Elizabeth Peters: Night Train to Memphis

I entered the office at a brisk trot, glancing at my watch. ‘Goodness, it’s later than I thought. Good morning, Gerda, I’ve got to hurry, I’m awfully late.’

‘For what?’ Gerda inquired. ‘You have no appointment this morning. Unless you have made one without informing me, which is contrary to – ’

I snatched the pile of letters from her desk. She snatched it back. ‘I have not finished sorting them, Vicky. What is wrong with you this morning? Ach, but you look terrible! Did you not sleep? You were, perhaps, working late?’

She hoped I hadn’t been working late. She hoped I’d been doing something more interesting. Gerda has one of those round, healthy pink faces, and mouse-brown hair, and wide, innocent pale blue eyes. She is short. I am all the things Gerda is not, and the poor dumb woman admires me and tries to imitate me. She also harbours the delusion – derived in part from Schmidt, who shares it – that men whiz in and out of my life like city buses, only more often. Little does she know. It was questionable as to whether John qualified for the role of my lover – three visits in nine months isn’t my idea of a torrid affair – but for the past two years he had been the only possible candidate.

‘Yes. I was working late,’ I lied.

She didn’t believe me. ‘Ach, so. I thought perhaps Herr Feder – ’

‘Who?’ I gaped at her.

She had sorted the messages, damn her. She waved two slips of paper at me. ‘He has telephoned twice this morning. He wishes that you call him as soon as possible.’

‘Thanks.’ This time when I grabbed my mail she let me keep it. ‘We will have lunch, perhaps?’ she called after me as I headed quickly for the door.

‘Perhaps.’ If I could just get out of Gerda’s office before Schmidt emerged from his . . . I was in no condition to cope with Schmidt that morning. He’s even nosier than Gerda.

I might have known it was going to be one of those days. Schmidt wasn’t in his office. He had just arrived. When I flung the door open there he was, briefcase in one hand, the remains of a jelly doughnut in the other. Schmidt eats all the time. Jelly doughnuts are his latest enthusiasm, one he acquired from me.

He was wearing one of those trench coats covered with straps, flaps, and pockets – the style James Bond and other famous spies prefer – and an Indiana Jones fedora pulled low over his bristling eyebrows. The ensemble, which indicated that Schmidt was in one of his swashbuckling moods, was ominous enough, but that wasn’t what brought me to a stop. Schmidt was singing.

That’s how he would have described it. Schmidt can’t carry a tune in a bucket, but he loves music, and he had recently expanded his repertoire to include country music. American country music. What he was doing to this tune would have sent the citizens of Nashville, Tennessee, running for a rope.

It was my fault, I admit that. I had heard them all my life, not the modern rock adaptations, but the old railroad and work songs, the blues and ballads. During the Great Depression my grandad had wandered the country like so many other footloose, jobless young men; he bragged of having known Boxcar Willie and John Lomax, and he could still make a guitar cry. I had once made the mistake of playing a Jimmie Rodgers tape for Schmidt. That was all it took.

In addition to being tone-deaf, Schmidt never gets the words quite right. ‘. . . I sing to my Dixie darling, Beneath the silver moon, With my banjo on my knee.’ Imagine that in a thick Bavarian accent.

He broke off when he saw me. ‘Ah, Vicky! You are here!’

‘I’m late,’ I said automatically. ‘Very late. I have to – ’

‘But my poor Vicky.’ He stood on tiptoe peering up into my face. ‘Your eyes are shadowed and sunken. You have the look of a woman who – ’

‘Shut up, Schmidt,’ I said, trying to get around him. He popped the rest of the doughnut into his mouth and caught hold of my hand. Strawberry jelly glued our fingers together. A stream of water from the hem of his coat was soaking my shoes.

‘Come and have coffee and tell Papa Schmidt all about it. Is Karl Feder annoying you again? Tsk! He should be ashamed, the old rascal. Or,’ – he grinned and winked – ‘or is it another individual who is responsible for the disturbance of your slumber?’

Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that Gerda was on her feet, leaning precariously across the desk as she tried to overhear. Schmidt had seen her too. Shaking his head, he said disapprovingly, ‘There is no decent regard for privacy in this place. Come into my office, Vicky, where we can be alone, and you will tell Papa Schmidt – ’

‘No,’ I said.

‘No what? It was not Sir John – ’

‘No everything! Nobody disturbed my slumber, no, I will not come into your office, no, Karl Feder is not . . .’ I stopped, clutching at the last ragged strands of sanity. Better to let Schmidt think Karl’s reasons for calling were personal instead of professional. Or was it? The world was dissolving into chaos around me.

‘See you later, Schmidt,’ I babbled, freeing my hand. ‘I have to – I have to – go to the bathroom.’

It was the only place I could think of where he wouldn’t follow me. I locked myself into a cubicle and collapsed onto the seat.

My hand was red and sticky. In certain lights, strawberry jelly looks a lot like fresh blood.

John was certainly a reasonable subject for anxiety dreams. He had more deadly enemies than anyone I’d ever met. Sometimes I was one of them.

When I first ran into him I was trying to track down a forger of historic jewels. 2I had no business doing any such thing; it was a combination of curiosity and the desire for a free vacation that took me to Rome, and some people might have said that it served me right when I got in over my head. John got me out. He had been an enthusiastic participant in the swindle until the others decided to eliminate me, but, as he candidly admitted, chivalry had nothing to do with his change of heart. He disapproved of murder on practical grounds. As he put it, ‘the penalties are so much more severe.’

I never meant to get involved with him. He isn’t really my type – only an inch or so taller than I, slightly built, his features (with one or two exceptions) pleasant but unremarkable. I don’t know why I ended up in that little hotel in Trastevere. Gratitude, womanly sympathy for a wounded hero, curiosity – or those exceptional characteristics? It turned out to be a memorable experience, and it may have been the worst mistake I have ever made in my life.

Another brief encounter, in Paris, was both embarrassing and expensive. I woke up one morning to find the police hammering at the door and John gone. Naturally he hadn’t paid the hotel bill.

So why did I respond to that enigmatic message from Stockholm a few months later? 3I told myself it was because I wanted to get back at him for Paris, meeting his challenge and beating him at his own game. (That’s what I told myself.) It was a relatively harmless little scheme to begin with – he needed me to gain access to an innocent old gentleman whose backyard happened to be full of buried treasure – but it turned ugly when a second group of crooks zeroed in on the same treasure. That was my first encounter with the hardcore professionals of the art underworld, and I sincerely hoped it would be my last. John was a professional, but compared to Max and Hans and Rudi and their boss, Leif, he looked like Little Lord Fauntleroy. They disliked John even more than I did, and from my point of view he was definitely the lesser of two evils, so once again we were forced to collaborate in order to escape. My negative opinion of him didn’t change, though, until . . .

It was one of the more lurid incidents in a life that has not been precisely colourless. There we were, trying to row a leaking boat across a very deep, very cold lake during a violent thunderstorm, with an aquatic assassin holding on to the bow and slashing at me with a knife. I had just about resigned myself to dying young when John went over the side of the boat. He was unarmed and outweighed, but he managed to keep Leif occupied until I got to shore. They found Leif’s body later. John never turned up, dead or alive. Everybody except me assumed he had drowned. After eight months without a word I began to wonder myself.