The Watchers (9 page)

‘I’m expecting someone, Pippo. Posh and rich, so get out your most expensive red.’

‘If he touches you, I will die.’

‘Then I wouldn’t get my white truffles.’

Pippo jabbed an imaginary knife into his heart.

‘This life,
c’est tragique
. I can only make love to you with my food.’

‘Well, at least you know how to satisfy a woman, Pippo.’

‘I burn with love.’ He bowed and kissed her hand, waltzed to the piano and grabbed the microphone. ‘Champagne for Mademoiselle Taylor! Champagne for everyone! Mesdames et messieurs, tonight, I am in love with a beautiful lady from America!’

Enzo broke into a chorus of ‘New York, New York’. Wrong fucking coast but Katherine smiled anyway. She liked Enzo. He had long, delicate fingers. The kind a girl dreams about.

She sipped champagne till Mr Duncan-Bowles arrived. He looked half in the bag already. He laughed when Pippo presented a starter of prosciutto and sausages while complaining to the next table that ‘this Englishman’ had stolen the love of his life from under his handlebar moustache. Pippo poured the Conterno Barolo with the look of a love-sick puppy. He walked to the piano and announced to the crowd he was now heartbroken. He sang his way through a sad Italian melody.

‘
Encora … encora …
’

There was loud applause. Mr Duncan-Bowles tasted the wine.

‘Odd little chap, isn’t he?’

‘Pippo? He and his moustache are part of the wallpaper in Lausanne. And he appreciates men of quality, such as yourself.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Savile Row suit, gold monogrammed cufflinks, the watch on your wrist.’

Handmade Patek Philippe. Forty grand at least, Katherine figured. And it wasn’t there yesterday. Mr Duncan-Bowles admired it himself.

‘Picked it up today, bonus to myself. Just closed a huge merger in Lausanne. That’s why I thought I’d like to see you again. Stay another night, celebrate.’

Katherine’s mind kicked into gear. One of the perks of dating men of immeasurable means. They loved to brag their way into her stock portfolio. She scooted over a smidge, sipping her wine and letting her hair fall over her eyes so she could slowly brush it away.

‘Really, what kind of merger?’

‘Oh, I couldn’t say.’

She reached under the table, rested her hand on his thigh.

‘Hey, I thought you wanted to celebrate.’

Katherine got home after two in the morning, made a note to call her banker to put in an order for 2,500 shares of Norton-Blessed Ltd. She dropped her clothes on the bathroom floor, rolled a fat marijuana cigarette and lounged in a hot bath.

Supply running low, must call Lili.

Lili always had the best dope. Hydroponic and home-grown in a converted barn full of sculptures. Women’s elongated bodies in bronze. Some of them modelled from Katherine’s body. Katherine liked getting stoned and posing for Lili. She liked the way Lili looked at her while shaping her body in soft mounds of hot wax. Yes, must call Lili and have a nice girlie afternoon.

She drew a deep toke, held the smoke in her lungs.

Outside the window Lausanne sparkled like diamonds for the picking.

‘So easy, so nice …’ She closed her eyes and floated away. ‘… and it always tastes like more.’

Rochat sat in the loge, listening to the wind.

He drummed his fingers on the wood table and waited for a thought. Sometimes they blew in with the wind. He was very sure a thought was coming to him when the telephone rang. Rochat jumped and fell off his stool. He looked at the old wood telephone on the wall near his bed. Two tiny bells on top, a tiny hammer pounding furiously between the bells.

Rochat got to his feet, dusted off his trousers and made himself presentable to answer the telephone in his official capacity. He unhooked the listening tube from the side of the box, spoke into the talking cone at the front.

‘
Bonsoir, je suis le guet de la cathédrale de Lausanne
.’

There was loud music and a screaming voice trying to make itself heard.

‘Hello, what? I can’t hear you. You want what? Pizza? I’m sorry, this isn’t the all-night pizza place. That has a number six at the end, not a number seven. No, I’m very sure, six at the end of the numbers spells pizza, seven at the end spells cathedral. What? Yes, I have no pizza.’

The line went dead.

