A Deceptive Clarity

by Aaron Elkins

  And that, more or less, was the way the first series went, but each succeeding one got a little sloppier, until there were flashes going off out of sequence in all directions, generally followed by giggling screams from the women and laughter from the men. Good thing, I thought grouchily, that the weapons weren't really loaded. Which was more than you could say for the people.

  "Kind of boisterous, isn't it?" Anne said. "I've never seen it so wild."

  "Dangerous too," I said, shielding my eyes against the jabbing flashlight beams. "Even without bullets, those flashes must be able to burn you. Or can't they?"

  "Oh, yes. People get hurt every year. If you're ready to go, I am too, Chris. All this tipsy Gemütlichkeit is getting to me."

  "Me too," I said with feeling, despite my head start of three ports. "And welcoming Christmas with a shooting spree still seems like a rotten idea, no matter how old it is."

  We had been sitting on a log convenientiy lying at the base of a thick pine that had served as a backrest, and although we were behind a group on blankets and air mattresses, we'd been too comfortable to move. We still were, so getting up took a special effort.

  "One ... two ... three" I said, and shoved myself up, tugging Anne along with me, or trying to. I got her halfway up, lost my footing in the snow, and went over backward just as another ragged volley exploded.

  "Ouch!" I said, at a small, sharp stab of pain in my left hip. I wound up flopping flat on my back, legs in the air, like a lassoed calf, while Anne tipped back over the log and landed in much the same position.

  "They got 'em," somebody observed. "Good shootin'."

  The twinge in my hip had only been momentary—a minor strain, I assumed—and we both roared with laughter, neither of us, it seemed, being so very far above the general level of tipsy Gemütlichkeit after all. I scrambled up, brushing the snow off, and hand in hand we trotted down the incline, working our way through the crowd. A turn in the path after a hundred yards put a great wall of rock between us and the shooting, and we stopped to listen to the sudden silence. The sound of our weight shifting squeakily in the snow was all we could hear.

  "Aah," we said together, letting our eyes adjust to the dark again, our ears to the quiet. When I put a hand to her shoulder, she moved willingly into my arms to the noisy rustle of our nylon jackets.

  "Tell your jacket to keep out of this," she said. "This is our affair. Oops."

  Abruptly tongue-tied, I said nothing. I brushed my lips over her eyebrows, against the grain to feel the roughness, with it to feel the smoothness, and I felt her lids flutter against my chin. Her cheeks were cool, fragrant with winter. We kissed gentiy, quietiy, and she bowed her head to my shoulder. Her hair stirred against my face when I breathed. There again was that cool, clean scent of citrus.

  "Anne—"

  "Shh." Her hands went to my sides and pulled me closer still. "Ow!" I said.

  "Sorry. When I get like this, I don't know my own strength."

  I laughed. "I must have landed on a rock when I fell over back there."

  She tilted her head back and regarded me. "No, you said 'ouch' before you hit the ground. I remember distincdy."

  "I did?" I worked my hand under my jacket and explored the top of my hip. "Ow!" I said again. "Damn."

  "Chris? Are you all right?"

  "Oh, sure. It just stings a little. And it seems to be a little stiff."

  "I think we ought to go inside and sit down," she said, and I complied happily, basking in her concern.

  The General Walker bar was open late for the apres-Weihnachtschutzen crowd, and we both ordered hot chocolate, which the creative bartender had to make from Kahlua, and a very warming invention it was. My hip stopped smarting by the third swallow.

  I can't remember what we talked about, but we spent half an hour at it, until Anne finished her drink and stretched. "One-thirty. Time to call it a day."

  "I guess so." I stared into the bottom of my cup, listening to my heart race. "Like to join me for a nightcap? I've got some cognac in my room."

  "Could you really stand a nightcap?"

  "No." I smiled and looked up. "All right, then; care to join me just for the company?"

  She looked at me for a while, her eyes soft. "No," she said finally. "I don't think so."

  No? This courting business was coming very hard to me, as must be obvious, and here was another unnerving development. I'd thought I was reading the signals correcdy.

