“Merde. I hate these conferences.”

     Thus Chief Inspector Antoine Nicod to Inspector Tissot, his subordinate, after nearly a week of conference duty. Nicod’s dislike ran deep. He believed that civic order and high culture were laboriously achieved and precariously defended, and he wanted to see the defenses fully manned. He had no patience with those willing to abandon the work of centuries for the kind of institutional do-goodery to which his own city of Geneva had itself become such a world-famous monument. The overpaid functionaries employed by the city’s 100+ nongovernmental, mostly United Nations-affiliated organizations, spent little time in their plush offices, so busy were they arranging their next lunch or business trip; but they partied hard, especially when one of their outfits hosted one of Geneva’s famous summit conferences. One of the biggest of these was the forty-first World Rice Bowl Organization Assembly, which was just winding down in the first week of May. Nicod’s Crime Squad and their colleagues at the International Security Force worked eighteen-hour days to keep things running and make sure no one lobbed a bomb at the pocket Caesars of the modern world. By the end of the week, Nicod’s joints ached, his eyes swam, his muscles felt limp. He was fifty-three and no athlete, except at the dinner table. All-night stakeouts were well beyond his physical vigor and considerably beneath his dignity.

    “It’s International Security’s gig anyway,” he grumbled to Yves Tissot, his junior inspector. “Or should be.”

     So that Saturday morning he slept late, rising at half-nine and breakfasting at idle speed. He read Le Temps over his tartine beurrée while Lise, his wife, a teacher of Italian and French Literature at the College Farel, corrected exams in the study. It was a damp and misty morning, typical of a Geneva spring. In the garden, rain dripped from the newly-budding trees. Across the rooftops of neighboring houses and apartment blocks the bluish cloud-shrouded loaf of Mont Salève loomed over the city. It was a do-nothing morning, just what the Chief Inspector needed. He intended to take full advantage of his weekend, as well, starting with the only perk to come out of the long week from hell: free tickets to the four p.m. matinee concert at the Victoria Hall.

     “Mahler’s Fifth,” he said to Lise. “And Mozart, too. The 26th Piano Concerto. That black American pianist is playing, Beverly? Beverly Johnson? Jackson?” Jackson: Her picture smiled out at him from above the announcement of the concert in Le Temps. She was dark-skinned and long-haired and really quite pretty; and a hell of a pianist.

     “Sounds tailor-made for you,” said Lise.

     “Yes. And with Jan Vitek conducting. You know, the Czech conductor they just brought on. Used to be with the Brescia Philharmonic? He does a fine Mahler.”

     “You go, dear.”

     “Meaning you don’t want to come, of course. Although I have two tickets.”

     “No, I’ll take Figgy for a walk if it stops raining. Anyway, I’m expecting a call from Marie-Claire. As you know.”

      Yes; and she and their daughter, who was clerking at the Supreme Court in Lausanne between her first and second federal law examinations at the University there, would go on and on and on, as usual. Plus, Lise didn’t much care for Mahler, and thought Mozart overrated, despite having named their standard poodle Figaro after the Mozart opera’s hero. But his wife’s indifference suited Nicod. He’d gone alone to the concert before, and would again. There would be acquaintances there and at the Café Lyrique, where he’d have a drink and catch up on news with M. Walter, the headwaiter. It was altogether a better prospect than that of sitting all day and/or all night in a patrol car outside a hotel watching the comings and goings of the call-girls hired by the delegates; or wearily working on a departmental restructuring report at 11 p.m.; or bickering with the airport police about whose turf the airport parking lot was (a real sore point when it turned out it was the city police’s, not the airport’s). . .

     After giving his love to his daughter via his wife, instead of taking the bus or walking Nicod drove to the Victoria Hall. He’d been driving or being driven in police cruisers all week and those boring cars and other people’s body odors were getting to him. And he missed his Mercedes. It was his one real indulgence, a refurbished 1980 6.9 that his brother-in-law Leon had offered him on the spur of the moment, three years previously. The car had turned up on Leon’s Mercedes lot in the Acacias district, “undriven,” as Leon said mysteriously, “for eight, maybe ten years.” Its owner had moved to Chile for reasons unspecified. After a couple of thousand francs in restoration work—happily hard upon a rare Christmas bonus—the car, a shiny repainted maroon, drove better by far than Nicod’s aging Peugeot, which he gave to Marie-Claire, and which was now transporting her at erratic speeds on her law-clerking errands around Lausanne. Nicod washed and waxed the Merc with bourgeois regularity; and even Lise, who shunned cars whenever possible, enjoyed driving “that Teutonic shoebox” from time to time.

