“Red shoes? With patches in odd places? I’ve seen them, too,” Bolduc said.
“Where?”
He went silent for an inexcusably long time, lit another cigarette, blew the smoke upward straight into his own eyes, blinked, rubbed his eyes, tapped his cigarette on the side of the ashtray. “Getting into a car in the parking lot at MWU enterprises.”
Brian and I looked at each other, stunned.
“I don’t know who he was, I don’t know if he works there or if he was visiting, and I doubt I’d recognize him if I saw him again. But you’re right, Mrs. Lamb. I’d recognize those shoes if I saw them again.”
“When was this?”
Bolduc pulled a Blackberry phone from his jacket and pushed a few spots with his thumb. “April fifth”—he pushed another spot—“at . . . just a minute . . . I must have it set to the wrong time zone. I was going to tell you exactly what time on the fifth, but I know it was around seven o’clock in the evening.”
“I wish I knew when that gold shipment came in from South Africa,” I hit the table with both fists. “I wish I knew!”
Brian grabbed his beer glass to save it.
The phone in my purse rang. Startled, I fumbled to find it before it stopped ringing. It was Marco, calling from his hotel room less than a quarter mile away. “Marco!” I nodded to Brian as I said the name. “We’re in town, not a stone’s throw from you. Why don’t you join us?” While saying this, I realized a potential problem. I was inviting an Italian Carabinieri captain, a military policeman, to meet Francois Bolduc, a corporate spy. Definite problem. Excusing myself from the table, I retreated to a row of bushes along the back of the patio. “Listen, Marco. The man Brian and I are talking to is the one I told you about—the one he hired to look into the Merz family business. So he’s a spy, basically, and he might take exception to having a beer with law enforcement.”
“I have nothing to do with business in Switzerland.”
“I know that, but please don’t show up in uniform. It’s intimidating.”
“I am wearing only my underwear right now. Would it be all right to come as I am?”
I returned to our table, still laughing from the phone call, as Bolduc was saying goodbye to Brian. I wondered if the call had scared him off or if he really did have to leave. After he had gone, Brian assured me his leaving had nothing to do with Marco’s call.
Marco showed up in wrinkled trousers, T-shirt, and flip-flops. “You said no uniform. Is this casual enough? Where is our local spy?”
I introduced Marco and Brian.
Brian rose and shook hands with the man he’d heard me mention often. As he recapped our meeting with Bolduc, I interrupted him to say, “So! The red shoes pop up again, this time in the parking lot of MWU enterprises. Still think it’s a coincidence?”
“I never said that,” Marco said, rolling his eyes.
“April fifth. That’s when Bolduc saw the red shoes. When did that shipment of gold arrive?”
“April fifth. The gold passed through customs on April fifth.” Marco’s tone turned serious.
“How would they have transported it?”
“Who knows? By armored car, if everything was normal and legal, but since it was not legal, they might have used something less conspicuous. I do not know.”
“Where was everyone on April fifth?” I said. “I was at home grading term papers on April fifth.”
Brian said, “Stephanie was already here. She flew to Switzerland a week early to make wedding arrangements. Dad flew over that Friday. What day would that be?”
I pulled out my little datebook and rifled through to April. “The ninth. So he wouldn’t have been here yet.”
“Patrick and Babs and Erin flew over together, and I think they got here after Stephanie but before Dad.”
“What about Juergen?”
“Don’t know.”
“He was here before I was,” I said, “but I don’t know how long he’d been here.”
Marco paid the waitress for the beers he’d ordered. “Do not look at me. I was in Florence.”
“What do we do next?” I asked.
“I have told Kronenberg he needs to check out the landing strip you told me about, and if he is any good, he will have done so already.” Marco sipped his beer and wiped the foam off his mustache with his wrist. “With police computers at his disposal, he will already know more about Anton Spektor than you were able to dig up, and he will possibly have already talked to him and heard his story about why he has been spying on your house. I say ‘his story,’ because we must not assume he will tell Kronenberg the truth.”
