A Deceptive Clarity

Chapter 5

Whatever else he might be, Mark Robey was a calm and orderly man who took things as they came. "I know the break-in is on everyone's mind," he announced dreamily, seated at the head of a folding table and gazing through the tall French doors at the bare trees and wintry courtyard behind Columbia House, "but let's just start with our agenda as Egad prepared it. Someone from OSI should be along in a while and we can talk about the break-in then. What's the first item, Egad?"

"Reception protocol," Gadney said promptly.

And so, under Robey's equable, absentminded leadership, we spent an hour on who should and who shouldn't be invited to the preview reception two weeks away, much as we might have done at the San Francisco County Museum under similar circumstances. There was little for me to contribute, so I spent the time sipping strong, fragrant German coffee and learning about my new colleagues.

There were two of them besides Robey and Gadney, and I would be lying if I didn't admit that one of them got most of my attention. This was a vibrant, extremely attractive woman of twenty-eight or twenty-nine who had something cogent or interesting-usually both-to say whenever she opened her mouth, which is not easy when the subject is reception protocol. She also had lovely, intelligent eyes that were as close to violet as eyes can be, glorious honey-colored hair, a healthy toothpaste-ad smile, and a pair of silver captain's bars on each blue-clad shoulder.

I had no ready stereotype for female air-force captains, but if I had, it wouldn't have been anything like Anne Greene. Robey had introduced her as having been lent by the Air Force to serve as "my adjutant and our intra-command liaison," and I had said, "Ah," as if I'd known what it meant.

The other person was Earl Flittner, a large, untidy civilian who was the show's technical director. With a small staff to assist him, he was responsible for physical details- exhibition layout, lighting, temperature and humidity, and so on-and for packing and unpacking. This may sound like semiskilled labor, but it isn't. It's esoteric, highly technical work. Crating and shipping thirty-five million dollars' worth of fragile, irreplaceable works of art is not the same thing as wrapping a box of brownies to send to Aunt Vivian. Moreover, the skill and taste of the technical director have made or broken many a show.

Flittner was one of the best, on loan from the National Gallery. I had met him a couple of years before when he had accompanied a show of High Renaissance wood sculpture to San Francisco, but he'd been surly and contentious from the start, and I had stayed out of his way. Now, when Robey introduced us, he said bluntly that he didn't remember me at all (which didn't make me like him a whole lot more), and he sat restlessly through the meeting, smoking cigarette after cigarette, not saying much, merely twisting his long mouth from time to time in a sour expression that sometimes seemed to indicate impatience with Robey's running of the meeting, sometimes dissatisfaction with the exhibition as a whole, and sometimes a universal and undiscriminating misanthropy.

We were still deep in the intricacies of protocol when the door opened and closed, snapping me out of a near-doze.

"Ah," Robey said, looking up from some woolgathering of his own, "come in. Let's see, I think some of you have met Major, uh…"

"Gucci. Like the shoes."

"Did you say, er, 'Major'?" Gadney asked.

"That's right," Harry said with a smile. "I'm just lucky. They don't make me wear a monkey suit."

Gadney's surprise was understandable. Harry looked about as much like a major as I did a curator. He was wearing the same baggy, gray, shawl-collared cardigan he'd had on at the hospital, shapeless brown pants, and loafers that had never seen polish. With pennies in them. The bulky sweater made him look not bigger but smaller than he was, and shabby besides; and a slight stoop made him seem frail and scholarly. His short, gray-splotched beard was neatly trimmed at the neck but grew unchecked up his cheeks, giving him a gaunt, rabbinical air.

"I hadn't known one could have a beard in the army," Flittner muttered rudely to the tabletop.

"Sure," Harry said pleasantly, "if it's for medical reasons. I got shot in the face a couple of years ago in Athens and I couldn't shave for a while. I forgot to tell 'em when it healed, and they forgot to tell me to shave."

There was a thick silence as he shambled across the room. Even Flittner had the decency to look embarrassed.

Harry flopped down in the chair next to Robey. "No thanks," he replied to the offer of coffee. "I don't drink it. Wouldn't mind some of that mineral water, though."

Robey passed him a small green bottle of Appolinaris. Harry poured it into a glass and took a long drink while he looked from face to face around the table with sharp, smiling eyes.

