There is something about cold that seeps in and saps courage.
Cold is a killer. It’s easy to forget and underestimate cold. Until you are surrounded by it without shelter or relief. Then it is more vicious than Hitler’s armies, more relentless than Napoleon’s troops.
I once knew a very high Buddhist teacher. He taught, as oracular obscurantists invariably do, that the longest journey begins with a single step. He was a thoroughly reprehensible bisexual who had AIDS, and knew it, and went around inserting his penis into other people anyway. Nonetheless, the one-step concept has some validity. There is always enough strength to take one step. Just take the one. The second step, and even the need for a second step, does not yet exist. And never will. Of course if you race slalom on such a basis, you’re fucked before you’re through the first gate.
I stood up. I got my ski poles and this time I broke them up. Something I should have thought of earlier. It gave me seven spikes. Four from one, three from the other, for no reason except that I am not a professional ski pole breaker. They would function as my pick and my pitons. That took me probably a half hour. I had also decided not to look at my watch. Not to know how long anything took, or how long I’d been there, or how soon the dawn. Knowledge of time would only bring delusions of hope or despair.
Then I began to climb again.
I only got a foot, perhaps two, further the second time. Then I fell again.
By the time I stood up, it was growing dark.
More slowly, and with smaller steps, I began to climb again. This time just to keep moving, with not much hope of climbing out. I don’t know how long I would have lasted. Perhaps not until morning, perhaps for days.
Clouds drifted in and it grew darker still. It meant a new storm, new snow to cover me. I heard the wind. It got louder and louder. It roared. Then a light, like a headlamp beam, flashed against the sides of my crevasse. Then there was barking. I looked up and saw Rudi, that mean and unsociable dog, at the edge, looking down, barking at me. Then the source of the light appeared. A helicopter passing over the crevasse.
I’d been found.
The chopper moved out of my line of sight and landed. A few minutes later, Franz, the gendarme, appeared. He threw down a rope ladder. It is not as easy as it should be to climb a rope ladder if you are very tired and wearing ski boots. With great and weary gratitude I stumbled up.
Franz was urging me to move faster. Rudi was barking. The chopper was making noise and wind. When I got near to the top, Franz grabbed me and pulled me up.
“It was deliberate,” I said. “That motherfucker tried to kill me.”
“Ja, ja, ja,” he said, in a hurry. He shoved me along toward the chopper. I wanted to go slow. “Come on. Wind is coming.”
“What? What?” I asked him. I wanted to tell him about Hans. I wanted to have dinner and a beer. I was a bit out of it. Tired or relieved or mild hypothermia, it was hard to tell. He shoved my head down as we moved under the blades. “Did you bring the beer?” I said.
“Stay!” he said to me, while he helped his dog into the chopper.
Then he turned to me and pushed me along inside. It was loud. Not a conversational place. The pilot seemed to be in a hurry. It was windy. I could tell because clouds raced heavily in front of the moon. The second I was in, he lifted off. “Well, we found you, and you are alive,” Franz yelled in my ear. “He called on the radio”—he pointed to the pilot—“… to tell Marie Laure that the father of her baby is alive and well.” He pulled a sausage from his bag, cut it in three parts, gave one piece to Rudi, one to me, and took one for himself. As it went down I could feel how much my body craved the fat. The cells sucked it up and threw it on the internal fire; it put heat in my flow of blood and slowly spread through me.
“If you hadn’t found me, I wouldn’t have made it.”
“Ja, ja, ja,” Franz said, and put a blanket over me. “Shut up—it’s too noisy.” My stomach jumped as the chopper lurched down the mountain in the dark, but when Franz pulled out more food—good Austrian bread and rich Austrian chocolate—I ate greedily. That’s three things they do really well—bread, chocolate, and mountain rescue. It made their faults seem minor.
The first thing I did after we landed was call Marie Laure and Anna Geneviève. They were napping, already secure in the knowledge that I was safe. Since any sleep at that stage of life, for mother even more than child, is such an achievement, my adventure paled beside it and my call was merely an annoyance. Irritated, I climbed into Franz’s car. The heater was going full blast.
