Silhouette in Scarlet vbm-3 Page 8

  ‘Ha, ha, ha,’ I said.

  The door continued to rattle. I couldn’t imagine why no one had complained. The people in the nearby rooms must be out.

  John grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me. ‘I must have been out of my mind to bring you into this,’ he snarled. ‘You’ve brought me nothing but bad luck from first to last – ’

  ‘Well, who the hell asked you – ’ I began.

  He stopped my mouth with his. The kiss lacked the leisurely finesse of his normal technique; it was hard and angry. When he let me go he was scowling. ‘I said I’d look after Gus, and I will. I’ll keep my promise, even if it brings me to a sticky end, which it probably will. That should please you.’

  I saw no point in denying it. ‘Who’s the man you’re afraid of?’

  ‘The field director of one of the most unscrupulous gangs of art thieves in Europe. I don’t know what he looks like, since I have sincerely endeavoured to avoid making his acquaintance. However, he is said to have an unusual hobby.’

  ‘What hobby?’ I asked. But I thought I knew.

  John’s hand seized the doorknob. He glanced at me over his shoulder. ‘He cuts silhouettes.’

  He twisted the knob and flung the door open. His timing was perfect. Leif barrelled through the opening like the Cannonball Express, reeled across the room, hit the bed, and crashed down on it. The bed collapsed.

  I looked out into the hall. There was no one in sight.

  Chapter Five

  I COULD HAVE SAVED myself a lot of bother if I had mentioned Cousin Gustaf’s name to the hotel management. The arrival of his Mercedes brought all the higher-ups out of their offices, bowing and smiling and hoping I had enjoyed my stay. Nobody mentioned the bed.

  I wasn’t ready when the car came. I didn’t get to sleep until after two a.m. Leif tore the room apart. John had departed with such celerity that Leif hadn’t laid eyes on him, and the big oaf refused to accept my statement that I was not concealing someone in the room. He made havoc among the clothes in the closet and stripped the bed down to the matress. It took me half an hour to get things in order after he finally stormed out, muttering threats and dire warnings of disaster.

  More than once, as pillows went flying across the room and blouses tumbled off their hangers, I was tempted to ask why he didn’t call in his cohorts from the Department of Art and Antiquities. I controlled the impulse for the same reasons that had kept me silent earlier. After the first quick survey of the room he must have known there wasn’t anyone there; throwing blankets around was just his way of letting off steam.

  I propped up the bed as best I could, but it wasn’t very stable.

  I was up at eight sharp. After a quick breakfast I headed for the museum, and argued my way into the office of the director. My official card gained me admittance to the library, though the place wasn’t supposed to be open to the public till later.

  I had some idea of what I was looking for, but even so it took a long time to find it. I kept wandering off into side tracks, some unexpectedly productive, others of purely academic interest. I took a lot of notes, though it was not necessary; the things I discovered had a poignant immediacy that branded them onto my memory.

  Delayed by my research and by some last-minute shopping, I was still packing my suitcases when the phone rang and an awed voice announced that Herr Jonsson’s car was waiting. Three bellboys arrived to carry my two suitcases. The third tried to take my purse, which was admittedly large enough to warrant his interest, but I insisted on carrying it myself. In stately procession, amid ranks of bowing officialdom, we passed through the lobby. I loved it, especially when I caught a glimpse of Leif hiding behind a pillar, bent almost double in his attempt to look shorter. He rose to his full height, gaping, when he saw my entourage. I waved. A few discreet inquiries would tell him where I was going, but I figured it would take him a while to get on the trail. It was unlikely that he had a car, or he would have used it before this.

  The chauffeur, a solemn middle-aged man, swept off his cap and handed me an envelope. I started to stuff it into my pocket. He frowned anxiously and said, ‘Please – read . . .’ So I did. The minuscule script covered the entire page; the text consisted solely of repetitive statements as to the reliability of Tomas and the happiness of Gus at my condescending to visit him.

