The Secret Agent

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The Secret Agent Page 5

by Francine Mathews


  He even taught her, during a stint in his cavernous subterranean gym, how to fall into the arms of a would-be attacker and flip him onto his back with a force that drove the breath from his body.

  “We’ll have to leave switchblades for another time,” Oliver said regretfully as he picked himself off the mat with a lithe spring. “I’ve no one whose neck I can put to the knife at the moment. You’ll have to rely on the C-clamp.”

  The C-clamp, she learned, was a rigid cupping of the fingers in the shape of the letter C. When jammed, hard, against an assailant’s Adam’s apple and shoved upward, it was capable of killing a man in three seconds. Oliver declined the experiment, however.

  “Use the mannequin,” he instructed with an airy wave at a life-sized Ken doll dressed in the requisite black. The mannequin emitted a high-pitched, mind-grating signal akin to a triggered smoke detector, setting nerves on edge and adrenaline pumping. Just to shut the thing up, Stefani lunged, grappled and shoved for all she was worth. Ken toppled backward with a satisfying thud, her hand still dragging at his plastic windpipe. It was unfortunate, she thought, that she had been forced to silence the only other person she’d seen in days.

  Inverlaggan House was empty of life except for themselves. This was technically impossible, of course— someone prepared Stefani’s meals and tidied her room. But except for a distant figure she once glimpsed raking leaves, the Highlands landscape was stripped of casual acquaintance. Either Oliver preferred to live in the illusion that he was self-sufficient, or his staff was under strict orders to give her a wide berth. Was this for her safety—or theirs?

  Like everything to do with Oliver Krane, the atmosphere of Inverlaggan House—part James Bond, part Bertie Wooster—intrigued and amused her in a way that nothing had for months.

  Every evening she curled up in her massive four-poster bed with a daunting collection of facts about Max Roderick: one hundred forty-three pages of names, dates and events in a very public life. It was, she thought, like studying an issue of People magazine devoted entirely to one person. The researchers at Krane’s had included photographs and video stills: Max as a boy of ten, dressed in a blue blazer that looked two years too small for him, standing with bowed head by his mother’s open grave. There were few other mourners: but Joe DiGuardia, the eternal ski coach, had his hand on the boy’s shoulder. Max as a gawky teenager, his smile forced and his right knee in a massive brace. And finally, a much older version, the features of the face sharpened and intensified by years of discipline: Max looking vaguely hostile as he stared down the camera lens.

  She glanced at the caption: 1999. The waning days of his World Cup career, after the failure to qualify for the Nagano Olympics. He was strolling through Gstaad, arm in arm with a spectacular blonde in a silver fox coat. Suzanne Muldoon.

  Stefani flipped through the dossier and found the woman’s entry. Muldoon, Suzanne—the only real love in Max Roderick’s life. A downhill skier ten years his junior. She had shared his sport, his passion, his bed, for three years—and self-destructed in a bruising fall during a World Cup final at Innsbruck. Knee ligaments detached in four places. She had been flown directly to the Steadman-Hawkins Clinic in Vail, where surgical miracles were routinely performed; and then—disappeared.

  Muldoon parted from Roderick in an acrimonious and public battle over culpability for her injuries, the Krane dossier noted. She sued for damages, citing deliberate and reckless endangerment due to relentless pressure to train beyond her physical capabilities. The suit was settled out of court. Muldoon never skied competitively again.

  Stefani reached for a pad of paper and pen she kept on her bedside table, and wrote in jarring red ink: What else does S. Muldoon know about Max? Will she talk? Why has he been alone ever since?

  The piercing gaze of a hawk haunted her dreams.

  Krane had suggested, back in New York, that Stefani’s Scottish interlude would be a sporting one, and despite the wealth of information he managed to impart, they spent most of each day outdoors, in the bracing chill of a Highlands March. The shooting box, as he called it, sat in the southern end of the Great Glen, a flooded rift valley that split the Central Highlands from northeast to southwest. The high lonely reaches above Loch Lochy were sparsely populated, barring the occasional hiker toiling through the glen. The place was as different from Manhattan as a place could be. Half of Oliver’s purpose in bringing her to Scotland, Stefani guessed, was disorientation.

