“Mon Dieu,” roared Brother Bartholomew. “Ten years the man makes contributions to the Hospice, every year, and once in a weak moment I suggest that if he ever needs anything I can be of help with he has only to ask. Ten years he asks for nothing, but now it seems the debt will at last be paid. Mon Dieu, what is it you wish?”
His emphasis of the word “you” told me what I wanted to know. Ridgway and Helen had come here ahead of me, all right.
“Axel Spade’s in trouble,” I said frankly but vaguely. “I’m trying to get him out of it. It won’t be easy.”
“Easy?” he boomed. “Nothing in this life is easy, and here in the St. Bernard Pass everything which is difficult becomes twice as difficult. All winter long my monks patrol the Col on skis and snowshoes and half of them forget their prayers and devotions by the time spring arrives. Sometimes I think I have been placed here to have a foretaste of the Ninth Circle of Hell, which doubtless I shall eventually occupy for my blasphemy. Mon Dieu, what sort of trouble is this Spade in now? He’s been in trouble all his life. Don’t you think I know that? A man tries to salve his conscience by giving to a worthy cause, but—besides,” Brother Bartholomew snorted suddenly, changing the subject, “what makes you think you can help him?”
“He wasn’t trying to salve his conscience, Brother Bartholomew. He was thinking more in terms of an escape route to Italy if he ever needed it. Your friars patrol south across the border, don’t they?”
“Naturally, but I don’t understand.” Brother Bartholomew rubbed his bald dome. “Does that mean you are a fugitive from justice? I thought you said it was Spade who needed help.”
“I’m not on the lam, Brother, and neither is Axel Spade—yet. But the people he sent here are. One of them is his daughter.”
“Mon Dieu,” said Brother Bartholomew, registering surprise unconvincingly. “The sweet little blonde thing is his child? And a fugitive?”
I took a chance. “Look, Brother Bartholomew,” I said, “we can beat around the bush from now until the Rhône Glacier melts, but that won’t get either one of us anywhere. You know what I’m talking about, and if you play it cagey with me that probably means you’re prepared to help them: Only trouble is, the setup’s changed. If Helen Spade walks across that border, somebody else who means a lot to Axel Spade gets her rear in a sling.”
Brother Bartholomew’s laughter rebounded from the stone walls. “I do appreciate your colorful manner of speech, Mr.—Drum, was it? But you’ve said nothing to prove you are a friend of Axel Spade’s. I’m but a simple man doing God’s good work, and for all I know you could be M. Spade’s worst enemy. You could even be,” he said chidingly, “with the police.”
I hadn’t got around to cashing Axel Spade’s retainer check, but when I dug it out of my wallet and showed it to Brother Bartholomew, he shook his head and told me: “That proves nothing. A simple man such as myself could never dream of all the reasons Axel Spade might have to write a check payable in your name. You could still be his enemy.”
He smiled. I smiled and said: “Brother Bartholomew, you’re simple—like a fox. I’m hungry, and I’m beat, and I need a hot meal, a nap and a talk with Helen Spade in that order, or in any order at all, as well as some assurance you’ll be in my corner when I come out fighting.”
“Your manner of speech still amuses me, my dear Mr. Drum,” he admitted to me. “When you, er, come out fighting whom?”
“Let’s try it this way,” I said, and told him all of it, everything from the time I’d received Axel Spade’s first-class round-trip jet ticket from Washington to Geneva. It took close to fifteen minutes. Brother Bartholomew was a good listener. A couple of times he clucked his tongue. He never interrupted me with a question. When I was all through he sat there a full minute saying nothing. Then he scowled, stood up, smashed a fist as big as a volleyball and as hard as a hockey puck on the desk top and exploded:
“What? They dare to come here, these brothers Piaget? Bringing their violence to God’s own Hospice? Bringing mayhem to this peaceful sanctuary? Bringing … by Christ—forgive me, forgive me,” he rumbled, smiting the desk repeatedly with his fist, “but if it comes to that, I’ll show them a thing or two about violence. I am a peace-loving man,” he bellowed. “Do I look bellicose?” The desk resounded to his blows. “I am but God’s servant, and I—when are they coming? When can I hope to get these two hands on them? When, by God, may I expect that pleasure?”
