“Wow! Six hundred wash cycles. I don’t know what I’d do with six hundred cycles. Anyway, I’m sitting in a restaurant with my new baby and my wife and there’s Wendy’s mother again. Hysterical. My wife is now part of the International Sisterhood of Mothers, so here I am, trying to find out if Wendy’s last days were happy or miserable and pick up any clothing or whatever she might’ve left behind.”
“How old?” he asked.
“A couple of months, almost three months.”
“Congratulations,” he said. “It’s a very special time.”
“You have kids?” I asked.
“Yes, yes.” He nodded eagerly. “I have a boy three years old and a girl one and a half years. Would you like to see pictures?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. I was learning that there is a big club in the world and the birth of my daughter had entered me in it. The Parents, like the Mafia or Freemasons or Moonies, has recognition signs, a secret language, and obsessive concerns with certain special subjects. The boy in the Fuji film photo already looked like his father—big nearsighted eyes and a slightly domed forehead. The little girl was all plump babyhood, twinkly and round and solemn all at once, formally dressed in some sort of Japanese baby robe and tiny obi.
“I miss them. Very much,” their father said.
“Cute kids,” I said, as I now understood that I had to do even if one had looked like a dwarf Godzilla and the other like a Ninja Turtle.
“You have picture of yours?”
“Not yet,” I said, feeling vaguely guilty. “Where are yours? Back in Japan?”
“You should,” he said. “Very good to have. Do you have a camera? I have a Minolta. I think Minolta is the best and Minolta Corporation is very closely related to my company, Musashi Trading Company. Yes, they are home with their mother.” He took the photos back. “You must know many people. Perhaps you could do me a favor while you are going about your own business. I too am interested in the final days of my friend, Hiroshi Tanaka. Anything you might find out about him and you could tell me, it would be very good.”
“Obviously you have something in mind. I mean you think something is wrong.”
“I tell you, Mr. Cochrane …”
“Call me Rick—everybody calls me Rick.”
“Okay, Rick. Call me Mike. Reminds me of America. All first names. Very good. I don’t know if anything is wrong. A man dies in an avalanche. Surely that is an accident. I spoke to the police and they said that it was an accident. And who would have any reason to kill Tanaka? No one. He was a good man. But then I see that this apartment was searched and I do not know why. Perhaps the police might talk to you more than to me. Frankly, many Europeans are prejudiced against Japanese. Either because they think they are better than us or because they think we are better than them. I would appreciate any help.”
Franz, the gendarme, lives four houses away from me. Nobody in St. Anton lives very far from anyone else. Nobody lives in a home that is just a home. Land and housing are too valuable for that. All homes are also hotels or pensions. Sometimes it seems we are all the staff of one big but decentralized cruise ship. Just as no real cruise ship is the The Love Boat, we, the inhabitants, are not quite as bright and cheery and neatly packaged as we would be if we were acted. Only our cops live up to their clichés. I don’t know if it’s true of all Austria, but in St. Anton our gendarmes, who direct traffic and silence drunken Swedes, look like—dare I say it?—the spitting image of cinema Nazis.
Franz, for example, looks ready for a remake of 1939. He’s six, one and 215 pounds, he has hands like hams and thin mean lips, his pallid eyes are a merciless Teutonic gray, and even when he strolls his stride holds a hint of a goosestep. Yet he’s generally easy and pleasant to deal with. I deliberately ran into him the next day. All I needed was a time-to-kill expression on my face and a let’s-chat attitude to be invited into his kitchen. His Frau, who runs their pension, brought out homemade schnapps, sausage, cheese, and bread. Franz asked me about the baby. His Frau sat a yard away from us, poised tentatively on the edge of her chair, prepared to stay only so long as it appeared that we were speaking of women’s subjects.
“She’s great,” I said.
“My grandson is just three months older than your little girl. We must have them meet soon, eh?” Franz has three children. He is so proud that the first grandchild is male, you would think he had personally reached in and matched up the XY chromosomes.
