A Shadow on the Sun

by Francis Cottam

  Bill could think of only two places that really provided everything Landau required. One was a narrow snowfield sloping gently above a sheer cliff face and ending in an abrupt overhang of smooth granite. The route to get to it was tricky, steep, almost a traverse. And that’s what made Bill favour the second site. Landau was no mountain man and this was easier to achieve. It was north by north-west of where he stood, bearing on Martin Hamer’s compass, and it was half an hour’s hard walking away. It was a spot above a gully, shielded by an ancient rock-fall. It was more sheltered than the first location, though not so secret a place. He had to gamble, though. And he would, he thought, snapping the compass shut and putting it into his pocket.

  Then he noticed the buzzards circling above an area a few hundred yards away. And his heart lurched inside him.

  ‘Oh, please, God, no,’ Bill said.

  He had taken a pump-action shotgun and two-dozen cartridges from the gunroom in the lodge. The cartridges were in a belt around his waist. He took off his pack and pulled the shotgun free of it and left his pack in the snow and started struggling through the snow to the place where the buzzards wheeled and waited. He was afraid. He was not fearful for himself, but he was dreadfully afraid of what he would find.

  When he got there, a pair of bobcats were digging at a depression in the snow with their front paws. They fled when they saw him. He remembered that his entrenching tool was still attached to his pack. Shit. Shit. He put down the gun and lay on the snow and dug with his hands, deepening the hole made by the scavenging cats, his breath coming in sobs that shook his big frame and scalded his cheeks in the cold.

  ‘Please, God,’ he said, ‘please, God,’ over and over again, beseeching, as the hole in the snow widened and deepened under his scooping hands and he saw blood, crimson with freshness, glistening against the white.

  It was a bird. It was a red-tailed hawk and it had been shot clean through. He saw something sludge-coloured a foot away from its body and realized it was the bullet that had killed the bird. The hawk had been shot right at the limit of the range of the rifle used by the shooter. The bullet had just possessed the velocity to go through its target. And that was how Bill knew it was Landau who had killed the bird. The man was an incredibly fastidious shot. He had been told so by the Creole when the Creole had been too scared of his connections to lie to him anymore.

  ‘He makes shots you only see shooters make in the movies,’ the Creole said. ‘Always shoots at the limit of his range. He’s a regular Sergeant York.’ He laughed. ‘If you can believe a Kraut Sergeant York.’

  Landau had killed the bird. Just as sure as Gary Cooper had played Sergeant York. And the position where the bullet lay, in relation to where the bird had fallen, showed Bill the direction from which the shot had come. And it showed him that his hunch had been wrong. Landau hadn’t been headed towards the place he’d gambled on. He’d been headed instead for the traverse that took you to the snow-field at the top of the cliff. It was there that he had built his bolt hole. It was there, alive or dead, that he now held Natasha Smollen.

  The change in location called for a change of strategy. There was no way Bill could surprise Landau if he had built his shelter where he now supposed it was. He was a skilled and experienced hunter. But it simply couldn’t be done. If you approached from the front you were horribly exposed. Even if you got behind and above the place, abseiled down from the lip of the overhang, you’d be heard by anyone half alert to the possibility of approach and picked off still clinging to the rope. A shot might be possible. It might if Landau left the shelter on his own and walked far enough out in the snowfield to give you an angle. But why would he do that? The snowfield ended in a thousand-foot drop. The route down, to the left of the field and along the traverse, gave you no shot at all. And Bill only had a shotgun, not a rifle.

  And he didn’t have much time. The weather was clear and stable. Soon the helicopter would be up and Landau would hear the thrum of its rotor blades and he would kill her and flee. Soon the dogs would be up, unleashed, after his scent, and he would hear their barking and panic and kill her.

  No.

  Bill would have to go there unarmed, with his hands held high in the air, and appeal to the kidnapper’s greed. Landau possessed a rare talent for killing. But the business with the eagle nests suggested the man had the soul of a thief. Some weird grudge against Julia Smollen had been the motive for the kidnapping. He was using the daughter to hurt the mother. But Bill believed he would listen to offers of money if he heard the kind of offer Bill was prepared to make. He’d say anything, after all. He’d say anything just to get close enough to snatch Landau’s rifle and break it over his knee and then break Landau, break his back or his neck, crush him like something that squirms under your foot until it was unrecognizable, obliterated, gone.

  All of you should know of his courage.

  Bill knew he wasn’t brave. He was mad as hell and desperate. He loved his god-daughter. And the man who held her captive offended him. He was an affliction. He was a stain on the world.

