Francesca

by Stephen Marlowe

  With Francesca I went to the ticket window and inquired about the location of any chalets on the mountain. There were three, close together, halfway down to Flegère. The ticket agent told me where to leave the marked trail. He thought the chalets were deserted.

  I went outside and shoved my ski-boots into the bindings and clamped them. Francesca wished me luck. I wondered if she would have to backstop me after all. I forgot what she had said earlier.

  There was more than one way up the mountain.

  chapter ten

  MAKING THE THREE-MILE run down to Howard Ridgway’s A-frame chalet, getting my ski-legs on the wide open slopes between L’Index and the protected gully that carried the timberline above Flegère to the left of the trail flags, I had time to think.

  Maybe the line I’d handed Francesca, to keep her at the telecabin station, made sense after all. Finding Ridgway, even bringing him in to face Interpol, the Swiss Federal Police and the U.S. Army investigators was one thing. Finding the three million bucks that would get my client off the hook was another. Lots of embezzlers have been brought in and, to use the euphemism, have paid their debt to society. The careless ones, the unlucky ones, the frightened ones, have lost their loot in the process. The careful ones, the clever ones, the bold ones, after serving their time, still wound up with the money. They had hidden it, or had a confederate keep it for them; and when they got a suit of clothes and a sawbuck from the prison warden, along with a brief lecture on the merits of the law-abiding life, they disappeared. A while later, they would re-appear, sleek, suntanned, driving a fancy sports car in Brazil or Portugal or someplace like that where extradition is tough if not impossible.

  If the money was someplace where they couldn’t find it, Ridgway could be brought in and still laugh at the authorities. A few years behind bars would be part of the price he paid for three million bucks. It was a lot of money, and it could buy him a lot of the good life afterwards. If he thought Spade had a part in turning him in, he might try to implicate my client just for the hell of it. That would be easy. Spade had taken a one-third interest in the bank, hadn’t he?

  But Ridgway, I thought as I left the marked trail and went into the pine woods, still wouldn’t be wild over the idea of a prison gate clanking shut behind him. He might be willing to surrender part of the three million bucks for a chance at freedom—if I could convince him the minions of law and order were closing in on him. He might even lead me to the money if I played my hand right. An embezzler, seeing the world through the only pair of eyes he has, is convinced there’s a little larceny in everyone. An embezzler would smile condescendingly at a crooked cop and say, neither bitter nor surprised, we are all brothers under the skin.

  I would meet Howard Ridgway, embezzler, as a crooked cop.

  Provided I got to meet him at all. I was straight-running a steep trail through the pines when I saw a clearing ahead of me. Three A-frame chalets, their steeply-pitched roofs almost free of snow, nestled in the clearing. A thin tendril of smoke drifted up from the chimney of the middle one. A window to the right of the door was open, and through it a voice hailed me:

  “Get away, get going. This is private property.”

  When I kept skiing, the voice repeated its warning in French.

  I left the pines behind me and skied over fresh powder across the clearing. When I was fifty yards from the chalet, I called out sheepishly in English: “Hello in there! I guess I’m kind of lost.”

  “Get lost someplace else.”

  My skis were hissing smoothly over the powder. The clearing was bowl-shaped, and I was running down the rim toward the chalet at the bottom. Would a lost skier do a Christie-stop and climb up out of the bowl? I decided he would not. I decided he would ski down to the chalet, and to hell with its occupant’s bad manners, and ask for directions. I kept skiing.

  “I said I was lost, mister,” I called out. “If you could just point my nose in the right direction—”

  Leaning against the split logs alongside the chalet door I saw a toboggan and a pair of skis. The door opened and a man stood in the doorway. He was wearing a turtle-neck sweater and held a rifle that looked like a bolt-action Mannlicher across his chest.

  “I’m not wild about your hospitality, friend,” I said, and parallel-turned to a sharp and sudden stop that spewed snow at him.

  “I’m not wild about you barging in here,” he said. “I told you this was private property.”

  “Uh-huh, and if you’re trying to keep the elephants away that rifle’s big enough.”

