“Go anytime you want,” Dunphy said. “The Forest Service don’t give a damn. All of these have been climbed in winter. But you’ll be wading and postholing and who knows what else. And the ridges won’t be stable, that’s a fact. Watch it or you’ll find yourself riding the bear’s back straight down the hill.”
“Instability,” Farrell said. “Just what the lady ordered.”
“Dandy,” Dunphy said sarcastically. “This attitude the Frogs and the Krauts got of letting it fly, hoping to Jesus you come through for the history books, is like throwing cow dung out the bed of a pickup and praying you get your face back behind the cab but quick. Can’t close your eyes to the danger, boy. Got to face exactly what it is you’re about to do. Don’t believe it? Look at me.”
Dunphy unbuttoned his flannel shirt and drew it down over his shoulder.
“Daydreaming up on the Middle Teton 1973,” Dunphy said. “Snow broke through. Went end over end, smashed some rocks. Tore the shoulder to shreds. Held together with pins now.”
Farrell grimaced, thanked Dunphy, and left him his room number at the Elk Tine in case he had any other ideas.
The meeting with the crew wasn’t for hours, so he picked Ruby up at the motel and drove out of town toward the elk refuge. He parked and watched fog burst from the muzzles of many of the beasts, which were still bedded down in tight circles, rumps to the center. Others browsed. The antlers of the bulls would fall soon, Farrell thought, and the process of regeneration would begin again and last all summer until the bugling season that heralds the rut and the snows.
“I’ve had enough of winters,” Farrell said to Ruby. “Next year we’ll go someplace warm.”
Ruby wagged her tail. Outside the wind stiffened, and within minutes, the clouds broke. Behind him Farrell could see the opening to Death Canyon and beyond it to Buck Mountain. The South, Middle, and Grand Teton peaks were still socked in, but Farrell could sense them there, beyond Avalanche Canyon, towering monoliths rising 7,000 feet above the valley floor. He thought of Page, The Wave, Ann, and Tony. “You don’t run away,” he said to himself.
For a moment he held the diary in his hand and faltered. He added another new rule: “You take responsibility.”
March 9
Tonight he came home ashen and sweating. Cordova had called him, wanting to know why their precious deals haven’t moved as quickly as before. Stern hasn’t installed listening devices in Jack’s office, but Jack took notes.
I could see he enjoyed this game of cat and mouse and told him so. His embarrassment gave way to anger. He asked me if I wanted to whip him or burn him. I told him I’ve stopped wanting—he doesn’t love the middle where I am.
Jack said he was there for me in his own way, that he’d left the job he loved in Chicago to come to San Diego for me. On this count he was right and I had no flip answer. He made sacrifices for me. But I don’t know if I can make this sacrifice. I told him the truth: he scares me.
March 12
Twice I’ve awoken late at night wanting to write a letter. Only I don’t know who to address it to. At work, I caught myself holding the babies up to beg forgiveness.
Stern says it is important that Jack and I go through the motions. But we pass each other without speaking. I ask myself how much more I do not know about him. We eat without talking, he at the counter, me at the table. We walk the dogs on the beach at night. I stay yards away when he throws sticks into the surf. He moves carefully around me. I stare.
Last week I had a red dream. People from our past, a jury, taunted me. Lydia was there, the only one who would defend me. I woke up shivering and went to look for him. He was curled in the basement next to her things. It has become a ritual: I come in the night to punch and kick and slap him until my nightgown clings to my wet skin. He never defends. We never talk of it.
I know I still love him, but all I feel is disgust.
The last sentence gored Farrell like the sharp horn of a wounded bull. Her feelings had been there below the surface, but he’d been able to delude himself by concentrating on getting Gabriel. Now her true emotions wrapped around him. He felt unworthy, small. Bile crept up the back of his throat, filling his mouth with the acrid taste of self-pity. He thought of a conversation they’d had about a month later. Her late-night visits to the basement had tapered off. They had retreated into civility.
“What will you do when it’s over?” Lena asked. She tossed salad at the counter.
