The Alex Kovacs Series Box Set

by Richard Wake

  "If the name fits," she said.

  "I think it's more like when I was in high school," I said. "We had this buddy who was about 6-foot-4, and we called him Shorty."

  "Exactly. Alex Kovacs, you are a true friend," Freddy said.

  "No problem, Tiny," I said.

  She snorted. Freddy made a face. I was smitten but also in a hurry. I had a 1:30 appointment that I couldn't miss. So I said my goodbyes and walked out into the Paradeplatz. I'm not sure I had ever been there without stopping on the way home at Confiserie Sprungli, on the south side of the square, for a small bag of something sweet and rich and decadent -- although, as everyone knew, the truly rich and decadent things happened on the north side and the west side. Anyway, I stopped, collected my little stash, and began the 10-minute walk back to Bohemia Suisse.

  As I turned onto Rennweg, I looked ahead and saw a small crowd had gathered outside of Gartner, a little restaurant that I had walked past about 500 times and never once thought to enter. As I got closer, the crowd grew, and I could see the frightened looks on the faces and hear the cries and the shouts for help. Then, in the distance, I heard a police siren.

  I got to the edge of the crowd and shouldered my way through it. Finally, to the front, I looked down and saw that I suddenly wasn't in a hurry anymore. Laying on the ground was my 1:30 appointment, his head framed by a puddle of blood. He had been shot through the left eye.

  2

  A few blocks away, on Fortunagasse, was Bohemia Suisse. The bank was tucked in amid a row of houses, each with a ground floor and four floors above. It could have been just another residence in the hilly line of homes, but for the small gold sign on the door that identified the bank and said, "By appointment only." I always thought that it seemed to be more of a warning than a statement of information.

  I moved slowly away from the crowd surrounding the body. I walked for five minutes in the wrong direction and did my best to check behind me while looking in the reflection of shop windows. I turned and walked in a circle around the Fraumunster and actually said a little prayer to myself somewhere behind the church, although I wasn't sure, in retrospect, about the effectiveness of a prayer that included the phrase, "Please let this not be completely fucked." Only then, when I was sure no one was following me, did I start walking toward the bank.

  Even I couldn't let myself in during business hours -- such was the show of security required for private banks in Switzerland. And it was a show. At night or on the weekend I just used my key, but at 1:30 in the afternoon I rang the bell and was greeted after about 30 seconds by Anders, the security guard. He was dressed in a blue blazer and gray slacks. He was dressed that way every day, the coat specially tailored to smooth the line of the pistol he carried beneath it. He was a retired captain in the Swiss army, which I always thought was a hoot. I had fought in Caporetto for the greater glory of Austria-Hungary, for the emperor and his whiskers, while Anders oiled his gun on weekends in some barracks beneath an Alp. I made a joke about it when I first met him. His reaction, not in words but in the more powerful language of the body, made it quite clear that there would be no need to make the joke a second time.

  "Herr Kovacs," he said.

  "Anders," I said.

  This was pretty much the extent of our conversation most days. He returned to his desk in our small lobby. What he did all day was beyond me, seeing as how most days we had no appointments. I never even saw him read a newspaper. He would let himself in. He would let me in. And he would let in Marta Frank, the office manager. She handled everything when I wasn't around, which was often. She could authorize cash deposits and withdrawals. She could, in the presence of Anders, open the vault and assist customers with their safe deposit boxes; she knew the lock's combination while he held the required key. Only I could open it by myself.

  Marta had heard the police sirens. She said, "What is going on out there?"

  I told her that a man was dead outside of Gartner and that he had been shot. And just as she got done gasping about that, I told her the dead man was Michael Landers, our 1:30 appointment, at which point she pretty much collapsed into the chair beside my desk, clutching my diary to her bosom. The diary was always either open on her desk or open in her hands.

  She pulled herself together and looked down at the diary. "Landers. You wrote this one in. Who is he? Did I ever meet him?"

