The Lonely Skier

by Hammond Innes

  At a million lire there was a pause in the bidding. Mancini had been getting slower and slower in his bids as the figures rose. He sat hunched in his seat, his jaw set and his eyes sullen. It was not the money he cared about so much as this deliberate flouting of his position in Cortina. It hurt his pride to have to haggle in public for something that everyone knew he had arranged in private. I leaned across to him and ventured to ask him what the property was worth. ‘To me, perhaps a million,’ he replied. ‘To an outsider, nothing.’

  ‘You mean you will boycott the place and Valdini will lose his money?’ I asked.

  ‘Valdini?’ He laughed mirthlessly. ‘Valdini is a dirty little Sicilian gangster. He loses nothing. It is not his money.’

  ‘He is acting for someone then?’ I asked.

  He nodded. ‘The Contessa Forelli, I think. I have sent someone to try and find out.’

  The auctioneer had grown tired of waiting. He poised his hammer. Mancini raised the bidding ten again.

  ‘Cinquanta’ came the monotonous voice of Valdini.

  ‘Sessanta.’

  ‘Cento.’

  ‘I do not understand it,’ Mancini muttered angrily to me. ‘They will pay through the nose and make a bad business of it. There are hidden reasons. That Forelli woman is up to something. She is too clever with men.’

  The man who had slipped out for Mancini returned and whispered in his ear. ‘Ma, perche?’ I heard him ask. The man shrugged his shoulders. Mancini turned and raised the bidding again. ‘It is Forelli,’ he said to me. ‘But why I do not know. She must have a reason. If I knew it and it was worth the money, I would give her a defeat. But I do not throw money in the drain, you understand.’ He was near the limit he would go. I felt sorry for him. He did not want me to think him unsporting or lacking in courage. He did not like an Englishman to see him defeated.

  The bidding crawled slowly up to the one and a half million mark. Then Valdini astonished the whole room by changing his tactics. He jumped from one and a half to two millions. There was a note of triumph in his voice. He guessed the hotelier would not follow him to that figure.

  His psychology was right. Mancini shrugged his shoulders as the auctioneer glanced at him enquiringly. Then he rose to his feet. The bidding was over. Mancini was making a grand exit as though washing his hands of a preposterous business. The auctioneer raised his hammer. This time his movement was quicker.

  But as the hammer rose, a sharp firm voice said, ‘Due e mezzo.’

  The room gasped. Two and a half million lire!

  Mancini sat down again, searching the room. For a moment there was not a sound. I looked across at Valdini. The beaming importance had been wiped from his face by this fresh bid. His features had a mean look. The auctioneer searched out and found the new bidder. He was a small, pallid man in a dark grey suit seated uncomfortably on an upright chair. He looked like an undertaker. His clothes did not suggest that he was worth a lot of money. Asked to repeat his bid, he did so in the same firm voice.

  The auctioneer glanced at Valdini who nodded his head with a worried look and raised the bidding a hundred thousand. ‘Tre millioni.’ The voice was firm and impersonal. It hushed the sudden outburst of excited conversation.

  ‘This is incredible,’ I said to Mayne.

  His eyes were fixed intently on the new bidder. He did not hear me. I turned to Mancini. ‘Who is the little man who is bidding?’ I asked him.

  ‘A lawyer from Venezia,’ he said. ‘He is a partner in a firm which works for big industrial enterprises. He, too, is bidding for a client.’ His tone showed his concern. I think he was envisaging a big syndicate invading Cortina with money enough to put himself and his friends out of business.

  Valdini suddenly jumped five hundred thousand. His voice was pitched a shade high as he made the bid. It was a violent gesture. ‘Shock tactics,’ I whispered to Mayne.

  He was still watching the scene intently, his eyes narrowed. I noticed the knuckles of his hands were white where they gripped the chair. He was clearly very excited by the bidding. Suddenly he relaxed. ‘What?—oh, shock tactics—yes. Valdini is near his limit.’ And he turned away again, tense and watchful.

  The little lawyer seemed to hesitate. He was watching Valdini closely. Valdini was nervous. His eyes darted here and there round the room. Everyone was watching him. Everyone sensed that he was approaching his limit. A gust of excited whisperings filled the room. The cold voice of the lawyer stilled it. Four million and one hundred thousand, he bid.

