He said he’d get right on it. I decided I might as well go home—there was no telling how long repairs would take. I went grumpily back into the building looking for Schmidt. His car was in the parking lot, but Schmidt himself was nowhere to be found.
There was nothing for it but to take the tram and then a bus; I live in the suburbs, near Grunwald, on account of my dog needing a yard.
The trams were still crowded with late workers and Christmas shoppers. I had to stand, squashed in between ranks of wet, tired, annoyed people. Shortly after we left Residenzplatz, I spotted Schmidt. He was wearing a bright red-and-green babushka with strands of gray horsehair sticking out all around the edges, a pair of dark glasses, and a purple scarf over the lower part of his face, to hide his mustache. I had no trouble seeing him, despite his diminutive stature, because nobody was anywhere near him. It wasn’t hard to understand why people were giving him a wide berth; he looked like an escaped lunatic.
There was a lot of inadvertent contact as people Were shaken, jostled, and pushed against one another; but all at once a specific contact brought me bolt upright and fuming. I turned my head and found myself staring into the wide innocent hazel eyes of a man standing directly behind me. He was the only one who could have given me that impertinent pinch; but instead of voicing my displeasure, I stood gaping in paralyzed silence. The only thing that kept me upright was the press of bodies around me.
He was dressed like a proper young businessman, in a dark tweed coat and snappy Tyrolean hat with a
My own lips felt as if they had been sprayed with quick-drying lacquer. They were still half-parted and incapable of speech when he turned away. His timing was perfect. Before I could get my shaken wits together, the tram jolted to a stop at one of the major transfer points and people crowded toward the doors. He mingled with the others; several other men were wearing hats like his.
I started clumsily after him, stumbling over shopping bags and feet, but I knew the futility of pursuit. He would have been among the first off the tram; and before I could follow, he’d be gone, swallowed up by the rainy darkness.
An acerbic comment from a stout
“
By the time we neared the end of the line and my transfer point, I had recovered. The tram was almost empty. I checked to make sure Schmidt was sitting in splendid isolation at the far end of the car, his face concealed behind a book he was holding upside down, before I reached into my coat pocket.
My pockets are usually a disgrace, bulging with objects—tissues, half-eaten candy bars, coins, keys, receipts, shopping lists. I had no trouble identifying John’s contribution to the clutter, though it was no wonder he had had a hard time squeezing it in. The stiff paper felt cold on my fingers as I pulled it out.
It was a postcard.
The Saint Columba altar piece is one of the gems of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, and a picture of it is a reasonable method of indicating a rendezvous point—not only a specific building, but a specific room in a large, rambling structure. But surely it was a diabolical coincidence that he had chosen a card showing one of my favorite details—the head of a man, beaky and handsome as a hawk, oddly familiar.
When I got off the tram, my bus was waiting, headlights cutting through the fog, steam snorting from its exhaust like the extrusions of a dragon with stomach trouble. I started to board it. Then I turned toward the chubby shadow that hovered in the gloom behind the lights of the station.
“Come on, Schmidt,” I said. “You don’t want to miss this bus; they only run every half hour.”
Three
SCHMIDT HAD NOT OBSERVED THE ENCOUNTER. I didn’t think he had, but I wanted to make sure. That was my primary reason for blowing his cover, as he put it; but I was also concerned about the little madman’s health. When he removed his bright purple scarf and blew his bright scarlet nose, I saw that he had the beginning of a nasty cold. I persuaded him to retain the babushka, in order to protect his bald head; although I must say the horsechair and the mustache made an unusual combination.
He was a little sulky at being found out, but the prospect of a convivial evening with his favorite subordinate soon cheered him. (I know I’m his favorite; it would be disingenuous of me to deny it.) I told him about Dieter, and he was chuckling over the plastic snake when we reached the house.
Caesar was delighted to see him. Schmidt was not so delighted to see Caesar. I helped Schmidt up off the floor and settled him in a chair. By the time I had fed Caesar and let him out and let him in and wiped his paws and removed Schmidt’s wet shoes and socks and rubbed his feet with a towel and hung his soggy babushka to dry and provided him with beer, food, and an ashtray for his smelly cigar, I was devoutly thankful I had not strayed down the path of domesticity, frilly aprons, and babies. On the other hand, a baby couldn’t be more of a nuisance than Schmidt.
After he had had a few beers and eaten the gargantuan meal I prepared, he decided to spend the night. He often did that when he had had a little more to drink than was legal, or whenever he had left his car at the museum. I fished out the flannel nightshirt I keep for such occasions, stuffed him full of cold remedies, and tucked him in bed.
Then, at last, I had leisure to think about what had happened.
It wasn’t John’s reappearance that shook me so much as my reaction to his reappearance. Typical, that epiphany—including the pinch—but I wondered if he had chosen a personal appearance instead of a more discreet response, via letter or telephone, in the hope of getting an unguarded display of emotion from me. He had certainly gotten one. No vapid heroine in a romance novel could have put on a better show—sudden pallor, pounding pulse, weak knees. Worse still, I had recognized him instantly, disguise and all. “Love looks not with the eyes but with the heart….” Or was it “with the mind”? John would know. He was always quoting Shakespeare.
The back of the postcard was blank except for the printed legend identifying the picture and the artist: Rogier van der Weyden (1399/1400),
I worked myself up into a state of righteous indignation before I noticed the faint pencil line under one of the dates. Fourteen hundred…hours? Two P.M.
“Oh, cute,” I muttered. Caesar raised his head and looked at me inquiringly. “It’s all your fault,” I told him.
The accusation was totally unjust, but Caesar lowered his head and looked guilty. That must be why some people like dogs; they can be made to feel guilty about anything, including the sins of their owners. Cats refuse to take the blame for anything—including their own sins.
Schmidt was fit as a fiddle the next day and generously credited my TLC for curing his cold. His gratitude did not prevent him from trailing me when I left the Museum for what was supposed to look like a late lunch. I ditched him without difficulty or compunction by running a changing light on Sendlingerstrasse, under the very nose of a traffic cop. Schmidt tried to go through on the red and of course got pulled over.
Since there had been no date or day of the week specified on the postcard, I assumed I was supposed to turn up at the earliest possible moment, i.e., the following day. I wondered what John would have done if Rogier van der Weyden had been born in, say, 1860—and then cursed myself for stupidity. Naturally he would select a painter whose vital statistics coincided with the time he found convenient.
On a wintry weekday when most people were busy Christmas shopping, the museum was not crowded. There were only half a dozen art-lovers in the room dominated by van der Weyden’s glorious rendition of the Nativity; a quick glance assured me that John was not one of them.
Strictly speaking, the painting is not a Nativity. Christian iconography is painstakingly specialized. Except for
