Fellowship of Fear (12 page)

Feller, smiling warmly and looking tall and clean and lovely, had been observing him for some time.

"Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you up," she said. "You look like the World’s Original Absent-Minded Professor."

The words, spoken so often by Nora, made his heart turn over, and while he fumbled witlessly for something to say, he was further flustered by the soft light that suddenly suffused her face. No one had looked at him like that for a very long time. For an irrational instant it seemed that Nora was back again, that the past had somehow changed, that time had bent.

She reached a hand toward his cheek and stopped with her fingertips a few inches away.

"You’ve really been through it, haven’t you?" she said, with something in her voice that hadn’t been there at the dinner party the week before.

It finally occurred to Gideon that she was reacting to his face. He had forgotten how damaged it was. "It was nothing," he said stupidly, watching her.

Janet dropped her hand back to her side. "Nothing?" she said. "You sure look like hell."

"So people have been telling me. But it’s nowhere near as bad as it looks." His voice sounded appropriately calm in his ears, but his heart was beating rapidly. For the first few months after Nora’s death, of course, he was always seeing her in the street or on campus, or getting on a bus. But it hadn’t happened for at least a year.

"I sure hope not," she said. "I see you’re using a cane."

"Only for another day or two. Really, I’m all right." He paused and cleared his throat. Asking for a date was something that came no more easily to him at thirty-eight than it had at eighteen, and he had to lower his eyes to do it. "I don’t suppose you’re busy for dinner tonight?"

She laughed. "Thanks a
lot
."

Gideon was confused at first. Then he laughed, too. "I mean, I don’t suppose you’re
free
tonight? I thought we might have dinner."

"Sounds swell," she said.

"Fine. Where shall I get you?" He stepped back a little, afraid she could hear his heart thumping.

"Get me? I live here."

"You live in the BOQ?"

"Certainly. Why not? Cheapest place in town and a sink in every room. I’m in Twenty-one. Come by in an hour."

   HEIDELBERG is one of the very few German cities that was never bombed during World War II. As a result it has an Old World quality more authentic and pervasive than most of Germany’s other ancient cities. In the Old Town, housed in a baroque palace, is the Kurpfalziches Museum. On his first day in Heidelberg, Gideon had gone there to see the exhibit of
Homo erectus heidelbergensis,
the famed 360,000-year-old jawbone that had rocked the scientific world seventy years before. He was disappointed to see that the display contained only a plaster cast of the bone, but was pleased to find an elegant restaurant tucked into one corner of the courtyard. He hadn’t eaten there then, but had marked it as a place to come another time. It was here he took Janet.

Over veal steaks with cream sauce accompanied by an excellent Beilsteiner Mosel, she listened pensively, almost tenderly, to his description of the attack in Sicily. Relishing her attention, he milked the story for as much sympathy as he could, then sighed and sat back in his chair with a suitably noble expression on his battered countenance.

"But why did they do it?" Janet asked. "What was it about?"

Gideon came close to revealing his involvement with NSD but changed his mind. The less she knew, the better for her. My God, he thought; the need-to-know principle. He was starting to think like them. "The police have no idea," he said. "They figure it was a Mafia thing, that I was mistaken for someone else."

"Do you buy that? It doesn’t sound like the Mafia."

He was suddenly alert. "What do you mean?"

She shrugged and held out her glass. He filled it. "Janet," he said, "what really happened to those other two visiting fellows?"

"You think there’s a connection?" She sipped and then delicately licked the fruity wine from her lips.

With an effort, Gideon kept his mind on the conversation. "Well," he said, "do these sorts of things happen to the regular faculty?"

"No," Janet said. "It’s odd, now that you mention it. As far as I know, no USOC prof has ever been killed here or even seriously hurt, except that other fellow and now you."

"What about the Econ fellow you and Eric were talking about last week?"

"Oh, Pete?" She searched for his last name. "Pete Berger? I didn’t know him all that well. Nobody did. He was kind of a strange bird; awkward, shy, hard to talk to, never mingled much. I know he had a bad reputation for missing classes, and Dr. Rufus was thinking about firing him. But he never got hurt, as far as I know. He just disappeared for good one day and never showed up again… Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, it
is
peculiar, isn’t it?"