When he paused for breath, his face red, I asked quietly: “What about Helen and Ridgway?”
“Yes. Yes, of course. I understand. If I carry out Axel Spade’s instructions,” he ruminated, calming down, “his daughter escapes, Ridgway keeps the money. and Spade is in trouble. Worse than that, this Artemi woman’s life is imperiled. Yes, I see that. What do you suggest?”
“What were Spade’s instructions?”
“You already guessed them. Tomorrow morning, when a team of friars patrols the road on skis and snowshoes to the border and beyond, they’ll have company. This man Ridgway. Helen Spade. Wearing the Augustinian habit. Naturally, they have no intention of returning.”
“The Piagets ought to be here long before tomorrow morning. Want to take it one thing at a time?”
He closed a powerful hand on my shoulder. I managed not to wince. “I can assure you,” he said, “that your friends the Piagets will receive a rousing welcome here. God forgive me, but I almost look forward to it with a certain amount of sadistic glee.”
“I’ll want a word with Helen,” I said. “Soon. And alone.”
He raised a hand like a traffic cop at a busy intersection. “First, if you are to be of any use to your client, you need some sleep. Miss Spade is going nowhere until tomorrow, the storm will likely delay your friends the Piagets, and you look as if you haven’t seen’ a bed in weeks.” He added: “I’m a simple man and I suppose, loving God, I should love all God’s children. But kidnappers … yes, yes, a certain amount of sadistic anticipation … it has always been a weakness of mine anyway, I like a good fight … time enough tomorrow to pray for merciful understanding and forgiveness.”
The old friar came for me. I left Brother Bartholomew standing there, glaring balefully at his desk.
chapter twenty
WEARING SANDALS and a brown Augustinian habit, and with my head cowled like many of the friars running errands through the big and drafty refectory at lunch hour, I spotted Helen Spade and Ridgway. They had a wood-plank corner table to themselves.
His right arm was in a sling. He was forking stew clumsily into his mouth with his left hand and not liking it. She was wearing the sweater with the Indian head, ski-pants and a silk scarf around her throat knotted at one side. With her blonde hair and blue eyes she still looked like the American dream from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. But something new had been added: she gave him a solicitous and almost motherly smile which didn’t go with her scrubbed, teen-aged good looks. She touched his left wrist with her fingertips. “Shall I cut it, hon?” I heard her say. “You’re having trouble.”
He withdrew his hand. “I can manage it. You don’t have to hover over me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Crummy chow anyway.”
“Who expected Cordon Bleu cooking here?” Helen asked lightly.
“Yeah. Don’t mind me, baby. You’ll get all the Cordon Bleu cooking you want once we’re across that border.”
She pouted. “I could live on Augustinian stew or whatever this is the rest of my life. I’m not complaining. You know what I want. You know what matters to me, Howard.” Her eyes brightened unexpectedly and then misted. I realized she was almost crying. “Say it. Please say it.”
“Sure,” he replied stiffly with the words she wanted to hear. “I love you. I love you, baby.” He patted her hand awkwardly.
All of a sudden I felt sorry for her. She was the product of a broken marriage, old lady in the States, old man a wheeler-dealer in Europe. Little girl how old, ten? Mommy and Daddy can’t live together any more, Helen. Somet
imes mommies and dadies can’t, even though they’d like to. But that doesn’t mean we both don’t still love you. Mommy loves you. Daddy loves you. And Helen grows up living with Mommy, and occasionally, and then more frequently, there are male friends of Mommy’s in the house, and sometimes loving Helen isn’t easy and sometimes, depending on the attitude of the male friends, Helen is a pain in the ass. As for Daddy, he wanders around making his pile and getting into hot water in a couple of dozen countries, and he doesn’t have much time for loving Helen either. Then along comes Ridgway, and Helen falls like a ton of paving blocks, and Ridgway plays it for three million bucks, leaving Helen with that vulnerable look on her face and a desperate need to hear words which don’t mean the same thing to him that they do to her.
They looked up. I cleared my throat. I essayed a slight falsetto and a slighter accent: “Brother Bartholomew wishes to see you. In his quarters?”
