were founded during the war, or right after, failed. Our economy was
not so good as it is now.”
“I have reason to believe it still exists,” Ben said.
Mercandetti cocked his head good-naturedly. “What sort of information
do you have?”
“It’s not solid information, really. It’s more along the lines of of,
well, people talking. People in a position to know.”
Mercandetti seemed amused and skeptical. “Do these people have any more
information? The name could easily have been changed.”
“But isn’t there some record somewhere of corporate name changes?”
The historian’s eyes scanned the vaulted ceiling of the library.
“There’s a place you might check. It’s called the Handelsregisteramt
des Kantons Zurich the registry of all corporations founded in Zurich.
All companies established here must file papers with the registry.”
“All right. And let me ask you something else. This list here.” He
slid the list of directors of Sigma AG, which he had recopied in his own
hand, across the sturdy oak table. “Do you recognize any of these
names?”
Mercandetti put on a pair of reading glasses. “Most of these names they
are names of well-known industrialists, you know. Prosperi, here, is a
sort of underworld figure I think he just died, just recently. In
Brazil or Paraguay, I forget which. These men are mostly dead or very
ancient by now. Oh, and Gaston Rossignol, the banker he must live in
Zurich.”
“Is he still alive?”
“I haven’t heard otherwise. But if he’s alive he must be in his
eighties or nineties.”
“Is there a way to find out?”
“Have you tried the telephone book?” An amused look.
“There were a handful of Rossignols. None of them with the right first
initial.”
Mercandetti shrugged. “Rossignol was a major financier. Helped restore
the solidity of our banking system after the Second World War. He had
many friends here. But perhaps has retired to the Cap d’Antibes, and is
slathering coconut oil on his liver-spotted shoulders even as we speak.
Or perhaps he now seeks to avoid any sort of attention, for some reason
of his own. With the recent controversies over Swiss gold and the
Second World War, there have been agitators, some of them vigilantes.
Even a Swiss banker cannot live in a vault, of course. So one takes
precautions.”
One takes precautions. “Thanks,” he said. “This is extremely helpful.”
Now he pulled out the black-and-white photograph he’d taken from the
Handelsbank and handed it to the academic. “Do any of these men look
familiar?”
“I don’t know if you are a banker, at heart, or a history buff,”
Mercandetti said merrily. “Or a dealer in old photographs quite a trade
these days. Collectors pay fortunes for nineteenth-century tintypes.
Not my sort of thing at all. Give me color any day.”
“This isn’t exactly a vacation snap,” Ben said mildly.
Mercandetti smiled and picked up the photo. “That must be Cyrus Weston
yes, with his trademark hat,” he said. He pointed with a stubby finger.
“That looks like Avery Henderson, dead many years. This is Emil Menard,
who built Trianon, really the first modern conglomerate. This may be
Rossignol, but I’m not sure. One always imagines him with his great
bald dome, not this thatch of dark hair, but he was a much younger man
here. And over here…” A minute passed in silence before Mercandetti
dropped the photo. His smile had vanished. “What sort of prank is
this?” he asked Ben, looking at him over his reading glasses. A bemused
expression crossed his face.
“How do you mean?”
“This must be some sort of montage, something involving trick
photography.” The academic spoke with a trace of annoyance.
“Why do you say that? Surely Weston and Henderson were acquainted.”
“Weston and Henderson? Surely they were. And surely they were never in
the same place as Sven Norquist, the Norwegian shipping magnate, and
Cecil Benson, the British automotive magnate, and Drake Parker, the head
of the petrochemical giant, and Wolfgang Siebing, the German
industrialist, whose family company once made military equipment and now
is best known for its coffee makers And a dozen more of their ilk. Some
of these men were arch rivals some in completely different lines of
enterprise. To posit that all these people had met–now that would
involve rewriting twentieth-century business history, for a start.”
“Couldn’t this have been a sort of mid-century economic conference, like
Davos?” Ben ventured. “A precursor to the Bilderberg conferences,
maybe? Some meeting of the corporate titans?”
