He looked as if he had the worst case of bubonic plague in medical history. I inched back another step. I didn't want to be within hearing range when he peeled off his lenses. They'd probably dried out so badly, they were superglued to his eyeballs by now.

"About the room assignments, Emily, I don't know how that could have happened. The bank made all those arrangements. Frieda saw to it personally, and Frieda never makes a mistake."

Frieda Olson had been a fixture at the bank since the first ice age. At eighty-five she was still sharp as a tack and drove into work daily, but her glasses were thick as pond ice, which cast serious doubt on her ability to process paperwork. "I suspect you filled your travel form out incorrectly," I accused. He'd probably written ANDREW in the space for LAST NAME and SIMON in the space for FIRST NAME, which would conveniently give us the same surname and room assignment.

"Emily, honey, why would I do that?"

"Because I'm female and conscious?"

"Emily Andrew, are you hinting that I planned this mix-up?" His gaze drifted to my chest. It made me wish Victoria's Secret had come out with a padded underwire that lifted, separated, and launched rocket grenades. I seized Wally's arm again.

"Wally here is going to fix the problem. Aren't you, Wally?"

"Emily, dear! Don't bother our tour guide. I've worked everything out myself." Nana, who dutifully wore a name tag identifying her as Marion Sippel, was four-foot-ten, built like a bullet, and still wore her hair in tight finger waves that had been fashionable in the sixties. "I been talkin' to that nice Mr. Nunzio over there. I couldn't understand everything he was sayin' 'cause he don't speak real good English, but I think he said he'd share the room with me if you'd found another roommate. Italians are so hospitable."

I'd scanned the roster of travelers on the flight over, but I didn't remember seeing a Nunzio. Nunzio I would have remembered. "Where is this Mr. Nunzio?"

Nana pointed to a marble pillar in the middle of the hotel lobby. "He's the gentleman wearin' the black trench coat. Standin' beside Bernice Zwerg."

I stood on tiptoe. But for the absence of a print cloth draped about his head, Mr. Nunzio was a Yasser Arafat look-alike--hair like a cactus, face like a ferret, knees like old potatoes. Knees? "He's not wearing trousers." Leave it to Nana. Three hours in Switzerland, and she'd managed to find what was possibly the only Italian pervert in the entire country.

"I did notice about the trousers, dear, but this is Europe. I thought he was makin' a fashion statement."

"Mr. Nunzio isn't on our tour, Nana. He'll have to room with someone else." I said this with more calm than I felt because if I let anything happen to Nana, my mother would kill me.

Nana looked disappointed. She was the most accommodating person I'd ever known. She'd hauled wood before the days of electricity, hauled water before the days of indoor plumbing, and hauled tail out of Minnesota after the roof of Grampa's ice shanty collapsed, killing him and the thirty-pound muskie he'd been struggling to pull in for the better part of the afternoon. She had them both laid out at the wake--Grampa Sippel in a cherry casket and the muskie on a bed of crushed ice. The whole town of Brainerd, Minnesota, turned out for the viewing, and everyone in attendance had the same thing to say about Grampa: he'd caught the plug-ugliest fish ever to swim the waters of Gull Lake.