The Case of the Flying Donkey: A Ludovic Travers Mystery

by Christopher Bush

  Then he stopped at the door.

  “First it would be wise, would it not, to remove carefully these two atrocities, and the paper and the little nails. See M. Gallois, if it is possible, and report that there has been a discovery. There is also an expert, perhaps, who will be able to say how long it is since Braque concealed these pictures which I now take with me for examination.” He picked up one of the sprigs. “There is rust that can be seen, perhaps, under a microscope, and your people will be able to make certain tests.”

  Charles nodded. All that, he said, would be immediately arranged.

  The Boulevard San Michel crosses the Seine, and it was at the southern end that was situated the establishment of the Schifflers. It was an unpretentious place, yet through the hands of the Schifflers there probably passed more pictures of supreme quality than were handled by the rest of the big dealers combined.

  Joseph Schiffler, looking more like a rabbi than ever, was delighted to see Travers, even if he did cast more than one private glance at the pictures which an attendant brought in at Travers’s heels.

  Travers told him in confidence the whole story.

  “Ah, the affaire Braque!” he said. “One reads of it already in the papers, but not as related by you, my friend. You permit that I see these pictures?”

  Travers showed him the bull-fight. He gave a little grunt at the sight of it, and then took it to the window. His old eyes peered closely, and then from his pocket he produced a glass.

  “In your opinion it is a Goya?”

  “Unmistakably so.”

  The old man smiled dryly. “In this life there is always the possibility of mistakes. But there is something which will interest you.”

  It was not the picture he meant, but something in the book whose pages be was now turning—Antoine Rabeau’s life of Goya.

  “There is your picture,” he said, and there indeed was a photograph of the Goya that Braque had hidden. From the text Travers saw that the picture was a late work, “now in the collection of the Marquis Hautgarde.”

  “There is the explanation that you seek,” Schiffler said. “The Marquis is French, and for some years has occupied his villa at Malaga. And this war in Spain, it reached Malaga, did it not?”

  The other picture intrigued the old man still more. It was a Zurbaran, he said, and Travers was glad he had given no opinions of his own. It had been tampered with, he said, and would Travers permit calling in another member of the firm, whose opinion should be valuable.

  Travers added more explanations, He had an urgent appointment, he said, and the whole thing could be left to the discretion and at the convenience of the firm.

  “Within two hours you shall know as much as we,” Schiffler said. “Your address is?”

  Travers requested that the information should be sent direct to Gallois at the Sûreté, but he himself would take the firm’s receipt.

  “You had naturally never heard of this Braque till you read of the affaire?” Travers asked him while he was writing.

  The old man shook his head. But he would make discreet enquiries, he said, and that information should also be passed direct to M. Gallois.

  Travers had a preliminary glance through the glazed door of Cointeau’s shop, and there was Charles at work, and an anxious-looking Cointeau accompanying him. Cointeau stared at the sight of Travers.

  Travers explained that he had come in order to see that M. Cointeau was disturbed as little as possible.

  “If anyone enters,” he said, “I am at once a client, but a client who can wait. As for this gentleman here, who examines the pictures, he can be explained as a new assistant.”

  Charles took advantage of the opportunity to have a rest. It was fatiguing work, he said, hoisting off pictures and hoisting them back again. He had seen M. Gallois and given an account of the extra-ordinary discovery.

  “He was surprised?” Travers asked.

  Charles shrugged his shoulders. “It is impossible to tell. He wears a mask, that one.”

  “And our friend there?” Travers nodded in the direction of the watchful Cointeau. “He knows what you are looking for?”

  Charles said he had given him an idea and no more. It was Travers, then, who had a word with Cointeau while Charles resumed the examination of the oils. Cointeau was flabbergasted and it was with a cringing and apologetic haste that he dissociated himself from the doings of his late partner.

  “But no one associates you,” Travers assured him.

  “You permit now that I assist in this examination?” Cointeau said energetically.

  “In a minute,” Travers said. “But about this partner of yours. You will miss him?”

  Cointeau said he had already replaced him by a nephew of his own who at that very moment was out calling on the hotels and restaurants where the firm had pictures.

  “He was a good business man, this Braque?”

  Cointeau thought for a moment. Whatever the unlawful activities in which Braque had been engaged, he said, it was necessary to confess that he brought most of the business to the firm. There followed a quick reservation that such had been the case until the last year, when Braque had got into his head that idea of gold-mines.

  “You haven’t by any chance remembered anything else that he said to you about these goldmines?”

  “Yes,” said Cointeau. “This morning I remember something but it is something which does not make sense. Two or three days ago he comes here, and I am annoyed. I ask about this business and that, and he says ‘All in good time’—like that. I say that this gold-mine looks like being the end of our affairs, and then I become angry. I become sarcastic. I say, where is it, this gold-mine? Perhaps he departs soon for America or South Africa, where there are real gold-mines. Then he laughs, and what he says is this. ‘There is no reason why one should sail for America. There are gold-mines everywhere. To get to this gold-mine of my own, for instance, I take a taxi.’”

  “And then?”

  Cointeau’s shrug of the shoulders was humiliation itself.

