“Initially, to see if the system works, several hundred thousand dollars over three months,” Cordova said. “Most of the money would end up overseas. But if it does work, you could eventually see an increase of between three million and seven million dollars a year on account at your bank.”
Farrell was stunned; such deposits would swell his division fourfold. He could expand his loan base by sixteen times. The bonus he could expect at the end of such a year was stupefying. No doubt, though, the risks involved were equally mind-boggling: Farrell would have to ride a thin line between deceit and the law to conceal the source and destination of the cash. Any mistake could mean expulsion, fines, or jail. And yet, this is what Farrell confessed to himself as he looked out the window at the lodge, watching a ski patrolman sweep through the trees on the mountain: He had liked the idea. At the back of his throat he tasted the sweet aluminum, and for the first time since Jenny, his body vibrated with expectation. “I’ll do it,” Farrell said.
“We’d hoped you would,” Cordova said, and he smiled. “Now how about dessert?”
Chapter 10
FOR THE NEXT TWENTY-FOUR hours, Farrell holed up in his room, unwilling to read the diary again, unable to follow through on his threat to split for Montana. He’d tried twice. Each time he left the room with his bags, the spinning sensation that had enveloped him since the night in the bar calmed. And each time, about halfway down the hall, he found himself longing for that feeling of imbalance and he’d rushed back, his mind a swirl of images, of Cordova and of Lena, who had no idea what he’d agreed to do that day at lunch, of speeding power boats and lonely Latin women, of pesos and secret accounts. On top of all of this was the picture of Inez hugging The Wave after he’d surfed. When he thought of that scene, the room would accelerate into a wonderful blur, a post-modern painting in icy blues and whites, and his past would fade.
By the time Inez and the rest of the crew had gathered in the woods below the Y Couloir the morning of the race, Farrell had to fight to remain upright; he was as excited and as scared as he was the day he’d started to illicitly move money for Cordova and Gabriel. Perhaps I am like Timmons, Farrell thought; perhaps this can be an ending.
Farrell barely heard Inez describe how she’d rented a helicopter and would hover over the giant ravine to film the race from above. The Wave would climb the ridge on the south face of the canyon with a camera mounted with a telephoto lens. Tony Carbone and Ann Queechee would climb the face of the couloir with Page and Farrell.
“Just what I need at my age, a crawl up a popsicle,” Tony said.
“The audience adores it,” Inez said. “They are going to remember this shot for years.”
Ann shook her head: “I don’t know why we just can’t take a ride to the top of this thing.”
Inez patted her on the arm as if Ann were a kindergartner. “A guide in Chamonix tells me once this is better to see close what you are to ski. See it face to face before you drop.”
“I’m not skiing.”
“But you need the same feel the skier has, no?” Inez said, gritting her teeth. “I believe that the camera must be the penetration of sympathy … in English, empathy? This is the word?”
Ann nodded.
“Empathy must be there or there is no point of view,” Inez said in an insistent tone. “No point of view and no film. Just footage that hangs together. So boring.”
The Wave said, “Gonna get a lot of empathy up there nice and cozy in that chopper, huh?”
Inez spun in her tracks. “My work is different, to film the race. I never see their expressions as they drop in. But Ann and Tony will. I wish them to feel the fear they film. It comes through, you know.”
“Who said anything about fear?” Page asked.
Inez smiled. “You do not have to speak of fear. Fear has a smell.”
“And you have a nose for it,” Farrell said dreamily.
Inez’s smile vanished. “I have the nose for drama. The question is, do you wish to be an actor?”
Time seemed to slow. Farrell couldn’t have left if he’d wanted to. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Yes,” Inez said. “You are.” She turned to make the final radio checks with Tony and Ann and The Wave.
Farrell strode back and forth across the glen. He shook his arms over his head, trying to loosen them. Page knelt in the snow to stretch the muscles of his thighs and lower back. Each of the men did their best not to look at the other. Inez was right: Fear had a smell both Page and Farrell were aware of, hanging in the air like the subtle tang of tarragon and anise.
