When she rose, however, her bare toes brushed against Farrell’s ankles. He ground his molars and did not look at her as Gabriel reached out to stroke her arm.
“I’ll check in on you later,” he said. Maria’s smile was wan. She vanished into the rear of the house.
The three men spent the early evening in an awkward, forced conversation over glasses of brandy as the thunderstorm came and passed. They spoke of dove hunting, of marlin fishing, and then of the human spirit. Farrell found it bitterly amusing that Cordova thought that repeated exposure to adversity was the forge that created an indomitable character, one capable of handling any situation. Farrell demurred, noting that the strongest of men and women have their weaknesses.
“Of course,” Cordova said. “But these people learn early on not to expose their soft belly, as it were.”
Gabriel disagreed, arguing that the strongest of people are the ones who recognize they are weak.
“Paranoia is healthy in small doses?” Farrell asked.
“Something like that,” Gabriel said. “Egos developed to the point of megalomania are often the most fragile. They consider themselves invincible and take no care to shield themselves.”
Gabriel carried on in this vein for another five or ten minutes; despite the hatred Farrell now felt toward him, he enjoyed the facileness of his mind and realized he was the embodiment of the term “charming crook.” Cordova added nothing more to the conversation. Farrell was aware the dove boy continued to evaluate him. You’re still an amateur at these things even after all this time. With every ounce of effort in his body, Farrell fought to keep his composure under the scrutiny of those pallid eyes. At midnight, he pled exhaustion and excused himself. He locked the door to his room, listening at it until he was sure the two men remained in the living room. He drew the drape across the window, opened the briefcase, slid the letter opener along the base, and pulled. The tape had rolled! The second conversation may not have registered, but he was sure they had given him what he needed the first time.
He refitted the false base and locked the case tight. He slid the drape open until he could see the moonlight glistening off the rain-soaked grass. An animal, possibly Cazador, moved at the edge of the light and then vanished. Farrell turned the crank on the window and relaxed as the fresh scent of the sea flowed into the room. He lay down with his hands under his head. Thoughts and images hurtled and bumped in the darkness: Cordova’s shadowed figure on the porch, Maria’s vacant stare, the donkey on the road from Colima too stifled by the heat to slap the flies, the stroke of Lena’s fingers on his skin so much earlier that day.
It had been that day after all. He coveted the sensation the way one will, on the morning after the first evening with a new lover, stop amid the bustle of life and relive such tender, secret memories. “New lovers,” Farrell said to himself, and the gentle reassurance of the notion gradually calmed the whirling buzz of activity. He slept.
The lock made a single clack as it moved. Farrell startled wide awake and afraid, sure in the frenzied manner of stressed logic that he would hear a man’s breath come like a whistle toward him.
Maria slipped around the edge of the door and pressed it quietly shut. Farrell calmed if only for a moment; it was no pitch dark night when he could tell himself she was a dream. The moon glowed through the parted drapes. She wore no robe, only a gauzy nightgown through which were visible the dark nipples of her breast and the triangular smudge below her powerful hips. In spite of himself, he was fascinated.
She crossed the room to his bed. She raised the hem of her nightgown until the smudge became ebony hairs that seemed smooth, not crinkly in the dim light. Her smell came to him and he thought himself lost. For an instant he played with the idea of having her as revenge.
But when Maria reached forward and stroked the skin above his shorts, he sensed a bitter, callous quality in her touch. He thought of Lena’s soft caress. In an instant, the situation became nonsexual and apolitical; Maria was a victim, not a perpetrator. He grasped her hand before she could pull his shorts down. With his other, he lowered the hem of her nightgown so it covered her. She sat stony on the bed.
“That’s not what you need,” he whispered.
“What do you know of what I need?!” she whispered angrily.
“I know enough to see you’re wounded. I seem to be an expert in that field these days.”
