A Deceptive Clarity

by Aaron Elkins

  It was too much to think about. Instead, I found myself sleepily and contentedly absorbed in the neon ceiling lights whizzing by like the lights of local train stations seen from a night express, and in the warm, lovely sensation of giving myself entirely into the competent, responsible hands of others.

  I was at the Air Force hospital for two days, much of it passed in a dopey haze that I barely remember, while white-coated people took X rays, stuck more needles in me, and prodded me with cheerful insistence. "Does this hurt? No? ... Does it hurt now? ... Now?" Sooner or later they got their way, and then left me to doze until the next one turned up.

  At one point—sometime during the first afternoon, I think—I wafted out of a soft, drugged haze to hear someone greet me in what seemed to be Japanese.

  "Dr. Norgren? Hariguchi."

  "Hariguchi," I replied sleepily, and forced up leaden eyelids. A thin, bearded, somewhat shabby, and altogether occidental man was in a chair at my bedside. He looked at me quizzically for a moment, and then he spoke again.

  "Harry," he said. "Gucci. My name. Like the shoes."

  "Oh. Hi."

  "Hi. How're you doing?"

  "Not bad. Who're you?"

  "Harry," he began again. "Gucci. Like the—"

  "No, I mean ... I mean ..." I'd forgotten what I meant.

  "I'm with OSI—Office of Special Investigations." He put a card in front of my eyes and held it patiently there for me to read, which I blearily pretended to do, although it could have been his Safeway card for all I knew. Or cared.

  "They said you'd be able to answer some questions. OK?"

  "Sure, if they said so." For myself, I doubted it. I felt as if I were floating ten feet off the ground, bumping lazily against the ceiling like a helium-filled balloon.

  "Great." From a pocket in his shapeless, shawl-collared cardigan he produced a small dog-eared notebook stuffed with protruding bits of paper and held together with a thick rubber band. He touched the tip of a mechanical pencil to his tongue. "All right. For starters, can you tell me anything about those two bozos in the storage room? The guard never got a good look at them."

  "The two—"

  "What'd they look like?"

  "Oh. Pretty ugly."

  I think he repressed a sigh. Things were going to be harder than he'd anticipated. "Anything else? Were they tall? Short? White? Black? Did they say anything? Call each other by name? Were they skinny? Fat? American? German?"

  That took concentration, and it was a while before I replied. "Uh, white. Definitely white. And they didn't say anything. And ... uh . .. what was the rest?"

  'Tall? Short?" He was very good-humored, very pleasant, not at all impatient.

  "One of them was short. But husky. Strong as a gorilla. Built like a, like a ..." I was beginning to drift off again. The sheets were luscious: cool and clean and smooth.

  "How short? Five feet? Five two?"

  "Mm ... maybe five seven, five eight. Little guy. But strong. Mean. Dangerous." I barely knew what I was saying.

  "Moderate height," Gucci said dryly, writing in his notebook and rearranging his five feet six inches or so in the metal chair.

  "Sorry," I said. "No offense."

  He laughed. "What about the other guy?"

  "I don't know. Mean face. He had some kind of little steel whip—"

  "I know." He grinned. "Smarts like hell, doesn't it?"

  "It sure does. What was it?"

  "It's called a sipo; a thin, flexible steel spring with a weighted knob on the end. You carry it telescoped, but it opens in a flash. Doesn't do much real damage, but if you know how to use it, it can really hurt. A single flick can make a guy helpless. So they tell me."

  "You've been correctly informed."

  "We found it outside on the stairs. No usable prints. Made here in Germany, but you can get them in the States from those lousy paramilitary magazines. Fourteen dollars and ninety-five cents."

  "Mmm."

  "Hey, don't go to sleep on me. Did you notice anything else about them? Glasses, wristwatch, ring? Unusual shoes?"

  "Unusual ..." In my fuddled state, it struck me as funny, and I'm afraid I snickered. "No, I didn't see any unusual shoes." My voice seemed to be someone else's, coming from a long way off. I giggled some more, I'm sorry to say, and let my eyes close. I was floating slowly up into a gauzy, warm, welcoming mist.

  "Mister .. . ?" I said, and started at the sound of my own voice. "I seem to be drifting off."

