Trojan Gold - Elizabeth Peters [56]
“You have such a poetic way of putting things.”
“In words of one syllable, then—they don’t know where it is. Or, ‘is at,’ as you Americans say. Having searched in vain, they have concluded—somewhat tardily, I agree—that you may succeed where they have failed.”
“I still don’t see—”
“You’ve had a great deal on your mind lately,” John said kindly. “Think. Why would Friedl go to such lengths to lure you to Bad Steinbach when she can murder you just as easily and far more safely, in Munich?”
“Cheerful thought. If they want to pick my brains, why did they try to kill me yesterday?”
“Because they’re a bunch of bloody amateurs,” said John, with professional disdain. “They had been half-expecting, half-dreading your arrival; when you turned up out of the blue, they didn’t know what to do. Someone—probably Freddy the Mindless and Muscle-Bound—acted on impulse. He’s the sort of chap whose natural impulses would be lethal. Later on Friedl got in touch with the Mastermind, who pointed out a more responsible course of action. I trust you realize what that implies? It takes her some time to reach the man in charge. He isn’t on the spot.”
“If you mean Tony…I don’t believe it.”
John’s demonic eyebrow soared skyward. “Of course you know him so much better than I, don’t you?”
My nice neat living room looked like the scene of an all-night binge. It stank of beer—Caesar had knocked a glass over—and the place was littered with empty bottles and glasses, the ashes of Schmidt’s horrible cigars, and the scraps of a bowl of pretzels. Schmidt had turned sentimental, as he usually does after three or four beers, and was looking at my photograph albums. He and Tony had their heads together over the Rothenburg mementos and were giggling as they recalled their encounters with the ghost of the Schloss.
“Yes, she married,” Schmidt said with a sigh; he was talking about Ilse, Countess Drachenstein, who had figured prominently in the case. “A fine young fellow—he was a chemist in Rothenburg. I attended the wedding. I wore my white linen suit I bought in Rome—”
“Chemist?” Tony echoed. “Not the same guy we rousted out of bed in the small hours?”
“The same,” I said.
John listened with bright-eyed interest. “Speaking of chemists,” he began, and went on to tell an outrageous story about an art forgery that had made headlines a few years earlier. The part of the story he told had not been in the newspapers. “And,” he ended, “it turned out he had latent diabetes; it was the sugar that did that trick.”
Schmidt laughed so hard he turned purple. Tony laughed too, but he was still suspicious. “You seem to know quite a lot about detecting forgeries, Sir John.”
John lowered his eyes modestly. “I’m just a dilettante, Professor. Jack-of-all-trades, master of none, as they say. As a matter of fact, I became interested because we had a slight problem with one of the family portraits—a Romney…. But that’s another story. It’s getting late. Shall we go, Herr Direktor?”
“Yes, yes.” Schmidt chug-a-lugged his beer and bounced to his feet. “Where is my coat? Did I have a briefcase?”
Caesar went to help him look for them, and I followed John into the hall. “What are you up to now?”
“You wanted Schmidt out of the way, didn’t you? Leave him to me.”
“Oh, God,” I said hopelessly, and said no more, because Schmidt appeared, trying to get into his coat, which was complicated by the fact that Caesar had hold of one sleeve.
We got Schmidt into his coat and convinced him he had not had a briefcase, and then they left, arguing about who was going to drive. Eventually Schmidt got in the passenger side and they drove off.
I returned to the living room. “Alone at last,” I said.
Tony was looking at photographs. “I’d never seen these,” he said, pleased. “We had a good time, didn’t we? Why don’t we spend a few days at that hotel in Bad Steinbach?”
It was all John’s doing, of course. When he had found time to corrupt Tony, I did not know; but he had