  The car lacked ostentatious gadgetry – TV sets, bars, and the like – but every appointment was of the best quality, and a pair of large baskets on the back seat showed that Gus had attempted to supply any missing amenities. As the car glided smoothly along the waterfront and across the bridge, I investigated the baskets. One was full of food – salads, sandwiches, and thermoses of various liquids from white wine to mineral water – enough to feed a dozen people. The other basket contained a mirror, several magazines in three languages, a jug of water with rose leaves floating in it (presumably for washing, since a towel was wrapped around it), a supply of hand cream and cold cream, a miniature tape player with a selection of tapes (Bach and Vivaldi), a book of crossword puzzles and a freshly sharpened pencil, and a guidebook entitled Beautiful Dalarna.

  By the time I had explored the baskets we were in the suburbs, heading northwest. I waited till the car stopped at a traffic signal before I banged on the glass. Tomas glanced back. I waved a sandwich at him. He smiled and shook his head. ‘Thank you. I have eaten.’ His voice came from over my head. As I might have expected, there was a speaker system between front and back seat.

  I leaned back against the grey velvet upholstery and poured myself a glass of wine. The ride was so smooth that the pale gold liquid scarcely rippled when I placed the glass on the small table (rosewood, what else?) that unfolded from the armrest. I began to hope that Gus really was a cousin. Or that I could persuade him to adopt me. If I hadn’t already been in love with him, the contents of those baskets would have won my heart.

  The guidebook told me little that I didn’t already know. I had looked up Karlsholm on a large-scale map at the museum that morning. It was too small to appear on the tourist map I had brought from Munich. It was in the country of Dalarna – Dalecarlia, Jämbäraland of the sagas – haunting, musical names, like something out of Tolkien. After all, northern history and legendry had inspired much of The Lord of the Rings. Dalecarlia might have been the hobbit name for the Elvish Dalarna, and it sounded like the sort of place hobbits would favour – a land of fertile farmland and green forest, of hills and rivers and deep-blue lakes. In the days of my innocence, before hordes of sinister characters started following me, I had planned to visit Dalarna. It is one of the few places in the world that is almost as charming as the guidebooks say it is.

  Karlsholm was off the beaten track, some miles northwest of the popular tourist centres around Lake Siljan. It had a lake of its own, though; on the large-scale map Lake Siljan looked artificially symmetrical, like a small blue coin. The guidebook Gus had supplied didn’t mention it, or the town, but there were references to the delightful folk costumes and customs, the crafts and the dances and the traditions of a past age lovingly preserved. Under the heading ‘Midsummer in Dalarna,’ the book waxed lyrical – cloudberries and cow horns, maypoles decked with wild flowers and birch branches, dancing to the sound of fiddles through the bright night hours of Midsummer’s Eve. That date was less than a week away. Maybe, if I could clean up the present mess, I would be able to celebrate the festival with Gus and the good villagers of Karlsholm. Footing it lightly around the maypole with a tall, handsome Swede . . .

  If I could clean up the mess. With a sigh I closed the guidebook and turned my thoughts from cloudberries to crime. I had most of the information I needed now. The only question was what to do with it.

  Once upon a time – in 1889, to be precise – a hardworking farmer dug up a fabulous ancient treasure – the Karlsholm chalice. I’m not talking about Viking loot; the chalice dates from the so-called Migration Period, three to four hundred years before the Vikings. It was an enormously wealthy era in Scandinavia.
As one authority said, the whole period glitters with gold – gold ingots and bars, gold coins, neck rings, and collars. Most of it was buried and never retrieved, possibly because its owners failed to return from their next raid on the dying Roman Empire, whence much of the treasure had come in the form of loot or tribute or ransom. One estimate stuck in my mind – the amount of gold used in the famous lurs, or horns, was worth about 1650 Roman solidi – the ransom of two hundred legionnaires.

  The lurs came from Jutland, in Denmark, and the most interesting thing about them is that they were found, by accident, in the same field – a century apart.

  I felt fairly sure I was dealing with a parallel case. The Karlsholm chalice was found in 1889. Almost a hundred years later someone unearthed another object in the same field – a field belonging to Gustaf Jonsson. A farmer, less honest than the majority of his countrymen, or a professional archaeological thief, following up a clue – I might never know, and it wasn’t important. What was important was that the finder tried to sell his discovery to John, who enjoyed a certain reputation in his own slimy world.

