Drumbeat Erica

by Stephen Marlowe

“This is Ahmed Shiraz. Thought I’d find you sooner or later. Only five top hotels in town. The de l’Europe here. The Amstel. The Doelen. The Hilton. Krasnapolsky was fifth. How would you like to go on being my lucky charm? I’ll pay you.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “The wife got a transatlantic call last night. Her old man died. She’s flying back for the funeral and joining me in Gstaad in a few days. I’m blowing this joint today, renting a car and driving up the Rhine to Basel, and from there to the Oberland. I figured you might like to play co-pilot. Pick you up in an hour?”

  I said that would suit me fine.

  He said dryly: “I kind of thought it would.”

  I started to replace the receiver, then heard his voice: “Drum? Hold on a minute.”

  “I’m still here.”

  “A funny thing. The wife told me you were working for him. For her old man. Care to elaborate?”

  “No,” I said.

  “What I can’t figure is Amos Littlejohn hiring someone to be my guardian angel. He made no secret of hating my guts. Well, I guess with him dead I’ll never know.”

  I agreed that that was a distinct possibility.

  One more call, or attempted call. I rang Fontein back. It didn’t seem likely that Claeys and Jeremy Budd would learn Shiraz was leaving Amsterdam a day early, but it wouldn’t hurt to have Fontein put the squeeze on them through his police friends right away. It would also not hurt, I decided, if a similar squeeze were put on Erica.

  The phone kept ringing. Wherever Fontein was, he wasn’t home.

  16

  BEFORE WE reached Arnheim on the first leg of a drive that would take us across the narrow neck of Holland and up the Rhine into Germany and along the river to the Swiss border and finally up into the Alps, I was convinced that Shiraz would do what Erica Nordstrom and her minions had been unable to accomplish. Shiraz, behind the wheel of a Mercedes-Benz 230 SL, would kill himself. He would also kill his passenger. Unfortunately, I was his passenger.

  To say that Shiraz drove like a maniac is like saying Sandy Koufax is a pretty good pitcher. Our cruising speed on the straightaways, and there were nothing but straightaways between Amsterdam and Arnheim, was 150 kilometers an hour. Winter-brown farmland and tidy villages and an occasional windmill flickered by like the tattered remnants of an ancient movie film. We passed big trailer rigs so fast they seemed to be going in reverse. Shiraz never looked before cutting out into the left lane. He just stepped down on the gas pedal. If anything was in the way it was just everybody’s tough luck.

  Beyond Arnheim I suggested hopefully: “If you get tired I’ll be glad to take over.”

  Shiraz stepped down on the gas. The Mercedes’ deep voice roared and we did a fandango between the truck ahead of us and the truck rushing toward us in the other lane. A protesting horn got lost in our slipstream. Shiraz no shook his head. “Forget it,” he said. “I’m the world’s worst back seat driver.”

  I tried again in the early afternoon as we were approaching Düsseldorf in Germany. “Where’s the four-alarm fire?”

  “Three attempts are enough to convince me. Okay, somebody’s trying to kill me. The open road’s a pretty good place to do it. We’ll make Gstaad before noon tomorrow. They’ll never catch up with us.”

  “Sure,” I pointed out, “but at least they’re getting paid to kill you.”

  At first he didn’t get it, then he did. He grinned. “Scared? Forget it. I used to do some racing when I was a kid.”

  He did some now. In the pecking order of a German highway a Mercedes 230 SL is cock-of-the-walk. Shiraz recklessly passed everything in sight. Driving that sleek silver beauty, it was expected of him. Stolid little Volkswagens watched us zoom by without envy. Lancias were left dispiritedly in our wake. A couple of lumbering Ferrari coupés growled disconsolately.

  Then, just twenty kilometers short of Düsseldorf, in considerable city-bound traffic, Shiraz spotted a competitor. It was three cars ahead of us, passing everything that got in its way. It was sleek racing green and it had an enormous hood that housed an enormous power plant.

  “Can you make her out?” Shiraz asked anxiously.

  “Forget it,” I said. “It’s a Model-T Ford.”

  Shiraz hunched toward the windshield, almost squashing his nose against it like a kid at a candystore window. “She’s a Maserati,” he cried finally. “This is going to be fun.”

