Poor Owen. He’d looked so tired when she’d left him. Not shocked or furious or desperate — just exhausted. It had been a moment she had been dreading for months now; for she knew — as he had known — that the relationship could not last. Yet when it had come, in that crowded bar at the Vereina, he had accepted it so mildly; all she could think of now was his poor tired face as he helped her out with her bags at the door of the Chesa.
She realized, with dismay, that she missed him.
She was bored — bored with this babbling gaggle round her; and for all his faults — his moodiness and social ill grace and sexual demands, Owen Packer had never exactly bored her. And as her mind became more fuzzy with champagne, she remembered a remark he had once made about her set of friends: ‘I don’t think much of their small talk, but I don’t think much of their big talk either.’
Tonight the small talk had been pathetic, terrible. There had been a lot of chatter about the avalanche, but mostly about the inconvenience it had caused; then the ski talk — endless, boasting, competitive ski talk, broken occasionally by the mention of an engagement back in England, the suspected break-up of a marriage, an impending bankruptcy, parties given or about to be given in Dorset and Scotland and Knightsbridge and Mayfair and Marbella and Cannes. Then back to the avalanche.
But not one mention of His Serene Imperial Highness, the Ruler of the Emerald Throne of the Hama’anah, and what had happened to him.
She was now sitting upstairs in the Gothic gloom of the main hall of the Grand Hotel. The walls, with their pitch-pine panelling and dark drapes, kept starting to revolve round her. She held herself very straight at the end of a leather sofa, with a glass of Cointreau perched on her knee. At a comfortable distance sat her host, Mr Shiva Steiner.
He was a broad, well-proportioned man with dove-grey hair, small shrewd eyes, and pronounced Semitic features — although DJ had made a point of claiming that he was not Jewish. He had apparently built his fortune in South Africa, before moving to London where he had cashed in on the Australian nickel boom in the sixties, and was today a powerful figure in the oil world. Above all, Mr Shiva Steiner was eminently relaxed. He had been talking in a cosmopolitan voice which Sarah found pleasant and reassuring, while not actually listening to what he was saying.
It was after three o’clock; apart from a tired-looking huissier, they were the only people left in the hall. From under the floor came the boom of the King Club, like an underground train.
Mr Shiva Steiner was saying, ‘In point of fact, I still have a couple of seats to fill on the plane. And, if you permit me to say so, you would be more than a mere passenger — you would be a positive adornment to our party.’
She smiled back at him, still only half taking in what he had said, and sipped her Cointreau.
Steiner went on, ‘And if you will forgive a slight immodesty, I assure you that my house is most comfortable. On one side lie the mountains, on the other the blue waters of the Gulf.’
She said sleepily, ‘But won’t things have changed? I mean, after today?’
‘Today?’ His eyebrows tilted. ‘What is so important about today?’
‘But the Ruler —?’ Sarah’s lips parted and she stared dumbly at him.
‘Yes — what about the Ruler?’
‘He’s dead — isn’t he?’ she replied, in a small flat voice.
‘Dead? My dear mademoiselle —’ he gave a light laugh — ‘I sincerely hope not! It is a most inconvenient hour for me to have to start telephoning my financial colleagues. But wherever did you get such an idea?’
She sat very still. The walls were no longer revolving, and the vulpine features at the end of the sofa came into sharp focus. ‘I heard —’ she began, but Shiva Steiner lifted a jewelled finger and motioned unobtrusively to the huissier at the end of the hall.
‘You heard?’ he said gently.
‘I heard it in Klosters this afternoon. In the hotel. There were a lot of people talking and there was a German — I think he was a German — and he was telling everyone that there had been shooting on the mountain just before the avalanche —’ the words had begun to flow even faster than she could think — ‘he said someone had shot the Ruler, and that it was the shot that had set off the avalanche.’
Steiner glanced up at the huissier, then pointed at Sarah’s glass. ‘And did he say the Ruler had been killed?’
‘I think — maybe —’ she blinked at the pair of bright little eyes watching her along the sofa — ‘maybe he said it, or someone else did.’ She tried to smile. ‘So it isn’t true?’ she added.
‘Well, it certainly wasn’t true at six o’clock this evening.’
‘You mean, there was nothing on the news?’
‘I did not hear the news,’ said Steiner; ‘but I did speak to His Imperial Highness.’
She found herself repeating his words: ‘You spoke to His Imperial Highness.’ Her eyes were open wide, her mouth felt dry.
Steiner gave her a lubricious smile. ‘I speak to His Highness almost every evening at six — if not on the telephone, I visit him at his chalet.’ His hands spread out in a deprecating gesture. ‘My dear young lady, my business interests do not only involve money — for what is money but scraps of printed paper? I deal in something more substantial — oil. That is why I can afford to be generous — to fly my friends in a private jet to Mamounia so
