The Vanished

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.

I took a room on the top floor, and from the window I could look out at the narrow gray waters of the Main River, the tree-studded opposite bank, the green and glistening land spreading out to the south. I spent a few minutes unpacking, and then I went downstairs and asked the desk man-who spoke excellent English-to arrange a transatlantic call to San Francisco for five that evening; that would make it about 8:00 a.m. California time and I would not be frightening Elaine Kavanaugh with a middle-of-the-night call.

This being Sunday, it was a certainty that the Galerie der Expressionisten would be closed-so I decided to look up Jock MacVeagh at Larson Barracks. I asked directions, and the desk man produced a map and pointed out the way.

The base was located to the northwest of the town, and you got to it via the Steigweg, on the other side of the rail tracks. It was a sprawling compound of weathered buildings, with a stoic gatepost sentry at the main entrance. I stated my name and the nature of my business, and it turned out that Jock MacVeagh had left word at the gate that I was to see him in his quarters, this being an off-duty day. The sentry gave me directions, and I found the place easily enough, well toward the rear perimeter of the compound.

It was a large building, without much adornment, divided into private residence facilities for the non-commissioned officers. I located MacVeagh’s quarters and rapped on the door, and a moment later it swung wide.

He was a big, red-faced Scotsman with huge hands and a wedge-shaped torso and eyes as black as a peat bog at midnight. Whiskey-broken veins etched the skin on either side of a somewhat battered nose, and he had the kind of wide mouth that would be quick to smile, quick to set in angry belligerence. His jaw was like a clefted granite bluff. But he was aging, too; you could see it in the lines and tributaries of his face, the roundness of his belly, the receding hairline, the faint liver spots among the dark black hairs on the backs of his hands.

I introduced myself, and the mention of my name brought a flashing grin like a neon sign coming on. He had an iron grip, but he did not try to prove anything with it. ‘I’ve been expecting you,’ he said. ‘I figured you’d be in last night.’

‘Well, I made Frankfurt,’ I told him, ‘but it was late and I was too tired to drive down.’

‘No sweat. Come on, I’ll pop you a beer.’

We went inside and his quarters were small and neat and orderly, the bed made according to regulations and his clothes picked up and hung away. He had some German-manufactured stereo equipment set up on one side of the room, and a lot of color and black-and-white photographs of women- interspersed with German beer and liquor signs-on the walls. He got a couple of bottles of Löwenbräu out of a small cooler and opened them and gave me one. We sat across from each other at a small dining table.

MacVeagh said, ‘I had this little Fräulein set up in Stuttgart for the weekend, but when I got your wire about Roy having disappeared, I said to hell with it. A buddy’s more important than a piece of tail any day, and besides that, she’ll be around next weekend; they always are.’

I had some of the Löwenbräu, and it was cold and rich and very good; the Germans brew the best beer in the world. I watched MacVeagh over the tilted bottle, and I thought: He’s one of the good-time boys, too, like Hendryx and Rosmond and Gilmartin- one of the handsome ones, the popular ones, the ones with the right word, the right phrase, the right line; the lovers, the cocksmen, with the world their bedroom and the bed seldom empty and seldom silent. But now they’re fast approaching middle age, and some of their appeal is fading, and some of their virility perhaps, and they can see the end now; they can see the wrinkles and the arthritis and the dentures and the shriveled glands; and they can see, too, the scornful looks and hear the mocking laughter of the daughters of the girls who once flocked to them. That glimpse of the future terrifies them, haunts them, gnaws at them, becomes almost an obsession, and they need constant reassurance of their prowess, constant reaffirmation of their attractiveness- running scared, telling more lies, bragging more and exaggerating more, laughing louder and longer and increasingly more hollowly. And each time they go searching for a woman, they’re filled with the same terrible dread: Can I still attract the young ones, the pretty ones? And when they find that they can, if they can, the attendant dread is always there and always the same as well: Suppose, this time, I can’t get it up; suppose, this time, I can’t perform?

Every man around my age has harbored some fears of failing virility, and I was no exception; but I had never been a cocksman, never wanted to be one, and when I saw guys like MacVeagh and the rest, I was thankful for that. When you took sex away from them, you took away their main purpose-and without purpose, no matter what form it takes, what more can you do except simply to vegetate? That was one particularly frightening hell I did not think I would have to face.

