We went to our favorite Bierstube, which specializes in a particular variety of heavy dark beer to which Schmidt is addicted. (There are few varieties of beer to which Schmidt is not addicted.) Schmidt ordered Weisswurst and got it, even though the church bells had already chimed twelve. He ordered a lot of other things, too, including an entire loaf of heavy black bread and a pound or so of sweet butter. I sipped daintily at my own beer and waited for him to get to the point, knowing it wouldn’t take long. Schmidt thinks he is sly and subtle, but he is mistaken.
After the waiter had brought the first course, Schmidt tucked his napkin into his collar and stared fixedly at me.
“That was not Frau Schliemann in the photograph.”
“I know.”
“You know? Oh yes, you, you always know.” Schmidt stuffed his mouth with wurst and masticated fiercely. Then he mumbled, “Mrshwenill.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Miss Know-It-All.”
“Ms. Know-It-All, bitte.”
Schmidt grinned. I reached across the table and removed a speck of wurst from his mustache.
“So what shall we do?” he asked.
“What can we do?”
“Have the wrapping examined to see if the stain is blood,” Schmidt said promptly.
“We could.” And of course I would. I had known that ever since I saw the brown-red water. Since we did a lot of work with fabrics, we had a fairly well-equipped lab at the museum. If that particular test was beyond our chemist, I had several pals in the police department.
“But what if it is blood?” I went on.
“Human blood!”
“So what if it is human blood? We can’t trace the damned thing; there is no return address. Perhaps the sender will follow up with a letter.”
“And perhaps he is no longer in a position to do that,” said Schmidt. “It took a lot of blood to make a stain that size, Vicky.”
His illogical, melodramatic conclusion irritated me all the more because it was exactly what I had been thinking.
“You ought to write thrillers for a living, Schmidt,” I snarled. “Which reminds me. Madly jealous at being supplanted in the affections of the King, Madame de Maintenon has accused Rosanna of practicing witchcraft. Would you like to hear—”
“No, I would not. At least not at the present time. Why do you refuse to discuss this matter? Most probably the photograph is a childish joke, but if there is the slightest chance it is anything else…. You have a flair for such things, Vicky. All of us develop a certain instinct, which is nothing more than long years of experience working with antiquities; but yours is stronger than most. If the jewelry in the photograph is not the original, it is an excellent copy, nein?”
“Yes,” I said.
Schmidt’s fork, with its impaled chunk of sausage, stopped midway to his mouth. Weisswurst is really quite revolting in appearance; I will spare you the comparisons. I averted my eyes.
“What is it?” Schmidt asked solicitously. “There is in your voice a note of grief, of tears repressed—”
“There is nothing of the sort. Your imagination is getting out of hand.”
“Ach, so? Then with the tactfulness for which I am well known, I will pass on to matters of documented fact. Since you are this Ms. Know-It-All, I presume you are well acquainted with the details of the fall of Berlin in 1945.”
“No, I am not, and what’s more, I don’t want to be. Art history may be a cop-out, but at least it enables me to focus on the positive achievements of the human race.”
I had meant the statement as a criticism—an indictment, if you will—of myself; but Schmidt’s sudden sobriety showed I had hit a nerve. Then, too late, I remembered something I had been told by Gerda, who really was Ms. Know-It-All. Schmidt had been a member of the White Rose, the Munich student conspiracy against Hitler—and he had lost many of his friends, including the girl he had hoped to marry, when the plot was discovered and the ringleaders were savagely executed. If the story was true, and I had no reason to suppose it was not, Schmidt had even stronger reasons than I to retreat from the contemplation of man’s inhumanity to man.
I didn’t apologize, since that would only have made things worse. After an interval, Schmidt’s cherubic countenance returned to its normal, cheerful expression. He went on without referring to what I had said.
“The most valued exhibits from the Berlin museums had been removed to a bunker in the Tiergarten—the zoo.”
“I know what Tiergarten means.”
“Ha! But you don’t know, I will bet you, that many of the objects taken away by the Russians when they entered the bunker have now been returned. The Gobelin tapestries, the Pergamum sculptures, the coin collection of Friedrich the Great…”
One up for Schmidt. I had known of the Pergamum sculptures, but not the other things. Naturally, I wasn’t going to admit my ignorance.