  The room gasped. The lawyer was reckoning on Valdini’s limit being four million. One glance at Valdini’s face showed that he was right. The bidding had passed beyond him. Valdini asked permission of the auctioneer to telephone his client. Permission was refused. He pleaded. His client, he explained, had not expected the bidding to go so high. He suggested that the auctioneer himself had not expected it. It was fantastic. In such exceptional circumstances the auctioneer should permit him to refer to his client for instructions. The auctioneer refused.

  He and the room waited in suspense, watching the workings of Valdini’s mind. It was clear that he wanted to go on, but that he did not dare without further instructions. The hammer rose, hesitated as the auctioneer raised his eyebrows in Valdini’s direction, and then finally fell.

  The astonishing auction was over. The slittovia was sold to an unknown buyer.

  3

  Murder for Two

  THERE WAS NO celebration after the auction. The room split up into excited, gesticulating groups. Mancini went off to confer with half the hoteliers in Cortina. I don’t know where Mayne went to—he just seemed to drift off on his own. I found myself having a lonely lunch at the Luna, trying to figure out what all this had to do with Engles.

  When I got back to Col da Varda, there were several parties of ski-ers there, for the sun was still warm. I went straight up to my room and wrote out a report of the auction for Engles. By the time I went downstairs again the ski-ers had all gone. But Valdini was there. He was standing at the bar, drinking. He had a furtive look.

  ‘You had bad luck,’ I said for the sake of something to say.

  He shrugged his shoulders. He would like to have appeared unconcerned. But he was very drunk. He could not control his features. He looked so wretchedly miserable that I felt almost sorry for the little bounder. ‘Anyway, you had Mancini licked,’ I encouraged him.

  ‘Mancini,’ he snarled. ‘He is a fool. He knows nothing. But that other . . .’ He suddenly burst into tears. It was a disgusting sight.

  ‘I am sorry,’ I said. I think my voice must have sounded rather stiff.

  ‘Sorry!’ he snarled with a sudden change of mood. ‘Why should you be sorry? It is me—Stefan—who is sorry. I should be the proprietor here now. This place should be mine.’ He made a grand wavering movement of his arm, and then added, ‘Yes, mine—and everything in it.’ And he peered forward at me cunningly.

  ‘You mean it should belong to the Contessa Forelli, don’t you?’ I said.

  His eyes focused on me soberly for a second. ‘You know too much, Blair,’ he said. ‘You know too damn much.’ He seemed to be turning something over in his mind. His expression was not a pleasant one. I remembered Mancini’s description of him—‘a dirty little Sicilian gangster.’ I had thought at the time that Mancini was just giving vent to his anger. But it occurred to me now that perhaps that was just what Valdini was. He looked ugly, and dangerous.

  Footsteps sounded on the wooden boards of the belvedere and the door was thrown open. It was the Contessa, and she was in a blazing temper—it showed in her face and in her eyes and in the way she moved. She was all in white—white ski suit, white gloves, white tam-o’-shanter. Only her scarf and ski socks were red. She looked hard at Valdini. The little man seemed to curl up, deflated. Then she looked past me to the bar. ‘Aldo!’ she called.

  The ape came running. She ordered cognac and went out to a table in the sun.

  ‘I think your boss wants y
ou,’ I said to Valdini.

  He glared at me. But he made no retort and followed Aldo and the cognac out on to the belvedere. When Aldo returned, he went behind the bar and produced a cable envelope. ‘For you, signore,’ he said, handing it across to me.

  ‘When did this come?’ I asked him in Italian.

  ‘This morning, signore. Just before you left. Emilio brought it up when he came to fetch you this morning.’

  ‘Then why the hell didn’t you give it to me?’ I asked angrily. ‘Can’t you see it’s a cable and therefore important?’ He smiled sheepishly and spread his hands in the inevitable gesture that he used to explain all his shortcomings.

  I ripped open the envelope. It was from Engles and read: Presume attending auction. Cable fullest report Mancini unbuy. Engles.

