The Crime Minister [antikvár]

Chapter OneI The refrigerator was late. Colonel O'Rourke at the ; PX in Vogelweh had promised an early-afternoon ' delivery. Now, with only fifteen minutes before the entire von Kelsing entourage was scheduled to leave for midnight mass at the Düsseldorf Cathedral, the only Christmas gift Werner von Kelsing had waiting for his wife Mitzi was his late mother's six-carat pear-shaped diamond. He'd had it reset as a dinner ring, but what was the fun of it? Mitzi didn't even like diamonds. The daughter of a leading Zurich banker and a natural blonde, she preferred gold. She claimed diamonds made her look prematurely old; hence, the refrigerator. All during August at their Berchtesgaden retreat on the Austrian border, she had ^ complained that only the Americans knew how to combine decorator colors with modem technology. What was the point of her redecorating her country kitchen with slate floors and paneled mahogany cupboards, she kept harping, if she was going lo be forced to plunk a "hospital white" refrigerator in the middle of "my beautiful, dark, exotic wood?"