Drumbeat Erica

by Stephen Marlowe

  “Stay with your guides,” one of the burly men said in slow, heavily-accented French. “Stay with your torch-bearers. It is no joke to be lost on the mountain at night, even with a full moon.”

  The other guide thrust a burning torch in Shiraz’s hand. The actor looked surprised.

  “Suzanne said you were to light the way for her group,” the guide explained.

  Gripping the torch firmly, Shiraz raised it aloft. The look of surprise on his face became one of pleasure. His skiing ability had been complimented.

  The first group, led by its guide and torch-bearer, started down the mountain. The second group gave them a couple of minutes and then went after them.

  That left about ten of us. “We are taking the easiest way down,” Suzanne said in French. “But at night, with the shadows of the moonlight, it can be deceptive. Are there any intermediate skiers here, or novices?”

  There were none. I began to have some doubts about my own skiing ability. I had qualified as an advanced skier on a junket in High Savoy a couple of seasons ago but hadn’t been near skis since then.

  “Very well,” Suzanne said. “The piste is roughly as follows. We take the black trail halfway down to the middle station, where it crosses the red trail. We follow the red past the middle station for a few hundred meters to the top of the T-bar, then the blue until the final cutoff for the parking lot. The only difficult section is just below the middle station. Try to stay close together, but not too close. Never lose sight of your torch-bearer.”

  She designated a local skier who knew the mountains to bring up the rear. “If you become separated from the group, don’t panic. The trails are clearly marked by numbers. It is less than six kilometers to the valley floor. Are you ready?”

  A few cigarettes were dropped in the snow. “Then ski heil!” Suzanne shouted, and pushed off with her poles, skating two or three times to pick up speed, and was gone over the lip of the hill at the beginning of the run. Shiraz followed her with the torch. I pushed off after him, feeling awkward and unsure of myself.

  An Olympic racing skier, if he ignores the possibility of falling and doing an egg-beater that can break a dozen bones including his neck, can hit ninety miles an hour over hard-packed snow on a steep slope. A merely advanced skier, like every member of Suzanne’s group, can hit forty miles an hour and still maintain his confidence. Forty miles an hour, with just half an inch of laminated hickory between your boots and the snow, feels like flying.

  Forty miles an hour, at night, with brilliant moonlight on the crests and deep shadows in the hollows, is downright foolhardy.

  For a while Suzanne maintained a slow pace, traversing diagonally to left and right down the first leg of the trail, a dark graceful silhouette gliding wraithlike over the snow a hundred yards ahead of me. Between us, his torch an orange streak, was Shiraz. Strung out behind me, some of them visible as I switched from side to side down the trail, came the rest of the group. I figured we were doing a respectable twenty miles an hour, which was plenty fast enough. There was the rush of snow under my skis and the sudden swooping shift of weight to the downhill ski as I dug a pole into the snow and executed a turn, then the feeling of weightlessness as I side-slipped out of the turn and into the next traverse. I began to feel pretty confident. The old knees still have it, I thought.

  Then the orange streak of a torch that was Shiraz began to gain on the dark silhouette that was Suzanne. His voice came drifting back along with the wind buffeting my face. “Track!” he shouted. “Track left!” He had no intention of slowing down. He was going to pass Suzanne on the left. He was back in the Mercedes again.

  Passing her on a narrow stretch of trail that swooped down through a stand of spruce, he kept picking up speed. I heard Suzanne shout something which failed to check his wild descent. She picked up speed too. She had no choice. The stragglers strung along the trail behind us had to keep the torch in sight.

  I narrowed my traversing turns, my skis almost parallel instead of stemming wide for braking power each time I changed direction. It began to tell on my knees. They were fighting gravity every time I turned. I knew I was poised on the edge of control. In just a few seconds Shiraz had doubled our speed.

  What you have working for you on high speed turns while you streak down a mountain is a four-beat rhythm. After a while if you don’t lose your nerve it becomes automatic. You crouch forward with your weight on the balls of your feet, thrust a pole into the snow, rise suddenly as if determined to jump clear of your skis and skid into a turn around the pole. The extent of the skid is determined by your speed and the strength of your knees to act as shock absorbers.

