“Perhaps I will do that.”
“Good. But—this is only a suggestion, of course—I don’t think you ought to discuss this with the others. They are even more baffled than I am.”
He agreed to meet us at the hotel at six. We parted with many expressions of good will.
After I had ushered him out, I turned to Schmidt, who was methodically finishing his catalogue of Middle-High-German obscenities. One advantage of an advanced education is that it provides you with such an extensive list of languages to swear in.
“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.
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—”