A Deceptive Clarity

by Aaron Elkins

  Like it or not, I had to settle for that. Peter left for Tegel Airport, and I took a taxi back to Tempelhof through the intervening miles of gray, blank-faced apartment buildings.

  Chapter 3

  A driving, sleety rain had begun to fall by the time we reached the Platz der Luftbrücke. I gave the driver a ten-mark note and dashed under the elegant blue canopy that stretched from the curb to the building. Columbia House, U.S. Air Force Open Mess, it said in English, Tempelhof Central Airport.

  I threaded my way between staggered rows of waist-high marigold-planters-cum-car-bomb-barriers and approached the bullet-proof sliding glass doors for the second time that day. Fortunately, the same guard was still on duty, and he not only let me in, he saluted. Heady stuff for a mild-mannered thirty-four-year-old museum curator who'd been rejected by the army during Vietnam (heart murmur) and who'd had no dealings with the military since.

  I was itching to see the show, of course, and I went directly to the Clipper Room, the big room on the ground floor where it was to be held, but there were no pictures, only a couple of carpenters nailing up partitions. One of them told me that the paintings were still in the storage room, and as far as he knew, they hadn't been uncrated yet, or then again maybe they had. I could find the storage room by taking the elevator to the basement and turning right.

  The basement of Columbia House was a long, dreary, curving corridor with concrete-block walls. At its end was a battered but formidable steel door, once beige but now so nicked and dented that the orange undercoat showed rustily through the paint in a thousand places. In front of it a guard leaned casually against the wall. When he saw me, he straightened up, shifted the stubby black rifle slung barrel-down over his shoulder—an M-16 automatic, I've since learned—and watched with half-closed eyes as I came up.

  I smiled confidently. "I'm Dr. Christopher Norgren, deputy director of the Plundered Past exhibition. I'd like to have a look inside, please."

  This try at a command presence of my own was not wholly successful.

  "ID," he said woodenly.

  I sighed, doing my best to seem bored with this routine triviality, and held my breath as I handed him my pathetic yellow card.

  He stared hard at it, turned it over to see the back, and then examined the front again, as if this were a type of object wholly unknown to him, unlike anything he'd ever seen before.

  "Issued yesterday at Rhein-Main," I said. "Department of Defense prerogative."

  This, whatever it meant, had its effect.

  "Okey-doke," he said. He shifted his rifle a little farther around his shoulder and turned to operate the combination padlock. When it opened with a sharp click, he pushed the handle down with his clumsy farm boy's hand, leaned his shoulder against the metal door, and shoved.

  The heavy door groaned over the concrete floor, and a weak shaft of .light from the hallway slanted diagonally into the otherwise dark room. I could see some large picture crates standing on end, and I leaned to one side over his shoulder to get a better look at them as he pushed the door fully open against an inside wall. This was, after all, my first sight of the collection of masterpieces I was going to be responsible for.

  It was a good thing I did, because it saved my life.

  There was a hoarse, boarlike grunt, then a scraping noise, and from the darkness hurtled something that I thought in momentary confusion was some kind of vehicle rushing out at us. What it was was one of the crates, flung end over end through the doorway, so viciously that it splintered with a wrenching groan against the concrete-block wall of the corridor. Had I not been moving to the side, it would have struck me full in the face; as it was, it caught my right shoulder with enough force to whip me around and slam me face-first into the concrete.

  The last time I'd seen stars, I had been fourteen years old, trying out the high-school trampoline. The first bounce had gone beautifully, but on the second I came down on the metal rim, smack on my nose. It broke then, and it broke now. (The crunch is audible.) The first time it happened, I passed out, and this time I came close. There was a sickly, growing dimness at the borders of my vision, like rose-colored ink spreading on a blotter. I felt my jaw go slack, my eyes begin to roll up, my cheek start to scrape down the rough, cold wall. But this time I managed to fight the darkness off. The pain helped—for a relatively insignificant organ, the nose is awfully well supplied with nerve endings.

