“Where?” she demanded. “Where are you? You left me no number, no forwarding address. What am I to do when people ask how to reach you?”
“Has anyone tried to reach me?” I asked, with a sudden uneasy recollection of the corpse in the garden.
“Nein. Not yet. But it is not professional, what you do—”
She went on scolding, and I went on thinking about Freddy. I am a great believer in not troubling trouble until it comes troubling you, and I certainly didn’t owe Freddy anything—I had a strong suspicion he was the one who had tried to send me and Schmidt shuffling off this mortal coil—but I hated to think of him lying there cold and unwanted. It was the cold that had kept him from being discovered. If the temperature rose…
I didn’t want to think about that. I said, “Gerda, will you look something up for me?”
Gerda loves being useful. She has her own little reference shelf, right beside her desk, and it only took a few minutes for her to find the information I needed, in the National Faculty Directory.
I thanked her and hung up before she could repeat her demand for an address and phone number.
So simple, and so damning. Professor James Belfort of the Mathematics Department at Granstock and his wife Louise had no children. Tony had lied to me from the beginning. Not only was Ann no knitter, she wasn’t even a person.
Eight
I WAS ON THE BED, FLAT ON MY BACK WITH the cat on my stomach, when Tony walked in. The early winter dusk had descended, and I hadn’t bothered to turn on a light. He fell over a chair, swore, fell over a table, swore, and finally found the light switch. I deduced that he had not expected to find me in residence, because he jumped nervously and let out a yelp when he saw me.
“What the hell…Are you all right? Is something the matter, Vicky? Are you sick?” He clumped to the bed leaving damp footprints across the floor, and put an icy hand on my forehead.
“I’m fine,” I said. His fingers felt like those of a corpse. “Just thinking.”
“You and Sherlock Holmes.” Tony sat down on the edge of the bed. He was in a high good humor, so I deduced he had not sprained or broken anything that day. “I don’t buy this sedentary ratiocination technique, Vicky; you’ll never learn anything if you lie around here.”
“You’re leaking all over the bed,” I said irritably. “Get up.”
“It’s just melted snow.”
“I know it’s melted snow, that’s what I’m objecting to. Get up.”
Tony rose to his full height.
“What time is it?” I asked, yawning.
“A little after five. Dieter and Elise are joining us as soon as they change. Listen, Vicky, I found out something—”
“I suggest you emulate them,” I said, looking critically at the puddle forming around his feet.
“I will in a minute. I want to tell you what I found out—”
“Jan Perlmutter will be here at six.”
“While you were lying here in slothful ease I found out…What? Perlmutter? Where? Here? How—”
“Schmidt captured him—or vice versa.” Tony stood there melting and looking chagrined while I explained. I did not feel guilty for spoiling his big news. During my hours of cogitation, I had decided not to confront him with his low-down lies. There might be an innocent explanation, but I couldn’t think of one, and I was very hurt by his behavior. If I couldn’t trust Tony, whom could I trust?
Sir John Smythe? I had been a fool to suppose the leopard had changed its spots. Worse—a besotted fool, so bemused by John Donne and his disciple that I hadn’t noticed the fatal slip until long afterward. Perhaps John had been a little bemused too; it wasn’t like him to be so careless. More likely he was just getting old. I would like to live to see the day when John alias Smythe let a woman cloud his crystal-clear selfishness.
I couldn’t trust Schmidt either. He would double-cross me without a moment’s hesitation if he could talk himself into believing he was doing it for my own good. Just as I would do it to him.
I couldn’t trust anybody. And after all the efforts I had made to keep Tony safe and unwitting…
The narrative took the wind out of his sails in another way. Jan’s theory anticipated the one Tony had cleverly formulated after talking with Dieter. “He and Elise both got copies of that photograph,” Tony informed me.
“Oh, yeah?”
“I expected a little more enthusiasm. Even, perhaps, a touch of admiration. Something like ‘Oh, Tony, how clever,’ or ‘Tony, you never cease to amaze me—’”
“You never do,” I said grimly. “So you spilled your guts to Dieter and Elise?”
“Why not?”