Franz started driving and headed for home. I bitched about Marie. He pulled out the schnapps. “She’s a good girl,” he said. “You should marry her.”
He passed the bottle. I took a sip. “How did you find me?” I asked him.
“The helicopter pilot,” he said. “He remembered where he put you down. We could see your tracks—also, Rudi could follow your tracks. Also, when we got close, we picked you up on the Pieps. It was easy.”
“He tried to kill me—you understand that?”
“Oh, sure, ja.”
“This is a crazy man. Psychotic. You understand? He led me to that crevasse and then skied away and left me there to die. Not only that—I think he killed the Jap and the girl. He either set that avalanche or knew that it was coming, though I don’t know how he did it.”
“How did he do it?”
“And he’s proud of it. You shouldn’t let German kids read Nietzsche. This superman shit is not good for them.”
“We are not German, we are Austrian.”
“So what are you going to do about him?” I shook. My body kept doing that. “It’s a game with him. That’s another thing. And he’s getting to like it. He tells his victim, ‘Follow me but watch out for the cliff,’ then he leads you to the cliff. Only he knows it’s coming and you don’t, so you go over and he stands on top, saying, ‘Oh, I gave you fair warning, ha, ha. What a great game. I’m alive and you’re dead.’ He’s going to do it some more. Did you arrest him yet? You better get this guy.”
“Have another schnapps,” he said, and passed me the bottle. “Why did you go skiing with Hans? Alone?”
“He thinks he killed me for a reason. According to him I goaded him into telling me that he killed Tanaka and Wendy Tavetian. But I didn’t goad him and he didn’t even really tell me. He wanted to tell me. He wants to brag. There were guys in Vietnam used to cut ears off the people they killed—and wear them, you understand. He wants people to know he’s a killer. He didn’t really confess until after I was down in that crevasse and he was pretty damn sure I wasn’t ever coming out. Right now he makes it a game. You and him against the mountain. I bet, in his mind, he doesn’t do the killing. No, it’s the mountain doing the killing—the avalanche, the crevasse.”
“How did he do the avalanche? You think he did the avalanche?”
“Oh, shit,” I said. “My skis. My skis went down that crevasse. My good skis, not my rock skis. Practically brand-new. With bindings, we’re talking about five thousand, six hundred schillings!”
“Those Dynastars?”
“Yeah, new Dynastars.”
“They’re not so good,” he said.
“You just say that because they’re French.”
“Austrian skis are better—even so, you paid too much.”
“Really?”
“Ja,” he said very seriously. “Five thousand, six hundred schillings is much too much. You should go to Sporthaus Glück—at least twenty percent less.” It was his cousin’s shop. He passed the flask.
I drank and I shivered as Franz drove back to St. Anton. The road twisted, a sheer drop always on one side. On the other, enough snow loomed above us to bury anything that passed. Where the engineers were certain that the snow would slide they had built half tunnels, awnings of cantilevered concrete, over the road. This was not to say that the mountains lacked sufficient originality and whimsy to avalanche in places that the road builders hadn’t prepared fo
r.
We finished the flask in silence.
He dropped me home. I forgot to even say danke schön or gute Nacht. Franz said, “Gross Gott.” I shoved my ski boots off and dropped my jacket. Then I picked up Anna Geneviève and held her in my arms. She smiled at me. She was mildly hungry, so she tried suckling on my finger. She knew better and perhaps it was just a hint. Then I made a face at her and she laughed.
“Hold her head up,” Marie Laure said, although Anna was quite strong enough to hold it up herself now. “I was worried about you.”
“I’m all right. It was all right,” I said, sipping the hot chocolate she’d made for me. She told me with a look that she knew that wasn’t true. “You saved me, I guess, by going to Franz and telling him to look for me.”
“You need someone to look after you,” she said.
“Do you think we should get married?” I asked, gazing at my daughter.
“I called your mother today,” Marie Laure said, “and told her she could come.”
“That made her happy, I bet.”
