The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [192]
“Politically, far left to far right. Normally they wouldn’t be caught in the same room together.” Remmer shook out a cigarette, lit it, then leaned over and poured himself a glass of mineral water from a bottle on the table.
Osborn leaned against the wall, watching. He’d not been given a copy of the guest list nor had he asked for 1 one. In the last hours, as more information came in and the detectives increased their concentration on it, he’d been almost wholly ignored. Its effect was to alienate him further and intensify the feeling he’d had earlier: that when they left to meet Scholl, he would not be going.
“Naturalized or not, Scholl seems to be the only American. Am I right?” McVey asked, looking at Remmer.
“Everyone else identified is German,” Remmer said. There were seventeen names on the guest list Bad Godesberg had so far been unable to trace. But with the exception of Scholl, all of those who had been identified were highly respected, if politically disparate, German citizens.
Looking at the list again, Remmer exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke that McVey waved off as it passed him.
“Manfred, you mind? Why don’t you just up and quit, huh?” Remmer glared and started to reply but McVey held up a hand. “I’m gonna die, I know. But I don’t want you to be the one who takes me out.”
“Sorry,” Remmer said flatly, and stamped the butt into an ashtray.
Increasingly irritable snippets of conversation, underscored by long periods of silence, evidenced the collective frustrations of three markedly tired men trying to piece together what was going on. Beside the fact that the Charlottenburg celebration was being held in a palace instead of a hotel ballroom, on the surface it seemed to be no more than that, the kind of thing done hundreds of times a year by groups all over the world. But the surface was only the surface, and the interest was in what lay beneath. Among them they had more than a hundred years of experience as professional policemen. It gave them an instinct for things others wouldn’t have. They had come to Berlin because of Erwin Scholl and, as far as they could tell, Erwin Scholl had come to Berlin because of Elton Lybarger. The question was—Why?
The “why?” became even more intriguing when one realized that, of all the illustrious people invited to the affair in his honor, Lybarger was the least illustrious and least known of any of them.
Bad Godesberg’s search of records showed him born Elton Karl Lybarger in Essen, Germany, in 1933, the only child of an impoverished stonemason. Graduated public school in 1951, he’d vanished into the mainstream of postwar Germany. Then, thirty-odd years later, in 1983, he’d suddenly reemerged as a multimillionaire, living in a castle-like estate called Anlegeplatz twenty minutes outside Zurich, surrounded by servants, and controlling considerable shares of any number of first-rate Western European corporations.
The question was—How?
Early income tax filings from 1956 until 1980 showed his occupation as “bookkeeper,” and gave addresses that were drab, lower-class apartment complexes in Hannover, Düsseldorf, Hamburg and Berlin, and then, finally, in 1983, Zurich. And in every year until 1983 his income had barely reached the mean wage. Then, with the 1983 filing, his income soared. By 1989, the year of his stroke, his taxable income was in the stratosphere, more than forty-seven million dollars.
And there was nothing, anywhere, to explain it. People were successful, yes. Sometimes almost overnight. But how did anyone, after years of work as an itinerant bookkeeper, living in a world a foot up from poverty, suddenly emerge as a man of opulent wealth and influence?
Even now, he remained a mystery. He sat on the boards of no European corporations, universities, hospitals or charities. He held membership in no private clubs, had no registered political affiliation. He had no driver’s license or record of marriage. There wasn’t so much as a credit card issued