The Secret Agent (5 page)

“And yet—you describe him as a man in the grip of an obsession. What does he really want? His grandfather’s house? Or the truth of what happened to Jack Roderick? And why are you so uncertain whether Max is capable of murder?”

“Call it respect for what is brutal in the blood,” Oliver returned. “Jack Roderick—however charming, however
patrician—lived and died by his wits. His son was beheaded at the hands of his enemies. Max is heir to both men.”

Stefani thrust herself restlessly out of her chair and stood near the fire, her expression hidden by the fall of dark hair. “There’s nothing in that will to cause murder. No reason to strangle a prostitute in a hotel bedroom. No reason to send your friend Harry to Kowloon and run him over with a taxi.”

“Then perhaps those deaths have nothing to do with Max’s Thai business,” Oliver suggested. “But his sudden appearance in Bangkok a year ago, armed with his grandfather’s last will and testament, coincided with a good deal of bloodshed.”

She glanced at him swiftly. “You think someone wants Jack Roderick to stay dead?”

“Why else have him disappear?”

“That presumes the disappearance was deliberate, and not of his choosing,” she countered. “The man walks down a driveway in ’67. He might have got lost in the Malaysian jungle. He might have met a tiger and been devoured.”

“But if the fact of his death is sufficient reason to murder two people
now,
after thirty-five years—”

“It wasn’t a tiger and it wasn’t the jungle. Oliver,” she said bluntly, “what do you want me to do in Courchevel? Prove Max Roderick a murderer—or a saint?”

“I want you to live high and drink deep. I want you to hire the best goddamn house in the Three Valleys and live like the French
expect
wealthy Americans to live. Wear outrageous clothes. Throw parties for strangers. It’s high season, ducks: ski your ass off. Invite Max for dinner and breakfast. He knows I’m sending you and he knows not to blow your cover.”

“My cover?”

“You’re an old friend. Or an ex-lover. A cousin’s discarded wife. Be a one-night stand he picked up years ago in Austria, if you must—who’s to know whether it’s true or not, in the middle of the French Alps? But you are categorically
not
to behave as though Krane and Associates is on your mental map. To suggest as much might be deadly. Don’t even call me unless you use a public box and this number”—he handed her a small slip of paper inscribed with his tiny handwriting—“and identify yourself as Hazel. Phones are the very
worst
where security is concerned.”

“Hazel,” Stefani said mistily. “Of all things. Like a fat old terrier snoring on the rug. I believe you’ve grown fond of me, Oliver.”

“Hell, darling.” He planted a kiss on her wrist. “I
invented
you.”

J
acques Renaudie swept the snow from his stone doorstep that morning with deliberate strokes of his short, muscled arms, a cigarette dangling absently from the corner of his mouth. He wore a blue fleece vest over a wool sweater knitted two decades ago by his wife, who had decamped for Paris last summer in a desperate bid for all she had never possessed in youth. Jacques sent her money from time to time and washed the sweater himself when necessary and did not ask his wife when she might return. He was a methodical man with a thatch of grizzled hair and a coarse-skinned nose. Although it was already past eight o’clock, he had not yet shaved. He had drunk heavily of schnapps the previous evening—a foul liquor he would never have touched had his wife been snug in the room upstairs. A faint odor of charcoal from the bar’s open fireplace still clung to his skin.

Jacques’s eyes were very blue and they were focused now on the hard, bright crystals at his feet. It had snowed
during the night—dry powder, a near-perfect fall despite the lateness of the season—but he was considering not the untracked
pistes
of the Sommet de la Loze above him but his youngest daughter, who was destined like her mother for unhappiness. He had slept fitfully after closing his bar at two
A.M.
, and by six o’clock in the morning when he gave up the battle, and rose with aching head to make coffee and send his ancient Bernese out into the drifts, Sabine had not yet returned from the party in Courchevel 1850. It would be that Austrian, Jacques decided—the young star of the ski team who had taken gold at Salt Lake, a boy with the slow stupid grin of all those who are named Klaus. Sabine would make a fool of herself just to prove she had value in
some
racer’s eyes, even if it was not the one she really wanted. Jacques spat suddenly into the new snow and raised his eyes from his stoop.

It was then he saw the blond-haired man riding the platter lift up the length of Le Praz’s main street, his gear strapped to his back and his helmet in his hand. Out of bitterness Jacques stood motionless, the broom idle, debating whether he should call out to this one, who was up before all the others in that exhausted town. He might offer him coffee. He might ask for the truth about Sabine and the Austrian named Klaus. But he knew Max Roderick would already have taken what was sufficient for the morning, and would refuse the day-old bread in Jacques Renaudie’s larder. Max did not linger in doorways, growing cold when he might be skiing. He saved his conversation for the longer twilight of spring and summer, when the Haute Savoie emptied of the hungry-faced women from New York and Paris with their flowing fur coats, their brass-colored hair. By May the door to Max’s workshop high on the hillside stood ajar each afternoon, and the effort of a hike through the meadow
and wildflowers was rewarded with cold beer from the barrel he kept in the stone cellar of his old Savoyard farmhouse. There was a time when Sabine herself had begged to accompany Jacques, with no greater reward in view than to study Max’s bent head in silence as he manipulated the images on his design screen.

