Aaron Elkins - Fellowship Of Fear

"I’ll bet you dinner at the Zum Ritter when we get back to Heidelberg," Gideon said in a whisper.

"You’re on," John said. "I say he’s English; you say he’s Rumanian or something. What if he’s neither, or both?"

"If he’s not eastern European, or his family isn’t, I’ll buy. But how are we supposed to find out?"

"Let’s go ask him."

Gideon, shy with strangers, quailed slightly. "You can’t just walk up to him and ask him where he’s from."

"Why not? How about if we just say ‘good afternoon’ to him in English and see how he answers? I think that will settle it right there."

As they started forward, Gideon touched John’s arm. "But what the heck makes you so sure he’s an Englishman?"

John smiled broadly and tapped his temple with a forefinger. "Who else would carry a big black umbrella on a day like this?"

Gideon saw the craziness in his eyes as soon as the man turned toward them. John didn’t.

"Good afternoon," John said jauntily. "Lovely paintings, aren’t-"

With a cry that was part shriek, part snarl, the man flailed at John with the umbrella. Catching him off balance as he ducked, the blows struck him on the shoulder with surprisingly solid thuds, sending him reeling backwards and finally depositing him on the floor in a sitting position. A quick look at his face told Gideon he was more surprised than hurt. The man lifted the umbrella again.

The room seemed to explode away from the upraised umbrella. People ran for the exits or fell back against the walls. Several women screamed, and some of the men dropped to the floor. Gideon, emerging from the momentary paralysis into which he had been shocked, jumped for the umbrella, concerned almost as much for The Surrender at Breda, which hung inches from the waving metal ferrule, as for John. He managed to get his hand around the shaft and drag it sharply downwards, away from the canvas. The man, twisting as his arm was wrenched, stepped forward just as the umbrella came down, so that the point struck him on his left foot. Gideon heard a distinct, sharp click, and assumed that blow must have cracked a metatarsal.

The effect on the man was extraordinary. With a shuddering gasp, he sprang back a step and clasped the umbrella tightly to his body. His eyes, panicky and crazed an instant before, pierced Gideon with a look so laden with despair that Gideon instinctively stepped forward to help. For a second the big man stood there, his eyes rolling ceilingward, like the nearby St. Sebastian of Zurbaran come suddenly to life, embracing an umbrella instead of a cross in his twentieth-century Passion.

Gideon’s hesitant touch galvanized him, and with a choked cry the man brushed him aside and ran for the exit, scattering the people in his way. John, in the act of rising from the floor, launched himself at the rushing figure but couldn’t reach him, so that he hung outstretched and suspended for a long moment, like a stop-action frame of a diver, before he fell to the floor with a crash.

At the exit, the guard who had earlier asked them to be quiet made a half-hearted attempt to block the doorway, but then dropped back against the wall, ashen-faced, before the charging man’s onslaught. The man disappeared toward the exit at a full run.

As the room’s shocked stillness gave way to a sudden babble, Gideon went to John and helped him up.

"Are you all right?" Gideon asked.

"Except for my pride."

"There wasn’t anything you could do. It happened too fast. I was just standing there with my mouth open through most of it, myself."

"And all I did was keep falling on my face."

"Not always your face," Gideon said. "John, do you have any idea what that was about?"

John shrugged and winced as he rubbed his shoulder. "Damn heavy umbrella. No, I don’t know what it was about. We just picked a crazy Englishman to talk to, I guess."

"I suppose so," Gideon said, smiling. He paused while they looked each other in the eye. "Do you really believe that? That it was just another coincidence?"

"Of course not. What do you make of it?"

They walked from the Great Rotunda under the awestruck scrutiny of the crowd, quiet again as they watched them go. The guard at the door, still pale, hesitantly moved toward them as if he were about to speak, but thought better of it and let them pass unmolested.

"I really don’t know," Gideon said. "It’s one more crazy event that doesn’t seem to connect with anything else, but it must. Whatever it was, something about you scared that guy witless."

"Or something about you."

By the time they had turned off he highway at Torrejon, they had exhausted all the theories that were even remotely plausible, and Gideon was musing and abstracted as they walked through the base terminal toward John’s plane. "Did you see what happened when the umbrella punched him on the foot?" he said. "It was as if he was a big inflated doll and the point of the umbrella punctured him and let all the air out. Or that his big toe was his Achilles’ heel"- Gideon grimaced at his metaphor, but John didn’t notice- "and that hitting him there meant his end, and he knew it."

"Doc," John said gravely at the gate to his flight, "you’re trying to make sense of a lot of puzzling things that nobody’s been able to figure out, so I can’t blame you for wanting to fit them together. But you only know a little part of the espionage picture, and I don’t know much more. Don’t lead yourself into thinking that you’re the center of everything that’s going on, or that everyone’s after you, or that you can save the world."

Gideon grinned wryly. "You’ve just given a textbook description of the classic paranoiac psychosis: delusions of persecution, delusions of grandeur, and the construction of an elaborate, internally logical system to account for everything." He paused. "You could be right."

The three old men sat side by side on the ancient wrought-iron bench, looking like octogenarian triplets identically dressed and posed by a doting centenarian mother with a turn for the grotesque. On each head a shapeless black beret sat squarely, pulled down to the ears. The patched frock coats of rusty black, equally shapeless, might have been cut from a single bolt of cloth. And each gray, sparsely whiskered chin was propped upon a knobby pair of hands clasped over the handle of a wooden cane as scuffed and scarred as the men themselves. Their eyes followed the group of strangers-foreigners, city people-who had left their cars along the roadside just outside the little village and now approached the dusty plaza, self-conscious and out of place.

"Is that your professor and his students, Ignacio?" asked one of the three without turning his head. "They are grown-ups, not children. I can’t tell which is the professor. Do you think it’s them?"

"How should I know?" said the one on the left, with appropriate unconcern. Actually, he knew that they were, and he knew the others knew. Who else could they be? Not tourists, certainly. There weren’t any tourists in Torralba.

When the authorities had built the ugly little museo in the hills outside the village, they had said there would be hordes of tourists coming to see the elephant bones that had been dug up, and that they would stop at the village to buy food and soda pop and hats to wear in the sun. But Ignacio Montes hadn’t believed them, of course, and neither had anyone else. And naturally there weren’t any hordes of tourists.

For one thing, why would anyone travel all the way from Madrid or Zaragoza just to see some old bones? Now, if they had some old saint’s little-finger bone, that would be different. But these were just elephants’ bones, or so they said.

Only Ignacio knew there weren’t any elephant bones there, no matter what the authorities said. If those things were elephant bones, what had they been doing under the ground? Who could bury an elephant in that soil? He had been in that little building a thousand times, and he should know. Once he had borrowed Joaquin’s hammer to chip off a piece, and had satisfied himself that it was made of stone.