by Aaron Elkins
"No," I said after a little more thought, as we turned back toward the center of West Berlin and began to look for a taxi stand. "No, not out of nowhere." And then I began telling her things that even Louis hadn't been able to nondirectively pry out of me, things I hadn't pried out of myself. How Bev and I had been drifting apart for three or four years and never faced up to it, how she had tried one thing after another to find what she needed—transcendental meditation, transactional analysis, assertiveness training— and I buried myself in work, gradually coming to spend most of my Saturdays at the museum (while Bev took glass-blowing lessons, or so I was given to understand) and pretty much left the twentieth century for the eighteenth.
"It must have been a miserable time for you," Anne said.
"But it wasn't," I answered truthfully. "I thought I was happy, and if you think you're happy, you must be happy, right?"
"You really didn't have an inkling?"
I shook my head. "I really thought everything was all right. We went out to dinner a couple of times a week, we went to concerts, to plays—"
"You know, I'm starting to think you might be that guy with not a whole lot upstairs, after all."
"You know, I'm starting to think you're right."
We found a taxi stand near Potsdamer Platz and climbed into a cab, grateful to be out of the deepening late-afternoon cold. "All this time she was out finding herself while you were dreaming away in the museum archives," Anne said, "you were faithful to her? Or don't I know you well enough to ask?"
"No, you know me well enough. And yes, I was." The world's changed, I thought. Here I am feeling ashamed of having been faithful to my wife.
"Even in thought?"
"Well, not always in thought."
"I'm relieved to hear it."
"But mostly even in thought," I persisted, wanting to be honest. "Look Anne, I loved Bev, and we got along fine in bed, and I didn't feel misunderstood or anything else." I shrugged. "I just didn't need anything on the side."
She looked out the window at the quickly darkening streets. "If this is a line," she murmured, "it has its points."
"It's not—"
"I know it's not. What about since you broke up? Anything important in the female line? Just curious."
"Not much. I mean, no. Not till now." Her hand was lying palm-down on the seat. I covered it with mine, and she turned it over to clasp my fingers.
OK, it was straight out of Booth Tarkington, but I couldn't have been happier. "Anne, I'm awfully glad you didn't just write me off that day at the meeting. I would have deserved it."
"Oh, I did. But later on I figured out what was going on."
"You did, huh? What was going on?"
"What was going on was that you were attracted to me—we both were, to each other—and it scared you."
"Scared me ..." I laughed.
"Sure. You were afraid of being burned again, and you were still feeling guilty and hurt over Bev—"
"Guilty! What did I have—"
"—so you put up this prickly barrier. Then, when we met for that drink, you started letting your hormones call the shots again, which was very sensible. But then when the possibility of dinner came up, you backed off in a hurry."
"And why did I do that?"
"Because in the bar we were talking about the show, so you had a nice, safe role to hide behind. But dinner would have been just you and me, no business talk, and that made you nervous again."
"Anne, that's ... Is this what they teach you in career counseling? It's ridiculous."
"Uh-huh."
"Come on, people don't behave that simplistically. You're talking pop psychology."
"Mm."
"OK, if you're right, why have I spent the afternoon with you? And enjoyed it, I should add."
She shrugged. "Hormones talking again, I guess."
"Well, you're right enough about that," I said, laughing.
We got to Columbia House at four-thirty, an hour before she was due to catch a military bus to the terminal. At the desk there was a stack of messages waiting for her, and a couple for me, one of which said that Harry Gucci had telephoned. Would I call him at 3660 or look for him in the Keller-Bar at about five?
"He might already be there," Anne said.
"Yes, I guess I'll go see. It's been a good day, Anne."
"For me too, Chris."
She didn't invite me up to her suite for a warm-up cup of coffee or a drink, and I didn't suggest it. The day was right, perfect, just the way it was, and neither of us wanted to risk spoiling it. Hormones be damned.
