It’s easy to go psychotically fast on modern skis. They rushed down the long, winding blue run into St. Anton. It was Sunday. It was crowded and the lower down they got, the more people there were. It didn’t slow Grigor and his crew at all. We followed at an easier pace, got to town, kicked off our skis, and strolled in the direction that Grigor had gone, into the pedestrian zone.

—

We hadn’t been in St. Anton more than five minutes when I felt someone staring at me. I looked around. It was a cop. A large one. At first, his expression was quizzical. Then a mixture of searching and puzzlement. His mouth hung open and he said, quite loudly, calling across the street, “Rick?”

Allison looked at me. She’d known me as Tony, now as Victor, was I Rick as well?

The cop had a dog with him. A large Alsatian. They were coming toward me.

“Rick, is that you?” It was phrased as a question, but said as a certainty.

“Franz?” I asked. He looked like Franz, but that was thirty years ago. A big man, over six feet, more than two hundred pounds, solid as the ceramic of an Austrian stove, with big hands, gray eyes, thin lips, and weathered lines in an otherwise genial face.

Allison looked bewildered. “Go with it,” I mumbled to her.

The big cop laughed, “Son of Franz.”

Then I laughed, too. “Lukas. Of course.” By then he was right in front of me. We embraced and slapped each other on the back. “Good God,” I said, “you look just like him.”

“Ja, ja, I know.”

“How is he?” Then I wondered if I should have asked. “Is he…”

“Yes. He’s still alive. Eighty-seven. Still got it all up here,” he tapped his head. “And you, you look the same.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “It’s thirty years.”

“Who’s this?” he asked about Allison. “Your daughter.”

“No,” I said. “My niece,” and I introduced them.

He gave a policeman’s man of the world look but didn’t challenge it. He said, “We still have the Laundromat.”

“Is it still making money?”

“Yes. The business has changed. Fewer tourists come in to use it, but the guest houses and smaller hotels and such, they use it and we fold and make everything nice. Good business. Cash business,” he chuckled. Then, with a laugh and a big forefinger poking my shoulder, “You’re not going to make any trouble, are you?”

“No, of course not.”

“No dead bodies?”

“No. Of course not. That wasn’t my doing. Not really. You know that.”

He laughed. “I know that. My father still talks about it. The biggest case he ever had. The biggest mess he ever had to cover up. You have to come for dinner.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said.