Bill didn’t want to think about that. Instead he measured the cold. While he walked, he worked hard enough to keep himself warm inside the layers of clothing under his quilted mountain parka. But the big breaths he pulled in were knife-edged, lung-piercingly cold. He would have to bivouac. Eventually he would have to stop and rest until morning. He wanted to travel on what sense he’d gained of his quarry until then. If the storm had really gone, he would curl down in his sleeping bag in the lee of a rock or on a sheltered ledge. If it returned, he would dig himself a snow hole with the entrenching tool strapped to his pack. He walked upward. He did not kid himself that he ascended the slopes on mountain legs. His mountain legs were no more than a fond memory to him now. He climbed on the strength of hundreds of hours of pushing the pedals of a stationary bike before an audience of incredulous fighters at a boxing gym in Anaheim.
He walked upward and west on what he had learned about Landau after his talk with the Creole mobster at the lodge. Ascending, he thought about the lodge. He had seen it crouched there on dozens of occasions over the years on his passages through the mountains and never felt the inclination to pay the lodge a visit. It was a curious place, but forbidding. It reminded him of various houses, sinister and grand, he had seen mostly on his travels in England. The English had a word for this character of dwelling. The word was manse. It was a medieval word derived from Latin and had originally meant the house of a minister. Bill thought manse sounded more like an affliction than an abode. And he thought it suited the lodge perfectly. Malevolence had dwelt there. He knew that now. He had a better sense altogether of who and what it was he hunted. And so he moved west, higher, where he thought Landau would go. Where he prayed Landau had not done what kidnappers almost always did, where he prayed Landau still had Natasha held safe.
Bill was not a man comfortable with the way he had lived his life. He thought his had been a life from which meaningful accomplishment was altogether absent. There was little about his past he was proud of and much that made him feel ashamed and embarrassed. In his worst and most remorseful moments he felt truly abject. And he got drunk. And afterwards he felt worse. The day of the orange grove picnic was a good example of the consequences of this behaviour. The evening prior to it, his god-daughter had called him in tears. Blind drunk, he’d slewed along the roads at the wheel of his Jeep to their house in Orange County with a wad of hundreds in his pocket and not the remotest fucking clue as to the nature of the problem. He’d tried to fake sobriety with some ludicrous courtroom burlesque inspired entirely by a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label. Unless a packet of Planters Peanuts provided the creative spark, but that he seriously doubted. And the following day he tried to make up for it to the girl and to restore himself in her estimation by taking her for a picnic. He was damn sure that picnics featured nowhere on any twelve-step recovery programmes he had ever heard about. But that was what he did. And they were stalked by Landau. Landau had ’Tasha in the cross hairs of his sight. And if he hadn’t been so debilitated by the Scotch of the night before, Bill knew he would have spotted the fucker far sooner and chased him down and broken his fucking neck.
Jesus Christ spelled sideways! He raised a foot and wasted energy trying to kick a lump of snow invitingly sculpted in his path by moonlight. Already knee deep in snow, he missed. Way to go, he thought, start an avalanche right here, put myself out of my misery. He waited for a moment for the physical world to rumble into action and exact natural justice. But no avalanche was triggered. So he punched the lump of snow instead and then started to look around for somewhere to bivouac and eat some of the field rations he’d packed. He wouldn’t risk a fire. Landau, he’d discovered, was far too good a shot. And should he be fortunate enough to find the man he hunted, he wanted his arrival to be a surprise.
He looked around. The world was entirely still and wore a profound, white hush. Julia had been wrong about his motives for coming here. He understood why she would think what she did, but she was wrong. He knew he had very little of what the psychologists termed self-love. Why should he love himself? He didn’t deserve to be loved. The idea was fucking ludicrous. But he loved Julia very much and he loved Natasha like a daughter. He was very grateful to have had her in his life. She had provided him with pride and joy for seventeen years and he had enjoyed nothing in his life so intensely as being able to do what he could to help take care of her. In the days when she still liked being read to at night, he would sometimes drive to San Francisco from LA just to tell her her bedtime story. What he appreciated about these occasions most was knowing how much they meant to her, how she looked forward to him coming, got excited when she heard his knock at their door with some new adventure she had not heard between the pages of the book in his hand. You could watch her bright mind illuminate in her eyes as she gathered up the sheets and blankets, scrunching down. Looking around now, still in the tree line, he could see the firs heavy and petrified under fresh snow in the freezing night. It would be the still, cursed kingdom of Narnia to a child, this place. It would. He had read her those stories, had had each shipped over from Foyles in London the moment it was printed and they had enthralled her. She would not have been reminded of Narnia in Landau’s company, though.