  She knew very well that she had never met him, and I knew that she knew. We had only about 50 clients, most of them ancient Czech expats, so it really wasn't tough to keep track.

  "He's one of the nephews in the Kerner Trust."

  "Rich fool setting his money on fire," Marta said. She had been disapproving of the setup from the first time I explained it to her.

  "But it's his money, and he pays his fees, so as far as I'm concerned, Bohemia Suisse will always be happy to supply Herr Kerner with all of the kerosene and matches that he requires."

  The Kerner Trust was the fiction that had been created during my first months at the bank. The original depositor was a 40-year-old who had, with the aid of some stage makeup, a hunch, a limp, and a cane, passed himself off as an 80-year-old when he made his one and only appearance at the bank. It was important that Marta and Anders saw he was a real person, living and breathing. There was no way, after all, to hide a mysterious account from them, and especially from her, seeing as how the client base was so small and she kept the books.

  The deposit he made was sizable, 200,000 francs. The money could be withdrawn by any of four of his nephews, all of whom I was to meet personally later that evening at Herr Kerner's home. There were no restrictions on the withdrawals. I would bring the required account identification materials on the home visit and distribute them so that a withdrawal could be made if I wasn't around.

  Marta actually snorted and said, "The whole thing is ridiculous. And what are you now, his butler? Going to his house?"

  "Look, it's a lot of money, and it's a service business, right? And you're acting like he's the only eccentric on the client list. What about Herr Lutz?"

  Rudi Lutz was one of our wealthiest depositors. He never made a withdrawal but, once a month, he came in and asked to see a full accounting anyway. Then he inspected the contents of his safe deposit box. This did not make him eccentric in my book, just untrusting. The eccentric part was that he showed up for every visit with a chauffeur whose job, besides driving the big black Daimler, was carrying in a small fish tank, and the several fish swimming inside, and placing it on my desk as we went through the accounts, and then on the table in the room where deposit boxes were examined in private.

  "Ah, he's just an animal lover," Marta said, conceding the point with a smile.

  "He's batshit is what he is," I said. "But we're happy to have his money, and we're happy now to have Herr Kerner's money."

  That seemed to satisfy her. She usually said something snide when she took note of the withdrawals on the accounts that I had posted -- they tended to be at night or on weekends and handled by special appointments with me -- but that was it. "Shiftless" was her favorite word to describe the nephews. She did meet one of them once and handled his transaction, and told me later that "he had obviously been drinking at lunch." That also was by design, to assist in keeping her suspicion level low.

  Marta was going to meet a second nephew that afternoon. Until, well.

  She pulled herself together pretty quickly and asked, "Are you going to inform Herr Kerner?"

  "No, I don't think so. It's not my news to tell. I'm sure the police will get to him soon enough."

  Of course, Marta did not know how right she was. I was going to have to tell somebody else -- not Herr Kerner, but Herr Kerner's handler.

  Because Herr Kerner was actually Fritz Blum, the man in charge of an espionage network working in Switzerland, Belgium and Holland on behalf of the French, the British, and my old bosses, the Czechs, whose spies had fled to London along with the leaders of the government after the Nazi takeover in 1938. My Czech boss
es, who were actually running the operation, shared everything with their hosts. My job was merely to be in charge of this sleepy bank and to distribute funds for operations to the spy network on demand. The truth was, it was the easiest and best-paying job I had ever had.

  Well, it was until that day. As Marta got up and went back to her desk, I was wondering how quickly I needed to contact London, and pretty much immediately was my conclusion. But the contact information was back in my house, the return address on a random postcard currently being used as a bookmark in a book I had never read, "Dante's Inferno." And while I contemplated precisely what circle of hell I was about to enter, Marta poked her head into my office.

  "There's somebody to see you," she said.

  "Is there an appointment I forgot about?"

  "Nope. He says he's a police detective."

  I stood, and buttoned my jacket, and batted a flake of dandruff off of my shoulder, and walked out to fetch him. What circle of hell indeed?

