‘Stump-legged, stump-witted, about as much sex appeal as a glass of stale beer. Always the same.’
‘Uh?’ There were perhaps ten thousand people, perhaps more, but another couple of thousand made no odds in the huge white valley. A football stadium would have been easier, but there one would have no liberty to walk about. They had started at the top of the hill and worked down: the crowd was strung along the four kilometres of the Olympic Piste and with a little patience one could look at everybody. Around the finishing line at the bottom were no more than two thousand people, perhaps; he had his binoculars on them.
‘Always the same,’ she was going on. ‘The really good skiers, the amusing ones, with a nice style and a bit of flair, get a bad starting number or have a sturz, and something wins with a style like a jeep, all tit and elbows.’ Yes, he thought, vaguely, the one he had liked best was the girl who had come slashing down giving herself shouts of encouragement, gone too far out on a curve, done a skater’s step on an icy patch and with a huge dismayed howl cabrioled into the crowd like a rabbit. A flurry of anxious hands had helped her up, and she had sat shaking with laughter.
There were still riders coming down, but a ski competition is won and lost by the first dozen, and the fanatics, the ones who were interested only by the performance and not by the spectacle and the atmosphere, what the Germans call the Stimmung, were already trickling down the slope at the bottom back to their autos. He was looking at one pair in particular, perhaps four hundred metres away and fifty, forty below, a rifle-shot, say. That, now, could perfectly well be Marschal and the tanzmariechen; the girl, in a big white fur hat, was in the right clothes for the part; the man was loading skis on to the rack of a red station wagon. The trouble was that a thousand pairs looked exactly the same. He could not see the nose at all, let alone the face; he held the binoculars steady, waiting for the man to turn, when the glasses were snatched out of his hand: Anne-Marie had suddenly noticed what he was doing. The red auto backed with a swirl and shot down the valley road, hidden at once by an awkward clump of pines. He took the glasses back leisurely. It had been a Fiat twenty-three hundred.
‘Mark,’ he said, contentedly. He had them! They were really here! He felt exactly as though he had drunk a tumbler full of champagne, straight off. His feet were no longer cold and his eyes no longer vague. He glanced at her; she had put on an indifferent face.
‘So.’
‘I couldn’t really see whether it was Jean-Claude or not,’ she said. ‘He was already stooping to get in – whoever it was.’ It was as obvious a lie as ever he had heard.
‘The Austrian police can pick that auto up in half an hour.’ He had no intention of telling the Austrian police, but he wanted to see how she would react.
‘Don’t be such a damned idiot,’ furiously. ‘If you call the police the whole damn thing comes out in the open, just for that silly girl. You can’t do that. Anyway you don’t need to. They’ll be here tomorrow, for the slalom. You can watch out for them – it’ll be easy.’
‘It’ll be even more easy to get them roped in straight away. They could just as easily have seen us – you, I mean.’ He knew something would have to give, now.
‘You fool, you fool – can’t you see that’s exactly what Canisius wants?’ He was walking rapidly down the slope; she was having to hurry to keep up with him. ‘Stop.’ He stopped. The auto she had hired was parked in the crowd, perhaps fifty paces from where Jean-Claude had left the red Fiat. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Please come back in the car with me. I want to explain something to you. Will you just not do anything precipitate till you’ve heard what I have to say?’
‘Very well.’ She unlocked the auto; there was the usual stuffy, tinny smell. It was an ordinary hire-service Rekord. There hadn’t, officially, been a car left to hire in the whole of Innsbruck: she had got one though. She got things done the way Jean-Claude got them done.
It had been sunny all morning, but it had clouded over now and was going to snow again. Yesterday’s fresh snow was lying thick on the whole valley, but the road had been kept free and one could drive fairly fast. She was driving a little too fast, but well. ‘Not much of a car is it, by your standards?’ She shrugged. ‘They’re all useless things. I’ve had them all: I know. I’ve had Ferraris and Maseratis, I’ve had a Hispano nineteen-thirty, with a solid stork and an ivory steering-wheel. You get there just as well on a scooter.’
