Trojan Gold vbm-4 Page 8

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “It didn’t take you long.”

  “Efficiency is my most admirable characteristic.”

  “You have so few of them.”

  A chuckle from John and a more intense stare from Schmidt reminded me to control my temper and my tongue.

  “My, my, what a sour mood we’re in,” said the jeering voice at the other end of the line. “I didn’t expect gratitude, but you ought to be relieved at the absence of activity.”

  Since I could not think of a reply that would not further arouse Schmidt’s suspicions, I remained silent. After a moment, John said, “Do forgive me, I neglected to inquire whether you had a guest.”

  “I do.”

  “Tony? Dieter? Tom, Dick—”

  “Schmidt,” I said between my teeth.

  “Who is it?” Schmidt demanded. “Is it someone I know? Does he wish to speak with me?”

  “Shut up, Schmidt,” I said.

  “Perhaps I had better ask leading questions,” John said.

  “Why bother?”

  “Tit for tat. Have there been any new developments?”

  “No.”

  “Hmmm,” said John.

  “You said you weren’t interested.”

  “Not under any circumstances whatever. I cannot conceive of any contingency that would persuade me.”

  “Then you have no need to know.”

  “Er—quite. Look here, suppose I ring you tomorrow. A late report may yet come in.”

  “Who was that?” Schmidt demanded as I hung up.

  “A friend of mine.”

  “You did not sound very friendly,” said Schmidt.

  Schmidt finally left at about one-thirty. As I pushed him out into the night he called, “I will telephone you at nine o’clock. We must get an early start.”

  I nodded agreeably. At nine the next morning I expected to be halfway to Garmisch.

  Four

  AT NINE O’CLOCK I WAS JUST LEAVING MUNICH. I had overslept. I figured Schmidt had probably done the same, so I wasn’t worried about his following me. I was worried about two other people.

  I lost more time taking a roundabout route through the suburbs instead of heading directly for the autobahn. The sun was trying to break through clustering clouds, but the side streets were slick with packed snow. I had to concentrate on my driving and try, at the same time, to keep an eye on the rearview mirror.

  I didn’t expect to have any difficulty spotting Dieter. He was such a ham he wouldn’t be able to resist some silly trick. Having observed no bright purple Beetles painted with vulgar mottoes (Dieter’s last-owned car) or vehicles driven by gorillas or mummies, I turned onto the autobahn and put my foot down. The suggested speed limit is 130 kilometers per hour, but nobody pays much attention to it; I got in the (comparatively) slow lane and gave myself up to introspection.

  Painful introspection. I wasn’t too pleased with myself. There is nothing wrong with having a positive self-image, but when self-esteem blossoms into conceit, it is apt to cloud one’s judgment.

  Whether the photograph was a hoax or a swindle or a sales pitch, it was reasonable to assume the sender would not limit himself to a single sucker. Until the previous day, I hadn’t been able to pinpoint a particular group of prospects; but I should have made some phone calls to colleagues and asked whether they had received anything unusual in the mail.

  On the other hand, nobody had telephoned me either. That made me feel a little less culpable. Either I was the only one Hoffman had contacted or the others were being devious—like me.

  Schmidt it was who said it: “If there is the slightest chance…” The acquisition of the gold of Troy would be the museum coup of the century. Well, maybe not the century—there have been others—but a coup of mythical proportions. We’re no nobler than anybody else. We talk about cooperation and mutual assistance in the lofty name of scholarship, but let some prize come on the market and we’re in the arena with knives swinging. Competition stops short of assassination, but not by much. I could tell you some stories….

  It was hard to avoid the conclusion that Hoffman had communicated with the others. They might even have information I lacked—a return address that had not been obliterated, a note or covering letter of which I had been deprived by Gerda’s interfering nosiness. They were behaving precisely as I would have expected if such a contingency had occurred.

