Aaron Elkins - Fellowship Of Fear

The drive from Catania had been the worst. Sicilian road signs were somewhat cursory at best, and the base itself was not on local maps. What should have been a thirty-fiveminute trip had taken two hours, made all the more unpleasant by the animated, wild-driving young males who had nearly forced him off the road half a dozen times. Three drivers had shouted curses at him and made obscene gestures when he took what seemed to him to be reasonable safety precautions. Although their intent was unmistakable, all the words and most of the gestures were unfamiliar. Once, when he had stopped at a light that was just turning red, the driver following a few inches behind him was forced to lean hard on his brakes and had directed the familiar hand-to-forearm jerk at him. Gideon had noted with an anthropologist’s interest the intercultural appeal of this signal, and had tried a middle-finger thrust in return. He had been gratified to learn that it, too, was understood in Sicily.

Once the seminar began, however, Gideon had little time for observations of Sicilian culture. He taught for three hours a day, spent six hours in the library, and caught up on his sleep in his room at the BOQ the rest of the time.

Only once did he leave the base, and then he drove to Aci Trezza for a solitary dinner at the Vera Napoli, a well-known but plain trattoria at the seashore. At one point during the meal, he happened to look up from his plate of linguine con vongole and caught two men at another table off to the side staring intently at him. One, he was sure, had been in the act of making a small gesture in his direction, as if he had been calling his companions attention to Gideon. Now he pretended that he had been reaching toward a bowl of fruit on the table, removed an apple, and bit into it with a loud snap. Then he let his glance move over Gideon once more, vacantly this time, as if unaware of him, and resumed talking to his companion.

There was something about them Gideon didn’t like, even about the way the man had bitten into the apple- with a kind of hardness, a casual brutality. It made him think of the men in the hotel in Heidelberg. He felt a prickle at the back of his neck. Was he in for trouble here, too? This time, if he could help it, he’d be ready. Gideon looked at them from time to time, but they continued to be absorbed in their own conversation, and left before he did.

Aside from this, the day passed uneventfully.

Somebody was in his room.

The quarter-inch segment of paper clip on the worn hallway carpet caught his eye the moment he reached the top of the stairs. He froze with one foot raised and his hand on the bannister, then slowly lowered his foot and placed his lecture notes on the top tread.

Since coming to the BOQ, he’d stuck a piece of paper clip or match stick or cardboard between the door and jamb every time he’d left his room. For three days it had been in its hidden place every time he’d returned. Now it glinted at him like a tiny, malignant exclamation point on the threshold of his room.

He had known that one day he would find them in his room again, but somehow his plans had never solidified beyond planting the paper clip. The most sensible course, obviously, would be to go quietly down to the registration desk and ask the sailor on duty to call the shore patrol. Instead, with his scalp prickling, he got down on his hands and knees and worked his way slowly toward the room. When he reached the wall, he put his ear carefully against it.

There was no sound from within. He could hear the blood pounding in his ears, and a few doors down, two men were laughing quietly. From a television set downstairs, he could hear a parrot squawking, "Ring around the collar!" Nothing else.

Possibly, whoever had been there was gone; Gideon had been in class for three hours. Still, he kept his body low and behind the meager protection of the partition as he slowly turned the handle. The spring latch slid smoothly out with a soft click; the door was unlocked.

Gideon took a deep breath and exhaled. Then he inhaled once more, stopped his breath, and flung the door sharply open, throwing himself full-length onto the hall carpet. The flimsy door banged noisily against the metal bed frame, and Gideon stiffened himself to lunge for the legs of anyone who rushed out.

No one rushed out; the bed frame vibrated, and the door slowly swung a third of the way closed again. One part of Gideon continued to tense itself; another, convinced by now that the intruder had gone, was wondering what to say should anyone emerge from another room to find him sprawled there.

He stood up and looked directly into the room. The light in the hallway threw enough illumination to show him that no one was crouching inside. He walked in and turned on the light. No one was under the bed. No one was in the corner alcove that served as a closet. He checked the door to the bathroom he shared with the occupant of the next room. It was still bolted from his side. He opened it and looked in. It was empty.

He went back to the hall and got his lecture notes, then returned to the room and closed the door. Nothing had been moved, but he could sense that someone had been there. He spent a long time going over the room and trying to determine what had been taken. The intruder, he assumed, must have gotten what he came for, or he would have been waiting for Gideon, as had been the case in Heidelberg.

When Gideon was unable to locate anything missing, he sat down and wrote a list of all the possessions he could remember, down to an underwear count. Then he went through the room again, checking off each item on the list. In the end, he came down to only one thing that wasn’t in its place: a plastic bag containing his clean socks.

The idea was so ludicrous that Gideon wouldn’t accept it at first. He knew that his memory for everyday things was poor. Nora had often laughed with him about his being an absentminded professor, though he always protested that his mind wasn’t absent but elsewhere, pondering weightier things. Once they had searched for fifteen minutes for a watch that was on his wrist, another time for a wallet that was already in his pocket. But the socks were not to be found, though he went so far as to go down to the car to search for them. When he came back up and stood looking stupidly at the alcove shelf for the fifth time, he suddenly remembered positively how he’d stood right there that morning and taken a green pair of socks from the bag, then changed his mind and taken a brown pair, and finally tossed the bag back on the shelf.

There wasn’t any doubt about it. Someone had waited until he went to class that evening, furtively let himself into his room, searched it-and made off with two pairs of blue socks and one of green. Plus the plastic Safeway produce bag that held them.

The man didn’t change his position. He remained slouched in the hard plastic chair, his hollow chest depressed and his long, skinny legs crossed at the knees and then entwined again at the ankles, the way women could sit-or men with long, skinny legs. His trousers, rucked up by the convolutions of his legs, revealed unattractive lengths of hairless white calf above beige anklets. His eyebrows were the only things that moved. They went up. His eyes remained on the sports page in front of him.

"They took what? " he asked, his voice barely audible above the wooshes and clanks of the washing machines.

"I know," Gideon said, "it’s ridiculous. I feel stupid saying it, but that is what they took."

It was so absurd that he had almost decided not to bother NSD with it. At eight o’clock that morning, however, he had gone to the Education Office to call USOC- the time was the same in Sicily and Heidelberg-and leave a message about an incomplete roster. Then, feeling both exhilarated and silly, he had had a big breakfast of corned beef hash and eggs at the Officers’ Club.