  We passed the three cars behind the green Maserati as if they weren’t there. Beyond the Maserati was a stretch of empty road. Shiraz gunned the Mercedes and we closed on the green car slowly. Its driver, ignoring the rearview mirror, craned his neck for a look at us. We were close enough to see his grim smile. The Maserati leaped ahead.

  So did we. Shiraz began to pull out and our grill drew up in a line with the Maserati’s rear fender. We held it that way for a while. Far in the distance, hurtling toward us like a projectile, was a big bus.

  The Maserati’s driver looked at us. He had a red face and short-cropped blond hair. We drew even with him. His face darkened. He drew ahead a little. We came back even. The bus was much closer. We drew a few feet ahead. The Maserati surged forward again. The bus was very much closer. With our combined speeds we were rushing toward it at a hundred and seventy miles an hour. Five seconds, I thought. Five more seconds, or maybe all of six, and Erica could go take a vacation somewhere.

  We passed the Maserati and cut back into lane a couple of feet ahead of its green snout. The bus roared by, buffeting us. Shiraz leaned on his horn and waved a casual hand at the Maserati as it faded back. He got a grudging wave from its driver.

  We entered Düsseldorf, and Shiraz began to talk.

  It was like that all the way to the Swiss border. On the open road only a direct question would get a terse word or two out of him. But on the streets of Düsseldorf and Köhi and Bonn and Koblenz and Karlsruhe it was different. There you couldn’t stop him from talking. I almost began to prefer the highway.

  Find a reckless driver in love with fast cars and ten to one you’ll find a blowhard in love with himself and convinced he is Allah’s gift to women. I heard all about Shiraz’s exploits. They were considerable. They were told with relish and detail. According to Ahmed Shiraz, Ahmed Shiraz was the most versatile and successful swordsman this side of Don Juan. “I never miss,” he allowed. “I mean, never. I want a dame, I get her. Sooner or later, usually a lot sooner than she thinks, she’ll roll over for me.”

  He began to name legions who had. Only a scant forty or fifty of Shiraz’s conquests were famous movie queens. “They’re usually jaded,” he said. “Did you know that—” he named France’s most prominent sex symbol—”is frigid? I mean, really frigid. She hates it. Me, I’ll take unknown starlets any time. They’re eager to please.” He named a few of the eager ones. “They’ll bend over backwards to satisfy you. Ha, ha, no pun intended.”

  In Karlsruhe I asked, “Did you ever think of writing your memoirs?” I asked it with the proper respect and solemnity. Being as how he was in love with himself, he took me seriously.

  “I toy with title idea every once in a while,” he admitted. “Only trouble is, I can’t write for beans. All I can do is talk.”

  I saw no real reason to refute that statement.

  “Talk,” he said. “That’s the secret. You’ve got to have a good line. You know what’s the most fun? Get a naïve broad somewhere, good-looking, stacked, but a weirdo who never saw one of your movies. Then seduce her with your line, lay her and then let her know who she’s been to bed with. It’s a hell of a lot more satisfying than just falling into bed on your reputation. It really breaks them up.”

  Babbling on about his conquests finally got Shiraz around to the subject of his ex-wife, who lived in Gstaad. “Wait till you lay eyes on her,” he said. “You’ll see what I mean. Suzanne’s my candidate for the Western world’s number one sexpot. I mean it. She is sex with a big capital S and she makes every other dame I ever screwed look like a cardboard
cut-out.”

  He kept that up through the Black Forest, forgetting that we had left Freiburg and were on the open road. I encouraged him for the first time. It kept his driving down to a conservative hundred K’s an hour. It had almost grown dark. I thought it would be a pretty good idea if we reached the Swiss frontier alive.

  “My only regret is that I can’t spend the rest of my life in the sack with Suzanne,” he told me.

  “Then how come you got divorced?”

  He sighed. “We were incompatible. For one thing she’s jealous. What the hell, I’m human, I get yens, Suzanne may be a real sexpot, but who wants to be a one-crop farmer? There are other fields to plow. Were you ever married?”

  I said I had been married once upon a time.

