But you were just one more roadside attraction,
It’s been ten thousand miles since I prayed.
If you ever get out of the fast lane
And get back to that highway above,
I’ll be waiting for you at the tollbooth,
In that land where all roads end in love.
Chapter One
I
THE MOUNTAIN meadow was carpeted with fresh green and starred with small, shy flowers. He came towards me, walking so lightly the grass scarcely seemed to bend under his feet. His hair shone silver-gilt in the sunlight, and he was smiling, and his blue eyes held a look I had seen in them only once before. Trembling, I waited for him to come to me. He stopped a few feet away, still smiling, and held out his hands.
They were wet and red and dripping. I looked from his bleeding hands to his face and saw blood erupt from it in spurting streams, from the corners of his mouth, from under the hair on his temples. Bright scarlet patches blossomed on the breast of his shirt. There was blood everywhere, covering him like a red rain. I stretched out my arms but I couldn’t reach him and I couldn’t move and the scream I tried to utter wouldn’t come out of my throat and he fell, face down at my feet, and the back of his head wasn’t golden fair but sticky scarlet and the blood spread out, staining the green grass and drowning the shy flowers and still I couldn’t reach him . . .
‘Oh God, oh God, oh God . . .’ Somebody was whining. It wasn’t I. I was blubbering and swearing – or was I praying?
Swearing. ‘Damn him, damn him!’ I reached out blindly in the dark. There was something monstrous and hairy on my bed. I threw my arms around it and clutched it to my bosom.
Caesar stopped whining and began licking my face with frantic slurps. Caesar is a Doberman; his tongue is as rough as a file and about a foot and a half long. He has very bad breath.
‘All right, okay,’ I gasped, fending him off and reaching for the bedside lamp.
The light helped, and so did the sight of my familiar messy bedroom, but I was still shaking. God! That had been the worst one yet.
Caesar’s furry face stared worriedly at me. He wasn’t allowed on the bed. I must have cried out in my sleep, and the gallant dog had leaped up to my rescue.
Clara was allowed on the bed. Caesar hasn’t got over the injustice of this yet, but he can’t do anything about it because he is terrified of Clara, who weighs approximately seven pounds to his seventy. I think he thinks she is a god. He slobbers with delight when she condescends to curl up next to him, and grovels when she raises a paw. She had retreated from her usual position, on my stomach, to the foot of the bed and was sitting up, eyeing me with that look of tolerant contempt only Siamese cats have fully mastered. In the dark seal-brown of her face her eyes looked very blue.
A shudder twisted through me as I remembered how blood had filled those other blue eyes.
It was the third time that week I had dreamed about John. The first one hadn’t been bad, just an ordinary anxiety/frustration dream in which I pursued a familiar form along endless streets only to find, when I caught up with it, that it wore someone else’s face. The second . . . well, never mind the details of that one. The metamorphosis of the body I clasped into a scaled, limbless creature that slid slimily through my arms and vanished into darkness had left a nasty memory, but it hadn’t awakened me.
I knew the cause of the dreams. My subconscious doesn’t fool around; it’s about as subtle as a brickbat. I had told myself there was nothing to worry about, even if I hadn’t heard from him for over a month, and I had believed it – sort of – until a week ago. Hugging my warm, hairy, smelly dog as a child would clutch a teddy bear for comfort, I remembered the conversation that had forced me (or my subconscious) to admit there was something to worry about.
II
‘But I don’t know anything about Egyptology!’ I yelled.
Normally I don’t yell when I say things like that. I mean, it’s hardly the sort of statement that arouses passionate emotions. But this was the fourth time I had said it, and I didn’t seem to be getting the point across.
The two men behind the desk exchanged glances. One of them was my old friend Karl Feder of the Munich Police Department. The other man was about the same age-mid-fifties, at a guess. Like Karl, he was losing his hair and starting to spread around the middle. He had been introduced to me as Herr Burckhardt, no title, no affiliation. If he was a colleague of Karl’s he had to be a cop of some variety, but I had only known one other man with eyes as cold as his, and Rudi had definitely not been a police officer.
I knew what they were thinking. It was Burckhardt who said it. ‘I fail to understand, Dr Bliss. You are an official of our National Museum, a well-known authority on art history. The Herr Direktor, Doktor Schmidt, has often said that you are his most valued subordinate.’
‘Yeah,’ I said gloomily. ‘I’ll bet he has.’
Schmidt has a mouth almost as big as his rotund tummy. He is as cute as one of the Seven Dwarfs and not much taller, and if he wasn’t so brilliant he’d have been locked up long ago as a menace to society. Not that he’s a crook. On the contrary; Schmidt thinks of himself as a brilliant amateur sleuth, the scourge of the underworld, and of me as his side-kick. As Watson was to Sherlock, as Archie was to Nero Wolfe, so Vicky Bliss is to Herr Doktor Anton Z. Schmidt. At least that’s how Schmidt looks at it. My own view of our respective roles is somewhat different.
I said slowly and patiently, ‘Human beings have been producing works of art of one kind or another for over thirty-five thousand years. Even if you include only the major visual arts and restrict yourself to Western art, you have to start with Stone Age man, proceed through the Egyptians and the Minoans and the Etruscans and the Greeks, to early Christian art and Byzantine and medieval and Renaissance and . . . Oh, hell. What I’m trying to say is that nobody can be an expert on all those fields. My specialty is medieval European art. I don’t know – ’
‘What about the Trojan gold?’ Feder inquired. ‘That does not come under the heading of medieval European art, does it?’
I had been afraid somebody was going to bring that up.
Schmidt refers to the affair of the Trojan gold as ‘our most recent case.’ He doesn’t often refer to it, however, because it had not been one of ‘our,’ most resounding successes. People had been looking for the gold, a hoard of priceless ancient jewellery which had vanished from besieged Berlin at the end of World War II, for almost fifty years. Educated opinion believed the Russians had carried it off to Moscow. Schmidt and I and a few other people had spent several weeks the previous winter following up a clue that suggested it had been smuggled out of Berlin before the Russians entered the city, and hidden somewhere in Bavaria. At one point I thought I had found the hiding place. Turned out I was wrong. Schmidt was still complaining about how I had misled him. Which I hadn’t, not deliberately. I had been – well – wrong. Sometimes I am wrong.
Not this time, though, dammit. Feder was smirking at me as if he had said something clever. He was correct. The Trojan gold could not be described as medieval art.
I tried again. ‘That had nothing to do with my expertize or lack thereof. It was pure chance.’
‘But you recognized, from a bad photograph, that the jewels pictured were genuine. Some degree of expertize – ’
‘Anybody could have done that!’ My voice rose. ‘The gold of Troy is famous. Everybody knows about it. Almost everybody . . . Let me put it this way, meine Herren; I could not pose as an expert on Egyptian art for more than five minutes without getting caught out. If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting I accept the position of guest lecturer on a Nile cruise. In exchange for a free tour I will be expected to talk at least once a day on some damned temple or pyramid, and be prepared to answer questions from the people taking the cruise, who wouldn’t be taking the cruise if they weren’t already interested in and informed about the subject. Five minutes, hell! I wouldn’t last sixty seconds. Why me, for God’s sake? There are hundreds of people who know more about the subject than I do.’