She stared at Farrell for a long time. Gradually her shoulders dropped and her hands relaxed. Tears rolled down her cheeks and splashed on his hands. He gathered her into his arms and she sobbed, her weeping muffled against his chest. By degrees her crying slowed and she started and shook into a fitful sleep. Farrell thought of his wife and how she’d managed to survive all that had happened with some dignity. He looked at Maria and found that he pitied her in a way he had not pitied anyone for years; she reminded him of every majestic animal he’d seen in zoos. Her breathing became rhythmic, hypnotic. And then he, too, drifted away into that formless state before real forgetful sleep.
So as he and Portsteiner came to the trailhead near the White Grass Ranch in midafternoon, Farrell was still unsure whether someone passed outside the open window to his room in the waning moonlight that last night in Mexico, casting a shadow across their entwined bodies and the floor and the door; and then gone.
Chapter 24
“RIDICULOUS,” INEZ SNAPPED. “And how long do we wait? A week? Two?”
The crew was gathered again in Inez’s room. Farrell had just given his report on the adverse snow conditions on Buck Mountain.
“If you want safe conditions—” Farrell said.
“What are you, a lawyer?” Page interrupted.
“What’s your problem, mon?” The Wave said to Page. “Thought we decided we are all in this together.”
Page blew his nose and waved his hand. “Change of heart. I’m in this for myself.”
Inez smiled. She pointed at Farrell. “I sense your attitude is negative even before you come. So when you do your snow tests today, I go to a bookstore where they have the books on the Tetons. And the people at the store tell me to speak with other guides besides this Dunphy. I find them and they say that unless you have climbed above nine thousand feet, your tests will not be true. Did you go above nine thousands?”
“No,” Farrell admitted. “Maybe sixty-five hundred. But I heard slides. Big ones.”
Inez dismissed him. “They say we be careful on the climb, in a slow, more gentler approach to the supersteeps above nine thousand.”
“And where did these guides suggest we go?” Farrell demanded.
“They say go all the way, we go the Grand,” Inez replied in a smooth seductive voice. “It has never been skied so early. And we have our first descent.”
The room buzzed with an intensity that had not seized the group since Page stood alone on the cliff at Granite Chief.
“That’s nuts,” Tony said. “All the snow on the mountain could move this time of year. One of those climax avalanches, take a whole slope right to the dirt.”
Page broke in, “Inez told me about her talks at noon. I went and talked to these guys myself. Kind of young, but they claim it can be done. People climb the Grand all the way, fourteen thousand feet. But yeah, skiing it from the top this time of year would be suicidal.”
Inez made as if to break in. Page cut her off. “That’s what they said, Inez. They said going to the top would be laying on the sword.”
Inez frowned. “Yes, but they say the Grand can be skied now.”
Page nodded. “Parts of it. They said we can climb more than halfway, up toward a place called the Black Dike and into a route called the Stettner Couloir up to where it goes to a straight rock wall.”
“This has been done before, so early?” Inez asked.
“As far as we know, never. You’ll get your first,” Page said.
“What’s up at the end of the Stettner, mon?” The Wave asked.
“A nearly vertical piece of stone, a hundre
d and fifty feet or more. The guides said anybody who’s ever skied the Grand from the top has had to do what Briggs, the first guy, did: rappel off the top of the stone until you’re down in the Stettner.”
“So we could get to the base of that wall?” The Wave asked.
“I think so.”
“We can shoot this from the helicopter, no?” Inez asked.
Page smiled and looked at Inez. “Almost none of it. If we could climb that stone at the end of the Stettner, you’d be able to get the run off the top of the Grand. But like Collins said, it’s too early to go up there. And filming the lower Stettner from above is almost impossible; on one side there’s a hunk of rock that hangs over it; the route down is almost hidden.”
And in that instant Farrell saw where Page was going. “You’ll have to climb with us if you want to film it,” Page said.
Inez’s face lost all color.
“What’s the matter, Inez?” Farrell asked. “Scared?”
“No peaking through the fingers this time,” The Wave laughed.
“Shut up, the two of you!” Inez snarled. She paced around the room. Her hand trembled as she lit another cigarette. She paused in front of Tony and Ann. “How much weight does you carry?”