I set the sweat-beaded bottle down on the table. ‘The pickings must be pretty good over here,’ I said, because that was what MacVeagh wanted to hear.

He grinned, and his black eyes sparkled. ‘The best,’ he said, nodding emphatically. ‘Listen, if you’re interested, I can fix you up with something hot and willing right here in Kitzingen. Guaranteed, baby-the original German Valkyrie.’

‘Well, if I can find the time.’

‘Yeah,’ MacVeagh said, and his expression sobered. ‘Roy. Why don’t you fill me in on the details? All I know is what you said in your wire.’

I filled him in on the details, leaving out the threatening telephone calls to Elaine and me and skipping lightly over the theft of the portrait. He listened attentively, a frown digging horizontal trenches in the red-hued skin above his eyebrows.

‘I don’t much like the sound of it,’ he said. ‘Roy was gone over the Kavanaugh chick, and if he hasn’t contacted her in three weeks, something must have happened to him. You really figure there’s some kind of connection between Kitzingen and him disappearing in Oregon?’

‘That’s why I’m here-to find out.’

‘I don’t get this portrait you told me about. Hell, Roy isn’t the kind of guy to pose for a goddamn picture.’

‘He never mentioned it, then?’

‘Christ, no. We’d have kidded him into the next century.’

‘Do you have any idea who might have drawn it?’

‘Not hardly.’

‘What about this gallery here in Kitzingen?’

‘What was the name of it again?’

‘Galerie der Expressionisten.’

‘I didn’t even know it existed.’

I got out my cigarettes and offered MacVeagh one, and we sat smoking and drinking from the bottles of Löwenbräu. You could hear the gentle skittering of the rain on the building roof, and watch it flowing in streaked silver patterns down the panes of the window nearby, like tears on the smooth shining face of a child.

I said, ‘How did Sands get along with his buddies? Rosmond and Hendryx and Gilmartin, especially.’

‘Fine. Hell, everybody likes Roy.’

‘No trouble with any of them while they were here?’

‘No. Why-what are you getting at?’

‘Nothing in particular,’ I said. ‘Do you know an Army major named Jackson, Nick Jackson?’

‘Name’s not familiar. Why?’

‘Sands had some trouble with him once. I thought he might have mentioned the name in some context or other.’

‘Not to me.’ MacVeagh frowned. ‘What kind of trouble?’

‘It was over a girl,’ I said, and watched the frown change to a knowing grin. I took the conversation in another direction. ‘Did Sands spend a lot of time in Kitzingen?’

‘As much as the rest of us.’

‘Any special place?’

‘Not really,’ MacVeagh said, and began chuckling.

‘Something funny?’

‘Kind of, yeah. I just happened to think about the Dodge City Bar.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A Kneipe. A dive on the Am Pfuhl, in what passes for whoretown hereabouts.’

‘Sands used to frequent this place?’

‘Hell, no. But he lived there for three days.’

‘I don’t get the point.’

‘There isn’t one, really. Roy went on this three-day bender back in October-the end of the month, I think it was. And he picked the Dodge City Bar to do his drinking in, for some reason. Man, what a hole; he couldn’t have found a worse place if he’d tried.’

‘I was under the impression that Sands is a low-key drinker, that he leaves the booze pretty much alone.’

‘That’s right, he does. But he was really juiced this one weekend. I’ve never seen a guy-any guy-that juiced before or since. He was damn near pickled in alcohol. Funny as hell.’ He laughed. ‘Ed Botticelli and me had to go into town to bring him before the C.O. raised a flap. He was supposed to be back on duty that Sunday night, but when he didn’t show by next morning, Ed and me requisitioned a jeep and went looking for him. Took us a couple of hours to find him; who the hell would have figured the Dodge City?’

‘Why did he go on this bender?’

‘Who knows? I tried to talk to him about it once, a couple of days afterward, and he went cold and distant on me. So I dropped it. I guess he just got uptight about something and decided to tie one on.’

‘Did he usually drink heavily when he was uptight?’

‘No. Like you said, he was pretty much of a low-key boozer.’

‘Did he say anything at all to you while he was still drunk?’ I asked. ‘Like when you first found him, or when you brought him back here?’

‘Seems to me he kept repeating the word why, like he was asking a question. “Why? Why? Why?”-like that.’

