Francesca

by Stephen Marlowe

  She turned away from him. I saw hope in the slump of her shoulders and in her bowed head. If she said no, she could make it stick. He couldn’t touch the money without her.

  Then she was facing him again. She said nothing. Her eyes were misty and her lips trembled. She was scared, but she was also in love. Slowly, she nodded.

  Ridgway’s smile of relief, following that nod, was our death warrant.

  She licked her lips. “When will you—?”

  “Later. Just before dark. It’s not likely, but I don’t want any skiers barging in on us.”

  It was a long day, as heavy as lead, as bitter as defeat, as moribund as a death rattle. Ridgway told Helen she could find some rope in the storeroom behind the kitchen. It wasn’t rope she found, it was twine, and it cut into my wrists and ankles like a knife. While she was tying us up seemed like the only opportunity I’d get to do something about the pending execution. But Ridgway was a guy who took no chances. He held the Magnum three inches from Francesca’s left breast while Helen was hog-tying me. Francesca winced when her turn for the twine came. Together we watched the sunlight move from the eastern to the western windows of the chalet. Ridgway chain-smoked. Helen made him lunch. Nobody offered us any. Helen didn’t eat either.

  Finally, through the windows, I could see night advancing up the mountain. Ridgway cut the twine with a knife. Returning circulation tingled painfully in my arms and legs.

  Ridgway sent Helen back to the storeroom for a couple of shovels. Her eyes were big. She wouldn’t look at us.

  She went outside first, with the rifle; she stood three paces from the door, training it on us, as we emerged. The butt of the rifle was pressed against her right shoulder in a very businesslike manner. She squinted, lining up the sights. Francesca came out with her shovel. I came out with mine. Bringing up the rear was Ridgway with the Magnum. It was a beautiful afternoon, though it had turned cold. Sunset on the peaks would be gorgeous—for those of us who were still alive to see it.

  Helen said: “I’m scared, Howard. I’m so scared.”

  “You don’t have to come.”

  “You said you’d do anything for us. Anything. So will I.” She said that almost defiantly. Her voice broke.

  Do anything for us? No, he hadn’t said that. What he had said was he’d do anything for the money. There was a difference, as Helen Spade would learn.

  chapter twelve

  I WAS DIGGING in the snow behind the chalet, sweating despite the cold.

  I’d always wondered why a condemned man will, on orders from his executioner, dig his own grave, if not in snow then in earth. The only punishment he could get for refusing was a bullet in the back a few minutes ahead of schedule. What difference did it make?

  But Ridgway said dig, and I dug. He stood a few steps behind me with the Magnum, Helen Spade behind Francesca with the rifle. We’d lie under the snow, as stiff as cordwood. At this altitude the thaw would come late—not before May. Ridgway and Helen would be wherever they were going by then.

  Still, those few minutes were important. They were vital. They were all the time we had left. I dug. Francesca dug beside me. We stood thigh-deep in a hole in the snow. Our hearts were still beating, blood still pumped through our veins; the mountain air was clear, crisp and cold, the resiny scent of the pines was strong in my nostrils. I saw sweat on Francesca’s face. The afternoon was beautiful. Francesca was beautiful. I had never felt so alive in my life. We were going to the.

  The worst part of it was not knowing when Ridgway might decide the hole was deep enough. No reason for him to apprise us of his decision. He’d squeeze the trigger of the Magnum without warning, we’d fall where we were digging, and that would be that.

  But I had faced death too often to take it now with my back turned. I hefted the shovel and tossed snow out of the hole. Bent, dug, hefted and tossed again. There was a rhythm to it, bending, lunging, raising, half-turning to release the snow. Ridgway was used to the rhythm. He expected it. A fraction of a second would pass before he sensed it was going to change. If I turned all the way around and hurled the shovel, leaping out of the hole after it.…

  Either I would be very lucky or very dead. I might miss Ridgway with the shovel altogether. I might hit him but flounder coming out of the hole. I might pull it all off smoothly and still wind up eating a rifle bullet. Helen Spade was waiting with the butt of the Mannlicher against her shoulder.

  I heard a pulsing, chopping, rasping sound. I thought of all the clever literary allusions to death. He was a man on a bicycle, pedaling inexorably toward you. He was a hyena, laughing like crazy off in the dark jungle. For me death was a distant roaring in my ears.

