A Deceptive Clarity

Chapter 13

I had already gotten a bottle of Lowenbrau at the bar before I saw Harry at a table near the back. Gadney was with him.

"Hiya, Chris, come on over. Egad and I are just shooting the breeze."

"So he pretends," Gadney said. "In fact, I'm suffering a merciless interrogation. I advise you to find another table if you don't want some of the same."

Harry laughed, scratching at the side of his scruffy beard, and pushed out a chair for me. He was slumped in a cardigan I hadn't seen before, with faded geometric Northwest Indian designs on it.

"I understand your mission to Florence was a great success," Gadney said.

I nodded. "Lorenzo asked me to be sure and say hello for him."

"Lorenzo?"

"Lorenzo Bolzano."

"Of course," he said impatiently. "But I don't understand. I barely know him."

"Really? He gave me the impression that you'd spent a day down there."

"Only to attend to the shipping of the paintings to Naples. I don't know why Lorenzo would remember me kindly. I'm afraid I was rather cross."

"Why?"

"Oh, Peter and Earl had left without completing the paperwork. My fault, really. I shouldn't have expected them to know about it. And certainly not Lorenzo."

"Is the paperwork pretty complicated, then?"

"Complicated? Not really; it's just a matter of following procedures. It's nothing compared to the difficulties of commissary logistics, I can tell you." He finished the sherry in his glass, pressed his lips together, and allowed himself an appreciative smack. "Consider, for example," he said with a fine, dusty enthusiasm, "how you would go about getting fifty thousand quarts of fresh Belgian strawberries onto the shelves of ninety commissaries from Bremerhaven to Izmir. With a permissible lag time of four days, I might add. There's excitement for you."

"I can imagine. But what about getting all those crates open and closed again in a single day? That must have been pretty harrowing too, considering how careful you have to be."

"Crates? Do you mean the paintings? What makes you think I did?"

"Didn't you say so a moment ago?"

"No, I didn't."

"You didn't? I thought you did. Didn't you hear him say that, Harry?"

Harry, who had been listening with interest, as he listened to everything, tugged at the hair behind his ear. "Well, yeah, I thought you said that, Egad."

"No," Gadney said again, his pale blue eyes looking levelly into mine, "I didn't say that. But as a matter of fact, as it happened, I did have to have the crates opened. Each one had to have its own bill of lading and a copy of my travel orders from Florence to Naples, since I was the authorizing officer. And no, it was not exciting. When we move from Berlin to London," he added stiffly, "I assure you it will be done properly in the first place. You needn't concern yourself."

"I'm sure it will, Egad. I didn't mean any criticism."

"Yes. Well, I really must run. Is that all right with you, Major?"

"Me? Sure. Enjoyed talking to you."

We both watched him stalk out. "What's up, Harry?" I asked.

"I thought we ought to touch base on next week."

"What's happening next week?"

"The El Greco pickup in Frankfurt. What, did you forget about it?"

I had. Fortunately, though, it appeared that Robey had remembered to alert Harry after all.

"Here's the way it'll work," he said, and rolled the rubber band off the limp little notebook. "Eleven hundred hours, you show up at the museum to verify the picture's OK when they crate it. Twelve-fifteen, you leave on the truck with it, along with a couple of museum guards. Thirteen hundred hours, the truck arrives at the Rhein-Main MAC terminal, VIP parking area. My people will meet you there and take over. Fourteen hundred hours, you come back with them on a special MAC flight. When you get to Berlin, there'll be a truck to meet you; then straight to Tempelhof and the back of Columbia House."

"Very impressive. Herr Traben will be pleased."

"Yeah," he said doubtfully. "Look, you've done this kind of thing before. Do you usually go through all this hassle to get a painting from one place to another?"

'That picture's worth two million dollars, Harry. And it's literally irreplaceable. All the same, Traben's overdoing it a little, if you ask me."

"Yeah," he said again. He put down his orange juice. "You want another beer?"

"No thanks."

"How about some food? You hungry?"

"A little. They've got a steak special upstairs tonight."

He made a face. "I don't eat meat."

I don't know why, but it didn't surprise me. "Health or ethical grounds?" I asked.

"Both. Why eat all that cholesterol, and why slaughter cows or pigs or sheep when there are a lot of other ways to get protein?" He gave me the kind of look civilized beings reserve for carnivores, then said abruptly, "Hey, how about some fried chicken? There's a Wienerwald a couple of blocks from here."

I laughed. "Sure, but what have you got against chickens?"

He looked at me as if he couldn't believe I'd ask so self-evident a question. "They're ugly."

In a comer booth at Germany's answer to Colonel Sanders, he grimaced at the menu. "Jesus, isn't that awful?"

