A Deceptive Clarity (19 page)

"Are you serious? Wednesday's Christmas; why don't you come down for a couple of days? I'll give you the super-duper tour usually reserved for only the most august visitors, like TV anchormen."

"Gee, that's a great idea," I said as innocently as Tony Whitehead might have done it.

"Fine," she said, and again we walked without saying anything, but conscious of something good in the air. This boy-girl maneuvering wasn't all agony by any means.

"How did you get assigned to the exhibition?" I asked. "I suppose you got involved with all the hoopla over the cache, and then just stayed with it?"

She nodded. "That's the way it was. Hallstatt isn't that far from Berchtesgaden, and when that soldier stumbled on those crates in the
Salzbergwerke
—that's the salt mine ... oops, I believe you
sprechen deutsch,
if I'm not mistaken."

"Anne, I really am sorry about that."

"I know you are," she said laughing. "Don't go all frowny on me again. God, you're so intense."

"Intense? Where do you get these ideas about me? That I never laugh, that I'm intense.... I am
not
intense. I am anything
but
intense. I am easygoing; relaxed to the point of somnolence."

"So why the puckered brow?"

I unpuckered. "I seem to get a little nervous around you, that's all. How about some chestnuts?"

We bought an aromatic bagful from a vendor who had them roasting over a brazier of charcoal, and munched while we walked. Mostly I asked questions and Anne told me about herself. She was thirty years old; she was from Syracuse, New York; and she had an M.A. in career counseling. She'd joined the air force as an educational-services officer after they'd promised her tours of duty in the Far East and Europe. They'd kept their word on the tours, but in time-hallowed military fashion she'd been assigned to Community Liaison, and there she'd stayed. To her surprise she'd enjoyed it. She'd been a captain for two years, and a pair of major's oak leaves was in the offing if she decided to stay in.

She'd been married for two years in her early twenties, she told me, getting down to important things, but had made a bad job of it, and she now saw two or three men on an intermittent basis, but they were just friends. More or less. (You can imagine how fiendishly subtle my ensuing questions were. Nevertheless, I could get no elucidation beyond "more or less.")

"All right," she said, tossing a steaming chestnut from hand to hand. "Now you. I'm having a hard time figuring you out."

"What is there to figure out? I'm not very complex."

"I don't know about that. You look like a, well, like an average guy with not too terribly much upstairs, if you'll forgive me for saying so, so that it's a shock when you start talking. You're very articulate, you know, very cogent—"

"Formidable," I said. "Intimidating."

"Highly. But then when you loosen up, there's another layer that comes peeking through, kind of wistful and vulnerable—that's very 'in' now, you know—with a sense of humor ... even sexy, I suppose, if you happen to like the type."

"Thanks, I think." On balance, it was an improvement over Bev's evaluation. "What can't you figure out?"

"Which layer is really you?"

"Oh, the sexy one. Ask anybody."

"Well. I'm certainly glad to have that settled. Now, what else should I know about you?"

I was glad to talk about myself, and Anne was a good listener. In twenty minutes she knew more about me— about my recent past—than I'd ever expected to tell anyone.

"You walked in one day and your wife wasn't there?" she asked incredulously. "Just like that? Out of nowhere?"

"Yes." We were at the eastern edge of the Tiergarten now, which is also the edge of West Berlin. We had walked along quiet, pretty paths at the very foot of the ugly Wall, past the gaunt, shell-scarred Reichstag, past the Brandenburg Gate (visible through one of the checkpoints), past the colossal marble soldier atop the Soviet Army Memorial (the Grim Raper, the West Berliners call it).

"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?"