Authors: Robert Harris
"You set up the account originally?"
"I did."
"Did Herr Luther say why he wanted to open it, or why he needed these particular arrangements?"
"Client privilege."
"I'm sorry?"
"That is privileged information between client and banker."
Charlie interrupted, "But we are your clients."
"No, Fräulein Maguire. You are beneficiaries of my client. An important distinction."
"Did Herr Luther open the box personally on each occasion?" asked March.
"Client privilege."
"Was it Luther who opened the box on Monday? What sort of mood was he in?"
"Client privilege, client privilege." Zaugg held up his hands. "We can go on all day, Herr March. Not only am I under no obligation to give you that information, it would be illegal under the Swiss Banking Code for me to do so. I have passed on all you are entitled to know. Is there anything else?"
"Yes." March closed his notebook and looked at Charlie. "We would like to inspect the box for ourselves."
A small elevator led down to the vault. There was just enough room for four passengers. March arid Charlie, Zaugg and his bodyguard, stood awkwardly pressed together. Up close, the banker reeked of eau de cologne; his hair glistened beneath an oily pomade.
The vault was like a prison, or a mortuary: a white-tiled corridor that stretched ahead of them for thirty meters, with bars on either side. At the far end, next to the gate, a security guard sat at a desk. Zaugg pulled a heavy bunch of keys from his pocket, attached by a chain to his belt. He hummed as he searched for the right one.
The ceiling vibrated slightly as a tram passed overhead.
He let them into the cage. Steel walls gleamed in the neon light: banks of doors, each half a meter square.
Zaugg moved in front of them, unlocked one at waist height and stood back. The security guard pulled out a long box the size of a metal footlocker and carried it over to a table.
Zaugg said, "Your key fits the lock on that box. I shall wait outside."
"There's no need."
"Thank you, but I prefer to wait."
Zaugg left the cage and stood outside with his back to the bars. March looked at Charlie and gave her the key.
"You do it."
"I'm shaking . . ."
She inserted the key. It turned easily. The end of the box opened. She reached inside. There was a look of puzzlement on her face, then disappointment. "It's empty, I think." Her expression changed. "No . . ."
She smiled and pulled out a flat cardboard box about fifty centimeters square, five centimeters deep. The lid was sealed with red wax and had a typewritten label gummed on top: PROPERTY OF THE REICH FOREIGN MINISTRY TREATY ARCHIVE, BERLIN. And underneath, in Gothic lettering:
Geheime Reichssache
. Top Secret State Document.
A treaty?
March broke the seal, using the key. He lifted the lid. The interior released a scent of mingled must and incense.
Another tram passed. Zaugg was still humming, jingling his keys.
Inside the cardboard box was an object wrapped in an oilcloth. March lifted it out and laid it flat on the desk. He drew back the cloth: a panel of wood, scratched and ancient; one of the corners was broken off. He turned it over.
Charlie was next to him. She murmured, "It's beautiful."
The edges of the panel were splintered, as if it had been wrenched from its setting. But the portrait itself was perfectly preserved. A young woman, exquisite, with pale brown eyes, was glancing to the right, a string of black beads looped twice around her neck. In her lap, in long, aristocratic fingers, she held a small animal with white fur. Not a dog, exactly; more like a weasel.
Charlie was right. It
was
beautiful. It seemed to suck in the light from the vault and radiate it back. The girl's pale skin glowed—luminous, like an angel's.
"What does it mean?" whispered Charlie.
"God knows." March felt vaguely cheated. Was the deposit box no more than an extension of Buhler's treasure chamber? "How much do you know about art?"
"Not much. But there's something familiar about it. May I?" She took it, held it at arm's length. "It's Italian, I think. You see her costume—the way the neckline of her dress is cut square, the sleeves. I'd say Renaissance, very old—and very genuine."
"And very stolen. Put it back."
"Do we have to?"
"Of course. Unless you can think of a good story for the Zollgrenzschutz at Berlin airport."
Another painting: that was all! Cursing under his breath, March ran the oilcloth through his hands, checked the cardboard container. He turned the safety deposit box on its end and shook it. Nothing. The empty metal mocked him. What had he hoped for? He did not know. But something to give him a better clue than this.
"We must leave," he said.
"One minute."
Charlie propped the panel up against the box. She crouched and took half a dozen photographs. Then she rewrapped the picture, replaced it in its container and locked the box.
March called, "We've finished here, Herr Zaugg. Thank you."
Zaugg reappeared with the security guard—a fraction too quickly, March thought. He guessed the banker had been straining to overhear them.
Zaugg rubbed his hands together. "All is to your satisfaction, I trust?"
"Perfectly."
The guard slid the box back into the cavity, Zaugg locked the door and the girl with the weasel was reinterred in darkness.
"We have boxes here that have lain untouched for fifty years or more."
Was that how long it would be before she saw the light again?
They rode the elevator in silence. Zaugg shepherded them out at street level. "And so we say good-bye." He shook hands with each of them in turn.
March felt he had to say something more, should try one final tactic. "I feel I must warn you, Herr Zaugg, that two of the joint holders of this account have been murdered in the past week, and that Martin Luther himself has disappeared."
Zaugg did not even blink. "Dear me, dear me. Old clients pass away and new ones"—he gestured to them— "take their place. And so the world turns. The only thing you can be sure of, Herr March, is that whoever wins, still standing when the smoke of battle clears, will be the banks of the cantons of Switzerland. Good day to you."
They were out on the street and the door was closing when Charlie shouted, "Herr Zaugg!"
His face appeared, and before he could withdraw it, the camera clicked. His eyes were wide, his little mouth popped into a perfect
O
of outrage.
