by Aaron Elkins
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.
"No, I damn well didn’t know," Gideon said. "What the hell are you trying to imply? I’m telling you I had a lucky—"
"And the business of scraping down the shin with the heel. Very impressive. About the most painful thing you can do to a man without really injuring him. Always effective." He drained the coffee. "Didn’t know about that either?"
"Well, to tell the truth—" Lau looked sharply up at him from under his eyebrows, and Gideon continued—"to tell the truth, I read about that in a self-defense book when I was a kid, but I never tried it before."
For a second Lau looked angry. Then his eyes crinkled again, and he laughed with a babylike spontaneity that made it impossible for Gideon not to join him.
"It’s the truth, honest," Gideon said through his laughter. Lau kept on laughing. Gideon suddenly remembered something. "Hey, wait a minute. That guy, the one I said was an American…"
Reluctantly, the policeman sobered. "Yes, what about him?"
"Well, he was American all right, but he’s spent a lot of time in Europe; in Germany, I think. I just realized it. What was it he said? ‘So, now we find out.’ No, it was, ‘So, now we see.’ That’s not American syntax. And he said it the way a German would: ‘So, now …we see.’ Americans don’t do that. The construction isn’t American, and certainly the rhythm isn’t. Could be he had German parents, but I don’t think so. I think he’s an American who’s been here a long time."
Lau was unimpressed. "I’m not sure I buy that. But please,"—he held up a hand as Gideon began to speak—"I don’t think I can handle another linguistics lecture. Doc, are you going to be in Heidelberg a while?"
"No, I leave Sunday morning for Sicily. I have to give some lectures there next week. But I’ll be back in Heidelberg the week after. Probably arrive a week from Sunday."
"Fine. I might want to get in touch with you."
"Okay, but I won’t be staying here. I’ll be at the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters. Cheaper. And a lot more convenient to the classes."
"Good idea. The BOQ will be safer, too."
"What do you mean? You don’t think they’ll come again?"
"No, no," said Lau, "I doubt it." A pause, then the sudden grin again. "I was thinking about your landlady over there by the sideboard. She looks like she’d like to poison you."
Gideon smiled thinly. "Yes. I think she holds me re sponsible for that broken mirror." "It’s not only that," said Lau. "She doesn’t trust you." "She doesn’t trust me?" "Uh uh. She never found the key you broke the mirror with, you know." "Well, yes, I assume one of those two guys—" "And she says you tried to steal it from her yesterday afternoon. You know she turned in a police report on that?" This was news to Gideon. "You’re kidding!" he said. "No, I’m not kidding," said Lau, bu
t he was laughing again, and Gideon laughed along.
THREE
THE afternoon was free of business. There was a bus tour to the gardens at Schwetzingen, arranged for the new faculty with the compliments of the administration, but Gideon declined to go. Aside from a constitutional aversion to group tours, he didn’t relish the idea of further questions on the attack. He told Dr. Rufus he would use the afternoon to catch up on his sleep. Actually, he was looking forward to spending the time alone, going back to Heidelberg Castle to explore the vast, turreted ruins and terraced gardens at his own leisurely pace.
He lunched at a busy seafood bar on the Haupstrasse, dining happily on little sandwiches of marinated herring— Bismarckhering—at one mark each. When he went back to the hotel to pick up his guidebook to the castle, John Lau was waiting in the lobby, joking with Frau Gross. He actually had her laughing, but Gideon’s entrance had its usual sobering effect.
"Hi, Doc," Lau said, sounding glad to see him. "You got some time to go over to NSD headquarters with me? There’s somebody else who’d like to talk to you."
"Sure." Questions from the police were a different thing than questions from curious colleagues. He had enjoyed the earlier talk with Lau and looked forward to more of the same, plus an inside glimpse of the NATO Security Directorate.
Expecting them to drive to the USAREUR command complex at the edge of town, he was surprised when John walked him two blocks down Rohrbacherstrasse to a two-story brownstone building, heavy, dingy, and cheerless.
