by Aaron Elkins
The Seevilla, shaded by a stand of trees, sits right at the shore, a pleasant country hotel with forty or so rooms—making it the village's largest—-whose claim to fame is that Johannes Brahms once lived there. At the reception desk the first thing I did after checking in was to ask in German if there were any messages for me. There weren't.
"Are you positive? I was expecting a fax."
"No, sir, I'm very sorry, there's nothing."
Something bumped against my elbow. I'd been noticing that the person next to me wasn't giving me much space—a foreign tourist, I figured; Austrians and Germans are generally pretty good about not crowding you—and now I looked down to see my MFA&A report on the Altaussee interrogations—not a fax, but the actual blue binder, complete with oversized label—being slipped along the counter under my forearm.
"Would this be what you're looking for?"
I turned in astonishment, and there she was in a blue linen blazer, a striped boat shirt, and beige slacks, leaning easily against the counter and laughing, a wisp of streaky blonde hair hanging prettily down over her forehead.
"Hello, Ben."
"Alex . . . what are you . . . how . . ."
"Special delivery. I brought the report you wanted. Also a fax that was in your machine. I tucked it inside."
I took it from her, then started laughing too. I couldn't believe she was standing right there next to me. "Hey, you look great!"
"So do you. Is that your Hungarian gangster-jacket?"
"Neat, isn't it? I wish I knew what I paid for it. Hey, what are you doing here? How did you get here so fast? I just talked to you the day before yesterday. You were in Boston."
"Yes, but they have airplanes now, you see. I flew out of Boston last night."
"What, you went up and found the report and then you thought, well, I suppose I could fax it, but why not just jump on a plane to Europe instead? Just like that?"
"No, not exactly just like that. I got a midnight red-eye out of Logan, arrived in Vienna at noon, flew to Salzburg, got a train to Bad Aussee, and took a taxi here, beating you by about twenty minutes."
"But—"
"Look, I do this kind of thing all the time. My brother's a United pilot, I travel for next to nothing. I go to Paris or London for the weekend all the time. And BU's very flexible about my schedule as long as it's not crazy season."
"Yes, b—"
"Ben, I can't tell you how touched I am that you're so glad to see me."
I grabbed her hand and pulled her away from the openly interested reception clerk. "Alex, I couldn't be more glad. There's absolutely nobody in the world I'd rather see. I'm just bowled over, that's all."
She gave my hand a slight return squeeze. "That's better."
"That being said, I want you to take the first bus, train, and plane out of here tomorrow morning and get the hell home."
"Because it's dangerous?"
"Because it's dangerous. I'm not sure you really grasp that this is the mafia we're—"
"Are you getting the hell home?"
"No, I'm not, but don't forget, I owe something to Simeon."
"And I don't? Look, I want to be part of this too, Ben. Simeon was my uncle, not yours. I loved that man, and I'm not going to sit around in Brookline any more waiting for occasional reports to trickle in from the front. You can understand that, can't you?"
"I can understand that."
"Also, my mother's family is from Austria and I'm betting I speak better German than you do, so I might even turn out to be useful. All right, are we done arguing?"
"All I'm—"
"Not that it matters, because I'm not going back. Now, are there any other questions?"
"Yes," I said, "what are you doing for dinner?"
* * *
After I'd sent my things up to my room, we walked into town to the Gasthof Engel, which the hotel clerk recommended to us as having the most authentic regional cooking in Altaussee. The little restaurant, part of a mom-and-pop guest house, had a pea-graveled terrace in back, with huge banks of impatiens and a few tree-shaded wooden tables covered with blue-checked cloths. Alex was delighted with the menu.
"I'll say it's authentic! Look, they have stinkerknödl."
"My goodness, doesn't that sound appetizing."
"As a kid I hated it, but, gosh, it brings back memories. They're sort of fried potato dumplings filled with Limburger cheese or something. You eat it with roasted onions. My Aunt Rachel was famous for it. You could smell it from four blocks away."