"Yes, isn’t it? Where was he when he disappeared?"

"Up north somewhere. Bremerhaven, I think. I wish I could tell you more."

"What about the other one?"

"The guy that got killed? I never met him. I just heard his car ran off the road in Italy."

They paused while the waiter brought them each a cup of coffee.

"Janet," said Gideon, stirring a little sugar into the strong, fragrant brew, "when you were telling me some of this last week at the dinner, Eric tried to shush you up, remember? Why did he do that?"

He studied her face. She looked at him with open, innocent eyes. Lovely eyes, really, with clear, beautiful hazel irises.

"Oh, I think he just didn’t want to frighten you off. But we were all pretty sloshed, as I recall." She sipped her coffee and put the cup carefully in its saucer. "What are you suggesting by all the questions? That there was foul play involved?"

"I don’t know what I’m suggesting. I’m just trying to make sense out of it." He waited until he caught her eye again. "You don’t suppose they were involved in undercover work, some kind of espionage, or—?"

"Espionage?
Spies?
Are you serious?" Her incredulity told him one thing he wanted to know; recruiting of faculty by NSD was not routine. Janet, at least, had not been approached by them.

For a while they drank their coffee in silence. It was three times as expensive as it would have been in an American restaurant and there were no refills, but it was delicious. Gideon was comfortable with Janet, and the veal sat well inside him. He listened to the splashing of the fountain in the courtyard and watched Janet frowning thoughtfully at her coffee. She was very beautiful, more so than Nora had been, really, and although the memory of her spluttering wine across the table during that alcoholic tetea-tete with Eric still put him off a little, who was he to criticize? As she said, he had been pretty well sloshed himself.

"How about a walk?" he said. "It’s a pretty night, and it would do my ankle some good."

"I’d love it," Janet said, and sounded like she meant it.

Gideon paid the bill, pleased when she didn’t demand to share it.

They walked slowly down the Haupstrasse, Gideon leaning on his cane, past busy sidewalk cafes and restaurants. For four hundred years the Haupstrasse had been the main street of Heidelberg; now it was open only to foot traffic, filled with strollers on this mild fall night, most of whom munched bratwurst or pastries purchased from sidewalk vendors. The smells of sausage and coffee, and the sounds of German conversation, oddly enough, seemed homey and warm. When Janet put her arm through his, Gideon trembled a little and glowed, and tried to look like a Heidelberger out for a
spaziergang
with his
Fraulein
.

"Sehr gemutlich, nicht wahr?"
he said, patting the hand that lay in the crook of his elbow.

"Jawohl,"
she answered, and squeezed his arm.

He bought them a sack of almond and chocolate pastries at a
Konditorei,
and they munched along like everyone else, smiling at passersby and murmuring
"Guten Abend.

Janet, more at ease with him than she had been before, told him about the dissertation on which she was working: a history of women book collectors in the nineteenth-century American Midwest.

Gideon made sympathetic noises and asked interested questions, but in his heart he sighed a quiet "Oh no." He liked women, really liked them, more than men, and respected them at least as much. In his own field, the cultural anthropologists whom he most respected were Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. Yet feminists often bored and sometimes irritated him with their grim, contentious rhetoric. He hoped that wouldn’t happen with Janet.

"What are you going to call it?" he asked between bites of pastry.

" ‘Keepers of the Written Word: A Study of Oppression, Sexism, and Bibliophily.’ "

She delivered the cumbrous words so ponderously, notwithstanding a mouthful of nuts and chocolate, that he thought she was joking. He laughed.

It was a mistake. She leaned on his arm to make him stop walking and face her. "You find that funny?" Her eyes were cool and serious.

Gideon winced and even drew a tiny breath between clenched teeth in an effort to make her think that she had inadvertently hurt his ankle but that he was stoically trying to keep it from her. It was a cheap trick, of course, intended primarily to head her off and secondarily to rekindle in her that warm sympathy in which he’d been basking until those damn female book collectors came up. He thought he carried it off fairly well, but perhaps he had been too subtle; her face was without pity.

