Games of the Hangman (50 page)

He now knew
quite a lot about the killer, thanks to the Monkey, and he might have found out
more if the knave hadn't tried to knife him.
 
The Monkey had thought that Ivo wouldn't know how to fight.
 
He might have been right about mere Ivo — but
Sir Ivo
was a different story.
 
He had blocked the knife thrust effortlessly
with his shield (the much-abused guitar, whose remaining strings were lost in
the encounter) and then had cut the varlet down with a few strokes of his mace
and chain.
 
He had been somewhat aghast
at the effects of his weapon but had suppressed his squeamishness with the
thought that a knight must be used to the sight of blood.

Still, it was
unfortunate that he had been forced to cut down the Monkey so soon.
 
He now had a jumble of facts and impressions
of the killer — possibly enough to identify him — but these were mixed up with
the Monkey's lies and with information on other clients.
 
In his panic the Monkey had spewed out
everything that came to mind, and sifting the useful from the irrelevant wasn't
easy.

Sir Ivo knew
that thoroughness was part of knightliness, so he had written everything down
and had even attempted various rough sketches based on the Monkey's
descriptions.
 
He knew what the inside of
the room was like where the blindfolded Klaus and the Monkey — sometimes
separately, sometimes together — had been taken.
 
He knew what the man with the golden hair
wanted sexually and, in detail, what they did.
 
He knew that the golden hair was not real, but a wig that was not only a
disguise but a representation of someone called
Reston
.
 
He knew that the man spoke perfect
Berndeutsch but was probably not Swiss.
 
He knew many other things.
 
He had
a list of license plates, but the Monkey had made his ill-fated move before he
had explained them.

Sir Ivo
reached into his guitar and removed a hard-boiled egg.
 
This one was painted bright red, the color of
blood.
 
It reminded him of the Monkey's
face after the chain had hit, but he suppressed this faintheartedness and
decided instead to regard it as an omen, a good omen.
 
He was going to get his man — but he needed
help.

He thought of
the Bear, one policeman who had treated him like a human being.
 
But no, the Bear wouldn’t do.
 
A policeman might not understand about the
Monkey.
 
Questions would be asked.
 
He couldn’t waste time with the police until
this was all over.

He thought
about the last person who had helped him, the Irishman.
 
That was a good idea.
 
He'd find the Irishman again and sound him
out.
 
If he reacted as expected, he'd
show him his notes on what the Monkey had said, and they could find the killer
together.
 
Two knights weren't a round
tableful, but it was a start.
 
The
Irishman would be easy to find.
 
He had
seen him around before, and
Bern
was a small town.
 
His Swiss upbringing
coming to the fore, Sir Ivo carefully placed the handful of scarlet pieces in a
nearby litter bin and skated away on his mission.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

The Kripos had
questioned the old man, but he told them nothing.
 
He had known Ivo for some time and had helped
him and other dropouts with food and, occasionally, small sums of money.
 
He had prospered in
Bern
, and since his wife had died and his
children left, he had decided the time had come to put something back into the
city that had been good to him.
 
Quietly
he had pursued a one-man campaign to help the less fortunate.

The Kripos
knew what he did and respected him for it.
 
They also knew, the way you do when you have been a policeman for some
time, that he was lying when he said he hadn't seen Ivo, but there was little
they could do except thank him for his time and leave, noting their
reservations in their reports and resolving to try again in a week or two if
nothing else turned up.

Kadar's
two-strong team did not suffer from the same scruples.
 
With the lessons of Siegfried's death still
clear in their minds, they didn't fold their notebooks and depart when they saw
that the old man was lying.
 
The bound
him and gagged him, and for the next ten minutes of his life they inflicted
more pain on him than he had experienced in all his seventy-three years.

When he wanted
to talk, they wouldn’t let him.
 
The made
him
write out what he knew in a shaking hand, the gag
still in his mouth.
 
The apartment was
small, and they wanted to make sure that he'd have no chance to cry for
help.
 
Then they tortured him again to
confirm his story.
 
It didn't
change.
 
His physique, despite his age,
was strong.
 
He endured the second bout
of agony with his heart sill beating but with his guilt at having betrayed Ivo
almost a greater pain.

Satisfied that
at least they now had a description of Ivo in his newer image and that the old
many had told them all he knew, they hanged him.
 
They didn’t think it would take too long to
find Ivo.
 
Bern
, after all, was a small town.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

The Chief
Kripo had been daydreaming.
 
It was an
understandable lapse given the hours he had been working recently, combined
with the glow of sexual satisfaction resulting from a quick twenty minutes with
Mathilde in her Brunnengasse apartment.
 
He was still in a good mood when he picked up the phone.
 
He recognized the pathologist's voice, which,
he had to admit, he did not associate with good news.
 
Cutting up corpses wasn't a very upbeat line
of work.

"Ernst
Kunzler," said the pathologist.

The Chief
racked his brains.
 
Then he
remembered.
 
Bern
averaged about two suicides a week.
 
This was the most recent.
 
"The old man who
hanged himself.
 
Yes, I
remember.
 
What about him?"

"He
didn't hang himself," said the pathologist.
 
"He was helped on his way, but it's much
worse than that."

