“Come on,” I said. “It’s getting colder. If you don’t keep moving, you’ll freeze to death.”
“I don’t care. I don’t care.”
“Baby,” I said, “I do.” I took her arm. She stumbled in the snow. I was carrying my skis and half her weight.
When we were close enough, I took a chance and hailed Brother Bartholomew. I’d seen one of the Piaget brothers down, probably with a broken leg or worse. I’d seen a second fall before Brother Bartholomew’s rifle fire. I decided the monks had been able to handle the third.
A figure traversed toward us, spewing a silver shower of snow in one of the flashlight beams. The light followed him down, and I saw the skirt of his monk’s habit flapping in the wind. He helped me guide Helen back upslope.
Ahead of us I heard a soft thump, then a rushing sound. A blue flare burst overhead and drifted slowly toward the snow. The combination of sounds was repeated three more times. The Alpine night sky blazed like the fourth of July.
A flare-gun was far from the only trick in Brother Bartholomew’s grab-bag. His monks produced and lit three alcohol lamps. While we huddled over the heat they gave, Brother Bartholomew chuckled at my grunt of surprise. “I regret,” he said, “that we lack a fondue crock and some cheese. Otherwise we could have a meal. However,” he added, reaching under his habit, “we can settle for these.” He came up with a dozen chocolate bars. One of the monks produced a bottle of cognac. I almost felt like asking: what, no half a buck Uppmann cigar?”
“Ridgway?” Brother Bartholomew said after the Cognac bottle had been passed around twice.
“Dead.”
He glanced at Helen. She sat hunched over one of the alcohol lamps, mesmerized by the flickering blue blow.
“What happened here?” I asked.
“One of them is dead, a rifle bullet in his throat.” Somewhat threateningly, Brother Bartholomew said: “I trust the Lord will forgive me.” I figured the Lord would. “The leg of another is broken in several places. We have covered him with the dead man’s clothes. He is suffering from shock as well, and whether he survives the night only God can say. I hate to admit that I for one do not particularly care.” Brother Bartholomew munched on a chocolate bar. “The third is suffering from a sore throat.”
“A sore throat?”
“I suppose that is what you would call it. Kidnapping,” said Brother Bartholomew, “while not exclusively an American crime, is rare in Europe. Mon Dieu, it affects a European the way child molestation affects an American or anyone else, and the way a cop-killer affects a cop anywhere. On the Continent a kidnapper is treated like the rabid animal that he is.”
“What about a sore throat?” I asked.
“Ah, that. Yes. The third Piaget brother refused to tell me where Francesca Artemi is. As you no doubt have observed,” Brother Bartholomew said dryly, “I am rather a large man. I held him down with my weight. Somehow I found a ski-pole in my hands. My balance was not of the best, and I fell forward with the basket of the pole in one hand and in the other the handle. Unfortunately for the man pinned under me, the shaft of the pole fell across his throat. After a while, I regained my balance. He then informed me, eagerly, but in what you would call a croaking voice, that his brother Yves and his mother are holding the Artemi woman in a house in Nyon—Nyon being a village a few miles up the lake from Geneva. More cognac?”
When the bottle was empty, we saw a blue flare burst far downslope in the direction of the Italian border.
“It took them long enough,” grumbled Brother Bartholomew. He stood up ponderously, brought a flare-gun to his shoulder and fired. This time the flare that exploded overhead was brilliant green, and it hung against the black, starless sky a long time.
“Parachute,” said Brother Bartholomew.
After five minutes he fired a second parachute flare. He looked, with regret, at the empty Cognac bottle. Pretty soon I heard the rumble of a big diesel engine. A pair of headlights crawled up the slope toward us. They belonged to a large snowcat like those I had seen parked outside the Hospice.
“Brother Bartholomew,” I said, with feeling, “I’m kind of glad you decided to be in my corner.”
chapter twenty-four
MOST OF THE REST of it made the papers in Europe and the wire-services back home. Three million bucks is a lot of money, even in the banking capital of the world.