“It has to be the bunker,” I said. “That must be what they’re interested in, and for the past two weeks, the bunker has been off-limits to everyone but the police. We need to tell Kronenberg to search inside the bunker with a fine-tooth comb.”
“He cannot do that,” Marco said. “He has no probable cause to suspect anything else related to his case is there to be found. Without that, he cannot get a warrant.”
“Plus, they’ve already searched it,” Brian said. “They’ve had it taped off for more than a week.”
“Then we have to do it—and soon,” I said. “Unless we’re wrong on all counts, things will start unraveling fast now that Kronenberg is on to the guys in the glider.”
Twenty-Nine
The next morning, Lettie and I were on our second cup of coffee in the kitchen when Erin popped in and announced: “I have to go to the bunker. Last night, Juergen asked me to bring down some wine and some other booze—he wrote me a list. It was late when he thought of it and he had to leave early this morning and drive to Zurich.”
“Oh! May I go, too?” The opportunity had fallen into my lap so easily. This would be better than going with Juergen because Juergen would’ve given me the guided tour and I’d have had to leave when he did. I’d have had no chance to snoop around on my own. Lettie said she wanted to come along, and a minute later the three of us were tramping through the morning dew. In my head, I prepared to be dazzled. Pictures I’d seen of the gold at Fort Knox flashed through, and I reminded myself I was only looking for a few bars. How large would they be?
Erin punched the entry numbers on the keypad and swung open the thick metal door. I looked around the meadow before entering, to see if anyone was watching us.
The room, about twenty by twenty feet square, was concrete on all sides, floor, and ceiling. One wall held nothing but a wine rack with hundreds of metal-wrapped bottle necks sticking out. Neat laminated labels—Chardonnay, Merlot, Sauvignon Blanc—tacked to the rack here and there, sectioned the whole into smaller units. Skis, ski poles, boots, bicycles leaned against the opposite wall. More shelving held canned goods, liquor, and an incredible array of party paraphernalia. Punch bowls, pitchers, trays, and chafing dishes that looked as if they hadn’t been used for some time. A waffle iron with a frayed cord, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since my grandmother’s estate sale.
“Where are the guns?” Lettie asked.
Erin headed straight for the wine rack, Juergen’s list in her hand. I spotted a simple wooden door with a brass knob in the back wall and opened it. Beyond the door lay a bathroom with shower stall, sink, and exposed pipes that led to a cylindrical water tank in one corner. I flipped a light switch. It worked.
“Here they are!” Lettie said.
I backed out and turned. Guns and ammunition filled the whole wall adjacent to the exterior door. Long guns like rifles lay flat on shelves, handguns in a wooden box, lidded but unlocked. Boxes and boxes of ammunition, some so old their cardboard had yellowed, their labels faded. This was where Stephanie and Gisele’s killer had stood and selected his or her weapon. I lifted the lid on the box of handguns and peered inside. An ominous empty space lay between two guns.
“Why don’t they lock this stuff up?” Lettie stretched her arms toward the weapons cache. “This is so dangerous!”
“It is locked up, Lettie.” Erin set a bottle of w
ine on the floor. “The bunker door is always locked. If they ever had to hole up in here, like in the event of an attack, they’d probably have to dash in quickly and they’d have nothing with them. That’s why they use a keypad rather than a key. Imagine you and your family are running for your lives and you get this far, but no one has the key.
“And if you needed to defend yourselves, you certainly wouldn’t want the guns locked up and the key back at the house, would you?” Erin had it all figured out.
I looked around again. In the corner between the guns and the party supplies, a wooden table supported an ancient-looking metal box with dials, needles, and knobs. A short-wave radio from the forties, no doubt. This place gave me the shivers.
“Let’s see what else is here,” I said. Lettie followed me through the door into the bathroom. On the far wall of that room a smaller door, only about four feet high, lay between the shower stall and a chemical toilet. I heard Erin calling to us from the big front room.
“I’m going back to the house,” she said. “Do you want me to leave the door open? If I close it, you can always open it from the inside.”