“What for?” Ridgway asked quickly.
“Only the lady, sir. I do not know what for.”
“Hell, the arrangements are simple. What’s his problem?”
“No problem that I would know of, sir. Brother Bartholomew wishes to see the lady.”
“He’s been very nice to us, Howard,” Helen said before he could open his mouth again. “He didn’t have to be. I like him, so why shouldn’t I see him if he wants?” She asked me: “Is it all right if I finish eating? Five minutes?”
I nodded, stood on line with the other friars, got a steaming bowl of stew and brought it to a table near theirs. I wolfed the stew down. It wasn’t Cordon Bleu cooking, but I liked it.
Ten minutes later I escorted Helen from the refectory.
I shut and bolted the door of Brother Bartholomew’s quarters. The three coal fires had burned low.
“Well, where is he?” No longer at Ridgway’s side, Helen seemed unsure of herself. She stood near the big desk. She went to one of the walls of books, her eyes roving their spines. “We are going tomorrow, aren’t we? In the morning?” She turned and looked at me, waiting for an answer.
I dropped the hood of my monk’s habit to my shoulders. “Surprise, surprise,” I said.
“You!” She made a run for the door, but I stood in her way.
“Hold it. I want to talk to you.”
“I have nothing to say to you. Get out of my way. I’ll scream for help. Did my father send you?”
“Go ahead and scream if it will make you happy. Brother Bartholomew knows I’m in here with you.”
“What do you want from us? Why can’t you leave us alone?”
“Like you’re leaving your old man alone to hold the bag while you and Ridgway walk off to collect three million bucks?”
She gave me a look that would have made a polar bear shiver. “The money means very little to me. My concern is for Howard. It always has been.”
“Even after he took a pot-shot at you?”
“He told me about that. I was hysterical at Flegère. He knew what he was doing. He’s an excellent shot. The bullet barely touched me.”
“An inch lower and it would have smashed your shoulder. A few inches lower and it would have killed you. No one’s that good a shot.”
She let that pass. She had made up my mind. “Why did my father send you after us?” Her eyes narrowed. “Did you bring some kind of message to Brother Bartholomew? To cancel the arrangements for our escape into Italy? Is that what my father wants? To see Howard in jail?”
“Maybe you’d rather see your father there.”
She laughed harshly. “Axel Spade? Don’t make me laugh. He has a way of squirming out of things—even out of what could have been a good marriage. They’ll never put him behind bars.”
Before I could answer, a voice shouted on the other side of the heavy oak door: “Mon Dieu, let me in. They are on their way.”
I unbolted the door before Brother Bartholomew took it off its hinges. He plowed into the room and past me carrying an ancient bolt-action rifle. He patted the barrel affectionately. It was pitted with corrosion. “We keep twelve of them at the Hospice,” he said. “More a tradition than a necessity. Once there were wolves, though a wolf hasn’t been seen in the Col since before the First World War.”
“When’s the last time you fired that thing?” I looked at the vintage rifle doubtfully.
Brother Bartholomew’s face crimsoned. “Mon Dieu, I was hoping no one would ask me that. These rifles function, I assure you.” I said nothing. He told me quickly: “Chamois. I have a fondness for hunting chamois in these mountains. Naturally it would be frowned on by my order, but a man must have some little vices.” He cleared his throat and patted the stock of the rifle.
“How do you know they’re on their way?”
“A call from the Cantine. I have made preparations, by Chr—yes, well.…” He cleared his throat again. “A Volkswagen bus with Geneva plates stopped at the Cantine. A big man got out and inquired as to the whereabouts of Mlle. Spade and M. Ridgway. He—”
“Who was he?” Helen demanded anxiously, looking first at Brother Bartholomew, then at me.
“He claimed to be with the Federal Police,” Brother Bartholomew said. “But since when do the Federal Police pursue their quarry in a Volkswagen bus?”
“Anyway,” I pointed out, “the cops don’t know they’re here. It has to be the Piaget brothers. What happened?”
“Yves Piaget?” Helen cried.
