Nazi hangout. Entering through intricately carved Art Nouveau doors from a landscape of dazzling white, you were met (once your eyes adjusted) by the interior design equivalent of sweetness and light. Buttercup-tinted walls, stained glass windows blooming with lilies and vines, a herd of overstuffed ivory-covered furniture grazing on Persian carpets in the palest shades of leaf, sunshine, and cream. Only the great checkerboard of the black and white marble flooring hinted at a more conflicted reality.
The concierge in his gilded cage was multi-lingual and beautiful in that melting, Rudolph Valentino, Sheik of Araby sort of way. Recognizing in Jane a bird of his feather, he smiled and inclined his head in welcome.
“Je recherché Monsieur Charles Acton,” Jane murmured in a low and intimate tone, looking at the concierge over her sunglasses. (“I’m looking for Mr. Charles Acton.”)
“Vous avez un rendez-vous?” In European fashion, the concierge allowed his gaze to travel appreciatively over all of Jane that he could see without leaving his post or boorishly craning. (“You have an appointment?”)
“Non,” Jane shook her head and allowed her brow to cloud. “Mais il est primordial.” (“No. But it is of the utmost importance.”)
His face reflecting her concern, the concierge explained that the gentleman had gone for a walk down toward the village and could be found in or around the local cemetery. This was a daily ritual, and not all that unusual. After all, his wife was buried there, along with the painter Kirchner and an unknown number of anonymous Jews murdered at Buchenwald.
“Vous l’apprecierez!“ he assured her. “Il est tres célèbre, tres historique. Un emplacement de patrimoine mondial.” (“You will enjoy it! It is very famous, very historical.”)
“A cemetery.” What’s more, a cemetery with a wife in it. Jane thanked the concierge and thought fleetingly of John, who without knowing anything had somehow known better. Advancing from square to square on her way out, Jane muttered, “Yeah, that figures.”
11 We Both Go Down Together
It was a long cold walk back down the road toward town, the dry snow crunching under foot. The glories of the Swiss scenery registered briefly, but Jane hit a slick patch and prudently redirected her attention to more immediate concerns – 1) any hint of movement in the frozen landscape and 2) not breaking her own fool neck. At the Zurich airport she had traded her heels for boots at the Burberry duty-free shop and snagged a no-nonsense gray wool topcoat at Hugo Boss; but the alpen air was briskly implacable and the temperature was dipping even further as the sun dropped like a frigid white stone toward the westward mountains. At the signpost, she took the narrow and mostly unbroken left hand track, plunging straightway into the forest. The ominous strains of “Finlandia” seemed to grow louder with every labored step.
Around the first bend, the cemetery began with a waist-high stone fence. Looking over the fence, among the many trees Jane glimpsed a roughhewn marker here, an odd wooden cross with a peaked roof there. A few raw cleared spaces in the thickets and the undergrowth. Those burial sites were an advance guard of sorts, settlers and unwelcome intruders in the kingdom of trees. Further on, the trees thinned out and the graves multiplied. Here the comparatively ancient deceased lay buried, the original colony, close to the ruins of a fifteenth century kirche. And over them stood the original trees, sparse in number, but towering higher than the eye could comfortably follow and holding their ground like stern primeval gods. Just in front of the arched entry into the cemetery, a tall dark figure stood hunched against the wind, gazing across the vista of cracked and moldering headstones.
The figure turned only its craggy head in Jane’s direction as she approached. A sharp gust raked at the brush of white hair a younger man would not have bothered with, but otherwise the man in his black muffler and overcoat remained as motionless as one of the obelisks in the graveyard before him. Neither Jane nor the man spoke until they were within perhaps two feet of one another. Then the man resumed his surveillance of the dead and said: “I don’t know you and I can’t help you.”
“But you know it’s all some colossal misunderstanding.”
“I know nothing of the sort.”
“You knew ten years ago,” she said evenly. He let the wind answer for him. She tried again. “If we could just talk to somebody. We always – both of us, separately, together, right down the line – played it by the book. We always did exactly what we were supposed to do.”
“With one slight exception,” he said with icy, heart-stopping deliberation, squinting at something only he could see.
