A Deceptive Clarity

by Aaron Elkins

  Emanuel Traben was a quiet, worried-looking man of fifty with a sparse little gray goatee, a round red spot on each sallow cheek so unnaturally bright it might have been rouged, and digestive difficulties that kept his fingertips hovering discreetly near his mouth during most of the time we talked.

  "You understand," he said apologetically, "that we're most anxious to cooperate, but signor Bolzano has entrusted the care of his magnificent painting to us and"—there was a pause while he winced and belched gently behind his hand—"excuse me—we feel we cannot release it to another party, even at signor Bolzano's request, unless we are fully protected against liability."

  I nodded. The Kunstmuseum was insisting that we reimburse them for taking out an extraordinary policy on the painting, one that would cover them in case of any conceivable (or inconceivable) damage to it—natural disaster, act of God, act of war, anything. Such policies come very high, and this one would cost thirty cents per hundred dollars' valued worth per month. On the two-million-dollar El Greco, that would be six thousand dollars a month for the four remaining months of the exhibition, a substantial chunk of the insurance budget.

  Peter had resisted. The standard museum policy insures against theft, fire, and the like, at a cost of about three cents per hundred dollars, and he'd felt that ought to be sufficient. Herr Traben, however, was terrified by the possibility of the Kunstmuseum's having to come up with the two million dollars to repay Bolzano if something happened to the painting while it was sub-lent to us. There was a simple way out, of course, and that was to call Bolzano and ask him to formally approve a standard policy—which he would certainly do, because it was the same coverage we had on the rest of The Plundered Past, which had come directly from his personal collection in Florence.

  Nobody, however, had wanted to bring it up with the touchy, sick Bolzano, so Peter and Traben had been negotiating for months. But I had new instructions from the open-handed Robey.

  "I understand," I said, "and I agree. We'll reimburse you."

  He was so astonished he forgot to cover his mouth, and a soft burp bellied his cheeks and emerged unrestrained. "You—excuse me—you're empowered to authorize this?"

  I assured him I was, to his obvious relief, but that was only the beginning. Herr Traben was a very conscientious man, and there were other delicate questions. At what point would the museum formally relinquish responsibility for the painting to the U.S. Defense Department? When it was picked up at the museum? When it reached Rhein-Main Air Base, the American compound outside of Frankfurt from which it would be flown to Berlin? Who would be responsible for it during transit through Frankfurt? What exact mode of transportation to the air base would be used? Who would provide it? How would ... ?

  I told him we would be happy to agree to anything reasonable, as long as we had the painting in time for the Berlin opening. Much soothed, he promised to call me in Florence the next day as soon as he had thoroughly discussed matters with the museum's counsel. He was sure things could be worked out.

  And that was as resolved as things were going to get. I left the museum with almost three hours before my Lufthansa flight to Florence, and took a bus to the central railroad station, from which I could catch one of the gleaming subway trains that ran out to the airport. I alighted at the train station at noon and immediately realized I was hungry.

  In Germany it is hard to be hungry for long without realizing it. The Germans are surely the munchingest people in the world. It is rare to pass three pedestrians in a row without noticing that at least one of them is chewing on something that looks, sounds, and smells delicious. If they have to walk more than 150 feet without sight of a bakery or a Schnell lmbiss—a hot-snack stand—they become perceptibly anxious, even panicky. As a result, railroad stations, airports, and other public places are lined with tiny stand-up bars selling sausages, beer, cakes, and other restoratives, generally of high quality.

  The Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof was no exception, and the first thing I did when I got there was to order a chunk of warm Leberkase and a roll, served with a dab of sweet German mustard on a paper plate, along with a half-liter of beer. I stood with two other men at a table made from a big barrel and downed the meal happily, wondering, not for the first time, how this pulpy, slippery, delicious sausage is made. (I've never dared to ask. There are some things ...)

  The Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof was typical of big-city Germany in other ways too, being cavernous, bustling, clean, and pleasantly located, fronting a lively square from which a mall led a few blocks into the heart of the city.