  Inverlaggan had been built on a rise above the loch, some five hundred feet from the shoreline, with a clipped green terrace and a field of boulders strewn in between. It was a pre-Elizabethan edifice that resembled a castle more than a house, with crenellated battlements and a moat that had long since been drained and graveled. A tower house, Oliver told her, in Scottish parlance—a thirteenth-century keep that had grown wings during the Renaissance. It had witnessed the Jacobite defeat at Culloden, not forty miles to the north, and harbored Bonnie Prince Charlie during his flight to the Continent; and when the tartan and the bagpipe and the clans were banned as a result of that failed revolt, Inverlaggan passed to English owners. Allied soldiers were garrisoned in its fastness during the Second World War, but since then, the place had fallen into disrepair.

  “This whole bit of country round about Loch Lochy was used for commando training in the last war,” Oliver said as he tramped down the wild western shore of the lake in his dark green Wellies. “There’s a memorial to them in bronze over at the foot of Spean Bridge. Parachute drops, live ammo, stealthy raids by night—assassins and decoder rings. Perfect setting for Krane and Associates’ corporate training center.”

  “Walt Disney could not have done better,” Stefani agreed. “But why the Highlands? Are your people Scottish?”

  “Good Lord, no!” he replied in tones of shock, and heaved her booted foot out of a boggy patch with one hand placed deftly at the elbow.

  “The will,” he said two nights later, as he handed her a few sheets of paper, “direct from Roderick’s lawyer, Jeffrey Knetsch.”

  The first thing she noticed was the date: February 12, 1967. Jack Roderick had drafted his final testament a little over a month before he disappeared. She shuddered involuntarily. She had never written a will. She was certain she would die if she did.

  The bequests were brief and to the point. A few minor monetary gifts to persons of multisyllabic Thai names that meant nothing to Stefani—a collection of Bencharong porcelain to “my houseboy, Chanat Surian, in recognition of his faithful service”—and three hundred shares of privately held stock in the Jack Roderick Silk Company to “my beloved friends, the Galayanapong family.” Midway through the first page, the document came to the point.

  I, John Pierpont Roderick, being of sound mind and body, leave the residue of my estate and all my worldly goods and chattels, including thirty percent of total shares in the Jack Roderick Silk Company (“the Estate”) to my son, Richard Pierce Roderick. In the event that Richard Pierce Roderick predeceases me, the Estate shall go in equal parts to his heirs and assigns.

  She glanced over at Oliver Krane. “Richard Pierce, I presume, was nicknamed Rory?”

  “The traditional diminutive of Roderick. Correct.”

  “I thought he died after his father.”

  Oliver shrugged. “Who’s to say? Jack Roderick wasn’t declared dead until a full seven years after his disappearance. No one can fix the time or place our Jack slipped this mortal coil. But Rory’s death was witnessed—by rather a lot of his flying buddies. So the Estate ought to have passed directly to Max.”

  “I see.” Stefani frowned over the document in her hands. “But this will was lost for more than thirty years? And then just … resurfaced?”

  “Jack Roderick’s sister Alice, who must have been ninety if she was a day, died quietly in Delaware last year. Her grandchildren subsequently cleaned out the matriarchal attic. In an old mailing tube—the sort that’s used for rolled pictures—they found the blueprints of a house. Jack’
s house in Bangkok. The will had been slipped between two elevation renderings. He must have dropped it on the pile of blueprints by mistake, and sent it on to his sister.”

  “He doesn’t sound like the sort of man to do anything by mistake.”

  “He was the soul of deliberate cunning. A.B., Princeton Class of ’28, then University of Pennsylvania for graduate work in architecture.” Oliver would know Jack Roderick’s date of birth, his Social Security number, lifetime traffic violations and each specific of his Decree of Divorce—no matter how long ago they had occurred. “Our Jack was something of a Brahmin. A trust-fund boy. Spent the Great Depression squiring socialites around the New York party circuit, then dove into the war and the OSS. Given the funds he started out with and his success in Bangkok, there should have been a tidy little sum awaiting his heirs. But at his death, there was exactly three hundred and twenty-seven dollars in his bank account, plus or minus a few cents. Odd, what?”

  “Think he had an account offshore?”

  “He left no instructions to that effect.”

