by Gavin Lyall
He yawned massively, showing a row of big, shabby teeth like a horse’s. ‘He rang up his wife and then went to bed in 217.’ We locked the bar, put out the lights and went back into the hall, and I leant against a wall and watched him lock the front door and tried to think what was nagging at my mind.
He turned and saw me still there and stopped, smiling vaguely, just by the wooden postbox, like a big nesting-box, hung on the wall by the bus timetables and rack of airline brochures.
I said: ‘Does the hotel have a key to that, or is it a proper post office box?’
He blinked, surprised. ‘It belongs to the hotel. Once or twice a day somebody clears it and just posts the letters in the nearest proper box.’
That sounded like Castle’s service with style, all right. ‘Open it up.’
Now he really did look surprised. ‘I think there is nothing in there …’
‘So we’ll check.’
He found the key on the big bunch and lifted the sloping lid. ‘No, nothing.’
I looked for myself. ‘All right, hand it over.’
‘What?’ The surprise was still there, but maybe a little fear behind it.
‘The letter the Professor wrote. Hand it over!’
‘But what letter?’
‘That’s why he put on a shirt. To come downstairs. And he bought the stamps off you and paid with a new 250-mil. note and it was too late for anybody to post it tonight but not too late for a fat vulture like you to remember it once the bloke was dead. I’ll bet you’d have sorted out his room, too, if that chambermaid hadn’t been there. Now either give it to me or stick around until I’ve got back Lazaros and told him my theory.’
‘It is in my room,’ he said shakily.
I jerked my head at the stairs.
He brought it down inside a couple of minutes: an ordinary long pale blue airmail envelope with a handwritten address to Pierre Aziz in Beit Mery, Beirut, Lebanon.
‘I was going to post it in the morning,’ Papa said, trying hard to get a little dignity back into his voice.
The envelope was still sealed so he might have been telling the truth except I was quite sure he wasn’t. From its thickness, it probably only held one folded piece of paper. I stuck it in my shirt pocket.
‘What are going to do?’ he asked.
‘Sleep on it. Behind a locked door.’
His expression got suddenly crafty. ‘Now why should I not tell the inspector that you have it?’
‘Because you’d still involve yourself. And because, when the going gets rough, you scare easier than I do.’
After that, I knew our relationship would never be the same again. But then, it already wasn’t.
Chapter 10
Breakfast ran long and late the next morning. I got down around ten and Kapotas was already having his first coronary of the day over the desk cash box.
‘They steal everything!’ he wailed. ‘Even a few—’
‘Don’t worry, that was me. I’ll pay you back when you pay me.’
‘I keep saying that I am not responsible for—’
‘It’s only money. And not even ours.’ I ducked into the dining-room.
Ken was the only one I knew there; no Mitzi, no Suzie and there’d been no sign of Sergeant Papa. I sat down with Ken and ordered three poached eggs and enough coffee to swim in, then started on the last of Ken’s coffee to bridge the gap. A half hangover, not the sort where you’ve got broken glass in your veins, always gives me an appetite like an opera singer.
Ken wasn’t looking so hopeful of the day. His eyes were puffy and red – you do lose your alcohol capacity – and he was morosely scratching a new pattern in an old gravy-stain on the cloth.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked. ‘Wasn’t it like it is in the women’s magazines? You’re just getting old. Lucky to be able to—’
‘Ah, shut up. I got my wick trimmed all right. It’s Bruno.’
‘You really liked him?’
‘He was a pretty nice bloke, though the competition wasn’t high, in there. I just don’t see why … and cancer patients just don’t kill themselves, anyway. Once you know you’ve only got so long to live, it seems too sweet to waste. Have you ever heard of anybody committing suicide in the condemned cell?’
‘Yes: Hermann Göring.’
‘For God’s sake … he doesn’t count. Anyway, he only beat the rope by a few hours, didn’t he?’
‘And he was a pilot.’ I don’t know why I was sounding so cheerful about it, except that it was too early to feel suicidal myself. Then my eggs arrived and I got noshed into them for a minute or two. ‘Anyway,’ I said finally, ‘he wrote a letter last night. Posted it in the box in the hall and Sergeant Papa nicked it and I nicked it off him.’
