Джозеф Файндер - Extraordinary Powers

I nodded, traced a pattern in the condensation on the side of the glass. “Well,” I said, “I have a name.”

“A name?”

“A banker’s name, I think.” A name, I didn’t say, that Orlov had thought in connection with the gold and Zurich. “Koerfer.”

“Well, all right ,” he said triumphantly. “Why didn’t you say so earlier? Dr. Ernst Koerfer’s the managing director of the Bank of Zurich. Or, at least, he was, until a month or so ago.”

“Retired?”

“Died. Heart attack or something. Although I wouldn’t swear for the fact that he had a heart. A real son of a bitch. But he ran a tight ship.”

“Ah,” I said. “Do you know anyone who’s at the Bank of Zurich now?”

He looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. “Come on, big guy. I know everyone in Swiss banking. That’s my job, man. The new managing director there is a guy named Eisler. Dr. Alfred Eisler. If you want, I can make a call, set up an introduction for you. You want that?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That would be great.”

“No problem.”

“Thanks, big guy,” I said.

Procuring a gun in Switzerland proved to be more of a challenge than I’d anticipated. My contacts were limited, virtually nonexistent. I was afraid to contact Toby or anyone connected with the CIA; there was no one here I trusted. If absolutely necessary, I could reach Truslow, but that route was to be avoided: how could I be sure that the channels of communication hadn’t been penetrated? Far better not to call him. Finally, after bribing a manager of a sporting goods and hunting supply store, I got the name of someone who might be able to “help” me: the manager’s brother-in-law, who ran, of all things, an antiquarian bookshop.

I found it a few blocks away. Gilt letters in the window, in old-style German Fraktur script, read:

A bell mounted on the door jingled as I entered. It was small and dark and redolent of mildew and dankness and the vanilla smell of ancient, crumbling bookbindings.

High black metal shelves, overcrowded with haphazard stacks of books and yellowed magazines, took up virtually every available square inch of floor space. A narrow path between the shelves led back to a small, chaotic-looking oak desk piled high with papers and books, at which sat the proprietor. He called out, “Guten Tag!”

I nodded a greeting and, peering around as if searching for a particular volume, asked the shopkeeper in German: “How late are you open?”

“Until seven,” he replied.

“I’ll be back when I have more time.”

“But if you have just a few minutes,” he said, “I have some new acquisitions in the back room.” He got up, locked the front door, and placed a Closed sign in the window. Then he led me back to a tiny, cluttered room piled high with crumbling leather-bound books. In several shoe boxes he had a pitifully small selection of guns, the best of them being a Ruger Mark II (a decent semiautomatic but only a .22), a Smith & Wesson, and a Glock 19. I chose the Glock. It is a gun that has had more than its share of problems, or so my Agency friends tell me, but I’ve always liked it. The price was exorbitant, but this was Switzerland, after all.

Throughout dinner at the Agnes Amberg on Hottingerstrasse, neither one of us brought up what was weighing so heavily on each other’s minds. It was as if we both needed to take a tension break and be ordinary tourists for a little while. With my hands bandaged I found it difficult, and not a little painful, to cut into my fowl.

Follow the gold ...

I had a name now, and a bank. I was several steps closer.

Once I had a direction, a path, I might come closer to learning why Sinclair was killed — that is, what conspiracy had to be covered up. Whether my midnight epiphany would be borne out.

We sat in glum silence. Then, before I could say anything, Molly said, “You know, this is a place where women didn’t get the right to vote until 1969.”

“What about it?”

“And I thought the medical profession in the U.S. didn’t take women seriously. I’ll never say that again after the doctor I saw today.”

“You saw a doctor?” I said, although I knew. “About the stomach thing?”

“Yep.”

“And?”

“And,” she said, folding her white linen napkin neatly, “I’m pregnant. But you knew that.”

“Yes,” I admitted. “I knew that.”

We could barely make it back to the hotel, Molly and I. There is something about the joy — and the terror — of discovering you are creating a human being that can be quite arousing, and that night we were both certainly feeling amorous. Although Laura had been pregnant with our child, I hadn’t known that while she was alive. So this was a first for me. And as far as Molly was concerned — well, for years she’d been sounding so antiprocreation that I fully expected her to be morose and even talk about getting rid of the child or something awful like that.

But no. She was thrilled, overjoyed. Did it have something to do with the recent loss of her father? Probably, but who really knows the workings of the unconscious mind?

She was tearing the clothes off me before we had the hotel room door closed. She was running her hands across my chest, under my belt to my buttocks, and then sliding them around to the front, all the while kissing me wildly. I responded with no less passion, tugging at her cream silk blouse, fumbling impatiently with the buttons (a few of which popped off onto the carpet), and reaching in to stroke her breasts, her nipples, which were already erect. Then, remembering my burned and bandaged hands, I instead used my tongue, licking in tighter and tighter concentric circles toward her nipples. She shuddered. With my shoulders and upper body — my throbbing arms averted like pegged lobster claws — I pushed her backward onto the enormous sleigh bed and fell on top of her. But she would not be dominated so easily. We tussled, wrestled with an aggressiveness I’d never before seen in our lovemaking but found I was enjoying immensely. Even before I entered her, she was moaning and groaning with pleasure, and anticipated pleasure.

And afterward, as they say, we lay there enjoying the sweatiness and stickiness and muskiness and the warm glow, stroking each other, talking quietly.

“When did it happen?” I asked. I remembered when we made love, shortly after I’d become telepathic, and we were both so aroused that she hadn’t put in her diaphragm. But that was too recent.

“Last month,” she said. “I didn’t think anything would happen.”

“You forgot?”

“Partly.”

I smiled at her subterfuge, not at all resentful. “You see,” I said, “people our age try and try and try to conceive, buying ovulation kits and books and all that. And then you go and forget to put in your diaphragm once, and it happens by accident.”

She nodded and smiled enigmatically. “Not entirely by accident.”

“I wondered.”

She shrugged. “Should we have talked about it in advance?”

“Probably,” I said. “But that’s okay with me.”

Another pause, and then she said: “How’s the burn?”

“Fine,” I said. “Natural endorphins are great painkillers.”

She hesitated, as if screwing up her courage to say something important. I could not help hearing a phrase — horrible thing he used to be — and then she spoke.

“You’ve changed, haven’t you?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know. You’ve become what you swore you’d never be again.”

“It’s the right thing, Mol. There really wasn’t any choice.”