because of the huge crush of people awaiting departure. Consequently, when I disembarked I was exhausted and irritable and in no damned shape to drive a hundred kilometers in a driving rain on a dark night in a strange country.
I picked up my rental car, a Volkswagen, and a road map, and managed to find my way out of the airport. I drove to the nearest overnight accommodations, a modern American-type motel, and took a room. I thought about calling Elaine to see if she was all right, but I decided to wait until I got into Kitzingen. She had followed my instructions about getting another hotel, and she was now registered as a Miss Elaine Adams in the Argonaut Hotel on California Street; I had talked with her briefly just before leaving on Friday afternoon and she had seemed well in control of the situation. I was fairly certain she would remain in her room, as I had asked, and if she did that she would be okay.
I had a quick and very hot bath, got in between cool sheets, and went to sleep immediately. I slept too heavily to be particularly well rested or refreshed when the eight o’clock call I had requested woke me Sunday morning. It was still raining. I took the road map, and the German language books I had bought in San Francisco prior to leaving, into the motel’s dining room for the Continental breakfast included in the room price. I located my position on the map and figured out a route south to Kitzingen, and then continued refreshing my memory with the German books; I had had a course in the language as part of my military training, with the Intelligence unit I had been assigned to in the South Pacific, but the years of disuse had pushed most of the words and the grammar far back into my subconscious. The books, which I had begun reading on the flights, had helped a little and I thought I could get by all right.
I paid twenty Deutsche marks for the room and put my luggage into the Volkswagen and set out for Kitzingen. I got lost a couple of times in the rain, and had a bad scare with a truck near Schweinfurt; I was the original babe in the woods, and my nerves were frayed when I reached Kitzingen a few minutes past eleven.
It was a small, attractive town set on a flat plain and surrounded by fertile fields and lush green forests of beech and oak; this was wine country, where they made the tart white Frankenwein in the valleys near Iphofen and Rodelsee to the southeast. The buildings were Gothic and German and Italian Renaissance in design-some with lavish wood studding, some with simple brickwork facades, almost all with rust-colored tile roofs. Here and there were squared or rounded church towers, reaching up into the wet gray sky, and the bells in some of them filled the morning with a resonant summons.
I entered the town proper, crossing the rail tracks connecting Wurzburg and Nuremberg. At Der Falterturm, a huge brick tower and carnival museum set in a wide flowered square, I turned to the left and into the center of the village. After ten minutes of searching, I located a hotel-the Bayerischer Hof-on Hernstrasse; there was not much traffic, and I found a place to park on the street and went inside with my bags.
I took a room on the top floor, and from the window I could look out at the narrow gray waters of the Main River, the tree-studded opposite bank, the green and glistening land spreading out to the south. I spent a few minutes unpacking, and then I went downstairs and asked the desk man-who spoke excellent English-to arrange a transatlantic call to San Francisco for five that evening; that would make it about 8:00 a.m. California time and I would not be frightening Elaine Kavanaugh with a middle-of-the-night call.
This being Sunday, it was a certainty that the Galerie der Expressionisten would be closed-so I decided to look up Jock MacVeagh at Larson Barracks. I asked directions, and the desk man produced a map and pointed out the way.
The base was located to the northwest of the town, and you got to it via the Steigweg, on the other side of the rail tracks. It was a sprawling compound of weathered buildings, with a stoic gatepost sentry at the main entrance. I stated my name and the nature of my business, and it turned out that Jock MacVeagh had left word at the gate that I was to see him in his quarters, this being an off-duty day. The sentry gave me directions, and I found the place easily enough, well toward the rear perimeter of the compound.
It was a large building, without much adornment, divided into private residence facilities for the non- commissioned officers. I located MacVeagh’s quarters and rapped on the door, and a moment later it swung wide.
He was a big, red-faced Scotsman with huge hands and a wedge-shaped torso and eyes as black as a peat bog at midnight. Whiskey-broken veins etched the skin on either side of a somewhat battered nose, and he had the kind of wide mouth that would be quick to smile, quick to set in angry belligerence. His jaw was like a clefted granite bluff. But he was aging, too; you could see it in the lines and tributaries of his face, the roundness of his belly, the receding hairline, the faint liver spots among the dark black hairs on the backs of his hands.
I introduced myself, and the mention of my name brought a flashing grin like a neon sign coming on. He had an iron grip, but he did not try to prove anything with it. ‘I’ve been expecting you,’ he said. ‘I figured you’d be in last night.’
‘Well, I made Frankfurt,’ I told him, ‘but it was late and I was too tired to drive down.’
‘No sweat. Come on, I’ll pop you a beer.’
We went inside and his quarters were small and neat and orderly, the bed made according to regulations and his clothes picked up and hung away. He had some German-manufactured stereo equipment set up on one side of the room, and a lot of color and black-and-white photographs of women- interspersed with German beer and liquor signs-on the walls. He got a couple of bottles of Lowenbrau out of a small cooler and opened them and gave me one. We sat across from each other at a small dining table.
MacVeagh said, ‘I had this little
I had some of the Lowenbrau, and it was cold and rich and very good; the Germans brew the best beer in the world. I watched MacVeagh over the tilted bottle, and I thought: He’s one of the good-time boys, too, like Hendryx and Rosmond and Gilmartin- one of the handsome ones, the popular ones, the ones with the right word, the right phrase, the right line; the lovers, the cocksmen, with the world their bedroom and the bed seldom empty and seldom silent. But now they’re fast approaching middle age, and some of their appeal is fading, and some of their virility perhaps, and they can see the end now; they can see the wrinkles and the arthritis and the dentures and the shriveled glands; and they can see, too, the scornful looks and hear the mocking laughter of the daughters of the girls who once flocked to them. That glimpse of the future terrifies them, haunts them, gnaws at them, becomes almost an obsession, and they need constant reassurance of their prowess, constant reaffirmation of their attractiveness- running scared, telling more lies, bragging more and exaggerating more, laughing louder and longer and increasingly more hollowly. And each time they go searching for a woman, they’re filled with the same terrible dread: Can I still attract the young ones, the pretty ones? And when they find that they can, if they can, the attendant dread is always there and always the same as well: Suppose, this time, I can’t get it up; suppose, this time, I can’t perform?
Every man around my age has harbored some fears of failing virility, and I was no exception; but I had never been a cocksman, never wanted to be one, and when I saw guys like MacVeagh and the rest, I was thankful for that. When you took sex away from them, you took away their main purpose-and without purpose, no matter what form it takes, what more can you do except simply to vegetate? That was one particularly frightening hell I did not think I would have to face.
I set the sweat-beaded bottle down on the table. ‘The pickings must be pretty good over here,’ I said, because that was what MacVeagh wanted to hear.
He grinned, and his black eyes sparkled. ‘The best,’ he said, nodding emphatically. ‘Listen, if you’re interested, I can fix you up with something hot and willing right here in Kitzingen. Guaranteed, baby-the original German Valkyrie.’
‘Well, if I can find the time.’
‘Yeah,’ MacVeagh said, and his expression sobered. ‘Roy. Why don’t you fill me in on the details? All I know is what you said in your wire.’
I filled him in on the details, leaving out the threatening telephone calls to Elaine and me and skipping lightly over the theft of the portrait. He listened attentively, a frown digging horizontal trenches in the red-hued skin above his eyebrows.
‘I don’t much like the sound of it,’ he said. ‘Roy was gone over the Kavanaugh chick, and if he hasn’t contacted her in three weeks, something must have happened to him. You really figure there’s some kind of connection between Kitzingen and him disappearing in Oregon?’
