Aaron Elkins - Fellowship Of Fear

"I can’t, Gideon. I don’t have much time."

"Why, what’s the matter?"

"Well, I have a date."

"A date?" He stood there with the drink in his hand. "With someone else?" he added stupidly.

"Yes, why not? What’s so amazing about that?" When he didn’t say anything, she went on irritably. "Did you think I was just going to come in and say ‘Take me, I’m yours?’ Listen, Gideon, you just walked into my life yesterday, and you’re going away again tomorrow. I’m not going to sit around pining away just because I went to bed with you last night."

"Who do you have a date with?" It was all he could think of to say.

"I don’t see why that’s any concern of yours." Gideon wondered what she had to be angry about.

"Yes, you’re quite right," he said. "I guess my male chauvinistic value system ran away with me. Enjoy your date. Thank you for last night. I’ll drop you a line from Torrejon."

To his surprise, her eyes brimmed suddenly with tears. In her annoyance with them, she stamped her foot like a little girl. Gideon wanted very much to take her in his arms and kiss the moisture that shone on her soft cheek. He held back, however, half in what he knew was childish retaliation, half because he wasn’t sure how she would react.

"That’s what I hate about women," she said. "Damn it. We cry at the drop of a hat. It doesn’t mean anything. Our glands are different." He was sure she wanted to brush the tears away, but she let them stay. "All right, it’s with Eric. It’s just a stupid dinner at some stupid Heidelberg professor’s house."

Janet with Eric-gross, fat Eric. Gideon suppressed the images that sprang quickly to his mind.

"Have a wonderful time," he said. "It’s been very pleasant knowing you. Perhaps I’ll see you again when I come back to Heidelberg."

"Damn you, Gideon, if you wanted to see me tonight, you could have asked me this morning, instead of assuming you owned me like some caveman. You stupid man!" She glared at him through her tears, looking wondrously huggable. "Stupid man! "

His mood was ambivalent as he watched her stride down the hall. On the one hand, he was very sorry indeed that he wouldn’t be spending the evening in her company and (another male chauvinist assumption) the night in her arms. But there was also an unmistakable if somewhat wistful sense of reprieve; clearly, he had narrowly missed becoming enmeshed in a Meaningful Relationship. He sighed. Maybe later on he’d be ready to try that. In the meantime, he would have been happy to settle for a Meaningful Experience or even a Moderately Significant Relationship. A Good Lay wouldn’t have been so bad, either.

He poured himself another Scotch and settled down to spend the evening grappling with the intricacies of simian brachiation.

A little after midnight, he heard her voice at the door.

"Gideon!"

Without putting on a robe and almost without waking up, he jumped from the bed and opened the door a few inches.

"Yes?" he said, blinking at her in the glare of the lit hallway. She smelled of the cool night, and when she laughed softly at him, he shivered with…lust? Love? He wasn’t sure.

"What are you laughing at?" he said.

"You. Look at your hair. You look as if you’ve just come out of six-month hibernation. Open the door some more. I bet you’re not wearing anything."

As he knew she would, she suddenly pushed at the door. He offered resistance of the most token sort, and she was quickly inside, turning on the light as he took her into his arms and pressed his lips against the soft, clear skin of her cheek, just where he had wanted to kiss her earlier. The roughness of her wool suit against his bare skin and the slipperiness of the slip under her skirt excited him at once.

"Eek," she said. "Just as I thought. There’s a naked man in here, too. Good heavens, this place is full of them."

"Mmm," he said, nuzzling at her faintly perfumed throat. "How was dinner?"

"Lousy. I couldn’t wait to get back here to say something to you."

Her seriousness brought his face up, but he didn’t let her go. "What is it?"

"Well…," she said, laying her head on his shoulder, wanting to be coaxed.

"Come on, tell Papa," Gideon said, his naked skin jumping where her long hair lay over it.

"Well…just…take me, I’m yours." She raised her eyes to his. "If you want me."

Without warning, his eyes filled.

"Gideon," she said, startled, "what’s this?" A tentative finger explored his wet cheek.

Gideon pretended a gruff embarrassment. "So, I’m crying. Contrary to your theory, lachrymal glands are not sexually specific organs. Males have them, too."

"How poetically you put things," she said. "It’s lovely."

He kissed her on the lips-a lingering, eyes-closed kiss, inhaling the peachlike fragrance of her breath.

When he came up for air, she said, "You know, I feel somewhat overdressed for the occasion."

"I see what you mean," Gideon said, his fingers already at the buckle of her belt. "Why don’t we lie down and discuss it?"

In the morning he made it a point to request the pleasure of her company when he returned the following week.

When you enter Madrid from the east, on the highway from Zaragoza and Torrejon de Ardoz, you watch the clean, rocky countryside with its occasional flocks of sheep give way first to blank-faced factories lining the roadway, and then to block upon block of dreary, high-rise apartments that make the heart sink. The air, especially in the hot summer and fall, turns gray-brown and choking; the noise of honking horns and backfiring motor scooters becomes nearly unbearable; and the traffic snarls reach extremities worthy of Rome or Paris. By the time you reach a downtown parking garage, the only thing that keeps you from turning around and driving right back out is the thought of going through all that traffic again.

And then you walk out onto the Paseo del Prado.

It is one of the world’s great avenues. Grand proportions, long rows of green trees, cool, bubbling fountains, and elegant, restful sidewalk cafes create a refuge of quiet and repose in the midst of the mind-jarring hubbub. As soon as Gideon saw it, his jaw muscles, which had knotted during the hot hour-and-a-half drive, relaxed.

He stopped at the first outdoor cafe they came to. "I have to have something cold right now, right here," he said to John.

"I’m for that," John said. "Anything to put off the Prado." They sat at a table in the shade of a tree and signaled for two beers. John leaned the back of his chair against the wide tree trunk.

"It’s beautiful here," Gideon said. "God, it’s great to be out."

"Come on, Doc, you make Torrejon sound like Devil’s Island."

"It is, when you only have five days in Spain and you spend three of them on an air base that looks, feels, and sounds like it’s in the middle of Oklahoma. And smells like it, too."

"You ever been to Oklahoma?"

"No."

"That’s what I thought."

They were both depressed, disappointed with three days of effort that had produced nothing. The old leads had evaporated, and there were no new ones. Following John’s suggestion, they had taken adjacent rooms in the BOQ, and John had remained inside, on his side of the thin wall, whenever Gideon had gone out, but no one had ever come. At other times, Gideon stayed in John’s room while John checked with Security on all the ID cards and temporary passes that had been issued during the previous two months; the only USOC’r that had been there before Gideon was a "local" business management instructor, an American woman who lived and taught in Spain. She had left several weeks ago at the end of the summer session.

The only exciting moment had come when Gideon, lurking on John’s side of the wall, had heard an intruder in his own room. Ignoring John’s instructions, he had dashed through the connecting bathroom and burst wildly in upon an elderly Spanish maid who had screamed and hit him with a pillow.