The Secret Agent

by Francine Mathews

  The chill dissipated. “Tell me.”

  “He’s wallowing in red ink, and he’s made no less than thirteen calls to Bangkok in the last six weeks. I found that singularly odd, given that his firm has no Thai clients.”

  “Calls to whom?”

  “The Ministry of Culture. The possibilities looked enticing, until I learned that Mr. Knetsch sits on the board of the Metropolitan Museum.”

  “So?”

  “The Met is gearing up for a pièce de résistance. Two Thousand Years of Southeast Asian Art, or some such, with pieces loaned from all over the world.”

  She felt a pang of disappointment. “He’s been talking museum business. Perfectly legitimate.”

  “The project could explain his chumminess with Mrs. Lee-Harris. She’s arranging for the shipment of several Buddhas from the Hughes Museum.”

  “Public relations.”

  “Exactly. Liaison is Ankana’s middle name. She works the networks, worldwide; none better. She’s also desperately short of cash. That seems to be a bond between her and Knetsch. Neither has a penny to spare the pauper.”

  “Are they feeling pressure, Oliver?”

  “Were I in either’s shoes, I should be wincing from pain.”

  “Then they’re vulnerable.”

  “To blandishments, blackmail and suspicious sums delivered in unmarked bags. All for services rendered, of course. Either might have sold our Max down the river. But there’s no proof of it. Does Knetsch still think you’re unsavory?”

  “He tried to get me fired.”

  “Oh, well done, heart! Jealous of Max’s luck, do you think?”

  “Meaning …?”

  “The medals—the money—the adoring young beauties? All landing on Max’s doorstep, while Jeff nurses his bum leg and ferries his dull kiddies to Sunday school? He’d have to be a saint not to repine. Not to wish their positions reversed. And he’s not a saint—”

  “—He’s a lawyer. I suppose it’s possible,” Stefani mused. “Oliver, did the Met ever do business with your late friend Harry Leeds?”

  “Now that is a question I had not thought to ask.” Speculation knifed the urbane voice. “So Max is flying to Bangkok? Still determined to unearth old bones?”

  “He wants Jack Roderick’s House. That’s the root of his obsession, Oliver—to him, that house stands for everything he’s lost. His childhood. His innocence. The time when he could trust other people without question. He wants it all back. The inheritance is just a proxy.”

  “One would think,” Oliver retorted with an edge of anger, “that when good men have died in the name of silence, silence would be observed. But no. We will have our truth, regardless of cost. I shall have to consider what this means for my clients.”

  “Oliver—whose side are you on?”

  “My own, naturally.”

  That night Max carried her into the old stone house high above the glittering tram and deposited her in front of the soaring glass windows. He had rigged a tent out of parachute cloth and rappelling cords, a fairy dome suspended from the ceiling.

  “When I was a kid in Evanston,” he told her, “we used to sleep out in the backyard on summer nights. My father kept a tent there, and he’d lie in it for hours. He loved the sound of rain pattering on canvas. I can remember his hand on my rib cage, his utter stillness. The rain dripping down. All of us, my mother included, safe inside.”

  She looked up into the soaring yards of cloth. “Max, what happened to your mother?”

  He took a moment to answer. “You’d have to know what she was like.”

  “Before 1967?”

  “She idolized Jackie Kennedy. Wore pillbox hats. White gloves. Had a matching bag for every pair of shoes. She spent weekends at the Naval Academy and was married under an arch of crossed sabers. She joined the Junior League in Evanston, and wherever we moved after that—from port town to training base—she sent recipes for the annual League cookbook. From the Kitchen of Anne Roderick.”

  “And after?”

  “She lost faith in Camelot.”

  “So did Jackie.”

  “Things she’d believed, all her life—that her country was wise, that heroism meant something, that God looked after his own—meant nothing once my dad was murdered. She went in search of a different type of meaning: psychedelic drugs, Eastern mysticism, free love. She tried to reinvent herself, as though if she were a different person she wouldn’t feel the pain.”

