I ran all the way back to my car and could hardly bear the traffic that slowed me on my way back to my office. At my desk, I used a magnifying glass to pick my way through the French footnote as best I could: the acquisition recent of Edelweiss A.G. by Nesthorn A.G., the most big company in Switzerland, would appear in the year following, when the Edelweiss numbers would not be something—seen? available? It didn’t matter. Until that time, something something company reportage would be independent.
A merger between Nesthorn and Edelweiss, and now the company was called Edelweiss. I didn’t understand that part, but I went on to the listing of offices. Edelweiss had three, one each in Basel, Zurich, and Bern. Nesthorn had twenty-seven. Two in Vienna. One in Prague, one in Bratislava, three in Berlin. They had an office in Paris, which had done a brisk business. The Viennese office, on Porzellangasse, had led the pack of twenty-seven in sales, with a 1935 volume almost thirty percent greater than any of its closest competitors. Had that been Ulrich Hoffman’s territory, riding around on his bicycle, entering names in his ornate script? Doing a land-office business among families worried that the anti-Jewish laws in Germany would soon affect them, as well?
Those numbers in Ulrich’s books that started with N could be Nesthorn life-insurance policies. And after the merger with Edelweiss—I turned to my computer and logged on to Lexis-Nexis.
The results for my previous search on Edelweiss were there, but these were only contemporary documents. I scanned them anyway. They told me about the acquisition of Ajax, Edelweiss’s decision to participate in a forum on European insurance companies and dormant Holocaust life-insurance policies. There were reports on third-quarter earnings, reports on their acquisition of a London merchant bank. The Hirs family was still the majority shareholder with eleven percent of the outstanding shares. So the H on Fillida Rossy’s china was her grandfather’s name. The grandfather with whom she used to ski those difficult slopes in Switzerland. A reckless risk-taker behind her soft voice and fussing over rosemary rinses for her daughter’s golden mane.
I saved this set of results and started a new search, looking for old background on Nesthorn and Edelweiss. The database didn’t go back far enough for articles about the merger. I let the phone ring through to my answering service as I struggled with a vocabulary and grammar too complex for my primitive ability.
La revue de l’histoire financière et commerciale for July 1979 had an article that seemed to be about German companies trying to establish markets in the countries they had occupied during the war. Le nouveau géant économique was making its neighbors nervous. In one paragraph, the article commented that, on voudrait savoir, the biggest company of insurance Swiss had changed its name from Nesthorn to Edelweiss, because there are too many persons who remember them from their histoire peu agréable.
Their less-agreeable history, would that be? Surely that didn’t refer to selling life insurance whose claims they wouldn’t pay. It must have to do with something else. I wondered if the other articles explained what. I attached them to an e-mail to Morrell, who reads French.
Do either of these articles explain what Nesthorn Insurance did in the forties that made them less agreeable to their European neighbors? How are you coming with getting a permit to travel to the northwest frontier? I hit the SEND key, thinking how strange it was that Morrell, thirteen thousand miles away, could see my words at virtually the same time I sent them.
I leaned back in my chair, eyes closed, seeing Fillida Rossy at dinner, stroking the heavy flatware with the H engraved on the handle. What she owned she touched, clutched—or what she touched, she owned. That restless smoothing of her daughter’s hair, her son’s pajama collar—she had stroked my own hand in the same disquieting way when she brought me forward to meet her guests on Tuesday night.
Could she feel so possessive of the Edelweiss company that she would kill to safeguard it from claimants? Paul Hoffman-Radbuka had been so certain it was a woman who had shot him. Fierce, sunglasses, big hat. Could that have been Fillida Rossy? She was certainly commanding enough behind her languid exterior. I remembered Bertrand Rossy changing his tie after her soft comment that it was rather bold. Her friends, too, had hurried to make sure nothing in the conversation annoyed her.
On the other hand, Alderman Durham kept swimming around the submerged rocks of the story. My client’s cousin Colby, who had done lookout duty for the break-in at Amy Blount’s place and who had fingered my client to the police, was on the fringes of Durham’s EYE team. The meeting between Durham and Rossy on Tuesday—had Rossy agreed to kill the Holocaust Asset Recovery Act in exchange for Durham giving him a hit woman who could shoot Paul Hoffman-Radbuka? Durham was such a wily political creature, it was hard to believe he’d do something that would so lay him open to blackmail. Nor could I see a sophisticated man like Rossy getting himself tangled up in a hired-murder rap. It was hard to understand why either of them would involve the other in something as crude as the break-in at Amy Blount’s.