  “Any other smart cracks? If you take those skis off and climb back up the trail you came down, you’ll find the flags. If you follow them a mile or so, you’ll reach the Flegère station. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, and crouched with my back to him to unfasten my bindings. As I did so I said, conversationally and with gratitude in my voice, “I sure was lucky to find you here. Kind of lonely, isn’t it?”

  “I like it lonely.”

  Reaching in through the unfastened zipper of my parka, I tugged the .44 Magnum from its clam-shell holster. He was still looking at my back. I said, as I began to turn, stepping off my skis:

  “I have a great idea.”

  He grunted “yeah?” unenthusiastically.

  “Why don’t we shoot each other, Ridgway?” I said, and turned around to point the Magnum at him from a distance of six feet. “If it snows soon, and no doubt it will, they wouldn’t find our bodies until the spring thaw. Be a real mystery.”

  He had his rifle, and it could shoot a bigger hole in me than the Magnum could in him, but either hole would be big enough. He was still holding the rifle at port arms across his chest, and before he could bring it to bear I could empty the .44’s cylinder at him.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  I jerked my thumb toward the skis and the toboggan. “If you put the elephant gun there, we can go inside and talk.”

  He did it. I watched him. He was a big man, about my age, and handsome in the kind of windblown and eye-crinkled way they use to sell cigarettes on TV. His hands were large and powerful. Muscles bunched on his shoulders as he propped the rifle against the split-log wall.

  “You first,” I said, gesturing toward the door. “Be my guest.”

  “Thanks a million, pal,” he said sarcastically.

  “Don’t take it so to heart, Ridgway. You could have said thanks three million.”

  He stiffened in the doorway. “So that’s the way it is.”

  “Move.”

  The walls were wood-paneled, the fire was burning cozily in the big hearth, and the ceiling went up high under the A-frame eaves, with balconies on both sides and doorways leading off them. The large main room was furnished with heavy leather chairs, a couple of tables and a highboy bar. If you had to have a hideout this looked like a pretty comfortable one.

  Ridgway sat down facing the fire. I stood in front of the hearth with the Magnum in my hand. “This sure beats jail,” I said.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning I came here to arrest you.”

  His shrug was almost imperceptible. He clubbed his fists on his thighs and his eyes narrowed. An embezzler, I thought again, who hadn’t expected to lose a few years of his life for three million bucks but was prepared to do it if he had to.

  “Mind telling me how you found me?”

  “Yes,” I said, and smiled.

  “You’re an American.” It wasn’t a question.

  “We’ll salute the stars and stripes and Switzerland’s white cross after we bring you in.”

  “You with Interpol?”

  “Right now I’m with a guy sitting on three million bucks.”

  “So you say.”

  “That’s what they’d say in court. For the record I’m not with Interpol.”

  “No?”

  “U.S. Army. M.P. Criminal Investigating Division,” I said, and sighed. “Thirty-three and still a first looey.”

  “I bleed for you.”

&nb
sp; “Don’t bother. Congratulate me, friend. I found you first.” I got a cigarette out of the zipper pocket of my ski-pants and lit it one-handed by bending the match against the flint edge of the matchbook. “I wonder which you’ll hate worse,” I said. “Swiss or American prison.”

  That was a new idea to him. He raised a big hand and fingered his jaw. There was sweat on his forehead. “What do you mean?”

  “The Swiss will want you for embezzlement. Thank the insurance people for that. But so will we. Thank a few hundred GI’s for that. It’s safe to guess you won’t serve the sentences concurrently, Ridgway. Well, at least they’ll sandwich a nice jet flight across the Atlantic in between. You wouldn’t be a kid when they finally let you out of the federal pen back home, that’s for sure.”

  The knuckles of his clenched fists were white. “They had to send a guy with a big mouth,” he said bitterly.

  “Maybe it’s your lucky day. I’m not exactly getting rich on a first looey’s take-home pay.”

  There was a silence. I let it grow. “Keep talking,” Ridgway said in a very soft voice.

