by Aaron Elkins
"Mmm," said Gideon.
"Gideon, don’t do that," she said again, but her voice was husky. She began to stroke his hair.
"Mmmmmmm," he said.
DEEP in the night, he had a childish nightmare. A glaring monster—an old movie-style zombie with outstretched arms, but with features that were familiar—pursued him. He couldn’t run; his feet were caught in gluelike mud. He must have cried out because he was awakened by Janet caressing his cheek.
"Sh, sh," she said. "It’s all right, I’m here. Shh."
When he was free of the dream, she said, "Do you want to talk about it? Did it have to do with the little rat in the Haupstrasse?"
As soon as she said it, he knew to whom the features had belonged.
"Yes," he said. "You know, the way that guy looked at me tonight… as ifI were a…a…"
"A fat green worm he found in his soup."
"Ugh. Yes. Like that. That’s what bothers me the most. That man detests me, absolutely despises me—and I don’t even know who he is. It’s so—"
Janet placed her fingers on his mouth and then gently cupped his face. "Sh," she said again. "Four a.m.’s a rotten time to try to think anything through. We’ll talk about it in the morning. Hug me, please."
But when he jumped out of bed four hours later, Janet merely opened one eye. "Eek," she said. "There’s a naked man in my room." She chortled and went back to sleep.
Gideon put on enough of his clothes to walk down the hallway to his room. The check of the carpet, almost habitual by now, revealed no toothpick slivers. Entering the room, he found it pleasantly austere, almost monklike, after Janet’s clutter. Not that he was complaining. A little clutter wasn’t the worst thing in the world.
While he shaved and showered, his mind kept drifting happily over the previous night, although he knew he should have been framing questions for Marks. Certainly he wasn’t in love with Janet; he doubted if he would ever really love anyone again. But she was surely the best thing that had happened to him since Nora. Cautiously, he probed his mind for traces of guilt or disloyalty, but none were there. He had crossed a big barrier last night. Things were definitely looking up.
By the time he finished dressing, he was whistling. It was 8:25. If he didn’t dawdle, there’d be time for a cup of coffee and a roll at the Officers’ Club before heading downtown.
At the door to his room, he paused to search for the toothpick slivers so he could reinsert them. They would fall out, of course, whenever he opened the door, and he usually picked them up on entering. When he’d returned from Janet’s room, however, he’d had a cane in one hand and some clothes in the other, so he hadn’t bothered.
Or had he? They weren’t on the floor. A panicky sort of alarm went through him as he searched his memory. No, he was sure he hadn’t picked them up. Opening the door wide, he checked to see if they had somehow lodged in the jamb or the hinges and failed to drop the floor. That hadn’t happened, of course. The wood splinters were simply gone.
Closing the door again, he stood with his back against it, his mind working jumpily. Could he have forgotten to place them before he went out with Janet last night? He wasn’t sure. He couldn’t remember doing it, but he couldn’t remember not doing it either. No, he thought, he must have; there was no way he would have forgotten to do that. Someone must have been in his room, then—perhaps during the night, perhaps earlier when he’d been out with Janet. His check of the carpet when they’d returned hadn’t meant anything one way or the other.
In the back of a notebook, he found the list of articles he had made in Sicily and began to move around the room checking things off. It still didn’t seem possible that anyone had been there; it might mean that someone had seen the two tiny splinters fall to the floor when the door opened, and had simply removed them. Gideon just couldn’t accept that. Each sliver was the pointed end of a toothpick, less than a sixteenth of an inch long. Unless you knew what you were looking for, they would be invisible against the mottled beige carpet. No, it was impossible. No one could have seen them.
But someone had. On top of his desk, in the exact middle, lay a sheet of white paper he hadn’t noticed before, its edges neatly aligned with the borders of the desk. In the middle of the paper, a heavy black circle had been drawn with a marking pen. And in the middle of the circle, neatly parallel to each other, lay the two minute fragments of wood.
