FicWad

5.

The bunks nearest the door were draped with black leather, courtesy three German women who had roared up earlier as part of a motorcycle group. The bed nearest the bathroom was occupied by a scowling, tanned girl of indeterminate nationality. The two lower bunks in the opposite corner contained a pair of small, silent girls who, I assumed from those snatches of whispered conversation earlier, were Japanese. Everyone had roundly ignored everyone else. So, entering into the spirit of the international youth communal experience, I'd taken an upper bunk as far away from them all as I could get.

The conference fund might not stretch enough to cover this stalemate for a few weeks, not to mention that I had no idea where John had decided to go to ground for the night. Which meant that if I wasn't where I was supposed to be in the morning, I didn't know how else I'd get picked up. Bastard. He'd effectively boxed me into this corner. I had no doubt that he was warm and comfortable, wherever the hell he was. But what else was I supposed to do? I wasn't going to just fall in with his latest . . . whatever it was that he was up to. No, I certainly was not going to pretend to be married to someone who, after all this time, had never deigned to tell me his real name. If he didn't trust me that much, then how stupid would I be to trust him?

That he'd seemed to take the whole idea so lightly had smarted, too. More than I wanted to admit.

The thin mattress felt like a slab of wood. "I really am too old for this," I groaned to myself. I burrowed down into my rented sleeping bag with the penlight from my purse and clicked my ballpoint. Part of the reason Schmidt hadn't instantly overruled my plans had been my earnest assurances that I'd be working hard on his behalf even on vacation.

Rosanna knelt on the stone floor, her bearing proud. She refused to be intimidated by the hostile, unforgiving gazes of the other women in the sultan's seraglio.

As I mulled over Rosanna's latest predicament, I had trouble reading my own wavering writing; even inside the sleeping bag, I was shivering. No, it wasn't my imagination -- the air was distinctly frostier than it had been at lights-out. I flicked off my flashlight, and poked my head out. Leaning over the edge of the bunk, I could see the faint steam of my breath in the dark room. Outside it was pouring rain, and the window over on the far wall was standing wide open.

"What on earth?" I muttered. But before I could get myself unzipped and untangled, Girl of Indeterminate Nationality let out a whoop of rage, followed by a string of incomprehensible curses in what could have been Spanish. She launched out from under her blankets, stomped to the window, and slammed the sash down. Oblivious to the sleepy chorus of /Was/, /Was ist's/, /scheisse/, she headed back to her bunk.

Slowly, slowly the temperature began to crawl upward again, and relieved, I went back to my notebook. That pale skin and tawdry yellow hair, you are not worthy to be our beloved's bride --

This time I actually heard the window sliding up. I peered over the edge of my bunk just in time to see one of the Japanese girls retreating soft-footed back to hers. Ah ha. Predictably, a few minutes later the shout rang out again.

It was going to be a long night. A very, very long night. Some reassessment, I concluded, was in order.

Rosanna quailed in terror before the other inmates of the sultan's seraglio . . .

"So how was your evening?" the offensively chipper bastard who hadn't spent a night bunking among lunatics asked me the next morning. I intercepted his latest attempt to bestow quatre bises by shoving my palm in his face. Without missing a beat, he went on blithely, "The youth hostel in Saint Brieuc, you'll be delighted to learn, is a genuine fifteenth century --"

I waved my hand in front of his face, damned gold ring already in place. "Feed me," I demanded. "Now."

"Surely not that awful?" He had the gall to look sympathetic.

"I don't want to talk about it," I snapped at him. "Get me out of here."

"Er, you don't appear to have had much sleep," said the Supreme Master of the Obvious. "Are you going to be all right today?"

"Yes, fine." Other than my spirit, which had been broken at the hostel wheel. I sighed. "Just no more seraglios."

"Is this a code?" He looked at puzzled.

"It is. Cracked into plain English, it means if you don't feed me breakfast this instant, I will be forced to resort to chewing on your leg."

"Understood." And, apparently, he really did understand because he mercifully refrained from further comment until I'd downed a large cup of coffee topped with a towering cliff of /Schlag/. He'd chosen a café that was used to odd tourist requests.

"All right," I told him magnanimously after he'd leaned over the table to wipe the cream off my nose. "Now you may speak."