I looked down at my own and saw nothing objectionable. "What?"

"The picture, the picture. Uch."

I still didn't know what was bothering him. The only picture I could see was a cartoon of a friendly and inoffensive chicken in a chef's hat, with a checkered kerchief around it's neck. "What's wrong with it?"

"Are you kidding? I hate this kind of picture. Look at it.

He's holding a knife and fork, he's got an apron on. I mean, the implication is that he's gonna eat himself-or at least another chicken-and he's laughing like crazy. It's horrible. You're telling me that doesn't bother you?"

"Harry," I said, "you're weird."

But not so weird that he didn't order half a sauteed chicken.

I wasn't very hungry, and asked for a small chicken salad.

"Oh, by the way," he said, when the waitress had brought apple juice for him and a glass of Mosel for me, "speaking of pictures…" He unfolded a poorly photocopied sheet with four photographs on it: two men, each photographed from front and side, with names and numbers beneath. "Would these possibly be friends of yours?"

They were like faces from a nightmare. No-neck, the gorilla man and his sidekick Skull-face. "You got them!" I cried. "The guys from the storage room! Harry-"

"Ah," he said with satisfaction, "good. But don't get too excited. We don't have them; we just know who they are."

"Who?"

He took back the sheet and spread it out on the table in front of him, smoothing down the creases. "Just a couple of particularly nasty rent-a-thugs. The Polizei has records a mile long on them. They call the one with the forty-inch neck the Beast."

"Gee, I wonder why that is," I said, remembering with a shudder how it felt to be lobbed six feet into a concrete wall.

"Got a little more news for you, Chris," he said, watching me over the rim of his glass. "We also know the guys who killed van Cortlandt-that is, the ones who walked him through those bars that night."

I slowly put down my wine. "Why didn't you tell me that before? Who are they?"

He smiled and tapped the sheet.

My eyes widened. "The same ones? How did you find all this out?"

"Wasn't too hard. I got a dozen possible matches to your Photofit and took them to Frankfurt yesterday. Then I spent last night with a couple of Polizei, showing the pictures to people in the bars around the Paradies. Three people positively identified them as the guys who were hauling him around from bar to bar, more or less holding him up between them."

I turned the sheet around and looked hard at the pictures. The men who'd killed Peter. "Why did they do it?" I asked dully.

"Well, how the hell am I supposed to know that? Somebody hired them, I guess."

"And somebody hired them to rob the storage room?"

"I think so."

"And that's all you know?"

"Hey, look, Chris, I'm not Superman," he said testily. "Don't worry, we'll find these guys."

"Hey, Harry, I'm sorry, you've done a terrific job. It's just… well, even if we know who they are, we don't really know anything more than we did before, do we?"

"Oh, I wouldn't say that. We know the murder and the break-in are connected now. We didn't know that before."

"That's true. You don't suppose-you don't think Peter somehow found out that the robbery was planned, and they killed him to keep him quiet?"

He didn't seem impressed with the idea. "Possible, but what happened to your forgery theory?"

I shook my head. "I don't know."

We sipped our drinks thoughtfully until the waitress came back with our dinners.

"Aahh," Harry breathed, "that smells great. He tore off a wing and went to work on it-quite carnivorously, I thought. "Now," he said, licking at his thumb, "you want to tell me what that was about with Gadney?"

"What what was about?"

"Your burning interest in logistics."

"I wanted to see if he'd admit to being alone with the open crates," I said, and went over the conclusions I'd reached in Florence, while Harry nodded and made steady progress on his chicken.

"OK," he said, "so you're saying, (a) either the forgery is one of the three paintings from Hallstatt-in which case probably nobody connected with the show had anything to do with it-or (b) it's from Bolzano's Florence collection-in which case somebody in the show has to be involved. And you figure it's b?"

"No, I figure it's a, but I didn't think it would hurt to talk to Egad. Did what he said sound right to you, by the way? About the bills of lading and the travel orders?"

"It sounds possible."

"Well, I'll check around and see."

"I'll check around." He wiped his fingers on a napkin and reached for another. "You really think that little guy's mixed up in this thing?"

"That little guy" was an inch taller and at least ten pounds heavier than Harry.

"No, but if the fake is from Florence-which I doubt- and not from Hallstatt, either he's involved with it, or Flittner is, or Robey is. One of them has to be."

"No, I don't see it that way."

"There's Jessick, you mean? I don't think so. He wasn't cleared to get near the paintings. Flittner, Robey, and Gadney are the only ones with the access and the knowledge. It's got to be one of them."

"No, it could have been all of them. Or any two."

I put down the Mosel and thought about that. "A conspiracy? That's pretty-"

"Or van Cortlandt."