“All right,” I said, with an exaggerated sigh. “Let’s admit for the sake of argument that both preposterous premises are right. The gold in the photograph is the genuine article and the stain on the envelope is human blood. We’re still up the creek without a paddle. We have no idea where that photograph came from.”
Schmidt’s cheeks gyrated as he tried to chew and nod at the same time. Swallowing, he patted his mouth daintily with the tail of his napkin and then remarked, “Too true. What a pity that the one man who might lead us out of our dilemma is no longer among the living.”
I reached for a piece of bread and busied myself breaking and buttering it.
Schmidt is so classically, overpoweringly cute that people tend to forget how intelligent he is. And I swear there are times when I think he can read my mind. Not that a high degree of ESP was required in this case. The word “copy” inevitably brought John to mind. Also the words “fraud,” “fake,” and “crook.”
Sir John Smythe he called himself, among other names—none of them his real one. The title was equally apocryphal. He had once admitted that John was his first name—not very informative, even if it was true, which it might not be. He was the most accomplished liar since Baron Münchausen.
His physical appearance varied as extravagantly as his name. The underlying structure, the basic John Smythe, was inconspicuously average—about my height, rather slightly built, with no identifying characteristics. In repose his features could only be described as pleasantly unmemorable, but they were capable of a rubbery flexibility any actor would have sold his soul to possess. The color of his hair and eyes varied, according to the circumstances (usually illegal); but, as I had good cause to know, he was fair-haired and blue-eyed. The only features he had trouble disguising—from me, at least—were his lashes, long and thick as a girl’s, and his hands. Deft, skillful hands, long-fingered, deceptively slender…
“Shall I ask the waiter for more butter?” Schmidt asked sweetly.
I looked at my plate. On it were five pieces of bread, each buried under a greasy yellow mound.
“No, thanks, this will do,” I said, and bit into one of the slices. The slippery, sliding texture of the butter against the roof of my mouth made me want to gag.
Schmidt is a canny little kobold. He didn’t refer to the subject again. He didn’t have to. The damage had been done, though not by him. By the photograph, the fake, the fraud.
I left work early, and when I got home that evening I did something I had sworn I would never do again. The portrait was buried deep under a pile of cast-off, out-of-date business papers. Usually it takes me days to find a needed receipt or letter, but I had no trouble finding this particular item.
The portrait was not a photograph, or a sketch, or a painting. I had no snapshots of John; I doubt if many people did. He had good cause to be leery of cameras. But the silhouette had been cut by a master of that dying art; the black paper outline captured not only the distinctive bone structure and the sculptured line of that arrogant nose, but also a personality, in the confident tilt of the chin and the suggestion of a faint sm
ile on the thin, chiseled lips.
People claim wine is a depressant. It never depressed me until that evening. I sat on my nice newly upholstered couch with my nice friendly dog sleeping at my feet, sipping my nice chilled Riesling Spätlese, and my mood got blacker with every sip—black as the scissored outline at which I stared. It might have been the chilly hiss of sleet against the windows. It might have been Caesar, moaning and twitching in a doggish nightmare. Sometimes dogs seem to have happy dreams. I had always assumed they grinned and whined at visions of bones, and overflowing food dishes, and friendly hands stroking them. What then were the subjects of canine nightmares? Giant cats the size of grizzly bears? Perhaps Caesar was reliving the tribulations of his youth, before I adopted him. I would never forget my first sight of him, bursting with fangs bared and eyes blazing out of the darkness of the antique shop I happened to be burgling. His keeper had kept him half-starved and beaten him to make him savage…
John was one of the gang—art swindlers, forgers of historic gems. He boasted that half the great art collections contained copies he had substituted for the priceless originals, and he was particularly proud of the fact that the substitutions had never been detected. Not for him the armed attack, the murdered guards, the crude, grab-it-and-run techniques of lesser craftsmen. John abhorred violence, particularly when it was directed against him.
However, he had killed at least one man. I couldn’t complain about that since the man he killed had been doing his damnedest to murder me.
