A Shadow on the Sun

by Francis Cottam

  ‘Do you know the name and location of the lodge?’

  She shook her head. ‘The name only.’

  ‘That’s enough. I’ve fished and hunted and skied in Colorado since I was eleven years old, Julia. I used to hunt there twenty-odd years ago with ’Tasha’s father. I know the ground. I know all of it. And I won’t be stopped from going.’

  Julia nodded. She looked defeated.

  ‘I’m going for the two people I love most on earth. Not to prove anything,’ Bill said.

  ‘He’ll kill you.’ She said it flatly, resignedly.

  ‘No doubt he’ll try.’

  Bill went over to her. He stroked her face and kissed her cheeks and the top of her head and his heart cleaved for her. But his voice was calm. ‘Call the police. Call them now. I’ll stay with you until the police arrive. And then I have to go.’

  Eight

  He had drilled holes in the trunk of his car so that she would not suffocate despite the ropes and gag that restricted her breathing and terrified her and inflicted the cramp she endured. During the short January days on the road she could see pinpoints of light and sometimes, thin shafts of sunlight pencilled through the small prison of her space. Mostly, though, they travelled in darkness and cold. Her hurt leg ached with cold and confinement. Hungry and, worse, very thirsty, she would remind herself of how uncomfortable she had thought the bus journey to New York Harbour for the boat to Europe and her ski holiday. Reminiscing about anything before her kidnap was, she knew, a dangerous thing to do. The nostalgia for freedom it invoked seemed almost overwhelming considering just how recently she had been free. And reminiscing brought with it a sort of despondent self-pity that threatened to rob her of her alertness and paralyse her mind. On the other hand, only reminiscing could keep her sane. She would think about how grumpy the chilly tedium of the bus journey had made her and would be almost able to laugh, picturing her own pompous disgruntlement. If only I’d had a crystal ball, Natasha thought. I’d never have complained. But then if I’d had a crystal ball, I’d never have been caught.

  Her kindness had allowed her to be taken. The road shuddered under her and she gritted her teeth against cramp and thought of that line from Tennessee Williams. What was it? I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. She hadn’t really known what it meant when she’d seen Claire Bloom in the play on Broadway and she didn’t know what it meant now. But she had tried to give comfort to a stranger, seeing a slight, bedraggled man apparently taken ill in a dark doorway on a Washington Street. And she had awoken here, with her tongue swollen and dry and her head pounding worse than it had after an evening of Glühwein with that cabal of school reefer-smokers in Austria. Much worse, actually. It was Bill, she remembered, who had told her that nobody under thirty really gets a hangover.

  ‘Then from thirty to forty, you learn to deal with a hangover. After forty, life itself seems to take on many permanent hangover characteristics. My advice, kid, is to make hay while the sun shines.’ And he had smiled. But the humour had not touched his eyes. And she had resolved then to confront him on the unhappy and persistent subject of the hangover that had become Bill’s self-imposed life sentence.

  The car went over another bump and she winced behind the tightness of the gag. The gag was a real pain because it was full of the dribble and snot that she had cried into it before she had got a grip on herself. It was crusty and it stank, to tell the truth. Did it mean she had bad breath? She hoped not. But halitosis, though a pretty disastrous affliction, was not at this moment the most compelling of her problems. Escape was the most compelling of her problems. She planned to escape. But that was not the same thing at all as having an escape plan. Formulating one of those had so far defeated her. It wasn’t like being abducted in the movies. Should she ever get out of this, she would have to confront her mom on that score, tell her mom that life wasn’t at all like the movies.

  Thinking about her mom threatened to bring more tears and panic and Natasha reminded herself fiercely that the gag in her mouth was disgusting enough without a fresh onslaught of tears and mucus. She blinked and counted the breaths until composure returned to her. He didn’t intend to kill her. Not straight away, he didn’t, or he would have already. He was feeding her, after a fashion, at deserted stops on the route at night, when he would untie the gag and give her candy and cola with his left hand while his right gripped a large hunting knife. Afterwards he would let her squat and pee at the roadside. He did all this with a light, she thought a bicycle lamp, hanging from one of his shirt pockets and shining in her eyes. It made him a silhouette, and so far, she had not clearly seen his face. The breathing holes punched in the trunk lid and the feeding stops told her he didn’t intend to kill her yet. But she needed a plan of escape. Because he would kill her, wouldn’t he? He would kill her because in real life, they almost always did.

