Free Pipeline by Peter Schechter Page B

Technologies; her father, the CFO of Star Microsystems. A lot of intelligence and passion had blossomed in the household, but there was precious little time for parenting. As soon as eleven-year-old Blaise developed an affinity for choir, her parents had jumped to enroll her as a boarder in London’s School for Artistically Gifted Children. Blaise had sung for three years, had become tired of the repetitiously rote chorale instruction, and had petitioned her parents to transfer her to a regular international school. As London’s international school had no slots, Blaise had ended up in Geneva.
    Blaise glanced over at the taxi driver’s license and noted more than four c ’s in his unpronounceable Eastern European name. She thanked the Lord that the taxi driver’s Croatian or Slovenian ancestry impeded any conversation in English. The quiet gave her time to lean back in the seat and remember the first time she’d met her German roommate, Anne-Sophie. She had gotten on her tiptoes togive Anne-Sophie her first formal European peck on each cheek. Blaise had considered Anne-Sophie a strange combination: the body of a lanky basketball player and a face like a porcelain doll. The two girls had shared a room for three years. During that time, a friendship was born that would be tested by time, distance, and events. The sisterhood of the Geneva International School was glue that still bonded them impressively years later.
    Anne-Sophie had always been different from most of the other students at school. She had been far more serious about her studies. From the beginning, Anne-Sophie had felt a responsibility to prove her worth to her classmates, teachers, and, most important, to the school’s administration, which had accorded her one of the few available scholarships. Anne-Sophie was from a middle-class German family—her father a senior civil service tax inspector with Germany’s Ministry of Finance—and had been unable to afford the upscale tuition costs of the Geneva boarding school.
    As a result, Anne-Sophie had bonded with few students. Blaise had been one of the exceptions. The charm of the Californian’s giddy brilliance and restless idealism had been impossible to resist. The two girls—one rational and studious, the other instinctive and irrepressible—became inseparable friends.
    With Blaise’s home so far away, there had been no way for her to return to the United States over short school breaks. Anne-Sophie had invited Blaise to come home with her to Frankfurt for the first long weekend in late October. That trip would prove to be the first of many visits to Hermann Perlmutter’s home. Blaise had seemed to gravitate toward confidences with her best friend’s rational and patient father over the ins and outs of her own mother and father’s schizophrenic parental presence.
    Treating him almost as a surrogate father, Blaise had ended up confiding in Hermann on a range of subjects: school, careers, drugs, and men. Blaise had confessed years later to a speechless Anne-Sophie that she had sought her father’s confidential counsel on a suspected pregnancy that later turned out to be a false alarm.
    Hermann had never told his own daughter about that conversation.
    Blaise noted the taxi’s crossing of the Main River and immediately began to pay attention. She recognized the surroundings. Warmth stirred inside as the taxi drove through Sachsenhausen, Anne-Sophie’s neighborhood. Blaise remembered Anne-Sophie’s stories about how much she had loved growing up in the old quarter. The neighborhood had been perfect for kids. It was a mix of elegant town houses and parks on the riverbank with lots of cafés and boutiques on the elegant Schweizer Strasse.
    Blaise felt a strange but serene sense of coming home as the taxi pulled to a halt in front of the flowered garden of the Perlmutters’ small home—after all, it had been years since Blaise last walked into the house.
    Anne-Sophie had married Daniel Uggin and moved