She ordered it, too. I was willing to go along with the old-country mood, but not that far. I asked for liver dumplings and sauerkraut, which I actually like. When the stinkerknödl arrived Alex she immediately cut into it with her fork, and out with the steam came what had to be the Mother of All Dirty-Socks Smells; four blocks was an understatement.
"Tell me," I said, leaning as far away from it as I could get, "why do they call it stinkerknödl?"
Tentatively, she tried a little on the tip of her fork.
I watched her move it around on her tongue, trying it out on different taste buds. "Well?"
"It's awful," she said with a happy grin. "Exactly like Tante Rachel's."
During the meal we talked a little bit about what had been happening—but there wasn't much to tell because I'd brought her up to date a few days ago and nothing new had happened yesterday—a little about her multi-leg trip to get here, and a little about Austrian cuisine, eventually reaching one of those awkward junctures where the chitchat seemingly dries up and blows away. We pushed our plates to one side and folded our napkins and set them on the table and sipped what was left of our wine and murmured "Mm."
"So," I said.
"So."
"Um, how about telling me something about yourself, Alex? You already know all about me."
"I do?"
"Well, you're friendly with Trish. I'm sure she's given you a warm and objective assessment of my background and personality."
"That's true," she said. "I happened to mention to her last week that I'd met you, and she said she's been giving you a lot of thought lately."
"I don’t know how happy I am to hear that."
"No, wait, it was interesting. She told me all sorts of fascinating things about you that I hadn't realized before. Such as—" Her eyes suddenly crinkled up; she laughed and bit her lower lip. "Such as—"
I grimaced. "Do I really want to hear this? Do I have a choice?"
"For one thing, I learned that you've always resisted sorting out the yin and yang aspects of your personality. That's why you never have any firm opinions and you're such an indecisive fence-straddler about everything."
I put down my wine. "Well, now, just one cotton-pickin' minute. I wouldn't say—"
"I'm quoting; no offense. But you know what else she told me? And this is really interesting—that you've never, not even once, made a genuine effort to enter into a frank and open dialogue with your sexuality."
I burst out laughing. "That one I can't argue with."
"Also—"
"Please," I said, raising a hand, "how much self-improvement can I absorb at one sitting? Can we get on to you for a while?"
"That's only fair," she agreed. "What would you like to know?"
Plenty, I thought. Have you ever been married? Is there anyone in your life now? Did you really come to Altaussee strictly to be part of whatever it was that was happening here, or did I, personally, have anything at all to do with it? What exactly do you think of me, really?
"Well?" she said. "Isn't there anything?"
I cleared my throat. "How long have you been at Boston University?" I asked.
* * *
Having hopelessly demolished our saturated-fat allowance for the month anyway (in Austria, you do that by the end of breakfast), we went ahead and got another local specialty for dessert : Mohr im Hemd, a super-rich chocolate sponge cake slathered with hot whipped chocolate and then buried under a mountain of whipped cream. Incredible; wh
y didn't these people all weigh 300 pounds?
While we worked through a kännchen of coffee and shamelessly cleaned our plates—polished is closer to the truth—Alex talked about herself. I learned that she'd majored in sociology at the University of Massachusetts and had started on her master's degree but had quit partway through to take a job as registrar at a community college on Long Island. There she'd finished up her master's at the state university in Stony Brook, but in educational administration, and after three more years at the community college she'd landed the job with BU.
Along the way, she'd fallen in love once (if you didn't count teenage crushes), or maybe twice; she still wasn't sure. She'd lived with the second one, a lawyer, for a year. They'd split up, amicably, about a year ago and were still good friends. She liked men and her social life was fairly active, and why she'd never gotten married she couldn't say. It seemed like a good idea in the abstract, but for some reason she'd never been able to imagine being married to anyone she knew without either laughing or shuddering, neither of which seemed like a promising sign.
