THE LONELY SKIER
I was filled with a bitter hatred for that gold as I looked down at Engles' body, sprawled limp in the easy-chair in which we had placed it.
What was there in gold? Little bricks of a particularly useless metal — no more. It had no intrinsic value, save that its rarity made it suitable for use as a means of exchange. Yet, though inanimate, it seemed to have a deadly personality of its own. It could draw men from the ends of the earth in search of it. It was like a magnet — and all it attracted was greed. The story of Midas had shown men its uselessness. Yet throughout history, ever since the yellow metal had first been discovered, men had killed each other in the scramble to obtain it. They had subjected thousands to the lingering death of phthisis to drag it from deep mine shafts, from places as far apart as Alaska and the Klondyke. And others had dedicated their lives to a hard gamble in useful products in order to procure it and store it back in underground vaults.
To get hold of this particular little pile of gold, Stelben had slaughtered nine men. And after his death, though the gold was buried in the heart of the Dolomites, it had attracted a group of people from different parts of Europe to squabble and kill each other over it.
Of all the people whom it had drawn up the slittovia to Col da Varda, I was the only one left alive. They had not been a particularly attractive group of characters: Stefan Valdini, gangster and procurer; Carla Rometta, a crook and little better than a common prostitute; Gilbert Mayne, alias Stuart Ross, deserter, gangster and killer; Keramikos, a Nazi agent with Greek nationality. They had all died because of that gold.
And now — Derek Engles.
He had his faults. But he had been a brilliant and attractive personality. He might have been one of the greats of the film world. And now all that remained of him was a body sprawled lifeless in an easy-chair in a mountain hotel in Italy. He would never direct another film. He had even had to pass on to me the responsibility for telling the story of Col da Varda.
Joe was leaning over the body, ripping the clothing away from the wound in the groin. 'Doesn't look like a bullet,' he said as he laid bare the white skin of the stomach.
I peered over his shoulder. It was more a bruise than a wound. The skin seemed to have been burst open in an irregular, ragged tear. The flesh round it was horribly bruised.
Joe shook his head. 'Something hit him there — and hit him hard.' He examined the rest of the body. There was no sign of any other wound. He straightened up with a grunt. 'He must have known he was dying when he came in,' he said. 'No one could have an injury like that and not know he was finished. I wonder how far away from here it happened. Every step afterwards must have been agony.' He walked to the window and looked out. 'Clouding over, Neil,' he said, letting the curtain drop again. 'If it begins to snow again his tracks will be covered up and we'll never know how it happened.'
'You mean that we ought to follow his ski tracks back whilst we can?' I said.
He nodded. 'Ought to,' he said. 'There's his sister — she'll want to know. And the Studios will expect a full report. The blood will show us the trail, even if we can't pick out his ski tracks immediately.' He walked over to the desk and looked at the sheet of paper in the typewriter. He nodded his head slowly as he read it. 'Perhaps that's what brought him back.'
'How do you mean?' I asked.
'Wanted to make certain you'd write the full story for a film,' he replied. 'He'd a great flair for knowing what the film-going public wants. He knew they'd like this story, and he didn't want it wasted.' He picked up a rubber and began tearing it methodically to pieces. Though he had not been a friend of Engles', I think his death had affected him more than he would care to admit.
'I never liked him, you know, Neil,' he murmured, looking down at the dead body. 'He wasn't a man you could really like. You could admire him. Or you could dislike him. But it was difficult to like him. He wasn't the sort of man who made friends easily. He lived on excitement. Everything had to be whipped up — conversation, work, action. That's why he drank so much. His nerves needed the sense of exhilaration drink could give him when there was insufficient excitement.'
'What are you trying to say, Joe?' I asked.
He looked at me then and tossed the broken rubber into the waste-paper basket. 'Don't you see — that's why he came out here. It wasn't a sense of responsibility because he had recognised Keramikos as a Nazi agent. It was his craving for excitement. And because he believed there might be the story for a film in it. And that's why, when he came in here, he sat down at the typewriter and wrote down the title and your name underneath. He knew he was finished. But in spite of the pain, his brain still functioned clearly and he saw what a film it would make. Pity he missed the fire scene. He would have liked that.'