“Yeah, Franz, they’re ready to start dating. By the way, is there anything odd about this thing—this avalanche and the Japanese guy and the American girl?”
“There is nothing incorrect,” Franz said as his Frau disappeared. It was not a woman’s subject and there was work to be done. “They were not in an area that was officially closed, their guide was a Skiführer, fully qualified.”
“I’ve never skied with him,” I said, “but I’m sure he knows his stuff.”
“Of course he knows. He is qualified. He is a Skiführer.”
“Yeah, I understand. But everyone makes mistakes. I mean when an airline crashes the verdict always seems to be ‘pilot error.’ I’m not questioning Austrian standards of ski guide qualifications. But anyone can make a mistake.”
“This is possible. Also it is possible that no one could know that this avalanche would happen in this place at this time. All the time when we ski we make this judgment. Usually we are right.”
“Do you know anything about Hiroshi Tanaka? I’m not doubting the guide.”
“About Tanaka,” Franz said, “he had money. What tourist doesn’t? He liked young girls. He could afford them.”
“There’s another Japanese, down at his apartment, claims the place was broken into and something stolen.”
“What was stolen?”
“He wouldn’t tell me.”
“There is no report of theft. All is correct.”
“Well, he thinks something is missing. He thinks it might be in the stuff you gave the girl’s family. You gave her family her clothes and things.”
“It was Martin gave the mother the things of the girl. But I saw those things and they were all girl things. Clothing, makeup, cosmetics. It was correct to give them to the mother. A mother’s love for a child is a powerful thing and must be respected. If this Japanese thinks something is missing, he must report it to the police.”
“That’s what I told him,” I said. “I told him I only do laundry. This is the guy.” I gave Franz the card that Mikio Hayakawa had given me. “He’s sitting there, looking for something and waiting for someone.”
“For what?”
“That’s all I know. Find any drugs in the apartment? Anything like that?”
“No drugs,” he said.
“Well, at least that’s something I can tell her mother.”
“Tell them this snow, five days of snow in February on top of nothing, there will be avalanches. Tell them if you ski off piste there is some risk, even for the Prince of Wales.”
That’s what I told Marie.
That’s what I told the Tavetians.
Nobody was satisfied. The Tavetians because they were full of grief and in the grip of the most powerful of all human hungers, the hunger for meaning. Their child had been taken from them at random. Act of nature, Act of God, cosmic accident, chance. That doesn’t cut it. That does not suffice. I once heard a twenty-six-year-old woman dying of cancer claim that her disease had come because she failed to express her anger at her husband. Death demands a reason and all of reason’s comforts—guilt, blame, and some parameters to put a limit on grief.
“Tell us about how she lived,” Arlene Tavetian said.
“Let it go,” Bob said.
“Please tell me,” she said to me.
“She was a happy and healthy young woman,” I said. “A good skier. Pretty. Desirable. Likable.”
“Rick, please,” Arlene said. “When my father died, the priest who did the funeral didn’t really know him. So he said all those nice th
ings you’re supposed to say. I sat there and I got so angry. Who the hell was he talking about! My mother kept shushing me. That was nobody he was talking about. A generic dead man, like generic detergent. Why didn’t he say that my father drank too much, which he did—at least it would have been about him. At least we all would have known who the hell it was we were burying. Why didn’t he say he sometimes hit my mother. He could say he was a good man overall, but not every moment of every damn day of his life he wasn’t. Please, I want to know who I’m burying. Some truth, please, even if it’s ugly, even if it’s painful—at least it would be real. Please tell me.”
“I don’t know what to say, Mrs. Tavetian,” I said.
“I would rather you tell me she fucked her way across Europe …”
“Arlene, please,” Bob said.
“… than tell me,” Arlene went on, “she was a … a … a pretty nonentity. A nothing. Who did she love? Anyone? Who did she like? Who did she hate? What did she care about? Did she care about anything?”