  She covered my hand with hers. "You don't need to look embarrassed. I'd like to, Chris, very much. I just don't think you're ready."

  "I'm not ready!" I laughed. "If I got any more ready I'd—well, I'm ready, believe me."

  She smiled. "I don't mean that way. Chris, I'm kind of old-fashioned.... I don't mean that I need a commitment or anything—"

  "Anne, it's OK. You don't have to justify—"

  "No, let me finish." She spoke hesitandy, rotating her empty cup slowly between her hands and staring down into it. It was a side to her that I hadn't seen before: uncertain, diffident, tentative. "Chris, when you and I ... if we ... well, I just want you to be there for me, not off somewhere else." She shrugged, still not looking up at me. "I don't feel that you're ready to do that."

  And I guess I wasn't. I didn't protest; I didn't tell her that she was so lovely it made my throat ache to look at her. I just sulked like any wounded male.

  "Don't be angry," she said.

  "I'm not angry," I snarled, and we both laughed. "

  And not embarrassed?"

  "That's different; I'm embarrassed as hell. Did you think my forehead always glistened like this? And now can we stop going on about it, please?" I held out my hand to her. "Come on, I'll walk you to your room."

  Later, alone in my own room, I had to admit it was a good thing. The pain in my hip had sharpened, and all I wanted to do was keep it still. I stripped gingerly, but all I found was a kind of crease, an angry red furrow, just below the crest of the hip bone, as if an object the size of a pencil had been pressed hard against the flesh for a long time. There had been some bleeding, and there were black specks on my skin that felt greasy when I touched them. I'd never had a bruise anything like it.

  When I took a look at my clothes I discovered a tear just above the hip pocket of my pants, and a small hole with signs of a smudgy ring around it through all the layers of my jacket.

  No strain had done that. Was this what a powder burn looked like? The pistols had gone off while I was pulling Anne up, I remembered, but I had been a good forty feet from them. Still, these were ancient, primitive weapons, and when they were fired, they produced great flaring volcanoes that very well might extend forty feet, for all I knew.

  I know, I know, if it were you, you would have figured out long ago that someone had shot at you. Easy for you to say, just sitting there, but I wasn't thinking along those lines. Admittedly, the possibility of danger had crossed my mind before, but not very seriously and not for very long. It was true that Peter had most certainly been murdered, but it was hard for me to give credence to the idea that anyone was out to kill me.

  Wait until you find yourself in a similar situation, and see if you don't feel the same way.

  By the next day my hip was better; still tender, but more of a dull, aching bruise than anything else. The same went for my ego.

  I met Anne for breakfast, during which we both were restrained and awkward, with little to say. Then she drove me down the mountain in a blue air-force car to the railroad station, where we had another old-comrades embrace (not so satisfying this time). And then I was off to Munich, there to make my way to the München-Riem airport, whence to London via Heathrow and the tube.

  Chapter 17

  London is the one city where I do splurge on accommodations, whether I'm traveling on my own money, the museum's, or the Defense Department's. I used to stay in Bloomsbury, in a pleasant little hotel on Bedford Street, just off Russell Square ("in the shadow of the British Museum," as they like to say in those
parts). Every self-respecting person with intellectual pretensions has a favorite small hotel in Bloomsbury, especially self-respecting intellectuals who are traveling on a budget. After a few years, however, I admitted to myself that most of Bloomsbury was pretty grungy, that its literary gloss was long-dulled, and that it was a long way from the places most of my business took me—Christie's, Sotheby's, the Wallace Collection, the National Gallery, the Witt Library.

  So I willingly waived my intellectual pretensions, and on my last few visits I'd stayed in Mayfair, surely the most civilized section of the most civilized city in the world. And, happily, within easy walking distance of Christie's, Sotheby's, and the Witt.

  I didn't quite have the nerve to check in at Claridge's or the Dorchester on taxpayers' money (not that I doubted what Robey's reaction would be: "Good, fine, no problem"), so I went instead to the Britannia on Grosvenor Square, hardly a major sacrifice on my part. In any case I deserved it, to make up for my rather slowly progressing love life.

