“John, I really have to get to work sometime today. Schmidt is sure to come looking for me—”

“Speaking of Schmidt—you don’t mean to involve him in this, do you?”

“I wish I could keep him out of it. Your turning up didn’t help. Schmidt is fascinated by you.”

“I will endeavor to put a lid on my notorious charm when next we meet. Seriously, Vicky. I don’t want to be constantly distracted by having to rescue Schmidt.”

“And I don’t want Schmidt to be in a position where he needs rescuing. We’ll just have to elude the little rascal, that’s all.”

“Agreed. It behooves us, then, to investigate the people you mentioned. Their reputations, their recent activities, any suspicious circumstances. You might give me a list.”

“I can do better than that. I have snapshots of all of them—they’re in a box on the coffee table. You’ll recognize the ambiance. There was Dieter Spreng from Berlin, Rosa D’Addio from the University of Turin, Tony…”

“Tony?”

“Tony,” I repeated. Caesar was howling, the sunlight lay golden on the floor…. I sat up with a gasp. “What time is it?”

For some reason, he was still wearing his wrist-watch. “Two.”

“Two P.M.? Oh, God! Wednesday. It’s Wednesday, isn’t it?”

“The last time I looked it was Tuesday. That was last night, so logic suggests—”

I jumped up and began groping for my clothes. “Tony. He’s here. His plane lands at two. I told him I’d pick him up.”

John sprang out of bed. Clad only in a wrist-watch and a lordly sneer, he struck a pose like Jove about to hurl a thunderbolt and declaimed, “‘Yet she/Will be/False, ere I come, to two, or three.’ Aren’t you scheduling your appointments rather too tightly? Far be it from me to…Tony Lawrence from Chicago?”

Jeans, shirt, shoes…“Don’t leave!” I ordered. “Oh, well—maybe you had better leave, come to think of it. Where can I reach you? Write it down. I want an address and a phone number—and a name! Any name so long as it’s one to which you are currently answering….” I ran to the door.

John had dropped down onto the edge of the bed and changed his pose—Rodin’s Thinker instead of Athenian Jove.

It’s a wonder I made it to the airport in one piece. As I wove in and out of the traffic, my brain felt like my spare-room closet, stuffed with odds and ends that had been shoved in, helter-skelter. It was all John’s fault. Our discussion had clarified several of my amorphous ideas, but John Donne and the Discobolus kept elbowing into my attempts at deductive reasoning. For God’s sake, hold your tongue, John Donne, and let me think.

Tony. I had to concentrate on Tony; he was the most imminent of the concerns of the moment. I couldn’t believe I had forgotten about him. Now that he had been recalled to my attention, I couldn’t believe the things I was thinking about him.

I could handle the possibility that Tony might be one of several people whom Herr Hoffman had contacted, and that he was keeping mum about it because he hoped to outsmart me in a hunt for the Trojan gold. That possibility was looking less likely, though. According to what Müller had told me, there had only been one envelope. It was conceivable that Hoffman had dispatched other communications earlier (he certainly hadn’t sent any later). But—call me egotistical—I couldn’t believe that the old gentleman would have left me until last, or that he would have given me less information than he had given the others. It was one thing for me to take a day off work and drive sixty miles to check out a wild theory; for Tony to spend time and money on a trans-Atlantic flight, he’d need more to go on.