  “You want to know the truth, I’m an old-fashioned guy. I believe in the double standard. A man, he’s like that if he’s any kind of man at all. But a dame is different. A dame, when she gets married, ought to be absolutely one hundred percent Old Faithful. Suzanne,” he admitted in a doleful voice, “didn’t see things that way. As long as I played around, she decided she could play around on me. It got to be a habit for both of us. We had to call it quits. No dame can put a pair of horns on me and get away with it,” he said righteously.

  He took his double standard up through the Black Forest and to the Swiss border at Basel. We crossed and ate some fondue Bourgignonne washed down with a couple of bottles of Döle. At our hotel Shiraz learned to his delight that one of his old films was playing in town with German subtitles. He went to see it. I turned in early. In the morning we drove to Bern and then up into the mountains of the Oberland.

  17

  THE JET-SET, bless their gold-plated hearts, have a watering place for each of the sybaritically good things in life.

  Eleuthera in the Bahamas is the place to go if you have a few million bucks in loose change and want to try your flippers at skin-diving.

  Cannes on the Côte d’Azur is the place to do your gambling. Las Vegas is vulgar and Monte Carlo is a relic of the twenties. More dough changes hands at the private casino in Cannes than anywhere else. Most winds up with the management.

  Paris remains the jet-set city, despite a renaissance of interest in that ugliest of all big towns, London. But to be a member in good standing of the jet-set in Paris, a suite at just any old deluxe hotel won’t do. The George Cinq is for phonies, the Ritz is for parvenus and the Meurice is for tourists with fat wallets. A jet-setter in Paris, if he can’t get invited as a house guest in one of the town houses on the Ile St. Louis, pitches his tent at the Plaza Athenée.

  Gstaad in the Bernese Oberland is winter jet-set headquarters.

  Not that St. Moritz and Klosters are hick towns where the season’s big event is a yodeler yodeling off-key. Kitz-bühl in Austria, Cortina in Italy and Chamonix in France have their partisans. But all of them are merely there. Gstaad is in.

  If you stay at any hotel in Gstaad except the Palace, you rate no notice at all. If you put up at the Palace or maybe the Chesery, you may earn a nod of slightly more than indifferent approval. The in thing to do, in Gstaad, is get hold of a key to someone’s vacant chalet.

  Ahmed Shiraz had the key to a chalet with the improbable name of Casa Chica. It was a fifteen-room pile high on a bluff five minutes from the center of the village. The exterior was all Swiss, the timber façade darkly stained, the three balconies omate, the snow-hooded roof high-pitched and the eaves overhanging. The interior, its stucco walls starkly whitewashed, its rooms furnished sparsely with antiques that had first seen the light of day south of the Pyrenees, was all Spanish. Its owner, Shiraz told me, was a retired Mexican movie funnyman who had given up skiing a few years ago. He had half-heartedly tried to sell the joint. The asking price was one million Swiss francs. I told Shiraz I’d buy it on the spot, except that unfortunately I’d left my checkbook in my other suit, the one with the frayed collar.

  As soon as we set our suitcases down in the entrance hall, Shiraz headed for the phone. He didn’t ask me to go away. I stood looking out the window across the long axis of the snow-covered valley to the high Oberland mountains while he dialed.

  “Hiya, baby-doll,” he said. “Guess who?”

  Baby-doll guessed correctly.

  “A few days,” Shiraz told her. “Hard to say how long. But what’s today, baby-doll?”

  Baby-doll figured out the day of the week.

  “That’s right, Monday. And Carol won’t show up till anyway Wednesday or Thursday. How’s that sound?”

  Baby-doll evaluated the sound for a while.

  “Working,” said Shiraz in a disappointed voice. “Then how about tonight? There is? What time you want me to pick you up? I’ve got a friend along, maybe you can fix him—At the restaurant? Okay, I guess. See you later, baby-doll.”

  He hung up and turned to me with a grin. “That was the ex. She’s playing a little hard to get. Can you ski?”

  I said I wasn’t about to give Billy Kidd a hard time, but I could ski.

  “You still bodyguarding?” he asked casually. Now that we were a couple of days removed from the last attempt on his life, it seemed to amuse him.

  “Nobody’s offered me a better job.”

  “Well, why don’t you hop down to the Sporthaus Central and get yourself outfitted with skis and boots? There’s a party tonight on top of a mountain. You ride the cable car up and ski down by torchlight. With some fun and games sandwiched in between.”

