Numbered Account (17 page)

“Herr Kaiser doesn’t mingle with the little people.”

“You’re a vice president.”

“Ask me that question when I’m on the Fourth Floor. That’s where the power is. Right now you’re better off asking the old timers — Schweitzer, Maeder, why not the Chairman himself?”

“He’s done enough for me already.”

“You’re the first employee he’s personally recommended since I’ve been handling human resources in the finance department. How did you swing that?”

He shook his head. “Actually, he approached me about the job. He first mentioned it about four years ago, when I was getting ready to leave the marines. Called me up out of the blue and suggested that I consider business school. Harvard. Said he’d call the dean on my behalf. A few months before I graduated, he phoned to say that there was a job waiting for me if I wanted one.” Nick pasted an angry scowl across his features. “He didn’t tell me I’d have to interview for the job.”

She smiled at his facetious quip. “Obviously, you managed just fine. I must say you fit right in line with the usual type Dr. Ott manages to lure over. Six feet tall, bone-crunching handshake, and a line of bullshit that would make a politician blush.” She raised a hand. “Except for the bullshit, that is. I hope you’ll excuse me, Mr. Neumann.”

Nick smiled. He liked a woman who wasn’t afraid of a little salty language. “No offense taken.”

She shrugged. “When his golden boys leave ten months later, it’s marked very clearly on my hiring record.”

“And that’s your problem with him?”

Sylvia squinted her eyes as if appraising his ability to keep a secret. “So we’re being honest with each other, are we? Actually, it’s nothing more dramatic than a little professional jealousy. I’m sure you’d find it very dull.”

“No, no. Go ahead.” Nick was thinking that right now she could talk about the mathematical derivation of modern portfolio theory and it wouldn’t bore him.

“Currently, I direct the recruiting of employees who’ll work in the finance department of our Swiss offices. But the finance department’s biggest area of growth is overseas. We’ve got a hundred fifty people in London, forty in Hong Kong, twenty-five in Singapore, and two hundred in New York. The sexy stuff — corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, equity trading — most of that takes place in the world’s financial capitals. For me, the next step up is to conduct the recruiting of the professionals who will fill those upper-level positions in our foreign offices. I want to make the deal that brings a partner at Goldman Sachs to the United Swiss Bank. I’d love to lure away the entire deutsche mark team from Salomon Brothers. I’ve got to get to New York to demonstrate that I’m capable of finding top performers and convincing them to come to USB.”

“I’d send you in a second. Your English is impeccable, and with no disrespect to Dr. Ott, you make a much nicer impression than he does.”

She smiled broadly, as if the compliment meant something to her. “I appreciate your confidence. Thank you.”

At that moment, their waiter arrived, his hands full with two green salads and a basket of fresh bread. He placed them on the table and returned bearing a carafe of red wine and two bottles of San Pellegrino. They had hardly finished their salads when two sizzling chickens were brought for their inspection. Approval was given, and the waiter set about preparing the succulent birds.

Sylvia raised her wineglass and offered a toast: “On behalf of the bank, we are happy to have you with us. May your career be long and successful! Prosit!”

Nick met her eye and was surprised when she held his gaze a moment longer than he expected. He looked away, embarrassed, but a second later looked at her again. He couldn’t stop himself. He felt a flush of attraction warm his stomach and spread upward into his chest. The feeling made him uncomfortable. She was his superior. She was off-limits, he told himself.

He couldn’t go any further until he had sorted out his feelings for Anna. Two years they’d been together and two months apart. Yet right now it felt like the opposite, and that their separation would be permanent. The first few weeks in Zurich, he had expected her to phone to say she was sorry, and that she understood why he had dropped his life and rushed across the Atlantic. He’d even teased himself with a fantasy of her showing up unannounced on his doorstep. She’d be wearing ratty blue jeans, scuffed boots, and an impossibly expensive camel’s hair coat, the collar turned up. She’d cock her head and ask to come in, as if she’d only been driving through the neighborhood and hadn’t flown five thousand miles to surprise him.

But she hadn’t called. Now he saw that he’d been foolish even to ask her to come. Had he actually expected her to quit Harvard in the middle of her senior year? Had he really thought she’d give up the job she’d lined up on Wall Street just to be with him?