Chapter 13
I had already gotten a bottle of Löwenbräu at the bar before I saw Harry at a table near the back. Gadney was with him.
"Hiya, Chris, come on over. Egad and I are just shooting the breeze."
"So he pretends," Gadney said. "In fact, I'm suffering a merciless interrogation. I advise you to find another table if you don't want some of the same."
Harry laughed, scratching at the side of his scruffy beard, and pushed out a chair for me. He was slumped in a cardigan I hadn't seen before, with faded geometric Northwest Indian designs on it.
"I understand your mission to Florence was a great success," Gadney said.
I nodded. "Lorenzo asked me to be sure and say hello for him."
"Lorenzo?"
"Lorenzo Bolzano."
"Of course," he said impatiently. "But I don't understand. I barely know him."
"Really? He gave me the impression that you'd spent a day down there."
"Only to attend to the shipping of the paintings to Naples. I don't know why Lorenzo would remember me kindly. I'm afraid I was rather cross."
"Why?"
"Oh, Peter and Earl had left without completing the paperwork. My fault, really. I shouldn't have expected them to know about it. And certainly not Lorenzo."
"Is the paperwork pretty complicated, then?"
"Complicated? Not really; it's just a matter of following procedures. It's nothing compared to the difficulties of commissary logistics, I can tell you." He finished the sherry in his glass, pressed his lips together, and allowed himself an appreciative smack. "Consider, for example," he said with a fine, dusty enthusiasm, "how you would go about getting fifty thousand quarts of fresh Belgian strawberries onto the shelves of ninety commissaries from Bremerhaven to Izmir. With a permissible lag time of four days, I might add. There's excitement for you."
"I can imagine. But what about getting all those crates open and closed again in a single day? That must have been pretty harrowing too, considering how careful you have to be."
"Crates? Do you mean the paintings? What makes you think I did?"
"Didn't you say so a moment ago?"
"No, I didn't."
"You didn't? I thought you did. Didn't you hear him say that, Harry?"
Harry, who had been listening with interest, as he listened to everything, tugged at the hair behind his ear. "Well, yeah, I thought you said that, Egad."
"No," Gadney said again, his pale blue eyes looking levelly into mine, "I didn't say that. But as a matter of fact, as it happened, I did have to have the crates opened. Each one had to have its own bill of lading and a copy of my travel orders from Florence to Naples, since I was the authorizing officer. And no, it was not exciting. When we move from Berlin to London," he added stiffly, "I assure you it will be done properly in the first place. You needn't concern yourself."
"I'm sure it will, Egad. I didn't mean any criticism."
"Yes. Well, I really must run. Is that all right with you, Major?"
"Me? Sure. Enjoyed talking to you."
We both watched him stalk out. "What's up, Harry?" I asked.
"I thought we ought to touch base on next week."
"What's happening next week?"
"The El Greco pickup in Frankfurt. What, did you forget about it?"
I had. Fortunately, though, it appeared that Robey had remembered to alert Harry after all.
"Here'
s the way it'll work," he said, and rolled the rubber band off the limp little notebook. "Eleven hundred hours, you show up at the museum to verify the picture's OK when they crate it. Twelve-fifteen, you leave on the truck with it, along with a couple of museum guards. Thirteen hundred hours, the truck arrives at the Rhein-Main MAC terminal, VIP parking area. My people will meet you there and take over. Fourteen hundred hours, you come back with them on a special MAC flight. When you get to Berlin, there'll be a truck to meet you; then straight to Tempelhof and the back of Columbia House."
"Very impressive. Herr Traben will be pleased."
"Yeah," he said doubtfully. "Look, you've done this kind of thing before. Do you usually go through all this hassle to get a painting from one place to another?"
'That picture's worth two million dollars, Harry. And it's literally irreplaceable. All the same, Traben's overdoing it a little, if you ask me."
"Yeah," he said again. He put down his orange juice. "You want another beer?"
"No thanks."
"How about some food? You hungry?"