      But on that particular damp May afternoon, Nicod’s enjoyment at the wheel was marred by traffic jams on the way into town. There was an accident at the Place des Charmilles that tied up a couple of cars from the Gendarmerie, and on top of that some world leader was leaving, so there were police cars everywhere else too, mostly International Security’s Hondas and Opels rather than the Crime Squad’s Fiats and Alfas. A Gendarmerie helicopter clattered overhead. Traffic was bumper-to-bumper all the way down the Rue de Lyon, eased up slightly on the boulevards, then clotted again around the Place du Cirque. A demonstration pro or anti something or other was scheduled for the Place Neuve after the concert, and that dignified square, and the adjoining sedate streets of private banks and quiet mansions, teemed with ambitious advocates of this and opponents of that, discreetly (too discreetly, mused Nicod) shepherded by some of his own Crime Squad boys. There was Sergeant Tschudi, the new man, on the corner, and young Tissot, Nicod’s “pet Inspector” as the Super called him, trying to cope with an unruly bunch of underdressed girls and evidently, to judge by his toothy grin, not entirely displeased with the assignment. He waved when he saw Nicod’s car. Tschudi, being from Zurich, gave a rather more formal salute.

      Walking to the concert hall along the Boulevard du Theatre, Nicod was surprised how animated it was, for a drizzly Saturday afternoon. Of course, early matinees were unusual, especially Saturday ones at four o’clock, and when they happened people came in droves. Geneva, despite the allied scourges of drugs and petty crime, was still a city very conscious of culture—and Culture. At the Victoria Hall. Nicod squeezed his way through to his seat, slightly below the gods but with a good view of the stage. He looked around for the known or the intriguing but saw neither until a couple brushed past on their way to the parterre: Pierre Hunziger and his wife. Hunziger—Federal Councilor, Chairman of the Department of Finance, former Chairman of the Defense, Justice, and Transport Departments, former Chargé d’Affaires at the Swiss Embassies in Czechoslovakia and Italy—was one of the most influential members of the Government. Yet he was a decent sort, for a politician, in Nicod’s opinion.

     “Ah, Chief Inspector,” said Hunziger.

     “Monsieur le Conseiller. Madame.”

     Hunziger had done his military service with Nicod’s brother Jean-Marc, a Bernese pastor, and their daughters had gone to the same school; and once—during a series of urgent debates in Berne on a federal crime bill the Geneva police desperately wanted passed, when Hunziger was chairman of the Justice Department—Nicod had persuaded his counterparts in the French Gendarmerie to turn a blind eye to a series of speeding tickets accumulated by the Councilor on his way to and from his vacation house in the placid wine-growing town of Collonges, just across the border. In return, Nicod found the occasional bottle of homegrown Seyssel on his desk. (It was drinkable, but he preferred a drier Swiss Fendant.) It was rumored that Hunziger had been well on his way to a stellar career in the diplomatic service, with ambassadorships the next stop after postings to Prague and Rome as chargé d’affaires in both capitals, but that an amorous indiscretion had closed off that particular avenue….

     The house lights went down and the conductor, Jan Vitek, mounted the podium. Vitek was  heavyset, with sideburns and a quiff of gray hair that stuck straight up as if responding to an invisible overhead magnet. He looked more like a Communist factory worker than an orchestra conductor, but then Nicod remembered that in fact, like many Czech intellectuals, Jan Vitek had been a Communist factory worker, back in the Red days, when so many dissident intellectuals had been forced to become furnace-stokers, boilermakers, and night watchmen, beneficiaries despite themselves of a stolidness and lack of pretension that workaday drudgery conferred, along with a screaming desire to be free of it. Unlike, say, your standard Western intellectual, with his self-indulgent dreams.