  The shovel leaped from my hands as I turned. Ridgway went down to one knee and fired as I came out of the hole. The big Magnum slug ripped through the steel blade of the shovel. I heard Helen Spade scream. The roaring in my ears was louder. Helen wasn’t looking at me. She was craning her neck and looking up. So was Francesca. A shadow passed over the hole in the snow. I’d scored a bullseye with the shovel. A bright red gash appeared on Ridgway’s forehead. Before he could fire the Magnum again, I jarred his middle with my shoulder. He went down and I came down on top of him.

  I could have got the Magnum then. I didn’t. The rasping roar was very loud. Five shots in quick succession pierced it. A wind buffeted me. I looked where everyone was looking, which was up.

  Twenty feet off the snow, its rotors whipping air, hovered a small yellow helicopter. The door was agape, and a rifle protruded. The copter began to settle toward us. The rotors slowed, the sound lessened and a voice cried out:

  “I’d drop those guns if I were you.”

  The accent was unmistakable. It was Geoffrey Havill. I saw him an instant later as he jumped to the ground while the copter was still hovering a few feet up. Helen Spade had dropped the Mannlicher. Havill had left his own rifle in the copter, but in his right hand he held a big Luger. I was on my feet. Ridgway sat up with the Magnum just as the Englishman alighted behind Helen and circled her body with his left arm. He pointed the Luger at Ridgway.

  “I could shoot you, old man,” he said calmly. “You’d have to gun the girl down to have a go at me. Now wouldn’t you?”

  Helen Spade struggled in his grasp. His forearm held the weight of her breasts. She couldn’t break away from him. She stopped trying.

  The helicopter landed, gentle as a snowflake. Yves Piaget appeared in the doorway with the rifle. He came toward us.

  Havill said conversationally: “The interesting thing about a carefully worked-out plan is that one can never account for the unexpected. For example, this chap here.” He meant me. “And the actress.” He shrugged, his head close to Helen’s and behind it. “Well, old man, I suppose they can share our vigil here at the chalet while M. Piaget and your lady obtain the money in Geneva.”

  I didn’t bat an eyelash over that. You don’t hide three million bucks in an old mayonnaise jar. I had assumed all along it would be in a secret account in Geneva. Havill had assumed the same. We were both right.

  “You see,” Havill went on, “Yves will fly the girl out. I will remain here with you. She will never be out of Yves’ sight. She’ll get the money for us. Should she try any hanky-panky, I’m afraid you would find yourself in considerable and permanent trouble.” Close to Helen’s ear he asked: “You can understand that, my dear, can’t you? I’ll be here with him all the time. His life will depend on your co-operation. As, indeed, yours will depend on his docility.”

  Helen Spade understood it. She nodded her head jerkily. Her eyes shut and tears squeezed out under the lids.

  “Put the gun down,” Havill urged Ridgway, who was still sitting on the snow with the Magnum in his hand. “There is no way you can possibly use it on me without hitting your lady first. And then of course,” he added offhandedly, “there is Yves with his rifle.”

  And as he said that, Piaget, approaching us across the snow, slipped, swung his arms wildly and fell.


  The Magnum bucked twice in Ridgway’s hand. His first shot slammed Helen back against Geoffrey Havill. She slumped on his arm. Ridgway’s second shot smashed through the Englishman’s teeth, entering his mouth at an upward angle and exiting from and with the top of his skull.

  Yves Piaget, on his knees, calmly and carefully put a rifle bullet through Ridgway’s arm. He couldn’t afford to kill the embezzler, not while he didn’t know if Helen were alive or dead. Someone had to lead him to the numbered account and three million bucks.

  I was on Piaget before he could angle the rifle for a shot at me. The sharp odor of cordite hung on the cool air. Piaget grasped the rifle by stock and barrel horizontally and snapped my head back with it. I brought a knee up into his face, as he had done to Douglas Jones. It had the same result, flattening his nose. Then the rifle was out of his hands and we were in a scramble on the snow. He probed for my solar plexus with two stiffened fingers. If he found the nerve ganglion there, I’d be all through. You can’t fight if you can’t breathe. He came close, but not close enough. He spread the same two fingers in a V and jabbed for my eyes. They hit my brow instead. We rolled over and over in the snow. I got my hands on his throat, but he squirmed out of it and used a knee on my groin. There is no such thing as a dirty fighter when you are fighting for your life. We both knew that.