  “You make any kind of arrangements for winding up somewhere they couldn’t touch you? With a new identity and all? Like that?”

  “I’m working on it. It takes time.”

  “Goose them,” I suggested. “You’re a rich man. Can you think of a better way to spend the dough? Though you could see where,” I said lightly, “under the circumstances it might be a shade less than three million bucks.”

  “How much less, lieutenant?” he asked quickly.

  “Relax,” I said. “There’s no hurry. Why don’t you make it a little more specific for me? Where’s the dough?”

  He laughed. “Sure, and you walk out of here, and like you said they wouldn’t find me till the spring thaw.”

  “The way I see it.” I said, “it would be stashed away in Geneva in a numbered account legal as could be. Union Bank Suisse? Swiss Credit Bank? The account drawn up and numbered under the name of an intermediary you could trust? But anybody could draw on it, and no questions asked, if he had the number.”

  “You expect me to give it to you—assuming you’re right?”

  “That would be nice of you,” I said.

  “What would stop you from walking off with all of it?”

  “I’m not that dumb. A call, an anonymous letter giving enough details, and I’d be a fugitive just like you.”

  “And you’re a guy who’d rather enjoy a modest income than run away a millionaire?”

  “It’s the army. We’re very security-conscious,” I said, laughing my most engaging laugh. I found the idea of being a con-man more unpleasant than I had expected. But I remembered Douglas Jones, his face hacked and cut to shreds in my room at the Du Rhône, and then it was easy.

  Ridgway said: “How modest an income would it take to satisfy you?”

  “Five hundred grand?”

  “That’s too high, lieutenant.”

  “In exchange for two prison sentences? I think it’s cheap.”

  Ridgway shook his head. “If I knew I’d get out from under it might be cheap. But you’re rushing me. Rushed, I’m liable to get caught.”

  “How? You wouldn’t have to cross any borders until you’re ready. Ski down to the valley, hop a train to Paris, get lost for a while.… Can you think of a better place?”

  “You’ll tell them you couldn’t find me?”

  “Let me worry about that.”

  “A hundred grand,” Ridgway said.

  I made a face.

  “Two hundred. But that’s it.”

  I made the same face, only more so. All I wanted was the number of the account; that and enough time to deliver the money to Axel Spade so that he could turn it over to the insurance people while the cops picked up Ridgway. But he didn’t know that. He’d be more likely to swallow the con-game if I held out for my original figure.

  “I guess I can’t hear you,” I said.

  In a sad and resigned voice he told me: “A quarter of a million.”

  “For each prison sentence.”

  “You bastard,” he said, but a reluctant smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. A good embezzler could always appreciate a good con-man.

  I heard a noise outside, a soft thump. It might have been snow falling off the roof. It might have been someone poking around the toboggan, skis and rifle leaning against the split logs of the chalet. Ridgway went tense in his chair. I half turned toward the door.

  It opened, and Helen Spade stood in the doorway with the rifle in her hands.

  “You left this—” she started to say, and then she saw me.

  “Shoot him!” Ridgway cried. “Shoot the sonofabitch!”

  chapter eleven

  IT WAS TOO MUCH to expect of her.

  Despite what the bleeding-heart social scientists will tell you, if we were all potential murderers then no police force anywhere in the world would be adequate. Besides, there was the element of surprise. Helen Spade hadn’t expected to find me in there, holding a gun on her boyfriend. She stood with a blank look on her face, the rifle pointing up at the bedroom balcony to her left, and if she shot anything at all, it would be a hole in the A-frame roof.

  But it was also too much to expect of me that I wouldn’t involuntarily turn toward her when Ridgway shouted his command. If I were a TV shamus, complete with sponsor and writer who didn’t know a .44 Magnum from an .03 Springfield with a telescopic sight, I would have shot the Mannlicher out of her hands and that would have been that. But no hand-gun is accurate enough, and I didn’t want to’ hurt Helen Spade.

  I swung toward her, watching her eyes widen with the first growth of fear.

