away!
Ben brought his car to a halt just after the stone bridge, lolling his
head back in his shock and exhaustion, waiting for the Polizei to
arrive. A minute went by, and then another. He craned his neck back to
the lethal stretch of road.
But the police car was gone now, too. The crumpled Saab had been
abandoned.
He was alone, the only sound the ticking of his car’s engines, and the
hammering of his own heart. He pulled his Nokia from his pocket,
remembered his conversation with Schmid, and made a decision. They can
lock you up for twenty-four hours without any cause, Howie had told him.
Schmid had made it clear that he was looking for an excuse to do just
that. He would put off calling the Polizei. He couldn’t think straight
anymore.
As the adrenaline ebbed, panic gave way to a sense of profound
depletion. He badly needed to rest. He needed to refuel, to take
stock.
He drove his ruined Opel, the engine straining, the shredded tires
making for a bone-jarring ride, a few miles up a hilly road to the
nearest town, although really it was a village, a Dorf. Its narrow
streets were lined with ancient stone buildings, progressing from tiny
dilapidated structures to larger, half-timbered houses. A few lights
were on, but most of the windows were dark. The street was unevenly
paved, and the car’s undercarriage, now low to the ground, regularly
bumped and scraped against the cobblestone.
The narrow road became a main street soon enough, lined now with great
gabled stone houses and rows of slate-shingled buildings. Now he came
to a large cobblestoned square, marked rathausplatz, dominated by an
ancient Gothic cathedral. At the center of the square was a stone
fountain. He appeared to be in a seventeenth-century village built upon
much older ruins, its buildings a peculiar hodgepodge of architectural
styles.
Across the town square from the cathedral was a seventeenth-century
manor house with crow-stepped gables, marked with a small wooden sign
identifying it as the Altes Gebaude, the Old Building, though it looked
newer than most of the other buildings in town. Lights blazed from its
small-mullioned windows. It was a tavern, a place to get food and
drink, to sit and rest and think. He parked his wreck alongside an old
farm truck, where it would be largely concealed from view, and went in,
his trembling, twitching legs barely supporting his weight.
Inside, the place was warm and cozy, lit by a flickering fire in an
immense stone hearth. It smelled of wood smoke and fried onions and
roasted meats, wonderful and inviting. It looked like a traditional
Swiss Stoblt, an old-style restaurant. One round wooden table was
obviously the Starmtisch, the place reserved for the regulars who came
in every day to drink beer and play cards for hours. Five or six men,
mostly farmers or laborers, regarded him with hostile suspicion, then
went back to their cards. Sprinkled throughout the room were others
having dinner or drinking.
Ben realized only now how famished he was. He looked around for a
waiter or waitress, saw none, and sat down at an empty table. When a
waiter arrived, a small round man of early middle age, Ben ordered
something typically Swiss, heavy and reliable: Rosti, roasted potatoes,
with Geschnetzeltes, or bits of veal in cream sauce, with a Vierterl, a
quarter liter carafe of local red wine. When the waiter returned ten
minutes later, balancing several plates on his arm, Ben asked in
English: “Where’s a good place to spend the night?”
The waiter frowned and set down the dinner plates in silence. He moved
aside the glass ashtray and the red Altes Gebaude matchbook, poured the
deep red wine into a stemmed glass. “The Langasthof,” he said, in a
heavy Romansch accent. “It’s the only place for twenty kilometers
around.”
While the waiter gave him directions, Ben tucked into his Rosti. They
were brown and crisp, onion-rangy, delicious. He continued wolfing down
his dinner, glancing through the partly fogged window at the small
parking area outside. Another car was parked alongside his, obstructing
his view. A green Audi.
Something twanged at the back of his mind.
Wasn’t a green Audi behind him for a good stretch of A3 out of Zurich?
He remembered having seen one, worrying whether he was being followed,
dismissing it as a figment of an overactive imagination.