A downhill girl! Or no – he was changing his mind about her: it was more Jean-Claude who was the downhill type. Calmly picking up a girl like that and not bothering his head for a second whether her family would be worried, whether the police would be notified, anything: someone else would have stopped to think. Would he himself not be searched for? And the girl – people were not going to just sit gazing at the fact that an eighteen-year-old girl vanishes. Yet he had not bothered, just come carting off here to Innsbruck and amused himself ski-ing, without a care in the world? That made no sense. There was something that drove him: he wanted to get somewhere fast. Anne-Marie knew about that.
The competition skiers call the downhill run ‘the hole’. You jump into it, and once you go there is nothing to stop you but the crash into the loose snow at the edge of the piste, where you can as easily break your leg or even your neck as find yourself panting, shaken, covered in snow, either laughing like that girl today, or crying, like three others that had gone off at exactly the same spot. You know nothing and you think of nothing. You simply get there, on nothing but your muscles and your instincts, at anything up to a hundred kilometres an hour. The top-class men average over ninety along the whole course; the girls hardly less. Competition ski-ing itself is a nonsense, because anybody at all can win, since conditions change in a minute, and the biggest championship can be won by one hundredth of a second. But the fact of going as fast as you can, stopping for nothing, on a course every metre of which can put you in hospital for a year, is enough, for in no other sport are you so close to the magic heart of life. He had seen that, this morning.
No, Anne-Marie was really more of a slalom girl. There are two ways you can run a slalom. You can wildcat it, hoping you hit nothing, or you can run it cunning, taking good care you hit nothing. For those frail stalks with the little fluttering pennants turn the darting iridescent dragonfly back into the shabby laborious caterpillar. They are made, even, of a special flexible plastic, for at the speed of a slalom nowadays a wooden or bamboo stick would be too dangerous.
To him, Anne-Marie was on a slalom course whose flags he could not see. All the movements were like the ski-jargon, meaningless. What was the point of the jet turn and the light christiania, the wax and the fix, the skate and the schuss, when a thick fog of not understanding lay over the whole maze? When he could see no flag?
She stopped outside the Kaisershof, and jumped out without looking at him.
‘Come on up to my room. I want to talk to you in quiet, and the place is full of gibbering journalists.’
She had to pause a second for her key. Two of the journalists were waiting for telephone lines.
‘I tell you a lightweight has a natural advantage on that kind of gymkhana course,’ one was saying.
‘What about the long schuss at the end, then?’ countered the other. ‘Her ten kilos extra picked her up damn near a second on that stretch alone: I clocked her there.’ Just so, friends.
Anne-Marie kicked her boots off, flung her anorak at a baroque gilded chair, and picked up the telephone.
‘Send up a bottle of whisky and two glasses.’ She looked at him. ‘Sit down,’ abrupt. She walked about, and looked out of the window, where the snow was beginning to fall again. He lit a cigarette peacefully. She was going to slalom, and he was going to guess at the flagstaffs!
‘I’m going to ask you to stop. To leave Jean-Claude alone altogether. To go home and forget him. I have a right to ask that. I’m his wife, after all. The rest is pure formalism. Don’t bother about Canisius: I’ll deal with that.’
‘It’s not quite that easy. Canisius didn’t hire me like a private eye.’
‘But you can’t arrest him or anything. He’s committed no crime.’
‘As to that, I haven’t been told,’ drily. ‘I’m a police officer, acting under instructions. Those instructions were simply to find him and establish if possible what he is proposing to do.’
‘And why do you think you were given those instructions?’
‘I don’t need to think about it. My superiors were satisfied that they were justified. We already have evidence that they were justified. Taking a girl away from her home sounds harmless enough. She’s under age, though, and she comes under the care-and-protection statutes. There exist in all European countries criminal charges that apply. Never heard of détournement de jeunesse – corruption of youth?’
She poured out a big glass of whisky, and drank it straight off, as though to fortify herself in a struggle against obstinate imbeciles.
‘Look – when I saw you in Amsterdam I could see you were not a foolish man. You don’t believe all this claptrap. You know perfectly that it’s a pretext.’