  Locked together, we tumbled into the hole Francesca and I had dug in the snow. Piaget butted my jaw with his head and used his knee again. He got up in a hurry. I was unable to. He found the shovel that Francesca had left in the hole and swung it down at my head. I jerked away. The edge of the shovel blade dug into the hard-packed snow. He shifted his weight, bringing one leg forward, to pull the shovel clear. I wrapped my hand around his ankle, yanking it toward me while kicking at his kneecap with the heavy heel of my ski-boot. He screamed. Even barefoot you can rip every tendon in a man’s knee like that. I was not barefoot. I was wearing three pounds of hard, heavy ski-boot. Piaget’s leg bent the wrong way. I had fractured his kneecap.

  I remember Francesca standing at the lip of the hole with Helen Spade’s Mannlicher. Remember struggling to my feet on shaky legs. Remember her coming down to help me haul Piaget out. She was more enthusiastic about it than I was. He was sweating, his lips quivered, and by the time we got him inside the chalet and on a bed and covered with blankets, his lips were blue. He was going into shock. Francesca hovered over him solicitously. I didn’t know why. I was almost out on my feet.

  Back outside again, Havill was dead. Ridgway stood slumped over, cradling his right forearm with his left hand. Bright blood trickled through his fingers to splatter on the snow. He looked down at it. His face was white.

  Of them all, Helen Spade had had the best luck. The big Magnum bullet had gouged a furrow on her shoulder, possibly breaking bone but not entering it. She was conscious. There wasn’t much bleeding. Her eyes met mine. She was crying. “Only the money. Not me. He didn’t care about me. He … shot me. All he cared about was the money.”

  I said nothing.

  Her eyes looked hurt but angry too. “The money,” she said. “He’ll never get his hands on it. In Geneva … I’m going to … turn it over to my father.”

  I brought Helen inside, then Ridgway. By then it was almost dark. Francesca was piling logs on the hearth. Pretty soon she had a big fire blazing. She found some candles and set them here and there and lit them. In the highboy bar she found a bottle of cognac and poured me a stiff slug in a waterglass, and one for herself. To get mine within reach of my lips I had to use both hands. I drank up and had a refill.

  “We are almost dead,” Francesca told me. Her eyes were enormous. “He almost kill us.”

  With a knife from the kitchen I cut Helen’s parka away. The wound looked clean. The bullet hadn’t struck bone. I sloshed cognac on her shoulder while she gritted her teeth and stared up at me. Francesca supplied the bandage, torn from a bedsheet. We did the same for Ridgway, who looked dazed but defiant. The slug was still in his arm.

  When I led him to a bedroom off one of the balconies, under the eaves of the chalet, he came docilely. He fell across the bed, wincing with pain. I poked around the small room, finding nothing he could use as a weapon.

  “Think you’re home free?” he managed to sneer.

  “I know somebody who’s not.”

  He was still sneering when I unlaced his boots and covered him with a blanket. After that I looked in on Piaget. He was asleep. A sheen of sweat covered his face. His breathing was shallow but regular.

  Downstairs once more. Francesca sat on the floor near the hearth with the cognac bottle and a glass near her outretched legs. She had tucked Helen in for the night in a bedroom off the other balcony. Her titian hair reflected the flames. Her eyes were shut. She sipped some cognac and sighed. I drank straight from the bottle, a long pull until the gag mechanism in my throat made me stop. I was feeling light-headed.

  “Alone at last,” I said.

  Francesca smiled a faint cat-smile with her eyes still shut.

  “Come to Chamonix,” I ranted. “Best skiing in the Alps, maybe the world. Throw in a killing and assorted mayhem just so things don’t get dull. Did I ever tell you the story of my life?”

  “No. But you are a little bit drunk.”

  “That’s the story of my life,” I persisted.

  She laughed softly. “You mean, always a little bit drunk?”

