Aaron Elkins - Fellowship Of Fear

By the time he had returned to the BOQ, there was an old, much-used transmittal envelope waiting for him at the desk. The last entry on it before "Oliver, BOQ" was "Mailroom." He had taken it up to his room in some excitement and had been a little disappointed to find it wasn’t sealed, but was simply closed by means of a string wrapped around two dog-eared cardboard discs.

Inside had been a white sheet of letter paper with a navy letterhead, the kind one could buy in the PX for personal correspondence. Typed neatly in the center of the page had been "Laundromat, 9:30 a.m. Re rosters."

He had arrived at exactly 9:30 with a small load of shirts and underwear for "cover," put them into a washing machine, and sat down to wait, choosing a part of the laundromat that was uncrowded. A few minutes later, the gaunt man with the long-nosed, deeply lined cowboy’s face had come in, also with a little bundle of wash. When he had set the washing machine going, he sat down near Gideon, lit a cigarette, picked up an old copy of Stars and Stripes, and offered a few pages of it to Gideon. Then, after a while, he had spoken without looking up from the paper, the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.

"Roster trouble?"

He had not said any more until Gideon had come to the socks. Now he said slowly, "I don’t know whether you’re just stupid or you’re trying to be funny, but let me tell you something. You’re fooling around with the big leagues. Don’t play games with us."

"Let me tell you something," said Gideon, his ready temper ignited.

"Voice down," the man said. He casually turned a page.

Gideon whispered. "I don’t know what’s going on-"

"Don’t whisper. Just talk quietly."

Gideon opened and then closed his mouth. He didn’t really have any reason to be annoyed with this man. "Look, I was asked to tell you people about anything unusual. Getting your socks stolen may be an everyday thing for you, but it’s pretty unusual for me. So I told you. Now, is that it?"

"Are you positive they didn’t take anything else? Did they maybe plant anything? A bug?"

"Why would they do that?" Actually, the thought had occurred to him earlier in the morning, and he had searched for one. Not knowing what one looked like made it difficult, but he had assumed it would be a button-sized gadget stuck on the bottom of a bureau drawer, or under a window sill, or behind a cabinet. He hadn’t found anything.

"You never know," the man said. "Feel around for one under things when you go back."

"I already did. Nothing."

The man uncoiled his knotted legs, got his laundry- two white towels with gray stenciled letters on them-and came back to Gideon. "I like to air-dry these. Makes them smell nicer. I think your laundry’s done. Have a nice day." He wished another nice day to a fat, sleepy woman near the door and walked out with a loose-legged gait that Gideon had once heard called a shit-kicker’s walk.

The seminar had gone well. On Friday evening Mary Fabriano, one of the students, gave an end-of-class cocktail party at her apartment in Catania. Gideon was forced to accept, inasmuch as he was more or less the guest of honor. As it was, he had a good time. Mary, a young nurse with wildly provocative buttocks, went out of her way to make it clear that she found him attractive and that she was unengaged for the rest of the night. He flirted with her for a while, enjoying himself. As usual, however, when it came down to brass tacks he retreated, as he had been doing since Nora’s death.

He left the party at eleven o’clock, depressed and angry with himself and the world. He had wanted to go to bed with Mary, all right. Of course he had. Why shouldn’t he? He needed sex like anybody else. He didn’t just need it; he liked it-he liked it a lot. At least he thought he did. It had been so damn long, maybe he was forgetting.

When he turned off the highway onto the Dump Road, he was deep in his thoughts. He barely noticed the dark young man watching him so intently from the passenger seat of the car slowly going the other way. Probably he wouldn’t have noticed him in any case. His few days of Sicilian driving had inured him to the scrutiny that occupants of passing cars accorded each other. What should have caught his attention, however, was the peculiar fact that anyone at all was emerging from the Dump Road after midnight. The Dump Road-no one seemed to know its real name, but the nickname was apt-was a narrow, back-country route between Sigonella and the Catania highway, used mainly as a route to work by base employees.

The night was clear, the road deserted and straight. Gideon plunged ahead at Sicilian speed, sunk in gloom. He could have been back at that cocktail party right now, damn it, going through all the delicious rigamarole of the Western pre-mating ritual. Instead, he was zooming down this black, godforsaken road, speeding toward another empty night.

He really had to have a heart-to-heart talk with himself one of these days. It wasn’t that he was trying to be faithful to Nora. That would be morbid, and she wouldn’t have wanted it anyway. It was just that he needed something- something he couldn’t identify-that he hadn’t found in anyone since Nora.

There was no shortage of sexy, available women around-that certainly wasn’t the problem-but they wanted either one-night quickies or Meaningful Relationships. For him, the one would have been tawdry, the other…well, he just wasn’t ready. It was funny, really. In his Social Institutions seminar, he separated them neatly into two concepts: the sexual drive was an ancient biological imperative, rooted in the pre-human past, whereas romance was merely a recent artifact, and a dying one at that; a twelfth-century French response to the non-ethics of feudalism. He really believed all that, or thought he did. Yet here he was tied up in knots and going without either sex or romance, horny and love-starved at the same time. Maybe what he needed most-

He saw the dark shape of the car blocking the middle of the road a split second before its headlights went on, blinding him utterly. His foot clamped to the brake pedal, the wheels locked, and he went slipping and sliding toward the stopped car as if he were on ice. Except for the screeching of the tires, it was strangely like floating in a dream.

He was, to his dismay, on a low one-lane bridge with no possibility of turning off the roadway. For the second time in a week, he was sure he was about to die, but with teeth clenched and muscles straining, he stepped on the brake and foolishly pulled back on the wheel. And somehow the weaving vehicle stayed on the bridge and slowed enough so that it finally slid into the stopped car at three or four miles an hour. There was a soft clunk, like a beer can crumpling, and then a gentle, tinkling shower of headlight shards to the ground. Then silence and darkness.

Acting by instinct, Gideon fumbled free from his seat belt, flung open the door, scrambled out, and leaped over the side of the bridge to the gully a few feet below. He landed on his feet somehow, and floundered his way through underbrush and muck, back toward the end of the bridge from which he’d come. Then the flashlights went on and the shouting started, and he ducked back under the bridge and threw himself down into the foul-smelling mud behind a concrete bridge support. He lay on his stomach in the slime, panting and wet. By working his chin a little deeper into it, he was able to look back toward the center of the bridge, where the shouting was coming from.

It sounded like Italian. They were angry, perhaps swearing at each other. His eyes had adapted to the night, and he could see that there were three men. Two of them were gesticulating, appealing to the third: a tall, slender man who stood silent and immobile. The beams from the flashlights darted down from the bridge, playing over the land near where he had jumped. He would be hard to find, Gideon thought. The ground was rough and strewn with rocks, with a lot of bushes big enough to shield him. Unless they happened to search in the right place, he might be able to keep away from them until he made it back to the bank of the gully only twenty feet behind him. Once he scrambled up that, the ground would be flat and easy to run on, with trees to block him from sight until he could get to the little village a mile down the road.