Games of the Hangman (32 page)

Vreni unzipped
one of the bean bags and rummaged inside.
 
Her hand came out holding a small leather bag secured by a
drawstring.
 
She opened the bag and, with
the contents, began to roll a joint.
 
She
looked up at Fitzduane.

"Grass,"
she said.
 
"You want some?"

Fitzduane
shook his head.

She smiled at
him.
 
"It's the generation
gap."

He didn't
disillusion her.
 
She lit the joint and
inhaled deeply, holding the smoke in her lungs for as long as possible.
 
She repeated the exercise several times.
 
The sweetish smell of cannabis smoke filled
the air.

"That's
good," she said.
 
"That's very,
very good."

She lay back
against the bean bag again, her eyes closed.
 
Faint tendrils of smoke emerged from her nostrils.
 
She was silent for several minutes.
 
Fitzduane drank some more schnapps and
waited.

"You're
easy to talk to," she said.
 
"Simpatico.
 
You know how to
listen."

Fitzduane smiled.

"It's
incredible to think of it now," said Vreni, "but we were in awe of
Daddy when we were small.
 
He was a
little brusque, somewhat stern, but we loved him.
 
He was often away on business or working
late.
 
I remember Mommy would often talk
about how hard he was working.
 
We knew
he had been a hero during the war.
 
We
knew he was a lawyer.
 
We knew about
something called ‘business,’ but we had no idea what that word meant in terms
of people and their lives.

"Mommy
was idealistic.
 
Daddy used to call her
naïve.
 
She came from another one of the
old Bernese families just like Daddy, but she wasn't an ostrich like so many of
that group.
 
She didn't just want to safeguard
her privileges and live in the past.
 
She
wanted a more caring society in
Switzerland
.
 
She wanted some kind of justice for the
Third World
, not to bleed it dry with high interest rates
and sell it arms and chemicals it doesn't need.

"Funnily
enough, I think that Daddy shared her ideas at first — or so Mommy said.
 
But then, as he grew more successful and
acquired power and influence, he became less and less liberal and increasingly
right-wing and blinkered in his outlook.
 
Too much to lose, I suppose.

"We —
Rudi and I — were about twelve or thirteen when we noticed things beginning to
go wrong between them.
 
There was no one
incident, just a change in the atmosphere and a kind of coldness.
 
Daddy was away more.
 
He came home from work later.
 
There were arguments, the normal sort of
thing, I suppose.
 
Even so, Erika came as
a complete shock.
 
She was on the scene
for about a year before the divorce took place.
 
They were married almost immediately after.

"The
reactions of us children were quite different.
 
Marta, as the eldest daughter, was always very close to Daddy.
 
She was a classic moody teenager, and she and
Mommy had gotten on badly for a few years.
 
So Marta took Daddy's side over the divorce and went to live with him
and Erika.
 
Andreas was of two
minds.
 
He was close to Mommy but was
absolutely fascinated by Erika.
 
He had a
real crush on her.
 
He used to get an
erection when she was near."

Fitzduane remembered
his own initial response to Erika's reeking sexuality.
 
He had
every sympathy
for Andreas.

"Rudi and
I were closest to Mommy.
 
We were both
terribly upset over the divorce.
 
All
that happy time was over.
 
Rudi took it
hardest of all.
 
He took a real dislike
to Daddy and, for a time, wouldn't even speak to him.
 
Surprisingly he didn't blame Erika.

"Rudi was
fifteen at the time and exceptionally bright.
 
He was also unhappy, frustrated,
angry
.
 
He wanted to do something, to get revenge, to
teach Daddy a lesson.
 
I suppose I felt
the same way at the time, though not as strongly.
 
He started to investigate Daddy's life and at
the same time to seek out people who were opposed to the system and values
Daddy supported.

"Rudi
became obsessed.
 
He began to read
Daddy's files, and then he grew more daring or reckless and photocopied some of
them.
 
I wasn't too keen on that at
first, but when I read some of the stuff he found, I began to wonder.

"The
companies that Daddy is involved with, either as a director or a legal adviser
in most
cases,
are really big.
 
I mean, put together, they probably employ
hundred of thousands of people all over the world, and their combined turnover
is in the billions.
 
We found some
terrible things."

"Such
as?" asked Fitzduane.

"The
worst cases involved a company called Vaybon Holdings.
 
Rudi found some confidential minutes in
Daddy's own handwriting.
 
I don't
remember all the details, but it was a review of their dirty tricks over many
years.
 
Many concerned bribery and
illegal sales of arms to governments in Africa and the
Middle
East
.
 
Another concerned
that tranquilizer they made — VB19 — which was found to have serious genetic
side effects.
 
It was withdrawn in the
United States
and
Europe
.
 
Under a different name and repackaged, it
continued to be sold in the
Third World
."

"What did
Rudi do with the papers he copied?"

"He was
going to keep them," said Vreni, "and release them to the press
outside
Switzerland
.
 
That was too much for me.
 
The whole family would have been affected,
and Ruid would have gone to prison if he had been discovered as the
source.
 
Commercial secrecy is
enforceable by law in
Switzerland
,
you know."

Fitzduane
nodded.

