Cloud Castles by Michael Scott Rohan Read Free Book Online Page B

thought of my ravished privacy, riffled files, my girlfriends checked up on, the baffled venom in that voice as it twisted and tortured the truth to suit its own suspicions. My conscience shut its mouth, folded its arms, and enjoyed the view.
    She considered her drink, put it down and walked with stiff dignity, like a sort of robotic ballerina, towards the bathroom. After a moment I heard the toilet flush, and the shower come on. Not a bad idea; I could use the same myself. I flicked the cams free, gathered my strength and kicked out hard, out, away and into the open air with a rush, then back round the arête to the face of the hotel. This time I didn’t need to cling; I hit, bounced, clamped on an ascender and began to haul myself up at speed with creaking arms, passing the rope under my battered buttocks to keep it away from windows. I had relief to fuel me, now that I knew what all this had been about.
    A Strasbourg number, and Goran Bernheimer, deputy trade commissioner for the European Community. So Joan of Arc here was an EC trade investigator; nice job for a paranoid. But by the sound of that little lot, she’d be off my back soon enough: Bernheimer was no fool. The relief lasted all the way back to my room – almost.
    I was on the window-sill when the cold feeling crept over me. Okay, she was just an overzealous cop with a fixation, the type that tends to end up planting the evidence. Let her try that now! But a cop of sorts she was, and not justsome muckraker. That gave more weight to the other things she’d said, a lot more. Okay, she was wrong about me – but the main reason she suspected me seemed to be the company I kept. I’d assumed she was just as wrong about them – but was she? About them she sounded absolutely sure; and as if the absent Georges did too. And surest of all about Lutz.
    I slid back in, wincing at my injuries, and headed for that haunt of philosophers, the bathroom. I needed to get clean all over again how. There was a television tilted over the broad bath, but it gave me little comfort as I let my aches soak away into the steaming water. The news was full of riots, both here and in Warsaw, Polish skinheads battling it out with neo-Communist thugs, both equally horrible; the ringleaders in particular looked practically interchangeable with each other – or with those here, for that matter. Europe was beginning to wear a common face, and it wasn’t one I liked. Grudgingly I hauled myself out of the water and phoned down to the valet service for my evening
frac
, and the garage for my car. I was going to look in at Lutz’s party after all.
    I’d rented a top-line BMW sport, and this late the roads were clearing; I made good time out of town and onto the byroads. They led me a curling way out to the little village that was the only material remainder of the once-vast Amerningen estates, squatting dourly beneath the shadow of their baroquely decorated gates. The men at the gates were in tuxedos, too, but there was no mistaking them for either guests or waiters, impeccably polite as they were; they were uniformly huge, great square-headed Prussian grenadier types. You thought they’d clump, but they moved with easy athletic grace. One of them chatted lightly in good English while the others gave me and my invitation the unobtrusive once-over, checking me against some invisible list; then they threw open the gates with enough ceremony to make anyone overlook the delay. Soft glows awoke among the shrubbery as I drove by, then dimmed again behind me to leave the long drive in shadow.
    You might have expected a Bavarian baron’s family home to be a Gothic extravaganza of towers and battlements, or a beamy old rustic
Schloss
full of stags’ heads and open fires. Instead I pulled up under the porte-cochère ofa wide, sleek stately home which must have been the latest fashion for an eighteenth-century gentleman of leisure, glazed dome in the roof and all. Evidently Lutz’s ancestors were