‘Certainly. From the first moment I was handed this tale I began asking myself why a man missing from home – an occasion for a police operation that is the simplest routine – was made a reason for sending an inspector of the criminal brigade, which is what I am, personally to try and find him. Without any of the usual steps being taken. No notice to Interpol, no notice to any of the administrative branches whose job it is to check things like hotels. Very unusual. In fact I’ve never heard of such a thing being done in all my experience.’
‘And why, do you think, was it done?’ Her voice was silky; her eyes gleamed, probably with whisky. She poured another one into her glass and, as an afterthought, filled the second glass too. She came over and handed it to him; he took it and drank some. Very good whisky.
‘I should say,’ steadily, ‘that a very large quantity indeed of money had something to do with the case. Mr Canisius and his friends are perhaps nervous that your husband may do things that look irresponsible, in the eyes of the world. They might be alarmed at the thought of his being able to run all round the world playing duck-and-drake with what everybody agreed is a colossal fortune.’
‘Have you sympathy with that point of view?’
‘I don’t have sympathies; I’m getting paid.’
She shook her head over him, sadly.
‘Use your intelligence. Try to understand.’ He drank some more whisky: he was enjoying it very much.
‘People v/ho have a great deal of money – a very great deal – are not easy to understand. They do things that people like me find confusing. I am trying to see why a man like Mr Marschal suddenly leaves his home without telling anyone. Why he goes to Köln at carnival time and runs off with a pretty girl in a gay uniform. Why he then sails off to the winter sports and has no cares, apparently, but to look over this year’s crop of ski-girls.’
‘You are paid to have no sympathies,’ she said. ‘Here, have some more whisky. Very well. I have, as you remark, a great deal of money. I will pay you to try and be less stupid. You want me to tell you why?’
She had already finished her second glass of whisky. She picked up the bottle, brought it over with her and bent over him to fill his glass up. Van der Valk understood at that moment that an extremely good-looking woman in ski-clothes, drinking whisky in a hotel bedroom with mountains outside the window, is a very tempting object, as tempting, perhaps, as a girl of eighteen at carnival time, dressed in the costume of a tanzmariechen.
‘Suppose I was to explain all this to you in bed?’ she said gently in his ear. She smelt of healthy woman, and faintly of sweat and perfume. There was the smell of expensive wool from her sweater, of ski-wax, of leather, of whisky. It is the world’s most seductive smell.
‘Canisius, and the clan, are very clever, you know. Take my clothes off.’
‘I can remember the same woman saying to me in Amsterdam “I am quite Spanish about such things.” Well, it just so happens – so am I.’
‘You think that Canisius has something on Jean-Claude – or on me? Don’t you?’ She was behind him now, with her arms round his neck. ‘You want me to tell you about it. I will show you how Spanish I am – if you like.’
He stood up, took the bottle from the table where she had put it, filled his glass, took a long drink, took a big breath of the scented air.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I would like to know several things. I think that Mr Marschal could tell me most of them. I would like to meet him. I want to meet him more than ever. If he’s planning to go and see the girls slalom tomorrow, I’ll be watching out for him. If he’s not there, I’ll turn the whole of Austria upside-down and keep shaking till he pops out. The German police, he may not have realized, are watching all the borders. They want this girl back. So do I. Going to bed with you would be very nice, and there’s only one thing I want more. To talk to your husband. That, for me, is the important thing. I’m a policeman. What Canisius thinks or does is of less interest to me than what Jean-Claude Marschal thinks – and does.’
‘Very well,’ she said after a moment. ‘Very well. You may be right. We’ll see – tomorrow.’
‘I’ll see you tomorrow morning,’ easily. ‘Thanks for the whisky.’
*
The waiter sat him at a table where two journalists were still drinking coffee, brushing crumbs negligently and explaining that there was rather a squash and tables for one were not easy to come by. Anne-Marie would have got one all right … He didn’t mind; he would pick their brains and enjoy it. So would they; everybody likes explaining things to the starry-eyed beginner. No lack of openings either; the shoptalk was continuing undiminished.
