He looked at his watch; it was four fifteen. Once again it had worked perfectly. He carried the sweatshirt and the two boxes over the embankment and across the narrow field back to his car. He dropped them through the open window onto the back seat. Then he went back for the mannequin.
Coco Witgold, née Chadraz, spilled out of the chaise longue and stretched herself out languorously on the soft, pale blue carpet.
“Oh God!” she moaned. “That was... mmmm.”
Harry watched impassively from an easy chair two yards away, smoking a cigarette. He wore a white, heavy terry cloth bathrobe with a golden hem. The cigarette was a Sobrani. Two empty bottles of Veuve Clicquot stood on the round mahogany table next to him; the champagne flutes lay beside each other near a dark stain in the rug. He shook his head and smiled, revealing twin rows of bright teeth with matching gold caps on the top incisors.
“Time for something else,” he said in a mocking voice. “We’ve had enough of that.”
He laughed a sudden, sharp, curt little laugh.
“I was thinking,” he went on, as he studied her studied pout, watched her sit up and look regretfully at the spilled champagne, “we ought to get out of this bedroom and see a few of the sights around here.”
He bent forward and picked up a brightly colored brochure on the floor.
“After all, Switzerland is more than chocolate and champagne and room service. We could have had all that on a honeymoon back in New York. Eh?”
Coco had stood up and let her silk chemise fall down her body, covering her to a little past the waist. She walked over to the window and leaned provocatively on the sill, gazing out at the fountain in the hotel park without seeming to take it in.
“There’s this funicular here, the Schrotthorn, takes you up to a revolving restaurant at three thousand meters.” He shook his head. “That’s ten thousand feet — you’d probably get altitude sickness. Tourists probably puking all over the damned place. Pleasant restaurant!”
He laughed his short, sharp laugh again.
“Then there’s this cave thing full of crystals—”
“I hate caves,” Coco said uninterestedly. She turned to face him, shook her thick, long, auburn hair, and shivered; then she walked over to the closet where she started pulling out bras, panties, stockings till she found a set that suited her.
“A bus ride up to the Tussen Pass,” Harry murmured. “Probably get nice and carsick on those hairpin turns — Christ, is this a tourist resort or a torture chamber? Or look at this — Mariluise Bridge! ‘Built in the eighteenth century of local limestone, made famous by Mariluise Frei, the nineteenth century Swiss novelist, who jumped to her death from it in 1865. She has been followed by countless suicides since. Mariluise Beach, farther down the Orne River, is an attraction for the macabre tourist; this is the spot where the bodies inevitably wash up.’ Jesus Christ! What a delectable vacation spot! But I suppose we could always go visit Victor—”
“Don’t mention that name in front of me, Harry!” She turned on him from the bathroom door, her eyes shiny and hot. “That goddamned moneymonger, thinks he can run my life. I spit on my little brother!”
She slammed the door, and he laughed. Then he stood up, looked at his watch, and walked across the room to the telephone.
Andrea Huber sat, bored, at the ticket booth of the Banzlaui Glacier Gorge. She was running both the entrance and the small snack bar today, which wasn’t very hard since there had only been three visitors. On a cloudy day in May she hadn’t expected many more, and she thumbed through her Bravo magazine for the tenth time. Milking cows was actually more interesting than this, she thought, and she regretted having taken on the tourist job.
The gorge, though, was an impressive sight. Carved out of the rock by millions of years of violently falling glacier water, it was full of incredible rock formations, and the water that thundered through it, with a force and violence that were not for the squeamish, never failed to impress her with its power — a power she felt to be amoral if not sinister. Fifty years ago her great-grandfather had blown a passage through the rock and built a walkway through the gorge, a suspended boardwalk a few meters above the turbulence and noise. He had fenced the passage in securely and opened it up to tourists, and in high summer hundreds of them walked through every day, emerging onto solid ground three hundred meters up the mountainside. There Andrea’s cousin had installed a turnstile that connected with a counter in the ticket booth. Andrea could check that everyone was safely out of the gorge by comparing the number on the counter with the number of people who had paid admission. And today there was something funny going on, for while three people had gone in, it looked as if only two had left.
It was five o’clock, time to close up shop. But somebody apparently was lingering in the gorge. Andrea waited, lazily, ten minutes; then, throwing down her magazine and grumbling, she pulled on her wind-breaker and left the ticket booth through the door that fed directly into the tunnel.
She sighed and started through the passage in the cold, moist rock. Dim light bulbs lit the way occasionally, and as she walked the incredible roaring of the gorge grew louder and wilder, chilling her as it always did. She tried to remember the three people who had visited today: the rich couple who’d come up in a taxi, the man with his golden teeth and the woman in that outfit, dress with matching jacket, that she’d recognized from Vogue: the Liza Itzenhagen thing she knew cost well over three thousand francs. She’d had long auburn hair and big golden rings in her ears. She must have been rich and stupid to wear such a thing through the Banzlaui Glacier Gorge. But the point was that Andrea had seen them leave — had seen them climb into the taxi that had driven them up from the valley and then waited for them in the parking lot. So the straggler had to be the man in the trenchcoat, short and stocky, foreign, who had eyed her with such evident appreciation as he’d bought the ticket. He was Italian or Yugoslavian, she thought; not very good looking, with too much dark hair on his cramped little face — a man who looked strong, like a little bull. He had arrived on foot and gone in almost an hour ago; it was unusual for anyone to stay so long. So probably he’d just slipped past her unnoticed, and the counter wasn’t functioning.
She walked slowly through the darkest part of the passage, past the dim light bulbs, shivering in the damp. Then the tiny tunnel curved, and she could see out into daylight, to the wide wooden balcony that looked over the most massive and frightening fall in the whole place, a cataract that shot thick bursts of heavy foam straight down into a writhing pool where the water was sucked into a vicious maelstrom and then disappeared under the rock. It actually disappeared, she knew — sucked into a chute under the earth — and only emerged, with equal fury, two kilometers farther on, where it shot into and muddied up the Wildenbach.
Andrea hated this part of the passage. She hated the way the water hit so hard, so loud, and then was sucked deep down, forced deep into the underground, into black nothingness. She knew it was so powerful that there would be no fighting it if one fell in, and she felt that the double metal railing that stood between her and such a fate was still not strong enough; the gaps in it still scared her, and as it only came up to her waist, it seemed possible that she could somehow lose her balance and topple over it. She heard the sound of a pebble falling behind her and turned quickly, startled; and as she turned she slipped, and grabbed onto the railing to hold herself up. But the railing was wet and slippery, and her hand slid down it just as her feet lost their hold on the rock and she fell hard into the fence, landing on her side on the wet ground. She felt suddenly, crazily afraid — all alone and yet not alone at all — and the knowledge that she was a sinner overwhelmed her, that she deserved whatever punishment God might intend for all the awful, selfish thoughts she’d had about her poor hardworking parents; the things that she had done with certain men; her horrible ambitions; and the terrible, unmentionable, constant thoughts she had and never could get rid of...