Going for the Gold Read online

“They’ve started to work down the list of commercial depositors,” Thatcher relayed. “Most motel owners and restaurateurs don’t even remember what was on their deposit slips.”

  “For God’s sake!” Hathaway exclaimed. “How have they managed to tackle my list? Half those places are still inaccessible.”

  Thatcher shook his head reprovingly. “Don’t be misled by the Olympic atmosphere, Hathaway. I know that yesterday began with your opening the branches on skis, and it ended with Everett’s breaking through to Lake Placid on a snowmobile, but Milliken’s bunch seems to manage quite well with standard operating procedures. At any rate, I told him we’d stop by to look at their haul.”

  As they filed through the lobby, Thatcher let his companions go ahead and halted by the switchboard. Meticulously informing the girl of their destination, he learned the reason for her harassed expression.

  “Oh, Mr. Thatcher,” she said, duly making a note, “you wouldn’t know where Mr. Withers is, would you? I have the IOC on the line and they can’t locate him.”

  By rights, Brad should have been laid up with the granddaddy of all hangovers. But his powers of recuperation had caused trouble more than once in the past.

  “Tell them to try the skating arena,” Thatcher advised.

  On the sidewalk he found Gabler and Hathaway watching a burst of activity across the street. Men were leaping into cars and gunning down the road, a crew was manhandling long ladders over a snowbank and into the back of a truck, dignitaries from Town Hall were emerging onto the freshly shoveled steps and delivering last-minute instructions.

  “Something’s up,” Hathaway observed.

  “I daresay there’s a good deal of activity involved in reopening this community,” Gabler rejoined. “But whatever is going on, we can safely assume it has nothing to do with our counterfeit Eurochecks.”

  He was out by a country mile.

  Chapter 15

  Upper Level Disturbance

  ALL those men and trucks were heading for Whiteface Mountain, where the drama being played out was of more importance to the Sloan Guaranty Trust than any of the principal characters imagined. Ironically, in view of the events scheduled for that location, attention was centered on a stationary object. The aerial tramway had been halted and two cable cars, neatly balancing each other, swayed in the breeze far from their supporting pylons. The down car was empty.

  Inside the other gondola, forcibly marooned, Anthony Melville and several companions dangled high above the precipitous slope.

  Newcomers to the scene, when they heard that the Swiss team had hijacked the tramway, could scarcely believe their ears. How, they demanded, could such a thing have happened?

  The explanation was simple enough. Melville, relaxing in the genial atmosphere of the disco the previous evening, had been too loose-tongued. As soon as he received word from the Olympic maintenance people, he said, he intended to ascend Whiteface and personally inspect the progress of trail grooming.

  It therefore seemed only natural to him when his lunch ended with a telephone call purporting to come from a grounds supervisor. He had immediately collected his assistants and trundled out to the base station. There, all unsuspecting, the party had entered the cable car waiting for them. Melville had never noticed that the attendants were a trifle more ceremonious than usual, a trifle less chatty.

  He had noticed plenty, however, when the tramway came to a stop and the radio in the corner began barking.

  “Mr. Melville, this is Bernard Heise of the Swiss team speaking. We have seized control of the funicular system in order to discuss the case of Mathilde Lowengard.”

  The accents were familiar. Dimly Melville remembered that voice from a troublesome encounter in his box at the skating arena.

  “Young man,” he said promptly, “I have nothing to say to you.”

  This pronouncement, splendidly boomed, was wasted. An aide slithered across the pitching floor to deliver a short lecture on the use of the R/T radio.

  “You have to punch this button to talk, Mr. Melville, and then you say it into the microphone. When you’re done, you hit this button to hear the answer.”

  Melville, never at his best with machinery, muffed the first attempt. It was now too late to recapture his initial fervor.

  “I have nothing to say to you, young man,” he repeated dully.

  “That is entirely satisfactory,” replied Bernard. “It is what I have to say that is important.”

