A Deceptive Clarity

Chapter 12

The next morning I breakfasted in the hotel's little bar with its fake but charming rococo ceiling. The meal was brought by Luigi, the ageless, taciturn man who had worked at the Augustus ever since I'd begun coming, and whose duties seemed to consist of serving breakfast from seven to nine, manning the never-very-busy switchboard, and wandering the hotel for most of the day, sniffling, plumping cushions, and mumbling to himself. In all the seven years I'd been a client, he had never said anything more to me than "Caffe o te?"

No, I take that back. In the old days, the hotel had served inexpensive fixed-priced dinners to guests, and once, reading the menu incorrectiy, I had asked for frutta e formaggio as the final course. "No, sir," he had sternly intoned, wagging his head, and then continued in Italian, "Not fruit and cheese." His finger prodded the appropriate line on the dittoed menu. "Fruit… or… cheese!" This burst of prolixity had never again been equaled.

" Caffe o te?" he said to me this morning.

"Caffe, per piacere."

Luigi grumbled off to the kitchen to get it.

Caffe, of course, was c affe latte, a huge pitcher of espresso and an even bigger jug of hot milk, to be mixed together in a cup large enough to bathe your head in. Along with it came hot rolls, pastry horns, zwieback, cheese, and preserves. Breakfast was another one of the reasons I kept coming back to the Augustus.

Just as I finished, Luigi returned, driven by extremity to converse once again. There was a telephone call for me, which I could take in the lobby if I wished.

It was Herr Traben of the Kunstmuseum, joyfully calling to tell me that he had a plan that met with the approval of the insurance company and museum counsel. I would take formal possession of the El Greco, which would be crated in my presence, on the following Friday-provided that the trip through Frankfurt to Rhein-Main Air Base was made in the museum's armored truck under museum guard. Once within the limits of American military jurisdiction, the painting would be fully released to me. Did I agree to this?

I did, as laughably overcautious as it seemed. (I'd carried equally valuable masterpieces on my lap in the coach section on United; and I'd certainly never felt the need of an armored truck before.) Then I telephoned Robey to give him the good news about having the El Greco in time for the opening. It took him a moment to remember what I was talking about, and then he said he thought that was nice.

"And Mark? Can you let Harry know? He'll want to make some security arrangements for getting it from Rhein-Main to Berlin. It's going to be too heavy for me to lug."

"Fine, good idea," he said vaguely. "Will do."

I made a note to talk to Harry myself when I got back.

My flight didn't leave until ten-thirty, which gave me an hour or so to visit my favorite museum. No, not the Uffizi, which, fabulous as it is, is no one's favorite museum, being laid out in a wearying

series of stuffy cubicles opening off two endless corridors. (Uffizi means "offices" in Italian, and those are what it was built as in 1560.)

Only a few blocks away, however, is the thirteenth-century palace-museum that is the Bargello, roomy and never crowded except in July and August. The Grand Council Chamber of the Bargello is surely one of the loveliest rooms of art in the world, and it was there I went. In it are some of Donatello's finest sculptures: the handsome Saint George, the two Saint Johns, the svelte, effeminate little bronze David with which Michelangelo's stupendous marble version would contrast so effectively seventy years later. There are some gentle, touching lunettes of della Robbia too, and other things worth looking at, but it is the room itself that is so wonderful.

The vaulted ceiling must be eighty feet high. Light pours in visible shafts through narrow windows, streaking the old red-tile floors with long, pale swatches of light. Above all there is a feeling of open space. There aren't more than thirty objects in the whole big chamber, almost all of them on pedestals-not a glass case in sight-so everything has twenty or thirty feet of open space around it. There's so much space that the floating dust motes and the cool shadows combine to make a sort of natural sfumato, so that you feel as if you're in the smoky, shaded, middle distance of a painting by da Vinci or del Sarto.

I had discovered a long time ago that this serene and stately room is a place to think and sort things out. Near one of the arched stone doorways is a bench that might have been made for contemplation, and it was there I sat.

What did I know? I knew, or thought I knew, that The Plundered Past had had no forgery in it when it was originally crated in Florence; Peter had had two full days with the paintings and had seen nothing suspicious. That meant one of two things: First and most probable, the forgery hadn't come from Florence at all but was one of the three from the Hallstatt cache. They had been out of sight for forty years with plenty of opportunity for skulduggery, the Bolzanos had never gotten a hard look at them, and it could be that with all the tumult and publicity surrounding them, Peter hadn't, either, until later. That would account for his taking so long to discover it.

