Cloak of Darkness (24 page)

“He was an Englishman—a pundit on art, architecture, and moral values. Totally nineteenth century.” Then Renwick smiled, his first real touch of amusement today. “Ever visit Oxford? There’s a college built after his favourite style. My irreverent friends call it ‘Ruskin Gothic’: red brick, imitation of early Italian, the kind you see in medieval churches around Milan. But what red-brick Ruskin Gothic has got to do with a wooden chalet in Chamonix...” Renwick gave up.

And this is the man who worried all morning about a lapse of memory, Claudel thought. “Could Ruskin have ever been here?”

“It’s possible. He travelled. A lot of well-heeled English writers did in those days—looking at monuments, looking at mountains.” Renwick slowed the car, glanced at Mont Blanc hidden by mists. “Byron was here. Shelley, too. He wrote about that beautiful monster. Called all these mountains around it ‘a desert, peopled by the storms alone.’ Oh, Shelley—if you could see what we see now.” Renwick looked at the row of huge buses, drawn up in neat arrangement before a sprawling inn. Its front garden, complete with long tables and benches, was ready to welcome the avalanche of tourists now pouring in for an eleven thirty lunch. There was a car park, too, at the side of the inn. “A good idea?” he asked Claudel as he edged the Audi into a free space.

“As long as we don’t pretend we’re Japanese.” But there was plenty of cover available in the Italian, British, German, Dutch, and Swedish visitors, even in the few French looking lost in their own homeland.

“Wonder if we could find a room here?” Renwick said. The inn was on the outskirts of Chamonix, but it was a place where they would never be noticed. “Scout around, Pierre. Just see if anything is available—one with good walls where no ears can overhear.” And if we’re in luck, he thought as he watched Claudel thread his way through the mixture of foreign faces and voices, I can make contact with London before we walk into Chamonix for lunch and a general look-around. Ruskin. Why name a chalet after him? If he had been here, where did he stay? That could be a good angle to follow, however wild it seemed.

His mind branched off into Shelley’s poem about Mont Blanc. It was twenty years since Renwick had read it, memorised parts of it. Now, odd lines came back to him, and trying to recapture them was one way to ease the worries that kept nagging at him.
The wilderness
—he remembered, and paused. Yes, the lines began with wilderness. And then?

The wilderness has a mysterious tongue

which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild

—that man may be

in such a faith with nature reconciled.

Thou hast a voice, great Mountain—not understood by all, but which the wise, and great, and good interpret, or made felt, or deeply feel.

He had lost some phrases there, a rhyme, too. But that was the gist of it. And it had worked. He was less tense, less troubled. He watched the garden, with its coloured light bulbs strung among the trees, listened to a babble of languages mixed with the clanking of plates and cutlery. No one was hearing the great Mountain’s voice. But, from this sheltered spot, no one could even see Mont Blanc.

“Where do we get a view of Mont Blanc?” he asked as Claudel returned. “From the hills opposite. Right?”

Claudel looked at him in astonishment. “Right. And what brought that on?”

“Shelley. He didn’t sit under trees in a garden when he felt that poem. And if Ruskin was here—he wasn’t the type to miss a view, either.”

Claudel broke into a fit of laughter.

“What’s so damned funny?”

Claudel recovered, produced three postcards. “Bought these while I was waiting at the concierge’s desk. We have a room, too. Not much to look at, but it’s on the back corner, top floor, and the walls seem adequate. I booked us for a long weekend—three nights—until Tuesday. Not many people stay here. Day tourists mostly. We’re just ten minutes, walking, from the centre of town. Okay?”

“Very much okay.” Renwick glanced briefly at the first two postcards. One was of the Mer de Glace, the sea of ice on Mont Blanc, where the glaciers began; the other showed a statue of the local doctor who had been the first to climb the mountain in 1786. At the third postcard, he stopped. Surprise, followed by delight, spread over his face. It was a view from a high hillside, from a small, flat stretch of grass overlooking the crests of descending fir trees. Below them, the valley. Beyond it, Mont Blanc’s white peak soaring into a very blue heaven. But it was on the stretch of grass that Renwick’s eyes were fixed. At one side was a giant boulder, beneath which the caption read:
Ruskin’s Chair.

