The Eighth Day (41 page)

Danny got out of the tram a little while later, finding himself in a more residential area. The sign on the corner identified the street as Seefeldstrasse. The shops along it were not the sort built for the tourist trade but the kind that served city residents. He passed a hardware store, a hole-in-the-wall selling small appliances, a health-food store, a hairdresser’s, a travel bureau, and two or three shops selling secondhand designer clothing. He passed what looked like a gun shop, its window bristling with crossbows, guns, and knives. A mannequin in camouflage gear aiming a rifle at a stuffed boar.

And so it went. A podriatrist’s office. A hairdresser’s. A Feng Shui shop. He’d gone three long blocks and was beginning to think he’d have to get back on the tram when he arrived at the Hotel Seefeld.

The desk clerk was a gorgeous blonde wearing white lipstick and long silver earrings. He asked if the hotel had a room and was told crisply: “Of course.” As she tapped the computer keyboard, they talked about the weather. “A real heat wave,” she said. “So un-Swiss.” She slid the key card across the brushed chrome surface of the counter and gave him a rueful smile. “And I can tell you’re not one of those Americans who expects air-conditioning everywhere he goes, are you?”

Danny shook his head. Of course he didn’t.

His room was an ultramodern cockpit on the third floor, all burled wood and chrome, black, white, and charcoal. And hot as hell. He drew the drapes to the side as a prelude to opening a set of French doors leading out to a tiny balcony overlooking Seefeldstrasse. But it wasn’t as easy as that. The doors were operated by a mechanism as complex as a Swiss watch. Crouching before it like a safecracker, he played with the mechanism for five long minutes, beads of sweat rolling down his temples. Finally, the doors sprang open and a gush of damp air flooded the room.

He picked up the phone and asked the operator to connect him with the Baur au Lac. Soon the phone was ringing in Mounir Barzan’s room. After the sixth ring, a recording asked if he’d like to leave a message for the guest. He thought about it. And hung up.

With a heavy sigh, he stripped to his boxers and stretched out on the crisp white bedspread to think.

The way he saw it, he’d only been in Zurich a couple of hours and, already, everything had changed. Now that Paulina had seen him, getting into the Tawus Holdings meeting was going to be next to impossible. Zebek would have someone in the lobby, someone at the door, someone waiting somewhere else. So much for the element of surprise.
(Way to go, Slick. . . .)

Still, Zebek had no way of knowing how much Danny knew. As far as the Yezidis’ brand-new Imam was concerned, Danny had been running so hard that he hadn’t had time to think. Zebek wouldn’t know how much Remy Barzan had told him—or, depending on whether the search of Barzan’s borrowed villa had turned up Danny’s passport, even that he’d found Barzan. Zebek would not know anything about what Manziger had told Danny. Neither would he know about Danny’s success in cracking Terio’s e-mail and acquiring Rolvaag’s report.

Not that it mattered, really. Zebek would kill him anyway, just to watch him die. He didn’t actually have to
know
anything.

On a table next to the bed, a digital clock blinked 12:18. He needed to get to Mounir—before the meeting. But how? He closed his eyes and remembered something Remy had said, about his grandfather, that talk of “a Swiss miss.”

Danny sat up, grabbed the yellow pages—and saw that it was in German. Or Swiss German. Whatever it was, he couldn’t read it. For a moment, he thought he was going to have to ask the blonde at the front desk for help. But then he saw that, like
golf
and
disco
,
escort service
did not require translation.

There were about thirty of them, and the idea of calling every one of them was depressing. But it wasn’t as if he had anything else to do, so he started in on the list. It turned out that his worries about language problems had been misplaced. It wasn’t the locals who needed “escorts.” It was foreign businessmen who had a night or two in Zurich. After a few calls, he had the feeling that the women he spoke to could have fielded questions in Japanese, Spanish, Russian, or whatever. Every one of them was fluent in English.

He made up a story about how he was the personal assistant to Mounir Barzan. It was essential that he talk to him, a matter of great urgency. The women were pleasant but uniformly unhelpful. He’d been through about a dozen services when a throaty-voiced madam told him he was wasting his time.

The rebuke surprised him. “Excuse me?”