The question surprised him. Since Stern had barged into their life, he’d done nothing but try to order and explain the past. He hadn’t considered the future. “How does a restaurant in Montana sound?”
“I’m being serious,” she said.
“The north shore of Kauai then,” Farrell said. “It’s so far from anything you have to drive on one-way bridges to get there. We could—”
“We?” she asked.
Farrell took the blow. “I thought there might still be a we.”
“You shouldn’t think like that.”
Farrell was quiet. “What will you do?”
“Go away. Maybe home. Begin again.”
“Will you tell them?”
“At some point I’ll have to,” she said.
“Stern says some of the information is so powerful it could cripple all of them, Gabriel, Cordova, those others,” he said to impress her.
“So you said.” Lena crossed to the table, chewing a piece of carrot. “Do you think she knows?”
“Who?”
“His wife, Maria.”
Farrell knew then that if he were ever to bring up what transpired between them, this was the time. But he knew that if he did, that “we” that lingered in his mind would surely remain a dream.
“I think of it like this,” Farrell said. “Either she knows and she ignores it because it’s too painful, or she justifies it by the things he does with the profits—the clinics and the programs to train the poor.”
“I think it’s more delicately balanced, she chooses not to know.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s probably something like me: she wants to believe in the man she chose to spend the rest of her life with.”
A note was attached to Farrell’s door when he returned to the Elk Tine: Just a reminder: crew meeting, Inez’s Room 6:30 p.m.—The Wave.
Two hours later, Ann opened the door. Video equipment and film cameras were strewn about the floor. Inez had her back to the room, fumbling with a map that was spread across a credenza. The Wave and Tony sat in the two chairs. Page leaned against a wall, sipping a beer.
Inez pirouetted when he came through the door. She fairly danced to him across the room, a wide, friendly smile plastered across her face. She slipped her hand around his waist. “I am not so sure I find you here. But we go on, forget the past, yes?”
Farrell glanced at her sidelong. He thought to himself: this is what recovering alcoholics must go through at their first cocktail party. She batted her eyelashes and smiled again. “Why not, Inez,” Farrell said.
Inez patted him on the rear, then slid back from him to the maps.
“The few days past I spend in San Francisco with one of the men who pays for the film,” she announced to the room.
“Who’s he?” Page asked. Farrell wasn’t sure, but he thought Page had been drinking again.
“A German industrialist,” Inez said. “And a fanatic for the mountains. He looks at some of the film already and other scenes on video. He calls our progress so far, the Y Couloir and the jumps—”
“We know: sticky fingers,” Page mumbled.
The Wave burst out laughing.
“What do you say?” Inez demanded.
Page waved his hand at her, “Ahh nothing. Go ahead.”
Inez glared at Page, who chuckled and waved at her again. “Go ahead!”
“He is angry we have no first descents,” Inez allowed.
“Such is life,” The Wave said.
“Not life, my petit Jamaica,” Inez
retorted. “Business. With the helicopter and the weeks in Utah and Tahoe, we’re off-schedule and over budget. Perhaps he is not in anger, but he is not in happiness.”
“What do you think,” Farrell said, studying her.
Inez pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “He has reason. There are the moments of action, truly brilliant: Page in the air off Granite Chief, the last minute in the Y Couloir; but I believe that the … essence of the film is to come. I wish to be at the Ranier and in the Brooks Range in June.”
“That’s five weeks,” Page said.
“Just so,” Inez said. “They give me a studio for the editing in Paris July the first.”
“You won’t make it,” Farrell said. “I checked the paper yesterday. Ranier got heavy wet snow earlier this week. Tough prospects here, too.”
The tip of her cigarette seared a hunter’s orange. She arched her head, let the smoke come out fast, and took another drag. “Tell me.”
Farrell laid out Dunphy’s scenario.
“Three weeks is bullshit,” Inez said. “We go as soon as possible.”
“Crazy,” Farrell said.
“Les hommes laches,” Inez muttered.