The historian pointed to another figure. “This can only be someone’s
idea of a joke. A very cleverly doctored image.”
“Who’s that you’re pointing at?”
“That, of course, is Gerhard Lenz, the Viennese scientist.”
Mercandetti’s tone was hard.
The name sounded vaguely familiar, but Ben wasn’t sure in what context
he knew it. “Who is he again?”
“Was. He died in South America. Dr. Gerhard Lenz, a brilliant mind,
by all accounts, was not to mention the product of Vienna’s finest
medical training, the epitome of Viennese civilization. Sorry, I’m
being sarcastic, and that doesn’t suit a historian. The fact is that
Lenz, like his friend Josef Mengele, was infamous in his own right for
his experiments on concentration camp prisoners, on crippled children.
He was already in his late forties when the war ended. His son still
lives in Vienna.”
My God. Gerhard Lenz was one of the twentieth century’s great monsters.
Ben felt lightheaded. Gerhard Lenz, a light-eyed Nazi officer, was
standing immediately next to Max Hartman.
Mercandetti fished an 8x loupe from a jacket pocket–he regularly had to
resort to magnification in his archival research, Ben guessed–and
scrutinized the image. Then he examined the yellowed card stock on
which the emulsion was fixed. After a few minutes, he shook his head.
“Indeed, it looks real. And yet it is not possible. It cannot be
real.” Mercandetti spoke with quiet vehemence, and Ben wondered whether
he was mostly trying to persuade himself. For even as he denied the
evidence of his eyes, the historian looked ashen. “Tell me,” he said,
and now his tone was brittle, all traces of bonhomie having evaporated.
“Where did you get this?”
One takes precautions. Gaston Rossignol was alive: the death of so
august a figure would not have passed without notice. And yet after
another hour of research, Mercandetti and he came up empty-handed. “I
apologize for a fruitless search,” Mercandetti said resignedly. “But
then I am a historian, not a private detective. Besides, I would have
imagined that this sort of thing would be down your alley, given your
familiarity with financial stratagems.”
The academic was right; it should have occurred to Ben already. What
Mercandetti was alluding to–financial stratagems, he called it–went by
the name of asset protection, and it was something Ben had some
familiarity with. Now it was his turn to sit back and think. Prominent
men do not simply disappear; they create legal edifices behind which to
shelter. The task of hiding one’s place of residence from pursuers was
not so unlike the task of hiding it from creditors or from the taxation
powers of the state. Rossignol would want to retain control of his
possessions while seeming to have been divested of them. It would not be
easy to keep tabs on a man without property.
Ben Hartman recalled a particularly miserly client of Hartman Capital
Management, who had an obsession with asset protection schemes. Ben
came to dislike the man with a passion, but as much as he begrudged the
time he’d spent working on the miser’s account, Ben realized that what
he’d learned about the subterfuges of “asset protection” would now come
in handy. “Gaston Rossignol must have blood relatives in the area,” Ben
said to Carl Mercandetti. “I’m thinking of someone both reliable and
compliant. Someone close enough to do his bidding, but decidedly
younger than he is.” In any variant of a gift-leaseback scheme, Ben
knew, it was an undesirable complication to be predeceased by the pseudo
beneficiary. And the clandestinity of any scheme depended upon the
discretion of the enlisted partner.
“You’re talking about Yves-Alain, of course,” the professor said.
“Am I?”
“You’ve just described him. Yves-Alain Taille, the banker’s nephew.
A civic leader here of some distinction, thanks to his family’s
prominence, and a banker of no distinction at all, thanks to his
intellectual mediocrity. Weak but well-meaning is the general consensus
on him. Used to chair the Zurich Arts Council or some such. He has a
sinecure at one of the private banks, a vice president of something or
other. Easy enough to find out.”
“And if I wanted to find out whether Taille had title to property in the
canton besides his primary residence? Aren’t there public tax documents
in connection to estate transfers?”
“There are municipal records in the Rathaus, just off the Limmat. But
if it’s a recent title transfer, from the past five years, you can do an
online search. The same with the tax documents you seek. They’re