Night Train to Memphis, page 1
Elizabeth Peters
Night Train to Memphis
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Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Elizabeth Peters
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FOR SHARON McCRUMB
With love and thanks
You’re a Detour on the Highway to Heaven
(To: Great Speckled Bird)
When Mama lay a-dyin” on the flatbed,
She told me not to truck with girls like you;
But I was blinded by the glare of your headlights,
And wnt joy-ridin’ just for the view.
CHORUS: You’re a detour on the highway to heaven,
I am lost on the backroads of sin,
I have got to get back to the four-lane,
So that I can see Mama again.
Your curves made me lose my direction,
My hands from the steering wheel strayed,
But you were just one more roadside attraction,
It’s been ten thousand miles since I prayed.
If you ever get out of the fast lane
And get back to that highway above,
I’ll be waiting for you at the tollbooth,
In that land where all roads end in love.
Chapter One
I
The mountain meadow was carpeted with fresh green and starred with small, shy flowers. He came toward me, walking so lightly the grass scarcely seemed to bend under his feet. His hair shone silver-gilt in the sunlight, and he was smiling, and his blue eyes held a look I had seen in them only once before. Trembling, I waited for him to come to me. He stopped a few feet away, still smiling, and held out his hands.
They were wet and red and dripping. I looked from his bleeding hands to his face and saw blood erupt from it in spurting streams, from the corners of his mouth, from under the hair on his temples. Bright scarlet patches blossomed on the breast of his shirt. There was blood everywhere, covering him like a red rain. I stretched out my arms but I couldn’t reach him and I couldn’t move and the scream I tried to utter wouldn’t come out of my throat and he fell, face down at my feet, and the back of his head wasn’t golden fair but sticky scarlet and the blood spread out, staining the green grass and drowning the shy flowers and still I couldn’t reach him…
“Oh God, oh God, oh God…” Somebody was whining. It wasn’t I. I was blubbering and swearing—or was I praying?
Swearing. “Damn him, damn him!” I reached out blindly in the dark. There was something monstrous and hairy on my bed. I threw my arms around it and clutched it to my bosom.
Caesar stopped whining and began licking my face with frantic slurps. Caesar is a Doberman; his tongue is as rough as a file and about a foot and a half long. He has very bad breath.
“All right, okay,” I gasped, fending him off and reaching for the bedside lamp.
The light helped, and so did the sight of my familiar messy bedroom, but I was still shaking. God! That had been the worst one yet.
Caesar’s furry face stared worriedly at me. He wasn’t allowed on the bed. I must have cried out in my sleep, and the gallant dog had leaped up to my rescue.
Clara was allowed on the bed. Caesar hasn’t got over the injustice of this yet, but he can’t do anything about it because he is terrified of Clara, who weighs approximately seven pounds to his seventy. I think he thinks she is a god. He slobbers with delight when she condescends to curl up next to him, and grovels when she raises a paw. She had retreated from her usual position, on my stomach, to the foot of the bed and was sitting up, eyeing me with that look of tolerant contempt only Siamese cats have fully mastered. In the dark seal-brown of her face her eyes looked very blue.
A shudder twisted through me as I remembered how blood had filled those other blue eyes.
It was the third time that week I had dreamed about John. The first one hadn’t been bad, just an ordinary anxiety/frustration dream in which I pursued a familiar form along endless streets only to find, when I caught up with it, that it wore someone else’s face. The second… well, never mind the details of that one. The metamorphosis of the body I clasped into a scaled, limbless creature that slid slimily through my arms and vanished into darkness had left a nasty memory, but it hadn’t awakened me.
I knew the cause of the dreams. My subconscious doesn’t fool around; it’s about as subtle as a brickbat. I had told myself there was nothing to worry about, even if I hadn’t heard from him for over a month, and I had believed it—sort of—until a week ago. Hugging my warm, hairy, smelly dog as a child would clutch a teddy bear for comfort, I remembered the conversation that had forced me (or my subconscious) to admit there was something to worry about.
