Aaron Elkins: A Deceptive Clarity

There was still half an hour before the meeting, and I didn't see why I couldn't use it for a few turns around the plaza. I drained the coffee, took my second codeine dose of the day, and went downstairs.

Ten minutes in the cold was all it took to drive home the fact that I still had some mending to do. In less time than that, I was glad to take advantage of one of the benches to sit down and turn my face up into the pale sunlight, like the convalescent I was. Columbia House was directly in front of me, with the rest of the huge Tempelhof complex angling away from it, seemingly into infinity. I'd learned something about Tempelhof by now, and I knew it was one of the most extraordinary structures on earth, the entire vast warren all being under one roof and therefore making up the third-largest building in the world. (The first is the Pentagon; what the second is I don't know, but if I find out, I'll pass it along.)

It was built by Hitler in the early, heady days of the Thousand-Year Reich to look from the air like a colossal, stylized German eagle: noble head, outspread wings half a mile wide, cruel talons, and all. Columbia House-all four sizable, curving stories of it-constituted the eagle's right foot. Which was why it curved.

It had been a good idea of Robey's to choose it as the site of the exhibition's German showing. Berliners, ordinarily not sentimental folk, had never forgotten how the transports of the 1948-49 airlift, loaded with food and coal for them, had roared in to land on the adjacent strip every ten minutes through a vicious winter, and the place was still special to them.

The codeine had taken full hold by now, so that I was able to forget about the pain for a few minutes at a time. Sitting there in the thin, cold Berlin sunshine, in fact, I was feeling better than I had in many months. Bev, Rita Dooling, and the gloomy, silent house off Divisadero were all a long way off, on a different planet, and what was going on here was a lot more exciting than budget reallocations and management-by-objectives reviews. And at the cost of a "small kink" in my nose, I had acquired a story that would carry me through many a cocktail party to come.

This surge of well-being lasted until I walked under the blue canopy and up to the glass doors of Columbia House. The guard-a new one-sat at the entry desk coldly watching me.

"ID," he said.

With a rising sense of deja vu, I removed the yellow card from my wallet and held it out. He wouldn't even take it, but only looked at it contemptuously and shook his head.

"Uh-uh. No banana."

"But I just walked out of here a few minutes ago-right by you. All I did was take a walk around the plaza."

"Look, mac, I don't give a shit about people going out; I watch 'em coming in. Now, you got a real ID, or just this cockamamy thing?"

Apparently I had not caught him on one of his better days. For that matter, I was not feeling overly civil myself. This ID business was wearing thin. Who was this callow twenty-year-old to deny me entrance when I had legitimate business here? Had he just spent two miserable days in the hospital? Had he broken his nose in the service of his country? Why was I being put through these continuing expressions of distrust?

"This card," I said with the quiet, telling dignity of a Peter van Cortlandt, "this goddamn card has gotten me into this goddamn building three goddamn times-"

"Not by me-" He straightened up suddenly, staring over my shoulder, and saluted stiffly.

"Sir!"

Two men carrying attache cases approached the desk from the lobby. One of them, a civilian, looked familiar, but it wasn't until he pursed his lips in a prim but amicable little smile that I recognized him: the dry, tweedy little man whose greeting in the corridor a couple of days before had been "Who is this… person?"

Today he was more friendly. "Good morning, Dr. Norgren. I'm very happy to see you up and about."

The other man was in an army uniform with silver eagles on the shoulders; a colonel. "So you're Norgren," he said with a slow smile.

The guard was still holding his rigid salute. "All he's got is a USAREUR privileges card, sir, and we were told-"

The colonel off-handedly returned the guard's salute. "Oh, he's OK, Newsome, you can trust me on that." He held a hand out to me. "I'm Robey. Happy to know you."

Colonel Mark Robey, the man in charge of The Plundered Past, was a distinct surprise. Gifted as I am with a remarkable ability to stereotype at the drop of a hat, I had conjured up someone lean and silver-templed, with something of the Lincolnesque about him: craggy, taciturn, and clothed with authority-your average army colonel, in other words, with maybe a little bit of art curator thrown in. But the hand that was thrust out to me belonged to a drowsy, soft-voiced man, comfortably overweight, with a pleasant, easygoing face, a dreamy gaze, and nothing at all of the flinty-eyed warrior about him.

"How are you feeling?" he asked. "Pretty much recovered?"

There is a distinctive and endearing V-shaped smile that can be found on Archaic Greek and Etruscan figures- gentle, lethargic, and (in a nice way) not quite all there. Art people refer to it as the Archaic smile. Mark Robey had the first live Archaic smile I'd ever seen.

"Pretty much, thanks, Colonel."

"Mark," he said. "Call me Mark, Chris. Let's see, I think you've already met Edgar Gadney, although from what he told me I'm not sure you'd remember. He's responsible for logistics and day-to-day administration. We'd be lost without him."

Gadney nodded briefly. He was holding my ID card between thumb and forefinger, like a fussy matron sipping tea in a drawing-room comedy. Around his neck was a thin, silvery lanyard attached to a pair of glasses through which he was examining the card with meticulous care. Mild though he appeared, he was unmistakably vexed. He waggled the offending card and frowned.

'This is very bad, very bad. It will have to go." He was as solemn as a surgeon telling me my original-equipment heart would need to be replaced with a Jarvik. "Form one seventy-four is not by any stretch of the imagination an appropriate card. You should have one-dash-ten-eighteen."

"Sorry." I spread my hands apologetically.

"Lack of proper identification," he said severely, "can lead to no end-"

Robey, whose attention had wandered off somewhere, now rejoined us. "I think Chris gets the message," he said pleasantly. "Do you suppose you could fix him up with a one-dash-whatchamcallit?"

Gadney compressed his lips to consider the wide-ranging implications of this question. "Well, I don't see why not."

"Thanks, Mr. Gadney," I said, "I'll appreciate that. So will the guards."

Gadney took his eyes from the card and lifted them to mine. "Egad," he said.

I waited, but only silence followed. "Pardon?"

"Call me Egad," he said improbably. He removed the glasses and let them hang from his neck, continuing to regard me somewhat uncertainly. "You're rather young to be a curator, aren't you?"

People say that to me a lot. I'm not that young, really; thirty-four isn't an unheard-of age for the job. What surprises them, I think, is that I just don't have a very curatorial look. Art curators, they think-and they're generally right-look and sound like Peter van Cortlandt or Anthony Whitehead: urbane, suave, aristocratic. Many are second- or third-generation collectors or curators. I guess I look like what I am, which is a second-generation hodge-podge of Swedish, German, Russian, and Irish. My father was a machinist with a night-school diploma, fingertips that had black grease permanently ground into the whorls, and an objet-d'art collection consisting of eighteen Indian-head pennies and a dozen dubious fossils from a 1949 trip to Arizona. I got my degrees at San Jose State (night classes, like Dad) and Berkeley, not at Yale (as Peter did) or Harvard (Tony), or even Stanford.