‘Not to me.’ MacVeagh frowned. ‘What kind of trouble?’
‘It was over a girl,’ I said, and watched the frown change to a knowing grin. I took the conversation in another direction. ‘Did Sands spend a lot of time in Kitzingen?’
‘As much as the rest of us.’
‘Any special place?’
‘Not really,’ MacVeagh said, and began chuckling.
‘Something funny?’
‘Kind of, yeah. I just happened to think about the Dodge City Bar.’
‘What’s that?’
‘A Kneipe. A dive on the Am Pfuhl, in what passes for whoretown hereabouts.’
‘Sands used to frequent this place?’
‘Hell, no. But he lived there for three days.’
‘I don’t get the point.’
‘There isn’t one, really. Roy went on this three-day bender back in October—the end of the month, I think it was. And he picked the Dodge City Bar to do his drinking in, for some reason. Man, what a hole; he couldn’t have found a worse place if he’d tried.’
‘I was under the impression that Sands is a low-key drinker, that he leaves the booze pretty much alone.’
‘That’s right, he does. But he was really juiced this one weekend. I’ve never seen a guy—any guy—that juiced before or since. He was damn near pickled in alcohol. Funny as hell.’ He laughed. ‘Ed Botticelli and me had to go into town to bring him before the C.O. raised a flap. He was supposed to be back on duty that Sunday night, but when he didn’t show by next morning, Ed and me requisitioned a jeep and went looking for him. Took us a couple of hours to find him; who the hell would have figured the Dodge City?’
‘Why did he go on this bender?’
‘Who knows? I tried to talk to him about it once, a couple of days afterward, and he went cold and distant on me. So I dropped it. I guess he just got uptight about something and decided to tie one on.’
‘Did he usually drink heavily when he was uptight?’
‘No. Like you said, he was pretty much of a low-key boozer.’
‘Did he say anything at all to you while he was still drunk?’ I asked. ‘Like when you first found him, or when you brought him back here?’
‘Seems to me he kept repeating the word why, like he was asking a question. “Why? Why? Why?”—like that.’
‘That’s all?’
‘That’s the only thing I remember. Listen, why all the interest in a simple bender?’
‘Because it seems out of character.’
‘Hell, everybody does something out of character a time or two in their lives.’
‘Sure,’ I said, ‘but everybody doesn’t disappear without apparent reason. Do you have any idea where Sands had been before he went to this Dodge City Bar?’
MacVeagh shrugged. ‘He was there the whole weekend, like I told you; at least that’s what the barkeeper told Ed and me. He’d come staggering in early Saturday night, bought a bottle, and sat off in a corner drinking out of it until he passed out. There are some rooms in the back of the place, over an alley, and the barkeeper and a couple of corporals who were in there got Roy up in one of them to let him sleep it off. The next morning he came down and paid for the room and bought another bottle and started in all over again. It got to be a goddamn ritual until Ed and me came in on Monday—and it’s a good thing we did, too, because Roy was almost out of money and they would have dumped him flat in the alley the next time around. It’s a miracle he wasn’t rolled half a dozen times as it was.’
‘Did Sands say anything to the barkeeper, or to anyone else?’
‘We didn’t stick around to ask questions,’ MacVeagh said. ‘The main thing on our minds was getting Roy out of there and sobered up and back here.’
‘He go on any other benders after that one?’
‘No. He stuck pretty close to base until he left for the States last month.’
‘Anybody else he might have confided in?’
‘He’s pretty close-mouthed. If he didn’t tell me, it isn’t likely he told any of the other guys.’
I drained the last of my beer. ‘Do you happen to remember the exact date this drinking bout took place?’
‘Not offhand. Wait a minute.’ MacVeagh got up and went to where a Playboy calendar hung on one of the walls; it was last year’s, open on the month of December. He flipped back through it, and then said, ‘It was the last weekend in October—yeah, Saturday, the thirtieth, through Monday, November one.’
I made a mental note of the dates. ‘How do I find the Dodge City Bar?’
‘You planning on going there?’
‘I thought I might do that.’
‘Well, I guess you know what you’re doing.’
‘There’s not much else I can do until tomorrow,’ I said. ‘There may not be anything in this bender, but it can’t hurt to look into it a little.’
‘If you say so,’ MacVeagh said. ‘How’s your German?’
‘Rusty, but I think I can get by.’
‘Mine’s pretty good. Why don’t I come with you tonight? Might be a good idea anyway, since you don’t know whoretown and you don’t know the Kneipen. I haven’t got anything else to do, now.’
‘Thanks, I’d appreciate it,’ I told him. ‘I’m strictly a backwoods boy over here.’
‘I know a place where you can get a pretty good schnitzel,’ MacVeagh said. ‘Suppose we have dinner and a couple of beers, and then get around to the Dodge City before it jams up?’
‘Fine by me.’
‘You got a hotel yet?’
‘The Bayerischer Hof.’
‘Meet you there at six, in the bar.’
‘Good enough.’