To see him thus, profile turned toward the summit, new-minted skis making twin tracks through the powder, was a source of relief. The rumors, Jacques thought, must be wrong. Max had strapped a pack to his back along with a length of rope, a small ice pick and an avalanche beacon; he was intending, then, to venture
off-piste.
Risky, perhaps, so late in the ski season; the winter had been unusually mild, and the cornices in the high peaks trembled in sunlight, the avalanche cannon boomed at dawn and the thunder of sudden snow slides roared through the town most afternoons. Nothing Max had not heard before.

Jacques shrugged at nobody in particular—perhaps an image of his wife he still carried in his mind. If Max Roderick was in the very midst of Le Praz by eight-fifteen, then he had already shot five hundred meters down the length of Jean Blanc from his home in Courchevel 1850. Nobody but a true man of the Alps skied so purposefully, and with so much gear, at this hour of the morning. Unless …

Unless Max had spent the previous night in Le Praz itself, and was only now crawling back toward Courchevel 1850 and home. And what was more likely? Jacques’s expression darkened. Max Roderick would never take the
piste
into Le Praz if he intended to ski the backcountry, as his gear suggested. Had he awakened in his stone house in the early hours of morning, and glanced at the fresh powder blanketing the peaks, nothing would have kept him from the tram that led to the heights of Saulire, the
tricky demanding couloirs and the broad, flat bowls where he loved to test his skill and exhaust his strength. Jacques watched Max disappear from sight, feeling a flare of rage toward the man. It was only a matter of time before Max abandoned Courchevel like all the rest; he had merely pretended, after all, to be one of them.

The rumors had
begun four days before, when the Dash 7 from Paris with its forty-seven passengers overshot the runway that ran alongside the Boulevard Creux and ended, engulfed in snow from nose to tail, on the neighboring
piste.
This was not entirely an unusual occurrence. The runway was just slightly more than a thousand feet long and was set at an incline—downhill for takeoff, uphill for landing. Private planes, unused to alpine conditions and thin air, routinely ended nose-up in the groomed expanse beyond the altiport; for a Dash 7 to do so, however, was news. The miscalculation might potentially be called a
crash.

Jacques had witnessed the affair himself from the comfort of Boulevard Creux, where he sat drinking a robust red wine from a local vintner and delicately considering the merits of a terrine. He heard the whine of the Dash 7’s engines; from the corner of his eye, saw the clumsy shape descend like a falling house on the tilted landscape. The terrine, he decided, was not without merit but strove for too much. He pushed it aside and concentrated on a fine soft cheese from a dairy farm near Méribel.

Cries of horror and immense excitement—a woman’s scream from the adjacent table—an overturned chair. Jacques stood, his napkin still tucked into the collar of his shirt as though he were a yokel, and not an institution in the life of the most glamorous ski area known to
man—and stared out at the huddled mess of the downed prop plane. It had missed several late skiers by a matter of meters.

“Sacré bleu,”
he’d muttered. “And how they will get that thing off the
piste
is anyone’s guess. A tow will not do it.
Imbécile.”

As he watched, the emergency door above the wing was thrust open. A long, booted leg in leopard-print velvet appeared in the black maw of the opening. Jacques swore under his breath.
This
type usually arrived by private jet.

She wore sunglasses under the mop of dark curls, although it was already evening and the light was alpine flat. A black Persian lamb coat, full and swinging. Suede gloves, and a leather backpack slung over her shoulder. She poised on the wing, jumped down as carelessly as though the entire life of Courchevel was not gaping at her from Boulevard Creux, and sauntered toward the altiport terminal some hundred meters back along the overshot runway. It was a good six minutes before the rest of the Dash 7’s passengers found courage to follow.

Jacques continued to swear as he watched her go, with a fluency that did him honor. Not because the woman was a sensation—he was long jaded by celebrity and bravado and chic, he saw them all the time. Nor because her beauty was a reproach to a man abandoned by his wife. No, he swore because he had seen Max Roderick fixed like a stone to one side of the
piste,
just beyond the fallen plane, his weight well back in his boots and his poles thrust into the snow. Watching.

He made no move toward the Dash 7—he suggested not the slightest anxiety or concern for its occupants— but something in Max’s expression, the arms folded tightly across his chest as he stared at the wing, told
Jacques that Max had been waiting for this plane. For the appearance of this woman.

Although such an idea was impossible.

Impossible,
Jacques repeated to himself now as he stood shivering on his own doorstep. There had been no welcome in Max Roderick’s face. He had merely stared after the woman’s figure while the sirens began to wail, then seized his poles, thrust himself cleanly down the
piste
and vanished from Jacques’s sight.

