Ben found Gaston Rossignol’s house in the area of Zurich called Hottingen, a steep, hilly area overlooking the city. The houses here were situated on large lots and hidden by trees: very private, very secluded.
Rossignol’s house was on Hauserstrasse, close to the Dolder Grand Hotel, the grande dame of Zurich hotels, generally considered the finest in all of Europe. The house was wide and low-slung, built of brownish stone apparently in the early part of the century.
It didn’t look like any kind of safe house, Ben reflected, but perhaps that was what made it so effective. Rossignol had grown up in Zurich, but spent much of his career in Bern. He knew certain Zurichers of power and influence, of course, but it was not a place where he had casual acquaintances. Besides, the residents of the Hauserstrasse were the sort who kept to themselves; this was a neighborhood without neighborliness. An old man who cultivated his own garden would never attract notice. It would be a comfortable life, but an effectively obscure one, too.
Ben parked the Range Rover on an incline down the block and set the emergency brake to keep it from rolling. He opened the glove compartment and took out Liesl’s revolver. There were four shells remaining in the chamber. He would have to buy more ammunition somewhere if he wanted to use the weapon for protection. Making sure the safety was engaged, he slipped it into his jacket pocket.
He rang the doorbell. There was no answer, and after a few minutes, he rang again.
Still no answer.
He tried the knob, but the door was locked.
He noticed a late-model Mercedes parked in the carport at one side of the house. Rossignol’s car or someone else’s, he couldn’t know.
He turned to leave when it occurred to him to try all the doors, and he went around the side of the house. The lawn was newly mown, flower
gardens well tended. Someone took good care of the property. The back of the house was grander than the front, a large sweep of land bordered by more flower gardens, bathed by the morning sun. A cupola sat in the middle of a large terrace at the back of the house, near an arrangement of deck chairs.
Ben approached the back entrance. He pulled open a glass storm door and then tried the knob.
The knob turned.
He opened the door, his heart hammering, and braced for an alarm to go off, but heard none.
Was Rossignol here? Or anyone else, a servant, a housekeeper, family?
He entered the house, into a dark, tiled mud room. A few coats hung on hooks, along with an assortment of wooden canes with ornamental handles. Passing through the mud room, he entered what looked like a study, a small room furnished with a large desk, a few bookcases. Gaston Rossignol, once the pillar of Switzerland’s banking establishment, seemed to be a man of relatively modest tastes.
On the desk was a green blotter pad, next to it a sleek black Panasonic telephone with modern gimmicks built in: conference, caller ID, intercom, speakerphone, digital answering machine.
As he was staring at the phone, it rang. It was ear-splittingly loud, the ringer turned up to maximum volume. He froze, expecting Rossignol to enter, wondering how he would explain himself. It rang again, three times, four, then stopped.
He waited.
No one had picked up. Did that mean no one was home? He glanced at the caller ID screen, saw that the number was a long series of digits, obviously long distance.
He decided to move on farther into the house. As he walked down a corridor, he heard faint music playing—Bach, it sounded like—but where was it coming from?
Was someone in fact home?
From the far end of the hall he saw the glow of light coming from a room. He approached, and the music grew louder.
Now he entered what he immediately recognized as a formal dining room, a long table in the center of the room covered with a crisp white linen tablecloth and set with a silver coffeepot on a silver tray, a single place setting at which was a plate of eggs and sausage. Breakfast appeared
to have been served by a housekeeper, but where was he or she? A portable tape player on a buffet against one wall was playing a Bach cello suite.
And sitting at the table, his back to Ben, was an old man in a wheelchair. A tanned bald head, fringed with gray, a bull neck, round shoulders.
The old man didn’t seem to have heard Ben entering. He was probably hard of hearing, Ben decided, a guess confirmed by the hearing aid in the old man’s right ear.
Still, taking no chances, he slid his hand into the front pocket of his leather jacket, felt the bulk of the revolver, pulled it out, and released the safety. The old man didn’t move. He had to be seriously deaf, or his hearing aid was turned off.
Suddenly Ben was jolted by the ring of the telephone, just as loud in here as it had been in the study a minute ago.
Yet the old man didn’t move.
It rang again, a third time, a fourth, and stopped.
Then he heard a man’s voice coming from down the hall, the tone frantic. After a moment, Ben realized that the voice was coming from the answering machine, but he couldn’t make out what it was saying.
He took a few steps closer, then placed the barrel of the revolver against the old man’s head. “Don’t move.”
The old man’s head fell forward, lolling on his chest.
Ben grabbed the arm of the wheelchair with his free hand and spun it around.
The old man’s chin was on his chest, the eyes wide and staring at the floor. Lifeless.
