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but shrugged and said he couldn’t help because he had a bullet hole in his head and was dead. And then I woke up.
    I was on my stomach, with my extra pillow mysteriously on the sofa. I groaned and rolled over to the sound of knocking at my door.
    “What, what?” I called.
    “May I enter?” came Gunther’s precise Swiss-accented voice.
    “Enter, enter,” I said, trying to sit up with the help of one hand on my back.
    Gunther entered, all three-feet-and-a-little-more of him. He wore his usual three-piece suit complete with vest and watch fob. He was clean-shaven, imperially tiny.
    “I was concerned,” he said. “You called out.”
    The Beech-Nut clock on the wall told me it was almost nine. The sun confirmed the hour and Bosco looked down at me critically for sleeping so late and making morning noises.
    “I had a nightmare,” I explained.
    Gunther nodded knowingly and, leaving my door open, disappeared. I tested my back, found that it wasn’t so bad, and was starting to get up when Gunther returned with a tray and eased the door shut with his elbow.
    “Some coffee,” he explained, moving to the table. “And some breakfast biscuits with butter and honey.”
    “Sounds great,” I said.
    “May I clean up this disarray?” Gunther asked, putting down the tray and examining the dirty cereal bowl and the basket of photographs, the remnants of my wild night.
    “Okay,” I said, knowing that Gunther’s level of tolerance for mess was very low compared to mine. Actually, I don’t have intolerance for messiness. It seems natural to me.
    “Nightmares may appear to be, and are, very upsetting,” Gunther said as he straightened up and I groped on my trousers. “However, according to Freud, Ernest Jones, Otto Rank, and others, the nightmare can be a therapeutic experience. It is an attempt by the unconscious mind to tell a secret to the conscious mind. But it is in the form of a puzzle, a conundrum.”
    Normally, I would have had my breakfast without getting dressed, but in deference to Gunther I went to the closet, found my last clean shirt, and put it on. If Gunther hadn’t been there I probably would have worn the same shirt I’d had on the day before. It wasn’t badly wrinkled and I had no big plans for the day.
    “We’re feeling very psychotherapeutic this Monday morning,” I said, sitting at the table.
    “I am in the process of translating an article in German into English for a medical journal,” he explained, carefully pouring us each a cup of coffee, in clean cups he had brought in from his own room. Gunther madea comfortable living as a translator. He could handle eight languages, and business had been great since the war, most of it coming from the U.S. government.
    “To consummate this translation,” he said, after taking a delicate sip of coffee and dabbing his mouth with the napkin that he had also brought from his room, “I have had to do extensive reading in the subject. The human mind is devious, Toby.”
    “Your mind is trickier than you are, Gunther,” I admitted, after finishing the cup of coffee in one gulp and downing a biscuit with a glob of honey.
    Gunther smiled and nodded in agreement. “Yes,” he said, “the separation of mind and body. A point Jung makes. May I ask? Do you have a hanover?”
    “I don’t think so,” I said, “but you can look around. If I’ve got one you can have it.”
    “No,” he tried again. “A hanover, the aftermath of too much alcohol in the system.”
    “A hangover, you mean. Maybe a little,” I admitted, “but the coffee and biscuits help.” I popped two more into my mouth, finishing off the last of them, and gave Gunther a loopy grin. If my table manners got to him, he never let it show. A little over two years earlier I had gotten Gunther off a murder rap and not only had we become friends, but he had gotten me into Mrs. Plaut’s just as I was being thrown out of my old apartment for an excess of broken windows and flying