  Tears streaming from my eyes, blood from my nose, I pushed myself away from the wall and turned, blinking and queasy, to see the guard just inside the storage room, his back against the door, struggling with a man in blue workman's clothing. The man was short but frighteningly massive, built more like a gorilla than a human being; virtually neckless, with a huge chest and long arms as thick as thighs. One thick-wristed hand was on the M-16's barrel, the other on its stock, and he was leaning hard, pressing the rifle into the guard's throat. The guard, husky as he was, was helpless. Crimson-faced and gagging, he was flopping about like a Raggedy Ann doll, banging his elbows impotently against the door.

  There was a second man too, no less evil-looking, with a face like a skull: tight, shiny skin; a long, fleshless mouth; hard, mean, bulging eyes. He was hovering to one side like a deadly mosquito seeking just the right place to bite. There was something flexible and metallic in his hand; it looked like the top ten or twelve inches of an automobile radio antenna.

  I probably would have been petrified if I hadn't been too stunned to think clearly. Instead, I made for them, none too steady on my legs. Somehow I managed to get one hand on the rifle barrel, the other over the gorilla-man's chin, and tugged with all my strength, digging my fingers into the soft flesh of his mouth. For a moment the three of us strained soundlessly and almost motionlessly, as if locked in a multiple arm-wrestle. The only movement was a pathetic screwing-up of the guard's eyes in my direction, in a purpling and otherwise rigid face. Then, as I got my feet under me and leaned forward, I felt the gritty jaw twist away under my hand, felt the rifle barrel give just a little, so that the guard was able to turn his head to the side and suck in a strangled breath.

  That was the high point. From there things slid rapidly downhill. Skull-face turned his attention from the guard to me, lashing out in a precise little movement with the antenna thing, snapping it like a tiny whip. It caught me on the outer bone of the right wrist. The pain was so astounding that I yelped and let go of No-neck's face. Another concise little movement and the antenna flicked my left wrist, same place. I gasped and let go of the rifle. The antenna rose again and quivered like a terrible dragonfly. I ducked quickly sideways to avoid it, to get under his arm and ram him in the chest with my shoulder.

  That was the plan. As it happened, No-neck intervened. It was like being charged by a rhinoceros. He rammed me against the doorframe, got one clublike hand on the neck of my shirt, the other one tangled around my belt, and actually lifted me off the floor while I pawed at him with numbed hands.

  At this point my memory loses its customary acuity, but I think he simply tossed me through the doorway and across the six-foot-wide corridor. I know I banged into the concrete wall a second time, just about where I'd hit it before, but backward this time.

  Of the two impacts, I'd have to say the back-of-the-head experience was less painful, but only marginally.

  Again the dimming vision, again the sickening pinpoints of lights, and again I worked hard to keep from going under. The floor was undulating under my feet, and it was all I could do to stay upright with the help of the wall. I forced my eyes to focus and saw a repetition of what I'd seen before: The guard was propped against the door, the M-16 jammed savagely into his throat, his fingers plucking weakly at the barrel, but no match for No-neck's powerful hands.

  The other one hung to the side again, lifting the antenna thing, holding it poised and vibrating over the guard's head. I tried both to shout and to move, but nothing happened. The metal cracked against the guard's temple and his whole body jerked. I heard his heels rattle
against the floor. No-neck flung the rifle clattering down the hallway, grasped the boy by the shoulders, and dispassionately rapped his head against the steel door. Instantly the uniformed body went flaccid and collapsed bonelessly into the corridor.

  Skull-face stood in the shaft of light, seemingly studying me, considering whether I merited another application of the antenna, or perhaps worse. I was too woozy to do anything. What I remember thinking in a bemused way, in fact, was how remarkably much his raw, open mouth and hollow, malignant eyes made him look like the shrieking bug-eyed man on the bridge in The Scream, that nightmare on canvas by Edvard Munch.