  I had never checked John’s professional qualifications (it would have been a little difficult, since I didn’t know his real name), but apparently he knew his subject well enough to have arrived at the same conclusion I had: Where there were two treasures, there might be more. Excavation of the site could produce a hoard like the one found in Södermanland, which contained more than twelve kilos of gold. Naturally, the real value of ancient jewellery is considerably higher than the value of the gold itself – worth a little trouble on John’s part.

  Investigating, he had learned that the site was owned by a wealthy, rigidly honest old gentleman who was disinclined to get matey with strangers. John’s reputed charm wouldn’t have the slightest effect on Gus. He had had to find another means of access – me. Anyone of Scandinavian descent is likely to have an ancestor named Johnson, or one of its variants.

  John obviously knew a lot more about me than I knew about him. Since I had nothing to hide, my family history and connections would be easy to discover. So ‘Aunt Ingeborg’ had written to Gus, suggesting a meeting with her niece, and if I had gone to the hotel John selected for me, Gus would have called me. Except for the inconvenient demise of Aunt Ingeborg, I might have believed the story. She had been my great-aunt, actually, and an interfering old busybody. It would have been just like her to make appointments for me without bothering to ask whether I wanted to keep them. I had written to Mother about my intention of travelling to Sweden. There would have been time – barely enough time – for Ingeborg to notify Gus of my plans.

  Once I was in residence at Gus’s home in Karlsholm, John would move in. I wondered how he had planned to do it. Surely not the hoary old car-breakdown trick; he was more inventive than that. It was all rather chancy, but that was typical of John. No doubt he had several tentative approaches worked out.

  However, his informant had crossed him up, peddling the information in several markets simultaneously. One such market was the one run by the silhouette cutter. It was strange how drastically John’s disclosure had altered my impression of the little man, from that of a harmless eccentric to a figure of sinister villainy, snip-snipping away with his sharp-pointed scissors, reducing a human face to a flat black outline.

  I wondered if it had occurred to John, as it had most certainly occurred to me, that the silhouette cutter might not be the only other source the informant had approached. The man who had socked John on the jaw, the mysterious person with the brown beard and hornrimmed glasses, might be another treasure hunter. John didn’t seem desperately worried about this character. I had never caught so much as a glimpse of him.

  Then there was Leif. He seemed too naive and bumbling to be a professional criminal or a policeman. But he definitely wanted John, and not to buy him a schnapps. And what about the fat man with the whiskers, whom Leif claimed to have seen the previous night? For all I knew, every crook in Europe might be on my trail.

  The others were more or less extraneous, at this point; one villain is one too many, and there was no question but that the silhouette cutter had spotted me. I remembered him sitting at the restaurant table, his grey head bent humbly over his work, his bright blades glinting. He had kept a copy of my portrait for himself. Perhaps one day it would adorn the wall in his private office, along with other black outlines commemorating victims. The silhouette he had given me might have an equally eerie significance – an omen, a warning to those who understood its dark meaning.

  John’s consternation had unquestionably affected me. I have said John was a coward, who backed away from trouble with celerity and without hysterics. If the silhouette cutter scared him that much, I was scared too. And that was why I was on my way to Karlsholm. A man of Gus’s wealth and prestige would be able to protect himself; he probably knew the King personally. But first he had to be convinced of the danger, and it wasn’t the sort of danger one can explain over the telephone to a comparative stranger.

  We stopped for lunch at a pretty inn on a blue lake. Having eaten a dozen smoked salmon sandwiches (they were small sandwiches), I protested, but Tomas indicated, with sidelong looks and some hemming and hawing, that he had been directed to make periodic stops. I guess both he and his employer thought ‘bathroom’ a vulgar word.

  As the afternoon wore on, our deliberate pace began to get on my nerves. I didn’t suggest that Tomas drive faster; I assumed Gus had ordered him not to joggle the merchandise. Under different circumstances I would have enjoyed the leisurely drive. The scenery was lovely – blue lakes set like jewels amid wooded hills, forest of birch and pine, red farmhouses with hand-carved gables, stretches of beach with healthy-looking brown bodies lying in rows like herring – doing just what I had planned to do on my holiday. Replete with sandwiches and wine, I dozed off. It had been a hard night.

