Aaron Elkins: A Deceptive Clarity

"Fine."

'Traben? The workmen?"

"Everybody's all right. You're the only one who got zapped. The painting's OK, too."

"Nobody else even got knocked down?"

Harry shrugged. "Explosions are funny. I guess you were standing in the wrong place. If you'd moved your ass when I told you to-"

"Believe me, next time I will."

"Major," the soldier said, looking over Harry's shoulder, "that must be the bomb squad."

Harry turned around. "Yeah."

"Already?" I said. "How long was I out?"

"Five minutes, a little more." He straightened up. "If I were you, I'd just sit there for a while. Need anything?"

I shook my head. While he went to meet the German unit, I leaned back against the wall, feeling my pulse hammer at about twice its normal rate, and waiting for my mind to reassemble itself.

Ten minutes later I was on my feet, waiting impatiently for Harry and Kapitan Knopp, the dour leader of the bomb squad, to conclude their discussion just inside the now-shattered glass doors. I realized that I was very, very lucky to be alive. The bomb had gone off at about 12:40, at which time I should have been sitting directly over it, halfway to Rhein-Main. I suppose I should have been weak-kneed with relief, but I wasn't; I was tense with excitement.

I grabbed Harry's arm as Knopp turned to snap orders at his men. "It's the El Greco," I whispered. "It's got to be the El Greco."

"What?" He was understandably distracted.

"The forgery, the forgery," I babbled. "Don't you see? Peter said he found it a week ago-I mean a week before he was killed. Well, he was here a week before he was killed, trying to work out the insurance." I shook my head wonderingly. "I just automatically assumed it was one of the ones in Berlin. I forgot all about this one. It was as if I had blinders on."

"Yeah, maybe."

"It's staring us right in the face. They tried to blow it up before we found out."

"That's one explanation."

"What other explanation could there be? That's why," I said, not above a little self-justification, "I haven't been able to identify a forgery in Berlin. It wasn't there. I've been wasting my time."

"Could be," he said, his eyes on the green-uniformed Germans and the American soldiers in mottled field dress now beginning to sift through the wreckage of the truck and to pick up unrecognizable fragments scattered throughout the courtyard.

The wooden crate was standing near the wall. On a bench next to it Herr Traben sat, pale and trembling, staring into space, the red spots on his cheeks as vivid as lipstick. I put my hand on the heavy wooden crate. "Harry, do you have any objection to my opening this up and having a look?"

"I do!" said Kapitan Knopp, materializing from somewhere and speaking fluent English. "I goddamned well do!"

Harry made a little motion assuring him it wouldn't be touched, and waved him off. "Me too," he said to me.

"But why-"

"Because I want to have a look at it first."

"But-"

"Look, Chris, for all we know the crate itself could be booby-trapped." On its own, my hand jumped quickly off it. "I think that's what Knopp's worried about. Me, my mind runs more to drugs."

"Drugs!" I said, startled. "Where the hell did that come from? Why should there be drugs?"

He sighed. "I guess it didn't sink in yet, what would have happened if that bomb had gone off the way it was supposed to." He turned me gently toward the glass doors opening into the courtyard. "Look at the truck."

I looked, through a border of glass shards hanging from the doorframe. Not only at the grotesquely twisted ruin of the chassis, tipped awkwardly onto its wheel-less rear corner, but at the truck-size cavity gouged out beneath it, and the blackened halo scorched onto the concrete all around. For the first time I noticed that the two heavy back doors really had been blown off and now lay, caved in but still locked together, some ten feet away, like a monstrous tortoise shell on its back. There were black metallic chunks and vicious splinters all over the courtyard. Now my knees did go just a littie soft.

"There were supposed to be two guards in the back," he said. "And you. Maybe the driver would have made it, but there would have been three dead guys for sure, in a whole lot of nasty pieces. You're lucky you're alive."

"Thanks to you; never mind the luck."

"You're welcome. What I'm getting at is that blowing up trucks-and throwing people out of sleazy hotel rooms in Frankfurt, for that matter… Is that the kind of thing you expect from art forgers?" He answered himself with a shake of the head. "Give me a break. They don't go in for that stuff. Besides, it's not worth the risk or the expense. But dope-you're talking big bucks, and you're talking the lousiest, most vicious creeps in the world."

He was undoubtedly right about drug criminals, but he was off-base about art crimes. Art involved a lot of money too, and the vicious creeps had found out about it. Art crimes were no longer the undisputed province of the well-bred gentleman crook.

"But why would anyone want to hide drugs on a famous painting going from a major museum to a big U.S. Army show? It's not the most inconspicuous place in the world."

"I'm only guessing, but the show's going from here to Holland, and then to England, right? Can you figure a better way to smuggle drugs from one country to another? How keen do you think customs inspectors are going to be on fooling around with sealed-up, irreplaceable paintings shipped by DOD and guarded by OSI?"

"All right," I admitted, "that could be. So why blow it up?"

"A lot of reasons. Maybe they thought we were onto them, and they needed to destroy it. Maybe it was one gang getting even with another… Who knows? But this whole thing revolves around dope. I can feel it in my bones."

I didn't. "All the same, there's a forgery somewhere in The Plundered Past, and I'm willing to bet this is it. So if it's all right with you, I'll stick around while you go over it. There's a lot I can do while you're looking for your drugs."

"Chris, I'm usually a patient guy, wouldn't you say? Amiable, easygoing?"

"I'd say so. Usually."

"Well, I am. But I've got a lot to do here, and your company-delightful as it is-is starting to bug me. No offense? Good. So Abrams here is, going to drive you to Rhein-Main and get you checked out at the hospital-"

"I don't need a hospital."

"And then he's going to check you into a room in the BOQ, and tomorrow morning we'll all fly back to Berlin with the painting, and you can look at it when we get there."

'Tomorrow's the reception," I protested, knowing it was a lost cause.

"You'll have time before the reception," Harry said, the delicate way he set his teeth together indicating that he was done being amiable and easygoing. "You don't mind waiting until then, do you?"

I did, but what was there for me to say?

We flew back to Berlin in the cavernous, windowless belly of a C-130 cargo plane, seated on flimsy seats mounted backward on steel rails. Harry was grumpy. He had found no drugs, even with the assistance of Wolf, Frankfurt's famous dope-sniffing beagle. And Knopp had found no explosives. No terrorist organization had claimed responsibility.

No one knew what was going on.

"What about insurance?" I asked helpfully. "It was insured for two million dollars."

Harry shook his head glumly. "Who'd wind up with the money? Bolzano. And he doesn't need it; I checked that out a long time ago."

"All right, then consider this: If that thing is a forgery, then someone still has the original, and-"

"Chris, I've got theories coming out of my ears. Why don't you find out first if it is a fake, and then we'll talk." He tilted his head upward and scratched vigorously under his bearded chin. The activity seemed to refresh him. "You know what I keep wondering?" he asked brightly. "I keep wondering if the painting was just incidental. Maybe there was something else they were trying to explode into little pieces."