Aaron Elkins - Gideon Oliver 01 - Fellowship Of Fear Page 9

  Even using his cane, he needed a steadying hand from John to get out of the car, up the three steps, and into the office.

  "My God, I feel like I’m a hundred years old," he muttered as he fell into a chair behind a battered wooden desk with a telephone on it.

  John went to talk with the shore patrol personnel while Gideon telephoned. To his surprise he got through on the first try.

  "Hello, Eric, this is Gideon Oliver."

  "Hey, Gid!" shouted Eric. Gideon raised his eyes ceilingward, but said nothing. "What do you say, man? Hey man, what’s happening? You had an accident, huh? You okay now?"

  "Yeah, Eric, I’m fine. What’s up?"

  "You know, I was in Sig on Friday," Eric said. "Tried to see you, but they said no visitors."

  "I’m a lot better now. What’s up?"

  "Rufe said to check with you about whether you were going to do the Spanish gig." Gideon almost laughed. Eric was laid back farther than ever.

  "Sure, Eric. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to call back earlier."

  "Fantastic, man. We figured you’d say that. Like, the show must go on, right? Well, I’ve been working on your logistics—I don’t know if you knew Cindy Poretzky had to go back to the States, so I’ve been made acting logistics director?"

  "Uh huh," said Gideon, although he had no idea what Eric was talking about. He began to be sorry he hadn’t waited until tomorrow to return the call.

  "So I’ve been working on your logistics. Believe it or not, the easiest way for you to get from Sicily to Spain is to fly back to Germany and take a direct shot from Rhein-Main to Torrejon. So—"

  "Wait, I’m getting mixed up. I thought I was going to Madrid. Where’s Torrejon?"

  "Torrejon’s the name of the base you’re going to. Twenty miles from Madrid. Groovy place. Fantastic chicks." Amazing, Gideon thought; he must get his vocabulary from 1950s movies.

  "Yeah, man," Eric said, with a leer Gideon could feel over the wire. "Get all the Spanish pussy you want."

  Change that to 1970s movies, Gideon thought. "Fine," he said. "What do I do?"

  "Well, if you’re able to fly tomorrow, we got you a special dispensation for a military flight out of Sig to Rhein-Main. Then come on down to Heidelberg for a couple of days—we got you a BOQ reservation at Patrick Henry. Then on Sunday you fly commercial out of Frankfurt to Madrid. Air force bus’ll leave for Torrejon an hour after you get there, and we’ve already set you up in the BOQ."

  Gideon was impressed in spite of himself. "That’s really helpful, Eric, thanks. I hadn’t even thought about how I’d get there."

  "We got our act together here, man. Service is our motto, right? Look, I hear John Lau from NSD is out there on something. Can you connect with him?"

  Gideon smiled. "I believe so."

  "Okay, get a hold of him and let him set it up for you to come back with him. It’ll save you a lot of paperwork."

  "Will do, Eric. Thanks again."

  "Take it easy, man. See you in Heidelberg."

  Gideon hung up and swiveled around in his chair to see John sitting on the edge of a desk in the midst of a group of shore patrol men, looking at him with an oddly calculating expression. Without asking, John took a sheet of paper, some form, from the hand of the man sitting behind the desk and walked over to Gideon, never changing his expression. Silently, he held the form out.

  It gave Gideon a nervous, guilty feeling. "What is this, John? What’s the matter?"

  "Read it." Gideon half-expected him to toss the paper at him, but he laid it carefully on the desk.

  The form was unfamiliar. Gideon shifted in his chair to ease the pain in his ankle. "Is this a missing person’s report?"

  John nodded, still watching him with that peculiar expression. "One of the base cafeteria workers. Been missing since last Friday."

  "John, I’m not up to fooling around. Will you tell me what’s going on, please?"

  "Read this part." He put his forefinger a third of the way down the page. "Read it out loud."

  Gideon was annoyed with the game-playing. He read it silently: Name Kenneth Ito; Height 5’5" Weight 148…At that point he couldn’t keep from shouting. "Race Asian! That’s the guy!" Under circumstances that were less grim, he would have whooped with triumph.

