A Castle in the Clouds

by Kerstin Gier

  From the door to the suite, I heard the scrape of metal on metal. Someone was fumbling around with the lock. It was only now that I heard the music again from downstairs, though it must have been playing the whole time. My brain had tuned it out. The waltz was reaching its crescendo, and I realized that if we shouted for help—from the roof terrace, for example—nobody would hear us. Everyone was downstairs in the ballroom. I could rely on Monsieur Rocher, though. He was bound to be sitting in his room, solid and steadfast as a rock.

  My fingers trembled as I dialed the extension for the concierge’s lodge, and I wasted precious seconds before I figured out that the phone wasn’t working. I whispered “Hello?” into the receiver several times before I thought to check the cable—and found a loose end in my hand.

  Somebody had cut the wire.

  “Mrs. Ludwig!” So she’d taken care of that, too—she must have done it when I’d let her into the room earlier. I’d probably have collapsed on the floor there and then if Tristan hadn’t dragged me through into the next room and locked the door behind us. He lifted Dasha from the bed and draped her over his shoulder. “Come on, Sophie.” He clicked his fingers in front of my face. “Don’t give up! You can do this.”

  I wasn’t so sure. My fingers were trembling so badly it was all I could do to grab Dasha’s sable coat from the coat stand at the end of the bed and dress her in it. Meanwhile, Tristan was pushing a chest of drawers in front of the door. “This whole thing is completely absurd,” I murmured as I pulled Dasha’s sable hat over her head—the same sable hat I’d once come to fetch from this suite, what felt like forever ago. It was like something from another life.

  “We’re on the first floor.” Tristan tried to reassure me. “It’s only sixteen feet to the ground from this window, and the snow’s so deep and soft it’s better than any mattress. We’ll just jump down. You go first, then I’ll drop Dasha down to you and I’ll follow. And then we’ll find somewhere safe to hide.”

  While he was speaking, he’d already started encouraging me onto the windowsill. The window was open—presumably from when Tristan had climbed into the suite just now. I clung to the window frame, practically hyperventilating.

  “This is crazy! We can’t just throw a drugged four-year-old out the window.” I listened anxiously for noises from the next room.

  “Yes, we can. We have to! Just step off the sill—the snow hasn’t been cleared down there yet. You’ll have a soft landing, I promise you.”

  And with that, Tristan gave me an almighty shove.

  24

  Tristan had been right: The snow really was softer than a mattress. But unlike a mattress, it was deep and wet—as I wriggled out of the hole I’d made as I landed, I could feel the melting snow soaking into my tights and trickling into my shoes. But I was more worried about Dasha. I knew I’d never forget the sight of her limp body falling through the air. I’d managed to catch her gently enough that (I hoped) she hadn’t hurt herself. But it was six degrees below zero out here, and she didn’t have any shoes or tights on. We had to get her somewhere warm. And safe.

  I’d thought, naively, that if we made it to the ground alive this nightmare would all be over. But in reality, the danger was far from past. Perhaps the Ludwigs weren’t about to launch themselves out of the window after us, but there was no way they were going to just give up and accept that their victim had slipped through their fingers.

  No sooner had Tristan landed beside me in the snow, falling softly on his feet like a cat, when he pulled me toward the shelter of the wall and pointed upward in warning. I tried not to breathe. Had the Ludwigs already discovered the open window? Were they standing directly above us right now, looking down? Would they shoot at us if we moved? Or were they on the phone to one of their accomplices, who was setting out in search of us right now and might appear around the corner at any moment? In my mind, I saw the devious kidnapper couple scurrying down the stairs, hand in hand, to intercept us before we could get inside the hotel and raise the alarm.

  And getting inside the hotel wasn’t going to be as easy as you might think. We’d landed behind the ballroom and we were now standing in the deep snow beneath the arched windows where nobody could see or hear us. The light from the chandeliers streamed out into the night. I felt like someone who’d fallen overboard, floundering helplessly in the dark ocean beside a brightly lit cruise ship. The nearest entrance (the door by the little smoking area outside the spa, where I’d spotted Tristan climbing up the wall last week) was all the way around the other side of the south wing. Or we could go around the east side of the main building to the main door at the front, which I instinctively preferred because it was so busy there—hopefully too busy for the Ludwigs to mount an ambush.

