The Ministry for the Future

68

Mary was flown back to Zurich in a military helicopter. They landed at Kloten and she was taken into town in a black van like the one she had left Zurich in. She sat next to Priska, watched their driver take the usual route into the city. But then where?

Home, as it turned out. Hochstrasse, stopping curbside in front of her apartment building. “Here?” she asked.

“Just to get some of your stuff,” Priska said. “They don’t think it’s a good idea for you to live here anymore, I’m sorry.”

“Where, then?”

“We have a new safe house up the hill,” Priska said. “We would like you to stay there. Once the situation becomes a little more clear, you can move back here. If that’s all right with you.”

Mary didn’t reply. She wanted to be at home in her place, but also the idea made her nervous. Who was watching, if anyone? And why?

She went in and packed a couple of big suitcases they provided. As she did she glanced around the place. She had lived here fourteen years. The Bonnard prints on the walls, the white kitchen; they looked like a museum recreation. That stage of her life was over, this was like walking around in a dream. Her legs were still throbbing. She needed to sleep. Shower and bed, please. But not here.

They carried the suitcases for her, down the stairs and into the street, into the back of the van. Then off east, past the little trattoria she had sat in on so many nights, reading as she ate. Farther up the Zuriberg, into the stolid residential neighborhood on the side of the hill. These big old urban houses were worth millions of francs each, they gleamed with the finish of all that money, unremarkable boxes though they were. The van turned into the gated driveway of one of them, the driveway just a concrete pad the size of one vehicle, in the middle of a garden behind a tall white plastered wall topped with broken green glass shards, an unexpected touch of evil in all this bourgeois conformity. A gate closed off the driveway and made it a compound. Her new home. She stifled a groan, kept her eyes from rolling. She could still walk to work from here, if they would let her.

Which they did. She could call and within minutes a little club of them would be gathered at the walk-in gate to escort her down the hill to Hochstrasse and the ministry offices, their blown-up building being rebuilt, the rest already re-occupied. She was surprised that the Swiss security people felt it was safe to go back, but she was assured that the area was now surveiled in ways that made it safer there than anywhere else. They couldn’t function from hiding, and it was important to show the world that Switzerland and the UN considered the ministry to be a crucial agency. Also that terrorism couldn’t change the momentum of history. They were going to defend that principle, and she was one of the living avatars of history in their time.

Or just bait, Mary thought. Bait in their trap, perhaps. But then again her team was reassembled and back in their offices or jammed into replacement offices, doing their familiar work. Possibly the Swiss had caught the people who had attacked them and thus eliminated the danger. Their banks were said to be back online and functioning as before; whether there were structural changes included in the reboot wasn’t clear yet. So if those assailants had been caught or rendered inoperative somehow, possibly they were safe now. There couldn’t be that many people in the world who felt a toothless UN agency was worth attacking. Although the Paris Agreement had enemies, sure. It could be that the entire military apparatus of some vicious petro-state was now aimed right at her, as the symbol of all that was going wrong for them. It would be great to take some of those petro-states down, somehow. Jail their leaders or the like.

But thinking of prison reminded her of Frank. Did she want to see him? Alas, she did. Possibly something in her wanted to make sure he was still locked up; maybe she was still afraid of the idea of him at large. But also, given that he was certainly going to be there, seeing him had to be more than just that. It felt like some kind of duty. Which feeling also had its interests. It was impossible to deny that he had caught her interest.

Downtown on a tram like any ordinary person. This was all right with her minders, as long as one or more of them accompanied her. She glanced at the people in her tram car, wondering who they were. None of them looked likely. She recalled a line from a children’s book she had loved, something like, If you want to claim to be our queen, while yet always invisible and unknown to us, you are welcome to the task. It was the same now; if you’re going to guard me but I don’t see you, fine, do it.

Down at Hauptbahnhof she got off and walked the narrow downtown pedestrian streets to the Gefängnis. So characteristic of the Swiss to keep the old jail downtown. Why proclaim one part of the city to be more valuable than any other? The whole point of a city was to smoosh the whole society together and watch it function anyway, daily life some kind of flaneur’s bricolage. An agglomeration, as their urban designers called it, unembarrassed by the ugliness of the word in English.

She checked into the prison without fuss and went to Frank’s dorm. He was in the living area there, reading a book. He looked up and his eyebrows rose.

“I thought you were run out of town.”

“I was. They let me come back.” She sat down on a couch across from him. “What are you reading?”

He showed her the cover; an Inspector Maigret omnibus. In a dark world, she thought, a place of safety. Diagnose the evil. Everyone should have a Mrs. Maigret.

“How’s it going?” she asked, wondering as always why she had come, what she could say.