  It was 5:00 p.m. when I got there, and I called Harry in Berlin as soon as I'd washed up and poured myself a Scotch.

  "Hey, Chris, where are you? I tried to get you in Berchtesgaden."

  "I'm in London, at the Britannia. Harry, listen, I've been talking to people, and there are a few things you need to know. In the first place, I know what Robey was doing on that flight to Frankfurt. He's got a girlfriend in Sachsenhausen."

  "How do you know that?"

  "Jessick told me."

  "And how does Jessick know?"

  "Don't ask me. Jessick's the kind of guy that knows those things. This means Mark's in the clear, doesn't it?"

  "Maybe, or maybe he just made up this girlfriend bit and told Jessick, knowing good old Conrad would pass it on to you. And even if it's true, that doesn't mean he couldn't have arranged the whole thing as an alibi, to make it look as if he had some reason for being in Frankfurt that night just in case someone found out he was there. Or—"

  "Harry, I think you've been a cop too long."

  "You and me both. Well, I'll check it out."

  "Here's something else to check out. The Heinrich-Schliemann-Gründung is one man. And that man ..." I paused dramatically.

  "Is Earl Flittner," Harry said offhandedly.

  "You knew?"

  "Well, sure."

  "Why didn't you ever tell me?"

  "I just figured you already knew. Jesus Christ, isn't it obvious?"

  It was, now that I thought about it. "You don't think it's important?"

  "Why important?"

  "Because maybe Peter knew even though Earl says he didn't, and maybe he was killed to keep him from talking."

  "You really believe that?"

  "Well—"

  "Because if it's true, there goes your forgery theory again. How's your investigation going, anyway?"

  No worse than yours, I thought meanly. "So-so," I said. "Incidentally, I found Peter's calendar."

  That got a rise out of him, especially when I told him it was waiting for him in the Columbia House safe.

  "Great! I'm on my way."

  "Wait, there's something else." I sipped the Scotch, looking out over Grosvenor Square, which looked more gray than green in the dismal light of a wintry, misty London evening; at Roosevelt's statue on the lawn, so arresting and odd because he is standing unsupported on his feet; at Saarinen's jarringly modern American embassy with its tangle of metal barricades across the front; at the sedate, symmetrical red-brick buildings that border the rest of the square.

  It was Christmas, and strange to see London without automobiles. Ordinarily, no city in Europe is noisier and more crowded with cars than London, and it is a mark of just how civilized it is that people don't go around shooting or even shouting at each other out of sheer frustration. That much traffic in Rome, or Madrid, or Paris, and the streets would be war zones.

  "You still there?" Harry said.

  "Harry, can an unloaded gun hurt you when it's fired? Not just powder burns, but .. . well, could it put a hole through a few layers of clothing?"

  "If what you mean by 'unloaded' is that it's shooting blanks, you're damn right it could. It could put a hole through you."

  "It could? But how? What is there to make a hole?"

  "Oh, well." He cleared his throat. "Well now. A lot more comes out of the end of a gun than a bullet, you know. There's always some gas—which comes out real fast and real hot—and there can be some primer fragments. And even the wad can do a hell of a lot of damage."

  "What's the wad?"

  "What's the wad? Boy, you don't know anything about firearms, do you?"

  "No."

  "All right, let me start from the beginning. What you probably think of as a bullet is actually a cartridge, okay? Now a cartridge has three parts: the primer—that's what explodes when the hammer hits; and that detonates the propellant; and that explosion shoots the bullet—which is the lead slug in front—along the barrel and out.... Hello? Anybody there?"

  "I'm with you, sort of."

  "All right. Now, what makes a blank cartridge blank is that it doesn't have that lead slug in front—but it's got the powder charge in back. The wad is, like, a cover that holds the charge in place when there isn't any bullet in front. People get killed by blanks all the time. There was this TV actor a couple of years ago, fooling around with a prop pistol between scenes—held it to his head, you know, and pulled the trigger. Killed him. Let me tell you, blanks can be as lethal as live ammo from close up."

  "How about thirty or forty feet?"