Ken was staring at me with more than the puffiness narrowing his eyes. ‘Who to? What’s it say?’
‘Bloke in Beirut. And I haven’t opened it.’ I nudged my jacket with my knife handle and the letter crackled in my pocket.
‘Keep your voice down,’ Ken said quietly. ‘The bloke at the next table’s a plainclothes jack.’
I didn’t ask how he knew, just waited for a reasonable excuse to glance sideways. A nice clean-cut thirty-year-old in a fresh white shirt and not a hotel guest unless he’d come aboard this morning. Well, it figured. If I’d been Lazaros I’d have sent somebody around to drink a few cups of coffee and keep his ears wide open. The inspector might not think there was something behind the Professor’s death, but he’d be quite sure there was something behind the Professor.
I said gently: ‘It could just be the suicide note the inspector wanted him to have left. I suppose there’s no law about posting one instead of sticking it on the mantelpiece.’
‘To somebody in Beirut? When his own daughter’s next door?’
‘Are you looking for logical behaviour in a suicide?’ I finished my last egg. ‘I suppose it’d be more proper for Mitzi to read it than for Lazaros, and he’d certainly open it, but then again – if it is a suicide note, it might cause her unnecessary grief, right?’
‘You’re achieving new standards in logical hypocrisy.’ He poured himself some of my coffee. ‘So what now?’
‘We wait until we’re alone, Josephine.’
He half grinned. The puffiness was fading and his face was taking on the old lean, shrewd alertness. He nodded briefly and leant back in the chair. ‘What happened to that girl at the Gatwick pub…’
It took five minutes before the cop decided he couldn’t go on reading his future in the bottom of the little coffee-cup and wandered out. I twitched my chair to get my back to the glass doors and slid the envelope across the table.
Ken shook his head, barely a quiver. ‘Pierre Aziz? Don’t know him.’
‘Nor me, though maybe I’ve heard something … Anyway, Beit Mery’s no refugee camp.’
‘It’s that hill with the fancy great hotel, isn’t it? The Al Boustan,’
‘That’s the place.’ I worked one fingertip in under the envelope flap. ‘Well, jog my elbow.’
He grinned, reached and bumped my aim. The envelope ripped open. ‘Dear me, it seems to have come undone …’ I unfolded the single piece of good-quality ten-by-eight writing paper with the single line Professor Doktor Bruno Spohr engraved across the top. No address; a professional travelling man. And underneath … a big slab of type-written German, ending in two signatures, one of them Spohr’s. I don’t read German much beyond ‘Bier’ and ‘Flugplatz’ and I was pretty sure Ken still didn’t either. The sheet had a slightly lop-eared, worn look; certainly older than last night. I shrugged and passed it across.
Ken frowned down at it. ‘Oh Christ, why didn’t we think of a German speaker writing in German … Das Schwert das wir in der Gruft in Akka entdeckt haben … Oh hell. Akka must be Acre, but what’s a Schwert and a Gruft?’
‘Dunno. What’s the other signature?’
‘Franz Meisler. The Prof’s assistant, maybe, it’s dated eighteen months ago; before Bruno got pinched.’ He skimmed do
wn the rest of the text. ‘There’s some dimension in here, too … what does 1003 millimetres sound like?’
‘Like just over three feet. Maybe it’s a treasure map in words: one metre north-west of the lonesome pine …’
‘Well, a suicide note it ain’t. And we’ll have to show it to Mitzi. How do we explain flow it got opened?’
‘We blame the Sergeant, of course.’
‘Stupid of me.’ He held it up. ‘You or me?’
‘You know the lady best.’
But Lazaros and his band of merry men turned up before Mitzi did. They set up at a bar table and took our formal statements in chronological order: the chambermaid finding him, Sergeant Papa confirming the finding, me arriving to reconfirm and tell Papa to get his finger out and into a telephone dial.
When I’d finished, I asked Lazaros: ‘Was it cancer?’
He thought for a moment before answering. His shirt was clean now, but his long face still looked weary. ‘Yes. The pathologist’s preliminary report says it was well advanced.’
‘So now we know.’