"This is your headquarters?"
"In Germany, yes."
"Boy, as far as I can see, you picked the only genuinely ugly building in Heidelberg. I mean, that is an ugly building."
"It figures. It was Gestapo headquarters during the war. I think we got it cheap." He smiled.
Inside there was a small vestibule, vacant except for a few wooden benches and an armed soldier who nodded balefully at Lau’s ID from behind a glass partition. Grayish-green corridors ran off in three directions. It looked as if it were still Gestapo headquarters: gloomy, tacky, smelling of disinfectant and old plumbing, and single-mindedly utilitarian. Gideon felt a small shiver at the back of his neck. It was hard to picture John Lau actually working there.
Lau, in fact, seemed subdued once they were in the building. He walked with Gideon down one of the corridors to an office made marginally less bleak by a wall calendar with a color picture of a Bavarian village. A big-boned, middle-aged woman sat erectly at a typewriter near a window.
"Frau Stetten, this is Dr. Oliver to see Mr. Marks," Lau said, his voice, it seemed to Gideon, lacking its usual friendliness. Then, to Gideon’s surprise, he left.
"Please sit down, Dr. Oliver. Mr. Marks will in a minute be with you." She spoke without looking up from her typing, with a strong German accent and a distinctly chilly manner. Gideon couldn’t help wondering, with uncharacteristic lack of charity, if she had come with the building.
In a few minutes, at some sign that he failed to perceive, she said, "Mr. Marks can see you now. Go in, please." She gestured with her head toward a door behind her.
Gideon opened it and entered a medium-sized office with a single old-fashioned window and plain, fairly presentable gray metal furniture: a desk, three file cabinets, two chairs with cracked green plastic seat cushions. It reminded him of his own office at Northern Cal. A neat small man in suit and tie sat behind the desk. He didn’t greet Gideon, but continued to write with a slow, precise hand on a yellow lined tablet. Gideon could see from the format that he was composing a memorandum. He came to the end of a sentence and placed the period carefully. Gideon waited for him to look up, but the man put the tip of his pencil to his tongue and then began another sentence.
Gideon, who was not slow to take offense when warranted, spoke somewhat sharply. "Mr. Marks? You wanted to see me, I think?"
The man put down his pencil and took a half-finished cigarette from an ashtray before looking at Gideon. He had a natty, carefully trimmed little mustache and short dark hair. Behind horn-rimmed glasses, he made no effort to hide the boredom in his eyes. Gideon didn’t like him at all.
"Have a seat. Glad to see you," he said, the words brimming with bureaucratic indifference. "Do you go by doctor or mister?"
"I go by doctor." Ordinarily, it would have been, "Call me Gideon."
"Doctor. Fine. Well, I suppose Charlie Chan told you who I am?"
"Mr. Marks, if you have some questions, please ask them. I have some things to do this afternoon."
"He didn’t, I see. Well, I didn’t call you in about the incident last night. I’m not in law enforcement."
"You’re not in the NATO Security—in NSD?"
"Yes, I’m in NSD, which you’re apparently unfamiliar with, so let me give you the two-bit lecture." His weary sigh was so elaborate that Gideon began to wonder if he was being offensive on purpose.
"The NATO Security Directorate is concerned with threats to the international security of the NATO community, with particular emphasis on terrorism and espionage. To oversimplify things—"
"Wait, hold it a minute. What does this have to do with me? Did that attack have something to do with espionage? Were they terrorists?"
Again a sigh, this time an exasperated one. Marks leaned back, put his hands behind his head, and looked at the ceiling. "Dr. Oliver, I’ve already told you once; I’m not interested in that incident. I’ve examined it with care, and it is of no interest to me. This interview has no connection with it. Period."