  Nothing to it, unless the trail becomes so narrow that you have no room for skidding.

  The trail narrowed.. Trees on one side and the edge of a cliff on the other. I had no idea how long the drop was. I had no desire to find out the hard way.

  Shiraz began to run flat out.

  All the rest of us could do was follow. I drew my skis tightly parallel, pointed them downslope, crouched well forward and let myself go. The trail turned sharply to the left. I turned with it. It swung to the right and then to the left again. I almost ran up a tree. Blue-white moonlit snow and dark shadows raced by. I cursed Shiraz. I vowed to take up ping-pong or maybe gin rummy, as befitting my declining years.

  The trail opened on a wide slope that cut diagonally across the mountain. We passed under the overhead cables of the téléférique. I could see the lights of the middle station a few hundred yards below. The torch wasn’t moving. Shiraz had finally ended his wild descent. With Suzanne he was waiting for the rest of us.

  I kept running straight until I was almost on them. Then I did a sudden christy to the right, my skis spewing snow at Shiraz as I came to a stop.

  “… want to break your own fool neck,” Suzanne was saying, “that’s all right with me. But I have ten people in this party.”

  “Skiing’s not worth a damn unless you ski right on the edge of control,” Shiraz told her.

  “Yes?” she said. “I know you. Driving is not worth a damn unless you drive on the edge of control, life is not worth a damn unless you live on the edge of control. You’re as reckless as a little boy.”

  “I’ll take that for a compliment,” Shiraz said.

  “And as irresponsible and amoral. Give me the torch.”

  “The torch?”

  “Take Mr. Drum’s poles,” she told him.

  I said, “You want me to carry the torch? I’m not much of a skier.”

  “You’re competent. I lead, you follow, the rest follow you. That’s what I want.”

  Shiraz snickered. I gave him my ski poles. He handed over the torch. One at a time the other skiers began to join us. Most of them were breathless. Skiing, you didn’t feel the cold of the Alpine night. But standing, the sweat freezing between your body and your clothes, you did. A gust of wind blew down the mountain, howling through the cables overhead. I stomped my skis up and down to keep my feet from going numb.

  When the last straggler appeared, Suzanne briefed us in French. “We are now a third of the way down the mountain. The middle third, just below the station, may give you some trouble. There are moguls. You won’t be able to see the torch except occasionally. We will proceed slowly. We will stay close together. Stop whenever you wish. If the person in front of you stops, you must wait also.” She repeated those instructions in German and English.

  “Ready?” she asked. She meant me.

  I said I was ready.

  She skied down to the left of the middle station. I waited a few seconds and went after her with the torch.

  Moguls are mounds of hard-packed snow on a ski slope. They are built slowly, over the length of a skiing season, becoming bigger as the season advances. They are formed because skiers tend to execute their turns in the same places due to the configuration of the slope. Every turn spews snow, building the mounds. By February some are fifteen or twenty feet high.

  The section of moun
tain between the middle station and the top of the T-bar was a steeply tilted incline as covered with moguls as an ocean is with waves. It was all mounds and ridges and deep gullies between. You had to ski it slowly, planning each move, each turn, in advance. A wrong move could send you hurtling down a thirty or forty degree slope with no hope of stopping for hundreds of feet. A wrong move, at night, while contending with the tricky mooncast shadows, and you could get yourself killed.

  I had covered about half the run between the middle station and the top of the T-bar when something seemed to tug at the torch in my hand. I managed to hold on, wondering what the hell had happened. An instant later I heard a flat cracking sound and then an answering echo.

  It took a few seconds to realize what had happened. Someone had taken a shot at me.

  The sound came again.

  I hurled the torch away. It spun end over end and hit the snow thirty yards off the trail and kept burning. Crouching low on my skis in what they call the egg position, I raced downslope to where Suzanne was waiting.

  She was angry. “You fool, why did you do that?”

