Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 01 - Fellowship Of Fear Page 20

  "Okay, but I intend to look at your rear end a lot—every chance I get. And I want you to know how beautiful you are down there. There isn’t a man in the world who wouldn’t think so. You’re so solid, so—"

  "Thank you very much. Do you think we’ll have nice weather today?"

  "The thing is, women try to look slim-hipped like men, and they can’t. Not if they have any female hormones. The very thing that makes a woman so lovely is exactly what you have: a big, beautiful trochanteric subcutaneous adipose tissue deposit."

  Janet put her head out between the shower curtains. "Do all anthropologists talk like you? It’s like listening to Elizabethan love poetry."

  Through the parted curtains Gideon could see the water glistening on Janet’s breasts and on one long, supple thigh.

  "Hey," he said. "If we’re short on time, why don’t I jump in? Be faster if we shower together."

  "Okay," said Janet, "but no fooling around."

  Gideon practically leaped into the shower and pulled Janet’s slippery body to him. "Would I fool around with a fat lady?"

  "Ooh, you rat!" Janet cried, and pummeled his sides. Laughing, they wrestled for a few moments, but then Gideon pinned her to the tile wall and kissed her wet mouth. They slid slowly down the wall, mouths pressed urgently together, not noticing the spray that drenched their hair.

  THEY were late leaving her room, of course, and were out the BOQ’s front door before Gideon remembered that he still hadn’t registered.

  "Well, make it as fast as you can," Janet said. "We’re supposed to be meeting them right now."

  Gideon hurriedly showed his TDY orders to the clerk, signed in, took the sealed brown envelope that was handed to him, and shoved it into his pocket. Then he ran back out the door, hand in hand with Janet.

  MOST of the staff members were congregated in the parking lot at USOC headquarters, awaiting the bus that would take them to Rudesheim. Dr. Rufus, all rosy cheeks and high spirits, came over to them at once.

  "Ah, I see you’ve convinced him to come along," he said to Janet. "Wonderful. It should be a glorious day; Bacharach, St. Goarshausen, the Lorelei, Rheinfels…"

  Janet’s attention was engaged by someone else, and Dr. Rufus took Gideon’s elbow, moving him to a more private place.

  "My boy," he said, puffing out his cheeks, "I can’t tell you how relieved I am to have you back in one piece." He mopped his brow with a handkerchief and grasped Gideon’s elbow more tightly. "Warmer than I’d hoped, but there’ll be breezes on the river." He smiled fondly at Gideon.

  "I imagine you know what happened there, sir?" Gideon said.

  "Well, I heard something about some people being killed…"

  "Dr. Rufus, Hilaire Delvaux told me—well, implied to me—that you’ve been working more closely with NSD than you told me."

  Dr. Rufus’s voice dropped. "Well, it’s not the sort of thing one goes around talking about, my boy. Sort of, er, defeats the point of espionage, don’t you think?"

  "Are you an agent?"

  The handkerchief came out again and blotted the moisture from Dr. Rufus’s throat. "Gideon, you’re putting me in a delicate position…"

  "I don’t mean to do that, sir. But my radio was stolen last night. I think NSDhad something to do with it, and—"

  "Why on earth would you think that?"

  "Because it happened to be taken during the time that NSD told me to stay away from my room. I doubt that it was a coincidence."

  Dr. Rufus frowned at the ground, silent.

  "Dr. Rufus, you do know about the theft, don’t you?"

  "Gideon," Dr. Rufus said, "I’m not very good at dissembling. I…well, I was informed of it, but …well, I can’t tell you any more than that…except that I can assure you… unqualifiedly assure you… that NSD had absolutely nothing to do with it. When I heard about it last night, they… that is, we …were as puzzled as you. I really can’t say any more….I hope you understand my position… Ah, Bruce," he cried with relief, "come and say hello to our world traveler."

  "Well, well," said Bruce Danzig with a prunelike smile. "The peripatetic professor, put in from his peregrinations."

  Dr. Rufus roared with laughter. "Wonderful, Bruce! How do you do that sort of thing?"

  "I prepare ahead of time," Danzig said.