  “And then, monsieur, he says no more. To me it was as if he knows he has said too much, and before I can speak, he waves his hand and off he goes.”

  “Take a taxi to a gold-mine,” repeated Travers reflectively. “And what do you now think about that?”

  Cointeau looked astonished. “But, monsieur, it is simple. It is to his flat that he takes the taxi, where he has hidden these pictures which have just been discovered. It is the pictures that are the goldmine.” He gave himself a nod or two of approval.

  “He was clever, was that one. He always did have the brains. I, I have the knowledge of affairs, but it is he who always had the ideas.”

  “Yes,” said Travers, “and they ended with a knife in the ribs. And now I will look round your shop while you continue the examination of the pictures.”

  In a few minutes the electric light had to be switched on. The shop itself was finished with, and by the time the upstair rooms had been gone through, it was half-past five. Nothing whatever had been discovered. Charles approached Travers for a confidential word.

  “Monsieur will allow me to depart? There is an appointment.”

  “Ah, yes.” Travers smiled dryly as he remembered the meeting with Elise. “You regale yourself at the cinema.”

  “First we eat,” Charles said.

  “And afterwards?”

  Charles grinned. “That is something which will arrange itself.”

  “And what are you posing as?”

  “I am a chauffeur-valet. Everyone has the possibilities of a valet, and I also can drive a car. Like that, one should be safe.” He gave one of his roguish looks. “I also have a fear of the police. Besides the affair of last night, there was a something else of which I am now about to work out the details.”

  Whatever the faint lingerings of indignation, Travers could no longer regard with serious disapproval that insinuation of Charles into the confidences of Elise Deschamps. Phrases like not playing the game, a
nd not cricket, seemed very British and very much claptrap when one considered that the woman was doubtless only too capable of looking after her own interests, and that Charles himself was regarding the adventure with a cynical amusement. And Gallois had certainly been right. To each country its own methods, and it was for messieurs les assassins to commence wearing kid gloves.

  He stayed for a final word with Cointeau. Had anyone at any time come in especially to see Braque? Anyone that might be now regarded as a criminal associate?

  Cointeau said there was no one. Then he recalled a someone on the morning of the murder, and from the description, Travers recognized Henri Larne. The account given by Cointeau tallied exactly with that which Larne himself had given of those guarded enquiries he had made about Braque, and Travers made no comment. Then he requested the use of the phone, and rang the Sûreté. A call from Travers had been expected, and the Inspector, he was told, would be ready for him in half an hour.

  The room was empty when Travers was shown in, but on the desk were those two atrocities in paint. Travers was having another look at them when Gallois came in. A melancholy smile was hovering about his lips, and his hand was held out.

  “A thousand felicitations, my friend. All this beneath our eyes, and it is you who make the discovery.”

  Travers said modestly it was no credit of his. He suffered from the curse of a tidy mind, and a mystery or even a peculiarity would no more let him rest than would thistles in his bed.

  “I should have known,” Gallois said, and shook his head despondently. “One does not keep atrocities without reason. But while we know that Braque was this picture smuggler whom we suspected, there is too much in which we remain in the dark. I hear from M. Schiffler that the pictures were undoubtedly removed from Spain, but I also know that the pictures which you have discovered are already for six months behind these frames.”

  “You’ve had a report already?”

  “To me it was essential that I should know at once. I am not here when you arrive because I await the report. Now that we know, we know also something else. Instead of being nearer to the moment when we apprehend the assassin, we are much farther away.”

  Travers smiled. “My dear Gallois, you’re not telling me that it’s done us harm to discover Braque’s gold-mine?”

  The lean fingers of Gallois were clawing the air impatiently.

  “Listen, my friend, and I explain. Months ago Braque mentions a gold-mine. It is then that he has his trip to Spain, and he brings back pictures which he conceals in the frames of those two atrocities. But the gold-mine is an affair of the most disappointing. He cannot dispose of the pictures and he makes therefore no more visits to Spain. And he confesses to the good Cointeau that it is a failure, this mine.

  “But a few weeks ago he mentions that second mine. And it is a mine of a character altogether different. For example, it produces dividends. Moreover, it leads to a knife in his ribs, and, my friend, one does not receive a knife in the ribs because of pictures from Spain: pictures which still remain concealed behind the atrocities.”

  Travers mentioned what Cointeau had let fall that very afternoon about Braque’s gold-mine.

  “I see it like this,” he said. “More than one person must have been concerned in the picture smuggling. Isn’t that so?”

  Gallois suavely agreed.

  “The scheme fell through,” went on Travers. “It lay dormant just as those pictures lay dormant inside those two frames. That was the end of the first gold-mine. But then Braque thought of another method of approach, and he was so sure of its success that he thought of it—and so described it to Cointeau—as a second gold-mine, even though it was only a modification of the first.

  “The scheme, I believe, was this: that he should find private buyers in England for those pictures. As a means of introduction he decided to use the name of Larne. He therefore made some study of Larne’s pictures, in order to be able to answer questions, and—remember this—he didn’t want to buy any Larnes. He merely hinted at a possible client in the future. The reason he chose the name of Larne was that he was with him at the Académie Poussin, which would sound very convincing.”