"'Her disdains are gall, her favours honey'," he murmured. "I'll have to remember the coffee cure in future. It has miraculous properties."

"It is a holy, healing liquid, yeah." That he assumed there was a future in which he'd be pouring more caffeine into me, I gave a free pass for now. To my relief, he didn't ask anything more about the night before; instead he began to chat amiably about what we could do for the rest of the day.

"After you've finished devouring that /galette/, you can see a bit more of the Intra-muros, the old town enclosed with the walls. We can walk on the ramparts, then work our way down to the beach of Bon Secours. The tide is out, so I thought we'd hike out to the old National Fort and take in the view."

I nodded, forking in whatever it was he'd had put in front of me. It tasted good and there was plenty of it, so I had no cause for complaint on that score.

"Your second cathedral is here as well, Saint Vincent, so we can stop by there on our way out of town," he said.

"After that?"

"I'm considering the scenic route down the Rance valley. Depending on circumstances, we'll stop in Dinan. In any event, we'll be heading back to the gulf coast for yet more scenic route, which will take us to the Cathedral of Saint Brieuc in Saint Brieuc, Saint Tugdual in Tréguier, and Saint Pol-Aurélien in Saint Pol-de-Léon. How does that sound?"

I stifled a yawn. I had the distinct impression that "depending on circumstances" meant "if you're still awake." He was expecting me to sleep through most of the scenic route, and he probably wasn't far off base. I'd do my best to prove him wrong, even if it only made me feel cranky. This unfamiliar version of John Smythe in conciliatory, considerate mode was getting on my nerves.

He towed me around the old city for a while and then onto the ramparts, but I still felt like a limp rag. "The /grandes marées/, the spring tides in these parts, roar over these walls up to ten meters in the air. It's a pity we're too late for them. I'm certain a good dousing would wake you up." It didn't strike me as a half-bad idea at that moment, either. We worked our way down to the beach, and watched a few apparent corpses floating in the seawater swimming pool that had been left filled by the receded tide.

"Those old guys seem to be having fun," I said, wistfully thinking of warm, sunny beaches again. The latest rain hadn't continued past the early morning, but the chill still hung in the salt air.

"Your corner of the American wilderness has nothing resembling a seacoast, does it?" John said, amused. "Bear in mind that, as they'd no doubt be delighted to inform you if you were to ask, young people today have no stamina. The waters of the Channel in the autumn are a bit chilly."

From there, we took the long walk over the sands to the National Fort, which was only accessible by foot at low tide. We picked our way through the boulders, following the arrows painted on the sides. John watched me scramble gracelessly (and unassisted) over a boulder; just as I landed on a flat, wet patch of sand, he observed, "I'm told that quicksand forms in the bay around Mont Saint Michel at low tide."

"I'd make sure to drag you in with me," I huffed at him. All the same, I was relieved that Sympathetic, Considerate John had retreated and Drawling, Obnoxious John had made his triumphant return. I was more comfortable with the latter, though what that says about our relationship is probably better left unexamined.

The hike only took about twenty minutes, and we dutifully paid our francs for entrance. "Built during the town's piracy era," John said, "late 1600s. I doubt they could have imagined that its primary value would one day be for sightseeing."

"Different eras, different uses. I'm valuing it just as it is," I said, trying to tame my hair. I didn't mind the stiff breeze; rather, I was grateful for it clearing out some of the remaining mental cobwebs. "You can see everything from here." The view from the fort gave us the city, the river mouth with the city of Dinard on the other side, the smaller islands, and ships of all sizes and types moving smoothly through the water.

"Out of sight, but directly out there is Jersey. Hence the ferry," John said, pointing. "Beyond that, England."

"Yes?" But he didn't respond to that. Instead, he walked over to stare at the massive city ramparts again. I tagged along after him, waiting for the rest of . . . whatever the thought was. I could sense that something was brewing.

"How have you found Saint Malo so far?" he said at last.

"Well," I said, "I haven't seen much of it yet, and we haven't been to the cathedral. But the old town and the ramparts are wonderful. I can see why it draws so many sightseers."

"It's a reproduction, you know," he told me. "The city of Saint Malo was occupied by the Germans during the Second World War, and it was destroyed by the Allied bombardment. Nearly everything you've seen thus far was reconstructed or rebuilt."