  But in Frankfurt's case something has gone wrong. When you head down the pedestrian shopping mall, the Kaiserstrasse, you quickly see that although the pavement is clean, the architecture generally handsome, and the lamp standards charming, a sleazy urban rot has taken hold. It is as if the office-supply stores and flower shops are there on sufferance, and their clients and personnel had better be gone before dark if they know what's good for them.

  Obviously, Peter hadn't known. It was here, within a few blocks of the Hauptbahnhof, that he had died in the gutter. I hadn't come to Frankfurt with that on my mind, except in a general sense, but now that I was there with two hours before I was due at the airport, it seemed a natural thing to want to see the place where he'd been killed. Whether a sort of veneration was operating, or simply an unwholesome curiosity, I didn't ask myself. I left my shoulder bag in a locker and walked east from the station, buttoning my coat collar against the dreary gray snow flurries.

  It was about as much fun as starting from Market and Turk in San Francisco and strolling into the Tenderloin. The scenery was different, but the cast of characters was the same. Men with faces as leathery and corrugated as old valises, many with crusty sores on cheeks or foreheads, stood hunched in shivering, unsteady groups of three or four, or leaned shakily against the walls of buildings, staring with bleary hostility at well-dressed passersby who kept their own eyes straight ahead, their expressions judiciously non-observant. Younger men, earringed and leather-jacketed, stared more openly and aggressively.

  Every other storefront was whitewashed or curtained, with a sign that said Sex-Shop or Sex-Kino—or, in one enterprising case, Sex-Supermarkt—and near their doorways, and other doorways as well, there were miniskirted, fat-thighed hookers, red-splotched from the cold, with grubby hands and mean, pinched faces. A respectable-looking man in shirtsleeves and tie came out of a photographic-equipment store to shoo one of them away from his entrance. He did it with a vigorous slap on the rear. The woman moved on with a silent grimace and a disgusted flap of her hand at him; he went back into his store flushed and laughing, hooting something to a customer.

  There were no big, blond Utelindes. The wigs were all jet black or copper-wire red. It took me a while to locate the Hotel Paradies, because I didn't know where it was and it wasn't listed in the telephone book. I found it finally in a forlorn alley between Kaiserstrasse and Taunusstrasse. It looked the way I had expected it to. Had it been in America, there would have been sad, torn window shades and a red neon sign. Here, those windows that weren't covered by drab metal blinds had grimy, ancient gauze curtains in them, and Hotel Paradies was painted directly on the gray stucco wall in rusty, faded brown.

  It took only one look to convince me of what I should have known days before; that Anne had been right in her conviction, that Harry had been right in his conjecture, and that the Polizei, Robey, and I had gotten it all wrong. Peter van Cortlandt, with his taintless French cuffs and clean, slender hands, would never have gone near the place; not willingly. The man, as Anne had said, was just too fastidious. And if that doesn't sound like a cogent reason, all I can say is that if you'd known him, you'd have thought so, too.

  And that meant, of course, what Anne had said it did: that his death had not been a straightforward, squalid little affair but a more complex matter trumped up to look like something it wasn't. Unexpectedly, I felt a whooshing rush of relief. Funny to be relieved when you realize that someone you
liked hadn't died in an accident after all but had been murdered. But that's what I felt. Regardless of what I'd been telling myself, I'd been troubled by the sordidness of the thing, and finding out I'd been wrong made a big difference.

  I had stood too long staring at the Hotel Paradies; long enough for the wet snow to collect on my eyebrows, long enough for a puffy-faced woman with copper hair to open the front door and call out across the street to me.

  I turned and walked back to the Hauptbahnhof, reflecting. What about motive? Was there really any reason to think, as Anne did, and Harry seemed to, that it was anything more complicated than a robbery? Peter did carry a lot of cash on him; once I saw him ask a waiter if he could change a thousand-dollar bill at the Thanh Longh, a tiny Vietnamese restaurant on Geary, not far from the museum. (I wound up paying the $9.80 lunch check for the two of us, although Peter had repaid me by 2:00 p.m.)

