A Deceptive Clarity

by Aaron Elkins

  And then there was the Vermeer. The more I looked at it, the more I liked it. I could find nothing questionable— nothing except Peter's "down-your-alley" remark. On that basis alone, I held off final judgment. I had some research I wanted to do, and I was probably going to have to go to London to do it.

  Finally, the last of the three from the cache, Rubens's fleshy Rape of the Sabines. Once again, there was nothing particularly wrong with it. But any sensible curator is queasy about giving his unqualified blessing to a Rubens. Lorenzo had remarked that Rubens ran a workshop. "Factory" was more like it. Not only did he sign works that had been painted mainly by his students, but he (or they) executed signed copies of the originals to order, and the number of canvases and panels issuing from the beautiful house just off Antwerp's Meir (it's still there) was prodigious.

  What this adds up to is that telling a mostly real Rubens from a hardly real Rubens from a good fake Rubens isn't easy. On this one too, there was some research I would have to do.

  So, for the first time, I felt as if I were really getting someplace; not twenty possibles anymore, but four: Rubens, Vermeer, Titian, and Piero. That was fine. But what was taking me so long to pin it down to one? Peter had clearly expected it to jump out at me as soon as I had a casual look at the paintings. Well, I'd had a lot more than a casual look, and nothing was jumping. What was I missing?

  Monday I spent catching up on "other duties as required." Yes, I actually did have some duties, although in this case they were no more than calling the luminaries of the Berlin art scene to ask them to the spiffy preview reception at Columbia House on the following Saturday. They had already received printed invitations, as had civic and military dignitaries, but Robey had thought, laughably, that my personal touch would add some ton.

  At about two o'clock I hung up the telephone, made my final check mark on the list, and stretched, very nearly tipping over the old straight-backed wooden chair at my desk. Carrying my empty coffee mug, I left the bedroom-converted-to-office that had been Peter's and was now mine, and walked into the living room of Suite 2100, which was Corporal Jessick's permanent domain, and also offered workspace for any senior staff members who needed it.

  The coffeepot was on a cleared corner of a table otherwise overflowing with lighting plans, flow charts, and critical-path diagrams.

  "Conrad—" I said, pouring the dingy fluid.

  A respectful sort, he jerked upright. "Sir!"

  "There's going to be a Dr. Kohler from the Technical University here tomorrow to look at a painting in the Clipper Room. I won't be here; I'm going to Berchtesgaden and then London for a couple of days. Does he need a pass or something?"

  "You know, he'll need a pass, sir. That's going to be hard to get."

  "Well, who do I talk to, Harry Gucci?"

  "You know who you ought to see about that, sir?"

  Let me guess.

  "I'd recommend you talk to Major Gucci about it." He smiled, happy to be of service. "He's in Frankfurt. You want me to try to get a, hold of him?"

  "Please." I stirred some powdered creamer into the coffee and frowned down at it while it coagulated into a gummy clump. "Conrad, I think you forgot to turn on the pot again."

  "I did? Gosh, I'm sorry." Jessick was actually a pretty good clerk, but it made him nervous to leave electrical appliances on while he was at lunch, so he turned the coffee off when he left, and since he didn't drink it himself in the afternoon, he was likely to forget about it. He leaped up to turn on the switch.

  "That's OK," I said quickly—the same pot had been on since 8:00 a.m. "Never mind. Kohler's going to have to be paid. What do I do about that?"

  "Requisition for consultive services."

  "Do I need Robey's signature?"

  "You'll have to get Robey's signature, though" was the predictable reply. "He's probably back by now. He was supposed to fly in from Heidelberg this morning."

  "That's fine." I went back through my office to the bathroom and dumped the cold coffee into the sink. While I was holding the mug under the tap and swabbing it out with two fingers, I remembered something. I walked quickly back to the outer office.

  "Conrad—"

  "Sir!"

  "Do you remember, a couple of weeks ago, right after I got out of the hospital, you talked to me on the telephone to tell me about the staff meeting that Robey'd called? You said he'd just flown in from somewhere. Where was it?"