He turned over the card, found an elucidation printed in four languages:
The famous English nineteenth-century critic, John Ruskin, spent many happy hours here each day admiring the beauties of Mont Blanc. Come to lovely Chamonix! All winter and summer sports!

“Well,” said Renwick, “what about that?”

Claudel enjoyed a small moment of triumph. Then, “Come on, Bob. Let’s have a look at the room. Its door has a strong lock. Also the wardrobe. We French like security, even on holiday. We can leave our baggage safely there when we step into town. Don’t worry about our transmitter. Anyone who doesn’t know how to open it is in for a nasty shock. Literally.”

The room was as described: nothing much to look at inside; outside, a vegetable garden with trees behind it. “Couldn’t be better,” Renwick said, and began setting up communications with London.

There was a favourable report from the Washington scene. Nothing more on Rome, as yet. “Love to my girl. Tell her all is well,” Renwick ended, and signed off.

“Lunch in the busy metropolis?” Claudel suggested.

“We’ll aim for a central café, and then we’ll wander as tourists do.”

“Wonder if Ruskin’s Chair will be any help. If he was a local celebrity a hundred years ago, his name could be popping up all over the place.”

“Hope not.” Renwick’s depression of this morning had been routed. Even if Haversfield—and Erik—were arriving in Rome right now, Renwick’s spirits were rising. No worrying news from Washington: Nina was safe.

***

Right in the heart of the little town, neat streets, neat shops and houses—no Tyrolean decorations here—they found a café with a rushing stream outside its door and a large statue of Dr. Paccard, the first to scale Mont Blanc, pointing triumphantly to its distant peak. He also blotted out any possible view of the mountain from the café’s picture window.

No one seemed to mind. The people crowding the well-spaced tables were not day tourists; or local inhabitants. Weekend visitors and summer residents, young for the most part, some in jeans, some in tennis clothes, others in well-cut blazers or smart cardigans. “Strange,” Renwick said, “how there’s always one café in any tourist town where the well heeled and carefree gather. A kind of homing instinct. How’s it done? By word of mouth or telepathy?”

“By the prices.” Claudel was studying a scant menu. “They’re enough to chase any busload away. I’ll have an omelette, cheese, salad, and some Rhine wine.”

“The same.” They were speaking in French, and with their tweed jackets, ties already removed, and collars unbuttoned, they were casual enough to fit into the scene. Renwick looked for a waitress, took the opportunity to glance around the room. He laid the menu aside, lit a cigarette, looked out the window at Dr. Paccard’s coattails, and let Claudel do the ordering.

He has spotted someone, Claudel thought, and resisted looking around at the far corner of the room. From a table there, somewhere near the small bar, he could hear voices speaking in English. The words came in snatches. A mixed group: men with German or Slavonic accents, a woman’s voice with a definite French intonation, another woman’s voice. American? Slightly Southern in its soft drawl? “She’s here,” he said very softly.

Renwick nodded. Annabel Vroom, dressed for tennis, was holding court.

“Her protector?”

“Not here.” Claus—so Vroom had said—was around fifty. The men at Annabel’s table were her age mostly, late twenties, early thirties. “Let’s eat and clear out.” And start our search. There must be several hundred chalets tucked into the hillsides around the town. At least we know the view from Ruskin’s Chair, and that’s a start. But we can’t sit here in dead silence. “I’d have thought Chamonix would have been built closer to Mont Blanc,” he tried.

Claudel caught on and started a long explanation. “The town had once been farther along the valley, near the approach to the mountain. Then the glaciers disintegrated.”

“How?”

“Never could understand that myself. But the valley below them—all the houses, all the farms—was completely destroyed.”

“So the people took the hint. Rebuilt at a safe distance.”

“Exactly. Now over near Zermatt, the danger is from avalanches.” The talk went on about the hazards of mountains, about the men who climbed them, and lasted nicely through omelette and Roquefort cheese.

As they rose to leave, Claudel could risk a casual glance around the room. Four men and two women at the corner table. Dark hair, he noted, on the girl in tennis clothes—she was listening intently to a blond man similarly dressed, a possessive type, and athletic. Partners for the day or for the night? Had the ski instructor returned for the summer season? Claudel followed Renwick toward the door. And then Renwick surprised him, turning his head to speak as a man paused just inside the entrance.

“Who’s the smaller figure on the Paccard monument— looking up admiringly at the doctor?”

