The Secret Agent

by Francine Mathews

  The rumors had begun four days before, when the Dash 7 from Paris with its forty-seven passengers overshot the runway that ran alongside the Boulevard Creux and ended, engulfed in snow from nose to tail, on the neighboring piste. This was not entirely an unusual occurrence. The runway was just slightly more than a thousand feet long and was set at an incline—downhill for takeoff, uphill for landing. Private planes, unused to alpine conditions and thin air, routinely ended nose-up in the groomed expanse beyond the altiport; for a Dash 7 to do so, however, was news. The miscalculation might potentially be called a crash.

  Jacques had witnessed the affair himself from the comfort of Boulevard Creux, where he sat drinking a robust red wine from a local vintner and delicately considering the merits of a terrine. He heard the whine of the Dash 7’s engines; from the corner of his eye, saw the clumsy shape descend like a falling house on the tilted landscape. The terrine, he decided, was not without merit but strove for too much. He pushed it aside and concentrated on a fine soft cheese from a dairy farm near Méribel.

  Cries of horror and immense excitement—a woman’s scream from the adjacent table—an overturned chair. Jacques stood, his napkin still tucked into the collar of his shirt as though he were a yokel, and not an institution in the life of the most glamorous ski area known to man—and stared out at the huddled mess of the downed prop plane. It had missed several late skiers by a matter of meters.

  “Sacré bleu,” he’d muttered. “And how they will get that thing off the piste is anyone’s guess. A tow will not do it. Imbécile.”

  As he watched, the emergency door above the wing was thrust open. A long, booted leg in leopard-print velvet appeared in the black maw of the opening. Jacques swore under his breath. This type usually arrived by private jet.

  She wore sunglasses under the mop of dark curls, although it was already evening and the light was alpine flat. A black Persian lamb coat, full and swinging. Suede gloves, and a leather backpack slung over her shoulder. She poised on the wing, jumped down as carelessly as though the entire life of Courchevel was not gaping at her from Boulevard Creux, and sauntered toward the altiport terminal some hundred meters back along the overshot runway. It was a good six minutes before the rest of the Dash 7’s passengers found courage to follow.

  Jacques continued to swear as he watched her go, with a fluency that did him honor. Not because the woman was a sensation—he was long jaded by celebrity and bravado and chic, he saw them all the time. Nor because her beauty was a reproach to a man abandoned by his wife. No, he swore because he had seen Max Roderick fixed like a stone to one side of the piste, just beyond the fallen plane, his weight well back in his boots and his poles thrust into the snow. Watching.

  He made no move toward the Dash 7—he suggested not the slightest anxiety or concern for its occupants— but something in Max’s expression, the arms folded tightly across his chest as he stared at the wing, told Jacques that Max had been waiting for this plane. For the appearance of this woman.

  Although such an idea was impossible.

  Impossible, Jacques repeated to himself now as he stood shivering on his own doorstep. There had been no welcome in Max Roderick’s face. He had merely stared after the woman’s figure while the sirens began to wail, then seized his poles, thrust himself cleanly down the piste and vanished from Jacques’s sight.

  Until he reappeared, so the rumors went, at a party in the woman’s rented villa—here, in Le Praz—the very next night. The two had been inseparable in the few days since. The paparazzi—never far from le pauvre Max—were beginning to sniff the wind.

  An old flame, declared Yvette Margolan with a knowing air as she handed Jacques his olives the following afternoon. I saw her when I delivered the charcuterie. Not young, but très chic. She happened upon our Max unawares, after the passage of many years. It is Fate, non? He has been too much alone, mon vieux, since la Muldoon …

  But Max had not been unaware.

