The Zurich Conspiracy

ordered. “A salami platter for two and a glass of Sonnenberger.”
    “You’re a man with feminine intuition,” she teased him. “I actually do want salami.”
    “You’re half Italian; you’ve got to love salami. Polenta’s the only thing you can’t get here.” He looked at her with his own peculiar blend of concern and curiosity so familiar to her by now. And there was something else in his eyes, but she’d rather not say exactly. She was keyed up enough as it was.
    “And what’s up in your life at the moment?” Sauter asked. Many of his questions came out of the blue like this.
    “Well, I’ve been reading a book—that is, no, I’ve read about a book, by an American writer whose divorced husband stalks her wherever she goes and hassles her with all sorts of tricks. He has masses of items delivered to her that she never ordered, sends people dirty letters under her name, and things like that. He was a computer expert. He did this for years and made her life a never-ending nightmare. In the end she had to assume a new identity and literally go into hiding.”
    Sauter listened intently. The waitress brought bread and cutlery. He offered Josefa the breadbasket but she waved it away.
    “He traced her anyhow, I think through her credit card or the bank—I’m not exactly sure. No, I believe he hacked into a computer in a government agency; of course, it would have to be something electronic. She was terribly desperate, at the end of her rope; all she could think of was to kill him.”
    The salami platter arrived. Sauter pushed it into the middle of the table, over to her. “It’s best to eat it with your fingers,” he told her, passing the bread again, and this time she took some. They both ate in silence, their eyes on their plates or on other customers. It was pleasantly quiet in the restaurant. Sauter picked up his wine glass; he had powerful hands with prominent veins. Hands of a man who liked to work with wood.
    “I know you’re not telling me this story so that I’ll say I’m not stalking my ex-wife. So what are you trying to tell me anyway?”
    “The moral of the story? I’m glad I wasn’t in her shoes, I mean, in the position the American woman was. Not only because her husband was a stalker. I think I’d have made the same decision she did. I think I would have killed him too. I wouldn’t want to be a victim my whole life, living in fear of death. Horrible.”
    She was toying absentmindedly with a slice of salami. “You’ve got to protect yourself. You owe it to yourself. Why should that guy get away with it? The difference between me and her is simply luck. Lucky I don’t have to decide. That’s the sole reason I’m a good person—a good person in the eyes of the law—because I’ve never been in a desperate situation like hers.”
    She looked up at him. He put a slice of salami into his mouth, looked back at her, broke off a piece of bread, chewed it, took a sip of wine, and looked at her again. For a long time.
    “And who can define ‘desperate situation’?” he asked. “Where do you begin?”
    “Fear of dying, for example. Fear of dying, every day.”
    He stopped chewing. “You’re not in any danger, Frau Rehmer—I ought not to have told you about Sali’s parents. I don’t want to upset you.”
    He pressed his lips together, and his gray, almost transparent eyes turned very dark. The ceiling light over the table was so low that his forehead was in shadow.
    Josefa shook her head. “I’m not talking about me, I’m talking about that American woman.”
    He didn’t believe her, she could see that. She felt trapped. Why was she telling him these things?
    “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” She shifted around in her seat. “What I meant to say is that you’re all by yourself in the most decisive moments of your life, at birth or death, in fear or anger.”
    She thought this summary was awfully awkward and out of place, especially here in the Trittlibach, with its red-and-white tablecloths, sheep horns on the wall, and an off-duty cop bedecking the table with bread crumbs.
    “I think I’m too tired to carry on a reasonable conversation,” she said quickly. “Since I’ve been working at home alone, I yak away like mad the first chance I get.”
    That wasn’t the least bit true, and Josefa was unhappier about it than she was about what she’d said before. She was so befuddled that her strongest desire was to get up and run out of the room. My