  I guess I didn't pose any immediate threat, because he decided to let me be. He slid noiselessly back into the darkness of the storage room and let his strong-man friend slam the thick door home. I still couldn't move, and while I continued to sag wretchedly against the wall I heard a bolt shoved into place on the other side of the door. Then a crash—a crate being knocked over?—and feet scraping over raw concrete, running up steps. Obviously there was a back way out of the storage room, maybe to the street.... Definitely to the street; an engine started up, followed by a lurching squeal as the car—truck, probably—jerked forward before the parking brake was released. Another roar of the engine and they were gone.

  There didn't seem to be any pressing reason for me to stay on my feet, so I got slowly to my knees and lowered my head, gingerly shoving some wadded tissue into my nostrils to stop the bleeding. When I felt that I could dare to move away from the support of the wall, I crawled on my hands and knees to the guard and touched his shoulder. To my relief he stirred and moaned.

  "Hoo," he said. "Hoo boy." He hauled himself to a sitting position against the wall and kneaded the back of his head, his eyes closed. "Jeez."

  I stared into his face. "You all right?" I had the impression he was in better shape than I was.

  My voice startled him. His eyes popped open to see my blood-smeared face a few inches from his own.

  "Ock!" he said. "Jeez!"

  "It's not as bad as it looks. Just a broken nose, I think." Just, indeed.

  "Lean your head against the wall, man. You're gonna bleed to death." Frowningly solicitous, he put a hand on my forehead and gently tilted me back, beginning to take charge, which was fine with me. I had begun to tremble, which seemed to me a very reasonable reaction, considering.

  "I better get on the brick," he said.

  From a holster on his belt he produced a toy-size black radio with a stubby little antenna. "Bingo Five," he said into it, "this is Falcon Six...."

  I smiled groggily—did they really talk like that?—and then I must have blacked out, because the next thing I knew my eyes were closed and he was standing up, leaning over me. "They'll be along in a minute. Don't you worry, buddy, you'll be OK."

  "Sure. Don't worry about me, I'll be fine." I was actually feeling a little better. The bleeding had stopped, and although my head hurt in a dozen places, the pain was dull and remote, as if it were in someone else's head. I couldn't breathe through my nose, but that was no surprise under the circumstances. My wrists, which had hurt so shockingly from those two crisp little blows, seemed to be all right, to my surprise; I had thought they were broken. I felt good enough, in fact, to try opening my eyes again.

  I was looking directly at the shattered crate that lay at the base of the wall across from me. I forced my eyes open wider.

  "Christ," I said softly.

  "Yeah," the guard said, following my gaze. "You're damn lucky."

  But I wasn't thinking about how it would have been if the heavy wooden container had caught me more directly. I was looking at what was inside it.

  The crate itself, perhaps four feet by three, and seven or eight inches wide, leaned crazily against the wall, as ripped and twisted as if it had been glued together out of popsicle sticks. Half-in, half-out of it was an ornate gilt picture frame of the Italian Renaissance, fractured and sprung; and within this there was an age-stiffened, yellowed drawing that had buckled and cracked into several pieces. Even upside down and mangled as it was, the style of its artist was instantly recognizable.

  Michelangelo, God help us. Michelangelo.

  Such is the flinty soul of the art curator that that crumpled, broken drawing produced an icier clutch inside my chest than anything that had gone before.

  I moved to it, again on my hands and knees. Michelangelo, all right; a fine, careful study for the The Battle of Cascina, the great fresco designed for Florence's Palazzo Vecchio but never executed. All that remained were a few of these rightly celebrated studies. This one was a pencil drawing, highlighted with white here and there, of a nude male caught bathing, twisting in surprise, every visible muscle taut and satiny, like carved, polished marble. It was Michelangelo at his most powerful, sculpting with pencil.

  And yet, somehow ... I frowned, trying to focus my eyes better. What was it ... ?

  With a noise like an armed invasion, two airmen came clumping excitedly down the long corridor, and then a third. Behind them scampered a slight sandy-haired man in a tweedy suit, hard-pressed to keep up.

  "Oh my," he said breathlessly. "What's happened? Oh dear Lord."

  The guard explained, quickly and efficiently, calling him "sir."

  "And who is this . . . person?" the sandy-haired man asked, looking down at me with his nose wrinkled in distaste.