  “Maybe they were lost, too.” Frowning, she flipped to the will’s final page, where the signatures stood out in bold black ink. Jack Roderick had got his witnesses, at least. In that respect the will looked valid. “Who are these people? George and Richard Spencer?”

  “Pair of Englishmen. Father and son. Roderick hired George in the early fifties to man the Bangkok store, and the Spencers gradually acquired twenty percent of the shares.”

  “Who owns the rest?” Shares—the trading power of percentages—was something she understood.

  “The weavers,” Oliver told her.

  “The Weavers?” she repeated blankly.

  “Silk weavers. Entire families, usually, who produced the hand-loomed goods. Jack Roderick Silk is a cottage industry, you know—or was. That was Roderick’s brainstorm: place the power of production into the hands of the artisans. Pay them for whatever they produced. Offer them shares in the total profits. Give them incentive to control their own industry. They called him the Silk King in Bangkok but he’s a Bloody Pinko Communist to you, and don’t you forget it.”

  “How is the stock presently disposed?”

  “Most of the original weavers made fortunes, sold their shares and set up in direct competition with Jack Roderick Silk; the cottage system is defunct; the company is centrally organized. George Spencer is dead; son Dickie is President and Chairman of the Board of Directors and holds fifty-one percent of stock. Spencer is Jack Roderick Silk.”

  “Never gone public?”

  “Too small-time.”

  She waved the papers in her hand. “So how much is this legacy worth to Max?”

  “Zero,” Oliver answered cheerfully. “The three-hundred-odd dollars is long gone. When the Thai government declared Jack Roderick dead in 1974, his silk shares reverted to the company. Old Man Spencer snapped them up. To tell you the truth—with the house and the art collection in the hands of the Thais, and the silk company in Spencer’s control—I’m not sure what Max is fighting for.”

  “And yet—you describe him as a man in the grip of an obsession. What does he really want? His grandfather’s house? Or the truth of what happened to Jack Roderick? And why are you so uncertain whether Max is capable of murder?”

  “Call it respect for what is brutal in the blood,” Oliver returned. “Jack Roderick—however charming, however patrician—lived and died by his wits. His son was beheaded at the hands of his enemies. Max is heir to both men.”

  Stefani thrust herself restlessly out of her chair and stood near the fire, her expression hidden by the fall of dark hair. “There’s nothing in that will to cause murder. No reason to strangle a prostitute in a hotel bedroom. No reason to send your friend Harry to Kowloon and run him over with a taxi.”

  “Then perhaps those deaths have nothing to do with Max’s Thai business,” Oliver suggested. “But his sudden appearance in Bangkok a year ago, armed with his grandfather’s last will and testament, coincided with a good deal of bloodshed.”

  She glanced at him swiftly. “You think someone wants Jack Roderick to stay dead?”

  “Why else have him disappear?”

  “That presumes the disappearance was deliberate, and not of his choosing,” she countered. “The man walks down a driveway in ’67. He might have got lost in the Malaysian jungle. He might have met a tiger and been devoured.”

  “But if the fact of his death is sufficient reason to murder two people now, after thirty-five years—”

  “It wasn’t a tiger and it wasn’t the jungle. Oliver,” she said bluntly, “what do you want me to do in Courchevel? Prove Max Roderick a murderer—or a saint?”

  “I want you to live high and drink deep. I want you to hire the best goddamn house in the Three Valleys and live like the French expect wealthy Americans to live. Wear outrageous clothes. Throw parties for strangers. It’s high season, ducks: ski your ass off. Invite Max for dinner and breakfast. He knows I’m sending you and he knows not to blow your cover.”

  “My cover?”

  “You’re an old friend. Or an ex-lover. A cousin’s discarded wife. Be a one-night stand he picked up years ago in Austria, if you must—who’s to know whether it’s true or not, in the middle of the French Alps? But you are categorically not to behave as though Krane and Associates is on your mental map. To suggest as much might be deadly. Don’t even call me unless you use a public box and this number”—he handed her a small slip of paper inscribed with his tiny handwriting—“and identify yourself as Hazel. Phones are the very worst where security is concerned.”

  “Hazel,” Stefani said mistily. “Of all things. Like a fat old terrier snoring on the rug. I believe you’ve grown fond of me, Oliver.”

  “Hell, darling.” He planted a kiss on her wrist. “I invented you.”

