Numbered Account

CHAPTER 35

The office was dark, except for a halo of light focused on a stack of papers in the center of his desk. The building was quiet. No footsteps scurried through the hallways. Only the hushed electronic breathing of the computer disturbed the pall of silence that surrounded him like a fertile cocoon.

Wolfgang Kaiser was alone.

The bank once again belonged to him.

Kaiser stood with his cheek pressed against the glass, staring out the arched window behind his desk. The object of his attention was a stout gray building fifty yards up the Bahnhofstrasse: the Adler Bank. No lights glowed from behind its shuttered windows. Squat and ominous it sat, eyes closed for the night. The predator, like its prey, was asleep.

Kaiser peeled his cheek from the cold window and circled his desk. For twelve months he had been aware that the Adler Bank was accumulating USB’s shares. A thousand here, five thousand there. Never enough to upset the average daily volume. Never enough to bid up the price. Just small blocks. Slow and steady. He had guessed Konig’s intentions, if not his means. In response, he had conceived a modest plan to permanently cement his own position as Chairman of the United Swiss Bank.

Twelve months earlier the bank had celebrated its one hundred twenty-fifth birthday. A celebratory dinner was given at the Hotel Baur au Lac. The collected members of the board of directors and their ladies were invited. Toasts were made, achievements recognized, and perhaps a tear was shed, but only by one of the pensioned board members. Kaiser’s active colleagues remained far too concerned with the evening’s final announcement to praise the labors of their predecessors. Their hearts were on money. Specifically, on how much of it they’d get their grubby hands on before the evening was over.

Kaiser recalled the greedy glow that lit those ratlike faces that evening. When he had announced that each member of the board was to receive an anniversary bonus of one hundred thousand francs, he was greeted by silence. His guests were incapacitated, man and woman alike. For several seconds, they sat as still as the dead, perched on the edge of their seats. The pressure from a lone mouse’s fart would have sent them sprawling onto the dining room floor. And then came the applause. A thunderous barrage of hand clapping. A standing ovation. Cries of “Long live USB!” and of “To the Chairman!”

How could he have doubted that the board was comfortably in his pocket?

Kaiser allowed himself a self-pitying laugh. Less than a year later, many of the executives so content to pocket a cool hundred grand had joined Klaus Konig’s snarling wolf pack, eager to denounce his own “antiquated” management strategies. The future lay with the Adler Bank, they argued, with aggressive trading in options and derivatives, with controlling stakes in unrelated companies, with leveraged wagers on the directions of foreign currencies.

The future, Kaiser summarized, lay with the inflated value of USB shares a takeover by the Adler Bank would bring.

The Wild, Wild West had arrived in Zurich. Gone were the days of negative interest rates, when foreigners anxious to deposit their funds in a Swiss bank would not only forgo interest but actually pay the bank account-management fees to accept their money. Switzerland was no longer the only safe haven for capital “in flight.” Competitors had raised their banners both near and far. Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, and Austria all offered stable, discreet institutions rivaling their Swiss neighbor’s. The Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, and the Netherlands Antilles each provided sophisticated banking services catering to the harried businessman in need of a secure hiding place for funds spirited from under the blind eyes of a trusting partner or the vengeful maw of a wronged spouse. Swiss banks weren’t the only game in town.

In this hostile environment, Wolfgang Kaiser had struggled to maintain USB’s position at the top of the private banking hierarchy. And succeeded. True, accounting measures of the bank’s profitability were down. Key indicators of the bank’s financial strength—its return on assets and return on equity—had suffered as internal investment was funneled toward those areas that would ensure continuing supremacy in private banking. Still, net profits would increase for the ninth consecutive year: a gain of seventeen percent over the past year was expected. At any other time such gains would be admirable. This year they were deemed a failure. How could you compare a rise of seventeen percent against the two hundred percent increase registered by the Adler Bank?

Kaiser slapped his hand against his thigh in frustration. His course for the United Swiss Bank was sound and correct. It respected the bank’s history and played aggressively to her strongest points. For its first hundred years the bank had prospered as one of a dozen medium-size local institutions that catered domestically to the commercial requirements of Zurich’s smaller concerns and internationally to the discreet demands of those foreign neighbors, who wanted to place their earnings in an atmosphere of maximum security and minimum scrutiny. When deciding where to deposit these newly gotten gains, more than a few educated heads turned toward the far-off safety of Switzerland and to the private banking division of the United Swiss Bank. Others followed.

Kaiser stood alone in the center of his dark office, savoring the past. He swore he would not allow Klaus Konig and his damned Adler Bank to take USB. Yet the situation was not encouraging. Even USB portfolio managers eager to lock in a decent return on their clients’ managed assets had taken to selling shares of USB stock. Meanwhile, the Adler Bank continued its purchase of shares on the open market, if at a calmer tempo. Was it too soon to hope that Konig’s inexhaustible supply of cash had dried up?

The Chairman returned to his desk, sat down, and looked at his neatly stacked papers. The lacquered ear of a photograph protruded from the bottom of the pile. He pulled it out and gazed at its lifeless subject. Stefan Wilhelm Kaiser. Sole fruit of an acrimonious and short-lived union. His mother lived in Geneva, remarried to another banker. Kaiser hadn’t spoken with her since the funeral.

“Stefan,” he whispered aloud to the ghosts hovering in his office. His only son had died at nineteen from an overdose of heroin.

For years, Kaiser had shielded himself from the pain of his death. His son was still ten years old. His son loved skating at the Dolder Ice Rink. His son clamored to swim at the local hallenbad. He did not know this man on the slab, this unkempt ruffian with the matted hair and acned skin. This drug addict who had exchanged a soccer jersey for a leather jacket, who preferred cigarettes to ice cream cones. This man he did not know.

Now Kaiser had a second chance. The son of a man he had known as well as a brother might replace Stefan. The thought of young Neumann on the Fourth Floor comforted him. The boy’s resemblance to his father was uncanny. Glimpsing him each day was like glimpsing the past. He saw every opportunity he’d taken and every one he’d missed. Sometimes when he looked at Nicholas he felt like grabbing him and asking him whether all his work had accomplished anything. And he could see in Neumann’s eyes that the answer would be yes. A resounding yes. Other times he felt as if he were staring at his own conscience, and he prayed for it never to betray him.

Kaiser turned off the light. He leaned back in his chair and wondered where it all was going to end. He didn’t care for the image of his tired body lying on the slag heap of deposed corporate chieftains. He’d give his last franc to remain Chairman of the United Swiss Bank until his death.

Kaiser closed his eyes and willed himself not to feel, but to be. He was the bank. Its granite walls and impenetrable vaults; its quiet salons and frenetic trading floor; its imperious directors and ambitious trainees. He was the bank. His blood flowed in its veins and his soul was mortgaged on its behalf.

“The Adler Bank shall not pass,” he declared aloud, taking the words of another embattled general. “They shall not pass.”