  But neither route would be a walk in the park in this deep snow and carrying an unconscious Dasha—especially as we could hardly see a thing. The moon hadn’t risen yet and the light from the windows didn’t pierce far into the deep darkness surrounding the hotel.

  At that moment, however, I had my bright idea about the coal chute. It wasn’t exactly an official entrance, but the hatch through which coal had once been emptied into the cellar was easily big enough for a person to fit through, and it was much closer—on the east side of the hotel, where the south wing joined the main building. We only had to battle our way through about a hundred feet of snow to get there. So we set off, sticking close to the wall, and reached the hatch a few minutes later. Although it hadn’t been used for a long time, it opened quite easily. I’d been afraid it might have rusted or frozen shut, but it seemed we were in luck.

  My knowledge of all the little nooks and crannies of the hotel was now worth its weight in gold. Pavel still hadn’t shown me all the secrets of the basement, but I did know that the old coal cellar opened straight into the laundry room. Nobody would think to look for us in there.

  Tristan looked around once more, then climbed through the hatch, slid down the chute, and crouched ready to catch Dasha at the bottom. I followed, and as my feet touched the ground and I smelled the musty basement air I let out a sigh of relief.

  We’d done it. We were safe!

  I felt really bad about Dasha—drugged, thrown out of a window, and now rolled down a coal chute. She’d probably be covered in bruises by tomorrow morning. But at least that was better than being kidnapped.

  “Not a bad shortcut,” said Tristan approvingly as I flicked the light switch and opened the door to the laundry room. It was a heavy fire door and you could lock it from the other side with a massive bolt. Which, luckily for us, nobody had done.

  Unfortunately, though, the laundry room was unusually quiet, dark, and deserted. And now I remembered that Pavel had gone to his New Year’s Eve concert in Sion. Tonight of all nights. But after all the panic, it still felt like coming home.

  I switched on all the lights in here, too, and I was tempted to turn on some of the washing machines and tumble dryers just to hear the familiar noises of the laundry room. I took Dasha from Tristan and tried to warm up her little feet in my hands. But it was a futile endeavor, because my hands were icy cold, too.

  “Do you think the drugs will do her any harm?” I asked anxiously. At least her skin was still a normal color, and her breathing was regular.

  The same thing seemed to have occurred to Tristan. He shook his head. “I don’t think she’d look like that if the drugs were affecting her,” he said, casting a glance around the room.

  “So what now?” I asked, imagining us bursting into the ballroom upstairs yelling “Help! Kidnappers!”

  Tristan didn’t appear to have a plan, either. “Who knows how many accomplices they have? At least down here we’re safe,” he muttered.

  “Perhaps we should all go for a spin in the dryer,” I said cheerfully. I was overwhelmed with relief at having survived. It wasn’t every day you jumped out of a window, after all. But now, the thousand questions I’d been suppressing during our adrenaline-fueled escape came crowding into my mind.


  As I laid Dasha down on a pile of sheets and started rubbing her little feet with a towel, Tristan opened the door to the corridor a crack and peered out. “Is there a phone around here?”

  I shook my head. “The closest one is in the kitchen. And there’s one in the spa, but that’s just as far away. How did you figure out the Ludwigs were the kidnappers, anyway? And how did you time it so well, coming to rescue us? A second later and I’d have let them in.” In hindsight, the idea sent a shiver down my spine.

  “Yes, it was a close shave.” Tristan closed the door again. “I realized too late who the Ludwigs really were. By then they were already on their way to you, so I had no choice but to sneak in through the window. I knew it would be hard to explain the situation to you, which is why I put my hand over your mouth—sorry about that…” He grinned wryly. “But I have to say you got your head around it all pretty quickly.”

  That was definitely not true.

