Fellowship of Fear (3 page)

As a man of studied self-observation, Gideon had never satisfied himself as to whether he was physically brave. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. This was definitely a no. His head hurt ferociously, his neck felt as if it had been seared with a hot iron, his stomach was heaving, and his limbs were completely without strength. And he was just plain scared to death; no arguing with it.

"Look," he said, his mouth against the wooden floor, "this is some kind of crazy mistake. I’m a professor. I just got here—"

"Shut up. Stand up. Keep your hands behind your head."

As Gideon began to rise he became aware of something in his right hand. Something cold and hard. The key. The key and its heavy brass plate. Somehow he’d held on to them all the time. He buried them deeper in his palm. Once on his feet, he moved his hands behind his head, keeping both of them clenched, and stood swaying, his eyes closed, while a billow of pain and nausea flowed over him.

The sleek-headed one spoke again. "Now where the hell is it? If we have to cut your gut open to see if you swallowed it, believe me, we’ll do it. I
mean
it, you son of a bitch." As if Gideon needed convincing, he removed from his inside jacket pocket a thin, gleaming stiletto, like a prop from an Italian opera, but obviously the genuine thing.

When Gideon did not reply, the man gazed thoughtfully at him, his tongue playing over his upper lip, his head nodding slowly.

"So," he said, his rich voice cordial and caressing, "now we see."

He nodded more sharply to the other man, who was off to the side, barely within Gideon’s range of vision, and who now began to circle around behind him. He was very tall. His eyes down, Gideon waited until he could see the large feet behind his own. Then, as suddenly as he could, he scraped his right heel savagely down the other man’s shin and jammed it into his instep. Almost simultaneously he pivoted sharply from his hips with his hands still clasped behind his neck, hoping to find the other man’s head with his elbow. It smashed into his throat instead. There was an unpleasant crackling sound and the lanky form collapsed against the wall.

The sleek, ferret-faced man hissed sharply and sprang with athletic speed into a crouch, the knife in his hand, low and pointing upwards. With an unconsciously imitative response, Gideon bent low and thrust the brass plate forward. The other man checked himself for an instant and stared at the plate. He made a gutteral sound low in his throat, then moved in, sinuous and graceful. Gideon hurled the key and plate at him. They flew by his head and into a wall-mounted mirror, which cracked into several large pieces, hung there for an instant, and slid down the wall with a huge crash.

At the sound, Gideon made for the door, but the smaller man, with a crablike hop, was there before him, still hunched over, still pointing the knife up at Gideon’s abdomen. They stood looking at each other for a few seconds. Off to the side, the tall man groaned and began to get up, clutching his throat. Gideon’s mind was in a strange state. He was certain he was about to die, and almost equally sure it was all a dream. He was calm now, and his mind was focused. He looked about him for anything he might use as a weapon.

His hand had closed on a heavy ashtray when there was a thumping on the door, accompanied by the landlady’s agitated shouts.

"Herr Oliver! Was ist los? Herr Oliver!

The three men froze and watched in fascination as the handle turned and the door opened. When Frau Gross saw the extraordinary scene within, she too remained frozen, so that the four of them seemed—to a slightly bemused, not altogether rational Gideon—like a tableau presented by a high school drama group. Here was the hero, doomed and defiant, lithe, ready to leap; there was the villain, cringing and contemptible, glittering dagger in hand; there was his cowardly minion; and there the heroine, hand upon the door handle, mouth open in artful astonishment…

The mouth opened yet wider, emitted a preliminary bleat, and then a full-throated bellow.

"Hilfe! Hilfe! Polizei!

"Quiet!" whispered Ferret-face urgently.
"Ruhig!"
He gestured at her with his knife.

At this, Frau Gross’s formidable jowls quivered, seemingly more in indignation than in fear; her hand moved to her breast so that she stood like Brunhilde herself; and she gave forth a shriek that stunned the senses. The two intruders looked at each other, then dashed out the door, shoving

Frau Gross out of the way. For a second she stopped howling. Then she took a measured breath and began again with renewed vigor, staring at Gideon with emotionless, piglike eyes.