The less likely possibility was also less attractive: The forgery was part of the collection that had been shipped from Florence, all right, but it had been slipped in after it was in American care; that is, one of the famous originals had been made off with, and a fake-a most excellent fake, I knew-had been put in its place.

Now, substituting a fake for a familiar painting is extraordinarily difficult and complex, over and above the problems of artistic reproduction. It requires an immense amount of detailed information, such as the weight and balance of the picture and its exact appearance, including the auction-house marks or other annotations on its back, repairs that have been made to the frame, and so on. Such information simply cannot be gotten without inside help. And that meant someone on the exhibition staff would have had to be involved. (That's what made the idea so unattractive.) And that someone was very likely to be a member of the senior staff.

Gadney, for instance. What the hell had he been doing that day in Florence? I couldn't imagine what kind of paperwork would require opening the crates, but then it was the army that was doing the shipping, and I didn't doubt that they had paperwork requirements I'd never dreamed of. That wouldn't be too hard to check. In any case, Gadney had had a day alone with the opened crates, right in the palazzo, within striking distance of the copies-while Bolzano was in the hospital, Lorenzo was off to Rome, and Peter and Earl had gone on to Naples. That hardly proved him a criminal, but it did give me a suspect to start with, and that gave me a sense of making some progress.

Would that mean that Gadney had something to do with Peter's murder? I rolled that around my mind while I used my last fifteen minutes to make a lightning tour of the rest of the Bargello. (I always like to stop and look at the young Michelangelo's smarmy, godawful Bacchus downstairs because it soothes me with proof that even the best of us can have bad days.) By the time I walked back out through the great courtyard, I had decided that wondering about Egad's role in a murder was going a long way beyond what the facts, such as they were, warranted. Anyway, that part of it would have to be Harry's job; I had the forgery to figure out.

I did a little more figuring on the Alitalia flight from Florence. There was another possibility aside from the two I'd already considered. Maybe the forgery was something that had been in the Bolzano collection all along. That would mean either that Bolzano and Lorenzo hadn't been aware of it… or that they had. But if the admittedly expert Bolzano and his son hadn't spotted it in years of living with it, how could Peter have found it in a few weeks-and how could he think I could find it in a cursory walk-through?

As for the idea that either of the Bolzanos had knowingly permitted a forgery to be part of the show, that made no sense at all. People with fakes in their collections don't put them on public exhibit to be scrutinized by thousands.

By the time I changed to a Lufthansa 707 in Frankfurt- only flights originating in Germany are permitted to land in Berlin-I had exhausted the subject and myself, and I let my thoughts wander to something more pleasant.

Anne Greene. Somehow, thirty thousand feet above it all, with a little plastic jug of coffee and an Apfelstrudel on the tray in front of me, it seemed like a good time to haul out and consider something that had been niggling away at me, buried under weightier matters: Why had I behaved to Anne at the staff meeting like such a condescending and supercilious prig? And then, a couple of days later, why did I back off so cravenly from the prospect of dinner? It certainly wasn't that I found her unattractive; on the contrary, I liked the way she looked, I liked the way she spoke, and I liked, from what I could tell, the way she thought and felt.

Was I still loyal to Bev or, rather, loyal to the idea of being married to Bev, and unwilling to risk a step that would make an end of it? Maybe, but what was left to make an end of? I knitted my brows, sipped the surprisingly good coffee, and considered. Was it simply a matter of "once burned, twice shy?" Having walked trustingly, even eagerly, into one lousy relationship, was I afraid of blundering into another? Did Anne's very attractiveness frighten me into a defensive stance that shielded me against more damage to my shaky ego?

Where was Louis when I needed him? I sighed and, as the wheels thunked down on the Tegel runway, put it all out of my mind.

For about forty-five minutes. As soon as I got to Columbia House I dialed her room.

"Well, hi," she said. "What happened in Florence?"

"It went fine. Bolzano's pacified."

"Congratulations. The colonel will put you in for a decoration."

"Oh, it wasn't too hard." I took a breath and plowed ahead before I could change my mind. "Are you free tonight? How about that dinner we talked about?"