‘Of course she’s unbeatable downhill – just that which makes her hopeless between the sticks. Not just too heavy – too crude – she slams the door.’
‘Please explain to me how this thing works,’ said Van der Valk through a mouthful of bread. ‘Just weaving between sticks – it’s always seemed dull to me.’
‘No no no, just the contrary,’ with enthusiasm. One pushed all the coffee-cups away and started to lay a course out with lumps of sugar. ‘It just looks like a slope, huh, with snow on it. But apart from all the bumps and hollows, there are lateral slopes from side to side as well, see. Laying the thing out they’re dead cunning. The runner shoots out of one gate here, see, and finds himself going sharp downhill and tilted far over to the right. So just to be nasty they set the next gate facing acute left pointing back uphill – so … no natural line to follow … you’ve got to pull up against the plunge of your own speed and weight, turn into a fresh line right across the tilt of the terrain, and find the exact angle to thread the next gate – remember five centimetres the wrong way and your ski hooks in the pole – without losing the rhythm. It’s tough as hell.’
‘And they change the rhythm’ – the other was anxious to impart knowledge too. ‘They give you a dogleg stretch like he says, gates fairly far apart, and just as you’re getting the hang of it they squeeze you into a very tight serpentine bit where the gates are only three or four metres apart instead of ten or twelve, and the runner that can tango like a dream gets buggered doing the twist.’
‘Chicken or veal cutlet?’ – the waiter, clanking coffee-cups on the tray.
‘Veal.’ He knew those hotel chickens, trotting tinnily off their assembly line. …
‘Come on Harry – don’t forget the crumpet.’
‘Do it no harm to wait a little,’ said Harry.
‘Anschluss,’ explained the other. ‘Norwegian anschluss. We teach them to slalom and they teach us to ski-jump, ha.’
‘Giant slalom – intervals of thirty metres,’ added Harry in a lecherous way. ‘Bye now.’
Yes, Anne-Marie’s slalom course was quite as wickedly laid out. Why the sudden change of front? Why had she suddenly come har-ing over to Innsbruck? Why had she suddenly started heading him off and wishing h
im to lose interest, after she had accepted the notion of his looking for her husband, back in Amsterdam?
Yes, Canisius had told her. Fair enough – normal that Canisius should ring her up, reassuringly. We’ve got news of him; don’t worry, whatever is biting him we’ll get it straightened out. But it hadn’t been like that. Canisius, making malicious hints about Jean-Claude being in Innsbruck with a pretty young German girl, had said something that had bitten her deep, and he wasn’t at all sure that it was just jealousy.
It must have been a shock to her. He thought of her words ‘I am the only woman who has any real meaning for him’ – and that little spat of rage she had shown over the coffee-cups had not been mere pretence. But was it only jealousy? He wasn’t so sure. She had made too abrupt a volte-face – was trying now too crudely to head him off and send him to play with the Norwegian girls. ‘I couldn’t really see if it was him or not.’ What was bad about his meeting Jean-Claude, talking to him, sorting out his tanzmariechen and sending her home to Mum? Surely Anne-Marie could have no objection to that!
Could her behaviour have anything to do with Canisius? Something he had said – or hinted – or implied – or spoken about in a gloating kind of way?
Van der Valk didn’t know. He went to ring his wife up, before going to bed.
*
There was a terrific queue for the téléphériques. A great many people were going up to look at the slalom course, which had been laid out in two halves down and along the slopes near the downhill track, and the Olympic Piste itself was open again to the public this morning, after being closed for a week for the competition. Several people with their skis on their shoulders were going to go up and see what they could do on the downhill run, excited and emboldened by the exploits of the girls yesterday. A good few of these were nowhere near skilful enough, nor experienced enough, to run a very fast and difficult course, and quite a few might well pay for biting off more than they could chew – with a broken leg or a dislocated shoulder! The Austrians were prepared for that, Van der Valk noticed cynically. They had the helicopter parked at the bottom of the piste; if anybody had a real crash, they used it to whisk the patient back to hospital, and of course, in case one of the competition girls had a bad ‘sturz’ in the slalom – that happened too!
The King of the Rainy Country Page 7