With an effort, Gideon stifled the impulse to say it was pretty interesting to him
"Now," Marks went on, "to oversimplify things, there are four main branches of NSD. Three of those branches deal with espionage, more or less. The other, Safety, functions in effect, like an ordinary police department—an international police department, however. It’s concerned with protection of life and property. Murder, robbery, that sort of thing. That’s your friend Lau’s province. Now, the Second Bureau, of which I am a deputy director, is, so to speak, the counterespionage branch. Our job is to counteract enemy agents and terrorists. There is another branch concerned with routine intelligence operations, and then there is Bureau Four, our own little internal secret police."
It was an ill-chosen term to use in this building, Gideon felt, but Marks smiled as if he had said something witty. "The Fourth Bureau keeps us all honest," Marks went on. "It polices our own agents, as well as nationals of member countries who are suspected of spying for the other side."
He stopped abruptly. The two-bit lecture was over. "Any questions?"
"Yes. You’ve given me an awful lot of so-to-speaks and in-effects. If it’s all the same to you, I’d appreciate having my information more precise. And I don’t know that oversimplifications are necessary."
"Dr. Oliver, this isn’t a college classroom. Everything you need to know, you’re being told."
"Damn it, you asked me if I had any questions."
The little mustache twitched, the brow contracted, and apathy suddenly changed to clear-eyed, man-to-man candor. "All right, in all frankness, we need your help, Dr. Oliver. We want you to work with us." He inhaled massively on the stub of his cigarette and let the smoke out through tightened lips: Bogart leveling with Claude Rains in Rick’s nightclub.
"Sorry, Mr. Marks, but if you’re expecting a yes or no to that, I’m afraid you’re going to have to tell me a lot more."
"I know. I’m just trying to decide how much you can be told." He stood up suddenly and made what Gideon assumed was his momentous-decision face. "I’m going to ask the director just how much we can share with you."
As he walked to the door, he placed his hand on Gideon’s shoulder and tightened it in a gesture of trust and conspiracy. Good God, thought Gideon, the man must have been trained in a used-car salesmen’s school. Closing Technique Number Four: "Just a minute, I’ll have to ask my supervisor if we can go that low." (Smile, shoulder pat.) "I’ll do my best."
He sat alone fo
r a few minutes, trying to make something of the conversation so far. Marks might be a buffoon, but this was certainly NSD headquarters, and he had just been asked, as far as he could tell, to spy for them. And all this naturally had no connection with an attack by two professional thugs—spies? agents?—last night. He wondered if they had learned from John Lau of his deductions based on speech patterns or if they shared Lau’s apparent suspicion that he was a world champion karate master. No, that was ridiculous; he dismissed the thought. He wished he hadn’t gone so long without a decent night’s sleep.
In about fifteen minutes, Marks returned with a round, rumply man in his late sixties. Wrinkled gray trousers belted six inches below his armpits and cuffed well above his shoe tops gave him a jolly, elfin quality slightly out of kilter with his watery blue eyes. He moved quickly, reaching out to shake hands with Gideon before Marks had introduced them.
"Monsieur Delvaux, Dr. Oliver."
"How do you do, Professor. Please sit down." With the greeting came an exhalation of cheese and wine. M. Delvaux had been interrupted at his dejeuner.
"Do not smoke, please," he said from the side of his mouth to Marks, who raised his eyes heavenward—in Gideon’s line of sight, not Delvaux’s—and stubbed out his cigarette. Marks seated himself at a side chair, leaving the one behind his desk for Delvaux, but the older man perched on the large windowsill—he had to hop to get up—and began to speak rapidly and softly in a flowing French accent.
"I would like to give you some background on what Mr. Marks has been telling you. For some time now, we have known—this is between us in this room, you understand— about a Soviet action of some sort that is now being planned. We don’t know what that action is, but we know that it requires certain secret information from a number of NATO bases. The surreptitious procurement of that information is among the highest priorities of their intelligence machine; its prevention is among ours. We are asking your help in an activity that may be of the greatest service to your country and to the cause of peace. To yourself, there is very little danger, virtually none."