  Jacques stood in the rising morning, his eyes fixed on the spot where Max Roderick had passed, riding the platter lift out of Le Praz at eight-fifteen on a Friday of new snow when he should have been aboard the tram for Saulire long since. The cold seeped through his vest and his ancient sweater and he shuddered suddenly, seized by the chill like a dog snapped on a too-short leash. Why should it matter to him, if Max amused himself with a hundred strange women? Was he, Jacques Renaudie, an old man now that his wife had run off with a banker to Paris? Never mind that he had known Max for more than a decade, and had never witnessed such slavish attention, such wholehearted indiscretion …

  Curse all women and their heartless scheming, Jacques thought savagely. Where was his daughter, anyway? He should refuse Sabine the house when she finally came home. Jacques banged the base of the broom against the step and turned in search of the cigarettes he kept in his kitchen.

  Max Roderick had not spent the night in Stefani Fogg’s villa. She had slept at his home instead.

  He had dropped down to Le Praz at first light in order to fetch some of her clothes—a change of long underwear, a fresh ski sweater. The rest of her gear still sat in the vestibule of his old farmhouse on the ridge just beyond Courchevel 1850, the highest of the ski area’s four main bases.

  She had hesitated when he invited her for dinner the previous night, and he knew that she was longing for a hot bath and an early bed. He had spared her nothing in the previous seventy-two hours: the relentless drops down the steeps of La Vizelle, the circuitous passage through the woods of Courchevel 1550; the nail-biting jumps from outcropping to outcropping in the rugged Grand Couloir; the moguls on La Combe de la Saulire. He had taken her into bowls far above tree line, so junked with crud they tore the skis out from under the best of amateurs. She was equal to everything but his pace.

  That first morning they had stood together in the sharp, cold, early light on the knife-edge of Saulire’s ridge, the far-flung Alps unrolling toward Switzerland. They were alone in a cruel and beautiful world of glacial ice. Wordlessly, he handed her the water bottle from his ski jacket. She tipped it to her lips and then said, “Follow me.”

  Before he could speak or move she was airborne over the cornice, eyes searching for landfall. She moved with a sort of reckless instinct he had not expected and found dangerously intoxicating. He threw himself after her, following precisely the turns she traced on the head-wall’s face. When at last she slashed to a stop and looked back over her shoulder, waiting for him, the two sets of tracks ran unbroken for nearly twelve hundred feet. A single clean run without pause or hesitation.

  “You’ve skied this before?” he asked her curtly.

  “Never.”

  “Your skis could be shorter, and they’re all wrong for your center of gravity.”

  “I just got them last year.”

  “We’ll switch them tomorrow. I can fit you from the stock in my studio.”

  “But I like my equipment!”

  “You’ll like mine better.”

  Did he intend to challenge her, that early in the morning on their first day? He wasn’t sure. Max had skied with many women in his professional life—women from the U.S. Ski Team, and girls down the length of his long apprenticeship on a thousand mountains around the world. He was used to the tenacity, the aggressiveness, the naked competition of such women; he was used to precision and skill. What he recognized in this woman was a more elusive quality: joy. It showed in every line of her body when she turned downhill.

  “Where do we go next?” she asked.

  “You told me to follow you.” Another challenge. She thrust her poles into the snow and went.

  There are more than three hundred and twenty miles of marked runs in Les Trois Vallées, the three valleys of St. Bon, Les Allues and Belleville; to ski them all would require an entire season, but she made a game attempt. Each day she ascended from Le Praz to Courchevel 1850, met Max at the foot of the Verdons gondola and from there decreed their course: toward the villages of Méribel, Val Thorens or Mott
aret. They skied hard and by unspoken agreement never referred to the business that had brought her to France. When they talked at all, in the spaces between runs as they climbed back toward the summit on a multitude of lifts, it was of the food or the sun or the terrain they had just conquered.

  “Where do you ski in the States?” he asked her once; and abruptly, as though she did not like to think about it, she replied: “Utah.”

  “Deer Valley?”

  She turned and gazed at him, her dark eyes unreadable behind her sunglasses. “Deer Valley. Is it so obvious?”

