“It looks as if you’ve had a wasted journey, Herr Ganz,” said Seehofer. “It seems that nothing has been recently damaged or taken.”
I wasn’t convinced about that. “Is that where they got in? These kids.”
“Yes, it looks as if they climbed up the scaffolding.”
I walked over to the window. “Mind if I take a look?” I asked the detective inspector.
“Be my guest.”
I put my head out the window. There were fresh-looking footprints on some planks stacked nearby. They might have been a builder’s footprints but I’d already seen a similar footprint on the carpet by the office door. A big fellow by the look of it and not kids at all, I thought. But I didn’t contradict the detective inspector. I decided it was best to keep on the right side of him for now.
“Do you get many visitors in this museum?” I asked Dr. Schmidt.
“It’s February,” he said. “Things are always a bit quiet in February.”
“What about the alarm?” I asked. “Why didn’t it go off?”
“What alarm?” asked Seehofer. “There’s an alarm?”
“I don’t know,” said Dr. Schmidt, as if he’d only just thought of it, and clearly he hadn’t mentioned it to the detective inspector, who looked slightly irritated to discover the existence of such a thing now.
“If you could show me where the bell is, sir?” said Seehofer, a little too late to fill any insurance investigator’s heart with confidence.
We went back downstairs, crossed the hall, and looked up at the bell that was mounted on the wall about a meter above our heads. From where we were standing it wasn’t going to reveal very much and after a while I felt obliged to move things along a bit and fetched the ladder from under the stairs.
“I should be doing that, you know,” said Seehofer as I mounted the ladder, which, now that I was working for an insurance company, felt a bit less than safe on the polished marble floor.
I nodded and came back down without a word, happy not to take the risk. I wasn’t about to get paid my twenty-five marks a week if I fell off a ladder.
Seehofer went up the ladder, looked down precariously several times, and finally managed to reach eye level with the bell, where his powers as a detective really started to kick in. “That explains it,” he said. “There’s a piece of folded card between the bell and the clapper.”
“Then don’t for Christ’s sake pull it out,” I said.
“What’s that?” he asked, and pulled it out. The bell began to ring, very loudly, almost causing Seehofer to fall off the ladder. Losing his nerve for the height he was at, he came quickly down again.
“Can you turn it off, sir?” I shouted at Dr. Schmidt.
“I’m not sure I know how,” he admitted.
“Who does?”
“The security guard.”
“Where’s he?”
“Er, I fired him when I discovered the break-in. I imagine he’s gone home.”
Since none of us could now hear ourselves think, let alone speak, I felt obliged to take the piece of card from Seehofer’s nervous fingers, go back up the ladder myself, and replace it between clapper and bell, but not before unfolding it to reveal that it was actually an empty packet of Lucky Strike cigarettes.
I came back down and said, “Why is this ladder here?”
“It was up all day yesterday,” said Schmidt. “One of the builders was using it to replace the lightbulbs in the ceiling fixtures.”
“So it might have been left unattended for some length of time.”
“Yes.”
“Then my guess is that whoever broke in here last night came into the museum as a visitor yesterday and, seeing an opportunity, went up the ladder and disabled the alarm with that empty cigarette packet.”
Seehofer murmured, “Lucky Strike. But not for some,” which hardly endeared him to Dr. Schmidt, whose sense of humor was understandably absent that morning.
“It looks very opportunistic,” I said. “Like our man saw his chance to disable the alarm on the spur of the moment and used the first object that came to hand.”
“Which makes it all the more surprising that nothing was stolen,” said Schmidt. “I mean, this was planned. I can’t see kids going to that amount of trouble. Or with that amount of foresight. Can you?”
“Could I see inside those desk drawers?” I asked him. “If you don’t mind, sir.”
“Certainly, but there’s nothing to see. Just some museum stationery and some guidebooks. Perhaps a few very small artifacts that were kept in a desk drawer. I’m not sure exactly. It’s not my desk. It’s the assistant director’s.”
“Maybe we could ask him what’s missing, if anything.”
“I’m afraid not. He’s been ill for some time now. In fact, I doubt he’ll be coming back at all.”
“I see.”
We went back across the hall, which was when we caught a glimpse of a large marble statue in a Pantheon of a room by itself, and if this caught our eye it was not because it had been damaged but because of what it was: a life-sized statue of a Roman faun or Greek satyr, legs akimbo—one of them at a right angle to the rock he was seated upon—who looked like he was suffering after a late night in the Hofbräuhaus. The indecorous statue was extremely well rendered and left nothing to the imagination.
“Christ,” said Seehofer. “For a moment I thought he was the real thing. It’s very—very realistic, isn’t it?”
“That’s the Barberini Faun I was telling you about,” said Schmidt. “Greek. Possibly restored by Bernini after being badly damaged during an attack by the Goths almost a thousand years earlier.”
“It seems that history is always repeating itself,” I said, momentarily picturing those previous Germans in some desperate fight to the death.
Back in the office I took a look inside the desk. “Anything stolen from in here?” I asked. “A cash box, perhaps.”
“No, not so much as a ticket roll.”
“Then why do you keep it locked?”
“Habit. Sometimes I leave