Inez walked off into the woods away from the hub of activity, then barked into her headset, “Two, check.” Her voice came in clear over the radios.
“Check two, loud and clear,” said Tony into his radio. “Harnesses ready. Four web lines. Anchors. Carabineers. My battery pack’s solid.”
When the radio check was over, Ann whispered to Tony within earshot of Farrell, “I still don’t know why I have to climb this.”
“Because she’s paying us,” Tony said. “Without her, we’re dead.”
“I know,” Ann said, her hands on her hips. “I just don’t like her attitude, that’s all. She’s not safe. She’s not even trying to be.”
Tony stepped over and put his thick arm around Ann’s waist.
“What’s the matter, Annie, you that out of shape you can’t make it?”
Ann twisted out from under his weight. “I’ve goated up worse and I seem to remember somebody behind me with a beard begging for mercy.”
“I remember that guy, too,” Tony said, and he grinned. “Let’s just not screw this up, now. No money—we kiss six years of work bye-bye.”
Ann stared down at the snow and kicked at it. Tony looked around. Farrell acted as if he were preoccupied with the pack that lay at his feet. Inez seemed to have leverage on everyone, he thought, except me. Who knew what she had on The Wave. He turned that idea over in his mind for a second, then discarded it. He had too many other things to consider. He and Page had loaded much of the same equipment: ski boots, water bottles, thin-nylon windbreakers—Farrell’s bright yellow, Page’s startling red—two coils of rope, four food bars, rigging lines for the cameras, collapsing shovels, and a second set of goggles.
The radios crackled: “This is two-four-two, they in that ravine yet?” asked a deep voice with a thick Texas drawl.
Inez pressed a button on the side of her radio. “They are about to begin.”
“Fine enough, little lady,” the pilot responded. “We’ll put this old bird in the air as soon as you get down here.”
Inez turned to the four climbers. “You all make the checks on the channels A and B on the radios? Bien. All climbers are on A channel during the ascent. The Wave and I monitor all talk on A. At the top, Page and Collins remain on A channel. But Tony and Ann Marie switch to B. I give the directions to Page and Collins to begin, then I switch over to B, so the skiers are not distracted. I want it silent on A during the descent.”
She stopped and fished in her pocket for a cigarette. She took two big drags, looking around the glen as if she were searching for a forgotten set of keys. “Alors then, the climb starts now, no? With that you are above the line of trees when I come up the canyon in the helicopter.”
“You going to hover the whole time?” Ann asked.
“No,” Inez answered. “Maybe we put down on the north ridge opposite the couloir and try the shot. The other camera The Wave operates across the road covers the basics. After Page and Collins drop out of your range, pack up and climb to the ridge. We pick you up there.”
Inez paused and looked them in the eye, one by one. When she got to Page, she leaned and hugged him. She did the same to Farrell, and when she’d pulled him close, she whispered: “I cheers for you!”
She pushed him away, picked up her hip pack, and hiked out the path toward the road. Farrell couldn’t take his eyes off her. It was not until Ann said, “Well?” that he saw Page was transfixed
, too.
Farrell coughed and shook his head to clear her away. He fished in his pocket for the drawing Inez had made of the couloir and given to each of them. He shut his eyes to visualize the diagram. The initial chute rose almost 800 feet straight off the canyon floor to a slight right-hand turn. Above that turn, there was a second thinner channel that climbed another 300 feet before it died. The main channel of the ravine bore to the right and arched swiftly for another 400 feet before it split into two arms. In that junction was a tangle of brush and rock and debris. Page’s arm, the right channel of the Y, continued up at a consistent angle through trees to the ridge. Farrell’s arm was shorter, but it was steeper and was bounded by stone walls and stunted pine trees.
The spinning lurched into effect again as Farrell thought of the race. One gear turning the whirligig in his mind was the competition with Page. The one-eyed skier has it easier in those first few minutes, Farrell told himself, but he’s screwed if he carries too much speed down the channel to that dog leg left before it drops to the canyon floor. He’s also going to be thinking of me flying at him from his right side. With only one eye, his concentration will be off going through the junction.
