Night Train to Memphis vbm-5

by Elizabeth Peters

  ‘That’s what I’ve been asking you to do.’

  Burckhardt leaned back and folded his arms. ‘The information reached us via a channel which has proved particularly fruitful in the past. How our agent acquired the information we do not know, but he has never before failed to be accurate. He gave us three facts: first, that there is a plot to rob the Cairo Museum; second, the individuals involved will be on the Nile cruise which starts on November first; third, one or more of them is personally known to you. Now obviously we cannot halt the cruise or detain everyone who has signed up for it. We must have an agent on that boat. You are the obvious choice, not only because you – ’

  ‘Wait,’ I said. My voice sounded quite normal. That surprised me; even though I had half expected it, one of his statements had had the same impact as a hard kick on the shin. ‘Let’s go back over that interesting assemblage of so-called facts, shall we? First, why are you guys involved? Why don’t you pass the information on to the Egyptian government and let them handle it?’

  ‘Naturally we have notified the authorities in that country. They have requested our cooperation. Are you familiar with the current political situation in Egypt?’

  I shrugged. ‘Not in detail. Keep it short, will you?’

  ‘I will endeavour to do so.’ Burckhardt steepled his fingertips and tried to look like a professor. He didn’t. ‘The modern nation of Egypt did not attain independence until 1922. For over a century it was exploited, as some might say, by Western powers, and many of the most valuable antiquities were – er – “removed” to museums and private collections in Europe and America. Anti-Western sentiment is of long standing and it is now being fostered by certain groups who wish to replace the present government of Egypt with one more sympathetic to their religious views. They have attacked tourists and members of the government. If the historic treasures of Egypt are stolen by a group of foreigners – ’

  ‘I see your point,’ I said reluctcntly. ‘Okay. Next question. Seems to me your information is very fragmentary. Why don’t you ask this hot-shot agent of yours where he got it and tell him to dig around for more?’

  Another exchange of meaningful glances. ‘Oh, please,’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me this is another of those plots. He’s dead. Right? Found in an alley with his throat cut? Horribly tortured and . . . I don’t believe this!’

  ‘Believe it,’ Karl said soberly. ‘We had not wanted to tell you – ’

  ‘I can see why. It might have put a slight damper on my girlish enthusiasm for playing Nancy Drew.’

  ‘You would be in no danger,’ Karl insisted.

  ‘And if I believe that, you’ve got a bridge you’d like to sell me cheap.’

  ‘Bitte?’ Karl said, looking puzzled.

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘It is true. We will have other agents on that cruise; they will guard you day and night. The moment you have identified the individual – or individuals – in question, they will be placed under arrest – ’

  ‘No, they won’t.’

  ‘Bitte?’ said Burckhardt, trying to look puzzled. He knew perfectly well what I meant.

  I spelled it out. ‘You can’t arrest people because Victoria Bliss thinks they look like somebody who might once, maybe, have committed a crime. You’ll have to wait till they do something illegal. And while you’re waiting, I’ll be sitting there like a groundhog on a superhighway at rush hour. If . . . they . . . are known to me, I’m also known to them.’

  ‘You will be in no danger,’ Burckhardt repeated.

  ‘Damn right.’ I stood up. ‘Because I won’t be on that cruise. Auf Wiedersehen, meine Herren.’

  ‘Think about it,’ Karl said smoothly. ‘You needn’t decide now.’

  I was thinking about it. My acquaintanceship with the members of the art underworld is more extensive than I would like, but there was one individual with whom I was particularly well acquainted. His had been the first name that occurred to me – if it was his name. He had at least four aliases, including his favourite, ‘Sir John Smythe.’ I didn’t know – I had never known – his last name, and even though be had told me his first name was John, I had no reason to suppose he was telling the truth. He hardly ever did tell the truth. He was a thief and a swindler and a liar, and he had dragged me into a number of embarrassing, not to say dangerous, situations, but if he hadn’t come to my rescue at the risk of grievous bodily harm to himself – something John preferred not to do – I wouldn’t be in Karl’s office wondering whether he and Herr Burckhardt knew, or only suspected, that the ‘individual’ they were after might be my occasional and elusive lover.