  I folded the cable and put it in my pocket. He wanted a cabled report if Mancini was not the buyer. Had he expected there to be an unknown buyer at the auction? What difference could it make to him who bought Col da Varda? However, he wanted the information by cable and that meant going down to Cortina again. I decided to give myself a try-out on skis. I hadn’t done any ski-ing since I had gone up to Tolmina from Rome, and that had been two years ago. I was just going to get my ski things when I remembered a question that I wanted to put to Aldo. It had been in my mind ever since Valdini had begun to bid at the auction.

  ‘You remember you did not want to let us have rooms here?’ I said to him in Italian. ‘That was because Signor Valdini had instructed you to turn visitors away, wasn’t it?’

  He looked helplessly towards the belvedere. He was afraid to answer. But it was clear that I was right. ‘Non importante,’ I said. It looked as though Valdini and the Contessa had planned to close the place down as soon as the purchase had been completed. Why?

  I went up to my room and got my things. I typed out my reply to Engles’ cable. It read: Auction sensation. Sold unknown purchaser operating Venice lawyer. Valdini for Carla outbid Mancini two million. Unknown outbid Valdini four million. Blair.

  When I got downstairs again the Contessa was alone in the bar. As I made for the door, she suddenly called out, ‘Mr Blair!’

  I turned. She was leaning against the bar. Her eyes were inviting and her wide mouth was made attractive by a little smile that lifted the corners of it. ‘Come and have a drink with me,’ she suggested. ‘I do not like drinking by myself. Besides, I wish to talk to you. I would like to know more about my photograph.’

  I felt ill-at-ease. She was hard and hard women frighten me. Besides, how was I to explain how that photograph came into my possession? ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I have to go down to Cortina.’ My voice sounded cold and unfriendly.

  The corners of her mouth drooped in mock disappointment and there was a hint of laughter in her dark eyes. She knocked back her drink and came towards me. Her ski boots made hardly a sound on the bare boards. She could have danced in them. ‘You shall not escape me so easily,’ she said, and with a ripple of laughter, she tucked her slim brown hand under my arm. ‘I too must go back to Cortina. You will not refuse to escort me?’ She did not wait for an answer, but exclaimed, ‘Oh—why are you English so stiff? You do not laugh. You are not gay. You are afraid of women. You are so reserved and so damned dignified.’ She laughed. ‘But you are nice. You have—how shall I say?—an air. And it is nice, your air. Now, you will escort me to Cortina—yes?’ She had her head cocked on one side and there was an impish gleam in her eyes that was quite disturbing. ‘Please do not look so serious, Mr Blair. I will not seduce you on the way down.’ She sighed. ‘Once—yes. But now—one gets old, you know.’ She shrugged her shoulders and walked across to her skis.

  ‘I am afraid it will be a question of you escorting me, Contessa,’ I apologised as I fixed my skis. ‘It is two years since I did any ski-ing.’

  ‘Do not worry,’ she said. ‘It will come back. And Cortina is not a difficult run. You need to do a lot of stemming on the first part. After that it is a straight run. Are you ready?’ She was standing poised on the slope that led into the fir woods.

  My feet felt very clumsy. I remembered what Joe had said that morning about his skis feeling like a couple of canoes. That is just what mine felt like. I wished I had not told her that I was going into Cortina. ‘Yes, I’m ready,’ I said, and slithered across the belvedere to the start of the run.

  She laid a slim, white-gloved hand on my arm. Her mood changed. ‘I think we are going to become good friends,’ she said. ‘I shall call you Neil. It is such a nice name. And you had better call me–Carla.’ She gave me a quick glance to see that the point had registered and then, with a smile and a flash of sticks, she plunged down into the dark firs. Whilst I was still hesitating on the brink of the run, her cry of ‘libera!’ floated back to me from the woods, telling me that already she had reached the point where the ski track from Monte Cristallo joins the Col da Varda–Cortina run.

  I thrust myself forward with my sticks, saw my ski points tilt on to the slope and then I was hurtling through the cold air, my skis biting deeply on the frozen surface of the run. I took it slowly, snow-ploughing on the steeper slopes so that my ankles ached and stemming hard on the bends. The track was not really steep. But to my unaccustomed skis, it seemed precipitous as it wound down through the black straight trunks of the firs. I had no time to think about the Contessa’s reason for that sudden admission of identity. Brain and muscle were alike concentrated on getting down the run.

