French Girl with Mother

by Norman Ollestad

  Four hours later, the wind had died and the sun was high in the sky and I took a break at the Darmstädter Hut, a last remnant of civilization before I reached Ischgl.

  After a sandwich and a bottle of water, I harnessed my pack, clicked into my bindings, and began blazing a trail toward the glacier above. Massive curving slopes of snow, shadowed by spires of rock. No movement but the drift of air funneling between the valleys, compressed in the gorges and couloirs, touching my face like Anaïs’s fingertips when we made love.

  Nearing the glacier, I saw cracks, dark veins, running up its gut, and the temperature had climbed too high for my liking, as the heat would burrow into those cracks and expand. Any extra weight might cause a chunk of glacier to break away, so I steered wide and chanced summiting the ridgetop via a flute of slippery vertical rock.

  It was a bad choice, and now I’d gotten myself too far into its throat to turn back. Hugging the cold, ice-glazed jigsaw of rock, I even used my chin to gain purchase and inch upward, reaching blindly with one hand to find a hold. But it wasn’t the fear of prison that drove me; it was wanting to crawl into a warm cozy bed with Anaïs, wake up with her in the morning, make love, eat breakfast, draw her, unravel something fascinating.

  Crawling like a lizard out of the flute and onto the ridgetop, I dug my phone out of the pack. It had a signal. I called her but got voicemail.

  “Hey, mon amour,” I said, gazing at the Alps sprawling 360 degrees around me. “Just checking in. All is well. I wanted to hear your voice but . . . Je t’aime. Big kiss.”

  My quads were seizing up; I had to keep moving, and I edged into the couloir. It was full of light, forgiving powder, and I drifted away for a few minutes.

  By sundown I made it to the pensione in Ischgl, buried among a smattering of chalets along a tight valley floor, far more provincial than St. Anton. Soothing my aching quads and buttocks in a hot bath, I called Anaïs at her apartment. Talking to her would keep my spirits buoyed.

  I heard the click of someone picking up her landline; then it sounded like the phone was thrown and it banged on the ground and suddenly went dead.

  I called back but there was no answer. So I called her cell. Again no answer. I left a message.

  Famished, I went next door to the restaurant and ate a beef stew. When I got back to my room, I texted and then called Anaïs again. “Call me back, mon amour. Please.”

  Of course something was wrong, but in my stupor of exhaustion I couldn’t cope with yet another hurdle, another test of will, and I decided not to worry. Before I got too tired, too bleary-eyed and absentminded, I had to focus on getting things rearranged. I opened my pack, unearthed the tamper tape I’d bought in Paris after Anaïs and I had made love, and then slid out the metal tubes with the precious Schieles inside them.

  seventy-four

  My phone was buzzing and it jarred me awake. I was still in my clothes. On the floor. The room dark. The screen read a few minutes after five a.m., and there was a text from a number I didn’t recognize, a video attachment. It might be new instructions from Hal. I clicked on it.

  A frozen image of a blonde woman. I pressed the arrow in the center of the image.

  The woman was three-quarters turned away from whoever was shooting the video, presumably from his or her phone, as the image came to life. She was posing like a ballerina, dressed in a tutu and ballet slippers. When I got a good look at her in profile I recognized Anaïs, wearing a blonde wig. She was clearly drunk, possibly high on something, and I could hear a party going on outside the dimly lit room.

  “Come on, Jean Luc,” Anaïs slurred in French, lifting her tutu, naked underneath.

  The camera moved in closer. Bile sluiced up my chest, burning my throat, and I spit onto the floor.

  “Nail me to the ground,” she hissed, and I extended the phone as far away from my face as possible, squinting as if at a horrific car accident.

  The camera went out of focus. Then it settled onto something, knee-high, a chair, I guessed.

  In the corner, I could make out a man’s pants dropping around his ankles, and then he stepped forward and thrust upward, going completely out of frame.

  Anaïs moaned. “Tell me what happened on the boat,” she flirted.

  “Nothing,” came a less-husky, younger voice than I expected. “I gave her a lot to drink but she never reacted to any of my advances.”

