Midnight In Madrid

FIVE

SCHWARZENGEL GLACIER AND ZURICH, SWITZERLAND, SEPTEMBER 5

A late summer thaw had come to the mountains seven kilometers south of Saint Gallen. Drip by drip, trickle by trickle, the Schwarzengel Glacier had re-created itself, advancing and retreating, some of it so slowly that no one might have noticed other than the geologists who monitored the area. In this one remote spot, it was noticed only by those who took note of the changing snowscape and stared hard into the ice near Koizimfrau Ridge.

There, a heat wave had floated a glove up to the surface, one of those gloves with wool on the inside and leather on the outside, but with the fingers cut away. And then a dead Chinese national was found not far behind the glove.

Yuan was unmistakable. He was still big and strong, still wearing his parka, still bound in his tight head gear. Underneath his parka, among other layers of clothing, was a Euro Disney sweatshirt bought from a gift shop in Paris.

Donald Duck in French. The perfect absurd touch.

Yuan’s dark hair was still thick too. His right eye carried a star fracture to the pupil, damage that he probably sustained in his rough trip from the basement of the monastery to this isolated location. His blue leather Hermès wallet was zipped in the pocket of his navy parka.

The wallet contained a Swiss phone card, his health card, his social-insurance card, three credit cards issued in Hong Kong, and his international driver’s license, for which he’d had his picture taken two days before he left China.

His passport was there too, valid and issued in Beijing. It indicated that he was fifty-five years old and further revealed that he traveled on official Chinese government business.

Yuan wasn’t alone. The heat wave had been extreme.

Also found during the melt was a twenty-year-old man who had said goodbye to his wife and newborn baby in 1995, gone snowboarding in late spring, and turned up now along with Yuan in the big thaw, his red hair still matted down on his forehead and a wedding ring still on his hand. And there was the Australian hiker, missing since 1977.

None of this by itself was unusual. The previous year, there were the two climbers who had remained roped together for more than thirty years, a man and a woman, their black leather boots still tied tight to their feet, their wooden skis still waxed and strapped to their backs. It had become part of the Alpine summer routine in this area, watching faces and corpses emerge from the big melt.

As always, the Swiss Gendarmerie Nationale was ready for the reappearance of the people who had been taken in by these mountains. They kept lists of those who were missing and waited for them to come forth.

That was the first unusual thing that the local police noticed about Yuan when his body had been found on the morning of September 5. Yuan’s name was not on any of the lists. The second thing they noticed was that there was no record of him being in Switzerland or anywhere in the European Union, diplomatic passport or not. Then a third thing: under his parka was a fully loaded semiautomatic, a Glock G18.

What the Glock had to do with snowboarding or mountaineering or hiking was anyone’s guess, but Lieutenant Rolf Hunsicker, who drew the investigation that would follow into Yuan’s death, spent little time on that question. After all, the dead Chinaman had obviously been killed somewhere else not that long ago and then dumped in a remote area.

That conjured up three questions which would vex Lieutenant Hunsicker until they were resolved.

Dumped: How? Why? And by whom?

The cantonal police sent Yuan’s remains by helicopter to a medical examiner’s office in Zurich. An autopsy was performed that same evening.

Cause of death, suffocation. From smoke. And that hadn’t happened out in the snow. There were also some strange bruises, and the funny configuration of the body when it had been found, as if it had been taken by helicopter to that place and then dumped from above. Well, stranger things have happened. But if they had a chopper, that also suggested that Yuan must have had some wealthy powerful enemies. Then again, almost everyone in Switzerland had wealthy, powerful enemies as well as wealthy, powerful friends.

Sometimes they even overlapped.