The Vanished - [Nameless Detective 02]

by Bill Pronzini

  But I was thinking of Cheryl, and that made it a very nice evening in all respects.

  * * * *

  The telephone was ringing.

  And ringing and ringing.

  I pushed my way up through the folds of a deep, warm, comfortable sleep—the first good rest I had had in days. The bell was strident, demanding, in the darkness of the bedroom. I lay quietly for a moment, reluctant to let go of the warmth and the comfort, waiting for the bell to stop. It kept on ringing. I lifted my left arm and looked at my watch, and it was twenty past one. Some time of night for a telephone call; and it will be a wrong number, sure as Christ made fools and drunks, it will be a wrong number.

  I swung my feet out of bed and stumbled over to the phone, on the dresser where I had put it earlier. I got the handset up to my ear, a little groggily, and muttered, ‘Yeah? Hello?’

  A muffled, neuter voice whispered, ‘If you go to Germany tomorrow, you’re a dead man, mister. And Elaine Kavanaugh is a dead lady. I’m not kidding, mister—you think I’m kidding, you go ahead to Germany and see what happens.’

  The line buzzed atonally, emptily.

  I stood holding the receiver, fully awake now, and I had a ridiculous urge to burst out laughing. A threatening telephone call. For Christ’s sake! Pulp detectives got threatening telephone calls in six stories out of ten, they were always getting them. And then the irony left me and I felt a coldness that was born of anger rather than fear settle across my shoulder blades; anger crept up into my throat, too, and forced itself out in the form of several sharp, savage words. I slammed the receiver down and went to the nightstand for a cigarette.

  Hendryx? I thought. Gilmartin? Doug Rosmond? One of those three, goddamn it, it almost has to be one of those three, nobody else knew I planned to leave for Germany tomorrow, not unless Elaine or one of them told someone, and that isn’t probable. Well, whoever it was has to be the same one who broke in here—

  And the phone rang again.

  Two in a row, is that it? I made the dresser in two strides and swung the handset up viciously—and Elaine Kavanaugh’s voice said in a broken, frightened, liquid rush, ‘Somebody ... somebody on the phone ... he said he would kill me ... and you ... oh God, my God, he said he’d kill us both if you went to Germany!’

  So that was the way he was playing it. Her first and then me. Cover all bets. One of us would scare off—that was the reasoning, the son of a bitch. I said thinly, ‘Easy, Miss Kavanaugh, try to calm down.’

  ‘But you ... you don’t understand ...’

  ‘I understand,’ I said. ‘I got the same kind of call, just two minutes ago. The same threat.’

  ‘For the love of God, why?’ Her voice had a shrill, cracking edge to it. ‘I don’t understand this ... I don’t know what’s happening ...’

  I spoke softly to her for several seconds, getting her calm. When she seemed in control again, I said, ‘Did you recognize anything about the voice—anything at all?’

  ‘No, it was muffled, disguised.’ She released a stuttering breath. ‘Do you ... think he meant what he said? About... killing us?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I told her. ‘I don’t know what kind of man we’re dealing with here—his motivations, anything about the way he thinks. He might be bluffing, and then again he might not be.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘That’s up to you, Miss Kavanaugh,’ I said tightly. ‘I’m not particularly brave, but I don’t like voices in the night telling me what to do. As far as I’m concerned, nothing’s changed. But I don’t want you harmed; if you want to call the trip off, we’ll do it that way.’

  ‘This is all so ... insane,’ she said. ‘Death threats and Roy missing—I don’t know what to do, what to think.’

  ‘Maybe we’d better just forget the whole thing.’

  ‘No. No, we can’t do that. I’m ... afraid, but I have to know about Roy. I have to know where he is, if he’s all right.’

  ‘Then I’ll have to go to Germany as we planned.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and her voice broke faintly, as if she had undergone a violent shudder; then, more firmly, ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re certain that’s what you want?’

  ‘I’m certain.’

  Good girl, I thought. I said, ‘Then it’s settled. But I want you to promise me that you’ll pack your things and check out of that hotel early in the morning. Will you do that?’

  ‘Where will I go?’

  ‘To another hotel. Any one you like, but make it some distance from the Royal Gate. Register under another name—anything but Smith or Jones. You can call me at my office tomorrow and tell me where you’ve gone.’

  ‘All right. If you think that’s best.’

  ‘While I’m in Germany, I want you to stay in your room. Don’t go out, don’t tell anyone— anyone at all—where you are, and don’t open your door to anyone but a member of the hotel staff. You can have your meals sent up, and books to read or a television to help pass the time. It’ll be hell for a few days, but you’ll have to do it. Do you think you can?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered, and I believed her.

  ‘You’ll be okay tonight. Take a couple of sleeping pills, if you have them, and try to get some rest. I’ll do all that’s humanly possible to find Roy Sands for you; I hope you can believe in that.’

  ‘I can.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said, ‘because we’ve got one thing going for us now, one thing those threatening calls told us for sure.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That there’s something damned important to be found out in Kitzingen, Germany.’

