Francesca

by Stephen Marlowe

  “Could they get into any of the Hospice buildings?” I asked Brother Bartholomew.

  “How? All strangers are stopped, questioned. That’s why we are here.”

  “They can’t stay outside very long,” I pointed out. “They’d freeze. There any other building up here, that doesn’t belong to the Hospice? Where they could hide?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “They’ve got to be somewhere,” I protested, and realized my voice was querulous. All at once it was like the worst part of combat, the waiting. We knew the Piaget brothers had come this far. But where and how had they gone to ground? And how long would they stay there?

  We trudged back to the Hospice on our snowshoes.

  chapter twenty-one

  SCORES OF MONKS in their brown habits were sitting at the long, wood-plank tables of the refectory. The Hospice lacked central heating, and it was cold in the big, windowless dining room. Some of the monks ate with their cowls up, hunched over their plates, silently wolfing their food. A few talked in anxious whispers. There were no strictures of silence in the Hospice, but many of them, Brother Bartholomew informed me, had come from monasteries where it had been forbidden to talk at meals.

  Brother Bartholomew sniffed the air eagerly. His nostrils actually quivered. “Lamb. Leg of lamb by the delightful smell of it. We eat well at the Hospice, and I hope God forgives us this sensory pleasure. But here in the Col we do more than cultivate our gardens and say our prayers. We need good, wholesome food.” He sniffed again. “Basil, or is it tarragon? It smells delicious.”

  We heaped our plates at the serving counter and sat down with Helen and Ridgway. She started to say something, looked at her fiancé and went back to picking at her food without enthusiasm. Brother Bartholomew was an amazing trencherman. He had piled his plate high with lamb, potatoes and peas. He bowed his head, having missed the evening devotions, mumbled a brief and inaudible thanksgiving, and dug in lustily with knife and fork. He was on his way back for seconds, only a little shamefacedly, by the time I had begun wishing I had a cigarette.

  Three monks, their cowls raised, followed toward the chow line. He began to serve himself. They did not. They stood facing the steam table, their backs to the big refectory. Brother Bartholomew turned and moved away from them, carrying his laden plate.

  They whirled right after him. I heard someone shout. I started to get up, reaching for the Magnum in its holster under my left arm. Helen grabbed at my arm and cried out: “They’re wearing gas masks!”

  They were. They were also holding what looked like black, sawed-off shotguns. I kicked my chair back, stood up with the Magnum and shouted: “Hold it.” But friars had risen at their tables, directly in my line of fire.

  One of the gas masks pointed his sawed-off shotgun at the ceiling. The second pointed his across the room, aiming for the far wall. The third aimed his at the floor a few yards in front of his sandaled feet. They were stubby, clumsy, ugly little weapons, small enough to have been hidden, along with the gas masks, under the brown monks’ habits, and though from this distance they looked like sawed-off shotguns, they weren’t. They were teargas guns.

  With an enraged roar, Brother Bartholomew hurled his plate at one of the gas masks. It struck the man’s shoulder. By then I was pushing past the friars who had crowded the aisles between the tables.

  I heard three metallic sounds, whoomp, whoomp, whoomp, in quick succession, as the guns were fired and the tear-gas canisters lobbed. Almost instantly the refectory was sprayed with thick, blinding, yellow-white mist. My eyes burned and began to stream water. I coughed chokingly and lurched blindly forward,. colliding with someone. Then I bounced off a chair and fell to my knees.

  A mighty and profane voice, that could only have belonged to Brother Bartholomew, cried in French: “Jesus Christ, Sweet Christ, let me get my hands on those bastards!”

  But those bastards were wearing gas masks, and they could go on about their business while we could not. Monks shouted, coughed, retched and stumbled into one another. I heard a scream, and then another; the second one sounded muffled: it was Helen. I groped back in her direction. Something cuffed the side of my head, and I was down again, unable to see and trying to breathe and finding that difficult, too, because the gas seared lungs as well as eyes.

  Chair and table legs scraped on the hard stone floor. Monks cursed in three languages, not with as much gusto as Brother Bartholomew had shown, but with enough so that they would have to pray for forgiveness in the solitude of their cells.