  III

  It took me a long time to get back to sleep after that grisly dream. I was not in the best possible condition to cope with Munich’s rush-hour traffic next morning – short on sleep, tense with a mixture of anger, anxiety, and indecision. It was raining, of course. It always rains in Munich when somebody offers me a trip to some place bright and warm and sunny.

  I’ve lived in Munich for a number of years, ever since I wangled a job out of the funny little fat man who had been a prime suspect m my first ‘case,’ as he would call it.1 He wasn’t the murderer, as it turned out; he was a famous scholar, director of the National Museum, and he had been impressed by my academic credentials as well as by the fact that I could have embarrassed the hell out of him by telling the world about some of his shenanigans during that adventure. We had become good friends and I had come to think of Munich as my adopted home town. It’s a beautiful city in one of the most beautiful parts of the world – when the sun is shining. In the rain, with fallen leaves making the streets slick and dangerous, it is as dreary as any other large city.

  When I pulled into the staff parking lot behind the museum, Karl the janitor popped out of his cubicle to inquire after the health, not of my humble self, but of Caesar, for whom he has an illicit passion. I assured him all was well and hurried through the storage areas of the basement, praying Schmidt hadn’t arrived yet. I had to go to the museum office to collect my mail and messages; if I didn’t, Gerda, Schmidt’s hideously efficient and inquisitive secretary, would bring them to me and hang around, talking and asking questions and ignoring my hints that she should go away, and then I would probably hit her with something large and heavy because Gerda gets on my nerves even when they are not already stretched to the breaking point.

  I entered the office at a brisk trot, glancing at my watch. ‘Goodness, it’s later than I thought. Good morning, Gerda, I’ve got to hurry, I’m awfully late.’

  ‘For what?’ Gerda inquired. ‘You have no appointment this morning. Unless you have made one without informing me, which is contrary to – ’

  I snatched the pile of letters from her desk. She snatched it back. ‘I have not finished sorting them, Vicky. What is wrong with you this morning? Ach, but you look terrible! Did you not sleep? You were, perhaps, working late?’

  She hoped I hadn’t been working late. She hoped I’d been doing something more interesting. Gerda has one of those round, healthy pink faces, and mouse-brown hair, and wide, innocent pale blue eyes. She is short. I am all the things Gerda is not, and the poor dumb woman admires me and tries to imitate me. She also harbours the delusion – derived in part from Schmidt, who shares it – that men whiz in and out of my life like city buses, only more often. Little does she know. It was questionable as to whether John qualified for the role of my lover – three visits in nine months isn’t my idea of a torrid affair – but for the past two years he had been the only possible candidate.

  ‘Yes. I was working late,’ I lied.

  She didn’t believe me. ‘Ach, so. I thought perhaps Herr Feder – ’

  ‘Who?’ I gaped at her.

  She had sorted the messages, damn her. She waved two slips of paper at me. ‘He has telephoned twice this morning. He wishes that you call him as soon as possible.’

  ‘Thanks.’ This time when I grabbed my mail she let me keep it. ‘We will have lun
ch, perhaps?’ she called after me as I headed quickly for the door.

  ‘Perhaps.’ If I could just get out of Gerda’s office before Schmidt emerged from his . . . I was in no condition to cope with Schmidt that morning. He’s even nosier than Gerda.

  I might have known it was going to be one of those days. Schmidt wasn’t in his office. He had just arrived. When I flung the door open there he was, briefcase in one hand, the remains of a jelly doughnut in the other. Schmidt eats all the time. Jelly doughnuts are his latest enthusiasm, one he acquired from me.

  He was wearing one of those trench coats covered with straps, flaps, and pockets – the style James Bond and other famous spies prefer – and an Indiana Jones fedora pulled low over his bristling eyebrows. The ensemble, which indicated that Schmidt was in one of his swashbuckling moods, was ominous enough, but that wasn’t what brought me to a stop. Schmidt was singing.