  * * * *

  CHAPTER TEN

  It was raining in Frankfurt, Germany.

  I had never been able to sleep on airplanes, and when we arrived it was almost seven o’clock in the evening and I had been awake for something like thirty hours, discounting the nine-hour time difference between California and Western Europe. The TWA flight to London, in one of the big new useless 747s, had taken close to twelve hours, and I had gotten entangled with a huge customs line at Heathrow Airport and a lot of red tape because bad weather had socked the place in for two days and all flights were either canceled or well behind schedule. My Lufthansa connection to Frankfurt was delayed two hours, but I had not been able to sleep in the waiting room because of the huge crush of people awaiting departure. Consequently, when I disembarked I was exhausted and irritable and in no damned shape to drive a hundred kilometers in a driving rain on a dark night in a strange country.

  I picked up my rental car, a Volkswagen, and a road map, and managed to find my way out of the airport. I drove to the nearest overnight accommodations, a modern American-type motel, and took a room. I thought about calling Elaine to see if she was all right, but I decided to wait until I got into Kitzingen. She had followed my instructions about getting another hotel, and she was now registered as a Miss Elaine Adams in the Argonaut Hotel on California Street; I had talked with her briefly just before leaving on Friday afternoon and she had seemed well in control of the situation. I was fairly certain she would remain in her room, as I had asked, and if she did that she would be okay.

  I had a quick and very hot bath, got in between cool sheets, and went to sleep immediately. I slept too heavily to be particularly well rested or refreshed when the eight o’clock call I had requested woke me Sunday morning. It was still raining. I took the road map, and the German language books I had bought in San Francisco prior to leaving, into the motel’s dining room for the Continental breakfast included in the room price. I located my position on the map and figured out a route south to Kitzingen, and then continued refreshing my memory with the German books; I had had a course in the language as part of my military training, with the Intelligence unit I had been assigned to in the South Pacific, but the years of disuse had pushed most of the words and the grammar far back into my subconscious. The books, which I had begun reading on the flights, had helped a little and I thought I could
get by all right.

  I paid twenty Deutsche marks for the room and put my luggage into the Volkswagen and set out for Kitzingen. I got lost a couple of times in the rain, and had a bad scare with a truck near Schweinfurt; I was the original babe in the woods, and my nerves were frayed when I reached Kitzingen a few minutes past eleven.

  It was a small, attractive town set on a flat plain and surrounded by fertile fields and lush green forests of beech and oak; this was wine country, where they made the tart white Frankenwein in the valleys near Iphofen and Rödelsee to the southeast. The buildings were Gothic and German and Italian Renaissance in design—some with lavish wood studding, some with simple brickwork facades, almost all with rust-colored tile roofs. Here and there were squared or rounded church towers, reaching up into the wet gray sky, and the bells in some of them filled the morning with a resonant summons.

  I entered the town proper, crossing the rail tracks connecting Würzburg and Nuremberg. At Der Falterturm, a huge brick tower and carnival museum set in a wide flowered square, I turned to the left and into the center of the village. After ten minutes of searching, I located a hotel—the Bayerischer Hof—on Hernstrasse; there was not much traffic, and I found a place to park on the street and went inside with my bags.

  I took a room on the top floor, and from the window I could look out at the narrow gray waters of the Main River, the tree-studded opposite bank, the green and glistening land spreading out to the south. I spent a few minutes unpacking, and then I went downstairs and asked the desk man—who spoke excellent English—to arrange a transatlantic call to San Francisco for five that evening; that would make it about 8:00 a.m. California time and I would not be frightening Elaine Kavanaugh with a middle-of-the-night call.

  This being Sunday, it was a certainty that the Galerie der Expressionisten would be closed—so I decided to look up Jock MacVeagh at Larson Barracks. I asked directions, and the desk man produced a map and pointed out the way.

  The base was located to the northwest of the town, and you got to it via the Steigweg, on the other side of the rail tracks. It was a sprawling compound of weathered buildings, with a stoic gatepost sentry at the main entrance. I stated my name and the nature of my business, and it turned out that Jock MacVeagh had left word at the gate that I was to see him in his quarters, this being an off-duty day. The sentry gave me directions, and I found the place easily enough, well toward the rear perimeter of the compound.

  It was a large building, without much adornment, divided into private residence facilities for the non-commissioned officers. I located MacVeagh’s quarters and rapped on the door, and a moment later it swung wide.

  He was a big, red-faced Scotsman with huge hands and a wedge-shaped torso and eyes as black as a peat bog at midnight. Whiskey-broken veins etched the skin on either side of a somewhat battered nose, and he had the kind of wide mouth that would be quick to smile, quick to set in angry belligerence. His jaw was like a clefted granite bluff. But he was aging, too; you could see it in the lines and tributaries of his face, the roundness of his belly, the receding hairline, the faint liver spots among the dark black hairs on the backs of his hands.

