To his right was the old city of Zurich, with its serpentine cobbled streets lined with medieval and Renaissance buildings. Yost’s shop was off one of the narrow lanes that intersected the Bahnhofstrasse two blocks up. As he shoved the map back in his overcoat pocket, Seth felt the lethal chill of the Magnum’s metal cylinder.

Christ, he thought as he pressed on into the crowd, death followed him like a shadow. First Rebecca Weinstock on his boat, then Tony Bradford. Then the priest in the park in Amsterdam.

And Zoe.

Stop it! He told himself. She’s alive. She has to be alive. Death. Death follows you. She’s dead. Dead. Admit it You’re fooling yourself.

Seth burrowed his hands deeply in his coat pockets and pressed on, head down, hurrying now as if he could outrun the thoughts that haunted him. If she was dead … he tried to think of an if, but he couldn’t conceive of life without her. He pressed on.

He was about to turn right on the street that led into the old section when he heard a low, arresting sound, a haunting musical note that seemed to fill the air around him and appeal to every part of his body, not just his sense of sound. He stopped and turned around, trying to find the source of the tones that came from everywhere, and from nowhere in particular. Most of the people around him stopped also.

Beside him a woman bent low and spoke to her daughter.

“There,” she said in German. She pointed, and the daughter immediately pushed through the crowd ahead of her mother. Seth followed them.

Across the street, his hat lying on the sidewalk, a bearded man of perhaps twenty, dressed in traditional alpine garb, blew into the mouthpiece of an alpenhorn. The wooden instrument, a good ten feet long and shaped like a stretched-out meerschaum pipe, seemed to glow with sound as the youth played a series of notes that resonated among the buildings.

A well-dressed woman walked up to the youth’s hat and tossed in a banknote and then rejoined the edge of the crowd. Soon several other people repeated her gesture as the youth played the simple melodies and messages that the isolated alpine people had used to communicate with each other from ridge to ridge before the birth of the telephone.

Seth listened with his whole body. First one note would please his ear, then another would seem to vibrate in his chest, and another in his head. Finally, he dropped an American five-dollar bill into the youth’s hat and turned Reluctantly toward the street that would lead him to Yost’s shop and, he hoped, some answers.

Less than ten minutes later, Seth found Yost’s shop at the address on the back of the painting, which now rested in a safe deposit box at the Eden au Lac. The shop had undergone several expansions in the past forty years, taking over a number of the adjoining shops, and Ridgeway found the entrance now at Number 13 Augustinergasse, just down the street from the original entrance.