The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [143]
“Pull over, pleasè,” Scholl said finally. Even though he was being polite, his manner was short and clipped, as if everything was a military order.
A half block down, the driver found a spot on the corner, pulled in and stopped. Sitting back, Scholl folded his hands under his chin and watched the squeeze of young Berliners trafficking relentlessly through the neon colors of their clamorous Pop Art world. From behind the tinted windows, he seemed a voyeur intent upon the pleasures of the world he was watching, but keeping his own distance from it.
Von Holden wondered what he was doing. He’d known something was troubling him the moment he’d picked him up at Tegel Airport and taken him to the gallery. He thought he knew what it was, but Scholl had said nothing and Von Holden thought that whatever it might have been had passed.
But there was no reading Scholl. He was an enigma hidden behind a mask of uncompromising arrogance. It was a temperament he seemed helpless or unwilling to do anything about because it had made him what he was. It was not unusual for him to work his staff eighteen hours a day for weeks and. then either criticize them for not working harder or reward them with an expensive holiday halfway around the world. More than once he’d walked out of critical labor negotiations at the eleventh hour and disappeared, going alone to a museum or even a movie, and not returning for hours. And when he did return, he expected the problem to have been resolved in his favor. Usually it was, because both sides knew that he would fire his entire negotiating staff if it were not. If that happened, a new staff would be brought in and negotiations would be started from scratch, a. process that would cost both Scholl and the opposition a fortune in new legal fees. The difference was that Scholl could afford it.
In both cases it was more than simply getting done what he wanted done, it was a control mechanism, the deliberate flaunting of a colossal ego. And Scholl not only knew it, he reveled in it.
Von Holden had been Leiter der Sicherheit—director of security—for Scholl’s general European operations—two printing plants in Spain, four television stations, three in Germany, one in France, and GDG, Goltz Development Group, of Düsseldorf, of which Konrad Peiper was president—for eight years; personally hiring the security staffs and supervising their training. Von Holden’s responsibility, however, did not end there. Scholl had other, darker and more far-ranging investments, and their safeguard fell under Von Holden’s title as well.
The situation in Zurich, for example. The pleasuring of Joanna was a case of manipulation requiring skill and delicacy. Salettl believed Elton Lybarger wholly capable of complete recovery: emotionally, psychologically and physically. But early on, he had voiced concern that with no women in his life, when the time came to test Lybarger’s reproductive capacity, a woman he was unfamiliar with could make him uncomfortable, to the point where he might possibly refuse to perform, or at least, be stilted in his performance.
A female who had been his physical therapist for an extended period and who had accompanied him all the way to Switzerland, to look after him there would be someone he trusted and was comfortable with. He would know her touch, even her smell. And though he might never have looked upon her sexually, he would, at the time he was brought to have intercourse with her, be under the influence of a strong sexual stimulant. Fully aroused, yet not wholly aware of the circumstances, he would instinctively sense the familiar and in doing so relax and proceed.
Hence the choosing of Joanna. Far from home, with no immediate family, and not terribly attractive, she would be physically and emotionally vulnerable to a surrogate’s seduction. A seduction whose sole purpose was to ready her for copulation with Elton Lybarger. The need for the surrogate had been Salettl’s calculated judgment and he’d voiced it to Scholl, who had turned to his Leiter der Sicherheit. Von Holden