  That’s how he would have described it. Schmidt can’t carry a tune in a bucket, but he loves music, and he had recently expanded his repertoire to include country music. American country music. What he was doing to this tune would have sent the citizens of Nashville, Tennessee, running for a rope.

  It was my fault, I admit that. I had heard them all my life, not the modern rock adaptations, but the old railroad and work songs, the blues and ballads. During the Great Depression my grandad had wandered the country like so many other footloose, jobless young men; he bragged of having known Boxcar Willie and John Lomax, and he could still make a guitar cry. I had once made the mistake of playing a Jimmie Rodgers tape for Schmidt. That was all it took.

  In addition to being tone-deaf, Schmidt never gets the words quite right. ‘. . . I sing to my Dixie darling, Beneath the silver moon, With my banjo on my knee.’ Imagine that in a thick Bavarian accent.

  He broke off when he saw me. ‘Ah, Vicky! You are here!’

  ‘I’m late,’ I said automatically. ‘Very late. I have to – ’

  ‘But my poor Vicky.’ He stood on tiptoe peering up into my face. ‘Your eyes are shadowed and sunken. You have the look of a woman who – ’

  ‘Shut up, Schmidt,’ I said, trying to get around him. He popped the rest of the doughnut into his mouth and caught hold of my hand. Strawberry jelly glued our fingers together. A stream of water from the hem of his coat was soaking my shoes.

  ‘Come and have coffee and tell Papa Schmidt all about it. Is Karl Feder annoying you again? Tsk! He should be ashamed, the old rascal. Or,’ – he grinned and winked – ‘or is it another individual who is responsible for the disturbance of your slumber?’

  Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that Gerda was on her feet, leaning precariously across the desk as she tried to overhear. Schmidt had seen her too. Shaking his head, he said disapprovingly, ‘There is no decent regard for privacy in this place. Come into my office, Vicky, where we can be alone, and you will tell Papa Schmidt – ’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘No what? It was not Sir John – ’

  ‘No everything! Nobody disturbed my slumber, no, I will not come into your office, no, Karl Feder is not . . .’ I stopped, clutching at the last ragged strands of sanity. Better to let Schmidt think Karl’s reasons for calling were personal instead of professional. Or was it? The world was dissolving into chaos around me.

  ‘See you later, Schmidt,’ I babbled, freeing my hand. ‘I have to – I have to – go to the bathroom.’

  It was the only place I could think of where he wouldn’t follow me. I locked myself into a cubicle and collapsed onto the seat.

  My hand was red and sticky. In certain lights, strawberry jelly looks a lot like fresh blood.

  John was certainly a reasonable subject for anxiety dreams. He had more deadly enemies than anyone I’d ever met. Sometimes I was one of them.

  When I first ran into him I was trying to track down a forger of historic jewels.2 I had no business doing any such thing; it was a combination of curiosity and the desire for a free vacation that took me to Rome, and some people might have said that it served me right when I got in over my head. John got me out. He had been an enthusiastic participant in the swindle until the others decided to eliminate me, but, as he candidly admitted, chivalry had nothing to do with his change of heart. He disapproved of murder on practical grounds. As he put it, ‘the penalties are so much more severe.’

  I never meant to get involved with him. He isn’t really my type – only an inch or so taller than I, slightly built, his features (with one or two exceptions) pleasant but unremarkable. I don’t know why I ended up in that little hotel in Trastevere. Gratitude, womanly sympathy for a wounded hero, curiosity – or those exceptional characteristics? It turned out to be a memorable experience, and it may have been the worst mistake I have ever made in my life.

  Another brief encounter, in Paris, was both embarrassing and expensive. I woke up one morning to find the police hammering at the door and John gone. Naturally he hadn’t paid the hotel bill.

  So why did I respond to that enigmatic message from Stockholm a few months later?3 I told myself it was because I wanted to get back at him for Paris, meeting his challenge and beating him at his own game. (That’s what I told myself.) It was a relatively harmless little scheme to begin with – he needed me to gain access to an innocent old gentleman whose backyard happened to be full of buried treasure – but it turned ugly when a second group of crooks zeroed in on the same treasure. That was my first encounter with the hardcore professionals of the art underworld, and I sincerely hoped it would be my last. John was a professional, but compared to Max and Hans and Rudi and their boss, Leif, he looked like Little Lord Fauntleroy. They disliked John even more than I did, and from my point of view he was definitely the lesser of two evils, so once again we were forced to collaborate in order to escape. My negative opinion of him didn’t change, though, until . . .

