‘Excellent timing,’ said the driver.
In front of the chapel entrance there was quite a large semi-circular forecourt with cars parked around the rim of it. A black Cadillac limousine with a driver waited by itself in front of the chapel steps. This was obviously the car that had brought the chief mourners and would presently take them away. There was, I noticed, a group of three men draped with cameras and camera equipment huddled by the entrance. I assumed that, since at least one senior bank official would be there to pay last respects to an employee, one photographer would be from the bank’s PR agency, with the other two covering or hoping to cover for local papers.
As I got out, the driver showed me where he intended to park. I followed the last of the mourners inside and was allowed by an usher to take a back seat. There was taped organ music — Bach, of course — coming through loudspeakers, and on a stone catafalque at the far end of the chapel was Kramer’s coffin. There was a single wreath of flowers on the coffin itself but the floor around the catafalque was covered with wreaths and flowers. I couldn’t see my roses but assumed that they would be somewhere there. It is difficult to be certain about numbers, but I would say that the searing capacity of the chapel was a hundred, more or less, end that over half the seats were occupied, mostly by business-suited men. A good turn-out.
The service was conducted by a Protestant pastor and was brief. Then, sliding doors rolled slowly into place, hiding the catafalque, so that the removal of the expendable inner shell of the coffin, the part with the corpse in it, to the functional section of the crematorium could take place unobserved by the mourners. The piped music began again. It went on for about ten minutes. When it ceased, the pastor went to Frieda Kramer in the front row of seats and said something to her. After a moment she stood up and, on the arm of a man who was probably her son-in-law, began to walk slowly back along the chapel aisle. The funeral was over.
The others started to follow. After a bit I joined the procession. A man near me told his companion that one collected an urn with the ashes in it a couple of days later.
Outside, Frieda was standing by an open rear door of the Cadillac as, one after the other, the business-suited men and the women in peculiarly awful hats came to commiserate and express solidarity.
I joined the reception line not because I wanted to but because I saw that she had spotted me. Since there was something I wanted from her, there seemed no point in giving offence by going direct to her apartment without uttering a word of sympathy there in public with everyone else. So, hat in hand, I went forward.
As I did so, Frieda said a word out of the corner of her mouth to the daughter who immediately reached inside the car and picked up something from the back seat. The people still between me and the Cadillac made it impossible to see what it was. The payers-of-respects shuffled forward once more.
I heard a woman mumbling to Frieda something about the deep sense of loss that everyone who had known her dear Johann was experiencing and hastily composed a similar speech for myself.
Finally, the man immediately in front of me sidled out of the way and my turn had come.
Until then, Frieda had been standing there stiffly with her elbows at her sides and both hands clasping her handbag just below her breasts as if she were afraid that someone there was going to try to snatch it. She had looped back her black veil and had her double chins held high ready for the attack. I found myself wondering if she already knew how surprisingly rich she was. As she acknowledged the mourners, you could tell who were friends or family and who were acquaintances she scarcely recognized. With the former she would allow herself to be embraced, with the latter she would incline her head stiffly, ignoring the proffered hands and simply saying, ‘Thank you, thank you.’ But always, so far, she had kept her handbag pressed against her solar plexus.
It was I who broke the spell. There could have been no question of my embracing her, so I did what the other acquaintances had done and proffered a hand for rejection.
That is to say, I started to proffer a hand. It was already on its way to her and the preliminary ‘My dear friend’ was already on my lips, when her handbag shot outwards and upwards, grazing my knuckles.
She was not, in fact, trying to hit me. She was simply using her handbag to point with so that there should be no doubt in any of the spectators’ minds about whom she was pointing at. She was pointing at me and, still pointing, when she spoke.
‘This,’ she said loudly and clearly to those present, ‘is Reinhardt Oberholzer.’
At the same moment several other things happened.
A blunt instrument hit me quite hard on the right shoulder. It was the edge of a brief-case wielded by the daughter. The brief-case must have been the object she had taken from the back seat of their car.
‘There are your papers, Herr Oberholzer,’ she snarled, and let go of the brief-case.’
As I caught it, I heard in the sudden silence that had fallen the clack of an SLR camera shutter. Almost at the same moment, a second photographer let fly with electronic flash. Both of them immediately moved in on me for more pictures.
Krom says that he was right behind the photographer with the flashgun, though I didn’t see him. I don’t say he wasn’t there, just that I didn’t see him; and the fact that I didn’t see him doesn’t surprise me in the least.
He says that I looked stunned. I was stunned, I have a mind that is capable of working quite quickly to solve reasonably simple equations and, as I caught the brief-case, my mind had informed me with breathtaking clarity that I was in some danger and — though I deplore the vulgarity there are times when one must be forthright — perilously close to finding myself up shit creek.
After the brief, horrified silence from everyone, except the cameramen who went on taking pictures, I decided that it was time to go. So I put the brief-case under my arm and then, with a little bow to Frieda, turned and walked over to my hired car.
The driver had neither heard nor understood what had happened but he had seen the photographers at work. That meant only one thing to him. He grinned as he opened the car door for me.
‘I see that the gentleman is a person of importance,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
All I saw was a police car parked thirty metres away with a plain-clothes man leaning through the window to use the radio. His eyes were on the car I was in and he was obviously calling in its registration number. I have never been in a police identification line-up and been tapped by witnesses as the guilty party, but at that moment I learned exactly how it must feel to be in that predicament.
‘Get moving,’ I said.
‘To Hottingen, sir?’
‘No. There is no need for that now. Just go, but go slowly for a moment.’
He was going slowly anyway down the long crematorium driveway, but I still had to have some time in which to think.
I had been set up by the Kramer women and publicly identified as Oberholzer. Photographs had been taken of me, but of no one else at the funeral. The police had been in on the deal. I had been given a brief-case. It was new and nasty, the kind of thing that could be bought for a few francs at a cheap stationers, and I did not think that there were papers or anything else in it. There had to have been a reason for their having given it to me, but any attempt at analysis of the kind of reason would raise questions that I couldn’t possibly answer at that moment. I had too many questions to cope with already. The brief-case could wait. The over-riding factor was the police involvement. What offence had I committed under the Swiss Criminal Code?
Well, I could be said to have induced a bank employee to breach the secrecy laws. That was an offence. But where was the witness to support a case against me? Kramer was dead. Frieda? She was co-operating with the police, it appeared, but why? And what would her evidence against me be worth in court? Nothing, because I would simply maintain that Kramer had approached me. What lies he may later have told his wife were no concern of mine. On the other hand, the Swiss police had a way of putting a foreign suspect in jail and leaving him there for a few months while the judicial authorities mulled over the possible charges that might be brought against him.