Chetwynd-Pitt: “Really? Let’s see what the police—”
That must be the TV expiring in a tinkly boom. The bookcase slams on the stone wall? Smash, clang, wallop: glassware, crockery, pictures, mirrors; surely Henry Kissinger won’t escape unscathed. And there’s Chetwynd-Pitt shrieking, “My hand, my f’ck’n’ hand!”
An inaudible answer to an inaudible question.
Camp-Psycho-German: “I CANNOT HEAR YOU, RUFUS!”
“We’ll pay,” whinnies Chetwynd-Pitt, “we’ll pay …”
“Certainly. However, you obliged Shandy to call us, so the price is higher. This is a ‘call-out fee’ in English, I think. In business, we must cover costs. You. Yes, you. What is your name?”
“O-O-Olly,” says Olly Quinn.
“My second wife owned a Chihuahua named Olly. It bit me. I threw it down a … Scheiss, what is it, for an elevator to go up, to go down? The big hole. Olly—I am asking you the English word.”
“A … an elevator shaft?”
“Precisely. I threw Olly into the elevator shaft. So, Olly, you will not bite me. Correct? So. You will now gather your monies.”
Quinn says, “My—my—my what?”
“Monies. Funds. Assets. Yours, Rufus’s, your friend’s. If there is enough to pay our call-out fee, we leave you to your Happy New Year. If not, we do some lateral thinking about how you pay your debts.”
One of the women speaks, and more mumbling. A few seconds later Camp-Psycho-German calls up the stairway. “Beatle Number Four! Join us. You will not be hurt, if you do no heroic actions.”
Soundlessly, I open the window—it’s cold!—and swing my legs over the window ledge. A Hitchcock Vertigomoment: Alpine roofs you’re planning to slide down look suddenly much steeper than Alpine roofs admired from below. Although the angle of Chetwynd-Pitt’s chalet becomes shallower over the kitchen, there’s a real risk that in fifteen seconds I’ll be the screaming owner of two broken legs.
“Lamb?” It’s Fitzsimmons, up on the stairway. “That money you won off Rufus … He needs it. They have knives, Hugo. Hugo?”
I lower myself onto the tiles, gripping the windowsill.
Five, four, three, two, one …
LE CROC IS locked, dark, and there’s no sign of Holly Sykes. Perhaps the bar’s closed tonight, so Holly won’t be in to clean it until tomorrow morning. Why didn’t I ask for her number? I hobble to the town square but even the hub of La Fontaine Sainte-Agnиs is in an end-of-the-world mood: few tourists, fewer vehicles, the gorilla- cr к pie’s nowhere to be seen, most shops have Ferm йsigns up. How come? Last year January 1 had quite a buzz. The sky presses lower, the gray of sodden mattresses. I go into La Pвtisserie Palanche de la Cretta, order a coffee and a carac, and slump in the corner by the window, ignoring my throbbing ankle. Detective Sheila Young won’t be thinking about me today, at least. What now? What next? Activate Marcus Anyder? I have his passport in a safety-deposit box at Euston station. A bus to Geneva, a train to Amsterdam or Paris; across on the hovercraft; flight to Panama; the Caribbean … Job on a yacht.
Really? Do I pack in my old life, just like that?
Never see my family again? It’s so abrupt.
Somehow this isn’t what the script says.
Olly Quinn passes the window, just three feet and a pane of glass away, accompanied by a cheerful-looking man in a sheepskin jacket. Camp-Psycho-German’s right hand, I presume. Quinn looks pale and sick. The duo march past the phone box where our Olly had his Ness-based meltdown only yesterday and into Swissbank’s automated lobby where the cashpoints live. Here Quinn makes three withdrawals with three different cards, before being frog-marched back. I hide behind a conveniently to-hand newspaper. A Normal would feel guilt or vindication; I feel as if I just watched a middle-of-the-road episode of Inspector Morse.
“Morning, Poshboy,” says Holly, holding a hot chocolate. She’s beautiful. She’s utterly herself. She’s got a red beret. She’s perceptive. “So, what sort of trouble are you in?”
I don’t know why I deny it. “Everything’s fine.”
“Can I sit down, or are you expecting company?”
“Yes. No. Please. Sit down. No company.”