  "That's OK; no problem. And make it Harry."

  "OK, um, Harry ... I wanted to ask you something."

  "Sure, shoot."

  But I couldn't remember. I tried halfheartedly to claw my way out of the fog, but I was sailing away, no longer bobbing against the ceiling, but far up out of reach. "Oh .. . yeah—the pictures—did they ..." I drifted and dozed for what seemed like a long time, but when I squeezed my eyes briefly open again, he was still there, smiling patiently.

  "Did they get away with anything?" I managed to ask.

  Whatever he answered, I never heard it.

  A couple of mornings later I was pronounced fit to leave the hospital. The verdict, delivered by a birdlike, whimsical Indian doctor, was that I had gotten off lightly: an "insignificant" concussion and a fracture of the right nasal bone— "Just as well left unset, in my opinion, unless you cannot bear the idea of a small, mm, ah, kink in your nose." (I could bear it.) Also two bruised ribs and a few abrasions of little consequence (to Dr. Gupta). Thanks to a sturdy constitution and two codeine tablets every four hours, I felt remarkably fine.

  I looked better than I had any right to look, too. My face, though puffy and amusingly colored around the eyes, was well on its way back to its usual appearance—which, I have been told, is nice but not unusually so.

  By Bev, in fact. Right after the first time we made love, in fact. We had been lying side by side, on the floor, as it happened, and she had been relaxedly studying my face, running a finger over my lips, that sort of thing.

  "Do girls generally tell you you're sexy?" she asked.

  "Many times each day. It gets pretty boring."

  "Well, you're not." She giggled. "Your face, I mean. It's, you know, a nice guy's face—open, pleasant ... but not very remarkable."

  "Too kind."

  "No, I'm serious. You look like the kind of guy a girl feels safe with. What I mean is, you don't radiate this animal sexuality, the way some guys do. You're not insulted, are you? I'm just being honest, Chris."

  So she was. I suppose I should have known then that things weren't going to work out in the end.

  By 10:00 a.m. I was in my room at Columbia House. A message for me to call Corporal Jessick, the army clerk assigned to the show, had been left for me at the reception desk, and as soon as I'd made myself a cup of coffee in the electric percolator on a shelf over the bathroom sink, I dialed 2100.

  "Dr. Norgren? Hey, I'm glad you're out, sir. I heard what happened. That's awfull How're you feeling?"

  "Fine, thanks."

  "That's wonderful. Listen, Colonel Robey flew in from Heidelberg this morning. He's been trying to get ahold of you at the hospital—"

  "I checked out at nine."

  "—but they checked you out at nine, so then he tried to call you in your room here at the O Club, but you weren't there."

  "I just got here this minute."

  "You must have just got there."

  "This minute," I said. "Did he leave a message?"

  "He wants to know if you feel able to make a meeting of senior staff at eleven o'clock."

  "Sure."

  "Great. It's in Room 1102, a couple of doors down from the Clipper Room."

  I made another cup of coffee and wandered restlessly around the room—suite, actually: big well-furnished living room, writing area, bedroom, well-stocked minibar in the refrigerator. It was all comfortable enough, but I was at loose ends. I'd been cooped up for two days, and what I needed was a walk in the cold air, not a sit-down meeting. F
or a while I stood at the window, looking grumpily down on the leafless trees, the gray-green plaza, and the soaring, three-pronged monument to the airlift. An intelligent, evocative piece of work, that monument; and that is high praise from someone who sneers at abstract sculpture on principle.

  There was still half an hour before the meeting, and I didn't see why I couldn't use it for a few turns around the plaza. I drained the coffee, took my second codeine dose of the day, and went downstairs.

  Ten minutes in the cold was all it took to drive home the fact that I still had some mending to do. In less time than that, I was glad to take advantage of one of the benches to sit down and turn my face up into the pale sunlight, like the convalescent I was. Columbia House was directly in front of me, with the rest of the huge Tempelhof complex angling away from it, seemingly into infinity. I'd learned something about Tempelhof by now, and I knew it was one of the most extraordinary structures on earth, the entire vast warren all being under one roof and therefore making up the third-largest building in the world. (The first is the Pentagon; what the second is I don't know, but if I find out, I'll pass it along.)