Until he reappeared, so the rumors went, at a party in the woman’s rented villa—here, in Le Praz—the very next night. The two had been inseparable in the few days since. The paparazzi—never far from
le pauvre
Max—were beginning to sniff the wind.

An old flame,
declared Yvette Margolan with a knowing air as she handed Jacques his olives the following afternoon.
I saw her when I delivered the charcuterie. Not young, but
très chic.
She happened upon our Max unawares, after the passage of many years. It is Fate,
non?
He has been too much alone,
mon vieux,
since la Muldoon …

But Max had not been unaware.

Jacques stood in the rising morning, his eyes fixed on the spot where Max Roderick had passed, riding the platter lift out of Le Praz at eight-fifteen on a Friday of new snow when he should have been aboard the tram for Saulire long since. The cold seeped through his vest and his ancient sweater and he shuddered suddenly, seized by the chill like a dog snapped on a too-short leash. Why should it matter to him, if Max amused himself with a hundred strange women? Was he, Jacques Renaudie, an old man now that his wife had run off with a banker to Paris? Never mind that he had known Max for more than a decade, and had never witnessed such slavish attention, such wholehearted indiscretion …

Curse all women and their heartless scheming, Jacques thought savagely. Where
was
his daughter, anyway? He should refuse Sabine the house when she finally came home. Jacques banged the base of the broom against the step and turned in search of the cigarettes he kept in his kitchen.

Max Roderick had
not spent the night in Stefani Fogg’s villa. She had slept at his home instead.

He had dropped down to Le Praz at first light in order to fetch some of her clothes—a change of long underwear, a fresh ski sweater. The rest of her gear still sat in the vestibule of his old farmhouse on the ridge just beyond Courchevel 1850, the highest of the ski area’s four main bases.

She had hesitated when he invited her for dinner the previous night, and he knew that she was longing for a hot bath and an early bed. He had spared her nothing in the previous seventy-two hours: the relentless drops down the steeps of La Vizelle, the circuitous passage through the woods of Courchevel 1550; the nail-biting jumps from outcropping to outcropping in the rugged Grand Couloir; the moguls on La Combe de la Saulire. He had taken her into bowls far above tree line, so junked with crud they tore the skis out from under the best of amateurs. She was equal to everything but his pace.

That first morning they had stood together in the sharp, cold, early light on the knife-edge of Saulire’s ridge, the far-flung Alps unrolling toward Switzerland. They were alone in a cruel and beautiful world of glacial ice. Wordlessly, he handed her the water bottle from his ski jacket. She tipped it to her lips and then said, “Follow me.”

Before he could speak or move she was airborne over the cornice, eyes searching for landfall. She moved with a sort of reckless instinct he had not expected and found dangerously intoxicating. He threw himself after her, following precisely the turns she traced on the head-wall’s face. When at last she slashed to a stop and looked back over her shoulder, waiting for him, the two sets of tracks ran unbroken for nearly twelve hundred feet. A single clean run without pause or hesitation.

“You’ve skied this before?” he asked her curtly.

“Never.”

“Your skis could be shorter, and they’re all wrong for your center of gravity.”

“I just got them last year.”

“We’ll switch them tomorrow. I can fit you from the stock in my studio.”

“But I like my equipment!”

“You’ll like mine better.”

Did he intend to challenge her, that early in the morning on their first day? He wasn’t sure. Max had skied with many women in his professional life—women from the U.S. Ski Team, and girls down the length of his long apprenticeship on a thousand mountains around the world. He was used to the tenacity, the aggressiveness, the naked competition of such women; he was used to precision and skill. What he recognized in this woman was a more elusive quality: joy. It showed in every line of her body when she turned downhill.

“Where do we go next?” she asked.

“You told me to follow you.” Another challenge. She thrust her poles into the snow and went.

There are more than three hundred and twenty miles of marked runs in Les Trois Vallées, the three valleys of St. Bon, Les Allues and Belleville; to ski them all would require an entire season, but she made a game attempt.
Each day she ascended from Le Praz to Courchevel 1850, met Max at the foot of the Verdons gondola and from there decreed their course: toward the villages of Méribel, Val Thorens or Mottaret. They skied hard and by unspoken agreement never referred to the business that had brought her to France. When they talked at all, in the spaces between runs as they climbed back toward the summit on a multitude of lifts, it was of the food or the sun or the terrain they had just conquered.

“Where do you ski in the States?” he asked her once; and abruptly, as though she did not like to think about it, she replied: “Utah.”

“Deer Valley?”

She turned and gazed at him, her dark eyes unreadable behind her sunglasses. “Deer Valley. Is it so obvious?”

She wore a headband of carved and dyed mink, the glossy curls springing back like a wild fringe from her forehead. Her nose was red from exposure. Her jacket, incredibly, was of Italian doeskin the color of caramel and the texture of satin. Her ski pants were the same. “It saves time,” she had explained, “après-ski. I’m already dressed for a party.”