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after all, she’d come to know her friend years ago during a similar rescue operation, in the middle of Zurich, in Centralplatz. A small crowd had gathered at the entrance to the Polybahn. Puzzled passengers were standing around a brownish thing that Josefa approached and identified as a young swan. Suddenly somebody pushed through the crowd, a young woman wearing a colorful Moroccan cap and a loose windbreaker.
    “Get back,” she’d commanded, her quick hands picking up the injured bird. When she turned around with the swan in her arms, the crowd parted like the Red Sea for Moses. The woman crossed the square, went to the railing overlooking the Limmat River, and threw the swan into the water where it gently landed and paddled off. “Bravo,” Josefa shouted, simply blown away, and made her way over to the woman. “You were magnificent!”
    The woman looked at her in bewilderment, and Josefa impulsively invited her for a hot chocolate at the Café Schuster.
    “Apparently it pays to have birds in your belfry,” Helene had replied with a grin.
    But today Helene had a scowl on her face after Josefa relayed the looming catastrophe at Loyn to her. Helene drank some of the cognac they had each ordered in a fit of daring and cleaned her glasses with the damask napkin lying beside the silver peanut bowl.
    “Who actually brought Schulmann in? Walther?”
    She was sharp as ever, for that was a question that had been bothering Josefa since she heard the news.
    “Francis Bourdin most certainly gave his agreement; Walther won’t do anything without him. Bourdin must have wanted Schulmann; I’m convinced of that. But I wonder why. Why did he go and get a person like him? It doesn’t make sense. Schulmann will only bring him grief.”
    “Maybe it hasn’t entered dear Franz’s head yet,” Helene countered (she could not bring herself to call him “Francis”). “Maybe Schulmann turned on all his charm, and little Franz fell for it because it so flattered his colossal ego.”
    Josefa swirled her cognac so that it almost splashed out of the glass.
    “His job is redundant,” she protested. “I’m doing it all myself anyway.”
    “Yes, at the same salary and without bragging rights. You simply rode out that other loser and never asked management to discuss it with you.”
    “Discuss?” Josefa snorted. “Those guys don’t even know the word. They’re egomaniacs, monomaniacs…” Josefa searched for something stronger. “Autocrats!”
    Helene was not impressed.
    “Schulmann will make life difficult for you. He’ll tear a strip off your back if you don’t look out, and there’s nobody who’ll stand up for you. You should’ve really gone at it after that fiasco with Schulmann’s predecessor, Josefa! And you should’ve dealt with Franz right at the start. And yet…somehow you admire him in spite of it all. The marketing genius. The doer. The maverick. ‘He’s just so spontaneous, got nutty ideas. The whole business is nuts in fact.’” Helene had Josefa’s voice down to a T.
    Josefa said nothing. She’d been expecting Helene to console her. Solace. Encouragement. And now she was holding a mirror up to her. Revealing her cowardice, her lack of consistency, her willingness to adapt. Helene didn’t have a clue about the workings of a company like Loyn. It wasn’t some forest filled with warbling little birds; it was a cage full of hyenas, and Josefa was smack-dab in the middle.
    But what was she supposed to do? What should she have said to Walther? And what was she to do now ? Expose Schulmann’s sexual harassment? She had no witnesses; and what if they accused her of trying to get her new boss kicked out by starting a vicious rumor? She wanted most of all to pack it in. And she’d already decided not to tell Helene one word about the mysterious e-mails; she wouldn’t take them seriously anyway.
    “First, go take your vacation and don’t give the company any thought for a while,” Helene said, as if