II
“But I don’t know anything about Egyptology!” I yelled.
Normally I don’t yell when I say things like that. I mean, it’s hardly the sort of statement that arouses passionate emotions. But this was the fourth time I had said it, and I didn’t seem to be getting the point across.
The two men behind the desk exchanged glances. One of them was my old friend Karl Feder of the Munich Police Department. The other man was about the same age—mid-fifties, at a guess. Like Karl, he was losing his hair and starting to spread around the middle. He had been introduced to me as Herr Burckhardt, no title, no affiliation. If he was a colleague of Karl’s he had to be a cop of some variety, but I had only known one other man with eyes as cold as his, and Rudi had definitely not been a police officer.
I knew what they were thinking. It was Burckhardt who said it. “I fail to understand, Dr. Bliss. You are an official of our National Museum, a well-known authority on art history. The Herr Direktor, Doktor Schmidt, has often said that you are his most valued subordinate.”
“Yeah,” I said gloomily. “I’ll bet he has.”
Schmidt has a mouth almost as big as his rotund tummy. He is as cute as one of the Seven Dwarfs and not much taller, and if he wasn’t so brilliant he’d have been locked up long ago as a menace to society. Not that he’s a crook. On the contrary; Schmidt thinks of himself as a brilliant amateur sleuth, the scourge of the underworld, and of me as his sidekick. As Watson was to Sherlock, as Archie was to Nero Wolfe, so Vicky Bliss is to Herr Doktor Anton Z. Schmidt. At least that’s how Schmidt looks at it. My own view of our respective roles is somewhat different.
I said slowly and patiently, “Human beings have been producing works of art of one kind or another for over thirty-five thousand years. Even if you include only the major visual arts and restrict yourself to Western art, you have to start with Stone Age man, proceed through the Egyptians and the Minoans and the Etruscans and the Greeks, to early Christian art and Byzantine and medieval and Renaissance and… Oh, hell. What I’m trying to say is that nobody can be an expert on all those fields. My specialty is medieval European art. I don’t know—”
“What about the Trojan gold?” Feder inquired. “That does not come under the heading of medieval European art, does it?”
I had been afraid somebody was going to bring that up.
Schmidt refers to the affair of the Trojan gold as “our most recent case.” He doesn’t often refer to it, however, because it had not been one of “our” most resounding successes. People had been looking for the gold, a hoard of priceless ancient jewelry which had vanished from besieged Berlin at the end of World War II, for almost fifty years. Educated opinion believed the Russians had carried it off to Moscow. Schmidt and I and a few other people had spent several weeks the previous winter following up a clue that suggested it had been smuggled out of Berlin before the Russians entered the city, and hidden somewhere in Bavaria. At one point I thought I had found the hiding place. Turned out I was wrong. Schmidt was still complaining about how I had misled him. Which I hadn’t, not deliberately. I had been—well—wrong. Sometimes I am wrong.
Not this time, though, dammit. Feder was smirking at me as if he had said something clever. He was correct. The Trojan gold could not be described as medieval art.
I tried again. “That had nothing to do with my expertise or lack thereof. It was pure chance.”
“But you recognized, from a bad photograph, that the jewels pictured were genuine. Some degree of expertise—”
“Anybody could have done that!” My voice rose. “The gold of Troy is famous. Everybody knows about it. Almost everybody… Let me put it this way, meine Herren; I could not pose as an expert on Egyptian art for more than five minutes without getting caught out. If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting I accept the position of guest lecturer on a Nile cruise. In exchange for a free tour I will be expected to talk at least once a day on some damned temple or pyramid, and be prepared to answer questions from the people taking the cruise, who wouldn’t be taking the cruise if they weren’t already interested in and informed about the subject. Five minutes, hell! I wouldn’t last sixty seconds. Why me, for God’s sake? There are hundreds of people who know more about the subject than I d
“But my dear Fraulein Doktor!” Burckhardt exclaimed. “Look at it this way. Never again will you have the opportunity for such a holiday. This is a luxury cruise; the boat is new, designed for millionaire tourists—suites instead of rooms, gourmet food, the best of everything. Passengers will be admitted to places that are barred to the ordinary tourist, the lecturers are all distinguished scholars—”
He waved a brightly colored brochure at me. I shied back. “That’s just the point, Herr Burckhardt. Karl, will you please tell your friend that I am not an empty-headed blond bimbo, even if I do look like one.”
