Trojan Gold

Schmidt was so happy to see us. He waved frantically. “Here,” he cried. “Here I am.”

We joined him. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I came to help you, of course,” said Schmidt.

“But I thought—”

“What is he doing here?” Schmidt glowered at Tony.

“Well,” I began.

“You have told him!”

“No. No, Schmidt—now look, Schmidt—”

“It was our private affair. You and I and—”

“Never mind!”

“You told this fat old idiot about the deal and you didn’t tell me?” Tony demanded.

“Fat and old? Who is fat and old?” Schmidt struggled to get out of his chair, but it fit his ample posterior so snugly he could only rock back and forth. His voice rose. “Fat and old, is it? I will show you. You will receive a strip of paper measuring the length of my sword. Choose your seconds!”

That was when I knew Schmidt was drunk—really bombed out, stinking drunk, not just mildly inebriated. He never challenges people to duels when he’s just mildly inebriated. At my urging, Tony apologized; we sat down; Schmidt stopped rocking and relaxed. A look of mild perplexity replaced his indignant frown, and he muttered, “Now what was it I had to tell you? So much has happened, but Sir John must know—”

“How long have you been waiting?” I asked, trying to get his mind off the engrossing subject of Sir John.

“Hours,” Schmidt grumbled. “Hours and hours and…No one knew where you had gone. Since I did not know where you had gone, I could not follow.”

“True, O Schmidt,” I said.

“I had a little to drink and to eat,” Schmidt said, like a suspect under police interrogation trying to remember the activities of a long-past day. “I talked to the pleasant lady at the desk—she is the housekeeper, you know…. But she intends to resign as soon as Frau Hoffman can find a replacement. I fear the poor young lady is not popular with the employees. It was expected that the hotel would be taken over by the nephew of the first Frau Hoffman, since it has belonged to her family for two hundred years. There is much resentment, I believe, since the second Frau Hoffman—”

“Schmidt,” I said. “What are you talking about?”

Schmidt blinked. “About the nephew—or perhaps it is the grandnephew—”

“Why are you talking about him?”

“Now that,” said Schmidt, “is a pertinent question. Why am I talking about him? I do not know. I should not be talking about him. There is a matter of greater importance—of consuming importance—of an importance demanding immediate action…. Ach, ja, now I remember! Come, come quickly, I will show you. He is there—I saw him go in. He has not come out. I staked myself here to watch.”

He surged to his feet, accompanied by the chair. Tony plucked it off his posterior and put it down. Schmidt ignored this with the lofty unconcern of a man who has more important matters on his mind. “There,” he hissed. “He is there. I saw him go in. He has not come out.”

He pointed toward the door of the bar. “But, Schmidt,” I began. “There’s another door—”

“Who?” Tony asked blankly.

“I will show you.” Schmidt beamed. His face looked like the harvest moon hanging low over the hills of Minnesota. A pang of homesickness swept over me. Oh, to be in Minnesota now—away from intoxicated German professors and slippery English crooks and miscellaneous people trying to kill me….

We followed Schmidt to the bar. I fully expected that his suspect—some innocent householder who had beady eyes or a nose like Peter Lorre’s—had had his beer and gone home via the street door. I was wrong. “There,” said Schmidt, in the hissing shriek that is his idea of a whisper. “See—he is there!”

He was there, all right. There was no doubt as to whom Schmidt meant; his quivering forefinger and his intent stare pilloried a man sitting alone at a corner table.

He was worth looking at—tall and broad-shouldered, with a profile like that of a brooding eagle. A Wyatt Earp-type mustache framed a pensive, thoughtful mouth; brown hair curled over his ears and his high, intellectual brow.

“I’ve never seen him in my life,” Tony said blankly.

I said nothing.

“Ho,” shrieked Schmidt. “I told you I never forget a face. Only once have I met him. Only once, but I remember, and you, who have known him better, do not recall him. It is lucky for you I came here, nicht.”

“If you don’t get to the point, I am going to kill you, Schmidt,” I said.

“It is Perlmutter,” Schmidt said triumphantly. “The assistant curator from East Berlin.”

“You’re crazy,” Tony stuttered. “Perlmutter is a blond, this guy is brunet. Perlmutter doesn’t have a mustache, this guy—”

It was Perlmutter. The outlines of that splendid profile were burned into my brain.

They say that if you stare at someone long enough, invisible waves of something or other will stretch out and attract his attention. There must be something to it. Perlmutter looked up and met my eyes. The instant recognition that transformed his face would have removed any lingering doubts I might have had, which I didn’t.

Before I could react, he was on his feet and out the door to the street. By chance or by design, he had selected a table in a spot convenient for retreat.

I wasted a vital couple of seconds trying to decide which way to go—across the crowded room toward the door he had used, or back through the lobby. Tony wasted a vital couple of seconds bouncing off Schmidt, who had started in one direction while Tony tried to go the other way. Schmidt then compounded the problem by keeling over, his face set in an imbecilic grin of triumph.

Schmidt does that sometimes. It is the inevitable conclusion to his bouts of really serious drinking. They are rare events and occur only when something has happened to upset him. I wished I knew what had upset him this time, but questions would have to wait. He wouldn’t be coherent for hours. I had seen it happen once before, when he learned of the death of a favorite nephew in a car crash.

Well, there he was, hanging limply between me and Tony. We had each grabbed an arm as his round red form sagged floorward. We looked helplessly at one another over Schmidt’s bowed head.

“What do we do now?” Tony asked.

“It’s too late to follow Perlmutter…. Oh, hell. We’d better get him to bed.”

“Whose bed?” Tony asked warily.

It was a reasonable question. As we soon discovered, Schmidt did not have a room reserved, and the hotel was full-up. He may have had a reservation in Garmisch, but that was irrelevant since Schmidt was incapable of answering questions—or hearing them. He revived sufficiently to be dragged instead of carried; with one plump arm over a shoulder of each, we propelled him up the stairs to the second floor. Tony wanted to put him on the couch in my room.

“You have twin beds, don’t you?”

“Yes. But—”

“Then he’s yours. All yours. Every…adorable…chubby…pound.”

The minute Schmidt hit the mattress he was gone. I took his shoes off and covered him with the blanket. Smiling beatifically, Schmidt heaved a deep sigh and began to snore.

An expression of profound melancholy transformed Tony’s face.

“Does he do that all night?”

Tony had unpacked, in his characteristically haphazard fashion; from among the litter on the dresser top, framed in silver, the lovely heart-shaped face of Ann Belfort smiled winsomely at me.

I smiled winsomely back. “Snore, you mean? Only when he’s drunk. Nighty-night, Annie—I mean, Tony.”

Friedl had preserved one of the Hexenhut’s pleasant old-fashioned customs; the chambermaid had turned down my bed and spread my nightgown gracefully across it. For the chambermaid’s sake, I was glad I had brought my fancy new nightie instead of my old flannel pajamas. For my own sake, I was sorry I hadn’t brought the jammies. The stove had been banked for the night, and as I knew from past experience, the room would be as cold as a frozen side of beef by morning, though it warmed quickly after someone revived the fire. I had usually managed