by Pierre Rey
The terrace was illuminated by floor-level lights that showed everyone's legs while leaving their upper bodies and faces in darkness, and spotlights converged on the helicopter, catching it in harsh, raw rays. The pilot was keeping his craft hovering some fifty feet above the roof, and on the terrace itself stood a wicker gondola entirely garlanded with lilies and roses. It was connected to the helicopter by a fine steel cable that snaked up into space and got lost in the darkness.
"Let the newlyweds through!" chanted a chorus of guests.
Those on the stairway hugged the walls to make way for Renata, whom Kurt was propelling forcefully ahead of him. By the time they got to the roof, she was livid. Her hair was frying wildly in the wind, and she looked around with dismay at the scene she herself had conceived, unable to believe she had been able to imagine anything so absurd and provoking. Sensing her hesitation, Kurt tugged her after him and moved forward between a double hedge of humanity cheering them on. He clenched his teeth, anx ious to have it over with, apprehensive about the dizziness he knew would grab him by both temples the minute the gondola took off into the cold night. The main thing was not to let on to all these nabobs who were probably waiting for some failure of nerve on his part: that young upstart who was marrying the heiress.
"Renata! Renata!" shouted Chimene at the top of her lungs, trying to be heard over the rotors. She was grabbing her daughter's arm with all her weight, trying to slow
her progress. From the crowd, jeering laughter could be heard.
"She doesn't want them to be alone for their wedding night!"
‘Let her get in!"
"Chimene, go with them! They need a chaperone!"
And all the guests, most of whom were carrying their own bottles of champagne, started chanting, "Chap-e-rone! Chap-e-rone!" between swigs.
"Renata, don't go! Don't get in that machine! Please, do it for me. I had a dream that was an evil omen!" her mother was muttering to her.
Kurt shoved his mother-in-law away, and she landed in the arms of the front row of spectators, who greeted her with jokes in varying degrees of good taste. Kurt jumped bravery into the gondola, only to become terrified at bow tiny it was. All he would be able to do would be to lie down on the bottom of it, bide his head, and puke up his guts.
Then two things happened simultaneously. In the midst of the awful confusion, Chimene wrenched free and grabbed Renata, who was just about to vault over the flower-decked side of the gondola. In a far corner of the roof there was a man with a red spotlight, which he was to turn on as a signal that the couple were aboard and ready for takeoff. When a guest handed him a glass of bubbly, he inadvertently let his light go on.
A red beam snaked up into the night. Up above, the pilot was hard put to keep his machine in one place be cause of the violent gusts. Half-blinded by the other spot lights playing on the whirlybird, he was more than a little relieved to see the red light at last. Obeying instructions, he gracefully lifted his machine some thirty feet or so, and the gondola floated into the air—with only Kurt aboard!
The shouting of all the guests drowned Kurt's scream. But the pilot couldn't hear any of it. Dazzled, bothered by the lights, he swung his machine around, faced in the di rection he wanted, and moved forward, the gondola dan gling just above the rooftops of the City. "The bridegroom's flown the coop!" someone shouted. Nonplussed, her moth er still dragging her back, Renata saw Kurt swinging his arms, hovering between heaven and earth in the flowery gondola that vanished in the night. There was some hesi tation on the terrace. Sobered by the cold, all the guests were now looking at Renata. She forced her mother's hands away, shoved back her father, who was trying to re strain her, and made a path for herself through the crowd of wedding guests. Deaf to all their voices, she rushed down the stairs.
In the deserted street, Renata looked about for a taxi. She wanted to get to the airport at the same time as Kurt. She was too properly brought up to jilt him now, in spite of the sudden scorn she felt for him. Then she re membered Lando's car.
"Renata!" Homer -Kloppe called from the doorway of the house, his stocky silhouette sharp against the light
She stopped still for a second.
"Listen to me, Renata," her father called as he came toward her.
"Later, daddy, later!"
She ran to the corner, slipped behind the wheel of the Beauty Ghost P9, and found the keys where Lando had said they would be.
When Renata started the motor, she looked around for the button that would raise the convertible top. She couldn't locate it, and she turned the heater on full blast, reversed for a few feet, and swung out practically on the hubcaps down Bellerivestrasse. She drove along the banks of the Limmat, turned sharply into Ramistrasse, zoomed across Kunsthausplatz, and then turned right again into Zurichbergstrasse. As soon as she got beyond the mid-town traffic lights, onto the highway, she gave it the gas, her long hair flying in the wind.
She planned to talk to Kurt right away. Obviously they had made a mistake, for which neither of them was to blame. He would understand.
As she came out of a sharp turn, flying along at a neat seventy-five miles an hour, she heard a heavy click, and the wheel began to shake in her hands, no longer re sponding. She didn't have time to panic. All she could think was, I'm going to be late for Kurt.