'Tonight…? Well, actually, I-"

"It's just that I wanted to talk about a few things related to the show," I said quickly. God forbid that she should think I might be attracted to her.

"I'd like to, Chris, but I've got a MAC flight to catch at six-thirty."

"Oh. Well, it's nothing that-"

"How about now? I haven't been off base all day, and I'd love a good long walk. Are you doing anything this afternoon?"

Too direct, I suppose. I almost retreated instinctively with a song and dance about having just gotten in, needing to do several things, etc., etc. What I said before about not being fainthearted still holds, but I never said I was terrifically secure, you know. Fortunately, I held firm for once.

"No, I'm not," I said. "Do you like the zoo?"

"I love it."

"Not too cold for you?"

"Cold? It's beautiful for December. You've lived in the Banana Belt too long. Meet you in the lobby in ten minutes."

She was dressed in civilian clothes this time; a trendy waist-length winter jacket and slacks, and pleasingly unsensible shoes. She was slighter than I'd realized, narrowly built in the shoulders and upper body, small-breasted and narrow-waisted, but with robust, rounded hips and curvy, athletic legs; something along the lines of a Venus of Lucas Cranach the Elder, but with longer legs. Cranach's Venuses and Lucretias, hot little numbers in their time, had never seemed very alluring to me, but quite suddenly I realized I'd been looking at things all wrong. In fact, I couldn't imagine a more attractive way for a female to be formed. Old Cranach rose considerably in my estimation.

We walked to the U-Bahn station at the other side of the plaza and caught one of the subway trains headed downtown. "First of all," I said as we sat down, "I owe you an apology. You were right and I was wrong about what happened to Peter. I went to look at the Hotel Paradies in Frankfurt. He never walked into that place voluntarily."

"Of course he didn't. Do you think there's some connection to the show, then?"

"Yes. So does Harry, by the way."

"Ah, that explains it. I spent an hour over a cup of coffee with him yesterday. He was being very charming and ingenuous, but I was being grilled, all right. About Peter's work, about his habits, his schedule… He really enjoys being a detective, doesn't he?"

I laughed. "He loves it."

"And how's your own detective work going? Have you gotten anywhere on the forgery?"

"No, except that my best guess now is that it's one of the three from the cache. And it may not be a forgery at all, in the narrow sense. It might be one of Bolzano's copies masquerading as an original, or maybe a genuine old painting that's been restored or reworked-or re-signed-so that it's not what everybody thinks it is."

"Mmm, interesting. But it still leaves a lot of possibilities, doesn't it?"

"Oh, and one more possibility: If it isn't from the cache- if it came out of Bolzano's own Florence collection-then I'm pretty sure it was substituted after and not before it became part of the show. At least," I said, struck with something that hadn't occurred to me before, "I'm sure about it if what the Bolzanos told me is true."

"What did they tell you?"

"That Peter himself was there for the packing."

"That is true. He and Earl spent two days down there getting the pictures ready for shipping."

"What about Egad? Did he go too?"

"I think so, yes. Later, for a day or two. Some sort of paperwork."

We got out at the zoo station and climbed the stairs up into the cold. "You know," she said thoughtfully, zipping up her jacket, "if the forgery did get into the collection after it left Florence, I don't see how it could have happened without one of our own people knowing about it." She frowned, thinking it over. "Isn't that so? Colonel Robey, Egad, or Earl. Or me, I guess, if you want to include eveyone. Or even Peter."

"I don't know about you and Peter, but otherwise I agree with you. It's hard to imagine anyone else having the access or the knowledge to do it. Of course, there's Jessick, or maybe one of the workmen, or some visitor-"

She shook her head. "The guards had specific orders. Only senior staff-and that doesn't include Conrad Jessick-was allowed near the paintings. Anyone else had to have a senior staff member with him. Of course, a guard might have been careless, or even bribed… Chris, is this starting to sound as bizarre to you as it is to me? I feel like I'm in a movie or something."

"Me too. Let's forget it for a while." We were at the entrance to the zoo. "Still feel like going in?"

"Sure. I missed lunch, though. Can we stop for a snack?"

