Trojan Gold (23 page)

“Now what's the matter with you?” I demanded. “That little nudge didn't hurt.”

“I am angry with you,” Schmidt explained. “Vicky, you are a fool; don't you know that when a Communist invites you to share a meal with him, he is planning to eat your food and his own?”

“That evil suspicion did occur to me, Schmidt.”

“He will give nothing away. He only wishes to pick your brain.”

“There's nothing in my brain to pick.”

“Humph,” said Schmidt.

“It should be amusing,” I said dreamily. “He'll be looking for hidden meanings in everything we say. Finding them, too, I expect.”

“Your idea of amusement is very strange,” Schmidt grumbled. “Why are you sitting here? Why don't you follow him?”

“Why should I?”

“Because he…because you…” Schmidt bounced up. “If you don't, I will.”

“Have fun.”

“Humph,” said Schmidt. Snatching his cap, he trotted to the door.

He opened it; then he stood back. Clara sauntered in, her tail swinging. “
Guten Tag
,” Schmidt said absently, and proceeded on his way.

“He wasn't home?” I asked.

The cat didn't reply. Jumping onto the bed, she clawed one of Tony's shirts into a nest, lay down on it, and went to sleep.

The beds had been made, but Schmidt and Tony had managed to create considerable havoc. Cast-off clothing littered the bed and the floor, the crumbs of Schmidt's snack were scattered far and wide, and poor Hoffman's private papers were all over the place. The majority of them had been returned to the cartons, not too neatly; I had the impression that they had been tossed there in frustrated disgust. Others littered the chairs and the beds.

I glanced through one of the untidy piles. It consisted of a dunning letter to a guest whose check
had bounced, a receipt from an antique shop in Garmisch, and bills from several record shops. Poor Tony. No wonder he had given up in despair and gone skiing.

What to do, what to do? The long empty afternoon was mine to do with as I wished, but none of the options attracted me. Skiing with Tony and the others, in the gray, flat light that skiers particularly hate—with Elise glowering at me and Dieter arranging pratfalls for me and Tony sulking because he spent more time on his backside than on his skis…Pounding on the door of the house where John squatted like a toad in its hole? He probably wouldn't let me in, which would hurt my ego, or else he would let me in, and I would end up doing something I would regret.

To my disgust I realized that while my mind was wandering, my hands had been busy, tidying up the room. That's what early childhood conditioning does. I noticed with sour amusement that the sweater I had just rescued from the floor was the one Ann had made with her own fair hands. She'd have a fit if she saw how cavalierly Tony treated her love-offering; it smelled faintly of the beer I had spilled the previous day. I wondered if Ann sewed cute little tags onto her creations—a picture of crossed knitting needles and a motto, “From the needles of…”

There was a tag at the back of the neck, all right. The sweater had been handmade. In Taiwan.

I stood quite still, clutching the sweater and trying to talk myself out of my evil-minded suspicions. There were a dozen different explanations for the discrepancy, the most obvious being that
this was not the same sweater. My good angel, my better self, asked piously, “What difference does it make?” My other self—the one with the higher IQ—knew it did make a difference. And it knew how to ascertain the truth.

I dropped the sweater onto the floor and kicked it for good measure.

At first I thought it would be safer to make the call from a public phone, but after some reflection, I realized that it wouldn't matter if the conversation was overheard because it wouldn't mean anything to anyone except me—and Tony. So I went to my own room and put through a call to Munich. Some people might have taken advantage of the boss's absence to indulge in a long lunch hour, but not Gerda. She was there. However, she was not noble enough to refrain from pointing out at some length that while she was at her desk, working her little heart out, certain other people were gadding around enjoying themselves.

“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.

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.

“If 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.”