Round the slalom course and thickest at the bottom, naturally, there was a thick crowd and a lot of excitement. Journalists gabbled, the public gabbled, the loudspeaker blatted. Radio relays were being set up and tested, the television cameras were hamming more than their fair share of space, officials were running about being important with little pieces of paper. The electronic scoreboard was racing lunatically through figures that didn’t belong to anybody at all, and the usual regiment of busy little dwarfs was trotting around like ants, pegging in ropes to keep the public back, dumping stretchers at strategic intervals, and staircasing laboriously up and down the twisting track between the gates, patting and fussing at the snow.
Outside the wooden huts with the banners the helicopter pilot was having a flirtation with the dextrose-tablets girl and enjoying a free cup of Ovaltine. And the reporters were dashing to and fro buttoning people, microphones brandished in their hands and hanging on their ties, cables up their sleeve and trailing behind them – they were extraordinarily good at not tripping, flicking the loose festoon of cable out from their feet as a woman flicks a long evening skirt.
There was a lot of tension. Last big competition of the season and this run would decide the combination prize. The Austrian girls had fought for a tiny edge yesterday in the downhill run. Would the French girls steal it back with their better slalom technique? Everybody knew, and was busy explaining why to his neighbour. Van der Valk didn’t know, and didn’t care. He had found a red Fiat station wagon parked, and was using his spare pair of eyes as well.
Anne-Marie, with her skis on her shoulder, was talking to one of the reporters, whom she knew, it seemed – she knew everybody! She walked back towards him.
‘Ten centimetres fell during the night, but married well to the old stuff. Good powder, very fast piste. Icy patches – they think it’ll favour the French girls. I feel like having a go – I’m going up to the top.’
‘I’m staying here for the moment.’
‘Please yourself,’ she said.
He turned his glasses on the group climbing into the télé-phérique; there was a fur hat that had caught his eye. Just such a Cossack hat wore the tanzmariechen. It might be, and it might not be: he couldn’t see properly. There was a man with her; might not be – and might be: it was as simple as that. He tucked the binoculars into the top of his zip and took large kangaroo hops down the hill, sliding and plunging. At the bottom it was well trodden; he ran fast.
The crowd had thinned when he got there, and he did not have to wait. The man and the woman were long gone, and Anne-Marie was gone – on the ‘bucket’ just in front of him. How slow it went – wobbling, vibrating, humming. The sun came out suddenly, amazingly warm in the gripping, biting air.
‘That’ll put oil on the piste,’ said a man next door to him. They had an excellent view of the slalom course, where the first try-out runner was slithering down in a chain of controlled skids.
He leapt off with no skis to wait for or encumber him and ran towards the top of the piste. Yes – there was Anne-Marie, kneeling, doing something with the binding on her ski; he could see her flipping the catch as though she were not quite satisfied with it. Half a dozen people were waiting their turn to schuss, at the top. Van der Valk stumbled through the fresh snow: a runner pushed himself off with an over-ambitious leap, and flew very fast about thirty metres before his arms started to windmill and he hit a tiny hump, lost both legs, and disappeared splendidly into a bank of loose soft stuff left there to make happy landings for the unwary. A knot of boys and girls standing at the top split themselves laughing. He reached Anne-Marie; she had her skis on and as he came panting up she did an about-turn conversion.
‘So you did come. Watch me schuss.’ They both saw the fur hat together. He gripped her sleeve; two more skiers launched themselves gingerly on the piste, leaning carefully forward, keeping their skis flat: she shrieked.
‘Jean-Claude. Jean-Claude.’
He saw the man at the same second; he had been masked by a fat fellow who had let his skis down, done a neat oblique glide, and dug his edges in a couple of metres further. Jacques Anquetil’s nose!
Marschal looked only for a second. He saw his wife, and his eye rested for perhaps seven-hundredths of a second (timed by the electronic scoreboard) on Van der Valk. He moved with no hesitation. He put a hand on the fur hat’s back, and launched her on the slope. Letting his skis down the way the fat man had done he started a skid, gathered his batons hanging by the wristloops, and went. With professional ease and speed; it was him all right.
