'We haven't looked at them yet, but the crates are all OK.'
'Then don't worry about the paintings,' Flittner said.
'What about the two men?' Anne Greene asked. 'Have they been caught?'
'No,' Harry said, 'and to be honest we don't have a clue. Obviously, they got on base without any problem, so it looks like they had forged IDs.'
Robey smiled. 'Maybe that's what you ought to try, Chris.'
'Not at all,' Gadney said primly. 'I'll have a proper card for him before the day is out.'
'Why did they want to get on the base in the first place?' I asked Harry. 'And why leave the truck there? Why didn't they just drive away with it?'
It was Anne who answered. 'Maybe you don't understand the layout here yet, Dr. Norgren. Columbia House fronts on the street, but it forms part of the perimeter of Tempelhof. The only way to get a truck around to the back of the building, where the storage room is, is to drive onto the base.'
'That's exactly right,' Harry said, 'and that's exactly what they did. They got hold of a beer truck authorized to deliver on base, drove it around to the courtyard behind this building, knocked out the outside guard with what we think was an electronic stun gun, then chloroformed him, and finally cut through the door with some kind of laser tool. The back door's down in the stairwell, so there wasn't anybody to see.'
'Stun gun, laser tool,' Robey said in his vague, musing way. 'Seems like pretty up-to-date technology. They must be professionals.'
'Oh yeah, for sure.' Harry drank some more mineral water, tossing it into his mouth like a slug of whiskey. 'When Chris scared them off, they didn't dare go tearing back out through the gate in a Schultheiss beer truck. So they left it in a protected corner of the lot, with the paintings, and as far as we know they just walked out the gate.' He held out his hands, palms up. 'That's all we know.'
'You have no idea who might be behind this?' Gadney asked.
Harry shook his head. 'As my British pals like to say, we're pursuing our inquiries. We're in touch with Interpol-they keep a file of international art thieves: MOs, connections, and so on. So far, nothing.'
Flittner, slumped gracelessly in his chair, sighed gustily, shaking out a match he'd used to light still another cigarette. The first two fingers of his left hand were the color of tobacco. 'You don't need Interpol,' he mumbled into his chest. 'It was an inside job.'
The rest of us looked at him.
'It stands to reason, doesn't it?' he growled, as if we were arguing with him. 'They knew just where the paintings were stored, didn't they? They were scheduled to be in the storage room for less than twenty-four hours, but they knew anyway. And they knew exactly where the storage room was, and that it had a back door, and how to get to the back door. That's not exactly public knowledge. It's somebody in the damn army.'
Gadney shook his head. 'No, I'm afraid I can't agree with that, Earl. If it was, er, an inside job, they'd never have bothered with the copies.'
Robey, staring at the ceiling, hands clasped behind his neck, drifted hack into the conversation. 'That's an interesting point, Earl. They couldn't very well have been insiders, could they?' He turned thoughtful eyes on Harry. 'Or professionals either. Pros wouldn't fool around with the fakes, would they? Not with the real things sitting right there.'
Anne shook her head. 'That isn't necessarily so. Everything was still packed up. How could they tell what was in each crate? And,' she said, turning to Flittner, 'the copies were all at the back of the room near the outside door, isn't that right?'
'So?'
'Well, then, they probably just started nearest the back door; that would be the easiest way. I imagine they were going to take everything. There weren't that many crates.'
'That could very well be,' Gadney said approvingly. 'In any case, it strongly supports my position that inside knowledge was not involved. After all, the acquisition number of each painting is clearly stenciled on its crate. Surely anyone connected with the show would be familiar with the numbering system, and would never have touched the reproductions.'
I put in my two cents' worth. 'I don't think that's necessarily true, either. From what I saw of the storage room, it was stuffed to bursting with crates. Even if those guys understood the numbering, there wasn't enough room to walk around looking for the right stencils. If I'd been stealing them, I'd have done what Anne said-start near the back door and keep going till I had them all. It would have been faster than trying to pick and choose.'
This not only made sense to me but gave me the chance to agree with Anne.
'I still say it was an inside job,' grumbled Flittner through a dense cloud of smoke pouring from mouth, nostrils, and-so it seemed-ears.
'And I,' Gadney said, seizing the gauntlet, 'say it was not.'
To display the depth of his conviction, he placed his cup in its saucer with an audaciously audible clink. He and Flittner, I had noticed earlier, rarely missed an opportunity to differ. This was one of the few times Gadney had held his own.
Harry had been listening alertly, his hand tugging at his beard or sometimes at his hair, his black eyes jumping from speaker to speaker. 'Well, well,' he said, 'that's really interesting. I'm glad to have your ideas.'
'Ha, ha,' Flittner commented.
'No, I mean it,' Harry said.
'I have another idea,' Gadney ventured.
Predictably, Flittner sneered. Or maybe he didn't. Some people have srnile lines permanently implanted on their faces, and some have frown lines. Flittner had sneer lines, as if he'd done it too often and now his mouth was permanently set.
'Yeah?' Harry said to Gadney with interest. 'What?'
'I wonder if it's occurred to anyone that the Heinrich-Schliemann-Grundung might have had a hand in this?'
I leaned inquisitively toward him. 'The…'
He didn't hear me, but Anne, sitting next to me, did. She leaned over, close enough so that I smelled her scent: citrus and citrus blossoms, faint but ravishing. 'Die Heinrich-Schliemann-Grundung. It means-'
'Ich spreche deutsch,' I said crisply, cutting her off in midsentence and midsmile. Her clear eyes widened momentarily, but she wasn't any more surprised than I was. What, I wondered, did I have to be curt about? And why would I want to put off a sensational-looking, single female (no ring, anyway) who was trying to be friendly? I had no idea.
Anyway, die Heinrich-Schliemann-Grundung obviously meant the Heinrich Schliemann Foundation-whatever that meant.
'Heinrich Schliemann?' I asked Gadney.
Anne had another try. 'He was a German archaeologist-'
Incredibly, I did it again. 'I know who Heinrich Schliemann was,' I snapped, regretting it instantly; and I'm sorry to say that it sounded as snotty as it looks.
This time she drew stiffly back. 'Of course you'd know, Dr. Norgren,' she said, coolly polite. 'Forgive me; that was silly of me.'
'No,' I said, 'not at all.' I meant to be contrite, but it's hard to say 'Not at all' without a touch of the regal. Hard for me, anyway. It was the sort of thing Peter said frequentiy. 'That is,' I bumbled on, 'I know who Schliemann was, but I don't have the foggiest' -I sounded more like Peter with every word- 'idea what he could have to do with…'
I hesitated invitingly, but she had been twice burned, and she wasn't having any more, and who could blame her? It was Robey who responded.
'Hm?' he said. 'What? Schliemann?' He slowly tamped tobacco into a blackened pipe. 'Well, you know how he had all that trouble with the Turkish government, a hundred years back or so, about his excavations at Troy? How they wouldn't let him take his finds out of Turkey and back to Germany?'
I nodded.
'Well, this group named themselves after him because they don't want to see Germany 'cheated' again. They say that whatever the Nazis took during the war shouldn't have been given back, and they're talking about a formal
