“That’s nice. I’m sorry I missed it.”

“I expect your attention was on something else,” John said, demonstrating.

“I thought you considered that one of Donne’s less-inspired—”

“I was referring to the poetic spark—the divine afflatus. Insofar as practical advice is concerned…”

“John, if you don’t stop that—”

“I thought you enjoyed it. Oh, very well. Lie still. I can’t concentrate on crime when you squirm around like that.”

“Is this better?” I curled up against him, my head on his shoulder.

“Not a great deal,” John murmured. “But I will endeavor to rise above lesser distractions. What were we talking about?”

“Crime. If that’s what it is.”

“Taking pot shots at you is a crime in my book.”

“Ah, so that’s what convinced you I wasn’t inventing wild stories in order to lure you back to my arms.” John made a small sound, a mixture of protest and laughter, and I insisted, “You did think that.”

“No, honestly.”

“Yes, you did.”

“I had enough confidence in your veracity to follow you to Garmisch. Damned lucky for you I did.”

“Yes, I deeply appreciate it, but I can’t help wondering why, if you had all that confidence in my veracity, you didn’t say so in the first place.”

“I thought you wanted to talk about crime.”

“I am. I do. I just don’t understand—”

John gave a long, exaggerated sigh. “My dear girl, your initial scenario was pure fantasy. Attempted murder is a solid fact. People don’t try to kill you unless you have done something to annoy them. What did you do yesterday?”

I gave him a brief rundown of the day’s activities.

“Ve-ry interesting,” John said thoughtfully. “Let’s concoct a plot, shall we? I’ll begin; feel free to interrupt if you have contributions or criticisms.”

“I will.”

“I’m sure you will. All right, here we go. Forty-odd years ago, Hoffman was an official of the museum where the Trojan gold was displayed. After the war—”

“Wait a minute, you’re skipping. What was he doing during the war?”

“Irrelevant. We have to assume he was in Berlin at the end of the war and that somehow he managed to make off with the treasure. Otherwise we don’t have a plot.”

“Okay, I’ll buy that.”

“All the same, I wish I knew how he managed it,” John mused. “It was one of the master scams of all time, played against a background of epic tragedy—Homeric tragedy, one might say. Crawling across a hellish no man’s land pocked with bomb craters and fallen bodies, with shells bursting overhead and buildings flaming around him, clutching that precious bundle…We’ll never know, I suppose.” I nudged him and with a wistful sigh—the tribute of a master to a brilliant amateur—he resumed his narrative.

“After the war, he turned up in Bavaria, married the innkeeper’s daughter, and settled into a life of quiet obscurity, giving up what might have been a distinguished academic career. The preservation of the Trojan gold had become an idée fixe, perhaps a symbol of all the masterpieces of art and learning smashed by the barbarians and never to be retrieved, as your friend the carpenter put it. Why should he hand it over to someone else? He had as much right to it as anyone—more, because he had saved it and they had threatened to destroy it. In his admittedly distracted mind, there was no difference between conqueror and conquered. One had bombed London and Coventry, but the other had reduced Dresden to rubble and gutted the Cathedral of Cologne. Well—what do you think?”