With a spurt of energy, Gideon hurried through his list. Nothing was missing. There was no sign of anyone having been there, as far as he could tell, except for the paper on the desk. Going back to the desk, he stood looking down at the slivers, trying to analyze what he was feeling. There was the now-familiar sense of privacy invaded, of vulnerability; he had felt that in both Heidelberg and Sicily, when he’d found that someone had been in his room. But now there was something different. Then, fear had been a prominent emotion. Not now. He wasn’t even remotely frightened. That ferret-faced son of a bitch had come into his room when he wasn’t there, had covered up his tracks without a trace, and then had had the effrontery, the gall, to flaunt the fact that he’d done it, as if Gideon were so stupid he’d never have figured it out for himself. Which happened to be true, but that was beside the point.
What he was feeling was a cold, lucid anger. In the mirror above the desk, he saw his own battered image: red welts from the cuts around his eyes, a livid scar where his cheek had been torn, fading but still-prominent bruises over the rest of his face. What the mirror didn’t show was the anxiety he’d been living with since the first time Ferret-face and his friend had skulked into his room and ambushed him two weeks ago.
Well, he was done being a pawn. If NSD, and John Lau for that matter, couldn’t protect him, he would protect himself. And he’d settle his own scores. No more of this passively waiting around until the next time he got beaten up.
He crumpled up the paper with the slivers and tossed them into the wastebasket. When he walked to the door, his back felt straighter than it had in a long time. He threw the cane on the bed as he left. He felt very, very fine.
ELEVEN
THE young guard in the dreary vestibule was the same one who’d been on duty before. He looked sourly at the ID that Gideon held up before the thick glass.
"I have an appointment with Mr. Marks," Gideon said.
The guard shoved a half-eaten Oh Henry candy bar off a typewritten sheet on the counter in front of him, then brushed away peanut and chocolate crumbs with the back of his hand. He studied the sheet for a long time. Finally, with a sigh and a what-the-hell-I-don’t-give-a-shit shrug, he said, "Go ahead."
Gideon was in the mood for a fight, but not with a churlish adolescent who didn’t even know he was being rude. He walked down the seedy hallway to Mark’s office, where he found Fraru Stetten looming steeply over her typewriter. Without stopping her typing, she glanced up at Gideon and cocked her head at the door to the inner office.
"Thank you and good morning to you too," Gideon said.
As usual, being snide gave him an immediate rotten feeling. Catching her eye as he walked past her, he smiled at her as pleasantly as he could. In return she bestowed a highly perfunctory lip contraction that made him sorry he hadn’t left well enough alone.
Marks was half-sitting on the windowsill in a pensive, judicial pose, arms folded and head inclined, with the earpiece of his horn-rimmed glasses between pursed lips.
The man of a thousand roles, thought Gideon. Had he been posing like that since nine o’clock, or had he leapt there upon some secret signal from Frau Stetten? Maybe there’d been warning of Gideon’s approach from the guard. All of the possibilities were in keeping with what he’d seen of Marks so far.
"Sit down, Dr. Oliver," he said without moving. "Just thinking through a tricky little problem here."
With an affable smile, Gideon sat down in a metal side chair. The desk top was littered with the remains of an earlier meeting: half a glass pot of coffee, three or four styrofoam cups, three doughnuts, two of them untouched.
"What?" said Marks abstractedly from the labyrinthine corridors of profound thought. "Yes, certainly. I mean, no, of course not."
Gideon wolfed down a vanilla-iced doughnut. It was delicious. The coffee was lukewarm, so he poured what was left of the milk from a metal creamer into a cup and drank that. Inasmuch as Marks was still chewing his spectacles, Gideon went cheerfully on to the next doughnut, a jelly-filled one. Besides tasting good, his impromptu breakfast seemed to throw Marks off his stride, which was fine. Gideon needed a lot of information from him, and if he were rattled, so much the better.
Marks took his glasses out of his mouth and sat down behind his desk with an "Ah, well…" that announced he was regretfully now back in the mundane world represented by Gideon Oliver. He lit a cigarette while watching Gideon lick the last of the jelly from his fingers.
"I thought we had a nine o’clock appointment," Marks said.
"Sorry. Someone broke into my room last night. It held me up."
"Is that right? Don’t tell me the Sock Bandit of Sicily has struck again?"
