“Whom,” said John. “Ouch,” he added indignantly.
“Then don’t be a pedant. You derailed my train of thought. Where was I? Oh—Friedl’s extramarital activities. I’m sure she had plenty. Not only was Hoffman old enough to be her grandfather, but he was a gentleman—not her type. Freddy was definitely her type, and it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he is not unknown to the police. But he’s even stupider than his lady. What Friedl needed was a person who had two specific qualifications: brains enough to comprehend the unique value of the treasure, and the right connections to dispose of it, quietly, lucratively, and illegally.”
The taut muscles under my cheek quivered, and then relaxed. “It wasn’t me,” John squeaked. “Honest, lady.”
“I believe you, darling. If she had approached you, you’d have taken care of the matter by now and left no loose ends dangling.”
“Thank you.”
“Bitte schön.”
“Your hypothesis, though unsubstantiated, is worth considering,” John said. “Where could she have met such a person? No, don’t tell me, let me work it out for myself. At the hotel, obviously. All sorts of people go to hotels. They are known to enjoy skiing and other harmless sports; they eat, drink, and are merry. Perhaps it was a chance encounter (how romantic) that introduced Friedl to the man of her dreams, and while they were being merry she opened her little heart to him. She’s the type that would babble in bed—”
“Unlike me,” I said wryly.
“Quite unlike you. I’ve had a look at the lady, and she lacks your external charms as well as your ability to carry on a witty conversation even under circumstances of considerable distraction…. What was I saying?”
“It wasn’t John Donne, but I liked it. Do go on.”
“That’s enough; I wouldn’t want it to go to your head. We might try to have a look at the hotel register. This hypothetical expert of yours must have visited Bad Steinbach during the spring or summer of last year.”
“She may have met him earlier,” I said. “And remembered him when she learned about the gold….”
John knew every nuance of my voice. He said alertly, “You’ve thought of someone.”
“No. It’s not only unsubstantiated, it’s pure fiction.”
The arm around my shoulders tightened painfully. “Don’t hold out on me, Vicky. I’m willing to collaborate in this little venture of yours, but only if you tell me everything.”
“Old habits die hard,” I said apologetically. “In our past encounters, we’ve been on opposite sides. I’m not accustomed to trusting you.”
The even movement of his breathing did not alter. After a brief, internal struggle, I said, “All right, then. I happen to know of five people—six, including myself—who had at least one of the necessary qualifications, and who were at the hotel last year.”
“I think you may have something there,” John said, when I had concluded the explanation. “While the old gentleman was learning to know—and of course, love—you, Friedl was learning to know someone else, in quite another sense of the word. Later, when the matter of the gold came up, she would think of him—or her?”
“Who’s to know?”
“Who indeed? The encounter needn’t have been heterosexual or even sexual. You say three of the lot have surfaced lately?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t necessarily mean what you think. Suppose Hoffman contacted some of the others, as well as me? You and I know I’m uniquely wonderful, but Hoffman might have decided to check out a number of candidates before settling on one. We don’t know how many copies of that photograph he mailed, or how much information he gave other people. I’m sure I would have received a letter or a phone call if he hadn’t died.”
“Or been murdered.”
I moved uncomfortably. “I thought of that, of course. But much as I abhor the woman, I can’t believe…”
“Always assume the worst; then you are never disappointed.”
“John, I really have to get to work sometime today. Schmidt is sure to come looking for me—”
“Speaking of Schmidt—you don’t mean to involve him in this, do you?”
“I wish I could keep him out of it. Your turning up didn’t help. Schmidt is fascinated by you.”
“I will endeavor to put a lid on my notorious charm when next we meet. Seriously, Vicky. I don’t want to be constantly distracted by having to rescue Schmidt.”
“And I don’t want Schmidt to be in a position where he needs rescuing. We’ll just have to elude the little rascal, that’s all.”
“Agreed. It behooves us, then, to investigate the people you mentioned. Their reputations, their recent activities, any suspicious circumstances. You might give me a list.”