  “She should have thought of you.”

  “I don’t blame her for it.”

  “She should have lived for you.”

  “But I failed her,” he said brutally. “Take good care of your mother—that’s what Dad said on the pier at Coronado. And I failed. I failed them both.”

  “Bullshit.”

  He stared at her wordlessly, the tram lights reflected in his eyes.

  She reached up and pulled the tent down around them like a shroud.

  Somewhere in the middle of the night she awoke to find that she was in his bed, and that his hand was resting lightly on her hip.

  “Tell me,” he commanded, “about the miscarriages.” “Why? Because it’s a tidbit Jeff’s spy didn’t have?” He got up and roamed around the room. He was comfortable in his skin—in the body that looked, in the snow-refracted moonlight, like chiseled marble. He reached for a black case that stood in one corner. The viola.

  He turned the instrument in the soft glow from the window. Then he picked up the bow and raked it across the strings.

  The feral notes shuddered through her body; an elegy for the night and its beauty, for the fleeting illusion of love. She lay motionless, the sheet drawn tight across her breasts, as though the slightest movement might break the spell of his playing. And when the bow fell and silence surged in around them, she said to his back, “They died inside me every time, no matter how hard I tried. I’m not a woman who’s capable of sustaining life.” “Bullshit,” he said, and bit the protest from her lips.

  12

  The March sun was just lifting into the sky when Max Roderick left his house. He snatched coffee for breakfast from a bar in town and took the first tram up to the top of Saulire, filled this Sunday with a handful of the one hundred and sixty passengers it usually carried. Courchevel was known for many things—its terrain, its crowd of beautiful young people, its state-of-the-art lifts—but not for its early risers. Heading out into the cold half-light of morning to carve first tracks was a habit Max had kept from years of hard training in the United States, a habit that marked him as a professional in this European playground.

  He was carrying a pair of skis he had designed himself and intended to test that morning while he was alone and able to focus. The skis were fairly short for a man of his height, with flaring tips and narrow waists, designed for tight turns in the steeps and for whipping easily through the bumps. The bindings rested on a platform raised roughly half an inch above the ski’s surface at the waist’s midpoint—an innovation borrowed from downhill racers, who had been wedging their boots higher for years, now. The raised footbed encouraged a swift transfer of weight from one edge to the other, and thus, faster turns.

  Max ignored the skiers in the tram: four tourists gawking at the spectacular abyss beneath the swinging cable; a couple locked hand-in-hand in the vast car’s far corner; an elderly man nursing a foam cup of something hot. The latter had his eyes fixed on Max as though he recognized his face from Olympiads gone by—from Albertville, just a few valleys and a decade away. He was holding a pair of skis Max had designed three years before. Max allowed his gaze to drift past the man to the rock wall looming near the front of the tram. His spirits surged as they always did when the mountains seemed ready to fall into the fragile car.

  It was eight-fourteen in the morning. By noon the chutes that riddled the backside of Saulire would be filled with cries of ambition and disappointment—but for this hour, at least, he would have them to himself. It was the last day of his ski season; the afternoon
would be devoted to packing, and tomorrow he and Stefani would be bound for Bangkok. He closed his eyes and saw again the roiling brown waters of the Chao Phraya, surging through its banks; the elegant lines of the ancient teak house set into its garden; and dimly, as through the smoke of years, the tall man with the white bird on his shoulder. Stefani would love Bangkok—the bold ugliness, the striving squalor. She would wear nothing but silk. The damp climate would turn her black curls into a mass of wild softness, restrained but never tamed by a sprig of orchid-After three good hours of skiing the steeps, Max decided, he’d head back to the old stone house for lunch.

  She would be there—it never occurred to him that she might not. He had learned more about her in the past week than she realized; the truth about himself he had learned long ago. To strike the delicate balance necessary between two such strong tempers and wills would never be easy—but he recognized his luck in finding her. For the first time in months, something had gone right.