"Well, yes, I realize that, but --"

"So I suppose my question for you would be, does that affect its value, in your view?"

"What? Value?" I looked at him.

"In a technical sense, you could say it isn't as authentic as, say, Dinan, which we'll be seeing later. As an historian, would you consider that to affect its worth?"

"You know, this strikes me as a damned odd time to launch into another 'Where's the harm?' argument." My incipient good mood vanished. With us, this was a time-worn, frayed topic. In the ordinary way, spending time with John would be classified as a colossal mistake: I'm museum staff, and he's professional thief who specializes in ripping off museums -- "now retired" if you believe him, and I'm not certain I do. But his modus operandi was liberating the originals from museums and replacing them with reproductions. I have no idea how many museums in the world are displaying the forged antiquities he left behind, but I wouldn't be surprised if any guess I hazarded was an underestimate. John was apparently very good at his job; I'd witnessed for myself that even people who loathed him wanted to work with him.

Even now, if I were to catch him so much as breathing on a display in our National Museum, I'd slap a bow on him for the cops. At times, he seems to have all the moral sense of a concrete slab. It's not that he doesn't understand my point of view -- 'Stealing is wrong' isn't a complicated idea, after all. He just dismisses it as some sort of hopelessly unrealistic, academic abstraction.

"Er, no, I hadn't planned on it," he said, looking disconcerted for a moment. "No, I suppose it is related. I should be used to you haring off in directions I hadn't anticipated by now."

"Then maybe you should be clearer about what you mean," I warned him.

"So it would seem. In this case, I hadn't been indicating the monetary aspect of value, although it is pertinent," he said, sighing. "I've read your work on the Reimenschneider reliquary, you know."

It took me a few moments before I realized what he must mean: the jewels. Back before I'd ever met John, I'd played a central role in recovering that shrine, which had been lost since the sixteenth century. I'd also, as noted in at least one of my articles, been the one to persuade Irma, the heir of the Schloss Drachenstein, to remove the enormous emerald, ruby, and pearl and sell them separately -- to replace them with paste copies. She needed the money, and at least three-quarters of the potential thieves would be dissuaded; the shrine lost none of its beauty or historical significance without them.

"Okay," I said, dragging my hand through my hair and looked at the city on the bay. I wasn't in the best mental space for this sort of thing at the moment, but he seemed to be genuinely curious about what I thought, so I wanted to answer. "There's an essential, fundamental difference between reproduction and restoration. Reproduction, as you know very well, is a new creation that imitates an original. I suppose," I mused aloud, "an equivalent would be one of those historic theme parks. No reproduction can ever be exact, so it's impossible to say what sort of details might be overlooked in the process.

"Restoration, on the other hand, pertains to the /original/. It's not always a good idea because it always involves interpretation, which is highly individual and subject to change over time. And there are also judgments being made about what's worthwhile, aesthetics depending on time and culture. Anyway . . . I'd consider this city a restoration rather than a reproduction, mainly because they reused the existing materials whenever possible. Also, they adhered very faithfully to the original model rather than 'correcting' it to be more in line with modern needs and tastes.

"Depending entirely on the situation, both reproductions and restorations have value," I finished up. "Reproductions can have a lot of educational value, not to mention becoming a draw for tourism. I don't look down on the idea of tourists -- they're the ultimate source of my salary, after all."

John was looking thoughtful at this, so I charged right ahead. "Which brings us to the more important question, which is why are you asking?" I added, "And fobbing me off with a 'no reason' isn't going to work."

"I do have a reason for asking," he agreed, "and I assure you that the reason will become quite obvious. However, not just now."

"You're asking me to wait." I drummed my fingers on the wall. "How many years are we talking, here?"

"Wait as I'm willing to do, myself -- only not years, mere days. 'Love's best habit is in seeming trust'," he said wryly, "isn't it?"

I caught my breath. He'd just played the trump card, that topic we'd both been adroitly side-stepping from the moment I'd walked out of that station: a hotel room in Bad Steinbach, certain sentiments I'd elicited from him but had yet to reciprocate. Damn. Well, he wasn't demanding a lifetime commitment -- even the ring had been declared to be a loan -- only a minor concession on my part. "All right," I said. "I hope I won't wind up regretting this."

"No cause for concern," he told me. "I use only silken lines and silver hooks of the highest quality."

And how was that reassuring?