  If he found anything unusual about the question, he didn't show it. "Heidelberg."

  That's what I'd remembered. "Are you sure?"

  "Well, sure. I mean, that's where he said he was. He said he had to see somebody at USAREUR headquarters."

  Now that was interesting. Harry had already told me that Robey had flown to Frankfurt the day Peter was killed, and had returned just before the meeting several days later. He'd also told me that Robey hadn't admitted it. But that was after Peter's murder, when he might have been afraid of being implicated in something he didn't do. Now I'd found out he'd lied about it even before the telephone call that brought the shocking news from Frankfurt. Why?

  Well, there wasn't anything for me to do about it except pass it on to Harry. His affair, not mine, right?

  I ran into Robey himself a few minutes later when I was coming back from the dining-room kitchen with a mug of fresh coffee I'd managed to beg even though it was between mealtimes. The moment I saw that muzzy, amiable countenance, my suspicions evaporated. Surely murderers didn't look like that.

  "Why, hello, Chris. Congratulations on your session with Bolzano."

  "Thanks, Mark. It wasn't too tough."

  "Oh, now, now," he said vaguely. "Everything going along all right?"

  "Yes. I've asked Max Kohler to look at one of the paintings, though, and I guess I'll need your signature to get him paid."

  "OK, sure. Have Conrad type up the req and I'll sign it."

  "Kohler's kind of expensive, but he's the best—"

  "No problem. Don't worry about it."

  "Great. And there's one other thing. I still have some questions about a few of the paintings, and the only place I'm going to find the answers is the Witt Library, and that's in London. I'd like to spend a day or two in their stacks."

  He was nodding in rhythm with my words, his eyes cloudy, Archaic smile comfortably in place. "Fine, sure."

  "I know it doesn't really have anything to do with the show, so if the budget can't afford the trip, I'll be glad to—"

  "No, no, fine. Whatever you need. I'll take care of it."

  "Thanks, Mark." Would life at the San Francisco County Museum of Art ever be the same?

  "You'll be back in time for Saturday's reception?"

  "Definitely. I thought I'd go down to Berchtesgaden for Christmas Eve"—he was paying more attention than it appeared; I got a surprising, avuncularly lecherous look out of the comer of his eye—"and head to London from there. Then I'll stop off in Frankfurt for the El Greco, and be back with it late Friday." This meant only a single day with Anne in Berchtesgaden, but there was no help for it.

  "Good, fine. So how are you doing on the forgery? Are you getting anywhere?"

  "Sort of, but no final answers. Maybe after I've been to the Witt."

  "Mm." He nodded, and went on nodding, and I watched his customary aura of vague impenetrability resettle about him like a warm, dense cloak. "Well," he said, looking slowly around (wondering where he'd been headed?), "let me know how it goes."

  * * *

  When I got back to Suite 2100, Flittner was in the outer room, at one of the tables near Jessick's desk, writing up some forms of his own.

  "Hi, Earl. Keeping you busy?"

  I was pleased with the way the talk with Robey had gone. I'd managed to bury my lurking suspicions and treat him like the pleasant, sweet-natured man he no doubt was—but at the same time I'd kept to myself the specifics of my progress on the forgery. That was the way I wanted to treat Flittner too, allowing for the obvious and repellent differences in per
sonality.

  "Busier than you," he mumbled around a cigarette, not bothering to look up.

  "You're probably right," I said with a smile, and went into my office.

  "I goddamn well know I'm right," I heard him mutter to Jessick, or to himself, or maybe to me.

  He did have a point; as Tony had predicted, I was not overloaded with responsibility. Mildly stung, I decided to save the harried Jessick some work by typing up the consultive-services form myself on the venerable Remington beside my desk. I got out the folder labeled Administrative Forms and Procedures, and while I searched through it for a blank form I found something else.

  The moment I saw it, I knew what it was, and I took it out with growing excitement: a slim blue leather booklet with the initials PVC in gold in the lower right comer of the cover.

