by Adrian Speed
“It would be...” Sylvain sighed and puffed at his cigar. He fixed me with a long stare while the smoke curled around his mouth. “It would be politically unwise of me to be anywhere else.”
“Even at home?”
“I am a proud member of the French Communists.” Sylvain said at last. “And I refuse to support that German Anarchist Danny Cohn-Bendit. His commitment to communism rings hollow. His workers’ councils are tyrants, and his rioters teeter on the edge of becoming the new SS.” Sylvain tapped his knee for a moment and then continued. “I weighed the situation carefully. I do not believe these students have the stomach to overthrow the government by force and it is force that will be required. It is well known amongst my peers that I am a communist and I have entertained the notion of entering politics when I tire of toiling in academia. I want my peers to believe that I spent the entirety of May and possibly even June sat in this archive, unpicking my great theorem.”
“And your wife doesn’t mind you spending all your time here?”
“Unlikely. She died last year,” Sylvain said. No hint of emotion, no twitch or tremor, it was just another fact.
“I’m sorry, I just thought, I mean, your ring,” I gabbled as I tried to apologise but Sylvain didn’t react. He remained as stoic as a statue.
“I think about taking it off every day,” Sylvain said. “But it is curious how you get attached to pieces of yourself. It was supposed to symbolise my attachment to her and now she has gone I still struggle to remove it.”
Would a man so cold even get married? Whose memory of his wife didn’t inspire even a flicker of sorrow? If it was a cover story of some kind it strained credulity. I thought about how often I had seen him fiddle with his ring, how often he itched to be rid of it and yet unable to throw it away.
Could that cold and calculating mind have turned to the theft of the treaty? He didn’t seem to have any motive, but none of them had any motive. No-one had any motive. It was just a dusty old piece of vellum that was superseded within a year of being written. It had been put in the archives to be forgotten, not conserved. Nobody in their right minds would want it.
All I had to go on was opportunity and evidence. Right now Sylvain had the knowledge to bypass the alarm and the opportunity to steal it and that was all. But there was hardly an overabundance of evidence to start with.
“Do you really believe it was one of us?” Sylvain asked after I fell silent.
“It has to be one of you. None of the exterior alarms have been bypassed or breached and setting up the alarm bypass on the door took more time than another thief would have had,” I said. “Etienne and Adélie were going back and forth from the archive once every half-hour. To study and bypass the alarm mechanism would take hours. It had to have been someone here. Someone Adélie and Etienne would have seen around the archives.”
“Well, it only takes one open window for a thief to bypass even the most high tech security,” Sylvain shrugged.
Was that a confession? No. It had just been an offhand remark. Which meant either Sylvain had slipped in another way or he hadn’t been the one to pass the documents out the window in the cleaner’s room. It didn’t matter if he wanted to bluff, double bluff or triple bluff, there was no way Sylvain would ever allude to an open window if he’d actually used it.
Meaning the only one left was Walter Beauregard. Walter Beauregard. What did he have to gain from the theft of the treaty? Why would he turn to crime? Surely he couldn’t risk extradition to the United States? He’d be out in Saigon before the end of June.
Though of everyone I’d met he’d been the most forthcoming with his secrets. He’d laid them in front of me right at the start and I’d never thought to question them further. Perhaps that was exactly what he’d been counting on.
But I needed more. I needed something that would pin him to the room. The process of elimination left him as the only choice but the process of elimination doesn’t tend to hold up very well in court.
“How well do you know Walter Beauregard?” I asked.
“Before he helped me with the percolator I had not met him,” Sylvain said. He puffed the last life out of his cigar and placed it in an ashtray. “He speaks French very well; I can see why the university made him a doctoral candidate.”
“You seemed quite friendly when I came in,” I said.
“Small talk,” Sylvain shrugged. “A simple skill. He complimented me on my suit, I complimented him on his, we talked about the difficulties he has finding a good suit because of his allergy to cotton and then you arrived.”