She laughed, a musical trill. “First of all,” she said, “if you were actually this fellow’s personal assistant, wouldn’t you have been the one to organize this activity?”

“Well, yeah, but—”

“Secondly,” she said in an amused voice, “do you think you can just call up and ask for people? Do you think someone’s going to answer the phone and say, ‘Hang on, pet, I think he’s just finishing up with Helena’? Not likely.”

“You’re right,” he admitted. “No question, but . . . I really have to find this guy. He’s in serious trouble.”

“You mean, you are.”

Danny started to object, then sighed and said, “Is it that obvious?”

“Let me ask you something,” she said.

“What?”

“The gentleman you’re looking for? Is he an Arab, or African or . . .”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Danny asked.

“Well, certain services
specialize
.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that. He’s . . . Kurdish, actually.”

“Kurdish, I don’t know. But I think Thai Centerfolds is popular with clients from the Middle East. And Little Black Book. But just leave the message. Don’t dress it up. It’s an emergency and the man should call you.”

It was good advice, and Danny thanked her for it.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “And who knows? You might get lucky.”

He did and he didn’t. By one-fifteen, he’d called every whorehouse in the phone book. And no one seemed to recognize Mounir’s name. He was yawning with jet lag but didn’t want to fall asleep. He tried the desk to see if they had room service. No dice. He splashed cold water on his face, which helped for a couple of minutes, but between the stifling air in the room and his lack of sleep he soon found himself beginning to nod off again. He didn’t want to fall asleep. He
couldn’t
fall asleep. He had to think of something, some way to reach Mounir. He had two hours and change to figure something out. He willed himself to focus, conjuring up Inzaghi’s crumpled body, the massacre of Remy Barzan, summoning up Manziger’s gray goo scenario, to fight off his fatigue. But the truth was, his brain was so fogged that he couldn’t come up with a single idea about what he might do or how he could get to Mounir. Then, minutes later, he just couldn’t stop yawning. He needed coffee,
at least
coffee.

He took the phone off the hook, reasoning that if Mounir Barzan got a busy signal he’d call back. He sprinted to the café at the end of the block. They had no drip coffee, only espresso drinks. Just the cooler air of the street and the smell of coffee helped revive him. He ordered a triple-shot latte to go and speed-walked back to the hotel with the paper cup burning his hand.

He couldn’t have been gone for more than five minutes, but as soon as he replaced the receiver the little red light on the phone blinked at him. Swearing, he punched the button to retrieve the message, then listened to Mounir’s heavy voice, with its formal intonations. “Mounir Barzan is speaking. I return this message, but you are not here. I am staying at the Hotel Baur au Lac. I am occupied all this day with meeting. For emergency, you can reach me this evening.” The message logged off with a time tag, in English: twelve forty-five. He realized from this that Mounir had called while he was still phoning escort services. The hotel’s phone system did not include call waiting, and it must take a while for a message to post into voice mail. His relief that his coffee run was not the reason he’d missed Mounir’s call lasted a split second and then he succumbed to a frustrated rage.

“Sonofabitch!”
He slammed the phone down in its cradle and looked wildly around the room. Then he crossed the room to the balcony (it was only two steps away), went outside, and growled,
“Come on!”

He was losing it.

He dropped onto the bed and lay there, staring at the immaculate white ceiling, feeling as if he’d been clubbed.
Now what?
A tram hurtled past beneath his balcony, its iron wheels slicing through the dull wash of traffic noise. Women came and went in the hall, speaking a language he couldn’t even identify. One of them laughed, and her delight was so genuine, it made him feel all the worse. And so it went—nowhere—for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes.

Eventually, he found the gumption to try the Baur au Lac again. But “Herr Barzan” was not in his room. He sat with his head in his hands on the side of the bed, thinking about his options and sinking deeper into despair—when it hit him. He remembered that gun shop he’d passed on the way to the hotel, the mannequin in camouflage.
Why not? In for a penny, in for a pound. What the fuck? I’m a dead man anyway.

For one semester in the tenth grade, encouraged by the thought of spending serious time on a bus with sweet Holly Saxton, he’d joined the Debate Club—of which she was a star. A cynical but not unintelligent ploy, it might have worked if Danny had been any good at debating. But he wasn’t, and so found himself left off the teams that actually traveled to tournaments.