“Leave it open!” Lettie called back.
I bent down and stepped through into a long hall hacked out of native rock. The musty smell of wet rock and mildew mingled with gloom and deep silence. “Can you find a light switch out there, Lettie?” I couldn’t stand up all the way. The ceiling forced me to keep my head and shoulders painfully bent. I felt around on the wall near the little door—no switch. And Lettie was having no better luck in the other room. Even with the door open, it was too dark in here to see anything more than lumps along both walls. I had almost given up when a string brushed my face and made me jump, banging my head. A light cord. I pulled, and an overhead bulb lit up. Luckily I had banged my head against rock and not the bulb. It was screwed into a bare socket.
Now I saw long rows of boxes. Gas masks. The World War II equivalent of a hazmat suit stretched out on a bed of boxes like a headless corpse along one wall. I sat on the floor, and called to Lettie that I’d be in here a while because I wanted to look in all these boxes, but there was no room for two people.
“I’ll wait outside, if you don’t mind,” Lettie said. “In the sunlight. This place is giving me the creeps.”
Opening box after box, I found nothing but supplies: extra light bulbs, batteries (years past their shelf date,) toilet paper, soap. No gold bars. By the time I had scooted myself the length of the hall and opened every single box, my legs had gone numb and my back ached. I had to scoot back to the doorway, unwilling to attempt standing until I could straighten all the way up.
“That’s about it, Lettie. No gold.” Holding onto the necks of wine bottles as I went, I wobbled out to the bunker door where Lettie stood, bathed in sunlight. “I guess it was a long shot, anyway.” I turned, surveying the whole room one more time. “Now, if I wanted to hide gold bars, where would I hide them?”
Lettie stuck her head inside. “Where would you hide a tree?”
“In a forest.”
“Where would you hide gold bars?”
“In a pile of gold things? Gold-colored boxes? Something that looks like gold bars? I don’t see anything.” My eyes found the yellowed boxes of bullets. They were about the right size and shape, but they looked nothing like gold bars. But could the bars be inside these boxes? With a sigh, I realized I would now have to open every damned one of those ammo boxes. Wait a minute. I’m not looking for gold, I’m looking for silver. The gold bars had been silver-plated to get them through customs. “Duh! Where would you hide silver bars?”
Lettie responded as expected, “In a pile of silver things.”
My gaze swerved around the walls to the party paraphernalia on shelves near the canned goods. The silver punch bowl, the silver trays, the silver pitcher. Some now tarnished from long disuse, some still shiny. I ran to the wall and reached for the huge punch bowl. I couldn’t lift it. The bowl sat on a shelf a little higher than my head, and, reaching up, I found I couldn’t even budge it.
Lettie found a five-foot stepladder against one wall and dragged it over. From this higher vantage point I could peer into the bowl and see its contents. I began pulling items out and handing them down to Lettie. Two silver dippers, a silver bread basket, serving knives and forks, a silver cigarette box.
Three silver bars. Snatching one out, I almost dropped it because it was twice as heavy as I expected it to be. “God, it’s heavy!” Some numbers and marks, all meaningless to me, had been impressed into the metal. The silver color seemed somewhat dulled by a light coating of tarnish. “I need a file or something.” Lettie handed me one of the knives. Scraping one corner of the silver bar, I released the dazzle of pure gold hiding just beneath the surface.
Lettie’s eyes were like saucers. “What do we do with these? Where do we take them?”
I thought about it for a minute. “Nowhere. Let’s put this one back with the other two in the punch bowl, close the door, and call the police.”
* * * * *
Lettie and I decided we dared not let the bunker go unwatched for even one minute. Someone could have been watching us from the house, from the tool shed, or, with binoculars, from any of several nearby peaks. She agreed to stay outside and watch the bunker’s entrance while I ran inside the house to call the police. Odile greeted me, wiping her hands on her apron, and showed me the number for the LaMotte police station, written on a neatly laminated card and taped to the wall beside the phone. I started to dial, then reconsidered. If Odile heard what I was about to tell Kronenberg, it would be all over town within the hour. Praying I’d remembered to recharge my cell phone, I wrote down the number and headed for my bedroom. I found the phone still plugged into the wall, yanked it out, and took it to the porch.