He paused for a moment and stared vacantly at the electric fire. 'It wasn't natural for him to sit down at a typewriter, you know,' he went on. 'Normally he'd have talked. Verbal self-dramatisation was his hobby. But he wanted the story told with himself as the central figure. He saw himself as — . He had to make sure you'd see it that way. He knew it was the end. And he planned his exit as he struggled through the snow. He wanted an audience. He always needed an audience. And he wanted roadie, sitting at a typewriter with a cigarette dangling from his lips, typing the title of the film and your name underneath. It was the thought of that scene that kept him going. He couldn't bear a good situation to be wasted. He had to get back, he had to be sure that you would write the script and that the Studios would produce it as the last work of Derek Engles, their famous director.' He drove his fist into his palm. 'If only I'd not been asleep, I could have taken a shot of that scene. He would have liked that.' He stopped then, exhausted by such an unusually long speech. He was massaging his lower lip between his finger and thumb. I think he was near to tears. For though he had no love for Engles as a man, he had great admiration for him as a director.
I went over to the window and looked out. The moon had set now and it was much darker. Clouds were skudding across the stars. 'Better get going,' I said. 'It looks like snow.'
'Can you make it?' he asked. 'You've had a pretty thick two days.'
'I'm all right,' I told him.
He went out then and woke the porter. Our ski things were in the kitchen, drying before the fire. Before we left, I locked the door of the manager's office and gave the key to the porter with instructions that no one but the manager was to be allowed into the office. 'The man who came in just now has died,' I told him in Italian. 'We will return in an hour or two and speak to the manager'
His mouth opened and he crossed himself with a scared look. We went out into the snow. After the warmth of that little office, it seemed very cold and dark outside. But there was a faint chill light in the sky to the east where the dawn would soon be breaking. Against it, the mountains towered dark and grim. The wind cut like a knife through our damp clothing and little flurries of powdery snow drove before it.
We had no difficulty in picking up the trail of Engles' skis. He had come down the old Military Patrol track from Faloria. Little splashes of blood showed here and there like crimson pennies in the snow. The track climbed steadily up a sparsely wooded slope. It grew steeper as it turned and twisted along the side of a valley that cut up into the mountains. Once, we passed a big crimson patch in the snow. It was where Engles had had a haemorrhage and had stopped to vomit blood. After that there was no more blood. But when we had climbed out of the wood and were following the ski tracks up a steep slope of tumbled downs of fresh snow, we came upon a spot where he had stopped to relieve himself, and the yellow discoloration was mixed with blood. This alone must have told him that he was seriously injured.
The tracks zig-zagged continuously across the slope now. Once we crossed another set of ski tracks. They had been made by two skiers climbing. They were undoubtedly the tracks of Engles and Keramikos, made on their way up to Faloria.
The sky was paling now and the jagged ridges of Tondi di Faloria stood out black against the chill light of early dawn. For such a good skier Engles had taken the slope very gently. A few hundred yards farther on we came upon the reason. The snow was all churned up around his tracks. He had fallen trying to do a Christi after taking a steep slope straight. The snow was all trampled about where he had struggled to get himself up on to his skis again, and there were red smears in the snow as though bloody clothing had rested on it. Joe had his baby camera with him, and it was here that he took his first picture.
After that the route Engles had come down became steeper and more direct. It looked as though he had been skiing normally, not realising how badly he was hurt, until he took that toss. The tracks were clearer now, for the snow was crisp and frozen and there was no powdery top surface.
In places we had to side-step, for the going was getting steeper. We were right under the Tondi di Faloria now and, as we struggled to the top of the final snow slope, the whole great line of jagged crests was ranged before us — white avalanche slopes gleaming coldly and topped with wicked teeth of black rock.
Straight ahead of us, across a white, rising plain, there was a gap. The Faloria escarpment finished, sweeping down in a frozen snow slope to the gap. The other side of the gap was formed by the lower slopes of the great mountains that swept up to the Sorapis Glacier. And through the gap, rank on rank of cold peaks shone in a watery gleam of the rising sun.
It was Up that frozen snow slope to the right of the gap that Engles must have climbed, with Keramikos behind him, for the track to Faloria ran right along the crest of the ridge. Most of this track ran just below the crest and in places the weight of snow seemed to have become too heavy for the slope and avalanches had spilled in tumbled heaps down the precipitous slope towards us, drawing the snow away from the crest.
To our right a long valley swept towards Tondi di Faloria itself. And here and there in this Valley rock outcrops showed black against the snow. The track of Engles' skis ran straight from one of these outcrops to our feet.
We followed the line of his skis to this outcrop. The snow was badly trampled around a jagged point of rock that barely showed above the mantle of snow. 'My God! Look at that!' Joe's voice was awed.
