“ Thirteen years.”
Herr Hoffgeitz nodded. “Let me speak with him a bout the computer situation. I’m sure the two of you can find common ground.”
The assistant, himself not young anymore, bowed stiffly. As he walked to the door, his bespectacled face grew, filling Wilhelm’s computer screen. The edge of the door appeared for a second at the bottom, just below the camera, and disappeared as Gunter exited.
At the far end of the office, Armande Hoffgeitz got up and maneuvered his heavy girth between the chair and the desk. He turned to the window and looked out. Despite the distance from the miniature video camera above the door, the pleasure on the banker’s pudgy face came through. He loved his Zurich, where the Hoffgeitz Bank had operated for 216 years at the same stout building on the corner of Bahnhofstrasse and Augustinergasse, managed by a long line of Hoffgeitz males. The neighboring buildings housed other private banks with understated facades and long family traditions. A hundred feet under the neatly swept Bahnhofstrasse, thick walls of steel and concrete protected massive vaults that contained the formidable fortunes entrusted to Armande Hoffgeitz and his colleagues. They, and the institutions they ran, had made Zurich a financial mecca.
Like the building in which his bank resided, Armande Hoffgeitz had weathered the years gracefully. At eighty-four, he was one of Zurich’s most respected private bankers, personifying the mystic aura surrounding the bank and its anonymous international clients. The bank’s investments in select private and public corporations were rumored to add up to several billion dollars. Diversifying among major industrial, agriculture, retail, construction, energy, and shipping companies, the Hoffgeitz Bank had refrained from accumulating a controlling position in any single public company, making it impossible to trace its investments.
A minute after his head had disappeared from the computer screen, Gunter Schnell knocked on Wilhelm’s door. With a single keystroke, he made Armande Hoffgeitz vanish from the screen, replaced by columns of numbers, and pressed the button under his desktop, unlocking the door.
“ Herr Horch?” Gunter leaned in through the half-opened door. “Herr Hoffgeitz wishes to see you.”
*
“ Hey! Open the door!” Bathsheba knocked and tried the handle again. “I’m going to wet my pants!”
“I’m almost done.” Gideon dried his face on a towel and turned the key. “All yours.”
“Don’t leave.” Bathsheba held the door as he exited the bathroom. “I like sharing.”
“I don’t.” He realized she was about to slip out of her nightgown and turned away. “What happened yesterday should never happen again.”
“Never? Then you’ll be in a lot of pain. I heard men have to ejaculate at least once a day to maintain-”
“We’re colleagues, not lovers!” He reached back without looking and shut the bathroom door.
“ Fine,” she said behind the closed door, “go ahead, play hard-to-get, I’ll play along if it makes you feel better.”
“ I’m not playing. I mean it.”
“ How about a cold shower then?”
“ If you continue, one of us will have to resign from the service.”
“The service?” Bathsheba started the water in the shower. “What service? We’re working for the Elie Weirdo Freak Show.”
Gideon struggled to control his anger. “The Special Operations Department reports directly to the prime minister’s office, and Elie Weiss is a great mentor-”
“Weirdo!”
“He might be different, but he’s very powerful. We’re not the only team working for him undercover-”
“ Weirdo!”
“ He hired us when Mossad wouldn’t. Where is your gratitude?”
“Weirdo!”
*
“ Lemmy!” Armande Hoffgeitz waved him in. “Did you made it back from Paris okay?”
“Why not?”
“Driving that little toy of yours?” The banker shook his head. “I’ll never understand why you’d rather drive an old Volkswagen all the way there instead of taking a short flight in first class.”
“It’s a Porsche, not a Volkswagen.”
Armande waved in dismissal. “A Beetle is a Beetle even with a low roof and a fancy name.”
“ And a much higher speed.”
“It should, considering all the time and money you have put into it. How was Paris?”
“ Very productive. I took a Saudi client to see Madame Butterfly at the Paris Opera. Maria Teresa Uribe played Cho-Cho-Sun. Incredible performance!”
“ Not my cup of tea. And how are Paula and Klaus Junior?”
“ Your grandson insists on a Saturday-morning sailing. I told him it’s going to be chilly, but he wouldn’t give it up.”
“ He’s a true Hoffgeitz, just the way his uncle was.” Armande glanced at the photo of his late son in a black frame on the desk. Klaus V.K. Hoffgeitz had died in a freak skiing accident in 1973. “Tell Junior that I’ll join him at the bow. We’ll face the wind together!”
“ Bring your coat and hat.”
“ I will.” He patted a pile of computer printouts filled with numbers. “Look, I’m too old to learn new tricks, and so is Gunter. We’ve always kept records with pen and paper-”
“It’s not the computer system. It’s me. I failed to earn Gunter’s trust.”
“ Nonsense. He respects you greatly.” Armande Hoffgeitz pushed up his glasses. d up hi0 But he’s accustomed to the safety of physical records and steel doors, not wires and keyboards.”
“ Let me propose,” Lemmy said, “that Gunter will enter new transactions into the computer database and at the same time continue to update his paper records.”
“ Why can’t we let him keep only paper records for my clients while the rest of the bank transitions to the electronic records?”
“ We need all the numbers in the computer system in order to maintain a correct daily balance of the bank’s total assets, reflecting deposits and withdrawals in all the accounts without exception. Every bank in Zurich will soon be automated the same way. The Banking Commission set the new accounting regulations, and compliance would be impossible without a computerized system.”
Armande Hoffgeitz raised his hand. “I’m familiar with the regulations.”
“ But it won’t change the fact that only Gunter has the account numbers and passwords for your clients. Only he can look at individual records-paper files and computer files. We bought the best equipment, with top security features and redundancy. It’s better than the systems used by Credit Suisse, UBS, and all the other banks.”
“Still, it feels too…intangible…unprotected, you understand?”
“That’s a common misperception. Imagine the computer as a large filing cabinet with a separate drawer for each account, made of steel that’s thicker than our underground vaults. Each drawer is equipped with two keys-account number and password. No one except Gunter will be able to look up specific records of your clients’ accounts. The only accessible data is the total financial positions at the end of each day, including net assets after deposits and withdrawals. I covered all this in my presentation last year, but if you want me to suspend the project-”
“No. No. Keep going, but make sure Gunter is comfortable, yes?”
*
Gideon and Bathsheba left the Paris apartment and drove to Ermenonville. From the parking area beside a gas station they had clear views of the intersection connecting the local road with the highway. Other than single-lane roads hampered by slow farming machinery, this was the only way for Abu Yusef’s men to reach Paris.
Bathsheba opened yesterday’s evening paper, Le Parisien. Al-Mazir’s bloody corpse was splashed across an inside page, his faced blurred, under a headline: Three Palestinians Shot in Turf War over Underage Prostitution
“Phew,” Bathsheba said. “Profiteering from kiddie sex. These Arabs would do anything for a buck.”
“You’re really twisted,” Gideon said.
“Do you want to straighten me out?” She fluttered her eyelids. “Will you spank me?”
“Just watch the road.” He had bought an audio edition of Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal. With the first tape playing on the cassette player, he settled to scan passing cars for the
green Peugeot 605.