  5

  Jacques Renaudie swept the snow from his stone doorstep that morning with deliberate strokes of his short, muscled arms, a cigarette dangling absently from the corner of his mouth. He wore a blue fleece vest over a wool sweater knitted two decades ago by his wife, who had decamped for Paris last summer in a desperate bid for all she had never possessed in youth. Jacques sent her money from time to time and washed the sweater himself when necessary and did not ask his wife when she might return. He was a methodical man with a thatch of grizzled hair and a coarse-skinned nose. Although it was already past eight o’clock, he had not yet shaved. He had drunk heavily of schnapps the previous evening—a foul liquor he would never have touched had his wife been snug in the room upstairs. A faint odor of charcoal from the bar’s open fireplace still clung to his skin.

  Jacques’s eyes were very blue and they were focused now on the hard, bright crystals at his feet. It had snowed during the night—dry powder, a near-perfect fall despite the lateness of the season—but he was considering not the untracked pistes of the Sommet de la Loze above him but his youngest daughter, who was destined like her mother for unhappiness. He had slept fitfully after closing his bar at two A.M., and by six o’clock in the morning when he gave up the battle, and rose with aching head to make coffee and send his ancient Bernese out into the drifts, Sabine had not yet returned from the party in Courchevel 1850. It would be that Austrian, Jacques decided—the young star of the ski team who had taken gold at Salt Lake, a boy with the slow stupid grin of all those who are named Klaus. Sabine would make a fool of herself just to prove she had value in some racer’s eyes, even if it was not the one she really wanted. Jacques spat suddenly into the new snow and raised his eyes from his stoop.

  It was then he saw the blond-haired man riding the platter lift up the length of Le Praz’s main street, his gear strapped to his back and his helmet in his hand. Out of bitterness Jacques stood motionless, the broom idle, debating whether he should call out to this one, who was up before all the others in that exhausted town. He might offer him coffee. He might ask for the truth about Sabine and the Austrian named Klaus. But he knew Max Roderick would alre
ady have taken what was sufficient for the morning, and would refuse the day-old bread in Jacques Renaudie’s larder. Max did not linger in doorways, growing cold when he might be skiing. He saved his conversation for the longer twilight of spring and summer, when the Haute Savoie emptied of the hungry-faced women from New York and Paris with their flowing fur coats, their brass-colored hair. By May the door to Max’s workshop high on the hillside stood ajar each afternoon, and the effort of a hike through the meadow and wildflowers was rewarded with cold beer from the barrel he kept in the stone cellar of his old Savoyard farmhouse. There was a time when Sabine herself had begged to accompany Jacques, with no greater reward in view than to study Max’s bent head in silence as he manipulated the images on his design screen.

  To see him thus, profile turned toward the summit, new-minted skis making twin tracks through the powder, was a source of relief. The rumors, Jacques thought, must be wrong. Max had strapped a pack to his back along with a length of rope, a small ice pick and an avalanche beacon; he was intending, then, to venture off-piste. Risky, perhaps, so late in the ski season; the winter had been unusually mild, and the cornices in the high peaks trembled in sunlight, the avalanche cannon boomed at dawn and the thunder of sudden snow slides roared through the town most afternoons. Nothing Max had not heard before.

  Jacques shrugged at nobody in particular—perhaps an image of his wife he still carried in his mind. If Max Roderick was in the very midst of Le Praz by eight-fifteen, then he had already shot five hundred meters down the length of Jean Blanc from his home in Courchevel 1850. Nobody but a true man of the Alps skied so purposefully, and with so much gear, at this hour of the morning. Unless …

  Unless Max had spent the previous night in Le Praz itself, and was only now crawling back toward Courchevel 1850 and home. And what was more likely? Jacques’s expression darkened. Max Roderick would never take the piste into Le Praz if he intended to ski the backcountry, as his gear suggested. Had he awakened in his stone house in the early hours of morning, and glanced at the fresh powder blanketing the peaks, nothing would have kept him from the tram that led to the heights of Saulire, the tricky demanding couloirs and the broad, flat bowls where he loved to test his skill and exhaust his strength. Jacques watched Max disappear from sight, feeling a flare of rage toward the man. It was only a matter of time before Max abandoned Courchevel like all the rest; he had merely pretended, after all, to be one of them.

 

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