“Nothing to do with cowardice,” Farrell said. “You go up, you want to come down.”
Inez picked a bit of tobacco off the tip of her tongue and flicked it. “In France, the skiers are not thinking first how I must protect myself and then ski. Always there is a way, if there is commitment. They climb a line two, three times before to find the path. But they are not on the knees to weep ‘Oh, Oh, perhaps I hurt myself.’ Of course perhaps you hurt yourself. To hurt is always there. It is life.”
“What’s the problem?” Page slurred. “Collins said almost every peak in the Tetons been done even in winter. Let’s go!”
“One gets off his knees!” Inez cried.
The Wave cracked his jaw: “It boardable. I mean these hills, mon?”
“Some of it,” Farrell said. “The bowls and slopes.”
“Shred city,” The Wave grinned, then saw Farrell frowning at him and he stopped.
“We go in three days’ time,” Inez said, stubbing her cigarette out. She pointed at the map. “I think this Grand Teton, the biggest, is my destiny. I arrange another helicopter.”
Farrell faced her and said, “I’m against it.”
Inez’s jaw froze. “I thought we declare the truce.”
“Like you said, Inez: even in France, the skiers climb to see what they’ve got before they run.”
“You already say it takes the minimum of two, maybe three days to climb this Grand and come back down. This is out of the question.”
“I’ll give you that,” Farrell said. “But the question isn’t so much the Grand as it is altitude. I’ll go for a climb tomorrow to the lower slopes of Buck Mountain, dig some pits. It will give us something to go on.”
Tony nodded. “It’s a good idea.”
“For who?” Inez demanded.
“For anyone not in the helicopter,” Ann said.
Inez drew another cigarette from the pack, tapped it on the surface of the map, put it between her lips, but did not light it. “Okay, Collins. Go dig your pits. I do some research of my own. We meet back here tomorrow, same time.”
Chapter 22
AFTER THE MEETING, FARRELL had avoided the rest of the crew and taken Ruby for a walk toward the edge of town. The full moon dimmed the stars, but lit up the valley so that the trees of early spring, leafless, stood out like calligraphy against the sky and the snow. Seeing how easy the landscape was to understand when it was just black and white triggered a fit of confusion. He knew either Stern or Gabriel or someone else was trying to track him through his Swiss accounts. He wondered how long they would hold. How long could he maintain stamina when confronted with Inez, a women composed in shades of gray? Every moment in the room with her that evening had been a struggle. The lure of skiing the Grand Teton, even this early in the year, was undeniable. For the first time in years that sort of yearning had a countervaling force; he felt an obligation now, for reasons he didn’t quite understand, to protect Page, The Wave, Ann, and Tony from danger.
He thought of Stern again. Why hadn’t the agent felt the same obligation? He remembered sitting in Stern’s office after sneaking into the federal building downtown one morning in mid-June. He’d been startled by the size of Stern’s office—barely large enough to hold a desk, its walls bare save a poster of a river with the word “Idaho” splashed across it.
Farrell cut to the point, “I can’t take this much longer. My wife wants out. Me, too. Let’s just bring this out into the open and get it over.”
Kennerson, the U.S. Attorney assigned to his case, raised his thick eyebrows and rubbed his palm across the sleeve of his blue serge suit.
Stern rapped a pencil off the corner of his desk and said, “It’s not enough … what you brought us.”
“I’ve given you everything I know,” Farrell protested.
Kennerson broke in, doing his best to lay out what was hearsay and what was clearly admissible in court. Farrell had done such an efficient job of burying the identities behind the different companies that owned the properties on Otay Mesa, near Nogales and El Paso, that legally Farrell and the other two attorneys in Las Vegas who’d signed on as secretary and treasurer were the only people responsible.
