“You’re very kind. But.… She was just nineteen. She was a beautiful girl. She didn’t do drugs. I swear it. She was a good girl. Smart. She was a wonderful skier. I don’t understand how this could happen.…” Arlene was ready to cry again, but she stifled it. “I did her laundry, washed her clothes, folded them, ironed them from when she was …” Then she started to cry again, holding her hands not more than eighteen inches apart, the length of a baby from head to toe. “… and we went shopping together and I taught her to sew. She was a good student. She was going to Amherst, in a year.”
I saw Arlene Tavetian again, the next night, at the Rasthaus Ferwell. She looked terrible. She was with a man who I assumed was her husband. After I had discreetly pointed them out to Marie, I tried my best to ignore them.
It was an evening for kitsch, an Austrian invention. By virtue of its location and lack of pretension, Ferwell is one of the few spots in St. Anton with genuine charm. It’s off in the woods, three kilometers from the road. It can be reached by car or taxi, but it’s better to cross-country ski or hike in, or, as we did, take a horse-drawn sleigh, riding all muffled under blankets. The Rasthaus itself is small. One of the two rooms has two tables, the other has four. The walls are hung with antlers and other rustic artifacts. The menu specializes in game: venison, mountain goat, rabbit. The restaurant is heated by an Austrian stove, another local invention, widely celebrated in the Middle Ages, at which time it was a tremendous breakthrough. The medieval fireplace was a disastrous affair, sending more heat up the chimney than into the room (which fireplaces still do) and more smoke into the room than to the outdoors (less likely with modern flue design). The Austrian stove is a closed ceramic box that sends all the smoke up the chimney, keeps most of the heat in the house, even, like the stones in a sauna, radiating warmth after the fire is out. The stove can be set into the room and is usually covered in cheery, decorative tile that is easy to clean. As far as I know, aside from ski resorts and Mozart, it is Austria’s greatest contribution to civilization.
We unswaddled our baby and adored the miracle of her while Arlene Tavetian stared at us. Such a hardy child. Not even three months old and she didn’t mind the cold ride at all. She had sturdy legs. Slightly bowed and made of roll after roll of baby fat, but she already loved to hold my fingers, stand up and wobble. That was terrifically funny.
“My downhill racer,” I said.
“Jamais,” Marie said. “Never.”
“Why not?”
“Because the women racers, they have legs bigger than their hips. Which is not nice in a girl. Because they ski into trees with their faces and then they are not so pretty. And because they chew tobacco.”
Arlene Tavetian kept staring at us.
It was a good meal, though heavy, as most Austrian meals are. In the middle of it, Anna got hungry—something she did at least every three hours, around the clock—and Marie gracefully opened her blouse and put the baby to her nipple. It left her one handed and I cut her food for her. We decided to skip dessert and even coffee. When I asked for the check, Arlene’s companion got up and came over to our table. He apologized for intruding. He was, as I thought, the husband, Robert Tavetian.
“I want to thank you,” he said, “for being so kind to my wife the other day.”
“It was the least I could do,” I said.
“She’s extremely grateful,” he said.
He looked at Anna, who looked engorged with contentment. To judge by the results, breast milk contains something very like heroin. When Anna was hungry for it her craving was something painful to see. When she was presented with the nipple she jumped on it like a dog on a bone. Once she began to suckle, all pain would leave her. When she was done, her eyelids would fall to half mast, her head would hang heavy and wobble, for all the world like a junkie on the nod.
“That’s your little girl,” Robert said. “They’re so incredible at that age. And yet—yet it gets better. My wife, she’s upset.” So was he. He’d been cored, like an apple, and didn’t know he was wrapped around his own emptiness. “I—I asked the restaurant to let me pay for your dinner.”
“That’s not necessary,” I said.
“That’s very kind,” Marie said. Americans assume that there is a great prairie out there that keeps spewing up food. No matter how many meals you give away, no matter how many cattle you slaughter, there’s still more acomin’. The French assume a finite number of meals in the universe, every one of which can be rated, any one of which you might get overcharged for.
