with him. He never seemed to get tired, and he taught us all about the different wild flowers.'
'What was his name?' Fitzduane felt a sense of betrayal as he asked the question. He was friend and confidant, but first he was interrogator.
Vreni was preoccupied. She answered his question almost without thinking. 'Oskar,' she said. 'Oskar Schupbach – a lovely man. He had a face that looked as if it were carved out of polished mahogany. He was always so tanned, always outdoors, winter and summer.'
'Do you still go to Lenk?'
'No!' she said. 'No! Never again, never.' The words snapped out with savage force. She started to cry and then wiped the tears from her eyes with the back of her hands. She sat on the floor on a cushion, back propped against the bean bag, legs stretched out, feet bare, head down. She looked about fifteen.
'Why did it all go wrong?' she said. 'Why did it have to? We were so happy.'
Fitzduane checked his watch. It was getting late, and unaccustomed as he was to driving on these frozen roads, it would take him a long time to get back to Bern in the darkness. Vreni looked up at him and read his mind. 'You can stay here,' she said, indicating the sofa. 'The roads will be icy now, and I don't think you are used to such driving. Please stay; I'd like you to.'
Fitzduane looked out the window. The night was dark. He could see no moon, no lights of other houses, no headlights in the distance. He let the curtain fall back into place. He smiled at her. 'Fine.'
Vreni unzipped one of the bean bags and rummaged inside. Her hand came out holding a small leather bag secured by a drawstring. She opened the bag and, with the contents, began to roll a joint. She looked up at Fitzduane.
'Grass,' she said. 'You want some?'
Fitzduane shook his head.
She smiled at him. 'It's the generation gap.'
He didn't disillusion her. She lit the joint and inhaled deeply, holding the smoke in her lungs for as long as possible. She repeated the exercise several times. The sweetish smell of cannabis smoke filled the air.
'That's good,' she said. 'That's very, very good.'
She lay back against the bean bag again, her eyes closed. Faint tendrils of smoke emerged from her nostrils. She was silent for several minutes. Fitzduane drank some more schnapps and waited.
'You're easy to talk to,' she said. 'Simpatico. You know how to listen.'
Fitzduane smiled.
'It's incredible to think of it now,' said Vreni, 'but we were in awe of Daddy when we were small. He was a little brusque, somewhat stern, but we loved him. He was often away on business or working late. I remember Mommy would often talk about how hard he was working. We knew he had been a hero during the war. We knew he was a lawyer. We knew about something called ‘business,’ but we had no idea what that word meant in terms of people and their lives.
'Mommy was idealistic. Daddy used to call her naive. She came from another one of the old Bernese families just like Daddy, but she wasn't an ostrich like so many of that group. She didn't just want to safeguard her privileges and live in the past. She wanted a more caring society in Switzerland. She wanted some kind of justice for the Third World, not to bleed it dry with high interest rates and sell it arms and chemicals it doesn't need.
'Funnily enough, I think that Daddy shared her ideas at first – or so Mommy said. But then, as he grew more successful and acquired power and influence, he became less and less liberal and increasingly right-wing and blinkered in his outlook. Too much to lose, I suppose.
'We – Rudi and I – were about twelve or thirteen when we noticed things beginning to go wrong between them. There was no one incident, just a change in the atmosphere and a kind of coldness. Daddy was away more. He came home from work later. There were arguments, the normal sort of thing, I suppose. Even so, Erika came as a complete shock. She was on the scene for about a year before the divorce took place. They were married almost immediately after.
'The reactions of us children were quite different. Marta, as the eldest daughter, was always very close to Daddy. She was a classic moody teenager, and she and Mommy had gotten on badly for a few years. So Marta took Daddy's side over the divorce and went to live with him and Erika. Andreas was of two minds. He was close to Mommy but was absolutely fascinated by Erika. He had a real crush on her. He used to get an erection when she was near.'
Fitzduane remembered his own initial response to Erika's reeking sexuality. He had every sympathy for Andreas.
'Rudi and I were closest to Mommy. We were both terribly upset over the divorce. All that happy time was over. Rudi took it hardest of all. He took a real dislike to Daddy and, for a time, wouldn't even speak to him. Surprisingly he didn't blame Erika.
'Rudi was fifteen at the time and exceptionally bright. He was also unhappy, frustrated, angry. He wanted to do something, to get revenge, to teach Daddy a lesson. I suppose I felt the same way at the time, though not as strongly. He started to investigate Daddy's life and at the same time to seek out people who were opposed to the system and values Daddy supported.
'Rudi became obsessed. He began to read Daddy's files, and then he grew more daring or reckless and photocopied some of them. I wasn't too keen on that at first, but when I read some of the stuff he found, I began to wonder.
'The companies that Daddy is involved with, either as a director or a legal adviser in most cases, are really big. I mean, put together, they probably employ hundred of thousands of people all over the world, and their combined turnover is in the billions. We found some terrible things.'
'Such as?' asked Fitzduane.
'The worst cases involved a company called Vaybon Holdings. Rudi found some confidential minutes in Daddy's own handwriting. I don't remember all the details, but it was a review of their dirty tricks over many years. Many concerned bribery and illegal sales of arms to governments in Africa and the Middle East. Another concerned that tranquilizer they made – VB19 – which was found to have serious genetic side effects. It was withdrawn in the United States and Europe. Under a different name and repackaged, it continued to be sold in the Third World.'
'What did Rudi do with the papers he copied?'
'He was going to keep them,' said Vreni, 'and release them to the press outside Switzerland. That was too much for me. The whole family would have been affected, and Ruid would have gone to prison if he had been discovered as the source. Commercial secrecy is enforceable by law in Switzerland, you know.'
Fitzduane nodded.
'It wasn't just me who persuaded Rudi to burn the papers. Mommy also discovered that Rudi had them. She didn't want them released either. She talked to Rudi a lot, and eventually – reluctantly, but mainly to please her – he agreed. Shortly afterward she was killed.
'Rudi was terribly upset. He was quite distraught. He started saying that she had been killed deliberately by Vaybon because she had seen the documents. I don't think he really believed it. It was just an accident, but he was overwrought and wanted to lash out – to blame someone or something. In some strange way I think he also blamed himself.'
Fitzduane remembered how Rudi's mother had died. Claire von Graffenlaub had run her Porsche into a truck loaded with spaghetti. It didn't seem the likeliest way to be murdered.
'The things Daddy was involved in, the burning of the papers, Mommy's death, the influence of some of his new friends, all made Rudi more and more extreme. He began to experiment with drugs, not just grass, but with different things like speed and acid. We had moved back to Daddy's, but he was away from home a lot. Rudi stopped arguing with Daddy and seemed to be getting on with him better, but really he was working on some kind of revenge. He wasn't just acting by himself anymore. He was taking advice, responding to some specific influence.
'He made friends with some people who were on the fringes of the AKO – the Anarchistische Kampforganisation. They wanted to destroy the Swiss system, the whole Western capitalist system, through revolution. It was mostly just talk, but some other people in the mainstream of the group had been involved in stealing weapons from the Swiss armories and supplying terrorists. They supplied weapons to order. Machine guns, revolvers, grenades, even panzer mines powerful enough to destroy a tank. They had links with the Baader-Meinhof gang. Carlos, the Basques, many extremist groups. The weapons-stealing group was broken up, and the active