  Bernard was highly selective in what he chose to tell his captives about their current predicament. Swiss units, he reported, were firmly barricaded inside the funicular control buildings at both the top and bottom of the cable. The IOC office had been notified of Melville’s situation and was sending representatives.

  Bernard did not pass on several other details. The Swiss team manager, a possible pressure point, had been warned after the fact and, wisely, had simply strapped on his skis and taken himself beyond human contact. The authorities converging on the Whiteface parking lot were being assured that delicate negotiations between Melville and Bernard were already in progress. This announcement effectively diminished the possibility of anyone summoning assault troops.

  For the IOC members pounding on the unresponsive door of the base station, there were only limited avenues for discharging their pent-up frustration. First and foremost was the loosing of pithy comments at the Swiss reception committee.

  “A disgraceful and dangerous perversion of peace-loving pursuits,” hissed a Japanese.

  “This is never-to-be-sufficiently-condemned hooliganism,” thundered a German, reverting to his native rhythms.

  A Czechoslovakian had a whole political vocabulary at hand. “Counterproductive and antisocial nihilism,” he said.

  But it was the Swiss delegate who was suffering the most, as the IOC switchboard forwarded its results. The U.S. member was nowhere to be found, the U.S.S.R. member had disappeared from the face of the earth, the French member had last been seen setting forth, on foot, in search of a lawyer for François Vaux. With just a modicum of luck he, too, could have been among the absent and not faced with these conflicting claims on his loyalty. His appeal to his co-nationals had been loudly hooted down.

  “Where was this famous solidarity,” demanded Egon, “when you let them disqualify Tilly Lowengard?”

  The name was on every lip. In one brief hour she had been enshrined in the same pantheon as Alfred Dreyfus and the Scottsboro boys. On high, Bernard Heise was instructing Anthony Melville about the modern drug culture with an abundance of biting references to Tilly’s plight. Below, the gathering mob of athletes, journalists, and functionaries reminded itself of what was known about her case. Everyone was talking about her, but where was she? Recognizing an inspiration when it crossed his path, the Swiss member hurled himself at a phone.

  And just about the same time as Anthony Melville was experiencing his first qualms of doubt, a jeep deposited Tilly and Dick Noyes at the hub of the controversy. They reacted differently to the sight before them.

  Dick took one look at the immobilized cable car and doubled up with laughter. “It’s beautiful,” he gurgled, “just beautiful.”

  Tilly, on the other hand, was dismayed. “Oh God,” she wailed, “now they’ll blame me for this.”

  Desperately she scanned the crowd until she spotted the familiar faces of two of her disco companions. Pushing her way forward, she clutched imperatively at a sleeve.

  “Egon, this is madness. I know you’re doing it for me, but you’ve got to stop. It’s dangerous and someone could be—”

  “Nonsense, Tilly. You have forgotten how many of us have worked on the funiculars back home. We are perfectly familiar with the mechanism.”

  “That’s not the point,” she snapped at him. “Those are elderly men up there. Anything could happen.”

  The Swiss delegate was congratulating himself on his acumen, but not for long.

  Egon folded his arms, elevated his chin, and transformed himsel
f, if only he knew, into a living replica of Anthony Melville at his most unyielding. “Once and for all, Tilly, you have to recognize that this is bigger than you. This is a matter of principle.”

  Tilly, too young to realize that these deadly words signaled a posture beyond the reach of persuasion or reason, continued to belabor him with objections. “What about exposure? What if one of them has a heart attack? What if one of them needs pills?”

  “All of that has been taken into consideration,” Egon rejoined loftily. “There is radio contact in case of a medical emergency. And they are not going to stay up there all night. A settlement will be concluded long before that.”

  Dick Noyes had stifled his hilarity in deference to Tilly’s feelings. Now he threw a consoling arm around her shoulders. “Come on, Tilly, you’re working yourself up for no good reason,” he urged. “You can count on these guys to do the right thing. Nobody’s going to get hurt.”