  Gideon didn’t doubt it. "Alliterative archivists always alienate," he said, rather pleased with himself.

  "Touche," Danzig said with some surprise. Then, after a pause during which Dr. Rufus continued to chuckle, "Are those the books you borrowed last week? I have to go back inside for a moment; I can take them in for you."

  "Actually, I brought them along hoping I could browse through them on the cruise. But I’m really only interested in one of them; you can have the other."

  Danzig looked at the title of the book Gideon handed him. "Campbell, Human Evolution," he read aloud. "So you’re keeping the Weidenreich?"

  "Just for a couple of days. I’m impressed; do you usually know your lent-out books by heart?"

  "No," said Danzig evenly, "It’s just that there’s a rush request on that one, and I said it would be available Monday."

  "I’ll bring it in on Monday."

  "Aren’t you going to Izmir Monday?"

  "All right, I’ll drop it off tomorrow. It’s not overdue, is it? What’s the hurry?"

  "Now, now," said Dr. Rufus uncomfortably, "let’s not quibble. This is a big day."

  "I thought I was the only one teaching anthro," Gideon said, studying Danzig. "Why would anyone else be interested in The Skull of Sinanthropus Pekinensis?"

  "No, no, no, no," Dr. Rufus said. "Absolutely not. No arguing permitted today." He took them both by the arm. "The bus is here, and I’m getting on it with our alliterative archivist. You, sir," he said to Gideon, giving him a friendly shove in Janet’s direction, "have the good fortune of being the object of that lovely lady’s impatience."

  He thumped Gideon on the back with robust good humor. "Really delighted you’re back safe," he said, and marched off, pulling an annoyed-looking Bruce Danzig with him.

  The Rheingau: BOOK 7

  TWENTY

  AT Janet’s suggestion, the four of them drove north via the Bergstrasse. Gideon was delighted with the road. Never more than a mile or two from the hectic autobahn and its dreary landscape, the Bergstrasse took them through a lovely world of ancient villages with names like Heppenheim and Zwingenberg and Bickenbach: little towns with crooked, half-timbered houses, and cobblestoned streets. Between the villages were neat little orchards that, according to Janet, were famous for blooming ten days before those anywhere else in Germany.

  For a while they enjoyed the peace of the countryside, chatting casually and only occasionally. Gideon, who was expecting a sultry Chinese beauty, found Marti Lau a surprise. A gangling, coltish twenty-five-year-old with big hands and feet, whose maiden name had been Goldenberg, she was given to ejaculations like "yuckers" and "wowiezowie." She had a frank, pretty face that dimpled engagingly when she smiled, which was every time they spoke to her, or looked at her, or looked as if they might look at her.

  Other than smiles and wowie-zowies, her communications consisted of non sequiturs, mostly in the form of odd, abstract, unanswerable questions directed at Gideon. She had already asked him, in a broad Kansas accent, what human beings were going to look like in ten thousand years, and why there was more than one language in the world. At first he had tried serious replies, which seemed to delight her. After a while he simply smiled and shrugged. She appeared equally pleased.

  Near Darmstadt they left the Bergstrasse and turned across the flat, industrial Rhine Plain below Frankfurt. The conversation turned to Gideon’s adventures. John hadn’t known about the attempted theft of the radio the night before and listened with absorption as he drove.

  "Forget about NSD being responsible," he said. "That makes no sense at all. It’s got to be the Russians. But why the radio?" he added under his breath. "Why the radio?"


  "I have an idea," Janet said. "Why don’t we try a little creative brainstorming on that question? Free association— whatever comes into your mind."

  "Okay," John said, after a few moments of silence, "maybe he was stealing it to sell because his wife needed an operation."

  "No," Gideon said. "This was really a cheap—"

  Janet interrupted. "Hold it, hold it. That’s not the way it works. No critical thinking, please. Just keep the ideas coming. Give your unconscious a chance."

  "All right," said Gideon. He was happy and relaxed, and car games were fine with him. "Maybe he wanted to hear the soccer scores and his own radio was broken."

  "Good," Janet said. "Or maybe he could hear it playing through the wall, and he hates music, and he was taking it to throw away."

