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.