Then my daughter started to cry. She was well wrapped, as she likes to be. So the best guess was that she was hungry. I gave her to her mother, who exposed her breast and put the infant to her nipple. She ate and fell asleep, but as soon as we went to bed she woke again. Marie tried to nurse her even though her nipples were sore. The milk didn’t have its normal soporific effect and Anna was crying and restless.
“You do something,” Marie said, never angry at the baby, but angry at me.
An American tourist who’d once seen me carrying Anna through the town asked me if I knew the football carry. I said no.
“I was carrying my own baby,” he said, “in Riverside Park. Except my baby was crying. Wailing away. Disturbing the peace. There was this black guy. Nice, mellow-looking black guy. Well dressed. Not threatening. ‘Is that your first?’ he says to me. I said yes. ‘Don’t you know how to carry a baby?’ he says. I say, ‘Of course, I do.’ He says, ‘No you don’t. You carry them just like a football. Let me show you.’ It’s a black guy. It’s Riverside Park. Am I going to hand him my firstborn son? Not even if it’s Bill Cosby, I say to myself.
“Then I realize it is Bill Cosby. I’m standing in Riverside Park and Bill Cosby wants to teach me how to carry a baby. So I said, ‘Sure. Show me.’ He crooks his arm, takes the baby, puts him with his head at his elbow and feet toward his hand, arms and legs dangling down, and the kid shuts up. Happy as a clam. Then Cosby hands me my son back and I try it. It’s easy, comfortable, kid can’t fall out. You know what I think? They like the view of the ground. America, it’s amazing. Me and Bill Cosby in Riverside Park, and I learn to carry my son like he’s a football.”
So I put Anna on my forearm, legs and arms dangling down, view of the ground, and began to walk. She got quiet. I walked for a while until I thought she was out. I went back to bed and gently, gently put her down, and began to slip my arm out from under. She wailed.
“You cannot stop so soon,” Marie Laure said, furious.
“Right,” I said, and lifted my daughter and put her over my arm and went back to pacing. Riverside Park, I knew it well. New York. America.
DAMAGES
BY THE TIME FRANZ went to arrest Hans Lantz, the mountain guide was dead.
It was an apparent suicide. The corpse held a long-barrel .22 in its right hand, an expensive target pistol by Beretta. The bullet had entered the right temple at the appropriate angle. It was clearly a contact wound. There were powder burns and the skin had exploded outward around the entry point. There was a note.
Sort of a note. A page had been torn from a book of poems and attached to the table in front of him by the expeditious method of stabbing a hunting knife through the paper and into the wood. It was a short piece and the last two lines had been circled with the slash-pointed calligraphy pen that lay beside it. It was not a Pentel, but like it, and also made in Japan.
MORPHINE
Groβ ist die Ähnlichkeit der beiden schönen Jünglingsgestalten, ob der eine gleich
Viel blässer als der andre, auch viel strenger,
Fast möcht ich sagen viel vornehmer aussieht
Als jener andre, welcher mich vertraulich
In seine Arme schloβ—Wie lieblich sanft
War dann sein Lächeln und sein Blick wie selig!
Dann mocht es wohl geschehn, daβ seines Hauptes
Mohnblumenkranz auch meine Stirn berührte
Und seltsam duftend allen Schmerz verscheuchte
Aus meiner Seel—Doch solche Linderung,
Sie dauert kurze Zeit; genesen gänzlich
Kann ich nur dann, wenn seine Fackel senkt
Der andre Bruder, der so ernst und bleich.—
Gut ist der Schlaf, der Tod ist besser—freilich
Das beste wäre, nie geboren sein.
“Morphine?” I said. “Is that morphine? Are we talking about drugs here?”
“‘Sleep is good, Death is better,’” Franz said, translating the circled lines, “‘the most best is never to be born.’ This is Heine, Heinrich Heine. I don’t think it has anything to do with morphine.”
“It says morphine,” I said.
“It is a bildlich.”
“A what?”
“Metaphorisch.”