  She thought the guy might be an ex-cop or maybe a prison guard. He followed strict procedures and seemed to possess some weird kind of expertise in dealing with a prisoner. It was what made the possibility of escape so damn difficult. So far, she didn’t think the guy had made any mistakes. And there were no flaws in his method. That would have to change, though. They would have to arrive somewhere eventually, wouldn’t they, and the situation would be obliged to change. He had not hit her. He had not molested or raped her. There was a temptation to feel almost grateful for that, but Natasha knew this was a seductive trap. Hating him was dangerous, but it was her best chance of survival. Feeling gratitude for what he hadn’t done to her was just foolish weakness. She thought about her bonds and the way her kindness had been abused and her freedom violated. She thought about her short life and her poor bereft mother. And she knew that if she were given any kind of chance, she would kill her abductor. She would kill rather than die. If necessary, she would kill him with her bare hands.

  What the girls at school called her jock instinct had kind of embarrassed her in recent years. It was hard to think of yourself as Holly Golightly (in the film, not the book); or Juliette Greco, when the athletics coach was always on your case to run track or throw a discus. Skiing was different because it was basically European and the clothing was incredibly cool. Riding was riding. Jodhpurs and boots could look pretty good. Riding was okay. But the other staff? The problem was that she was naturally good at it. She was quick and she was very strong. Once, for a bet, she had been challenged to see how many pull-ups she could do in the gym on the chinning bar. She’d given up at ten, when Alice Dorne had emerged from her Rod McKuen dope stupor and begun ironically clapping.

  ‘Easy, Alice,’ Natasha had said, dropping from the bar. ‘You’ll wear yourself out.’

  She could have done a lot more than ten pull-ups. She could have done twice that number.

  She was slender, disproportionately strong, the coaches always said; surprisingly strong. She thought her strength might come in useful now.

  On the third evening of her abduction he cut off all her hair. She had been proud of her hair and began to cry. He told her to shut up, the first thing he had said to her. Everything prior to that had been gestures and shakes of his head. ‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘If I had pliers, I’d take a tooth. So shut up.’

  His voice was guttural and his accent harsh. Italian? The Bronx? He cut her hair off, cutting her head, twice, in his hurry, with the shears he used. She thought that the cuts to her scalp probably felt worse than they actually were. When had she last had a tetanus jab? She did not cry out and she tried very hard not to provoke him further by wincing as he carried out his wretched task. She could see no lights, but the air was colder and thinner than it had been, she was sure of it. It was almost mountain air. He had forgotten to bring pliers. It was a mistake, wasn’t it? He had meant to bring pliers to pull one of her teeth. It wouldn’t do to dwell on what would be happening, now, on this dark roadside, had he remembered them. The fact was, he’d fouled up. As she watched her hair spill down the face of her ruined coat in cloudy moonlight, as he gath
ered dead, flaxen tresses from her shoulders and put her hair into a bag, she did what she could in her mind to take encouragement from that small fact.

  He’d fouled up.

  When he fucked up, she would be ready and she would kill him.

  Sorry, Mom. About the swearing, I mean. I don’t mean about the intent.

  He pushed her back into the trunk of the car and her head felt cold and small, her scalp naked now to the cold of the night air. She sniffed and bit on the gag. She still had all her teeth. And her hair would grow out and she would have it styled short, the way Jean Seberg had worn hers in the movie Breathless.