  John nodded. "It’s him," he said in an almost comically respectful tone. "Shore patrol tells me he worked nightshift and took the Dump Road home. They must have killed him, planted him in the car, and then burned it. So the police would think the driver was still in it and not bother to search for him." He shook his head. "Goddamn, Doc, that’s really something."

  Gideon read further: Age 38; Handedness Left. The guesses had all been right, remarkably right. "This Distinguishing Characteristics section," he said. "They forgot to say he smoked a pipe."

  John turned and called to the shore patrol. "Hey, did this guy smoke a pipe, do you know?"

  One of them shouted back, "That’s right, I forgot. He always had his metal pipe, one of those air-cooled jobs, stuck in his mouth! Hey, how the hell did you know?"

  John turned back to Gideon. "That is really something," he said again. "I never saw anything like it. I owe you an apology." He shook his head. "I can hardly believe it. From those little pieces of bone. Doc, how do you know he smoked? How can you tell he was left-handed?"

  Gideon smiled. "You know my methods, Watson."

  "No, seriously."

  "Oh no," Gideon said. "I tried to explain it once before, and you gave me nothing but a hard time. I think I’ll just keep a few tricks up my sleeve."

  "Hey, don’t be like that." John suddenly smiled. "Anyway, you were two pounds off on his weight."

  Gideon frowned. "Hmm," he said, "that’s impossible. He pretended to scrutinize the form worriedly. "Ah, here," he said with feigned relief, "this explains it. He had thinning hair. When I said one-fifty I was assuming he had a full head of hair. No way I could tell otherwise. Allow a couple of pounds for hair and you get one-forty-eight." He handed the form to John.

  John’s dumbfounded expression was the most delightful thing Gideon had seen all day. "Does hair weigh that much? Doc, are you kidding me?"

  "Would I kid you?" Gideon said.

  Heidelberg: BOOK 3

  NINE

  THE trip to Heidelberg was smooth and easy. They left Sigonella at 11:00 a.m.; at 5:00 John was back at his office and Gideon was in the lobby of the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters, trying to reach Tom Marks by telephone. He had quite a few questions to ask him, and John had advised him to go ahead and ask, although he doubted that he’d get any answers.

  Mr. Marks was not in, Frau Stetten informed him. Perhaps Dr. Oliver could come the following day? The following day was Saturday, Gideon said. Was Mr. Marks at his office on Saturdays?

  "We work when we must," was the lofty Teutonic response, and across Gideon’s mind there flashed an image of the wrought-iron Arbeit macht frei that once greeted newcomers to Dachau. "We will say nine o’clock, yes?"

  "Fine," Gideon said. "Thank you very much." Silently he added, "Heil Hitler."

  He had hung up the telephone and was standing there frowning at himself for being subject to such groundless, stereotypical thinking when he became aware that Janet

  Feller, smiling warmly and looking tall and clean and lovely, had been observing him for some time.

  "Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you up," she said. "You look like the World’s Original Absent-Minded Professor."

  The words, spoken so often by Nora, made his heart turn over, and while he fumbled witlessly for something to say, he was further flustered by the soft light that suddenly suffused her face. No one had looked at him like that for a very long time. For an irrational instant it seemed that Nora was back again, that the past had somehow changed, that time had bent.

  She reached a hand toward his cheek and stopped with her fingertips a few inches away.

  "You’ve really been through it, haven’t you?" she said, with something in her voice that had
n’t been there at the dinner party the week before.

  It finally occurred to Gideon that she was reacting to his face. He had forgotten how damaged it was. "It was nothing," he said stupidly, watching her.

  Janet dropped her hand back to her side. "Nothing?" she said. "You sure look like hell."

  "So people have been telling me. But it’s nowhere near as bad as it looks." His voice sounded appropriately calm in his ears, but his heart was beating rapidly. For the first few months after Nora’s death, of course, he was always seeing her in the street or on campus, or getting on a bus. But it hadn’t happened for at least a year.

  "I sure hope not," she said. "I see you’re using a cane."

  "Only for another day or two. Really, I’m all right." He paused and cleared his throat. Asking for a date was something that came no more easily to him at thirty-eight than it had at eighteen, and he had to lower his eyes to do it. "I don’t suppose you’re busy for dinner tonight?"