  3

  Anders and the cop were talking as I approached. They were laughing, in fact.

  "You guys know each other?" I said.

  They stopped laughing. Anders said, "Army training together."

  Perfect. That Anders did not like me had been made pretty plain over the prior 16 months. I'm not sure I had seen him laugh -- or, if I had, I didn't remember. But here he was, laughing with the cop. The two of them had probably been drunk together more than once, because what else do you do during Swiss army training but march and drill and...drink? And what do you when you're drinking but tell each other endlessly, in some variation, "Fuck them -- we are so real soldiers."

  I stuck out my hand and introduced myself. The cop's name was Peter Ruchti, and he was a detective. He said his goodbyes to Anders and suggested we head into my office. The look on Anders' face indicated that he knew all along that I was a pickpocket or a pervert or something, and that I was about to be found out. In his heart, Anders was likely hoping for pervert.

  Ruchti sat down, didn't want anything to drink. I tried small-talk, which is about the only professional skill I possessed. "So, were you in the army long?"

  "Just two years -- I didn't make it a career like Anders. That was enough time for me to make the world safe for democracy and the bankers."

  Great. Just great. "So what can I do for you?" I asked.

  "Do you know a Michael Landers?"

  In the minute or so I'd had to think, I had played this question out in my head. Would I admit it or not? There were upsides and downsides to both answers. Telling the truth is always best when dealing with the police, and there would be no harm in admitting that I knew the guy other than having to endure a series of follow-up questions. But then, the more I thought, there was a problem. There was no way Ruchti could find out that Landers was able to draw on an account at the bank because the Swiss banking secrecy laws were pretty much impenetrable. And there was no self-respecting Swiss banker who would ever identify one of his private clients. So if I told Ruchti that I knew Landers, I would have to invent some other context for knowing him, and that lie would be more complicated.

  The alternative was to deny knowing him. Again, the banking secrecy laws protected me there. But it was a lie, and if Ruchti could ever put Landers and me in the same place at the same time, it could be a problem -- and we had met for a drink once, and he had made a previous withdrawal on a Saturday afternoon, and who knows who on the street might have seen us together.

  So there were risks either way.

  I went for the lie.

  "No, I don't think I know him. Why?"

  "He's dead. Murdered about three blocks from here. Shot through the head. You must have heard the sirens and the commotion."

  "It is pretty quiet in here," I said, pointing to the leather padding on the walls behind him, and on the door. "That's official, standard-issue private bank wall paneling, gracious soundproofing. It really works pretty well -- but I did hear a little something. I thought it was maybe an ambulance siren."

  "You mean maybe 10 ambulance sirens. I think the whole police force is on Rennweg. This would be a great time to rob a bank."

  I shrugged. Maybe I was going to get out of this after all. "So you're just asking everybody in the neighborhood?"

  "Street cops will get to that in the next few hours," Ruchti said. "I came to you because the deceased had your business card in his wallet. When I saw that and saw how close you were, I took you for myself. Besides, I'd had enough of the crime scene. Puddles of blood turn my stomach."

  He removed the card from his breast pocket and flipped it on to my desk blotter. It was, indeed, my business card.

  "You sure you don't know him?"

  "Pretty sure."

  "So how did he get your card?"

  "Beats me."

  As soon as I said it, I was pretty sure I was going to need more than "beats me" to end this conversation. Flippant doesn't work with these guys. So I started to tell Ruchti how I spent my time. When I wasn't in the office, I was going through the motions of drumming up business -- and being seen drumming was significantly more important than actually signing new accounts. So besides lunching with prospective clients, mostly wealthy friends of friends who lived to have their asses kissed and their lunches paid for, I attended banking conferences and trade shows and sat through boring speeches at arts festivals and municipal project unveilings and whatnot. The truth was, I gave out 50 business cards a month, easily. For all I knew, the next random dead guy they found would have my card, too.

