There was nothing for me to say to that; any words I could have come up with would have sounded forced and tenuous. I let several seconds pass, a coldness on my shoulders, and then I said, ‘I don’t know what this means, if anything, but I found a piece of paper in the pocket of your fiancé’s suit-the one in his suitcase at the hotel here. It had the name of a gallery printed on it, and an address that was obviously German-fifteen Blumenstrasse.’
‘Gallery? You mean an art gallery?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Well, what was the name?’
‘Galerie der Expressionisten,’ I said.
‘I’ve never heard of it. What city is it in?’
‘There was none listed on the paper.’
‘Do you think this gallery has something to do with the portrait of Roy? Do you think it means anything?’
‘It might. I don’t know.’
‘Roy disappeared for some reason. Maybe… well, maybe the gallery and the portrait are mixed in somehow. Mightn’t that be possible?’
‘At this point anything might be possible, Miss Kavanaugh,’ I said, and sighed inaudibly. I wanted to tell her that rhetorical questions, even though we all indulge in them from time to time, served no real purpose; but I thought that if I did, it would sound cruel. ‘Do you want me to check around up here another day?’
‘Is there any more you can do?’
‘Not really. I’ve covered everything I can think of.’
‘Then I suppose you’d best come back to San Francisco.’
‘Do you want me to come by your hotel when I get in?’
‘Yes, I think that would be a good idea.’
We said good-bye, and I went over to the motel coffee shop and ate a hot dinner and drank some hot coffee to go with it. A long soak in the bathtub and I was ready for bed. I buried myself between the warmth of fresh sheets and a quilted comforter, but for the second night in a row sleep came slowly, reluctantly. A nonsense thing kept running around inside my head:
The time of Sands is running out, the shifting, whispering, vanishing Sands…
CHAPTER EIGHT
The shuttle bus from San Francisco International Airport pulled in to the Downtown Terminal just before twelve the next day. I picked up my overnight bag, went across the street to the parking garage where I had left my car, and locked the bag in the trunk. Then I walked over and down to Powell Street, past the skin-flick houses and the porno bookstores-the new San Francisco, the decadent one, the ugly one. On Powell, I cut across the narrow street in front of one of the few remaining cable cars and entered the Royal Gate Hotel.
This was old San Francisco, vanished San Francisco, a part of the glorious and spirited city that had risen from the ashes of one of the world’s greatest tragedies. It was an unostentatious twelve-story building which had once numbered the likes of J. P. Morgan, Louis Bromfield, and Lillian Russell among its many distinguished guests-and had never forgotten them. The quiet, spacious lobby had been modernized just enough to keep it fashionable, but without losing any of its gentility. If you were a native of The City, coming into the Royal Hotel, you felt a little sad, a little wistful, for the things that once were, the traditions-such as the chattering, lurching, magnificent cable cars-that were one by one being returned to those ashes which they had survived or from which they had been reborn. It was that way for me.
I asked an elderly desk clerk, who might very possibly have carried the bags of Thomas Edison or Florenz Ziegfeld in his youth, for Miss Kavanaugh’s room; he told me politely that he would have to ring to find out if she would see me, and I gave him my name and waited while he had the switchboard call her. When he had her confirmation, he directed me to the elevators and told me Miss Kavanaugh was in 1012.
I rode up with a uniformed operator, another vanishing breed, and got off and walked through velvet plush past gold inlaid mirrors and rococo furnishings to 1012. Elaine opened the door immediately to my knock, and I went into a large room done in soft blues and dark wood, with a double bed and a writing desk and three chairs and a low, comfortable-looking divan. There was no television set, and that told you something right there.
Elaine wore a beige wool dress, simply cut, and a single stand of cultured pearls at her throat. She was not wearing the silver-rimmed glasses she had had on in my office, and her brown eyes were tired and faintly blood-shot- very probably from a lack of sleep. A vague smokiness seemed to be clouding the textured translucence of her skin, as if some inexplicable form of pollution had begun to consume her from within.
We said perfunctory amenities, and she motioned to one of the chairs and took one for herself and we sat facing each other with a glass-topped table between us. She had her hands folded on her knees and her knees drawn tightly together, the way she had sat in my office. Her head was erect, chin up, and I could see the cords in her slender throat, the faint pulse beating in its soft white hollow.
‘Well,’ she said with a certain firmness, ‘I’ve been thinking about things, and there doesn’t seem to be anything more you can do over here.’
‘Over here?’
‘I’d like you to go to Germany,’ she said.
I blinked at her. ‘What?’
‘Germany. To Kitzingen.’
‘For what reason?’
‘To find out about that gallery and that portrait of Roy. To find out if they have anything to do with his disappearance.’
‘We don’t know that the gallery is in Kitzingen,’ I said. ‘It could be anywhere in Germany. And we don’t even know that it’s an art gallery. I had planned to check on that today by phone-’
‘You don’t need to,’ she said. ‘The Galerie der Expressionisten is an art gallery, and it is in Kitzingen. I called overseas information early this morning, and there was a listing for it.’
‘Then we can contact the gallery by telephone.’