  Halfway down to the road I found the Contessa waiting for me in a patch of sunlight. She looked a ghostly figure in her white ski suit, which was cream-coloured against the purer white of the snow. I nerved myself for a half-Christi and it came off. I stopped dead beside her in a flurry of ice-crisp snow. A little wobbly it was true, but still I had done it and it takes quite a bit of nerve to try it, if you haven’t been on skis for a long time and aren’t particularly good anyway.

  ‘Bravo!’ she applauded. She had a cigarette in her mouth and was holding the packet out to me.

  I took one. I was feeling very pleased with myself. I had been trying to show off and her quietly voiced ‘bravo!’ gave me immense satisfaction. My hand was trembling with the nervous excitement of the effort as I lit her cigarette.

  There was a short silence between us. It was not an embarrassed silence. It was more the silence of two people thinking out what line they are going to take. It was very quiet in the woods and the sun was warm. My body glowed and tingled. The cigarette was Turkish and the scent of it was an exotic intrusion in that solitude of snow and fir. My brain was working fast. I knew what she was going to ask. That was why she had stopped for a smoke. And I had to think of some natural explanation of how I had come by that photograph. How had Engles got hold of it? I glanced at her. She was watching me covertly through a veil of smoke. She was expecting me to say something. I nerved myself to break the silence between us. ‘So that was your photograph?’ I said, hoping that my voice did not sound nervous.

  She drew deeply at her cigarette. ‘Yes,’ she said and her voice was pitched strangely low. ‘You were quite right. I was once called Carla Rometta.’ She hesitated then. I waited and at length she said, ‘You seem to know more about my affairs than I like in a stranger. For we have not met before, you know.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We have not met before.’

  ‘You lied to me.’

  ‘I had to open the conversation somehow.’

  ‘So, we have not met. Yet you have my photograph. That picture was taken—oh, a long time ago, in Berlin.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was taken by a Berlin photographer.’

  ‘May I see it please?’

  ‘I have not got it on me,’ I lied.

  She gave me a quick, searching glance. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘I find it strange that you should carry my photograph when we have not met before. You will explain to me the reason—yes?’ She was watching me. I concentrated on my cigarette. ‘I had signed it?’ she asked. ‘And written
on it also?’

  I nodded.

  ‘What had I written—please tell me.’ There was a tremor in her voice.

  ‘It was to Heinrich,’ I told her.

  A sigh escaped her lips and she was silent for a moment. Then she said, ‘You seem to know much of my affairs. Stefan tells me that you were at the auction this morning and that you know he was trying to buy Col da Varda on my behalf. How did you know that?’

  ‘Edouardo Mancini told me,’ I replied.

  ‘That ugly old pig!’ She gave a short laugh. ‘Nothing can happen in Cortina but he knows about it. He is a tarantula. Did he tell you who bought it? That little man who bid against Stefan, he was only a lawyer.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘He did not tell me. But he said the lawyer belonged to a Venetian firm that handled the financial affairs of big industrial concerns. I think he feared that a powerful hotel or tourist syndicate had bought it.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But it is strange. Big financiers do not pay fancy prices for places like Col da Varda.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘You ask yourself why I was prepared to pay so much, is that not so?’

  ‘It certainly interests me,’ I told her.

  ‘But why?’ she asked, and there was a note of irritation in her voice. ‘Why are you so interested in my affairs? You are here to write a story for the cinema—so everyone is told. But you have my picture. You know my real name. You are interested enough in Col da Varda to attend the auction. What is all this to you? I insist that you tell me.’

  I had my story ready now. That reference to my writing a script had given me the clue. The thing fell neatly into place. ‘It’s quite true about my writing a script for a film,’ I said. ‘And because I am a writer it is natural for me to be interested in anything unusual that I find happening around me. A writer bases everything he writes on people he has met, things that have happened to him, places that he’s seen, stories that are told him. Everything an author writes, he has either experienced or seen or read about. I had your photograph. I did not know you or anything about you. You were just a signature to me, linked with the name Heinrich. And then I read that Heinrich Stelben was associated with a dancer named Carla Rometta. I meet you within a few hours of reading that. And then, next day, I find you prepared to pay a fantastic sum for Col da Varda, a property that was once owned by Heinrich Stelben. You must admit, I could hardly fail to be interested in such a strange sequence of events.’