  If Ruchti was swayed at all by my explanation, he wasn't letting on. He had that cop face perfected, that vaguely-smelling-shit-on-your-shoe look. I didn't know if I had made any progress, but I was out of things to say and didn't want to start babbling. So I just shut up.

  He stared back at me, three seconds, four seconds, five seconds. Silence like that can be better than thumbscrews sometimes, and it took everything I had to match him, wordless second for wordless second. Finally, Ruchti gave up.

  "Okay, we'll be in touch," he said, standing and shaking my hand and heading for the leather-padded door. I scrambled to follow him, but he stopped me. "I can show myself out."

  I sat at my desk and grabbed a stack of letters to sign and a pen, playing over that one phrase in my head: "we'll be in touch." About what? I said I didn't know the guy. There should be no need for any other questions, no reason to be in touch. Maybe he didn't mean anything by it. Maybe it was nothing.

  I began signing the letters and, after each signature, took a quick peek. One letter. Two letters. Three letters. Four. And Ruchti and Anders were still talking as they stood near the bank's front door.

  4

  One of the privileges of friendship, when the friends you are talking about are the owners of a cafe, is your own personal stammtisch. Mine was a tiny booth in the back corner of Cafe Fessler, where I could see the whole place. The table was designed for two people, max, but the space was big enough that I could spread out a couple of file folders stuffed with paperwork, and there was a decent light overhead.

  I had never been an office guy, and much preferred a more comfortable environment when I was wading through the black-and-white avalanche that came with my job, as it did with a lot of jobs. Order forms and delivery schedules back when I was a magnesite salesman in Vienna had morphed into legal compliance forms and weekly deposit reports in my bank job, but it was all just shitwork, there to remind you that your job was, indeed, a job. And in my experience, it tended to go down easier with a beer or two.

  Cafe Fessler usually did an early dinner business, as it was a family kind of place and an old guy kind of place. I was 40 and single, and there was precisely zero chance of me finding a date in the cafe most nights, this one included. It was 8 p.m., and we were already down to what I liked to call the "fossil collection." They were all over 70, all men. Their conversations were dominated either by jokes that traveled another mile along the rutted road from risqué to raunchy with the c
onsumption of each successive round of drinks, or by spirited-beyond-all-sense arguments about the FC Zurich vs. Grasshoppers football rivalry.

  I was plowing through the latest compliance schedule and half-listening to an anguished debate about the substitution patterns employed by "that fucking Bohm," the FC Zurich manager, when Henry sat down.

  "Shouldn't you be massaging your wife's feet or something?" I said.

  "She's out at dinner with a couple of girls from work."

  "What do you think librarians talk about at dinner?"

  "I think they rage on about the Dewey decimal system."

  "Or they talk about the male librarians," I said, and Henry shrugged. Henry was one of my dear friends from Vienna, and also one-half of the Fessler empire. He ran the cafe during the day while his wife, Liesl, was working as a librarian at the Central Library, the biggest in the country. Henry's father, Gregory, was the other Fessler, still automatically Mr. Fessler to me. He took over in the afternoon and closed up at night. They both lived above the shop in enormous apartments -- it really was a big building -- with Gregory on the second floor and Henry and Liesl on the fourth.

  Henry stood up almost as soon as he sat down. "I'm just getting my drink," he said. I hadn't seen Henry legitimately drunk in a while, probably years. He was on a one-Manhattan-per-day plan, a regimen from which he rarely deviated.

  "Besides," he said, with a quick flick of his head toward the circle of fossils that included his father. "You know how he gets."

  How Gregory got was angry if he perceived that Henry was hanging around because he thought the old man was letting things slide. Henry ordered the provisions and the alcohol, supervised the deliveries, scheduled the staff, kept the books, and made sure to go upstairs when Liesl got home from work. Gregory was the central presence in the cafe from lunch till closing -- pinching babies, telling tales, very much the charming rogue. And if he tore up a few checks now and then, well, Henry would just have to understand.