  Peter's appointment calendar, the one Harry had been looking for. Of course it was Harry's concern, but of course I went through it anyway. For December 11, the day he was killed, there were two notations: Lv Fkft 2:15 and CN arr. In his simple shorthand they referred to his flight to Frankfurt and to my arrival in Berlin. No surprises there.

  No surprises elsewhere either, and only one entry that got me to thinking. It wasn't in the square for any particular date, but in the lower margin of the two pages allowed for November.

  Tk F re HS! it read. I thought for a moment.

  'Talk to Flittner about HS," I said aloud. "Exclamation point." Who or what was HS? And why the emphasis?

  "HS," I repeated. "HS." After five minutes of that I could come up with only one possibility: the Heinrich-Schleimann-Gründung, the organization that was so hostile to the show. I walked thoughtfully to the outer office. Flittner was still there.

  "Earl, could I talk to you?"

  Having just given Jessick some things to type, he was on his way out. He turned to look at me over his shoulder and was, I think, about to inform me that he didn't work for me (which he didn't), when he appeared to read something in my face that made him change his mind. He followed me back into my office and sat down heavily in the chair beside the desk.

  "What do you want to talk about?" he demanded, relentlessly surly. He glanced around for someplace to put the remaining half-inch of his cigarette.

  I found a small aluminum-foil pie plate I'd remembered seeing in a bottom drawer and placed it at his elbow. "I want to talk to you about the Heinrich-Schliemann-Gründung."

  He looked sharply up from grinding the butt into a stale-smelling mess. "So talk."

  Belatedly, it occurred to me that I might have given this conversation a little more thought before starting. "No," I said, fishing blindly, "you talk. What's it all about?"

  He stared at me, his hand still over the ashtray, his long gray face not more than two feet from mine.

  "Peter told me everything," I said when he didn't speak.

  He snorted. "Peter didn't know everything." I could see he wanted to take it back as soon as he'd said it.

  "But he did, Earl," I said, wondering what the hell we were talking about. "And what little he didn't, I figured out."

  "What did you figure out?" He said it with a sneer that didn't quite come off. I was onto something.

  "About the Schliemann group ... about where they're located ..." I watched his face to see if I was getting closer, but he merely reached for his pack of cigarettes with no expression other than his usual resigned disdain.

  "What they're after ... who's behind them—who they really are ..."

  Bingo. The pack spurted from his hands. He fumbled with it convulsively and managed to catch it, but one cigarette fell out onto the table like a sign of guilt in some primitive trial by ordeal.

  I'd hit it, but what had I hit? "Yes," I said quietly, "I know." And then I had the good sense to shut up and wait.

  It didn't take him long to recover. He picked up the cigarette, lit it, sucked in, and noisily blew out twin ropes of smoke through his nostrils. "What does it matter anymore? All right, what the hell, so I wrote those letters."

  If I'd had a pack of cigarettes to drop, I'd have done it.

  "So," he went on, "the horrible, bloodcurdling gang that makes Egad piss in his pants was just poor old harmless Earl Flittner stating a few painful truths." He laughed, or sneered. "It was damn salutary, if you ask me. What harm did it do?"

  "For one thing, it got Harry Gucci off on a false lead on the storage-room break-in—or was it a false lead? I don't suppose your one-man Gründung had anything to do with that?"

  He sat straight up, spilling ash into the files in my open bottom drawer. "Are you out of your fucking mind?"

  "Egad thought it was a possibility."

  "Egad! Jesus Christ ... now you listen to me. I stopped writing those letters a week before that ever happened, and that was that. I figured the point was made." He gestured at me with the cigarette. "Don't try to hang any of this other crap on me."

  "But what was the point, Earl?"

  "The point? The point?" He jumped up from the chair, a ponderous, pear-shaped man with wide hips and a long torso that tapered to sloping, fleshy shoulders. "The point is that everybody was so goddamn smug and self-satisfied they needed a boot in the ass, that was the point. This show was supposed to be God's gift to the human race. I just wanted them to know that not everyone saw it that way."