  “Watch the doors!” Brother Bartholomew bellowed, but just then I felt a cold draft of air, which meant someone had reached and opened the big double doors. More shouts and stamping. A monk near me was violently sick. I stumbled, found a wall, cold and hard to my touch, and groped my way along it. Blinded friars were struggling in the bottleneck of the doorway. Finally I pushed through with them and we were outside in the hallway, our eyes still streaming, our noses streaming, our breath coming in great, tortured gasps.

  I was standing outside, ankle-deep in snow, letting the wind rip at my face. I did not know how much time had passed. A car roared by on the road south over the pass to Italy.

  Big hands grabbed me. I saw a hulking shadow that swam in and out of focus. My vision cleared enough to let me take a stab at his identity: Brother Bartholomew.

  “Drum? Mon Dieu, tear gas. Who ever would have thought of tear gas?”

  “My stupid fault,” I said. “They’d used it before, in Chamonix.”

  “They could have stolen it from an army quartermaster depot. Every able-bodied man in Switzerland belongs to the reserve. And the. brown habits, they could have got them in Geneva.”

  “They just walked in with the patrols,” I said.

  “No doubt they even got a good meal out of it,” Brother Bartholomew agreed, dolefully.

  “I heard a car pass, heading south.”

  We stood there, crying the tear gas out of our eyes and reeling like a couple of punch-drunk boxers, and gabbing like a couple of maiden aunts. There was nothing we could do until our vision returned.

  “Yes. Their car, of course. With Helen Spade and Ridgway in it.”

  I bent, scooped up two handfuls of snow and rubbed at my eyes. I could see Brother Bartholomew more clearly then, and I went down for more snow. He was a hazy double-exposure against the bleak, twilight sky. His blurred arms were raised. He was knuckling his eyes. Suddenly he hit his bald pate a resounding smack with the palm of his right hand. “The border. We’ll have to alert the border.”

  We went inside. I could see better than he could. I steered him by one arm, like the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.

  chapter twenty-two

  FOR THE FIRST five minutes the road climbed steeply toward the Italian border. Then we crested a bluff, the Facel Vega’s chains digging for traction in the soft snow, and in the fading light we could see the road twisting and zig-zagging below us, descending the pass in a series of hairpin turns.

  “Top of the Col,” said Brother Bartholomew. He sat in the bucket seat at my side, a bolt-action rifle across his knees. Two monks from the Hospice were in back, also holding rifles. While Brother Bartholomew had called the Swiss border station, one of the monks had fastened a ski-rack to the roof of the Facel Vega. Four pairs of skis rode over our heads.

  I took the first descending switchback, swinging wide on the outside of the curve. Far below, the valley already was cloaked by night, but Alpine twilight still lingered in the high pass.

  Brother Bartholomew leaned forward. The butt of his rifle bumped my right knee. “There they are,” he said.

  Three switchbacks below us, where the road ran straight for several hundred yards across a high valley before plunging again down the side of the mountain, I saw a tiny black rectangle against the snow. It was the Volkswagen bus. It disappeared from sight as we rounded the first hairpin turn. We saw it again a moment later. It hadn’t moved.

  “They left the car,�
� I said. “They’ll be heading overland on skis. They know they can’t hit the border at the highway checkpoint.”

  Five minutes later we piled out of the Facel Vega. I had parked it off the road right behind the Microbus. The monks were removing our skis from the rack.

  I pointed, and Brother Bartholomew nodded. Five clear sets of ski tracks headed across the valley at right angles to the road. They had cut deep in the virgin snow.

  “Cinch to follow,” I said, clamping on my skis. They were old. Most of the lacquer had worn away, exposing bare wood. But the running surfaces were plastic and in good condition. The bindings were racing long-thongs. I wrapped the leather lanyards around my boots and stood up.

  “Yes, they’ll be easy to follow,” Brother Bartholomew agreed, but added: “Until it grows dark. After that—” He shrugged.