  More than that, Peter looked rich—the way he talked, lit his cigarette, crossed one slim leg over the other. As considerate and polite as he was to anyone who came his way, he moved in an aura of self-assured complacence that would probably make a really poor man want to kill him on sight.

  So the obvious motive was robbery, especially since the valuables he'd carried with him were missing. And yet, by the time I took my seat on the smooth, silent airport train, I knew I didn't buy it. It was too elaborate for so ordinary a theft: watch, ring, wallet. Peter's killer—or killers—had gone to a great deal of trouble throwing up a smoke screen to befuddle the police. They must have drugged him, put him into a walking trance so that witnesses would remember seeing him "drunk" in a couple of bars, dragged him into that awful hotel, arranged for the tattooed Utelinde ... but why go through all that when a blow on the head and a quick toss into the Main would have sufficed? Why kill him at all?

  And if it wasn't robbery, then I could think of only one reasonable alternative: Anne's hypothesis that "they" had killed him to keep him quiet about the forgery he'd found, the forgery he'd been so quietly jocular about. The idea no longer seemed absurd. One week he discovers a forgery in The Plundered Past, and the next he's murdered in a well-planned setup; set up to have no apparent connection with the show, set up to make his friends, his associates, his family only too happy to see the resulting inquiry get as little publicity as possible. Given the circumstances, "they" must have reasoned, there was hardly likely to be an outcry for an exhaustive investigation. The sooner he was buried, the sooner his miserable end could be forgotten.

  It made sense, but it was all conjecture. No, not all. He was murdered; of that I was now certain, and his murder was not what it seemed. It had been natural enough for Harry to think along those lines, but why, I wondered irritably, had Anne been able to see it from the beginning, while I, with all my smug condescension, had not? Well, I would tell her that she was right and I was wrong when I saw her next, and I would try to say a few more things too.

  As the Lufthansa jet, predictably punctual, rose from the runway, bound for Italy, I was turning a hundred questions over in my mind, and two in particular: Who were "they"? And what was the forgery Peter had found? The first I couldn't do anything about, other than put it in the hands of the police. The second, I could. And would.

  I began that evening. Fog and ice storms over much of northern Italy made it impossible for the jet to take off from Milan's Malpensa Airport, where it had made an intermediate stop. I checked into an Agip Motel near the airport, called Lorenzo Bolzano to tell him I'd be a day late, and then telephoned Robey's office in Heidelberg, which would not give me his telephone number but promised to give him mine.

  Twenty minutes later, while I was under one of those functional, unenclosed Italian showers where the entire bathroom serves as the shower stall and the water runs down a drain in the middle of the floor, the telephone rang. I grabbed a towel and ran for it.

  "Chris?" Robey's daydreamy voice asked. "Where are you—Florence? Is there a problem with Bolzano?"

  "I'm in Milan. I'll see Bolzano tomorrow."

  "Ah."

  "That's not what I called about, though. There's another problem." I sat down on the bed, toweling my hair, and went through what Peter had told me one more time.

  "A forgery in The Plundered Past," Robey mused, with all the feverish intensity he might have shown if I'd told him we needed another bottle of glue for the partitions. "Are you going to be able to find it?"

  "I don't know. That's what I'm calling about. I think I may have to bring in some technical help. It's expensive. Can the budget stand it?"

  "Oh, don't worry about that. If we need help, we'll get help. You let me worry about the budget."

  These words were so unlike any I'd ever heard at the San Francisco County Museum of Art that I was momentarily struck dumb. "That's good," I finally managed.

  "Well, that's what I'm here for." He was ready to go back to whatever else was on his mind.

  "There's something else, Mark. I think Peter's death was a setup; I think he was killed because of the forgery."

  "You what?" I had his full attention at last.

  I explained as well as I could the conclusions I'd come to in Frankfurt, but my reasoning sounded pretty lame even to me, and I could feel his concentration wander as I told him about the seedy Hotel Paradies.