  Dieter would be intrigued and amused, and perfectly willing to spend a few days on a possible wild-goose chase, so long as the geese were nesting in one of his favorite vacation spots. Tony would call me on some pretense and wait to see if I would mention the peculiar photograph I had received from that dear old gentleman at the Gasthaus Hexenhut. My failure to do so would persuade him I was up to my old tricks, trying to track down a prize without cutting him in on the deal. Our first treasure hunt had begun with a challenge: “I’m smarter than you are and I’ll prove it.” I had no reason to suppose he had become any less competitive.

  Jan was an East German. My vague notions of satellite politics had convinced me that half the people in Eastern Europe worked for the KGB, if that’s what they call it these days. He would have a stronger motive than any of us to locate the gold. If the Soviets didn’t have it, their poor little feelings must have been badly wounded by the suspicions of the world; it would be a nice publicity ploy for them to rescue it and return it—to Jan’s museum, where else?

  So far, I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of either of the women. That didn’t mean they weren’t around. It also didn’t mean they were. Elise was not the world’s brightest little lady, for all her academic qualifications, and her specialty was Renaissance sculpture; of all the group, she would be least likely to recognize or respond to the Trojan gold. Rosa was brilliant, but utterly devoid of imagination. I could see her glancing at the photograph and tossing it aside as just another crank communication.

  There was only one jarring note in my composition. I simply could not see that gracious, kindly old gentleman as either a practical joker or a seller of stolen goods. That was why I was on my way to Bad Steinbach to confront him personally instead of calling or writing.

  Still no purple Beetles in the mirror. Nor a sleek black BMW. If John intended to follow me, he wouldn’t use a car I might recognize….

  One might reasonably ask why, since I had taken the trouble to locate John, I was now so determined to avoid him. I asked myself the same thing, and I knew the answer, even though I hated to admit it.

  Putting that insane advertisement in the newspapers had been tantamount to yelling, “Anybody down there?” into the depths of the Grand Canyon. I had not really expected a response. In a way, I had not really wanted one.

  Why do people have a hopeless need to glamorize things and people? It was impossible to turn John into a romantic hero when he was on the scene; he simply refused to behave like one. He was always making silly remarks or setting up a situation in which he looked like a fool. He could move fast enough and hit hard enough when he had to, and he could think even faster, but my most vivid memories of him were memories of deliberate foolishness. The only pure, unmarred memory was the last, when, stripped and sleek and deadly, he went over the side of that leaking boat into the icy water and risked his neck for someone else.

  If he had never turned up again, I could have cherished that image and worked it into something beautiful. Or if he had come rushing to my side murmuring clichés—“I tried to forget you—I tried to stay away—It was for your sake, my dearest, I’m not worthy to black your boots—but I couldn’t resist you, your image has been enshrined in my heart…” Hell, I could invent page after page of dialogue like that. So could John.

  Instead he had popped out of nothingness like a demon in a horror movie, shocked me into a coma, pinched my bottom, handled me with the tolerant amusement of a man who had rediscovered some forgotten trinket—a toy he had enjoyed playing with once upon a time…. And he had turn
ed me down flat when I asked for his help. Let’s not forget that. He had turned me down. If he had had second thoughts, it was for reasons of his own, and that possibility made me very uneasy. I didn’t believe his claims of virtue and respectability for a moment. He was still a crook, and a crook was the last thing I needed.

  I was startled out of my sullen meditations when a car whizzed contemptuously past me and cut back into my lane so sharply that it grazed my left front fender. The driver was a little old lady with blue hair; she made a remarkably rude gesture at me as she went by. After that I concentrated on driving.

  The streets of Garmisch were full of vacationers, winter-sports fans, and cows. The cows are part of the local color, and they have the right of way. They were not the only distractions; the shop windows bulged with goodies, including some gorgeous ski and après-ski costumes. I managed to get through the town without incident, bovine or otherwise, and took the road to Bad Steinbach.

  The highway climbed steadily up into the foot-hills, passing through pine-shrouded shadows and out again into the sunlight of open meadows frosted with white. The sky ahead was a deep pure blue, framing the majestic outlines of the snow-capped Alpine peaks. I wished my mood matched the serenity of the scenery; the closer I got to Bad Steinbach, the more my vague sense of apprehension deepened.