  His reassurances were having some effect until Gunther Euler, who had been gleefully circling the base station, flitting from one knot to another, picking up a crumb here and a crumb there, decided to enter the dispute.

  “It won’t do them any harm to freeze their butts for a couple of hours. Let them see how it feels to be at the mercy of someone else’s whims.”

  In two sentences he managed to offend all three of them.

  “We are not operating out of caprice.” Egon was stiff as a ramrod. “We are protesting a cover-up. The IOC is deliberately shirking an investigation into how Tilly was really drugged.”

  Dick Noyes had put behind his initial reaction to Melville’s plight. “This isn’t fun and games, you know,” he said hotly. “Tilly’s being railroaded so they can brush the whole mess under the rug, and her reputation is at stake. The public doesn’t know what really happened.”

  As for Tilly herself, she was glaring at the others impartially. “Men!” she raged. “Behaving like little children! Don’t any of you have any sense?”

  She would have been gratified to know that the two who qualified were the ones actually conducting the negotiations.

  Years on the bench had honed Anthony Melville’s ability to assess evidence. After being forced to listen to Bernard’s exposition, he was profoundly shaken in his assumption of Tilly’s guilt. But, in addition to being possessed of an analytic mind, he was also stiff-necked, arrogant, and proud of his reputation for toughness. He would willingly subject himself, and his unfortunate companions, to hours of discomfort and real hardship in order to demonstrate his superiority to coercion. It was unthinkable that he should yield to a band of ruffians. It was equally unthinkable that he should connive at trumped-up charges. Stuck on the horns of his dilemma, Anthony Melville badly needed a cogent reason to retreat.

  Bernard Heise was intelligent enough to supply one.

  As soon as Bernard was convinced that he was making headway on their substantive dispute, he shifted to matters of procedure. “You must understand that we cannot allow this situation to protract itself without offering some public explanation of our conduct,” he said soberly. “Of course, the ideal solution would be a statement originating from you. But rather than leave the spectators below in doubt as to what is going on, one of our team, Egon Uhlrich, has prepared an interim release. I would like to read it to you.”

  As Melville’s transmitter necessarily remained off during the next few minutes, Bernard could not hear the mounting crescendo of dissatisfaction greeting his carefully composed sentences. Nonetheless the young Swiss had a fairly good notion of how his words were being received.

  “Uhlrich,” he said at the end of the reading, “is a law student.”

  “I might have guessed,” Melville retorted.

  Egon had produced a small masterpiece. Under cover of the stately impersonal language of a government document, he had gone from a biased account of Tilly’s experience to an even more prejudiced recital of the IOC response. But the real damage was in the final paragraph, which left the reader in no doubt as to the motive for this outrageous conduct. Tilly had been drugged by a competitor, and the IOC, more concerned with its public image than with the claims of simple justice, had found it more expedient to brand her a miscreant than to institute a search for the real culprit.

  Melville, reduced to gnawing his underlip to a pulp, saw the alternatives clearly. He could stand pat and the Swiss would release this pernicious document. Or he could yield and gain the privilege of describing the confrontation in his own words. Seen in this fight, it was no contest.

  Bernard was interrupted in mid-flight by the light from Melville’s transmitter winking on and off.

  “Stop distracting me,” the great man ordered. “I’m drafting!”

  He was quicker at it than Egon. Within minutes he was reading the finished product to his captor. It was, naturally enough, redolent of the language of the trial courtroom. The world was going to learn that an appeal for a new hearing had been successful. The defense attorneys had brought to the attention of the bench freshly uncovered evidence, the consideration of which merited de novo proceedings. If, in the opinion of the court, these raised a reasonable doubt as to the defendant’s guilt, then she would be exonerated and her expulsion from the Olympics rescinded.

  “And Tilly gets another run when the slalom continues,” Bernard added firmly when Melville concluded.

  “Oh, very well. Now see that this release gets to the press and burn the other one!”