"Peter? Are you serious? My God, Harry, he was murdered!"

"Yeah, well," he mumbled into his beard, "I was figuring that any involvement would have been before he died, you know?"

"That's not what I meant. There's no way Peter would have had anything to do with something crooked. And if he did, why would he tell me about it?"

"Hey, calm down, Chris; don't get excited. Eat your salad."

"I am calm, damn it!"

"All I'm doing," he said, searching sadly in the debris on his plate for any shreds he might have missed, "is thinking out loud, building possibilities from what you told me, you know? And it's possible- possible -that van Cortlandt was involved in something shady, and that he wound up getting killed on account of it."

"Yes, I know, but-"

"There are some other possibilities too. Anne Greene, for instance."

"Anne? You're out of your mind! She didn't know anything about it. And she's the one who kept trying to tell everybody Peter was murdered right from the beginning."

"Look, you said-and it's a good point-that the people who had access and knowledge are our best bets. Now, she's got both, right? Stop being so subjective, for Christ's sake. Whoever's guilty, you can bet there's someone, somewhere, who thinks he's a wonderful person." He cocked his head and scratched raspily at the hair on his cheek. "Well, maybe not Flittner."

"I understand what you're saying, and you're right. But Anne-well, hell, I had access and knowledge, too, for that matter. What about me?"

Harry licked grease from his pinky and nodded thoughtfully. "Yeah, then there's you."

"Not likely," I said, in a tone implying that of course he was being playful. "I just got here last week."

"And how do I know this forgery business didn't get set up last week?"

"Because Peter told me about it the very first day I was here, for one thing."

"Yeah, so you say."

"So I… Why the hell would-"

Harry threw back his head and chortled. "Hey, relax, will you? You're not on my list of suspects, OK? Neither is Anne. I just enjoy seeing the veins stand out on your neck, that's all, but I don't want you to have a stroke. Loosen up; don't be so intense. I'm on your side, you know."

Intense, again. What was this? When did I become so intense? "That's nice to know, but how come you're being generous enough to exclude me?"

"Intuition. Also the fact that you almost got yourself killed in the storage room. But mostly intuition."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence." I took a long sip of the Mosel. "I'd like to help any way I can, Harry."

"Good; find that fake. And there's one thing you can tell me that might help a lot. Do you have van Cortlandt's appointment calendar?"

"It isn't on the desk in Room 2100?"

"No, but Jessick's sure he had one. Blue, he thinks."

"I haven't seen it, but I'll have a look. I have a few of Peter's files in my room."

"That's fine. Well, I don't know about you, but I'm bushed. Let's figure out how we split the check. Your salad was ten marks, right? My chicken was only nine, so…"

The night had turned a dry, bitter cold, and on the walk back to Tempelhof Harry humped along with hunched shoulders, buried in his parka like a turtle, so that nothing below his eyes showed over his collar. And everything above was hidden by a thick knit cap, so he seemed to be peering warily out of the slit of a big, soft tank.

"Oh, by the way, Chris," he said from deep in the coat as we waited to cross the eight-lane Tempelhofer Damm, "did Flittner ever come up in your conversations with van Cortlandt?"

"No."

"How he got along with him, that kind of thing?"

"Harry, maybe if you'd just trust me and come out and tell me why you're so interested in Flittner I'd be able to help you. Since we're on the same side, it'd be nice to know just what the hell is going on."

He had to swivel the whole thickly encased upper half of his body to look at me. I think I heard him laugh, or he might have grunted; the sound was lost somewhere in the depths of the coat. "You know, you've got a point. All right, did you know that he's not on leave from the National Gallery-that he was canned?"

"Canned? Why?"

"Bad PR, lousy attitude, uncooperative behavior-all those curmudgeonly leanings you told me about. Come on, the light's changed."

Berlin traffic lights do not encourage dawdling. We jogged quickly across the broad street and onto the Platz der Luftbrucke, dark except for the spotlit monument. "I suppose," Harry went on, "you didn't know that Robey's dumping him too, effective the end of the month, for pretty much the same reasons."

"I didn't have any idea. Poor guy. Does he know?"

"Yeah, Robey told him a couple of weeks ago."

"Hm. So why did you want to know if Peter-"

"Because he's the one who talked Robey into getting rid of him-according to Robey. Let me ask you: Would van Cortlandt do something like that? Go to Robey and ask him to get rid of somebody else?"

"If he thought the paintings were being endangered or the show was being compromised, yes. Definitely. He'd consider it a matter of honor." I turned to look at him. "Are you saying you think Earl might have killed him-arranged to have him killed-out of… what, revenge?"

