room almost at a run. At that point the porter remembered the messenger with the ticket and, recalling having ordered the ticket himself over the phone, he realized it had been meant for the German and not for Mittelhorn. The sight of the German’s empty box confirmed his mistake, and he decided to go directly to Mittelhorn’s room. He knocked on the door but, getting no answer, went inside. The room was deserted. Lying on the table were the torn envelope and a crumpled piece of paper. The porter peeked into the envelope and found the ticket, which Mittelhorn had evidently overlooked. He took the ticket and, out of curiosity, smoothed out the sheet of stationery that had made such an impression on the Swiss. It was completely blank. The porter left the room, thoroughly bewildered, but said nothing when he later ran into Mittelhorn, who was on his way back from the refrigerator with a bottle of mineral water.
Since by now the investigation had reached the point of desperation, the detail of the blank sheet of paper began to acquire a special significance, all the more so as Mittelhorn had spent all of the following day burning his precious prints in the fireplace, coming downstairs only for lunch. Either the blank piece of paper had been a secret message or signal, or else he had experienced a hallucination in the hotel lobby and only imagined having read a nonexistent letter. The first possibility seemed highly implausible, smacking of some cheap movie thriller, and was not at all consistent with Mittelhorn’s reputation as a man of unimpeachable honesty, a respected antiquarian, and an authority in his field. An audit of his business transactions turned up nothing the least bit shady or suspicious. As they probed deeper into the past, however, the investigation uncovered certain facts dating from the last world war. During it, Mittelhorn had been manager of one of Germany’s largest secondhand bookshops, located in Munich. The owner of the shop was a rich and elderly Jew. When the Nuremberg laws went into effect, Mittelhorn was appointed sole trustee of the shop, and its former owner was shipped off to Dachau, where he eventually perished. After the war, Mittelhorn took legal possession of the shop, supporting his claim with a document designating him as sole heir and executor of the dead man’s estate. But there were rumors that the document had been signed under duress and that Mittelhorn had had a hand in it. Two years later, even though these were only rumors, Mittelhorn transferred his business to Switzerland and settled permanently in Lausanne. Speculation arose that his mental breakdown was somehow connected with these events that had transpired some forty years ago, that, owing perhaps to an optical illusion, he mistook the blank sheet of paper for some communication reminding him of past sins, became so disturbed that he decided to destroy his most valuable possessions, and was eventually driven to the point of attempting suicide. On regaining consciousness in the hospital, he may have had a vision of the deceased; helpless against the dead man’s reproaches, he was driven again to suicide. However plausible it may have been, such a hypothesis appeared too ingenious; above all it did nothing to explain how such a well-balanced man could suffer a sudden mental breakdown. When they interviewed Mittelhorn’s former neighbor at the hotel, he merely confirmed the porter’s testimony, namely, that he had failed to get the opera ticket and that by the time he did receive it the following day it was too late. The case of the eccentric antiquarian thus reached an impasse, like all the others.
The files now included nine cases, all following the same mysterious pattern and all ending in tragedy. Despite their all-too-obvious similarity, there were still insufficient grounds for launching a criminal investigation aimed at prosecuting the guilty, since there was not the slightest hint as to their whereabouts or whether in fact they even existed. One very curious incident took place soon after the Mittelhorn case was officially closed; the hotel turned over to the police a letter recently addressed to the deceased man, even though he had been dead for more than a year. Postmarked Lausanne and bearing a typewritten address, the letter contained a blank sheet of paper. Efforts to trace the letter failed. Nor could it have been someone’s idea of a practical joke, since the press had never made any mention of the first letter. I had my own thoughts on the matter, though I preferred not to reveal them for the time being.
