The Zurich Conspiracy

dark.”
    Josefa got up and zipped up her rucksack. Then they took the skins off their skis.
    “Now the fun begins,” Claire shouted once they were on their sticks. And after a mighty push they went whistling over the powder, churning up white clouds left and right.
    By the time they reached the car it was already dusk. Josefa was glad that Claire knew the area well and would get them safely to the bumpy, ploughed main road. They were just coming out of the valley basin and had stopped briefly at a turn-off when the motor died. Claire tried the ignition again. Nothing. She tried once again, but the engine wouldn’t turn over. Shit , Josefa thought, but was careful to keep her thoughts to herself. Claire, on the other hand, was completely calm.
    “You’ll have to help me,” she said.
    “Help you? I know next to nothing about car motors.”
    “Just hold the flashlight so I can see.”
    Snow flurries were falling. Josefa wrapped a scarf around her head and joined Claire a moment later as she fiddled around under the hood in the weak beam of light.
    Shit, shit, shit , Josefa thought to herself again. This is all I need. To be trapped out here , miles from any human habitation. If Claire can’t fix the car, we’ll have to go ahead on skis , she reasoned.
    “More to the right,” said Claire, who kept poking around under the hood.
    “Maybe it’s the electronics,” Josefa offered, fearing the worst: a cold night in the car. What if they were standing under an avalanche slope?
    “No, this is an older model; it’s almost all mechanical. A kid could understand it. Try to start the motor up again.”
    Josefa climbed in the car and turned the ignition.
    Nothing.
    Claire disappeared under the hood again, holding the flashlight herself this time. Josefa didn’t have the faintest idea what Claire was doing.
    “Try it again,” she told her a moment or two later. Lo and behold! The motor kicked in.
    “You deserve a medal,” a relieved Josefa gushed when her companion got into the car.
    Claire maneuvered them safe and sound through the snow squall. “My father once went three weeks without speaking to me, not a single word, after his car died on our way home from hiking in the mountains. I was twelve at the time, and we had a four-wheel drive. The motor just went on strike. My father tried to figure out what had happened, thinking of everything it could possibly be but nothing worked.”
    She geared down. “I finally said, ‘Maybe it’s the ignition problem Uncle Konrad was talking about the other day at our place.’ My uncle was a car mechanic and owned a garage. He’s long dead. You know how kids can have such acute hearing, picking up the weirdest things. That must have been what I had done because it just popped into my head.”
    The snow flurries were lighter now and Claire stepped on the gas.
    “My father went into a terrible rant, screaming: ‘You keep your nose out of it, you damn smartass!’ He was totally flustered… But I’ll keep it short: It turned out to be an ignition problem after all.” Claire turned up the heater. “After that he didn’t say a word to me for three weeks, didn’t give it a second thought. Three weeks. That’s a long time, Josefa. It was absolutely awful. I didn’t know what I’d done wrong. I was just trying to help.”
    “Yes, fathers can be like that,” Josefa said pensively. She could imagine that kind of silence could hurt like hell, even if her own father never gave her the silent treatment. He preferred verbal punishments, acid sarcasm, and allusions sharp as knives.
    Claire was looking straight ahead. “It was probably better he said nothing. Because whenever he did open his mouth, it was usually to tell me that I couldn’t do anything. But he was the real loser.”
    “And your mother? What did she say?”
    “Mother? She never came to my defense. My mother never ever stood up for me, not one single time. It just wasn’t done. Even when she knew I was in the right. Yeah, well, that’s how I learned that you had to help yourself.”
    “So how did you help yourself?”
    Claire braked carefully to take a sharp curve. The road was getting icy in spots.
    “Well, for one thing, I wanted to go to a commercial college, but my parents refused to pay for my training. They thought that being a secretary was good enough. So I went to my uncle, the one with the garage, and he gave me a loan.”
    Josefa thought that was a peculiar kind of self-help. “Did your