Trojan Gold - Elizabeth Peters [50]
“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.
On the other hand, Tony said he had been planning to go to the meetings. If the trip had already been in the works, it wouldn’t be much out of his way to stop over and find out what I was up to.
I wanted to believe it, because the alternative was an ugly one. If Tony was the faceless hypothetical conspirator John and I had invented, it would mean he was a cold-blooded, dishonest bastard who was ready to betray every ethical and professional principle—and that he had been making out with Friedl at the same time he was supposed to be enjoying my company. Guess which bothered me more.
I refused to believe it. There was a third possibility, and that was that Tony was completely unwitting. A man is innocent until proven guilty, after all. But if he was unwitting, I preferred to keep him that way. Tony and I had collaborated once before, with some success, but I didn’t want to make a habit of it. Even if John had not turned up…
John.