Downtown on a tram like any ordinary person. This was all right with her minders, as long as one or more of them accompanied her. She glanced at the people in her tram car, wondering who they were. None of them looked likely. She recalled a line from a children’s book she had loved, something like, If you want to claim to be our queen, while yet always invisible and unknown to us, you are welcome to the task. It was the same now; if you’re going to guard me but I don’t see you, fine, do it.
Down at Hauptbahnhof she got off and walked the narrow downtown pedestrian streets to the Gefängnis. So characteristic of the Swiss to keep the old jail downtown. Why proclaim one part of the city to be more valuable than any other? The whole point of a city was to smoosh the whole society together and watch it function anyway, daily life some kind of flaneur’s bricolage. An agglomeration, as their urban designers called it, unembarrassed by the ugliness of the word in English.
She checked into the prison without fuss and went to Frank’s dorm. He was in the living area there, reading a book. He looked up and his eyebrows rose.
“I thought you were run out of town.”
“I was. They let me come back.” She sat down on a couch across from him. “What are you reading?”
He showed her the cover; an Inspector Maigret omnibus. In a dark world, she thought, a place of safety. Diagnose the evil. Everyone should have a Mrs. Maigret.
“How’s it going?” she asked, wondering as always why she had come, what she could say.
“It’s okay,” he said. “They let me out during the day. I work at the same place I was working before.”
“The refugee center?”
“Yeah. They’re expanding again. I’ve been there so long I’ve become a fount of institutional wisdom.”
“I doubt that.”
He laughed, surprised. “How come?”
“We’re in Switzerland. The institutional wisdom all gets written down.”
“You would think. Anyway I’m there.”
“Feeding people?”
“Most of the time I’m in processing.”
“What does that mean?”
“People arrive and we try to figure out where they got Dublined, if anywhere.”
“It must have been somewhere, right? No coastlines in this Bohemia.”
He shook his head. “Smugglers. They get to Greece or the Balkans, they don’t want to get registered there. Switzerland has a reputation for quality, in this as in everything.”
“Despite the kind of attack that got you arrested.”
“But it’s worse everywhere else. So they want to come here and then get Dublined. A lot of them have mangled their fingerprints so you can’t ID them that way.”
“Which means they probably got Dublined somewhere else.”
“Sure.”
“So what do you do?”
“If we find out they were tagged elsewhere we have to send them back there. So we don’t try very hard. Most of them we can register here, fingerprints or not. They use retinal scans here. Then we try to find room for them in camps that already have people from their country.”
“Where are they from?”
“Everywhere.”
“Are they climate, political, economic?”
“You can’t tell the difference anymore. If you ever could.”
“So you think you’re getting real refugees.”
He gave her a look. “No one would leave home if they didn’t have to.”
“Okay, so you get them registered here, then you send them to a camp where they’ll have people from their country?”
“We try.”
“But you don’t visit the camps?”
“No. I have to be back here by eight every night.”
“Well, but you can get almost anywhere in Switzerland and back by eight.”
“That’s true. But I’m not supposed to leave the canton.”
“Doesn’t Zurich have any camps?”
“Yes, and I’ve gone to them. There’s a big one out beyond Winterthur, in an old airport or something. Twenty thousand people there. I see how they’re doing. Help in the kitchen. That’s what I like. Although I can help in the kitchen here too.”
“Does that get you time off?”
“I think so. I’m not so worried about that anymore. I don’t have anywhere to go.”
She regarded him for a while.
“Did you ever spend any time in the Alps?” she asked at last.
“A little bit.”
“They’re amazing.”
He nodded. “They look steep.”
“They definitely are.” She told him about her crossing of the Fründenjoch. He seemed interested in her tale, which to her was about the Alps, but when she was done he said, “So who do you think was after you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who loses the most when your ministry does well?”
She shrugged. “Oil companies? Billionaires? Petro-states?”
“That’s not a giant list of suspects.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It could be anyone, I suppose. Maybe it was some individual or small group that they’ve caught. It would make sense if it was just some nut who thought we were the important ones. When actually we’re just a cog in a giant machine.”
“But they might have thought you were the clutch.”
“What does a clutch do again?”
He almost smiled, which was his smile. “It clutches. It’s where the engine connects to the wheels.”
“Ah. Well, I don’t know.”
“Wouldn’t your guards tell you if you asked them?”
“I’m not sure. We’re not that close. I mean, their job is to protect me. They might think I’m safer not knowing.”
“Why would that be?”
“I don’t know. The Swiss banks were attacked too. So they’re keeping pretty quiet about their counterattacks.”
He was smiling his little almost-smile. He gestured at his book. “You need an Inspector Maigret. He liked to explain things to the people he saved.”
“Or if he thought it would make them reveal themselves to be the actual criminal.”
“True. You’ve read them?”
“A few. They’re a bit too dark for me. The crimes are too real.”
“People are twisty.”
“They are.”
“So you need Inspector Maigret.”
“And you need the Alps.”
A woman and girl entered the room, and Frank looked startled. “Oh hi,” he said, then looked
