“Alone?”
“Don’t shatter all my new illusions, Tanya. You mean you still believe in bourgeois institutions like chaperones? Or don’t you think I’m as good a bodyguard as Ivan or Igor?”
He had poured drinks for both of them, and he put hers in a passive hand.
“Of course, I can leave orders for them to follow us; if we are not here, they will know where to ask for instructions.”
“You aren’t afraid of shocking them?” he mocked her. “You were on a trip with them when I met you, but I didn’t assume they were your lovers. Would such good Soviet Boy Scouts have naughtier minds than mine?”
They were standing close together, and as Tanya sipped her drink her lips moved charmingly into a smile.
“I do not know what is in your mind,” she said, “but if you wish to be my lover I expect you to ask me. In such things men should take the lead.”
7
Simon had called the concierge for a mid-morning flight to Zurich, and just before noon the plane bearing him and Tanya set down at the Zurich airfield. He had arranged in advance for a U-drive car to be waiting, and in a matter of minutes they were on their way into the town, and then driving on through it and out again along the north shore of the lake.
“We’ll have lunch at the Ermitage at Kusnacht — it’s just a few miles farther on,” he said. “There’s a beautiful shady terrace right on the water, and their filets de perche à la mode du fils du pêcheur are something that has to be tasted to be believed.”
The setting and the meal were as perfect as he had promised, and perfectly accompanied by the bottle of ice-cold dry Aigle of Montmollin which he ordered.
“I think you are the most decadent man I have ever personally met,” she remarked thoughtfully.
He grinned with Saintly impudence.
“And aren’t you loving it?”
“We have work to do, and all you think of is what we should eat and drink.”
“For tomorrow we die — maybe. And that’s not all I think of, as you ought to remember.” He held her eyes until she lowered them. “Besides, I’ve never found I could work better for missing a good meal.”
“And while you are enjoying all this, do you never think of the millions in the world who are starving?”
“Sometimes. But I can’t convince myself that if I wasn’t eating it, any of them would get it.”
“You are impossible,” she said, and he laughed.
“What did you expect of a horrible capitalist?”
Nevertheless, no one who had been observing them would have taken them for enemies when they left to drive on towards the mountains just faintly visible in the distance.
From the air the Alps had appeared like a great wall of cloud near the horizon, but after Simon and Tanya crossed the lake and bore away to the south-east the peaks took on their true forms as the car began to climb twisting and steeper roads. The winter snows, now just a fading memory in Paris and even in Zurich, stubbornly clung on even below the timber line, where later in the summer, when the whiteness had withdrawn further, the last venturesome scraggly firs would be seen manning the frontier between the rich verdure of the forests below and the raw gray expanses of stone above.
Altbergen was the kind of place whose existence is announced to the traveller by a minute sign pointing from the highway up something like a glorified cow path. Though Simon had found it on the map, he almost passed the turning, but managed to get his brakes down in time to make the sudden transition from modern highway engineering to rural improvisation.
The car bounded from boulder to pothole with protesting rattles, and it became increasingly obvious as the angle of climb approached something like fifty degrees that what they were on was possibly not a cow path at all, but an occasional river bed gouged out by the torrents of thawing spring.
Luckily for the automobile, as well as its occupants, the distance from highway to Altbergen was only seven kilometers — straight up, it seemed at times. But the drive was invigorating, shaking out any last traces of sluggishness traceable to the previous long and perhaps overindulgent evening.
Altbergen was as surprised to see Tanya and Simon as Tanya and Simon were relieved to see it. Set on the green slope of a tiny plateau, its site constituted the only place within miles where more than three houses together might have clung to the ground. As it was, there were not many buildings, perhaps twenty, including a small inn and a few starkly essential shops.
“It’s beautiful,” Tanya said. “I have seen it only in picture books. Like gingerbread houses.”
“Anyway,” Simon remarked, “if Ivan and Igor get this far, they won’t have much of a search to locate us.”
He parked in front of the inn, joining company with a pair of Volkswagens and a squarish deux chevaux whose natural tendency to look like a corrugated tin lean-to had apparently been well assisted by numerous trips between Altbergen and the nearest paved road.
From across the narrow street, the combined grocer and hardware merchant peered through his display window at the Zurich license plate. The servant girl who had been sweeping the threshold of the Gasthof with no great enthusiasm in the first place came to a complete halt as she gaped curiously at the novelty of city tourists — and rich ones, too, by the looks of them — coming to the Goldener Hirsch and unloading baggage with the apparent intention of making a stay.
Altbergen’s isolation from the conveniences of modern life meant that checking in simply consisted of being led up the steep stairs by the plump proprietress while the servant girl, a slim blond creature, staggered along behind with all the luggage, refusing Simon’s offers of help. There was no surrender of passports for inspection by the police overnight, no filling out of lengthy forms in the usual European manner, whereby one gains entry to sleeping quarters only by confessing in detail a large part of one’s own and one’s relatives’ pasts, and explaining precisely whence one has come and where one is going. There was not even a register to sign, and the proprietress had not asked for names.
“So, bitte,” she said, smiling as she opened the door of what was obviously the best room, “schön, nicht wahr?”
“Sehr schön,” Simon agreed, before Tanya could make any other comment.
The walls were all natural wood, with the lingering smell of fresh-cut lumber about them. There were two beds, huge and solid, with white comforters a foot thick but light as air. Beyond the double doors was an ornate balcony of the kind that fronted the upper floors of almost every house in the village.
“I didn’t want to attract more attention by asking for separate rooms,” Simon explained innocently to Tanya, in English. He went on more wickedly: “The only problem will be if Ivan and Igor get here. Which of them would you rather double up with?”
She turned away quickly, towards the balcony.
“Supper is from six o’clock,” the proprietress said in leaving. “If you want hot water or anything, the bell is there.”
“Oh, Simon, come look.”
Tanya was outside, deeply breathing the sharp clear air. The view she wanted him to see was superb: the snow-covered Alps, the dark green meadows studded with outcroppings of pale stone, the shingled roofs of the houses weighted with chunks of the same rock. There was a peace and timelessness totally unlike any other in the world.
He turned from the view to her, and thought that she looked happier than he had ever seen her. There had been very good moments, but the kind of deep-down contentment that he sensed in her now was something new and different. They seemed a long long way from subterfuge, treachery, and murder.