  It sounded like Henri, and I was so relieved it wasn’t her father that I thanked God aloud.

  “Pretend I’m her,” Anaïs coaxed. “Live out your fantasy.”

  No response. The grainy screen showed only the far wall, or perhaps it was a door. I could hear Henri sigh, searching for the right words.

  “Jean Luc, you don’t want me?”

  “No, it’s . . .” he finally responded. “Let’s just be us.”

  “Ah, now you want me to be ashamed?”

  “No, it’s just a bit . . .”

  “Deviant?” She scoffed and her voice, garbled by alcohol and spite, came through in bits and pieces. “. . . spend your life, even your sexual . . . in a petite bourgeois prison. Go find a little boring bitch . . . nose in the air.”

  I heard her pad across the room, heard a door open, and then light shot in, blowing out the screen. When the aperture adjusted, I could see a mass of bodies, the party I’d been listening to in the background, through the open door. Everyone was dressed up in costumes. Lots of white-robed emirs, Rastafarian wigs, and scantily clad Cleopatras. Then the video went black.

  I flipped on the light. Moving to the window, parting the curtain, I looked onto the empty street. I was showing him a real part of me . . . in bed . . . but he rejected it, she’d told me cryptically when we’d first met in Paris, and now I understood what had happened.

  But who sent the video? Henri, the jilted lover, was the obvious answer. It could be Sophie, though, or maybe even Hal. If so, what were they trying to tell me? I called the number to find out.

  seventy-five

  Every time I tried the number it went to an automated voicemail. It wasn’t necessarily the content of the video that made me uneasy. I’d gotten used to, even become fascinated by, Anaïs’s eccentric behavior and our uninhibited sex life—which had proved to be the impetus for great drawings. There was something else I couldn’t put my finger on.

  After restoring my provisions, I boarded the first ski tram out of Ischgl. Ischgl always opened a week or two earlier than St. Anton. There were only a few other skiers on it. One of them was a local guide who gave me a funny look and then ignored me—probably because he thought I was a good-for-nothing ski bum.

  The next few hours were spent traversing cornices and climbing steep walls of rock and snow, weighted down with the questions that whoever sent the video obviously wanted to elicit.

  If Anaïs knew, at least obliquely, about the sexual game between her parents, and took part in it by some measure, feeding off the threat of a paramour, like her father did, then what else was she hiding from me?

  Had she invited me to the château not only as a way to challenge and provoke her mother, but also specifically as a resource for her and her uncle’s forgery scheme—the legitimate reproduction business serving as the hook? In Paris, upon seeing my work, she would have easily recognized that I drew like Schiele, and she would’ve quickly deduced that I was a desperate artist—the perfect mark.

  Repeated over and over, the questions eroded my strength and confidence and made the trek far more complicated than it already was. Shuffling along a narrow ridge on my skis, I stupidly closed my eyes to imagine her in the best possible light—waiting for me, soaking in a bath, biding her time at a café—and then I felt my skis slip on a patch of ice.

  My eyes popped open and I was tumbling head over heels down the mountainside. I tried to jam a pole into the snow and the handle snapped back and punched me in the eye. Now I could see only one side of the slope, and as I tumbled I tried to turn my head to determine if there was rocks or a cliff in my
pathway. The snow got deeper as I entered the heart of the slope and I twisted to get my skis sideways and dig in. Finally I skidded to a stop.

  No broken bones and my pack was still strapped to my shoulders. Pressing snow against my eye for a few minutes to keep the swelling down, I then had to put the skins back on my skis and zigzag my way up the slope and onto the ridge. I could’ve been badly injured or even killed. Forget the video, what it might mean, and stay on task.

  An hour later, I was again pondering our relationship, and at some point I realized that I’d hiked too far north. Now I had to backtrack the couloir I’d scaled and figure out another way around the rock massif. It would cost me at least an hour and a bundle of energy I wasn’t sure I had.

  As I descended the couloir, I entertained the idea that Anaïs would be gone when I returned to Paris, and that Bernard wouldn’t be at the château, and I was convinced that I’d never see her again.

