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Sometimes you have to confront the possibility that you might be wrong. Sometimes it seems like there won't be at least one tomorrow. Sometimes one isn't all you can count on. Hell, sometimes it's more than you can count on. Because, sometimes, you're forced to confront your own mortality and the fragility of the human condition by a maniacal balding Lithuanian who, angered by your recent attempt to hoodwink him into thinking that a jelly-filled pastry is actually a priceless work of art, is doing his best to send your Audi tumbling off the side of an overpass and into the frenzied streams of Autobahn traffic below.
The Audi's wheels squealed frantically as I flattened the accelerator and wrenched the car into fifth gear, trying to outrun the black van that was ruthlessly bulldozing us off the road. Next to me, John swore and fearfully eyed the vehicles rushing past below.
"Speed it up, won't you, darling?" He asked through clenched teeth. "I suspect my mother had a much more exalted death in mind for me than being crushed under a thousand speeding examples of fine, practical German engineering and one would hate to let the old dear down."
I nearly lost my grip on the wheel as the nose of the van smashed cruelly against my rear fender and threw us hard into the concrete guard rail. Sparks shot past my window as we collided.
"Do you..." I swallowed rapidly against a wave of nausea and resolutely did not start screaming. My ankle ached from pressing the gas peddle down. "Do you think she'd prefer that you be cut down in battle whilst crusading against the Saracens or poisoned by a devious turncoat underling?"
"Undoubtedly the second." John flinched at the sound of wrenching metal. "Given today's current political climate, the first could lead to a messy military incident and being hauled before the International Court of Justice would be most unbecoming of an ancient family such as ours."
"Of course." I swerved sharply as the van lurched against us again, sending shudders though my little car's frame. We hurtled down the road side-by-side, grating and grinding against one another. John reached over and gripped my thigh with a shaky hand.
The end of the bridge arrived in a rush. It wasn't until I flattened a patch of someone's carefully-tended peonies that I realized John and I were not only no longer in immediate danger of plunging to death but that our homicidal foe had apparently also given up pursuit. Peering into the rearview mirror for signs of the van, I turned the car down a small, twisting one-way.
Every year the Superbowl Champs say that hoisting that trophy over their heads is the best feeling in the world. Valerie Vanderbilt says it's knowing the love of a good man (to judge from her latest novel, presumably a chiseled and darkly mysterious Highland Chief). My brother Bob says it's watching his kids on Christmas morning. At that moment, I could have cheerfully told them all to go to hell. Relief is the best feeling in the world.
I couldn't help it. I pumped my fist.
"Vicky..." The hand on my thigh tightened dangerously again.
I turned to John, who still looked mildly stricken. "That," I crowed triumphantly, "was the best balancing on the tightrope we've ever done!"
"Yes, brilliant. Vicky!"
"What?"
John pointed in panic. "Tree!"
It was a maple. I barely managed to get my foot onto the brake before we barreled into it. My head hit the steering wheel and exploded in pain; I didn't so much slip gently into unconsciousness as run full-throttle into it with arms flailing.
*
It started like this, late last night: me in my office, faithful hound curled at my feet, ostensibly putting the final touches on an article about the Oscott Psalter. Actually, I was trying to decide whether Rosanna's horror at learning her estranged half-brother had just succumbed to the Black Death would be strong enough to keep her from spending a wanton and dangerous night of forbidden passion with the High Priest of Aykab. That is not, however, the sort of thing you tell your boss when he asks why you're holed up at work in the wee hours -- especially if your boss is Schmidt. The last time he figured out I was working a new chapter, I couldn't leave the room without coming back to find him haphazardly rummaging through my desk. He created so much chaos that I couldn't find any of my work and was nearly forced to present five pages about Rosanna's ordeal in the caves of Kamchatka at a conference.