  “I have a funny thing about being shot at,” I said.

  “Shot at?”

  “Didn’t you hear it?”

  “I heard a noise, two noises, yes. Someone shot at you?”

  “Mistaking me for your ex-husband. He was supposed to be carrying the torch. That was your idea, wasn’t it?”

  “My idea? Yes, of course. The torch. I see. But I took it away from him.”

  In the eerie moonlight I couldn’t see her face, but she sounded genuinely confused.

  Shiraz skied down to us. He side-slipped off the trail, heading for the torch.

  “Leave it alone,” I said sharply. “Come on back here.”

  “What’s going on?”

  A third rifle shot told him what was going on. This time I saw a spurt of orange fire off to the right, where the run was flanked by deep woods.

  I toyed with the idea of going after him, whoever he was. I shook my head. Unarmed, it would be suicide.

  Shiraz laughed nervously. “That kind of looks like number four,” he said. “Doesn’t it?” He was scared, but still managed to strike a pretty good pose. I came as close to admiring him then as I ever did.

  Pretty soon some of the other skiers in Suzanne’s group joined us, and I knew it would be all right. There was no way the assassin could single Shiraz out, erroneously or otherwise.

  At the bottom of the run, while we were removing our skis in the parking lot, I had a moment alone with Suzanne.

  “I want to see you,” I said.

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  She mulled it over. “All right. But Ahmed will be very jealous.”

  “He’s better off jealous and alive than indifferent and dead.”

  Shiraz approached us, skis on his shoulder. “I was wondering—” he began brightly.

  The tone of voice must have told Suzanne what he was wondering about. “I’m busy,” she said.

  He looked at me. “You don’t waste any time.”

  “We can talk about my social life later,” I said. “Get up to the Mexican’s chalet and stay there. Lock the place up and don’t open for anybody but me. Know how to use a revolver?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’ll find one in my B-4 bag.”

  “Aren’t we being just a wee bit melodramatic?”

  “I always get melodramatic when somebody takes a shot at me. Get going while the parking lot’s still crowded, will you?”

  Skiers from the two earlier groups were loading their skis on the tops and backs of cars and pulling out. Shiraz grumbled but did likewise. The Mercedes made a right turn out of the parking lot. I watched its taillights recede.

  “You have a car?” I asked Suzanne.

  “The VW over there.”

  “Okay, finger woman. Let’s go someplace we can talk.”

  18

  SOMEPLACE WE could talk could have been any one of half a dozen night spots in Gstaad. But at Suzanne’s suggestion it turned out to be her own apartment in town. It was a three room flat over a hardware store near the river, nothing sumptuous but cozy in a wood-paneled, beam-ceilinged Alpine way. Even with the windows shut you could hear the rushing stream down below.

  “Give me five minutes,” Suzanne said. “Drinks are over there. I’ll want a whisky and water. No ice, I’m afraid.”

  She shut a door behind her. I lit a cigarette and made two strong Scotch and waters. The lack of ice was no problem. The tap water in the kitchen was numbingly cold.

  I had finished half my drink and removed my rented clod-hoppers when Suzanne emerged. Her long dark hair had been combed straight down. She was barefoot and wearing a muu-muu or whatever the hell they call a muu-muu in Switzerland. It had a high neckline and covered her arms to the wrist and hung almost to the floor and therefore should have been about as sexy as a Mother Hubbard, but the rose-colored woolen fabric clung to the points of her high breasts and again, just the slightest bit as she walked, to the curves of her hips, and wound up being as seductive as a black lace nightgown.

  “Fetching,” I observed dryly.

  She smiled and canted one hip in parody of a come-on. “Don’t get the wrong idea. I’ve been teaching novices how to ski all day and I’m tired. I wanted to get comfortable, that’s all.” She sat down and crossed her legs Buddha-fashion in a chair opposite mine. “Now I would like my drink and a cigarette, please.”

