jet tub and bathrobes. Like advertisements in the Sunday
And now, it seemed, his forgetfulness was catching up with him. Sadly, the fat, bullet-headed president of Kukuanaland was not the Robin Hood he’d pretended to be at first. The wealth he earned by the criminal enterprises he oversaw with Gash rarely went much farther than the garrison walls in Fourandao or beyond the front doors of the bank directly below Saint-Sylvestre’s offices. Certainly none of it reached the impoverished people of the country.
Unlike the policeman, General Kolingba was not a reader of history, nor a reader of anything at all, for that matter, and was unaware of a truism that most high school history teachers and every overthrown dictator in the world could tell you: he who lived by the coup d’etat had a very good chance of dying by it.
There were several restaurants within the hotel and an extensive room service menu, so, antirevolutionary or not, Saint-Sylvestre ordered himself a breakfast of freshly squeezed orange juice, cream cheese on a bagel with British Columbia smoked salmon, a breakfast steak frites with a perfectly fried egg on the top and a thermos of Viennese coffee. He had a quick shower, dressed himself in the fluffy white robe and was just settling in with a complimentary copy of the
By eleven he was ready to begin. A quick check of the local telephone directory revealed that the Brocklebank sisters lived on a street simply called the Crescent in a district of Vancouver known as Shaughnessy. He spent twenty minutes in the hotel’s business center Internet kiosk on the lower-lobby floor and discovered that the Brocklebanks were a respectable old Vancouver family with the requisite skeletons in the closet, including a huge silver mine that had gone bust in the 1920s after A. G. Brocklebank, the sisters’ grandfather, had overleveraged himself, the bust virtually cleaning him out.
P. T. Brocklebank, A.G.’s son and the sisters’ father, had married into a huge sugar fortune, but the marriage turned sour when his heiress wife discovered that he was not only having an affair with her sister’s husband but had also embezzled millions from the family business to squander on the Standard Stock and Mining Exchange in Toronto.
The scandal in Vancouver was enormous, but womanizer, embezzler and poor businessman he may have been, he did love his daughters and had made them the beneficiaries of an extremely large life insurance policy well before he “accidentally” drove his wife’s rather swank 1936 Packard V12 Convertible Coupe over the two-hundred- foot-high cliffs at what was now Wreck Beach near the Point Grey Campus of the University of British Columbia.
Since the insurance company could not prove suicide or inebriation, they had no choice but to pay off the claim, including the double-indemnity clause. The sisters, who were still living in the original Brocklebank mansion on the Crescent, were suddenly wealthy again.
Wisely consulting lawyers and bankers, the sisters had stayed wealthy ever since. Neither had married and there were no heirs or assigns. Upon their deaths the Brocklebank estate would become the property of the University Women’s Club of Vancouver, of which they had been active members after their graduation from McGill extension college in Victoria more than half a century ago.
Neither woman had ever worked, although both were longtime volunteers for various women’s causes. For no good reason in particular, Betty was prochoice and Margie was antiabortion; Betty was a theoretical Marxist while Margie was an enthusiastic supporter of monopoly capitalism.
Saint-Sylvestre dialed the phone number he had found in the directory and after seven rings a small, slightly distressed-sounding woman’s voice answered.
“Yes?”
The voice was thin, brittle and quavering: an elderly woman who received few calls and when she did get them they were usually bearing bad news. He could imagine a little old lady in a housedress, sitting in a hallway filled with dusty oil paintings of old family members and lit by low-wattage bulbs to save on the electricity bill.
“Miss Brocklebank?” Saint-Sylvestre replied, trying to keep his voice as unthreatening as possible.
“This is Betty Brocklebank; who is speaking, please?”
Saint-Sylvestre was ready for the question. “My name is Wolfgang Gesler, Miss Brocklebank. I represent the Gesler Bank of Aarau, Switzerland. I am here in your beautiful city on behalf of my father, Herr. . Mr. Horst Gesler, the president of the bank. This is concerning the disposition of your stock in the Silver Brand Mining Company, of which you and your sister are the majority shareholders.”
“Now, isn’t that strange,” answered Betty Brocklebank. “We had a telephone call from a representative of your bank only yesterday.” Her voice brightened. “He’s picking us up in a limousine and taking us to the Sylvia for tea this afternoon to discuss the situation.”
“No, no, it’s not strange at all, Miss Brocklebank,” said Saint-Sylvestre, trying to put a laugh in his voice and only barely succeeding. “My father mentioned that the business of your shares was important enough to require two representatives from the bank. We seem to have gotten our wires crossed, yes?”
“Apparently,” said Betty Brocklebank.
“I wonder if you could tell me which of our people he sent along to help me out?”
“A Mr. Euhler,” said the Brocklebank sister. “If that’s how you pronounce it.”
“Your pronunciation is excellent, Miss Brocklebank,” soothed Saint-Sylvestre. “And Leonhard was an excellent choice, a very good man. Did he leave a telephone number, by any chance? I’d feel a bit of a fool if I had to phone my father and ask.”
“He’s staying at the Hotel Georgia, room eleven twenty-four. I think they call it the Rosewood Georgia or the Georgia Rosewood now. Margie and I rarely get out these days, you see. Frankly she’s gone a bit dotty, if you ask me. I’m afraid I spend most of my time picking up after her and reminding her that her precious Siamese cat died years ago. . if you know what I mean. Margie can be something of a trial.” She pronounced her sister’s name oddly, with a hard
“How unfortunate,” said Saint-Sylvestre. “Did Mr. Euhler say when he was coming for you?”
“Three,” said Betty Brocklebank promptly. She suddenly made a startled little sound. “Good Lord, look at the time. I’ll have to start getting us ready.” There was a brief pause. “He
“Of course,” answered Saint-Sylvestre. “Not a problem at all, Miss Brocklebank. Until three, then.”
“Until three,” she answered. “Good-bye, Herr Gesler.”
He hung up the phone and thought for a moment, then dialed the concierge desk in the main lobby.
“Two questions,” he asked when the female concierge answered. “Can you tell me where the Rosewood Hotel Georgia is located, and where can I order a limousine on short notice?”
The Rosewood Hotel Georgia turned out to be within easy walking distance, only a few blocks away from his own hotel. After ordering a limousine from a local service, Saint-Sylvestre walked up Burrard Street and turned right onto Georgia Street. The sun was shining and to the north a wall of mountains stood crisply against a bright blue sky.
For the most part Vancouver seemed to be a very young city; none of the buildings the policeman saw were more than a hundred years old, and except for something that looked like a half-scale version of the British Museum that turned out to be the Vancouver Art Gallery, even though it was called the Courthouse, glass and steel seemed to be the order of the day.
The Rosewood Hotel Georgia was an older twelve-story building at the corner of Georgia and Howe streets, its bricks freshly acid-washed and a doorman under the canopy of the main entrance. The lobby, all reds and golds and deep browns, had that freshly renovated look that was a little at odds with the somewhat old-fashioned 1920s exterior. Saint-Sylvestre wasn’t even slightly interested.
He rode the elevator alone up to the eleventh floor and found 1124. He reached into his jacket pocket, took out the same surgical gloves he’d used in Euhler’s apartment and slipped them on. He knocked and then took half a
