Trojan Gold - Elizabeth Peters [19]
There was nothing for it but to take the tram and then a bus; I live in the suburbs, near Grünwald, on account of my dog needing a yard.
The trams were still crowded with late workers and Christmas shoppers. I had to stand, squashed in between ranks of wet, tired, annoyed people. Shortly after we left Residenzplatz, I spotted Schmidt. He was wearing a bright red-and-green babushka with strands of gray horsehair sticking out all around the edges, a pair of dark glasses, and a purple scarf over the lower part of his face, to hide his mustache. I had no trouble seeing him, despite his diminutive stature, because nobody was anywhere near him. It wasn’t hard to understand why people were giving him a wide berth; he looked like an escaped lunatic.
There was a lot of inadvertent contact as people Were shaken, jostled, and pushed against one another; but all at once a specific contact brought me bolt upright and fuming. I turned my head and found myself staring into the wide innocent hazel eyes of a man standing directly behind me. He was the only one who could have given me that impertinent pinch; but instead of voicing my displeasure, I stood gaping in paralyzed silence. The only thing that kept me upright was the press of bodies around me.
He was dressed like a proper young businessman, in a dark tweed coat and snappy Tyrolean hat with a Gamsbart in the band. A trim dark mustache framed his mouth. What had he done to make his mouth look like that—so soft, so pink, so primly innocent? His mouth wasn’t soft; it was hard and knowledgeable and very far from innocent….
My own lips felt as if they had been sprayed with quick-drying lacquer. They were still half-parted and incapable of speech when he turned away. His timing was perfect. Before I could get my shaken wits together, the tram jolted to a stop at one of the major transfer points and people crowded toward the doors. He mingled with the others; several other men were wearing hats like his.
I started clumsily after him, stumbling over shopping bags and feet, but I knew the futility of pursuit. He would have been among the first off the tram; and before I could follow, he’d be gone, swallowed up by the rainy darkness.
An acerbic comment from a stout Hausfrau called my attention to the fact that I was sitting on her lap. The tram had started, throwing me off balance. I apologized and removed my offending person. She touched my arm.
“Entschuldigen Sie, Fräulein—I did not realize…You are ill? Sit down, here is a place….”
By the time we neared the end of the line and my transfer point, I had recovered. The tram was almost empty. I checked to make sure Schmidt was sitting in splendid isolation at the far end of the car, his face concealed behind a book he was holding upside down, before I reached into my coat pocket.
My pockets are usually a disgrace, bulging with objects—tissues, half-eaten candy bars, coins, keys, receipts, shopping lists. I had no trouble identifying John’s contribution to the clutter, though it was no wonder he had had a hard time squeezing it in. The stiff paper felt cold on my fingers as I pulled it out.
It was a postcard.
The Saint Columba altar piece is one of the gems of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, and a picture of it is a reasonable method of indicating a rendezvous point—not only a specific building, but a specific room in a large, rambling structure. But surely it was a diabolical coincidence that he had chosen a card showing one of my favorite details—the head of a man, beaky and handsome as a hawk, oddly familiar.
When I got off the tram, my bus was waiting, headlights cutting through the fog, steam snorting from its exhaust like the extrusions of a dragon with stomach trouble. I started to board it. Then I turned toward the chubby shadow that hovered in the gloom behind the lights of the station.
“Come on, Schmidt,” I said. “You don’t want to miss this bus; they only run every half hour.”