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Berlin. And there was a small metal strongbox, nothing pretentious … but it was locked and I left it alone.” She stopped and looked at me quizzically.
    “Go on, Paula. How did Cyril get into it?”
    “Cyril. Yes, all right. Cyril got into it because he calls me every week, no matter where he is—Europe, Africa, anywhere. A couple of weeks ago it was Cairo, before that Munich, before that Glasgow, London … every week I get a long distance call and it’s Cyril. Last week he called me from Buenos Aires and I told him about what I’d found. …”
    “What did he say?” I was hypnotized by her recital.
    “It was strange,” she said, remembering. “First he laughed for a long time and when I asked him why he was laughing he said that it was all very funny because life was so carefully constructed, detail upon detail.” She thought back: “Yes, detail upon detail. And then he gave me some instructions. He said I shouldn’t mention it to anyone. No one at all.” She lit a cigarette and sat down opposite me in the squeaky wooden swivel chair.
    “Did he say anything else?”
    “Only that he’d get in touch with you and that he’d be back here in Cooper’s Falls this week. He said he’d be talking to me in person and he said something else. He said that it was no surprise to him … but he didn’t say what it was.”
    I puffed my pipe and she said it was comforting to watch me puff my pipe and I said everyone should have a crutch. She laughed. “What do you think he meant?”
    We could hear the town clock chiming noon, muffled in the snow.
    “Life is so carefully constructed, detail upon detail. … Well, I’m damned if I know,” I said. “But apparently whatever you found, and God only knows what it means, it fitted with some theory of his. But why was he in Buenos Aires? And why didn’t he get here on the twentieth?”
    “The snow,” she said. “That’s the logical explanation.”
    “Yes, of course it is. The snow.” I tamped the ash. “Can you come out to lunch?”
    She smiled. “I’ve got to finish my day’s work. I’m very compulsive.”
    “Well, why don’t I stop back before I go to the house? You can come with me. We’ll surprise him together.”
    “All right.”
    “Did he say anything else?”
    “Only what he always says.”
    “And what’s that?”
    “That he loves me, John.”

Eight
    M Y HEAD WAS ACHING WHERE the man in the sheepskin coat had clubbed me. When I left the library I walked back up Main Street, feeling snow blowing in my face. Trying to sort through what Paula Smithies had told me was making my head worse, so I climbed the steps to Doctor Bradlee’s office over the drugstore. My childhood overtook me again as I smelled the antiseptic aroma I remembered so well. Everything was like that, full of emotional responses.
    Doctor Bradlee’s fingers pressed against the soft, squishy swelling underneath the thick layer of hair. I winced.
    “Aha, that hurts, does it?” He had acted as if I’d been in for a visit just last week. He was an old man now, seventy something, but tremendously composed: bald, well over six feet, a serge suit and vest, plain gold cufflinks, nose like a banana, and piercing, intelligent eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles. He breathed softly, always spoke with a very faint intimation of a smile at the corners of his thin-lipped mouth. Harry Bradlee had seen a great deal in his time.
    He probed some more with his fingertips. “Looks as if somebody hit you with a … poker, perhaps? Heavy and sharp enough to break the skin. Nasty, but I expect you’ll be all right. Any vomiting? Recurring nausea? You’d better tell me how this happened.”
    As I did, he finished attending to the wound, scratched out a prescription, and arranged himself carefully behind his desk. Through the window I could see that snow was falling hard again. He listened, leaning back, watching me, hands anchored around the arms of the chair.
    “You didn’t report this to the