Rochat reset the listening tube on its hook, tried to remember what he was thinking about before pizza. He couldn’t, so he turned around to the shelf on the wall and sorted through his sketchbooks, pulling down the one he had titled,
les bishops mort
. He thumbed through the pages to the last drawing of Basil the First. He took an eraser and pencil and began to touch up the old boy’s face. Basil lived with other dead bishops in the nave, all in a row near the Virgin’s Chapel. No one knew their real names because somebody forgot to carve them into the marble. So Rochat named them all Basil and he always greeted them when passing. He was very sure they appreciated it. But the years had not been kind to Basil the First’s marble face. His eyes and nose were missing, and his ears stuck out from the side of his head like a monkey. Rochat worked at it till it was time to prepare for the three o’clock bells, the final call of the night.

‘I’m truly sorry, your grace, but here’s no hope.’

He closed the sketchbook, put on his overcoat and floppy hat, set a fresh candle in the lantern and waited for Marie-Madeleine to call him outside. The binoculars from Monsieur Buhlmann sat on the table, the neck strap looking like the lead on Monsieur Junod’s small dog in Café du Grütli. Rochat picked up the binoculars and slipped the strap over his head.

‘
D’accord
. We’ll go for a little walk, but no barking.’

The timbers creaked and groaned, Marie sounded three times. Rochat lit the lantern and shuffled around the balconies, calling the hour to the east, north, west and south. When he finished, he looked out over Lausanne.

‘All was very well for another night, Rochat.’

He blew out the lantern, hooked it to the iron railings. He raised the binoculars to his eyes and focused on the red-tile rooftops of the Palud quarter. Heatsmoke curled from chimneys. A little to the right, a lone trolley bus rolled over Rue du Grand Pont. Sparks flashed where the trolley’s arms touched the overhead power lines, the lights on the bus sputtered off and on. He panned left. The clock on the belfry of Saint-François was staring back at him through the lenses.

‘Aha! I knew it. Just like the bells in the Hôtel de Ville. Two minutes fast. You’d better not let Clémence find out. She’ll have you boiled in oil.’

The clock looked close enough for him to reach out and give the big hand a tap and set it right. Then he remembered he was looking through binoculars. He turned the lenses backwards, looked again. Now the clock was so far away it looked as if it was sitting across the lake in France.

He shuffled into the shadows of the southeast turret and leaned against a pillar. He looked through the binoculars again. Down on Pont Bessières, a man standing at the railings of the bridge, looking up at the cathedral.

‘Do you see, Marie? That man on Pont Bessières? He’s standing very still and he’s got his hands in the pockets of his coat. And it’s a coat with a belt and little straps on the shoulders like detectives wear in old movies Grandmaman liked to watch.’

He lowered the binoculars and thought about it. He turned to the great bell hanging in the timbers.

‘You know, Marie, I think the man on the bridge must be a detectiveman, and I think he must be solving a mysterious mystery because that’s what detectivemen do, they solve mysterious mysteries. But I can’t think of any mysteries in Lausanne, can you?’

A small breath of wind whisked by Marie-Madeleine to find him in the turret.

‘What do you mean, the cathedral is full of mysteries? When was the last time you saw a detectiveman movie, hmm? Why, there’s nothing in this pile of old stones but some teasing shadows who keep leaving doors open and all those dusty skeletons under the nave who like to rattle their bones at night and Otto the Brave Knight always falling over in his armour. Very common things for a cathedral, that’s what I think.’

Rochat slowly raised the lenses, he scanned the rooftops of Lausanne and the trails of chimney smoke in the sleepy dark.

‘
Non
, I’m very sure if there is a mystery in Lausanne, it must be somewhere out there. And with these very good binoculars for watching cows on hills I can see …’

A bright light flashed in his eyes, and a woman in a white robe appeared as if floating. She settled before a mirror, let the robe fall from her shoulders. Rochat saw the skin of her naked back. Her hair was wet and she slowly combed it till it lay in long blond streaks.

Harper stood a moment longer.

He’d been walking the streets, checking every strip joint and after-hours club in Lausanne looking for Alexander Yuriev with nothing but a pocketful of receipts to show for it. Coming up Rue Caroline, and on the phone to the night clerk at the Hôtel Port Royal in Montreux for another round of ‘no, the man you want has not checked for messages, sir’, Harper heard the bells of Lausanne Cathedral ring for three o’clock.

