Astounded, Seth turned to the last flight of stairs and began his descent.

“Are you telling me that without telephoning or any other kind of notification, you simply emptied the safe deposit box and mailed the contents to my husband?” Zoe was outraged. She’d made her way past two layers of the Eden au Lac’s internal bureaucracy and had managed to get to the manager before he left for the evening. She snared him in the middle of the hotel’s main lobby near the frieze by Bernini. Stratton and Cartiere hovered about her, trying to look inconspicuous and failing to succeed, due mostly to Cartiere’s bulk.

“But Madame Ridgeway, I assure you that we had no choice,” the hotel manager protested in a desperate whisper. He looked about him after ever every sentence to see if any of the hotel’s other guests were paying attention to the disagreement. “After a guest checks out, we have a policy that all items left behind in our boxes must be returned to them. After all, it wouldn’t be fair to deprive other guests of the proper facilities in which to store their valuables.”

“Policy!” Zoe snapped. “Policies are for bureaucrats and bankers and anybody else too dimwitted to make intelligent decisions on their own. Not for the management of one of the world’s finest hotels.”

The manager’s face brightened momentarily at this unexpected compliment from the angry American woman.

“We assumed that—”

“That painting was among the world’s most valuable,” Zoe said. “Priceless! At the very least it merited being hand-carried by a courier. Not trusted to the vagaries of the mails!”.

As Zoe said “priceless,” most of the color drained from the manager’s face. “But the Swiss mails are—”

“I know the Swiss mails are reliable,” Zoe interrupted. “But once the package gets to America, it’s in the hands of the U.S. Postal Service, and most of the people who work for that outfit need a road map to find their way to the bathroom.”

Zoe’s vehemence brought color back to the manager’s face, but it was a wan, unenthusiastic pink blotched with pale white. He looked about him desperately. No one was staring. The lobby was nearly deserted and the staff were busy straightening out the receipts from the busy afternoon.

“I… A-hem!” The manager cleared his throat nervously. It was time to play his last card, to risk stepping into the middle of what might turn out to be a domestic quarrel. If so, he would either turn this woman’s wrath away from him or—he swallowed hard—redouble her wrath. And perhaps incur her husband’s as well. She obviously was unaware that her husband had checked in the night before and had put the same painting back into a hotel safe deposit box. The Eden au Lac prided itself on its discretion and respect for its guests’ privacy. Confidences were to be respected unless the situation became so desperate that it reflected poorly on the hotel’s image.

And things were getting desperate, the manager decided.