Switzerland. Where the money comes. I have mixed feelings about the place. On the one hand it is sumptuously beautiful in a rugged, blatant and snowy way, and everything works. On the other hand they shout at you for crossing the street when there's no traffic visible for miles, just because the crossing signal is showing a red man not a green man, and if you pass them in a car doing a kilometre more than the legal limit, they honk their horns and flash their lights.
Plus, it's where all the Third World dictators and other assorted robbing bastards stash the loot they've sucked out of their own countries and their own people. This is a whole country where money goes to money; this is one of the richest nations on Earth, and some of the dosh comes from some of the poorest countries (who, once they've been bled dry by the latest thieving scumbag, then get the IMF stepping in with orders to Tighten Their Belts ).
Somehow, being whisked along the N1 towards Lausanne, in the midst of all the other Beemers, Mercs, Audis, Jags, Bentleys, Rollers, Lexi and the rest, it all looked even more self-satisfied and opulent than it usually did. The snow-topped mountains around the lake alone appeared aloof from it all. Even those, though, didn't look quite the same any more. One of the things I've always liked about Switzerland is that they've civilised a lot of their hills: you can get cable cars up there, you can drive up them, between them, through them and underneath them, or climb into a train and be clunked and trundled to cafés and restaurants at the top where the only things more breathtaking than the views are the prices. Then you can ski back down. I always appreciated that; that accessibility, that refusal to treat each and every peak as something which absolutely had to be left pristine, so that only the mountaineers and the local fauna ever got to appreciate it. And I still liked the idea in theory, yet now, looking at the peaks across the lake, I couldn't help comparing them unfavourably with those of Thulahn, and almost scorning them for being so compromised, so tamed.
Fuck me, I thought, I'm going native. I gave a single snort of laughter through my nose. Hans the white-haired driver glanced at me, saw I wasn't trying to attract his attention, and promptly looked away again. I slipped Joni M's latest into the Walkman, but only half listened.
I'd left my phone off for the journey as far as Geneva. I'd switched it back on when I got into the BMW but deliberately hadn't checked on any messages or previous callers. It rang as we were passing Vevey and turning up into the mountains for the long loop round to Château d'Oex. I looked at the incoming number. I found myself smiling.
'Hello?'
'Kathryn.'
'Suvinder. How are you?'
'I am well. I thought I might call at a more civilised hour and enquire how everything went at Freddy's funeral. It was bad enough that I could not come myself, but, well, there was so much to be done here, and I had just come back. Did it all go…I don't know the right word. Fittingly?'
'It did. A Viking's funeral.' (I had to explain to Suvinder about what a Viking's funeral was.) 'And Miss Heggies sends her regards.'
'That is kind of her. She always made me feel most welcome.'
'I used to find her scary at first, but I had a good long talk to her at just last night.' I looked up at the mountains around us.
'Yes? Kathryn? Hello.'
'Sorry. Yes. A good talk. Suvinder?'
'Yes?'
'Nah. Nothing.' I'd been going to say I might be back in Thulahn before too long, but I didn't know how to say something like that to him without investing it with too much in the way of implication. So I settled for, 'How is everybody?'
'All here are well, though my mother learned of my proposal to you and was highly upset. She is still not speaking to me, for which alone I owe you a favour, I think.'
'Suvinder, shame on you for saying such a thing. You should go to her and try to make amends.'
'I will not apologise for what I asked. Nor will I retract my offer to you, not even to please her. She must learn to move with the times. And also that I am the ruler, not her.'
'Well, good for you, but you should still try to make up.'
'I suppose I should. Yes, you are right. I will see her tomorrow. If she will see me.'
'Well, I'd send her my regards, but I don't think it would be a good idea for you to mention that.'
'I think it would be politic not to.' I heard him sigh. 'Kathryn, I must go.'
'Okay, Suvinder. You look after yourself. All right?'
'I will. You too.'
I clicked the phone off. I sat there, tapping its little warm black body against my other hand, looking out at the mountains and thinking.
Château d'Oex is, as I've said, the closest thing we have to a world HQ. The compound starts just above the town itself, on the far side of the railroad tracks. It doesn't look like much, considering: a big old château that looks like it can't decide whether it really is a château or a Schloss, lots of grounds — the sort of grounds that get bigger the longer you look at them, following walls and fences that are as discreetly concealed as possible — and a mountainside scattered with smaller buildings and houses. Blysecrag is a far more impressive sight.
The bit above ground, however, is not even half the story. Some people have tried to nickname the place the Iceberg, because so much of it is hidden under the surface.
In the dusk, Château d'Oex the town looked rich and neat and tidy as ever. It had snowed recently and the place looked quite picturesque, in a neat and tidy way. I swear they clean the slush. The road to the compound swept over the railway and up to a tall set of gates and a designer guardhouse. One of the three guards recognised me and nodded, but they checked my passport anyway.
The gates hummed open with an inertia-rich deliberation that would make you wary of taking anything flimsier than a main battle tank through them uninvited. The 7-series purred upwards past the trees and the crisply white lawns and pastures, its way lit by ornamental light clusters with three softly glowing white globes apiece, and — on about every fifth or sixth lamp — a little CCTV camera.
The château swung into view, tastefully floodlit and looking chocolate-box pretty against the black and white of the wooded mountainside beyond. Above it, necklaces of white road lights wiggled on up the slope to higher buildings.
The mostly male staff at the château went gliding around, white-jacketed, efficient, seeming to do the old Miss Heggies trick of materialising and dematerialising at will. I was welcomed with nods and clicked heels, my bags disappeared apparently of their own volition, my coat slipped silently and almost unnoticed from my shoulders and I was escorted through the baroque and glowing foyer towards the gleaming elevators in the dreamlike state that usually afflicted me here. I nodded to people I knew, exchanged travel pleasantries with the white-jacketed guy carrying my briefcase, but it all seemed dissociated from reality. If you'd asked me when I got to my room and was settling in which language I'd been talking to the guy in the white jacket, I couldn't have told you for sure.