allowed near a phone, and the news I'm being fed is so scrappy that if I were a dog, I'd be chasing sheep.'
'Don't exaggerate.'
'Any progress with Vreni?'
'None. She's alive, she's physically almost recovered, but her mind is the problem. She talks little, sleeps a lot, and any attempt to question her has proved disastrous. It sends her into a fit each time. The doctors have insisted that she be left alone.'
'Poor kid,' said the Bear. 'What about Lodge?'
'Vanished – not that he ever appeared, now I think about it. The house has been taken apart by the army and made safe, which was no small task itself. There were booby traps everywhere. Afterward the forensics people had a field day. There is no doubt that Lodge is the Hangman, but the question is, is Lodge really Lodge?'
'Why do you say that?'
'Questioning of the neighbors hasn't yielded much,' explained Fitzduane. 'He is a recluse. He comes and goes at irregular intervals. He is absent for long periods. It's consistent with what we expected. We have had some small luck in terms of physical description, though few people have seen him up close. Mostly quick glimpses through a car window.'
'I thought all his various cars have tinted windows.'
'Sometimes, on a hot day, a window might be wound down,' said Fitzduane. 'He has also been seen walking on a couple of occasions – both times while it was raining so he was huddled under an umbrella.'
'Blond, bearded, medium build, et cetera,' said the Bear.
'Quite so,' said Fitzduane. 'And that tallies with the photo and other personal details filed with the Bern Fremdenpolizei.'
'So what's the problem?'
'We've traced some of Lodge's background in the States,' said Fitzduane. 'We haven't been able to lay our hands on a photograph – his father was a senior CIA man and apparently for security reasons didn't allow either himself or his family to be photographed – but the physical descriptions don't tally. Hair and eyes are a different color. Lodge in his youth had dark brown hair and brown eyes.'
'A good wig and contact lenses are all you need to solve that problem.'
Fitzduane shook his head. 'Not so simple. Normal procedure for an alien coming to live in Switzerland involves the Fremdenpolizei, as you know. In Lodge's case, he was interviewed several times by an experienced sergeant who swears that the man he spoke to – for several hours in all – had naturally blond hair, was not wearing contact lenses, and is the man in the photo in his file, which in turn pretty much tallies with the neighbors' description.'
'Fingerprints?'
'None,' said Fitzduane. 'None on file in the States anyway. The Fremdenpolizei apparently don't taken them if you're a well-behaved affluent foreigner, and the jury is still out on the house in Muri. The forensics people have picked up some unidentified prints, but without a match they're not much use. I wouldn’t bet on the Hangman's prints being among them. He seems to skate near the edge, but in fundamental things he's damn cautious.'
'So Lodge is the Hangman,' said the Bear, 'but maybe Lodge isn't Lodge – and the Lodge that isn't Lodge isn’t to be found.'
'Hole in one,' said Fitzduane.
The Bear looked out the full-length window. Despite protestations about security, he had insisted on being on the ground floor and on having direct access to the garden. The window was slightly open, and he could smell freshly cut grass. He could hear the mower in the distance. 'I hate hospitals. But I'm developing a certain affection for this one. Dental records?' he added.
'Like the marriage feast at Cana, I'm saving the best for last.'
'So?' the Bear said impatiently.
'The Nose has been set up to monitor any incident in Bern that might conceivably relate to the activities of the Hangman. A couple of days ago a dentist's surgery was completely destroyed by fire – as was the dentist, who had been bound into his own chair with wire.'
'That sounds like the Hangman's sense of humor,' said the Bear. 'Though I guess there might be a few other candidates among the patients.'
'Needless to say, all of the dentist's records were destroyed, and that would have been that except it turns out he kept a backup set in his bank.'
'I'm sure his widow will enjoy looking through them. And I presume Mr. Lodge's full frontals are among them?'
'Exactly.'
'Matrushka,' said the Bear, 'if I can quote Henssen's latest obsession.'
'Gesundheit,' said Fitzduane.
The Chief Kripo was contemplating the computer screen. His face had been gashed unpleasantly, if not severely, during the Muri raid, and the scars itched. The stitches had been taken out several days before, and he had been told he was healing well. He had also been told the scars would be permanent unless he had plastic surgery. He was unenthusiastic about the idea; he thought he'd prefer to remain scarred and dangerous-looking than have some quack peel skin off his bottom and try to stick it on his face. He didn’t like strangers attempting to rearrange his bit – which brought him right back to the Hangman, who had damn nearly succeeded in disassembling him into his component parts.
He tapped the computer keyboard a couple of times with his forefinger. 'It works,' he said. 'You've proved that it does. Why is it that now, when we're so close, it's of no help anymore?'
Henssen shrugged helplessly. 'It has to be asked the right questions.'
The Chief glared at the VDU. He had a totally irrational desire to climb inside the machine with a screwdriver and wrench and force the dumb beast to cough up some answers. Somewhere inside that electronic monster lay the solution. He was convinced of that. But what to do about it? He had no idea. He was certain he was missing something – something obvious. He walked back and forth across the room, glancing frequently at the computer. After ten minutes of this, to Henssen's great relief, he stopped and sat down.
'Tell me more,' he said, 'about how this machine thinks.'
Fitzduane found walking in the Marzili pleasant but distracting. The Marzili was a long, thin park sandwiched between the River Aare and a well-to-do residential area of Bern, both of which were overlooked by the Bundeshaus bad a plethora of government buildings, including the Interpol building and the headquarters of the Federal Police.
The Marzili's proximity to the center of things meant that even this early in the year, as the day was warm and sunny, a generous sprinkling of nearly naked women was scattered across the lawn. Topless sunbathing was the norm in the Marzili, and hundreds of secretaries and computer operators and other government workers were busy making up for a long, cold winter. Serried ranks of nipples were pointed at the sun like solar cells on an energy farm.
Fitzduane, encased in a bulletproof vest under a light cotton blouson jacket, felt overdressed. He glanced across at the Bear, who was humming. Externally the detective seemed little the worse for wear after his two weeks in the hospital, and his cheeks had the ruddy glow of good living. On second thought Fitzduane decided that more than good food and wine were reflected in the Bear's demeanor. Love and the Bear? Well, good for Frau Maurer. Her first name, he had learned, was Katia.
'Don't you find all this distracting?' he asked. Fitzduane's eyes followed a spectacular redhead as she loped across the grass in front of them and then lay down on a towel, eyes closed, face and body toward the sun, knees drawn up and slightly apart. Tendrils of pubic hair escaping from the monokini confirmed that she was the genuine article. She looked edible.
'On the contrary,' said the Bear, 'I find it riveting.'
