A Deceptive Clarity

by Aaron Elkins

  "I have to disagree," Flittner said. "There are a lot of people who see this show as nothing more than self-serving propaganda. Which we all know it is, even if we don't have the guts to admit it."

  Robey dug peacefully at his pipe with a gimmicky tool while his mind drifted elsewhere. Anne listened impassively. Gadney rolled up his eyes again and made a put-upon face. I kept waiting for him to say, "Oh ... really!" but he restrained himself. All three, it was clear, had heard Flittner on this subject before. Only Harry was attentive and interested, his forefinger curled in his beard.

  Seeking a fresh audience, Flittner swung his long, somber face back and forth from Harry to me as he spoke. "Even in the Bundestag—a couple of weeks ago Katzenhaven got up and demanded to know how much this show is costing the German government."

  He was not a careful shaver, I noticed; stubble glinted like shards of mica here and there along his jawline. A spattering of ash was on his jacket, and while he spoke he dropped some more from the cigarette in his hand.

  "But it isn't costing them anything, Earl," Anne said. "You know that"

  "I know, of course I know." Impatiently, he flicked more ash on himself. "I'm using it as an illustration. The—oh, the hell with it." He slumped back in his chair.

  "Listen, let me say something at this point," Harry said. We've asked the Polizei to look into this Schliemann gang—"

  "They're not a gang" Flittner interrupted. "They're a political foundation. Jesus Christ."

  "Excuse me, this Schliemann Foundation. Except that they're not a bona-fide foundation. They're not on record, they don't have an address, they don't sign their letters with their real names. For all anybody knows, they could be one old Nazi crank sitting home alone grinding out crackpot letters." He winced as Flittner reared up to protest, but stuck to his guns. "Excuse me, Dr. Flittner, but that's the way they look to me. They've got no support, even from the lunatic fringe."

  "Now look here, Major," Flittner said angrily, "it seems to me you're being damned free with your—"

  "What I think Harry's saying, Earl," Robey cut in smoothly, "is that they wouldn't have the expertise to get into the storage room the way those two men did."

  "Right," Harry said amiably, "that's all I'm saying. Or the money to buy somebody else's expertise." He smiled winningly at Flittner, who subsided, detonating another gush of smoke from his facial orifices.

  An airman entered with a message. Robey read it and stood up. "Telephone," he said. "Why don't you take over, Harry?"

  "You bet, Colonel. Well, I think we better get on to talking about what we do to prevent a repeat of what happened. Now, Captain Romero of my staff is an expert in this stuff, and he's been working with Captain Greene here on a new ... what's he call it, Anne?"

  "An intrusion-detection system."

  "Right, an intrusion-detection system. Now, these things are pretty complicated, but I want to try to explain, because it means procedures are going to be a little different starting in a few days."

  "Uh, Harry?" Robey had come back as far as the doorway. "Harry, I think you better sit in on this call. Anne, you can fill them in on the security system, can't you?"

  "I'll do my best, sir." She pulled some notes out of a pocket in her attaché case and glanced uncomfortably at me as Harry left with an oddly subdued Robey. "I'm sure Dr. Norgren will see very quickly that I'm out of my element."

  Terrific, Norgren, I thought; the most attractive female you've met in months, obviously predisposed to be friends, and you've managed in little over an hour, with just a couple of succinct and impeccably chosen sentences, to convince her you're a boorish, arrogant horse's ass.

  "Out of mine too," I said with what I hoped was modest charm. "I've yet to meet a wiring diagram I could understand."

  It was true enough. Her enthusiastic and apparendy expert description of infrared beams, entry-reporting networks, pressure alarms, and photo-electric barriers quickly left me behind. I could almost feel my eyes glaze over. Gadney participated vigorously, however, and Flittner participated after his fashion.

  Within twenty minutes I was once again almost asleep. It was, of course, not merely the soporific topic but the accumulated impact of many grams of codeine on a system not much used to drugs. More than that, although I didn't admit it willingly, my body hadn't altogether recovered from the knocking-around it had gotten two days before.

