Francesca Read online

  IF I WAS Geoffrey Havill, I thought at nine-thirty that night, I’d open up a twist joint and combine business with pleasure.

  He had a ringside table at Whisky-a-Gogo, and he sat with his head on a level with that part of female anatomy which does most of the twisting. The place was crowded, hot and noisy, the music was strident, and after a while, if you were Geoffrey Havill, you could tell the girls apart by their gyrating pelvises and swinging buttocks.

  There are no real steps in a twist, though you put an imaginary cigarette butt out first with your left foot and then with your right. Meanwhile, the body sways faster and faster to the music, the back is dried by an imaginary Turkish towel held in both hands behind you, and the rhythm is picked up by fluid hips and restless thighs and grinding loins and come-hither gestures on the part of your partner. Polite social dancing bears the same relationship to the twist as a tea-time conversation with a prim matron bears to a discussion of arrangements with a street-corner whore. And Geoffrey Havill was right: on a well-built dame, and what young skier isn’t, après-ski pants took the twist out of the realm of fantasy and wishful thinking and put it in the realm of hard, hot fact. In normal clothes the twist is seductive as hell. In après-ski pants it is a mating dance.

  I went a few rounds with Helen Spade. She was wearing a gold lamé blouse that made her blonde hair look almost white, and purple après-ski pants that ran without a wrinkle, seamless, buttonless and apparently zipperless, from ankle to crotch. For a girl who had reason to worry about her fiancé, she danced with astonishing abandon. But her face remained Cedar Rapids, Iowa—the American dream, blonde good looks, sparkling eyes, tanned and glowing with health, as wholesome as deep-dish apple pie.

  We went back to our table. Helen was breathless. When you twist you face your partner and do whatever comes to mind. What had come to my mind, mostly, was watching what came to her mind. But I pretended to be out of breath too. I wanted to talk.

  “Like your friend at the Savoy,” I said, “I’m kind of pooped.”

  “It must be your bad leg. But it was fun, wasn’t it?”

  I nodded. We were drinking gin-and-tonics. When we clinked glasses I pretended to notice her engagement ring for the first time. “Who’s the lucky guy?”

  “Oh, just a guy.”

  “Skier?”

  “He skis, yes.” The conversation less than delighted her. Her voice had gone cool.

  “Would I know him?” I persisted. “Most of the current crop are new to me. I spend a lot of time in Chile. But I might know him.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “He here?”

  “Would I be out dancing with you?”

  I tried another tack, a dangerous one. “I know a man named Spade. He’d be about old enough to be your father.”

  “Spade’s not a rare name.”

  “I met him in Geneva. Axel Spade?”

  “You met my father? How interesting.” She stared at me coldly and suspiciously.

  “I was in Geneva about a week and used to take some of my meals at the Brasserie Moderne on Rue Vieux Collège. Your old man. often eats there. We got to talking.”

  She seemed to relax, but then she asked quickly: “About what?”

  “Finance and skiing. His first love and mine. Nothing important. But he did say he was in trouble.”

  “I suppose you know he gives financial advice to black-marketeers and smugglers. He’s always in one kind of trouble or another. But not in Switzerland.”

  “He is now,” I said.

  She raked me with a glance a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. “Did my father send you here to question me about—Howard?”

  My lack of answer was answer enough. I’d used a subterfuge to get within talking distance of Helen Spade, and it had worked, but taking her out twisting every night until the cows climbed down from all the tilted pastures in High Savoy wouldn’t get me any closer to Howard Ridgway. “You lied to me,” she said, “didn’t you? You never skied in Chile.”

  “I ate a bowl of chili con carne once.”

  That made her smile in spite of herself, but it didn’t last. “You’d better take me back to the hotel.”

  “You planning to use the three million bucks Ridgway stole for your dowry?”

  “Father never liked Howard. Never.”

  “He went into business with him.”

  “Take me back to the Savoy.”

  “A guy got murdered last night,” I said.

  She looked startled. “What? What did you say?”