He remembered the night before, the light floating in the belfry just after the midnight bells. Curious if it’d be there again and wondering if he’d only been well pissed, he disconnected with the night clerk and headed up the road. By the time he rounded the corner and saw the cathedral atop the hill, all was dark. Then he thought he saw something shadowlike moving in the belfry. He walked slowly ahead, stopped and waited. Eyes focused on the high pillars and arches. He gave up and pulled out his smokes.

‘And the winner is – well pissed.’

He lit up, aware of his surroundings. On a bridge stretching between Avenue Mon Repos and the old city. As if the earth had fallen out from under him and he was standing in midair. He stepped to the railings, looked down. A 200-metre drop to narrow lamp-lit streets, where unseen winds gathered dead leaves and carried them away in darting spirals. Shadows chasing leaves, leaves chasing shadows. The winds curled up the bridge supports, cut through the railings … He snapped back from the edge, rubbed the back of his neck.

‘Bloody hell.’

‘Are you all right?’

Harper turned to the voice, saw a young man standing on the pavement the other side of the bridge.

‘Sorry?’

‘Are you all right? I noticed you leaning over the railings.’

Harper stepped to the edge of the pavement. Two of them at the middle of the bridge, talking across the roadbed like villagers chatting across a brook.

‘Fine. Touch of vertigo looking over the edge, I guess.’

‘Lausanne takes some getting used to. I came from Poland, everything’s so flat there. All these hills and bridges in Lausanne, always looking down, it’s a little like flying.’

‘Or standing in midair maybe.’

‘Yes, that too. You’re a newcomer, aren’t you?’

Harper took a long pull of smoke.

‘What did you call me?’

‘A newcomer. Those are the names we use in Lausanne. “Locals” for the people who live here, and “newcomers” for ones like …’

‘Like me.’

‘Yes, like you.’

Harper took another pull of smoke, stared at him. Leather jacket, blue jeans, trainers on his feet. Nineteen, twenty maybe.

‘I walk this bridge at night. Sometimes I see newcomers wandering near the cathedral, not quite sure where they are. They always come this way.’

‘That’s what you do, keep a sharp eye out for newcomers on the bridge?’

‘You don’t know about this place, do you?’

Harper looked both ways, not a soul in sight.

‘What’s to know, other than I’m standing on a bridge in the middle of the night?’

‘Some of the locals come here and … I thought you might be a local, someone in need of comfort. That’s what I do.’

Swell, Harper thought, spend the night looking for a drunken Russian and end up in Lausanne’s all-night cruising shop.

‘That’s terribly kind of you, mate, but maybe you could just tell me the way to Chemin de Préville.’

The young man pointed towards the old city.

‘That way.’

‘Up the hill, past the cathedral?’

‘There’s a view of Lausanne from the esplanade. You’ll see where you need to go next.’

Harper checked his watch: three thirty in the morning. He pointed to the opposite direction.

‘Actually, I think I saw a taxi stand back down—’

‘There’s not a lot of time, monsieur.’

Harper dropped his smoke on the pavement, shoved his hands in the pockets of his mackintosh.

‘Not a lot of time, right. I’ll get a move on then.’

Harper headed off the bridge.

Corner of Rue Caroline he looked back.

One midnight cruiser crossing the roadbed, carefully removing a handkerchief from his leather jacket and collecting the crushed remnants of Harper’s cigarette and tossing it in a bin. Then stepping back to the pavement marking the centre of the bridge, waiting for someone else to come along.

‘And good luck.’

five

The mobile rang and vibrated at the same time.

Harper pulled his eyes from the telly, watched the thing rumble into a half-empty bottle of vodka. The bottle went
clink
. He grabbed the phone before it did any more damage.

‘Yes?’

‘Mr Harper, Nathalie Barraud calling. The Doctor is on his way from Geneva Airport and wishes to see you in Vidy Park.’

Harper kick-started his brain. The Doctor. Doctor Johann Schwarzenberg, President of the International Olympic Committee. Liked to be called
le docteur
rather than
le président
. Nathalie Barraud, nice-looking bird who ran the Doctor’s office. Wore horn-rimmed glasses and tight skirts, spoke nine languages, never smiled. Coming from the airport? Right, overnight from Jo’burg, the African regional games.

‘What day is this?

‘Sunday and the Doctor does apologize for the inconvenience. But he’ll be receiving the King of Spain tomorrow and must see you about the lab report.’