"Hey, Chris, glad to see you up. How's the old schnozz?"

"The old schnozz is fine, thanks. The old head's still a little fuzzy."

He laughed, emptied the rest of the bottle into his glass, and wiped a drop of moisture from his beard with the back of a finger. "Well, let me set your minds at ease. First, as some of you know, we found the'truck they used. It was on base, in the pool lot behind the education center. The four missing crates were all in it." His eyes lit on me again. "What's so surprising, Chris?"

"I didn't realize they'd gotten away with anything."

"Oh yeah. None of the originals; only four of the copies." He took out his bulging little notebook and snapped the rubber band off it, letting it roll up around his wrist. "Let's see…" He began to read aloud: "One van Gogh-"

A corner of Flittner's unkempt mustache lifted in a faint sneer. "Van Gukh."

"Really?" Harry said.

"V'n Khakh" Gadney corrected mildly, eliciting a glare from Flittner. "I believe that's closer to the Dutch." With a finger, he delicately brushed at his own tidy, pale mustache.

"Well, thanks," Harry said brightly. "Thanks a lot. I'll remember that. Van Hah."

"Also a Cranach, a Vermeer, and a Poussin," Gadney said, pronouncing carefully, no doubt for Flittner's benefit. "All of them having considerable value, copies or not. Are any of them damaged?"

"We haven't looked at them yet, but the crates are all OK."

"Then don't worry about the paintings," Flittner said.

"What about the two men?" Anne Greene asked. "Have they been caught?"

"No," Harry said, "and to be honest we don't have a clue. Obviously, they got on base without any problem, so it looks like they had forged IDs."

Robey smiled. "Maybe that's what you ought to try, Chris."

"Not at all," Gadney said primly. "I'll have a proper card for him before the day is out."

"Why did they want to get on the base in the first place?" I asked Harry. "And why leave the truck there? Why didn't they just drive away with it?"

It was Anne who answered. "Maybe you don't understand the layout here yet, Dr. Norgren. Columbia House fronts on the street, but it forms part of the perimeter of Tempelhof. The only way to get a truck around to the back of the building, where the storage room is, is to drive onto the base."

"That's exactly right," Harry said, "and that's exactly what they did. They got hold of a beer truck authorized to deliver on base, drove it around to the courtyard behind this building, knocked out the outside guard with what we think was an electronic stun gun, then chloroformed him, and finally cut through the door with some kind of laser tool. The back door's down in the stairwell, so there wasn't anybody to see."

"Stun gun, laser tool," Robey said in his vague, musing way. "Seems like pretty up-to-date technology. They must be professionals."

"Oh yeah, for sure." Harry drank some more mineral water, tossing it into his mouth like a slug of whiskey. "When Chris scared them off, they didn't dare go tearing back out through the gate in a Schultheiss beer truck. So they left it in a protected corner of the lot, with the paintings, and as far as we know they just walked out the gate." He held out his hands, palms up. "That's all we know."

"You have no idea who might be behind this?" Gadney asked.

Harry shook his head. "As my British pals like to say, we're pursuing our inquiries. We're in touch with Interpol-they keep a file of international art thieves: MOs, connections, and so on. So far, nothing."

Flittner, slumped gracelessly in his chair, sighed gustily, shaking out a match he'd used to light still another cigarette. The first two fingers of his left hand were the color of tobacco. "You don't need Interpol," he mumbled into his chest. "It was an inside job."

The rest of us looked at him.

"It stands to reason, doesn't it?" he growled, as if we were arguing with him. "They knew just where the paintings were stored, didn't they? They were scheduled to be in the storage room for less than twenty-four hours, but they knew anyway. And they knew exactly where the storage room was, and that it had a back door, and how to get to the back door. That's not exactly public knowledge. It's somebody in the damn army."

Gadney shook his head. "No, I'm afraid I can't agree with that, Earl. If it was, er, an inside job, they'd never have bothered with the copies."

Robey, staring at the ceiling, hands clasped behind his neck, drifted hack into the conversation. "That's an interesting point, Earl. They couldn't very well have been insiders, could they?" He turned thoughtful eyes on Harry. "Or professionals either. Pros wouldn't fool around with the fakes, would they? Not with the real things sitting right there."

