Night Train to Memphis - Elizabeth Peters [5]
‘You will be in no danger,’ Burckhardt repeated.
‘Damn right.’ I stood up. ‘Because I won’t be on that cruise. Auf Wiedersehen, meine Herren.’
‘Think about it,’ Karl said smoothly. ‘You needn’t decide now.’
I was thinking about it. My acquaintanceship with the members of the art underworld is more extensive than I would like, but there was one individual with whom I was particularly well acquainted. His had been the first name that occurred to me – if it was his name. He had at least four aliases, including his favourite, ‘Sir John Smythe.’ I didn’t know – I had never known – his last name, and even though be had told me his first name was John, I had no reason to suppose he was telling the truth. He hardly ever did tell the truth. He was a thief and a swindler and a liar, and he had dragged me into a number of embarrassing, not to say dangerous, situations, but if he hadn’t come to my rescue at the risk of grievous bodily harm to himself – something John preferred not to do – I wouldn’t be in Karl’s office wondering whether he and Herr Burckhardt knew, or only suspected, that the ‘individual’ they were after might be my occasional and elusive lover.
III
It took me a long time to get back to sleep after that grisly dream. I was not in the best possible condition to cope with Munich’s rush-hour traffic next morning – short on sleep, tense with a mixture of anger, anxiety, and indecision. It was raining, of course. It always rains in Munich when somebody offers me a trip to some place bright and warm and sunny.
I’ve lived in Munich for a number of years, ever since I wangled a job out of the funny little fat man who had been a prime suspect m my first ‘case,’ as he would call it.1 He wasn’t the murderer, as it turned out; he was a famous scholar, director of the National Museum, and he had been impressed by my academic credentials as well as by the fact that I could have embarrassed the hell out of him by telling the world about some of his shenanigans during that adventure. We had become good friends and I had come to think of Munich as my adopted home town. It’s a beautiful city in one of the most beautiful parts of the world – when the sun is shining. In the rain, with fallen leaves making the streets slick and dangerous, it is as dreary as any other large city.
When I pulled into the staff parking lot behind the museum, Karl the janitor popped out of his cubicle to inquire after the health, not of my humble self, but of Caesar, for whom he has an illicit passion. I assured him all was well and hurried through the storage areas of the basement, praying Schmidt hadn’t arrived yet. I had to go to the museum office to collect my mail and messages; if I didn’t, Gerda, Schmidt’s hideously efficient and inquisitive secretary, would bring them to me and hang around, talking and asking questions and ignoring my hints that she should go away, and then I would probably hit her with something large and heavy because Gerda gets on my nerves even when they are not already stretched to the breaking point.
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,