by A. B. Decker
“What a stroke of luck,” the colonel shouted, hurrying over to them, excitement in his step and pathos in his eyes. “I was just about to take a pot of tea. Would you charming people care to join me?”
Frank had the distinct impression that he had been waiting all afternoon for them.
“We’d be delighted to join you for a coffee,” he replied, surprising himself with the ring of sincerity. But tea was anathema to him, so the colonel would have to meet them halfway if he wanted their company. It was for Patricia’s sake that he had made the gesture, and her smile did not escape him as the colonel led them to a far corner of the lobby with the pleased pride of a little boy taking his parents off to show them his secret den.
“Don’t like to be too close to the bar at this time of day. Too much of a temptation.”
The colonel pulled out a chair for Patricia and, in so doing, drew attention to Frank’s own lack of manners, which he suspected was the colonel’s intention. Over the throng of people gathering after their return from a day on the slopes, the sound of a piano carried across the lobby to their table. It drew with it a melody as languorous and melancholy as it was familiar. But he could not quite place it. All he knew was that it seemed grossly incongruous in the setting, even though the pianist was plainly doing his best to match it to the warm homecoming mood of the guests.
“‘The Man I Love’,” Patricia said. She glanced across at Frank as she spoke, the words carried by a silky warmth that came unexpectedly after the frosty afternoon together. “It’s a beautiful song when Billie Holiday sings it. Why can’t people leave well alone?”
“It doesn’t fit, does it?” Frank agreed. “But then neither would Bartok.”
“What’s Bartok got to do with it?” she asked.
“Nothing at all,” he replied. “It was simply an observation.”
“Then it was a silly observation. You know I love them both – passionately.” She teased him with an almost imperceptible pause that was just long enough to let the full enchantment of her last word sink into the willing flesh of his heart, before she added: “But then, you’re not French. You wouldn’t feel it with the same passion.”
With those words, Patricia lowered her voice, leaned over to the colonel and whispered in his ear. The ex-army wallah rose from his chair muttering “Of course my dear. My pleasure,” and strode off like a man with a mission. With burning curiosity, Frank watched him approach the pianist and engage in a brief exchange of words.
“Don’t have time for music myself, especially this modern stuff,” the colonel said when he returned and sat back in his chair. “Except maybe Elgar once in a while. ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ – that sort of thing, you know.”
How fitting, Frank thought. But the colonel was not finished. He wanted to lead the conversation down a path he felt more comfortable on. He turned ominously to Frank.
“Have you done the Cresta Run yet, old boy?”
At that moment, Frank noticed the music change.
“‘These Foolish Things’,” he exclaimed, fully aware of the ludicrous smile that instantly lit up his face as he ignored the colonel’s question. He recalled the Billie Holiday record he had bought for Patricia and looked across at her, a delicious teasing sparkle in her eyes.
“We were there this afternoon,” she said, replying to the colonel for him when it became plain that Frank’s mind was somewhere else altogether at that moment.
“This afternoon?” the colonel said with a sceptical expression, evidently puzzled by Frank’s words. “It would have been closed then.”
“It was,” Frank affirmed.
“Just plucking up the courage, eh? When are you going down?”
“Well, I hadn’t really…”
“What? You can’t come to St Moritz without doing the Cresta Run. The ladies expect it, you know.” He sent a conspiratorial wink in the direction of Patricia, who surprised Frank by her amusement. What was it about this man that appealed to her? Frank asked himself. He was certainly not as he imagined her father to be.
“Did it regularly myself when I came here with the chaps, you know. Wager I could still manage it today. Not in the sixty-odd seconds it took me in those days of course. Maybe foolish, as you say. Takes nerves of steel, you know, but I wager I could still do it today.”
‘Nerves of steel’, Frank repeated silently to himself, while in the background the piano continued its refrain. Was it that little gesture of Patricia’s – just one of those foolish things – which was beginning to concentrate his mind?