  She wore a headband of carved and dyed mink, the glossy curls springing back like a wild fringe from her forehead. Her nose was red from exposure. Her jacket, incredibly, was of Italian doeskin the color of caramel and the texture of satin. Her ski pants were the same. “It saves time,” she had explained, “après-ski. I’m already dressed for a party.”

  “You have the skill for Snowbird and Alta,” he commented, “but you look like Deer Valley.”

  Her lips curled in contempt. “Deer Valley’s nice, Max. They valet your skis when you come off the hill.”

  “They valet them here,” he replied, “if you pay them enough.”

  “Don’t let the skill level fool you.” She avoided his eye, staring instead at the ridgeline. “I’m relentlessly shallow. I like pretty houses and pretty bodies wherever I go.”

  “How honest of you to admit it. Most people profess the opposite—and live out their days as liars. There’s no Mr. Fogg, I gather?”

  She shook her head. “I buy my own mink, thank you very much. The one thing money can buy, you see, is freedom.”

  He thought of Suzanne Muldoon, and the sweeping silver fox. She’d loved furs as much as he hated them, and so the coat arrived in tribute to their three years. Two months after he’d bought the thing, she’d served him with a lawsuit.

  “Freedom,” he told Stefani, “can be quite solitary.”

  “But loneliness, in my book, is always preferable to dependence. All relationships require someone to dominate, and the other to submit. That ain’t gonna be me.”

  “Unless you pursue a man whose strength matches yours. An equal. What might happen then?”

  “A fight to the death.” She threw back her head and laughed. “Don’t tell me you’re a romantic, Max. I don’t believe in them anymore.”

  He stayed off her private terrain after that.

  She let him guide her through the bars and hostels of his adopted town; she drank Armagnac warmed over a candle flame and turned her toes toward the fire and paid lip service to his attempts to charm her. Max had been a celebrity for nearly twenty years. To be held at arm’s length—to be treated as though he were nothing more than a guide to the terrain—was disconcerting.

  What exactly did Stefani Fogg know about that moment in Geneva? The dead Thai stripper with her hair flung like raw silk across his pillow? What could—what ought—he to tell her?

  That the girl’s eyes had bulged obscenely in death? That as he emerged from the shower, he noticed first the way the early morning sun caressed her golden breast-how her fingers reached wantonly for air—and only a second later, the look of horror and denial in her face?

  He could not find the words to describe what he had seen, nor the revulsion—the fascination—he still felt. He said nothing of the painfully young corpse or the red-sequined thong that left a raw band across her dead flesh or the flurried hotel manager or the correct little man with the Hitler mustache who interviewed him for the Geneva police, deferential as Stefani Fogg could never be.

  She had asked him nothing about the murder. This woman sent out from New York to walk with him through the wasteland was clearly waiting for further developments. She seemed content to let him size her up for a few days on the slopes. Max knew that she was assessing his qualities in turn. He didn’t stop to wonder how this test—for that was what it clearly was—might have been accomplished, if Stefani Fogg had never skied. She would not, then, have been Stefani Fogg. An entirely different set of assumptions would have applied.

  And so that third afternoon, when the light had flattened at the high elevations and clouds had converged on the lower pistes, he turned to her as they entered Courchevel 1850 and said: “Have dinner at my house tonight. It’s time we talked about Thailand.”

  “Then of course I’ll come.”

  “You can see the place from here, if you strain your eyes. There’s a platter lift to the top.”

  She followed the line of his hand, staring toward the lonely peak at the end of the ridge beyond the village and the stone house with its heavy cap of snow.

  “It’s exactly the sort of house you should have. Rooted to the earth. Beautiful in its simplicity. A house that knows who it is.”

  “The smaller building to the rear is my studio. You can come up now, if you want. It’d save you a second trip, in the dark.”

  “I will,” she replied. “I want to see those skis you promised me.”

  They left their gear outside in the clear dusky cold. The hall was empty but for a painted Swiss armoire and a long pine bench; a faint scent of vanilla lingered in the air. The pavers beneath Stefani’s toes felt warm, like the stones of a hearth.