  Bill was there. He had taken the traverse without thinking about it. So much for procedure. Well, fuck procedure. It had all gotten a little late in the day suddenly for that. He faced a squat hut and behind it, a looming rampart of grey granite. The overhang cast the hut into shadow and Bill stood now on the edge of that shadow and could feel its sunless chill. There was a door dead centre of the hut. There was a window to the left of the door and in the shadow of the rock its panes looked like they were made from black glass. Smoke rose from a round zinc chimney on the roof. The top three or four inches of chimney were all you could see above the drift snow lying thick up there. To the left of the hut from where Bill stood, he could see a snow-covered shape that he guessed from its length was a sled. Lying on the snow, sticking out from the rear of the sled, was a pair of boots. He thought it was odd the boots had been left there. But everything was odd. The silence and the stillness were odd in the shadow of the overhang and the building itself seemed bizarre, anomalous in such a remote and desolate place. It was solidly, even neatly constructed. But even from this distance he could smell a sour mingling of odours from within. It was a mix of burnt paraffin and decaying animal flesh and old tobacco and human dirt. The dogs would have no trouble finding it when they were unleashed, that was for sure. But Bill very much hoped the dogs would be too late for Landau.

  He raised his hands above his head and called out the man’s name. His voice echoed and magnified in the space between the crags and buttresses, across the high valleys, before fading on the thinness of the air. He watched the door. But nothing happened. Smoke rose from the zinc chimney. Snow trickled on a steep slope high to the left of the overhang in a manner that reminded him of the way sand moves sometimes in an hourglass when the opening between its chambers looms.

  ‘Landau?’

  Nothing. An echo. Stillness. His arms were starting to ache over his head. They were big arms to hold that high and his mountain parka wasn’t cut to accommodate the pose. Plus it was undignified, standing there in the posture of surrender. He thought it odd that he had no sense of being watched. He reminded himself that everything in this place was odd.

  ‘There’s a million dollars in used bills in your room back at the lodge.’

  Nothing.

  ‘No police. I swear it, Landau. The door to your room is locked and I’ve got the key. It’s a good deal. No strings. A million straight for the girl.’

  Nothing.

  His arms ached in the silence and the shadow slowly crept and stole, retreating from where he stood as the sun ascended.

  ‘Landau?’

  Nothing.

  Fuck this. He started to walk through the snow towards the door. If he started running now, silly old fool that he was, he’d probably have a heart attack before he got there. So he walked through the snow. And he lowered his arms. Ah, much better. He swung his arms as he walked. It was thirty-seven years since he’d played nose tackle fo
r Yale. But he still held the record for tackles completed. His pace increased. He’d set that record and he’d kept it. And he doubted any of the opponents who helped him compile it had ever forgotten the contribution they made. He tilted forward and started to trot. What was a lock, anyway? It was a few cheap screws and a tin hasp. Bill felt an old and familiar roar rising in his chest. Twenty feet from his target, he began to run. He was bellowing when he bulled into the door and it broke and splintered under his shoulder and huge momentum and he was in Landau’s hovel, Natasha shivering under a shorn scalp, feet drawn up on a cot, a blanket at her throat, alone. Alive.

  ‘Where is he, honey?’ Bill was breathing hard, relief and foreboding fighting in him. The smell of the place was an intimate, feral assault. Her head was pale and shaven, cut. Dried blood ran down her temple in a zigzag trickle. I’ll break him, Bill thought. So help me, I’ll rip him apart. He looked around. He saw the trapdoor in the floor, the iron ring that would open it.

  ‘He’s outside. I think I killed him, Bill.’

  Bill remembered the boots behind the sled. He nodded to Natasha and held his finger to his lips and because he had to, went straight back out. She seemed okay. His priority now was the man who had taken her.

  Landau lay with one hand reaching for his rifle and the other trying to push his spilled guts back inside his body. His entrails were blue and purple and frozen in the deep shadow of the overhang and his face wore the rictus of fear. Bill was no expert on violent death. But this looked like a man who had died having learned in increments everything there was to know about the subject. The hand reaching for the rifle was a claw, contracted with cold and blackening, two or three inches from the weapon’s trigger guard. Landau had died desolate in a desolate place. But that was also how he had chosen to live.

  Bill looked for a long moment at the man who had killed the friend he had, above all men, loved. He felt no anger or vindication, no triumph or satisfaction at the sight of Landau’s corpse. He just felt profoundly grateful for the life of Natasha, saved. He’d been a man much visited by grief over the course of his life and it was a burden he had faced and necessarily borne. But he did not think that on this occasion his heart would have allowed him to survive the pain and bitter familiarity of a loved one lost. Not this time. Not again. Not his god-daughter. Not his daughter in his heart and soul, Natasha.

  That wasn’t the reason, though, for his gratitude. For better and often for worse, his span of years had largely been lived. What remained to him was twilight, now, ashes glowing in the hearth on remembered heat. She was a girl on the cusp of adulthood. At seventeen she was only about to embark on her great and impossible adventure. He could think of nobody he’d ever met who better deserved their chance at living. To him Natasha was life, joyful and abundant in her qualities and gifts. She would need to get over this, though. She would need to recover from what it was Landau had said and done to her before she could ever begin.

  He looked again at the corpse. He was curious to see what manner of man had willingly inflicted such turmoil, so much anguish. But Landau gave away as little about himself in death as he had apparently when living. He’d been one of those with an instinct for unobtrusiveness, someone who found it practical to live on the margins of life, where he plotted and schemed to revenge himself on others endowed with the gift for living he had been denied. He had clearly clung to what remained of his life very tenaciously at its conclusion. Beyond that, there was nothing to distinguish him, though. He was smallish and slight and pale and dead. This last characteristic, Bill thought, was the finest he’d been capable of possessing. In a man like the one whose corpse he pondered, death was an attribute for the rest of the world to be grateful for. He plucked Landau’s rifle out of its sticky grave in the snow and broke it over his knee and flung the sundered stock and barrel at the granite wall facing him, where the parts clattered with a dull impact and fell to rest.