Anne-Marie, her batons planted, was tucking her hair under her cap, panting.
‘Go on, damn you, go. Catch them up, do anything, stand on your head, but hold on to him. I have to talk to him, I must. Now go, what are you waiting for?’
Marschal had caught the girl up before the turn, swung well out to give her room, and passed her. She was going very carefully; it was too fast and steep for her but she was ski-ing steadily. Anne-Marie went, with a long tearing sigh of the skis, very fast, holding to the line, leaning right over to keep her balance on the turn.
And he could not ski! It had been the same ever since he came here … He ran back madly towards the lift, stumbled, skated, and sprawled full length. He ran on muttering furiously, covered in snow, his shoulder hurting.
One of the mountain ‘dwarfs’ was on the ski-lift; an old man with the thick mountain dialect he could not follow: a puckered, withered, tough little man in a hooded coat too long for him. ‘Have a sturz?’ he chuckled. Van der Valk dusted the snow off himself and cursed silently. His shoulder hurt. A cheer came up in the thin mountain air from the slalom course.
‘We’ll flip those French girls,’ said the old man.
‘Time, fifty-nine eighty-three,’ blatted the loudspeaker, but the name was drowned by the echo.
‘Who for, who for?’ squeaked the old man. ‘That’s fast, that’s very fast.’ Van der Valk stared numbly.
They had almost reached the bottom when a second bigger cheer went up.
‘Fifty-nine eighty-one, new best time,’ bawled the speaker.
‘Is it one of ours?’ yapped the dwarf, tumbling excitedly off the landing platform.
‘Sure it’s one of ours,’ muttered Van der Valk, limping, his shoulder hurting. ‘What d’you think it is, a Martian?’
He loped along the beaten path wretchedly, his heart pounding with the altitude. No fur hat, no nose to be seen at the bottom of the piste, no black trousers and sweater, either. Where had the three of them got to? Three hundred metres further the helicopter’s motor coughed and roared. As he looked it tilted clumsily, lifted off, and turned, gaining height: clouds of powder snow flew about wildly in the wind of the rotor. It roared directly over his head; someone had had a sturz.
He saw Anne-Marie, then, sliding down the last easy slope of the piste. He ran stumbling over to her.
‘Where are they?’ stupidly. ‘How is it I’m ahead of you?’
‘I had a sturz,’ ruefully. ‘A royal one. I looked at the girl instead of the track. Served me right. I flew out at a curve. Lost both skis and all my breath. You had one too by the look of you. Hurt your shoulder?’
He wasn’t looking. A new commotion was growing there, on the slope below the crowd watching the finish of the slalom. A knot of people were gesticulating and shouting; a policeman in mountain boots was running heavily, roaring crimson at another, below.
‘Someone’s pinched the bloody helicopter.’
Anne-Marie laughed, a clear soft laugh with a silver edge of malice in it. Van der Valk would have laughed too, at any other moment; it was the sort of joke he appreciated. It was just this mountain air, and the shortage of breath – he rubbed his shoulder resignedly. Tintin was here … It took that; the combination of skill and cheek that comes from having a lot of money. Jean-Claude had taken the girl with him: the tanzmariechen was gone.
Up above, the sixteen runners of the top group had finished the first leg
of the slalom.
*
He went back alone to Innsbruck, rubbed liniment on his shoulder, changed, and had time to think what a fool he had made of himself. Floundering in snow …
Anne-Marie had shrieked. It had not been a cry of recognition; nor astonishment; nor anger. It had been a cry of warning. There was only one thing that she had not known, and that was Marschal’s determination to keep the girl with him. Jean-Claude had seen that Van der Valk had no skis, but that his wife had. The girl had had perhaps thirty seconds start – not enough for a skier as strong and experienced as Anne-Marie. By himself, Jean-Claude could have taken his red Fiat. He had chosen to wait for the girl. In those few seconds – perhaps a minute – he had taken the extraordinarily reckless decision to pinch a helicopter belonging to the Austrian government.
