Numbered Account (23 page)

“To who?” Nick demanded.

“Leave it to Maeder. It is a world entirely beyond you. Keep it that way.”

“You know the Pasha,” Nick insisted. He felt reckless and out of control. “You visited him in December. What is his name?”

“Please, Mr. Neumann, no more questions. I am quite upset.” What had been a minor palsy bothering Cerruti’s arm grew into an uncontrolled spasm shaking his entire body.

“What business is the man in?” Nick asked forcefully. He wanted an answer now. He fought to stifle an impulse to shake the bantamweight until he talked. “Why are the authorities pursuing him?”

“I don’t know. And I don’t want to know.” Cerruti grabbed the lapels of Nick’s jacket. “Tell me, Neumann. Tell me you haven’t done anything to upset him.”

Nick held the little man by the wrists and eased him gently onto the couch. The sight of so much fear in Cerruti’s face drained all the anger out of him. “No. Nothing,” he said.

Cerruti released the lapels. “No matter what you do, don’t upset him.”

Nick looked down at the frightened banker and, drawing a deep breath, realized there was no more to be gotten out of him — at least for now. “I can show myself to the door. Thank you for my father’s memo.”

“Neumann, one question. What have they told you at work about why I’m no longer at the office?”

“Martin Maeder announced that you had suffered a nervous breakdown, but we’ve been asked to tell your clients that you contracted hepatitis on your last trip. Oh, and I forgot to mention, word is you may come back to one of our affiliates. Maybe the Arab Bank.”

“The Arab Bank? God help me.” Cerruti gripped the couch’s cushions, his knuckles white with tension.

Nick fell to one knee and placed a hand on Cerruti’s shoulder. It was clear why Kaiser was delaying Cerruti’s return. The man was a wreck. “Are you sure you’re okay? Let me call a doctor. You’re not looking very well.”

Cerruti pushed him away. “Just leave, Mr. Neumann. I’m fine. A bit of rest is all I need.”

Nick walked toward the door.

“And Neumann,” Cerruti called weakly, “when you see the Chairman tell him I’m fit as a fiddle and rarin’ to go.”

Later that evening, Nick found himself standing before an ungainly gray-stone apartment building on a lesser street far from the prosperous center of the city. The temperature had crawled below freezing and the sky had partially cleared. A scrap of paper showed an address: Eibenstrasse 18.

His father had grown up in this building. Alexander Neumann had lived with his mother and grandmother from his birth until he was nineteen in a lousy two-room apartment overlooking a perpetually shaded interior court.

Nick had visited the apartment when he was a boy. Everything about it had been dark and musty. Closed windows covered by heavy drapes. Massive wooden furniture dyed a deep chestnut brown. To a child used to playing on the rolling lawns and sunlit streets of southern California, the apartment, the street, the entire neighborhood where his father had grown up, had appeared evil and unfriendly. He had hated it.

But tonight he felt the need to revisit the place of his father’s childhood. To commune with the ghosts of his parents’ past and to reconcile the boy who had grown up on these streets with the man who had become his father.

Nick stared up at the grimy building, recalling a day when he had hated his father. Absolutely despised him. When he had wished the earth would crack open and suck him down to the burning nether regions that were undoubtedly his true home.

A trip to Switzerland during the summer of Nick’s tenth year. A weekend in Arosa, a mountain village nestled on the hillside of a sweeping valley. A Sunday-morning gathering of the local chapter of the Swiss Alpine Club in a glade situated under the stoic gaze of a monstrous peak, the Tierfluh.

The party of twenty-odd climbers sets out at dawn. They are a mixed lot: at ten, Nick is the youngest; at seventy, his great-uncle Erhard, the oldest. They walk through a field of high grass, past a milky lake as flat as a mirror, then ford a gurgling brook. Soon they enter a stand of tall pines, and the path begins to move up a gentle slope. Heads are bowed, breathing deep and steady. Uncle Erhard leads the pack. Nick stays in the middle. He is nervous. Will they really try to reach the craggy peak?

An hour after the walk has begun, the group stops at a wooden hut standing in the center of a grassy meadow. The door of the hut is pried open and someone ventures in. He returns a moment later, holding a bottle of clear liquid high in the air. A cry goes up. All are invited to enjoy the home-distilled
Pflumli
. Nick, too, is given the bottle, and he drinks down a thimbleful of the plum liqueur. His eyes water and his cheeks flush, but he refuses to cough. He is proud to have been taken into this fine group’s company. He vows not to reveal his fatigue. Or his growing fear.