The bigger gear was Farrell’s own line of descent: he had to ski his own steep chute, then get through the rocks and bushes that blocked part of his entrance into the main channel of the ravine without crashing or hitting Page. And then there was the motor driving the gears: Inez would be watching. Somehow that made the mechanics of his situation pulse and whine with the terrible insistence of a race car about to unwind down the straightaway.
Farrell strapped on a white half-helmet, walked to the runout of the couloir, and began to climb. They’d agreed the night before that he’d start, free climbing at first, no ropes until he decided it was necessary. Page, Ann, then Tony would follow at ten-minute intervals. If they found anything out of the ordinary, they’d alert The Wave, who was set up on the first ridge across the road, about 600 feet off the canyon floor.
Farrell wore crampons, metal devices with teeth to bite into the frozen ravine as he climbed. The first few strides he took felt awkward; in the spring air, the mound at the bottom of the couloir, which had been hard-packed snow topped with light powder two days before, was now mushy. Still, he slogged on, knowing he’d need the sharp teeth of the crampons when the snow became firmer at higher altitude.
In the channel, he kept his attention focused on the terrain directly in front of himself. He found a pattern: chop up with the ice axe for purchase, left hand on the wall for guidance, pull and stab in with the crampon. Chop up, brace the body, pull, stab in. Teardrops of sweat gathered at his neck and between his forehead and the helmet. After ten minutes he relaxed into the exertion and climbed at a steady pace.
The wind that cycled at Farrell’s back was moderate, but about once a minute a gust roiled up the passage, the towering rock walls amplifying the sound, so it seemed that Farrell was not climbing, instead the couloir drew him upward like a giant vacuum cleaner sucking and clanking on a discarded penny.
The Wave’s voice crackled in his earpiece: “Got you, Collins, old mon mountain, hobbling hisself into that Y Couloir.”
Farrell smiled in spite of himself; he found The Wave’s voice reassuring. “Preserving my energy, unlike someone I know.”
“Hey, I don’t regret the excesses of my troubled youth, mon,” The Wave said. “I will only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn’t embrace.”
“Didn’t know you could be so eloquent, Wave.”
“Not me, old one, that’s Henry James,” The Wave said.
“A well-read rastaman.”
“Bartlett’s Familiar, mon,” The Wave said. “My favorite book as a kid—”
“Sorry, Wave,” Farrell broke in. “Write this down and pass it on to Inez: at one hundred and seventy-five feet, the chute widens from five to seven yards. There’s a dagger of rock protruding from the snow. And exactly what I didn’t want to find—blue ice, watered and rippled. It cuts across the entire width of the couloir.”
“Shit,” The Wave said. “How long a piece?”
Farrell looked up the smooth face. “Probably fifteen, twenty feet of it. Pray the sun hits in here and it corns up. I’m climbing.”
The static in Farrell’s earpiece died and he kicked the toe spikes of the crampons into the blue ice at the edge of the wall and inched himself higher in slow, precise movements. The ice was a very bad sign. At that moment, he had no idea how he or Page would cross it coming down. He became light-headed and nervous for a second, then put the ice behind him and hoped his subconscious would develop a strategy as he climbed.
Above the ice patch, the wall on the right side of the ravine rose twenty feet on average, higher in places. Black-red lichen, fibrous and rough, splashed across the rock face, fungus that survives in the harshest conditions, yet grows only a quarter inch every fifty years. Twenty minutes had passed since he’d entered the couloir. He paused once to look down between his legs. From that perspective the undulating, almost coordinated bobbing of Ann and Tony’s helmets and packs far below him reminded him of the twisting of the eight-segment back of the scorpion he’d seen crawling on the witch doctor’s arm so many years before.
Farrell came across shoots of brush poking through the snow. He got out a small pair of pruning shears, snipped the branches below the snow line, then tucked the twigs into a gap between the snow and the rock wall. He didn’t want to catch a tip on a twig this late in the race.
