Francesca Page 6

  “Tell her you gave me the treatment and I’m scared blue. Then you’d be doing her a real favor.”

  “How come?” Al asked.

  “Howard Ridgway’s a fugitive from justice in Switzerland,” I said. “He embezzled a fortune from a bank, leaving Helen’s old man to hold the bag.”

  “Kee-rist,” Charlie said.

  “I’m going up there tomorrow. I want Helen to think I’m on the way back to Geneva with my tail between my legs.”

  “Will she get into hot water, mister?” Charlie asked.

  “I’m trying to keep her out of it.”

  Al inquired: “You a cop or something?”

  “Or something. I work for her father.”

  “How do we know you haven’t been spooning us a mouthful of lies?” Al wanted to know.

  “Look at it from my point of view,” I said. “What’s to stop you from spilling your guts to Helen the minute I let you out of my sight?”

  Al and Charlie looked at each other. “I could have put you on ice,” I said. “I didn’t have to call off the cops. But this way you can really do Helen a favor. I’m trusting you. I’m asking you to trust me. Tell Helen you scared the pants off me. I’ll do the rest.”

  “We could go up there with you,” Charlie suggested.

  I was tempted. There was no telling what I’d find at the chalet above Flegère. A couple of big and eager kids backstopping me made a pleasant prospect. But if Ridgway was desperate—and who wouldn’t be, sitting on three million bucks?—they might go shush-booming into range of a loaded gun. I’d been paid to take that kind of risk. They hadn’t. I shook my head.

  “Thanks. Just tell Helen Spade mission accomplished. I’ll do the rest.”

  They resented their passive role, but agreed to it. After they left I got the .44 Magnum out of my B-4 bag. It had passed through customs in Geneva and again crossing the border into France in its clam-shell holster under my left arm. An American tourist in Western Europe is not subjected to the indignity of a physical search unless he’s caught with contraband in his luggage.

  I broke the Magnum and squinted at the snub-nosed bullets in its chambers. I snapped the cylinder shut and hung the rig on a hook in the closet. The Magnum would be where it belonged under my ski-parka when I went up the mountain in the morning.

  chapter nine

  WHEN I GOT THERE after breakfast, the Flegère teleferique station was crowded with skiers toting their laminated hickory and plastic boards over their shoulders. A cold mist hung in the valley, obscuring the flanks and peaks of the mountains, but the weather reports said it was clear above six thousand feet.

  I bought my ticket, good for a ride on the big cable car to Flegère and the smaller telecabin from Flegère to L’Index, and joined the crowd surging up the stairs to the sliding doors of the teleferique. The rectangular car could hold eighty people, packed together like standing sardines. I went through the door with my skis and felt the floor sway under me. The car was already crowded but a few final passengers were squeezing into it. One of them, wearing a black nylon parka and a white ear-band, was Francesca Artemi.

  She excused herself with a dazzling smile as she pushed her way through to me. Setting her skis upright between us next to mine, she turned that smile on me. “The morning after,” she said. “I feel wonderful. I feel as if I can ski all day. And you?”

  “Bright-tailed and bushy-eyed,” I said, wondering how I would get rid of Francesca when the cable car reached its destination. The sliding doors banged shut. The car swayed and began to move.

  “But spending the day on the slopes,” she mocked me. “Is this what Axel pays you for?”

  The car rose quickly and smoothly on its cable. Groves of pine trees floated by, laden with snow. The air was smoky with mist. Ski-trails ran down among the pines. The cable car passed under one of its supporting towers with a loud thump.

  I said something about all work and no play. Francesca laughed throatily. “If you call what we did last night work, I wonder what you call play.” Despite her bantering attitude, Francesca Artemi looked tense. Her gorgeous blue eyes, unsmiling now, studied my face. “No, I do not believe you. You have learned something that takes you up to Flegère?”

  “Sure. I learned the weather was clear above six thousand feet and there’d be fresh powder on the slopes.”

  Francesca shrugged. “I discover something last night,” she said. “After I leave you, I am restless. Always afterwards, when it is good, I am restless. I go down to the bar for a drink, but I do not get it. I see him at the bar, drinking alone—Yves. Yves Piaget is here in Chamonix.”

