by Aaron Elkins
Only once did he leave the base, and then he drove to Aci Trezza for a solitary dinner at the Vera Napoli, a well-known but plain trattoria at the seashore. At one point during the meal, he happened to look up from his plate of linguine con vongole and caught two men at another table off to the side staring intently at him. One, he was sure, had been in the act of making a small gesture in his direction, as if he had been calling his companions attention to Gideon. Now he pretended that he had been reaching toward a bowl of fruit on the table, removed an apple, and bit into it with a loud snap. Then he let his glance move over Gideon once more, vacantly this time, as if unaware of him, and resumed talking to his companion.
There was something about them Gideon didn’t like, even about the way the man had bitten into the apple— with a kind of hardness, a casual brutality. It made him think of the men in the hotel in Heidelberg. He felt a prickle at the back of his neck. Was he in for trouble here, too? This time, if he could help it, he’d be ready. Gideon looked at them from time to time, but they continued to be absorbed in their own conversation, and left before he did.
Aside from this, the day passed uneventfully.
SOMEBODY was in his room.
The quarter-inch segment of paper clip on the worn hallway carpet caught his eye the moment he reached the top of the stairs. He froze with one foot raised and his hand on the bannister, then slowly lowered his foot and placed his lecture notes on the top tread.
Since coming to the BOQ, he’d stuck a piece of paper clip or match stick or cardboard between the door and jamb every time he’d left his room. For three days it had been in its hidden place every time he’d returned. Now it glinted at him like a tiny, malignant exclamation point on the threshold of his room.
He had known that one day he would find them in his room again, but somehow his plans had never solidified beyond planting the paper clip. The most sensible course, obviously, would be to go quietly down to the registration desk and ask the sailor on duty to call the shore patrol. Instead, with his scalp prickling, he got down on his hands and knees and worked his way slowly toward the room. When he reached the wall, he put his ear carefully against it.
There was no sound from within. He could hear the blood pounding in his ears, and a few doors down, two men were laughing quietly. From a television set downstairs, he could hear a parrot squawking, "Ring around the collar!" Nothing else.
Possibly, whoever had been there was gone; Gideon had been in class for three hours. Still, he kept his body low and behind the meager protection of the partition as he slowly turned the handle. The spring latch slid smoothly out with a soft click; the door was unlocked.
Gideon took a deep breath and exhaled. Then he inhaled once more, stopped his breath, and flung the door sharply open, throwing himself full-length onto the hall carpet. The flimsy door banged noisily against the metal bed frame, and Gideon stiffened himself to lunge for the legs of anyone who rushed out.
No one rushed out; the bed frame vibrated, and the door slowly swung a third of the way closed again. One part of Gideon continued to tense itself; another, convinced by now that the intruder had gone, was wondering what to say should anyone emerge from another room to find him sprawled there.
He stood up and looked directly into the room. The light in the hallway threw enough illumination to show him that no one was crouching inside. He walked in and turned on the light. No one was under the bed. No one was in the corner alcove that served as a closet. He checked the door to the bathroom he shared with the occupant of the next room. It was still bolted from his side. He opened it and looked in. It was empty.
He went back to the hall and got his lecture notes, then returned to the room and closed the door. Nothing had been moved, but he could sense that someone had been there. He spent a long time going over the room and trying to determine what had been taken. The intruder, he assumed, must have gotten what he came for, or he would have been waiting for Gideon, as had been the case in Heidelberg.
When Gideon was unable to locate anything missing, he sat down and wrote a list of all the possessions he could remember, down to an underwear count. Then he went through the room again, checking off each item on the list. In the end, he came down to only one thing that wasn’t in its place: a plastic bag containing his clean socks.