“Tell me, colonel, with your experience as a military man, what takes more nerve? To ride the Cresta Run or to kill a man?” Frank asked.
He saw the teasing amusement in Patricia’s face flicker like a light in the first gust of a storm. She knew the implication. But the colonel was undeterred by the question.
“Couldn’t tell you, old chap. Never looked upon the enemy as men. More like rats in the cellar. Excuse the bluntness, my dear,” he added, putting an apologetic hand on Patricia’s arm. To Frank’s disappointment, she accepted the gesture with a smile that he would have seen as darkly seductive had it been directed at him. But the colonel appeared not to notice. He still had the army in mind. “The discipline of military training, you know. As long as you don’t think of them as men, it’s not a problem. Now, the Cresta Run is a different cup of tea altogether. Tame that, and you can do anything.”
“Colonel,” Patricia interjected at last, “I’m afraid you must excuse us. We have to go and dress for dinner.” She was plainly unsettled by the direction the conversation had taken. Frank sensed she was angry with him for allowing it to happen. A feeling he felt was vindicated by the afterthought she added as they got up to leave: “Frank was wondering whether you would care to join us for dinner?”
“What a splendid idea. I’d be delighted.” The colonel’s face lit up with a boyish enthusiasm that almost endeared him to Frank – and at least made it easier for him to lend the semblance of truth to Patricia’s mischief-making:
“Is seven-thirty all right for you?” he asked.
“Splendid,” the colonel said again, and they left him with a smile on his face as he settled back into his chair to finish his pot of tea.
Dinner ran a similar course. The colonel was punctual, as to be expected, and positively bounced with excitement at the occasion. Frank had the impression they were the only people he had talked to the whole time he had been in St Moritz – apart from the hotel receptionist, the waiters and, almost certainly, the chambermaids. Patricia for her part played the attentive daughter substitute with conviction, flattering him with her smile and complimenting him on his choice of wine. For although Frank was ostensibly the host, he suggested that the responsibility for such an important decision as choosing the wine should not be left to the inexperience of youth. And all the while he was unable to imagine what it was about the colonel’s company that amused Patricia.
“Excellent, this dried beef,” the colonel said, as he devoured the last wafer-thin slice of his entrée and smacked his lips under cover of his moustache in a manner that Frank found faintly disgusting. The colonel appeared relaxed. But the slow deliberation with which he put down his wine glass and fixed his host across the table with his ageing, slightly washed-out eyes unnerved Frank, who once again suspected this was his intention.
“Well, old chap. Have you made up your mind yet?” the colonel asked.
Frank feigned incomprehension. But the colonel knew he was faking, even if he did not let on. And he knew the question had been occupying Frank’s mind ever since they had left him in the lobby. It was written all over the smug expression he used to wrap up his words. Frank suspected he also knew the answer.
“The Cresta Run, old chap. When are you going to do it?”
Frank’s reply was impulsive, but inevitable.
“I thought I’d give it a try tomorrow.”
“Knew you wouldn’t be able to resist it for long.”
&
nbsp; ‘Of course you knew,’ Frank said to himself. The self-satisfied smile on the colonel’s face irritated him intensely. But in a curious way he was beginning to look upon the man as an accomplice, if not an ally.
“Colonel, would you do me the honour of coming along?” he asked.
“Show you the ropes, you mean? Be only too pleased.” For a moment the colonel hesitated, as his smugness gave way briefly to a look of uncertainty. “Not sure I’m fit enough to do it myself, though. Not as young as I used to be, you know.”
It was as if he wanted to attempt an honourable retreat from his earlier posturing before Frank forced him onto the defensive by calling the bluff of his absurd bragging. And Frank wondered whether the colonel sensed the ambivalence of his invitation and the deep resentment he felt towards the man.
But it was settled. At nine o’clock in the morning, they would meet in the lobby. He had expected Patricia to be pleased that he was offering her lonely old colonel his company. But for the remainder of the evening a dark anxiety filled the expression in her eyes and told him that all was not well. Even later, when they were alone together in their room, her mood did not change. She made it plain that she wanted nothing to do with his plans.