“Wait, he’s allergic to cotton?”
“He claims it makes him break out in hives.” Sylvain noticed my agitation. “Is that a problem?”
A smile started to spill across my face.
“How can he touch archive documents if he’s allergic to cotton gloves?”
“Latex gloves? Like a surgeon.”
“And how do they lubricate latex gloves?” I leapt to my feet and started running for the door.
“Er, I don’t know,” Sylvain struggled to catch up with me as I fled the room. “How?”
“Cornstarch!”
*****
At first I ran up the stairs back to the examination room two at a time, but as I climbed adrenaline started to fade and my rational mind started to kick in. I needed confirmation for everything, logical progress of events and I needed proof Walter had gone in the room, donned his latex gloves and left the cornstarch as silent witness. I needed Walter to feel trapped, to want to cooperate and give up his co-conspirator.
If I just burst in and started throwing accusations around with what I had now there was no way any of it would stick. Walter would run out the clock of the riots and his co-conspirator would escape with the treaty without any hope of us tracking him down. I needed Walter to want to tell me.
So when I strode back into the examination room I didn’t leap straight towards an accusation and it paid off in spades.
“Ooh you fixed my percolator, aren’t you a dear.” The cleaner had emerged from her flat with an old fashioned vacuum cleaner. It was brand new now, I thought. Currently her thick, robust arms were locked around Walter Beauregard giving him a bear hug. “You’ll have to come back to my flat and have another reward. He’s been such a help,” she added to the room.
Another reward, I thought.
I smiled, nodded to the others in the room and headed to Sir Reginald in the archive room. He was deep in study with the Arnold family documents. However, it provided me with an opportunity to get a good look at the alarm bypass.
There was a number plate in the corner of every door in the archive. It was only a small piece of printed acrylic that allowed the archivists to know where they were and where they needed to be. It also hid the mechanism for the alarms from prying eyes. On the door to the archive room here the acrylic was very, very slightly further away from the wood and electric components had been hidden inside and behind it. How Sir Reginald had been able to see it at a glance was beyond me.
“Clever, isn’t it?” Sir Reginald looked up from the tablet. “They’d have been able to build the bypass in another room, or possibly even another building and then easily slot it into place while Etienne and Adélie were down in the basement.”
“It can’t last forever though, can it?”
“No, its battery would keep the alarm bypassed for I would wager three days.” Sir Reginald shrugged slightly to suggest this was only a loose guess. “In ideal circumstances that would be more than enough time to make your excuses and leave without arousing suspicion.”
“But our American friend had only limited time,” I said, very softly.
“Ah,” Sir Reginald nodded, in understanding. He did not seem surprised.
“I need to trap him.”
“To elicit his accomplice,” Sir Reginald nodded again. “Then by your leave, I’ll follow your lead.”
I walked back into the common room and tried to blast out the same non
-specific suspicion I had when I had first seen the assembled academics so that when I rounded on Walter Beauregard he had no reason to suspect I had honed in on him. He had collapsed his house of cards into a game of solitaire.
“Walter, I’m afraid it’s your turn,” I said and indicated the makeshift examination room.
“We all have to take our lumps sometime.” Walter scooped up his cards and rolled out of his chair. One by one we squeezed into the small room made somewhat more difficult by Walter’s natural propensity to sprawl.
“Before we begin the interview,” I said when the door to the common room was finally closed. I spoke in English to try and keep him comfortable. “I’d like to check your identity documents, if I may.”
“Passport.” Walter rolled his eyes as he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the small blue booklet. “Visa’s inside,” he added as I flipped through it. It was much as I expected, baby boomer, born in Columbus, Ohio. His passport photograph hid a scowl he did not carry in person.
“And your draft deferral?” I asked.
