Trojan Gold

Impulsively I threw my arm around the old man and gave him a hearty smack on the cheek. “Happy Christmas, Herr Muller.”

“The blessings of the good God to you, Fraulein.” I didn’t kiss John. District inspectors don’t get fresh with their superiors.

That was one load off my mind. Grudgingly I gave John credit, not only for seeing the obvious without explanation, but for caring enough about the old boy to get him to a safe place. I’d have given him even more credit if I had not known he had an ulterior motive. Why he thought he could find a clue the searchers had overlooked, I could not imagine; but if anyone could, it was John. His natural bent toward chicanery had been developed by years of experience.

The lower end of the alley debouched into the Marktplatz. When I reached the hotel, I found Tony lying in wait. “Where the hell did you go?” he demanded.

“Out,” I said shortly. “What’s the matter, couldn’t you get a room?”

“I got a room all right.” He took my arm and pulled me aside. People passed us, going in and out and giving us curious looks as we stood nose to nose glaring at each other. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Tony snapped.

“Tell you what?”

“Anything. Something. That Friedl was the new owner—”

“You know Friedl?”

“Well, sure. We all…” He grinned self-consciously. “Not me, of course.”

“Of course. I’m sure she would have worked all of you in if she had had time.”

Once again I had been caught with my pants down, figuratively speaking. (Obviously the metaphor applied more accurately to some of my former colleagues.) I had only been gone for half an hour; it was symptomatic of the luck I was having that Tony should have latched onto Friedl during that brief interval. Hoping against hope she hadn’t spilled her guts, I murmured, “I didn’t think you’d be interested, Tony.”

“Not interested in somebody trying to kill you?”

“Oh, Schiesse,” I said. “What did she tell you?”

A Bavarian teenager trying to stash his skis in the rack beside the door narrowly missed decapitating Tony. Bawling the boy out relieved some of Tony’s spleen; he turned back to me and said in a milder voice, “Suppose we have a beer and a little heart-to-heart talk. Friedl is anxious to see you, but not as anxious as I am.”

The bar was crowded; we wedged ourselves into a quiet corner, mugs in hand. Sunset reddened the slopes of the Zugspitze and draped the sky with gaudy cloths of scarlet and purple, but Tony wasn’t moved by the beauty of the scenery. I let him talk. I wanted to find out how much he knew before I contributed to his store of information. That was fine with Tony, who seldom got a chance to conduct a monologue when he was with me. As I recall, the lecture went something like this:

“I don’t mind participating in these mad extravaganzas of yours. Not at all. I’m always happy to give a friend the benefit of my superior expertise. A lesser man might resent being shoved into a mess like the one you’ve obviously got yourself into without some warning; I mean, the words ‘sitting duck’ come to mind. Or possibly ‘decoy.’ What I really resent is the insult to my intelligence. I knew something was going on. You and Schmidt and that—that effeminate character, with your heads together…who is that guy? Never mind, don’t tell me, I’m not finished. You might at least warn a person that he’s putting his head in a noose instead of pretending this was just a social visit—”

“Now wait a minute,” I said, indignantly. “I didn’t invite you to come. It was your idea.”

“You could have warned me off.”

“I could have,” I admitted. “At the time I didn’t know—”

“Is that the truth?” Tony scowled at me over his mug. “Nobody tried to mug you, murder you, or burglarize you until the day before yesterday?”

I was glad he had phrased the question that way, because I could look him straight in the eye and say firmly, “No. Nobody.” Not that I wouldn’t have looked him straight in the eye and denied anything he accused me of.

“Oh. All the same, you might have mentioned it.”

“It could have been an accident. Some drunken hunter.”

“Yeah. But Friedl seems to think not. Are you sure you never got a letter or a package or anything from her husband?”

I looked him straight in the eye and said firmly, “No. I mean, yes. How about you?”

“Me? Why would I…” Tony considered the question. “No reason why it shouldn’t have been me, come to think about it. According to Friedl, the object in question is a work of art—she didn’t seem to know more than that. I met Hoffman last year, chatted with him…Hey. What about the rest of them—Dieter, Elise, Rosa…”

“I’m sure he liked you best,” I said.

“I might not have taken notice of a letter,” Tony muttered. “We get a lot of crank mail.”

“I know.”

“Just the week before I left, there were half a dozen or so. People seem to get weirder during the holiday seasons…. An appeal for funds from that Psychic Archaeology crowd in Virginia, a curriculum vitae from some loony who thinks he should be appointed to the staff because he’s the reincarnation of Herodotus, a copy of that photo of Sophia Schliemann—Hey, watch out!”

I had spilled my beer. “Sorry. Did you say Sophia Schliemann?”

Tony grabbed a handful of napkins off a nearby table and swabbed at his sweater. “Damn it, Ann made this for me…. Yeah, you know, the one where she’s wearing the jewelry from Troy. I don’t know what the hell that was all about; there wasn’t even a letter with it.”

That answered one question, unless Tony was a lot sneakier than I had ever known him to be. “What else did Friedl tell you?”

“She didn’t make a lot of sense,” Tony admitted, “what did she tell you?”

“She hasn’t told me anything yet,” I said, with perfect truth.

“Well, let’s go see her. Maybe the two of us can extract some information. So far it’s a damned fishy story.”

I was about to endorse this assessment when Tony’s mouth took on the wistful curve that made strong women want to mother him. “It would be too good to be true,” he said longingly.

Friedl did not rise to greet us. She gave Tony her hand at an angle that made it impossible for him to do anything with it except kiss it.

Usually I can tell when people are lying. Friedl defeated me; she was so accustomed to putting on an act that everything she said sounded phony. The gist of her long and rambling narrative was that (a) her husband had some hidden treasure, (b) she didn’t know what it was, and (c) she didn’t know where it was.

Though visibly moved by her quivering lips and pathetic story, Tony was not moved to the point of excessive gullibility. Tactfully he pointed out that old men sometimes suffer from delusions.

“He was not old,” Friedl protested.

“Seventy-five?” I suggested.

“Not in his heart—in his love…” Friedl covered her face with her hands.

Tony patted her clumsily on the shoulder and gave me a reproachful look. Like all men, he is quite willing to believe that a young and beautiful girl will adore him when he’s eighty.

Friedl restrained her grief, which had left not a smudge on her make-up, and proceeded with her story. She had not learned of the treasure until the past spring. It was something her husband had rescued at the end of the war and had kept safely hidden for forty years. Recently, however, he had begun to fear that his enemies had finally tracked him down.

“Enemies?” Tony said. “What enemies?”

Friedl opened her eyes so wide her mascara flaked. “The Russians. The Communists.”

“Oh,” said Tony.

I said, “Bless their red hearts, they make such handy villains.”

The comment passed over, or through, Friedl’s head. She went on. Her husband would tell her nothing more for fear of endangering her, and when she suggested that he turn the treasure over to the authorities—she didn’t specify which authorities and neither of us pressed her—he had angrily refused. The treasure was his. It had passed through many hands, the original ownership had always been in dispute, and now it was his by right of possession. He had as much right to it as anyone. He had saved it.