The idea was so ludicrous that Gideon wouldn’t accept it at first. He knew that his memory for everyday things was poor. Nora had often laughed with him about his being an absentminded professor, though he always protested that his mind wasn’t absent but elsewhere, pondering weightier things. Once they had searched for fifteen minutes for a watch that was on his wrist, another time for a wallet that was already in his pocket. But the socks were not to be found, though he went so far as to go down to the car to search for them. When he came back up and stood looking stupidly at the alcove shelf for the fifth time, he suddenly remembered positively how he’d stood right there that morning and taken a green pair of socks from the bag, then changed his mind and taken a brown pair, and finally tossed the bag back on the shelf.
There wasn’t any doubt about it. Someone had waited until he went to class that evening, furtively let himself into his room, searched it—and made off with two pairs of blue socks and one of green. Plus the plastic Safeway produce bag that held them.
THE man didn’t change his position. He remained slouched in the hard plastic chair, his hollow chest depressed and his long, skinny legs crossed at the knees and then entwined again at the ankles, the way women could sit—or men with long, skinny legs. His trousers, rucked up by the convolutions of his legs, revealed unattractive lengths of hairless white calf above beige anklets. His eyebrows were the only things that moved. They went up. His eyes remained on the sports page in front of him.
"They took what?" he asked, his voice barely audible above the wooshes and clanks of the washing machines.
"I know," Gideon said, "it’s ridiculous. I feel stupid saying it, but that is what they took."
It was so absurd that he had almost decided not to bother NSD with it. At eight o’clock that morning, however, he had gone to the Education Office to call USOC— the time was the same in Sicily and Heidelberg—and leave a message about an incomplete roster. Then, feeling both exhilarated and silly, he had had a big breakfast of corned beef hash and eggs at the Officers’ Club.
By the time he had returned to the BOQ, there was an old, much-used transmittal envelope waiting for him at the desk. The last entry on it before "Oliver, BOQ" was "Mailroom." He had taken it up to his room in some excitement and had been a little disappointed to find it wasn’t sealed, but was simply closed by means of a string wrapped around two dog-eared cardboard discs.
Inside had been a white sheet of letter paper with a navy letterhead, the kind one could buy in the PX for personal correspondence. Typed neatly in the center of the page had been "Laundromat, 9:30 a.m. Re rosters."
He had arrived at exactly 9:30 with a small load of shirts and underwear for "cover," put them into a washing machine, and sat down to wait, choosing a part of the laundromat that was uncrowded. A few minutes later, the gaunt man with the long-nosed, deeply lined cowboy’s face had come in, also with a little bundle of wash. When he had set the washing machine going, he sat down near Gideon, lit a cigarette, picked up an old copy of Stars and Stripes, and offered a few pages of it to Gideon. Then, after a while, he had spoken without looking up from the paper, the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.
"Roster trouble?"
He had not said any more until Gideon had come to the socks. Now he said slowly, "I don’t know whether you’re just stupid or you’re trying to be funny, but let me tell you something. You’re fooling around with the big leagues. Don’t play games with us."
"Let me tell you something," said Gideon, his ready temper ignited.
"Voice down," the man said. He casually turned a page.
Gideon whispered. "I don’t know what’s going on—"
"Don’t whisper
. Just talk quietly."
Gideon opened and then closed his mouth. He didn’t really have any reason to be annoyed with this man. "Look, I was asked to tell you people about anything unusual. Getting your socks stolen may be an everyday thing for you, but it’s pretty unusual for me. So I told you. Now, is that it?"
"Are you positive they didn’t take anything else? Did they maybe plant anything? A bug?"
"Why would they do that?" Actually, the thought had occurred to him earlier in the morning, and he had searched for one. Not knowing what one looked like made it difficult, but he had assumed it would be a button-sized gadget stuck on the bottom of a bureau drawer, or under a window sill, or behind a cabinet. He hadn’t found anything.
"You never know," the man said. "Feel around for one under things when you go back."
"I already did. Nothing."
The man uncoiled his knotted legs, got his laundry— two white towels with gray stenciled letters on them—and came back to Gideon. "I like to air-dry these. Makes them smell nicer. I think your laundry’s done. Have a nice day." He wished another nice day to a fat, sleepy woman near the door and walked out with a loose-legged gait that Gideon had once heard called a shit-kicker’s walk.