Anne shook her head. "That isn't necessarily so. Everything was still packed up. How could they tell what was in each crate? And," she said, turning to Flittner, "the copies were all at the back of the room near the outside door, isn't that right?"

"So?"

"Well, then, they probably just started nearest the back door; that would be the easiest way. I imagine they were going to take everything. There weren't that many crates."

"That could very well be," Gadney said approvingly. "In any case, it strongly supports my position that inside knowledge was not involved. After all, the acquisition number of each painting is clearly stenciled on its crate. Surely anyone connected with the show would be familiar with the numbering system, and would never have touched the reproductions."

I put in my two cents' worth. "I don't think that's necessarily true, either. From what I saw of the storage room, it was stuffed to bursting with crates. Even if those guys understood the numbering, there wasn't enough room to walk around looking for the right stencils. If I'd been stealing them, I'd have done what Anne said-start near the back door and keep going till I had them all. It would have been faster than trying to pick and choose."

This not only made sense to me but gave me the chance to agree with Anne.

"I still say it was an inside job," grumbled Flittner through a dense cloud of smoke pouring from mouth, nostrils, and-so it seemed-ears.

"And I," Gadney said, seizing the gauntlet, "say it was not."

To display the depth of his conviction, he placed his cup in its saucer with an audaciously audible clink. He and Flittner, I had noticed earlier, rarely missed an opportunity to differ. This was one of the few times Gadney had held his own.

Harry had been listening alertly, his hand tugging at his beard or sometimes at his hair, his black eyes jumping from speaker to speaker. "Well, well," he said, "that's really interesting. I'm glad to have your ideas."

"Ha, ha," Flittner commented.

"No, I mean it," Harry said.

"I have another idea," Gadney ventured.

Predictably, Flittner sneered. Or maybe he didn't. Some people have srnile lines permanently implanted on their faces, and some have frown lines. Flittner had sneer lines, as if he'd done it too often and now his mouth was permanently set.

"Yeah?" Harry said to Gadney with interest. "What?"

"I wonder if it's occurred to anyone that the Heinrich-Schliemann-Grundung might have had a hand in this?"

I leaned inquisitively toward him. "The…"

He didn't hear me, but Anne, sitting next to me, did. She leaned over, close enough so that I smelled her scent: citrus and citrus blossoms, faint but ravishing. "Die Heinrich-Schliemann-Grundung. It means-"

"Ich spreche deutsch," I said crisply, cutting her off in midsentence and midsmile. Her clear eyes widened momentarily, but she wasn't any more surprised than I was. What, I wondered, did I have to be curt about? And why would I want to put off a sensational-looking, single female (no ring, anyway) who was trying to be friendly? I had no idea.

Anyway, die Heinrich-Schliemann-Grundung obviously meant the Heinrich Schliemann Foundation-whatever that meant.

"Heinrich Schliemann?" I asked Gadney.

Anne had another try. "He was a German archaeologist-"

Incredibly, I did it again. "I know who Heinrich Schliemann was," I snapped, regretting it instantly; and I'm sorry to say that it sounded as snotty as it looks.

This time she drew stiffly back. "Of course you'd know, Dr. Norgren," she said, coolly polite. "Forgive me; that was silly of me."

"No," I said, "not at all." I meant to be contrite, but it's hard to say "Not at all" without a touch of the regal. Hard for me, anyway. It was the sort of thing Peter said frequentiy. "That is," I bumbled on, "I know who Schliemann was, but I don't have the foggiest" -I sounded more like Peter with every word- "idea what he could have to do with…"

I hesitated invitingly, but she had been twice burned, and she wasn't having any more, and who could blame her? It was Robey who responded.

"Hm?" he said. "What? Schliemann?" He slowly tamped tobacco into a blackened pipe. "Well, you know how he had all that trouble with the Turkish government, a hundred years back or so, about his excavations at Troy? How they wouldn't let him take his finds out of Turkey and back to Germany?"

I nodded.

"Well, this group named themselves after him because they don't want to see Germany 'cheated' again. They say that whatever the Nazis took during the war shouldn't have been given back, and they're talking about a formal claim-a suit on behalf of the German people-on the three paintings from the Hallstatt cave. They don't see why Bolzano should get them back."

