He stopped and looked back suspiciously.
“Caroline thinks I’m ready to join you,” I explained, “but I’m not so sure and would value a second opinion. I’ve broken my own record for the B-slope several times, but I wouldn’t want to make a fool of myself in front of my wife.”
“Well, I—”
“I’d ask Marcel if he were here. And in any case you’re the best skier I know.”
“Well, if you—” he began.
“Just the once, then you can spend the rest of your holiday on the A-slope. You could even treat the run as a warm-up.”
“Might make a change, I suppose,” he said.
“Just the once,” I repeated. “That’s all I’ll need. Then you’ll be able to tell me if I’m good enough.”
“Shall we make a race of it?” he said, taking me by surprise just as I began clamping on my skis. I couldn’t complain; all the books on murder had warned me to be prepared for the unexpected. “That’s one way we can find out if you’re ready,” he added cockily.
“If you insist. Don’t forget, I’m older and less experienced than you,” I reminded him. I checked my skis quickly because I knew I had to start off in front of him.
“But you know the B-course backward,” he retorted. “I’ve never even seen it before.”
“I’ll agree to a race, but only if you’ll consider a wager,” I replied.
For the first time I could see I had caught his interest. “How much?” he asked.
“Oh, nothing so vulgar as money,” I said. “The winner gets to tell Caroline the truth.”
“The truth?” he said, looking puzzled.
“Yes,” I replied, and shot off down the hill before he could respond. I got a good start as I skied in and out of the red flags, but looking back over my shoulder I could see he had recovered quickly and was already chasing hard after me. I realized that it was vital for me to stay in front of him for the first third of the course, but I could already feel him cutting down my lead.
After half a mile of swerving and driving he shouted, “You’ll have to go a lot faster than that if you hope to beat me.” His arrogant boast only pushed me to stay ahead but I kept the lead only because of my advantage of knowing every twist and turn during that first mile. Once I was sure that I would reach the vital slope before he could I began to relax. After all, I had practiced over the next stretch fifty times a day for the last ten days, but I was only too aware that this time was the only one that mattered.
I glanced over my shoulder to see that he was now only a hundred feet behind me. I began to slow slightly as we approached the prepare
d ice patch, hoping he wouldn’t notice or would think I’d lost my nerve. I held back even more when I reached the top of the patch until I could almost feel the sound of his breathing. Then, quite suddenly the moment before I would have hit the ice I plowed my skis and came to a complete halt in the mound of snow I had built the previous night. Travers sailed past me at about forty miles an hour, and seconds later flew high into the air over the ravine with a scream I will never forget. I couldn’t get myself to look over the edge as I knew he must have broken every bone in his body the moment he hit the snow some hundred feet below.
I carefully leveled the mound of snow that had saved my life and then clambered back up the mountain as fast as I could go until I reached a large group of fir trees. I grabbed the red flags that I had hidden behind one of them the night before. Then I skied from side to side replacing them in their correct positions on the B-slope, some three hundred feet above my carefully prepared ice patch. Once each one was back in place I skied on down the hill, feeling like an Olympic champion. When I reached the base of the slope I pulled up my hood to cover my head and didn’t remove my snow goggles. I unstrapped my skis and walked casually toward the hotel. I reentered the building by the back door and was back in bed by seven forty.
I tried to control my breathing but it was some time before my pulse had returned to normal. Caroline woke a few minutes later, turned over and put her arms around me.
“Ugh,” she said, “you’re frozen. Have you been sleeping without the covers on?”
I laughed. “You must have pulled them off during the night.”
“Go and have a hot bath.”
After I had had a quick bath we made love and I dressed a second time, double checking that I had left no clues of my early flight before going down to breakfast.
As Caroline was pouring my second cup of coffee, I heard the ambulance siren coming from the town and then later returning.
“Hope it wasn’t a bad accident,” my wife said, as she continued to pour her coffee.
“What?” I said, a little too loudly, glancing up from the previous day’s Times.
“The siren, silly. There must have been an accident on the mountain. Probably Travers,” she said.
“Travers?” I said, even more loudly.