Trojan Gold - Elizabeth Peters [43]
“Where does the friend live?” I asked, hoping it was someplace like Paris or Lhasa, and that I could talk Schmidt into catching the first plane.
“Not far from here. I can tell you….”
He rattled off directions, adding helpfully, “It is only several miles from the town.”
“I know it, I know it,” Schmidt cried. “Thank you, my friend—vielen Dank.”
Freddy went running back to the hotel and Schmidt unlocked the Mercedes. “You are following me,” he insisted, forgetting his grammar in his excitement. “I the way am knowing.”
“Wait a minute, Schmidt—”
It was too late. He almost ran over my foot.
I got in my car and took off after the old lunatic, cursing aloud. If I had been on my own, I would have deliberated long and hard about pursuing that oh-so-convenient lead. I probably would have ended up pursuing it, if only for the sake of the chest, which I remembered well. It was a beauty. But I seriously doubted that it contained the gold of Troy.
The first few miles weren’t bad going. Then Schmidt, who drove with an assurance that suggested he really did know where he was going, turned abruptly into a side road that plunged steeply up the mountainside. After a while I shifted into four-wheel drive. I’d have signaled him to stop if there had been anyplace to turn around, which there wasn’t. Snowplows had carved out a single narrow lane; banks of glistening white rose high on both sides. I prayed he wouldn’t meet a car coming down. Occasionally a sidetrack would wind off through clustered pines or up rocky banks toward an isolated dwelling. Otherwise there was no sign of human life.
I wasn’t happy about the situation, but I didn’t start to get really worried until after we had gone fifteen kilometers. The road had twisted and curved so often I had lost my sense of direction, but as it turned out, we weren’t more than a mile from the town. I found out in the most direct possible fashion; rounding a sudden curve, I saw the damned place down below—straight down. The plows hadn’t had any problem disposing of the snow in this spot; they had just pushed it off the edge of the cliff.
I leaned on the horn. Schmidt responded with a cheerful beepity-beep, and the Mercedes disappeared around another steep curve, its rear end wriggling like a belly dancer’s navel. We went around a few more bends, with Bad Steinbach flashing in and out of sight down below; finally, to my relief, the road leveled out. It was then that the thing I had feared finally happened. Suddenly the Mercedes swerved, bounced off a snowbank, and headed straight for the opposite side. There was no snowbank on the side. The drop wasn’t sheer—not after the first twenty or thirty feet.
I started pumping my brakes. Luckily the process had become automatic, because every ounce of my concentration was focused on the wildly weaving vehicle ahead. Schmidt was fighting the skid, but he was losing. There was something wrong with the Mercedes, it wasn’t a simple skid…. At the last possible second, he managed to sideswipe a tree. If he hadn’t done so, he’d have gone over the edge.
I was out of my car before the echoes of the crash had died, running frantically toward the wreck. The Mercedes was skewed sideways; the front wheels were off the ground, still spinning.
Schmidt was slumped over the wheel, his poor pathetic bald head shining in the sunlight. Of course he wasn’t wearing his seat belt; he never did, the damned fool…. I wrenched the door open and reached for him.
The bullet spanged off the rear fender with a sound like a cymbal. The echoes rattled so furiously that I thought it was a semiautomatic. Before they died, another shot sent them flying again. Missed me by a mile…but there were a lot of potential targets. My tires, me, Schmidt, the gas tank…As I tugged frantically at Schmidt’s dead weight, I could have sworn I heard a gentle trickle of liquid.