Brother Bartholomew shrugged. “At the Cantine they were told the same thing you were told. To try the Hospice. In a matter of minutes they should be here. I have six men outside with rifles, six more in the building including myself.” He smiled, then snorted and said: “As you can see, I am very much in your corner. In fact I almost regret that likely you will not have to come out fighting after all. These Piaget brothers, masquerading as police and never suspecting we know, will walk right into our arms.”
“Don’t be so sure about that,” I said. “The Hospice isn’t the Cantine. A few friars on duty there, a handful of stranded travelers—but the Hospice is different. You’ve got a small army here, and they’ll know that. They’re professionals. They busted their brother out of jail in Chamonix in a very professional way. And they’re playing for big stakes now. They’re playing for three million bucks.”
Brother Bartholomew’s eyebrows climbed toward his bald pate. Helen nibbled at her lower lip. “We don’t have it with us. Only a few thousand dollars, an emergency fund. The rest—”
“I know where the rest is,” I said. “But what the Piagets figure is all they have to do is get their hands on you and let you know what the score is.”
Helen looked at me blankly. “What the score is?”
“They kidnapped Francesca Artemi. She’s in or near Geneva somewhere, with Yves. The Piagets take you down to Italy, you get the money for them and Francesca goes free. Otherwise she’s in for it.”
“You mean they’re holding her hostage?” Helen demanded, outraged.
“It looks like she has no luck at all,” I said softly but not gently, and with a smile that was no smile at all. “Up at Flegère you and Ridgway were standing over her with a couple of guns while she dug a hole in the snow—”
“But we never would have—”
“—that she was going to fall in after you shot her in the back. I guess three million bucks can make bastards even out of paragons like Howard Ridgway.”
“You don’t know Howard. You don’t know him at all. Besides, even assuming you’re right and I’m wrong—not that it’s true—do you think I would have stood there and let him go ahead with it?”
“No,” I said. “There were two of us, remember? Francesca and me. You were going to help him.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said, glaring at me. But we both knew it wasn’t. I didn’t feel sorry for her any more.
By mid-afternoon the snowstorm stopped, but the sky remained threatening. A howling wind blew the snow into drifts. I was outside with Brother Bartholomew, looking down the road t
oward the Cantine. In groups of three and four, in snowshoes and occasionally on skis, with packs strapped to their shoulders, the friars were returning from their patrol duty. Their heads were cowled and they wore rope-belts around their waists. The skirts of their habits blew in the wind.
It was almost two hours since the call from the Cantine. The Piaget brothers hadn’t showed up yet.
“Perhaps they are stuck in the snow,” Brother Bartholomew suggested.
“Your patrols would have spotted them.”
“Yes, I suppose so. Then what do you think?”
“Search me.”
“What will you do with Ridgway? He knows he is a virtual prisoner now. He sits in the refectory, drinking cup after cup of coffee.”
“I can’t do anything with him yet. If we call the cops in and the Piagets manage to get here and away, goodbye Francesca.”
“But afterwards?” Brother Bartholomew peered down the road and saw nothing but the wind-blown snow devils. “Mon Dieu, I gather the man was going to kill you and the Artemi woman in cold blood.”
I nodded. There was nothing to say. Hell, how long could I play it Axel Spade’s way? Sooner or later I’d have to let the French and Swiss cops play a game of football to see who got a crack at Ridgway first. And Helen.
“You will surrender them to the police?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“It is a thing you must do, my friend. The girl has a quality of innocence and vulnerability about her, but still—”
A voice hailed us: “Fratello Bartolommeo.”
Four monks on snowshoes plodded toward us. They had come over a snow-covered rise near the Cantine road. One of them spoke hurriedly to Brother Bartholomew in Italian.
Brother Bartholomew turned to me. “The Volkswagen bus. With Geneva plates. They found it less than a kilometer from here, on a little goat path off the road. The bus is locked. Several pairs of skis are in it. There were no indications of an accident. But the bus had been abandoned.”
It was one of the red and black deluxe models, with tinted windows all around. Leading away from it we could see the big oval tracks of three pairs of snowshoes in the soft snow. We followed them from the Microbus back along the goat path to the main road. But the Hospice monks had been coming off patrol all afternoon, and there the tracks merged with others. It was impossible to follow them.
Francesca Page 13