  She played games in her mind. She played the fame and the fortune game but mostly she played the dating game. In an ideal world she would find someone who looked like Alain Delon had in Plein Soliel. But he’d have to be taller. According to Alice Dorne, dope fiend, failed ballerina and oracle of all knowledge, Alain Delon was only five-eight. One of the many privileges of being her mother’s daughter was that she got to see final cuts in preview theatres sometimes before movies were actually released. So she had seen Breakfast at Tiffany’s already, even though none of her friends had. And she had seen The Hustler. Playing pool wasn’t really an accomplishment she admired, though, and Paul Newman’s Eddie Felson character was about as dumb and self-destructive as you could get. But God, he looked beautiful. Writing was a much more beguiling talent than hitting pool balls, but George Peppard was much too preppy in Breakfast for her taste. Given that raising Alain Delon to six feet defied the laws of physics, what she’d like to do was date someone with the soulful nature of Peppard’s writer and the looks of Paul Newman. It would be a good start.

  She had asked her mother could she meet Paul Newman, before The Hustler was finished, on the set.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ her mother had said. ‘He works on a closed set. Also he’s a method actor and therefore very aloof. Also he’s thirty-five years old and you’re a schoolgirl. It’s a ridiculous idea.’

  She smiled to herself at that. Her mother dismissed lots of ideas as ridiculous. She didn’t understand the fun of just being a fan. Her mother admired some men. She certainly admired Jack Kennedy. But she had probably never had a crush on anyone in her life. It would be much too undignified. Natasha wondered had her mother ever loved a man. No, she decided. It would be much too undignified. She wondered would she get the chance, the time now, to have a non-celluloid romance of her own. There was a lot she wanted to do, to experience. Her love life had been limited to a few flirtations. She was seventeen and she didn’t want to die at the hands of the guttural stranger who had stolen her.

  She knew it was the guy in the creepy pickup with the blind windshield who had followed her and Bill from the airport. She had smelled the lanolin and Old Spice smell on him. She thought it was probably something to do with her mother and the Kennedy connection. It was some creep with a grudge against the government or the Kennedy family or maybe the new president himself. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t make the connection. And the alternative, that it was actually about her, was too terrifying for her yet to consider. She closed her eyes and her naked head prickled in the raw cold and she imagined another version of events. In this one, Bill had run the creep off the road and dragged him out of the pickup and brained him with that bike lamp thing he wore clipped to his breast pocket. Or Bill had surprised him spying on them and sent the creep tumbling and cartwheeling down the hill, knocked cold by a mighty blow. If only. If only. If only that had been how it had happened instead of this.

  They were definitely getting higher. The air was thinning and she recognized the frigid cold she had felt in the Alps in Austria. They were at altitude, among mountains. The car climbed an almost constant gradient that forced her weight towards where the trunk locked. The gears ground and the engine complained as the car took a series of narrow turns that reminded her body of how bruised it had become, trussed up and confined.

  He’d said something really odd when he’d cut her hair. She wondered had she heard him right. His accent was heavy and his words indistinct and she hadn’t exactly been concentrating on what he was saying. Forced to avert her eyes by the power of the torch beam, she had seen the car interior briefly bathed in light and noticed a long canvas bag on the rear seat. It was dun coloured in the torch beam and had a thin leather strap. Bags like that carried rifles or they carried fencing foils. She did not think this was the sort of guy who would fence for recreation. He had pulled her shorn head around, then, back to face him and the blinding whiteness, and he had turned her head this way and that, her jaw held hurtfully in the grip of his finger and thumb. She had smelled burnt tobacco strong on his fingers. ‘Gott,’ the silhouette had said to her, and it had barked laughter. ‘It’s like looking at a ghost.’

  Maybe Bill had been right. Maybe it was just some random lunatic with a grudge against the world in general. He’d hit on her at the airport when they dropped her mom and followed them and then done that scoping thing from behind his rock above the orange grove. He must have known Bill had spotted him, but that hadn’t put him off. Bill was a big, fierce guy, big enough to put most people off. But this guy hadn’t been put off at all. He had been clever and persistent enough to follow her to Washington. And he’d been cunning enough to trap and abduct her too.

  It was about her, wasn’t it? It wasn’t about the Kennedys or politics or anything like that. It was about her, no matter how random his fixation or weird his motives. The ghost remark was personal. Whatever it meant to him, it was personal and it was the proof. Natasha shivered with this realization in the darkness of the trunk. Suddenly she felt very tired, overwhelmed by a narcotic, smothering blanket of fatigue. It was the onset of shock, she imagined, or her body’s response to the onset of shock. But sleep was a blessing. It would block out the pain and it would make her stronger and she needed her strength as never before. And so when sleep engulfed her she was glad and grateful and she surrendered entirely to it.