John had vanished under the icy storm-lashed waters of Lake Vippen six months earlier, taking with him the aquatic assassin who had picked me as victim number one. The body of the man he killed had been found a few days later. John had never been seen again.
The scenario was as romantically tragic as any I could have invented for my unending novel; and all the surviving participants had been suitably moved, including Schmidt, who had insisted on helping erect a suitable monument to the fallen hero. Schmidt was determined to regard John as a kind of Robin Hood, which couldn’t have been farther from the truth. John did confine his depredations to the rich, but that was only because poor people didn’t have anything worth stealing, and the only charity to which he contributed was himself. Of course John had never happened to rob Schmidt’s museum. And Schmidt is a hopeless sentimentalist.
Schmidt is not, however, a fool. He had enjoyed wallowing in sloppy tears over the heroic dead; but once the glow wore off, he had probably reached the same conclusion I had reached—namely and to wit, that the memorial might be a trifle premature. The event had given John a heaven-sent opportunity to avoid a number of people whose greatest ambition in life was to nail him to a wall by his elegant ears. The man he had killed was the head of a gang of thieves who would probably resent the death of their leader and the loss of their jobs, particularly since John had been trying to steal the loot from them all along. John was also an object of passionate interest to the police of several countries. His presumed death would wipe the slate clean and give him a chance to start over.
At first I didn’t doubt he was still alive. For weeks I expected to hear from him—one of those absurd communications in which his quirky, devious mind delighted. Once he had sent me a forgery of a famous historic jewel. Another time, it had been a single red rose—another fake, a silk copy of a real flower. But six months had gone by without a word from him….
Is it any wonder I thought of John when I received an anonymous photograph of what appeared to be an excellent imitation of a museum treasure? Cryptic messages, copies, and forgeries were the trademarks of Sir John B. Smythe. Was this the message for which I had been waiting? Waiting was all I could do. I did not know how to get in touch with John; I never had known. Of course, if I was mistaken about his survival, a spiritualist medium was probably my best bet.
Yet this particular communication had sinister overtones that were not characteristic of John. His frivolous attitude toward life in general and his dubious profession in particular had gotten him into a heap of trouble. As he had once sadly remarked, some of his colleagues had no sense of humor. They kept misinterpreting his little jokes (at their expense) and wanting to beat him up.
The grisly bloodstain on the envelope wasn’t John’s style. Unless the joke had backfired. Unless the blood was his.
The shiny white cardboard reflected the lamplight, enclosing the black profile in a soft golden halo. The inappropriateness of that image brought a sour smile to my lips. The smile turned to a grimace as I remembered what I had done that afternoon.
It had seemed like a good idea at the time. In retrospect it struck me as the most idiotic move I had ever made—and I speak as one whose career has not been unblemished by foolish actions.
I had put personal ads in the major newspapers of the world. All of them. Figaro, Die Welt, La Prensa, Neue Zurcher Zeitung, II Corriere della Sera, ABC, the New York and London Times….
Even now I hate to admit I did it. However, a lot of underworld characters use the personals as a means of communication, and I knew John sometimes read them for the sake of amusement. I felt certain the message would capture his attention. It read: “Rudolph. Not roses, Helen’s jewels. Michael and Rupert no problem. Contact soonest. Flavia.”
It had seemed like a good idea at the time. Few people would understand that string of absurdities, but I knew John would; the single red rose he had sent me came from the same corny old novel. The reference to Michael and Rupert cost me an extra twenty bucks, but I thought I had a better chance of arousing John’s interest if I assured him the villains were out of the picture.
Caesar moaned. The wind wailed. The sleet kept on falling. The wine was gone. I was all alone and nobody loved me. Worse than that—I was drunk and all alone and nobody loved me.
Which only goes to show that those boring clichés about optimism are true. “Tomorrow is another day; it’s always darkest before the dawn.” Unbeknownst to me, a lot of people were concerned about me—thinking, worrying, caring, talking. The most provocative of the conversations might have gone something like this:
It began with commiserations, half-ironic, half-furious, on her husband’s death.
“But there was nothing else to do! He had made up his mind. He was actually on his way to the Postamt, to send the photograph. I had to act quickly!”