“Ballat—” Claudel began and was interrupted by a surprised shout from the corner table: “Hey, Barney! When did you get in?”

Barney gave a wave of his hand and a cheerful greeting. “Hey there, yourself!” he called back and passed Renwick and Claudel, who was now explaining that Ballat was Paccard’s porter, had trundled the heavy ropes all the way to the top of the peak, and some said he had climbed it ahead of the good doctor.

And then they were out, leaving a lot of handshaking and backslapping and general welcoming behind them, stepping into the heady mixture of warm sunshine and crisp air. They paused, as good mountaineering enthusiasts would, to read the inscription at the statue’s base.

There was a delighted look on Renwick’s face. “That was the guy I saw in New York handing out a tip to garage attendants before he drove away in a borrowed ambulance.”

“That was on Tuesday—just after your visit to Exports Consolidated. Time enough for Barney to be called back to Chamonix. As a reinforcement?”

“Or to deliver any documents he filched from Brimmer’s office. When the FBI visited it, nothing incriminating was found.”

“Nothing to connect Klingfeld & Sons with Brimmer,” Claudel said. “Clever boys. They move fast.”

“Why d’you think we’ve been breaking our necks?” Renwick asked. “Yes, they move fast. We just have to be faster.”

“Barney gave us a sharp look—not that he could see much of your face. Would he recognise you?”

“Don’t think so. I kept well behind a blue Chevy.” But it had been Barney, all right: same round cheeks and broad smile, same wave of the hand, same voice. A threatened abduction was one moment you didn’t forget: smallest details were stamped into your mind. “Okay, Pierre, let’s start our search.”

They strolled through the crowded street, veering—once they were out of sight from the café—toward the hillside that rose on their right hand. Judging from the postcard, its viewpoint was somewhere up there. “Could be several roads up that hill,” Claudel said. And chalets dotted around each of them. Couldn’t ask directions, either: Klaus was bound to have a couple of informers planted here as a safeguard. No easy way to trace his chalet, yet it had to be found. It was the surest chance of seeing him. Without that, no surveillance would be possible. “It will be a long hot afternoon,” he predicted gloomily.

“Can’t imagine any of those chalet dwellers walking all the way down to a café and then climbing back uphill. We’ll have a look at the parked cars. A black Ferrari is what we need.”

“You don’t expect Klaus’s grey one?”

“Later. If Klaus were in Chamonix now, I don’t think Barney would have time to relax with the gang.” He must have a report to make—details of his successes in New York, plausible excuses for his failures. It was nice to be one of these, Renwick thought.

“It looked as if he had just arrived, found no one at home, dropped down to the old hangout for lunch. Quite a welcome he got.”

From dupes and dopes, thought Renwick. “He’s one of the three who murdered Brimmer. Possibly by a cyanide pistol. Heart failure as usual.”

“A team of three? Is that a fact or a guess?”

“A little of both. I saw three of them working together: Barney, the man who drove the ambulance, and of course Grable. As the clerk in charge of supplies, he knew the floor plan of the office and could smuggle the others inside. He also could talk his way into Brimmer’s office, get its door unlocked. It took more than one man to kill Brimmer and go through all the files, yet leave them in good order as if nothing had been touched. Otherwise, Brimmer’s death might have raised questions.”

“Will the other two turn up in Chamonix?” Pierre speculated.

“I wish they would,” Renwick said. Then Grable would be out of Washington, with no lead to Nina discovered. “I wish they would,” Renwick repeated, and began searching for a black Ferrari.

They found the Ferrari parked among a group of seven cars at the foot of a quiet road leading off the busy main street. The road was unpaved, broad at its start, narrowing as it climbed. There had been a row of simple houses at its beginning, with a woman hanging out some family washing and another beating a rug even if this was the start of a Saturday afternoon. Farther uphill, only trees and bushes edged the road. There were no chalets in sight.

There had to be some, thought Claudel: too many cars at the bottom of this road; or had the Ferrari been left there simply because of good parking space? A discouraging notion. He stopped, eased his arm in its sling, and waited for Renwick, who was picking up a small wooden sign that had toppled on its face along with its support. Renwick held it out, and Claudel looked. The lettering was faded but it was still legible:
RUSKIN
’
S
CHAIR
. And the arrow that followed the two words had once pointed uphill.