In the distance he heard a drone that became a buzz and then a growl and then a roar. A hurricane-force wind closed in around him, filling every crevice and break in the ravine. A fierce storm of fine, sharp ice bits burst off the surface of the couloir and dazzled the air around Farrell with the spark and flash of a dozen hypnotic crystal globes in a tiny dance hall. He panicked, fear wrenching him out of focus. He grabbed on tighter to the ice axe as bigger chunks of ice, these the size of BBs, broke away and stung at his face and neck. They pelted the anorak and pinged off the skis and the helmet. They slapped the heavy cordura pack. Several smashed into his goggles, which cracked into a crazy spider’s web. The air filled with more of the crystals until Farrell began to choke on them.
His grip began to slip and he thought about letting go, letting it end there on the side of the mountain, when over his earpiece he heard Inez’s voice cackle: “Go, Collins!”
Farrell dragged himself higher and kicked his feet into the face of the ravine. He reached down and hit the transmit button on his radio. “Jesus Christ, you bitch!” he bellowed. “Back off! I can’t see a thing!”
The snow under his feet slipped and he realized he’d go down, taking Ann, Tony, and Page with him if he didn’t get a better hold. He snapped the ice axe over his head, felt it grab, then strained until his weight came off the crampons. He spread his legs, kicked the toe pieces into the wall and ducked his head away from the helicopter’s wash. There was no thought of letting go now, only a slowing of time, as if he were no longer a participant in these events, but a member of an audience.
As rapidly as it had come, the pulsing of the chopper blade faded. Farrell clung to the couloir by the toe piece of his right crampon and the twisted leather lanyard he’d bolted to the handle of his ice axe. His left leg dangled in space. In the steady wind he swung back and forth like a rusty weather vane atop an old barn.
The helicopter arched away to the north, circled, and hovered 200 yards behind him.
“The shot, it is incredible, Collins!” said Inez, her voice quivering. “Vraiment, you disappeared. You do not believe it when you see it!”
The Wave’s voice broke in: “Collins! Collins, mon! Are you all right? Can you hear me, mon?”
“Wave, get off the radio,” Inez said.
“You bitch!” The Wave yelled. “You almost blew him off!”
“Give me a second here,” Farrell puffed. “I … I can’t see … the goggles are shattered.”
<
br /> Farrell swung his free arm and leg to the wall and got them anchored. He leaned his helmet into the snow, shut his eyes. The slowing of time was replaced by fury. “Inez,” he said. “Another stunt like that and I’ll …”
There was silence and then Inez said: “Tell me, Collins, is that what you feel when we come too close?”
Farrell sputtered, “What the Christ does that matter …” Then, strangely, he remembered and whispered: “No, I wanted to sleep.”
“Sleep?” Inez said, incredulous. “How—”
Page broke in: “Collins, can you still climb?”
His voice came to Farrell like a yellow light through a fog. “Yeah. Yeah. Just give me a minute.”
“Collins,” Inez insisted. “Tell me about the sleep.”
“Fuck you, Inez!” Farrell thundered, and he reached down and shut off the radio. His hands shook violently now and it took him almost five minutes to change to sunglasses. During that time he considered backing down. But he realized he didn’t have the equipment necessary to anchor a rappel. Without understanding why, he began to climb again. Yet before he did, he shifted his receiver to the B channel; he was uneasy being out of touch with the other climbers, but for his own good he had to monitor Inez.
The earpiece was silent for the next twenty yards, then he heard Inez say, “Wave, pull your camera back for the long shot of the chute. They are above the treeline now. We go back down the hill until we get the signal they tie together for the second part of the climb. The pilot says we burn too much fuel.”
The chugging of the helicopter faded. The beating of blood at his temples ebbed. Farrell turned in the chute to look off in the direction of the disappearing helicopter. He was confused; as angry as he’d been at Inez just moments before, for some reason he now desperately wanted her to come back, to take him to that sleepy state of terror and glee.
The Fall Line Page 14