“Or they wanted that other twenty percent,” Selby said. “Maybe that’s the reason they went to their graves.”
Senator Lester shook his head firmly. “I’m not going to leave you on that morbid note. You did what you set out to do on your level, you broke that lying conspiracy of Thomson s, and you probably saved that lovely child of yours a future of heartache. Dammit, Selby, accept that. I’m proud I was able to help. As a matter of fact,” he went on, removing his wallet and taking a card from it, “we could make a good team. Here s a number where you can always reach me. I know Vickie gave you the office number and extensions, but this is a priority line. Connects directly to any meeting I’m in, regardless of circumstances.”
He closed the car door and smiled at Selby through the open rear window. “Have a good flight, Selby. When you’re in Switzerland with a glass of something warm after a day on the slopes, think of me. Take care of yourself, Harry, and God bless.”
They shook hands and the senator stepped back and Clem raised the rear window from his front control panel.
Selby turned and glanced around as the car swung out of the congressional parking lot. The senator stood with the warm sun on his face, his head thrown back and staring, Selby decided, with an expectant and defiant challenge at the monuments along the mall, the great and sternly righteous figures of his nation’s founders.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The Selbys’ hotel in Switzerland was near Lake Geneva in the foothills of the Jungfrau. At dusk, banks of clouds gathered around the peaks but in the morning the sunlight broke through like splendid yellow lances.
The village had no name; it was a suburb, a cluster of buildings on the narrow road between the towns of Zweisimmen and St. Stephan.
Their lodge was settled in a valley circled by stands of fir trees and smooth white hills. The main street — there was just the one thoroughfare actually, the others were only lanes or footpaths — that single street was packed deep with snow and lined with a few shops and a pair of open air cafes. The architecture was pleasantly uniform; all the buildings were faced with cream-colored stucco crisscrossed with stained brown timbers. A steepled church stood at the top of the street, where the road forked to St. Stephan. In this season the shop windows were trimmed with holly wreaths and silver bells and brilliant, glittering lights.
Shadows deepened in the cafes as the last sunlight slanted over the tallest ridges of the Jungfrau. The hazy light made a dull shine on the steeply pitched red-tile roofs of the village. A few bundled-up tourists were window shopping, but most of the skiers were down from the slopes by now, either resting up in their rooms or sitting about the fireplaces in the lounges. Dogs with thick heavy coats trotted along the sidewalks, stopping as if on schedule for a snack from the few people sitting outside at the open air cafes.
A large horse-drawn sled came down the street, harness bells jingling, bringing in a last group of skiers. The youngsters perched on the high seats laughed and waved like celebrities to the people in the cafes in front of the hotels. Most of the ski lift traffic was routed back and forth in long diesel station wagons, but the huge sled with its hand-painted panels was brought out during the holidays as a reminder of the country’s festive old traditions.
The horses’ hooves thudded rhythmically on the packed snow. Their snorting breath puffed like streams of white smoke from their frosted nostrils. The decorative brass “irons” on their harness straps were relics of a lost craft, delicately worked with tiny figures of knights and hounds and castles.
Shana sat on one of the highest seats of the sled, between two tall teenagers who carried her skis and poles slung over their shoulders. Their laughing voices mingled with the sound of the creaking harness, the pounding hooves and the Angelus bells on the gusting winds.
Selby looked up and smiled at his daughter. He sat in a sidewalk cafe with a pot of chocolate and the British newspapers. Shana laughed and pointed to the young men beside her; they smiled broadly at Selby and pantomimed bowing from the waist and shaking hands.
When the sled stopped, the young men handed Shana’s skis and poles down to her and shouted cheerful goodbyes as she joined her father.
“They’re brothers, Jules and Guy Brizzard,” Shana said, waving back at them as the horses pulled the sled off. Stacking her skis in the hotel’s outdoor rack, she joined her father and took a long swallow from his pewter mug of chocolate. “I had an adventure with them,” she said, turning and smiling after the jingling sled and horses. “I lost a binding on that slope they call Bonne Chance, accurately enough, and took a derriere-over-teakettle spill. I wasn’t hurt but my knee felt funny, so I stuck my skis in the snow, made a cross of them, the international May Day distress signal, you know, and within seconds, really, the Brizzard brothers came swooping down to rescue me.”
She was a pleasure for Selby to look at in a red parka with her blond hair tumbling around her shoulders, glinting now with sun and snowflakes. Her face was pink and tanned with the mountain sun, except where her snow goggles had made a slim white mask across her eyes and cheeks. It gave her an animated and whimsical look, a winter harlequin.
She ate a sugar bun, licked her fingers and drank the rest of his chocolate. Guy and Jules Brizzard were nineteen, she told Selby. They had tucked her skis under their arms, picked her up between them and carried her down the Olympic trail to the lift area, where the doctor said a hot bath was all she’d need, and maybe a day or two off the slopes to rest her knee.
“They’re both studying medicine in Lyon,” she told him. “They’re fantastic skiers. They’d like to come over some time to meet you and have tea with us.” She gave him back his empty cup. “When’s Miss Brett’s train getting in?”
“In about an hour,” Selby said. “I just checked, it’s on time.” Brett had flown to Bern from Paris that afternoon. She was coming over to St. Stephan on the Bern-Montreux Exchange. Selby planned to drive over shortly to meet her.
“I’ve talked to the hotel manager,” he said. “He’s put Brett in the room next to yours, on the floor above Davey and me.”
“Wonderful. We’ll probably talk all night, then we can have a graceful invalid’s breakfast on the terrace. I am an invalid, you know. I can’t ski for two whole days. But we have lots to talk about. She wrote that her sister’s poodle had puppies, six of them, imagine. She’s bringing pictures. They named them after wines and grapes. Pinot, Margaux, Chablis, Merlot — I forget the others. She says they’re absolutely adorable but rascals, into everything. She wondered by the way” — Shana glanced at him — “how Blazer would manage in his dotage with a puppy.”
“Blazer’s only six, what does she mean?”
Shana picked up another sugar bun but put it down again with a resolute gesture. “No, it would spoil dinner,” she said, “and my shrewd intuition tells me dinner might be a celebration of sorts.”
“It will be a pleasure, for sure,” Selby said. “But there’s nothing definite to raise glasses to.”
Davey came out of the hotel then and joined them with the afternoon mail. He had filled out in the last year; he was as tall as Shana now, and had the promise of Selby’s size in his wide hands and knobby shoulders. Shana told him excitedly of her fall on the Bonne Chance — it was now a “desperate, dizzy slide” — and the rescue efforts by the Brizzard brothers.