  The expression on the two men when they returned brought me awake with a chill. Harry was grim, and Robey's entire face had sagged; the corners of his mouth now pointed down instead of up. Neither man sat. Robey stared through the French doors with his eyes unfocused and let out a long, close-mouthed sigh.

  "What?" Gadney asked nervously. "What is it? What's wrong?"

  Robey exhaled again and turned slowly to face us. "Peter's dead."

  Chapter 6

  "He's dead?" I asked, after a long silence.

  Robey nodded. "Uh, yes. Wednesday night."

  "Wednesday! But that's impossible! I had lunch with him Wednesday—at the Kranzler ..." The odd, irrational way one's mind twists and skitters to reject what it doesn't want to know.

  "It's true, Chris." He began to say more, then shook his head back and forth. "My God."

  The others at the table stared as if hypnotized while his slowly oscillating head rocked gradually to a stop.

  "How well did you know him, Chris?" Harry asked abruptly.

  "Not very. Better than most people did, but that isn't saying much." Why had he asked me that? "He was a good man," I added, obscurely driven to defend him. "I liked him."

  "I did too," Robey said. Then, reflectively: "I guess I didn't know him very well either. It looks like none of us did."

  An uneasy shiver trickled down my neck and settled icily between my shoulder blades. "Mark—what the hell has happened?"

  Robey looked down at the table and concentrated on stroking the cold pipe in the ashtray. "That was Frankfurt MP headquarters on the phone. They said he—" His eyes came up and flickered apprehensively in Anne's direction. He shook his head again, this time roughly. "Damn!"

  Harry quietly interceded. "You think maybe I ought to explain? I'm kind of used to these things." He smiled gently at us. "I'm afraid it's like the colonel says: pretty bad."

  It was. Peter van Cortlandt, genteel, standoffish, the ultimate patrician, had been found dead in the gutter in Frankfurt's raunchy sex district, a few blocks from the railroad station, at 3:30 a.m. He was lying in front of the Hotel Paradies, a ratty little place with a "sex-kino" on the ground floor and rooms that were rented by the half-hour above. He was wearing only a shirt and a pair of socks, and had apparently been killed in a fall. The rest of his clothing— but not his watch, wallet, or Yale class ring—was found in a third-floor room of the Paradies, the window of which was immediately above his body.

  The desk clerk had told the German police that he thought he remembered Peter coming in a little after midnight with a blonde he had seen around, but he wasn't sure; there were so many. ("So many blondes or so many gray-haired gentlemen?" the Polizei had asked. "Take your pick," the clerk had answered with a shrug.)

  An autopsy had already been performed, the conclusions being that Peter had been killed by a fall from Room 303 of the Hotel Paradies, and that there were drugs and alcohol in his system. It was not possible to determine whether his death had been accidental or if he had been thrown from the window. A search had been instituted for a tall husky blond called Utelinde, or Linda, who was reputed to have the word amour tattooed on her left buttock.

  "I hate to say it," Harry said, "but the Polizei have about as much chance of finding her as ..." He lifted his shoulders resignedly. "This is a pretty common occurrence around the Kaiserstrasse. There's not a night goes by but some soldier or some businessman on the prowl doesn't wind up like this."

  "Now, wait a minute!" I said, my throat tight. "This wasn't some bum, this was Peter van Cortlandt!" Disconcertedly, I shook my head, tried to regroup my muddl
ed thoughts. "It's got to be a mistake."

  "I'm afraid not," Robey said. "It's Peter, all right."

  There was more. An unopened package of condoms had been found in his trousers pocket; a few of the hairs on the tousled bed in Room 303 had been analyzed as his ("Some of them extracranial," Harry said delicately); and he had been seen drinking in two nearby bars earlier that night.

  As these unsavory details came out, the ends of Robey's mouth buried themselves in dry little grooves that hadn't been there before. He was angry, I thought, less at Peter's killer, if there was a killer, than at Peter himself, for the shabby, squalid way he'd permitted himself to die. Not quite angry, maybe, but let down; disappointed in the wretchedly common end of a distinguished man; shamed by proxy.