"What is it that’s so humorous about it?" she said. "Do you think women bibliophiles have
not
been oppressed? Can you even grasp what it was like to be a female intellectual in a society that was dominated by—"

"Janet, don’t go all polemic on me. All I was laughing about was, well, was how all serious titles have to have a colon in them nowadays. They used to have subtitles. Now it’s all one title with colons. I don’t know why, but it strikes me funny."

It was so wonderfully irrelevant that it served as a much-needed non sequitur. After a sharp glance at him, Janet seemed to decide he was being truthful. She opened her mouth to speak and then closed it.

"Do you know," Gideon asked as he moved them gently along, "I haven’t yet been to one of the student taverns. Isn’t the Red Ox near here? How about a beer?"

"I don’t think you’re the type," Janet said, still ready to fight. Gideon smiled innocently at her, although under other circumstances he might have asked her what she meant.

She smiled suddenly, and the warmth came back into her eyes. "Well," she said, "I suppose one can’t come to Heidelberg without hoisting a stein at the Red Ox. What would Sigmund Romberg think?"

   WHEN they walked into the smoky, noisy Restaurant Zum Roten Ochsen, he found that she was right. He didn’t like it at all. The age-blackened ceiling of the big tavern rang with lusty male voices raised in martial-sounding songs, and with the clank of beer steins beating time on old oak tables. It was all very jolly and picturesque, but it depressed him.

He knew these songs had been sung in this room for nearly three hundred years. He knew that images from
The Student Prince
were supposed to leap to the mind of the visitor. They didn’t. What he saw instead was an ominous scene out of the 1930s: flushed, sweating faces, glazed and fervent eyes… It wasn’t for him; maybe another time.

"You’re right," he shouted over the singing. "Let’s go someplace else."

They turned to leave and were almost bowled over by a husky, perspiring serving wench who might have stepped out of a Frans Hals painting: rosy cheeks, cherubic smile, peekaboo seventeenth-century bodice and all. Arms aloft, she banked as she charged toward them, apparently taking advantage of centrifugal force to keep the four liter-sized steins of beer she carried in each red hand from spilling.

Janet ducked under one brawny forearm, Gideon under the other, and they emerged laughing and hand-in-hand into the street, where Gideon ran directly into a smallish man standing on the sidewalk at the entrance. His first reaction was one of concern. They had been moving with considerable impetus, and Gideon weighed over a hundred-and-eighty pounds. The man in the street, he was sure, was going to be knocked sprawling. Automatically, he reached out to steady him.

Gideon’s second reaction, following closely on the first, was amazement. Running into the motionless figure was like running into a two-ton statue. Not only did he not go flying; he didn’t budge. It was Gideon who was nearly knocked off his feet.

His third reaction was a mixture of alarm and fury, just barely in that order. It was the ferret-faced man, staring at him with an expression closer to disgust than menace. The man began to turn away.

"Hey!" Gideon cried. "You! Wait!" He thrust out his cane to block the man’s path. Calmly, the smaller man seized it and pulled it across his chest, jerking Gideon toward him and spinning him half-around. Then, with an expert, economical motion, like a martial-arts instructor demonstrating before a class, he lifted his foot and brought down the sole on the calf of Gideon’s left leg. Gideon’s knee buckled like cardboard, and he fell to the ground, writhing desperately to keep his weight off the injured ankle. The cane was wrenched from his grasp and sent clattering into the street.

As a boxer in college, Gideon had learned to anticipate an opponent’s movements by watching his eyes. Now, even as he landed heavily on his back, he looked up into the face above him and was stunned by a blazing look of surpassing contempt, theatrical in its intensity.

The man blinked, and a little of the glittering danger left his eyes. Then he pivoted abruptly, as if forcing himself to leave, and began to walk firmly away.

"Wait a minute, you—" Janet cried, stepping slightly forward. Gideon’s arm went out to warn her off, but she stepped back on her own when the man stopped, rotated his snaky neck, and fixed her with those fierce eyes. Turning a little further, he looked at Gideon one more time with a glare that said he was considering whether he might not rather come back and kill him after all. Apparently deciding against it, at least then and there, he turned once more and disappeared quickly into the darkness.