SIX
THE seminar had gone well. On Friday evening Mary Fabriano, one of the students, gave an end-of-class cocktail party at her apartment in Catania. Gideon was forced to accept, inasmuch as he was more or less the guest of honor. As it was, he had a good time. Mary, a young nurse with wildly provocative buttocks, went out of her way to make it clear that she found him attractive and that she was unengaged for the rest of the night. He flirted with her for a while, enjoying himself. As usual, however, when it came down to brass tacks he retreated, as he had been doing since Nora’s death.
He left the party at eleven o’clock, depressed and angry with himself and the world. He had wanted to go to bed with Mary, all right. Of course he had. Why shouldn’t he? He needed sex like anybody else. He didn’t just need it; he liked it—he liked it a lot. At least he thought he did. It had been so damn long, maybe he was forgetting.
When he turned off the highway onto the Dump Road, he was deep in his thoughts. He barely noticed the dark young man watching him so intently from the passenger seat of the car slowly going the other way. Probably he wouldn’t have noticed him in any case. His few days of Sicilian driving had inured him to the scrutiny that occupants of passing cars accorded each other. What should have caught his attention, however, was the peculiar fact that anyone at all was emerging from the Dump Road after midnight. The Dump Road—no one seemed to know its real name, but the nickname was apt—was a narrow, back-country route between Sigonella and the Catania highway, used mainly as a route to work by base employees.
The night was clear, the road deserted and straight. Gideon plunged ahead at Sicilian speed, sunk in gloom. He could have been back at that cocktail party right now, damn it, going through all the delicious rigamarole of the Western pre-mating ritual. Instead, he was zooming down this black, godforsaken road, speeding toward another empty night.
He really had to have a heart-to-heart talk with himself one of these days. It wasn’t that he was trying to be faithful to Nora. That would be morbid, and she wouldn’t have wanted it anyway. It was just that he needed something— something he couldn’t identify—that he hadn’t found in anyone since Nora.
There was no shortage of sexy, available women around—that certainly wasn’t the problem—but they wanted either one-night quickies or Meaningful Relationships. For him, the one would have been tawdry, the other …well, he just wasn’t ready. It was funny, really. In his Social Institutions seminar, he separated them neatly into two concepts: the sexual drive was an ancient biological imperative, rooted in the pre-human past, whereas romance was merely a recent artifact, and a dying one at that; a twelfth-century French response to the non-ethics of feudalism. He really believed all that, or thought he did. Yet here he was tied up in knots and going without either sex or romance, horny and love-starved at the same time. Maybe what he needed most—
He saw the dark shape of the car blocking the middle of the road a split second before its headlights went on, blinding him utterly. His foot clamped to the brake pedal, the wheels locked, and he went slipping and sliding toward the stopped car as if he were on ice. Except for the screeching of the tires, it was strangely like floating in a dream.
He was, to his dismay, on a low one-lane bridge with no possibility of turning off the roadway. For the second time in a week, he was sure he was about to die, but with teeth clenched and muscles straining, he stepped on the brake and foolishly pulled back on the wheel. And somehow the weaving vehicle stayed on the bridge and slowed enough so that it finally slid into the stopped car at three or four miles an hour. There was a soft clunk, like a beer can crumpling, and then a gentle, tinkling shower of headlight shards to the ground. Then silence and darkness.
Acting by instinct, Gideon fumbled free from his seat belt, flung open the door, scrambled out, and leaped over the side of the bridge to the gully a few feet below. He landed on his feet somehow, and floundered his way through underbrush and muck, back toward the end of the bridge from which he’d come. Then the flashlights went on and the shouting started, and he ducked back under the bridge and threw himself down into the foul-smelling mud behind a concrete bridge support. He lay on his stomach in the slime, panting and wet. By working his chin a little deeper into it, he was able to look back toward the center of the bridge, where the shouting was coming from.