  “It’s a long story. He got stabbed to death because he was sleeping off a drunk in my hotel room. I was slated for it.”

  “Who are you?” Helen Spade asked. She answered her own question. “You’re with Interpol. You must be. Or else the American army.”

  “I’m a private detective,” I said. “Your old man hired me to find Howard Ridgway. Where is he?”

  “Why, didn’t you know?” Helen Spade said sweetly. “He’s in Chile.”

  “Yves Piaget stuck the knife in the guy sleeping in my bed,” I said.

  That rocked her off balance. She finished her drink quickly. She had gone pale under her tan. “My father’s bodyguard? But Howard said—” Her voice trailed off.

  “What did Howard say?”

  “I—nothing. I haven’t heard from him in weeks. You say he stole the three million dollars. How do you know it wasn’t my father who did?”

  “Sure,” I said, “and doing business as usual in Geneva is his getaway. You must be real close to your father.”

  “He divorced my mother, for no real reason except he was panting after wife number three. I was ten then. Axel Spade is as moral as a barracuda.”

  “That’s funny,” I told her. “He said the same thing about Ridgway.”

  “You’d better take me back to the hotel.”

  I paid the check. As we left, Geoffrey Havill ogled me. He probably thought we were on our way to try the natural horizontal sequel to the twist. Hadn’t P said I was a skier?

  We walked back along the narrow main street of Chamonix. It was beginning to snow, not hard but hard enough to cover the slopes with fresh powder. The street was lined with ski-shops, souvenir shops and little cafés. With the snow coming down and the lights in the café windows, it looked like a picture postcard of the good après-ski life—as far removed from con-men and a missing three million bucks and sudden death as you could get. Helen Spade stalked alongside of me like a co-ed whose date had been too bold too soon.

  I took her up to her room at the Savoy. At the door she asked me: “Are you going to stay in Chamonix?”

  “I was hired to do a job here.”

  “It’s a wild goose chase. If you were smart, you’d leave on the morning bus.”

  “Good night, Helen.”

  “Good night, Chet.” She smiled then. “If it’s any sop to you, I sort of liked that skier with the bum leg from Chile. He was a nice guy. I’ll miss him.”

  We had nothing more to say to each other. I climbed the flight of stairs to the floor above hers and my own room. When I opened the door, a throaty voice purred from the darkness inside:

  “When you miss the bus this morning I am very angry at the police. But I think you will come anyway. Why do you wait so long?”

  It was Francesca Artemi.

  “I tell the police last night you are with me. I am a woman of Napoli. If I have the name, why not the game. Bah, the police! But a concierge in a French hotel, he is different. He understands an affair of the heart. He cooperates.”

  The bedsprings creaked. That’s where Francesca was waiting for me.

  All I could think of saying was, “It’s swell seeing you again, Francesca.” But at a time like that, who has to talk?

  “Seeing me?” She took it literally. “How can you see me with the light off? Please turn it on before coming to bed. I would like to watch your face while you make love to me.”

  I shut the door. I switched on a small
lamp. Francesca was waiting under the covers with her titian-colored hair spread on the pillow. A pair of stretch pants and a blouse were folded neatly across the back of a chair.

  “But I warn you,” she said as I approached the bed. “I am insatiable and a man-eater.” She stretched her arms out wide and smiled at me. If that was what a man-eater looked like, it was a great way to the.

  “Welcome to Chamonix,” she said.

  chapter eight

  SHE LEFT SOME TIME during the night, and then I had another kind of welcome to Chamonix.

  I awoke in darkness, heard something move and started to sit up, groggy with love and sleep. The blanket was draped over my head. Hands, more than one pair of them, dragged me off the bed. I hit the floor on the base of my spine, and that jarred me all the way awake. I tried to struggle free of the enveloping blanket. Something struck the side of my head through it. I heard a grunt, and something else pile-drived my chest and knocked me over on my back.