“You’re not worried, are you?” he asked. “I’ll be in safe hands with your colonel.”
A stony stare told him that she did not appreciate his flippancy.
“I don’t know what you’re playing at, Frank. But I don’t like the sound of it. And I want no part in it.”
Although he was unsettled and slightly perplexed by this reaction, her intuitive knowledge thrilled him for the way it underlined the intimacy between them. But it was not this that kept him awake for much of the night, caressed by her breathing body as she slept. It was his apprehension at the gulf that he could sense opening up between dream and reality. A fear of failure. Tomorrow, his ambition would get the chance for a practice run, but would it match up to the task? Would it be strong enough? Would it show him that he was capable of leaping that gulf? He could not afford another failure. It was this that occupied him while the silky touch of Patricia’s body teased the man in him.
He had hoped that at the last minute she would change her mind. But it was not to be. So, when he met up with the colonel in the lobby the following morning, he made the necessary excuses for her. The colonel seemed surprisingly relieved.
“Just as well,” he said. “Not really the place for women.”
And he spent the next thirty minutes or so on their way over to the toboggan run explaining the ropes to Frank, as he put it. Coaching him. Preparing him for what he was about to embark on.
“Battledore is important,” he kept saying. “You’ll see a marker at Battledore. Get your steering line right here and you’ll sail round the horseshoe at Shuttlecock easy as anything. Get it wrong and you’re in trouble. And remember, don’t drag your rakes too heavily. If you must use them at all, then use them properly. If you don’t, you’ll be thrown all over the place.” And he proceeded to explain the technique with the detail of a military strategist that went right over Frank’s head as he began to wonder why it was he had considered this such a necessary plank in his preparation. But the colonel was in his element.
“Makes me feel thirty years younger,” he said. “Perhaps I should give it another try after all. Tomorrow maybe,” he added. And escorted Frank over to the office to put his name down and have him kitted out.
It surprised Frank to find that he was far from alone in embarking on this hare-brained enterprise. The whole area at the top of the run was teeming with wholesome chisel-jawed types who looked very much as if they knew what they were about. Frank wondered whether they shared anything even approaching a common motive. It seemed unlikely. They looked very much at peace with themselves and the world around them. But they had plainly tamed the Cresta Run already. They had steeled their nerves on the wall of ice. They had every reason to be at peace.
“They’ll call your name on the loudspeaker when you’re on,” the colonel explained. “Let’s go and enjoy the sun while we wait, old chap.”
He led Frank over to the run. The snow crunched affably beneath their feet, and the warmth of the sun’s rays came pleasantly packed in a crisp air that carried every sound with precious individual care. An atmosphere in stark contrast to the growing tension that had Frank’s heart already racing.
“As a novice, of course, you start down there at Junction.”
He pointed to a box some thirty metres down the run. Frank listened with growing trepidation for his name to be called. His pounding heart competed with the insistence of the loudspeaker so effectively he wondered whether he would even hear his name when it was called. He thought of Breitner. Pictured the rats in the cellar crawling over the decomposed bodies of Gertrude and her two little boys. Imagined the gun in his hand. But his heart almost lurched to a complete standstill when he heard an unexpected name over the loudspeaker. Crystal clear in the mountain air. It was unmistakable.
“Silverstone,” called the disembodied voice. “Silverstone.” The name seemed to boom down from every mountain peak around them. Frank craned his neck as the next toboggan appeared on the run.
“Is this really Silverstone?”
“What’s that, old chap? Do you know him?”
“No. Nothing. I was just thinking aloud.”
The colonel paid no further attention. Frank’s eyes meanwhile focused on the man on the toboggan as he slid past down the mountainside. It was impossible to identify him, just another figure lying prostrate on a slab of steel and looking a shade ridiculous.
