Night Train to Memphis

‘Never mind.’

‘It is true. We will have other agents on that cruise; they will guard you day and night. The moment you have identified the individual – or individuals – in question, they will be placed under arrest – ’

‘No, they won’t.’

‘Bitte?’ said Burckhardt, trying to look puzzled. He knew perfectly well what I meant.

I spelled it out. ‘You can’t arrest people because Victoria Bliss thinks they look like somebody who might once, maybe, have committed a crime. You’ll have to wait till they do something illegal. And while you’re waiting, I’ll be sitting there like a groundhog on a superhighway at rush hour. If . . . they . . . are known to me, I’m also known to them.’

‘You will be in no danger,’ Burckhardt repeated.

‘Damn right.’ I stood up. ‘Because I won’t be on that cruise. Auf Wiedersehen, meine Herren.’

‘Think about it,’ Karl said smoothly. ‘You needn’t decide now.’

I was thinking about it. My acquaintanceship with the members of the art underworld is more extensive than I would like, but there was one individual with whom I was particularly well acquainted. His had been the first name that occurred to me – if it was his name. He had at least four aliases, including his favourite, ‘Sir John Smythe.’ I didn’t know – I had never known – his last name, and even though be had told me his first name was John, I had no reason to suppose he was telling the truth. He hardly ever did tell the truth. He was a thief and a swindler and a liar, and he had dragged me into a number of embarrassing, not to say dangerous, situations, but if he hadn’t come to my rescue at the risk of grievous bodily harm to himself – something John preferred not to do – I wouldn’t be in Karl’s office wondering whether he and Herr Burckhardt knew, or only suspected, that the ‘individual’ they were after might be my occasional and elusive lover.

III

It took me a long time to get back to sleep after that grisly dream. I was not in the best possible condition to cope with Munich’s rush-hour traffic next morning – short on sleep, tense with a mixture of anger, anxiety, and indecision. It was raining, of course. It always rains in Munich when somebody offers me a trip to some place bright and warm and sunny.

I’ve lived in Munich for a number of years, ever since I wangled a job out of the funny little fat man who had been a prime suspect m my first ‘case,’ as he would call it.¹ He wasn’t the murderer, as it turned out; he was a famous scholar, director of the National Museum, and he had been impressed by my academic credentials as well as by the fact that I could have embarrassed the hell out of him by telling the world about some of his shenanigans during that adventure. We had become good friends and I had come to think of Munich as my adopted home town. It’s a beautiful city in one of the most beautiful parts of the world – when the sun is shining. In the rain, with fallen leaves making the streets slick and dangerous, it is as dreary as any other large city.

When I pulled into the staff parking lot behind the museum, Karl the janitor popped out of his cubicle to inquire after the health, not of my humble self, but of Caesar, for whom he has an illicit passion. I assured him all was well and hurried through the storage areas of the basement, praying Schmidt hadn’t arrived yet. I had to go to the museum office to collect my mail and messages; if I didn’t, Gerda, Schmidt’s hideously efficient and inquisitive secretary, would bring them to me and hang around, talking and asking questions and ignoring my hints that she should go away, and then I would probably hit her with something large and heavy because Gerda gets on my nerves even when they are not already stretched to the breaking point.

I entered the office at a brisk trot, glancing at my watch. ‘Goodness, it’s later than I thought. Good morning, Gerda, I’ve got to hurry, I’m awfully late.’

‘For what?’ Gerda inquired. ‘You have no appointment this morning. Unless you have made one without informing me, which is contrary to – ’

I snatched the pile of letters from her desk. She snatched it back. ‘I have not finished sorting them, Vicky. What is wrong with you this morning? Ach, but you look terrible! Did you not sleep? You were, perhaps, working late?’