Schmidt had been lurking outside my door in the hopes that I would forgo (what he thought was) professional duty to take him out for a midnight meal. I'd managed to ignore him entirely for a good hour or so, but finally the plaintive knocking had gotten the better of me and I'd opened the door just long enough to shove both a slightly squashed doughnut and Caesar at him. Now he, the dog, and their gooey baked good were all in the museum's chemistry lab happily playing detective. Gerda had recently made the mistake of introducing Schmidt to an American mystery series whose sassy heroine who uses her training as a forensic scientist to solve gory murders and, true to form, he'd immediately become obsessed. Not too surprising, really -- Schmidt's a sucker for outspoken women and bloody mayhem. (Probably part of the reason he likes me so much, actually.) I thought it was a pretty harmless past time for him to be engaging in, especially compared to his recent fascination with organized crime, but the museum's chemist apparently disagreed. The poor man had been walking around with a look of barely suppressed outrage for days now and taken to taping threatening notes to every piece of breakable equipment in the lab.
Rosanna was struggling womanfully with the buttons on the High Priest's cassock when a high-pitched scraping broke the silence in my office. Disturbing images of Caesar gnawing contentedly on the corner of a Caspar David Friedrich instantly flooded my brain and so I tossed my writing aside and crept downstairs hurriedly (or as hurriedly as a woman who's nearly six feet tall can creep around on the small, warped staircases of the Schloss). I turned the corner into the dimly lit main exhibition hall and froze. Not twenty feet away, a black-clad figure was struggling to remove the glass panel protecting a display of Russian enamels.
As always happens when I spy someone stepping shamelessly outside the bounds of the law (or, well, when I see ski resorts or eat perfectly buttered toast or step into a claw-footed bathtub or wake up in the morning and see that red ribbon draped over the corner of the headboard), my thoughts leapt to John. At the same time, I knew without a doubt that I wasn't looking at him: reformed or not, John is the epitome of stealth. Also, unlike this guy, he's not built like an Olympic weight lifter and is certainly too fastidious to spit on the floor of a museum he's burgling. I grimaced. Lovely.
I deliberately weighed my options for a moment -- there was a telephone tastefully concealed behind a rather musty tapestry in the next room and Schmidt was still gallivanting through fields of test-tubs and rare solvents upstairs, I assumed -- but then the thief gave up on subtlety all together and, ducking a little to shield his face, shattered the glass with his elbow. He reached into the ruined case with his now-bleeding arm and grabbed something small and silver. Figuring this would be my last chance to intervene before he sprinted out the door to the nearest international airport, I steeled my nerves.
"Drop it!" My voice, never timid or meek to begin with, boomed wildly as it echoed off the walls. "I've got you covered. You've...you've got nowhere to go!" John would have sneered at the banality of my threat (not to mention it's patented untruthfulness; I could count three exits from where I was standing alone) but B-movie dialogue was about the best I could come up with under such short notice and, anyway, I have a well-established history of anxiety-induced triteness in these situations.
The distraction worked. The thief wheeled towards me, hastily stuffing the stolen object into his jacket pocket. I was unhappily surprised to discover that he looked a lot more threatening when all those muscles started flexing; I could see the tendons in his neck constricting with rage. I grabbed the closest weapon I could find that wasn't chained down or seven centuries old: one of the spindly chairs I'd finally talked Schmidt into buying and placing around the museum after seeing one too many of our patrons decide that their exhaustion was more pressing than the conservation of their national history and drop exhaustedly onto Ludwig II's gilded swan settee.
The thief grinned evilly at me and spat. The dome of his head gleamed a little in the gloomy light.
Schmidt must have heard the crash and my screaming because mere seconds later he came charging out of the door behind me, face scarlet with exertion. I'm still not quite sure how he managed to get to the scene of the crime so quickly -- after all, my problem with moving through those medieval passageways is the minor issue of height whereas Schmidt's is the larger one of width. Even on his slimmer days, Schmidt has to perform a number of gut-minimizing maneuvers to slip through the narrow twists and turns of that staircase. Possibly it was the thought of his favorite employee being trouble that spurred him to such an athletic feat. Or, more likely, he knew that if he were to get stuck in the cramped passage way my overfriendly doberman would be on him in a matter of seconds. I could hear the click of Caesar's nails as he bounded down behind him.