It sounded like Italian. They were angry, perhaps swearing at each other. His eyes had adapted to the night, and he could see that there were three men. Two of them were gesticulating, appealing to the third: a tall, slender man who stood silent and immobile. The beams from the flashlights darted down from the bridge, playing over the land near where he had jumped. He would be hard to find, Gideon thought. The ground was rough and strewn with rocks, with a lot of bushes big enough to shield him. Unless they happened to search in the right place, he might be able to keep away from them until he made it back to the bank of the gully only twenty feet behind him. Once he scrambled up that, the ground would be flat and easy to run on, with trees to block him from sight until he could get to the little village a mile down the road.
There were, however, two problems, both major. First, the terrain between himself and the bank, lying as it did in the shadow of the bridge, had no protective bushes; moreover, the ground was swampy, full of litter, and difficult to traverse, particularly in the dark. Second, he was crouched in one of the first places they would look once they climbed down from the bridge and saw that the supports at either end provided obvious cover. That is, if they climbed down. For the moment his best bet was to stay where he was until he had a better idea of what they had in mind.
There was a sudden clattering on the pebbles a few feet behind him. Gideon twitched violently, banging his head hard enough against the concrete to see stars. Between the stars he caught a glimpse of a large hare that contemplated him with wide, shining eyes for a fraction of a second and then skittered away. At the same moment the beams swung down to where the hare had been, and there was a flurry of shots—Gideon could hear some of them thunk into the earth—while the lights played frantically over the area. They were shooting from almost directly above him. Gideon could see their pistols, three of them, held out over the side of the bridge, bouncing with the repercussions of the shots.
They were trying to kill him. He had been reacting, not thinking, since the headlights had blinded him, and the thought came as a surprise. They weren’t trying to rob him, and they had no questions about "it," no silken cord to force information from him. They weren’t shouting at him to stop or to come out with his hands up. They weren’t shouting at all; they were just shooting at what they thought was him with guns that made very loud bangs.
Gideon had never been around guns much—not at all, actually—and their loudness stunned him. He jumpe
d at every shot, as he did in a theater when an actor fired a gun. When they stopped at last, after what could have been no more than half a minute, he found that he had his eyes screwed shut.
He opened them to see the light beams sweeping over the gully and along the banks. The hare had apparently gotten away. That’s good, he thought. They had been shooting wildly, without ever focusing on or possibly even seeing their target. Now they were back to shouting at each other. He might just possibly have a chance.
Except that he couldn’t think of anything to do. As soon as they had started firing, he had changed his mind about waiting them out. He wasn’t about to lie there meekly and let them kill him. But without a weapon, or even with one, he was no match for three armed assassins. As for escaping, the moment he moved from behind the support, they’d catch him with their flashlights and mow him down. All he could think of was to toss a rock or a rusty can as far as he could, to engage their attention, and then to run for the bank behind him.
It was hard to get terribly enthusiastic about the idea. A rock or a can bouncing over the ground wasn’t likely to fool anyone. It would sound just like what it was, and they would have their beams on him and their bullets into him before he got three steps. But he didn’t have any other ideas.
Near his right hand he saw a plastic sack of garbage that was tied at the neck; that, at least, would sound more like a body if he threw it. He reached for it and twisted his head around to assess the run he would have to make. The land was rough and ran slightly uphill, but there were no large bushes or rocks in the way. With all the litter, though, and puddles of ooze, he’d have to watch carefully where he was going. He’d have to get into a runner’s starting crouch—there wasn’t room under the bridge to stand up— facing the bank a few feet downstream. Then he’d throw the garbage behind him and a little upstream. The moment it hit, he’d run. If they went for the bait, they’d be on the upstream side of the bridge, and the bridge itself would shield him. He’d have to crouch as he ran four, maybe five steps, Groucho-Marx-style. Another two strides would take him over the bank. Then, if they hadn’t yet seen him, he’d drop flat on his belly and inch away toward the stand of trees. If they had seen him, however, he’d just run like hell.