Robert looked over at Arlene. He had been sent on an errand that he knew was more than he should be asking from a stranger. His wife looked back at him. He looked helplessly at her. She rose and came across the room to look at him until he was forced to ask whatever it was she wanted him to ask.
“Maybe you can help us,” Robert said. “It’s so hard here. They really don’t speak a lot of English, not most of them, and I hardly ever know whether they really get it when I talk.”
“Get to the point, Robert,” Arlene said. She was pale beyond the disguise of makeup, and tired, and as full of grief as I’ve ever seen anyone.
“My wife,” he said, “is … sort of obsessed.”
“It’s not an obsession to want to know. I just want to know …”
“There’s nothing to know,” Robert said. “What you want is to—is to have just some more of her. And there is no more to have. She’s dead, Arlene, dead.”
“Please,” Arlene said, “Rick—it is Rick, isn’t it? I just want to know.”
“What is it you want to know?” Marie asked, cradling Anna in her arms, speaking as one mother to another.
“That’s your little girl?” Arlene asked Marie. Marie nodded. Arlene sat down, leaned forward and gazed at our little girl. Arlene was having a breakdown or was very close to it. Anna looked plump, juicy. The kind of baby that makes people want to bite baby’s bottoms. “Ask your husband to help us,” Arlene said.
“I don’t know what you want … but …”
“Look,” Robert said, “my wife wants to know how my daughter spent her last days. That’s all. How she lived. Was she happy? We heard that she had—that she was going with an older man. And that he was … Asian.”
“Tanaka,” I said. An avalanche death is big-time news in a small town. What there was to know, everyone knew, some of it accurate. “Hiroshi Tanaka. The man who was skiing with her when …”
“You see, you do know things,” Robert said. Arlene stared at Anna. “What it is, is you’re an American …”
“I spent time there,” I said. My passport says I’m Irish. And a priest.
“Whatever. You talk like an American and I know I can relate to you. But also you know these people here. You’re part of the community. You can get around. Please, for the sake of my wife’s sanity, could you just—I don’t know—find out how my daughter spent her last little time on earth?”
“I think you should do this,” Marie said to me. “If it was my Anna and it was in a place strange to you, you would want the same thing.”
“Marie,” I said, “between helping you with Anna and the Laundromats and maybe, if I’m lucky, getting in a little skiing someday…”
“Poof. Poof on you and your skiing. And the Laundromat. You are more than that. When I met you, this is not what you were. So there,” she said to me and turned to the pained father. “Monsieur Tavetian, you have come to the right person. He will help you.” She turned back to me. “A mother,” she said, “is entitled to her grief as well as her love.”
I went along with Marie’s request to examine the final days of Wendy Tavetian, daughter of Robert and Arlene, accountant and housewife, because the downside risk was virtually zero. All I had to do was listen to gossip. Easy enough to do in a small town. If it had been a wrongful death involving serious criminal, financial, or political matters, it would have been a serious error for me to get involved. Anything that brought me too much official attention could be a mistake.
DIRTY LAUNDRY
WHEN TOURIST GIRLS WANT to score a ski instructor, Luis is usually their first choice.
The big boom in skiing took place in the sixties. Where once the position of ski instructor was a high-turnover job for kids, like lifeguard or tennis pro, it slowly became a reasonable career even for a mature man with a family. So the instructors began to stay on the job. Once upon a time many of them looked like they had stepped out of a ski poster, blond and firm and tan with a twinkle in the crinkle of their blue-on-blue eyes. But that was twenty or thirty years ago and most of the full-time instructors are now distinctly middle-aged, with middle-aged faces, middle-aged bodies, mortgages, and middle-aged wives.
Luis, who is actually a Spaniard with seven names, is exactly what the girls think they are buying when they book their one or two weeks in the Tyrolian Alps. An actual ex-Olympics alternate, blonder and more Teutonic, in a pleasant beach-boy, circa 1969 surfer way, than any of the Austrians. But that has been Luis’s situation for many, many years and it’s hard to get his motor running. He’d much rather discuss financial plans. He reads the exchange rates every day and loses money trading in Eurocurrency futures. He’s convinced this not-quite-yet-existing version of money will replace the dollar as the leading international denomination of exchange.