  It all seemed so absurd. Ben had spent days trying to convince me there was no grand hotel kidnapper, and eventually I’d come to agree with him. And now it turned out the kidnapper did exist after all. Or rather kidnappers, plural. And they were the Ludwigs, of all people—my favorite guests. No, I still hadn’t got my head around that.

  “How did you figure it out?” I asked.

  “The ring,” said Tristan. “I thought it was weird that someone could wear a ring like that for thirty-five years without realizing, or at least without someone telling them, that it was platinum and not silver. And the stone! It doesn’t look anything like a beryl. You don’t find pink diamonds of that size and quality at your local jewelry store. Stones like that are incredibly rare. The flea-market story sounded very implausible to me, and my grandpa thought the same. So I took some photos of the ring and Grandpa sent them to … well, to a friend. We thought we might have stumbled across a cunning pair of small-time crooks. We never dreamed they could be dangerous kidnappers. But when you asked me about the grand hotel kidnapper the other day, alarm bells started to ring.”

  “I don’t understand.” Dasha’s feet were nice and warm again now, so I moved onto her hands.

  Tristan leaned back against the door. “My grandpa remembered the kidnapping cases immediately because the kidnappers had such an unusual modus operandi—they always asked for valuables as well as cash, and they showed astonishingly good taste. They knew exactly what their victims’ parents owned—from jewelry to paintings to a Stradivarius worth millions of euros. It took a while, but eventually we got a message from a friend who’d cross-referenced our photo of the pink diamond with all the information he had on the kidnapping cases. It left us in no doubt: The stone in Mrs. Ludwig’s engagement ring was originally part of a brooch belonging to a publisher whose young daughter was abducted from a luxury hotel on Lake Maggiore in 1997.”

  It took me a few seconds to process this information. “So the ring could be used as evidence against the Ludwigs? What an amazing coincidence that your grandpa is a gemologist and just happens to be staying in the same hotel at the same time as…,” I trailed off.

  Tristan smiled. “Do you know what’s really an amazing coincidence? The fact that Stella Yegorov stole the ring in the first place. If she hadn’t done that, Mrs. Ludwig wouldn’t have had to come up with that story about the flea market, and I’d never have suspected there was something fishy about the pair of them.”

  “That’s a lot of coincidences…,” I murmured, cradling Dasha’s hand in mine. Tristan had just so happened to know that Stella Yegorov was a kleptomaniac and that was why he’d suspected her of stealing the ring. He just so happened to be able to climb up walls, so it had been easy for him to break into the suite, where not only had there happened to be a window open but also Stella Yegorov happened to have left the ring in the drawer of her nightstand instead of in the safe. And Tristan’s grandpa just so happened to have a friend who could access the police database.

  No, I wasn’t falling for that.

  “Grandpa says that coincidences are God’s logic.” Tristan sighed as if he knew exactly what I was thinking.

  “Who are you really, Tristan?” I burst out.

  He sighed again. “Have I ever lied to you, Agent Sophie?”

  How should I know? There were plenty of times I’d asked him a question and he’d replied with another question—like he’d done just now, for example. Instinctively, I stepped in between him and Dasha on her pile of sheets.

  “No, I haven’t.” Tristan slipped off his tuxedo jacket. “From the moment I met you, I found you charmingly disarming. Or disarmingly charming, if you prefer.”

  “What are you doing?” I asked, puzzled.

  “I’m showing you the truth. Otherwise you’ll never believe me.” Tristan loosened his elegant black bow tie and started unbuttoning his shirt.

  I stared at him, baffled.

  “It’s no coincidence that Grandpa and I are staying here,” he said. “We’re here for the Nadezhda Diamond, and when we realized who the Ludwigs were, we thought they might interfere with our plan to steal it.”

  This had to be some kind of sick joke, surely?

  “So you—you really are a hotel thief? And your grandpa, too? You’re here to … you’re actually planning to steal the necklace?” I could hardly get the words out.

  “Oh, I’ve already taken care of the necklace.” Tristan ripped open his shirt with a dramatic gesture to reveal his perfectly toned chest. Around his neck was a two-string diamond necklace with a large blue stone in the center, surrounded by smaller jewels.