  The tram slid into the cable house; the doors flew open. Max stepped past the attendant, clicked into his skis and skated three hundred feet toward the trailhead at the far side of the peak. The chutes of Saulire were vertical trenches cut into the mountain by eons of wind and weather. The deep snow that blanketed the gentler pitches elsewhere on the mountain was a scant dusting here, more ice than powder. Bare rock thrust outward, granite dark, the length of the couloir.

  He wondered, for an instant, how Stefani would ski them—and was brought up short at the thought. He was no longer alone. The sensation was a strange one. In the midst of even his most demanding affairs—even with Suzanne—he had remained essentially solitary. Was it this loss—this invasion—that she fought, rather than him?

  He settled the straps of his poles firmly in his palms, tightened his helmet and chose his line.

  Like jumping down a ladder, whispered DiGuardia, his first and forever ski coach. Except you’re doing it with boards strapped to your feet. Trust your training, trust your equipment. Nothing else is real.

  It was the mantra he’d learned by heart, years ago, the half-uttered prayer to whatever god governed ski slopes. He studied the rock face falling away beneath him, bent his knees and sprang into the air.

  Twelve feet below was the square yard of snow he intended to hit. The skis took the full impact of his two-hundred-pound frame, and with a metallic crunch that was audible for a fraction of a second, the right binding sheared completely off.

  The ski flipped twice and fell in a gleaming arc some seventy-five feet below.

  Max stabbed at the rock surface with his pole—fell forward over his remaining ski—and tumbled like a stone.

  Jacques Renaudie skied only ten days a year. He never started earlier than ten o’clock, so that the rising warmth could soften the ice into something like half-dried cement, which tugged at the undersides of his skis so gently that his speed was broken without the slightest demand upon his aging thighs. He hated the layers of clothes dictated by January and February, and ventured up the mountainside only when he could slide down it wearing a heavy sweater and jeans. He rarely skied more than two hours at a time, taking the best of the mid-morning and leaving the flat light of afternoon to the foolish and the avid. He was a Frenchman and therefore a connoisseur— of the pistes, as of everything.

  In his day, Jacques had been a hellbent daredevil with a talent for bruising his way through a mogul field faster than any other man in Courchevel. He had worked the competitive bumps circuit at a time when the sport held little glamour and no Olympic slot. If he dallied in his middle age, it was in part because his knees could no longer support the punishment he longed to deal them. Thus two solid hours on the steeps of Saulire this warm March morning: a prize for good behavior.

  He was worried about Sabine, who once again had been out all night and was threatening to join her mother in Paris. He thought suddenly of that woman’s face—the American Max Roderick had picked up off the runway—with its milk-white skin and cunning black eyes. The Snow Queen, Jacques called her; the mythic witch who froze men’s hearts to ice. How Max could turn from a girl like Sabine—

  Jacques swore under his breath. He stood at the mouth of his favorite couloir, one the locals called La Trahison. Betrayal.

  A lump of ice the size of a walnut skittered past his ski tips and bounced off the rock walls of the chute, careening downward. He followed its fall idly enough while he adjusted his gloves, and then his eyes narrowed. Far below him like a discarded doll lay the figure of a skier-motionless against the rock-Jacques went rigid, then craned his head for a better look. The suit was bright yellow, the helmet dark blue. A man, from what he could see at this distance, and facedown, his legs splayed at an unnatural angle.

  Jacques’s eyes traveled upward, found the ski poles twenty meters above, lying like bent hairpins. The skier had fallen, then, at the very mouth of the chute.

  Mon dieu, Jacques whispered. Le pauvre con hadn’t stood a chance.

  There were rotors in the dream, a persistent hacking. Stefani scowled in her sleep and felt the coldness where Max had lain. She sat up abruptly in bed.

  Through the windows she saw the tramline rising to the heights of Saulire—and something else: a helicopter beating its way steadily toward the peak. A Medevac chopper. Some fool had attempted terrain he couldn’t handle.

  “Max?” she called, and swung her legs to the floor.

  The house threw back the stillness peculiar to empty space. She glanced at the clock on the bookshelf under the window. Ten-forty-three. Jesus—how had she slept so late?

