Fellowship of Fear

The words, spoken so often by Nora, made his heart turn over, and while he fumbled witlessly for something to say, he was further flustered by the soft light that suddenly suffused her face. No one had looked at him like that for a very long time. For an irrational instant it seemed that Nora was back again, that the past had somehow changed, that time had bent.

She reached a hand toward his cheek and stopped with her fingertips a few inches away.

“You’ve really been through it, haven’t you?” she said, with something in her voice that hadn’t been there at the dinner party the week before.

It finally occurred to Gideon that she was reacting to his face. He had forgotten how damaged it was. “It was nothing,” he said stupidly, watching her.

Janet dropped her hand back to her side. “Nothing?” she said. “You sure look like hell.”

“So people have been telling me. But it’s nowhere near as bad as it looks.” His voice sounded appropriately calm in his ears, but his heart was beating rapidly. For the first few months after Nora’s death, of course, he was always seeing her in the street or on campus, or getting on a bus. But it hadn’t happened for at least a year.

“I sure hope not,” she said. “I see you’re using a cane.”

“Only for another day or two. Really, I’m all right.” He paused and cleared his throat. Asking for a date was something that came no more easily to him at thirty-eight than it had at eighteen, and he had to lower his eyes to do it. “I don’t suppose you’re busy for dinner tonight?”

She laughed. “Thanks a lot.”

Gideon was confused at first. Then he laughed, too. “I mean, I don’t suppose you’re free tonight? I thought we might have dinner.”

“Sounds swell,” she said.

“Fine. Where shall I get you?” He stepped back a little, afraid she could hear his heart thumping.

“Get me? I live here.”

“You live in the BOQ?”

“Certainly. Why not? Cheapest place in town and a sink in every room. I’m in Twenty-one. Come by in an hour.”

Heidelberg is one of the very few German cities that was never bombed during World War II. As a result it has an Old World quality more authentic and pervasive than most of Germany’s other ancient cities. In the Old Town, housed in a baroque palace, is the Kurpfalziches Museum. On his first day in Heidelberg, Gideon had gone there to see the exhibit of Homo erectus heidelbergensis, the famed 360,000-year-old jawbone that had rocked the scientific world seventy years before. He was disappointed to see that the display contained only a plaster cast of the bone, but was pleased to find an elegant restaurant tucked into one corner of the courtyard. He hadn’t eaten there then, but had marked it as a place to come another time. It was here he took Janet.

Over veal steaks with cream sauce accompanied by an excellent Beilsteiner Mosel, she listened pensively, almost tenderly, to his description of the attack in Sicily. Relishing her attention, he milked the story for as much sympathy as he could, then sighed and sat back in his chair with a suitably noble expression on his battered countenance.

“But why did they do it?” Janet asked. “What was it about?”

Gideon came close to revealing his involvement with NSD but changed his mind. The less she knew, the better for her. My God, he thought; the need-to-know principle. He was starting to think like them. “The police have no idea,” he said. “They figure it was a Mafia thing, that I was mistaken for someone else.”

“Do you buy that? It doesn’t sound like the Mafia.”

He was suddenly alert. “What do you mean?”

She shrugged and held out her glass. He filled it. “Janet,” he said, “what really happened to those other two visiting fellows?”

“You think there’s a connection?” She sipped and then delicately licked the fruity wine from her lips.

With an effort, Gideon kept his mind on the conversation. “Well,” he said, “do these sorts of things happen to the regular faculty?”

“No,” Janet said. “It’s odd, now that you mention it. As far as I know, no USOC prof has ever been killed here or even seriously hurt, except that other fellow and now you.”

“What about the Econ fellow you and Eric were talking about last week?”

“Oh, Pete?” She searched for his last name. “Pete Berger? I didn’t know him all that well. Nobody did. He was kind of a strange bird; awkward, shy, hard to talk to, never mingled much. I know he had a bad reputation for missing classes, and Dr. Rufus was thinking about firing him. But he never got hurt, as far as I know. He just disappeared for good one day and never showed up again… Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, it is peculiar, isn’t it?”

“Yes, isn’t it? Where was he when he disappeared?”

“Up north somewhere. Bremerhaven, I think. I wish I could tell you more.”

“What about the other one?”

“The guy that got killed? I never met him. I just heard his car ran off the road in Italy.”

They paused while the waiter brought them each a cup of coffee.

“Janet,” said Gideon, stirring a little sugar into the strong, fragrant brew, “when you were telling me some of this last week at the dinner, Eric tried to shush you up, remember? Why did he do that?”

He studied her face. She looked at him with open, innocent eyes. Lovely eyes, really, with clear, beautiful hazel irises.