“Which could be said to prove the rule,” Jane countered, at the same time stunned by his total lack of irony. “Even there, the most extreme case imaginable, we - did the right thing. We did not follow an unlawful order. No court would expect someone either to kill their spouse or to accept execution without a trial.”
“Leaving aside that the appeal to law is laughable, you do realize you wiped out an entire graduating class?”
“You do realize the decision to make us a final exam was arrived at without our input, much less our consent? No judgment!” she held up one hand as he looked at her and looked away again. “But they’re penalizing the wrong parties. Not that we want to blow the whistle. We’re team players, always have been. We just want things back the way they were.”
“Young woman,” he began.
“’Young woman?’” she echoed derisively. “That’s rich, Charles.”
He continued speaking as if she had not spoken. “A short time ago your business associates tried to kill you. Read something into that. The ground has shifted. The game has changed. There is no job, there is no security. That world is gone.” He turned his back and walked away from her a few steps before stopping to cast one last comment over his shoulder. “For me too, by the way. So you see, you really are on your own, cookie. We’re all on our own.” The last line was uttered almost under his breath.
“Could you at least tell me why?” she asked, and the last word hung in the air like something strung between them.
In answer, he thrust his hands deeper into his pockets, hunched forward against the cold, and trudged away from her toward the deeper woods.
12 Calamity Song
Once more crunching down the road toward Davos, Jane thought about calling John. That was one call she did not want to make. “Honey, we hit a dead end in a Swiss cemetery.” Total fail. And score one for John. Turned out her ace in the hole was nothing but a bonehead move. Alrighty then. This much was certain: she and John were officially outside. Out in the cold. Both in spy parlance and, in her case, literally. She shivered with grim amusement. They had no idea why, it made no sense, but there it was. End of story.
And now she had a train to catch. Beyond that, the future loomed a little darker and a little more dangerous than before. Fortunately she was pressed for time, so she allowed herself the luxury of taking the Scarlet O’Hara approach. She would think about it tomorrow.
As she entered Davos proper, the snowy hummocks of the less-travelled Obere Strasse thinned to a polite veneer of ice about five feet before the Promenade began. Already the streetlights shone muddily over a crepuscular swarm of uber-wealthy transnationals, the global elites who turned sleepy Davos into a sort of glitzy Epcot Center every January. An empty horse-drawn sleigh trotted into view, harness bells jangling with forced merriment along the flanks of a world-weary appaloosa. Jane tussled with her need to speed to catch the Zurich train and a reluctance to burden the horse, whose downcast demeanor shrieked forced labor and in whose eyes she read a glint of suppressed mutiny. “Fuck it,” she murmured and was about to plunge into the crowd on shank’s mare when two mildly intoxicated, innately loutish hedge fund types accosted her. Visually indistinguishable except for their “Hi, I’m Bernie”-“Hi, I’m Howie” WEF nametags (embellished with the blue dot of million dollar donorship), they presented as stereotypes of Wall Str
eet entitlement gone wild, decked out in designer everything and screamingly over-accessorized by a couple of leather-bound bodyguards.
“Oh! Oh! There she is. That’s her,” Howie piped up, first pointing at Jane, then grabbing her upper arm. Jane tensed to respond with an elbow-strike to his windpipe, when she saw that Bernie was backing off and looking doubtful.
“I dunno, man. She looks a little-“ he spread his fingers and waggled his hand, palm down, the international sign for ‘iffy.’
Howie stepped back, both hands outstretched toward Jane, shoulders hunched in disbelief. “You crazy asshole. Bernard. You got Venus on the fucking half-shell here…”
“Venus on the fucking half-shell was a fucking blonde,” Bernie pointed out, feeling for a pack of smokes.
“Don’t listen to him,” Howie implored, “he’s a crazy fucking asshole. He robs widows and orphans and charges them 20% for the privilege.”
“Said the guy who’s this close-“ Bernie measured the air with forefinger and thumb, “to a federal indictment…”
Jane smiled icily and pivoted away. “I’m late for a train.” This time it was Bernie who stepped forward to physically detain her.
“Oh whoa!” he said around his cigarette. “Listen to Miss
To Iceland, With Love Page 9