“Your father’s been dead for seventeen years, Nick,” Anna had said the last time he saw her. “What can you expect to find except more disappointment? Leave him in peace.”

“If you cared about me, you’d make the sacrifice,” he’d fired back.

“And you—” she cried, “why won’t you make the sacrifice for me?” But before he could respond, she answered for him. “Because you’re obsessed. You don’t know how to love anymore.”

Seated in the busy restaurant, Nick wondered if he still loved Anna. Of course he did. Or maybe he should say a part of him did. But time and distance had weakened his love. And every minute he spent in the presence of Sylvia Schon weakened it further.

Over coffee, Sylvia inquired, “Do you happen to know Roger Sutter? He’s the manager of our representative office in Los Angeles. Been there forever.”

“Vaguely,” said Nick, wondering if forever was longer than seventeen years. “He called our home a few times after my father died. I haven’t been back to L.A. for a while. My mother moved away about six years ago. She passed away last year, so I don’t have much occasion to visit.”

Sylvia met his eyes. “I’m sorry. I lost my mother when I was little, just nine. Cancer. After she was gone it was just my father and my little brothers, Rolf and Erich. Twins. That’s probably why I feel so comfortable working in a bank full of men. Some may think I’m a little bossy, but when you have two brothers and a rigid father to contend with, you quickly learn how to fend for yourself.”

“I can imagine.”

“Brothers? Sisters?”

“Nope. Just me. “Independent’ is how I look at it.”

“Best to rely on yourself,” said Sylvia, without a trace of sympathy. She sipped her coffee before resuming her personnel director’s interrogation. “Tell me what really brought you to Switzerland. No one just ups and leaves a post at one of the top firms on Wall Street.”

“When my mother died, it hit me hard that I didn’t have any real roots in the world. All of a sudden I felt alienated from the States, especially from New York.”

“So you quit and came to Switzerland?” Her voice said she wasn’t buying his spiel.

“My father grew up in Zurich. When I was younger we came over all the time. After he passed away, we lost contact with our relatives. I didn’t like the idea of letting it all fade away.”

Sylvia stared at him a moment, and he could see she was evaluating his answer. “Were you close to him?”

Nick breathed easier, happy to be over that bridge. “My father? Tough question to answer after so many years. He was from the old school. You know, kids should be seen and not heard. No television. In bed at eight o’clock sharp. I don’t know if I was ever really close to him. That part was supposed to come later, when I had grown up.”

Sylvia raised the cup to her lips and asked, “How exactly did he die?”

“Kaiser never told you?”

“No.”

Now it was Nick’s turn to size her up. “So, we’re supposed to be honest with each other, right?”

Sylvia half-smiled and nodded.

“He was murdered. I don’t know by whom. The police never arrested anyone.”

Sylvia’s hand registered a minor tremor, and a few drops of coffee tumbled from her cup. “I am sorry for prying,” she said crisply. “Please excuse my being so rude. It was none of my business.”

Nick saw that she believed she’d gone too far, and that she was ashamed. He appreciated her respect for his privacy. “It’s all right. I don’t mind you asking. It’s been a long time.”

Both took a sip of coffee, then Sylvia said she had something to tell him, too. She moved closer to him, and for a moment it seemed that the din and roar surrounding them faded. He hoped she didn’t have some catastrophic family secret of her own to share. She gave him a puckish smile and he knew his fears were for naught.

“Since the beginning of the evening I’ve been dying to take these horrid little pieces of paper out of your hair. I was afraid to ask how they got there, then I realized that you must have had to dry your hair — because of the snow. Come on, lean a little closer.”

Nick hesitated for a moment, studying Sylvia as she shifted her body on the banquette to face him more directly. She looked at him and a puzzled expression wrinkled her brow. Her eyes were a soft brown, no longer so challenging, and for a moment they held his in their embrace. Her nose crinkled slightly, as if he had asked her a vexing question, and then she smiled and he saw that a small gap separated her front teeth. And in that smile, he spotted — if only for a moment — the girl who had grown into this, perhaps, too responsible executive.