  "Usually no problem, but there's this case where a guy watching a show in the balcony had his hand blown away by some balled-up newspaper they were using as wadding in a little cannon on the stage. Oh, God, then there's this really horrible case—"

  "Please, no more cases. I believe you."

  "Tell me, Chris, why are we having this particular discussion? No holes in you, are there?"

  "No, just a groove," I said, and told him what had happened. "From what you said," I concluded hopefully, "it sounds like it was just an accident."

  Harry let that sink in for a few moments. "I don't know," he said soberly. "Could be. See, here we're not talking about cartridges at all, just loose black powder, and that puts out a lot of burning crud. But thirty, forty feet? I don't think so. I think maybe you got shot with an honest-to-God ballistic projectile."

  "Ballistic–?"

  "A bullet. Maybe somebody ought to go back and look at the place and see if there's a ball, a slug, imbedded in a tree or something."

  "I did that this morning, first thing. I didn't find anything. Look, let's say somebody really wanted to kill me. Why get so damn intricate? Why not just shoot me with an ordinary .38 on a dark street?" I startled myself by breaking into sudden laughter. "I can't believe I'm saying these things." I took a long gulp of Scotch.

  Harry wasn't laughing. "You're right; killing somebody is pretty easy. But killing somebody and making it look like an accident—that's harder."

  "Shooting me would look like an accident?"

  "Yeah, your particular death would look accidental, if you know what I mean–beside the point."

  "Oh, beside the point. My particular death. I see."

  Now he laughed. "Hey, cheer up, buddy; we're just thinking out loud, right? I don't think there's really any reason to get worried; it probably was an accident, considering all the boozing that was going on."

  "I'm glad to hear you say that," I said, somewhat relieved. "Anne told me that there are a few injuries every year, so—"

  "On the other hand, it wouldn't be such a bad idea to sort of exercise some caution, you know? Don't go where they're firing guns anymore. Don't fool around on the edges of cliffs. Avoid standing directly underneath glaciers."

  "I'm in London, Harry. No glaciers."

  "Oh. Well, then, keep your ass the hell out of Soho."

  * * *

  Five minutes later, as I was finishing the drink and trying to remember
whether that basement pub with the terrific steak and oyster pie was on Davies or Duke, the telephone rang. Harry again.

  "Chris? Who knew you were going to that shooting thing last night?"

  "Why? I thought it was an accident."

  "I said it was probably an accident. Did anybody know?"

  "No, I didn't know it myself until a few hours before— Well, there was a German, Herr Wecker, but he's some kind of Bavarian official; he's worked with the Americans here for years."

  "Uh-huh. Nobody else?"

  "No, I told you. I hadn't even heard—wait a minute...."

  "I'm waiting, I'm waiting. Who?"

  I put the glass slowly down on the pad of embossed Britannia notepaper on the desk.

  "Jessick," I said. "Conrad Jessick."

  * * *

  The next morning was damp, gray, and cold—London's reputation for awful weather is well earned—but the walk to 20 Portman Square, where the University of London's Witt Library is located, was a pleasure. Portman Square is at the border of Mayfair and Marylebone, in a part of London dotted with little green mini-parks around which are two- and three-story Georgian town houses of mellow brown brick, with white-painted ground-floor exteriors and black wrought-iron balconies one floor up. Whenever I think longingly of London, it's not of the great monuments of Wren or Inigo Jones but of these plain, tasteful, quietly elegant squares, where it's easy to imagine yourself in the eighteenth century. Especially on a foggy Boxing Day morning, with the ferocious traffic still reduced to a purr.

  The Witt Library, housed in a fine old Robert Adam building, is the largest collection of photographs of paintings, drawings, and engravings in the world—a million and a half black-and-white copies, all annotated, in thick green file boxes stacked ceiling-high in every available inch of space. In the basement is the Dutch section, and it was there I went first, where "J. Vermeer of Delft" is given a four-foot shelf along the wall of a long, narrow corridor. This may seem rather a lot for a painter with forty works at most, but the Witt, as its director once told me with admirable British nonchalance, "is uncritical as to attribution." What that means is that the files include many copies—a great many copies—of paintings of doubtful authenticity or outright fakery.