‘Yes. Read the statement over, please, and sign if it is correct.’
Mitzi got back from wherever as I was reading, and Lazaros called her in. She was smartly but quietly dressed in a mid-length charcoal grey skirt, short-sleeved white blouse and what looked like a small antique gold coin on a chain around her neck. She gave me a polite, pale smile as we passed in the doorway.
Ken was leaning on the counter outside; Lazaros hadn’t wanted anything formal from him. ‘Half past eleven. When’s it respectable to start drinking in this town?’
‘When the cops are out of the bar. It’s an old Cypriot custom.’
‘I was thinking more of strolling round to the Ledra.’
‘Well, unless you do it for the exercise, stop thinking. We’re busted after last night. We can’t pay for what we drink so we’ll have to drink it here.’
Kapotas came out of the office in time to get the tail-end of that, and glared at me. ‘It is all being charged in the end!’
‘Sooner or later it’s going to get cheaper to pay me and let me fly home.’
He waved a piece of paper. ‘I can do nothing until Harborne, Gough tell me … And what about the Professor? Will his daughter be able to pay? All that champagne and caviar!’
‘Delicious it was, too,’ I said, just to cheer him up. Then, to Ken: ‘How was the Professor fixed, moneywise?’
He shrugged. ‘Middling well, I’d guess. He didn’t talk about it, but I’d say he was used to living well.’
‘He’d had a year without income.’
‘True, true …’
A woman came up to the desk and said in an American accent: ‘Good morning. Is this where Professor Bruno Spohr was staying?’
We all looked at her. After a moment, Kapotas said nervously: ‘I am afraid the Professor is—’
‘I know all about that. But I think he had his daughter with him; I was wondering if I could talk with her.’
I nodded at the bar doors. ‘She’s making a statement to the police in there, but she shouldn’t be long.’
‘Why, thank you. I’m Eleanor Travis.’ And she held out a firm, slim hand.
She must have been about thirty-five, slim and a bit tall and with a general air of tautness. Something in the way the skin was pulled tight over the high suntanned cheekbones, the way she cocked her head and smiled, showing a lot of big white teeth, the cat-like precision with which she moved. Her hair was longish and blonde and a little likely to separate into straggles; she wore tight blue trousers – and had a bottom small enough for it – a blue denim shirt and a bright yellow silk neckscarf.
I said: ‘Roy Case. And this is Ken Cavitt.’ She shook his hand, too.
Then he asked: ‘Did you know Professor Spohr?’
‘I never met him, no, but I’ve heard a lot about him.’
‘Oh?’
‘I work for the Met in New York.’
‘The which?’
‘Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’m a medievalist.’
I said: ‘Forgive me asking – but how did you know where the Professor was?’
Her whole body tautened another notch. But the smile stayed. ‘It was on the radio this morning, the desk at the Ledra told me. I’d tried ringing him at a dozen hotels yesterday – including this one – and they’d all said he wasn’t staying.’
Ken and I glanced at each other and he nodded about a millimetre. It sounded reasonable.
I said: ‘He was trying to stay secret. I imagine a hotel guest is entitled to that. I suppose you didn’t—’ But then I said: ‘Skip it.’ I’d been going to ask if she’d played games with delivering those green envelopes all over town, but if she had she certainly wouldn’t admit it.
Ken said. ‘You really are from the Met, are you?’
This time the smile was long gone. Kapotas stood up straight and made worried twittering noises.
She said coolly: ‘And who are you two?’
‘He’s an old friend of the Prof’s,’ I said quickly, ‘and I’m an old friend of him. Sorry if we sound snoopy, but a man doesn’t commit suicide every day.’
‘I’d guess once is the most anybody ever did.’ Her voice was quite calm. She reached into a big shoulder bag made of fringed white buckskin, rummaged around and handed all three of us visiting cards. It said:
Eleanor Travis
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
TR9–5500.
Instinctively I ran a fingernail over the lettering to see if it was engraved. I hadn’t had cards of my own since I’d left the RAF, where all officers had to have them and they had to be engraved, to show we were gentlemen as well.
‘It’s engraved,’ Miss Travis said, voice still freeze-dried.
