Seven
SCHMIDT DID WAKE ME THE FOLLOWING morning. It had taken me some time to fall asleep. The emphatic hammering on my door shattered a dream whose details I prefer not to recall and shot me out of bed before I realized what I was doing. Having gotten that far, I decided I might as well open the door.
“Ha, there you are,” Schmidt said happily.
I stared blearily at him. He had changed into a bright orange ski suit, in which he looked like an animated pumpkin.
“We are having breakfast together in our room, Tony and I,” Schmidt went on with ghastly cheerfulness. “Come. Come quickly, we have much to discuss.”
I grabbed a robe as he towed me toward the door, and managed to get it around me before he ushered me into his—their—room. Heavenly warmth wrapped around my shivering limbs. Some noble soul had fired up the stove.
Appropriately attired in lederhosen, suspenders, et al., Tony was seated at the table digging into a hearty Bavarian farmers’ breakfast. It was no wonder he had been moved to start the stove; his bare thighs were still faintly blue with cold.
He was in a better mood than I had expected after a night listening to Schmidt snore. He greeted me with a wave of a fork on which a sausage was impaled. Such was my state of sleepy confusion that I was not at all surprised to see a Siamese cat sitting on the table next to the sausage.
“Sit down,” said Schmidt. “We must discuss the case.”
“I’m retiring from the case,” I mumbled, sitting. Fortunately there was a chair under me.
“What? No! Give her coffee, Tony, she does not ever make sense until she has had coffee.”
Tony obliged. Clara took advantage of his distraction to hook the sausage off his fork; she carried it across the room and sat down on the beruffled lace-trimmed hem of my robe to eat it. I was too far gone to protest. I said faintly, “1 am retiring from the case.”
“Have more coffee,” said Schmidt.
“I will. But that will not affect my decision. I am retiring from the case because there is no case.”
Tony and Schmidt said in unison, “You can’t.”
“Oh yes, I can.”
“No, you can’t,” said Schmidt and Tony. Tony glared at Schmidt, who continued in solo, “The police are looking for you, Vicky, my dear. You must solve the case to free yourself from suspicion.”
The cat rose fluidly from the floor to the table and clamped its teeth on the bacon Tony was holding. Tony tugged at it and swore. The cat growled but did not relinquish her hold. Schmidt giggled.
“A charming animal,” he said approvingly. “Yours, Vicky? It was outside your door early this morning; I had hoped you would be awake, but you were not, and I thought I would let you sleep a little longer, so I brought it here with me—”
“Schmidt,” I said softly. “Shut up. No. Don’t shut up. Repeat what you just said.”
“I thought I would let you sleep a little longer, so—”
“Before that. Something about the police.”
“Yes, I expect they are looking for you.”
“Why, Schmidt?”
“Because of the dead man in your garden, of course.”
“The dead man in my garden,” I repeated hollowly.
“Give her more coffee,” said Schmidt.
Schmidt was full of admiration for the foresight of Sir John Smythe, who had warned him about the dead man.
“Well, not in so many words, of course,” Schmidt admitted. “But he told me there would be a desperate attempt on your life, Vicky, and that I must come at once to tell you when it occurred.”
“He told you I would be here?” I was still trying to get a grip on the situation.
“He did not have to tell me, I knew. He has a greater respect for my intelligence than some people.”
“Wait,” I pleaded. “Just stop talking for a minute, Schmidt, and let me think. Did you find…No, that’s not the most important…How was he…What I want to know is, who was it?”
“You don’t have to shout,” Schmidt roared, clapping his hands over his ears.
“I’m sorry,” I whimpered.
“Have some hay,” Tony suggested. “It’s very good when you’re feeling faint.”
Suddenly I felt better. It may have been the caffeine, but I think it was just Tony—the comradely grin, the familiar dimple, the tacit acknowledgment that the whole scenario had the lunatic logic of a Lewis Carroll plot. The cat jumped on my knee and began washing her whiskers.
“Let him tell it,” Tony went on, indicating Schmidt. “He’s been bending my ear with his tale since six A.M. He’d have rousted you out at that hour if I had let him, so you can thank me for your extra sleep.”
“Thank you,” I said meekly.
“
“There were more important things,” Schmidt protested. “The spy from East Berlin—”
“Schmidt, you were so drunk you wouldn’t have known a spy from a brontosaurus,” I said wearily. “Never mind. Tell me now.”
Schmidt made a long dramatic story of it, but there really wasn’t much to tell. He had arrived at my house shortly after Tony and I had left. After Brotzeit, lunch, and a short nap, he had decided to take a little exercise. Jogging briskly and breathlessly around the block, he had attracted a pack of dogs. (Schmidt is irresistible to dogs; he is so round and so roly-poly, and he yelps so delightfully when they nip at his ankles.) Trailed by the fascinated pack, he had fled back to the house, but had been too distracted by the nips and barks and whines to unlock the door. In the hope that his admirers would lose interest and go away, he had slipped through the side gate into the back yard. One of the dogs had slipped through with him; from his vivid description, I recognized the animal as the beagle who lived three doors down. When the dog abandoned him and began digging furiously in a snowbank by the fence, Schmidt was curious enough to investigate.
I couldn’t blame him for getting drunk. As soon as he realized what the snow concealed, he had bundled the dog out the gate, but its frantic howling provided a ghastly background accompaniment to his excavations. The stiff white flesh was the same shade and temperature as its icy shroud, but Schmidt had no difficulty recognizing the face of Freddy.
I patted Schmidt’s hand sympathetically. He frowned at me and pulled it away. “It was a terrible sight. I am glad it was I and not you who found him, Vicky. His eyes were open and coated with a thin layer of ice….”
Shocked though he was, Schmidt had dug snow away until he found the dark-crusted stains on the breast of Freddy’s fancy Hawaiian shirt. They came from multiple stab wounds, according to Schmidt—and I was willing to take his word for it. However, there was no blood on the snow. Freddy had been long dead and half frozen when someone tipped him over the fence into my back yard. It must have happened the night before, after I took Caesar to visit his friend Carl.
“So of course I left Munich at once,” Schmidt finished. “To tell you what had happened. But I could not find you. You were not here. And by the time you came, I had seen Perlmutter—”
“Didn’t you call the police?” I asked.
“No. Why should I do that? They would only detain me, asking questions. But I suppose they will find him before long,” said Schmidt calmly. “And then they will want to talk with you. And when they find who he is, and that you were at the hotel—”
“Schmidt, don’t be theatrical. I’ve got to go home right away. There is no sense in staying on here—”
“We can’t leave yet,” Tony protested. “Friedl—er—Frau Hoffman—has given me permission to look through her husband’s papers. He must have left some sort of memo or note or map telling where he hid the gold.”
“The gold,” I said. “Right. I suppose Schmidt told you.”
“Yes, he did. And I must say, Vicky, that your behavior has hurt and astonished me. I would like to believe that it was concern for my safety and respect for my altered status that prompted your reticence—”
“Believe it,” I said, shrugging.
“I would like to believe it, but I don’t. You’ve harbored a grudge ever since the Riemenschneider affair
