“If I go,” I said, “I’ll need two of those Amex cards. In two different names. The other one is Victor Vasquez.”

CHAPTER FORTY

TRIBUTE, OF SORTS

TRAVEL / Spring skiing: Bloodied but unbowed on a knife-edge in the sky.

DOUG SAGER, THE INDEPENDENT, March 21, 1993

I OFFER AN OBSCURE METAPHOR. It’s from Doug Sager.

Doug taught me to ski off-piste and in the backcountry. Once, using his own word, he’d been a “real” journalist, in Egypt for CBS, when Sadat signed the peace deal with Begin. Then, somehow, he never said why, he’d wandered off to Verbier, Switzerland, and became a ski journalist. He skied all the most dramatic and dangerous locations in Europe. In his late sixties he returned to the U.S. In April 2019, on a bicycle ride in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he got hit from behind by a car. He died there, age seventy.

The only meaning in that is meaninglessness. A morsel tainted with asphalt to toss to the nihilists coming up behind us.

Doug taught me, “Never take off your skis in the mountains.”

Off-piste you get to places that scare you. Slopes that look far too steep for your skills, windblown slabs that look like they’ll break, rotten snow that feels like it will slide, and if the weather comes in when you’re above the tree line you can’t even tell if you’re moving or standing still. Your every instinct, your whole life’s experience, begins to cry and tell you you’d be better off to kick off those boards and get back to your feet. But you’d be wrong. Your skis are the only thing that would get you out of there alive.

It seemed to me—I knew for a fact—it was obvious beyond dispute—that I’d left the marked routes—trails, pistes, whatever you’d like to call them—and wandered off into the wilds of the mountain range called murder—lo, I walk—slide—through the valley of the shadow of death—and I do fear evil.

If there was logic to it, it went like this.

Like the weather, like the winter, like the snows, what was happening would not stop. Elizabeth would not stop. If I walked off, trudging thigh deep to I know not where, she’d find someone else. Odds on, someone less able, or less lucky, or less careful, than I had been. Even if they were good, the best of the worst as it were, cunning and sharp, as well trained as a mythical ninja, Elizabeth and Madelaine were amateurs, impulsive, greedy, prone to—guaranteed to—make mistakes. They were not organized crime with some code of omertà. Once they were in a cell with cops questioning them, they’d fold. They’d compete to be the quickest to blame others, and the odds were that my name would appear in that short chain of laying it off on someone else.