  It was built by Hitler in the early, heady days of the Thousand-Year Reich to look from the air like a colossal, stylized German eagle: noble head, outspread wings half a mile wide, cruel talons, and all. Columbia House—all four sizable, curving stories of it—constituted the eagle's right foot. Which was why it curved.

  It had been a good idea of Robey's to choose it as the site of the exhibition's German showing. Berliners, ordinarily not sentimental folk, had never forgotten how the transports of the 1948-49 airlift, loaded with food and coal for them, had roared in to land on the adjacent strip every ten minutes through a vicious winter, and the place was still special to them.

  The codeine had taken full hold by now, so that I was able to forget about the pain for a few minutes at a time. Sitting there in the thin, cold Berlin sunshine, in fact, I was feeling better than I had in many months. Bev, Rita Dooling, and the gloomy, silent house off Divisadero were all a long way off, on a different planet, and what was going on here was a lot more exciting than budget reallocations and management-by-objectives reviews. And at the cost of a "small kink" in my nose, I had acquired a story that would carry me through many a cocktail party to come.

  This surge of well-being lasted until I walked under the blue canopy and up to the glass doors of Columbia House. The guard—a new one—sat at the entry desk coldly watching me.

  "ID," he said.

  With a rising sense of déjà vu, I removed the yellow card from my wallet and held it out. He wouldn't even take it, but only looked at it contemptuously and shook his head.

  "Uh-uh. No banana."

  "But I just walked out of here a few minutes ago—right by you. All I did was take a walk around the plaza."

  "Look, mac, I don't give a shit about people going out; I watch 'em coming in. Now, you got a real ID, or just this cockamamy thing?"

  Apparently I had not caught him on one of his better days. For that matter, I was not feeling overly civil myself. This ID business was wearing thin. Who was this callow twenty-year-old to deny me entrance when I had legitimate business here? Had he just spent two miserable days in the hospital? Had he broken his nose in the service of his country? Why was I being put through these continuing expressions of distrust?

  "This card," I said with the quiet, telling dignity of a Peter van Cortlandt, "this goddamn card has gotten me into this goddamn building three goddamn times—"

  "Not by me—" He straightened up suddenly, staring over my shoulder, and saluted stiffly.

  "Sir!"

  Two men carrying attaché cases approached the desk from the lobby. One of them, a civilian, looked familiar, but it wasn't until he pursed his lips in a prim but amicable little smile that I recognized him: the dry, tweedy little man whose greeting in the corridor a couple of days before had been "Who is this ... person?"

  Today he was more friendly. "Good morning, Dr. Norgren. I'm very happy to see you up and about."

  The other man was in an army uniform with silver eagles on the shoulders; a colonel. "So you're Norgren," he said with a slow smile.

  The guard was still holding his rigid salute. "All he's got is a USAREUR privileges card, sir, and we were told—"

  The colonel off-handedly returned the guard's salute. "Oh, he's OK, Newsome, you can trust me on that." He held a hand out to me. "I'm Robey. Happy to know you."

  Colonel Mark Robey, the man in charge of The Plundered Past, was a distinct surprise. Gifted as I am with a remarkable ability to stereotype at the drop of a hat, I had conjured up someone lean and silver-templed, with something of the Lincolnesque about him: craggy, taciturn, and clothed with authority—your average army colonel, in other words, with maybe a little bit of art curator thrown in. But the hand that was thrust out to me belonged to a drowsy, soft-voiced man, comfortably overweight, with a pleasant, easygoing face, a dreamy gaze, and nothing at all of the flinty-eyed warrior about him.

  "How are you feeling?" he asked. "Pretty much recovered?"

  There is a distinctive and endearing V-shaped smile that can be found on Archaic Greek and Etruscan figures— gentle, lethargic, and (in a nice way) not quite all there. Art people refer to it as the Archaic smile. Mark Robey had the first live Archaic smile I'd ever seen.

  "Pretty much, thanks, Colonel."

  "Mark," he said. "Call me Mark, Chris. Let's see, I think you've already met Edgar Gadney, although from what he told me I'm not sure you'd remember. He's responsible for logistics and day-to-day administration. We'd be lost without him."