“I would have thought MTV was more his style,” I said.
“You have to tell me everything that he told you, word for word,” Franz said. “It is the quote of a romantic teenager. They teach this in all the schools. But, ja, I agree. From Hans I would expect a quote from the disco at Krazy Kangaruh. AC/DC or Madonna. Yet every person is entitled to their choice of last words.
“Two days ago you were all over town asking questions about him. Do you want to tell me why you went skiing with him? Alone?”
I told him how Arlene Tavetian had come to the Laundromat, then run into us at Rasthaus Ferwell, how Marie had pressured me to help the bereaved mother discover her daughter’s final days. “I just figured that if I spent a day alone with Hans he would talk. About the avalanche, the girl, whatever. They were regular clients, Tanaka and the girl. Besides, it was an excuse to get out of the house and up on the mountain.”
“I tell you, Rick, you have a knack for this. You go around asking questions and the first thing you find out is that someone else is asking questions, all the way from Japan. Then you find out that someone stole something from the dead man’s apartment. Then that the accident was a murder. Maybe you were a detective back in Dublin. Richard Cochrane of Royal Dublin Constabulary? Eh?”
“They call them the Gardia back home.”
“Gardia. Oh, is that what they call them? So, you really are Irish?”
“Was it really a suicide? Why should he kill himself? He got away with one killing. He didn’t know you pulled me out of the crevasse. Odds were nobody was going to find me till spring. You really figure this is a suicide note?”
“Ja. Definitely.”
“It’s not like he wrote something in his own handwriting and signed it, is it?”
“Perhaps I did not translate it well for you,” Franz said. “It is a poem they teach us in grade school. They tell us that it is a poem about escape from earthly woe. Personally it was not my interest. But it is what they teach.”
“I don’t believe it. Hans was full of himself. He was really strutting. This guy felt no more guilt than Klaus Barbie. None. However he killed Tanaka, he was proud of it. Like he was proud that he dumped me down that hole. According to him, it was some kind of contest. And Wendy, Hiroshi, and me—we lost. It made him the great skier. It was going to make him popular with the girls. Trust me. This guy only liked other people’s death. Not his own.”
“I like things simple,” Franz said. “We have a forensic specialist in from Vienna. A specialist in the pathological evidence of suicide. There is nothing in the forensic evidence to contradict suicide.”
“He didn’t kill himself.”
“You would have to
imagine someone very clever and complicated to make it look like Hans Lantz shot himself when he did not. Who is this person? Why would they do this? Where are they? No. I like this better. Skiführer has clients killed by accident in an avalanche. Then has another client fall, by accident, into a crevasse. Filled with guilt, he kills himself.”
“If he was feeling so guilty, how come he wasn’t the one who called for help for me? How about that?”
“Afraid,” Franz said. “Afraid to admit so much incompetence. Rather than face it, he killed himself.”
“Who are you trying to kid?”
“It’s been a bad season. We have maybe four, five months to make our money.” This is a litany that Austrians recite to justify everything from ÖS24 for a cup of coffee to the practice of putting a 200 to 300 percent markup on phone calls from hotels and pensions. Franz’s own additional income, the incomes of his various in-laws, cousins, and friends all come from the winter season.
“So you don’t like the idea of a ski guide psycho killer knocking off the punters. That’s quite a nightmare for our guests.”
“Ja.” He nodded. “Like the great white shark in Jaws. Chase the tourists away. But our great white shark is dead. I like things quiet. Everyone making money.”
“He talked about having money. That he didn’t have to work as a guide anymore. He had something else going. Did he have a lot of cash around? Did you check his bank account? Did you look under the mattress? Maybe someone paid him to kill Hiroshi Tanaka or Wendy Tavetian.”
“For now, it was an accident. Both them and you. And a suicide.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “I know that’s not true. I don’t know why you want to cover it up, but I’m going to see to it that it’s not covered up.”
“Don’t do anything to embarrass me,” he said.
“I know you saved my life…”
“Ja.”
Foreign Exchange (The Tony Cassella Mysteries) Page 9