‘I did that, too. I had to have something to do with myself, and so I placed a call to Germany and talked with a man named Ackermann; he owns the Galerie der Expressionisten. He spoke English-very good English.’
‘What did he have to say?’
‘He’d never heard of Roy,’ she answered thinly. ‘And he’d never heard of the portrait, at least he said he hadn’t from my description.’
I rubbed the back of my neck. ‘I see,’ I said. ‘Well, why do you want me to go to Germany, if that’s the case?’
Her eyes were steady on my face. ‘I think it’s very strange that anyone would want to steal that portrait, and because it was stolen, it must mean something to somebody. Don’t you agree?’
‘Yes,’ I admitted.
‘Well, Roy had the sketch and he had the address of the gallery, too, and now he’s missing-that all could be important, somehow, we don’t know that it isn’t. You can’t tell much by talking to someone on the telephone, and anyway, there are other places you might be able to go if you were over there. If that sketch means something in terms of Roy’s disappearance, maybe you can find out what it is in Germany.’
‘Your fiancé vanished on this side of the Atlantic, Miss Kavanaugh.’
‘I know that, for God’s sake, but the portrait must mean something, and we don’t have any other clue, do we?’
‘No, we don’t.’
‘Well, then?’
‘Do you realize how much it would cost you to get me over to Germany and back again?’
‘I told you before, I don’t care how much anything costs. Don’t you understand, finding Roy is the only important thing-nothing else is important, not money, not anything!’
‘All right, Miss Kavanaugh, take it easy.’
‘Will you go to Germany for me?’
‘Are you sure that’s what you want?’
‘Yes, I’m sure, I’m very sure.’
I thought: It may be a waste of time and money, but her arguments are valid enough: a connection between that portrait-the theft of it-and Sands’ disappearance might very well exist, and the connection could conce
ivably be found in Germany. One thing is sure: both are damned odd, and both need explanation. You can’t just walk out on her now, she’s half frantic and she’s got nobody and it’s her money after all; you owe it to her for her faith and her investment, you owe it to yourself for what happened the other night.
I said, ‘Then I’ll make the trip for you,’ and gave her a little smile to let her know I was on her side all the way.
She nodded, and relief was apparent on her pale face. ‘How soon can you leave?’
‘Probably tomorrow sometime,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to make arrangements.’
‘Will you need more money, for tickets or anything?’
‘Well, I’ll have to get some traveler’s checks.’
She came quickly to her feet and went to where her purse was on the nightstand and got a checkbook out of there. She sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Five hundred dollars-will that be enough for right now?’
‘More than enough.’
She wrote very fast and tore the check out and brought it to me. I put it away in my wallet. ‘I should be going now,’ I told her. ‘There are a lot of things I have to do.’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘I’ll let you know later today what sort of flight schedule I can work out.’
‘That’s fine.’
We went to the door and got the farewells said, and I left her there alone with the kind of thoughts you should never be alone with. And as I rode down in the elevator, I realized the nature of that inexplicable pollutant which had clouded her skin with such inner grayness.
It was fear-raw and desperate fear.
* * * *
There was one envelope in my office mailbox, and my answering service reported no calls in the day and a half I had been away. I put on coffee and opened the valve on the steam radiator and sat down to open the envelope. It was an advertising circular from a mail-order house in New Jersey that specialized in stuff like hand-guns and balanced Indonesian throwing knives with double-edged blades. Some business enterprise-and some laws to sanction it. I put the circular away in the waste-basket and pulled out the telephone book and set about booking airline accommodations to Germany.
It took a little time, but I managed to arrange a seat on a direct polar route flight from San Francisco to London, leaving the following afternoon at three. From London, I would take a connecting flight to Frankfurt. Kitzingen, it turned out, was some one hundred kilometers south, on the Main River, and I would have to rent a car and drive down there from Frankfurt.
When I had all of that set up, I dialed Cheryl’s number and there was no answer. Well, that took care of that for the moment. I sat back and lit a cigarette, and the telephone rang.
It was Chuck Hendryx, wondering if I had gotten back from Oregon yet and if I had learned anything of import. I told him about the hotel, and about the suitcase. He said, ‘I don’t like the looks of it. Roy wouldn’t just leave his stuff in that hotel unless he’d gotten into some kind of jam-a bad one, you know?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Have you got any ideas?’
‘Not really.’
‘Well, what do you do now?’
‘I go to Germany,’ I said.
‘Germany? What for?’
‘Because Elaine Kavanaugh wants me to.’
‘I don’t see the point,’ Hendryx said. ‘Wherever Roy is, it sure as Christ isn’t Germany.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘but we’re dead-ended in Oregon and San Francisco. We’ve got nothing at all to work on. There’s an outside chance I may find something over there.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like whether or not that portrait of him means anything,’ I said, and I told him about the theft of it from my apartment.
The only reaction I got was: ‘Who the hell would want to steal a thing like that?’
‘I don’t know. Somebody seemed to want it-and badly.’
‘It couldn’t be valuable, could it?’
‘I don’t see how.’
‘Then stealing it doesn’t make any sense.’
‘Not much seems to in this thing.’
‘Yeah.’
