"Yeah?" Cash grinned. "I'm just getting started. Got so much going today that I won't have time for it all. Been driving Beth crazy."

He glanced at his watch. "Fifteen minutes. And I've still got a call to make." He had come near forgetting O'Lochlain again.

"I'll catch you in the courtroom, then. It's twelve, in Kiel."

"Right. Nice to see you again, Teri." He chuckled as John hurried her away before she could strike up a conversation. She began giving him hell before they were out of earshot.

The Fates were conspiring to make him late today. After finally getting change from the blind couple who ran the courts building canteen, he found the phones tied up. He got through to O'Lochlain barely in time.

"Hey, Rookie. I'd given up on you. I'm on my way to the club now."

Couldn't be too bad, being retired, Cash thought. Phone in his car yet. "I won't tie you up long, Tommy. Remember what we talked about last time?"

"O'Brien?"

"Right. I wanted to go over some things again. Especially the twenty thousand. That ever turn up?"

"No."

"Not even one bill?"

"Not a one."

"How much looking did they do?"

"Plenty. They covered every step he took from the train to the girl friend's house. It disappeared when he did."

It seemed to Cash that, for twenty-thousand 1921 dollars, rough riders like Egan's Rats would not have balked at manhandling Miss Groloch. "Anybody talk to the woman?"

There was a long silence.

"I take it they did. Come on, Tommy. What's to worry now?"

"I wasn't in town, so I don't know the details. The bet was that they got the cash and decided to vacation."

"Who?"

"The two guys they finally sent in a couple weeks later. Only, when they never turned up, they sent a couple more to make sure."

"Four men? You mean a whole gang disappeared there?"

"Five-guys if you count O'Brien. It was so spooky that after that they couldn't get nobody to go ask the questions."

"Four more. Jesus. How come you didn't tell me before?"

"You didn't ask. You got to ask, Rookie. Anyway, you was just interested in O'Brien. Look, we're coming to the club. I got to go."

"Do me a favor. Just one more. Drop me a postcard. Just four names on it. Okay?"

"I'll think about it. Watch yourself, Rookie." He hung up before Cash could respond.

Norman first ascribed the disturbance to the chili. Then he remembered a time when his stomach had felt the same with nothing in it at all.

He was sitting in a peasant shack in eastern France on December 17, 1944, supposedly safely behind the lines. He had been in France just two weeks. Somehow, during the night, he had lost his first patrol and himself. Exhausted, he had decided to hole up till morning before trying to find his unit.

The only evidences of war were an abandoned German field telephone and a tiny wood stove the Krauts had made from a fuel can.

A nagging sound from afar wakened him, a growling, metallic cling with overtones of squeak. Twice he tore himself away from the stove to look out across winter at nothing but skeletal, distant woods. The sky was so heavily overcast that nothing was in the air, and few shadows stalked the earth below. The third time he looked he saw the vague shapes of the winter-camouflaged Tigers and Panthers. The Fifth Panzer Army was on the move.

The feeling was terror. Stark, unreasoning terror.

Five men had vanished without a trace. He and John could have gone the same way…

"Hey, buddy, you going to fart around all day?"

He realized he had been staring into nothing for several minutes, reliving the past. He glanced at his watch. "Shit." He was late already and still had two blocks to walk. "I'm really sorry."

"Yeah. Sure."

The assistant prosecuting attorney scowled as Cash slipped into the pewlike courtroom bench next to John. The man was one of the young firebreathers, bound for political glory. The judge, defense attorney, and court staff barely glanced his way. The jury and other witnesses paid him no heed either.

"Anything happened?" he whispered.

"Still making speeches." John handed him a manila envelope. It contained two-dozen Xeroxes of classified pages, Personals. The key item on each had been circled in red magic marker.

Most began with a cryptic, "Thanks to St. John Nepomuk for favors received," and a date, followed by two or three vaguely religious and completely uninformative lines.

Nepomuk? Wasn't that a Czech saint? Cash asked himself. There was a Czech Catholic church at Twelfth and Lafayette dedicated to him. Why would a German, especially one who showed no religious inclinations in her home, be invoking a Czech saint?

Wait. Parts of Czechoslovakia… the Sudetenland, Bohernia. That had been Hitler's excuse for invading Czechoslovakia-to liberate the German minority. People who spoke German, anyway. In fact, Czechoslovakia as a country only went back to the First World War, didn't it?

What was it before that? Part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But the part called Bohemia had been an independent kingdom once. Prague was the capital. Hadn't there been a Mad King Ludwig once? No, he had been king of Bavaria. Hadn't he? Or was that Leopold? No, that was in Belgium…

There were times when he wished he knew more. About everything.

"The dates are important," John whispered.

Teri had gone to the bother of typing up a catalog list. Most of the dates, the earlier ones, were at regular six month intervals. But since March there had been four, at erratic intervals. Cash reread those ads. He couldn't see where they varied significantly from the others, but their publication seemed timed to his encounters with Miss Groloch.

"How'd she put them in?"

John grinned. "Through her accountants. I did a little number on them this morning. Had to stretch the truth a little and hint that we were on a narcotics case. The boss finally admitted that he got his instructions by phone."

"But she doesn't have one."

"There's an outside pay phone at the service station at Russell and Thurman. Only two blocks. She called the man at home, late at night."

Cash laid a hand on John's arm. Both prosecutor and judge were eying them in irritation. "Later."