Kesting gave her a sharp look but said nothing.

  Herr Professor Doktor Carl Mercandetti had warmed immeasurably when Ben mentioned that he was a friend of Professor John Barnes Godwin. “There is no inconvenience, and nothing to apologize for. I have an office in the library. Why don’t you meet me there midmorning? I’ll be there anyway. I hope Godwin didn’t tell you—I’m supposed to be publishing a monograph as part of a Cambridge University Press series that he’s editing, and already I’m two years late with it! He tells me my sense of timing is a touch Mediterranean.” Mercandetti’s laugh was booming even over the phone line.

  Ben had been vague about what he’d wanted from Mercandetti, and Mercandetti, judging from his high jollity, had probably assumed it was as much by way of a social call as anything.

  Ben spent the first part of the morning searching through every directory of corporations in Switzerland he could find, even running a computer search of all telephone listings. But he could find no record of such a corporation as Sigma AG. So far as he could see, there was no public record that it ever did exist.

  Carl Mercandetti was more austere-looking in person than Ben had imagined when they spoke on the telephone. He was around fifty, slight, with a gray crew cut and oval wire-rimmed glasses. When Ben introduced himself, however, the eyes became lively, and his handclasp was welcoming.

  “Any friend of God’s …” Mercandetti said.

  “And I thought it was only Princeton undergraduates who called him that.”

  Mercandetti shook his head, smiling. “In the years I’ve known him, I’d say he’s only grown into his nickname. I’m quite terrified he’ll be there at the pearly gates, saying, ‘Now, a small query about footnote forty-three in your last article …’”

  After a few minutes, Ben mentioned his efforts to track down a corporation named Sigma AG, one founded in Zurich toward the end of the Second World War. He didn’t explain further: the scholar would doubtless assume it was the sort of thing that an international banker might well pursue, perhaps in the course of corporate due diligence. In any case, Ben knew he would not be ill-served by reticence.

  When he learned of Ben’s immediate concerns, Mercandetti was polite but unengaged. The name Sigma clearly meant little to him.

  “You say it was established in 1945?” the historian asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “A magnificent year for Bordeaux, did you know that?” He shrugged. “Of course, we’re talking well over half a century ago. Many companies that 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 Zürich—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 Émil Ménard, 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 coffeemakers. And a dozen more of their ilk. Some of these men were archrivals, 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 Taillé, 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 Taillé 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 on-line search. The same with the tax documents you seek. They’re supposedly public documents, but they’re kept on a secure server, honoring one of the two great Swiss passions—those being for chocolate and for secrecy. I myself have a user ID and password that will provide access. Not so long ago, you see, the town fathers hired me to write something for a brochure to mark the six hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Zurich’s joining the Swiss Confederation. A bit more local than my usual research, but they were openhanded with the francs.”

  An hour later, Ben had an address, a residence decidedly more modest than Rossignol had formerly inhabited. Two hours later, after immersing himself in a series of tax documents of astounding intricacy, he had satisfied himself that it was Gaston Rossignol’s. For one thing, the title was in Taillé’s name, and yet it was not his primary residence. A country house? No one would have one in Zurich proper. A pied-à-terre for a mistress? But it was too grand for that. And what of the real-estate investment trust that maintained comanagement privileges? Taillé did not enjoy unilateral control over the property’s disposition; he could not sell it or transfer the title without permission of the trust. And where was the trust headquartered? In one of the Channel Islands, Jersey. Ben smiled. Nicely done—a tax haven but not one of the truly infamous ones. It wasn’t as notorious as Nauru, but its banking establishment was even more tightly knit, more difficult to penetrate.

  Ben glanced again at the address he had jotted down. It was incredible to think that a brief car ride would take him to one of Sigma’s founders. Peter had tried to hide from Sigma, and it had destroyed him. Ben took a deep breath, and felt his stores of anger burn within him. Well, there’s been a change of plans, he thought. Now let Sigma try to hide from me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Ben found Gaston Rossignol’s house in the area of Zurich called Hottingen, a steep, hilly area overlooking the city. The houses here were situated on large lots and hidden by trees: very private, very secluded.