  It was the treatment, army-barracks or college-dorm style. You don’t like a guy, you visit his bed at night, making sure to invite your friends, and drape him in a blanket and start stomping him. The blanket pads the blows of shoes and fists. If you are an expert you leave the victim unmarked—unmarked but not unhurt. And he never gets a look at you. Struggling with the blanket, tangled in it, he can’t fight back.

  If they were wearing ski-boots instead of shoes, I had time to think, I would be a sick man come morning. Ski-boots weigh upwards of three pounds each and can kick holes in anything short of plate-armor.

  Two more blows, both below the rib-cage on the right side. They hurt. Still on my back, I did a good imitation of a man bellowing in fright and pain. Under the circumstances it was easy. Then I tensed every muscle in my body and did what the gymnasts call a kip-up. It is the easiest way to go from flat on your back to flat on your feet in no time at all. You kick your legs straight out at an angle thirty degrees from the floor, then bend your knees swiftly, plant your feet and, using the momentum of the kick, spring upright.

  It worked. I was on my feet. I reeled around the room. A hand grabbed at me, and then I came free of the blanket.

  They were pretty good at the treatment, but I’m pretty good at a brawl, and it was a brawl they had on their hands now. After the complete darkness under the blanket I could see them in silhouette against the snow outside the windows. There were three of them. The first came at me with the chair Francesca Artemi had used as a clothes-tree. I got hold of the chair legs, yanked hard and let go. The chair went through the window, taking the window with it, with a crash they could have heard on the top of Mont Blanc. The chair-wielder ran into the wall, bounced off it, turned around and took as good a right cross as I have ever thrown. It dumped him on the bed, and he stayed there.

  The second one got a mugger’s grip on me. I crouched, and levered and sent him over my head. He got to his feet slowly and lurched toward the door. I let him go. By then I was in a slugging match with the third and biggest. He was strong but wild. I am strong but not wild; I’d learned unarmed combat in training for my one and only hitch with the FBI. I moved inside his wild swings and went to work on his gut. He began to sob. When he started to jackknife, I tapped him once on the side of the jaw and he went down.

  I padded naked and barefoot to the door and switched on the overhead light. They were a couple of big, brawny kids, as I’d thought they would be, members of the American ski team. Helen Spade’s goon squad. I put my pajama-bottoms on. The one on the bed was coming around.

  “Get the hell out of Chamonix, you bastard,” he groaned.

  I grasped his brush-cut and hauled him into a sitting position. “Is that a threat? If I don’t you’ll let me work you over again? What am I supposed to have done?”

  “Bastard. You know what.”

  “No I don’t. Enlighten me.”

  “You brought her back to the hotel and started to paw her. She didn’t want any part of you, grandpa. You scared her and you hurt her. A guy your age, you ought to learn to take no for an answer.”

  I’m thirty-three, but talking like that he made me feel like my own great-uncle. “You won’t believe this,” I said, “but if you mean Helen Spade, I never laid a glove on her.”

  “Who the hell do you think I mean?”

  “I never touched her, kid.”

  There were footsteps in the hall, and someone pounded at the door.

  “Entrez,” I called. The night concierge, in his black monkey-suit with crossed keys on the lapel, came in, followed by a porter. They looked at the guy on the floor, who by then was sitting up. They looked at his companion on the bed. They looked at me. But nothing pained them so much as the window that wasn’t there any more. A cold wind and snowflakes were blowing into the room.

  “Go for the police,” the concierge told the porter.

  “Hold it,” I snapped. “You want to raise a stink, call the cops. These boys are competing in the meet. By now you ought to know how skiers are.”

  “The damages—”

  “We’ll pay for the damages.”

  “The disturbance to other guests—”

  “Who came here to see these boys on skis, not run out of town, not in the pokey on disorderly conduct charges.”

  “Pokey?”

  “Jail. Prison. And the American team may be forced to withdraw from the meet. Well, which will it be?”

  The concierge puckered his lips and scowled, the way only a Frenchman in deep thought can. After a while he said: “In the morning the hotel will present a bill for the damages. We will attribute this unfortunate accident of the window to high spirits. But the bill, you will pay it. Yes?”