  All of a sudden the cable car burst through the mist. It hung as thick as cumulus cloud below us. The trees on either side were small and wind-stunted now, and the cable towers marched in a straight line beyond them above timberline. Far ahead and above us the last tower looked no bigger than a matchstick, standing solitary guard before the square stone building of the upper station that seemed tiny at this distance.

  “You talk to him?” I asked.

  “No.”

  The mountains rose, awesome and incredible, on the far side of the valley of Chamonix—black cliffs, two miles high and streaked with ice, the white fangs of peaks and the startling blue of glacial ice.

  “Who’s Geoffrey Havill?” I asked Francesca suddenly.

  Her eyes narrowed. Her white teeth nibbled at her full lower lip. “Then you have been working.” She seemed both anxious and pleased.

  “Who is he?”

  “Once he work for Axel, the Englishman. I tell Axel he must fire this man. He does this thing for me.”

  “Why?”

  Francesca smiled. “If last night I ask you to—”

  “I mean, why did you want to get him fired?”

  “Axel sells advice to smugglers and black-marketeers. Advice only, and he does not join them in their ventures. It is good.”

  “A hundred bucks for half an, hour of his time—it’s good all right.”

  “But Geoffrey Havill, he is greedy. In matters of finance he is an expert, and Axel pays him well. But he wants a percentage.”

  “You mean from Spade?”

  Francesca shook her head. “From the customers, in exchange for advice. They cannot refuse, of course. If they do, Havill can report their activities to the police. This is not good: they come back no more for advice.”

  “Couldn’t Spade see that for himself?”

  But Francesca closed up on me. “I tell him, and he does it.” She nibbled at her lip again. “Has Geoffrey Havill come to Chamonix?”

  “He’s been camped at the Savoy a couple of weeks that I know of.”

  Francesca considered that, saying nothing. A few minutes later we passed under the last tower and the big car climbed the cable to the upper station. There was a rush to get out and go down the stairs and along a corridor to another flight of stairs that reached a large room where the round yellow telecabins, each big enough for two passengers, came in at one end, made a circuit on their cable, and were wrestled to a stop by an attendant long enough for passengers to board and two pairs of skis to be loaded before they went out again and started up toward L’Index.

  I waited on line for my turn at the sleek little telecabins. Francesca waited at my side. “I too am going to L’Index,” she said. She was now, because I was. About a third of the big cable-car’s passengers had taken their skis outside and would make the run down to the valley from Flegère. But Francesca had decided I wasn’t up here for the fresh air and exercise. I had a hunch she would stick like glue.

  “Listen,” I said. “I’m liable to be up there longer than—”

  “Yves,” she cut me off. “After Havill was fired he also—how you say?—took his cut.”

  “Why didn’t Spade fire him too?”

  “He cannot.”

  “Why can’t he?”

  A telecabin thumped around the arc of cable. The attendant steadied it, put our skis on the rack in back and open
ed the curved door for us.

  “Going up?” Francesca said, flashing the big Artemi smile at me. She ducked her head, climbed into the little cabin and sat down. The attendant stared at me, waiting. I swung in alongside Francesca, the door was banged shut behind me and we began to sway forward on the cable.

  The telecabin burst from the building, moving smoothly and swiftly now, suspended on its cable forty feet above the snowfields, riding up from tower to tower toward L’Index high above the timberline. The sky was a deep, brilliant blue, and the sun was painfully bright on the slopes. Francesca unzippered the big breast pocket of her parka, took out a pair of dark goggles and put them on. I lowered my own goggles from my forehead to my eyes.

  “Before I make the big movies in Cinecittà in Roma,” Francesca said, “you know what I do?” She was smiling again, but her eyes, hidden by the dark plastic of her goggles, were averted. I could sense that the utter isolation of the telecabin, and the silence broken only by the thump as we passed under a tower, and the goggles hiding her eyes, all helped put her in a frame of mind where she could ask that question.