I like Luis because he taught me the invisible key to slalom racing. Not that it made me a racer, but it was a true teaching. It is to always look two turns ahead. The feet deal with the gate you are in and where they are is already history. The hands are leading the shoulders into the coming gate. The eyes are up ahead, at the turn after that, commanding the body to prepare. It is easiest to understand this in the gates, although it applies to any skiing and becomes extremely obvious with all difficult skiing, in the bumps, on the steeps, in the woods. The future arrives very rapidly on skis. If where you are is where you’re at, you’re already stuck in the past, facing the wrong way when the moment that has just become the present knocks you on your ass.
“Yes, I think I met her,” he said.
“She’d been here almost two months,” I said. Which is a long time by ski area standards. Certainly long enough to have stumbled on Luis.
“Do they ever have bad years in the Rocky Mountains?” he asked me. Again. Luis has decided that being beautiful and a great skier is not enough. He should be in business. He says he wants to package tours from Los Angeles. “That would be a good time for me to start.”
“It always snows in the Rockies,” I said. “Plus the dollar’s down because General Motors fell asleep for twenty years and let the Germans skim their cream while the Japs gutted them from underneath. That’s not to say there’s not a ton of money still in the States. But they won’t come for the snow. What about the ski guide, Hans Lantz? Did he make a mistake taking them the other side of the Valuga?”
“I don’t know, Rick. It’s always possible to make a mistake about the conditions. Would I have skied there? With clients? I don’t know.”
“So what do you remember about this girl? This Wendy?”
“She was American,” he said positively.
“I want to know who she hung out with. What was she like? All that stuff. For the parents.”
“Tell them nice things, Rick. Oh, she was a very good skier. Attentive in ski school. Quick to learn. Dressed nicely. Did not fuck around too much. Yes?”
“Do you remember her?” I asked him. “Did you pass her on?”
“Oh, really, Rick,” Luis said. But that is exactly what he does. At the start of each week he has three or four girls hanging on to him from ski school. That’s the day group. Then there is a second group that seems to appear in the evenings from the disco crowd. Luis, who is very polite and keeps tabs on who is the loneliest and the horniest of the other instructors, manages to introduce each of the girls to someone else. “You know about her and Tanaka? Tell me, Rick, what do you think of package tours for the Japanese? Is that a permanent trend?”
“Was she going out with anyone else? Who’d she hang out with?”
“I am remembering that I think she went out—maybe once, I think—with Kurt.”
“Which Kurt?” I asked him. There were at least three in the ski school. “Tall blond? Short blond? Or short and losing his hair?”
“Tall Kurt,” Luis said.
“Ah, married Kurt,” I said.
“Well, yes,” Luis said. “But he was having a terrible time with his wife. He was very unhappy.”
“Did she stay with him? Or recirculate?”
“You know, I have been thinking about the avalanche. It is sad, of course, that this girl is dead and this Japanese and I am sorry for them. But I think it is good that we have the avalanche. It is important to remember that what we do on the mountain—it has risk, it has death. It is good to be reminded that the mountain can strike. Otherwise we might as well all go to Disneyland.”
“She was a little too American,” tall, blond, married Kurt said. “This is for you and me only, Rick. I am with my wife again. She is very stormy.”
“What do you mean a little too American?”
“We would never leave each other,” Kurt said, in reference to his wife. They were both locals and therefore very Catholic. “But she went to visit her mother, in Pettneu.” He made it sound very distant. It is the next town down the valley, about three kilometers away. “So, you understand. Anyway, she is back but it is still a little stormy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I won’t tell anyone about Wendy.”