Back at the Hospice, we called the Federal Police and told them about the hideout in Nyon. Helen was put to bed under strong sedation. I was just climbing into the Facel Vega when Brother Bartholomew lumbered out the front door of the Hospice.
“Mon Dieu,” he said, “is this why you insisted on returning to the Hospice in Axel Spade’s car? So you could drive all night again and no doubt kill yourself?”
“I’m all stoked up with coffee,” I said lightly, “and for a mountain resort this joint is pretty dead. Me for the bright lights of Geneva.”
“And for the castle of Nyon, of course. There is a castle, by the way, very picturesque. Seriously, why not at least wait until morning? The police can do what must be done in Nyon.”
“You said it yourself: kidnapping is not exclusively an American crime, but almost. I want to be there.”
“It will all be over before you reach Nyon. Please, my friend. You are the only private detective I have ever met, or am likely to meet, and I have a certain fondness for you. If you attempt the drive from here to Geneva tonight, I’ll expect to read your obituary in the morning.”
But he couldn’t stop me, and he knew it. We shook hands, and a few moments later I was driving.
Brother Bartholomew was wrong on two counts. He did not read my orbit the next day, though he came close despite an uneventful drive across the mountains. And, either because he had misjudged Yves Piaget’s tenacity, or the efficiency of the Swiss Federal Police, or both, the situation in Nyon was far from over when I got there.
I picked up Axel Spade in Geneva at dawn. I had wired him from Evian. He took one look at me and told me to shove over so he could do the driving. I didn’t argue, but slumped down, shut my eyes and let my chest support my chin as he raced the Facel Vega past the United Nations building and along the edge of the lake toward Nyon. He had a million questions. I think I answered them for a while. There was the sound of rain drumming on the roof of the car, the steady click-thump of the windshield wipers and the howl of the bise blowing gustily off the lake. Once we slowed almost to a stop. I opened my eyes.
“Branch down,” Axel Spade said tersely. He was wearing a black raincoat and a grim look on his suave face. We were going slowly around a winter-bare branch that had fallen across the northbound lanes of the highway. “Was it snowing in the mountains?”
“No.”
“You are lucky. It was raining all night in Geneva. And the wind.” His voice went away. I dozed.
We drove up from the lake, past the cylindrical towers and glossy black turrets of Nyon castle, on a narrow cobblestoned road. We turned two or three times, past stone houses that leaned pugnaciously across narrow lanes, past the floodlamps that would light up the castle during the tourist season. I had got what would pass for a second wind, but my arms still felt leaden with fatigue, my, eyes burned and Axel Spade’s voice droned on meaninglessly, the words flowing together.
The car jerked to a stop at a police barricade. A cop in a glistening black slicker made negative sounds. Axel Spade made positive sounds and impatiently displayed some sort of identification at the rolled-down window. The cop let us pass.
Another hundred yards, a sharp turn to the left, and suddenly we were in a large square, brilliantly lit by floodlamps which might have been part of the castle illumination. Most of the powerful beams converged on the facade of a two-story, half-timbered stone house that stood in a row at the far side of the square with others just like it. A couple of dozen cars Uttered the square. Men in slickers crouched down in the rain behind them. There was a knot of slickers opposite the floodlit house, and that was
where we went. More negative sounds. outside the car, and positive sounds from Axel Spade again, and then he nodded and I yanked the handle of the door on my side and lurched out into the wind and rain and came all the way awake.
A loudspeaker blared in French: “Come out of there with your hands raised, the house is surrounded, you cannot possibly escape. Come out, Piaget. You are surrounded. Surrender.” The voice was hoarse and lacked enthusiasm.
A man in an oilskin slicker and hood told Axel Spade: “All night it is the same, and now in the morning as well. His mother came out, like a lamb, hours ago. He remains inside. If we attack, he will kill the woman. I believe him.”
I thought of Yves Piaget’s brother. I said: “Tear gas?”
The man in oilskins looked at me. Axel Spade’s nod served as my credentials. “We cannot, monsieur. The wind is too strong. The little cans of gas, they would not reach the house; Unless we went very close. And if we did, he would kill the woman. This he has promised.” He repeated: “I believe him.”