  I introduced myself, and the mention of my name brought a flashing grin like a neon sign coming on. He had an iron grip, but he did not try to prove anything with it. ‘I’ve been expecting you,’ he said. ‘I figured you’d be in last night.’

  ‘Well, I made Frankfurt,’ I told him, ‘but it was late and I was too tired to drive down.’

  ‘No sweat. Come on, I’ll pop you a beer.’

  We went inside and his quarters were small and neat and orderly, the bed made according to regulations and his clothes picked up and hung away. He had some German-manufactured stereo equipment set up on one side of the room, and a lot of color and black-and-white photographs of women— interspersed with German beer and liquor signs—on the walls. He got a couple of bottles of Löwenbräu out of a small cooler and opened them and gave me one. We sat across from each other at a small dining table.

  MacVeagh said, ‘I had this littleFräulein set up in Stuttgart for the weekend, but when I got your wire about Roy having disappeared, I said to hell with it. A buddy’s more important than a piece of tail any day, and besides that, she’ll be around next weekend; they always are.’

  I had some of the Löwenbräu, and it was cold and rich and very good; the Germans brew the best beer in the world. I watched MacVeagh over the tilted bottle, and I thought: He’s one of the good-time boys, too, like Hendryx and Rosmond and Gilmartin— one of the handsome ones, the popular ones, the ones with the right word, the right phrase, the right line; the lovers, the cocksmen, with the world their bedroom and the bed seldom empty and seldom silent. But now they’re fast approaching middle age, and some of their appeal is fading, and some of their virility perhaps, and they can see the end now; they can see the wrinkles and the arthritis and the dentures and the shriveled glands; and they can see, too, the scornful looks and hear the mocking laughter of the daughters of the girls who once flocked to them. That glimpse of the future terrifies them, haunts them, gnaws at them, becomes almost an obsession, and they need constant reassurance of their prowess, constant reaffirmation of their attractiveness— running scared, telling more lies, bragging more and exaggerating more, laughing louder and longer and increasingly more hollowly. And each time they go searching for a woman, they’re filled with the same terrible dread: Can I still attract the young ones, the pretty ones? And when they find that they can, if they can, the attendant dread is always there and always the same as well: Suppose, this time, I can’t get it up; suppose, this time, I can’t perform?

  Every man around my age has harbored some fears of failing virility, and I was no exception; but I had never been a cocksman, never wanted to be one, and when I saw guys like MacVeagh and the rest, I was thankful for that. When you took sex away from them, you took away their main purpose—and without purpose, no matter what form it takes, what more can you do except simply to vegetate? That was one particularly frightening hell I did not think I would have to face.

  I set the sweat-beaded bottle down on the table. ‘The pickings must be pretty good over here,’ I said, because that was what MacVeagh wanted to hear.

  He grinned, and his black eyes sparkled. ‘The best,’ he said, nodding emphatically. ‘Listen, if you’re interested, I can fix you up with something hot and willing right here in Kitzingen. Guaranteed, baby—the original German Valkyrie.’

  ‘Well, if I can find the time.’

  ‘Yeah,’ MacVeagh said, and his expression sobered. ‘Roy. Why don’t you fill me in on the details? All I know is what you said in your wire.’

  I filled him in on the details, leaving out the threatening telephone calls to Elaine and me and skipping lightly over the theft of the portrait. He listened attentively, a frown digging horizontal trenches in the red-hued skin above his eyebrows.

  ‘I don’t much like the sound of it,’ he said. ‘Roy was gone over the Kavanaugh chick, and if he hasn’t contacted her in three weeks, something must have happened to him. You really figure there’s some kind of connection between Kitzingen and him disappearing in Oregon?’

  ‘That’s why I’m here—to find out.’

  ‘I don’t get this portrait you told me about. Hell, Roy isn’t the kind of guy to pose for a goddamn picture.’

  ‘He never mentioned it, then?’

  ‘Christ, no. We’d have kidded him into the next century.’

  ‘Do you have any idea who might have drawn it?’

  ‘Not hardly.’

  ‘What about this gallery here in Kitzingen?’

  ‘What was the name of it again?’

  ‘Galerie der Expressionisten.’

  ‘I didn’t even know it existed.’

  I got out my cigarettes and offered MacVeagh one, and we sat smoking and drinking from the bottles of Löwenbräu. You could hear the gentle skittering of the rain on the building roof, and watch it flowing in streaked silv
er patterns down the panes of the window nearby, like tears on the smooth shining face of a child.

  I said, ‘How did Sands get along with his buddies? Rosmond and Hendryx and Gilmartin, especially.’

  ‘Fine. Hell, everybody likes Roy.’

  ‘No trouble with any of them while they were here?’

  ‘No. Why—what are you getting at?’

  ‘Nothing in particular,’ I said. ‘Do you know an Army major named Jackson, Nick Jackson?’

  ‘Name’s not familiar. Why?’

  ‘Sands had some trouble with him once. I thought he might have mentioned the name in some context or other.’