  ‘Did he hurt you, ’Tasha?’

  ‘He didn’t rape me, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Did he hurt you?’

  ‘He told me about my father.’

  ‘And how did that make you feel?’

  ‘Proud of my mother. Prouder of her, I mean.’

  There was a silence then that, to Bill, seemed absolute.

  ‘He must have been very brave, my father, after his own fashion. Landau told me he was given a medal.’

  ‘The thing for which he was given the medal was not the bravest thing your father did, Natasha.’

  ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘I’d like you to tell me about him.’

  ‘I will. One day I will. I expect my opinion of him differs from the one you’ve heard.’

  She shivered on the cot. Her eyes swivelled. ‘Is Landau dead?’

  ‘Oh yes. Comprehensively.’

  She dropped the blanket and held out her arms to him and he saw the knife, huge and bloody in her lap.

  ‘Pick me up and show me, Bill. I want to see him. I want to see him dead.’

  Bill sat on the cot. He shifted the knife away from her. ‘He’s not a pretty corpse, hon.’

  ‘He killed my father, who was your friend. I want to see him. He stamped on my knee and I can’t walk. Take me, Bill.’

  And he did. He carried her outside and she looked down at Landau which was the start, he supposed, of some sort of recovery. And when they went back inside the hut she told him how the death was accomplished. She told him as he tore the parts of the cot blanket not bloodied by the bowie knife into strips to wrap her feet with. He wrapped them tenderly. She had some frostbite and Bill feared might lose her toes.

  She had realized that Landau got pleasure from being served. In a curious way he seemed to think that it was his right. He must have yearned for the days of the camp, when the slave inmates scurried to the snap of his fingers. But Natasha discovered this about him even before he told her about the camp, on the first night there, when she offered to make his coffee. On the first evening in the hut she made coffee for him twice. On the second day she went through the ritual six times. Then in the evening he stamped on her knee and she thought she might have to abandon her plan.

  ‘But then this morning I decided to risk it. I had nothing at all to lose.’

  The routine was always the same. She would make the coffee on her knees with her back to him and when it was poured into his mug would turn and slide it across the floor to where he sat with his rifle across his lap. He would wait for her to retreat to the cot and handcuff herself, then pick up the mug and drink.

  ‘I was counting on his being a punctilious and methodical man. I was relying on his instincts.’

  She was gambling, Bill thought. And the plan would not have been practical had Landau been a taller man.

  ‘When I slid his coffee to him I had to kind of dog-leg the mug to avoid this knot in the grain on the floor. Only this morning, I didn’t. Not with the second cup. I pushed it straight and the mug tripped on the knot and the coffee threatened to spill.’

  And Landau leant forward instinctively to steady the mug and prevent the spill and Natasha stood putting her left hand on the rifle stock, leaning over his back with her full weight on him, to pull the bowie knife from its scabbard.

  ‘When I pulled back again he straightened up and tried to stand and I pushed the knife into his stomach. He let go of the rifle, so I did, too. I had both hands on the hilt of the knife then and I pushed it all the way into him. He tried to use his hands to stop me but I was stronger than he was. Then I pulled the knife out and tossed it across the room. And then I opened the door and threw his rifle in the snow. When he went after it, I bolted the door behind him.’

  ‘You make it sound easy.’

  ‘No, Bill. It wasn’t easy. It was a simple plan and it worked. But it wasn’t easy.’

  ‘And now you know about your father.’

  ‘Landau called you the rich American friend. He despised you for getting my mother out of Switzerland.’

 
Bill smiled, remembering, wrapping her feet in careful strips of woollen cloth. ‘I got you out of Switzerland, too.’

  ‘Can you get me off this mountain?’

  ‘I can get you off this mountain, kid. But we’d better start right away.’

  ‘Do we have to use the sled?’

  ‘We can’t. Not going down, we can’t. The snow is too deep for it to run ahead of me and if I pull it I’ll trigger an avalanche for sure.’

  ‘God isn’t going to kill me today, Bill. Not today.’

  She made the remark in a dreamy, singsong manner. He thought she was maybe going into shock. He fastened the final, makeshift bandage wrapping her feet and put his parka around her and plucked her off the cot.

  He carried her out of Landau’s hut, out into the raw and ponderous world of the western slopes of the Rockies after a deep winter snowstorm. Everything was still. The rocks and crags were snow-draped, clumsy things. They were high and the air was static with cold and altitude. Bill was strong. He had always been strong. But the sun was ascending and the snow was becoming loose and treacherous in its heavy deposits all down their descent.

  ‘You’re the best, Bill,’ she said. ‘I want you to take me home. I wish you lived with us. With me and my mom. I wish you didn’t live in that Meis van de Rohe mausoleum you had built in the canyon.’