“What will you do?” Axel Spade asked.
The man in the oilskins shrugged a very Gallic shrug, half patience, half pessimism. “We must wait him out, Mr. Spade.”
Shaking his head, Axel Spade asked: “What about the woman? The mother?”
“In a car. Under guard. That one is as big as a tank, and as strong.”
“Put her on the loudspeaker,” Spade suggested. “Have her ask him to surrender.”
“She already did.” The man in the oilskins shrugged again. “It is apparently a strange family relationship, monsieur. If a man told my mother to do, loudly and in public, what Yves Piaget told his own mother to do, I would kill that man.”
I said: “How many men have you out here?”
“Thirty in the square. Six on the rooftops of adjacent houses. And another dozen behind.”
“He’s one man.”
“But armed and desperate, monsieur, be assured of that. And he has the actress.”
“One man,” Axel Spade said, “with a cast on his leg from thigh to ankle.”
“The actress,” said the man in oilskins, almost petulantly.
“That’s not what I meant,” I explained. “Sure he can put a bullet through her if you attack him like an infantry platoon. He sees the lights, the cars, an army out here. He’s scared. But if you stand around in the rain doing nothing, sooner or later he’ll try to take the play away from you.”
“Monsieur? I have very little English.”
“If he gets scared enough, he’ll figure he has nothing to lose by coming out that door, a gun in each hand and Francesca Artemi right in front of him. What then?”
“Then we have him.”
“Then he kills her.”
The rain beat down, the wind howled, the loud-speaker blared again. I said: “Don’t overwhelm him. Send someone across the square. One man.”
“He’ll shoot. The man. Or the woman. Or both.”
“Not Francesca,” I said. “Why should he, with a single man walking toward him?”
“Possibly not the woman,” the man in oilskins agreed. “But I would be sending a man needlessly to his death. We will wait.”
“Sooner or later a fugitive with a hostage will make a desperate move. How long it takes depends on how much patience he has. You’re giving him all the time he needs to lose it.” I asked: “Are you a cop?”
The question surprised him. “I am Inspector Deladier of the Federal Police.”
“Didn’t anyone ever take a shot at you?”
His surprised expression froze, but he let the wind field that question for him and asked one of his own. “And who are you?”
Axel Spade did the honors, I said: “I’ve been in on a couple of kidnappings. They’re endemic in the States. Not here.”
“Yes, this is my first kidnapping,” Inspector Deladier admitted.
“Don’t give him time to lose his head. She’s dead if he does.”
“I cannot ask for a volunteer to commit suicide. I cannot order a man to do it. We will wait.” Inspector Deladier waved his hands at the rain and said fatalistically, “Something will occur.”
“Let me do it,” I said.
Inspector Deladier grunted. “You are in no position of authority here. You should not even be here.”
“Would you stop me?”
“I would be forced to stop you, monsieur. I appreciate bravery, but—”
“Almost fourteen million Swiss francs,” Axel Spade cut him off.
“Monsieur?”
“A considerable feather in the cap of the police official who brings it in, Inspector Deladier. How would you like to be that man?”
Inspector Deladier’s eyes narrowed. He stroked his mustache and shook rain-water off his fingers. “You mean that?”
“But of course—if you let Drum do what he feels must be done. Whatever happens, I promise this: you will be the man to recover the money. Well?”
Deladier sucked at his mustache. “But how can I … my superiors … if something goes wrong.…”
“Deputize me,” I said.
He didn’t understand the word. Axel Spade explained it to him in French.
“It is most irregular.”
“Can you do it?”
Suddenly, his mind having been made up, Inspector Deladier’s eyes twinkled. “Naturally you must be a Swiss citizen.”
“Naturally.”
“Before a witness you must tell me you are a Swiss citizen.”
“I’m a Swiss citizen,” I said.
“I heard him,” Axel Spade said promptly.