"Is that supposed to be funny? Look, Mr. Marks—"
"Oliver, let’s stop fooling around. It’s not working. We picked the wrong man. Let’s forget the whole thing." He dragged deeply on his cigarette.
Gideon was so surprised that all he could do was echo Marks stupidly: "Forget the whole thing?"
"That’s right. Consider yourself fired. Without prejudice, of course."
"Fired? Hell, you never hired me!" The anger Gideon had been carrying around went from a simmer to a boil. It felt good. "Now let’s get things straight. A couple of weeks ago, you asked me to take on an assignment—for the cause of peace, if I remember correctly. There wasn’t going to be any danger to me, virtually none, as you put it—"
"Monsieur Delvaux."
"What?"
"Le directeur said that, not me."
Gideon looked sharply at him. The stare was blandly returned through a haze of cigarette smoke. Marks wasn’t quite the clown he’d been last time.
"Since then," Gideon went on, "I’ve been beaten up twice, I’ve been attacked by an armed gang, my room’s been broken into at least two times—"
"Not quite right; you’ve only been beaten up once. The first time you were beaten up was before you took the assignment. Remember, we talked to you Friday, the day after—"
"God damn it, Marks, don’t fuck around with me!" He clamped his mouth shut; this wouldn’t do. Using profanity was rare with him, a sure sign that he had slipped from the cool, rational anger with which he’d walked in, into the sort of loutish tantrum he despised. It was he, not Marks, who was off his stride. He took a long, slow breath.
Marks put his hands behind his head and leaned back lazily, eyes narrowed against the smoke of the cigarette dangling from his mouth.
"A little while ago, you said you’d picked the wrong man," said Gideon more quietly. "I’d appreciate knowing what you think I did wrong."
Marks raised his right eyebrow above his horn-rimmed glasses in a gesture that must have taken hours of mirror practice. "Look, Oliver, you’re just not the type. Our people have to be unobtrusive. You seem to have a way of getting into violent situations. To be perfectly frank, we think there’s something unstable about you, and we can’t risk it."
"Unstable?" Gideon couldn’t sit still any longer. He jumped to his feet. "I can’t believe this! You’re actually blaming me for what’s been happening?"
"You get into altercations on the street, for God’s sake! Like last night on the Haupstrasse…just because someone bumps into you… I mean, really—"
"Bumps into me! Marks, that wasn’t someone! That was the man who tried to kill me a couple of weeks ago. He was following me—" Gideon stopped himself, aware of how emotional he was and how melodramatic he sounded. A sudden thought hit him. "Wait a minute. How did you know about that? Are you people following me around?" He sank back into his chair.
"We’ve been keeping an eye on you, yes. We wouldn’t just turn you loose without protection. And it’s been more trouble than we can afford."
"Protection!" Gideon said. He knew he kept repeating Marks, but he couldn’t help himself. Somehow, Marks had taken control, and every statement he made was so newly outrageous that it threw Gideon into fresh confusion. "If that’s the way you protect your people, no wonder the free world’s in trouble."
"Is that right?" For the first time, Marks’s voice had an angry edge. "Just who do you think got you out of that ditch in Sicily?"
"The man on the bridge? That was one of your men? Then you must know who those… goons were."
"Forget it. I already told you more than I should have."
"Marks, I have a right to know. I came awfully close to being killed."
"We don’t operate on right-to-know. We operate on need-to-know, remember? And you don’t need to know."
"Marks—"
"Oliver, there’s no point in continuing this. I’ll be as honest as I can." He lit another cigarette from the stub of the old one and inhaled deeply. "We are terminating our relationship with you because it’s not doing any good. That’s all I’m at liberty to tell you." He reached for a manila folder on the desk and opened it. "Now, I have a lot of important things to do." Once again Gideon was being dismissed.
"At liberty, hell," Gideon said. "You don’t know any more than I do about this, do you? I don’t know why I’m wasting my time talking to Delvaux’s errand boy." He got up again.
