The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [188]
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MCVEY WAITED with Noble and Osborn until Gravenitz signed the Haftbefehl, the arrest warrant for Erwin Scholl, and presented it to Remmer. Then, thanking Gravenitz and shaking hands with Honig, the four left the judicial chambers and took Gravenitz’s private elevator to the garage.
They were walking on eggshells and knew it, Osborn included. For all intents, the court order now resting in McVey’s pocket, as Honig had suggested, was all but useless. Presented to Scholl in your everyday knock and notice—”Good evening, sir, we are the police and have a warrant for your arrest and this is why”—Scholl might be carted off to jail like John Doe, but within the hour would come a battery of attorneys who would do all the talking, and in the end Scholl would walk out, most likely never having said a word.
In the weeks that followed, a volume of depositions would be filed by Scholl and a number of extremely distinguished others vouching for Scholl’s character and swearing his total noninvolvement, denying he’d ever known, had business with or had reason to have business with Osborn’s father or any of the deceased; denying he’d ever heard of, let alone known and had dealings with, a man called Albert Merriman; avowing he’d been else-where and not at his Long Island estate during the dates mentioned; denying he’d ever heard of, let alone had dealings with, a former Stasi agent named Bernhard Oven; avowing he’d been in the United States and nowhere near Paris at the time of Merriman’s murder. And those sworn testimonies, backed by the prominence of those who had given them, would in effect, warrant Scholl’s complete innocence. Adding to that the fact there was no real evidence, the charges would be promptly dismissed.
And then, perhaps a year or more later, with Scholl’s name and person fully distanced and the episode all but forgotten, would come the cold, detached retribution Honig had warned about. And McVey, Noble, Remmer and Osborn would see their careers and then their lives crumble into nothing. Friends, co-workers and people they’d never heard of would come forward with accusations of theft, corruption, sexual depravity, malpractice and worse. Their families would be held up to ridicule and their once-proud names would be splashed across media headlines for as long as it took to ruin them. Compared to the]m, Humpty-Dumpty would be a great granite edifice, chiseled eternally whole alongside the other grand survivors atop the cliffs at Mount Rushmore.
With a squeal of tires Remmer wheeled out of the garage and onto Hardenbergstrasse with a federal police escort car right behind.
Five minutes later, he pulled into a garage on a street across from the twenty-two-story glass-and-steel Europa Center. “Auf Wiedersehen. Danke,” he said into his radio.
“Auf bald.” See you later. The escort car accelerated off in traffic.
I assume you feel we’re safe,” Noble said, as Remmer pulled into a spot away from the entrance.
“Sure we’re safe.” Getting out, Remmer lifted the submachine gun from its door holder and locked it in the trunk. Then, lighting a cigarette, he led them down a ramp, through a steel utility door and along a corridor filled with electrical and plumbing conduit that ran directly under the street above and connected to the Europa Center complex on the far side.
“Do we know where Scholl is?” McVey’s voice echoed in the long chamber.
“The Grand Hotel Berlin. On Friedrichstrasse, across the Tiergarten. From here, a long walk for an aging gentleman like yourself.” Remmer grinned at McVey, then i pushed through a fire door at the end of the corridor Stabbing out his cigarette in an ashtray, he stopped at a service elevator and pressed the button. The door opened almost immediately and the four entered. Remmer punched the sixth-floor button, the doors closed and they started up. It was only then that Osborn realized Remmer had been carrying a gun at his side the entire time.
Looking at the three as they stood there silently in the pale light of the elevator, he felt wholly out of place, as if he were