A Deceptive Clarity (24 page)

"Hey," Jessick said, "—er, sir—how's Berchtesgaden? Boy, I love it down there at Christmas."

"It's beautiful. And Conrad, 'hey' is fine."

"Yes, sir. Are you going to the shooting? It's fantastic."

"I think so. Conrad, has Harry Gucci tried to reach me there? I've been trying to get him since yesterday."

"Uh-uh. He's supposed to be back here tomorrow, but."

"Good. Will you ask him to give me a call? No, tomorrow's Christmas; you won't be in the office, will you?"

"Gee, I'd be glad to," he said sadly, "but I won't be here. It's Christmas."

"Oh, is it? Well, merry Christmas, Conrad."

"Thanks. Uh, sir ... ? Remember when you asked me, where was Colonel Robey the day before the meeting, and I said Heidelberg?"

My ears pricked up like a dog's. "What about it?"

"Well, was it important?"

"Kind of, yes."

"Well—it wasn't exactly true. He was in Frankfurt; that is, Sachsenhausen, right across the river."

"Oh," I said without expression, "how do you happen to know that?"

"I guess you're wondering how I come to know that."

 
"Now that you mention it, yes."

"Well, I got his airline tickets for him. I know this guy at Lufthansa and I can get a good deal, so I usually get him his tickets whenever he goes."

"Whenever he goes? To Frankfurt?"

"Yes, sir, uh ..."

"Conrad, it really is important. If you know some more about this, I need to know."

"It's kind of personal," he said uneasily. "I don't feel right about—".

"Let's hear it, Conrad!" Jessick was the only person in Berlin on whom the Norgren command presence had any effect.

"Yes, sir. He's got a girlfriend in Sachsenhausen."
 

"A
girlfriend?'

"Well, a lady friend. He goes to see her whenever he gets a chance." He seemed to interpret my silence as disapproval. "It's not as if he's got a wife somewhere, sir. He got divorced, like, five years ago."

"Why so secret, then?"

"Well, she's not exactiy divorced yet herself, and I guess he doesn't like—"

"OK, Conrad, thanks for telling me. Don't worry, this won't make any problem for Mark, and I won't tell him you told me. And Conrad? Call over to Harry's office right now, will you? Leave a message for him to call me whenever he gets in."

If nothing else, at least I knew where Robey's mind was all the time.

A late dinner with Anne in the hotel dining room, and then coffee and vintage port (at fifty cents a glass) in the grand bar, where big, relaxed Americans, still in their ski outfits, sprawled in comfortable chairs at the foot of imposing columns made of Hitler's favorite pink Utersberg marble.

Anne poured more coffee for both of us from a ceramic pitcher and leaned back to sip. "So where do you go from here?"

"As far as the forgery goes, you mean?" I shook my head dejectedly. "I don't know. We may have to run all of them through a lab yet, but the show'll be over before that ever gets done."

"But you've already said you're sure the pictures are all the right age. How can a laboratory tell you any more than that? If
you
can't tell if something is really by Vermeer, how can an X-ray machine?"

"It can, as a matter of fact—if the operator knows what he's looking for. For example, Vermeer worked without drawing in the outlines first. Nobody knew that until we looked at one with an X-ray machine. That means that any old Vermeers with a drawing under the paint aren't really Vermeers." I took a long swallow of the velvety wine and licked the sweet stickiness from my lips. "Titian also worked without outlining, which was no secret from his contemporaries—but why would anyone faking a Titian a hundred or two hundred years ago bother doing it the hard way? There was no such thing as an X-ray.
 
No one else could possibly know what was or wasn't under the surface."

She nodded.
 
"I see.
 
An X ray actually shows you the way an artist worked."

"And not only X rays. A good lab will put a painting through a mass spectrometric analysis—"

"Yoicks! What?"

"Don't ask me to explain it; I wasn't even sure I could say it. But it isolates chemicals, which can tell you interesting things." There was a long pause while I tried to think of an interesting thing. "Well, Dürer, for instance. For a while he was using copper blue under the impression that it was ultramarine. Even careful forgers didn't know that— and still don't—so their failure to make the same mistake proves the forgery. Clever, what?"

"Very. You think that might be the case with our Dürer?"

"No, I'm sure it's real. I'm down to the Vermeer, the Titian, and the Rubens now. And if they check out ..."

"Don't look so glum. If Peter said there's a forgery, there is. And you'll find it, my good man. I have complete confidence."

"Good, I'm glad one of us does."

She stood up and held out her hand for my glass. "I think you can stand one more round of cheer before we face the shooting. And I'll buy."

"You will? I'm already more cheerful."

Chapter 16

Midnight on the Obersalzberg.

There is a painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder,
The Return of the Hunters,
in which three muffled men breast a snowy hill. Before them stretches a great plain rising to grotesque, jagged peaks in the far distance. Below are everyday people engaged in everyday activities on the plain, and snug houses with smoke coming from the chimneys, and yet the effect is—and this was certainly Brueghel's intention—of man dwarfed and trivialized by an awesome and indifferent Nature.

That was very much the feeling on the mountain. No moon, but starlight reflected from the snow made it bright enough to see across the valley to the mountains of Austria: ghostly blue-white snowfields; black, dense clumps of forest; monumental crests and ridges—everything windless, silent, sweeping, immense. For a while it was enough to subdue the crowds that had gathered in shivering little clumps, but after a time the Class VI vodka, gurgling steadily from flasks and bottles, had created a hum of conversation and laughter among the American military spectators.

There were German spectators too, and they and the milling shooters had been at their schnapps, so the mood was pretty lively all around. Most people had brought flashlights, the beams of which bounced playfully from group to group.

By the time the shooting began, things were starting to get rowdy. The way it was supposed to work was that the senior marksman would give the order, and the others would then fire in rapid sequence, sounding like a string of Chinese firecrackers. They would then load up again, ceremoniously knocking their powder into the pistol barrels with little wooden hammers, and await the next signal to fire.

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.