  Brother Bartholomew and the two monks slung their rifles across their backs. The monks looked at one another uneasily. Chasing fugitives down the pass was not their line of work. I wondered if they would use their rifles, and decided they wouldn’t. How many Brother Bartholomews were there?

  I kick-turned toward the tracks, dug my poles into the snow and started skiing, crouched low like a downhill racer, shifting my weight from left foot to right and back again, ski-skating to gain speed quickly. Then gravity took over, and there was the clean, cold feel of the wind against my face, the hiss of fresh snow under my skis, and the knowledge that if we didn’t overtake them before dark we would never find them.

  The fastest way down a steep slope with any degree of safety is Wedling. But it is an advance technique that had been perfected in Austria, and apparently it hadn’t reached the St. Bernard Hospice. I was Wedling, shifting my weight from side to side so that my skis skidded to the left and right of the fall line. The gap between me and the three monks, after just five minutes, had widened to two hundred yards.

  Next to Wedling, the best method of negotiating a steep slope was the one Brother Bartholomew and his monks were using. They were traversing steeply from left to right and back again, avoiding the fall line entirely, crouching and straightening to stem turn as they changed direction. I wondered if the brothers Piaget could Wedl. Helen could, of course, and probably Ridgway, too. If the Piagets couldn’t, they’d have their hands full when it grew darker. Helen and Ridgway might make a break for it—unless the Piagets were skiing with guns in their hands, which, I decided, they likely were. But if all of them could Wedl.…

  I saw them below me suddenly, five black dots racing downslope in the pink-gray of dusk. Three-quarters of a mile, I thought, maybe less. They were traversing, not plummeting toward the valley as fast as I was. We were still above timberline, but the darkness below them looked like pine forest. To the left of the darkness, the clouds were crimson with the final light of the sun. A lot of sky there, I realized, and that would mean the slope fell away sharply. This was fine skiing country, but too far from anywhere and unmarked. There might be an abrupt drop, too steep for skiing; there might even be a sheer cliff. At any event, in the uncertain light of dusk it would be perilous.

  The five tiny figures below me traversed to the left. I Wedled after them, closing the gap by a hundred yards, waiting for them to cut back to the right. They did not. They needed what was left of the daylight and, dangerous or not, were heading downslope toward the big sky and whatever lay below it.

  All of a sudden, one of them took an eggbeater. I heard his hoarse scream, and then he was tumbling heels over head, heels over head, the tiny match-stick arms and legs churning, churning. A ski broke loose and whirled away, then slid downslope as the four other figures Christi-stopped, executing sudden right-angle turns and plowing gouts of snow with the edges of their skis as they skidded to a standstill. No more than three hundred yards above them, I stopped too. The slope was flat and steep. There was no place to hide. Above, about half a mile behind me now, were the monks. I could see them clearly. If the Piaget brothers looked in my direction, they would see me too.

  One of them crouched over the fallen skier. He did not get up. I waited, the thongs of both poles on my left wrist, the glove off my right hand and the Magnum cold against my fingers. Pretty soon all four of the standing figures below me were huddled around the fallen one. I saw a spar. A skier crouched, probably with a cigarette for his fallen comrade.

  The smallest figure backed away, sideways and slowly, across the slope. From this distance it almost looked comic, an abrupt sliding movement, then a long pause, then another; the skis that could be so graceful for downslope running were big and awkward now. A second figure joined the first. They were five yards away, then ten. The two other skiers were still crouched over the one who had fallen.

  And then one of them shouted. Helen and Ridgway kick-turned, took three or four lunging skating strides and zig-zagged downslope. I saw a flash of flame, far brighter than the flare of the match had been, then another. Two pistol shots cracked across the absolute silence. The racing figures of Helen and Ridgway did not falter.

  I fired the Magnum once in the direction of the Piagets. The two who were standing whirled toward me at the sound of the shot. I had been too far to hit them, but I had to distract their attention. Surprise had made their aim wild the first time, but Helen and Ridgway, skiing downslope frantically now, were still within easy range. Surprise, though, had also made them fire. What good would Helen and Ridgway do them, dead?