“Why not?” I echoed. “Why not indeed? Why ever not?”
“You are sick,” Tony said.
I pushed his hand away. “I’m not sick. Keep your clammy hands off of me. So. Dieter and Elise are on the trail, too. Separately or in collusion?”
Tony scratched his head. “They seem to be colluding now. It was Dieter’s expedition to begin with. Elise paid no attention to the photograph—thought, as I did, that it was a typical crank communication.”
“There was no message on hers?”
“I guess not. There certainly wasn’t on mine. Dieter…” Tony pondered. “He didn’t say exactly, but there must have been something. He called Elise and got her interested; talked her into joining him here.”
“The sly little rascal,” I said. “He certainly didn’t invite me to collude with him.”
“You don’t collude well,” Tony said with a grin. “Dieter likes to be Chief; Elise makes a better Indian than you.” Then he added generously, “That’s a good point; I should have asked Dieter how he knew it was Hoffman who sent the photograph.”
“The same way Jan did, I expect.”
“That’s odd, though,” Tony said. “Why would Hoffman give Perlmutter and Dieter leads he didn’t give the rest of us?”
“I don’t know.”
I had another question, but I wasn’t about to ask Tony—not since I had learned that Ann was a figment of his imagination. Perlmutter’s photograph had been of Frau Schliemann, not Frau Hoffman. Maybe jerky Helene had been right about Tony’s photo after all. What about Dieter and Elise—Frau Hoffman or Frau Schliemann? I would try to find out, though God knows why; I couldn’t think what it might mean, if anything.
“A committee.” Tony was communing with himself. “That makes sense, you know.”
“Maybe it makes sense to you. Go drip on your own floor, Tony. I want to change.”
“It is my floor,” Tony said indignantly. With the air of a squatter establishing property rights, he dropped his soggy jacket onto said floor.
“Oh. So it is. I forgot I was in your room.”
Tony unzipped his ski pants and tried to step out of them. Since he had neglected to remove his heavy, wet boots, the pants only wadded up around his calves. “You needn’t be coy with me, Vicky,” he said tenderly, struggling with the pants. “When I realized you were here waiting for me—Hey, don’t go. I want—”
Though he was effectively pinned to the spot by the wet cloth around his feet, he has very long arms; one of them reached me as I was sidling toward the door and spun me neatly back into a fond embrace. It would have been as pretty as an old Astaire-and-Rogers routine had it not been for the fact I wasn’t feeling as friendly as Ginger, and the additional fact that Tony’s feet were immobilized. We toppled over onto the bed in a flurry of arms and bodies and breathless dialogue, profane on my part, conciliatory on Tony’s, just as Schmidt walked in.
Instead of tactfully retiring, or bursting into laughter, either of which would have been appropriate, Schmidt rubbed his hands together and beamed from ear to ear. “Ah, it is nice to see you so friendly together. Don’t mind Papa Schmidt, just go on with what you were doing.”
This cooled Tony’s ardor as effectively as the elbow I had placed under his chin. He stopped thrashing around and I assumed my feet.
“I
f we had been doing what you thought we were doing, which we weren’t, we certainly wouldn’t go on doing it with you refereeing from the sidelines.”
“Then what were you doing?” Schmidt asked curiously.
Tony lay motionless, his arms over his face, like a dead knight on the battlefield. I’m not as hardhearted as I’d like to be. The total humiliation of the man moved me; I knelt at his feet and began working him out of his boots. It was a complicated procedure, since everything was soaking wet and his terpsichorean efforts had twisted his pants into overlapping coils.
“We were discussing the case,” I said. “I told him about Perlmutter…. Where did he go, Schmidt?”
“I lost him,” Schmidt admitted. “I made a mistake, you see. I should have adopted a disguise. He had seen me in this suit—”
“Yes, that’s all right,” I said abstractedly.
Schmidt bent over Tony, lifted one arm, and peered down into his face. “Did you learn anything from Hoffman’s papers, mein Freund?”
“No,” Tony muttered. Schmidt let go of his arm, which dropped with force enough to make Tony grunt. “There’s nothing there,” I said.