  Gadney nodded briefly. He was holding my ID card between thumb and forefinger, like a fussy matron sipping tea in a drawing-room comedy. Around his neck was a thin, silvery lanyard attached to a pair of glasses through which he was examining the card with meticulous care. Mild though he appeared, he was unmistakably vexed. He waggled the offending card and frowned.

  'This is very bad, very bad. It will have to go." He was as solemn as a surgeon telling me my original-equipment heart would need to be replaced with a Jarvik. "Form one seventy-four is not by any stretch of the imagination an appropriate card. You should have one-dash-ten-eighteen."

  "Sorry." I spread my hands apologetically.

  "Lack of proper identification," he said severely, "can lead to no end—"

  Robey, whose attention had wandered off somewhere, now rejoined us. "I think Chris gets the message," he said pleasantly. "Do you suppose you could fix him up with a one-dash-whatchamcallit?"

  Gadney compressed his lips to consider the wide-ranging implications of this question. "Well, I don't see why not."

  "Thanks, Mr. Gadney," I said, "I'll appreciate that. So will the guards."

  Gadney took his eyes from the card and lifted them to mine. "Egad," he said.

  I waited, but only silence followed. "Pardon?"

  "Call me Egad," he said improbably. He removed the glasses and let them hang from his neck, continuing to regard me somewhat uncertainly. "You're rather young to be a curator, aren't you?"

  People say that to me a lot. I'm not that young, really; thirty-four isn't an unheard-of age for the job. What surprises them, I think, is that I just don't have a very curatorial look. Art curators, they think—and they're generally right—look and sound like Peter van Cortlandt or Anthony Whitehead: urbane, suave, aristocratic. Many are second- or third-generation collectors or curators. I guess I look like what I am, which is a second-generation hodge-podge of Swedish, German, Russian, and Irish. My father was a machinist with a night-school diploma, fingertips that had black grease permanently ground into the whorls, and an objet-d'art collection consisting of eighteen Indian-head pennies and a dozen dubious fossils from a 1949 trip to Arizona. I got my degrees at San Jose State (night classes, like Dad) and Berkeley, not at Yale (as Peter did) or Harvard (Tony), or even Stanford.

  In museum circles I had often seen and quailed under that doubtful look when I w
as introduced as San Francisco's curator of Renaissance and baroque. And even under Gadney's inoffensive scrutiny, I confess to a small stab of insecurity. Way down deep, you see, I'm not so sure that I really am a bona-fide art curator, and not just a fraud who's picked up the jargon. Art, after all, doesn't have a lot you can hang your hat on, and there are times when I know I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. (I'm still waiting for someone to explain neoplastic constructivism to me, for example, and I've lectured on the damn thing!) Never have I heard my self-assured colleagues confess such uncertainties, and in my dark hours I sometimes wonder if they—the Peters, the Tonys—were simply bom to the field and I was not.

  I murmured something noncommittal to Gadney as we walked through the lobby, and then asked Robey the question I'd asked Harry Gucci in the hospital.

  "Did they get away with anything from the storage room?"

  "Nope, everything's accounted for, thanks to you. You broke in on them before they got properly started. The only thing damaged was that picture they heaved through the door. Aside from your nose, of course. But we can repair that." He smiled sympathetically. "The picture, I mean."

  I nodded ruefully. "That's good, anyway. But about that drawing ..." I turned to Gadney. "Something has been bothering the hell out of me. Down there, in the basement, when I said that Michelangelo was a forgery, you said—I thought you said—that of course it was."

  "Of course I did."

  "I don't understand. Why 'of course'? And how did you know about it?"

  "How did I—" He stared at me in bland astonishment. "You don't know? I put the entire episode down to your understandably confused state of mind at the time. I assumed you knew all about the copies."

  There was a discreet hint of reproach, as if I'd failed to do my homework. "Along with the twenty genuine works of art, signor Bolzano has lent us twelve copies of pieces that were looted from his collection by the Nazis but have never been recovered. The idea is to publicize them, you see, in hopes that they might be recognized, and that information on where they really are might turn up. The Michelangelo sketch is one of them."