“Well, I took her out. Over to Kris’s apartment. We drank some wine. Then she jump into bed. Nice body. Not too big”—Kurt cupped his hands in front of his chest—“but pretty good. An athlete, I think. But she did it like an athlete. I think that she is keeping score in her mind. Like she is rating me on form and distance like a ski jumper,” he laughed, but it was not a happy sound. Jumping is for Norwegians and Finns.
“You went out again?”
“No,” Kurt said. “She left right after. But I saw her with the Japanese. He had a lot of money. I think he was buying her things.” He said this to let me know that women didn’t leave him over any lack of size or competence, but only for money.
“Did she have any special friends?”
“I didn’t know her, Rick. Just that once. We did it, like she was taking a sample, then she was done.”
A ski bum is not a bum in the sense of being unemployed. He or she is underemployed, forsaking career and taking less than minimum wage to clean, to serve, to labor, so long as the job allows ski time and includes a discount season ticket. The going rate is about ÖS1,000—$90—a week, plus room and board, which is not as bad as it sounds since rooms are more precious than gold and food rather uniformly overpriced.
Wendy, Bob Tavetian told me, had come to Europe prepared to work. That was unusual. I could count the number of American ski bums in St. Anton on my fingers. It is not that foreigners are barred from doing dirty work for even less than Turks will work for—Australians and Kiwis are ubiquitous. A bewildered English-only speaker can hardly say, “Sprechen ze English?” without a ski shop technician, chambermaid, waiter, or bartender offering a cheery “Goo’ day, mate,” like Crocodile Dundee peddling Australian holidays in a television commercial. My ski bum at the Laundromat, Anita, is a strapping young lady from Melbourne, solid as a brick and sweet as the day is long. It may be that Americans simply don’t have a global vision—they think that it’s all in the U.S.A. and they stay there. It may be that skiing in the States is an upper-middle-class sport and in America upper-middle-class kids just don’t do jobs that involve labor and dirt. The closest thing to a requirement for a job is bilingualism, and that too is rare in America.
Wendy had not prearranged employment from home and she had not arrived with a working visa. It’s not unusual, but, as Anita discovered, it is difficult. Anita arrived at about the same time as Wendy. It took Anita three weeks to find a job cleaning a pension in St. Jakob, sort of a subur
b of St. Anton, if a town averaging two blocks wide and half a mile long can be thought to have a suburb. She called and the Frau said she could start right away. The job included a room, so she jumped at it without discussing wages. After a day of scrubbing toilets and changing sheets, Anita asked the Frau how much she was getting paid.
“We must see first,” said the Frau, “how good you can clean.”
“Never,” I told Anita when she told me her story, “deal with an Austrian unless you settle the price up front and what’s included.”
“Easy for you to say,” Anita said. “I was desperate. Am desperate.”
“I will not tell you the full extent of my humiliation,” I said, “but I will tell you how I learned this. When I first came to St. Anton I went to a pension. It included ‘English breakfast.’ I’ve been in England. A real English breakfast is a weighty affair. Even in France an English breakfast is a serious meal.”
“Oh, God, yes,” Anita said. “Bangers and grilled tomatoes and eggs.”
“Right, and toast, and cereal, and tea.”
“And jam, and butter, and cream.”
“So, this was Haus Kurt Ebner,” I said. “And each morning Frau Ebner very kindly said, ‘Would you like an egg, Mr. Cochrane?’ ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, ‘I would like an egg.’ And Frau Ebner would serve me an egg. A good Austrian egg, soft boiled to perfection. She had a special machine for it that just boils eggs, with that sleek, form-follows-function, we-also-build-Porsches, Germanic design. I stayed there for three weeks. When I got my bill at the end, there was an extra ten schillings a day for each and every egg.”
Anita laughed. I said she could have the job.
“How much does it pay?”
“Fifteen hundred and a room.”
“Great,” Anita said. “I’ll take it.”
“You didn’t get the point.”
“What?”
“The egg is not included.”
“Oh,” she said, and thought about it. “Oh, bloody hell. I’ll bloody well starve. A pizza and a beer is a hundred and fifty.”
Foreign Exchange (The Tony Cassella Mysteries) Page 4