Tony sat up. “So that’s why you were here. Can’t you trust me to do a job right?”
“No,” I said coldly. “Damn it, there goes a fingernail. Take your own damned clothes off.”
“Such language does not become a lady,” Schmidt remarked.
“I don’t give a—”
“Nothing?” Schmidt picked up handful of papers and began looking through them. “Nothing at all? No maps, no keys for storage lockers, no code messages?” Neither Tony nor I felt it necessary to dignify this question with a reply. Schmidt went on, “But what is this? Ach, Gott, it is a love letter! ‘To my adored, my own Helen…’ Ha, but that is significant! There is no Helen in the case. Had this dignified old gentleman a mistress, then? She may know—”
I took the paper from Schmidt’s hand. “It’s to his wife,” I said. “There were only a few letters; I guess they weren’t often parted. But she kept them tied up with a blue ribbon.”
“Oh.” Schmidt’s eyes filled. “How touching. Her name was Helen?”
“No, it was Amelie. Helen was his pet name for her. He quotes Goethe and Marlowe—‘Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships…’ Oh, stop blubbering, Schmidt, or you’ll get me started. You’re a sentimental old—a sentimental fool.”
It wasn’t Schmidt’s easy tears that roughened my voice; it was the memory of the woman’s face in the photograph. There had been beauty in that lined face once, at least to the eyes of the man who loved her.
I gathered up the rest of the letters. “I’m going to burn these,” I said. “Friedl should have had the decency to do it, instead of handing them over to strangers.”
Schmidt approved. Tony did not express any opinion. He was still struggling with his boots when I left them.
I hadn’t brought a dress, since I had not expected to attend any formal social functions. I rather wished I had when I saw Elise dolled up in mink and four-inch heels, but the weakness was fleeting; competition on that level is something I avoid, all the more readily because I don’t own a mink coat. It did occur to me to wonder how Elise could afford one.
Dieter was sporting a Groucho Marx nose with attached mustache—a modest effort, for Dieter. When someone (me) objected, he said it was Weihnacht, and there would be other masked and costumed revelers in the crowd that evening. I doubted it; but Schmidt’s face assumed a wistful expression. He asked Dieter where he had procured the nose, and they entered into an animated discussion of costume and magic shops that sold ghastly props for practical jokers.
Schmidt, who loves parties and is generous to a fault, had reserved a table and ordered champagne. Tony said very little. He was still annoyed with me, and he didn’t care much for Elise. She appeared to be in a bad mood, too. Under her mink she was wearing a slinky black cocktail dress spattered with sequins—very inappropriate, in my opinion. Glancing at the unoccupied chair, she said disagreeably, “Is this for the skeleton at the feast?”
“No,” I said. “We’re expecting someone else. Jan Perlmutter.”
That distracted Dieter from the subject of whoopee cushions. “Jan? He is here?” Unexpectedly, he began to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Tony asked sourly.
Dieter took off his nose and wiped his eyes. “You don’t see how comical it is? All of us skulking about in disguise, keeping secrets from each other. It is most comical for Jan, he is naturally a spy at heart. How did you flush him out?”
Puffing himself up, Schmidt gave his version of the “capture.” Dieter shouted with laughter. “Yes, it is very funny. Poor Jan, how his pride must be hurt. He hoped to find the prize and make off with it before we could stop him.”
“Didn’t we all?” I asked, glancing at Tony, who scowled back at me.
“Of course,” Dieter said cheerfully. “Can you imagine the legal battles if it were found? Everyone has a claim—the Greeks, the Turks, the Germans—and the Metropolitan Museum or the Getty Museum would try to buy it; they have the most money to spend. But if one of us said, ‘Ha, here it is, I have it, now what are you going to do?’ it would not be easy to take it away. And if it were in East Berlin—”
“Sssh,” I said, “Here he comes.”
“Why should I ssssh?” Dieter demanded. “I don’t say anything I wouldn’t say to him. Ha, Jan, old comrade, how are things in the beautiful socialist society, eh? Have you won your dacha on the Black Sea yet?”