  I had to hold onto Pavel’s sewing table to stop myself from falling over.

  “Magnificent, isn’t it?” Tristan took off the necklace with a practiced movement and held it out to me. “Kali’s third eye. See how it glows? As if there was a divine fire at the heart of it. Do you want to put it on?”

  I took a step backward. “No, I don’t. I want…” What did I want, actually? To run away? To call the police? “I want you to tell me none of this is true,” I finished, in a whisper.

  “Don’t worry, Sophie!” Tristan’s eyes met mine. “We don’t steal things. We just restore them to their rightful owners. This diamond belongs in a secret temple in Madurai, India. That’s where it was first used and that’s where we’re going to take it—back to the goddess Kali. It’s not meant for ordinary mortals.”

  “Are you one of those freaks from one of those wacky cults?” I asked, taking another step backward.

  Tristan laughed out loud, and suddenly he looked more like the Tristan I knew: arrogant and amused. He turned the necklace over in his hand and the blue stone sparkled in the light. “Good Lord, no! But I do work for a secret society that … well, let’s just say it has an interest in righting wrongs. In maintaining balance in the world.”

  “The Illuminati?” I stammered.

  “No. Although … some of us might well be Illuminati, too. Listen: nobody’s going to miss the diamond. Up there in the ballroom right now, unbeknownst to her, Stella Yegorov is wearing a remarkably realistic replica necklace, and my grandpa is confirming her belief that she’s got the most beautiful and expensive diamond in the world hanging around her neck. The man from the insurance company thinks everything is perfectly legit. They’ll have no idea it’s not genuine until they try and sell it, which hopefully they’ll never do. And the smaller diamonds in the forged necklace are equal in quality to these ones. Only the replica blue diamond is made of zirconia, because there’s no other diamond like it in the world.”

  Somewhere in the basement a door slammed, and we both jumped.

  “We should probably think about trying to get back to civilization,” said Tristan, as if the previous conversation had never happened. “What time is it, do you reckon?”

  I had no idea how much time had passed since the moment Tristan had pressed his hand to my mouth in the suite upstairs—given how rapidly events had unfolded, probably not very much.

  “Do you think the Ludwigs might
have just given up by now?” I asked hopefully. Tristan might be in a secret society, and he might have stolen the necklace, but he’d still saved me and Dasha from the kidnappers.

  “I doubt it,” he said. “They don’t know their cover’s blown. They think you’ve run off with Dasha and are hiding in a corner somewhere, quaking with fear. They’re probably dancing a couple of waltzes at the ball while their people come looking for you.”

  “People? You think they have more than one accomplice?” I said. “You think they have several?” And they probably all had pistols with silencers.

  Tristan shrugged. “Or they could be working alone. I wouldn’t put it past them.”

  “But they have no idea you’re with us, do they?”

  “No.” Tristan’s face brightened. “How could they? They have no idea that Grandpa and I are onto them or that we know about the engagement ring. They’ll assume you and Dasha are alone.” He glanced at the little oligarch’s daughter, lying on her pile of laundry like in “The Princess and the Pea.” “Which means I can just walk straight out of here—they’re not going to do anything to me.” He smiled at me. “Sorry, I should have thought of that before. It’s just that it’s the first time I’ve had to deal with dangerous criminals.”

  “Oh, you get used to it,” I said.

  Tristan was already at the door. “I’ll go upstairs and tell people about the Ludwigs. Then I’ll come back and get you. You’d better stay put.”

  “And perhaps you could call the police, too, before you come back,” I said. “Or is that too big a risk for a hotel thief?”

  Tristan held up the necklace. “As I said, we don’t call it theft. We call it restoring ill-gotten gains—priceless treasures—to their rightful owners. But if you don’t trust me…” He came back to stand beside me and before I knew what was happening he’d pressed the necklace into my hand. “Then I’ll leave this with you as a security deposit till I get back. Just don’t let anyone see it.” He looked deep into my eyes and added solemnly: “You and I have a secret now, Agent Sophie. I trust you and you trust me.”