“Don’t be afraid. I told you that my bark is worse than my bite. You must believe me.”

Nick inclined his head toward her. He came nearer her body, smelling her perfume, then sensing it mix with her own warmth, her own peculiar, feminine scent. He blushed, and as she removed the last pieces of tissue from his hair, he dismissed any worries he had had about her being his superior at the bank. Abandoning himself to her feminine charms, he could barely suppress a sudden and powerful urge to wrap his arms around her and bring his mouth to hers and to kiss her long and deep and hard.

“I think we’ve cured your rather nasty case of dandruff,” Sylvia stated proudly.

Nick brushed the top of his head, not quite ashamed of his secret thoughts. “All gone?”

“All gone,” she confirmed, a bright smile gracing her features. And then she added in a tone of hushed confidentiality, “If you ever need anything, Mr. Neumann, I want you to promise me right here that you’ll call.”

Nick promised.

Later that night, he spent a long time thinking about her final remark and the million and one things it might have meant. But right then, as she spoke the words, he could think of only one thing that she could do that would make him happy. Maybe, just maybe, she would call him by his first name.

The United States Drug Enforcement Administration chose the first floor of a nondescript three-story building in the Seefeld district as its temporary headquarters in Zurich. Number 58 Wildbachstrasse was a grim affair of plaster stucco and sober disposition, its only extravagance the pair of double-paned French windows that peered from each floor onto the street. Neither terrace, balcony, nor window box prettied its spinster’s facade.

Seeing the building for the first time, Sterling Thorne had declared that it resembled a cinder block wearing a bedpan. But the monthly rent of Sfr. 3,250 had been well within budgetary constraints, and the outdated floor plan, which divided the ground floor into six rooms of equal size, three on either side of a central corridor, was ideal for a staff of four or five United States government employees.

Thorne held a telephone close to his ear and stared anxiously out the front window, as if waiting for a tardy agent to cross over from the east. The morning fog, which during winter loitered on the Swiss plateau like an unwelcome houseguest, had at 11:45 A.M. Friday not yet lifted.

“I heard you the first time, Argus,” said Thorne, “but I didn’t like the answer. Now come again. Did you find the transfer I told you to look for?”

“We got zip,” said Argus Skouras, a junior field agent, from his post in the payments traffic department of the United Swiss Bank. “I was here until they kicked me out last night at 6:30. Came in this morning at 7:15. I have searched through a stack of papers taller than an elephant’s ass. Zip.”

“That is impossible,” said Thorne. “We have it on good sources that yesterday our man received and transferred a huge chunk of money. Forty-seven million dollars cannot just disappear.”

“What can I tell you, Chief? If you don’t believe me, come over here and we can do this together.”

“I believe you, Argus. Don’t get yourself all worked up. Settle down and keep doing your job. Give me that officious prick Schweitzer.”

A few moments later a gruff voice came through the receiver. “Good morning to you, Mr. Thorne,” said Armin Schweitzer. “How may we be of service?”

“Skouras tells me you have no activity to report from the account numbers we supplied you with on Wednesday evening.”

“That is correct. I sat with Mr. Skouras this morning. We reviewed a computer printout listing every electronic funds transfer the bank has received and transmitted since the surveillance list was last updated twenty-four hours ago. Mr. Skouras was not satisfied with the summary sheet. He demanded to check each individual instruction form. As we process over three thousand transfers a day, he’s been very busy.”

“That’s what his government pays him for,” Thorne said dryly.

“If you care to wait a moment, I will key in the accounts on your list. Our Cerberus system does not lie. Anything specific you are looking for? It might be easier if I had an exact sum, say the amount transferred, to use as a cross-reference.”

“Just check all the accounts on your list one more time,” said Thorne. “I’ll let you know if we find what we need.”

“State secrets?” joked Schweitzer. “Fine, I’ll enter all six accounts. This will take a moment. I’ll pass you Mr. Skouras.”

Thorne tapped his foot impatiently and scowled at the miserable weather. Near noon and no sign of sun, no sign of rain, and no sign of snow. Just a quilt of gray cloud sitting on top of the city like a dirty carpet.