  "Well, yes," he said. "I can certainly see why you'd think that. Hm." Back to business as usual with Robey. It was what he'd said to Anne.

  "But what do you think?" I asked.

  "Well ... I wouldn't rule it out."

  That was what I'd said to Anne. "Mark, I think I ought to talk to Gucci about it."

  Silence.

  "Do you have any objection?" I asked.

  "No, no objection. Just—well, I wouldn't want to see a lot of adverse publicity about the show. It's bad enough already."

  "I'm as concerned about the show as you are, but Peter's been killed, for God's sake—"

  "You're right, you're right," he said soothingly. "Totally. I was just worried about the media getting a hold of it in some sensational way, that's all. I know you'll conduct yourself discreetly."

  "I'll be discreet," I said, not showing my annoyance.

  "Of course you will. And Chris?"

  "Yes?"

  "Assuming for the sake of argument that you're right about Peter's death having something to do with the forgery, then, well ... I guess what I'm trying to say is pretty obvious."

  "I don't think I—"

  "Well," he said with a long, slow sigh, "you'd better take care of yourself." Pregnant pause. "Hadn't you?"

  And that was the first time, right then, while I sat naked on the bed, with my hand still on the cradled telephone, that it belatedly dawned on me that I was in danger myself. Peter had been killed, I was now assuming, because he'd come upon a forgery. And here was I, doing everything I could to find the same forgery. I remained there, thinking that over for a while, but I never seriously considered— never considered at all—giving up the investigation.

  I don't mean to imply that I'm particularly brave, because I don't think I am. (I was proud of the way I'd reacted in the storage room, but I knew very well I had charged into that fracas instinctively, without stopping to think about it, which is a different thing than bravery.) But when I get started on a problem, there is a dogged streak that surfaces—that old anal fixation, I guess—and it had most certainly surfaced now. I was not about to pull back until that fake was identified. And until Peter's killer was found.

  Resolute as all that may sound, I was glad I'd bought a small bottle of Italian brandy at the airport, and when I'd slipped into my robe, I poured myself a substantial dollop. Then I sat down at the small round table and called Harry Gucci.

  It was after eight, but he was still in his office.

  "Hey, Chris!" he cried happily. "What's up? Where are you, anyway—Frankfurt? Florence?"

  "Milan. Harry, you were right. I think Peter was murdered, and that it had something to do with the forgery."


  "What brings on this change of heart?"

  "Well, I'm not sure it'll make much sense to you, but I had a look at the Hotel Paradies today."

  "And?"

  "And Peter van Cortlandt would never in a million years have walked into that place. Not of his own free will. It didn't really hit me until I saw it."

  "That's your evidence?"

  "I'm afraid so. But I know I'm right, Harry."

  The earpiece whistled with a sigh. "Yeah, I think you are, too. The whole thing doesn't sit right, does it?" He was quiet for several seconds, if you don't count tooth-sucking.

  "Are you going to follow up on it?" I asked.

  "Yeah, I'll follow up, but technically this is the Polizei's case, not the U.S. Army's; all I can do is sort of work along with them. I think it'd be a good idea if you talked directiy with the guy that's running the investigation in Frankfurt."

  "Oh, sure, I can hear it now: 'Herr Inspektor, I know with certainty that Peter van Cortlandt would never have gone to bed with a prostitute in the Hotel Paradies.' 'Ja? And how do you know this, Herr Doktor?' 'I know, Herr Inspektor, because it would have offended his aesthetic and hygienic sensibilities.' That'll really get them going, won't it?"

  Harry laughed. "OK, leave it to me. Listen, do you have any idea at all who might have wanted to kill him?"

  "No. Nobody."

  "Well, somebody. What about motive?"

  "All I can think of is what Anne Greene suggested to me: Somebody wanted to keep him quiet about the forgery." I stood up and looked at the sleet thrumming against the black window pane. "It isn't much, is it?"

  "I wouldn't exactly call it a watertight case, no," he said cheerfully. "But have a little faith. Hey, what about the forgery, by the way? Any luck yet?"