"It
wasn't just me who persuaded Rudi to burn the papers.
 
Mommy also discovered that Rudi had
them.
 
She didn't want them released
either.
 
She talked to Rudi a lot, and
eventually — reluctantly, but mainly to please her — he agreed.
 
Shortly afterward she was killed.

"Rudi was
terribly upset.
 
He was quite
distraught.
 
He started saying that she
had been killed deliberately by Vaybon because she had seen the documents.
 
I don't think he really believed it.
 
It was just an accident, but he was
overwrought and wanted to lash out — to blame someone or something.
 
In some strange way I think he also blamed
himself."

Fitzduane remembered
how Rudi's mother had died.
 
Claire von
Graffenlaub had run her Porsche into a truck loaded with spaghetti.
 
It didn't seem the likeliest way to be
murdered.

"The
things Daddy was involved in, the burning of the papers, Mommy's death,
the
influence of some of his new friends, all made Rudi more
and more extreme.
 
He began to experiment
with drugs, not just grass, but with different things like speed and acid.
 
We had moved back to Daddy's, but he was away
from home a lot.
 
Rudi stopped arguing
with Daddy and seemed to be getting on with him better, but really he was
working on some kind of revenge.
 
He
wasn't just acting by himself anymore.
 
He was taking advice, responding to some specific influence.

"He made
friends with some people who were on the fringes of the AKO — the Anarchistische
Kampforganisation.
 
They wanted to
destroy the Swiss system, the whole Western capitalist system, through
revolution.
 
It was mostly just talk, but
some other people in the mainstream of the group had been involved in stealing
weapons from the Swiss armories and supplying terrorists.
 
They supplied weapons to order.
 
Machine guns, revolvers,
grenades, even panzer mines powerful enough to destroy a tank.
 
They had links with the Baader-Meinhof
gang.
 
Carlos, the Basques, many
extremist groups.
 
The weapons-stealing
group was broken up, and the active members were imprisoned before Rudi came on
the scene.
 
Still, there were many
sympathizers who got away.
 
Some of them
were known to the police and watched."

"So
you're saying that Rudi wasn't actively involved," said Fitzduane.
 
"He was more of a terrorist groupie once
removed."

Vreni
smiled.
 
"That's a funny way of
putting it, but I suppose it's about right."

"And
where were you in all this?" said Fitzduane.

She looked at
him without answering, and then she turned away and stared at the floor, her
hands clasped around her knees.
 
"I
prefer to be an
Aussteiger
.
 
I don't want to hurt anyone," she said
quietly.

"What's
an
Aussteiger?
"

"What in
English you call a dropout," said Vreni.
 
"Actually it's funny.
 
The
German word means more like a ‘climb-out.’
 
Here you can't just drop out like in
America
.
 
You have to make the effort — to climb."

She
yawned.
 
It was past midnight.
 
Her voice was beginning to slur from the
combined effects of tiredness and grass.
 
He had many other questions to ask, but most
would have to wait until morning.
 
He
doubted she would speak so freely in the light of day.
 
Few people did.

He had the
sense that what he was hearing was true, but only part of the truth; it was a
parallel truth.
 
Something else had been
happening at the same time, something that, perhaps, Vreni did not know — or
was only partially informed about.
 
He
yawned himself.
 
It was pieces, feelings,
vibes,
guesswork
at this stage.

"I'm
sleepy," she said.
 
"We can talk
some more in the morning."

She uncurled
herself from the floor and knelt on her haunches in front of him.
 
Her blouse was unbuttoned, and he could see
the swell of her breasts and the tops of her nipples.
 
She brought her face close to his.
 
He could feel her breath, smell her
body.
 
She slid an arm around his neck
and caressed him.
 
She kissed him on the
lips, and her tongue snaked into his mouth for a moment before he pulled back.
 
Her hand flickered across the bulge in his
trousers and then withdrew.

"You
know, Irishman," she whispered as if to herself, "you know that
they're going to kill you, don't you?"
 
Then she vanished through
he
round hole in the
ceiling.
 
In his exhaustion Fitzduane was
unsure that he'd heard her correctly.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

Small sounds
woke him.
 
The room was empty, and the
lamp, almost out of oil, sputtered as it quietly died.
 
He saw her legs first, then the V-shaped patch
of fawn pubic hair as she slid down from her room onto the warm stone of the
choust.
 
The gold bracelet on her left
wrist caught the last flickers of light.
 
Then her naked body was shrouded in darkness.

He could hear
her moving slowly across the floor toward him.
 
She was sobbing quietly.
 
He could
feel the wetness of her cheek against his outstretched hand.
 
Without speaking, he drew her into the bed
beside him and held her in his arms.
 
Her
tears wet the hair on his chest.
 
He
kissed her gently as one would kiss a child, and after a long while she fell
asleep.

He remained
awake thinking for several hours until the first faint light of dawn eased its
way through the curtains.
 
Vreni slept
easily, her breathing deep and even.
 
Very slowly he unclasped the bracelet from her wrist, moving it only
slightly so he could see what was there.
 
It was hard to discern in the minimal light, but he could see
enough.
 
There was no tattoo.
 
Vreni stirred slightly but did not waken.