The walk resumes. Again into the trees. An hour later, the path emerges onto a rock-strewn plain and for a while is flatter, but now less sure. Stones crumble beneath every footstep. Slowly, all vegetation disappears. The trail leads upward as it skirts the side of the mountain, moving deeper into the shadowy saddle that links two peaks.

The line of climbers has strung out. Erhard keeps the lead. He carries a leather rucksack on his back and holds a gnarled rod in his hand. One hundred yards along comes Alexander Neumann. Twenty paces farther back follows Nick. One by one, the climbers pass him by. Each pats him on the head and offers an encouraging word. Soon no one is behind.

Ahead, the trail cuts into a field of summer snow, as white as icing on a chocolate cake. The pitch of the slope increases. Each step forward is one half step higher. Nick’s breath is shallow, his head light. He can see his great-uncle far in front, can recognize him only by the walking stick he carries. He can see his father too: a bobbing head of black hair above a sweater as red as the Swiss flag.

Minutes pass. Hours. The trail winds upward. Nick lowers his head and walks. He counts to one thousand. Still the end is no closer. Snow rolls out for miles before him. High above his left shoulder, he can see the sharp rocks that lead to the summit. He notes with alarm the distance that separates him from the others. He can no longer see his uncle. His father is merely a red speck. Nick is alone in a valley of snow. With every step, he grows farther separated from his father and his great-uncle. With every step, he comes closer to the peak that wants to kill him. Finally, he can go no farther and stops. He is exhausted and frightened.

“Dad,” he yells. “Dad!” But his thin voice disappears easily in the vast mountain spaces. “Help,” he yells. “Come back!” But no one hears. One after another the trail of climbers disappears around the girth of the mountain. And then his father disappears, too.

At first Nick is stunned. His breathing has calmed. His heartbeat has slowed. The constant crunching of snow that has accompanied him for so long has come to a halt. All is quiet. All is absolutely still. And for a child raised in the city there is nothing so terrifying as that first moment when he feels the icy breath of unspoiled nature upon his naked face, when his dulled senses cower at the magnificence of solitude’s deafening roar, and when he learns for the first time that he is alone.

Nick falls to his knees unsure of his ability to carry on. Where has everyone gone? Why has his father deserted him? Don’t they care? Do they want him to die?

“Dad!” he shrieks.

Nick feels his cheeks flush. His throat tightens uncontrollably. Tears rush into his eyes and his vision grows blurry. With a wrenching sob, he begins to cry. And in the steady flow of his tears come all the injustices, all the petty tyrannies, all the unfair punishments ever bestowed upon him. No one loves him, he says in a garbled tongue, between gulps of air. His father wants him to die up here. His mother probably helped plan it.

Nick cries for his father again. Still, no one comes. The slope ahead is as empty as it was five minutes ago. Soon, the tears dry and the sobbing stops. He is alone with the towering mountains and the slashing breeze and the evil rocks above that want so to kill him. He wipes the dried tears from his cheeks and blows his nose into the snow.

No, he swears, the rocks won’t kill me. The mountains won’t kill me. No one will. He remembers the hot bite of the
Pflumli
and how he was given the bottle like any other man. He remembers the pats on the head as each climber in turn passed him by. Mostly he remembers the mute plain of his father’s back, the bright red sweater that never once looked back to check upon his progress.

I have to go on, he tells himself. I can’t stay here. And like a divine gift, the thought forms inside him that he must make it to the summit — that this time he doesn’t have a choice. And he tells himself, “I will reach the top of this mountain. Yes, I will.”

Nick lowers his head and starts off. His eyes move from one hollow footprint to another. His feet advance quickly along the steep trail. Soon he is almost running. To the beat of his pounding heart, he tells himself he must make it, he cannot stop. And so he climbs. For how long he does not know. His mind is focused only on the empty footsteps of those gone before, knowing that along this path came his great-uncle and his father and all the others who expect nothing more of him than to walk up the mountain.