She removes her ski jacket, the mint-green one, sits opposite me, places her red beret on the table, unwinds her cream scarf from her neck, rolls it up into a ball, and places it on her beret.
“I just went to the bar,” I admit, “but figured you were skiing.”
“The slopes are shut. Because of the blizzard.”
I glance outside again. “What blizzard?”
“You really should listen to the local radio.”
“There’s only so much ‘One Night in Bangkok’ a man can take.”
She stirs her hot chocolate. “You ought to be getting back—the forecast’s for whiteout conditions, within the hour. You can’t see three yards in a whiteout. It’s like being blinded.” She eats a spoonful of froth and waits for me to confess what sort of trouble I’m in.
“I just checked out of the Hotel Chetwynd-Pitt.”
“I’d check in again, if I were you. Really.”
I do a downed-plane hum. “Problematic.”
“Unhappy families in the House of Rufus Sexist-Git?”
I lean forward. “Their hot totties from Club Walpurgis turned out to be prostitutes. Their pimps are extracting every last centime they can scare out of them as we speak. I exited via an escape hatch.”
Holly shows no surprise at this common ski-resort tale. “So what’s your plan?”
I look into her serious eyes. A dum-dum bullet of happiness tears through my innards. “I don’t know.”
She sips her hot chocolate and I wish I was it. “You don’t look as worried as I would be, if I was in your shoes.”
I sip my own coffee. A pan hisses in the bakery kitchen. “I can’t explain it. It’s … impending metamorphosis.” I can see she doesn’t understand, and I don’t blame her. “Do you ever … know stuff, Holly? Stuff that you cannot possibly know, yet … Or—or lose hours. Not as in, ‘Wow, time flies,’ but as in,” I click my fingers, “there, an hour’s gone. Literally, between one heartbeat and the next. Well, maybe the time thing’s a red herring, but I knowmy life’s changing. Metamorphosis. That’s the best word I’ve got. You’re doing a good job of not looking freaked, but I must sound utterly, utterly, utterly bonkers.”
“Three too many utterlies. I work in a bar, remember.”
I fight a strong urge to lean over and kiss her. She’d slap me away. I feed my coffee a sugar lump. Then she asks, “Where do you plan to stay during your ‘metamorphosis’?”
I shrug. “ It’shappening to me. Not me to it.”
“Which sounds cool, but it hardly answers my question. The buses out aren’t running and the hotels are full.”
“Like I said, it’s a very poorly timed blizzard.”
“There’s other stuff you’re not telling me, isn’t there?”
“Oh, tons of stuff. Stuff I’ll never tell anyone, probably.”
Holly looks away, making a decision …
WHEN WE LEFT the town square there were just a few scratchy snowflakes prowling at roof height, but a hundred yards and a couple of corners later it’s as if the vast nozzle of an Alp-sized pump is blasting godalmighty massive coils of snow up the valley. Snow’s up my nose, snow’s in my eyes, snow’s in my armpits, snow howls after us through a stone archway into a grotty yard with dustbins already half buried under snow, snow, snow. Holly fumbles with the key and then we’re in, snow gusting through the gap and the wind whoo-whooingafter us until she slams the door shut, and it’s suddenly very peaceful. A short hallway, a mountain bike, stairs going up. Holly’s cheeks are hazed dark pink. Too skinny; if I were her mum I’d get a few fattening desserts down her. We take off our coats and boots and she gestures me up the carpeted stairs first. Above, there’s a light, airy flat with paper lampshades and varnished floorboards that squeak. Holly’s flat’s plainer than my rooms at Humber, and obviously 1970s, not 1570s, but I envy her it. It’s tidy and very sparsely furnished: The big room has an ancient TV and VHS player, a hand-me-down sofa, a beanbag, a low table, a neat pile of books in a corner, and that’s a near-complete inventory. The kitchenette, too, is minimalist: a single plate, dish, cup, knife, fork, and spoon wait on the drainer. Rosemary and sage grow in pots on a shelf. The top three smells are toast, cigarettes, and coffee. The only nod to ornament is a small oil painting of a pale blue cottage on a green slope over a silver ocean. Holly’s large window must offer an amazing view, but today it’s obscured by a blizzard, like white-noise static on an untuned telly. “It’s unbelievable,” I say. “All that snow.”