"Vicky!" Schmidt skidded to a stop next to me, panting. "Was ist..."
I gestured towards the man with my chair.
"Ah," exhaled Schmidt, eyes narrowing in comprehension.
For a long moment, no one moved. My fingers were past tingling and on their way to numb from gripping the chair so tightly. A drop of blood from the thief's arm fell quietly to the floor. Then, at once, all hell broke loose.
The thief finally seemed to realize that, my no-doubt intimidating use of furniture and lines from old Charles Bronson flicks aside, nothing was actually preventing him from escaping. He turned tail and sprinted towards the giant double doors at the end of the hall. Schmidt let out a roar of rage and followed -- just as Caesar bolted out of the stairwell.
Now, Schmidt is Caesar's favorite plaything. He tolerates playing fetch with me on occasion and always enjoys his early morning game of Tug-of-War-with-Irate-John-over-John's-Socks, but nothing gets his tail going quite like the opportunity to spend time with Schmidt. Schmidt is cuddly and so often carrying a wide variety of savory foodstuffs around with him and sputters so hilariously when Caesar has him backed into a corner and is licking crumbs from his mustache. So when Caesar saw Schmidt huffing angrily after the intruder, he wanted nothing more than to join in the fun.
Caeser leapt onto Schmidt, who stumbled forward onto the thief, sending all three of them went crashing to the ground. I nearly dropped the chair in amazement.
Caesar planted both front paws on top of the hapless, squirming pile of humans beneath him and barked enthusiastically. He leaded down and happily licked a slobbery stripe over Schmidt's rosy cheek. From his unenviable position under Schmidt, I could hear the thief howling angrily in a language I didn't immediately identify. Possibly my attempts at recognition were hampered by the sight of Schmidt's fists bouncing like Silly Putty off the man's excessive bulk as Schmidt tried to pummel him into submission.
Well, carpe diem, I thought. Avoiding the wildly thrashing limbs as best I could, I thrust one hand into the thief's jacket pocket and one hand into Schmidt's pocket. I closed my fingers around the delicately inlaid Faberge jewelry box in the thief's and the oozing confection in Schmidt's respectively, extracted each, and hastily switched them. Then I whistled for the dog, wrapped my arms around Schmidt's ungainly torso, and heaved him to his feet. Caesar trotted over and sat dutifully.
The thief struggled to a standing position, spat on the floor once more, and ran out of the building. I restrained Schmidt from following, figuring that the disgusting creep would need at least a day to lick his wounds (or at least generate more saliva) before realizing the box was gone and trying to steal it again.
I was wrong. Like I said, it happens sometimes.
I called Karl Feder, took Schmidt and the dog home, hid the box, and collapsed into bed next to John, who swiftly pronounced the entire thing a debacle and was in the midst of giving me a rousing lecture on the myriad of ways most modern thieves' abilities pale in comparison to his own fine-honed skills when I fell asleep. The next morning when he and I left, I didn't even think twice about the black minivan that pulled out of the driveway down the block and started after us.
*
I awoke to the preposterous sight of John, bloody shirt ripped beyond repair and wearing only one shoe, perched carefully on a grimy window ledge. Through the dirty glass behind him, I could just make out the pale circle of the moon.
Gingerly, I touched my fingers to the painful lump on my head, inadvertently catching John's attention. He leapt off the sill, threw himself down on one knee, and rhapsodized enthusiastically to me. "'High and preposterous and separate -- lozenge of love! Medallion of art! O wolves of memory! Immensements!'"
Through the tears in his ruined shirt, I could see that John was sporting a vicious strip of gashes and raw skin where he'd been thrown against his seatbelt. He continued his rendition more somberly, crawling over to where I lay cataloguing my injuries and touching my face carefully. "'No, one shivers slightly, looking up there. The hardness and the brightness and the plain far-reaching singleness of that wide stare. It is a reminder of the strength and pain of being young; that it can't come again, but is for others undiminished somewhere.'"
