There’s heli-skiing. That’s a big mountain thing for rich people. It’s fairly common in Italy and Switzerland. It’s banned in France and Germany. Only one place in Austria permits it. Lech. Most of the heli-skiing departs from the other helipad, at Balmalp, which is officially part of Lech.

Whomp, whomp, whomp…

I looked to the sound. The choppers that fly into Flexenpass are two-seaters to eight-seaters. This was one of the big ones, an AgustaWestland, which, in spite of its name, is an Italian machine. Like my Benelli shotgun, it’s got style. It’s sleek and dark, with a shark’s look.

Whomp, whomp, whomp…looking up, I felt dizzy…Oh, Francis Ford Coppola…with your fleet of choppers coming in over the jungle and the sea…Apocalypse Now…speakers hung upon them blasting “Flight of the Valkyries”…Wagner’s stirring salute to dying by violence…the Valkyries come from out of the sky to pick through the corpses, selecting the ones they want to carry off as heroes to Valhalla…Dum da da-dum dum, dum de da dadum, dum de da da dummm…Whomp, whomp, whomp…farewell Mick McMunchun…you flew a $325,000 McLaren 720S Spider off the road and into the trees with your seat belt off and your penis pointing forth…are you in Valhalla now, drinking and whoring and boasting…I was audio-hallucinating, multiplying the rotor blades of a single machine into a Coppola-sized fleet…I was laying in a music track to increase the drama…it was a different kind of dizziness…not falling down…a weightless rising…detached from the Earth…buffeted by the winds from the rotors…though in actual physical truth they were too far away for me to feel them at all.

Was the madness returning? Was that ancient deity—the one intent on deconstructing Nietzsche—about to reappear disguised as a snowman?

I willed myself down. Down until I felt my feet in my boots and my boots on my skis, my skis on the mountain, as the music faded to silence.

I saw a shadow pass over the snow. Not as a bird might fly. I looked for what caused it. It seemed to be a tiny helicopter. A toy. A drone. A hallucination within a hallucination? It seemed real. The resort taking promotional pictures? Ski patrol examining the snow-pack? A rich person, child or adult, playing with the modern version of a model airplane?

Helicopter.

That could be it. If I could get mother and child to a helicopter, it could whisk them away faster than a pursuit could be organized to stop them. But with the three Borises and the one Borisova always on watch, on behalf of their God, Grigor Voloshin, how could that be done? What the hell, if I could actually get the two of them away from their keepers, speed probably wouldn’t be the issue, and we could make our escape in a horse-drawn sleigh.