  I stopped atop the Piz Rots at just over nine thousand feet and teetered at the edge of a huge cliff. Was I just being paranoid? Did the sender of the video intend to confuse me, keep me off-balance so that I wouldn’t know who to trust? But why? Maybe it was to hurt my chances of making the delivery, as was now the case. But who would want that?

  Abruptly the carousel of questions ground to a stop. I heard my stomach growl and realized it was completely empty and that I was dehydrated. When I reached into my pack for a bar, though, I couldn’t stand the thought of food. I sucked water from the hydration bladder and sprayed it over my face in an attempt to think clearly. Cathedrals of white peaks went on forever. Otherwise nothing was clear.

  The map indicated that from here I could dip down and cross into the Val Chamins via a mild slope face, and then into the Val Maisas, which would allow me to reach my final destination camouflaged by trees. I’d been traversing the highest, most shielded terrain in order to avoid detection from ski or border patrol.

  As I crested the sidewall of the first valley, a voice called out from behind me. I turned and it was a border patroller on skis. He waved me down to where he stood, tucked on the side of the valley wall. He was a good ten-minute haul from me, I determined, and the ridge was all cliffs except at the top. I’d have to keep skinning upward for another twenty or thirty minutes to enter the next valley. Meanwhile, he’d simply enter from below and be ahead of me.

  Gathering speed, I polled through the snow along the ridgeline and then launched off the cornice. Sailing over the cliff faces, the backpack drew my weight onto my heels. I rotated my arms, rolling up the windows, in an attempt to shift my weight forward. Twenty feet was not enough to regain my balance and when I landed the tails of my skis hit the snow first. For some reason, one ski didn’t pierce the snow and my leg ricocheted into the air, hyperextending that knee.

  A moment later, lying prone as if in a bathtub, I brushed enough snow off my face to finally breathe and a needle of pain gouged my knee. It would be a bitch to slog through the deep snow with a bum knee, especially now that I had to move fast.

  Halfway across the valley, with still no sign of the patroller, I was in such paralyzing pain that I stopped and stuffed my ski pants with cold snow. It took five valuable minutes before my knee was numb enough to carry on.

  It got me to the far side, only to hear the patroller call out. He was about a hundred yards below, shuffling toward me at an upward angle. If I didn’t move faster, he’d cut me off before I got up and over the valley wall, where the forest would hide me.

  I bit down on the hydration tube, chomping on it more as a way to eat up the agony than for the water. I lurched up the wall. When I looked back, he was about fifty feet away and I felt my body give out. The air seemed too thin, no longer filling up my lungs, and the more I gasped for oxygen, the more fuel I expended, a vicious cycle. Looking back to check on the patroller’s progress again was out of the question and I had to fight the surreal desire to just plop down in the snow and sleep. The white, smooth contours seemed to bounce clipped, echoed voices at me. Will I go to jail for my sins? Is this the true price of making art? Anaïs will be drinking champagne in Corsica while I’m sleeping on a cement floor. I was a fool, a dreamer, all the more ridiculous because after proving the naysayers wrong I’d managed to sabotage my redemption.

  I tipped forward, expecting to collapse in the snow, before I realized that I’d staggered up and over the sidewall of the valley and was now careening down the backside toward a cluster of trees.

  Dodging them, shards of pain rippled from my knee to my hip, up my ribs, and all the way into my armpit. It was keeping me alert and I fed off it.

  When I came through the first cluster and into a short clearing, my body tensed with the anticipation of the patroller leaping out and tackling me. The next hundred yards was like taking blind curves on a single-lane road, braced for a head-on collision at any moment.

  It never came, but the anticipation severed my last nerve, and I was a bedraggled, starving, pain-gripped, angry dog by the time I reached the town. The town was ugly, littered with duty-free shops and rabid consumers. I tried to blend in, which was laughable. If the patroller or one of his partners spotted me, I had no way to run, and in my delirium I planned on whacking and stabbing him with my poles to get away.

  Just as the sun set, I found the Ferienwohnung apartments on the outskirts and knocked on number three. The door opened and I shoved the metal tubes into the arms of a red-haired, Irish-looking maid. She did a double take, unnerved by my cantankerous face, before she shut the door.