  “Glycerin,” he told her. “Piped through the subflooring. Thicker than water and heat retentive. It warms the surface, then the whole house.”

  “I thought this place was an antique.”

  “It dates from the forties. I renovated a few years ago.”

  In 1996. The year after he’d settled in Courchevel and bought the farmhouse. She remembered the date from his dossier—those one hundred forty-three pages consumed before Scottish bedtime. She had most of the man’s life memorized by now; none of it had prepared her for Max.

  The videos had captured the cutthroat competitor, the inexhaustible energy. But there was a quality of refusal about Max in person—of disengagement from the world—that Stefani found intriguing and unnerving. He weighed every word before he spoke, as though the consequences of speech—of contact—of human emotion-might be irreversible. She suspected that yawning fear lay behind that reflexive control; but fear of what? Was he capable, as his air suggested, of living without a shred of love? Was his solitude the result of arrogance? A defense against pain? Or a calculated decision to take the best life could offer, and give nothing back?

  “How did you manage to build up here?” she asked.

  “It wasn’t easy. In summer, the roads are accessible by four-wheel, but most of the lumber had to be lifted. Around June, the resort people pull the quad chairs off the cable and attach steel containers capable of carrying anything up the mountain. Whirlpool baths, caviar, goats seeking summer pasture … The usual mix of necessity and luxury.”

  “Max, why did you leave the States?”

  The tousled gold head turned in the act of shedding its helmet. “That’s the first personal thing you’ve asked me.”

  “I couldn’t find the answer in my files.”

  “And do you like your data complete?” He studied her intently with those clear, light eyes. “Or are you trying to understand my soul?”

  “I’m interested in French real estate.”

  It was not, Stefani thought, the truth. But she had kept Max at arm’s length ever since she’d arrived. It was the one way she felt safe.

  “I detest the American skier’s practice of retiring to a resort as the local mascot,” he said deliberately. “I have no interest in skiing once a day with a crowd of delighted fans or plastering my face across billboards. I don’t want to make commercials endorsing watches or credit cards. I chose this place because I could live here, and do work that interests me. The French don’t care what I eat or what I wear or who I sleep with. Courchevel is so public I can disappear.”

  Until, she thought, a corpse shows up in your bed. “Don’t the paparazzi ski?”

  His mouth twisted. “Not on my terrain. The last time they followed me, three guys and a woman had to be air
lifted off the headwall. Like a drink?”

  He had tampered with the old Savoyard structure in the main room; the far wall was glass instead of stone, with a view of the tramline. The lights strung from base to peak were sparks in the growing dark. She stood in the middle of the space—he was spare with furniture— and felt the loneliness. He probably slept with all his windows wide open. She shuddered suddenly.

  “What happened to Suzanne Muldoon?”

  “Your second personal question.” His hands stilled over a bottle of Bordeaux. “Once she got my check, she cut me out of her life. Is red wine okay?”

  “Red’s fine. Why did she sue you?”

  “She could hardly sue Innsbruck. Or the World Cup.” He concentrated on pouring her a glass. “When you race, Stefani, you face death every day. That’s why you train so hard—it’s the voodoo that keeps you alive. Suzanne was lucky. She kicked back—eased up on her training—par-tied too hard—and did a back flip over a course barrier. She got off with a blown knee. Could have been a broken neck.”

  “She claimed you drove her beyond her limits. That your coaching was relentless.”

  “Relentless? I didn’t know Suzanne understood words of three syllables. But I wasn’t her coach. She paid somebody else for that.”

  “So why sue you, Max?”

  He set down the bottle and stared at her, his expression remote. “I think her dreams died hard. Somebody had to pay, and Suzanne figured she’d paid enough. Her career was shot. She’d lost her chance to medal, she’d lost the endorsements—she needed to clutch at something. Apparently it wasn’t me.”