Ben’s body flooded with panic.
He felt the food on the plate. The eggs and sausage were still warm.
Apparently Rossignol had died just moments ago. Had he been killed?
If so, the killer could be in the house right now!
He raced down the corridor from which he had come, and the telephone rang again. In the study, he looked at the caller ID screen: the same long series of digits, beginning with 431. Where was the call from? The numbers were familiar. A country in Europe, he felt sure.
The answering machine came on.
“Gaston? Gaston?” a man’s voice shouted.
The words were in French, but spoken by a foreigner, and Ben could make out few of the heavily accented words.
Who was calling Rossignol, and why?
Another ring: the doorbell!
He raced to the back entrance, which he’d left partially open. No one was there.
Move it!
He stepped outside and ran around the side of the house, slowing when he got near the front. From behind some tall shrubbery, he could see a white police cruiser passing slowly by, patrolling the neighborhood, he guessed.
A low wrought-iron fence separated Rossignol’s yard from the neighbor’s. He raced to the low fence, and leaped over it into the neighbor’s yard, which was roughly the same size as Rossignol’s, though not as ornately landscaped. He was taking an enormous chance of being spotted by anyone in the neighbor’s house, but no one called out to him, there were no shouts, and he kept running, around the far side of the house and out to Hauserstrasse. A hundred feet or so down the street was the Rover. He ran to it, leaped in, and keyed the ignition. It roared to life.
He made a quick U-turn and then drove down the steep street, deliberately slowing his pace to that of a local driving to work.
Someone had just tried to call Rossignol. Someone calling from a place whose telephone number began 431.
The digits tumbled around in his brain until something clicked.
Vienna, Austria.
The call had come from Vienna. These men have successors, heirs, Liesl had said. One of them, Mercandetti had told him, resided in Vienna: the son of the monster Gerhard Lenz. With Rossignol dead, it was as logical a lead to follow as any. Not a certainty—far from a certainty—but at least a possibility. A possible lead when there was a paucity of leads.
In a few minutes he had arrived in the heart of the city, near the Bahnhofplatz, where Jimmy Cavanaugh had tried to kill him. Where it had all begun.
He had to get on the next train to Vienna.
There was a soft knock on the door, and the old man called out irritably, “Yes?”
A physician in a white coat entered, a short, rotund man with round shoulders and a potbelly.
“How is everything, sir?” the physician asked. “How is your suite?”
“You call this a suite?” Patient Eighteen asked. He lay atop the narrow single bed, fully dressed in his rumpled three-piece suit. “It’s a goddamned monk’s cell.”
Indeed, the room was simply furnished, with only a chair, a desk, a reading lamp, and a television set. The stone floor was bare.
The physician smiled wanly. “I am Dr. Löfquist,” he said, sitting in the chair beside the bed. “I would like to welcome you, but I must also warn you. This will be a very rigorous and difficult ten days. You will be put through the most extensive physical and mental tests you have ever had.”
Patient Eighteen did not bother to sit up. “Why the hell the mental?”
“Because, you see, not everyone is eligible.”
“What happens if you think I’m crazy?”
“Anyone not invited to join is sent home with our regrets.”
The patient said nothing.
“Perhaps you should take a rest, sir. This afternoon will be tiring. There will be a CAT scan, a chest X-ray, then a series of cognitive tests. And, of course, a standard test for depression.
“I’m not depressed,” the patient snapped.
The doctor ignored him. “Tonight you will be required to fast, so that we may accurately measure plasma cholesterol, triglycerides, lipoproteins, and so on.”
“Fast? You mean starve? I’m not starving myself!”
“Sir,” the doctor said, rising, “you are free to go any time you wish. If you stay, and if you are invited to join us, you will find the procedure to be lengthy and quite painful, I must be honest. But it will be like nothing you have ever experienced in your long life. Ever. This I promise you.”
Kesting did not conceal his surprise when Anna returned several hours later with an address; and in truth Anna shared a measure of that surprise. She had done what she’d determined to do, and it had worked. After a few readings of the Rossignol file, she had come up with one name that could be of help: that of a Zurich civil servant named Daniel Taine. The name recurred in several different contexts, and further inquiries had confirmed her intuition. Gaston Rossignol had been Taine’s first employer, and, it appeared, something of a mentor. In the seventies, Taine and Rossignol were partners in a limited liability venture involving high-yield Eurobonds. Rossignol had sponsored Taine’s application to the Kifkintler Society, a men’s club whose membership included many of Zurich’s most powerful citizens. Now Taine, having made his small fortune, served in various honorific capacities in the canton. He was someone with precisely the sort of access and resources to ensure that his old mentor’s plans ran smoothly.
