"Where?"
"Well, you know what I think about the hotel. That lets out any room there. And I don't like to mingle with the people at the Prado Llano. Look, what about the ski run?"
I considered. "It's plenty deserted there, all right — at times. No bugs in the snow, either." I laughed, wondering how true that was.
"The hell with the snow. You can shoot a person a mile away with a telescopic lens." He shivered. "I don't like that at all."
"But if no one knows you're Corelli…"
"Who says? Also, there's another bad point. If Moscato is still around — and I'm sure he is after Arturo bought it — he's going to be keeping his eyes on you and on your broad, right?"
"On Juana?"
"Of course! So, I've got to see her somewhere that's conspicuous, and protected at the same time."
I shrugged. "That's not an easy bill to fill."
"No? What about one of those cable cars? When you're in one of them you're isolated, alone, and safe!"
I thought about it. "A gondola? I see what you mean. Get on it with her and travel up together. While you're there, locked in the cable car, you can make the delivery in a controlled environment, and nobody will be the wiser. Is everything on film?"
"Right."
I sat there thinking. "But someone could still take a pot shot at you from the slope."
"That's where you come in, old man," Parson said, lapsing back into British U. "You get on your skis and stand at the Borreguilas station and cover us as we come up."
I thought about it. I liked it. The more I thought about it, the better I liked it.
"I'll buy it," I said.
"What time?"
I said, "Ten a.m. tomorrow?"
"Right," said Parson. "I'll stay away from Juana. I don't want any complications when we're so near to closing the deal."
"Good luck," I said.
He stood in the snow, tightening up his wind-breaker. I could feel the cold whipping in through the open door, even though the snow had let up almost completely.
"You start," Parson said. "I'll follow you down."
I nodded.
He slammed the door on me and hurried around the monument where he vanished from sight.
The Renault started up without any trouble. I let ft warm up for a few moments, then waited until I saw the Simca appear around the corner of the monument, its headlights slanting down toward the makeshift roadway. Then I drove off, crawling along the short access road to the highway. I waved to Parson in the rearview mirror.
I saw the Simca following me, its headlights shimmering in the falling snow.
The twists and turns were quite sharp, requiring constant braking and downshifting. I was beginning to enjoy the challenge of the roadway when I felt the first sogginess in the brake system.
I was coming down through a valley of black mica upthrust where the road had been blasted in a V groove. At the end of it I could see the pavement make a quick sharp right turn.
In the middle of the straightaway I started to brake and felt slippage. I thought I had inadvertently come across a frozen spot in the road, and tried again. But it was not a frozen spot at all.
Once again I applied the brake to get some traction for a downshift, but the brake did not seem to transmit any power to the wheels.
I pushed frantically on the shift stick but I was traveling too fast now to engage, and I could not get down into the lower gear.
I had the brakes down to the floorboard as I went into the graded curve, but it was much too fast a speed. Luckily the curve was very well graded. I made the turn. But immediately I was faced with a quick S-turn to the left, in the opposite direction, and I pushed on the brakes again, hoping that the roadway would give me traction here. But I could feel nothing but soggy ineffectiveness.
Nothing.
I thrust the wheel over hard and made the turn. The roadway straightened, but pitched downward as the highway went into a long flat traverse across the face of a high cliff-like slope. At the end of the traverse I could see a hard-angled switchback with a large highway sign of warning ahead of it.
I pushed down the brakes again, but got no response at all. I shoved on the gear stick, but could not get it down a notch. I began to twist the wheel back and forth, trying to get a snow-plowing type of friction to reduce the speed of the Renault so I could get the damned thing down into a lower gear.
No luck.
I saw Parson's lights behind me, and I wondered if he was watching me in the S and puzzling over my unaccountably bad driving.
I flashed the lights two times as a kind of signal for help.
The curve came closer and closer, and I was doing absolutely no good at controlling the Renault's speed. I thought of going across the inner drainage ditch, but decided that the chance of smashing the axles and tearing the wheels off was too great to risk. Besides that, I might wind up smashed flat against the schist cutbank that rose from the ditch with the steering wheel growing out of my back.
The tires screaming, I thrust the wheel around to the left to take the turn too fast. I smashed into the rising cutbank on my right. The Renault caromed off the cutbank and went directly toward the outer rim of the road, which had about a foot of rock piled below a white-painted wooden guard rail that continued for twenty feet or so.
I slammed sideways into the guard rail, tore off something from the side of the Renault, and then caromed back toward the cutbank. But I pulled hard and straightened out the car again.
Ahead of me the roadway continued to descend rapidly. A hundred yards away I could see the roadway turning sharp right, with another wooden guard rail protecting the turn, and a very large sign in front of the turn.
I could never make that turn.
I heard the thunder of an engine next to my ear and I turned quickly.
It was Parson.
He was gunning the Simca past me, and shooting down the roadway ahead.
I wondered what in hell he was trying to do. I thought of yelling out to him, but did not.
He cut in front of me and I almost screamed at him to get out of my way or be hit.
I was pushing on the stick shift again, trying frantically to get down a notch, but it was useless.
Parson was directly in front of me. I almost closed my eyes, waiting for the crash.
It never came.
Suddenly my front bumper was tapping Parson's back bumper. I saw the red brake lights of Parson s Simca blink on and off and on and off again.
I was slowing up.
It was an old trick, all right — stopping a runaway car by braking the car in front of it to slow down the car behind.
I held the wheel tightly, because I knew that one rock in the wrong place in the roadway would throw the Renault off the Simca bumper, and send me hurtling either to the left or the right, after which I would slide off the slowing car and go either into the cutbank or over the edge of the cliff into thin air.
Parson's brakes kept winking and blinking, and by the time we came to the turn, he had brought me to a stop. I thrust the shift into reverse and sat in the car, shaking.
The door opened and Parson got out of the Simca. He walked back to my side of the car, the snow blowing down around him.
My lights blazed outside, lighting up the back of the Simca, and showing Parson standing there in the night.
"I won't ask what happened," Parson said slowly. "Somebody got to your Renault."
I nodded. "Thanks for the help. It was a good driving trick."
We hit the Bar Esqui on the Prado before I got the car to the garage man. I had three lumumbas and a cup of coffee, and I still did not feel quite right.
Eleven
I had returned to my room after a short stay in the Bar Esquí with Parson. The rum and chocolate in the lumumba helped steady me somewhat, but I was still shaky when I inserted the key in my door and pushed inside.