  When I woke up the sun had disappeared, and the skies were a depressing grey. We stopped again at a restaurant outside Mora, on Lake Siljan. I tactfully had tea, in order to give Tomas time to do whatever he wanted to do. It was after five. Gus had optimistically underestimated the length of time the drive would take. A fast driver could have done it in five or six hours, but we had been chugging along at a steady fifty – far less than that superb automobile was capable of doing. A glance at my map reminded me that Dalama is a good-sized region, stretching all the way to the Norwegian border. Karlsholm was in the far northwest corner. We still had a way to go.

  It may have been the change in the weather that induced a vague apprehension, formless as the clouds that hung overhead. I began to regret that I had not gone to the police before I left Stockholm. At the time it had not seemed the most practical solution. It is difficult to convince a stolid bureaucracy to take one seriously, especially with a story as wild as mine. I’d have done it in time; my credentials are impeccable, and I could have dragged in Schmidt and my buddies in the Munich police force. But it takes most men, including policemen, quite a while to get past my physical characteristics. Thirty eight, twenty-six, thirty-six, if you want to know. I’m not proud of them; they have been a distinct handicap to me throughout my life. I’m a historian, not a centrefold.

  As I was saying, I had decided it would be easier to convince Cousin Gus and let him argue with the cops, especially since I wasn’t absolutely certain I was right. My reasoning made good sense to me, but I had very little solid evidence with which to back it up. All the same, as I sipped my tea and stared at the shadowy outlines of the high hills ahead, I regretted my decision. Too late now.

  Shortly after leaving the restaurant we turned off the modern highway onto a side road that twisted across the hills. It got narrower and more winding, dipping and rising again between aisles of birches whose black-striped trunks resembled processional pillars set up by a modern architect. Now and then the trees thinned out, giving views of upland meadows and barns like those of Austria and Switzerland, with steeply pitched roofs and solid, windowless walls. We
were high in the hills now, in the sater country – the upland farms, where the cattle graze from Midsummer to Michaelmas. Huts and farmhouses, the heavy logs of their walls faded to a soft grey, clung tenaciously to the slopes.

  Once Tomas had to pull far to the right to let a truck get past. We met little traffic; occasionally we passed hikers striding along with their backpacks jouncing. One turned and hoisted a hopeful thumb. Tomas didn’t stop. The hitch-hiker had brown hair and a beard. So did the male half of the next pair we overtook. The girl’s bowed shoulders looked tired as she trudged along behind her companion. I leaned forward, then remembered the car was wired for sound. ‘I don’t mind if you want to pick someone up, Tomas.’

  The peaked cap didn’t turn. ‘No, miss. Not when you are here.’

  Gus’s orders, no doubt. He must picture me as a fragile flower too. He was due for a shock when he saw me.

  It was difficult to carry on a conversation with a disembodied voice and the back of a head. I was dying to pump Tomas about his employer, but doubted that he would indulge me. He didn’t appear to be the gossipy type. I remembered a story I had once read that typified the sturdy independence of the people of this region. Some years back, when the crown prince was vacationing at Lake Siljan, he recognized a farmer who had been part of a delegation that had come to the palace. Thinking to make a gracious gesture, he sent an equerry to command the farmer to an audience. The farmer sent word back – he was sorry, but he had to go to town to lay in his winter supply of liquor. If His Highness was still around, he might be able to get over to see him Thursday or Friday.

  Between dense walls of fir and alder the road slipped down into a little clearing. A cluster of roofs and a bulbous wooden spire appeared, and Tomas said, ‘Karlsholm, miss. We are soon home.’

  I wondered where Gus’s house could be. There was no sign of a mansion pretentious enough to match the Mercedes. The village was small – thirty or forty houses, a church, and a few larger structures that might have been public buildings. We passed through Karlsholm in about a minute and a half, even at a decorous pace, and climbed again. The car crested a low ridge.