All this didn't come without some pretty subtle probing on my part, you realize, and it had taken a while to get to this point. In the meantime it had grown dark and I could see that she was starting to flag, which was natural enough, considering that she hadn't slept the night before and had spent the entire day on the road. For the first time I saw something vulnerable in her face, the smallest of fatigue-tics in her cheek, just under the left eye. And damned attractive it was.
"What do you say we call it a day?" I suggested.
"No more questions left?" she said with a tired smile.
Yes, I had some questions left. What did she mean by "good friends"? What the hell did "fairly active" mean?
"Nope," I said.
"That was fun, Ben," she said when we got outside. "Thank you. I enjoyed it."
"Me too. I am glad you're here, Alex, I—well, I'm glad."
I think we both knew that we'd moved to a different level in our relationship. Not deeper, necessarily, but easier, closer, more comfortable. For four hours we'd been steadily in each others' company, talking almost without stopping, not about murders or stolen art, but about ourselves and each other, and whatever else was at hand or came to mind. It had all been so casual and random, like the desultory talk of old friends, that we'd slipped into imagining that that's what we were, and, although it felt fine it was going to take some getting used to.
I took her arm, highly conscious of the fact that it was the first time I'd touched anything other than her hand, and started us toward the hotel.
She held back. "I go the other way."
"But the hotel is—aren't you staying at the Seevilla?"
"No, I'm down the other way, at the Pension Obermayr. We're not all on expense accounts, you know."
"Is it all right?"
"About what I expected: the room's just big enough to hold a bed and a bureau, with a bathroom down the hall. And the view is of Frau Obermayr's string bean and tomato garden. But it's clean. How's your room?"
My "room" was an airy bedroom and a big sitting-room, with a fireplace, a shining, well-equipped bathroom, and a pleasant balcony overlooking the lake and the mountains.
"Pretty posh," I said.
"Ah," she said soberly. "Well, I should think so."
A pretty ambiguous statement, if you asked me. What did she mean by it? I was teetering on the edge of suggesting that she come spend the night at the Seevilla with me—I almost thought that was what she might have been hinting at—but I didn't know how to put it. Oh, say, I have an idea. I have lots room at my place, so why don't you stay the night with me? I'll sleep in the sitting room and you can have the bedroom. Or you can sleep in the sitting room and we'll get a nice fire going in the fireplace for you to sleep by if it gets chilly. Would that sound as sappy to her as it did to me? What about a simple, carelessly tossed-off Why don't you stay the night with me?—and leave the interpretation to her. How would she take that? What would she think I meant? What did I think I meant? You see, it was already getting tricky.
Did I want her to come and sleep with me? In principle, yes, sure, what do you think? But now, tonight? Well, there I didn't know. I liked her a lot, I liked the way I felt when she was around, and I was happy with the way we were getting to know each other. Would sex at this point spoil that? (That is, assuming that she was interested.) Yeah, actually, I thought it just might.
Or then again, it might not. In the end I kept quiet about it and walked her to her pension, which wasn't bad-looking at all, a two-story house built in the Tyrolean style, with a steeply pitched roof, carved wooden balconies, and geraniums spilling from a dozen window boxes. I told her to sleep as late as she wanted to and give me a call when she woke up. We'd have breakfast somewhere, then drive up to the salt mine and see what was to be seen.
We bade each other a slightly stilted goodnight, followed, after a moment's hesitation and one false start, by a blameless hug and then an old-friends-style kiss on the cheek, made even more clumsy because we hadn't figured out which of us was supposed to aim for which cheek, so that we wound up bobbing heads at each other like pigeons doing a mating dance. But that made us laugh, which was a nice way to end the evening.
Walking back to the Seevilla in the dark I felt like three different people, angry with myself for being so namby-pamby, pleased with myself for behaving like a gentleman, and relieved with myself at managing so far not to screw everything up. What I wanted to happen I still didn't know. I was beginning to think Trish had a point. Maybe what I needed was a frank and open dialogue with my sexuality. In fact, I'd be highly interested to hear what it had to say for itself.
