intruders looked at each other, then dashed out the door, shoving Frau Gross out of the way. For a second she stopped howling. Then she took a measured breath and began again with renewed vigor, staring at Gideon with emotionless, piglike eyes.
WITH THE MORNING SUNLIGHT streaming through the windows of the Hotel Ballman’s breakfast room, and the fragrance of rich European coffee in the air, the horrors of the night had paled to a kind of good guys-bad guys adventure farce, which Gideon was happily describing to a rapt gathering of fellow USOC’rs. He had already gone over the details with the unsympathetic American MPs and the rough, green-uniformed German Polizei who had arrived within minutes after the two men had fled. Now, with a more amiable audience, he was telling things at his own pace, perhaps leaving out a few unnecessary details here and embellishing a little there for the sake of the narrative flow.
He was about to explain how he had carefully palmed the key and brass plate as soon as he had entered his room and found the men, when he saw the husky Oriental come in. The newcomer walked to Frau Gross, who was sullenly laying out baskets of hard rolls and individual little packages of cheese and jam. The landlady gestured ill- naturedly at Gideon with her chin, and the big man—Gideon guessed he was Chinese Hawaiian—walked toward him.
“Dr. Oliver? I wonder, could I talk to you a little?”
Gideon excused himself and got up, and they went to an unoccupied table.
“My name’s John Lau, Professor. I’m a police officer.” He laid an open card case on the table, revealing a blue, plastic-coated card, and left it there until Gideon had had time to read it.
NATO
Gideon nodded. “All right, what can I do for you, Mr. Lau?”
Lau had made himself comfortable, ordering coffee for both of them, while Gideon had examined his card. Now he flashed a sudden, good-natured smile. “Not Mr.
Gideon sighed. “I’ve already been through it three times with the Polizei and the MPs… But I guess you already know that.”
Again the eye-crinkling smile. Gideon liked the man’s face, relaxed and powerful. “Sure,” he said. “Look, what I want to know is, do you have any idea what they were after?” He had a choppy, pleasant way of talking.
The coffee was dumped down in front of them by Frau Gross. Gideon shook his head slowly while stirring in cream. “No idea, none at all.”
“Well, try guessing, then.”
“Guessing?”
“Guessing. Pretend you’re me. What would be your theory?” It had the sound of a harmless academic exercise. Gideon sometimes used the very same words in Anthropology 101.
“Theory? I don’t even have a hypothesis. You’re the expert; what do you think?”
“You told the Polizei they were Americans,” Lau said. “Is that an inference, or can you support it?” Another Anthro 101 question, Gideon thought.
“I told them
“What makes you so sure? People speak more than one language.”
Gideon sipped his coffee and shook his head emphatically. “Uh uh. I’m not talking about languages; I’m talking about speech patterns. He was born in the U.S., or maybe he came here—I mean there—when he was a kid; five, six, no older.”
Lau looked doubtful, and Gideon went on. “I’m telling you, the guy spoke native American; midwestern, maybe Iowa or Nebraska. It’s a question of stress, of lilt.”
Lau regarded him blankly. Gideon searched his mind for a simple example.
“Do you remember,” he said, “when he said to me, uh… Try to move and I kill you now‘? Well, aside from having no trace of foreign pronunciation, he said it the way only an American would. First, there was the rise-and- fall inflection; unmistakable in simple declarative sentences. Medium pitch at the beginning, up on the ’kill you,” and then down on the ‘now.“ ”
“Are you telling me—?”
“That’s not the critical part. Some foreigners learn to do that consistently. But the way the words are grouped—the flow, the clotting—that’s what tells you for sure. When an American talks, he jams a lot of words into irregular groupings, so the beat’s uneven. If you know how to listen for it, you can’t miss it.”
Lau’s expression was anything but convinced. Gideon continued, his teaching instincts warming to the challenge.
“Let’s say that he’d used a slightly shorter sentence like ‘Move and I kill you now.” In that case he would have given about the same amount of time to ’move‘ and ’kill you.“ Americans and Europeans both do that. But he threw in that ‘try to’ at the beginning, so that there were a few more words supporting ‘move.” Well, a native midwestern speaker of what’s sometimes called ’General American‘ tries to compress all three words into the same amount of time as the one word, and then lags a little in the next word group.“
Lau was leaning back in his chair, his arms crossed, apparently trying to decide whether Gideon was a purposeful liar or a simple academic quack. Gideon kept trying:
