"I'll do my best, sir." She pulled some notes out of a pocket in her attache case and glanced uncomfortably at me as Harry left with an oddly subdued Robey. "I'm sure Dr. Norgren will see very quickly that I'm out of my element."
Terrific, Norgren, I thought; the most attractive female you've met in months, obviously predisposed to be friends, and you've managed in little over an hour, with just a couple of succinct and impeccably chosen sentences, to convince her you're a boorish, arrogant horse's ass.
"Out of mine too," I said with what I hoped was modest charm. "I've yet to meet a wiring diagram I could understand."
It was true enough. Her enthusiastic and apparendy expert description of infrared beams, entry-reporting networks, pressure alarms, and photo-electric barriers quickly left me behind. I could almost feel my eyes glaze over. Gadney participated vigorously, however, and Flittner participated after his fashion.
Within twenty minutes I was once again almost asleep. It was, of course, not merely the soporific topic but the accumulated impact of many grams of codeine on a system not much used to drugs. More than that, although I didn't admit it willingly, my body hadn't altogether recovered from the knocking-around it had gotten two days before.
The expression on the two men when they returned brought me awake with a chill. Harry was grim, and Robey's entire face had sagged; the corners of his mouth now pointed down instead of up. Neither man sat. Robey stared through the French doors with his eyes unfocused and let out a long, close-mouthed sigh.
"What?" Gadney asked nervously. "What is it? What's wrong?"
Robey exhaled again and turned slowly to face us. "Peter's dead."
Chapter 6
"He's dead?" I asked, after a long silence.
Robey nodded. "Uh, yes. Wednesday night."
"Wednesday! But that's impossible! I had lunch with him Wednesday-at the Kranzler…" The odd, irrational way one's mind twists and skitters to reject what it doesn't want to know.
"It's true, Chris." He began to say more, then shook his head back and forth. "My God."
The others at the table stared as if hypnotized while his slowly oscillating head rocked gradually to a stop.
"How well did you know him, Chris?" Harry asked abruptly.
"Not very. Better than most people did, but that isn't saying much." Why had he asked me that? "He was a good man," I added, obscurely driven to defend him. "I liked him."
"I did too," Robey said. Then, reflectively: "I guess I didn't know him very well either. It looks like none of us did."
An uneasy shiver trickled down my neck and settled icily between my shoulder blades. "Mark-what the hell has happened?"
Robey looked down at the table and concentrated on stroking the cold pipe in the ashtray. "That was Frankfurt MP headquarters on the phone. They said he-" His eyes came up and flickered apprehensively in Anne's direction. He shook his head again, this time roughly. "Damn!"
Harry quietly interceded. "You think maybe I ought to explain? I'm kind of used to these things." He smiled gently at us. "I'm afraid it's like the colonel says: pretty bad."
It was. Peter van Cortlandt, genteel, standoffish, the ultimate patrician, had been found dead in the gutter in Frankfurt's raunchy sex district, a few blocks from the railroad station, at 3:30 a.m. He was lying in front of the Hotel Paradies, a ratty little place with a "sex-kino" on the ground floor and rooms that were rented by the half-hour above. He was wearing only a shirt and a pair of socks, and had apparently been killed in a fall. The rest of his clothing- but not his watch, wallet, or Yale class ring-was found in a third-floor room of the Paradies, the window of which was immediately above his body.
The desk clerk had told the German police that he thought he remembered Peter coming in a little after midnight with a blonde he had seen around, but he wasn't sure; there were so many. ("So many blondes or so many gray-haired gentlemen?" the Polizei had asked. "Take your pick," the clerk had answered with a shrug.)
An autopsy had already been performed, the conclusions being that Peter had been killed by a fall from Room 303 of the Hotel Paradies, and that there were drugs and alcohol in his system. It was not possible to determine whether his death had been accidental or if he had been thrown from the window. A search had been instituted for a tall husky blond called Utelinde, or Linda, who was reputed to have the word amour tattooed on her left buttock.
"I hate to say it," Harry said, "but the Polizei have about as much chance of finding her as…" He lifted his shoulders resignedly. "This is a pretty common occurrence around the Kaiserstrasse. There's not a night goes by but some soldier or some businessman on the prowl doesn't wind up like this."
"Now, wait a minute!" I said, my throat tight. "This wasn't some bum, this was Peter van Cortlandt!" Disconcertedly, I shook my head, tried to regroup my muddled thoughts. "It's got to be a mistake."
"I'm afraid not," Robey said. "It's Peter, all right."
There was more. An unopened package of condoms had been found in his trousers pocket; a few of the hairs on the tousled bed in Room 303 had been analyzed as his ("Some of them extracranial," Harry said delicately); and he had been seen drinking in two nearby bars earlier that night.
As these unsavory details came out, the ends of Robey's mouth buried themselves in dry little grooves that hadn't been there before. He was angry, I thought, less at Peter's killer, if there was a killer, than at Peter himself, for the shabby, squalid way he'd permitted himself to die. Not quite angry, maybe, but let down; disappointed in the wretchedly common end of a distinguished man; shamed by proxy.
Me, I didn't feel that way, but what I did feel wasn't any more commendable. I wish I could say that I had refused to believe any of it, and insisted from the beginning that Peter had been set up, but I didn't. I was astonished, of course, because what I knew of him was as contrary to the notion of drunken whoring on Frankfurt's Kaiserstrasse as anything could be.
But you have to remember where I was myself at the time. I had been married for a decade, contentedly and (I thought) securely. I had been faithful to Bev, and, generally speaking, happy to be faithful. And then I was suddenly alone, betrayed, confused, aching for solace, and bursting with healthy young hormones. During the ensuing year I had found myself, sometimes to my considerable surprise, in a few places in which, as it now was for Peter, it would have been damned embarrassing to be found dead.
How did I know what stresses he'd been under? He was aging. Was the job getting to be too much? Was his marriage breaking up? Was he estranged from his children? I had no idea. Who was I to say it was inconceivable or reprehensible that he should lay himself down on a foul bed, rented for half an hour, in the Hotel Paradies.
And so I accepted it as simply one more proof that we never really know anyone else, regretting Peter's death but absorbed in my own life, my own problems. When the meeting drew to a low-spirited close, I went up to my room and called Tony in San Francisco, forgetting that it was four in the morning there, to tell him about Peter. I also asked him what he knew about the forgery.
"Only that Peter thought there was one," Tony said, his voice shocked and dull, "and that it was something in your line. I thought he was having a little private joke." There was a long silence. I heard him breathe twice. "You mean there is one? A forgery?"
This depressing and unhelpful exchange completed, I was downhearted and headachy. I took another couple of codeine, dropped onto the bed, and slept heavily until 7:00 p.m. Down for a groggy bowl of soup, and back to sleep.
The next day was more of the same: codeine, soup, and sleep. But Monday I was better, managing to work for a few hours at learning the ropes with Corporal Jessick, and spending the rest of the morning with Harry, tediously trying to construct pictures of No-neck and Skull-face with Photofit, a jigsaw-puzzle-like set of thousands of photographs of eyebrows, noses, and chins. None of them seemed ugly enough.