She heard another pebble fall, and then another. But if someone was there, where could he be hiding...
The water on the ground began to soak through her clothes, but she couldn’t get up, she couldn’t move; she turned her face down to the ground; she felt that something horrible was about to happen to her...
It was about two in the morning when the receptionist at the Sauvage called the police. Bruno Mohr, who was on duty, listened dully to the story, then threw his jacket on and stepped outside. He got into the car and backed onto the empty street. He drove three blocks without seeing a single light on in a house. Then he reached the main road where a couple of shop windows were lit up; and then, of course, the lobby windows of the Grand Hotel Sauvage.
He pulled up in front of the rotunda, twisted off the ignition, closed the door softly, and took the steps. The night air was warm, and the mountains rising up to the stars all around him made him feel strong. He was thirty-three years old and in good shape from his workouts with the soccer club, and he enjoyed feeling his well-trained muscles work together smoothly as he loped up the steps of Ringgenberg’s fanciest hotel.
Through the window of the front door he saw Raoul, whom he knew vaguely, sitting rigidly at the reception desk while another man, short and dark, his tie and hair in disarray, paced back and forth on the deep red carpet. Bruno pushed the door open gently. The crazy-looking man rushed up to him and began pleading with him in fluent German with a strong American accent.
“I need to see my sister. I need to see my sister! She called me three hours ago — she’s in trouble — she needs my help. Will you tell this fool to give me her goddamned room number?”
Raoul rolled his eyes at Bruno and spoke quietly and slowly in the local dialect.
“He says that Mrs. Witgold in 414 is his sister and she needs his help. I’m not going to let him barge in on her and her husband in the middle of the night unless you tell me to, Bruno. For obvious reasons.”
“She could be dying, even now. This is absurd! She’s my sister! I got a desperate phone call from her. She’s freshly married to a man who’s — who’s — evil, and I’m scared to death for her, and if you don’t let me up, I’m going to scream through the goddamned halls of this whole damned hotel and wake all of your clients up, you little — spaniel, you twit! Do you hear me, man?”
Bruno had the man identify himself, which he did, squirming, by means of a driver’s license and a business card. He was a divorce lawyer, Victor Chadraz, who lived and worked in Bern.
“It’s not our policy to disturb guests in the hotel without overwhelming cause, Mr. Chadraz,” Bruno stated calmly. “No one has heard or seen anything out of place, and your sister will surely be willing to see you tomorrow morning—”
“You don’t understand,” Victor insisted. “She may not be alive tomorrow morning!” He was screaming, his face twisted in fury — then suddenly he darted towards the stairs, and before Bruno or Raoul could react, he was around the corner, heading up for the fourth floor. Bruno sprinted up after him, but the little man was fast, and he pulled pictures off the walls and tossed them backwards and they almost tripped up Bruno, and he had to slow down, and then a large plant lay across the red carpeted stair, and a broken alabaster statue of a naked woman — and by the time Bruno reached the fourth floor Victor was a good twenty meters ahead of him, ramming his shoulder into the door of 414, to little effect; and then he tried the door handle, and it opened. At the other end of the hall an old woman appeared in a fuzzy purple nightgown, her mouth wide open, but Bruno had no time to deal with guests; he stormed into the open room, ready to pull the crazy man off whomever he might be attacking there.
But Victor was attacking nobody. The lights were all on in the room, which was not a room but a suite; the big bed was perfectly made up, its shiny silver quilt tucked eloquently into the corners of the mattress; two used champagne glasses stood next to each other on a windowsill; the bathroom door was open, the fan blowing senselessly. But nobody was there. Bruno ran quickly into the next room, a small sitting room, and then the next, another bedroom, with a matching bed similarly made up. The lights were on in all the rooms, but they were undisturbed. He returned and saw Victor standing at the bed in the first room, reading a sheet of paper. His face was pale and his hands were shaking; he dropped the note back onto the bed and fell into a chair. Bruno picked it up; it was a short, typewritten paragraph followed by a flamboyant signature.
Harry,
I’m sorry but it hurts too much. There are things you don’t know about me and I thought that, with you, I would be able to forget about them — it was my last chance. But I can see that it’s no good. The past wins out. I wasn’t made to start again. Thanks for trying. You chose me such a pleasant place to die.
All my love, always,
And then the signature, something Bruno could not make out.
Victor was sitting forward now, his forehead sweating, wringing his hands.
“It isn’t true,” he said. “It’s phony. Coco would never write a thing like that. It’s him.” Bruno waited for enlightenment. But he was pretty sure already what the next few hours would bring. A watch down at the beach, the bored but nervous waiting — and then, just as you were thinking of something else, just when you thought it was taking too long and nothing would be coming at all... the empty body rolling in. The Ringgenberg police had been lobbying for years to take that damned bridge and its history off the tourist brochures, take the damned plaque off of the bridge. But every time the burghers, economically astute, turned them down, realizing at some level that the gory story of Mariluise Frei — and its string of pathetic successors — helped them rake in the tourist dollars they needed to stay afloat.
“It’s him, I’m sure of it. He’s killed her. It’s a cover. Oh Jesus, what a monster, not to have waited even a goddamned week...”
He put his face in his hands and began to sob. Bruno moved over to the telephone, cradled it in his hand, and dialed.
Exactly one week later, Max Fremont received one of the strangest phone calls in his long, strange life. He was sitting in the rocking chair on the screened porch, looking out on a Hansor midafternoon — the occasional car rolling by, the leaves unfolding, wet and fresh, on the great maple trees — finding it odd that what would have seemed so boring to him in his youth was such a tonic to him now. He almost didn’t answer the phone, reminding himself that he no longer had the obligation to look on every call as a matter of life and death — but the thought that his wife was out on Quimby Mountain looking for fiddleheads and that something might have happened to her dragged him to his feet and had him there on the eleventh ring.