“I can do better than that. I have snapshots of all of them—they’re in a box on the coffee table. You’ll recognize the ambiance. There was Dieter Spreng from Berlin, Rosa D’Addio from the University of Turin, Tony…”
“Tony?”
“Tony,” I repeated. Caesar was howling, the sunlight lay golden on the floor…. I sat up with a gasp. “What time is it?”
For some reason, he was still wearing his wrist-watch. “Two.”
“Two P.M.? Oh, God! Wednesday. It’s Wednesday, isn’t it?”
“The last time I looked it was Tuesday. That was last night, so logic suggests—”
I jumped up and began groping for my clothes. “Tony. He’s here. His plane lands at two. I told him I’d pick him up.”
John sprang out of bed. Clad only in a wrist-watch and a lordly sneer, he struck a pose like Jove about to hurl a thunderbolt and declaimed, “‘Yet she/Will be/False, ere I come, to two, or three.’ Aren’t you scheduling your appointments rather too tightly? Far be it from me to…Tony Lawrence from Chicago?”
Jeans, shirt, shoes…“Don’t leave!” I ordered. “Oh, well—maybe you had better leave, come to think of it. Where can I reach you? Write it down. I want an address and a phone number—and a name! Any name so long as it’s one to which you are currently answering….” I ran to the door.
John had dropped down onto the edge of the bed and changed his pose—Rodin’s Thinker instead of Athenian Jove.
It’s a wonder I made it to the airport in one piece. As I wove in and out of the traffic, my brain felt like my spare-room closet, stuffed with odds and ends that had been shoved in, helter-skelter. It was all John’s fault. Our discussion had clarified several of my amorphous ideas, but John Donne and the Discobolus kept elbowing into my attempts at deductive reasoning. For God’s sake, hold your tongue, John Donne, and let me think.
Tony. I had to concentrate on Tony; he was the most imminent of the concerns of the moment. I couldn’t believe I had forgotten about him. Now that he had been recalled to my attention, I couldn’t believe the things I was thinking about him.
I could handle the possibility that Tony might be one of several people whom Herr Hoffman had contacted, and that he was keeping mum about it because he hoped to outsmart me in a hunt for the Trojan gold. That possibility was looking less likely, though. According to what Müller had told me, there had only been one envelope. It was conceivable that Hoffman had dispatched other communications earlier (he certainly hadn’t sent any later). But—call me egotistical—I couldn’t believe that the old gentleman would have left me until last, or that he would have given me less information than he had given the others. It was one thing for me to take a day off work and drive sixty miles to check out a wild theory; for Tony to spend time and money on a trans-Atlantic flight, he’d need more to go on.
On the other hand, Tony said he had been planning to go to the meetings. If the trip had already been in the works, it wouldn’t be much out of his way to stop over and find out what I was up to.
I wanted to believe it, because the alternative was an ugly one. If Tony was the faceless hypothetical conspirator John and I had invented, it would mean he was a cold-blooded, dishonest bastard who was ready to betray every ethical and professio
nal principle—and that he had been making out with Friedl at the same time he was supposed to be enjoying my company. Guess which bothered me more.
I refused to believe it. There was a third possibility, and that was that Tony was completely unwitting. A man is innocent until proven guilty, after all. But if he was unwitting, I preferred to keep him that way. Tony and I had collaborated once before, with some success, but I didn’t want to make a habit of it. Even if John had not turned up…
John. I should have locked him in the closet, tied him to the bed…. Not that he couldn’t get out of any prison I could construct. He had gotten out of worse ones. What if he disappeared and never came back?
And then there was Schmidt. The thought of my boss, and of the possible permutations—all disastrous—of Schmidt and Tony, John and Schmidt, Tony and John, and all three—sent my brain into overload. The terminal was in sight. I decided to emulate Scarlett O’Hara and think about it tomorrow.