I was hungry, too, and we followed the signposts to the Zoo Restaurant, past indifferent antelope, gnus, and zebras. We joined a few hardy Berliners and ate outside in the pale sunshine, on the Sud-Terrasse: orange-checked tablecloths and rattan chairs overlooking a wintry but mostly ice-free pond with quacking ducks. Huddled in our coats, we had bratwurst and rolls, hot potato salad, and the invariably good German coffee.

"No," Anne said, dabbing mustard from her lips with a paper napkin, "it just doesn't make sense. How could any of those people be a forger?"

"We're not talking about a forger. Whatever the counterfeit is, it's not a copy that was dashed off in the last few months-or in the last ten or twenty years. It may have been doctored a little to match one of Bolzano's paintings, but that's all. We're talking about a crook-a big-time crook-but not a forger."

"If that was supposed to make me feel better, somehow it doesn't."

"Well, maybe this will. Remember, the most likely possibility is that the forgery is one of the ones from the Hallstatt cache. And if that's true, the crook we're dealing with is probably some sneaky Oberleutnant who's been dead for twenty years."

"Maybe." She looked up from a crumb she was holding out on her palm to a nervy but irresolute sparrow at the edge of the table. "But Peter wasn't killed by a sneaky Oberleutnant who's been dead for twenty years."

"No, not likely. You know, except for Earl, I don't know anything about the others on the staff. Who is Egad, anyway? Where did he come from?"

"Attaboy," she said to the sparrow, which had finally made its move and flown off with its prize. "Is Egad suspect number one?"

"Have to start someplace."

"All right, Egad is Edgar Franklin Gadney, a DOD civilian-"

"Department of Defense?"

"Uh-huh. He's on special assignment to this project- like me. Ordinarily he works for EDPSC as-"

"Would it be too much trouble to speak in words, please?"

"Sorry, the European Defense Personnel Support Center. He's deputy director for subsistence contracting."

I laughed. "Maybe you ought to go back to initials. I don't understand the words either."

She smiled at me. "That's the first time I've seen you laugh."

"It is?" Was it really?

"Yes, you're a very serious person." Very Serious Person is the way she said it. "Terribly formidable and intimidating.

"I am?" She was only half-joking, and I was genuinely surprised.

"Uh-huh, but you look almost human when you smile. It warms up your eyes. You look much better than you did a few days ago, by the way."

"I think you're absolutely fantastic-looking," I blurted out to my own surprise, and God help me, I think I blushed. I had been away from the wars too long; my courtship technique was a little rough.

"Thank you," Anne said, and pleased me by seeming to be pleased herself, but then unnerved me by continuing to regard me and my reddening cheeks with those lovely, solemn, violet eyes.

"Would you like another wurst?" I asked romantically.

"Half of one," she said, "and how about some more coffee?"

"Fine," I said, and made my escape to the cafeteria line.

By the time I returned, I was firmly back at the helm. "Now then," I said briskly, slicing the sausage in two with a plastic knife, "what does it mean to be DDSC of the EDPSC?"

"It means Egad's the deputy purchasing agent for the commissary system."

"Am I wrong, or does that translate to 'assistant buyer for the grocery stores'?"

"No, you're right, but don't look so condescending. It's a tough job, and he's absolutely amazing with details. And he knows everything there is to know about army logistics. Ask him sometime what's involved in getting fifty thousand quarts of Belgian strawberries onto the shelves in ninety commissaries in six different countries before they spoil, if you don't believe me."

"I believe you."

"Which probably won't do you any good. You'll hear about it anyway. Everybody does. But it's worth it. Without Egad-especially since Colonel Robey tends to be a little, well-"

"Off in the clouds?"

"Immersed in thought, I was going to say. Anyway, without Egad, peculiar as he can be, The Plundered Past would be a madhouse." She shook her head firmly. "Nope, sorry. I can't see him as the bad guy."

"All right, who can you see?"

"Well, I could see Earl. Not for any special reason, I mean, just

… What is it? Did I say something clever?"

"I was just remembering something. Harry's a little suspicious of him, too."

"He is? About what? Why?"

"I don't know. He was asking me what I knew about him."

"Oh yes, you knew him from before, didn't you?"

"A little. He's one of the most respected conservators in the States; nobody better. I grant you, though, he oesn't add much to the general hilarity level, does he?"

She laughed and pushed away her empty plate. "Are we going to look at some animals, or are we not?"