But he had the build of the Silverstone he knew. And he started from the top – Silverstone could never be seen to start from a novice’s junction, no matter how uninitiated he was. He heard scattered cheers of “Hopp-Hopp!” as the tobogganist disappeared from view.
Was this really the Silverstone he now recalled trying vainly to hold on to the last remnants of his dignity in a public convenience?’
“You’d better get over to the box at Junction, old chap. Your name will be coming up before too long.” The colonel took the momentum out of his thoughts. “I’ll make my way down to the Kulm and have the drinks ready for you on the terrace. Good luck,” he added with a military wave as he turned to poke his way gingerly down the slope with his stick.
For once, the colonel was wrong. It was a good forty minutes before his name was called. Someone had apparently fallen badly at Shuttlecock, which was not the kind of news he needed to send him on his way. He tried consoling himself with the thought that maybe the victim was Silverstone. But any consolation he could find was short-lived – his time had come.
Flat on the tray, his face barely inches from the ice that moved away from under his chest, he began the descent – sedately to begin with – and for the first few seconds wondered what the colonel had been making all the fuss about. Then, as if from nowhere, it opened up before him like the mouth of a monster whale. And swallowed him whole. Down he plunged into the vortex. The weight of his frame opened up an ever-widening gap between the callous cruelty of the ice that blew its mocking breath against his face as it passed and his battered thoughts that lingered some thirty metres behind him. He wanted speed at all costs and kept his rakes contemptuously off the ice to let the steel underneath his belly throw him high around the banking. But where was Battledore? His line marker? All he could see was Breitner, his crimson carcass split open on the ice before him, laughing as a ghoulish raw head of a creature – tentacles rising from its blood-engorged skull – crawled out of his body to a roll of drums and dragged behind it Frank’s mother, white and drained of any life. She and Breitner buffeted their way endlessly past the steel bullet that shot Frank high around a bend so tight he was not sure whether he was clinging to his toboggan or the ice. It was only as he came out of the bend and the visions of sweet death were swept away that he realised Battledore was already well behind him and he had just come through Shuttlecock. A smile
tried to break through his shaking jowls as he came onto what looked like the home straight.
But his smugness was premature. Lulled into the comfort of the straight and a self-satisfied disinterest in his gathering speed, he was already looking forward to the celebration of his survival on the terrace of the Kulm when the toboggan lost contact with the ground and he shot into the air. Visions of Patricia flashed through his mind, heavy chains around her slender ankles. He thought of Breitner. And as he crashed back onto the ice with a belly flop that punched the wind right out of him, he saw the bloodied carcass of Patricia’s tormentor once again buffeted along the track beside him, felt it dragging at his feet, slowly putting the brake on his steel bullet. The course lay crimson red like a carpet of blood rolled out before him.
Frank lay on his slab of steel, savouring the stillness of the ice, letting the sun warm his back and filter out these images from his mind. Only the precious clarity of the air washed over him. He felt strangely purified.
“Come on, old man. You can’t stay here all day. The next chap will be on his way down before long.” It was the colonel. He put a hand under Frank’s arm to help him up. “Come on, let’s go and have that drink. You’ve earned it. Did jolly well. Beat my best time by a good two seconds.”
The colonel clapped him on the back as he imagined he would pat his pet dog. And Frank felt an urge to growl and gnarl at his master.
“What’ll it be?” he asked, as he led Frank onto the sunny terrace of the Kulm. The place thronged with steely Titans of the Cresta Run toasting their prowess and others who were there just to bask in the sun and the excitement. Aromas of coffee and cigar smoke mingled with the oily fragrance of sun creams. Hardly a free seat was to be had. But the colonel had the hawk eye of a military strategist and a bearing that commanded respect. He led Frank straight to a couple of seats at the end of a table that was otherwise exclusively French. Frank thought of Patricia, and wished she was here.
“This is my invitation, colonel,” he said. “And since I have something to celebrate, let’s have a bottle of champagne.”