I threw him a soft curve. ‘What do you know about the Galerie der Expressionisten?’
‘The what?’ he said. Some pitch.
‘The Galerie der Expressionisten. It’s an art gallery in Kitzingen.’
‘I never heard of it. Why?’
‘The name came up, that’s all.’
‘Is that where Roy had the portrait made?’
‘Possibly. That’s one of the things I’ll be checking.’
‘Well, I hope you find something that leads to Roy. I just don’t see how that sketch can tie in, but I hope it does if it turns him up. Keep in touch, right?’
‘Sure.’
So my questions had gotten me nothing at all. I had not really expected them to; if Hendryx-or Gilmartin or Rosmond-had stolen the portrait, they would be on guard against possible slips. The thing was, I could not really envisage any of them doing it. There just didn’t seem to be any logical reason why one of the three would want to run heavy risks to get his hands on a portrait of his best friend.
That started me thinking about this Nick Jackson again, and I rang up my friend Salzberg at the Presidio. He had the information for which I had asked. Jackson had been born in Salem, Oregon, was divorced, and had no permanent civilian residence; but his widowed mother still lived in Salem, and a brother, Dave, resided in Portland.
I spent the next half-hour on the phone long-distance to Salem and Portland, feigning an old friendship with Jackson. I learned that he was still stationed in Okinawa-but that he had come back to the States for Christmas, returning on the fifteenth of December. He had arrived in Oregon, with a WA nurse on his arm, on December 24; he and the nurse had gone to San Francisco from Hawaii, the mother told me, and the two of them had been touring the coast, since the WAC was from Georgia and had never been west of the Mississippi until now. Jackson had stayed with Dave and his family in Portland until six days ago, and then he and the nurse had left to do some touring. His leave was up on the twenty-fifth of the month, and he was scheduled to return to Okinawa, via Hawaii, on the twenty-fourth-flying out of Portland on that date. As to where Nick Jackson had been at the time Roy Sands disappeared, and where he was at the moment, neither mother nor brother could tell me.
I swiveled my chair around and stared out the window for a time. None of what I had learned about Jackson had to mean anything, of course, but it was considerable food for thought-especially because San Francisco had been Jackson’s first stateside stop, and his whereabouts between the fifteenth and twenty-fourth of last month were unaccounted for. Depending upon what I learned in Germany, I would have to decide whether or not to fly up to Portland when I returned. In the meantime, Jackson remained on my mind; and he had plenty of company there.
I went into the alcove and rolled out the stand with my portable typewriter on it. For the next half-hour I worked out a report for Elaine Kavanaugh on my investigation thus far, making a duplicate for my files. When I had that finished, I tried Cheryl’s number again; there was still no answer.
I notified my answering service that I was leaving for the day, and that I would not be in for several days hence. Then I turned off the heat and started across the office to get my overcoat. Before I reached the coat tree, the door opened and Rich Gilmartin came in.
‘What’s the word,’ he said. The corners of his mouth and his silky Continental mustache were pulled up in a glad-hand grin. He wore corduroy trousers with a knife crease and a leather jacket lined in thick white fur.
‘How are you, Gilmartin?’
‘No kicks. I had to come in to the Presidio today, and so I thought I’d stop by and see if you were back.’
‘I came in this morning.’
‘Find out anything in Eugene?’
Well, I thought, let’s do it all over again and see what happens. So I did it all over again- relating what I had dis
covered in Oregon and then going into the theft of the sketch-and nothing happened. Gilmartin possessed a good poker face, and he maintained the same expression throughout. He had no idea why anybody would want to steal the sketch, it had looked like nothing more than a simple street-artist’s work to him-was I sure that whoever had broken into my flat was after that specifically? He had never heard of the Galerie der Expressionisten, he said; art galleries were definitely not his bag. And he echoed Elaine’s and Hendryx’s sentiments that the abandoned suitcase did not look very good for Roy Sands.
When I told him I was leaving for Germany the next afternoon, he said, ‘What do you figure to find over there?’
‘More than I’ve been able to find here, maybe.’
‘You’re the detective, baby. Locating Roy is the main thing, and if you think you can do that in Germany, you must know what you’re doing.’
I thought there might be some irony in his voice, but I wasn’t sure and I let the remark pass. ‘What can you tell me about a man named Nick Jackson?’ I asked him.
He had nothing to tell me about Jackson- at least nothing that I did not already know. Gilmartin knew of the trouble between Jackson and Sands-he made a couple of obscene references to Jackson’s sexual proclivities-and said that as far as he knew, the feud between them had ended with the capture of the men who had actually been responsible for the black-marketeering. Jackson had left the Presidio six months after that, and Sands had not mentioned his name since in Gilmartin’s presence.
I got out a fresh cigarette, and I thought of something I had neglected to ask Hendryx. Gilmartin could supply the information just as well. I said. ‘There’s a friend of yours-of Sands-still at Kitzingen, isn’t there? MacVeagh, something like that?’
‘Yeah, Jock MacVeagh.’
‘Will he give me a hand while I’m over there? I’m going in cold.’
‘If he can,’ Gilmartin said. ‘Jock’s a good cat.’
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