  “He mentioned to you in London this Académie Poussin?”

  “No,” said Travers ruefully. “That was one of his trump cards to be used only in case of necessity. He regarded me as so very likely a victim that he hadn’t need to play his trumps.”

  “Very well,” said Gallois. “Let us admit all this. But how does it bring us nearer to the assassin of this Braque?”

  “In this way,” Travers told him. “The first gold-mine had failed, and the associates of Braque were becoming anxious. They began to think he was playing some double game, and it was one of them who killed him. For instance, this one who killed him—our assassin, in fact—became aware that Braque had money, and he drew the only possible conclusion—that Braque had double-crossed the gang·”

  “Then one commences all over again—”

  The buzzer went at his elbow, and he picked up the receiver.

  “Good,” he said, and repeated the word with a nod of satisfaction. “Ask him to have the goodness to wait for five minutes only.”

  His smile, as he turned to Travers, was so less mournful that it almost amounted to the hilarious.

  “At last something arrives. It is not much, but it is something. Already I have ascertained who it is that are the acquaintances of Braque, and this afternoon I interrogate them here. But they are acquaintances and not—what you say?—partners in crime. They know nothing of his private affairs; even this good Olivier, who is the picture framer for the firm. But it emerges that this Olivier was with Braque until just before he was murdered. In order to exonerate himself, he makes, at my suggestion, certain enquiries. I go now to see what it is that he has discovered. Without doubt you wish to come also?”

  “Without the slightest doubt,” smiled Travers, and got at once to his feet.

  CHAPTER IX

  TRAVERS IS PUZZLED

  WHAT Travers was soon to gather was this. The firm of Olivier which did the picture framing for Braque and Cointeau, had their shop within a hundred yards of Braque’s shop, but it was at the Café Wagram, some way along the Boulevard Bastide, where Braque and Olivier used to meet. But not necessarily on business. The meetings were rather of that sociable quality, at the accustomed hour of five o’clock, and there was a small circle which would assemble for an early aperitif and a chat.

  On the afternoon of Braque’s murder, only three of the friends came to the Café Wagram, and just before half-past five, Braque and Olivier were left alone. At half-past Braque suddenly caught sight of the time and said he would have to fly. A quick handshake, and he was hailing a taxi.

  Gallois had put two men at the disposal of Olivier, and it was the taxi-driver who was waiting at the Café Wagram. He confirmed that it was at half-past five that he had picked up the fare, who had said he was in a great hurry. Then something rather strange happened. The taxi was held up, and the driver turned to Braque and protested that the fault was not his. Braque, who had been in such a hurry, now shrugged his shoulders, and he made use of an extraordinary phrase which the driver insisted was: “Let the bastard wait!”

  The implications were obvious. At the rue Jourdoise Braque was meeting somebody whom he would have liked to meet on time, but on the other hand he had so little respect for that somebody that he was indifferent whether or not he waited in the cold and drizzle outside the flat door. Braque had most certainly therefore not gone to the flat to meet Travers.

  Gallois thanked Olivier and had a last word with him. He was still sure that Braque had received no telephone message at the café? Olivier was positive. He had been in Braque’s company for the half-hour and Braque had never left his seat.

  “And how long was it that your vehicle was held up?” Gallois asked the driver.

  “Five minutes, perhaps,” he said. “After that one travels quick, and one regains a minute.”
r />   “Drive us to where you set the fare down,” Gallois said, “and try to travel at the same speed. It is I who will make allowances for the wait.”

  It was about a hundred metres short of the rue Jourdoise that the driver stopped. Gallois made the time nine minutes in all. Then, when the driver was dismissed, he began walking towards Braque’s flat.

  “It will be better to talk there,” he said. “One has there the atmosphere, and for those of the sensibility of ourselves that is an essential, is it not?”

  A gendarme was still on duty at the back stairs. The flat struck damp and chill, and the living-room seemed curiously more bare without those two garish pictures. Gallois lit the gas stove. Travers, feeling somewhat leg-weary, took a chair. Gallois prowled restlessly about the room.

  “You’re still not happy about things?” Travers said.

  Gallois anchored himself for a minute or two by Travers’s chair.

  “One does not arrive yet at the moment in which to be happy. But we achieve something that is not without interest. At five-forty Braque arrives here, and, unhappily, it is before I myself arrive. He admits the assassin, with whom he has the rendezvous, or perhaps the assassin admits himself, and kills Braque over there, when he enters. The assassin takes money, papers, everything and at once he is gone.” He raised hands of exasperation. “He had luck, that one. Five minutes later and we should have followed him.”

  “And where does this get us to?”

  Gallois came back again.

  “Gently, my friend. It is necessary to think slowly. But it is not you that Braque comes here to meet. I tell you that before, on account of the shaving. Now also there are other ideas it is necessary to change. One does not telephone Braque to come in a hurry to the flat. All the day, perhaps, he knows that he will meet the assassin here. And therefore, my friend, you are not concerned at all.”

  “But I was concerned,” insisted Travers. “Haven’t we agreed that the assassin arranged for me to meet Braque here at six o’clock?”