Inspector Deladier sighed. “Monsieur, as I have said, I appreciate bravery. I hope you can demonstrate that I have not mistaken foolhardiness for it.”
I hoped so, too. I went to find the loudspeaker.
“Piaget,” I said, my voice reverberating in the rain-drenched square. “Piaget, listen to me. This is Chester Drum.” I was speaking English. I wanted him to know he wasn’t dealing, for the moment, with an army of cops. “They’ve got you, Piaget,” I said slowly, “and you know it. If you act like a mad dog they’ll treat you like one. Come on out of there.”
No answer. I hadn’t thought there would be one. Inspector Deladier’s face was grim and white. “All right,” I said. “Then I’m coming in after you. I’m walking across the square and coming in there. Alone. Then you’re coming out with me.”
Still no answer. The cold rain lashed down. Gusts of wind raided it against the windshield of the loudspeaker truck. I. looked across at the house. There were four windows in front, two down and two up, and a floodlamp on each one. A lamp on the door, too.
“Cut that one,” I told Inspector Deladier, and in a moment the door went gray behind the veil of rain. Clouds hung low over the square. It was almost as dark as night.
“You are armed?”
I said I was armed. Inspector Deladier shook my hand. Axel Spade just looked at me. I started walking.
My footsteps were very loud on the cobblestones. I realized I was still wearing my ski-boots. I walked neither slowly nor in any great haste, a normal stride in the rain on the rain-slippery cobblestones. Halfway there I thought: he’ll shoot. Why the hell shouldn’t he? You’re armed. He can see the Magnum in your hand. He has nothing to lose that he hasn’t lost already. Deladier was right. He’ll shoot. I stopped. There was a sundial just below the eaves of the house, its bright blues and yellows washed out by the bleak, dim morning. Halfway there, and then more, and carrying with me the absolute knowledge, the dead certainty, that he would shoot. I wondered, with surprising clinical detachment, if I was scared. I decided I wasn’t. The rain beat down on me. I was wary, cold and tired, and I wanted to get it over with.
He would shoot. Any second now. Why should he let me reach the door? No, maybe he would let me get that far. But he would shoot. I remembered the way he had cut up Douglas Jones. A little guy, tough and insecure, a sadist who enjoyed killing. Francesca was in there with him. I kept walking.
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On the door I saw an ornate knocker. Swiss bear, the bear of Berne, with a ring in its mouth. He’ll shoot. Hell yes, he will positively shoot. You are out of your cotton-picking mind.
Francesca was in there with him.
I reached the door. The rain pounded down on the cobble-stones.
“Piaget,” I called out. “Open up.”
Maybe he was at one of the windows, playing with me, cat and mouse. No, he couldn’t be. They were floodlit. He wouldn’t be able to see. Maybe I was all wrong and Inspector Deladier was right. Maybe I’d force his hand, make him take a shot at Francesca. But one man at the door wouldn’t make him desperate. He could always take a shot at me instead.
I tried the knob. It was locked, of course. But if he couldn’t be at the windows, he had to be at the door. Right behind it, waiting. He wouldn’t be hiding under a bed.
“Open it,” I said, and waited. Silence. Only the rain.
“Then get back out of the way,” I said. “I’m going to shoot the lock in.”
His voice, muffled by the door, was high and tense. “One shot,” he said, “and I kill her. Open the door and I kill you. Better get back. I have nothing to lose. You, monsieur, you have everything. And now now you had better listen.”
I heard a sound: whimpering. Francesca’s voice. He had done something to hurt her. He wanted me to know she was at the door with him.
“What will a few more minutes buy you?” I asked.
“They know what I want. To come out. With her. To find a car in front. Waiting. The engine running.”
“They can’t do that.”
“Then they’ll never see her alive. They—”
I heard a thump, as if someone had struck the door hard inside. Francesca cried out: “Now, Chet! Now! Shoot the lock!”
I fired three times, very quickly, not giving Piaget or myself time to think. Francesca had broken away from him, momentarily, long enough for me to shoot out the lock. What else could her words have meant?
Francesca Page 15