Cat In A Topaz Tango

Alpine Do-si-do

“Tall, blonde?”

He nodded anxiously. His name was James McKlosky for the moment, according to the stolen credit card in his back jeans’ pocket.

He was on the run from the posh Swiss private clinic just up the Alps where he was registered as Michael Randolph, although he didn’t have a scrap of that identity on him. He was secretly known as Max to the older gent who’d paid to have his mangled body and mind admitted and treated there some six weeks ago.

None of this mattered because he didn’t remember a thing about himself since he’d awakened in said posh clinic. Just three days ago, he’d fled an attempted assassination with the help of his psychiatrist, his tall, blond, attractive psychiatrist, an intriguing blend of French and German genes called Revienne Schneider.

While she’d delved for his missing memory, he’d found he liked her mind and various French folderols. Too bad something in him didn’t trust the luck of the draw. They’d shared a rough road trip for three days, but he still wasn’t sure she wasn’t a planted assassin. Waking up to find her gone was maybe the gift of the morning. Too bad he didn’t buy sudden disappearances, not even his own. He would find her and then find out if she was an enemy, or just a really attractive diversion.

Right now he was pretending she was his missing wife.

“She was wearing a pink suit and boots. The boots aren’t pink,” he added. “Just black. I missed the bus and she’s probably looking for me too.”

The quaint upland Swiss town hosted scads of tourists, especially during the spring and summer when the Alps were passable, so the shopkeepers spoke excellent English. This shop had the best view of the plaza. Revienne was handsome enough that she would not escape notice unless she wanted to.

He took a deep breath as the man turned to question his staff in the slightly different German the Swiss people had developed. Scents of chocolate and pipe tobacco soothed his senses, but they weren’t succumbing to any of it.

Revienne could have dumped him, been kidnapped, or even be lurking nearby to assassinate him. Maybe he should let her disappearance this morning go, get the hell down off the mountain. The clinic security personnel, as in goons, were bound to be searching for him, for good or bad reasons.

They wouldn’t expect a fugitive with casts on his legs to be plaster-free and this mobile already. He owed that to Revienne begging a saw to hack off the casts, and his own preinjury muscle strength. Six weeks in painkiller and sedative limbo made a lot fuzzy, but he’d lost no muscle tone in his arms, thanks to shower-rod chin-ups on steel fixtures robust enough to hold up a bull.

Why, one had to wonder, was the clinic so industrially tricked out? Simple efficiency, or something more sinister? Torture?

“Sorry, sir.” The pleasantly pudgy shopkeeper offered a sheepish smile beneath a down-turned moustache. “None of the staff has seen such a woman this morning.”

“She’s probably waiting for me at the next bus stop down the mountain.” He returned the smile with a rueful grin and was already examining the square for other options before he was quite out the door.

The charming breakfast places with exterior tables under second-story window boxes spilling blossoming flowers had not seen hide nor hair of her. He spotted a huge German bus pulsing in the square, waiting to leave, and started concocting a tale that would get him on the tour without a ticket.

On a whim he stopped at a flower seller’s cart that had just set up by the central fountain. The water splashed as vivid gold, purple, and pink flowers scented the clean mountain air. He bought a bunch of fragrant yellow freesias, thinking even as he did that they’d suit a brunette or a redhead more than a blonde. He wondered if he was buying for a woman he’d forgotten, like everything else he’d forgotten since the accident that had brought him here so far so fast from the United States.

Garry, the stranger who called himself his old friend, had said that was the place they called home. The United States. Too bad the guy hadn’t left any information on where to reach him in Switzerland.

“For your sweetheart?” the woman asked.

She was an old-country grandmother in an embroidered vest she’d probably stitched herself, dirndl skirt, and peasant blouse. “Sweetheart” was a word out of an operetta, as she was.

He smiled, and poured on the charm he suspected he’d lived off for years. “You might have seen her. You have clever, bright eyes. How could you miss her? Tall, blond, in a chic suit. French.”

“Ach, yes. The Frenchwoman never sheds her style. She was with you?” She eyed his new-bought jeans and hiking boots.

His heart had almost stopped to stumble across a lead.

“Can’t get her away from the big-time banking position long enough to relax, not even in the mountains,” he complained amiably.

She nodded, handing over the simple bouquet in exchange for some coins. He felt awkward as a schoolboy standing there, just holding it. Must not be a hearts and flowers kind of guy.

She smiled at him. “A bank job? No wonder I saw her in the back of that big black Mercedes. I’m sorry, lad, but these flowers come too late. Her driver took her down the mountain when I was coming into the square.”

“How long ago?”

“Ten on your watch.”

He eyed the cheap tourist model. “How big a Mercedes?”

“A Mercedes 280 SEL.”

His surprise at her knowing the model, more than he dared hope for, must have showed.

She smiled and nodded again. “I know that because it was the car Princess Diana was killed in, God rest her soul.”

Max frowned, trying to remember Princess Diana as dead. Trying to remember a Princess Diana for a few moments.

The crisp mountain morning air he inhaled froze in his chest. He remembered now.

The chase in Paris, the crash in the underpass. The car. Big, powerful, engineered and customized from the factory, the kind of car driven to ferry the rich, the important, the nefarious. A Mercedes 280 SEL.

This stuff he knew without hesitation.

Not just a Mercedes.

Not just a big black Mercedes.

An armored model built for security purposes, for whisking blond young women away from it all, perhaps to their deaths.

Was Revienne a prisoner, or a lovely lure drawing him farther afield into another booby trap like the one that had broken his legs and clouded his memory?

Only way to know that was to find her.

And Garry, the old man who’d mentored Max and now looked after his semi-self, Garry must know he’d gone missing by now and be worried.

“You didn’t glimpse the license plate?” Max asked.

Her crepe-shuttered eyelids fluttered with surprise.

He said quickly, “I don’t know if she’s been sent for by the Swiss or the Italian branch of her bank.”

“ZH, Zurich, of course. Six, twelve, five-six. My eldest son was born November 6 in 1956.”

Confused, he thought: 6/12/56 was June. Wait. No. Europeans put the month before the day: 12/6/56. Her son had been born on that date and year, but in the previous month.

“The Milan branch, then,” he said. “The Italians are always unreliable when it comes to money and train schedules, unlike the Swiss.”

She nodded, smiling at the compliment.

Max checked his cheap watch again, made not in Switzerland, but—where else?—China. He actually used his wooden cane to propel him faster toward the big bus throbbing in idle before leaving.

The doors whooshed open. He looked up the narrow steep stairs into the cornflower blue eyes of the young brunet driver.

And held out the deceptively purchased bouquet. “Gruezi, fräulein. For you.”

She took in the flowers, his cane, his face. A tourist bus driver would know English.

“I have a bit of an embarrassing problem—”

She smiled and reached for the bouquet.

Not anymore he didn’t.