The rain had slackened considerably, I saw as I went out to the Volkswagen; pale blue lines patterned the gray overcast above, like incisions carefully made by a surgeon. There was very little wind. I drove directly back to the Bayerischer Hof, ordered a hot brandy sent up to my room, and drank it lying propped up on the bed, thinking alternately of Elaine Kavanaugh and Cheryl and the inexplicable disappearance of Roy Sands.
Five o’clock came and my call to San Francisco went through. Elaine was fine, bearing up admirably; she had not left her room at the Argonaut Hotel, and she had not been bothered by visitors or phone calls. Her voice seemed faintly listless, but I put that down to the prolonged inactivity, the constant waiting; apathy is just one of the mind’s defense mechanisms, and a far better one than screaming agitation. It made me feel better to know that she was unharmed and firmly anchored.
I told her about my talk with MacVeagh and asked her if Sands had ever mentioned the three-day bender; she said that he hadn’t, and seemed surprised that he had done a thing like that. He just didn’t care for liquor that much, she said, and she could offer no explanation for it. I said that I would check it further, and get down to the Galerie der Expressionisten first thing in the morning, and that I would call her again tomorrow night whether or not I had anything definite to report.
I cut the call short then, to alleviate expenses as much as possible, and went in to shave for my visit to Kitzingen’s whoretown.
* * * *
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MacVeagh was twenty minutes late arriving at the bar in the Bayerischer Hof, which was not particularly surprising; he had struck me as anything but the punctual type. I was on my second bottle of Scheuernstuhl, Kitzingen’s personal contribution to the brewer’s art; the only other paying customers were two elderly types playing chess and drinking schnapps under an ornate brass lamp in one corner.
I saw MacVeagh come in and raised a hand at him, and he came over to where I was sitting. He was in uniform, a fur-lined greatcoat thrown carelessly over one shoulder; by the three chevrons above the single arc on the sleeve of his blouse, I could see that he was an E-6—a staff sergeant. I had the thought that he had held the non-com rank for some time, and that he would continue to hold it until he retired or perhaps died from one ailment or another. He was not exactly a world beater,
and an extra stripe or two would have no special value in the pursuit of his true life’s work.
He sat down beside me and I bought him a bottle of Scheuernstuhl and we made a little small talk about nothing much. When the beer was gone, we left the hotel. MacVeagh said, ‘We can walk to the restaurant I mentioned this afternoon—it’s only a couple of blocks— but we’ll have to take your car to the Am Pfuhl later on unless you want to shell out for a taxi. I hitched in.’
‘That’s no problem.’
We walked to Mainstockheimer Strasse, which paralleled the Main River to the north. There was no rain, but the rifts in the clouds had been sutured with thick black thread; the wind had picked up and it was considerably colder than it had been earlier. The dark, still water of the river appeared frigid, as if it were at the point of freezing solid. You could see the bright clear lights of the houses strung along the opposite shore, and to the east the lighted runways at Harvey Barracks—the Army Air installation which flanked Kitzingen in that direction.
The restaurant MacVeagh steered me to was called Die Vier Jahreszeiten—The Four Seasons—and it was located in an ornately façaded brick building facing toward the river. We managed a table in the crowded main hall, and ordered Wiener schnitzel and green salad and German rye bread and bottles of Scheuernstuhl. The food arrived in a couple of minutes—Teutonic efficiency—and I had to admit that MacVeagh had a valid appreciation of the local cuisine.
Over cigarettes and coffee he said, ‘Well, what do you think of Germany so far?’
‘I haven’t seen enough of it to form much of an opinion.’
‘It grows on you, gets into your blood. I been here eight years now, at Larson and Mannheim and Bad Kreuznach, and I wouldn’t go back to the States on a bet. They got good beer, better food, and the best pussy in the world. What more could you want?’
I could think of a couple of things, but I said, ‘Not much, I guess.’
‘You married, are you?’
‘No.’
‘Smart boy. I been through the mill twice. American women don’t know how to treat a man. But a German chick—well, Jesus, I was shacked up with this one the last time I was in Munich...’
So I listened to him tell about the last time he was in Munich, his eyes glowing, and maybe it was the truth and maybe it wasn’t; it sounded very good and very false at the same time, so that you had the feeling that even if it was true, he was touching only the very highest points and maybe embellishing those a little. I wondered what he would say if I told him about Cheryl and the way it had been that first time at her house; but then I thought I knew what he would say and I kept my mouth shut and let him talk until he was finished inflating his ego. He let me pay the check and we got out of there.
At the Bayerischer Hof, we picked up my rented Volkswagen and drove south, following the curve of the river, until we came to an old, dark section of the town, near the rail tracks. The sound of a train whistle, low and wistful, punctuated an indication from MacVeagh for a left-hand turn, and I saw by the street sign that we were now on the Am Pfuhl.
It was a short, narrow, twisting street with a considerable amount of pedestrian traffic. Neon bar signs cast surrealistic red and blue and green shadows over the rough brick buildings standing shoulder to shoulder on both sides of the street, and there were black alleyways and small iron balconies at the stories above the pavement. Enlisted servicemen walked in pairs and groups, but seldom alone.