  And then Ridgway jumped me.

  His weight shoved me back against the hearth. My head struck hard. His left hand closed on my right wrist, and the Magnum blasted a hole in the ceiling. He hammered his right against my jaw. My knees went rubbery. The Magnum squirted out of my fingers, hit the floor and skidded. Ridgway dove for it.

  I landed on his back just as his fingers closed on the gun-butt. A half-nelson made it impossible for him to bring the Magnum around. I slipped my other arm under his other arm and made it a full nelson, forcing his head down against the floor. The full nelson is an illegal hold in amateur wrestling, which is the only kind of wrestling that counts. It can break a man’s neck.

  Ridgway grunted, straining impotently. “Let go the gun,” I said against his ear, lacing my fingers at the back of his neck and applying pressure. He let go of it.

  Helen Spade came up beside me, took a golfer’s stance, and swung the butt of the big Mannlicher like a chipping iron against the side of my head.

  I spilled off Ridgway like water off a duck’s back. Not quite out, but not functioning enough to matter. Ridgway stood over me with the Magnum. Helen stood over me with the Mannlicher. I saw their ski-pants. I couldn’t raise my eyes high enough to see their faces. My head hurt like hell.

  They made noises like a stereo record running on a monaural hi-fi and at the wrong speed. The noises became words.

  “… working for my father …” Helen said.

  “… be an s.o.b.…” Ridgway said.

  “Francesca,” Helen said. “L’Index station … ski faster … she’s on her way.”

  I sat up, my head roaring. Francesca Artemi was in the doorway, looking as surprised as Helen had looked. Ridgway waved her into the room with the Magnum. She entered, but otherwise ignored him and came straight to me.

  “I tried to stop her,” she said. “Then I race her here. She skis like the wind.” Francesca’s cornflower-blue eyes were close to mine. “There is blood all over your face.”

  “On your feet, pal,” Ridgway said.

  I made it with Francesca’s help. She looked at him defiantly. I didn’t look at him any way at all. The room whirled like a waterspout.

  “What are you going to do?” Helen asked Ridgway. “You can’t stay here now.”

  “Who says I can
’t?”

  “But they know. Drum and Francesca. If they—”

  “They’re not going to the cops, if that’s what you mean. I’ll stay here until I’m ready to move. They’ll stay here longer than that.” Ridgway jerked the Magnum in my direction. “The con-artist spelled it out for me. Nobody’s going to find them until the spring thaw.”

  Helen Spade’s mouth made a startled O. She looked like a co-ed who had just been informed she’d flunked her course in modern dance. “But you can’t—”

  “Three million bucks,” Ridgway told her. “Close to fourteen million Swiss francs. Baby, baby, you know what that means for the rest of our lives? Once we’re all set where nobody can lay hands on us?”

  She shook her head. The blonde helmet of hair gleamed in the sunlight streaming through the windows. “I did what you asked me to. I put the money in an account. I have the number. I’ll draw it when you want—now, later, never. You know I’d do anything you want.” She went to his side and drew his left arm against her breasts. “Anything. I love you, Howard.”

  “I’m nuts about you, baby,” he said, a little off-handedly and impatiently, I thought.

  “But not—murder. I didn’t bargain on murder. I don’t want anything to do with murder.”

  “Then don’t watch,” Ridgway said coldly, and she withdrew from him. “I told you I’d do anything for the dough. I meant it.”

  I looked at Francesca. She looked at me. We both looked at the .44 Magnum in Ridgway’s right hand. I wondered if she was thinking what I was thinking. A lovers’ tiff, with our lives in the balance. Helen was pouting, sulky and uncertain. Ridgway looked like what he was—a hardcase guy with his mind made up.

  He was patient, though. He painted a picture for her. The good life, the big villa above the bay in Rio, the Mardi Gras, an ocean-going yacht, a private beach where they could bake themselves brown, a flock of servants to come when she crooked her little finger, international playboy-type and his wife living it up. So what if they had a couple of corpses in their background? You had to make small sacrifices, didn’t you?