‘That’s all?’

‘That’s the only thing I remember. Listen, why all the interest in a simple bender?’

‘Because it seems out of character.’

‘Hell, everybody does something out of character a time or two in their lives.’

‘Sure,’ I said, ‘but everybody doesn’t disappear without apparent reason. Do you have any idea where Sands had been before he went to this Dodge City Bar?’

MacVeagh shrugged. ‘He was there the whole weekend, like I told you; at least that’s what the barkeeper told Ed and me. He’d come staggering in early Saturday night, bought a bottle, and sat off in a corner drinking out of it until he passed out. There are some rooms in the back of the place, over an alley, and the barkeeper and a couple of corporals who were in there got Roy up in one of them to let him sleep it off. The next morning he came down and paid for the room and bought another bottle and started in all over again. It got to be a goddamn ritual until Ed and me came in on Monday-and it’s a good thing we did, too, because Roy was almost out of money and they would have dumped him flat in the alley the next time around. It’s a miracle he wasn’t rolled half a dozen times as it was.’

‘Did Sands say anything to the barkeeper, or to anyone else?’

‘We didn’t stick around to ask questions,’ MacVeagh said. ‘The main thing on our minds was getting Roy out of there and sobered up and back here.’

‘He go on any other benders after that one?’

‘No. He stuck pretty close to base until he left for the States last month.’

‘Anybody else he might have confided in?’

‘He’s pretty close-mouthed. If he didn’t tell me, it isn’t likely he told any of the other guys.’

I drained the last of my beer. ‘Do you happen to remember the exact date this drinking bout took place?’

‘Not offhand. Wait a minute.’ MacVeagh got up and went to where a Playboy calendar hung on one of the walls; it was last year’s, open on the month of December. He flipped back through it, and then said, ‘It was the last weekend in October-yeah, Saturday, the thirtieth, through Monday, November one.’

I made a mental note of the dates. ‘How do I find the Dodge City Bar?’

‘You planning on going there?’

‘I thought I might do that.’

‘Well, I guess you know what you’re doing.’

‘There’s not much else I can do until tomorrow,’ I said. ‘There may not be anything in this bender, but it can’t hurt to look into it a little.’

‘If you say so,’ MacVeagh said. ‘How’s your German?’

‘Rusty, but I think I can get by.’

‘Mine’s pretty good. Why don’t I come with you tonight? Might be a good idea anyway, since you don’t know whoretown and you don’t know the Kneipen. I haven’t got anything else to do, now.’

‘Thanks, I’d appreciate it,’ I told him. ‘I’m strictly a backwoods boy over here.’

‘I know a place where you can get a pretty good schnitzel,’ MacVeagh said. ‘Suppose we have dinner and a couple of beers, and then get around to the Dodge City before it jams up?’

‘Fine by me.’

‘You got a hotel yet?’

‘The Bayerischer Hof.’

‘Meet you there at six, in the bar.’

‘Good enough.’

The rain had slackened considerably, I saw as I went out to the Volkswagen; pale blue lines patterned the gray overcast above, like incisions carefully made by a surgeon. There was very little wind. I drove directly back to the Bayerischer Hof, ordered a hot brandy sent up to my room, and drank it lying propped up on the bed, thinking alternately of Elaine Kavanaugh and Cheryl and the inexplicable disappearance of Roy Sands.

Five o’clock came and my call to San Francisco went through. Elaine was fine, bearing up admirably; she had not left her room at the Argonaut Hotel, and she had not been bothered by visitors or phone calls. Her voice seemed faintly listless, but I put that down to the prolonged inactivity, the constant waiting; apathy is just one of the mind’s defense mechanisms, and a far better one than screaming agitation. It made me feel better to know that she was unharmed and firmly anchored.

I told her about my talk with MacVeagh and asked her if Sands had ever mentioned the three-day bender; she said that he hadn’t, and seemed surprised that he had done a thing like that. He just didn’t care for liquor that much, she said, and she could offer no explanation for it. I said that I would check it further, and get down to the Galerie der Expressionisten first thing in the morning, and that I would call her again tomorrow night whether or not I had anything definite to report.

I cut the call short then, to alleviate expenses as much as possible, and went in to shave for my visit to Kitzingen’s whoretown.