In the second block MacVeagh pointed to a heavy rococo door set between two milky-white globes on tarnished brass arms; black lettering on the lighted globes read: DODGE CITY BAR. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Some place, huh?’
‘Matt Dillon would be proud.’
We went another block, and Am Pfuhl ended at a well-lit thoroughfare. MacVeagh directed me to a spot under a streetlamp, for obvious reasons, and I parked there and locked the Volkswagen. We walked back to the Dodge City.
Inside, there was not much to differentiate it from its brother establishments in two dozen countries around the world. You went down three steps into a dark smoke-filled room with a long bar and tables and booths in the rear. There were red and green lamps on the bare walls, and candles in wine bottles on the tables. Behind the bar were three huge wine casks draped with imitation grapes on wilted vines, and a short, fat barkeeper sporting muttonchop whiskers and wearing a tattered red coat and a bow tie as wilted as the grape vines.
The place was about a quarter filled, but it was early yet and they would pack them in later on—you had that feeling. Bar girls in low-cut shiny dresses numbered fifteen or twenty, and there was a lot of laughter and a lot of sporadic singing in accompaniment to discordant German rock music emanating from a garishly lighted jukebox. I followed MacVeagh up to the bar, and we got some looks from three Flittchen painted like Barnum clowns sitting off on our right.
The barkeeper came down and nodded and said, ‘Ja, bitte?’
In German, MacVeagh ordered a couple of beers and then said that he wanted to ask him some questions about a friends of ours, a soldier. The barkeeper started to protest that he didn’t have time for talking, saw the way MacVeagh was looking at him, and closed his mouth. He opened two bottles of Scheuernstuhl and set them in front of us.Was ist es?’
MacVeagh asked him if he remembered the American soldier who had been drunk in there about three months ago—the one they had had to keep putting in a room in the back each time he passed out. The barkeeper grinned a little and touched his muttonchops and said that he remembered him very well, yes, and weren’t you one of the men who came to take him back to the Flakgelände? MacVeagh admitted that he was.
He said, ‘Did you talk to the soldier while he was drinking in here?’
‘Only to sell him another bottle of schnapps,’ the barkeeper answered, and shrugged. ‘He did not want conversation.’
‘Then he didn’t say where he had been before he came here?’
‘Not to me.’
‘Or why he was drinking as he was?’
‘No.’
‘Did he talk to anyone while he was here?’
‘No—ah well, perhaps to Sybille.’
‘Sybille?’
The barkeeper shrugged again. ‘Ein Flittchen,’ he said.
‘Is she here now?’
The guy let his eyes move slowly over the room, squinting against the pall of smoke. He shook his head.
‘Will she be in tonight?’
‘It is possible. One never knows with Sybille.’
I said slowly, in German, ‘Why do you think the soldier may have talked to her?’
‘She sat with him for a time, the first night— Saturday.’
‘And after that?’ MacVeagh asked.
‘He sat alone,’ the barkeeper said. ‘He sent the girls away when they came to his table. Some soldiers and myself carried him to one of the rooms in back two or three times. Once I had to take him alone.’
‘Was the soldier drunk when he arrived that first night?’ I asked. ‘Or did he become drunk in here?’
‘I think he was not drunk when he came.’
‘Was he nervous or afraid or angry?’
‘He appeared very weary—an old man.’
‘That’s all?’
‘I can remember nothing more.’ The barkeeper glanced over his shoulder, and there were a couple of customers yelling for service at the other end of the bar. His eyes flicked over MacVeagh and me again. ‘I have no more time for talking now.’
‘Okay,’ MacVeagh said. ‘But you point out Sybille to us if she comes in. We’ll be at one of the tables.’
‘Ja, Ja.’ He turned his back to us and hurried away along the boards.
MacVeagh and I carried our beers to one of the empty tables and sat down, and immediately two of the girls who had been sitting to the right of us at the bar came over. MacVeagh looked them up and down with plain contempt—they were nothing for his ego—and said something in German that I did not understand. One of them laughed sh
rilly, and the other looked offended; they both shuffled away.
A half-hour passed, and the place began to fill up with soldiers and civilians alike, pressing two- and three-deep at the bar. The stale, steam-heated air was bloated with shouts and laughter and the strident electronic discord bursting forth from the juke. I began to get a headache, and there was a tightness in my chest from too many cigarettes and the sour atmosphere. I coughed a couple of times and spat up phlegm into my handkerchief, and I thought: Oh God, not this again.
At the bar in front of our table, there was some kind of commotion. The knot of humanity split into two halves, flowing away, like an amoeba reproducing. Two guys, both of them wearing civilian clothes, one in lederhosen, were shoving at one another, yelling. Then the one in the lederhosen put his back to the bar and hit the other in the stomach, bending him double. He followed up with a looping right hand, and the first guy came windmilling backward, in a direct line to where I was sitting.
The Vanished - [Nameless Detective 02] Page 10