"A little. They've got a steak special upstairs tonight."
He made a face. "I don't eat meat."
I don't know why, but it didn't surprise me. "Health or ethical grounds?" I asked.
"Both. Why eat all that cholesterol, and why slaughter cows or pigs or sheep when there are a lot of other ways to get protein?" He gave me the kind of look civilized beings reserve for carnivores, then said abruptly, "Hey, how about some fried chicken? There's a Wienerwald a couple of blocks from here."
I laughed. "Sure, but what have you got against chickens?"
He looked at me as if he couldn't believe I'd ask so self-evident a question. "They're ugly."
In a comer booth at Germany's answer to Colonel Sanders, he grimaced at the menu. "Jesus, isn't that awful?"
I looked down at my own and saw nothing objectionable. "What?"
"The picture, the picture. Uch."
I still didn't know what was bothering him. The only picture I could see was a cartoon of a friendly and inoffensive chicken in a chef's hat, with a checkered kerchief around it's neck. "What's wrong with it?"
"Are you kidding? I hate this kind of picture. Look at it.
He's holding a knife and fork, he's got an apron on. I mean, the implication is that he's gonna eat himself—or at least another chicken—and he's laughing like crazy. It's horrible. You're telling me that doesn't bother you?"
"Harry," I said, "you're weird."
But not so weird that he didn't order half a sauteed chicken.
I wasn't very hungry, and asked for a small chicken salad.
"Oh, by the way," he said, when the waitress had brought apple juice for him and a glass of Mosel for me, "speaking of pictures ..." He unfolded a poorly photocopied sheet with four photographs on it: two men, each photographed from front and side, with names and numbers beneath. "Would these possibly be friends of yours?"
They were like faces from a nightmare. No-neck, the gorilla man and his sidekick Skull-face. "You got them!" I cried. "The guys from the storage room! Harry—"
"Ah," he said with satisfaction, "good. But don't get too excited. We don't have them; we just know who they are."
"Who?"
He took back the sheet and spread it out on the table in front of him, smoothing down the creases. "Just a couple of particularly nasty rent-a-thugs. The Polizei has records a mile long on them. They call the one with the forty-inch neck the Beast."
"Gee, I wonder why that is," I said, remembering with a shudder how it felt to be lobbed six feet into a concrete wall.
"Got a little more news for you, Chris," he said, watching me over the rim of his glass. "We also know the guys who killed van Cortlandt—that is, the ones who walked him through those bars that night."
I slowly put down my wine. "Why didn't you tell me that before? Who are they?"
He smiled and tapped the sheet.
My eyes widened. "The same ones? How did you find all this out?"
"Wasn't too hard. I got a dozen possible matches to your Photofit and took them to Frankfurt yesterday. Then I spent last night with a couple of Polizei, showing the pictures to people in the bars around the Paradies. Three people positively identified them as the guys who were hauling him around from bar to bar, more or less holding him up between them."
I turned the sheet around and looked hard at the pictures. The men who'd killed Peter. "Why did they do it?" I asked dully.
"Well, how the hell am I supposed to know that? Somebody hired them, I guess."
"And somebody hired them to rob the storage room?"
"I think so."
"And that's all you know?"
"Hey, look, Chris, I'm not Superman," he said testily. "Don't worry, we'll find these guys."
"Hey, Harry, I'm sorry, you've done a terrific job. It's just ... well, even if we know who they are, we don't really know anything more than we did before, do we?"
"Oh, I wouldn't say that. We know the murder and the break-in are connected now. We didn't know that before."
"That's true. You don't suppose—you don't think Peter somehow found out that the robbery was planned, and they killed him to keep him quiet?"
He didn't seem impressed with the idea. "Possible, but what happened to your forgery theory?"
I shook my head. "I don't know."
We sipped our drinks thoughtfully until the waitress came back with our dinners.
"Aahh," Harry breathed, "that smells great. He tore off a wing and went to work on it—quite carnivorously, I thought. "Now," he said, licking at his thumb, "you want to tell me what that was about with Gadney?"