“Depends on what we’re going for and how long,” Ann said. Tony nodded and said, “Roughly sixty to eighty pounds.”
Inez squeezed her hands into fists. “I want to know the meters vertical in total we get on film.”
“I can give you that,” Page said. “Four thousand, maybe forty-five hundred vertical feet. And most of it at forty to sixty degrees fall line.”
The Wave whistled. Ann sat down. Tony ran his fingers through his hair. For danger junkies, the allure of the Grand was undeniable. Even in the best conditions it was arguably one of the two or three most dangerous ski descents in the United States. And no one had ever done it this early. Farrell didn’t notice what was wrong at first; he saw only the gourmets of peril enjoying the anticipation of an adrenaline feast. It worked on him, however, gradually gnawing at him until he was sure something was out of sync: their motivation wasn’t limited to wanting to ride the bear’s back. There was something he couldn’t see.
“The snow today was rotten,” he said. “You all know what that means.”
Neither The Wave, nor Tony, nor Ann would look at him.
Page shrugged. “Where you tested, it probably was. But we’re climbing an almost totally shaded route, much higher than where you were. Sure, we’ll be slogging through slush at first. But like I said, if we take the most gradual way up, stick to the shade, careful and testing as we go …”
Inez’s cigarette glowed. “Yes?”
“You’d be selling your movie short if you didn’t at least take a look, Inez,” Page said.
“How much back-country guiding have you done?” Farrell asked.
“Enough to know this is possible,” Page said.
“Anything’s possible,” Farrell said. “The point is to play the odds.”
“I thought we were making a movie about extreme skiing,” Page sneered.
Farrell tried to speak again, to point out Dunphy’s reservations about a climb, even from the easier eastern approach. But Inez jumped in, strung out on her plans. “How soon do we leave?”
“Day after tomorrow,” Page said. “It’ll take a full day to get our equipment ready. Then a day’s climb to get to a hut at eleven thousand five hundred feet that will have us ready for your shots in the lower Stettner the next morning.”
“What equipment do we need?”
“Bare bones,” Page said. “We can hire two guys to lug stuff as far as the hut. They’ll bring down our sleeping gear. We won’t be coming down the same way and the skiers will want as little to carry as possible.”
The Wave’s voice cracked with uncertainty: “You’re sure this can be boarded, right?”
“The whole thing was surfed last year by a local guy who’s over in Europe now,” Page said. “But he did it in early June. You’ll be forced to make do with Tepee’s Glacier. It’s on the way down, but shred city.”
Inez’s cheeks had taken on a high-toned flush Farrell had never seen before. She bubbled with questions and plans, demanding to know what they’d need to pull the shot in the Stettner off. He wanted to argue again, but he saw it was beyond his control. In that moment he knew the only way he’d stop the climb was to stop Inez. He had to talk to the attorney. Farrell got to his feet and he walked to the door. The room fell silent as he twisted the knob. Inez laughed, “He is timid. He leaves us.”
“Who said anything about leaving?” Farrell said, and he gave her his most maniacal leer. “I wouldn’t miss seeing you take a physical risk for anything, Inez.”
Inez blanched. She fumbled for a cigarette, tapped it on the side of the pack. “You relieve me,” she croaked. “This is your time, you know.”
Farrell watched the way she lit the cigarette, a studied, controlled series of motions designed to unnerve him. It did. His stomach flutterered, and for a second he felt a fever coming on.
“I said the Grand is your shot, your moment in the film,” Inez said, more confident now. “You and I have much to discuss. Come to my room tomorrow after you have your equipment ready.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Farrell saw The Wave furrow his brow. His dreadlocks shook almost imperceptibly. Farrell never let his glance waver. “Like I said, I wouldn’t miss it, Inez.”
He walked out into the night air, warmer now than it had been since he’d arrived. The Wave caught up to him. “Don’t see her, mon,” he said. “I get real bad vibes. The files.”
“I’m a mystery to myself, Wavo,” Farrell said, glad that The Wave cared. “What makes you think she can figure me out? Besides, you were all gung-ho to go up that hill.”