Chapter 27
In the morning I put in another call to Mr. Nussbaum in Vienna, and this time I finally got him. He'd been in Badgastein for a week, he explained in German, taking his annual spa cure, and he was apologetic about having missed my calls. He came across as a decent sort, nothing at all like his deceased fellow-claimant Szarvas, and the impression I had was that he was probably honestly confusing the Boston Velazquez with some other painting; hardly surprising after a half-century or so. An honest mistake. If so, it meant that he would know nothing of value relating to Simeon or Stetten, but I thought that an hour spent with him might save him, as well as Stetten, a lot of unproductive time and money, and he very cordially agreed to see me when I got back to Vienna.
"Thank you very much," I said, "I should be there tomorrow—no, make that the day after tomorrow. Could I come by about three?"
He switched to English. "Tell me, what kind of accent is that? American, Canadian?"
"American. I'm from Boston."
"Is that so? I was five years in Chicago, living with my son and his wife. Twice we went to Boston. A wonderful city, so much history, so much culture. You're lucky."
"Well, Vienna's not too bad on those scores either," I said. "Is three o'clock okay, then?"
"I'll be here."
"Oh, and one more thing? Would you please not tell anyone that you're going to be seeing me?"
"Why not, what's the secret?"
"I just think it would be better. It's important; I'll explain later. Will you give me your word?"
"Sure, you can have my word. Who would I tell anyway, my dog?"
"That's good," I said. "Thanks."
He sounded like a nice old coot. I didn't want to get him killed.
* * *
Continuing our cardiological banzai charge of the evening before, Alex and I brunched on rostbratwurst and rolls, with Eskimo Pie bars for dessert, sitting on high stools at a sausage stand on the main road.
"Listen," I said, unwrapping my ice cream, "I can't imagine that we'll need more than a couple of hours up at the mine. What are your plans for the next few days?"
"I don't know. What are my plans for the next few days?"
I liked that answer a lot. "Well, I finally got hold of Mr. Nussbaum in Vienna this morning, and I set up
a meeting with him for the day after tomorrow. You might want to be there too."
"The day after tomorrow? Vienna's only a one-hour flight from Salzburg. We could be there tomorrow morning."
"Well, that's my point. There's no real hurry on this. I sure could stand a day off, and I was thinking it might be fun to drive there instead of flying; it's beautiful country, and it's only a couple of hundred miles, even going the slow route. We could follow the Danube valley most of the way, and there's a terrific little village right on the river, an old fortified town named Dürnstein with some wonderful old inns. There's a ruined castle there that you can climb around in, where Richard the Lionhearted was imprisoned for a year. Do you know the legend of Blondel? Well, that's where it happened, Dürnstein. . . ."
It's an old habit. When I get nervous, or anxious, or unsure of myself I tend to blather. It never helps, of course, but I do it anyway. And Alex wasn't helping either. She was just munching away at her second bratwurst and watching me prattle. I could feel my forehead getting hot.
"Anyway," I said offhandedly, as if it couldn't matter less (I'm sure it fooled her), "what do you think? How does that sound?"
She licked mustard off her pinky. "It sounds," she said, "just fine." And then she gave me the prettiest smile you can imagine, with her eyes as well as her mouth.
"Great," I said, and over me, like a warm, welcome cloak settling on my shoulders, came the feeling that I was on to something good, that maybe the gods were with me again. That I'd turned a corner.
* * *
To get to the Altaussee salt mine, you turn off the village's main street at the Salzbergwerk sign, then drive a thousand feet or so up into the mountains on a steep but well-engineered, paved road. At the mine there's a big visitors' parking lot with a separate area for tour busses, a pleasant little picnic area with a few tables, and several buildings, the largest of which is the entrance to the mine and also houses a small museum on the upper floor.