“What would you do?”

His eyes narrowed, acknowledging the covert insult, but he said only, “Go for the gold—to coin a phrase. It’ll take him a while. There is no hurry.”

“But you’re not him.”

“No, I’m not. I’m so flattered that you noticed the difference.”

“We did a lot of the work for him, softening the ground,” I mused. “Depends on how deeply it’s buried. Transportation will be a problem…. How the devil did he get there this morning? It’s all uphill from Bad Steinbach.”

“And all downhill from the top of the Hexenhut. I expect he took the lift up, and then sashayed down to us. The smoke signal was a grave error on our part, but he must have had some idea before-hand.”

“He overheard us talking about the daffodil bulb.”

John’s lips curled in an elegant sneer. He had visited the facilities, as my mother always calls them, and washed the soot and dried blood from his face; the sneer was one of his best.

“He wouldn’t have wits enough to reason that one out. It’s more likely that your initial visit to the cemetery aroused his suspicions; it wouldn’t occur to him that your motives were as pure and charitable as they really were.”

“Or he located someone who saw me leaving town last night. I almost ran over a policeman when I turned into the road leading to the cemetery; I’ll bet that’s the only place it leads to.” I glanced toward the door. “Where do you suppose Schmidt is? It isn’t like him to stay away from food for more than an hour at a stretch. Maybe he’s taking a nap.” I put my napkin on the table and stood up.

“It’s the best possible place for him,” John said, sipping coffee. “If I were you, I’d leave him there.”

“No, I need him to help me convince the police to dig up that grave. He’s got more clout than I have.”

“Oh, very well.” John reached in his pocket. “Er—I seem to have lost my wallet somewhere…”

“Back to your old form,” I said, scribbling my name and room number on the check.

I knocked on Schmidt’s door. The mumbled grunt was the reply I had expected. The door wasn’t locked, so I opened it and walked in.

Schmidt was napping, all right, hands folded on his stomach, mustache vibrating with the intensity of his snores. I didn’t see Dieter until I was well inside the room. He had been behind the door.

John put his hands in his pockets and let his shoulders sag. “Stupid,” he said critically. “I should have anticipated this.”

“Neither of us is at our best this morning,” I agreed. “I wonder where he got the gun?”

“It isn’t his,” John said. “Unless he was carrying it on him the whole time. I searched his luggage—”

The barrel of the gun slashed across the side of his face and sent him reeling back against the closed door.