The Wave hung his head. “It was pretty much a done deal even before you showed up tonight. She got to us all, said if I climbed the Grand, she’d tell me where I can find Sunshine. It’s strange, but as bad as she’s been, I have to see her. She may be clean now.”
Farrell sighed. “The rest of them?”
“Ann and Tony get their notes written off. Page, I don’t know. He’s been off in his own Idaho since he saw his old man.”
“You think you can board the Grand when it’s this unstable?”
“How bad could it be?” The Wave said, but the usual bravado was not there.
The Wave looked up at Farrell, who did not reply. They both knew the answer without having to hear it. The Wave tugged at a dreadlock. Farrell walked away, surprised at how he felt now. He wasn’t numb, he wasn’t even cool; he was as furious at Inez as he had been with Gabriel. Two blocks away he found a phone booth and punched in the numbers for the Swiss attorney. In minutes, the smooth, familiar voice came on the line.
“So good to hear from you, sir,” the attorney said. “The companies you requested are in place. I believe you are secure for the time being.”
Farrell nodded. “The best news I’ve had today. The report?”
“It will be here late in the day, my time, sir,” he said. “I’m afraid I have an appointment and will not be available. Do you have a number where I could fax it?”
Farrell reached down and opened the phone book. He found the name of a pharmacy with fax services. He gave the attorney the number.
“Very good, sir,” the attorney said. “We await your instructions.”
Farrell sat in the only chair in his room, concentrating on the throbbing in his legs and the lightness at the back of his neck. He wondered if he’d ever find stillness again, and if he really wanted to. Perhaps, life isn’t supposed to be all one way, calm or chaotic. Maybe the roller coaster was the point: life is nothing but those agonizing moments climbing the first hill, waiting for the drop, your head going a million miles a minute, then over into the swirl and the blur until it slows again for another ascent. He got out the diary and turned ahead until he saw blank pages. Only a few entries left. The thought filled
him with as much despair as he’d endured the morning he left Gabriel’s. Maria had left his room before dawn without a word. Gabriel stood alone by his jeep two hours later as he loaded the briefcase and luggage. Gabriel patted him on the back with such an air of resignation that Farrell didn’t have the strength to look at him again.
He had pulled over twice on the drive to Colima and vomited. He slept fitfully on the flights back to the United States, painfully aware that people from both sides were probably watching. It had dawned on him that while he’d breached limits and was coming back alive, people like Maria never saw the line coming; she had crossed to the other side in a waking coma. One day she opened her eyes in a foreign land where the language sounded familiar, but was not coherent. The few words she understood were laced with menace. A numbing liquid was the only thing that let her survive.
Stern was leaning against a wall in the crowded terminal when Farrell came off the plane. Stern slid through the crowd to walk next to him.
Farrell growled low: “Don’t open your mouth! Don’t look at me, you lousy shit! They followed your followers. And the rest they bought off. I’m lucky to be alive.”
Stern allowed himself a single wide-eyed glance at Farrell. Stern was frightened.
“Do not go anywhere near my home for at least a week,” Farrell said. “Then figure out a way in from the rear. Understand?”
“Yes,” Stern said. He disappeared. Farrell opened the diary and found the entry for that night.
July 4
The house was dark and the dogs whined when I opened the door. I panicked; Jack was supposed to be home hours before. My feelings about him the past two days have flip-flopped. I love him, but hate him for what he has done. I see in him a terrible link to Lydia and what I almost did to her. Could I ever want him dead the way I wanted Lydia dead?
But when I got home and found the house dark, I wanted him alive. I ran through the house flipping on the lights until I found his luggage on the floor in the kitchen. The glass door to the terrace was open. Jack was asleep on the edge of one of my flower beds, curled into the fetal position, one hand between his legs. His face and neck and hands and white shirt were smeared with soil. Yet he appeared so content, I didn’t want to wake him. It’s like that, isn’t it, to know that waking someone can be the cruelest thing possible?
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