  I brought her both. Her big dark eyes looked up at me gravely as I lit the cigarette. Her hand touched mine to hold the light steady. That may or may not have been another come-on, but no parody this time. You couldn’t tell with Suzanne. Shiraz had been right about her. Every little gesture she made was, inadvertently or otherwise, sexy. I began to wish, with urgency, that this had been just a social call.

  “I wish you’d stop hovering over me like that,” she said.

  I stepped back and sat down.

  “Now then,” she said.

  “Now then,” I repeated. I smiled broadly. She smiled warily.

  “Just who are you?” she asked.

  “Friend of Ahmed Shiraz?”

  “Ahmed has no friends. Just acquaintances, toadies and enemies.”

  “Which category do you fit?”

  “Me? I’m different. I am the ex-wife.”

  “No offence to this snug little nest of yours,” I said, “but I would have figured you to do better in the alimony department.”

  Her big dark eyes narrowed. “I wanted nothing from him when we were divorced and I want nothing from him now.”

  “He may have other ideas.”

  She snorted, managing to make it a very feminine sound. “Of course he has other ideas, all of them mistaken. He is a complete egotist. Once I realized that, we were through.”

  “I got the idea you were still married when the new Mrs. Shiraz came along.”

  “We were. But heading in just one direction—the divorce court. I had some growing up to do. As soon as I did it, our marriage was all finished.” She yawned exaggeratedly, again making it seem feminine. “I find the subject of my marriage to Ahmed Shiraz very boring. Was there something else on your mind?”

  “A torch, a man and a gun,” I said.

  “Oh, that.” A small, uncertain smile.

  “Shiraz looked surprised when you gave him the torch.”

  “He’s a schussboomer from way back. I should have known he’d start showing off.”

  “Then why’d you give him the chance?”

  “Well, of course, had I accepted alimony—”

  “You just lost me, Suzanne.”

  “I get no alimony. I’m a ski instructor. Gstaad in winter and the Jungfrau the rest of the year. It’s a nice, healthy job, but the pay is not exactly—what’s the word?—astronomique. I need the money.”

  “What money?”

  “A man paid me five hundred francs to make Ahmed my torch-bearer.”


  “What man?”

  “I don’t know. I never saw him before. He rode up the mountain in the téléférique with me. He made the offer and I accepted it.”

  “Can you remember what he looked like?”

  She frowned prettily. “Young, American. Definitely American. Tall and dark, and with a very sensitive face, the sort of face that a naïve girl finds irresistible and a—more experienced woman finds slightly effeminate. You know the type? A little gaunt in the cheek, a little long in the hair and eyelashes. Smooth-cheeked with hardly a suggestion of beard. A mouth like bruised cherries?”

  I sat up straight. She could have been describing Jeremy Budd.

  “I didn’t see anybody who fitted that description up at the restaurant,” I said.

  She frowned again, prettily again. “No, that’s odd. Neither did I. I don’t think he was there. Could he have waited at the téléférique station?”

  That was probably a good guess, I thought. Then I began to wonder how he’d traced Shiraz to Gstaad so fast. The actor had driven the Mercedes flat out from Amsterdam to the Bernese Oberland to keep his whereabouts unknown.

  “But why does anyone want to kill him?” Suzanne asked.

  I said that was a long story.

  “And you, why do you wish to prevent it?”

  “It’s what I do, among other things. I’m a detective.”

  “You are? Are you any good at it?”

  I shrugged.

  She looked at me. “I believe you are. You would be competent in anything you undertook. And very difficult to intimidate.”

  “You sound like a fortune teller.”

  “I’m very good at judging men. Once I wasn’t. Ahmed taught me that. He also made a fool of me. It’s the same thing.” She held her empty glass out. “Please?”

  “Two more whisky-sodas, coming up.” I made them and brought them over. She was standing, which put the top of her head at about lip-level. She looked up at me.

  “I was wondering. Does an itinerant detective have anywhere to stay?”

  “I’m at the Mexican’s chalet with Shiraz. Know the place?”

  “Of course, but what a waste.”

  I said, “I guess it is a long way back to the Mexican’s chalet.”