The Key to Midnight (35 page)

The French customs officials thoroughly inspected the luggage, but they neither opened the can of body powder nor took a close look at the hair dryer.

On the express turbotrain from Cherbourg to Paris, Alex’s mood brightened somewhat, apparently because Paris was his favorite city. He usually stayed at the Hotel George V; indeed, he was so well known by the staff that he might have gotten a room without a reservation. They stayed elsewhere, however, in less grand quarters, precisely because they didn’t want to go where Alex was well known.

From their hotel, he telephoned another hotel in Saint Moritz. Speaking fluent French and using the name Maurice Demuth, he inquired about reserving a room for one full week, beginning Sunday, two days hence. Fortunately, a recent cancellation had made a room available, and currently there was no waiting list for week-long accommodations.

When Alex put down the phone, Joanna said, “Why Maurice Demuth?”

“So if anyone connected with Rotenhausen should go around Saint Moritz checking advance bookings at the hotels, he won’t find us.”

“I mean, why Maurice Demuth instead of some other name?”

“Well... I don’t know. It’s just a good French name.”

“I thought maybe you knew someone with that name.”

“No. I just plucked it out of the air.”

“You lied so smoothly. I better start taking everything you say with a grain of salt.” She moved into his arms.

“Like when you tell me I’m pretty—how can I be sure you mean it?”

“You’re more than pretty. You’re beautiful,” he said.

“You sound so sincere.”

“No one has ever done to me what you do.”

“So sincere... and yet...”

“Easy to prove I’m not lying.”

“How?”

He took her to bed.

Later, they ate dinner at a small restaurant overlooking the Seine, which was speckled with the lights of small boats and the reflected amber wedges of the windows in the buildings that stood along its banks.

As she nibbled flawless
oie
rotie
aux pruneaux
and listened to Alex’s stories about Paris, she knew that she could never allow anyone or anything to separate her from him. She would rather die.

In Saint Moritz, Peterson had a gray Mercedes at his disposal. He drove himself, continuously peeling a roll of Life Savers and popping a series of butter-rum morsels into his mouth.

Low over the towering mountains, the sky appeared to be nine months gone, bulging with gray-black storm clouds that were about to deliver torrents of fine dry snow.

During the afternoon Peterson played tourist. He drove from one viewing point to another, enchanted by the scenery.

The resort of Saint Moritz is in three parts: Saint Moritz-Dorf, which is on a mountain terrace more than two hundred feet above the lake; Saint Moritz-Bad, which is a charming place at the end of the lake; and Champfer-Suvretta. Until the end of the nineteenth century, Saint Moritz-Bad was the spa, but thereafter it lost ground to Saint Moritz-Dorf, which is perhaps the most dazzling water playground in the world. Recently, Moritz-Bad had been making a concerted effort to recapture its lost position, but its ambitious recovery program had led to a most unlovely building boom.

An hour after nightfall, Peterson kept an appointment in Saint Moritz-Bad. He left the Mercedes with a valet at one of the newer and uglier hotels. Inside, he crossed the lobby to the lakefront cocktail lounge. The room was crowded and noisy.

The hotel’s day-registration clerk, Rudolph Uberman, had gone off duty fifteen minutes ago and was waiting at a corner table: a thin man with long, slim hands that were seldom still.

Peterson shrugged out of his overcoat, hung it across the back of a chair, and sat facing Uberman. The clerk was nearly finished with a brandy and wanted another, and Peterson ordered the same.

After they were served, Peterson said, “Any word?”

Uberman was nervous. “Monsieur Maurice Demuth tele- phoned four hours ago.”

“Excellent.”

“He will arrive Sunday with his wife.”

Peterson withdrew an envelope from an inside coat pocket and passed it to Uberman. “That’s your second payment. If all goes well on Sunday, you’ll receive a third envelope.”

The clerk glanced left and right before quickly tucking the payoff out of sight—as if anyone who witnessed the exchange would immediately know that it was dirty business. In fact, none of the other customers was the least bit interested in them.

“I would like some assurance,” Uberman said.