  I spoke from a sitting position at his feet. "Chris Norgren. I'm—"

  "Christopher Norgren? You're Dr. Norgren? Good heavens. Oh, really." He said it the way he might have if I'd embarrassed us both by showing up for a cocktail party on the wrong night.

  Meanwhile, I was looking at the drawing again, dazedly trying to figure out what it was about it that bothered me. I twisted my head nearly upside down so I could see it right side up. That was a mistake. The blood thumped painfully at the back of my nose, and I quickly jerked upright. That didn't feel too good, either. The picture swam and blurred. I leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes again. There was a crust on my lips, and my shirt front was sodden; blood, no doubt, but I had no wish to see. My head felt as if it were pumped to bursting with Jell-O. I considered blacking out again, and I think I did.

  As if they were coming from a moving echo chamber, the voices around me floated hollowly back into range.

  "Yes, sir, I just had a look." That was one of the airmen. "I can't tell if they got away with anything. The guard out in back is out cold. I called for a medic. This poor bugger could use one, too."

  That's me, I reflected with distant interest. This poor bugger.

  "Yes, of course. Certainly." The mild voice of the small man. "I believe he's unconscious."

  "Not unconscious," I mumbled, suddenly figuring out what it was about the drawing. I waved my hand vaguely toward the smashed crate. "The picture ... there's something the matter with it."

  The ensuing silence was so long that I tried opening my eyes again. Things were wavery but not too bad. The sandy-haired man, who was studying the drawing judiciously, turned his attention to me, back to the wrecked drawing, and then back to me once more. He pursed his lips.

  "So it would seem."

  "No, I mean the drawing itself. Look at the pencil lines. See how they glisten?" "Glisten?" he said.

  "Yes, glisten." I rubbed the back of my neck, annoyed at having to look up at him from the floor, but not about to try standing. 'That means there was graphite in the pencil."

  "Graphite."

  "Yes, damn it, graphite."

  "Ah, graphite, yes."

  "Look ... they didn't start using graphite in Europe until the end of the sixteenth century. Before then pencils were made of lead alloyed with tin."

  "Tin," he said. "Of course. I see, yes. Tin."

  "Listen ..." My voice began to rise a little. I did not en: joy being humored by this irritatingly bland little man, "Don't you see? Michelangelo worked on the Cascina studies around 1500. He died in 1564—which means he had to have drawn this posthumo
usly."

  I thought that was pretty good for a man in my condition, but he only said in that dry, patient, maddening way: "Posthumously."

  "Goddammit," I snapped with as much emphasis as I thought my nasal passages would bear, "it's a forgery—a fakel"

  If he says "Forgery," I thought, I am going to bite him on the knee.

  He was saved, however, by the appearance of two teams of medics hurrying down the corridor with folded stretchers on wheels. "Over here, please, you men," he called, wiggling a finger at them. Then he looked down again at me.

  "Well, of course it's a fake," he said calmly. "What else would it be?"

  Chapter 4

  I think I ought to say at this point that this kind of thing doesn't usually happen to me. I'm an art historian, as you've gathered, curator of Renaissance and Baroque painting at a major San Francisco museum. And despite what you may have read about art curators, I don't find myself habitually entangled in international theft or deceit on the grand scale, and certainly not in murder. It's not that I'm particularly unadventurous or fainthearted, you understand, but thrilling-chases-through-the-capitals-of-Europe are things I read about on long flights, not things I do.

  Not until lately.

  "Well, of course it's a fake. What else would it be?"

  Much as I wished to pursue that laconic rejoinder, I had to let it pass. The medics, with quiet speed, did several things to my face—some hot, some cold—stuck a needle into my arm, and settled me unresisting onto the gurney. I was trundled off down the long hallway trying to focus on the questions that were already beginning to flutter off out of reach. Could I really have stumbled on Peter's forgery by having it literally thrown in my face? It seemed unlikely. And how did that tweedy little man know it was a forgery? Peter had said no one knew. Was there a second fake? If so, why hadn't Peter mentioned it? And ... and ...