Bill had loved his daughter, Hannah, who had been taken by spiteful God, or indifferent fate, or whatever you chose to believe in, barely having reached the age of two. And he had loved his wife, Lucy, whose sometimes febrile spirit had not possessed the strength to survive Hannah’s death. Did he love Natasha now as much as he would a daughter of his own?
There had been a spate of child adoptions in Hollywood a few years back, the consequence of one of those periodic bouts of guilt the very young and unexpectedly wealthy sometimes indulged in. He had spoken at a party to a married actor in his thirties who had two young children with his wife. They loved each other and they adored their kids. But the couple were battling over the prospect of taking a toddler from an orphanage. He was against it. He told Bill why.
‘I call it the Titanic test,’ he said. ‘You’re aboard the Titanic.’
‘Unfortunate.’ Bill was drunk. Of course he was drunk.
‘And you end up in this arctic water with your kids. Say there are two of them.’
‘You’re not a Catholic, obviously.’
‘Come on, Bill. You asked the question.’
‘Mea culpa. Continue.’
‘You’re holding up the kids in the water and the cold is killing them. It’s killing them. One is yours by blood. The other you adopted. And a lifeboat rows by and they say they have room for one kid. Which kid would you choose?’
Bill shook his head. ‘It’s an impossible choice.’
‘It’s no choice at all,’ the actor said. ‘Not for me, it isn’t. And if you can’t pass the Titanic test, you don’t adopt.’
Bill had never posed himself the Titanic question, had never given serious thought to taking the Titanic test in his mind. It was an ordeal by theory he’d considered gratuitous. He grieved for Hannah still, as he knew he always would grieve for her. And he loved Natasha. And he could simply not imagine how he could love a daughter more. He had done what he could to enrich her life, at least when he’d been sober and fit for the task. And the thought that this petrified time in this desolate place might mark the end of her life, when it was only about to really begin, was an outrage to him. She was only just seventeen. She was clever and beautiful and good. And he would do everything he could possibly do to save her.
That was why he had come.
Bill bedded down and ate pemmican in his sleeping bag from a tin. And he slept and he dreamed of choppy water, dead children ringed by lifebelts floating on a freezing sea. Natasha was not among them.
Chuck, the Creole John Cheever, had taken him first to where Landau had worked and then to where Landau had lived. The Remington concession at the lodge was bigger than a mere gun counter. It was a gallery, with guns and rifles lining the walls and a workbench and a lathe and a neat row
of power tools. It contained a lot of firepower.
‘This isn’t an armoury,’ Bill said. ‘It’s an arsenal.’
Chuck shrugged like it was nothing to do with him.
Bill examined some of the hardware on display. ‘Do people really hunt these days with pump-action shotguns and automatic rifles?’
‘We get a lot of real gun enthusiasts. You know how it is.’
‘Yeah. I know how it is.’
There were no pictures on the walls of Landau’s living quarters. He had been provided with the most basic of the guest rooms rented and had clearly lived there for a long time. There was a patina of nicotine on the ceiling and scars from cigarette stubs on his bedside table. There was an ashtray and an empty water glass. But there were no pictures on the walls of the generic type the lodge provided in all of the rooms it rented to guests. These were the predictable mix of Frederick Remington prints and pictures of corpulent men in red hunting coats and port-ruddied cheeks with dogs at their feet as they supped at some mythic English inn. There weren’t even the patches on the walls to show their recent removal in Landau’s room, though. The pictures had been gone a long time. He must have taken them down as soon as he arrived there. His room was the bare cell of a seedy, cantankerous hermit. Bill examined the pattern of wear on the carpet and saw with no surprise at all that Landau was a man who paced. He’d been waiting for a long time, Landau. And the waiting had made him impatient.
