Aaron Elkins - Fellowship Of Fear

"Oh, Pete?" She searched for his last name. "Pete Berger? I didn’t know him all that well. Nobody did. He was kind of a strange bird; awkward, shy, hard to talk to, never mingled much. I know he had a bad reputation for missing classes, and Dr. Rufus was thinking about firing him. But he never got hurt, as far as I know. He just disappeared for good one day and never showed up again… Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, it is peculiar, isn’t it?"

"Yes, isn’t it? Where was he when he disappeared?"

"Up north somewhere. Bremerhaven, I think. I wish I could tell you more."

"What about the other one?"

"The guy that got killed? I never met him. I just heard his car ran off the road in Italy."

They paused while the waiter brought them each a cup of coffee.

"Janet," said Gideon, stirring a little sugar into the strong, fragrant brew, "when you were telling me some of this last week at the dinner, Eric tried to shush you up, remember? Why did he do that?"

He studied her face. She looked at him with open, innocent eyes. Lovely eyes, really, with clear, beautiful hazel irises.

"Oh, I think he just didn’t want to frighten you off. But we were all pretty sloshed, as I recall." She sipped her coffee and put the cup carefully in its saucer. "What are you suggesting by all the questions? That there was foul play involved?"

"I don’t know what I’m suggesting. I’m just trying to make sense out of it." He waited until he caught her eye again. "You don’t suppose they were involved in undercover work, some kind of espionage, or-?"

"Espionage? Spies? Are you serious?" Her incredulity told him one thing he wanted to know; recruiting of faculty by NSD was not routine. Janet, at least, had not been approached by them.

For a while they drank their coffee in silence. It was three times as expensive as it would have been in an American restaurant and there were no refills, but it was delicious. Gideon was comfortable with Janet, and the veal sat well inside him. He listened to the splashing of the fountain in the courtyard and watched Janet frowning thoughtfully at her coffee. She was very beautiful, more so than Nora had been, really, and although the memory of her spluttering wine across the table during that alcoholic tetea-tete with Eric still put him off a little, who was he to criticize? As she said, he had been pretty well sloshed himself.

"How about a walk?" he said. "It’s a pretty night, and it would do my ankle some good."

"I’d love it," Janet said, and sounded like she meant it.

Gideon paid the bill, pleased when she didn’t demand to share it.

They walked slowly down the Haupstrasse, Gideon leaning on his cane, past busy sidewalk cafes and restaurants. For four hundred years the Haupstrasse had been the main street of Heidelberg; now it was open only to foot traffic, filled with strollers on this mild fall night, most of whom munched bratwurst or pastries purchased from sidewalk vendors. The smells of sausage and coffee, and the sounds of German conversation, oddly enough, seemed homey and warm. When Janet put her arm through his, Gideon trembled a little and glowed, and tried to look like a Heidelberger out for a spaziergang with his Fraulein.

"Sehr gemutlich, nicht wahr?" he said, patting the hand that lay in the crook of his elbow.

"Jawohl," she answered, and squeezed his arm.

He bought them a sack of almond and chocolate pastries at a Konditorei, and they munched along like everyone else, smiling at passersby and murmuring "Guten Abend.

Janet, more at ease with him than she had been before, told him about the dissertation on which she was working: a history of women book collectors in the nineteenth-century American Midwest.

Gideon made sympathetic noises and asked interested questions, but in his heart he sighed a quiet "Oh no." He liked women, really liked them, more than men, and respected them at least as much. In his own field, the cultural anthropologists whom he most respected were Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. Yet feminists often bored and sometimes irritated him with their grim, contentious rhetoric. He hoped that wouldn’t happen with Janet.

"What are you going to call it?" he asked between bites of pastry.

" ‘Keepers of the Written Word: A Study of Oppression, Sexism, and Bibliophily.’ "

She delivered the cumbrous words so ponderously, notwithstanding a mouthful of nuts and chocolate, that he thought she was joking. He laughed.

It was a mistake. She leaned on his arm to make him stop walking and face her. "You find that funny?" Her eyes were cool and serious.

Gideon winced and even drew a tiny breath between clenched teeth in an effort to make her think that she had inadvertently hurt his ankle but that he was stoically trying to keep it from her. It was a cheap trick, of course, intended primarily to head her off and secondarily to rekindle in her that warm sympathy in which he’d been basking until those damn female book collectors came up. He thought he carried it off fairly well, but perhaps he had been too subtle; her face was without pity.

"What is it that’s so humorous about it?" she said. "Do you think women bibliophiles have not been oppressed? Can you even grasp what it was like to be a female intellectual in a society that was dominated by-"

"Janet, don’t go all polemic on me. All I was laughing about was, well, was how all serious titles have to have a colon in them nowadays. They used to have subtitles. Now it’s all one title with colons. I don’t know why, but it strikes me funny."

It was so wonderfully irrelevant that it served as a much-needed non sequitur. After a sharp glance at him, Janet seemed to decide he was being truthful. She opened her mouth to speak and then closed it.

"Do you know," Gideon asked as he moved them gently along, "I haven’t yet been to one of the student taverns. Isn’t the Red Ox near here? How about a beer?"

"I don’t think you’re the type," Janet said, still ready to fight. Gideon smiled innocently at her, although under other circumstances he might have asked her what she meant.

She smiled suddenly, and the warmth came back into her eyes. "Well," she said, "I suppose one can’t come to Heidelberg without hoisting a stein at the Red Ox. What would Sigmund Romberg think?"

WHEN they walked into the smoky, noisy Restaurant Zum Roten Ochsen, he found that she was right. He didn’t like it at all. The age-blackened ceiling of the big tavern rang with lusty male voices raised in martial-sounding songs, and with the clank of beer steins beating time on old oak tables. It was all very jolly and picturesque, but it depressed him.

He knew these songs had been sung in this room for nearly three hundred years. He knew that images from The Student Prince were supposed to leap to the mind of the visitor. They didn’t. What he saw instead was an ominous scene out of the 1930s: flushed, sweating faces, glazed and fervent eyes… It wasn’t for him; maybe another time.

"You’re right," he shouted over the singing. "Let’s go someplace else."

They turned to leave and were almost bowled over by a husky, perspiring serving wench who might have stepped out of a Frans Hals painting: rosy cheeks, cherubic smile, peekaboo seventeenth-century bodice and all. Arms aloft, she banked as she charged toward them, apparently taking advantage of centrifugal force to keep the four liter-sized steins of beer she carried in each red hand from spilling.

Janet ducked under one brawny forearm, Gideon under the other, and they emerged laughing and hand-in-hand into the street, where Gideon ran directly into a smallish man standing on the sidewalk at the entrance. His first reaction was one of concern. They had been moving with considerable impetus, and Gideon weighed over a hundred-and-eighty pounds. The man in the street, he was sure, was going to be knocked sprawling. Automatically, he reached out to steady him.