"Right," I croaked out cautiously. He grabbed my hand, which was still stubbornly poking at a particularly nasty welt on my side, and helped me struggle to a sitting position. I stared searchingly at him. "Are you okay? God, I am so sorry, I just..." I spotted a forebodingly familiar figure hunched in the far corner of the small, dark room. "Where are the hell are we?"
John lowered his voice to a whisper. "It appears we have stumbled and are now dangling below that tightrope, holding on for dear life. Literally. We may have been followed after all. If you'll observe..." He gestured towards the shadowy man in the corner, who -- as if on cue -- stood up. He was big. Burly. Severely lacking in hair. Extremely upset. And holding the remains of a doughnut in one hand and a rather lethal-looking handgun in the other.
I groaned. It made my head throb. I groaned again. John, however, put on his most supercilious smile and sarcastically patted the floor next to him. "Oleg, my good man, come sit with us for a spell." The goon -- Oleg? -- looked thoroughly non-plussed by the invitation. "No?"
John turned to me. Had I been more cerebrally alert and less dry-mouthed with fear at the sight of Oleg's weaponry, I probably would have shut him up right there as I am well acquainted with the way in which John's already remarkable ability to be loquacious and infuriating increases threefold when he's nervous. Like being with me, it's not a habit that's served him particularly well, yet he seems incapable of stopping.
"Dr. Bliss," he began in a tone of arch superiority, "may I formally introduce Oleg? That's the moniker he seems to prefer, though based upon our previous interactions, I believe he's more commonly known as Oleg the Incompetent and Prone to Ghastly Fits of Utterly Disgusting Expectoration. It's quite a quaint and yet strikingly accurate title, don't you think? I even offered to take his towels to be monogrammed the last time Oleg and I met, which I thought was very definitely above and beyond of me considering that he was attempting to crush my windpipe with his bare hands at the time. Of course, I was then working under the assumption that he both owned and used towels, as opposed to prescribing to the more uncomfortable method of air drying or the like, whereas I now suspect that he simply eschews bathing all together."
I gaped at him, my mind spinning with a thousand questions. Oleg's only acknowledgment of this speech was to viciously lob a greasy glob of saliva onto once pristine leather of John's shoe. I can't say I particularly blamed him.
John mouth curled in distaste as he brushed ineffectively at the wet spot on his loafer with blood-stained hands. And kept talking. "Really, Oleg. You may be interested to know that recent scholarly work on the subject has shown that the prevailing notion that men and women walked around being swarmed by flies and carrying little pouches of spices to mask their own stench for months is complete bunk. Even the most oppressed of peasants found time to spruce himself up in a nearby river or public bath house from time to time."
Oleg growled. I hastily interjected a "Look, Oleg, why don't we talk about this..." but John swiftly cut me off.
"Still, it's an interesting, if not particularly unique, lifestyle choice given your profession." He stretched and put both hands behind his head, looking more like he was relaxing pool side awaiting a drink than being held captive and awaiting a swift blow to the head. "One would imagine that your intended victims might be more unsuspecting if you didn't traipse through their residences or places of employment smelling like a particularly ripe barn animal. And spitting loudly, of course."
Oleg growled again. You may think that's a tactic that becomes less intimidating with repetition, but Oleg really managed to put some terror behind it this time by pointedly cocking the hammer of his gun.
While Rosanna has run into more than shrieking ghostly specters and gypsy curses than your average heroine and John's behavior sometimes makes me wonder whether I've been too hasty about blowing off the idea of exorcism, I am not a believer in the paranormal. At that moment, though, I was so desperate to make John stop talking that I tossed aside my skepticism and started trying to beam messages to him via ESP. "Someone would think you want to have your ribs broken," seemed too long and complex for a beginning psychic like myself, so I finally settled on a rather pleading repetition of "shut up, John, shut up, shut up, shut up". I squinted through the haze of dirt and dust that hung in the air directly into his eyes, tried to ignore the throbbing in my jaw, and concentrated as hard as I could.