I had hoped the plane would be late, or that it would take Tony a while to get through customs. Both those contingencies would have occurred if I had been breathlessly anticipating the moment when I could fold him in a passionate embrace. Since I wasn’t, they didn’t. He was already there.
Though the terminal was crowded with holiday travelers, I had no trouble spotting him because he was a head taller than anyone else. He was bareheaded. His hair, thick and black and wavy, is the kind women love to run their fingers through, which is probably why Tony, thoughtful soul that he is, seldom wears a hat. He looks like a popular misconception of a poet (who usually looks like the popular misconception of a truck driver). He has delicate hollows under his cheekbones, and a thin, sensitive mouth, and a high forehead over which his hair tumbles in distracting curls.
I attributed his frown and his formal outstretched hand to annoyance at my tardiness, so I brushed the latter aside and flung myself into his less-than-enthusiastic arms. They were not unenthusiastic for long; as they tightened around me, and his lips warmed to the task at hand, I thought how nice it was to have to stand on tiptoe to kiss a man. After the first second or two I didn’t make any other mental comparisons; it would be like comparing apples and oranges, each is delicious in its own way, it all depends on which you prefer. There is no doubt, however, that a certain degree of guilt increased the ardor of my embrace—though why the hell I should have felt guilty I don’t know.
I freed myself, amid a spatter of applause from the watching tourists; after all, they had nothing else to look at. Tony was blushing furiously, as is his engaging habit. I linked my arm with his and led him toward the exit.
There wasn’t much I could do but take him home with me. The Museum was out of the question until I could warn Schmidt not to give Tony the slightest hint of our latest scam—excuse me, investigation. John would surely have gone by the time we returned. I only hoped he had not left some intimate garment hanging on the bedpost or a message scrawled in shaving cream across the mirror. But so what if he had? Tony didn’t own me. Fidelity had never been part of the deal. But I did owe him a place to stay, for old times’ sake. He’d expect that much.
“I have a reservation at the Bayrischer Hof,” he said, staring straight ahead. “If that’s out of your way, you could drop me at a taxi stand.”
My hands lost their grip on the wheel for an instant; I swerved back into my own lane amid the frenzied gesticulations of the wild-eyed driver of a Fiat on my right.
“What did you say?”
“I said, I have a reservation at the—”
“I heard you. What’s bugging you, Tony? Just because I was a little late—”
“That has nothing to do with it.”
“With what?”
“With the—er—the situation being what—er—” Tony let out a long, gusty sigh. “I’m engaged.”
“To be married?” I gasped.
“That is the customary meaning of the word,” Tony mumbled.
I cut across two lanes and finally found a place where I could pull off the road. I turned to face him. He wouldn’t look at me; he continued to stare straight ahead, as if the bleak winter landscape held something of absorbing interest.
“That’s very nice,” I said. “Just one question, Tony. Why the hell did you come here?”
“It was her idea.”
“Oh, was it?”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“Oh, did it?”
He kept sliding down in the seat, his knees rising as his body sank. When his knees were on a level with his head, I couldn’t control my laughter any longer. But I will admit that the laughter wasn’t altogether merry.
“Look at me, Tony.” I put one hand on his cheek; he shied like a skittery horse. “I’m not going to bite your head off,” I continued gently. “Seems to me you’re in enough trouble as it is. Who is this extraordinary female?”
The mildness of my voice reassured him. He pulled out his wallet. “Her name is Ann Belfort.”
If he’d set out to find someone whose characteristics were the antithesis of mine, he had succeeded. A cloud of soft dark hair surrounded the girl’s heart-shaped face; her eyes were as big and brown and melting as those of a Jersey cow. “Five feet two inches?” I inquired, studying the face I had always wanted to possess.
“Three and a half inches.”
“Uh-huh. What do you do when you want to—”
“Now cut that out!” Tony sat upright, rigid with chivalrous indignation.
