Sanguineus woke in his own room at 4am, on the 21st.
He had brought Tertia to the last of her three orgasms, in which he had at last joined, just after midnight in the powder blue room with the white drapes.
His first wakeful thought was the memory of her hands on his throat when she finally managed to straddle him.
He blamed himself for that, a misguided moment of tenderness, the source of which still puzzled him. He had flexed his neck muscles to counter the stiff pressure of her fingers, a force augmented by her upper body weight. He hesitated to throw her off, seeing in her eyes and in the quivering of her firm breasts the onset of that first orgasm. But his breath was severely restricted. She had trembled all over and moaned like a lost soul just as he was preparing to toss her.
It had been a close thing. While she lay sprawled over his legs in subsiding convulsions of euphoria, he was filling his lungs with air scented by the jasmine candle she had bought in the Dubendorf lagerhaus where they got the Cabernet.
He sat up, touching gingerly the deep scratches on his right forearm that had left red streaks over his tattooes. He smiled at the memory of Tertia's fierce straining to bite his shoulder. He had held her off with a fistful of her hair. But... that moment of tenderness... He shrugged and leaned over toward the nightstand.
The small portable alarm mechanism, which he had wired to the door and the two windows before getting in bed, blinked its blue light. This meant that the objects in question had not been disturbed. Had they been, the light would have shown red.
He switched on the lamp, got out of bed, stretched for a minute, and took a long shower, gradually adjusting the water temperature from warm to very cold.
At 4:45am, dressed in jeans and a grey thermal undershirt, Sanguineus sat at the table with cinnamon toast and coffee. On his Nordic cell phone was a notification concerning the social media site that Red Rum used for communications.
It had been decided, after a thorough study of the subject, that the most secure mode of messaging was wide open public posts on a heavily used site. The reasoning was simple. When you see a door marked 'private,' you feel a desire to open it, to see what goes on behind it. It is the nature of a door to allow access to a particular area. This remains true no matter how many locks and bars and bolts are employed to the contrary. Doors are meant to be opened, in one piece or otherwise. Privacy is an invitation to peek. Nothing is failsafe that has for its nature the meeting of imperfect human minds. Anything hidden can be found. The one thing that can not be uncovered is a thing that was not covered in the first place. The only code that can not be broken is the one that says exactly what it means to convey. There is nothing in the text that is invisible to the reader.
Sanguineus tapped the notification, lit a Sultan, took a sip of coffee, and read the title of the post by Madelaine Woolf. 'A Brief Analysis of Custer's Last Stand.'
"What the fuck," he said aloud, sitting up.
He read the analysis of the famous historical event twice, and there was no doubt about the meaning of it for him. It had been spelled out quite clearly. He was surrounded. He was outgunned. If he proceeded with his assignment in the manner that he originally intended, his fate was sealed. This was the opinion of Madelaine, who would have assessed every scrap of information that her surveillance and contacts provided before coming to her conclusion.
Sanguineus ate his toast. He weighed the odds and was not reassured. The enemy was there in force, but in what quantity "not even the most learned historian can with confidence say. Most estimates put the number of hostiles at roughly three thousand." This meant three hitmen, since a second digit tallied thirty, which would be a ridiculous overkill.
At 5:30am Sanguineus dressed, armed himself discreetly, and went downstairs to the restaurant for a more satisfying breakfast. Aside from two middle-aged couples and three ski instructors, the dining area was deserted.
Outside the wind was bitingly cold. The grounds around the main lodge were lit brightly, except for the black impenetrable shadows of the firs and the high structures which caught the soft flurry of snow that fell as Sanguineus walked to the staff lodgings.
These were two A-frame buildings facing each other across a private skating rink. He went into Building A. It was labelled 'Staff Only' in German, English, and French.
An old and sleepy concierge at a desk near the entrance yawned at him, her white brows raised inquiringly.
"I was asked by Miss Dolina Galsworthy to meet with her at six-thirty this morning," Sanguineus said, prepared to repeat the speech in pidgin German. It was not necessary. The concierge smiled knowingly. He continued. "Would you be so kind as to call her up and inform her that I have arrived?"
"Dolina called down a few minutes ago, Mr Ricklen Cruor... is it?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"You are to go straight up." Just to practice her English, she said haltingly: "Are you enjoying your visit to Sonnenhut? We are the most popular ski resort in all of Europe, you understand."