  She laughed. "Thanks a lot."

  Gideon was confused at first. Then he laughed, too. "I mean, I don’t suppose you’re free tonight? I thought we might have dinner."

  "Sounds swell," she said.

  "Fine. Where shall I get you?" He stepped back a little, afraid she could hear his heart thumping.

  "Get me? I live here."

  "You live in the BOQ?"

  "Certainly. Why not? Cheapest place in town and a sink in every room. I’m in Twenty-one. Come by in an hour."

  HEIDELBERG is one of the very few German cities that was never bombed during World War II. As a result it has an Old World quality more authentic and pervasive than most of Germany’s other ancient cities. In the Old Town, housed in a baroque palace, is the Kurpfalziches Museum. On his first day in Heidelberg, Gideon had gone there to see the exhibit of Homo erectus heidelbergensis, the famed 360,000-year-old jawbone that had rocked the scientific world seventy years before. He was disappointed to see that the display contained only a plaster cast of the bone, but was pleased to find an elegant restaurant tucked into one corner of the courtyard. He hadn’t eaten there then, but had marked it as a place to come another time. It was here he took Janet.

  Over veal steaks with cream sauce accompanied by an excellent Beilsteiner Mosel, she listened pensively, almost tenderly, to his description of the attack in Sicily. Relishing her attention, he milked the story for as much sympathy as he could, then sighed and sat back in his chair with a suitably noble expression on his battered countenance.

  "But why did they do it?" Janet asked. "What was it about?"

  Gideon came close to revealing his involvement with NSD but changed his mind. The less she knew, the better for her. My God, he thought; the need-to-know principle. He was starting to think like them. "The police have no idea," he said. "They figure it was a Mafia thing, that I was mistaken for someone else."

  "Do you buy that? It doesn’t sound like the Mafia."

  He was suddenly alert. "What do you mean?"

  She shrugged and held out her glass. He filled it. "Janet," he said, "what really happened to those other two visiting fellows?"

  "You think there’s a connection?" She sipped and then delicately licked the fruity wine from her lips.

  With an effort, Gideon kept his mind on the conversation. "Well," he said, "do these sorts of things happen to the regular faculty?"

  "No," Janet said. "It’s odd, now that you mention it. As far as I know, no USOC prof has ever been killed here or even seriously hurt, except that other fellow and now you."

  "What about the Econ fellow you and Eric were talking about last week?"

  "Oh, Pete?" She searched for his last name. "Pete Berger? I didn’t know him all that well. Nobody did. He was kind of a strange bird; awkward, shy, hard to talk to, never mingled much. I know he had a bad reputation for missing classes, and Dr. Rufus was thinking about firing him. But he never got hurt, as far as I know. He just disappeared for good one day and never showed up again… Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, it is peculiar, isn’t it?"

  "Yes, isn’t it? Where was he when he disappeared?"

  "Up north somewhere. Bremerhaven, I think. I wish I could tell you more."

  "What about the other one?"

  "The guy that got killed? I never met him. I just heard his car ran off the road in Italy."

  They paused while the waiter brought them each a cup of coffee.

  "Janet," said Gideon, stirring a little sugar into the strong, fragrant brew, "when you were telling me some of this last week at the dinner, Eric tried to shush you up, remember? Why did he do that?"

  He studied her face. She looked at him with open, innocent eyes. Lovely eyes, really, with clear, beautiful hazel irises.

  "Oh, I think he just didn’t want to frighten you off. But we were all pretty sloshed, as I recall." She sipped her coffee and put the cup carefully in its saucer. "What are you suggesting by all the questions? That there was foul play involved?"

  "I don’t know what I’m suggesting. I’m just trying to make sense out of it." He waited until he caught her eye again. "You don’t suppose they were involved in undercover work, some kind of espionage, or—?"

  "Espionage? Spies? Are you serious?" Her incredulity told him one thing he wanted to know; recruiting of faculty by NSD was not routine. Janet, at least, had not been approached by them.

