On our way back to the commandant’s office, we passed a coffee shop, where I took a chance on the espresso: thin, watery, essentially undrinkable, except that I was starting to have a caffeine-withdrawal headache. If I’d gone to Basel, I’d be drinking rich European coffee with hand-knit chocolates, walking along the banks of the Rhine. Alone, without even my dog for company.

Colonel Baggetto reached the commandant’s office just as I did. Like the secretary, he was in khaki, with medals and insignia. Unlike her, he had the kind of heavy beard that needed shaving twice a day.

“Captain Arrieta tells me that Emerald Ferring’s disappeared and you’re looking for her?”

So the two bars on the secretary’s collar meant she was a captain. I guess a general couldn’t have just any Tom, Dick, or Harriet book his dinner reservations for him. Colonel Baggetto sported silver oak leaves and something that looked like lightning bolts from a Wonder Woman cartoon.

I repeated my spiel. “This is the first trace I’ve found of Ferring or Veriden, so I’m hoping you can tell me what they did here and where they were heading next.”

Baggetto’s cell phone rang. He looked at the screen, took the call, made a few cryptic remarks, and turned back to me. “I’d never heard of Ms. Ferring before, but we’ve ordered copies of the films she starred in. We’ll be showing them at the base cinema next month. While she was here, I got the library to look up her father’s service record for her. He died at the Battle of the Bulge.”

He coughed self-consciously. “He should have been recommended for a Bronze Star, but the times being what they were . . . Anyway, we had a small private ceremony here for Ms. Ferring and awarded the star posthumously to Private Ferring.”

While he was speaking, his phone rang twice more. Both times he took the call and then picked up what he’d been saying to me in midsentence. Field training must focus the brain in a special way.

“I assume August Veriden filmed the ceremony,” I said. “And then what? She said, ‘Thanks, and I’m heading back to Chicago, or Hollywood’?”

Baggetto looked at Arrieta. “Jackie, call over to the library, will you, and see if Ferring or her escort said anything about their next stop.”

Captain Arrieta touched a speed-dial number and asked for the librarian. We could hear her end of the conversation, but apparently she had to speak to someone else and then yet another someone.

I said to Baggetto, “The Chicago and Evanston police departments have a BOLO out for August Veriden. You wouldn’t be holding him here in your fort’s jail or stockade or whatever it’s called, would you?”