"What what was about?"
"Your burning interest in logistics."
"I wanted to see if he'd admit to being alone with the open crates," I said, and went over the conclusions I'd reached in Florence, while Harry nodded and made steady progress on his chicken.
"OK," he said, "so you're saying, (a) either the forgery is one of the three paintings from Hallstatt—in which case probably nobody connected with the show had anything to do with it—or (b) it's from Bolzano's Florence collection—in which case somebody in the show has to be involved. And you figure it's b?"
"No, I figure it's a, but I didn't think it would hurt to talk to Egad. Did what he said sound right to you, by the way? About the bills of lading and the travel orders?"
"It sounds possible."
"Well, I'll check around and see."
"I'll check around." He wiped his fingers on a napkin and reached for another. "You really think that little guy's mixed up in this thing?"
"That little guy" was an inch taller and at least ten pounds heavier than Harry.
"No, but if the fake is from Florence—which I doubt— and not from Hallstatt, either he's involved with it, or Flittner is, or Robey is. One of them has to be."
"No, I don't see it that way."
"There's Jessick, you mean? I don't think so. He wasn't cleared to get near the paintings. Flittner, Robey, and Gadney are the only ones with the access and the knowledge. It's got to be one of them."
"No, it could have been all of them. Or any two."
I put down the Mosel and thought about that. "A conspiracy? That's pretty—"
"Or van Cortlandt."
"Peter? Are you serious? My God, Harry, he was murdered!"
"Yeah, well," he mumbled into his beard, "I was figuring that any involvement would have been before he died, you know?"
"That's not what I meant. There's no way Peter would have had anything to do with something crooked. And if he did, why would he tell me about it?"
"Hey, calm down, Chris; don't get excited. Eat your salad."
"I am calm, damn it!"
"All I'm doing," he said, searching sadly in the debris on his plate for any shreds he might have missed, "is thinking out loud, building possibilities from what you told me, you know? And it's possible—possible—that van Cortlandt was involved in somethin
g shady, and that he wound up getting killed on account of it."
"Yes, I know, but—"
"There are some other possibilities too. Anne Greene, for instance."
"Anne? You're out of your mind! She didn't know anything about it. And she's the one who kept trying to tell everybody Peter was murdered right from the beginning."
"Look, you said—and it's a good point—that the people who had access and knowledge are our best bets. Now, she's got both, right? Stop being so subjective, for Christ's sake. Whoever's guilty, you can bet there's someone, somewhere, who thinks he's a wonderful person." He cocked his head and scratched raspily at the hair on his cheek. "Well, maybe not Flittner."
"I understand what you're saying, and you're right. But Anne—well, hell, I had access and knowledge, too, for that matter. What about me?"
Harry licked grease from his pinky and nodded thoughtfully. "Yeah, then there's you."
"Not likely," I said, in a tone implying that of course he was being playful. "I just got here last week."
"And how do I know this forgery business didn't get set up last week?"
"Because Peter told me about it the very first day I was here, for one thing."
"Yeah, so you say."
"So I ... Why the hell would—"
Harry threw back his head and chortled. "Hey, relax, will you? You're not on my list of suspects, OK? Neither is Anne. I just enjoy seeing the veins stand out on your neck, that's all, but I don't want you to have a stroke. Loosen up; don't be so intense. I'm on your side, you know."
Intense, again. What was this? When did I become so intense? "That's nice to know, but how come you're being generous enough to exclude me?"
"Intuition. Also the fact that you almost got yourself killed in the storage room. But mostly intuition."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence." I took a long sip of the Mosel. "I'd like to help any way I can, Harry."
"Good; find that fake. And there's one thing you can tell me that might help a lot. Do you have van Cortlandt's appointment calendar?"
"It isn't on the desk in Room 2100?"
"No, but Jessick's sure he had one. Blue, he thinks."