Neither Kronenberg nor Seifert was there, but a female voice gave me Kronenberg’s mobile number. I called it.
“Kronenberg.”
“I’ve found the missing gold bars.”
Kronenberg shouted something in German to someone nearby and began asking me for more details. As we talked, I could hear him panting. Running. “We will be there in thirty minutes. Wait for us and don’t leave the bunker unattended until you see us.”
Next I called Marco and found him in the hotel restaurant eating breakfast. While he was still on the phone I heard him ask for the check, rush out of the room, and through a revolving door. “Wait!” he said. “How do I get there?”
“Do you have a car?” I remembered he did have one. He had driven up from Florence. “Never mind. You’ll never find it if you drive. You need to go to Dorfstrasse and locate the tunnel entrance.” I explained how he could recognize it. “When you get there, push the button and I’ll buzz you in. Take the elevator up and, when you leave the little hut, head west. There’s a path. Follow it.”
Thanks to the difficulties of maneuvering the big-wheeled police vehicle up what I had dubbed “Sheer Terror Canyon” and across the rocky terrain to the meadow, Marco arrived long before the police did. Meanwhile Erin, Patrick, and Brian had learned what was going on and had taken spectator positions on the porch.
Kronenberg already knew the entry combination to the bunker, and I told him where to find the gold bars. Marco, Lettie, and I waited outside. After the two policemen had been inside only a few minutes they stepped out. Kronenberg said, “There is no need to be careful about contaminating the scene. Too many people have been in and out in the last few weeks. Any fingerprints we find on the bars may possibly help us, but the serial numbers should tell us where they came from and when.” He turned to Marco. “Captain Quattrocchi, you know more than I do about how this illegal importing works. Whom do I contact? What should I do next?”
“You need to call the Swiss Central Bureau of Interpol and you need to call the customs agents at the main airport in Geneva. The date you are interested in is five April.”
“You already know these people, Captain. Would you do it for us?”
Marco beamed. I knew he was champing at the bit to take over, but he couldn’t ask. It would have been presumptuous and insulting to Kronenberg. The fact that Kronenberg had asked and had done so without a hint of rancor, raised my estimation of the big Swiss policeman. “I will be happy to do this, Detective Kronenberg. Is there a place where you and I can go to be more comfortable? This will take some time, and I may need you to help with translations.”
I led Marco and Kronenberg to Juergen’s little office behind the living room and left them alone. By this time the house was in full rubber-neck mode, everyone dying to know more. I found them in the living room pretending to read, write letters, or work Sudoku. Odile was pretending to dust the bookshelf. I told them everything I knew and, together, we waited.
An hour later, Marco and Kronenberg emerged and joined us. Kronenberg stood in front of the big glass doors exactly as he had done that morning when he’d told us both Stephanie and Gisele had been murdered. With the light behind him, his face was less clear to us than ours were to him.
We heard footsteps on the outside stairs and Juergen popped in, obviously taken aback by the large group assembled in his living room. “What is this?” he said.
Kronenberg explained.
Juergen’s face reddened. “Gold bars? What are you telling me? Someone has been storing gold in my bunker? I cannot believe it. Who, besides me and a few others”—he looked at Erin—“know how to open the door? Certainly, none of us would have anything to do with such a thing!” His voice rose to a squeak and his face turned even redder. “Thank God my father can’t hear this. I’m sorry he’s dead, but at least he doesn’t have to . . .” He stumbled to the ottoman, the only unoccupied seat in the room, and collapsed on it.
Kronenberg rocked up on his toes. “Do any of you know anything about these gold bars? Tell me now, because we will find out how they got here and we will eventually know if you have withheld any information.”
“I’ve never even seen a gold bar,” Babs said, smoothing the front of her blouse.
Death of a Second Wife Page 22
