“He wasn’t home?” I asked.

The cat didn’t reply. Jumping onto the bed, she clawed one of Tony’s shirts into a nest, lay down on it, and went to sleep.

The beds had been made, but Schmidt and Tony had managed to create considerable havoc. Cast-off clothing littered the bed and the floor, the crumbs of Schmidt’s snack were scattered far and wide, and poor Hoffman’s private papers were all over the place. The majority of them had been returned to the cartons, not too neatly; I had the impression that they had been tossed there in frustrated disgust. Others littered the chairs and the beds.

I glanced through one of the untidy piles. It consisted of a dunning letter to a guest whose check had bounced, a receipt from an antique shop in Garmisch, and bills from several record shops. Poor Tony. No wonder he had given up in despair and gone skiing.

What to do, what to do? The long empty afternoon was mine to do with as I wished, but none of the options attracted me. Skiing with Tony and the others, in the gray, flat light that skiers particularly hate—with Elise glowering at me and Dieter arranging pratfalls for me and Tony sulking because he spent more time on his backside than on his skis…Pounding on the door of the house where John squatted like a toad in its hole? He probably wouldn’t let me in, which would hurt my ego, or else he would let me in, and I would end up doing something I would regret.

To my disgust I realized that while my mind was wandering, my hands had been busy, tidying up the room. That’s what early childhood conditioning does. I noticed with sour amusement that the sweater I had just rescued from the floor was the one Ann had made with her own fair hands. She’d have a fit if she saw how cavalierly Tony treated her love-offering; it smelled faintly of the beer I had spilled the previous day. I wondered if Ann sewed cute little tags onto her creations—a picture of crossed knitting needles and a motto, “From the needles of…”

There was a tag at the back of the neck, all right. The sweater had been handmade. In Taiwan.

I stood quite still, clutching the sweater and trying to talk myself out of my evil-minded suspicions. There were a dozen different explanations for the discrepancy, the most obvious being that this was not the same sweater. My good angel, my better self, asked piously, “What difference does it make?” My other self—the one with the higher IQ—knew it did make a difference. And it knew how to ascertain the truth.

I dropped the sweater onto the floor and kicked it for good measure.

At first I thought it would be safer to make the call from a public phone, but after some reflection, I realized that it wouldn’t matter if the conversation was overheard because it wouldn’t mean anything to anyone except me—and Tony. So I went to my own room and put through a call to Munich. Some people might have taken advantage of the boss’s absence to indulge in a long lunch hour, but not Gerda. She was there. However, she was not noble enough to refrain from pointing out at some length that while she was at her desk, working her little heart out, certain other people were gadding around enjoying themselves.