I put him down and joined Gerda at the next exhibit. She was showing signs of restlessness, for which I couldn’t entirely blame her. Even the miraculous birth pales after a dozen repetitions. “Look,” she muttered, poking me. “That man—he has been following me.”

So had a lot of other men, women, and children. I glanced in the direction she indicated and decided she was engaging in some wishful thinking; the light was poor and her follower moved on as I turned, but I caught a fleeting glimpse of a clean-cut profile, spare and handsome as a hawk’s, before darkness obscured it.

“He looks familiar,” I said thoughtfully.

“I suppose you think he is following you,” Gerda said.

“I don’t think he is following either of us. Gerda, you’re getting testy. Hunger, I expect. Let’s have a little snack; we’ve improved our minds long enough.”

After she had been stuffed with whipped-cream cakes and coffee, Gerda’s temper improved. We returned to work arm in arm, figuratively speaking.

I never lock my office door. I don’t keep anything valuable there, and the guard on duty in the Armor Room is supposed to prevent unauthorized persons from going up the stairs. I was only mildly surprised to discover that the lights were burning. Usually I turn them off when I leave, but I had been distraught, distracted, and bewildered when I left. I thought nothing of it until I approached the desk and looked at the untidy pages of my manuscript.

I’m always impressed by characters in books who can tell at a glance that their belongings have been searched. They must be compulsively neat people. Normally, I wouldn’t notice anything unusual unless my papers had been swept onto the floor and trampled underfoot. But I distinctly remembered struggling over a description of a Holbein miniature just before Tony’s call put an end to my labors. The page now on top of the pile began, “quivered as her slender aristocratic hands strove in vain to veil their rounded charms from the Duke’s lascivious eyes.”

Schmidt was the obvious suspect. He was always trying to find out what Rosanna would do next. But he wasn’t desperate enough to climb all those stairs, and as I glanced around, I saw other signs of disturbance: the drawer of a filing cabinet gaping open, a pile of books spilled sideways.

My first reaction was not alarm or annoyance, but hopeful anticipation. I had been waiting for something to happen. Maybe this was it. It, not John; if he had searched the office, I wouldn’t notice anything out of place.

Schmidt had finally gotten around to making a copy of the mysterious photograph. (I deduced that from the fact that he had stopped swiping it.) I kept it in the top right-hand drawer of my desk.

As I reached impetuously for the drawer, it did occur to me to wonder how the intruder could have passed the guard down below. He had been on duty when I came in; he had nodded and mumbled a sleepy “Grüss Gott,” but he had not mentioned a visitor.