  He had gone to the window to look down onto the plaza, and now strode back to the desk. "You don't need to look at me like that. I did my job, didn't I?"

  "Yes, extremely well."

  "All right, then. As long as nobody can complain about my work, I'm entitled to my personal opinions." He slumped back into the chair. "I suppose you're going to run to your pal with this earthshaking information?"

  "My pal?"

  "Gucci."

  I nodded, and then on second thought I said, "I've already told him." On the one hand, I was inclined to accept what he'd told me as nothing more sinister than another example of his nasty quirkiness. On the other, he just might be a killer, and I didn't want to put myself in the precarious situation of those people in novels and movies who blithely announce to the villain that they will shortly go to the police with the damning evidence of which they and they alone are aware.

  "I figured as much," he said with a shrug. "Big deal. Tell me something, will you?" He pulled in another of his ferocious drags and let the smoke dribble out as he spoke. "I know van Cortlandt thought I was helping the Gründung, but he never figured out I was it, and don't tell me he did. How the hell did you?"

  "I'm afraid I can't tell you that," I answered mysteriously.

  Chapter 15

  Somebody once said that when World War II ended, the British were in control of Germany's industry, the Russians had the agriculture, the French the fortresses, and the Americans the scenery.

  If Berchtesgaden is any example, he was right. What's more, the Americans still have it. Not Berchtesgaden per se, which is a lovely old Alpine village with winding streets, quaint shops, and a picturesque sixteenth-century square complete with an elegant little royal palace. That Berchtesgaden is as German as ever. What the Americans have is the Berchtesgaden of Hitler and Goering and Bormann and Speer. The Berchtesgaden to which Lloyd George, Daladier, Mussolini, and the Duke of Windsor trekked. And of course the Berchtesgaden at which Neville Chamberlain found peace in his time.

  This more notorious Berchtesgaden is actually a beautiful, rolling, forested plateau more than half a mile above the town and properly called the Obersalzberg, sitting as it does on top of the Salzberg, or Salt Mountain. By the war's end, Anne had told me, almost all the buildings on the Obersalzberg had been bombed. Those that hadn't were razed during the next few years, except for a few that were ambitiously restored to make a vacation complex for American servicemen, and that's what it's been for forty years: R and R at Hitler's playground in the Bavarian Alps.

  I had arrived at ten, after a flight to Munich the night before, a pleasant morning train journey, and a ride on the military shuttle bus th
at regularly drives up the mountain road from the village center. Anne was waiting at the bus stop, laughing, rosy and fresh from the cold, and convincingly and satisfyingly glad to see me. We hugged like old friends, which was just right for that time of the morning.

  "It's a work day for me," she said, "but they've given me a couple of hours off for you. I told them you were a bigwig art expert with government connections."

  "Damn right."

  "I'm glad you're here. Any new, exciting developments?"

  "Not since yesterday," I smiled. I'd called her from Munich the evening before and told her about the last couple of days.

  "Well, you know, I've been thinking. We've been assuming that the forgery—"

  I held up a hand. "Please. Could we talk about something else for a while? I've been up to my eyeballs in forgery. Right now it'd be great just to get my head clear in this fantastic air."

  "OK," she said amicably. "I'll save my brilliant deductions. How'd you like that tour I promised? It's all open-air."

  And so we spent an intriguing couple of hours poking around the snow-dusted rubble that had been Goering's house, probing with our toes at the dismal frozen marsh that had been his tiled swimming pool, clambering over the nearly nonexistent remains of Bormann's extravagant home, wandering through the burned-out skeleton of Hitler's guest house.

  The Eagle's Nest, which I asked to see (as did everyone, Anne said) was now a restaurant, open to the public, but closed in winter. It was visible another two thousand feet above us, not much more than a speck on the very tip of Kehlstein Mountain, and the amazing road to it that had been blasted from the granite by slave labor wasn't drivable for seven months of the year.