Peterson scowled. “Assurance?”

“I would like a guarantee that no one...”

“Yes? Go on.”

“That no one will be killed.”

“Oh, of course, dear man, you have my word on that.”

Uberman studied him. “If anyone were killed in the hotel, I’d have no choice but to tell the authorities what I know.”

Peterson kept his voice low, but he spoke sharply. “That would be foolish. You’re an accomplice, sir. The authorities wouldn’t deal lightly with you. And neither would I.”

Uberman tossed back his brandy as though it were water. “Perhaps I should return the money.”

“I wouldn’t accept it. A deal is a deal.”

“I guess I’m in over my head.”

“Relax, sir. You’ve a tendency to melodramatize. It will all go very smoothly, and no one will ever know it happened.”

“What do you want with them anyway?”

“You wouldn’t care to know that. Just think of all those Swiss francs in the envelope and the rest to come, and forget the source of it all. Forgetting is always best. Forgetting is safe. Now, tell me, is the restaurant here any good?”

“The food is terrible,” Uberman said.

“I suspected as much.”

“Try Chesa Veglia.”

“I’ll do that.”

“Or perhaps Corviglia at the top of the funicular.”

Peterson put enough money on the table to cover the bill. As he stood and struggled into his overcoat, he said, “I’m a heeder of my own advice. I’ve already forgotten your name.”

“I never knew yours,” Uberman noted.

“Did someone speak?” Peterson asked, looking around as though he couldn’t even see Uberman.

Smiling at his own joke, he left the hotel for dinner at Chesa Veglia.

On Saturday they flew from Paris to Zurich. Their hotel, Baur Au Lac, stood in its own lakeside park at the end of Bahnhofstrasse.

In their room, Alex dismantled the hair dryer yet again and put the pistol under his belt. He took the spare clips of ammunition from the talcum powder.

“I wish you didn’t have to carry that,” Joanna said.

“So do I. But we’re getting too close to Rotenhausen to risk going without it.”

They made love again. Twice. He could not get enough of her—but he wasn’t seeking sex as much as closeness.

That night he had the dream again.

He woke shortly before three o’clock, gasping in panic, but he regained control of himself before he woke Joanna. He couldn’t go back to sleep. He sat in a chair beside the bed, the pistol in his lap, until the wake-up call came at six o’clock.

He was grateful for his peculiar metabolism, which allowed him to function well on little sleep.

Monday morning they boarded a train at Zurich’s Haupbahnhof, and they headed east.

As the train pulled out of the station, Joanna said, “We’re sure going roundabout. No one’ll be able to track us down easily.”

“Maybe they don’t need to track us down,” Alex said. “Maybe they knew our route before we did.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure. But sometimes I feel... manipulated... programmed. Like a robot.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I,” he said wearily. “Forget it. I’m just edgy. Let’s enjoy the scenery.”

At Chur they changed trains to follow the fertile Rhine Valley downstream. In summer the land would be green with vineyards, wheat fields, and orchards, but now it lay dormant under a blanket of snow. The train chugged into the towering Rhaetian Alps, passed through the dramatic Landquart Gorge, and followed a new river upstream. After a long, winding, but for the most part gentle ascent, past a handful of resort villages, they came to Klosters, which was nearly as famous as Saint Moritz.

They debarked at Klosters and left their luggage at the station while they outfitted themselves in ski clothes. During the trip from Zurich, they had realized that nothing they’d packed was adequate for high-altitude December weather. Besides, dressed in the usual winter clothes of city dwellers, they were conspicuous, which was precisely what they did not want to be. They changed in the dressing rooms at the ski shop and threw away the clothes they had been wearing, which amazed the clerk.

After lunch they boarded a train to Davos. It was crowded with a large party of French skiers bound for Saint Moritz. The French were happy, noisy, drinking wine from bottles that were concealed in plain paper sacks.

A fine snow began to fall. The wind was but a breeze.