As simple as it was, it worked. Marks was still Marks. Two red spots appeared on the sides of his throat. He slammed the folder closed. "The Russians needed something from Sigonella; they got it. They needed something from Rhein-Main; they got it. They got it without having to go to you." As he spoke, smoke dribbled from his mouth as if his tongue were on fire. "They don’t need you. They’re obviously getting what they need some other way. So you’re not doing them—or us—any good. What’s more, you’re one hell of a lot of trouble. So thanks for all your help, and good-bye. You’re no longer involved." He opened the folder again.
Gideon put his hands on the desk and leaned over Marks. "It’s not that simple. There’s something about being run off the road, and shot at, and garroted, and having a knife waved in your face that’s highly involving—engrossing, even. Whether NSD likes it or not, I’m involved, and I intend to say involved."
Marks looked up at Gideon, his hands flat on the folder. "It’s not that simple either. I’m having your schedule changed again. You won’t be going to any more sensitive bases, I’m afraid. So there won’t be much chance of involvement."
"What do you mean, ‘again’?" It was you who got Dr. Rufus to change my schedule in the first place?"
"What?" said Marks with mock surprise. "You mean the learned professor didn’t have that figured out? Yes, of course it was us, and we intend to do it again. You can kiss romantic Torrejon off, Doctor. On Monday you’ll be off to Frankfurt."
"Oh no," said Gideon with more confidence than he felt. "No way. I’m a teacher; I don’t work for NSD. I agreed to go to Torrejon, and that’s where I’m going. I’ve put too many hours into preparing my lectures to have the schedule changed with one day’s notice." This wasn’t strictly true, but it wouldn’t hurt.
Taking the cigarette from his mouth, Marks stifled a fake yawn. "We’ll see," he said.
In his mind Gideon drew a comic-strip balloon with dotted lines. "Screw you," he wrote in it. (Imaginary profanity didn’t count.) Aloud he said, "Well, thanks for your time." As he was leaving, he smiled again at Frau Stetten, receiving in return an aloof and virginal nod.
"PUFFED wheat," said Dr. Rufus from behind him.
"Pardon?" Gideon said, turning in his chair and beginning to rise.
"No, stay where you are, my boy," said Dr. Rufus, coming up to Gideon and pounding him on the shoulder. "I said that the object you are holding in your h
and and studying so carefully is a kernel of puffed wheat."
He had come looking for Dr. Rufus a few minutes earlier, straight from NSD headquarters. The chancellor’s secretary had said he was somewhere in the building and had shown Gideon into his office to wait. He had taken a thickly upholstered chair in a grouping by the window, and his attention had been caught at once by the large glass bowl on the coffee table nearby. He had thought it was full of lentils or pebbles until, sticking a finger in, he had found them hollow. He had just picked one up to smell it when Dr. Rufus came in.
With a sigh, the chancellor plumped his bearlike body down in the sofa opposite Gideon. "Ah, yes, puffed wheat, couldn’t live without it. Finest snack in the world. Munch ‘em all day long and never gain an ounce. Why, the whole bowl probably doesn’t contain ten ounces. Of course, you have to get the good kind, not the ones in the plastic bags; those are two-thirds sediment."
He settled back and crossed one chubby thigh over the other. "Well, well, well, you’ve had quite a harrowing adventure, I hear. I hope you’re all right now?" His face sagged as he took his first good look at Gideon. "Oh my! You’ve really been hurt, haven’t you? I had no idea…"
Gideon smiled, something he could do with no pain at all now. "You should have seen me last week. I’m fine now, and they tell me it won’t be long before I look myself, or at least before I’m predominantly flesh-colored again."
"I’m certain of it. Still, I just had no idea…" Dr. Rufus slowly shook his head back and forth.
The commiseration was making Gideon uneasy. Until then he had been rather pleased with the improvement in his appearance. "Sir," he said, "I’ve just come from NSD. Tom Marks told me that the reason you changed my schedule a few weeks ago was so that they could use me as an informant at Sigonella and Torrejon. Is that true?"
"Well," said Dr. Rufus, frowning and reaching into the puffed wheat, "well now—"
"Dr. Rufus, I’ve been through a lot since I came to USOC. I’d certainly appreciate the truth."