Farrell listened closely because he liked Kennerson as much as an informant can enjoy the company of a man who holds a sword over his head. He supposed, too, that Kennerson liked him, as much as a prosecutor can like a criminal. They were both about the same age, of similar burly build and afflicted with premature baldness. There was also the background: Farrell was from Maine, Kennerson from Rhode Island; they talked much the same language. It was not much to base a relationship on, yet it was there. Farrell could also tell that Kennerson bore him a grudging respect, for once Farrell had entered into the deal for immunity, he held nothing back; nothing except the three off-shore accounts he’d created for himself and the identity papers for him and Lena; he wanted a safety valve.
“Let me get this straight,” Farrell choked. “All I’ve done the past four months is incriminate myself?”
Stern said, “You’ve got nothing with the names of Cortez or Cordova on it except for a few bank accounts and loans. All legitimate. And other than the fact that you know a lot about the furniture in the homes of Rodriguez and De La Leone, we can’t place you there.”
Kennerson went on, “What you’ve done is explain and document the pattern of activity. That was necessary and correct. We’ve got everything to get Cordova and Cortez, except—”
“Them,” Farrell said.
Stern whacked the pencil off the desk again. “And to be honest, that is not going to be hard … to do.”
Farrell caught something familiar in the expressions of the two men. It took him a moment, but he placed it: he’d seen a variation of it on people watching the Olympic ski race on television and the craziest Austrian was about to start on course. It was the odd mix of delight and revulsion that surfaces involuntarily in an audience when it knows someone is about to go downhill fast.
For most of Farrell’s life he’d fed off that sort of energy. But now he was a lab rat in the government’s experiment. Stern and Kennerson knew that if they sent enough electrical current through the wires implanted in the rodent’s brain, the rat would run to sugar water or have an erection or squeal in pain.
“What do I have to do?” Farrell asked.
“You should know the risks first,” Kennerson said.
Farrell’s laugh was bitter.
“What’s the matter?” Stern asked.
“That always comes first, doesn’t it?”
Two days later, Farrell leaned against a pay phone along the trolley tracks on C Street, four blocks from his office. Rubenstein had become a regular visitor to his office of late and he didn’t dare make any contact with Gabriel from there. He dialed a series of numbers, talking his wa
y through two operators who patched him to Mexico. After five minutes, Gabriel’s smooth voice came on the line.
“Jack?”
“We have to talk,” Farrell replied. “Things are moving slower than I expected.”
“Go on.”
“I’m nervous.”
“More vertigo, Jack?”
“That’s not it. I’m hitting snags with the new banks we’ve recruited. The government auditors are cracking down on currency documents up here. We’ve got to devise a new system. Besides, it’s been four months. I want a face-to-face.”
There was a pause, then Gabriel asked: “Can you come to Manzanillo on the first?”
“Why not come north?” Farrell responded. “You haven’t been to San Diego.”
“Too much work here,” Gabriel said. “A trip to the States will wait.”
Farrell hesitated, “The first then. I’ll see you sometime that afternoon. Don’t bother coming over for me. I’ll rent a Jeep at Colima Airport. I’ve never had the chance to drive that road alone.”
“I look forward to it.” Gabriel paused. “Maria, too.”
Farrell listened to the clicks and whirs on the line fade to nothing. He hung the receiver in the cradle. “He wouldn’t go for a meet here.”
Stern reached into his pocket and tugged out a butterscotch candy. He popped it into his mouth, tonguing it into his cheek where it gave him the appearance of a chipmunk hoarding a nut.
“I said—”
“I heard you … Mr. Farrell,” Stern said. “I was just telling myself how nice it would have been to put the cuffs on him right here. Now, it’s extradition. Or we wait until he comes to the states. Either way, a bitch.”
“This is the big coup, I imagine,” Farrell said.
Stern smiled while sucking on the candy. “I’m a patient man … Mr. Farrell. Spend my weekends fly fishing. If we lay the right pattern on the surface, sooner or later they’ll get hungry.”
“Why am I always Mr. Farrell?”
Stern looked away. “Keeps it impersonal.”
Farrell pursed his lips, seeing the implications behind the statement. They walked past the busy outside restaurants where dozens of office workers lunched in the warm sun. “I don’t want to be there when you cuff him.”
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