Chapter Three
‘Happy birthday, Daddy!’ gushed doe-eyed Vivian Steinherr, youngest daughter of Kristalldorf’s most powerful hotelier, as she raised her champagne glass and looked adoringly at her father, sitting at the head of the table next to her.
His two sons were out of town but Walter was celebrating turning seventy with his beloved daughters, Vivian and Anastasia, Anastasia’s husband Dimitri, and their three children, Orfeas, Ophelia and Olympia, named after their father’s Greek ancestors, who were home from boarding school for the occasion.
On Walter’s other side was his wife, Kiki, who trailed a pointed fingernail in figures of eight on her husband’s arm.
‘Thank you, Vivi,’ Walter said, raising his Baccarat glassware and chinking it against Vivian’s.
He wasn’t in a celebratory mood, but he put a good face on it.
He had been particularly grumpy since repeat mystery infections had led to his recent cancer diagnosis, which he was keeping from everyone except his physician, Dr Blitzer, who he spoke to about the cancer almost in code.
Walter wasn’t particularly frightened of his cancer – he was not a young man – he was more inconvenienced by the myeloma, because it was causing increasing pain in his bones, and by the increasing amount of appointments he didn’t really have time for.
He didn’t want aggressive treatment either; at his age it felt rather pointless.
For now, Dr Blitzer recommended a ‘watch and wait’ strategy, and Walter decided not to tell a soul. Not his wife. Not his children.
Vivian was thirty-one, as charming as she was composed, and had the most luminous complexion in Kristalldorf. Walter was an imposing man with pale-blue eyes like his daughter, white hair and a bushy moustache. He wore a shirt and a cardigan with thick gold buttons.
Despite his devoted daughters insisting he have a party for his birthday, he insisted not.
There were always parties in Kristalldorf: hotel launches, restaurants celebrating their Michelin stars, the Kivvis’ annual Christingle, The Kristall Ball, the spring music festival, the list felt endless.
So the last thing Walter Steinherr wanted to do was attend another damn party.
He might have had his pick of venues, seeing as he owned most of the town, from the restaurant at the Steinherrhof to the terrace at the Alpenrose.
Sometimes, when Walter was feeling mischievous, he hosted private dinners in one of the three vacant and enormous chalets he owned at Seven Summits.
Each of the seven chalets had at least five bedrooms (all with ensuites with rain showers and mountain-view balconies), private ski rooms, wellness areas, a hammam and elevators.
Finnish tycoon Viktor Kivvi had worked closely with Russian developer Alexey Stognev, and world-renowned architect Ludwig Smythson, to the highest spec, with his own Kivvi elevators installed into each premises, of course.
No one else in Kristalldorf had the money or the inclination to do what Walter did: cut a private deal with Stognev behind Kivvi’s back to buy three of the villas just to spite him – and then leave them mostly unoccupied.
The small consolation for Viktor was that he and his family lived in the largest of the chalets, which was the only one of the properties to have its own cinema, card room and bar.
The wasted income on Seven Summits was something that irked Walter’s children, especially his eldest daughter Anastasia, who was sitting at the opposite end of the long table to her father.
Anastasia had ideas, if only she could have a closer look inside the empty properties.
Walter was very guarded about them. He was becoming more guarded, more private in general lately.
Tonight Walter wanted an early dinner – he had always liked to eat early – in his mansion at the foot of the mountain; a mansion that looked more like a Snow Queen’s palace, its turrets and gables giving it a Disney-like charm.
Inside was a sturdy sweeping staircase, elaborate tiled floors adorned in ornate rugs, crystal chandeliers and crackling fireplaces.
Anastasia had tied scores of gold balloons to her father’s chair, which made him look a little ridiculous – as if this serious stalwart of a man might just take off and float out of the mansion towards the mountains.
Walter didn’t like to be made to look ridiculous.
He had expensive but demure tastes, which is why it was such a shock to everyone when he married Kiki five years ago.
American Kiki had white-blonde hair, a baby-smooth forehead, pneumatic tits and lip fillers that made her look older than her thirty-five years.
Vivian did a better job of disguising her disdain for Kiki than Anastasia did; Vivian was good at making polite chat, asking Kiki how her day had been, even though the answer would predictably involve shopping or a spa.
Vivian was partly relieved that her father had a companion.
Anastasia, however, loathed their stepmother, who was two years younger than her and a money grabber as far as Anastasia could see.
But then Anastasia had loathed all her former stepmothers.
In her eyes no woman would ever live up to the saintly and distant memory of their dead mother.
No woman would be good enough for their father.
No woman would not be a perceived threat to her inheritance.
Next to Kiki sat Anastasia’s two daughters, Olympia and Ophelia, who were ten and eight and had hooded eyes like their father, Dimitri, a lawyer for his father-in-law’s businesses.
Anastasia, with her dark locks and perfectly symmetrical face, was at the other end of the table next to their twelve-year-old son Orfeas, who had impeccable manners and wore a blazer as sharp as his bowl cut.
Walter’s butler entered the ornate dining room and silently furnished glasses with wine while two maids brought plates of smoked salmon, chateaubriand, escargots and river trout garnished with dill. The adults raised their wine glasses; the children drank apfelsaft.