  In case the patroller was still looking for me, I hobbled through the back alleys and side lanes all the way to the bus depot. Collapsing in a chair, I put my leg up on the armrest, sustaining dirty looks from the fastidious Swiss and French folks.

  seventy-six

  “You have the time, mate?” I heard someone ask, and I opened my eyes.

  It was Mr. Beck—Hal’s enforcer, the figure from the motorcycle—his square, chiseled face bearing down at me.

  “It’s a little after five,” I said, groggily.

  He nodded and moved off to the bathroom of the bus depot.

  Oh shit, I thought. Is he here to let me know that Anaïs has betrayed me? Or is it about the Schieles?

  Moving my leg down from the armrest, a shrapnel of pain erupted under my kneecap. I clenched my jaw, gnashed my teeth, smothering the groaning noises coming out of me, and walked to the men’s room.

  The urinals were all empty. Behind me, one of the stall doors opened. Mr. Beck motioned me past, toward the next one.

  Beneath the dividing panel appeared a manila envelope. I picked it up off the floor and opened it. A ticket to Los Angeles from Charles de Gaulle on Air France, and a thin stack of hundred-euro notes.

  “What’s this for?”

  “It’s time to go home, Nathan.”

  “Does that mean the plan has changed?”

  “Yes. Once you arrive in Paris, don’t go to the château; go straight to the airport.”

  I flipped through the stack of money. “Has something gone wrong?”

  “No. But there’s a fifty-fifty chance the man Bernard works for will try to terminate you.”

  I stared into the toilet bowl. I was so physically taxed that my adrenaline only gave a little jump and it made me feel half-dead already. “Ain’t that grand,” I muttered.

  “Nathan,” I heard him say.

  “What?” My eyes on the bowl.

  “Move with the crowds. Don’t find yourself alone. Got it?”

  “Why don’t I just go to Zurich and split from there? It’s a lot closer.”

  “No, for the next eighteen hours we need you to follow the routine.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re tailing the delivery boy right now. He left Samnaun about twenty minutes ago, headed in the direction of Bern. The prince’s plane landed there this morning. We think the exchange will happen tomorrow morning. If it doesn’t, we’ll contact you with a new plan.”

  “Okay,
” I sighed because at any moment they could sick the police on me and possibly ruin my life. “But Hal promised to get the portraits for me if something changed. The most important one is the big canvas in the last horse stall.”

  “We got that covered,” he said.

  It felt like a lie. I was an expert now.

  “Hey, is everything all right with Anaïs?” I said, cringing with trepidation. “I can’t get a hold of her.”

  “Everything’s peachy as far as we know.”

  Another lie.

  “No, it’s not,” I told him. “She’s not calling me back.”

  He paused. “We had to let Bernard and company see the body.”

  “What the hell,” I said, outraged. “You guys were supposed to wait until I was long gone.” But I was also relieved—it explained why she wouldn’t be answering her phone, giving me hope that I was wrong, that she hadn’t set me up like a bowling pin.

  “We had to, mate. His disappearance was giving them cold feet. They thought he’d been arrested or was ratting them out.”

  “Isn’t this worse?”

  “No. We placed him in the Seine along the Left Bank. Distraught husband returns to the city and, drunk, slips and falls into the river. He’s not a rat. They proceed.”

  “Where’s Anaïs?”

  “With her mother in Paris.”

  I punched open the door. The adrenaline was flowing now, spiked with panic. Using the throbbing in my leg to beat down the fear, I limped out of the bathroom. The bus was leaving in a few minutes.

  seventy-seven

  The bus moved slowly down the twisting mountain road and I wanted it to go even slower because when it was time to disembark, I’d be exposed. If they came for me, I wouldn’t even be able to run, just hobble along some dark street while they chased me down.

  An hour later, it was time to transfer to the train for the main leg of the trip, and I bought a bottle of ibuprofen and a phone card in the station—there might be a couple calls I’d want to make that I wouldn’t want Hal to overhear. Otherwise, if I followed Mr. Beck’s instructions, I would be out of the country before the shit hit the fan, I told myself, settling in my seat.