“I thought he was.” George was badly shaken. “He sure looked dead. I couldn’t help—”

“Nobody’s blaming you,” I said, more mildly. “Doctor, can we do anything?”

“You can go,” said Blankenhagen, without looking up. “All of you. Out of here.”

So we left. But I sat in my room with the door open till the ambulance arrived and took Schmidt away. The doctor went with him. Then I closed and locked my door and, remembering the interchangeable keys of the Schloss, I wedged a chair under the handle.

I was glad Schmidt wasn’t dead. I rather liked the old guy, despite the fact that I would not have been willing to stake my life on his honesty. In fact, I had been willing to consider him a prime suspect. His earlier attack hadn’t put me off the scent; the suggestion of invalidism was a good alibi in a case where the villain displayed such startling agility. But this attack couldn’t have been faked. Unless…

I had already considered the idea that there were two villains. Tony’s encounter with the armor was particularly significant. Blankenhagen had suggested that Tony had hit his head when he fell, but I had seen that neat round lump behind his ear, and the word that came to my mind was “blackjack.” If someone had been waiting for Tony in the darkness under the stairs, and had knocked him out, it would explain a lot of things.

It began to look more and more like Blankenhagen. If Schmidt’s heart attack tonight was a fake, only the doctor could back him up in his pretense. Yet in that case would Blankenhagen risk taking Schmidt to a hospital, with a whole staff of doctors and interns?

It looked less like Blankenhagen.

I took a sheet of paper and a pencil, thinking maybe things would be clearer if I wrote them down, the way the detective always does in a mystery story. I wrote down Schmidt’s name, and that of the doctor. I couldn’t think of anything else to write.

Even if Schmidt’s heart attack was genuine, he could be one of the conspirators. However, he had not been the black figure we had pursued that night; he was far too short. The Black Man had had ample time to reach the Schloss while we were limping along the streets.

So then what? George’s crazy story implied that Schmidt had faced someone, or something, that had scared him almost to death. How had the intruder reached Schmidt and escaped without being seen? And what had the hypothetical villain done to frighten the old man so badly?

Suppose someone had dangled an object from the roof in front of Schmidt’s window—an object so horrifying that the mere sight of it swimming in space had been enough to paralyze Schmidt’s weak heart.

I scowled and drew doodles over the rest of the paper. I couldn’t think of anything that scary. A grinning skull? A phosphorescent phantom? Schmidt was a grown man. He might be startled, but no homemade phantom could frighten a man to that extent.