The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [242]
Shocked and confused by his abruptness, she vaguely remembered agreeing and thanking him, then absently putting his present in her purse. Her mind had been on Lybarger. They had been together for a long time, and shared a great deal, not all of it entirely pleasant. The least Salettl could have let her do was to wish him well and say goodbye. Gift or not, what he had done had been curt, even rude. But what came next was even worse.
“—I know you expected to spend this last evening with Von Holden,” Salettl said. “Don’t act as if it’s a surprise that I know. Unfortunately, Von Holden will be occupied with duties for Mr. Scholl and will be leaving with him for South America immediately after the dinner.”
“I won’t see him?” She suddenly felt heartsick.
“No.”
She didn’t understand. She was to have spent the night at a Berlin hotel, then fly out to Los Angeles in the morning. Von Holden had said nothing about leaving with Scholl. He was to have come to her after the ceremony at Charlottenburg. The night was to have been theirs together.
“Your things have been packed. A car is waiting downstairs for you. Goodbye, Miss Marsh.”
And that had been that. A security guard had taken her downstairs. And then she was in the car and gone. Turning to look back, she could just see the palace. Barely visible in the thick fog, it slowly faded from sight. It was as if it, and everything she had done leading up to it, Von Holden included, had been a dream. A dream that, like Charlottenburg, simply vanished.
“Hubschrauber” helicopter, Remmer said, cradling the radio against his broken hand. The BMW sped past the Charlottenburg Hospital complex and then, a half mile later, turned abruptly into the dark expanse of Ruhwald park. Two-thirds of the way across it, the BKA detective at the wheel turned out the yellow fog lamps, then abruptly pulled over and stopped. Almost immediately the bright spotlight of a police helicopter illuminated the ground fifty feet away, and with a deafening roar settled down onto the grass. The pilot cut his engine and Schneider got out of the car and ran toward the machine. Ducking under the rotor blades, he opened the door and climbed inside. There was a roar of engine, followed by a storm of blowing grass and dust as the helicopter lifted off. Clearing the tree line, it spun a hundred and eighty degrees to the left and vanished into the night.
From his seat next to the pilot, Schneider could just make out the fog lamps of the BMW as it circled out of the field and turned left toward Charlottenburg Palace. Leaning back, he tightened his shoulder harness, then unbuttoned his coat and lifted out the handkerchief-covered prize he was taking to the fingerprint laboratory at Bad Godesberg: the water glass Elton Lybarger had used to swallow his vitamin pills.
123
* * *
“SEVERAL DAYS before Doctor Osborn’s father was murdered”—McVey had taken a small, dog-eared notebook from his jacket, and was half looking at it as he talked to Scholl—”he designed a scalpel. A very special kind of scalpel. Designed and made for his employer, a small company outside Boston. It was a company you owned, Mr. Scholl.”
“I never owned a company that manufactured scalpels.”
“I don’t know if they manufactured scalpels, I only know one was made.”
McVey had known from the moment Goetz went upstairs, to advise him what had happened, that Scholl would leave his guests and come down to meet him. His ego would make him. How could he pass up the chance to meet the man who had just survived a deadly ambush and still had the hubris to invade his private arena? But the curiosity would be fleeting, and as soon as he had seen enough he would leave. That is, unless McVey could take that same curiosity and run with it. That was the trick, working