  Crouching, my hands in front of my knees, my back and upper legs parallel to each other and parallel to the snow, I raced downslope after Helen and Ridgway. That would bring me close to the Piaget brothers, within fifty yards. The two who were standing had not yet moved. What good would it do them? They knew they couldn’t match Helen and Ridgway’s speed. I soon saw that I could match Ridgway’s but not Helen’s. She was a downhill racer with the American team, and she began to open a gap that neither Ridgway nor I could close.

  The Piaget brothers opened fire on me. Above the crack of gunfire and the angry wine of bullets I heard, on the slope behind me, Brother Bartholomew’s outraged roar.

  I had been shot at before, and would be shot at again. I was moving, crouched low, at better than forty miles an hour in uncertain light: not much of a target. But still, an icy hand of fear clutched at my stomach. All they had to be was lucky.

  Seventy yards, sixty, fifty—that was as close as I would get to them. Sixty again, and seventy, as I raced downslope. They were still firing at me intermittently: pause, then a burst of two or three shots, then pause again, then more firing.

  Brother Bartholomew’s rifle spoke with more authority than their pistols. I looked back over my right shoulder. Only one of the Piaget brothers was standing. I skied on after Helen and Ridgway.

  Ridgway had a hundred and fifty yards on me. I couldn’t close the gap, but he couldn’t widen it. I was skiing at the very edge of control, straight down the fall-line, Wedling only occasionally. A top skier, running a steep slope with no regard for his safety, can hit ninety miles an hour. I figured we were doing sixty. Control is a hairline thing then: a rut, a soft spot, a rock protruding through the snow, and you’re gone.

  Helen was several hundred yards ahead, still widening the gap. Beyond her the sky was very big, with distant fangs of mountains biting at it. The slope fell away sharply out of sight. She seemed to be skiing on the edge of the world. She looked back once. Suddenly she executed a very sharp Christi-turn to her right, spewing snow and side-slipping close to a hundred yards before she skidded to a stop. She shouted a warning. I didn’t hear what it was. She screamed.

  Ridgway tried to do the same turn she did. He made it, and began the long sideslip that would eventually check his terrific speed. Behind him, seeing that he was very close to whatever it was that had made Helen scream her warning, I crouched, shifted my feet to the right and came up straight. Snow sprayed me and there was tremendous pressure against my left leg, which now bore all my weight. I had gone into a long sideslip, skidding downslope very fast. I
rolled my left ankle to let the steel edge of the ski bite into the snow.

  Ahead of me, Ridgway was still side-slipping. I could tell that he was digging with his edges too. He was all but lost to view in a cloud of flying snow.”

  Helen screamed: “Howard! God, no! No.…”

  He approached her, still skidding fast. Having started my Christi further upslope than he had, I was in control by then. He was not. He kept going, past Helen. Suddenly he bellowed with fear, and then I saw what had stopped Helen and what Ridgway would not be able to stop for in time.

  For another few seconds he skidded on snow, and then his skis left the snow and were in air, still close, still parallel. And then, his cry of terror fading, he dropped out of sight.

  My legs were trembling when I came to a stop at the edge of the precipice. It wasn’t quite a cliff but a steep slope, seventy degrees or more, and it went down and out of sight, a long way down into the darkness of the valley night. Patches of snow clung to it, but mostly it was bare black rock. Even if there had been snow, a man would have fallen off it rather than skied down it. There was very little snow. The difference between that almost perpendicular wall and a true cliff was marginal.

  And it had made no difference at all to Howard Ridgway.

  chapter twenty-three

  IF I EVER get lost in winter, at night, on a mountain, it had better be within commuting distance of the St. Bernard Hospice.

  Helen and I were trudging back uphill with our skis on our shoulders. It was dark by then, and slow going. Helen didn’t help. She walked robot-like at my side. She was crying. Several times, for no reason at all, she stopped. I prodded her, urging her on. Far ahead we could see lights, the beams of two powerful flashlights bouncing off the snow, where Brother Bartholomew and his monks were waiting.