  Rossignol’s house was on Hauserstrasse, close to the Dolder Grand Hotel, the grande dame of Zurich hotels, generally considered the finest in all of Europe. The house was wide and low-slung, built of brownish stone apparently in the early part of the century.

  It didn’t look like any kind of safe house, Ben reflected, but perhaps that was what made it so effective. Rossignol had grown up in Zurich, but spent much of his career in Bern. He knew certain Zurichers of power and influence, of course, but it was not a place where he had casual acquaintances. Besides, the residents of the Hauserstrasse were the sort who kept to themselves; this was a neighborhood without neighborliness. An old man who cultivated his own garden would never attract notice. It would be a comfortable life, but an effectively obscure one, too.

  Ben parked the Range Rover on an incline down the block and set the emergency brake to keep it from rolling. He opened the glove compartment and took out Liesl’s revolver. There were four shells remaining in the chamber. He would have to buy more ammunition somewhere if he wanted to use the weapon for protection. Making sure the safety was engaged, he slipped it into his jacket pocket.

  He rang the doorbell. There was no answer, and after a few minutes, he rang again.

  Still no answer.

  He tried the knob, but the door was locked.

  He noticed a late-model Mercedes parked in the carport at one side of the house. Rossignol’s car or someone else’s, he couldn’t know.

  He turned to leave when it occurred to him to try all the doors, and he went around the side of the house. The lawn was newly mown, flower gardens well tended. Someone took good care of the property. The back of the house was grander than the front, a large sweep of land bordered by more flower gardens, bathed by the morning sun. A cupola sat in the middle of a large terrace at the back of the house, near an arrangement of deck chairs.

  Ben approached the back entrance. He pulled open a glass storm door and then tried the knob.

  The knob turned.

  He opened the door, his heart hammering, and braced for an alarm to go off, but heard none.

  Was Rossignol here? Or anyone else, a servant, a housekeeper, family?

  He entered the house, into a dark, tiled mud room. A few coats hung on hooks, along with an assortment of wooden canes with ornamental handles. Passing through the mud room, he entered what looked like a study, a small room furnished with a large desk, a few bookcases. Gaston Rossignol, once the pillar of Switzerland’s banking establishment, seemed to be a man of relatively modest tastes.

  On the desk was a green blotter pad, next to it a sleek black Panasonic telephone with modern gimmicks built in: conference, caller ID, intercom, speakerphone, digital answering machine.

  As he was staring at the phone, it rang. It was ear-splittingly loud, the ringer turned up to maximum volume. He froze, expecting Rossignol to enter, wondering how he would explain himself. It rang again, three times, four, then stopped.

  He waited.

  No one had picked up. Did that mean no one was home? He glanced at the caller ID screen, saw that the number was a long series of digits, obviously long distance.

  He decided to move on farther into the house. As he walked down a corridor, he heard faint music playing—Bach, it sounded like—but where was it coming from?

  Was someone in fact home?

  From the far end of the hall he saw the glow of light coming from a room. He approached, and the music grew louder.

  Now he entered what he immediately recognized as a formal dining room, a long table in the center of the room covered with a crisp white linen tablecloth and set with a silver coffeepot on a silver tray, a single place setting at which was a plate of eggs and sausage. Breakfast appeared to have been served by a housekeeper, but where was he or she? A portable tape player on a buffet against one wall was playing a Bach cello suite.

  And sitting at the table, his back to Ben, was an old man in a wheelchair. A tanned bald head, fringed with gray, a bull neck, round shoulders.

  The old man didn’t seem to have heard Ben entering. He was probably hard of hearing, Ben decided, a guess confirmed by the hearing aid in the old man’s right ear.

  Still, taking no chances, he slid his hand into the front pocket of his leather jacket, felt the bulk of the revolver, pulled it out, and released the safety. The old man didn’t move. He had to be seriously deaf, or his hearing aid was turned off.

  Suddenly Ben was jolted by the ring of the telephone, just as loud in here as it had been in the study a minute ago.

  Yet the old man didn’t move.

  It rang again, a third time, a fourth, and stopped.