“She cared about being alive,” I said. “She had something. I don’t know what exactly. Maybe just femaleness. More than cuteness. More than prettiness. But everyone remembers her presence. Paul, at Down Under, he wanted her, but she said no. He hired her best friend—that’s Carol—figuring it would bring Wendy around. Wendy was collecting experiences. Which for my money is right on, and exactly what she should be doing. She made it with a ski instructor …”
“Which one?”
“They’re interchangeable,” I said.
“Which one?”
“His name is Kurt. He’s going bald, has a wife with a tough mouth and a mean streak. He wasn’t good enough for her, so she moved on. I don’t know too much about how she felt about the Japanese guy, but at least he was an interesting guy. She had to be learning something about the world from him.”
“Thank you,” she said. “That was certainly a lot more informative.”
“You’re welcome,” I said.
“Now find out,” she commanded, “who killed her.”
Bob Tavetian looked at me, pleading.
“Mrs. Tavetian,” I said, “the mountain killed her.”
Marie wasn’t satisfied either. But she hadn’t had more than four hours’ uninterrupted sleep in three months and wasn’t satisfied with anything. More precisely, she wasn’t satisfied with anything I did. She was deeply satisfied with her daughter. Watching the baby grow was her primary satisfaction and sole joy. When Anna first arrived her existence seemed ephemeral. When she slept, she slept so still that each of us, in turn, without saying anything, so as not to alarm the other, would creep close and fearfully touch her to be certain that she was breathing. Now she almost snored, snoring adorably of course, as only an infant can. She’d even gone briefly yellow before her liver had fully kicked in and there had been two days of anxiety. But she turned pink again and began putting on weight from her cheeks to her toes.
I went skiing.
The Greens had enough political clout to eliminate helicopters from St. Anton last year, much to the regret of the serious skiers and the ski guides. Helicopters were still available on the other side of the pass, in Lech. But due to ski school politics, far too Austrian and arcane for me to understand, Skiführers from the Arlberg Ski School in St. Anton acted as if the Lech copters didn’t even exist. So we drove all the way down to Galtur, near Piz Buin, the peak for which the sun block is named, where profit is also still running a hair ahead of the environment and they continue to offer heliskiing. We flew up to the glacier in the wide Silvretta range on the southern border with Switzerland. Where we could make fresh tracks. Where it was quiet. Far from a woman who was irritable with lack of sleep. Far from a hysterical mother wanting answers about a dead daughter.
As soon as we were in the air I experienced a sudden panic. That was new to me. I’d been in choppers before and I’ve always known about how dangerous they are. But it used to be just brain knowledge. Now it was gut fear. Who had built the thing? Were the workers drunk or on drugs? Who supplied the rivets, the steel, the plastic? Who did the maintenance? Was our pilot quietly crazed or prone to strokes? I didn’t like being in the air. If something happened on the ground at least I had a chance. Even against an avalanche. Hadn’t my guide, Hans Christian Lantz, outrun one? I concentrated on my breathing and set my face in the hope that my fear didn’t show. A new fragility had come upon me with fatherhood and mortality stood beside me.
As soon as we touched down it was all right again. I was safe, on solid ground.
“How come, after all this time,” Hans asked while we were putting on our skis, “you hired me?”
“Oh, I heard in town that you were good,” I said. We spoke in German. Like most of the officially multilingual ski instructors, Hans’s English was limited to about fifteen phrases—five for skiing, four for drinking, three for eating, two for intercourse, and one for oral sex. “That you really knew the mountains.”
“That is true,” he said. “But that is not why you hired me.”
“No?”
“No. I have a certain charisma now,” he said. “I am the man who outskied the avalanche. Ja. I am right?”
“Actually,” I said, switching to English, “if you think about it, that’s not exactly a recommendation. It’s great for you, of course, but who would want to be one of your clients when you want to try it again?”
“You are making fun,” Hans said, but since I’d spoken in English he wasn’t nearly sure enough of what I’d said to know if he should be offended.
