Aaron Elkins: Fellowship Of Fear

He was about to explain how he had carefully palmed the key and brass plate as soon as he had entered his room and found the men, when he saw the husky Oriental come in. The newcomer walked to Frau Gross, who was sullenly laying out baskets of hard rolls and individual little packages of cheese and jam. The landlady gestured ill-naturedly at Gideon with her chin, and the big man-Gideon guessed he was Chinese Hawaiian-walked toward him.

"Dr. Oliver? I wonder, could I talk to you a little?"

Gideon excused himself and got up, and they went to an unoccupied table.

"My name’s John Lau, Professor. I’m a police officer." He laid an open card case on the table, revealing a blue, plastic-coated card, and left it there until Gideon had had time to read it.

NATO Security Directorate Identification was printed across the top, and a better-than-average ID photograph was on the left. Then: Name of Employee John Francis Lau; Issuing Department or Agency AFCENT; Ht 6-2; Wt 220; Hr clr Blk; Eye clr Brn; Birth date 7-24-40; Issue date 4-23-70.

Gideon nodded. "All right, what can I do for you, Mr. Lau?"

Lau had made himself comfortable, ordering coffee for both of them, while Gideon had examined his card. Now he flashed a sudden, good-natured smile. "Not Mr. Lau. Just John." He didn’t look like Gideon’s idea of a policeman. "I’d like to ask you a few questions about last night."

Gideon sighed. "I’ve already been through it three times with the Polizei and the MPs…But I guess you already know that."

Again the eye-crinkling smile. Gideon liked the man’s face, relaxed and powerful. "Sure," he said. "Look, what I want to know is, do you have any idea what they were after?" He had a choppy, pleasant way of talking.

The coffee was dumped down in front of them by Frau Gross. Gideon shook his head slowly while stirring in cream. "No idea, none at all."

"Well, try guessing, then."

"Guessing?"

"Guessing. Pretend you’re me. What would be your theory?" It had the sound of a harmless academic exercise. Gideon sometimes used the very same words in Anthropology 101.

"Theory? I don’t even have a hypothesis. You’re the expert; what do you think?"

"You told the Polizei they were Americans," Lau said. "Is that an inference, or can you support it?" Another Anthro 101 question, Gideon thought.

"I told them one of them-the one that spoke-was an American. I could tell from the way he talked."

"What makes you so sure? People speak more than one language."

Gideon sipped his coffee and shook his head emphatically. "Uh uh. I’m not talking about languages; I’m talking about speech patterns. He was born in the U.S., or maybe he came here-I mean there-when he was a kid; five, six, no older."

Lau looked doubtful, and Gideon went on. "I’m telling you, the guy spoke native American; midwestern, maybe Iowa or Nebraska. It’s a question of stress, of lilt."

Lau regarded him blankly. Gideon searched his mind for a simple example.

"Do you remember," he said, "when he said to me, uh…’Try to move and I kill you now’? Well, aside from having no trace of foreign pronunciation, he said it the way only an American would. First, there was the rise-and-fall inflection; unmistakable in simple declarative sentences. Medium pitch at the beginning, up on the ‘kill you,’ and then down on the ‘now.’ "

"Are you telling me-?"

"That’s not the critical part. Some foreigners learn to do that consistently. But the way the words are grouped-the flow, the clotting-that’s what tells you for sure. When an American talks, he jams a lot of words into irregular groupings, so the beat’s uneven. If you know how to listen for it, you can’t miss it."

Lau’s expression was anything but convinced. Gideon continued, his teaching instincts warming to the challenge.

"Let’s say that he’d used a slightly shorter sentence like

’Move and I kill you now.’ In that case he would have given about the same amount of time to ‘move’ and ‘kill you.’ Americans and Europeans both do that. But he threw in that ‘try to’ at the beginning, so that there were a few more words supporting ‘move.’ Well, a native midwestern speaker of what’s sometimes called ‘General American’ tries to compress all three words into the same amount of time as the one word, and then lags a little in the next word group."

Lau was leaning back in his chair, his arms crossed, apparently trying to decide whether Gideon was a purposeful liar or a simple academic quack. Gideon kept trying:

"Let’s say he’d made the sentence even longer-’Just try to move and I kill you now.’ Then he’d try to squeeze all of the first four words into the same time as ‘move.’ It would be "just-try-to-move and I kill-you-now.’ Only Americans use that kind of rhythm, and no matter how well you learn the phonemes-the sounds-of a foreign language, you never get the rhythms exactly right. For example, a Frenchman would use a nice, steady beat throughout the whole sentence. He’d say ‘Just-try, to-move, and-I-kill, you-now.’ A German-"

"What’s my accent?" Lau said suddenly. "Do I speak General American?" The challenge was implicit but clear: Do you have the nerve to say I don’t?

"No, you don’t. There are Chinese overtones. Your individual syllables are a little more separate and even, and naturally there’s a little more emphasis on tone, a little less on stress."

Gideon expected him to be angry; instead, he simply looked even more skeptical.

"Look," said Gideon, "I’m an anthropologist. This is the sort of thing I study." The last and least effective argument of the frustrated teacher, he thought.

"I thought anthropologists studied primitive cultures."

"We do, but linguistics is part of culture. And we study culture in general, not just primitive ones."

Lau thought it over. Suddenly banging on the table with his hand so that Gideon jumped, he said, "I don’t buy it! You’re practically telling me language is inherited, not learned. That’s ridiculous!" His hands chopped the air.

Gideon was becoming a little irritated. "First, that isn’t what I’m telling you," he said. "Second, it certainly seems to me you do have a hypothesis. Why are you trying so hard to get me to say he wasn’t an American?"

"I’m not trying to get you to say anything. Don’t get touchy." Suddenly he was very much a policeman, issuing a steely, unmistakable warning. Gideon’s irritation was replaced by a stab of concern. He very nearly asked if he were in some sort of trouble, but held his tongue.

Lau glared at him a moment longer. Then his eyes crinkled, and the mild, affable Hawaiian returned. "I’m sorry. I guess I’m touchy too. We’ve both been up most of the night on this, haven’t we? And my guess is it’s been a little tougher on you than on me." Again the friendly smile. Gideon returned it, but now he was wary.

Lau went on. "I’ve read the report, but there’s one thing I’m not very clear about." He held his cup in both hands, seemingly absorbed in its contents. "Would you mind going over how you got away from them after they pulled the knife?"

"All right. I just stamped on the one guy’s foot-"

Lau looked puzzled. "I understood you scraped down his shin with your heel and then stamped."

"Well, yes, I did, sure, but I didn’t think it was important enough-"

"Okay, I just want to make sure I have it straight. Go ahead."

"Then I sort of swung around-my hands were still behind my head-and I lucked out and hit him in the neck…"

Gideon stopped. Lau was smiling cheerfully at him.

"Okay," said Gideon, "what now? I’m getting the feeling you know something I don’t."

Still grinning, the policeman unbuttoned the flap on the pocket of his denim shirt and took out a small notebook. "This is from the tape the MPs made of your story. Verbatim. ‘Then I pivoted around. I drove my left elbow into his larynx. I caught him on the thyroid cartilage, at the apex of the laryngeal prominence.’ Uh, as a simple policeman, can I assume you’re referring to the Adam’s apple?"