"By all means." I picked up her napkin. "Mustard," I said, and dabbed at the tip of her nose, thereby establishing a more intimate level between us, in my own mind at least.

We went from enclosure to enclosure in the handsome zoo, looking at the Elefanten, the Baren, the shaggy Buffel, and one grouchy, cold Kangaruh, and when we got cold ourselves, we went inside to watch the apes get fed.

"What about Robey?" I asked, while the keeper brought out cardboard boxes of oranges, bananas, and lettuce. "How much do you know about him?"

Anne burst out laughing. She had a way of doing it with a sudden little explosion of air, as if she'd been holding her breath, that always made me want to laugh, too.

I smiled, but I didn't know what about. "What's the joke?"

"What made you ask about Colonel Robey?"

"Well, he's the only one we haven't talked about, and-"

"No, I mean, why did you ask just now? This minute?" She was still snuffling with laughter, hardly able to talk, and with her eyes she motioned me to look at the glass-walled, tiled cell in front of us.

I frowned. "The orangutan…?" And then I shouted with laughter, too. It was impossible not to. The thing was, it looked exactly like Robey. Not something like him, but just like him: soft heavy body, dreamy drowsy eyes, even a wispy cloud of orange-red hair that covered but didn't hide his scalp. While the other animals ate, the orang sat placidly, slowly rotating a banana before its face, lost in contemplation of its mysteries.

"God," I sputtered, "put a pipe in its mouth and a uniform on it, and it could chair our next staff meeting. Nobody would know the difference."

We had to move on, to a morose gorilla, before we could stop laughing.

"That's better," I said. "More like Earl."

Her hand went to her mouth. "Chris, please, don't start me off again." She pulled in a deep breath. "Whew. Now, what was the question?"

'Tell me about Mark."

"Right. He's head of HNR-darn, did it again; it's an occupational hazard-Host-Nation Relations. As I understand it, The Plundered Past truly was his personal idea, and so he likes to oversee it, but Egad does all the real administration, and I help where I can."

The apes had gotten their food, and the building was getting stuffy, so we went outside again, averting our eyes from the orangutan. We stood for ten minutes in front of the cage with the famous Chinese pandas, waiting for them to do something, but they slept, snoring, the whole time, curled up in chubby balls of black and white.

Anne looked at them and laughed when they scratched their noses or turned over in their sleep with discreet little snorts. And I looked at Anne, trying to figure out what it was that was so devilishly attractive about her. She was pretty, but not that pretty. She reminded me, in fact, of the heroines in romance novels. Not quite beautiful in the usual sense (whatever that is); eyes set a little too far apart (never too close together); nose a trifle too pert, even tilted (never too long or hooked down); mouth a little too wide and generous (never narrow, and never, never ungenerous). The total effect was devastating.

She caught me looking at her, or maybe I let her catch me, and we turned away from the pandas to begin walking again. "I know a little about everyone involved with the show now, except for you," I said, cunningly shifting the conversation to a personal level. "Who's Anne Greene?"

"So I'm a suspect, too?"

"You wouldn't want me to play favorites, would you?" I was ready to kick myself for being arch. This fumbling, getting-to-know-each-other process was positively painful. It had me self-consciously chafing over almost everything I said. What had been titillating fun at eighteen or nineteen-at least that was the way I remembered it-was agony for an out-of-practice thirty-four-year-old.

But still titillating.

"Yes, I would," Anne said, "but I'll tell you anyway. I'm on special assignment to Colonel Robey. Ordinarily I work in Community Liaison Services-"

"Usually called CLS, of course."

"No; for some reason ordinarily called Community Liaison, but you're learning. I'm a sort of glorified tour guide, a contact between visiting VIPs-congressmen, foreign dignitaries, media people-and the military community. I have to make sure they get to see who they're supposed to, and don't get to see who or what they're not supposed to. And I seem to spend a lot of my time smoothing over rough spots before they become 'incidents'-not always successfully."

"You don't sound like a glorified tour guide to me. Where are you headquartered?"

"Berchtesgaden. That's where I'm taking off for tonight. The annual visit of the Congressional oversight committee on military morale starts tomorrow." She grimaced. "The big event of the social year."

"I didn't know there were any American facilities in

Berchtesgaden. Isn't that where Hilter had his mountaintop retreat-the Obersalzberg, is it called? Are you anywhere near there?"

