'Oh, yes. People get hurt every year. If you're ready to go, I am too, Chris. All this tipsy Gemutlichkeit is getting to me.'
'Me too,' I said with feeling, despite my head start of three ports. 'And welcoming Christmas with a shooting spree still seems like a rotten idea, no matter how old it is.'
We had been sitting on a log convenientiy lying at the base of a thick pine that had served as a backrest, and although we were behind a group on blankets and air mattresses, we'd been too comfortable to move. We still were, so getting up took a special effort.
'One… two… three' I said, and shoved myself up, tugging Anne along with me, or trying to. I got her halfway up, lost my footing in the snow, and went over backward just as another ragged volley exploded.
'Ouch!' I said, at a small, sharp stab of pain in my left hip. I wound up flopping flat on my back, legs in the air, like a lassoed calf, while Anne tipped back over the log and landed in much the same position.
'They got 'em,' somebody observed. 'Good shootin'.'
The twinge in my hip had only been momentary-a minor strain, I assumed-and we both roared with laughter, neither of us, it seemed, being so very far above the general level of tipsy Gemutlichkeit after all. I scrambled up, brushing the snow off, and hand in hand we trotted down the incline, working our way through the crowd. A turn in the path after a hundred yards put a great wall of rock between us and the shooting, and we stopped to listen to the sudden silence. The sound of our weight shifting squeakily in the snow was all we could hear.
'Aah,' we said together, letting our eyes adjust to the dark again, our ears to the quiet. When I put a hand to her shoulder, she moved willingly into my arms to the noisy rustle of our nylon jackets.
'Tell your jacket to keep out of this,' she said. 'This is our affair. Oops.'
Abruptly tongue-tied, I said nothing. I brushed my lips over her eyebrows, against the grain to feel the roughness, with it to feel the smoothness, and I felt her lids flutter against my chin. Her cheeks were cool, fragrant with winter. We kissed gentiy, quietiy, and she bowed her head to my shoulder. Her hair stirred against my face when I breathed. There again was that cool, clean scent of citrus.
'Anne-'
'Shh.' Her hands went to my sides and pulled me closer still. 'Ow!' I said.
'Sorry. When I get like this, I don't know my own strength.'
I laughed. 'I must have landed on a rock when I fell over back there.'
She tilted her head back and regarded me. 'No, you said 'ouch' before you hit the ground. I remember distincdy.'
'I did?' I worked my hand under my jacket and explored the top of my hip. 'Ow!' I said again. 'Damn.'
'Chris? Are you all right?'
'Oh, sure. It just stings a little. And it seems to be a little stiff.'
'I think we ought to go inside and sit down,' she said, and I complied happily, basking in her concern.
The General Walker bar was open late for the apres-Weihnachtschutzen crowd, and we both ordered hot chocolate, which the creative bartender had to make from Kahlua, and a very warming invention it was. My hip stopped smarting by the third swallow.
I can't remember what we talked about, but we spent half an hour at it, until Anne finished her drink and stretched. 'One-thirty. Time to call it a day.'
'I guess so.' I stared into the bottom of my cup, listening to my heart race. 'Like to join me for a nightcap? I've got some cognac in my room.'
'Could you really stand a nightcap?'
'No.' I smiled and looked up. 'All right, then; care to join me just for the company?'
She looked at me for a while, her eyes soft. 'No,' she said finally. 'I don't think so.'
No? This courting business was coming very hard to me, as must be obvious, and here was another unnerving development. I'd thought I was reading the signals correcdy.
She covered my hand with hers. 'You don't need to look embarrassed. I'd like to, Chris, very much. I just don't think you're ready.'
'I'm not ready!' I laughed. 'If I got any more ready I'd-well, I'm ready, believe me.'
She smiled. 'I don't mean that way. Chris, I'm kind of old-fashioned… I don't mean that I need a commitment or anything-'
'Anne, it's OK. You don't have to justify-'
'No, let me finish.' She spoke hesitandy, rotating her empty cup slowly between her hands and staring down into it. It was a side to her that I hadn't seen before: uncertain, diffident, tentative. 'Chris, when you and I… if we… well, I just want you to be there for me, not off somewhere else.' She shrugged, still not looking up at me. 'I don't feel that you're ready to do that.'
And I guess I wasn't. I didn't protest; I didn't tell her that she was so lovely it made my throat ache to look at her. I just sulked like any wounded male.
'Don't be angry,' she said.
'I'm not angry,' I snarled, and we both laughed. '
And not embarrassed?'
'That's different; I'm embarrassed as hell. Did you think my forehead always glistened like this? And now can we stop going on about it, please?' I held out my hand to her. 'Come on, I'll walk you to your room.'
Later, alone in my own room, I had to admit it was a good thing. The pain in my hip had sharpened, and all I wanted to do was keep it still. I stripped gingerly, but all I found was a kind of crease, an angry red furrow, just below the crest of the hip bone, as if an object the size of a pencil had been pressed hard against the flesh for a long time. There had been some bleeding, and there were black specks on my skin that felt greasy when I touched them. I'd never had a bruise anything like it.
When I took a look at my clothes I discovered a tear just above the hip pocket of my pants, and a small hole with signs of a smudgy ring around it through all the layers of my jacket.
No strain had done that. Was this what a powder burn looked like? The pistols had gone off while I was pulling Anne up, I remembered, but I had been a good forty feet from them. Still, these were ancient, primitive weapons, and when they were fired, they produced great flaring volcanoes that very well might extend forty feet, for all I knew.
I know, I know, if it were you, you would have figured out long ago that someone had shot at you. Easy for you to say, just sitting there, but I wasn't thinking along those lines. Admittedly, the possibility of danger had crossed my mind before, but not very seriously and not for very long. It was true that Peter had most certainly been murdered, but it was hard for me to give credence to the idea that anyone was out to kill me.
Wait until you find yourself in a similar situation, and see if you don't feel the same way.
By the next day my hip was better; still tender, but more of a dull, aching bruise than anything else. The same went for my ego.
I met Anne for breakfast, during which we both were restrained and awkward, with little to say. Then she drove me down the mountain in a blue air-force car to the railroad station, where we had another old-comrades embrace (not so satisfying this time). And then I was off to Munich, there to make my way to the Munchen-Riem airport, whence to London via Heathrow and the tube.
Chapter 17
London is the one city where I do splurge on accommodations, whether I'm traveling on my own money, the museum's, or the Defense Department's. I used to stay in Bloomsbury, in a pleasant little hotel on Bedford Street, just off Russell Square ('in the shadow of the British Museum,' as they like to say in those parts). Every self- respecting person with intellectual pretensions has a favorite small hotel in Bloomsbury, especially self-respecting intellectuals who are traveling on a budget. After a few years, however, I admitted to myself that most of Bloomsbury was pretty grungy, that its literary gloss was long-dulled, and that it was a long way from the places most of my business took me-Christie's, Sotheby's, the Wallace Collection, the National Gallery, the Witt Library.
So I willingly waived my intellectual pretensions, and on my last few visits I'd stayed in Mayfair, surely the