   WITH the morning sunlight streaming through the windows of the Hotel Ballman’s breakfast room, and the fragrance of rich European coffee in the air, the horrors of the night had paled to a kind of good guys—bad guys adventure farce, which Gideon was happily describing to a rapt gathering of fellow USOC’rs. He had already gone over the details with the unsympathetic American MPs and the rough, green-uniformed German Polizei who had arrived within minutes after the two men had fled. Now, with a more amiable audience, he was telling things at his own pace, perhaps leaving out a few unnecessary details here and embellishing a little there for the sake of the narrative flow.

He was about to explain how he had carefully palmed the key and brass plate as soon as he had entered his room and found the men, when he saw the husky Oriental come in. The newcomer walked to Frau Gross, who was sullenly laying out baskets of hard rolls and individual little packages of cheese and jam. The landlady gestured ill-naturedly at Gideon with her chin, and the big man—Gideon guessed he was Chinese Hawaiian—walked toward him.

"Dr. Oliver? I wonder, could I talk to you a little?"

Gideon excused himself and got up, and they went to an unoccupied table.

"My name’s John Lau, Professor. I’m a police officer." He laid an open card case on the table, revealing a blue, plastic-coated card, and left it there until Gideon had had time to read it.

NATO Security Directorate Identification
was printed across the top, and a better-than-average ID photograph was on the left. Then:
Name of Employee
John Francis Lau;
Issuing Department or Agency
AFCENT;
Ht
6-2;
Wt
220;
Hr clr
Blk;
Eye clr
Brn;
Birth date
7-24-40;
Issue date
4-23-70.

Gideon nodded. "All right, what can I do for you, Mr. Lau?"

Lau had made himself comfortable, ordering coffee for both of them, while Gideon had examined his card. Now he flashed a sudden, good-natured smile. "Not
Mr. Lau.
Just John." He didn’t look like Gideon’s idea of a policeman. "I’d like to ask you a few questions about last night."

Gideon sighed. "I’ve already been through it three times with the Polizei and the MPs…But I guess you already know that."

Again the eye-crinkling smile. Gideon liked the man’s face, relaxed and powerful. "Sure," he said. "Look, what I want to know is, do you have any idea what they were after?" He had a choppy, pleasant way of talking.

The coffee was dumped down in front of them by Frau Gross. Gideon shook his head slowly while stirring in cream. "No idea, none at all."

"Well, try guessing, then."

"Guessing?"

"Guessing. Pretend you’re me. What would be your theory?" It had the sound of a harmless academic exercise. Gideon sometimes used the very same words in Anthropology 101.

"Theory? I don’t even have a hypothesis. You’re the expert; what do you think?"

"You told the Polizei they were Americans," Lau said. "Is that an inference, or can you support it?" Another Anthro 101 question, Gideon thought.

"I told them
one
of them—the one that spoke—was an American. I could tell from the way he talked."

"What makes you so sure? People speak more than one language."

Gideon sipped his coffee and shook his head emphatically. "Uh uh. I’m not talking about languages; I’m talking about speech patterns. He was born in the U.S., or maybe he came here—I mean there—when he was a kid; five, six, no older."

Lau looked doubtful, and Gideon went on. "I’m telling you, the guy spoke native American; midwestern, maybe Iowa or Nebraska. It’s a question of stress, of lilt."

Lau regarded him blankly. Gideon searched his mind for a simple example.

"Do you remember," he said, "when he said to me, uh…’Try to move and I kill you now’? Well, aside from having no trace of foreign pronunciation, he said it the way only an American would. First, there was the rise-and-fall inflection; unmistakable in simple declarative sentences. Medium pitch at the beginning, up on the ‘kill you,’ and then down on the ‘now.’ "

"Are you telling me—?"

"That’s not the critical part. Some foreigners learn to do that consistently. But the way the words are grouped—the flow, the clotting—that’s what tells you for sure. When an American talks, he jams a lot of words into irregular groupings, so the beat’s uneven. If you know how to listen for it, you can’t miss it."

Lau’s expression was anything but convinced. Gideon continued, his teaching instincts warming to the challenge.

"Let’s say that he’d used a slightly shorter sentence like

’Move and I kill you now.’ In that case he would have given about the same amount of time to ‘move’ and ‘kill you.’ Americans and Europeans both do that. But he threw in that ‘try to’ at the beginning, so that there were a few more words supporting ‘move.’ Well, a native midwestern speaker of what’s sometimes called ‘General American’ tries to compress all three words into the same amount of time as the one word, and then lags a little in the next word group."