  Me, I didn't feel that way, but what I did feel wasn't any more commendable. I wish I could say that I had refused to believe any of it, and insisted from the beginning that Peter had been set up, but I didn't. I was astonished, of course, because what I knew of him was as contrary to the notion of drunken whoring on Frankfurt's Kaiserstrasse as anything could be.

  But you have to remember where I was myself at the time. I had been married for a decade, contentedly and (I thought) securely. I had been faithful to Bev, and, generally speaking, happy to be faithful. And then I was suddenly alone, betrayed, confused, aching for solace, and bursting with healthy young hormones. During the ensuing year I had found myself, sometimes to my considerable surprise, in a few places in which, as it now was for Peter, it would have been damned embarrassing to be found dead.

  How did I know what stresses he'd been under? He was aging. Was the job getting to be too much? Was his marriage breaking up? Was he estranged from his children? I had no idea. Who was I to say it was inconceivable or reprehensible that he should lay himself down on a foul bed, rented for half an hour, in the Hotel Paradies.

  And so I accepted it as simply one more proof that we never really know anyone else, regretting Peter's death but absorbed in my own life, my own problems. When the meeting drew to a low-spirited close, I went up to my room and called Tony in San Francisco, forgetting that it was four in the morning there, to tell him about Peter. I also asked him what he knew about the forgery.

  "Only that Peter thought there was one," Tony said, his voice shocked and dull, "and that it was something in your line. I thought he was having a little private joke." There was a long silence. I heard him breathe twice. "You mean there is one? A forgery?"

  This depressing and unhelpful exchange completed, I was downhearted and headachy. I took another couple of codeine, dropped onto the bed, and slept heavily until 7:00 p.m. Down for a groggy bowl of soup, and back to sleep.

  The next day was more of the same: codeine, soup, and sleep. But Monday I was better, managing to work for a few hours at learning the ropes with Corporal Jessick, and spending the rest of the morning with Harry, tediously trying to construct pictures of No-neck and Skull-face with Photofit, a jigsaw-puzzle-like set of thousands of photographs of eyebrows, noses, and chins. None of them seemed ugly enough.

  The afternoon brought a setback of sorts. While I was dozing after lunch the telephone rang.

  "Chris, I've been calling you for days"

  Rita Dooling. Calling with more offers and counteroffers and counter-counteroffers. My head started aching again the moment I heard her voice.

  "I know, Rita," I lied, with sinking heart. "I've been trying to get through to you." What traitor had given her my number at Columbia House?

  "Sure, I just bet you have. You probably went all the way to Europe just to get away from me. Well, what do you say?"

  'To what?"

  'To nine-and-three-quarters percent of your book," Rita said mildly. She was used to dealing with me.

  "Oh yeah, that's right." I lay down on my back with the telephone cradled against my ear. "Well, I've given it a lot of thought, a lot of thought, and I can't see it. In the first place, I just don't want to be bothered with figuring out nine-and-three-quarters percent on every royalty check—"

  "Uh, it's not just the royalty checks. She figures she ought to get nine-and-three-quarters percent of your advance too—the one you got last April. Five hundred, she says it was, so that comes to forty-eight dollars and seventy-five cents."

  "Jesus Christ, Rita."

  "Look, I'm just passing on what her attorney told me. You know I'm on your side, Chris."

  "I know."

  "Still, if it was me, I'd give it to her," she said, generous as ever. "And if you don't want to do the figuring, why don't you ask your publisher to send the nine and three quarters directly to her?"

  Because I'd be embarrassed to, that's why. "I'll tell you what," I said. "Let's put that aside for the moment—"

  "I've been hearing that for a year and a half. If you want my honest opinion, Christopher, you're treading water. You don't want Bev back, but you can't face letting go and admitting ten years of marriage are just time down the drain. You've got mixed-up feelings of loyalty and guilt, and your self-concept has been so traumatized—"

  "Rita, I'm going to have to introduce you to my friend Louis one of these days."

  "I know your friend Louis. We talk about you a lot."

  "Wonderful. Now, I was going to say: About this business of her getting the car and me getting poor old Murphy—"

  "Oh, that's past history, forget that. She's mellowed on that one. She says she's happy to see you keep them both."

  "If."