Anna had dropped in on Taine at his home unannounced, identified herself, and laid her cards on the table. Her message was simple. Gaston Rossignol was in serious, imminent danger.
Taine was visibly rattled, but closemouthed, as she expected. “I cannot help you. He has moved. No one can say where, and it is no one’s concern.”
“Except the killers?”
“Even if there are such assassins,” Taine spoke with a display of skepticism, but he acceded too readily to her stipulation, “who’s to say they can find him if you cannot. Your own resources are obviously considerable.”
“I have reason to believe they’ve already made headway.”
A sharp glance: “Really? And why is that?”
Anna shook her head. “There are certain matters I can only discuss with Gaston Rossignol himself.”
“And why do you suppose anyone would want to kill him? He is among the most admired of Zurichers.”
“Which explains why he’s living in hiding.”
“What nonsense you speak,” Taine said, after a beat.
Anna stared at him levelly for few moments. Then she handed him a card with her name on it, and her numbers at the Office of Special Investigations. “I will return in an hour. I have reason to think your own
resources are pretty considerable. Check me out. Satisfy yourself as to my bona fides. Do whatever will help you to see that I am who I say I am, and that I’m representing myself accurately.”
“How can I, a mere Swiss citizen …”
“You have ways, Mr. Taine. And if you don’t, your friend does. I’m quite sure you’ll want to help your friend. I think we understand each other.”
Two hours later, Anna Navarro paid a call to Taine at his place of work. The ministry of economic affairs was located in a marble building constructed in the familiar late-nineteenth-century Beaux Arts style. Taine’s own office was large, sunny, and book-lined. She was ushered in to him immediately upon her arrival; the dark-paneled door closed discreetly behind her.
Taine sat quietly behind his burled walnut desk. “This was not my decision,” he stressed. “This is Monsieur Rossignol’s decision. I do not support it.”
“You checked me out.”
“You have been checked out,” Taine replied carefully, hewing to the passive voice. He returned her card to her. “Good-bye, Ms. Navarro.”
The address was penciled in small print, in a blank space to the left of her name.
Her first call was to Bartlett, updating him as to her progress. “You never cease to amaze me, Ms. Navarro,” he’d replied, a surprising note of genuine warmth in his voice.
As she and Kesting drove to the Hottingen address, he said, “Your request for surveillance was approved this morning. Several unmarked police cars shall be engaged for the purpose.”
“And his telephone.”
“Yes, we can have a tap in place within hours. An officer at the Kantonspolizei will be assigned to listen in at the Mutterhaus.”
“The Mutterhaus?”
“Police headquarters. The Mother House, we call it.”
They headed steadily uphill on Hottingerstrasse. The houses became larger and nicer, the trees denser. Finally they came to Hauserstrasse, and pulled into the driveway of a low-slung brownstone house set in the
middle of a nicely landscaped yard. She noticed there were no unmarked police cruisers anywhere nearby.
“This is the correct address,” Kesting said.
She nodded. Another Swiss banker, she thought, with a big house and a nice yard.
They got out and walked to the front door. Kesting rang the bell. “You do not mind, I hope, if I lead the interview.”
“Not at all,” Anna replied. Whatever “international cooperation” meant on paper, that was the protocol and they both knew it.
After waiting a few minutes, Kesting rang again. “He is an old man, and for some years he has been wheelchair-bound. It must take him time to move around his house.”
After a few minutes more, Kesting said, “I cannot imagine he goes out very much at his age.” He rang again.
I knew this was too easy, Anna thought. What a botch.
“He may be ill,” Kesting said. Uneasily he turned the doorknob but the door was locked. Together, they walked around to the back door; it opened readily. He called into the house, “Dr. Rossignol, it is Kesting from the Public Prosecutor’s office.” The “Dr.” seemed purely an honorific.
Silence.
“Dr. Rossignol?”
Kesting stepped into the house, Anna following. The lights were on, and she could hear classical music.
“Dr. Rossignol?” Kesting said more loudly. He ventured forward into the house. Soon they found themselves in the dining room, where the lights were on, and a tape deck played music. Anna could smell coffee, eggs, some kind of fried meat.
“Dr.—Oh, dear God!”
Horrified, Anna saw what Kesting had seen.
An old man sat in a wheelchair at the table, before a plate of breakfast. His head was on his chest, the eyes fixed and dilated. He was dead.
They’d gotten to him too! That in itself didn’t surprise her. What stunned her was the timing—so soon before their arrival, it had to be. As if they knew the authorities were coming.
She tasted fear.
“Dammit,” she said. “Call an ambulance. And the homicide squad. And please, don’t let them touch anything.”