“I don’t know.”

I had another question, but I wasn’t about to ask Tony—not since I had learned that Ann was a figment of his imagination. Perlmutter’s photograph had been of Frau Schliemann, not Frau Hoffman. Maybe jerky Helene had been right about Tony’s photo after all. What about Dieter and Elise—Frau Hoffman or Frau Schliemann? I would try to find out, though God knows why; I couldn’t think what it might mean, if anything.

“A committee.” Tony was communing with himself. “That makes sense, you know.”

“Maybe it makes sense to you. Go drip on your own floor, Tony. I want to change.”

“It is my floor,” Tony said indignantly. With the air of a squatter establishing property rights, he dropped his soggy jacket onto said floor.

“Oh. So it is. I forgot I was in your room.”

Tony unzipped his ski pants and tried to step out of them. Since he had neglected to remove his heavy, wet boots, the pants only wadded up around his calves. “You needn’t be coy with me, Vicky,” he said tenderly, struggling with the pants. “When I realized you were here waiting for me—Hey, don’t go. I want—”

Though he was effectively pinned to the spot by the wet cloth around his feet, he has very long arms; one of them reached me as I was sidling toward the door and spun me neatly back into a fond embrace. It would have been as pretty as an old Astaire-and-Rogers routine had it not been for the fact I wasn’t feeling as friendly as Ginger, and the additional fact that Tony’s feet were immobilized. We toppled over onto the bed in a flurry of arms and bodies and breathless dialogue, profane on my part, conciliatory on Tony’s, just as Schmidt walked in.

Instead of tactfully retiring, or bursting into laughter, either of which would have been appropriate, Schmidt rubbed his hands together and beamed from ear to ear. “Ah, it is nice to see you so friendly together. Don’t mind Papa Schmidt, just go on with what you were doing.”

This cooled Tony’s ardor as effectively as the elbow I had placed under his chin. He stopped thrashing around and I assumed my feet.

“If we had been doing what you thought we were doing, which we weren’t, we certainly wouldn’t go on doing it with you refereeing from the sidelines.”

“Then what were you doing?” Schmidt asked curiously.

Tony lay motionless, his arms over his face, like a dead knight on the battlefield. I’m not as hardhearted as I’d like to be. The total humiliation of the man moved me; I knelt at his feet and began working him out of his boots. It was a complicated procedure, since everything was soaking wet and his terpsichorean efforts had twisted his pants into overlapping coils.

“We were discussing the case,” I said. “I told him about Perlmutter…. Where did he go, Schmidt?”

“I lost him,” Schmidt admitted. “I made a mistake, you see. I should have adopted a disguise. He had seen me in this suit—”