Lau was leaning back in his chair, his arms crossed, apparently trying to decide whether Gideon was a purposeful liar or a simple academic quack. Gideon kept trying:

"Let’s say he’d made the sentence even longer—’Just try to move and I kill you now.’ Then he’d try to squeeze all of the first four words into the same time as ‘move.’ It would be "just-try-to-move and I kill-you-now.’ Only Americans use that kind of rhythm, and no matter how well you learn the phonemes—the sounds—of a foreign language, you never get the rhythms exactly right. For example, a Frenchman would use a nice, steady beat throughout the whole sentence. He’d say ‘Just-try, to-move, and-I-kill, you-now.’ A German—"

"What’s my accent?" Lau said suddenly. "Do I speak General American?" The challenge was implicit but clear: Do you have the nerve to say I don’t?

"No, you don’t. There are Chinese overtones. Your individual syllables are a little more separate and even, and naturally there’s a little more emphasis on tone, a little less on stress."

Gideon expected him to be angry; instead, he simply looked even more skeptical.

"Look," said Gideon, "I’m an anthropologist. This is the sort of thing I study." The last and least effective argument of the frustrated teacher, he thought.

"I thought anthropologists studied primitive cultures."

"We do, but linguistics is part of culture. And we study culture in general, not just primitive ones."

Lau thought it over. Suddenly banging on the table with his hand so that Gideon jumped, he said, "I don’t buy it! You’re practically telling me language is inherited, not learned. That’s ridiculous!" His hands chopped the air.

Gideon was becoming a little irritated. "First, that isn’t what I’m telling you," he said. "Second, it certainly seems to me you
do
have a hypothesis. Why are you trying so hard to get me to say he wasn’t an American?"

"I’m not trying to get you to say anything. Don’t get touchy." Suddenly he was very much a policeman, issuing a steely, unmistakable warning. Gideon’s irritation was replaced by a stab of concern. He very nearly asked if he were in some sort of trouble, but held his tongue.

Lau glared at him a moment longer. Then his eyes crinkled, and the mild, affable Hawaiian returned. "I’m sorry. I guess I’m touchy too. We’ve both been up most of the night on this, haven’t we? And my guess is it’s been a little tougher on you than on me." Again the friendly smile. Gideon returned it, but now he was wary.

Lau went on. "I’ve read the report, but there’s one thing I’m not very clear about." He held his cup in both hands, seemingly absorbed in its contents. "Would you mind going over how you got away from them after they pulled the knife?"

"All right. I just stamped on the one guy’s foot—"

Lau looked puzzled. "I understood you scraped down his shin with your heel and
then
stamped."

"Well, yes, I did, sure, but I didn’t think it was important enough—"

"Okay, I just want to make sure I have it straight. Go ahead."

"Then I sort of swung around—my hands were still behind my head—and I lucked out and hit him in the neck…"

Gideon stopped. Lau was smiling cheerfully at him.

"Okay," said Gideon, "what now? I’m getting the feeling you know something I don’t."

Still grinning, the policeman unbuttoned the flap on the pocket of his denim shirt and took out a small notebook. "This is from the tape the MPs made of your story. Verbatim. ‘Then I pivoted around. I drove my left elbow into his larynx. I caught him on the thyroid cartilage, at the apex of the laryngeal prominence.’ Uh, as a simple policeman, can I assume you’re referring to the Adam’s apple?"

Gideon, on guard, nodded. Lau continued. "That’s pretty technical language, isn’t it? Or don’t tell me you’re an anatomist, too?"

"Yes, I’m an anatomist, too," said Gideon, showing more heat than he intended. "My primary field is physical anthropology—that’s skulls and bones—" he permitted himself a condescending smile at Lau, who returned it with evident good humor—"and you have to know anatomy for that."

Lau nodded. "I see. Well, what I was wondering… that’s a pretty fortunate piece of ‘lucking out’—I mean accidentally connecting with the Adam’s apple—excuse me, the laryngeal prominence—" he consulted his notebook— "of the thyroid cartilage of the larynx. That’s a pretty vulnerable spot. You didn’t happen to know, I suppose, that an elbow smash there is a standard defensive maneuver against someone who’s got you from behind?" Again he had his coffee cup in both hands and was swirling the dregs and carefully examining them.