“Fun? No,” I said, switching back to German. “Like with Toni Sailer—I want to ski with him, but I wouldn’t want to do a downhill with him.”
“Ja, I understand,” Hans said. He liked the comparison. Two people in history have won all three alpine Olympic events. Toni Sailer was the Austrian who had done it. “Austria has the best skiers in the world. We invented modern skiing. There”—he pointed off in the distance—“in St. Anton, by Hannes Schneider. We are related.” Let the Austrians claim skiing. If the French did not have Jean Claude Killy they would still have Paris, Italians without an Alp would still have style, Germans have deutsch marks, and the Swiss have banks. Take skiing away from Austria and what’s left? An old waltz and the shabby birthplace of Adolf Hitler.
The first thing he tried to do was blow me off.
It’s what they all do, in varying degrees, particularly to another male who shows testosterone signs. They call it evaluating your abilities. In spite of my age, and my station in life as a Laundromat mogul, I am just as juvenile about it as they are. While I generally won’t die to prove my abilities, I have to be pushed awfully hard. Fortunately for my machismo most glacier skiing is relatively gentle. If there were groomed pistes they would be graded blue and red, intermediate skiing.
Hans took off. The snow was deep, which is what we were there for. It was also a little heavy, but he still laid down some perfect rhythmic turns. The kind they photograph for postcards. I matched the track, although I had to give it all my concentration and Hans was just fucking with me. So he tried some straight running. Which was fine. Except that if he really wanted to dump me he would lead me into something hellacious and completely unexpected.
Just as I was thinking that, he pulled up.
“Ja, you pretty good skier,” he said when I caught up to him. “We can have some fun.”
“Great.”
He skied. I followed. I had to admit he knew his stuff. He found great snow and I felt perfectly safe. Twice he stopped and had us skirt a slope because he thought the snow was avalanche-prone. The third time we stopped he took a pair of binoculars out of his pack. He looked out across the mountains, searched, focused, found something, and then handed them to me.
“You see, up there,” he pointed toward St. Anton and I thought I recognized the Valuga way in the distance. “From there, that is where the avalanche came. You see, almost the whole mountainside, it came down for us.”
&nb
sp; What looked like a shadow might have been the area he meant. I certainly couldn’t tell and I don’t think he really could either. But it was clear that he liked talking about his avalanche run and he assumed that I wanted to hear about it and that I was after a vivid vicarious thrill from seeing the site of sudden death, even at this distance.
“See the point there? That’s where we were. There is a ridge you can’t see from here, behind the mountain. That was safety. Anyone who could ski to that ridge before the avalanche, they could live.”
He was proud. Like a matador. Why not? If Hemingway was right and courage is grace under pressure, then surely retaining your skill while a mountainside that wants to be a runaway freight train is rushing downhill at you certainly qualifies. If Hemingway was right, we also must assume that fishing and suicide are the zenith of human existence.
Hans turned and headed down a new slope. It was both south facing and open to the wind. The result was a crust on top of soft snow. Crust is the trickiest of all snow conditions. If it’s thick enough to support your weight then you ski it very gently, weighting your skis evenly, skidding your turns with as little force as possible and almost no up-down motion. Breakable crust, and it can switch from one to the other instantly, requires exactly the opposite approach. You must crash through and jump out of it. And you must have faith, a belief that your skis will perform as they should in spite of every effort of the conditions to trap them. They will perform. I’ve seen other people do it lots of times. I’ve even done it myself sometimes. This time my faith faltered, or I rushed a turn, or caught an edge, jumped too hard or not hard enough, or some damn thing, and went down.
Hans waited patiently for me. He was pleased. He’d found one of my limits.
I brushed the snow off of my face. I picked up my hat and tried to shake the snow off of the wool. I clomped back up the hill, found where I’d buried my ski, dug it out of the snow, cleared the binding, scraped the snow off of the bottom of my boot, and stepped back in. I took a moment to catch my breath, then skied down to Hans.
Foreign Exchange (The Tony Cassella Mysteries) Page 7