A high-pitched whistle intrudes on his hermetically sealed world. A whoop, a yell, a cry of encouragement. Nick looks up. The whole group sits on an outcropping of rock, just yards away. They are cheering his arrival. They are standing and clapping. He hears the whistle again and sees that it is his father running down the slope to greet him.

He has made it. He has succeeded.

And then Nick is in his father’s arms, held tightly in a loving embrace. At first he is upset. He has walked up this mountain. No one has helped him. It is his victory. How dare his father treat him like a child? But after a few tentative moments, he gives in and wraps his arms around his father. For a long time, they hold each other close. Alexander Neumann whispers something about taking the first steps toward being a man. Nick feels hot and smothered. And for some unexplained reason, he begins to cry. There in the lee of his father’s arm, he lets the tears run down his cheeks and he hugs his father as hard as he possibly can.

Nick would always remember that day. He looked up once more at his father’s building and felt awash in pride. He had come to Switzerland to get to know Alexander Neumann. To search for the truth about the banker who had died at the age of forty.

Become one of them,
his father’s spirit had urged him. And he had. Now Nick could only pray that his actions on behalf of the Pasha, whoever he was, had not jeopardized his search.

Ali Mevlevi slammed his foot onto the accelerator of the Bentley Mulsanne Turbo and pulled into the oncoming lane of traffic. An approaching Volkswagen van carelessly hugging the center line careered to the left, raising a curtain of dust on the highway’s shoulder, then toppled onto its side and slid down the unpaved embankment. Mevlevi blared his horn and kept his foot firmly on the gas. “Out of my way,” he yelled.

The half-ton pickup that had stubbornly blocked his path scooted to the crest of the highway, allowing him to pass. The decrepit vehicle was loaded far beyond its capacity ferrying a team of migrant laborers, and once on the hardscrabble shoulder it puttered to a halt. Workers jumped from the flatbed, yelling oaths and making obscene gestures at the passing Bentley.

“Miserable beggars,” Mevlevi said, his rage waning as he watched the men scramble about in the late-afternoon sun. Under what unfortunate star had they been born? Their time on earth was marked by degradation, penury, and the systematic crushing of their once indomitable Arabic spirit. For these men, he would risk his fortune. For these men, Khamsin must succeed.

Mevlevi returned his attention to the stripe of asphalt before him, but it was not long before his mind wandered back to the dilemma that pressed on his heart like a sharpened dagger. A spy, he thought to himself. A spy is lying nearby.

Hours earlier, he had discovered that the United Swiss Bank had failed to transfer forty-seven million dollars of his money according to his precise instructions. Calls to inquire about the delay had revealed the circumstances of his escape. However, no explanation had been given as to which failure in the bank’s systems had resulted in his account number’s appearing on a surveillance list established by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. For now, though, that was of minor concern. For not only had the authorities expected the transfer, they had known its exact amount.

“A spy,” Mevlevi said, through clenched teeth. “A spy has been peeking over my shoulder.”

Normally, he was thankful for the unerring efficiency of the Swiss. No other country oversaw the execution of a client’s instructions with such exactitude. The French were arrogant. The Chinese imprecise. The Cayman Islanders — who could trust that colony of self-serving financial leeches? The Swiss were polite, deferential, and exact. They followed orders to the letter. And so his escape, when analyzed, grew more storied. For it was the disobeying of a clearly defined order that had permitted him to flee the grasp of the international authorities. He was indebted to an American: a United States Marine, no less. One whose brethren’s blood defiled the holy land over which he now drove.

Mevlevi could not stifle the laugh rising up from deep within his belly. The self-righteous Americans — policing the world, making it safe for democracy; a planet, dictator and drug free. And
he
was a dreamer?

Mevlevi checked his speed and kept the car pointed south on National Route 1, toward Mieh-Mieh, toward Israel. To his right, barren hillocks of pale alkali grit rose up from the Mediterranean Sea. Occasionally, a settlement dotted the top of a small rise. The low-slung structures were built of cinder block whitewashed to deflect the Levant’s bleaching sun. More and more sported antennas, some even a modest satellite dish. The Shouf Mountains rose steeply to his left, colored a bluish-gray and shaped like the dorsal fins of a school of sharks. Soon, their slopes would darken into a verdant green as the deciduous trees that flourished on the mountains’ slopes sprouted new buds.