  It was one of the more lurid incidents in a life that has not been precisely colourless. There we were, trying to row a leaking boat across a very deep, very cold lake during a violent thunderstorm, with an aquatic assassin holding on to the bow and slashing at me with a knife. I had just about resigned myself to dying young when John went over the side of the boat. He was unarmed and outweighed, but he managed to keep Leif occupied until I got to shore. They found Leif’s body later. John never turned up, dead or alive. Everybody except me assumed he had drowned. After eight months without a word I began to wonder myself.

  The matter of the Trojan gold4 gave me an excuse to contact John, through the anonymous channels that were the only ones I knew. To be honest, I was surprised when he responded. He had once told me I brought him nothing but bad luck.

  His luck didn’t improve. He got me out of trouble a couple of times, and the second rescue resulted in a considerable amount of damage to John himself. This was decidedly against his principles. He had once explained them to me: ‘It is impossible to convince some people of the error of their ways without hitting them as often and as hard as possible. I simply object to people hitting me.’

  The Trojan gold affair had ended with another event John undoubtedly resented as much as he hated being hit by people. I had taken ruthless advantage of a man who was battered, bruised, and bloody to force him to admit he loved me. He had used the word before, but always in context – Shakespeare or John Donne or some other literary glant. The phrases I had wrung out of him that day were boringly banal and dire. They had no literary merit whatever.

  It had been ten months since that momentous event. I had seen John only three times, but almost every week I’d received some message on a postcard or a silly present or a few words on my answering machine – just enough to let me know he was all right.

  The last postcard had arrived at the end of August – six weeks ago. There had been nothing since.

  I got up and went to the washbasin to rinse the jelly off my hand. I’d have to leave the museum and call Karl from a kiosk or a café; I didn’t want Gerda listening in.

  The ‘individ
ual’ referred to in the message from Burckhardt’s agent had to be John. He was the only crook I knew that well, and I was one of the few people in the world who knew him that well, one of the few who had seen him au naturel, who would probably recognize him no matter what disguise he assumed. He couldn’t hide the shape of his hands or his long lashes or . . .

  Six weeks without a word. How could he do this to me, the bastard? Love had nothing to do with it. I was inclined to take that declaration of his with a grain of salt, and I had never returned the compliment; but if he meant to end the relationship, the least he owed me was a courteous dismissal.

  It had of course occurred to me that John might have planted the message himself. He’d done it before. If that was the case I wouldn’t be in danger. John was no killer. (‘What, never? Well, hardly ever.’) I had known all along I was going on that damned cruise. As Burckhardt had said, it was an opportunity not to be missed.

  IV

  I’ve never been very good at poker. I quit playing with Karl Feder a couple of years ago. We had agreed to meet at a café. He was waiting when I arrived and before I so much as opened my mouth I saw he was smirking. He had known I’d fall for it.

  I said, ‘Supposing I did agree – I’m not agreeing, but supposing I did – why couldn’t I go as a tourist? I don’t want to make a fool of myself pretending to knowledge I don’t possess.’

  ‘Because there is no way you could have saved the money for such a trip,’ Karl said. His voice was as smooth as the whipped cream on his coffee. (Bavarians put whipped cream on everything except sauerkraut. That’s one of the reasons why I love Bavaria.) ‘Oh, yes, we could invent an aunt who died and left you her fortune, or some such piece of fiction; but who would believe it? Why would you spend your windfall on such a trip? As you said, this is not your main area of interest. No, let me finish.’ He raised his finger and shook it in grandfatherly admonition. ‘The story will be that you agreed to replace a friend who was taken ill at the last moment. You are cheating a little, that is understood, but who would not, given such an opportunity? You will be lecturing on – um, let me see. Ah! On medieval Egyptian art! That will be perfect, nicht?’