  The village huddles on a few acres of level ground, with the high hills enclosing it like a rampart. Some of the streets leading off the central square go up at a thirty-degree angle, and outlying houses cling precariously to the slopes. The roads that give access to them looked like tangled white ribbons against the deep green of the pine-covered hills. A broader panel of snow slashed across the side of the Hexenhut—the ski slope, one of the trickiest in the area because of the trees bordering it so narrowly. A lift operates from the station behind the hotel; I could see a bright car swinging in its ascent as I pulled into a parking place near the central fountain, with its oversized statue of Saint Emmeram. The fountain was dry now, and a fringe of icicles lengthened the saint’s beard.

  (In case you are interested—and I can’t imagine why you should be—Emmeram was one of the first missionaries to the heathen Bavarians. He died in 715 or thereabouts.)

  Most Bavarian villages look as if they had been designed for a production of Babes in Toyland. The Marktplatz of Bad Steinbach is no exception. On one side the serene, austere facade of the St. Michaelskirche gives no hint of the baroque fantasies within. The two adjoining sides are lined with houses and shops, fairytale quaint with their wooden balconies and painted fronts. Some of the balconies were draped with bright red geraniums, and I gaped at them for a moment until I realized they must be plastic. Facing the church, on the fourth side of the square, is the hotel. The only discordant note is the town parking lot, but it has to be there because they’d have had to blast out a piece of the mountain to get any more level ground.

  In the summer, there are tables and bright umbrellas outside the hotel restaurant and the cafés. At least I assume there were, since that is the custom; I had never visited the village in the summer. There were no tables outside that day. However, the restaurant appeared to be doing good business, to judge by the people passing in and out.

  Like the English, the Bavarians eat all the time. Unlike the English, they have not invented separate names for their various snack times; instead of elevenses and teatime and whatever, they refer to all of them as Brotzeit. It was just past 11 A.M. A reasonable time for Brotzeit.

  The first thing I noticed was that the lobby had been modernized—not extensively, just enough to add a few jarring notes to what had been a charming period ambiance. There was a souvenir counter with racks of cheap beer steins and dolls dressed in Bavarian costume and pillows embroidered with mottoes like “I did it in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.” The old wooden registration desk had been replaced by a shiny plastic structure. Hoffman wasn’t on duty. The man behind the counter was someone I had not seen before—young and heavy-set, inappropriately attired in a short-sleeved gaudy print shirt. I didn’t linger but went straight through into the restaurant.

  It had undergone a similar transformation. The tables were more numerous and closer together, and each one boasted a vase of tacky plastic rosebuds. The bar was a modern monstrosity, frosted glass blocks with colored lights behind them.

  Eventually one of the waitresses made it to my table. She was squashed into one of those Salzburger dirndls that you’re supposed to buy several sizes smaller than your actual measurements. They are fastened across the midriff with hooks as stout as industrial steel, and the excess flesh thus ruthlessly compressed billows up over the low-cut bodice into the cute little white blouse, and sometimes beyond. When she bent over to ask for my order, I was reminded of a scene from one of my favorite movies—when Walter Matthau, confronted by a similar exhibition, screams, his eyes bulging, “Don’t let them out! Don’t let them out!”

  They didn’t get out. I ordered beer and examined the menu the girl had given me. The featured item was something called a Bavarian burger—ground veal and sauerkraut on a bun.

  The omens were not auspicious. I had hoped I’d find Herr Hoffman in his usual place behind the desk. He might be elsewhere in the hotel or the village—or the world—but the implications of that bloodstained envelope were getting harder to deny. The refined old gentleman I had known would never have countenanced such vulgarities as plastic rosebuds and souvenir cushions.

  I drank my beer and tried to figure out what to do next. There would be nothing unusual in my asking for Hoffman; anyone who had stayed at the hotel would remember him and he had been particularly kind to me. If my forebodings were mistaken, and I devoutly prayed they were, I would simply show him the photograph and ask him what it was all about.

