Free The Public Prosecutor by Jef Geeraerts Page A

as “girls working in a bordello while trying to keep their virginity”. Jacobi senior had also used the epithet “ cheibe Usländer ”, or bloody foreigners, to refer to anyone who could not be categorized as Swiss. He had once confided to a number of intimate friends that a Swiss banker had to be like the owner of a quality hotel: a civilized host who provided excellent service, and counted his takings to the last penny as his guests settled down to an evening cognac. Ernst Jacobi followed in his father’s footsteps and respected family tradition. Like his father, he was almost six and a half feet tall, had a large round head that was bald as a billiard ball, thin lips and the jowls of a toad, greedy eyes of cracked grey porcelain behind thick glasses, and was always dressed in a worn-out anthracite suit and a black tie. He looked to all the world like an undertaker’s master of ceremonies.
    He walked like a crane, slow and lurching from arthritis of the hip, which he refused to have operated upon, afraid of the consequences a full anaesthetic might have for someone of his age. He had been a widower for ten years, was father of nine children, warden of the Augustiner church, devoted knight of the Order of Malta, holder of several Vatican distinctions granted by His Holiness, friend of the Archbishop of Chur - who profited from his generous gifts - with whom he spent his summer vacations in the Graubünden mountains. He was an Opus Dei supernumerary, which he denied when necessary in line with the rule of personal humility, obedient to the prohibition against flaunting membership that had been relaxed to some degree in the 1982 statutes. In addition to two wedding rings, however, he also wore the gold ring with the inset black stone of Opus Dei, but no one had any idea what it meant. He lived alone with an aged Alsatian in a genuine eighteenth-century chalet with a weathered wooden roof hidden among the trees on the flanks of the Uetliberg, with breathtaking views of the Lake Zurich, although he paid them little attention. His primary secret was his executive position on the board of the “ Stiftung Limmat ”, a bank network that administered billions of Opus Dei dollars. His greatest strength was being a citizen of a peaceful country in the centre of old Europe, in which historical axes intersected and where creativity was considered a superfluous quality best left to artists and writers, brats that needed constant supervision because they tended to think as they acted and vice versa, patent proof of unreliability.
    On Tuesday 25 May 1999 at eleven forty-five a.m. - he started work at eight every day except Sunday - Jacobi was sitting at his desk in a gloomy office on the fourth floor of the imposing Credit Suisse building, Paradeplatz 8. The edifice’s nuclear bomb-proof cellars, five concrete shafts thirty metres deep, preserved the secret fortunes of the likes of Mobutu, Ceauşescu, Hailie Selassie, Hassan II, Idi Amin, Bokassa, Stroessner, Saddam Hussein, Abu Nidal, Duvalier, Noriega, Suharto, Marcos, Karadžić, Pinochet and others.
    When American journalists demonstrated in 1996, on the basis of irrefutable documentation, that billions of dollars of Holocaust money were locked up in the safes of a number of Swiss banks, Ernst Jacobi responded in an interview in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung : “A waste of breath… peanuts!”
    The telephone rang. Jacobi, who was examining a file on tax evasion and fraud, blindly lifted the receiver with his giant liver-spotted claw of a hand. A fatherly smile lit up his face. “ Grüezi , dear Hervé,” he said, and listened carefully.
    As usual, his responses were limited to a monotonous drone and guarded nods of the head, his eyes fixed on a Gobelin tapestry from Brussels hanging on the wall opposite, portraying a pogrom against medieval Jews who had desecrated the body of Christ by cutting Communion wafers into pieces to add lustre to the sacrifice of goy children.
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