It didn't work.
I was squirming around trying to maneuver myself into a position from which I could hopefully hit the Love of my Life's fair head hard enough to knock him unconscious when Oleg finally spoke. I guess he'd just had enough.
Actually, he told us that he had.
"Enough, Aloysius!" He bellowed angrily. He petted the gun in his hand slowly. "I wish to speak to the broad."
I blinked. The broad? More importantly... I swivelled around to look at John.
"Aloysius?" I hissed. Even our current dire circumstances couldn't keep him from smirking a little at my openmouthed stare.
"That's nothing. I still get the occasional letter addressed to 'Celeste' from his lovelorn sister. It was a very intriguing job. I really have been meaning to contemplate a return to the Baltic nations..."
I yelped as Oleg reached down and wrenched me to standing position. My head swam from the sudden movement.
"The box," Oleg's face contorted with anger as he pressed close to me and pushed the muzzle of the gun tightly beneath my ribs. I sucked in a shaky breath. "Or I pull trigger. Give it to me."
"John, I'm not falling off this goddamn thing." I twisted in Oleg's grip, trying to catch his eye.
I think I saw John nod. I took as a good sign as it meant there was still some blood flowing in his body somewhere. You'd never know it from his pale, white face.
"What?" demanded Oleg, jabbing me harder. I snapped my head back.
"Detroit! I don't know. It's not here," I stammered. "I...I d-don't have it."
"Fine." Oleg released me gruffly and pushed against the dingy wall. He shoved John next to me and trained the gun on one of us. I'm not sure which one even now, and then I certainly didn't care. The final outcome would be the same.
"Any last remarks?" He asked with cold disinterest. "Heartwarming tributes? Further discussion of old ways of hygiene? Witty quotations I should remember for next dinner party?"
I reached my hand out for John's. "'He always has a quotation for everything'," I parroted. "'It saves original thinking.'"
John gave me a tiny, sickly grin and ran his thumb across my palm, slowly. "'In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice.'"
"Inspiring." Oleg rolled his eyes, setting off a tiny series of ripples across this smooth scalp. "And now..."
"Five."
"Four."
As physical assaults go, it was probably pretty perfunctory: very little spinning, no martial arts, and only one slow-motion punch to the gut (John's, unintended). I didn't care, though; we won. On three, John squeezed my hand hard and, together, we ducked and ran headlong into Oleg. He grunted, staggered off balance. One swift kick to the groin and Oleg doubled over. I grabbed the gun, as John caught him under the chin with a vicious knee. He hit the floor with a floor-shaking crash and sprawled there, unmoving.
Neither John or I are inclined towards violence, though we've both been known to be a little more flexible when each other's precious hide is at stake. Still, we didn't kill Oleg. I didn't even suggest it to John; I'd been party to his nightmares after the last time he'd had to make that decision. We ended up contenting ourselves by making sure Oleg was securely locked in his little holding cell and that he had a knot on his head large enough to match mine. And I piled the precious remains of the damn pastry next to his head where he'd be sure to see it when he woke up. I had vague childish thoughts of spelling out "HA HA" with the doughy chunks, though John seemed so absolutely appalled by the idea that I gave it up.
*
I had still been humming The Tennessee Waltz as I'd straddled John in my bed that rainy night last fall. I'd licked his neck and the scars marking his chest and whispered in his ear that I didn't care if he'd taken up as a circus performer as long as he came back to me at least once more -- and brought the leotard, of course. He'd chuckled, gathered my hair at the nap of my neck, and kissed me until I couldn't form words. That could be arranged, he pointed out, since his life already strongly resembled a traveling freak show. He ran his fingertips lightly over my skin and said that, after all, "'life is always a tightrope or a feather bed'". "'Give me the tightrope'", he said.
I told him that if "the tightrope" was a double entendre, it was a terrible one and he'd have to be more specific.
It's the motto we've been living with ever since, though.