"Incredible," I said, the first sensible comment I'd made in a while.

"What's so incredible about it?" Flittner said abruptly. "The rules of war. How much art would be in the Louvre if Napoleon hadn't raped the rest of Europe? To the victors belong the spoils. What's the difference in this case?"

Gadney rifted his eyes and tossed his head minutely, as if he had borne this sort of thing more times than any human being should have to. But he sat in stoic silence.

"I think there is a difference," I began, ready to have my first real say, and arranging my thoughts on this venerable issue, but Anne got there before me, and much more pithily.

"They weren't the victors," she said simply.

'Exactly," Flittner said, as bitterly as if he'd signed the surrender himself. "We're the victors, so we make the rules."

"Well," Robey said, his Archaic smile shining gently forth, "let's enjoy it while we can. How often do the good guys get to make the rules?"

That appeared to be a reasonable end to an unpromising avenue, and while Robey went through the pipe smoker's slow voluptuous, lighting-up ritual, the rest of us held our peace.

"Anyway, Chris," he finally said behind a slowly twisting web of blue smoke, "this Schliemann group spends its time writing nasty letters to us and to the press-'The Plundered Past is an insult to the German people, nothing but American propaganda'-that kind of thing. They don't get any support, thank God."

"I have to disagree," Flittner said. "There are a lot of people who see this show as nothing more than self-serving propaganda. Which we all know it is, even if we don't have the guts to admit it."

Robey dug peacefully at his pipe with a gimmicky tool while his mind drifted elsewhere. Anne listened impassively. Gadney rolled up his eyes again and made a put-upon face. I kept waiting for him to say, "Oh… really!" but he restrained himself. All three, it was clear, had heard Flittner on this subject before. Only Harry was attentive and interested, his forefinger curled in his beard.

Seeking a fresh audience, Flittner swung his long, somber face back and forth from Harry to me as he spoke. "Even in the Bundestag-a couple of weeks ago Katzenhaven got up and demanded to know how much this show is costing the German government."

He was not a careful shaver, I noticed; stubble glinted like shards of mica here and there along his jawline. A spattering of ash was on his jacket, and while he spoke he dropped some more from the cigarette in his hand.

"But it isn't costing them anything, Earl," Anne said. "You know that"

"I know, of course I know." Impatiently, he flicked more ash on himself. "I'm using it as an illustration. The-oh, the hell with it." He slumped back in his chair.

"Listen, let me say something at this point," Harry said. We've asked the Polizei to look into this Schliemann gang-"

"They're not a gang" Flittner interrupted. "They're a political foundation. Jesus Christ."

"Excuse me, this Schliemann Foundation. Except that they're not a bona-fide foundation. They're not on record, they don't have an address, they don't sign their letters with their real names. For all anybody knows, they could be one old Nazi crank sitting home alone grinding out crackpot letters." He winced as Flittner reared up to protest, but stuck to his guns. "Excuse me, Dr. Flittner, but that's the way they look to me. They've got no support, even from the lunatic fringe."

"Now look here, Major," Flittner said angrily, "it seems to me you're being damned free with your-"

"What I think Harry's saying, Earl," Robey cut in smoothly, "is that they wouldn't have the expertise to get into the storage room the way those two men did."

"Right," Harry said amiably, "that's all I'm saying. Or the money to buy somebody else's expertise." He smiled winningly at Flittner, who subsided, detonating another gush of smoke from his facial orifices.

An airman entered with a message. Robey read it and stood up. "Telephone," he said. "Why don't you take over, Harry?"

"You bet, Colonel. Well, I think we better get on to talking about what we do to prevent a repeat of what happened. Now, Captain Romero of my staff is an expert in this stuff, and he's been working with Captain Greene here on a new… what's he call it, Anne?"

"An intrusion-detection system."

"Right, an intrusion-detection system. Now, these things are pretty complicated, but I want to try to explain, because it means procedures are going to be a little different starting in a few days."

"Uh, Harry?" Robey had come back as far as the doorway. "Harry, I think you better sit in on this call. Anne, you can fill them in on the security system, can't you?"

"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."