The Account. Roderick Mann

Franz Liszt had once spent a year, which had once played host to Stendhal and Mark Twain. And she loved the Palace Hotel. People there had been so kind she had now decided to make hotels her career. But she had promised her parents to go back to England after six months. And already she was a little homesick. Two weeks after their talk, when Moscato suggested dinner with his wife at Il Cielo on the lakeside, she was flattered and excited. Here was a sophisticated Italian hotel manager taking a personal interest in her. What luck!

      That night she put on her prettiest dress and shoes. Flushed and excited she arrived at the restaurant early. Moscato was already there – alone. His wife, he explained, was not feeling well. The dinner was a great success, with Moscato being attentive and encouraging. Afterwards they walked back along the lakeside, admiring the full moon shimmering on the water.

      At one point she stumbled and Moscato took her arm. And then it began. Turning, he kissed her so hard he bruised her lips. Startled, she pulled away. ‘Signor Moscato, please don’t.’

      Then Moscato pushed her roughly to the ground, ripping off her dress, tearing at her pants. She screamed but the scream stifled in her throat and a great stab of pain consumed her body as he thrust into her. ‘Please,’ she begged. ‘Please. No.’ She clawed at his face as he pounded into her but it was useless. The more she fought the more excited he became.

      Then he began hitting her, slamming his right fist into her face, grunting like an animal as each blow went home. She felt blood in her eye and a tear in her cheek, and the taste of blood in her mouth.

      Finally it was over and Moscato staggered to his feet. ‘You asked for it,’ he panted. ‘Leading me on like that. You asked for it.’ He stood looking down at her, breathing hard. ‘Go and clean yourself up,’ he said. With a final glance at her he turned and headed back towards the hotel leaving her lying there, bleeding and bruised, whimpering softly, almost senseless …

Chapter 8

      Hunched over a cup of coffee, Albert-Jean Cristiani sat by the window of a small bar in the rue du Rhône watching passers-by as they walked along the fashionable Geneva shopping street. He was feeling despondent. It had been a difficult week so far. He had a deep-seated suspicion it was not going to get any better.

      He sighed and raised his hand to order another cup. It was after 11 a.m. but he saw no point in hurrying. The investigation on which he was engaged was going nowhere. He might as well enjoy a few more minutes of people-watching. And contemplate his forthcoming retirement at the age of fifty-five. Just that week he had picked out a small office for himself on the corner of the Quai Wilson where he planned to set up as a private investigator.

      For twenty years Cristiani, a short, stocky man with thinning hair, had been one of four special investigators for the Swiss Federal Banking Commission. When he had first joined the Commission it had been a puny thing with a staff of five. Now it was fully staffed with bright young lawyers and accountants eager to gain a few years’ Government experience before branching out on their own. And it had clout. It was now a criminal offence to mislead or lie to the Commission. At the slightest hint of impropriety it invoked the clause in the 1971 Banking Law, which stated that the director of a bank must behave ‘irreproachably’. Failure to do so could result in the Commission withdrawing a bank’s licence.

      Cristiani’s main function was to monitor ‘irregularities’ in the bank system and report them back to his head office in Bern. Since he joined the Commission, there had been plenty of ‘irregularities’. So many, in fact, that Cristiani had not been surprised when his irate boss finally called him in for a meeting.

      ‘I’ve just had a call from the Director,’ Commissioner Pierre Bonnet said grimly. ‘He is incensed. The world now sees us as a place where any Mafia boss or drug dealer can hide his money. We’ve got to put a stop to it. We must restore Switzerland’s reputation as a law-abiding country.’

      Sitting opposite his portly boss, Cristiani had nodded dutifully. Was the Commissioner kidding himself? A law-abiding country? Bonnet knew as well as he did that for years the Bern Government had engaged in secret surveillance and eavesdropping on its own citizens. And that somewhere in the capital there were almost 600,000 dossiers on Swiss citizens tucked away.

      But this was serious. This was about banks. The life-blood of Switzerland. He had not been surprised when, next day, Bonnet issued a strongly worded statement to every bank in Switzerland. It said, in effect: No more scandals.

      He knew the edict would be ignored. It would have no more effect than the booklet the Big Three banks had issued some years before. In The Truth About Swiss Banking, they stated: ‘The purpose of Swiss banking secrecy is to protect the innocent, not shield the guilty.’ He was told the booklet produced guffaws of laughter in Washington where officials knew there wasn’t a bank in Switzerland that would turn away a man with a suitcase stuffed with $100 bills.

      Sometimes Cristiani wondered where all the cash came from. Drug money, of course, made up much of it. That, and money skimmed from the casino tables of Las Vegas and Atlantic City. But it was surprising to him just how many ordinary people now passed through Geneva’s Cointrin Airport with tote bags stuffed with notes.

      But it was not another money scandal that occupied Cristiani’s thoughts as he sipped his second cup of coffee. It was the death of Georges di Marco. There was something suspicious about it.

      Despite his age, the man had been in apparent good health. He held an important position in one of Geneva’s most respected banks. He was popular with his peers and friends. He had a pleasant apartment off the rue des Granges. He seemed financially well off. Why, then, would he have decided to end his life? It made no sense.

      The question of the coat bothered Cristiani. When found, di Marco had been wearing only a suit. Cristiani could not imagine the elderly banker walking a mile to the lakeside on a freezing winter’s night without an overcoat.

      There was something else. He had no key in his pocket. Had he just walked out without locking the door? That, too, seemed unlikely.

      Inspector Thibault, the police officer investigating the banker’s death, had dismissed any suggestion of foul play by pointing out that there were no signs of a struggle. Cristiani had been astonished at such naivety. Only two years before there had been a report of a drowning in Lake Garda, ostensibly due to suicide. Later a man had confessed to the murder. The victim’s hands and legs had been bound with tape, he explained, before being lowered over the side of a boat with a rope around his waist. When he was dead the man’s body had been pulled back to the surface and the tapes and rope removed. No signs of struggle. An apparent suicide.

      Cristiani had met di Marco several times, most recently when they had dined at the same restaurant. They had talked briefly and di Marco had asked to see him again. He had seemed agitated. Cristiani told him to call. A few days later, sounding nervous, di Marco had telephoned to set up a dinner appointment. Before they could meet again he was found dead.

      When Cristiani telephoned Paul Eberhardt to discuss di Marco’s death and voice his concern about the coat and the key, the banker had seemed equally baffled.

      ‘I’ve thought about that myself,’ Eberhardt said. ‘I simply don’t understand it. It’s a complete mystery. Why did he do this terrible thing?’

      Cristiani listened politely. Although he knew Eberhardt only slightly, the elderly banker had intrigued him ever since a rumour had surfaced a few years earlier that he was being blackmailed. The rumour stemmed from the fact that he had continued paying a former officer of his bank, a man named André Leber, 10,000 francs a month even though he had left the bank several years earlier. Cristiani’s enquiries had come to nothing and in the end he had concluded that if the banker wanted to support a former colleague that was his affair. Leber had later died in a car accident.

      Frustrated, Cristiani made his way homeward, holding his umbrella with both hands against the gusting rain. Perhaps the death of di Marco had been a genuine suicide, he decided.