Turning his gaze, he thought he saw, in his peripheral vision, someone
staring at him. Yet when his eyes swept the room, there was no one
giving him so much as a casual glance. Ben set down his wineglass. What
I need is some black coffee, he thought, not more wine. I’m starting to
see things that aren’t there.
Most of his dinner was gone, downed in record time. Now it sat heavily
in his stomach, a leaden mass of greasy potatoes and cream sauce. He
looked around for the waiter to order a strong coffee. Once again he
got that creepy sensation of someone looking over at him, then looking
away. He turned to his left, where most of the scarred wooden tables
were empty, but a few people sat in dark booths, deep in shadow, next to
a long, ornately carved wooden bar that was dark and unoccupied, the
only object on its surface an old-fashioned white rotary-dial telephone.
One man was sitting alone in a booth, drinking coffee and smoking, a
middle-aged man in a worn brown leather bomber jacket with long graying
hair pulled back into a ponytail. I’ve seen him before, Ben thought. /
know I’ve seen him before. But where? Now the man casually brought an
elbow to the table, leaned forward, and rested his head on the
outstretched palm, the hand cradling the side of his face.
The gesture was too studied. The man was trying to hide his face,
trying too hard to be casual about it.
Ben remembered a tall man in a business suit, sallow complexion, long
gray hair worn in a ponytail. But from where? He had caught a quick
glance of such a man, thinking in passing how ridiculous, how dated, a
ponytail looked on a businessman. How… eighties.
The Bahnhofstrasse.
Ponytail man had been among the crowd milling around the pedestrian
shopping district just before he spotted Jimmy Cavanaugh. Now he was
certain of it. The man had been in the vicinity of the Hotel St.
Gotthard; later, he’d followed Ben in a green Audi; now he was here,
looking decidedly out of place.
Dear Christ, he’s tailing me, too, Ben thought. Since this afternoon,
he’s been watching me. He felt his stomach tighten.
Who was he, and why was he here? If, like Jimmy Cavanaugh, he wanted to
kill Ben–for whatever reason Cavanaugh had tried–why hadn’t he done so
already? There had been plenty of opportunities. Cavanaugh had pulled
out a gun in broad daylight right on the Bahnhofstrasse. Why would
Ponytail hesitate to fire at him in a mostly empty tavern?
He signaled the waiter, who bustled over with a questioning look, “Could
I have a coffee?” Ben asked.
“Certainly, sir.”
“And where’s your rest room, your WE?”
The waiter pointed toward a dimly lit corner of the room, where a small
corridor was barely visible. Ben pointed in that direction too,
confirming the rest room’s location in as broad a gesture as possible.
So Ponytail could see where he was going.
Ben slipped some money under his plate, pocketed one of the restaurant’s
matchbooks, got up slowly, and made his way toward the rest room. It
was located just off the small corridor, on the other side of the dining
room from the kitchen. Restaurant kitchens usually had service
entrances from the outdoors, Ben knew, so they made good escape routes.
And he didn’t want Ponytail thinking he was trying to leave the
restaurant through the kitchen. This rest room was small and
windowless; he couldn’t leave this way. Ponytail, presumably some sort
of professional, would likely have already checked out the means of
egress.
He locked the rest room door. There was an ancient toilet and equally
ancient marble sink basin, and it smelled pleasantly of cleaning liquid.
He pulled out his digital phone and dialed the telephone number of the
Altes Gebaude. Ben could hear the faint sound of a telephone ringing
somewhere in the restaurant. Probably the old rotary-dial phone he’d
seen on the bar near Ponytail’s booth, or one in the kitchen, if there
was one there. Or both.
A man’s voice answered, “Altes Gebaude, gut en Abend.” Ben was fairly
sure it was the waiter.
Making his voice deep and gravelly, Ben said, “I need to speak to one of
your customers, please. Someone who’s having dinner there tonight. It’s
urgent.”
“}a? Who is that?”
“Someone you probably don’t know. Not a regular. It’s a gentleman with
long gray hair in a ponytail. He’s probably wearing a leather jacket,
he always does.”