  She brushed her hair out of her eyes, took his robe from its peg and went in search of coffee.

  It required three men traversing the rock face in crampons and ropes to reach the body where it lay. Forty minutes after Jacques Renaudie sounded the alarm—nearly three hours after the fall—the head of the Courchevel ski patrol bent down by his side and felt for a pulse in the neck.

  “Il vie,” he said tersely. He lives.

  The helmet alone had probably saved him; but from the angle of his head the three men feared for his neck. In the best of circumstances they might have encased him in a foam body shield and flown him immediately to Geneva; but he lay wedged into a sloping cleft on which only one other person could crouch. The last thing anyone wanted was a second casualty among the ski patrol. And yet, the victim must be strapped somehow onto a stretcher with skis, for transport to flatter terrain where a helicopter could land.

  The head of the rescue team glanced grimly at the sheer concave wall of the chute rising six stories above. He had traversed the face with the stretcher strapped to his back and had found nowhere that three men, much less a helicopter, might stand. He glanced below, and saw that perhaps ten meters farther down, the chute widened. It would have to be enough.

  “Two of us will have to turn him,” he barked, “get him onto the stretcher, and slide him carefully to that spot. It’s the only way.”

  His colleagues, roped together and then to the ropes secured at the couloir’s mouth nearly fifty meters above, stamped their crampons into the ice. One drove the blade of his ice axe into the surface of the chute and clung to it while the other inched downward to help un-strap the bulky stretcher from the team chief’s back. The chief stabilized the victim’s head and neck as his colleague slowly log-rolled the inert form onto the gurney. The face was ghastly with bruises and cold; but it was unmistakable.

  “Merde,” the chief muttered. “C’est Roderick.”

  “Max Roderick?”

  The name echoed against the stone. It sped upward to Jacques Renaudie like a well-placed bullet as he stood shivering in his sweater and jeans. He had removed his skis and propped them crosswise in the snow near the orange rope that cordoned off La Trahison. He heard the name, stood stock-still an instant, then shouted back down into the chute.

  “C’est Max?”

  “Oui.”

  “Il vie?”

  “À peine.”

  Ba
rely.

  They were sliding the stretcher with great difficulty, now, to the point in La Trahison where the piste widened. Their progress was agonizingly slow. From above, Jacques could see nothing but the helmet and the dead weight of the man, a murderous burden to the team attempting to save his life. There was the stretcher poised on the bare ledge. The head of the ski patrol waved wildly to the chopper circling at a little distance; it zoomed nearer, the rotors beating painfully against the thin air. The ski patrol attached the stretcher to the chopper’s line; all watched as it swung upward, into the gullet of the craft.

  Jacques stood there, freezing, until the helicopter had ducked its nose and dropped turbulently away into the sunny March sky; then he stumped slowly back to the tram head. There would be a phone. It was his duty to call.

  13

  The monstrous titanium cage the doctor called a “halo” was bolted to Max’s blond head. Stefani had arrived after the hideous procedure of driving spear-shaped pins into his skull; thankfully, he was so deeply medicated with morphine that he never flicked an eyelid as two surgeons worked simultaneous torque wrenches on the halo’s bolts. Thirty pounds of pressure per square inch, at the thickest points of the skull, until his head was suspended in the cage and the mobility of his neck was arrested. He had fractured two cervical vertebrae—the C1 and C2—and lost all neurological function in his extremities.

  “What does that mean?” she asked the trauma specialist who spoke to her in the waiting room.

  “He’s experiencing quadriparesis.”

  “He’s completely paralyzed? From the neck down?”

  “For the present. It is far too early, madame, to predict the outcome.”

  “I don’t understand. If Max broke his neck—”

  “Monsieur Roderick suffers from concussion, he fractured two vertebrae, his spinal cord is bleeding,” the doctor explained. “He cannot feel his arms or legs, he has no movement in them—but the cord itself is only bruised, not severed. That is reason to hope.”