  For a while they drank their coffee in silence. It was three times as expensive as it would have been in an American restaurant and there were no refills, but it was delicious. Gideon was comfortable with Janet, and the veal sat well inside him. He listened to the splashing of the fountain in the courtyard and watched Janet frowning thoughtfully at her coffee. She was very beautiful, more so than Nora had been, really, and although the memory of her spluttering wine across the table during that alcoholic tetea-tete with Eric still put him off a little, who was he to criticize? As she said, he had been pretty well sloshed himself.

  "How about a walk?" he said. "It’s a pretty night, and it would do my ankle some good."

  "I’d love it," Janet said, and sounded like she meant it.

  Gideon paid the bill, pleased when she didn’t demand to share it.

  They walked slowly down the Haupstrasse, Gideon leaning on his cane, past busy sidewalk cafes and restaurants. For four hundred years the Haupstrasse had been the main street of Heidelberg; now it was open only to foot traffic, filled with strollers on this mild fall night, most of whom munched bratwurst or pastries purchased from sidewalk vendors. The smells of sausage and coffee, and the sounds of German conversation, oddly enough, seemed homey and warm. When Janet put her arm through his, Gideon trembled a little and glowed, and tried to look like a Heidelberger out for a spaziergang with his Fraulein.

  "Sehr gemutlich, nicht wahr?" he said, patting the hand that lay in the crook of his elbow.

  "Jawohl," she answered, and squeezed his arm.

  He bought them a sack of almond and chocolate pastries at a Konditorei, and they munched along like everyone else, smiling at passersby and murmuring "Guten Abend.

  Janet, more at ease with him than she had been before, told him about the dissertation on which she was working: a history of women book collectors in the nineteenth-century American Midwest.

  Gideon made sympathetic noises and asked interested questions, but in his heart he sighed a quiet "Oh no." He liked women, really liked them, more than men, and respected them at least as much. In his own field, the cultural anthropologists whom he most respected were Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. Yet feminists often bored and sometimes irritated him with their grim, contentious rhetoric. He hoped that wouldn’t happen with Janet.

  "What are you going to call it?" he asked between bites of pastry.

  " ‘Keepers of the Written Word: A Study of Oppression, Sexism, and Bibliophily.’ "

  She delivered the cumbrous words so ponderously, notwithstanding a mouthful of nuts and chocolate, that he thought she was joking. He laughed.

  It was a mistake. She leaned on
his arm to make him stop walking and face her. "You find that funny?" Her eyes were cool and serious.

  Gideon winced and even drew a tiny breath between clenched teeth in an effort to make her think that she had inadvertently hurt his ankle but that he was stoically trying to keep it from her. It was a cheap trick, of course, intended primarily to head her off and secondarily to rekindle in her that warm sympathy in which he’d been basking until those damn female book collectors came up. He thought he carried it off fairly well, but perhaps he had been too subtle; her face was without pity.

  "What is it that’s so humorous about it?" she said. "Do you think women bibliophiles have not been oppressed? Can you even grasp what it was like to be a female intellectual in a society that was dominated by—"

  "Janet, don’t go all polemic on me. All I was laughing about was, well, was how all serious titles have to have a colon in them nowadays. They used to have subtitles. Now it’s all one title with colons. I don’t know why, but it strikes me funny."

  It was so wonderfully irrelevant that it served as a much-needed non sequitur. After a sharp glance at him, Janet seemed to decide he was being truthful. She opened her mouth to speak and then closed it.

  "Do you know," Gideon asked as he moved them gently along, "I haven’t yet been to one of the student taverns. Isn’t the Red Ox near here? How about a beer?"

  "I don’t think you’re the type," Janet said, still ready to fight. Gideon smiled innocently at her, although under other circumstances he might have asked her what she meant.

  She smiled suddenly, and the warmth came back into her eyes. "Well," she said, "I suppose one can’t come to Heidelberg without hoisting a stein at the Red Ox. What would Sigmund Romberg think?"

  WHEN they walked into the smoky, noisy Restaurant Zum Roten Ochsen, he found that she was right. He didn’t like it at all. The age-blackened ceiling of the big tavern rang with lusty male voices raised in martial-sounding songs, and with the clank of beer steins beating time on old oak tables. It was all very jolly and picturesque, but it depressed him.