Going through the bureau drawers, Bill found the only thing that really surprised him. It was a cutting from a German newspaper and when he unfolded it he found himself looking at a photograph of Martin Hamer sitting on a cot in what was obviously a field hospital. He began to read.
‘You can read that?’
Chuck was looking over his shoulder. Bill turned his back to shield the cutting.
‘What language is that?’
‘German.’
‘You can read German?’
‘Also French and Spanish. My Latin is rusty, but the romance languages are still the easiest to master.’
‘Jeez. No kidding.’
‘When first we met, Chuck, I thought you looked a little like John Cheever.’
‘Wow. No kidding.’ There was a pause. ‘Who?’
‘A writer. From New York.’
‘That a compliment?’
‘Not really. I’d like a few moments of privacy, please. Would you leave?’
Chuck left.
The delayed shock of coming face to face with Martin again hit him then, and because he didn’t want to sit on Landau’s bed he walked over to the one straight-backed chair in the room and sat on that to gather himself. The chair creaked under his weight. The wind whistled and shrieked outside the room’s one small window. His hands were shaking, the yellow cutting trembling between them. He felt he was in the presence of a ghost.
Martin had been wounded. He lay on a cot and looked like much of the life had been bled out of him. An open tunic had been draped across his shoulders and a fur-lined field cap put on his head for warmth. His upper torso was wrapped in white bandages and a bloodstain obliterated the right side of his chest up to the shoulder. A senior Werhmacht officer sat on the cot and held Martin’s hand in his own, which was gloved. Snow goggles were perched above the peak of this officer’s cap. He was the sort of high-ranking German always played by someone like James Mason or Anton Diffring in the movies, when ruthlessness needed leavening by a little culture and a light sprinkling of aristocratic manners. But he looked much more cruel than they did. He looked far deadlier. Because this wasn’t the movies, was it? This was a portrait of war.
Julia had told him long ago in Mexico that Martin had buried a medal in the snow high on the pass they tried to escape over. Now, in Landau’s melancholy cell, he found out from a German newspaper cutting how the medal had been earned. The story didn’t read like propaganda. The prose was flat and factual, even pedantic. Either way, the hollow look on Martin’s face made the wound seem real enough.
He had been involved in the counter-offensive planned by Field Marshall von Manstein after the Russians had over-extended their forces pursuing the German army on its retreat after the defeat at Stalingrad. The Germans had counter-attacked with their backs to the frozen Dnepre River and nowhere else to run to. The Russians had made the mistake of assuming they were chasing a rabble. But at the Dnepre River, and in the subsequent battle for Karkhov, they discovered they weren’t. Martin had been a tank killer, the leader of an elite unit of tank infantry charged with the task on the field of battle of destroying the Russian T34s. But his unit had been ambushed by a tank, decimated, the surviving members forced to take cover in a deep, frozen ditch. It was a position they could neither defend nor escape from. Their situation was hopeless.
Martin had been hit by a machine-gun round that punched a hole through the right side of his chest. The impact had blown him into the ditch and torn his rifle from his hand. He got to his feet and used his helmet to scrape snow to pack his wound and hinder the bleeding. Then he climbed out of the ditch and crawled under persistent fire to a shell hole in which he’d seen his sergeant take cover before being hit. His sergeant had been wounded also, had lost his right leg below the knee to a canon round. Martin used his belt to tourniquet his sergeant’s leg and gave him his morphine and took his grenades. He ordered the man to provide him with covering fire. Then he left the shell hole and crawled across the snow, concealed somewhat by the smoke of gun batteries and burning wagons and tanks. He got behind the tank that had ambushed his unit and, using his pistol and grenades, killed the crew and disabled it. And so he saved his men.
And his sergeant was able to give an account of the action before dying of blood loss and trauma on his way to a field hospital. He told it to the medics carrying him. I serve under a brave officer, the sergeant said. You should know of his courage. All of you should know of his courage.