“Kiss her, I was about to say. I suppose you can always find a rock or a low table…. Oh, hell, I’m sorry. Forget I said that. Belfort…Any relation to Dr. Belfort of the Math Department at Granstock?”
“Uh—yes. His daughter.”
“When are you being married? No, don’t tell me. June, of course.”
“That’s right. I don’t know why you—”
“Neither do I,” I admitted. “I’m very happy for you, Tony. I honestly am. But I don’t understand why you are here instead of in Illinois.”
“She knows all about you,” Tony said.
“All about me?”
“All she needs to know.” Tony bowed his head. A lock of raven hair dropped adorably over one eyebrow. I repressed an urge to grab it and pull as hard as I could. “It was okay,” he went on gloomily, “until about a month ago, when I woke her up calling your name.”
“Did you really, you dear thing?”
“It wasn’t so much what I said as the way I said it. ‘Oh, Vicky—Vicky—oooooh…’”
He sounded like a dying calf, or a man in the last extremity of about-to-be fulfilled passion. I grinned reluctantly. “I can see her point—though I still think this is stupid. She sent you back to your old love to make sure the incubus is exorcised?”
“Succubus,” Tony said. “Incubi were masculine; the female demons whose diabolical sexual assaults on helpless innocent men—”
“Oh, right. Seems to me you’re waffling, Tony. Either you’re still lusting for me or you’re not. What’s the point of the Bayrischer Hof?”
“I don’t really have a reservation.”
“I thought not. It’s a very expensive hotel.”
“I had assumed I’d stay with you, of course. In a perfectly platonic way—no fooling around—”
My sympathy for cute little Ann began to dissipate. “‘I could not love thee, dear, so much, Lov’d I not honour more.’” But this was really too far out. Not love, quoth she, but vanity, sets love a task like…Like a weekend nose to nose and side by side with an old flame, with no moment of weakness, no—“fooling around,” indeed.
“And you agreed?” I demanded incredulously.
“I didn’t think there’d be any problem.” Tony looked so hurt and baffled and young that I thought seriously of slugging him square in the chops. That boyish look gets all his women, but he was thirty-four years old, for God’s sake. Old enough to have better sense.
“I mean, we were always good friends,” Tony went on in
an aggrieved voice. “I used to like to talk to you. If you hadn’t kissed me—”
“I did it out of the kindness of my heart, you conceited male chauvinist! If you’re going to let one friendly kiss get your male hormones in a whirl…Did this woman step out of some kind of time warp, or is she just emotionally retarded?”
“Of course a single experiment is not conclusive,” said Tony, reaching for me.
Apples. Nice, crisp fresh apples, like Jonathans, with a little tang under the sweetness. Wholesome American fruit, no imports, nothing exotic. But the very best of their kind.
It was Tony who ended the kiss. I’d have gone on as long as he wanted; it was his experiment, not mine.
“Well?” I inquired. “Have you reached a scientific conclusion or is more research necessary?”
“I think,” said Tony weakly, “I had better go to the Bayrischer Hof.”
“You can’t.” I started the car and edged back into the traffic. “They’ll be booked solid this time of year. Don’t worry, you can always prop a chair against your bedroom door.”
What I had said was true—most of the hotels would be full-up over the holidays. But the more I thought about letting Tony stay with me—chair or no chair—the madder I got. In addition to the other disadvantages, I resented being used as a bad-conduct prize.
After a moment of chilly silence I said, “Scratch the chair. You can start calling hotels as soon as we get to my place.”
The silence that followed was even chillier.
There was one positive feature to the situation, though. Now I could dismiss my suspicions of Tony once and for all. His odd behavior over the phone had bothered me more than I had been willing to admit; I hadn’t even mentioned it to John, because I knew he’d pounce on it as further evidence of guilt. That was all explained by Tony’s news; he had been apprehensive about breaking the news of his engagement and (the conceited thing) ditto my poor heart, and he must have known I would react profanely and angrily to Ann’s loony experiment.
Tony stirred. “You’ve changed.”
“How?”
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