The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [193]
Remmer’s reasoned guess was that in all those years, Lybarger had been secretly dealing in the drug world, moving from city to city, amassing a fortune in cash and laundering it into Swiss banks, where in 1983 he had enough to suddenly go legitimate.
McVey shook his head. There was something that struck both him and Noble the moment they had seen the guest list. Something they hadn’t shared with Remmer. Two of the names on it—Gustav Dortmund and Konrad Peiper— were principals, along with Scholl, in GDG—Goltz Development Group, the company that had acquired Standard Technologies of Perth Amboy, New Jersey. The firm that in 1966 had employed Mary Rizzo York to experiment with super-subzero cooling gasses. The same Mary Rizzo York, Ph.D., Erwin Scholl had allegedly hired Albert Merriman to murder in that same year.
It was true that takeover had happened at a time when only Scholl and Dortmund were involved with GDG. Konrad Peiper hadn’t come aboard until 1978. But since then, as its president, he had forged GDG to the forefront, however illegally, as a world-class arms supplier. The obvious was that both before Peiper and afterward, Goltz Development was hardly a wholesome, straightforward operation.
When McVey asked Remmer what he knew of Dortmund, the German detective joked and said that aside from his relatively minor position as head of the Bundesbank, the central bank of Germany, Dortmund was already one of the pedigreed super-rich. Like the Rothchilds, his family had been one of the great European banking families for more than two centuries.
“So, like Scholl, he’s beyond reproach,” McVey said.
“It would take one hell of a scandal to bring him down, if that’s what you mean.”
“What about Konrad Peiper?”
“Him, I know almost nothing about. He’s rich and has an extraordinarily beautiful wife who has a great deal of money and influence of her own. But all one really needs to know about Konrad Peiper is that his paternal grand-uncle, Friedrich, was supplier of arms to half the planet in both world wars. Today that same company does very well making coffeepots and dishwashers.”
McVey looked at Noble, who merely shook his head. The thing was as mystifying now as when they started. The Charlottenburg affair had attracted a gathering that included Scholl, the chief of the Bundesbank, the head of an international munitions trade and a guest list of German citizens who were the Who’s Who of the ultra-rich and powerful and the truly politically connected; many of whom, under other circumstances, would be philosophically and maybe even physically at each other’s throats. Yet here they all were, coming arm in arm to an ornate museum built by Prussian kings, to celebrate the return to wellness of a man with a history so shadowy you could put a hand through it.
And then there was the Albert Merriman situation and the swath of horror that had followed it, including the sabotaging of the Paris-Meaux train and the murders of Lebrun in England, his brother in Lyon and the gunning down of Benny Grossman in New York. Not to mention the hidden Nazi past of Hugo Klass, the respected fingerprint expert at Interpol, Lyon, and Rudolf Halder, the man in charge of Interpol, Vienna.
“The first one taken out was Osborn’s father, in April 1966, just after he designed a very special kind of scalpel.” McVey padded a few feet across the carpet and sat down on the window ledge. “The latest was Lebrun, sometime this morning,” he said, bitterly. “Shortly after he connected Hugo Klass to the killing of Merriman . . . And from first to last, one link through it all, the straight line, from then until now is—”
“Erwin Scholl,” Noble finished for him.
“And now we’re back to square one with the same questions. “Why For what reason? What the hell is going on?” Most of McVey’s career had been spent on the circular route, asking the same question hundreds of times. That’s what you did in homicide,