  "Or maybe," Gideon said, getting into the swing of it, "it sounded like it wasn’t playing right, and he was taking it out to get a new battery for it."

  "Hey, wow, got it!" Marti said. "How about if whatshisname was in your room doing something that had nothing to do with the radio, but that he saw you coming—he could have, through the window, couldn’t he?—and he just grabbed the radio and made off with it to keep you from figuring out what he was really doing."

  It made a strange kind of sense to Gideon. He looked at Marti with respect. "But what was he really doing?"

  John cut in excitedly. "Using something else in your room as the dead drop…your suitcase, your shaving gear, your books, anything."

  Gideon nodded. "It’s possible," he said slowly. "They could have deposited stuff in my room for me to carry off the base. Even with the alert, my pass was getting me through the gate pretty easily."

  "So, if he took something, a radio, you’d assume he was just a thief," John said. "Hey, that’s probably what happened to the socks, too. It’d never occur to you someone had been putting something in your room."

  "I don’t understand," Janet said. "You mean that’s the way they smuggle things off the base? You carry it off for them?"

  Gideon shook his head. "Do we really believe any of this, or are we just fooling around?"

  "Funny, isn’t it?" John said with a small, tight laugh. "It would mean you were the guy we were looking so hard for at Torrejon."

  IT was the Rudesheim Gideon had read about in the travel books, but with a vengeance. What he’d read was "a lively Rhine village, with streets of wineshops and bierstuben, friendly and gregarious at all times of year." What he found was a riotous town jammed with tourists, bursting with tourists. Mostly German, mostly male, and mostly in large groups, they barreled along the streets in yellow- or green- or red-hatted brigades, tipsily following tour leaders with matching umbrellas held high.

  "My God," he shouted over the clamor, "is it always like this?"

  Janet assured him it was. "The Germans work hard," she shouted back, "and when they play, they work hard at playing hard."

  And obviously, thought Gideon, this is where they come to do it.

  "You ain’t seen nothing yet!" John cried, pulling them along the street. "Come on, we only have twenty minutes before the boat goes."

  They had to snake along single-file to get through the crowds of beefy, blond men, many of whom tramped along singing, with arms about each others’ shoulders.

  "Where to?" asked Janet. "The Drosselgasse?"

  "You bet," John shouted.

  Marti cheered: "Hot puppies!"

  The Drosselgasse was Rudesheim’s most famous street. An alley, really, with no room for vehicles, it was packed along both sides from one end to the other with restaurants, weinstuben, and bierstuben. And all of them, or so it sounded, were full of people playing accordions and singing with all their might. The alley itself was so crammed with people that it seemed impossible to get through.

  "I can’t believe it," said Gideon. "It’s only nine-thirty in the morning. What’s this place going to be like at nine-thirty tonight?"

  "The same," said John. "Let’s go."

  "You’re nuts," Gideon said. "I’m not going in there."

  "You can get the best bratwurst in Germany halfway down that street," John said, and pulled them into the throng.

  The best bratwurst in Germany, it turned out, were served at a nondescript stand with the incongruous name of "Clem’s." There, a scowling, elephantine man ferociously speared the sausages from the grill, tucked them deftly into split hard rolls, and for less than two marks each, thunked them down in front of a steady, appreciative line of patrons. Gideon, skeptical at first, changed his mind after the first crackling bite and ordered a second to fortify him for the struggle back down the alley.

  He needed it. The crowd all seemed to be surging up the Drosselgasse in one direction, while the four of them were going in the other. Gideon suggested they turn around and go with the mass to the next corner, then turn up a side alley and come down another street, but Janet rejected the idea as unsporting.

  Clutching his bratwurst in one hand and his copy of Weidenreich in the other, Gideon twisted and dodged his way out of several near-collisions with the uproarious German crowds. At the very end of the Drosselgasse, however, just when he thought he had safely made it, a thickset, blond man tore unsteadily around the corner and smashed heavily into him. The bratwurst flew one way, The Skull of Sinanthropus Pekinensis the other; Gideon himself was thrown backwards almost into the arms of a bald fat man who, seemingly thinking Gideon was going to fall, grasped him in a firm embrace and apologized effusively.