It was not, of course, such a risk as it looked. Nobody pays attention to a helicopter any more; he could put it down anywhere and get a half-hour start. The Austrian police, who were not getting themselves very wound up about a missing millionaire in Amsterdam, nor a missing shopgirl in Köln, would not even be bothered about their helicopter, once they had it back. They would put it down to the exuberance of some student.
He found a bar that was pleasantly dark and stuffy after the blinding white of the snowfields and ordered cognac gloomily. He had made a mess of this. There were a lot of things that were clearer than they had been, at least. That much was gained …
Jean-Claude Marschal was bored. He had a boring wearisome life, and found it tedious past belief. That was plain to grasp: the man simply found everything too easy. He had vast amounts of money, and was good at everything. He could win things without trying, help himself to everything he fancied without effort. If he dropped a sixpence, he found half-a-crown lying on the path. There was not much that gave him pleasure, not even vice, not even crime. To run off just because he was sick of everything was quite plausible.
There was more to it. He had been afraid. Canisius had put the police on his track. He had not known that, but he had guessed it. The second he had seen Van der Valk he had known and recognized the menace. Canisius had something on him. A crime – well, perhaps. One did not know. Perhaps an escapade of years before. Suppose – as a hypothesis – he had once had a hit-and-run accident, or something of the sort.
But why, suddenly, should Canisius have become such a menace as to force him to try and escape? If the man had a hold on him, why was it urgent at this precise moment?
Anne-Marie knew a good deal about this. She had not, at first, taken it very seriously, but when Canisius had rung her up and told her … He might have been a scrap premature with malicious triumph. When Van der Valk had phoned to tell him about the German police he had been a thought too quick to imagine he had his young friend Jean-Claude Marschal over a barrel.
Now, thought Van der Valk, I am in a cleft stick, for Anne-Marie, who is badly frightened now that she has seen the light, has made a very crude panicky approach: she offered me money, lots of money, she offered to sleep with me – just to forget about Jean-Claude.
And Canisius, for reasons I do not know, will press me all the harder to chase Jean-Claude, harry him, worry him into something still more imprudent, still more criminal. It certainly looked as though Canisius had known what he was doing when he manoeuvred the police into taking an interest …
The sensible thing to do is to go back to Amsterdam and make a very carefully worded report, stating just why I think we’re being carted and why, at the very moment when I could undoubtedly take Mr Marschal by the collar, I prefer to do no such thing; I don’t know enough.
There are several powerful arguments against this. First, it might look a little too much as though I had been sleeping with Anne-Marie – or worse. I have already committed the imprudence of taking a sweater she bought me!
Second, bigger reason was the tanzmariechen. Not only had she been charmed away from her home into what must seem to her a very romantic and glamorous adventure, but Marschal was, for some reason known only to him and perhaps obscure even at that, not letting go. He was cornered now, and frightened. Might he do something even more reckless than pinching a helicopter?
Van der Valk could understand the attraction a girl like that might have to a man sick to death of expensive and sophisticated women: he could understand the excitement of hiding her, smuggling her out of the country, being chased by the German police, taking her off to the winter sports. To someone who found it as difficult to get excited by anything as Marschal, to someone with Marschal’s reckless, incurably romantic nature, that was understandable.
But did he love her? How seriously did he take her? Was he aware that she was caught up in a tangle she could not possibly imagine? She certainly loved him furiously, uncaring: for him she would sacrifice anything. But he – he was sacrificing an innocent girl on the altar of his own boredom.
That was the flashpoint – whatever Van der Valk did, he had to get little Dagmar Schwiewelbein back to her distracted parents in Köln. Heinz Stössel was right, Marschal was of no importance: the central figure in this tale was not Jean-Claude the millionaire, nor Anne-Marie de Meeus, ex ski-champion, nor Canisius, regional manager to one of the world’s biggest financial trusts – but an eighteen-year-old shopgirl who had put on a Cossack hat and high boots to show off her pretty legs and face at the carnival. Van der Valk drank off his cognac and asked the waitress for a couple of coffeebeans to chew.