  He must have chloroformed her again or used ether on her while she slept in the trunk. She awoke strapped to something rigid with the sun shining directly into her eyes. Her head ached terribly in pulsing thumps and she was moving and the motion made her nauseous. Her tongue was swollen again and felt blistered. She turned her head to one side and puked and choked behind the gag. She heard him swear from somewhere in front of her and he knelt down and pulled out his hunting knife and pressed the blade against her throat. The meaning was clear. She nodded and he cut the gag and she coughed out vomit. There was blood in the vomit. She must have bitten her tongue. He was wearing snow goggles and a hooded smock and a harness to pull the sled he had bound her to. She groaned and he stood and kicked her. The knife had a handle carved from bone and a brass pommel and had felt very sharp. It was a bowie knife with a groove along the blade to channel blood. It was the biggest knife she had ever seen.

  She was in the mountains. The snow was too white to look at and the sky too blue in the sunlight. She blinked and tried to accommodate the brightness. He had the rifle strapped across his back. He was a slightly built man, not tall. Maybe she had been kidnapped by Alain Delon. She coughed again and winced from the pain in her ribs.

  ‘You laugh at me? You think this is funny?’

  She shook her head. German. The accent was German. He looked like a mountain soldier in the get-up he wore. With the accent and all, he looked like one of the bad guys in a war movie. Now if only Kirk Douglas or Burt Lancaster would come round a bluff and kill him. Wouldn’t that be great? She was giddy from the chloroform. Should she survive this, she would have to tell Alice Dome about chloroform. This stuff beat reefer hands down.

  ‘You think this is funny?’

  She shook her head. No, she didn’t think it was funny at all. She didn’t want to get kicked in her ribs again. If she kept her eyes open she would give herself snow blindness. Her feet felt numb with cold but her toes were hurting her through the numbness. And black clouds like fro
zen thunderheads loomed above the peaks that seemed to be where they were headed. It was going to dump snow. The snow would cover their tracks. They would likely get caught in a blizzard and die of exposure or be torn off a slope and hurled into the void by the force of the wind. A month before, she had narrowly avoided death in an avalanche in Austria and thought then it must be her fate to live a long life. What a joke that assumption seemed now. But it wasn’t funny, was it? It wasn’t funny at all. The creep was right. Nothing was funny.

  She was in Colorado. The landscape was silent and mountainous and they were high up. She had skied in the Rockies in Canada but the air felt different there. She knew from the dry texture of the air and the snow that she was in Colorado. And her heart seemed to fold up inside her at the sight, through her wincing vision, of this white, craggy wilderness. She would never be found here in all this vaunting, empty space. In front of her, her abductor trudged ever upward and her harnessed sled followed. She was truly lost. Above the peaks, the clouds roiled now in a vast black and purplish spill. The air had the compressed feel you felt in your ears before a storm. It didn’t matter, did it, that it was going to snow? No one knew where she was. No one was coming to try to rescue her. She was in real life, not in a movie, and there was no Burt Lancaster poised to emerge on spiked boots from a crevasse and save her with a burst of machine-gun fire and a trademark Lancaster grin.

  He had not yet made a mistake. Two days and two nights and he had not put a foot wrong in his procedure. He had forgotten the pliers with which to wrench out one of her teeth. But that was all. Probably he would have a tool kit wherever it was he was taking them. And there he would do with her whatever he wanted. He was a methodical man. She knew that much about him. And he was short, like Alain Delon was short. Natasha could feel her eyes brim with tears. But she would not give in to self-pity. She would nurse her precious flame of anger, let it flicker until it got the chance to roar. That’s what she would do. She would ignore the pain from her freezing toes and her blistered tongue and contain the fear and waste no energy on grim and ghoulish speculation. It was what it was until it changed, her situation. It might get worse. But it would certainly change and she took hope at that prospect and kindled and nourished the flame of the anger burning fiercely now inside her.