Aaron Elkins - Fellowship Of Fear

"I have an appointment with Mr. Marks," Gideon said.

The guard shoved a half-eaten Oh Henry candy bar off a typewritten sheet on the counter in front of him, then brushed away peanut and chocolate crumbs with the back of his hand. He studied the sheet for a long time. Finally, with a sigh and a what-the-hell-I-don’t-give-a-shit shrug, he said, "Go ahead."

Gideon was in the mood for a fight, but not with a churlish adolescent who didn’t even know he was being rude. He walked down the seedy hallway to Mark’s office, where he found Fraru Stetten looming steeply over her typewriter. Without stopping her typing, she glanced up at Gideon and cocked her head at the door to the inner office.

"Thank you and good morning to you too," Gideon said.

As usual, being snide gave him an immediate rotten feeling. Catching her eye as he walked past her, he smiled at her as pleasantly as he could. In return she bestowed a highly perfunctory lip contraction that made him sorry he hadn’t left well enough alone.

Marks was half-sitting on the windowsill in a pensive, judicial pose, arms folded and head inclined, with the earpiece of his horn-rimmed glasses between pursed lips.

The man of a thousand roles, thought Gideon. Had he been posing like that since nine o’clock, or had he leapt there upon some secret signal from Frau Stetten? Maybe there’d been warning of Gideon’s approach from the guard. All of the possibilities were in keeping with what he’d seen of Marks so far.

"Sit down, Dr. Oliver," he said without moving. "Just thinking through a tricky little problem here."

With an affable smile, Gideon sat down in a metal side chair. The desk top was littered with the remains of an earlier meeting: half a glass pot of coffee, three or four styrofoam cups, three doughnuts, two of them untouched.

Gideon gestured at them with his chin. "No chance for breakfast this morning. Do you mind?"

"What?" said Marks abstractedly from the labyrinthine corridors of profound thought. "Yes, certainly. I mean, no, of course not."

Gideon wolfed down a vanilla-iced doughnut. It was delicious. The coffee was lukewarm, so he poured what was left of the milk from a metal creamer into a cup and drank that. Inasmuch as Marks was still chewing his spectacles, Gideon went cheerfully on to the next doughnut, a jelly-filled one. Besides tasting good, his impromptu breakfast seemed to throw Marks off his stride, which was fine. Gideon needed a lot of information from him, and if he were rattled, so much the better.

Marks took his glasses out of his mouth and sat down behind his desk with an "Ah, well…" that announced he was regretfully now back in the mundane world represented by Gideon Oliver. He lit a cigarette while watching Gideon lick the last of the jelly from his fingers.

"I thought we had a nine o’clock appointment," Marks said.

"Sorry. Someone broke into my room last night. It held me up."

"Is that right? Don’t tell me the Sock Bandit of Sicily has struck again?"

"Is that supposed to be funny? Look, Mr. Marks-"

"Oliver, let’s stop fooling around. It’s not working. We picked the wrong man. Let’s forget the whole thing." He dragged deeply on his cigarette.

Gideon was so surprised that all he could do was echo Marks stupidly: "Forget the whole thing?"

"That’s right. Consider yourself fired. Without prejudice, of course."

"Fired? Hell, you never hired me!" The anger Gideon had been carrying around went from a simmer to a boil. It felt good. "Now let’s get things straight. A couple of weeks ago, you asked me to take on an assignment-for the cause of peace, if I remember correctly. There wasn’t going to be any danger to me, virtually none, as you put it-"

"Monsieur Delvaux."

"What?"

" Le directeur said that, not me."

Gideon looked sharply at him. The stare was blandly returned through a haze of cigarette smoke. Marks wasn’t quite the clown he’d been last time.

"Since then," Gideon went on, "I’ve been beaten up twice, I’ve been attacked by an armed gang, my room’s been broken into at least two times-"

"Not quite right; you’ve only been beaten up once. The first time you were beaten up was before you took the assignment. Remember, we talked to you Friday, the day after-"

"God damn it, Marks, don’t fuck around with me!" He clamped his mouth shut; this wouldn’t do. Using profanity was rare with him, a sure sign that he had slipped from the cool, rational anger with which he’d walked in, into the sort of loutish tantrum he despised. It was he, not Marks, who was off his stride. He took a long, slow breath.

Marks put his hands behind his head and leaned back lazily, eyes narrowed against the smoke of the cigarette dangling from his mouth.

"A little while ago, you said you’d picked the wrong man," said Gideon more quietly. "I’d appreciate knowing what you think I did wrong."

Marks raised his right eyebrow above his horn-rimmed glasses in a gesture that must have taken hours of mirror practice. "Look, Oliver, you’re just not the type. Our people have to be unobtrusive. You seem to have a way of getting into violent situations. To be perfectly frank, we think there’s something unstable about you, and we can’t risk it."

"Unstable?" Gideon couldn’t sit still any longer. He jumped to his feet. "I can’t believe this! You’re actually blaming me for what’s been happening?"

"You get into altercations on the street, for God’s sake! Like last night on the Haupstrasse…just because someone bumps into you… I mean, really-"

"Bumps into me! Marks, that wasn’t someone! That was the man who tried to kill me a couple of weeks ago. He was following me-" Gideon stopped himself, aware of how emotional he was and how melodramatic he sounded. A sudden thought hit him. "Wait a minute. How did you know about that? Are you people following me around?" He sank back into his chair.

"We’ve been keeping an eye on you, yes. We wouldn’t just turn you loose without protection. And it’s been more trouble than we can afford."

"Protection!" Gideon said. He knew he kept repeating Marks, but he couldn’t help himself. Somehow, Marks had taken control, and every statement he made was so newly outrageous that it threw Gideon into fresh confusion. "If that’s the way you protect your people, no wonder the free world’s in trouble."

"Is that right?" For the first time, Marks’s voice had an angry edge. "Just who do you think got you out of that ditch in Sicily?"

"The man on the bridge? That was one of your men? Then you must know who those… goons were."

"Forget it. I already told you more than I should have."

"Marks, I have a right to know. I came awfully close to being killed."

"We don’t operate on right-to-know. We operate on need-to-know, remember? And you don’t need to know."

"Marks-"

"Oliver, there’s no point in continuing this. I’ll be as honest as I can." He lit another cigarette from the stub of the old one and inhaled deeply. "We are terminating our relationship with you because it’s not doing any good. That’s all I’m at liberty to tell you." He reached for a manila folder on the desk and opened it. "Now, I have a lot of important things to do." Once again Gideon was being dismissed.

"At liberty, hell," Gideon said. "You don’t know any more than I do about this, do you? I don’t know why I’m wasting my time talking to Delvaux’s errand boy." He got up again.

As simple as it was, it worked. Marks was still Marks. Two red spots appeared on the sides of his throat. He slammed the folder closed. "The Russians needed something from Sigonella; they got it. They needed something from Rhein-Main; they got it. They got it without having to go to you." As he spoke, smoke dribbled from his mouth as if his tongue were on fire. "They don’t need you. They’re obviously getting what they need some other way. So you’re not doing them-or us-any good. What’s more, you’re one hell of a lot of trouble. So thanks for all your help, and good-bye. You’re no longer involved." He opened the folder again.