Zürich's lake was misty blue, like a picture from a fairy story—a landscape fit for sea monsters and heroes to do battle in. If only the world had been as we were promised, thought March, then castles with pointed turrets would have risen through that haze.
He was leaning against the damp stone balustrade outside the hotel, his suitcase at his feet, waiting for Charlie to settle her bill.
He wished he could have stayed longer—taken her out on the water, explored the city, the hills; had dinner in the old town; returned to his room each night to make love to the sound of the lake ... A dream. Fifty meters to his left, sitting in their cars, his guardians from the Swiss police yawned.
Many years ago, when March had been a young detective in the Hamburg Kripo, he had been ordered to escort a prisoner serving a life sentence for robbery, who had been given a special day pass. The man's trial had been in the papers; his childhood sweetheart had seen the publicity and written to him; had visited him in jail; had agreed to marry him. The affair had touched that streak of sentimentality that runs so strong in the German psyche. There had been a public campaign to let the ceremony go ahead. The authorities had relented. So March had taken him to his wedding, had stood handcuffed beside him throughout the service and even during the wedding pictures, like an unusually attentive best man.
The reception had been in a grim hall next to the church. Toward the end, the groom had whispered that there was a storeroom with a rug in it, that the priest had no objections . . . And March—young husband that he was—had checked the storeroom and seen that there were no windows and had left the man and his wife alone for twenty minutes. The priest—who had worked as a chaplain in Hamburg's docklands for thirty years and seen most things—had given March a grave wink.
On the way back to prison, as the high walls came into view, March had expected the man to be depressed, to plead for extra time, maybe even to dive for the door. Not at all. He had sat smiling, finishing his cigar. Standing by the Zürichsee, March realized how he had felt. It had been sufficient to know that the possibility of another life existed; one day of it had been enough.
He felt Charlie come up beside him. She kissed him lightly on the cheek.
A shop at Zürich airport was piled high with brightly colored gifts—cuckoo clocks, toy skis, ashtrays glazed with pictures of the Matterhorn, chocolates. March picked out one of the musical boxes with "Birthday Greetings to Our Beloved Führer, 1964" written on the lid and took it to the counter, where a plump middle-aged woman was waiting.
"Could you wrap this and send it for me?"
"No problem, sir. Write down where you want it to go"
She gave him a form and a pencil and March wrote Hannelore Jaeger's name and address. Hannelore was even fatter than her husband, and a lover of chocolates. He hoped Max would see the joke.
The assistant wrapped the box swiftly in brown paper, with skilled fingers.
"Do you sell many of these?"
"Hundreds. You Germans certainly love your Führer."
"We do, it's true." He was looking at the parcel. It was wrapped exactly like the one he had taken from Buhler's mailbox. "You don't, I suppose, keep a record of the places to which you send these packages?"
"That would be impossible." She addressed it, stuck on a stamp and added it to the pile behind her.
"Of course. And you wouldn't remember serving an elderly German here, about four o'clock on Monday afternoon? He had thick glasses and runny eyes."
Her face was suddenly hard with suspicion. "What are you? A policeman?"
"It's of no importance." He paid for the chocolates, and also for a mug with I LOVE ZÜRICH printed on the side.
Luther would not have come all the way to Switzerland to
put
that painting in the bank vault, thought March. Even as a retired Foreign Ministry official, he could never have smuggled a package that size, stamped top secret, past the Zollgrenzschutz. He must have come here to
retrieve
something, to take it back to Germany. And as it was the first time he had visited the vault for twenty-one years, and as there were three other keys, and as he trusted nobody, he must have had doubts about whether
that other thing
would still be here.
He stood looking at the departure lounge and tried to imagine the elderly man hurrying into the terminal building, clutching his precious cargo, his weak heart beating sharply against his ribs. The chocolates must have been a message of success: so far, my old comrades, so good. What could he have been carrying? Not paintings or money, surely; they had plenty of both in Germany.
"Paper."
"What?" Charlie, who had been waiting for him in the concourse, turned around in surprise.
"That must have been the link. Paper. They were all civil servants. They lived their lives by paper, on paper."
He pictured them in wartime Berlin—sitting in their offices at night, circulating memos and minutes in a perpetual bureaucratic paper chase, building themselves a paper fortress. Millions of Germans had fought in the war: in the freezing mud of the steppes, in the Libyan desert, in the clear skies over southern England or—like March—at sea. But these old men had fought their war—had bled and expended their middle age—
on paper
.
Charlie was shaking her head. "You're not making any sense."
"I know. To myself, perhaps. I bought you this."
She unwrapped the mug and laughed, clasped it to her heart. "I'll treasure it."
They walked quickly through passport control. Beyond the barrier, March turned for a final look. The two Swiss policemen were watching from the ticket desk. One of them—the one who had rescued them outside Zaugg's villa—raised his hand. March waved in return.
Their flight number was being called for the last time:
"Passengers for Lufthansa flight 227 to Berlin must report immediately..."
He let his arm fall back and turned toward the departure gate.
No whisky on this flight, but coffee—plenty of it, strong and black. Charlie tried to read a newspaper but fell asleep. March was too excited to rest.
He had torn a dozen blank pages from his notebook, had ripped them in half and half again. Now he had them spread out on the plastic table in front of him. On each he had written a name, a date, an incident. He reshuffled them endlessly—the front to the back, the back to the middle, the middle to the beginning—a cigarette dangling from his lips, smoke billowing, his head in the clouds. To the other passengers, a few of whom stole curious glances, he must have looked like a man playing a particularly demented form of solitaire.