Bill paused after reading this. He bent and put the cutting on the floor and sat up again and the chair creaked and he rubbed his eyes. He looked around Landau’s empty walls and looked back to the cutting. It lay open, scored by its habitual folds, against Landau’s thin oatmeal carpet. Martin looked out of the picture at him, wounded. Martin would never blink in the picture. He would never smile or age or cry or perish. Though he had done all of these things but the one of them Landau denied him. Bill raised his eyes to the window. The flakes of snow were white and impossibly pure outside this dismal room through the panes of glass. They seemed less frantic now, though, more sedate in their descent from the sky. The storm was abating.
All of you should know of his courage.
Bill felt thirsty. He would very much have liked a glass of water. There was a water glass in the room, but it was empty. And there was no faucet. It seemed Landau had been obliged to use the facilities in the rest room along the corridor outside. And the water glass on Landau’s bedside table was covered in a film of dirt or dust. Bill didn’t like to look at it, much less think about drinking from it. Instead he turned back to the bureau and under the false bottom of a drawer found Landau’s careful cache of newspaper cuttings concerning Julia Smollen and her contented, successful life. Some of the cuttings were from the trades. The rest were from the newspapers. They had been stored neatly in a folder made of stiff card. She was smiling, groomed, in all of them a poised, beautiful woman characterized by style and self-possession. He put the folder back and rose from the chair and heard his limbs creak this time as he raised his weight and straightened up. He felt very old suddenly and awfully tired. There was a knock on the door.
‘Yes?’
Chuck.
‘I’m leaving now,’ Bill said.
‘I’m leaving too. For Denver.’
‘Oh? Urgent business?’
‘In a manner of speaking.’ He tugged at his cravat and smoothed his hair. ‘When you slapped me on the back earlier? I think you displaced a vertebra.’
Dawn came sluggish and wintry and late. The
sun rose on the other side of the mountains. It would be something like noon before he saw it. By his reckoning it was probably twenty degrees below zero. The snow was cold, dry, powdery stuff it was effortful to walk in. The only advantage was that in this state it lacked the weight and mass of moisture, so that despite the huge quantity that had fallen, the avalanche risk was not so great as he had feared the previous day. A freeze followed by a partial thaw was the ideal formula for an avalanche. It was much too cold for a thaw. Bill brushed snow from the fur that edged the hood of his parka. He brushed snow from his sleeping bag and rolled it tightly and tied it in a dense roll to the top of his pack. Procedures were what kept you alive in the mountains. You followed them and you never allowed your concentration to slip. Yesterday the storm had made his quarry blind to his presence but today the sky was clear. Yesterday he had blundered upward at will with no real thought of a bullet until night fell and he dismissed the idea of a cooking fire. Today was a different proposition entirely. The moon was still high in the sky but pale, like a spectre of itself. It was January. It would be afternoon before the sun hit the slopes he intended to climb and maybe two o’clock or after before it possessed its greatest strength on the westerly side of the range. He hoped to have found Natasha by then. And Landau. He hoped to have found Landau, too.
It was a bad sign, the man leaving his cuttings behind in his abandoned room. It meant he had left no longer needing them. Their being left behind was less a tantalizing clue than a morbid proof of his intent to replace them with some more tangible trophy. His intent was absolute and it was deadly. The room and its hidden contents had been evidence to Bill that there was nothing in this man’s life beyond an urgent compulsion to do harm to Julia Smollen. She had been right about that. The desire for a sort of revenge possessed him. And Bill had hunches rather than the firm leads he had sought as to where the kidnapper might now be.
Landau was very adept with his hands. He made his own bullets and he carved the stocks of rifles. The Creole guy had shown him some of Landau’s work and it was finely accomplished. But he was physically small. He would have to pull a sled bearing his materials to build his bolt hole. The place would have to be made of wood. Wood was heavy. Given his size and the weight of a laden sled, Bill figured on his building no more than half a mile from the lodge. There was nothing, or very little of him, in his quarters there. In the confinement of the lodge he had brooded over Julia Smollen and paced and smoked in his room when he wasn’t working. In his spare time, he had disappeared. The Creole guy had confirmed that. His refuge would need to be convenient, accessible even in bad weather, or it was no refuge at all. It defeated its own purpose. So Bill reckoned half a mile. And, of course, above the lodge, where height offered him remoteness and seclusion.
A Shadow on the Sun Page 20