  "Well, of course 'if'. What she suggests—and I'll tell you honestly, if I were you, I'd go for it—is that you sell the house—"

  "Sell the house," I echoed hollowly.

  "—and split the proceeds fifty-fifty with her, but with a guaranteed fifteen thou up front in cash. Do that and she'll forget about the car."

  "And Murph, no doubt."

  "Well, no. That is, not exactly. She says that if you want Murphy—"

  "Uh, Rita, I have to go now. My beeper just buzzed; I mean beeped."

  "You have a beeper?"

  "Right. Yes. Can't talk now. Emergency. Gotta run. Call you soon. 'Bye."

  I left the telephone off the hook, pulled the blinds, took two more codeine, and went numbly back to bed for the rest of the day.

  On Tuesday I woke up late, feeling good again, my trusty subconscious having wedged Rita's call into the furthest, dimmest corner of my mind. Plenty of time to deal with that later. With great pleasure I tossed the remaining codeine tablets into the wastepaper basket and went downstairs for a hefty lunch of hamburger and fries. After that I took care of a few chores in the office and then went to the Clipper Room to see what headway I could make on the "minor problem" of Peter's forgery.

  While I'd been on my back, Earl Flittner and crew had been busy. The Plundered Past was very nearly ready for public viewing. Most of the partitions, smelling of glue and freshly sawed wood, were in place, and some of the pictures were already hung. The others were leaning against the walls. Flittner was up on a ladder doing something with the lights, and two men I didn't know—Anne's people, I supposed—were on their knees by the entrance, installing what must have been an intrusion-detection system.

  Before I got down to thinking about forgeries, I wandered around the exhibit simply for the pleasure of looking at the paintings. I respectfully admired some I hadn't seen before: a swirling, vertiginous Wind and Snow of Turner's; a serene, early self-portrait by Dürer, the first major artist to be fascinated with his own image.

  Others I greeted happily, like the old acquaintances they were, either from photographs or from seeing them in museums to which Bolzano had lent them: Piero della Francesca's softly glowing Madonna and Child, with a lively dwarf of a bambino as charmingly repulsive as only a fifteenth-century artist could make an infant; and Gainsborough's sedate Henry Colchester and His Family, who peered coolly out of their frame at me, complacent and incurious, as if they never doubted that they were solid flesh and blood, and blue blood at that, but they weren't
quite sure what I might be.

  The show wasn't big enough for the conventional arrangement into little bays and rooms (Mannerism and the High Renaissance, Seventeenth-Century Minor Dutch Masters, etc.). Instead they were simply hung chronologically, well separated, each painting with an informational plaque at its side. The only exceptions to this staid progression were an inconspicuous alcove near the exit, where the copies of the twelve still-missing paintings were modestly hung (with the sad exception of the "Michelangelo"), and a dramatic three-sided bay, draped with green silk brocade, which was the centerpiece of the room and of the exhibition. Here three paintings were dramatically displayed: the newly discovered cache from Hallstatt. I had kept this for last on purpose, saving it the way a kid puts off the best part of dinner.

  They were superb. A florid, frenzied Rape of the Sabines by Rubens, one of many versions, looked less like a rape than a good party that had gotten a little out of hand, but the composition was awesome, and the flesh tones, with liberal applications of his brightest, blushingest rapine pink, were marvelous. The Titian was sensual and robust too—a sexy Venus and the Lute Player. There are also several versions of this painting, and this was one of the best, broadly painted with a grand and sure-handed disregard for detail.

  And then, seemingly from a different universe, the Vermeer. Of all painters, with the possible exception of Rembrandt, it is Vermeer who strikes the deepest chord in me. But Rembrandts are plentiful; there are hundreds of paintings, etchings, drawings. In all the world, however, there are only thirty undisputed Vermeers, with another dozen arguables—forty-two at the outside—and this, of course, was one I had never seen before. Bolzano had actually owned two Vermeers, the only private collector who did. Both had been taken for Hitler's museum in Linz by the führer's designated art-looting unit, the ERR, but the other, A Woman Peeling Apples, had never been recovered. A fine copy hung with the rest of the copies in the cheerless corner by the exit.