‘Yes, happy birthday, Papa,’ oozed Anastasia, not to be outdone by her sister. ‘To the strongest seventy-year-old man on the planet! We adore you.’
Walter smiled wanly. He felt a pang of guilt, but he raised his glass and drank to that. He squeezed Vivian’s hand as his eyes filled a little.
He was a tough man with a ridiculous work ethic, but when it came to his family, he was mush.
Walter’s grandfather, Ernst, had been a sheep farmer in Kristalldorf at the turn of the twentieth century, when he saw an opportunity with the mountain train opening up from the settlement of Bloch down the valley.
Ernst had the foresight to turn arable land into tourism and he opened a guesthouse at the foot of the mighty Silberschnee, the majestic mountain that overlooked the village, then three more as tourism started to grow.
Ernst’s son, Walter’s father Gerhard, bought more land along the banks of the Glanzfluss river, and turned guesthouses into luxurious hotels when Kristalldorf started becoming as popular in the winter months as it was in summer.
In the 1940s, the Steinherr family joined forces with the Sommars and the Kochs, two other founding families, to fund the first chairlift from the village up to the mountains, which by now were being fashioned into ski runs.
Despite war raging in Europe, Kristalldorf was booming with Swiss visitors, or Paris’s exiled elite, all looking for an escape.
When Walter was born in the 1950s, he had his grandfather’s foresight and his father’s taste for grandeur, and over the decades he expanded his portfolio of hotels, with the Steinherrhof, the Alpenrose, the Kristall Palace, the Silberblick and, in the 1990s, Vitreum – the most luxurious, modern and exclusive hotel he’d built yet, perched high on a ledge overlooking the town.
With his growing fortune, Walter alone funded a superfast train from the north bank of the Glanzfluss up to the slopes.
The mountain train enabled skiers to get from the village to the slopes in three fast minutes, which brought a bigger boom and cemented Kristalldorf’s reputation as the finest – and most exclusive – ski resort in the world.
For the past five years he’d focused on building the lofty glass box by the river, a beauty to rival Vitreum, which he’d carelessly lost in a bet at a casino in Monte Carlo.
When it was finished, Walter gifted the Anna Maria hotel, a tribute to his late first wife, to their daughters for Christmas, to see if the sisters could come together in business.
A test to help Walter identify an heir to take over the Steinherr empire.
Anna Maria Steinherr had died of ovarian cancer at home, opposite the site of the hotel that would one day be named after her.
She was only thirty-four. Her daughters and two sons were all aged ten and under.
Vivian was just a baby, she never knew her mother.
She didn’t remember wife number two, Mechthild, who took on the heartbroken billionaire and his four young children with matronly gusto, but Walter was too grief-stricken to let her in and the marriage was over within three years.
Wife number three was wicked stepmother Susan, an Englishwoman whose own husband had died in a car accident.
Susan endured the teen and young adult years, a tricky time as eldest brother Lysander and Anastasia were particularly combative.
Susan stayed in Kristalldorf long enough to receive a tidy divorce settlement for her fifteen years of service.
Before them there was a nurse Walter alluded to if he was misty-eyed or tipsy, but he shut down the conversation when his children ever asked more.
And there was Kiki. Wife number four who Walter met when he was playing blackjack in Monte Carlo five years ago.
Half Walter’s age with absolutely no shared interests apart from poker.
‘Proscht,’ Walter conceded. ‘Anna Maria would have loved to watch you all grow up,’ he said sentimentally. ‘To see what beautiful children you bore Anni.’
Anastasia looked proud. She loved it when her children got her compliments.
‘And I’m sure you will too, Vivi.’
Vivian looked solemn for a second. Her honey-blonde hair was tied back in an elegant ponytail and her huge bright-blue eyes were spaced far apart.
Pale and ethereal looking, she was totally different to her darker, sharper, more sinewy elder sister, who had brown eyes like their mother.
It made Vivian feel even sadder. She couldn’t remember the woman Anastasia was always told she looked like.
Vivian gripped her father’s hand, grateful she was here next to him.
‘Thank you,’ she almost whispered, as she gave his hand a squeeze.
‘Why don’t you bring this mystery man of yours over?’ Walter asked. ‘It would be nice to meet him.’
‘A man?’ scoffed Anastasia. ‘I thought darling Vivian was too busy for romance.’ The thought of her sister finally having a boyfriend and no longer pining over the Joubert boy piqued Anastasia’s interest and she raised an eyebrow.
Walter waved a hand.
The huge doorbell chimed and Vivian’s heart raced, full of hope. Perhaps he was coming. Perhaps he was finally ready to officially stand by her side.
‘I don’t know why you’re so coy, Vivi,’ Walter interjected.
‘I take each person at their own value, I don’t judge based on their name or background.
’ As he said this, he knew it not to be true.
If Vivian were dating a Kivvi, perhaps, Walter imagined it might be problematic.
‘Nor should people judge you or your brothers for being Steinherrs,’ Walter said, somewhat unsurely.
They all knew the Steinherr name could carry as much contempt as it could kudos.
A man in a suit, tie undone, clutching a bunch of flowers, walked into the dining room.
‘Hey, who’s judging?’ he said with a shit-eating grin.