The Zurich Conspiracy

of the needle in the open case on her father’s desk. “Do you have to inject the insulin yourself?” she asked by way of a greeting. That saved her from having to hug him.
    He took off his glasses and turned around in his wooden office chair to look at her. Verena’s father, a corporate lawyer in his day, had done his accounts in that chair.
    “Yes,” Herbert Rehmer said. “But that’s not the worst of it.” He rubbed a flat hand over his forehead. “I have to stay on a diet. Weigh everything, not one gram too much. You can lose your lust for life over it.” This confession almost took the wind out of her sails. But then she heard her father say, “And what catastrophe brings Josefa Rehmer to her parents’ house this time?”
    This comment allowed her to regain her usual objectivity. “I’d like you to read this.” She handed him the printouts. Her father was a connoisseur of English literature, so a translation was unnecessary.
    Rehmer put his glasses back on. Josefa studied him more closely as he read; he’d aged quite a bit in the few weeks since her last visit.
    Her father looked up at her, irritated. “What’s this? What am I supposed to do with this?”
    “I got these messages from an anonymous sender. I want to find out who it is.”
    “So what? What do you want from me?” Herbert Rehmer was as impatient as ever.
    “Somebody says there are quotations in there. Quotations from famous people. I’d like to know what those quotations are and who sent them.”
    Her father gave her a curious look. He opened his mouth as if to say something but refrained from doing so.
    “I recognized two quotations straight off,” he said after a while. “One is from Tennessee Williams : ‘ We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.’” He translated it into German for her, then went back to the page. “The other is from Oscar Wilde, but somewhat changed. The others, let me see, I’ll have to look them up.” He got up with great effort, dragged himself over to the bookcase, and selected a thick tome.
    “What’s that?” Josefa asked. Her father looked at her again with that strange expression.
    “A reference work,” he grunted. And then, in a somewhat more animated tone of voice, “Here, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: ‘The devil’s most devilish when respectable.’ That’s my translation. I’ve improvised a bit.” After thumbing some more he found another quotation: “‘An injury is much sooner forgotten than an insult.’ Lord Chesterfield in a letter to his son.”
    Herbert Rehmer couldn’t resist this kind of riddle, and Josefa knew it.
    Finally he found another quotation: “As a matter of fact, I was glad to hear you lose your temper. It’s a good sign when sick people are cross.” He raised his eyes. “A passage from Dorothy Parker. She goes on: ‘It means they’re on the way to getting better.’”
    That gutless bastard left out the last sentence , Josefa thought to herself. Of course, it would have changed the sense completely. Or did the mysterious writer assume she’d discover the continuation one day? But she couldn’t worry about that now. She noted the title of the reference work in which her father had found the quotations.
    “Thanks a lot. That really helps.”
    “Josefa, are you trying to tell me something with these quotations?” Her father once again took the bull by the horns.
    She shook her head. “I told you: I got these e-mails from an anonymous sender. He wants to tell me something.” And she got all bristly again.
    Her father kept turning his ballpoint pen around in his fingers and said nothing. This annoyed her.
    “Maybe you can imagine—or maybe not—that it’s not particularly nice to get these warnings. It’s not…even edifying to be pursued by the media just…just because somebody at a company was murdered where you once happened to work. And then to lose your former boss through suicide. And while it was all happening…trying to start up your own business.”
    Herbert Rehmer coughed a little and shuffled the papers on his desk. “I don’t know if this will help, but I can tell you one thing: English is most certainly not the writer’s native language, unless he or she is crafty enough to distort some sentences with non-English expressions, which I don’t believe…I hope that helps you get somewhere.” He handed the pages back.
    She stood in the room, undecided as to how to end the encounter.
    Then