The Rhaetian Railway crossed the Landquart River high on a terrifyingly lofty bridge, climbed through magnificent pine forests, and chugged past a ski center called Wolfgang. Eventually the tracks dropped down again to Davosersee and the town of Davos, which was composed of Davos-Dorf and Davos-Platz.

Snow fell fast and hard now. The wind had gained power.

From the train window, Alex could see that the storm concealed the upper regions of Weissfluh, the mountain that most dominated the town. Up there in the mists, behind a heavy drape of falling snow, skiers began the descent along the Parsenn run, from Weissnuhjoch—at the 9,000-foot level—down to the town at 5,500 feet.

In spite of the charming village beyond the train window, a sense of absolute isolation was unavoidable. That was one of the qualities that had attracted people to this place for more than a century. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle often had come to escape London and perhaps to think about Sherlock Holmes. In 1881, Robert Louis Stevenson had sought the solitude and the healthful air of Davos in which to finish his masterpiece, Treasure Island.

“The top of the world,” Alex said.

“I get the strange feeling that the rest of the earth was destroyed,” Joanna said, “all of it gone in a nuclear war or some other great cataclysm. This might be all that’s left. It’s so separate... so remote.”

And if we disappeared in this vastness, Alex thought uneasily, no one would
ever find
us.

From Davos the train went to Susch and Scuol. The French were singing reasonably well, and no one complained. In early darkness, the train moved up the Engadine Valley, past the lake, and into Saint Moritz.

They were in the middle of a blizzard. The wind was coming off the mountains at thirty—gusting to fifty—kilometers an hour. The preternaturally dense snowfall reduced visibility to a single block.

At the hotel when Alex and Joanna checked in, they were required to present their passports and, therefore, used their real names; but he asked that the Maurice Demuth nom de guerre be the only name kept in the registration file. In a town that was accustomed to playing host to privacy-conscious movie stars, dukes, duchesses, counts, countesses, and wealthy industrialists from all corners of the world, such a request was not unusual, and it was honored.

They had a small but comfortable suite on the fifth floor. When the bellmen left, Alex tested the two locks and double-bolted the door. He went into the bedroom to help Joanna with the unpacking.

“I’m exhausted,” she said.

“Me too.” He took the pistol out of the waistband of his slacks and put it on the nightstand.

“I’m too tired to stand up,” she said, “but still... I’m afraid to sleep.”

“We’ll be safe tonight.”

“Do you still have that feeling? That somehow we’re being manipulated?”

“Maybe I was just wired too tight,” he said.

“What will we do tomorrow?”

“Scout around. Find out where Rotenhausen lives, if we can.”

“And then?”

Alex heard a noise behind them. He turned and saw a tall, husky man standing in the open doorway between the bedroom and the living room.

So soon! Alex thought.

Joanna saw the intruder and cried out.

The intruder was holding an odd-looking gun and wearing a gas mask.

Alex lunged for the pistol that he had left on the nightstand.

The man in the mask fired the gas-pellet gun. Soft, waxy bullets struck Alex and disintegrated on impact, expelling clouds of sweet fumes.

He picked up the 9mm pistol, but before he could use it, the world dissolved in whirling white clouds, as though the blizzard beyond the windows had swept inside.

In the front room of the suite, Ignacio Carrera and Antonio Paz loaded the luggage into the bottoms of two large hotel laundry carts. Then they placed Alex Hunter and Joanna Rand into the carts, on top of the suitcases.

To Carrera, the woman was even more beautiful than she appeared in photographs. If the gas could have been counted upon to keep her unconscious more than just another half hour, he would have undressed her and raped her here, now. Helplessly asleep, she would be warm and exquisitely pliant. But he didn’t have time for fun just yet.

Carrera had brought two pieces of Hermes leather luggage with him. They belonged to the fat man. He put them in the bedroom.

Tomorrow, the day clerk would secretly alter the registration card. It would appear that Anson Peterson had checked in on Sunday. There would be no record of Hunter and the woman: They would simply have ceased to exist.

Paz covered the unconscious couple with towels and rumpled bed linens.

They wheeled the carts to the service elevator and rode down to ground level without encountering anyone.