Of the two remaining cases, the first dated from some time ago, the second was more recent. To start with the older one, some years ago, in May, a German from Hanover, Johann Titz, took a room in Portici, not far from Herculaneum. He chose a small boardinghouse with a spectacular view of Vesuvius, because as a postcard manufacturer he was interested in producing a series of cards devoted to Vesuvius. But he was also there for medical reasons: he had suffered from asthma since his childhood. After too much exposure to the sun, he came down with a severe case of heat blisters. A dermatologist whom he consulted in Naples advised against any more sunbathing. To the doctor’s astonishment, his patient vehemently objected, insisting that the sunbathing was absolutely indispensable for clearing up his asthma and that it had been recommended by his doctor in Hanover. Titz was taking mud baths in a small spa to which he commuted every day from Herculaneum—he had driven down from Germany in his own car. On May 9 he began having dizzy spells and attributed them to food poisoning. He accused his landlady of serving him contaminated fish and threatened not to pay his bill. But in the end he paid it and drove off. When the landlady later went to dean his room, she found a message inscribed on the wall in red India ink: “I was poisoned here.” The ink had penetrated so deeply into the plaster that there was no getting rid of it except by repainting the walls, so the owner of the boardinghouse filed a complaint against her former tenant.
On his way north, however, somewhere in the vicinity of Milan, Titz suddenly swerved to the left on a straight stretch of highway, cut across a grass island, and, disregarding the blinking lights and honking horns of the other drivers, started driving down the opposite lane into the path of the oncoming traffic. Astonishingly enough, he was able to drive like this for a distance of four kilometers, forcing the oncoming cars into the most desperate tactical maneuvers. Some of these drivers later testified that he seemed to be aiming for the “right” car. To avoid a long- haul Intratrans track blocking his path, he swerved onto the island, waited till the truck had passed, then moved back into the wrong lane, where, less than a kilometer down the road, he collided with a small Simca carrying a young couple and a child. The child, though critically injured, was the sole survivor. Titz, who had been driving at high speed without a safety belt, died behind the wheel. There was speculation in the press that this was a new form of suicide in which the suicide victim tried to take others with him. In a collision involving the huge tractor- trailer he would probably have been the sole fatality, which explained why he had passed up the “chance.” The case was classified as definitely belonging to the series when reports came in concerning certain incidents that had taken place immediately prior to the accident. Just outside Rome, Titz had pulled in at a service station because of apparent engine trouble and pleaded with the mechanics to hurry because he said the “red bandit” was on his tail. At first the mechanics thought he was joking, but they changed their minds when he promised each of them ten thousand lire if they could fix his engine in fifteen minutes, and then actually kept his promise. When he gave all of the nine mechanics on duty the same “bonus,” they decided he was not all there. He might have gone unidentified had it not been that while he was backing out of the garage the German put a dent in one of the cars parked outside and drove off without stopping, though not before they were able to take down his license-plate number.
The last case dealt with Arthur T. Adams II, who checked into the Hotel Vesuvio in Naples, bought a three- week pass to the mineral baths, then dropped out a few days later when he discovered he was allergic to sulfur. At forty-nine, he was a tall and easygoing man, always on the move and something of a restless type, having tried his hand at some ten different jobs. At one time or another he had been a bank officer, a Medicare official, a piano salesman; he had taught correspondence courses in banking, worked as a judo and later as a karate instructor, and actively pursued a number of hobbies: he was a licensed parachutist and an amateur astronomer, and for the past year or so he had been publishing on an irregular basis
Adams first began acting suspiciously on his return trip to Rome by barreling along at high speed, then pulling over in deserted places; buying an inner tube when his car used tube-less tires; sitting out a storm in a parked car just outside Rome; and telling a highway patrolman his windshield wipers were broken when there was actually nothing wrong with them. That night he arrived in Rome and made the rounds of the hotels, looking for a vacancy —even though he had already reserved a room at the Hilton—returning to the Hilton only when he failed to find any. The next morning he was found lying dead in his bed. The autopsy disclosed early emphysema, enlargement of the heart, and generalized hyperemia typical of death due to suffocation. The actual cause of death was never determined. The coroner’s report suggested either overstimulation of the parasympathetic nervous system or suffocation caused by cardiac arrest precipitated by a severe asthmatic attack. For a while the case came under discussion in various medical journals, where the coroner’s ruling was attacked as erroneous. It was argued that