Lately I’d been trying very hard not to look like one, swathing my too well endowed torso in loose jackets and my long legs in full skirts that flapped around my calves. I had let my hair grow long so I could wind it into a schoolmarmish bun. Nothing seemed to work. If you are tall and blond and blue-eyed and shaped like a female, some people assume you don’t have a brain cell working.
Karl tried to hide his smile. “I warned you this approach would not work, Burckhardt. The lady is very astute. I imagine she already suspects why we are making this request.”
I nodded gloomily. It didn’t require a high degree of intelligence. The affair of the Trojan gold was only the most recent of several encounters I have enjoyed with the criminal element, if “enjoyed” is the right word. I do not enjoy being shot at, assaulted, kidnapped, and chased across the countryside. I didn’t want to do that anymore.
“Something is going to happen on that cruise,” I said. “What is it? Murder, hijacking, or just a simple case of grand theft which could easily lead to murder or hijacking?”
“If you will allow me to explain,” Burckhardt began.
“That’s what I’ve been asking you to do.”
Burckhardt leaned back and folded his arms. “The information reached us via a channel which has proved particularly fruitful in the past. How our agent acquired the information we do not know, but he has never before failed to be accurate. He gave us three facts: first, that there is a plot to rob the Cairo Museum; second, the individuals involved will be on the Nile cruise which starts on November first; third, one or more of them is personally known to you. Now obviously we cannot halt the cruise or detain everyone who has signed up for it. We must have an agent on that boat. You are the obvious choice, not only because you—”
“Wait,” I said. My voice sounded quite normal. That surprised me; even though I had half expected it, one of his statements had had the same impact as a hard kick on the shin. “Let’s go back over that interesting assemblage of so-called facts, shall we? First, why are you guys involved? Why don’t you pass the information on to the Egyptian government and let them handle it?”
“Naturally we have notified the authorities in that country. They have requested our cooperation. Are you familiar with the current political situation in Egypt?”
I shrugged. “Not in detail. Keep it short, will you?”
“I will endeavor to do so.” Burckhardt steepled his fingertips and tried to look like a professor. He didn’t. “The modern nation of Egypt did not attain independence until 1922. For over a century it was exploited, as some might say, by Western powers, and many of the most valuable antiquities were—er—’removed’ to museums and private collections in Europe and America. Anti-Western sentiment is of long standing and it is now being fostered by certain groups who wish to replace the present government of Egypt with one more sympathetic to their religious views. They have attacked tourists and members of the government. If the historic treasures of Egypt were stolen by a group of foreigners—”
“I see your point,” I said reluctantly. “Okay. Next question. Seems to me your information is very fragmentary. Why don’t you ask this hot-shot agent of yours where he got it and tell him to dig around for more?”
Another exchange of meaningful glances. “Oh, please,” I said. “Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me this is another of those plots. He’s dead. Right? Found in an alley with his throat cut? Horribly tortured and… I don’t believe this!”
“Believe it,” Karl said soberly. “We had not wanted to tell you—”
“I can see why. It might have put a slight damper on my girlish enthusiasm for playing Nancy Drew.”
“You would be in no danger,” Karl insisted.
“And if I believe that, you’ve got a bridge you’d like to sell me cheap.”
“Bitte?” Karl said, looking puzzled.
“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 favorite, “Sir John Smythe.” I didn’t know—I had never known—his last name, and even though he 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 someplace 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 in my first “case,” as he would call it.* 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.