  If Hoffman was out of the picture, permanently or temporarily, it might be Frau Hoffman whom I would confront. I had never met her, but I assumed the woman wearing Helen’s jewels must be she; she was the right age, at any rate. I couldn’t think of any reason why I should not be equally candid with her. She was obviously in her husband’s confidence.

  If I asked for the manager and found myself facing a total stranger…Play it by ear? I keep thinking I’m good at that, even though events have often proved me mistaken. In this case there wasn’t much else I could do. I paid my check and went back to the lobby.

  The concierge behind the counter kept me waiting while he answered the phone and made busy work with piles of papers. He kept glancing at me out of the corner of his eye to see if I was impressed. At close range, I understood why he was shivering in short sleeves; every move he made was shivering in short sleeves; every move he made was designed to show off his muscles. Biceps bulged, pectorals popped, and everything else undulated. He had tousled his brown hair in deliberate imitation of a popular American movie star, and his full lips were set in a pout derived from the same source. After he had snapped at the girl at the switchboard, for no reason I could see, he turned to me with what he obviously believed was an ingratiating smile.

  “Your pardon, Fräulein; we are very busy today.”

  Full pink lips and exaggerated pectorals happen to be the two male characteristics I most abhor. I didn’t hold them against him; what I held against him was the smirk on his face as he looked me over.

  “Are you?” I said.

  “You wish a room? We are booked, but perhaps there will be a cancellation….”

  His hand—open, palm up—rested suggestively on the counter. I gave him a dazzling smile. His fingers curled like fat white worms exposed to the light.

  “You weren’t here last year,” I murmured.

  “No.” He shrugged, setting off an obscene upheaval of chest and shoulder muscles. “This is not my profession, you understand. I am helping a friend in her time of need. My name is Friedrich Sommers—but I hope you will call me Freddy. As for the room—”

  “No, thanks. I’d like to see Herr Hoffman.”

  Asking for the manager doesn’t make yo
u popular, even in big hotels. Freddy’s smile wavered. “If there is a complaint, Fräulein—”

  “Nothing like that. I just want to say hello to him.”

  “I am sorry to inform you that Herr Hoffman is deceased.”

  I had expected it, and, after all, I had scarcely known the man. But I didn’t have to feign distress. “I’m so sorry. When did it happen?”

  “Two weeks ago.”

  “Was he ill long?”

  “He was not ill. It was an accident. He was struck by a car.” Freddy’s smile had passed into oblivion. “Are you by chance…Are you a friend?”

  “No. I stayed here last year. He was very kind to me.”

  There was no obvious reason why I should have been so cagey, yet I found myself reluctant to give him my name. I didn’t like Freddy. I had not liked his face or his muscles or his smirk, and I liked his suspicious scowl even less.

  “Perhaps you would like to speak with Frau Hoffman,” he suggested.

  I had been about to ask if I might. The fact that it was Freddy’s suggestion made me wonder whether I really did want to. There was no retreating now, though, so I nodded and Freddy picked up the telephone. He raised one hand to his cheek when he spoke; it muffled his words to some extent, but my hearing is excellent.

  After he hung up, he informed me that Frau Hoffman would see me, and indicated where I was to go. I remembered the corridor; it led to the room where Hoffman and I had spent such a pleasant evening a year ago. I must admit I felt a little like Alice falling down the rabbit hole.

  Freddy must have been under the impression that I didn’t understand German. That was stupid of him. I had not used the language when I spoke with him, but if he knew who I was, he must be aware of my proficiency in the language of the country where I presently resided. And he knew who I was. What he had said was: “She is here. Yes, the one you told me to watch out for. She is at the desk at this moment, asking for the old man.”

  Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice is reported to have remarked.

  The friend Freddy was helping in her time of need had to be Frau Hoffman. I would not have expected the sedate elderly woman in the photograph to hobnob with a character like Freddy, but people don’t always behave the way you expect them to. The Hoffmans were childless. Maybe Freddy had appealed to the widow’s frustrated maternal instincts. Or maybe he had a kind heart under an unprepossessing exterior. Be fair, Vicky, don’t judge people by appearances.