He was pointing on along the ski tracks.
I looked up and followed the twin lines, up and up the slope beyond, to a tumbled mass of heaped-up snow.
The slope reared up a thousand feet or more to the Crepedel of Faloria, a narrow ridge which is marked as dangerous on the maps. The slope seemed nearly sheer at the end. And out of the sheer part of the slope, a mighty avalanche of snow had tumbled. It lay, spilled and disordered, across half the mountainside. And out of the lowest reaches of it, two faint lines ran parallel and close together, as though drawn with a ruler in the snow, straight to the rock outcrop by which we were standing.
Joe had his camera working again. When he had taken the picture, he said, 'He must have been a marvellous skier, Neil. He did the impossible. He rode that avalanche on skis and came out of it alive. And then he had to hit these rocks. See — he fell before he reached the worst of the outcrop. But he didn't see that little chap half-hidden in the snow. That's what did the damage.'
I nodded. I was past speaking. It seemed such irony for him to escape that avalanche, only to injure himself fatally on this outcrop.
I was gazing up at the slope, fascinated, when my own eyes suddenly picked out a dark object lying on the snow just below the final spill of the avalanche. It was well to the left of Engles' ski tracks, towards the gap, and it looked like the body of a man.
I pointed it out to Joe. 'Is it the body of a man, or am I seeing things?' I asked him.
He squinted up the slope. 'My God — yes,' he said. Then he looked at me. 'Keramikos?' he asked.
'Must be,' I replied.
I looked along the ridge, trying to reconstruct the scene. And then I noticed that, away to the right, the avalanche became indistinct as though fresh snow had fallen on it. 'I think I know what happened,' I said.
He looked at me enquiringly.
'Engles had only eighty-five seconds' start on Keramikos at Col da Varda,' I said. 'I timed it by my watch. The fact that he was a brilliant skier would only help him on the down slopes. Going uphill it would be a matter of endurance; and Keramikos, as likely as not, was in better condition. He couldn't have been far behind Engles when they began to side-step up the slope from that gap over there. Keramikos would gain a bit at the bottom of that climb. And then, when he!
started along the track that runs under the crest there, Engles found his progress blocked by an avalanche. That's an old one at the end of the crest there to the right. He couldn't go back. Keramikos was close behind him and he had a gun. And he couldn't go forward because of the avalanche. There would have been only one thing to do — and he did it. He came straight down the avalanche slope. He was a good enough skier to try it.'
'And in doing so, he started an avalanche that brought Keramikos down too?' Joe finished for me. He looked up at the slope again, running his eyes along the ridge. Then he nodded. That's about the size of it,' he said. 'Could he still be alive?' He nodded in the direction of the body, lying like a black smut on the white shirt-front of the mountain.
'We'd better go and see,' I said. 'Can we make it, do you think?'
'We can try,' he replied.
It was a precipitous climb. The snow was soft and as soon as we had made any height, we had to pack it down with our skis at each step in order to get a grip on the slope. And each time we trampled it solid, I thought the whole slope would slide away from under our feet.
But at last we reached the body. It was huddled in an untidy heap, its face buried in the snow, one arm broken and twisted unnaturally behind its back. We turned it over. It was Keramikos all right. He was stiff and cold. Only his head was unaffected by rigor. The neck was broken. I took off my gloves and searched through his clothing, which was frozen hard. He had no gun on him. But in his breast pocket I found his wallet. It contained nothing of interest except the statement by Korporal Holtz. This I put in my pocket.
We managed to slide the body down to the rock outcrop at the bottom. There we left it to be collected later, and made our way back to Tre Croci. It was beginning to snow again by the time we reached the hotel.
And that was how Engles and Keramikos died. And that was how we finished the film, up there on the cold slopes of the Tondi di Faloria.
Before I left Cortina, I made one trip up to Col da Varda. The hut, where so much of it had happened, was a gaunt, tumbled heap of blackened beams, already covered with a light crust of snow. The burnt-out ruins had spilled right over the concrete housing of the slittovia plant. Mayne, who had bought the place, left no will, and I fancy the place has reverted to the Italian Government.
Nearly a year has passed now since the night of the fire. But I am told that the ruins of the hut still lie sprawled over the concrete machine-room, and that the slittovia is not used any more.
And the gold? I suppose I am the only person left who has any idea where it is. I think I know. But I'm not certain. And anyway I have no interest in it. It has been the cause of too many deaths already. If it is there, then let it lie and rot with the rest of Col da Varda.