“Christ, you’re worse than the gendarmes,” Walter rummaged in his jacket again and brought out a battered piece of A4. “That’s only a xerox copy. I keep the real one safe at home. Assuming the rioters haven’t trashed it, of course.” He tossed it over. I unfolded it and ran my eyes over the form. A typewriter had filled in the form with all the essential information and Walter Beauregard’s signature adorned the bottom along with the draft board clerk’s.
“And you’ve been classified S-2 since you turned 18?”
“Oh yeah,” Walter nodded. “Ohio State, class of ’65, and again for my master’s degree. I was a local boy, I had good grades. It wasn’t hard to get in.” He held out his hands for the return of his documents but I kept them with me, shifting between them.
“So after never leaving the city you were born in you decided to up sticks, cross the Atlantic and study in France?”
“Who wouldn’t want to come to Paris if they got the chance?” Walter said, still holding out his hand for his ID. “There’s no way my family had the money to pay for a flight, but my professor had the ear of the professor here and put in a good word for me.”
“Quite the coincidence you happened to be nearly fluent in French.” I scooped up his documents but didn’t hand them back.
“Sir Reginald,” I turned to him and passed Walter’s documents to him. “Would you mind asking the director for a phone and verifying Mr Beauregard’s documents?”
“Certainly,” Sir Reginald let the tablet droop and took Walter’s ID.
“What?” Walter snorted. “It’ll be two in the morning in the States.”
“Ah but the beauty of Alexander Graham Bell’s invention is that it rings at any time, day or night,” Sir Reginald wagged a finger as he left the room.
“He’s going to waste a lot of time listening to the wrong side of a ringing phone,” Walter said as he watched the door close behind Sir Reginald. “Does he have a stick up his butt or is that just an English thing?”
“It’s definitely unique to him,” I said, thinking back to the hawking roving masses of twenty-first century London. “So, what use is there for French in Ohio?”
“I happened to be very good at French,” Walter shrugged. “And I kept it up in case because if I ever lost my deferment I could try and get work as a translator behind the scenes instead of a grunt. They speak French as a second language over in Vietnam, not English.”
“That’s a lot of work to avoid Vietnam. Most Americans seem pretty keen to get out there and serve their country.”
“Most Americans don’t have two brain cells to rub together,” Walter growled. “Look, I’m no pinko-sympathiser but I’m not going to go and get shot in some Vietnamese swamp just so Lyndon B. Johnson can feel good about the size of his... johnson. What did we do when Hungary was invaded? Nothing. What did we do when East Germany was taken? Nothing. What did we do when Mao took China? Nothing. So why does it matter that Korea and Vietnam might go commie? Why does it matter Cuba went commie? Because they used to be ours. American and European. It doesn’t matter that they’re dictatorships, it doesn’t matter they’re communist. Our politicians are petulant because our good little puppet states turned their back on us. And I refuse to die for that like all those poor dolts who waved the flag and died in Korea, the Bay of Pigs and Hanoi.”
“That speech must convince a lot of people,” I said. “It probably wins over any of the other self-righteous intellectuals who think you’re a coward. But it doesn’t convince me.” Walter glared back with hard, imperceptible eyes. Slowly one hand crawled up his neck to rub the back of his head. “I think you just saw too many people go off to Vietnam and not come back. And worse, you saw the state of some of those who did come back.”
“Well whatever,” Walter rolled his shoulders and I knew I’d hit the nail on the head. “It doesn’t matter anyway. Another two months and I’ve won. I turn twenty-four and the draft board can’t touch me.”
“Congratulations,” I said and tried to sound sincere. I changed the subject. “So you studied history at Ohio State?”
“Eventually,” Walter shrugged. “I wasted a lot of time as a freshman.”
“Is that where you learnt how to repair percolators?”
“If a man can’t be handsome, he should at least be handy,” Walter smiled and spread his arms wide in self-deprecation. “I don’t like paying for someone else to fix things, whether it’s my car, my faucets or my percolators.”
“Though you hardly leapt at the opportunity earlier.”