“No,” Jan said. “Guten Abend, Elise, Vicky, meine Herren.” Elise gave him a languid hand, and he bent over it, obviously relieved that someone was doing the proper thing.
“But how lovely it is to see you again, Jan,” Elise murmured. “Vicky, why don’t you move over, then Jan can sit between us? It is more suitable than having two ladies together.”
In my opinion, it was questionable as to whether either of us qualified, but I did as she asked, and Jan sat down. They made a nice couple; unlike the other men, Jan was formally attired in a gray three-piece suit and a somber dark tie. He only needed a black armband to complete the picture, but even the rotten tailoring and dismal color couldn’t mar Jan’s absurd good looks. He’d look divine in the clothes like those of the King in the painting—rich brocades and glowing colors, and the chaperone headdress, with its graceful hanging drapery.
Tony on my other side gave me a sharp jab in the ribs, and I realized that a silence had fallen over the table. Several people started talking at once; out of the corner of his mouth Tony muttered, “You look like a groupie staring at a rock star. Stop making a fool out of yourself.”
“I’ll have plenty of help,” I said.
Dieter banged on the table. “A toast,” he exclaimed, raising his glass. “Let us drink to…to Heinrich Schliemann!”
Schmidt giggled and Tony’s tight lips relaxed. Jan nodded gravely; but after Elise had drained her glass, she said pettishly, “I say to hell with Heinrich Schliemann. He started this—”
“Yes, but you can’t blame him,” said Dieter. He leaned over and planted a wet, smacking kiss on her cheek. “It is my fault you are here, Herzgeliebte, so you should say to hell with Dieter.”
“To hell with Dieter,” Elise said. I realized she was a little drunk. She must have downed a few before joining us.
Jan ignored the byplay. “I am glad you have decided to be candid,” he said, addressing the table at large. “As I said to Vicky today, it is foolish we should not cooperate.”
“To hell with cooperation,” Elise muttered. “I think you are all crazy. This is a wild-goose chase; we are wasting our time.”
“Oh, you hurt me,” Dieter exclaimed, clutching his heart. “I have not wasted my time, Schatzie. What is the harm in this, if it gives us a pleasant holiday? Here—have more champagne.”
“I believe I will,” Elise said.
“You claim this is for you only a pleasant holiday?”
Jan demanded, frowning. “You refuse to—”
“Oh, don’t be such a suspicious old Marxist,” Dieter said. “No one is trying to put one over on you, Jan. We came here for the same reason—we admit that—and now we know we have arrived at a dead end. Is that not so? Hoffman is dead, the treasure is hidden, if it was ever here to begin with, and that is all there is to it. Now I say forget it, enjoy yourself.”
“But—” Jan began.
“But nothing. Have you an idea, a theory, you would like to propose? No? And you, Vicky—you, Tony?…” His bright, amused eyes moved around the table. “And you, Dieter? Dieter says no, he has no idea either. So let’s forget it and have fun, eh?”
“Amen to that,” Elise said loudly.
The arrival of the first course put an end to the discussion, if not to the disagreement. The band arrived, and began playing—a bizarre mixture of American soft rock and schmaltzy Bavarian waltzes. Filled with food and drink, especially the latter, Tony asked me to dance. I declined; Tony is even more of a menace on the dance floor than he is on skis. So he asked Elise, out of spite, and she was delighted to accept.
Dieter and Schmidt had gone back to discussing disguises, which left me tête-à-tête with Jan. He ate in silence for a while; then the band broke into a waltz—I think it was a waltz—and Jan said solemnly, “Will you honor me?”
“Why not?” I said.
The dance floor was so full we couldn’t do much but stand in one spot and sway back and forth. Jan swayed rather nicely; I told him so, and he returned the compliment. He was holding me even closer than the crowded conditions demanded, and when his hand began making what my mother would have called “rude gestures,” I said, amused, “I’m surprised at you, Jan.”
“Surprised? That I am human, after all?” At close range the smile was drop-dead blinding. He went on, “Do you think I am some sort of machine? No, Vicky, I am a man; I feel as any man would feel in the company of a beautiful woman.”
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