Trojan Gold - Elizabeth Peters [4]
Instead, I said sharply, “What did you do with the outer envelope?”
Schmidt was still studying the photograph with a puzzled frown. Without looking up he asked, “How do you know there was another envelope?”
“Because this one is blank—no address, no stamps, no postmark. Come on, Gerda; there had to be an outer envelope. What happened to it?”
Gerda’s eyes shifted. Mine followed the direction of her gaze. Her wastebasket was not only empty, it was as clean as my kitchen floor. Cleaner—I have a dog. “You threw it away?” I yelled.
“It was covered with filth,” Gerda said, with a fastidious curl of her lip. “Stained and dirty—one could scarcely read the name.”
“Was there a return address?”
“None that I could read. The dirty stains—”
“Postmark?”
Gerda shrugged.
Schmidt followed me out of the office. I asked him where he was going, and he said simply, “With you.”
“Why?”
“You are going to look through the trash for the missing envelope.” Schmidt savored the phrase. “The missing envelope…A good title for a thriller, nicht?”
“It’s been used. Probably by Nancy Drew.”
Schmidt didn’t ask who Nancy Drew was. Maybe he knew. As I said, he has deplorable tastes in literature. “And,” he went on cheerfully, “a good beginning for an adventure.”
“What makes you think this is the beginning of an adventure? If,” I added, “one can apply that melodramatic word to the unfortunate incidents that have marked my academic career.”
“I hope it is. It has been six months since our last case. I am bored.”
Since Schmidt’s only contribution to my last “case,” if it could be called that, was to be pushed into the local slammer by a group of suspicious Swedes, his use of the plural pronoun might have been questioned—but not by me. He was still sulking about missing most of the fun. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but I didn’t want to encourage him either. I had had enough “cases,” or “adventures,” or, more accurately, “narrow escapes.”
Not that I expected the mysterious photograph (damn! another thriller title) would lead to any such undesired development. It wasn’t really mysterious, only odd, and if I could find the covering letter—there must be one, Gerda had simply overlooked it—the oddity would turn out to be odd only in the academic sense. Like most academicians, I had received my share of crank letters. Some were communiqués from the lunatic fringes of historical scholarship—like the woman who claimed to be possessed by the ghost of Hieronymus Bosch. Before her family got her committed, she sent me fifteen huge canvases she had painted under his spiritual direction. Some were from amiable ignoramuses who hoped to sell us some piece of junk they had dug out of the attic. This would probably turn out to be something of that sort, and my present quest was a real waste of time and effort. Possibly an explanatory letter had been sent under separate cover and had been delayed in transit. In any case, if the idea was important enough to the sender, he or she would write again when I failed to reply.
Having arrived at this reasonable conclusion, did I return to my office and my duties? No, I did not. I was still annoyed with Gerda, and an odd, provocative sense of something not quite right about that photograph was beginning to trouble my mind. With Schmidt trotting happily at my heels, I threaded a path through the maze of corridors and rooms that constituted the basement of the museum. The plan represented the Graf’s vague idea of a medieval undercroft, complete with model dungeons and torture chambers. Schmidt had tried to set