“Eh, Sylvain looked like he wanted first crack at it.”
“Do you know Sylvain well?”
“Seen him around a bit, last few days,” Walter shrugged. “Man in a suit that nice sticks out. Didn’t know his name before though.”
“You like a good suit?”
“Who doesn’t?” Walter said, ignoring the fact his own cream suit wouldn’t be high on anyone’s list of good suits.
“So you’re here to study the French and Indian War?” I changed the subject back to more prescient details.
“Sure am.”
“Which war was that?”
“The one between Britain and France for control of North America, 1756–1758?” he prompted me but my expression stayed blank. “What do they teach in Canada?” he said, throwing a hand up to the sky in exasperation. “It was part of the Seven Years War.”
“Oh that war,” I said, memory dawning. “So you’d be working fairly close to where the Treaty of Fontainebleau was kept.”
“Closer than the rest, I guess,” Walter shrugged. “It was still a long way down the corridor.”
“Do you remember seeing anyone acting suspiciously around the room where the treaty was kept?”
“No, not especially.”
Of course not, I thought. Because you were the one acting suspiciously. And here come the lies.
“Although I saw Adélie run past a few times,” Walter said. “Without Etienne.”
“Never forget the face of a pretty girl, huh?” I suggested.
“Never forget the face of a commie.” Walter glared. “Dunno what she was doing. Didn’t think twice about it until after the treaty was stolen. But she could have used it to lift the treaty.”
“That is certainly a concern,” I said. “What about Sylvain?”
“Sylvain?” Walter rolled the name around in his mouth as if it was gristle. Spit or swallow the gristle, condemn or indemnify Sylvain.
“I’m really struggling to pin down Sylvain’s movements.” I pushed Walter a little more. “By his own admission, no-one can say where he was when the treaty was stolen.”
“Got a feeling I saw him stalk past,” Walter nodded. “You never miss that shiny silk waistcoat. Didn’t know who he was at the time of course.” I let the silence draw on and Walter filled it. “I didn’t check the time or anything, but he must have gone past my window not twenty minutes before the
treaty was stolen.”
“You’re sure?” I tried to contain my excitement.
“Certain,” Walter said, taking my excitement for a sign he had deflected suspicion onto Sylvain.
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” I said, lowering my voice. “I hear he’s a member of the Communist party,” I whispered. “Not Cohn-Bendit, but the true communists. One step from the Soviets.”
“There you are then!” Walter slapped the table.
“Of course.” I put my head on one side. “The same person who told me that also told me you were allergic to cotton.”
“I... what?” Walter’s elation froze.
“Are you, allergic to cotton?” I asked. “I mean, if this source was right about Sylvain he’d be right about you, wouldn’t he?”
“Well, uh, yeah, I am allergic to cotton,” Walter tried to rally. “Hence the suit. Polyester shirt, silk lining, wool jacket.”
“How allergic?”
“The moment I touch cotton I break out in hives,” Walter said. “Red blisters like golf balls, but, but... but who told you that?”
“Sylvain,” I said with a grin. “Who also admitted he was a member of the Communist party. He was quite forthcoming really.”
“So why... do you...” Walter’s mouth gabbled while his brain started to realise the smartest thing it could do was shut up.
“How do you touch the historic documents if you’re allergic to the cotton gloves everyone else wears, Walter?” I just wanted him to admit it with his own mouth. “Tell me what you wear instead.”
Walter leant back in his chair tensing as he did so. I felt my hackles rise and prepared to leap after him if he bolted. Then he broke into a broad smile and slumped back.
“You haven’t got anything that’ll stick,” Walter shook his head. “And there’s no way the police will investigate based on what you’ve got. You can try to stick this on me, but you haven’t got a lick of real, actual proof.”
As I tried to marshal my final salvo of accusations to blast a confession out of him the door to the examination room opened with a click. Sir Reginald slid inside. I looked up into his grey eyes and they glinted with reassurance.