Fellowship of Fear

“Well, well,” said Bruce Danzig with a prunelike smile. “The peripatetic professor, put in from his peregrinations.”

Dr. Rufus roared with laughter. “Wonderful, Bruce! How do you do that sort of thing?”

“I prepare ahead of time,” Danzig said.

Gideon didn’t doubt it. “Alliterative archivists always alienate,” he said, rather pleased with himself.

“Touche,” Danzig said with some surprise. Then, after a pause during which Dr. Rufus continued to chuckle, “Are those the books you borrowed last week? I have to go back inside for a moment; I can take them in for you.”

“Actually, I brought them along hoping I could browse through them on the cruise. But I’m really only interested in one of them; you can have the other.”

Danzig looked at the title of the book Gideon handed him. “Campbell, Human Evolution,” he read aloud. “So you’re keeping the Weidenreich?”

“Just for a couple of days. I’m impressed; do you usually know your lent-out books by heart?”

“No,” said Danzig evenly, “I just happened to remember because there’s a rush request on that one, and I said it would be available Monday.”

“I’ll bring it in on Monday.”

“Aren’t you going to Izmir Monday?”

“All right, I’ll drop it off tomorrow. It’s not overdue, is it? What’s the hurry?”

“Now, now,” said Dr. Rufus uncomfortably, “let’s not quibble. This is a big day.”

“I thought I was the only one teaching anthro,” Gideon said, studying Danzig. “Why would anyone else be interested in The Skull of Sinanthropus Pekinensis?”

“No, no, no, no,” Dr. Rufus said. “Absolutely not. No arguing permitted today.” He took them both by the arm. “The bus is here, and I’m getting on it with our alliterative archivist. You, sir,” he said to Gideon, giving him a friendly shove in Janet’s direction, “have the good fortune of being the object of that lovely lady’s impatience.”

He thumped Gideon on the back with robust good humor. “Really delighted you’re back safe,” he said, and marched off, pulling an annoyed-looking Bruce Danzig with him.

Book 7: The Rheingau

20

AT JANET’S SUGGESTION, THE four of them drove north via the Bergstrasse. Gideon was delighted with the road. Never more than a mile or two from the hectic autobahn and its dreary landscape, the Bergstrasse took them through a lovely world of ancient villages with names like Heppenheim and Zwingenberg and Bickenbach: little towns with crooked, half-timbered houses, and cobblestoned streets. Between the villages were neat little orchards that, according to Janet, were famous for blooming ten days before those anywhere else in Germany.

For a while they enjoyed the peace of the countryside, chatting casually and only occasionally. Gideon, who was expecting a sultry Chinese beauty, found Marti Lau a surprise. A gangling, coltish twenty-five-year-old with big hands and feet, whose maiden name had been Goldenberg, she was given to ejaculations like “yuckers” and “wowie-zowie.” She had a frank, pretty face that dimpled engagingly when she smiled, which was every time they spoke to her, or looked at her, or looked as if they might look at her.

Other than smiles and wowie-zowies, her communications consisted of non sequiturs, mostly in the form of odd, abstract, unanswerable questions directed at Gideon. She had already asked him, in a broad Kansas accent, what human beings were going to look like in ten thousand years, and why there was more than one language in the world. At first he had tried serious replies, which seemed to delight her. After a while he simply smiled and shrugged. She appeared equally pleased.

Near Darmstadt they left the Bergstrasse and turned across the flat, industrial Rhine Plain below Frankfurt. The conversation turned to Gideon’s adventures. John hadn’t known about the attempted theft of the radio the night before and listened with absorption as he drove.

“Forget about NSD being responsible,” he said. “That makes no sense at all. It’s got to be the Russians. But why the radio?” he added under his breath. “Why the radio?”

“I have an idea,” Janet said. “Why don’t we try a little creative brainstorming on that question? Free association—whatever comes into your mind.”

“Okay,” John said, after a few moments of silence, “maybe he was stealing it to sell because his wife needed an operation.”

“No,” Gideon said. “This was really a cheap—”

Janet interrupted. “Hold it, hold it. That’s not the way it works. No critical thinking, please. Just keep the ideas coming. Give your unconscious a chance.”

“All right,” said Gideon. He was happy and relaxed, and car games were fine with him. “Maybe he wanted to hear the soccer scores and his own radio was broken.”

“Good,” Janet said. “Or maybe he could hear it playing through the wall, and he hates music, and he was taking it to throw away.”

“Or maybe,” Gideon said, getting into the swing of it, “it sounded like it wasn’t playing right, and he was taking it out to get a new battery for it.”

“Hey, wow, got it!” Marti said. “How about if what’s-his-name was in your room doing something that had nothing to do with the radio, but that he saw you coming—he could have, through the window, couldn’t he?—and he just grabbed the radio and made off with it to keep you from figuring out what he was really doing.”

It made a strange kind of sense to Gideon. He looked at Marti with respect. But what was he really