She hoped I hadn’t been working late. She hoped I’d been doing something more interesting. Gerda has one of those round, healthy pink faces, and mouse-brown hair, and wide, innocent pale blue eyes. She is short. I am all the things Gerda is not, and the poor dumb woman admires me and tries to imitate me. She also harbours the delusion – derived in part from Schmidt, who shares it – that men whiz in and out of my life like city buses, only more often. Little does she know. It was questionable as to whether John qualified for the role of my lover – three visits in nine months isn’t my idea of a torrid affair – but for the past two years he had been the only possible candidate.

‘Yes. I was working late,’ I lied.

She didn’t believe me. ‘Ach, so. I thought perhaps Herr Feder – ’

‘Who?’ I gaped at her.

She had sorted the messages, damn her. She waved two slips of paper at me. ‘He has telephoned twice this morning. He wishes that you call him as soon as possible.’

‘Thanks.’ This time when I grabbed my mail she let me keep it. ‘We will have lunch, perhaps?’ she called after me as I headed quickly for the door.

‘Perhaps.’ If I could just get out of Gerda’s office before Schmidt emerged from his . . . I was in no condition to cope with Schmidt that morning. He’s even nosier than Gerda.

I might have known it was going to be one of those days. Schmidt wasn’t in his office. He had just arrived. When I flung the door open there he was, briefcase in one hand, the remains of a jelly doughnut in the other. Schmidt eats all the time. Jelly doughnuts are his latest enthusiasm, one he acquired from me.

He was wearing one of those trench coats covered with straps, flaps, and pockets – the style James Bond and other famous spies prefer – and an Indiana Jones fedora pulled low over his bristling eyebrows. The ensemble, which indicated that Schmidt was in one of his swashbuckling moods, was ominous enough, but that wasn’t what brought me to a stop. Schmidt was singing.

That’s how he would have described it. Schmidt can’t carry a tune in a bucket, but he loves music, and he had recently expanded his repertoire to include country music. American country music. What he was doing to this tune would have sent the citizens of Nashville, Tennessee, running for a rope.

It was my fault, I admit that. I had heard them all my life, not the modern rock adaptations, but the old railroad and work songs, the blues and ballads. During the Great Depression my grandad had wandered the country like so many other footloose, jobless young men; he bragged of having known Boxcar Willie and John Lomax, and he could still make a guitar cry. I had once made the mistake of playing a Jimmie Rodgers tape for Schmidt. That was all it took.

In addition to being tone-deaf, Schmidt never gets the words quite right. ‘. . . I sing to my Dixie darling, Beneath the silver moon, With my banjo on my knee.’ Imagine that in a thick Bavarian accent.

He broke off when he saw me. ‘Ah, Vicky! You are here!’

‘I’m late,’ I said automatically. ‘Very late. I have to – ’

‘But my poor Vicky.’ He stood on tiptoe peering up into my face. ‘Your eyes are shadowed and sunken. You have the look of a woman who – ’

‘Shut up, Schmidt,’ I said, trying to get around him. He popped the rest of the doughnut into his mouth and caught hold of my hand. Strawberry jelly glued our fingers together. A stream of water from the hem of his coat was soaking my shoes.

‘Come and have coffee and tell Papa Schmidt all about it. Is Karl Feder annoying you again? Tsk! He should be ashamed, the old rascal. Or,’ – he grinned and winked – ‘or is it another individual who is responsible for the disturbance of your slumber?’

Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that Gerda was on her feet, leaning precariously across the desk as she tried to overhear. Schmidt had seen her too. Shaking his head, he said disapprovingly, ‘There is no decent regard for privacy in this place. Come into my office, Vicky, where we can be alone, and you will tell Papa Schmidt – ’

‘No,’ I said.

‘No what? It was not Sir John – ’

‘No everything! Nobody disturbed my slumber, no, I will not come into your office, no, Karl Feder is not . . .’ I stopped, clutching at the last ragged strands of sanity. Better to let Schmidt think Karl’s reasons for calling were personal instead of professional. Or was it? The world was dissolving into chaos around me.