Aaron Elkins - Fellowship Of Fear

Other than smiles and wowie-zowies, her communications consisted of non sequiturs, mostly in the form of odd, abstract, unanswerable questions directed at Gideon. She had already asked him, in a broad Kansas accent, what human beings were going to look like in ten thousand years, and why there was more than one language in the world. At first he had tried serious replies, which seemed to delight her. After a while he simply smiled and shrugged. She appeared equally pleased.

Near Darmstadt they left the Bergstrasse and turned across the flat, industrial Rhine Plain below Frankfurt. The conversation turned to Gideon’s adventures. John hadn’t known about the attempted theft of the radio the night before and listened with absorption as he drove.

"Forget about NSD being responsible," he said. "That makes no sense at all. It’s got to be the Russians. But why the radio?" he added under his breath. "Why the radio?"

"I have an idea," Janet said. "Why don’t we try a little creative brainstorming on that question? Free association- whatever comes into your mind."

"Okay," John said, after a few moments of silence, "maybe he was stealing it to sell because his wife needed an operation."

"No," Gideon said. "This was really a cheap-"

Janet interrupted. "Hold it, hold it. That’s not the way it works. No critical thinking, please. Just keep the ideas coming. Give your unconscious a chance."

"All right," said Gideon. He was happy and relaxed, and car games were fine with him. "Maybe he wanted to hear the soccer scores and his own radio was broken."

"Good," Janet said. "Or maybe he could hear it playing through the wall, and he hates music, and he was taking it to throw away."

"Or maybe," Gideon said, getting into the swing of it, "it sounded like it wasn’t playing right, and he was taking it out to get a new battery for it."

"Hey, wow, got it!" Marti said. "How about if whatshisname was in your room doing something that had nothing to do with the radio, but that he saw you coming-he could have, through the window, couldn’t he?-and he just grabbed the radio and made off with it to keep you from figuring out what he was really doing."

It made a strange kind of sense to Gideon. He looked at Marti with respect. "But what was he really doing?"

John cut in excitedly. "Using something else in your room as the dead drop…your suitcase, your shaving gear, your books, anything."

Gideon nodded. "It’s possible," he said slowly. "They could have deposited stuff in my room for me to carry off the base. Even with the alert, my pass was getting me through the gate pretty easily."

"So, if he took something, a radio, you’d assume he was just a thief," John said. "Hey, that’s probably what happened to the socks, too. It’d never occur to you someone had been putting something in your room."

"I don’t understand," Janet said. "You mean that’s the way they smuggle things off the base? You carry it off for them?"

Gideon shook his head. "Do we really believe any of this, or are we just fooling around?"

"Funny, isn’t it?" John said with a small, tight laugh. "It would mean you were the guy we were looking so hard for at Torrejon."

It was the Rudesheim Gideon had read about in the travel books, but with a vengeance. What he’d read was "a lively Rhine village, with streets of wineshops and bierstuben, friendly and gregarious at all times of year." What he found was a riotous town jammed with tourists, bursting with tourists. Mostly German, mostly male, and mostly in large groups, they barreled along the streets in yellow- or green- or red-hatted brigades, tipsily following tour leaders with matching umbrellas held high.

"My God," he shouted over the clamor, "is it always like this?"

Janet assured him it was. "The Germans work hard," she shouted back, "and when they play, they work hard at playing hard."

And obviously, thought Gideon, this is where they come to do it.

"You ain’t seen nothing yet!" John cried, pulling them along the street. "Come on, we only have twenty minutes before the boat goes."

They had to snake along single-file to get through the crowds of beefy, blond men, many of whom tramped along singing, with arms about each others’ shoulders.

"Where to?" asked Janet. "The Drosselgasse?"

"You bet," John shouted.

Marti cheered: "Hot puppies!"

The Drosselgasse was Rudesheim’s most famous street. An alley, really, with no room for vehicles, it was packed along both sides from one end to the other with restaurants, weinstuben, and bierstuben. And all of them, or so it sounded, were full of people playing accordions and singing with all their might. The alley itself was so crammed with people that it seemed impossible to get through.

"I can’t believe it," said Gideon. "It’s only nine-thirty in the morning. What’s this place going to be like at nine-thirty tonight?"

"The same," said John. "Let’s go."

"You’re nuts," Gideon said. "I’m not going in there."

"You can get the best bratwurst in Germany halfway down that street," John said, and pulled them into the throng.

The best bratwurst in Germany, it turned out, were served at a nondescript stand with the incongruous name of "Clem’s." There, a scowling, elephantine man ferociously speared the sausages from the grill, tucked them deftly into split hard rolls, and for less than two marks each, thunked them down in front of a steady, appreciative line of patrons. Gideon, skeptical at first, changed his mind after the first crackling bite and ordered a second to fortify him for the struggle back down the alley.

He needed it. The crowd all seemed to be surging up the Drosselgasse in one direction, while the four of them were going in the other. Gideon suggested they turn around and go with the mass to the next corner, then turn up a side alley and come down another street, but Janet rejected the idea as unsporting.

Clutching his bratwurst in one hand and his copy of Weidenreich in the other, Gideon twisted and dodged his way out of several near-collisions with the uproarious German crowds. At the very end of the Drosselgasse, however, just when he thought he had safely made it, a thickset, blond man tore unsteadily around the corner and smashed heavily into him. The bratwurst flew one way, The Skull of Sinanthropus Pekinensis the other; Gideon himself was thrown backwards almost into the arms of a bald fat man who, seemingly thinking Gideon was going to fall, grasped him in a firm embrace and apologized effusively.

"Verzeihen Sie, bitte…

The first man, to Gideon’s surprise, was equally solicitous. He bent quickly, almost frantically, to retrieve the fallen book, but was held back by the crush of pedestrians. Meanwhile, Gideon twisted himself free and picked the book up himself, practically snatching it from the blond man’s well-meaning fingers.

Gideon straightened up, composing a smile. Although annoyed-the bratwurst had been delicious, and he wasn’t going back for another-he was prepared to exchange apologies with the two Germans, who had meant him no harm and had been so quick to help. He was astonished to see that they were gone, already engulfed by the fast-moving crowds. He stood there in confusion for a moment, the smile dying on his face, dividing the oncoming foot traffic as a tree trunk might divide the waters of a flooding river.

John grabbed his arm and plucked him out of the crowded alley. "You want to get killed? Never get between a wine drinker and a weinstube, not in Rudesheim."

"Don’t look so sad," Janet said, laughing. "It was only a bratwurst. There’ll be more on the boat."

"Ah, but not like Clem’s," John said.

Arm in arm, like the German tourists, the four of them ran three blocks to the pier, arriving only a minute before the ship’s departure.