The heavy car swung to the left and skittered sideways on the road with the speed of a cannonball. Renata, des perately hanging onto the collapsed steering wheel, jammed on her brakes. The tires shrieked and the front wheels of the roadster hit a low wall that was hidden in the grass on the shoulder of the road. The car bucked and be gan to fly over the wall. Renata found herself lying flat on the ground, looking into the sky. She could see the two tons of P9 slowly swinging around over her head. Then the steel hulk came down and crushed her.
For Intercontinental Motor Cars, this was the ninth accident caused by a defective steering column in one of the Beauty Ghost P9s that had come off its assembly lines. Of the nine, this was the fifth involving a fatality.
Part Three
Dr. Mellon was unobtrusively testing Gabelotti's pulse.
"You feel all right?" he asked. "Hell, no," said Don Ettore.
At fifty-four, Gabelotti was taking his maiden flight Before takeoff, Mellon pumped him full of tranquilizers, which resulted in a bitch of a headache. His every muscle tensed as he desperately held the armrests of his first-class seat and he mentally reviewed all the plane crashes that had occurred during the past few years. He tried to concentrate on the newspaper, but he couldn't make sense out of it. Why did the captain make such ominous an nouncements over the loudspeaker? 'We are now cruising at an altitude of thirty-five thousand feet..."
"Richard," said Gabelotti to his doctor.
"Yes, Don Ettore?"
"I'm not feeling very good. Gimme another one of those pills."
"You've had more than enough already."
"I don't care."
"Well, if you insist..."
Richard Mellon rang for the stewardess to bring some water. He had had three years of psychiatric experience before specializing in the illness of the affluent and he un derstood what fear of flying meant Gabelotti was paying him the tidy sum of twelve thousand dollars to hold his hand during this three-day trip to Europe. At those rates,
he could afford to have someone else look after his other patients—no questions asked.
'This might help you 'sleep," said Dr. Mellon.
"But I don't want to sleep! I’ll dream I'm in a plane and I'll wake up in a cold sweat"
That's a good one!" The doctor laughed apprecia tively. "But don't worry. We'll be in Zurich in three hours."
"If I live that long," Don Ettore lamented.
For the tenth time he checked to make sure the barf bag was handy in the seat pocket. Dying might not be so bad, but throwing up in public was more than he could face.
Chimene took charge of everything. She used all her husband's powerful pull to keep her daughter's body from be
ing taken to the morgue. Instead, Renata was brought home to Bellerivestrasse.
A phone can had taken Chimene away from a group of friends who were talking about Kurt Heinz's amazing solo departure on his honeymoon. Like the others, she had pretended to find it a huge joke, and she was still laugh ing when a voice on the phone informed her that Renata had had a serious automobile accident Beside herself, she hurried over to tell Homer, and they slipped away from the reception to rush to the scene of the accident wild with anxiety.
Homer's first shock had been seeing the Beauty Ghost The second was seeing Renata's body. The police had not yet moved her. Her neck was broken and her chest crushed by the metal frame of the windshield.
At 4:00 a.m., unaware of the tragedy, the wedding guests were still carousing in the grand salon. When the double doors opened to reveal a group of black-clad men bearing Renata's body on a stretcher, the crowd went limp. The men moved through a sea of half-empty liquor glasses to Renata's bedroom, Chimene, her face glistening with tears, leading the way. Homer Kloppe brought up the rear, his lips pressed together, his face a mask of grief.
Chimene lost no time in waking an undertaker, who sent over a team of his best people. By dawn Renata lay in her bed, dressed in the salmon gown that should have been her wedding dress, her face in repose, as beautiful in death as she had been in life. At each of the four corners of the bed a candle burned, illuminating the kneeling fig ures of Homer and Chimene who were weeping silently. Manuella had joined them briefly, but, overcome by the stillness of the lovely figure before her, she left the room to bear her pain alone.
Around eight o'clock the door opened to admit Kurt Heinz. The Kloppes did not even glance at him as he knelt beside them and began to pray.
His trip back from the airport had been a nightmare. His cab had run into a police roadblock, and off to the side of the road he saw a gunmetal-gray convertible that was upside down.
"Keep going!" he instructed the driver as he looked away.
Kurt wasn't sure just how he ought to act after what had happened at the wedding. It would all depend on Renata. If she apologized and gave him a reasonable ex planation for her intolerable flightiness, he might forgive her. She had turned their marriage into a farce.
"Just a second," the taxi driver was saying. "Boy, that's some accident!"
Kurt's eyes turned toward where the driver was look ing, his heart sinking as he spotted Renata's blue suit. He jumped from the cab, devoid of feeling except for the strange taste of rust that seemed to fill his mouth. Five minutes later, the Kloppes had arrived, their evening clothes in cruel contrast to the scene garishly revealed by the headlights of the police cars.
"Did the car belong to the victim?" the police officer in charge asked Homer.
The banker shook his head bitterly. Whoever owned the P9 must be the one responsible for the accident. Why had the Lord seen fit to put his own daughter into this mysterious deathtrap?