“It’s okay,” he said. “They let me out during the day. I work at the same place I was working before.”

“The refugee center?”

“Yeah. They’re expanding again. I’ve been there so long I’ve become a fount of institutional wisdom.”

“I doubt that.”

He laughed, surprised. “How come?”

“We’re in Switzerland. The institutional wisdom all gets written down.”

“You would think. Anyway I’m there.”

“Feeding people?”

“Most of the time I’m in processing.”

“What does that mean?”

“People arrive and we try to figure out where they got Dublined, if anywhere.”

“It must have been somewhere, right? No coastlines in this Bohemia.”

He shook his head. “Smugglers. They get to Greece or the Balkans, they don’t want to get registered there. Switzerland has a reputation for quality, in this as in everything.”

“Despite the kind of attack that got you arrested.”

“But it’s worse everywhere else. So they want to come here and then get Dublined. A lot of them have mangled their fingerprints so you can’t ID them that way.”

“Which means they probably got Dublined somewhere else.”

“Sure.”

“So what do you do?”

“If we find out they were tagged elsewhere we have to send them back there. So we don’t try very hard. Most of them we can register here, fingerprints or not. They use retinal scans here. Then we try to find room for them in camps that already have people from their country.”

“Where are they from?”

“Everywhere.”

“Are they climate, political, economic?”

“You can’t tell the difference anymore. If you ever could.”

“So you think you’re getting real refugees.”

He gave her a look. “No one would leave home if they didn’t have to.”

“Okay, so you get them registered here, then you send them to a camp where they’ll have people from their country?”

“We try.”

“But you don’t visit the camps?”

“No. I have to be back here by eight every night.”

“Well, but you can get almost anywhere in Switzerland and back by eight.”

“That’s true. But I’m not supposed to leave the canton.”

“Doesn’t Zurich have any camps?”

“Yes, and I’ve gone to them. There’s a big one out beyond Winterthur, in an old airport or something. Twenty thousand people there. I see how they’re doing. Help in the kitchen. That’s what I like. Although I can help in the kitchen here too.”

“Does that get you time off?”

“I think so. I’m not so worried about that anymore. I don’t have anywhere to go.”

She regarded him for a while.

“Did you ever spend any time in the Alps?” she asked at last.

“A little bit.”

“They’re amazing.”

He nodded. “They look steep.”

“They definitely are.” She told him about her crossing of the Fründenjoch. He seemed interested in her tale, which to her was about the Alps, but when she was done he said, “So who do you think was after you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who loses the most when your ministry does well?”

She shrugged. “Oil companies? Billionaires? Petro-states?”

“That’s not a giant list of suspects.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It could be anyone, I suppose. Maybe it was some individual or small group that they’ve caught. It would make sense if it was just some nut who thought we were the important ones. When actually we’re just a cog in a giant machine.”

“But they might have thought you were the clutch.”

“What does a clutch do again?”

He almost smiled, which was his smile. “It clutches. It’s where the engine connects to the wheels.”

“Ah. Well, I don’t know.”

“Wouldn’t your guards tell you if you asked them?”

“I’m not sure. We’re not that close. I mean, their job is to protect me. They might think I’m safer not knowing.”

“Why would that be?”

“I don’t know. The Swiss banks were attacked too. So they’re keeping pretty quiet about their counterattacks.”

He was smiling his little almost-smile. He gestured at his book. “You need an Inspector Maigret. He liked to explain things to the people he saved.”

“Or if he thought it would make them reveal themselves to be the actual criminal.”

“True. You’ve read them?”

“A few. They’re a bit too dark for me. The crimes are too real.”

“People are twisty.”

“They are.”

“So you need Inspector Maigret.”

“And you need the Alps.”

A woman and girl entered the room, and Frank looked startled. “Oh hi,” he said, then looked at Mary, and back at the two who had just entered. He didn’t know what to say, Mary saw. Nonplussed; confused.

He stood up. “This is Mary Murphy,” he told the two. Then to her: “These are my family.”

Mary squinted. The woman’s mouth had tightened at the corners.

The girl, about ten or eleven years old, broke to Frank and lifted the tension. “Jake!”

“Hey Hiba. How are you.”

“Good.” The girl gave Frank a hug. Frank leaned awkwardly into it, looked over the girl’s shoulder at the woman.

“How did you get here?”

“We took the train.”

“Where do you live?” Mary asked her.

“We stay at the refugee camp outside Bern.”

“Ah. How is that?”

She shrugged. She was looking at Frank.

“Listen, I’ll let you all catch up,” Mary said, standing and holding a hand out to block Frank’s objection. “It’s okay, I should be going anyway. And I’ll come back soon.”

“All right,” he said, distracted still. “Thanks for dropping by.”