Local police and fire officials insisted there was no sign of arson or other foul play. Faulty wiring in the centuries-old structure had been the cause, they said. And the American should realize that the gentleman was advanced in age. Heart attacks are common among such men, they pointed out

He fared no better at the hospital. Willi Max was unconscious and had been so since being brought to the hospital. And even had he been conscious, the doctors had no intention of letting him be interrogated. The man died three days later with his secrets and—Ridgeway was convinced—Zoe’s fate unrevealed.

Ridgeway shook his head now, trying to clear away the memory. He listened as the December rain drummed steadily on the Valkyrie’s deck. He pushed himself to his feet and stumbled into the head. As he urinated he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror above the sink. He didn’t particularly like what he saw. In the nearly six months since Zoe had disappeared, deep plum-colored bruises had smudged themselves beneath both eyes. A layer of fat had crept around his waist for the first time in his life. Although the 185 pounds still looked taut and firm on his six-foot frame, Ridgeway knew that unless he started exercising again, he’d start to look sloppy in another six months. Worse than that, the old wounds might start acting up. The doctors said they did that sometimes. But, somehow, it just didn’t seem important anymore. So what?

Ridgeway spat as he pumped the marine toilet empty and leaned over to examine himself more closely in the mirror. All his life he had appeared younger than his age. The other police officers called him the Kid. The last time a bartender had asked him for proof of his age had been just a month after he had gotten out of the hospital. He was twenty-nine years old then and recovering from the slugs that had torn through his chest and back and kidneys, but he still looked like a kid. Twenty-nine years old and the department had put him on permanent disability. The doctors had told him he probably wouldn’t walk normally the rest of his life. But a year later he was fitter than the best recruit turned out by the academy. Yet bureaucratic rules were inviolable. They wouldn’t give him his old job back.

But even in the worst of those days, alone, in pain, lost without the police life—even with all that he still looked like a kid. Then the years all seemed to catch up with him at once when Zoe disappeared. Now every one of his thirty-seven years seemed tattooed in the lines of his face.

Ridgeway went back to the Valkyrie’s galley and pulled open the refrigerator. He stood there for a long sleepy moment staring intently at the refrigerator’s contents without seeing them. What he saw instead was the way he had spent the rest of the summer. He stayed on in Zurich, arriving back in Los Angeles just in time to start teaching fall classes. But despite more than two more months of investigating he had little to show for his time other than an outrageous hotel bill at the Eden au Lac, a proficiency in speaking German, a close friendship with a number of Swiss law enforcement officers, and a working friendship with an American attached to the U.S. consulate in Zurich.