Ken grinned. ‘And you know? – I’d’ve said she was no gentleman.’
Her face twitched for a second, then she smiled outright.
I said: ‘Sorry again. But … other people were trying to track him down and I’m sure one did.’
Ken said sharply: ‘When was this?’
‘Last night. I found out just after I found him. Meant to tell you. Sorry.’
Miss Eleanor Travis, medievalist, asked: ‘Just what is all this?’
‘Perhaps you can tell us,’ I said. ‘You were looking for him, others were looking for him. You must have had a reason, so maybe they had the same one.’
She nibbled the idea like the first taste of some new foreign food. ‘We-ell … I’ve been researching in Rhodes the last two months and a rumour came through that Professor Spohr had been dropping hints that he had something interesting, and it sounded like he was trying to work up bids from the big museums, and I heard he was going to Cyprus so I called the director at the Met and asked if he wanted me to try and find out what it was all about.’
‘And he said Yes?’ I suggested.
She put on a slightly hesitant, artificial smile. ‘Er … how well did you know Professor Spohr?’
Ken said: ‘I met him in jail, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Normally,’ I said, ‘Ken and I only move in strictly Blue Book circles, but you can’t blame somebody for the people he meets in jail, can you?’
Her glance flicked back and forth between the two of us. ‘Ye-es,’ she said slowly. ‘Well, this is what the director said..’ She took a crumpled cable form from her Sitting Bull bag and passed it over.
Address and mistakes apart, it read:
GO CYPRUS IF YOU LIKE WILL PAY HALF EXPENSES BUT
IF WE BUY DIRECT FROM THAT OLD CROOK WILL BE
FIRST TIME KEEP US INFORMED.
Ken said: ‘Yes, I see,’ quite tonelessly, and then: ‘So you don’t know what he was hawking around?’
‘I was hoping his daughter would know – unless you do?’
He shook his head. ‘He never told me. But he had something, all right.’
Mitzi came out of the bar with Lazaros close behind. He came straight across and as
ked Kapotas: ‘Did Professor Spohr post any letters here yesterday?’
It was a clever idea, but eight hours too late. Kapotas shook his head. ‘No. I opened the box before I went home yesterday, and again this morning. Nothing.’
‘Did he make any telephone calls?’
Now why hadn’t I been that clever eight hours ago? Kapotas reached for the book beside the switchboard and ran a finger down the column. ‘Room 323 … yes, at 8.25 last night he spoke to a number in Israel, in Jerusalem.’
‘Papadimitriou put it through, did he? Why didn’t he tell me?’
‘He probably forgot in the fuss last night,’ I said soothingly. ‘He was in a pretty panicky state.’ And this was an angle where I didn’t want anybody getting rough with fragile fat old Papa.
Lazaros grunted and looked half convinced. ‘Just the number, no name, of course?’ He wrote the number down, then stared at it. ‘I can ask Papa; he probably listened in.’ And headed off to the doorstep where the Sergeant was sunning himself.
Mitzi was standing just on the edge of our little sewing circle; now she leaned timidly forward. ‘May I see the number, please?’
Kapotas shoved the book at her. She took a diary from her bag and copied it down. Ken asked: ‘Do you recognise it?’
‘No, but perhaps I can call it and ask what …’ her voice trailed off.
Ken indicated Eleanor Travis. ‘This is Miss Travis from the New York Met. She wanted to meet your father. Mitzi Braunhof, née Spohr.’
Eleanor stuck out her hand and Mitzi shook it tentatively. ‘I am sorry, but I cannot say anything about—’
Our Eleanor hadn’t come all the way from Rhodes (paying half her own expenses) for that. She said firmly: ‘I just wanted to see if the Met should put in a bid for whatever it was your father had turned up.’
When in doubt, talk money.
Mitzi frowned briefly, looked a little bothered, then shook her head. ‘I am sorry I do not know … I have not had time for his papers yet, you understand … I only know it was ein Schwert… a sword.’
Ken and I looked at each other; he recovered first. ‘Look – maybe we could all sit down for a little chat.’ He looked towards the bar, where Apostolos was just unlocking the grill, but still with a table-full of policemen comparing and arranging papers.