  “Kiss him!” somebody shouted in English. “Forfeit! You have to kiss him!”

  The girl sitting between me and Ahmed Shiraz had just speared a chunk of bread on a long fork and dipped it into the crock of cheese and wine bubbling over an alcohol lamp in the center of the table. The bread had fallen off. For this gaffe she had to kiss the man seated at her right.

  The inept fondue eater was Shiraz’s ex-wife, Suzanne.

  The man seated at her right was me.

  It was nine o’clock, the moon was full, its light reflected by the white mountains and shining through the red and white curtains, the restaurant was jammed with merrymakers in ski-clothing, most of whom made me feel as old as Methuselah’s grandfather, and hot red wine punch and cold white wine had been flowing freely ever since our arrival two hours before. A red-faced little fat man in a checkered shirt and a leather vest was playing an accordion. The party had reached that bibulous stage where people who didn’t know the words were singing along off-key, their smiling sweaty faces reflected in the candlelight.

  Suzanne Shiraz was a small dark girl who didn’t look twenty-one but of course had to be older. On her blue anorak she wore the two red stripes of the Oberland ski guides. Her black hair was drawn back tautly from her temples and tied at the back of her neck. She had fine high cheekbones and big luminous black eyes in which I could see the candle flames dancing.

  She was French-Swiss, from the Vaudois town of Nyon on Lake Geneva, but she had spent most of her life here in the mountains. That much I got from her in brief and cool tidbits of conversation between glasses of wine punch. The message had seemed clear: any friend of Ahmed Shkaz would be no friend of hers. He hadn’t been boasting in the car, though. She was stunning. She looked enough like my Dominique to make me wish I hadn’t drunk as much wine or else had drunk far more.

  “It is an old custom,” she explained. “If I lose my bread in the fondue, I must kiss the man on my right.” Her hand alighted on my shoulder, pulling me gently toward her. I could see Shiraz’s face past hers. He was studiously looking in three other directions. Suzanne had been ignoring him all night. She had done most of her animated talking, in Schwyzerdutsch, to a couple of burly Alpine guide types seated across the long table.

  Her face swam toward mine. She kept her eyes wide open. A smile was lurking in their black depths. At the last instant, just before my lips on her lips would make talking impossible, she whispered quickly, “I’ve eaten fondue since before I could walk. I never drop the bread.”

  At
first she kissed tentatively, like a child carefully tasting an exotic food she is half convinced she won’t like. I began to draw back, but the pressure of her hand was still on my shoulder. Suddenly it went away. Just as suddenly it increased, and her lips were open under my lips. She tasted of wine and cinnamon. Her tongue touched my tongue and darted back. I followed it. What had begun as a party game forfeit became something else. A girl either kisses with her eyes shut and a dreamy look on her face or with her eyes open and a challenging look on her face. A wise man marries the first kind and takes the second kind as his mistress. Suzanne’s black eyes remained open.

  Finally we came unstuck. I felt the pressure of her hand on my shoulder again. “Ski down the mountain with me,” she said softly.

  There had been other fondue-forfeit kisses, dutiful little party pecks. The red-faced man played a few bars of Lohengrin’s wedding march on his accordion. Everybody laughed, even Shiraz. The two burly ski-guide types looked at Suzanne longingly. She jumped with both feet into animated conversation with them in that incomprehensible dialect that passes for German in the Bernese Oberland. I wasn’t there any more.

  After the hot and smoky air of the restaurant it was very cold outside, the crisp, exhilarating cold of the high Alpine night. In all directions snow-covered mountains loomed blue-white in the moonlight and far, far below, the lights of Gstaad were a handful of diamonds glittering on the valley floor.

  “Mon Dieu, but it is beautiful,” Suzanne said.

  We were walking across the hard-packed snow toward the top cablecar station to get our skis. I could see glowing orange flame down there. A few expert skiers would be carrying torches instead of ski poles.

  I found my skis and set them down parallel on the snow, clamping them to my boots. The party had divided into three groups. The two burly guides would each take one group down the mountain. Suzanne would take the third. I realized that her invitation had been about as exclusive as membership in the Order of the Empire since the Beatles got in.