“Stupidly, you mean. You have silenced the only man who knew where it was hidden.”
“Perhaps he told her. A note, a letter, sent with the photograph—”
“And now you’ve lost that too. What the devil could have become of it?”
“I tell you, I don’t know! Someone may have found it lying in the snow—”
“Are you sure that was the only copy? Did he communicate with anyone else?”
“No—I don’t think so…How can I be sure? Any of them might—”
“Shut up and let me think.”
A long silence followed. She ran shaking fingers through her hair, nibbled on her bitten nails. Then the voice at the other end of the wire said, “I have received nothing. That would suggest that she was the only one he confided in.”
“Yes. Yes. We can deal with her—”
“As you dealt with the old man? I forbid it. Do you hear? Keep that degenerate follower of yours under control. Leave it to me.”
“Yes, my darling. I am sorry—”
“Rather late for regrets, isn’t it?”
Tears filled her eyes, smearing her heavy makeup. “Don’t be angry with me. You will break my heart. I promise, I will do whatever you say.”
“Do nothing. Keep searching. Notify me at once—at once, do you hear?—if she communicates with you. In the meantime, I will take steps to correct your mistake.”
“You think you can—”
“I have several ideas,” the far-off voice murmured.
For the next few days I was followed around Munich by little fat men—or, sometimes, little fat women. They were all Schmidt. He loves dressing up in funny co
stumes. I wouldn’t dream of destroying his illusion that he is a great detective, so I pretended not to recognize him. I didn’t try to lose him either, which wouldn’t have been hard.
I would have lost him if I had been doing what he thought I was doing—heading for a rendezvous with the mysterious, the enigmatic Robin Hood of crime. Schmidt assumed that though John had vanished from the rest of the world, he had kept in touch with the love of his life. Maybe he had—but obviously I wasn’t it.
The stain on the wrapping paper was human blood, all right. This fact, among others, convinced me John was not the sender. The sight of blood made him sick—especially, as he had candidly admitted, his own. Nor would he have left me hanging in limbo. He’d have sent a follow-up message.
I studied that damned photograph, with the naked eye and the magnifying glass, until every detail was imprinted on my brain. If there was a hidden clue, I failed to find it. Schmidt had no better luck than I. He kept stealing the photo, and I had to keep stealing it back; and I knew that if he had found something I overlooked, he wouldn’t be able to resist bragging about it. I made a point of arriving early at work so I could intercept the mail before Gerda messed around with it. I infuriated the switchboard operator with my daily demand of “Are you sure no one else called?”
She was sure.
Except for Schmidt’s comedy routine, it was a dull week. Even his appearance as a pint-sized Erich von Stroheim, complete with monocle, didn’t cheer me up. Schmidt’s eye muscles weren’t up to the job of retaining the monocle, it kept falling out, and whenever I looked back at him, all I saw was his rotund rump as he pawed at the snowdrifts looking for his prop. That pursuit ended when some woman started beating him with her purse and accusing him of trying to look up her skirts. I guess he talked her out of calling a cop. I didn’t intervene, since I wasn’t supposed to know who he was.
I’m not one of those unfortunate people who sink into a deep depression during the holidays. Usually I love Christmas, and Weihnachten in Bavaria is lots of fun. Streets and shops were strung with greens; Christmas trees sparkled in every square and plaza. The Kristkindlmarkt was in full swing, as it had been for over a hundred and fifty years; booths and stands crowded the square under the shadow of Der Alte Peter, who is not an elderly gentleman but an elderly church. In the evening, lanterns and candles and strings of rainbow lights shone like fallen stars in the blue dusk, and trumpeters on the church tower played the old carols; the clear, bright notes drifted down like music from heaven, blending with the gently falling snow. Every variety of Christmas decoration was for sale, from gilded gingerbread to handmade ornaments; and I lingered at the booths featuring the lovely carved creches. I couldn’t afford any of the ones I wanted, so I bought Pfeffernüsse and sugared almonds for Schmidt, and a gilded bare branch strung with hard candies—a kindly compromise of the old legend in which the saint brings sweeties to the good little children and switches to the naughty ones.
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