  “Yeah. Okay,” I said, and a moment later I was alone with two-thirds of Helen Spade’s goon squad again.

  “You didn’t have to do that, mister,” one of them admitted. “I guess we ought to thank you.”

  “Man, our asses would have been in a sling,” the other one said.

  “If she gave me the story she gave you, I might have done the same thing you did. But that wasn’t what happened.”

  “No? What did happen?” the bigger one asked.

  “Tell me about the boyfriend,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Helen Spade wears an engagement ring. Who’s the guy?”

  “What the hell do you care?” the bigger one demanded, getting truculent again.

  “If you figured you were doing Helen a favor by giving me the blanket treatment, it’s nothing compared to the favor you’ll do her by giving me a line on her fiancé.”

  “Why would that be?” the smaller one asked.

  “Ah, cut it out, Al,” the bigger one said, rubbing his midsection and smiling at me ruefully but with admiration. “Mister, next time you work me over will you remind me to take out insurance first? I feel all busted up inside. There ain’t much we can tell you about the guy.”

  “Tell me what you can.”

  “Well, he’s an older man.”

  “Your age at least,” Al said.

  “Past thirty,” the bigger one said.

  “You saw him here in Chamonix?”

  “Seen him once,” the bigger one admitted.

  Al said: “Did anybody ever tell you you’ve got a big mouth, Charlie?”

  “He gave us a break. No law said he had to.” Charlie told me: “Not in the valley, but up above.”

  “Skiing?”

  “We were, Al, Helen and me. He wasn’t. We dropped in on him in a chalet up above Flegère.”

  “When was that?”

  “When the team first got here. Two weeks ago. Coach said just to ski loose a few days. We rode the teleferique up to Flegère and little two-man cabins to the station above that, L’Index. Al and me rode in one cabin. Helen went up in hers with a guy from England.”

  “Her fiancé isn’t English.”

  “That wasn’t her fiancé. Well, when we get to the top, Helen says you boys ski down, I’ll come later. Me and Al did
n’t know how well the limey could handle himself on skis, and those slopes up there can be hairy. So we gave Helen and the limey a headstart and then tagged after them. Halfway down to Flegère they cut north of the trail flags right around timberline. There was a chalet in the pines there, an A-frame job. They took off their skis and went in.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Hell, me and Charlie got hungry,” Al said. “We went up to the chalet, took off our skis and banged on the door.”

  “You should have seen his face,” Charlie said. “He was mad enough to chew up a ski-pole and spit it out as ball-bearings.”

  “Who? Her fiancé?”

  “Nope. The limey. He had a gun. Helen made him put it away.”

  I had an inspiration. “Guy with an RAF mustache? Name of Geoffrey Havill?”

  “Jeff, he called himself. He wore a soup-strainer mustache all right. You know him? He’s staying right here at the Hotel Savoy.”

  “I know him,” I said. “Go on.”

  “Nothing much to tell. We all had lunch. This guy Howard, that’s her fiancé, had the chalet stacked with enough canned goods to feed an army. Like he was planning to spend the whole winter up there. It would have suited Helen fine, having him close like that. She couldn’t get her eyes off him. She got all starry-eyed every time he looked at her.”

  “It made me sick,” Al said. “An old guy like that.”

  “Well,” Charlie told me, “that’s it. After lunch the four of us skied down to Flegère and through the woods from Flegère to the valley. Howard stayed behind.”

  “He’s still there?”

  “Search me,” Al said. “That was two weeks ago.”

  Charlie scowled at him. “You think Helen’s communing with nature or something every time she goes off skiing by herself? Like, every time she has a free afternoon? He’s still there, mister. What’s it all about?”

  “What are you going to tell Helen?”

  “That we caught an edge on the ice trying to give you the treatment,” Charlie said, “and wound up on our duffs at the bottom of the hill.”

  “And told me about the chalet above Flegère?”

  “You mean we shouldn’t?” Charlie asked.