"Very much," he replied, giving her a gentlemanly nod.
She opened her mouth to say more, but he did not linger. He went briskly up the modern steel-and-plank staircase to the apartment level.
The bartendress, Dolina, let him in on the second knock. She said, "A wee minute, please," and went into the bedroom. He heard a small boy's drowsy voice.
It was a spartanly furnished living room with a kitchenette on one side. The prominent feature was an entertainment center with a large plasma screen, a bookshelf above it. The coffee table in front of a short couch had a number of magazines strewn over it, a closed laptop, and a vase of dried alpine wildflowers.
The room was warm and full of potent smells that made Sanguineus think of a neighbor woman when he was a child living with an alcoholic uncle in Los Angeles. The neighbor was an artist who used cooked food as her medium, spraying the finished work with a type of lacquer. He was remembering the night he ran to her house when his uncle was having an especially violent fit, throwing empty wine bottles against the wall.
When Dolina came back whispering something, he suddenly understood the source of that moment of tenderness. The neighbor woman's daughter had wrestled with him when she, the mother, went to talk to his uncle. Something about Tertia had reminded him of the daughter, of a form of affection expressed in vigorous terms. He smiled at himself. That was all there was to it, he thought.
"What do you want to know?" asked Dolina. She was cinching tight her dressing gown of a pale maroon color. "You mentioned last night about... solitary male guests."
"First, thank you for Miss Montoya's room number. It would've been risky for her to tell me herself. We are undercover here, and her male acquaintance is not to be trusted, or taken lightly. Here--"
He gave Dolina a debit card. It was for expenses. "I wrote the pin number on the back. There's five hundred dollars on it. Keep it. It's yours. I need to know the names and room numbers of any male guests between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-five who have single occupancy. I think there are three such persons who have registered here over the past twenty-four hours. I need the information as soon as possible."
Dolina fanned the card across her knuckles, smiling at him, her cute pixie face beaming with the joy of intrigue. "You're an American? You and the young lady? My father was born in Tennessee. I have spent a wee time in the South."
"Yes. We're with an international private investigation group headquartered in America. What brings you to Switzerland? You're Scottish, aren't you?"
"I'll be working for the BBC beginning this spring. I thought it would be fun to bartender here for the season. Well, I can find out what you want to know within the hour. The assistant manager is--"
"Please, if you can do this on your own, I would much prefer it."
"Oh! I should've known. It's hush hush! Yes, of course. I can get the registration records myself. But that will take a wee bit longer."
"By noon, perchance?"
"Should, yes. Have you had breakfast? Oh, I have some creme de menth coffee I haven't tried yet! Would you like a cup?"
"That would be very kind," Sanguineus said, taking out his phone. "I must make a call to Zurich. I'll step out for a minute."
Dolina smiled at him over her shoulder as she went into the kitchenette.
Out in the corridor Sanguineus tapped Fredrico Rolgo's icon. There was a series of fabricated glitches in the voice mail, but when Sanguineus said, "One dash zero one," Rolgo answered.
"How's the sales convention going?" Rolgo asked.
"Are you still at the university in Zurich?"
"For another week. Do you need me to come up? Our sales analyst thought you might want a foot up."
"Three reps from our competitor are here, which might force a change in our sales strategy. Yes, come up. When can I expect you?"
"By mid afternoon, I should say. Did you get that shipment of ice?"
"I've got the ice put away," Sanguineus replied tersely. "And the repair man will be leaving Gipfelhaus today or tonight, with an escort, to Marseilles. And by the way, the saleswoman I worked with in upstate New York last year, the redhead, she's here and has been socializing with the escort, one of our competitor's men. You know anything about that? She's agreed to assist me. Says she doesn't know our client, but I have my doubts about that. Our analyst only confirmed that the saleswoman was in Switzerland, but not on assignment."
There was a pause. Then: "Hmm. I'll look into it. I wasn't aware she was in our neck of the woods. Let me get a quick bite to eat and I'll be on my way up. Take care."
Tertia dressed in her olive green ski clothes, and carrying her down jacket and woolen sockcap she went down to the restaurant at precisely 7:30am, to meet Sanguineus.
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