  It was at this point that the limited communication links, thus far so useful to the Swiss cause, began to play merry hell. Melville could talk to Bernard, Bernard could talk to the base station, the base station could talk to the IOC members clustered at its door. When the operator below typed out the release and handed it over to the IOC, it drew a mixed response.

  “Thank God,” said the German.

  “Now we can all go home,” said the Japanese, who was cold.

  “I will give it to the press,” the Czech offered, stretching out his hand.

  But Herr Buber, of Austria, shook his head. He continued to frown at the capitulation. “How do we know this comes from Herr Melville?” he objected. “He may not even know about it. We must insist on speaking with him.”

  There followed a confused babble of suggestion and countersuggestion that soon overflowed onto the airwaves. When Herr Buber grasped the fact that the only radio speaking directly to Melville was on top of Whiteface, he issued a call for expeditionary volunteers.

  “It is only a matter of taking the funicular,” he reasoned.

  More explanations, this time on the counterbalanced nature of aerial tramways. When one car goes up, the other must come down.

  “Then we will walk!”

  The situation was deteriorating overhead as well. A powerful breeze had developed which, starting with playful buffets, was now imparting to the gondolas a strong, steady oscillation. Already one of the travelers was experiencing the onset of motion sickness.

  “What’s holding things up?” Melville demanded.

  “It’s one of your people. He wants to walk up the mountain.”

  “That’s Buber. Pay no attention to him. We never do.”

  For the first time, Bernard was at a loss. “But there’s no way we can convince him that you authorized that communique.”

  “Oh, yes there is! Tell him to look up at the cable car.” Melville was stripping a long white scarf from his neck and summoning the aide who was still on his feet. “Here! Flap this out the other window.”

  He had been galvanized by a sight far below. Perched in his aerie, he could see a long way down the road snaking back to Lake Placid. Coming hell-bent toward Whiteface was an unmistakable television truck. Nobody knew better than Melville that the network was desperately trying to fill the time originally scheduled for outdoor events. Their trucks were scouring every inch of plowed road for human interest material. Indeed, they had just passed an exhilarating half-hour with the Grenoblois at the Northland Motel. There, memories
of check forgery and blizzard conditions had been obliterated by horror at the food provided. The cable car dangling in the breeze was made to order for television.

  Within moments, an alert IOC scout at sea level had also spotted the peril. He raced inside to warn his superiors.

  The Czech ripped off a guttural oath. “We had better stop wasting time. Melville has indicated his surrender to us.”

  “How do we know that was Melville?” Buber asked cunningly. “I say that we should demand assurances—”

  The Japanese and the Czech tried to reason with him. The German, recognizing the futility of that course, simply acted. Reaching over when his quarry’s attention was distracted, he plucked the release from unwary fingers.

  “I will read this to the press,” he announced, striding toward the door.

  Thereafter Whiteface Mountain, at every altitude, rang with imprecations, commands, and entreaties.

  “Get this damned thing down,” Melville barked.

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen! If you will stop firing questions, I have here a statement from the acting head of the International Olympic Committee.”

  “I still say we should go to the top.”

  “Start those cameras rolling!” a newsman pleaded. “They’re going to move the cable cars.”

  Victory, such as it was, went to Melville and Bernard. The TV cameras captured nothing more exciting than a tramway proceeding at normal speed. And the news item accompanying this footage merely announced that the IOC was reopening the suspension of Tilly Lowengard.

  But a lot of people were able to read between the lines.

  At the Andiron Inn they did not even have this raw material to work on. Thatcher, together with Gabler and Hathaway, had been met at the door by Wesley Milliken, who proudly showed them around his operation.

  In the billiard room, where two men in shirtsleeves had transformed the table into a command post with annotated index cards arriving at one end and complicated charts emerging from the other, Milliken grinned at Hathaway.

  “I’ll bet you don’t recognize the place. My boys have taken over the dining room and the kitchen, too.”