Something moved in the dark. I heard someone go into the hall and through the front door. I caught a vague scent of beer and tobacco and men’s cologne, and then the sound of footsteps down the stairwell. I sprinted after him and got as far as the first-floor landing before my bare feet slipped and I fell. I picked myself up, limped down the last flight of stairs, and ran out into the street just in time to see a man disappear around the corner of Turkenstrasse. If I had been wearing shoes I might have gone after him, but in bare feet, in an inch of snow and ice, there was nothing I could do but go back upstairs.

Vera’s neighbor was standing outside her front door when I arrived on the top floor. She eyed me with suspicious, shrewish eyes, which was a bit of a nerve given she looked like the kind of bride Frankenstein’s monster would have left standing at the altar. She had the same Nefertiti hairstyle, reptilian clawlike hands, and long shroud of a white nightgown, but even a scientist as mad as a March hare would have known better than to try to pass off a midget creature with a mustache as a plausible-looking woman.

“Fräulein Messmann,” I said, limply. “There was an intruder in her apartment.”

Saying nothing, the hideous, sharp-boned creature gave a little jerk, like a frightened bird, and then darted inside her own apartment, slamming the door behind her so that the whole icy stairwell echoed like a forgotten tomb.

Back in Vera Messmann’s apartment, I found her wearing a dressing gown and a worried look on her face.

“He got away,” I said, shivering.

She took off the dressing gown and put it around my shoulders and, unashamedly naked, went into the kitchen. “I’ll make some coffee,” she said.

“Is anything missing?” I asked, following her.

“Not as far as I can see,” she said. “My handbag was in the bedroom.”

“Anything in particular he might have been after?”

She filled a drip coffeemaker and placed it on the stove. “Nothing that’s easy to carry,” she said.

“Ever have a break-in before?”

“Never,” she said. “Not even a Russian. This is a very safe area.”

I watched her naked body absently as it moved around the kitchen and, for a moment, my mind turned to Cassandra’s fate. I decided not to mention the possibility that the intruder had had something other than theft on his mind.

“Strange it should have happened while you were here,” she said.

“It was you who persuaded me to stay,” I said. “Remember?”

“Sorry.”