"I don't think anything yet. I'm trying to get my facts in order. Here's the funny part: Robey says van Cortlandt told him he'd had a couple of tough talks with Flittner about it."

"That sounds like Peter. He'd want to be aboveboard. What's funny about it?"

"What's funny is that when I asked Flittner about it, he said he didn't know what I was talking about; Peter never talked to him about his behavior or anything else."

"So somebody is lying."

"Right. And Flittner's got a pretty good reason. With me poking around asking questions, he's probably scared to admit he had any reason for hating van Cortlandt."

"Which makes him worried, but not necessarily guilty. Earl's pretty paranoid at the best of times."

"That's right," Harry said. "I never said he was guilty."

Once in the lobby at Columbia House, Harry woofed and stamped his feet as if we'd been trudging in three feet of snow. "Sheesh, it's freezing outside! Brr." He began unraveling himself from gloves, hat, scarf, and coat, emerging like an undersize moth from its cocoon. "I gotta get some wool socks."

"Harry, I was thinking. It's pretty natural for people's guard to be up with you questioning them-"

"I don't question them; I'm pretty subtle."

"Yeah, you really had Egad fooled."

He laughed. "You didn't do any better. He's madder at you than at me."

"That's true, but with me, anything about the show is a legitimate concern. I might get people mad, but I'm not going to make them suspicious. I thought maybe I might do a little… well, talking to people-"

"Forget it," he said firmly. "Here's the deal: You leave the investigation to me, and I'll leave the forgery to you."

"Look, I didn't mean I was going to confront Earl about Peter. I could do it indirectiy. Maybe if I got a little more information from Robey-"

He sighed. "Let's go sit down for a couple of minutes."

We went to the same grouping of chairs that Peter and I had sat in when I'd first arrived in Berlin. Harry heaped his peeled-off garments on the chair next to him, and sighed again. "Flittner's not the only one I've got questions about."

"Who else? Not Mark?"

"Yeah, Mark."

"What questions?"

"Two of them. Why he went to Frankfurt with van Cortlandt the day van Cortlandt got killed-"

"What?" I exclaimed, then lowered my voice at Harry's wince. "But-Peter would have mentioned it. He went alone; I'm sure of it."

"Not exactly. Robey was on the same plane, sitting twenty rows behind him, in the smoking section."

"Well… why? What did he say?"

"That's my other question: Why won't he admit he went?"

"He out-and-out denied it?"

"No, I wouldn't say that. Didn't I tell you I'm subtle? I just gave him about ten different chances to mention it- you know, 'Been to Frankfurt lately?'-that kind of stuff. He wouldn't bite."

"Then how do you know he went?"

"High-class police work, pal. I checked the passenger list of van Cortlandt's plane to see if anything turned up. Robey's name did."

"Wow, I don't have any idea what to make of that. When did he come back, do you know?"

"Not till just before that staff meeting. Two days and three nights in Frankfurt, right when van Cortlandt bought it, and it slipped his mind. Funny, huh?"

I sagged back against the soft chair and thought about all this. "Yes, it's funny. Earl's such a miserable character I don't have any trouble imagining him as a murderer. But I like Mark. I don't like to think… hey, that gives him a reason for lying, doesn't it? About whether Peter really talked to Earl, I mean. He could have been trying to throw you off, to invent a motive for Earl's killing him." I suddenly knew what Anne had meant about feeling as if she were in a movie.

"It's conceivable. But let me find out what's what in my own simpleminded way, OK? I mean, as much as I value your help-"

"All right," I said, smiling, "I won't get in your way."

"And don't look so gloomy. One of the things you learn in this business is that people spend a hell of a lot of time sneaking around and lying, and if you assume that the particular lie you just found out about has something to do with the case you're working on, you're gonna be wrong ninety-five percent of the time. People just act that way out of habit."

He stood up and began the lengthy process of gathering up his clothes. "So don't assume anybody killed anybody until we know a lot more."

"I'll remember that," I said, and got up too. "But you know, on second thought I think I was happier not knowing what was going on."

"So next time don't ask. See you in a couple of days; I'm gonna spend some time in Frankfurt." He shambled off to the elevator, engulfed by a mountain of clothing and trailing a six-foot-long striped scarf.

Upstairs in my living room I sat by the telephone looking glumly at the other message that had been in the box with Harry's. It was from Rita Dooling. Pls. call, it said. Bev will take 40% on house. You keep Murphy. Other devels.

I sighed. It was 9:30 p.m.; 1:30 in the afternoon in San Francisco. Little chance of getting Rita, who took late and leisurely lunches. Ah well, too bad, maybe tomorrow. No, that was Saturday. Well, next week sometime.

Whistling, thinking about the afternoon at the zoo, I went to bed.