"We're in it. Or on it. The whole Obersalzberg is a U.S. military R and R operation. Some of the Nazi-era buildings are still standing, and they're army hotels now. There are restaurants, a golf course, ski lift-it's a great place to show visitors, which is why I'm stationed there; lucky me."

"You like it?"

"Anybody would like it. Hilter had a great eye for scenery. The Bavarian Alps are breathtaking. It'll be like heaven after Berlin."

"I imagine so. How long will you be there?"

"Eight days. I'll be back next weekend for the reception."

Eight days? I wanted to groan with dismay. Eight whole days? I smiled and said, "That'll be nice for you."

We had left the zoo and turned into the Tiergarten, that elegant swath of woods and meadow in the heart of the city, green even in December. We walked up the Spreeweg, past the Schloss Belvedere, the delicate canary-yellow chateau that serves as the presidential residence in Berlin, and then along John-Foster-Dulles-Allee, where we watched chilled, miserable-looking scullers in sleek five-man shells gliding an ice-free quarter mile or so up and down the Spree.

For perhaps fifteen minutes we didn't talk while I moped along, and then I had an idea. "Berchtesgaden sounds great," I mused casually. "I wonder if my ID card would get me in. I'll probably be able to use a little R and R before long."

"Are you serious? Wednesday's Christmas; why don't you come down for a couple of days? I'll give you the super-duper tour usually reserved for only the most august visitors, like TV anchormen."

"Gee, that's a great idea," I said as innocently as Tony Whitehead might have done it.

"Fine," she said, and again we walked without saying anything, but conscious of something good in the air. This boy-girl maneuvering wasn't all agony by any means.

"How did you get assigned to the exhibition?" I asked. "I suppose you got involved with all the hoopla over the cache, and then just stayed with it?"

She nodded. "That's the way it was. Hallstatt isn't that far from Berchtesgaden, and when that soldier stumbled on those crates in the Salzbergwerke -that's the salt mine… oops, I believe you sprechen deutsch, if I'm not mistaken."

"Anne, I really am sorry about that."

"I know you are," she said laughing. "Don't go all frowny on me again. God, you're so intense."

"Intense? Where do you get these ideas about me? That I never laugh, that I'm intense… I am not intense. I am anything but intense. I am easygoing; relaxed to the point of somnolence."

"So why the puckered brow?"

I unpuckered. "I seem to get a little nervous around you, that's all. How about some chestnuts?"

We bought an aromatic bagful from a vendor who had them roasting over a brazier of charcoal, and munched while we walked. Mostly I asked questions and Anne told me about herself. She was thirty years old; she was from Syracuse, New York; and she had an M.A. in career counseling. She'd joined the air force as an educational-services officer after they'd promised her tours of duty in the Far East and Europe. They'd kept their word on the tours, but in time-hallowed military fashion she'd been assigned to Community Liaison, and there she'd stayed. To her surprise she'd enjoyed it. She'd been a captain for two years, and a pair of major's oak leaves was in the offing if she decided to stay in.

She'd been married for two years in her early twenties, she told me, getting down to important things, but had made a bad job of it, and she now saw two or three men on an intermittent basis, but they were just friends. More or less. (You can imagine how fiendishly subtle my ensuing questions were. Nevertheless, I could get no elucidation beyond "more or less.")

"All right," she said, tossing a steaming chestnut from hand to hand. "Now you. I'm having a hard time figuring you out."

"What is there to figure out? I'm not very complex."

"I don't know about that. You look like a, well, like an average guy with not too terribly much upstairs, if you'll forgive me for saying so, so that it's a shock when you start talking. You're very articulate, you know, very cogent-"

"Formidable," I said. "Intimidating."

"Highly. But then when you loosen up, there's another layer that comes peeking through, kind of wistful and vulnerable-that's very 'in' now, you know-with a sense of humor… even sexy, I suppose, if you happen to like the type."

"Thanks, I think." On balance, it was an improvement over Bev's evaluation. "What can't you figure out?"

"Which layer is really you?"

"Oh, the sexy one. Ask anybody."

"Well. I'm certainly glad to have that settled. Now, what else should I know about you?"

I was glad to talk about myself, and Anne was a good listener. In twenty minutes she knew more about me- about my recent past-than I'd ever expected to tell anyone.