  “Uh-uh. Throw in a killing and assorted mayhem—”

  I was squatting near her and tilting the cognac bottle again. She touched my knee with her hand. “You are a very brave man.”

  “You didn’t look so bad out there yourself.”

  “What will you do now?”

  “Sleep. Nobody up there’s going anywhere, and we’ve got this armory down here. Two rifles, an automatic and a revolver,” I added unneccessarily.

  “Not to mention the cognac, eh?” She smiled. I smiled. She poured some for me in her own glass. It seemed like a good idea. It made the assorted aches that Piaget had supplied recede into a warm, fuzzy haze.

  After a while I was aware of Francesca helping me to a big, soft chair and covering me with the hearth-rug. “Tomorrow?” she said. “You will go for the gendarmes?”

  “First light,” I agreed drowsily, already burrowing into sleep. “Ski down into the valley. Call the cops. Or you can. I’ll stand guard duty. Either way.”

  She answered something. The words didn’t register, and then she wasn’t there any longer. Neither was I.

  chapter thirteen

  ALL DECKED OUT in a safari-cloth hunting jacket and a pith helmet, a girl who might have been Francesca Artemi was hunting elephants with a bolt-action Mannlicher rifle. She found a herd of twenty pachyderms in assorted sizes, calmly dropped to one knee, brought the rifle to her shoulder, took careful aim and squeezed the trigger. Click, went the Mannlicher. She squeezed the trigger again. Click, went the Mannlicher again.

  Her native bearers dropped bundles, bales, boxes, sleeping bags and whatnot, and took a quick collective powder, the way only bearers or anyone or anything can in a dream.

  The elphants raised their trunks, showed off their tusks and stampeded toward Francesca. The Mannlicher kept making a helpless and forlorn click. The elephants began to trumpet.

  I was swinging down on a vine or a liana or whatever the hell they are, with a knife clamped between my teeth and wearing a Tarzan-style loincloth. I alighted in front of the biggest and toughest elephant, which was leading the herd and doing most of the trumpeting, and with calm and almost weary patience raised my right hand. All the elephants pulled up short, like cars that don’t quite hurtle off cliffs in old Mack Sennett films. Their leader dropped ponderously to his knees and nuzzled me lovingly before they all took an orderly powder.

  Francesca looked at me admiringly. “There is only one Chester Drum,” she said breathlessly.

  “That’s what the Son of Tarzan says to Tarzan when his old man rescues him from a herd of stampeding elephants
,” I replied modestly. “There is only one Tarzan.”

  “I know this. It is why I say it. But you have made me a better offer.”

  One of the elephants was still trumpeting. That seemed odd, as they all had left the dream, as obedient elephants should.

  “One of the elephants is still trumpeting,” I said, perplexed.

  Francesca kissed me. “This I know too. But you have made me a better offer,” she repeated.

  They changed the sound effects on me. The trumpeting elephant become a man screaming with pain. I went up the vine or liana, or whatever the hell they are, hand over hand, and when I got to the top I was awake. Not wide awake, but up and out of the dream, groggy but aware that I was awake and still hearing a man scream.

  I lurched to my feet. The fire had burned to embers in a soft bed of ash. Half a dozen candles were still lit. The chalet was as cold as an Eskimo’s nightmare. I grabbed the Magnum and ran up the balcony stairs on one side of the living room. Wrong side: it had been a man screaming, and Helen had this side all to herself. Down again, across the living room and up again. Piaget’s door was open. He was all finished screaming. I heard him talking in a whimpering, bubbling, eager voice. Not knowing what to expect, I turned the knob, kicked the door in and stood to one side with the Magnum ready. Silence.

  Piaget was supine on the bed, his arms spreadeagled and his hands dangling limply on either side of the mattress. Francesca had brought a candle up with her. It was on the bare floor, and the draft from the door had almost gutted it. She sat astride Piaget, her head close to his, her titain hair veiling his face. They might have been a couple of lovers caught in slightly unorthodox flagrante delicto, except that nobody was making love to anybody.

  Francesca was leaning forward on her haunches, one knee on either side of Piaget. Her right hand was well behind her right haunch, her fingers gripping Piaget’s broken kneecap, and plenty of her weight on it, too. No wonder he had made me dream of trumpeting elephants.