"Is the victim's name Renata Kloppe?" the officer had asked.
"Not Kloppe," Kurt put in. "Renata Heinz." And Homer had turned away from Kurt
Kurt had gone back to his apartment to get out of the ridiculous black velvet suit he was wearing. He bad taken a scalding shower and then collapsed in a chair, trying to get it through his head that he was a widower after fif teen minutes of marriage.
Now, as he finished his prayer, he looked over at his father-in-law. At this moment, Kloppe, who was still hold ing his wife's hand, no longer seemed a stranger to Kurt, but rather a brother to whom he was linked by a common loss. In a very low whisper Kurt asked, "What did we do to the Lord to make Him visit such’ a misfortune on us?"
Without opening his clenched teeth, Homer Kloppe muttered back, "Leave us alone with our grief "
"Renata was my wife!" Kurt replied.
"Not your wife; just my daughter," Kloppe decreed. "You have no more business here. Now, get out"
Once more Kurt felt his mouth flood with the strange taste of rust
Moshe Yudelman watched the birds flutter from branch to branch in the golden sunshine, while Italo Vol pone, his upper body bare, walked in circles, drying his back with a bath towel. Each of his movements made his well-developed muscles stand out
"Who asked you to come here?" he said for the ump teenth time. "Who? Will you tell me that?"
"Nobody," Moshe answered.
"You've done nothing but fuck things up! You let my wife get snatched, and then you play footsie with her kid napper. You think I’m goin' to welcome Gabelotti with bouquets of flowers?"
Sick of all this sour recrimination, Yudelman turned his eyes away from the rustic scene.
‘Listen, quit putting the blame on others. You've been here four days yourself, and how far did you get? Do you have the account number? Of course not If you wanted to knock off a couple of cops, you didn't have to come to Zurich. Your boys could’ve done the same thing in New York."
Italo faced him. "If you know what's good for you," he said, "don't you ever talk to me in that tone of voice. You hear me? Never!"
Moshe shrugged. I’m not interested in what's good for me. What I care about is what’s good for you! The Commissione has its eye on your If they decide to mix into our business, we've had it"
"You expected me to let Genco get killed and not do nothin' about it! You want me to take Gabelotti's insults and thank him too?"
"There's a time for doing business and a time for set tling accounts. I cared for Genco as much as you did. You think it was some kind of accident that he and I worked together for seventeen years, every day, around the clock? You know how he got to be a don? He knew how to bide his time before hitting back."
Italo's anger subsided. Moshe was right—and that was just what galled him. The consigliere was the only one from whom he was willing to listen to the truth.
"You're not some punk, Italo. You're the new capo of our family. And a capo uses his gray matter more than his rod."
"Okay. If you're so smart," Volpone grumbled, "well see how you handle it"
"The main thing is to survive. I just got here. I don't know a thing, except that the best we can hope for is that our dough is where we left it. Just what did you do to get even with that banker?"
"Kid stuff. I put him on the spot with a cunt who went and showed him her snatch in a church where, he was makin' a speech."
"That all?"
"Then I had all his teeth pulled out"
"What'd he do?"
"Nothin'. Told me to fuck off!"
"That's the wrong approach," Moshe said darkly. "Even if you squeezed his balls off, he'd never talk. You think you're fighting one guy. You're wrong. You're up against all of Switzerland! These goddamn banks never give in to anyone."
"So? What can we do?" Volpone barked.
Yudelman sighed and went back to the window, con centrating on the garden.
. "We'll have to wait till Don Ettore gets here," he said.
Italo looked at him. "You mean to say you expect that lard-ass to come up with an idea?"
"No. I just expect him to start acting. Up to now we're the ones who've done everything. If the deal flops, we're the ones who've fucked up. Gabelotti'd have no trouble convincing the Commissione that he let us handle the whole thing our way and we loused it up. If we let him get his feet wet, we'll be in it together. If he's able to get anything done, we'll get our share, all right."
"What makes you think he can do anything I couldn't?"
"Nothing, I'm afraid. But right now that's not our problem. This is a four-handed game, Babe. Volpone, Gab elotti, the banker, and the cops. You lost the first rubber. Let's see what Gabelotti can do in the next one."
"And what do I do meantime? Keep score and scratch my ass?"
"You shut up and let him flounder. We'll see how he goes about it."
"Suppose he flops, too?"
"Then, Italo, you know me: I’ll be the first to tell you it's time to take the bull by the horns."
Moshe Yudelman's arri
val in Zurich had not soft ened Italo in any way. He had that worrisome off-day look about him that morning, and his cheeks were blue with an unshaven beard.
"And you let her go and get married, you bum!" Vol pone was taunting Lando. "You weren't even man enough to hang onto her!"
"I did everything I could."
"I don't guess you got under her skin that much," Italo sneered. "Here I thought you were the biggest stud of them all."