  “I never tell anyone before, not even Axel. But he finds out.” She sighed. “If I tell you now, you will tell me why you take the telecabin to L’Index? You will let me go where you are going? Do you perhaps know where Howard Ridgway is?”

  “Maybe,” I said. I watched the shadow of the cabin below us, passing swiftly along the snow. Another shadow, even faster, passed it. I heard a rasping roar above us and looked out the window. A small helicopter, with snowrunners instead of wheels for landing gear, went by overhead. It was painted the same bright yellow as the telecabins. Two pairs of skis were strapped behind the small cockpit.

  “There are many ways to reach the top of the mountain,” Francesca said, looking up too. “There are many ways a girl from Napoli can claw her way to the back door at Cinecittà. Before I make the big movies, I make—little ones. I was very young, sixteen, and my family it was poor. Such poverty you rarely know in America.”

  I thought of the grinding, relentless poverty in Baltimore on the wrong side of the tracks, when I was a kid during the Depression. I said nothing.

  “The man is a big producer once. But in Cinecittà too much drink, too much bad luck—a man can fall fast. His studio then was a shabby room in a tenament near the Tiber, but I do not know this. He impresses me. He can put me in Cinecittà. But who can start at the top? he asks, and I am young and willing to do anything for a chance. Anything, you must understand. He takes me to his studio and does not tell me what is expected until he gives me wine, much wine to drink. I am very drunk. The room, it spins around its great big bed.

  “He says, ‘Take off your clothes.’ I think it is a mistake, I hear wrong, I am dreaming a bad dream. But he grows angry, saying I have waste his time, and he himself undresses me. I am crying. I fling myself on the bed. A man comes in. With no word for the producer or me, he undresses too. He comes to the bed. He—gets on top me. I try to fight him off. I am too drunk. All the time while he does it I cry. This is very good, the producer says. This is special and fine, he gloats. I hear the camera. I am crying. The producer loves it. Suddenly there is pain. The camera, it comes close to my face. ‘Everybody loves to rape a virgin,’ the producer says with happiness. And so,” Francesca laughed harshly as the telecabin neared the high station at L’Index, “I am in the movies.”

  Cinecittà in Rome wasn’t the only place. The Hollywood hills were full of stag-party picture makers too, and once they hooked a would-be actress she was hooked. One print of the film was held in reserve while the rest were peddled. That one went to the family in Oshkosh or Brooklyn or, in Francesca’s case Naples, if she didn’t play ball.

  Francesca played ball. She made four pictures that way, she told me, and then she got her real break when she was crying her eyes out on a bench in the Borghese Gardens. A young producer on the way up found her, screen-tested her, rolled out the red carpet and let her in through the front door of Cinecittà. She said nothing about any stag pictures until her first feature was made and distributed. They spent half her considerable income the next two years buying back every copy they could find of her earlier thespian activities. They were lucky. There wasn’t a potential blackmailer among the owners of the film, nor anyone whose price was too outrageously high. Francesca Artemi was meteoring to fame. When enough years passed she forgot all about her first cinematic career.

  Until she met Axel Spade. Until they were seen together at all the international watering places. Until Geoffrey Havill walked into Spade’s office with a few frames of 16-millimeter film, asked for a job and got it.

  Yves Piaget, Francesca told me, had been a private detective with one of the two agencies in Geneva. Axel Spade hired him to get the film. He got it. He kept it. He quit the agency and went to work for Spade at double the salary he’d been getting. It was easy to fire Havill then. But the irony was that Piaget had simply taken his place.

  By now we had reached L’Index station; we left the telecabin, taking our skis from the rack. “Spade didn’t make a peep about the movies,” I said.

  “Of course not. Why should he? Once he hired a private detective to get them back, and you see what happened. Besides, he does not know Geoffrey Havill will be here in Chamonix.”

  “Why wouldn’t Piaget want Ridgway apprehended? Does he have any interest in the missing three million bucks?”

  Francesca shook her head. The question made her nibble her lips again. “Unless Ridgway holds the film for him,” she suggested.

