“Wait.” They spoke in Arabic.
Across the river the three men got up from the table. They shook hands and walked toward the back of the restaurant, where they disappeared.
“All right. You know what to do?” The man with the field glasses looked at his partner.
“Yes.”
“I will stay and watch to make sure the other two go to their rooms. If they follow the old man I will call to warn you.”
“Good.”
“Check your phone. Make sure it’s on.”
The one holding the glasses said, “Go!”
The other Libyan scurried across the roof and clambered down a fire escape at the back of the building. There was no reason to hurry. He knew that the old man would cross the wooden footbridge moving toward him. All he had to do was get to the end of the bridge on this side of the river and wait.
He reached the ground, walked briskly toward the bridge, and checked his watch. It was after one in the morning. The narrow winding back streets of the old town were almost completely deserted. The shops along the way were all closed, the interiors dark. The open-air street vendors had long since shuttered the stalls, hauled away their perishables, and headed for home.
Occasional traffic could be heard on the four-lane auto bridge a hundred meters or so to the east, where the waters of Lake Lucerne flowed into the river.
The Libyan quickly found a position near the end of the wooden footbridge. He hunkered in the shadows near one of the closed stalls on the curving cobbled quay along the riverbank. He waited as he listened to the lonely whine of a motor scooter somewhere off in the distance as it shifted gears until it was swallowed by the silence of the night.
We left Korff in the lobby. He was a few sheets to the wind, uneasy on his feet. Still, for a man who had downed an ocean of beer, the fact that he was standing at all was itself an Olympian feat. We gave him some cash, three hundred Swiss francs, for his time, for the information, and to hire a taxi to take him home. Harry and I offered to go with him. But he said no. He took the cash, thanked us profusely, and headed to the counter to call the night clerk to get a cab.
Harry and I headed up to our rooms. European style, each of the adjoining rooms has a tiny bath with a shower and a window overlooking the river, comfortable but small and very expensive.
Tonight I don’t care. I could sleep in a tent. I’m exhausted, finally losing the battle over the nine-hour time difference between the West Coast and Lucerne.
In the hallway outside his door Harry stops, looks at me, and says, “I just had a thought. Why don’t we head back?”
“What?”
“Home,” he says.
“What, you mean now?”
“Why not? We stick around, we’re just gonna swallow a big load of jet lag. If we head back now, we stay on California time and we’ll be fine. We sleep on the train to Zurich and all the way home on the plane. You heard the man. There’s nothing more we’re gonna get here.”
“I’m tired. I want to sleep. We paid for the rooms, let’s use them. Besides, how can you be so sure there’s nothing more?”
“Unless you think he was lying,” says Harry. “What else is there? We need hard evidence and there’s only two sets of records. The bank has one. The other is buried somewhere, probably stateside, and the only man who knows where is locked up in a federal pen.
“You think he was lying?” says Harry.
“You mean Korff?”
“Yeah.”
“No. I think he told us everything he knew.”
“So then we know almost everything there is to know. We just can’t prove any of it.” Harry puts the key in the lock and opens the door to his room. Harry disappears inside, but he keeps on talking and doesn’t close the door. Harry’s wound up. He wants to chat. “What else is there? Tell me?” he says.
I ignore him, open the door to my own room, and flip on the light. I can hear him still jabbering away in the other room. I yawn, cover my mouth, and make my way around the bed toward the window on the other side. When I get there I pull the curtains closed. All I want to do is collapse on the bed and sleep. I’ll shower in the morning.
“I’m talking to you,” he says. “Where’d you go?” I hear him hollering, top of his lungs in the other room. If he doesn’t tone it down they’re going to throw us out. I stumble back around the bed into the hallway toward his room. When I get to his open door I tell him as much.
“Good,” he says. “They throw us out, we can go home.” Harry has his back to me, opening the window, taking in some fresh air. With Harry, a few beers and he gets a second wind. He pulls the curtains closed as he turns to look at me. “If we stay here we’re just wasting more time. You heard the man. There are no records to be had. Not here at least.”
“There is the bank,” I tell him. “It’s a shot.”
“You mean Gruber? Yeah, right through your head. You don’t actually think they’re gonna share anything with us. You heard him. Swiss banking secrecy is carved in stone. Put there by the fiery finger of God. We go wandering over to Gruber asking questions about any of the information he gave us tonight, they’re gonna throw our asses in the Swiss pokey until we tell them who ratted them out. Then the three of us can share a cell,” says Harry.
He may be right. But at the moment I’m not thinking too clearly. “OK, but why don’t we get some sleep first?”
Harry stops talking. Instead he is looking down at something with the kind of expression you might save for a snake.
“What is it?”
“That.”
“What?”
“My comb. On the bed.”
“Jeez, you had me scared.” There’s a small pocket comb lying near the head of the bed halfway under one of the pillows.
“I didn’t leave it there,” he says.
“Maybe you did and you forgot.”
“No. I didn’t open my bag.” He lifts the rolling piece of luggage up and tosses it onto the bed. Harry unzips it and throws back the cover. He looks but he doesn’t touch anything.
“Is everything there?”
“I don’t know. But it’s not the way I packed it,” he says. Harry would know. He is phobic about such things.
I head to my room and check my bag. Before I even get it open I realize he is right. The running shoes I’d packed in the side pocket are no longer there. When I unzip the bag I find them inside, on top of my other clothes.
I leave the bag unzipped on the bed and head back to Harry’s room. When I get there he is folding up a piece of paper, something from his travel folder.
“We can sleep on the train,” he says. He’s already chugging around the bed toward me. “There’s one that leaves for Zurich at two.” He grabs the comb, tosses it in the suitcase, and zips it up.
Before I can say another word, Harry has the lights off, pulling his suitcase behind him. He closes the door to his room and ushers me down the hall to get my bag and lock up.
At this point the adrenaline has kicked in. I am no longer arguing with him. My weariness seems to have fled, driven off by my natural instinct of flight rather than fight.
The ancient covered footbridge was lit by incandescent lights high up under the gable of the wooden roof. The bright light seemed trapped inside the long span over the dark water.
But even with the illumination it was difficult from outside to see much on the bridge at night. There was only a small gap between the eaves of the roof and the solid plank walls that lined each side of the walkway. If a person fell on the bridge, unless you were walking on it yourself, you would not be able to see them.
The Libyan hiding in the shadows on the other side realized this almost immediately. He had been waiting almost ten minutes by the time he saw the old man stumbling along the quay across the river. In that time not a single soul had crossed the footbridge. The man was getting tired of waiting. Besides, from the look of it, the old guy might pass out before he got across.
About fifty meters out from the Libyan’s side of the river there was a large six-sided stone tower with a matching hexagonal roof. It appeared to be part of the bridge structure. At the tower the bridge angled sharply to the left. To that point the Libyan would have complete cover from the old man moving toward him from the other side of the river. He considered moving out onto the bridge at least as far as the tower. Then he looked at the cold, dark water flowing by, and decided against it.