His good mood
suddenly
vanished,
the Chief Kripo began to feel sick.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

Fitzduane had
three people to see in Lenk, and besides, he had never actually been to a real
live ski resort.
 
Lenk wasn't a jet set
sort of place where you got crowded off the ski slopes by ex-kings, movie
stars, Arab sheikhs, and rumbles of bodyguards; it was more of a family place
for the Swiss and certain cognoscenti.
 
It was also off season and felt like it.
 
Fitzduane was mildly shocked when he arrived in the valley where Lenk
nestled.
 
Something normally associated
with ski resorts was missing.
 
There were
cows, there was brownish grass that looked as if it still had not decided that
winter was quite over, there were chalets nestling into the hillside the way
chalets should, and there were alpine flowers in profusion — but no snow.

The sun blazed
down.
 
He shaded his eyes, looked around
and then
upward,
and instantly felt reassured.
 
All those picture postcards hadn't lied.
 
The village might be two-thirds asleep, but
as his gaze rose, he could see ski lifts still in action.
 
Farther up, the thin lines of the cables, the
grass, and the tree line blended into the white glare of snow, and higher up
still, multicolored dots zigged and zagged.

He thought he'd
better get some sunglasses.
 
As he paid,
he remembered that inflation came with the snow line.
 
Or, as Erika had put it, "Why should we
have to pay twenty percent more for a few thousand meters of
altitude?"
 
The air was clear, the
day warm, and the thin air invigorating.
 
On balance Fitzduane thought it was a silly question.

*
         
*
         
*
         
*
         
*

Marta von
Graffenlaub looked the part of the firstborn.
 
In contrast with Andreas, Vreni, and Rudi, who were still in the
transition stage into full maturity, Marta had arrived.
 
She was no longer a girl but very much a
woman:
 
poised, assured, and cautiously
friendly.

It was hot two
levels up, where they met by arrangement, and they sat on the veranda of the
chalet-style restaurant, watching the skiing and listening to the distinctive
swish and hiss of wax against snow.

The bottom
half of Marta wore padded ski trousers and bright red composite material ski
boots.
 
The top half wore a designer
T-shirt that consisted mainly of holes.
 
Fitzduane wondered if one or the other half wasn't too hot or too
cold.
 
She had a creamy gold tan and an
almost perfect complexion.
 
She radiated
good health and energy, and her nipples were nearly as prominent as Erika's.
 
Funny, he'd never thought of the Swiss as
sexy before.

He suppressed an
impulse to nibble a nipple and looked across the snow to where a cluster of
tiny skiers was making him feel inadequate.
 
He thought they were probably still in diapers.
 
They all wore mirrored sunglasses and skied
as if they had learned how inside the womb.
 
He cheered up when one of the supertots suddenly sat down and started to
cry like a normal child.
 
The little
monster was probably a part-time major in the Swiss Army.

"You're
very quiet," said Marta with a smile.
 
She had the disconcerting ability to keep her distance while sounding
intimate.
 
"You drive from
Bern
and then climb a
mountain to see me, and then you don't speak."

"I'm in
shock," said Fitzduane.
 
He was
drinking hot Glühwein, which seemed like the right thing to do when you were
surrounded by snow but unwise when sweat was dripping off your Polaroids.
 
"Those things remind me of
helicopters" — he pointed at the ski lifts clanking past quietly about a
hundred meters away — "and I don't like helicopters."

"Oh,
they're quite safe," said Marta.
 
"We are very experienced in these things here."
 
She saw the Fitzduane's Polaroids had angled
to nipple height, and she blushed faintly.

"Mmm,"
said Fitzduane.
 
Apparently it was true
that alcohol hit harder the higher the altitude.
 
He went into the bar to get another Glühwein
and a scotch for Marta.
 
Everybody was
clumping along the wooden floor with the rolling gait of B-movie
gunslingers.
 
He seemed to be the only
person not wearing ski boots.
 
The
five-year-old in front of him selected what looked like a beer.
 
He shook his head.
 
Sometimes he missed
Ireland
.
 
He squeezed his way back through the
gunslingers and gave Marta her drink.
 
"Do you yodel?" he said.

"Oskar
used to yodel," she said very quietly.

"I
thought it was like riding a bicycle," said Fitzduane, "once learned,
never forgotten."
 
He had been
looking at a particularly spectacular demonstration of skiing prowess by an
adult of indeterminate sex.
 
For a moment
he had missed the change in Marta's tone of voice.
 
The skier misjudged his approach to the
chalet and slammed into the wooden railings.

"
Olé!
" exclaimed Fitzduane.
 
He started to clap, and others on the veranda
followed.
 
A furious-looking mid-European
face, dignity severely dented, surfaced from the snow.
 
He shouldered his skis and clomped off toward
the ski lift.

"I'm
sorry," he said.
 
"Oskar
Schupbach, you mean."

"Yes."
 
There were tears in her eyes.
 
"Damn," she said, and wiped them
away.
 
A little troop of ski boppers went
past, chattering like sparrows.

"‘The man
with the face that looked as if it were carved out of solid mahogany,’"
quoted Fitzduane.
 
"Vreni told me
about him, and so did Andreas.
 
I'm going
to see him while I'm here."