  I didn’t swallow that. The film was Francesca’s consuming interest, understandably; but Ridgway had three million bucks on his mind and no one, not even Francesca Artemi, could or would pay anything like that for the stag-party pictures. Nor were they reason enough for Piaget to stab Douglas Jones to death in my hotel room. It was only because I’d ridden up to L’Index with Francesca that I’d learned about the pictures at all. But Spade might have yakked it up with Piaget that I was a hotshot investigator who could get to Ridgway and the money before the authorities, and if he had, that was what made Piaget come looking for me with a knife. But why—if Piaget owned no part of the missing bank money?

  “Why was Piaget leaning on you in the Café Rendezvous?” I asked Francesca.

  “He ask me to stall Axel.”

  “Stall him how?”

  “He wants Axel to insist to the police that the insurance company should make—I have no word—”

  “Restitution?”

  “Restitution. Si. Restitution to the bank depositors.”

  “They’d never do it. They didn’t insure against embezzlement.”

  “But it would have take months if Axel brought it to court.”

  That was true. I thought we were onto something. With Interpol on the lookout for him, all Ridgway could do was stay put in one place, such as his chalet between L’Index and Flegère, and hope he wouldn’t be found. But Interpol is an experiment in international law enforcement, woefully understaffed. In time the heat would be off Ridgway. In time other cases would command Interpol’s attention. Dragged out litigation would make that almost inevitable. What Ridgway needed, more than anything, was time. It looked like he was trying to buy it through Yves Piaget and Francesca.

  “Piaget threatened to make the pictures public if you didn’t co-operate?”

  “To send them to my studio in Cinecittà and say he would deliver prints to every scandal magazine on the Continent if I star in another picture. Still, I ignore his threat. It is no bravery. It is good sense. Axel would not do what Piaget demands anyway. At stake he has his position in Switzerland and America, too. For me he can only do so much.” She smiled wryly. “He is a man who falls in love hard but often. Today, Francesca Artemi. Next month or next year—who knows?”

  Next month or next year, Howard Ridgway could walk out of Chamonix, take a train to Paris and board a plane to anywhere. Not only would the heat be off, but with three million bucks to
play with he’d have no trouble getting a phony passport. Figure he’d already stashed the loot, possibly through an intermediate, possibly through Piaget, in a secret Swiss bank account. The account would bear a number, and anyone who had the number could draw on it. Once Ridgway set himself up under a new identity in another country he’d be worth three million bucks and no questions asked. But could he trust Piaget or anyone as far as he had to? Whoever had the number could draw on the account.

  I told Francesca: “Ridgway’s hiding in a chalet up here. That’s where I’m going.”

  Those cornflower-blue eyes lit up. “But that is wonderful. I will go with you.”

  I shook my head. “Not if Ridgway knows you.”

  “He knows me ever since he ask Helen Spade to marry him,” Francesca admitted.

  “Okay, but he doesn’t know me. I can ski down there and be anybody I want.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Helen’s been visiting him at the chalet, but even so he’s in hiding and out of touch with the world. I’ll play it by ear. I could be a messenger sent by Helen. I could be an insurance agent ready to make a deal with him. He might not know they’ve refused to pay off. I could offer him, say, half a million bucks and no questions asked if he returned the rest. That’s a lot of dough, and he might be interested enough to let me know where he’s got it. I could be anything but a detective hired by Axel Spade. I’ll see when I get there.”

  “And what of me? Do I just wait here at L’Index?”

  “We took the first teleferique up this morning. Helen’s in Chamonix. So is Piaget. They both know me, know what I’m here for. Stick around. If they show up, stall them.”

  “How can I do that?”

  “Piaget’s easy. Say you decided to play ball with him. Say you can convince Spade to take the insurance underwriters to court. Draw it out as long as you can. I need time, but I don’t need forever. I don’t know how you can stall Helen Spade if she pops up. You figure something out. All right?”

  Her joy was not boundless, but she agreed to cooperate. Whether Helen or Piaget would choose this morning for a cable-car ride to L’Index I didn’t know. The one I really wanted out of my hair was Francesca Artemi. A man in hiding and sitting on three million bucks is a desperate man. I hadn’t brought the .44 Magnum along just to make my left armpit uncomfortable.