"You walked in one day and your wife wasn't there?" she asked incredulously. "Just like that? Out of nowhere?"

"Yes." We were at the eastern edge of the Tiergarten now, which is also the edge of West Berlin. We had walked along quiet, pretty paths at the very foot of the ugly Wall, past the gaunt, shell-scarred Reichstag, past the Brandenburg Gate (visible through one of the checkpoints), past the colossal marble soldier atop the Soviet Army Memorial (the Grim Raper, the West Berliners call it).

"No," I said after a little more thought, as we turned back toward the center of West Berlin and began to look for a taxi stand. "No, not out of nowhere." And then I began telling her things that even Louis hadn't been able to nondirectively pry out of me, things I hadn't pried out of myself. How Bev and I had been drifting apart for three or four years and never faced up to it, how she had tried one thing after another to find what she needed-transcendental meditation, transactional analysis, assertiveness training- and I buried myself in work, gradually coming to spend most of my Saturdays at the museum (while Bev took glass-blowing lessons, or so I was given to understand) and pretty much left the twentieth century for the eighteenth.

"It must have been a miserable time for you," Anne said.

"But it wasn't," I answered truthfully. "I thought I was happy, and if you think you're happy, you must be happy, right?"

"You really didn't have an inkling?"

I shook my head. "I really thought everything was all right. We went out to dinner a couple of times a week, we went to concerts, to plays-"

"You know, I'm starting to think you might be that guy with not a whole lot upstairs, after all."

"You know, I'm starting to think you're right."

We found a taxi stand near Potsdamer Platz and climbed into a cab, grateful to be out of the deepening late-afternoon cold. "All this time she was out finding herself while you were dreaming away in the museum archives," Anne said, "you were faithful to her? Or don't I know you well enough to ask?"

"No, you know me well enough. And yes, I was." The world's changed, I thought. Here I am feeling ashamed of having been faithful to my wife.

"Even in thought?"

"Well, not always in thought."

"I'm relieved to hear it."

"But mostly even in thought," I persisted, wanting to be honest. "Look Anne, I loved Bev, and we got along fine in bed, and I didn't feel misunderstood or anything else." I shrugged. "I just didn't need anything on the side."

She looked out the window at the quickly darkening streets. "If this is a line," she murmured, "it has its points."

"It's not-"

"I know it's not. What about since you broke up? Anything important in the female line? Just curious."

"Not much. I mean, no. Not till now." Her hand was lying palm-down on the seat. I covered it with mine, and she turned it over to clasp my fingers.

OK, it was straight out of Booth Tarkington, but I couldn't have been happier. "Anne, I'm awfully glad you didn't just write me off that day at the meeting. I would have deserved it."

"Oh, I did. But later on I figured out what was going on."

"You did, huh? What was going on?"

"What was going on was that you were attracted to me-we both were, to each other-and it scared you."

"Scared me…" I laughed.

"Sure. You were afraid of being burned again, and you were still feeling guilty and hurt over Bev-"

"Guilty! What did I have-"

"-so you put up this prickly barrier. Then, when we met for that drink, you started letting your hormones call the shots again, which was very sensible. But then when the possibility of dinner came up, you backed off in a hurry."

"And why did I do that?"

"Because in the bar we were talking about the show, so you had a nice, safe role to hide behind. But dinner would have been just you and me, no business talk, and that made you nervous again."

"Anne, that's… Is this what they teach you in career counseling? It's ridiculous."

"Uh-huh."

"Come on, people don't behave that simplistically. You're talking pop psychology."

"Mm."

"OK, if you're right, why have I spent the afternoon with you? And enjoyed it, I should add."

She shrugged. "Hormones talking again, I guess."

"Well, you're right enough about that," I said, laughing.

We got to Columbia House at four-thirty, an hour before she was due to catch a military bus to the terminal. At the desk there was a stack of messages waiting for her, and a couple for me, one of which said that Harry Gucci had telephoned. Would I call him at 3660 or look for him in the Keller-Bar at about five?

"He might already be there," Anne said.

"Yes, I guess I'll go see. It's been a good day, Anne."

"For me too, Chris."

She didn't invite me up to her suite for a warm-up cup of coffee or a drink, and I didn't suggest it. The day was right, perfect, just the way it was, and neither of us wanted to risk spoiling it. Hormones be damned.