*
Mr Bratfisch was sitting at his desk telephoning.
‘Quite right … no damage? … well then, there’s no more to worry about, is there? … yes of course, but that can wait till this evening … Right you are.’ He put the phone down, picked up a forgotten cigarette smouldering in his ashtray, and grinned at Van der Valk.
‘Well – found your millionaire yet?’
‘Found your helicopter yet?’ Eyebrows went up.
‘So the wind lies there, does it?’ He got up and went to stare out of the window. ‘Clouding up, and we’re going to get a föhn. Make the snow sticky. Now if that had happened yesterday we’d have won that slalom.’
‘I was out there, but I had other things on my mind.’
‘That French sister act again. So it was you. He ran away when he saw you?’
‘He doesn’t know me. He may have guessed what I am. His wife came here, supposedly to help find him. I was with her. She shouted when she saw him, in a stupid way. We were at the top of the piste. He was on skis and I wasn’t. I can’t ski anyway; I had to go down on the bucket. He took a remarkably drastic way of getting out.’
‘That’s of little enough consequence. We weren’t worried. You can’t hide a thing like a heli. We’ve just found it. Took us two hours searching, for all that; it was quite cleverly hidden, at the top of a valley in a stand of pines. Might have taken us longer, but we took another heli to search for the first one – since last year, we have two.’ He threw away the cigarette, picked up a half eaten piece of bread and cheese, and bit into it with strong white teeth, brushing crumbs negligently on to the floor. ‘The one irritation was that I got no dinner.’
‘And?’
‘Yes, I admit, this changes things. He have this girl with him? – this one the Germans were flapping about?’
‘Yes.’
‘Bit exaggerated all this, isn’t it? I mean I don’t know why you’re after him, but when he sees you he grabs our heli. That’s in itself not serious, is it? I mean there’s no larcenous intent, so we’re left with joyriding. Is a joyride in a heli any more dangerous or serious than the same thing in a sports car? But for him to do a thing like that makes me think there’s more in this than meets the eye.’
Well, this Bratfisch might be casual, but he was not stupid.
‘I don’t know myself what he thinks I’m after. My instructions were to find him and learn why he chose to vanish from his home. He may have something on his mind I know nothing of. The point is that he feels himself cornered and he may
do something more reckless than joyriding. He has a young girl with him who is innocent of anything at all.’
‘Mm,’ Bratfisch tapped the white teeth and hitched a bit of cheese out of some corner. ‘We’d better go and look. And you must come, since you can recognize this chap. We’ve got no proper description. I may say I meant to sound lukewarm when you came to see me last night, because it all sounded a bit too hole-and-corner, and I hadn’t had this chap signalled, or anything. Still – I can act on the signal Köln sent me about the girl. You do understand why I didn’t regard that as serious? We had a smash and grab in a jeweller’s last night, right here in the street. Impudence, that. It’s been taking up most of the resources I possess. Still, we’ll see what we can do now,’ leading the way downstairs.
He had a car outside, one of the old BMW saloons that are extremely solid and a great deal faster than they look. ‘Give me a description and I’ll broadcast it,’ he said with a finger flicked at the radio transmitter. ‘Mark, this valley’s not wide, and they may quite likely be still in it, since the roads are being watched. They left the heli at the head of the valley and skied down.’
*
After a bit of boy scout work they found the chalet where Marschal had been honeymooning with his tanzmariechen: there was nobody there. It was furnished with the ordinary things one finds in all mountain chalets. There were plenty of expensive things strewn about, from roses – flown into Innsbruck by plane at that time of year, and forced quite likely in Holland or Hyères, costing the earth – to a fancy Japanese camera which, alas, had no films in it. It was hard to say whether they had been back there or not. They had made little effort to take anything with them, and certainly no real luggage: the clothes that had been bought in München – and in Innsbruck! – were lying about everywhere. A careful search failed to turn up anything remarkable.
The King of the Rainy Country Page 8