There was only one jarring note in my composition. I simply could not see that gracious, kindly old gentleman as either a practical joker or a seller of stolen goods. That was why I was on my way to Bad Steinbach to confront him personally instead of calling or writing.

Still no purple Beetles in the mirror. Nor a sleek black BMW. If John intended to follow me, he wouldn’t use a car I might recognize….

One might reasonably ask why, since I had taken the trouble to locate John, I was now so determined to avoid him. I asked myself the same thing, and I knew the answer, even though I hated to admit it.

Putting that insane advertisement in the newspapers had been tantamount to yelling, “Anybody down there?” into the depths of the Grand Canyon. I had not really expected a response. In a way, I had not really wanted one.

Why do people have a hopeless need to glamorize things and people? It was impossible to turn John into a romantic hero when he was on the scene; he simply refused to behave like one. He was always making silly remarks or setting up a situation in which he looked like a fool. He could move fast enough and hit hard enough when he had to, and he could think even faster, but my most vivid memories of him were memories of deliberate foolishness. The only pure, unmarred memory was the last, when, stripped and sleek and deadly, he went over the side of that leaking boat into the icy water and risked his neck for someone else.

If he had never turned up again, I could have cherished that image and worked it into something beautiful. Or if he had come rushing to my side murmuring clichés—“I tried to forget you—I tried to stay away—It was for your sake, my dearest, I’m not worthy to black your boots—but I couldn’t resist you, your image has been enshrined in my heart…” Hell, I could invent page after page of dialogue like that. So could John.

Instead he had popped out of nothingness like a demon in a horror movie, shocked me into a coma, pinched my bottom, handled me with the tolerant amusement of a man who had rediscovered some forgotten trinket—a toy he had enjoyed playing with once upon a time…. And he had turned me down flat when I asked for his help. Let’s not forget that. He had turned me down. If he had had second thoughts, it was for reasons of his own, and that possibility made me very uneasy. I didn’t believe his claims of virtue and respectability for a moment. He was still a crook, and a crook was the last thing I needed.

I was startled out of my sullen meditations when a car whizzed contemptuously past me and cut back into my lane so sharply that it grazed my left front fender. The driver was a little old lady with blue hair; she made a remarkably rude gesture at me as she went by. After that I concentrated on driving.