Until now, the Debate Club had been a symbol of failure, but suddenly it paid its dividend. While he never got within two bus seats of Holly Saxton, Danny knew more than a little about Swiss gun laws.

In a debate about gun control, Danny had been assigned to defend what amounted to the National Rifle Association’s position:
Resolved, that restrictive gun-control laws have little or no impact on crime.
In this argument, his big gun (heh-heh) was Switzerland. Because here was a country with
lots
of guns, few regulations, and hardly any violent crime. The murder rate in Switzerland was lower than it was in countries—such as England, Canada, and Japan—that had some of the world’s most stringent gun-control laws.

Like the Americans, the Swiss had won their independence in a revolutionary war fought by an armed citizenry. And they were still packing, discouraging potential invaders with a policy of heavily armed neutrality.

Switzerland had universal military conscription for males. Moreover, virtually every male between twenty and fifty was either required or encouraged to keep his service weapon at home while serving in the Army or military reserves. As Danny recalled, that weapon was a fully automatic assault rifle, the Sturmgewehr 90.

The only firearms that required a special permit were handguns and automatic weapons—and even in those cases, permits were easily obtained. Shotguns, on the other hand, were completely off the books. Buying a twelve-gauge was like buying a toaster. The same for semiautomatic rifles. And although its European neighbors had pressured Switzerland about it, attempts to pass laws regulating gun sales to foreigners had been repeatedly shot down by the Swiss equivalent of the NRA. So, as strange as it seemed, Danny knew for a fact that he could walk down the block to that gun shop and buy a fucking cannon if he wanted.

The problem was that he wouldn’t know what to do with it. Despite the fact that he’d just shot a guy less than a week ago, that gun had been handed to him, loaded and ready to go. It was like a cap gun; all he’d had to do was pull the trigger. He wouldn’t know what to do with a rifle, let alone a semiautomatic weapon.

There were no hunters in the family. Not a single one, even among his cousins. He realized, of course, how unusual this was. Every American family had at least one crazed loner uncle who took his nephews shooting and stopped by each Thanksgiving with neatly wrapped packages of venison for the family freezer. But not the Crays. There was no one. And even if there had been, Danny was a
vegetarian
.

Now Caleigh—Caleigh was a whole other story. She could shoot the lights off a rhinestone cowboy. While Danny was practicing step-over drills with a No. 4 soccer ball in the backyard,
she
was in the Black Hills shooting rattlesnakes—and getting good at it. But that was Caleigh. He was him.

Still,
he thought.
I’m a guy. How hard can it be? Just point and shoot. Or not.
And, anyway, what about that guy he shot? And hit. So, maybe he was a natural. Like that Woody Harrelson character in the Oliver Stone film.

But somehow, he didn’t think so.

Not that it mattered what he thought. The gun idea was the only idea he had. It was like the bluesman said,
If I didn’t have the gun idea I wouldn’t have no idea at all. . . .

He tried the Baur au Lac one last time. No Mounir.

With an effort, he got to his feet and bounced on his toes, revving up a sense of energy that he didn’t really feel. Then he closed the door behind him and took the stairs, two at a time, down to the lobby. Two minutes later, he was standing inside the William Tell
Speicher des Jagers
.

The man behind the counter was fifty, with piercing blue eyes and a florid face. In his left ear was a single earring in the shape of an edelweiss flower. He inclined his head. “
Bitte?”

“I’m looking for a gun,” Danny said, restraining an inclination to roll his eyes.

The man raised an eyebrow, offered a little smile. “As you can see . . . you’re in the right place. What sort of gun? “

An impressive one,
he thought.
Something I can wave around.
“What about that one?” he asked, nodding toward a black, boxy-looking thing. Whatever it was, it looked lethal, the kind of gun Schwarzenegger might carry into a bikers’ bar in San Berdoo. The idea that some nut could walk in off the street and buy it off the shelf—as he was about to do—was terrifying.

“The Uzi?”

“Yeah. Right.”

The man closed his eyes and nodded in approval. “An excellent piece of equipment if you are wanting an assault rifle that’s lightweight—and very reliable. And the folding stock makes it even more compact for easy transport.” By way of demonstration, he picked up the gun and folded the stock against the barrel.