  "Verzeihen Sie, bitte…

  The first man, to Gideon’s surprise, was equally solicitous. He bent quickly, almost frantically, to retrieve the fallen book, but was held back by the crush of pedestrians. Meanwhile, Gideon twisted himself free and picked the book up himself, practically snatching it from the blond man’s well-meaning fingers.

  Gideon straightened up, composing a smile. Although annoyed—the bratwurst had been delicious, and he wasn’t going back for another—he was prepared to exchange apologies with the two Germans, who had meant him no harm and had been so quick to help. He was astonished to see that they were gone, already engulfed by the fast-moving crowds. He stood there in confusion for a moment, the smile dying on his face, dividing the oncoming foot traffic as a tree trunk might divide the waters of a flooding river.

  John grabbed his arm and plucked him out of the crowded alley. "You want to get killed? Never get between a wine drinker and a weinstube, not in Rudesheim."

  "Don’t look so sad," Janet said, laughing. "It was only a bratwurst. There’ll be more on the boat."

  "Ah, but not like Clem’s," John said.

  Arm in arm, like the German tourists, the four of them ran three blocks to the pier, arriving only a minute before the ship’s departure.

  TO his initial dismay, the ship was packed with people: not only the USOC group and many German families, but two of the high-spirited, well-lubricated tour groups, one with yellow hats and one with orange hats. Nevertheless, Gideon enjoyed the trip. The finespun mist that hung in the Rhine valley, the fall colors, the vineyards running nearly vertically up from the river, and above all the castles—the ghostly, haunted, stunningly beautiful castles—all held him so enthralled that he barely noticed the racket on the boat.

  After the first half hour, John and Marti went in search of wine and USOC company, but Janet stayed with him in the relatively uncrowded stern, watching the castles glide by. One after another they came, literally at every turn. There was hardly a time when two or three castles could not be seen perched high in the gorge.

  When they approached the Lorelei, the great rock that juts into the Rhine like the prow of a stupendous ship, the loudspeakers squawked twice, announced "Die Lorelei," and emitted a series of hollow, tinny noises that were barely recognizable as Silcher’s music to Heine’s famous poem. At first it distressed Gideon. He had loved the song since his high school German class—it was almost all he remembered—and he found the scratchy rendering tasteless and commercial. The passengers pa
id no attention; they continued to shout, laugh, and pour huge glasses of wine and beer.

  Then, as they neared the great rock, the clamor died down. One by one, the Germans softly took up the song, so that, as they passed the towering cliff face, the mournful, surpassingly sweet melody enveloped the ship like a sad, silvery cloud. Gideon was too overcome by the beauty of it to sing. Others were weeping as they sang, and he felt the tears come to his own eyes. Janet, her eyes shining too, leaned closer from her chair and tilted her head onto his shoulder.

  "Oh, you neat, crazy man," she said, her voice furry. "It is glorious, isn’t it?"

  He squeezed her hand and leaned his cheek against the top of her head.

  After a while in the hush that followed the song, she spoke again, her head still on his shoulder. "Do you know, everyone talks about how corny that is. Me, too. But in my heart I’ve always felt it was beautiful. I was afraid you wouldn’t like it, but I should have known."

  He must have dozed then in the peaceful filtered sunlight, because when he felt something brush heavily against his arm he sprang up, startled and ready to fight. What he saw were several yellow-hatted tourists lurching down the deck away from him.

  "Easy, easy," Janet said, a gentle concern in her voice. "They just bumped you accidentally. They’re a little pie-eyed, that’s all."

  "That’s twice today," he said angrily. "Why don’t they watch where they’re going?"

  "Be fair, now. It’s not as if they were the same people."

  "They look the same to me. That guy on the right, he sure looks like the one that practically ran me over on the Drosselgasse."

  "How can you tell? You barely saw him."

  "Well," he said, knowing how childish he sounded, "he’s blond and big, and full of beer, and—"

  "So are ninety percent of the passengers." She laughed, suddenly. "My, baby gets grumpy when he wakes up all of a sudden, doesn’t he?"