Heaven Has No Favorites: A Novel Read Free

“How do you know?”
    “We go over there now and then when we play hooky from here.”
    “Play hooky?”
    “Yes, at night every so often, when we want to feel like normal people. It’s against the rules, but when the blues get you, it’s better than holding a hopeless discussion with God on why you’re sick.” Hollmann took a flask from his breast pocket and poured a shot into his glass. “Gin,” he said. “It helps, too.”
    “Aren’t you allowed to drink?” Clerfayt asked.
    “It isn’t absolutely forbidden, but it’s simpler this way.” Hollmann thrust the flask back into his pocket. “We get to be pretty childish up here.”
    A sleigh stopped in front of the door. Clerfayt saw that it was the one he had met on the road. The man in the black fur cap got out.
    “Do you know who that is?” Clerfayt asked.
    “The woman?”
    “No, the man.”
    “A Russian. His name is Boris Volkov.”
    “White Russian?”
    “Yes. But just to vary things, not a former grand duke, and not poor. I gather that his father opened a bank account in London at the right time and was in Moscow at the wrong time. He was shot. The wife and son got out. The story goes that the wife carried emeralds the size of walnuts sewed into her corset. In 1917 women still wore corsets.”
    Clerfayt laughed. “You’re a regular detective agency. How do you know all that?”
    “Up here you soon know everything about everyone,” Hollmann replied with a trace of bitterness. “In two weeks the skiers leave, and this village goes back to being a gossip society for the rest of the year.”
    A group of short people pressed by behind them. They were dressed in black and were talking animatedly in Spanish.
    “For a small village, you seem to have a pretty international set here,” Clerfayt said.
    “That we have. Death hasn’t got around to being chauvinistic yet.”
    “I’m no longer so sure of that.” Clerfayt looked around toward the door. “Is that the Russian’s wife?”
    Hollmann glanced around. “No.”
    The Russian and the woman came in. “Don’t tell me those two are also sick,” Clerfayt said.
    “But they are. They don’t look it, do they?”
    “No.”
    “It’s this way. For a while, the patients look as though they’re brimming over with life. Then that stops; but by then they’re no longer running around.”
    The Russian and the woman lingered near the door. The man was saying something insistently to the woman. She listened, then shook her head vehemently and walked swiftly toward the back of the lobby. The man waited a moment, watching her; then he went outside and climbed into the sleigh.
    “They seem to be quarreling,” Clerfayt said, not without satisfaction.
    “That sort of thing is always happening. After a while everyone here goes a little off his rocker. Prison-camp psychosis. Proportions shift; trivialities become important and important things secondary.”
    Clerfayt scrutinized Hollmann. “Does that happen to you, too?”
    “To me, too. It’s this business of forever staring at one point. No one can endure it.”
    “Do the two of them live in the sanatorium?”
    “The woman does; the man lives out.”
    Clerfayt stood up. “I’ll drive over to the hotel now. Where can we have dinner together?”
    “Right here. The place has a dining room where guests can come.”
    “Good. When?”
    “Around seven. I must go to bed at nine. Like school.”
    “Like the army,” Clerfayt said. “Or before a race. Remember how our manager in Milan used to come and shoo us up the stairs of the hotel like chickens?”
    Hollmann’s face brightened. “Gabrielli? Is he still around?”
    “Of course. What would happen to him? Managers die in bed—like generals.”
    The woman who had entered with the Russian came back. At the door she was stopped by a gray-haired matron who seemed to be reprimanding her. Without replying, she turned around. Indecisively, she stood still—then she caught sight of Hollmann and came