“It has been more than three weeks!” Levesque went on. He looked as though he wanted to loosen his collar. “Do you know who it is who has been killed?”
Benedetti nodded slowly. He seemed to do everything slowly. Ron had decided long ago that was in compensation for the speed of the old man’s brain. Benedetti had been training Ron for years (“You are at least not averse to the notion of thinking,” the Professor had said) but Gentry still sometimes had trouble keeping up.
Like now, for instance. Ron had known a half hour ago that the old man was going to send this Levesque packing, along with Pecson, the U.S. State Department man he’d brought with him. So why was he still stringing them along?
Ron suppressed a sigh. The only way to find out the answer was to wait and see. He settled back in his chair to watch the show. He wished he had a bag of popcorn.
“I make it a practice,” Benedetti said, “to keep myself informed of the events of the world. The victim was Herr Professor Doctor Hans Goetz of Hamburg, a prominent astronomer.”
“Prominent?” Levesque echoed. “Doctor Goetz was among astronomers what Niccolo Benedetti is among detectives!”
Oops, Ron thought. That was a mistake.
The Professor’s chair creaked as he leaned forward across his desk. “I am not,” he said distinctly, “a detective. I am a philosopher.”
Mr. Pecson of the State Department, a little gray man in glasses, spoke for the first time since they’d all said hello. “I’m sure Monsieur Levesque meant no offense.”
Benedetti ignored him. “I am,” he said, “one of the few genuine philosophers left in the world. I do not devote a computer and the time of four graduate students to the enumeration of every possible use of the word ‘but.’ I, and a few others, concern ourselves with the basic issues of philosophy: What is real? How can we know? And what are we to do about it?”
“If I may say so,” Pecson began, determined to say it whether he got permission or not, “with the number of your world-famous investigations—including the HOG murders right in this very city—a person might be forgiven for thinking—”
Benedetti smiled again. “Was I scolding? My apologies, Monsieur Levesque, Mr. Pecson. I did not mean to scold. I was attempting only to clarify. While it is true that my colleagues and I—” he gave Ron a quick bless-you-my-son look “—have occasionally helped bring evil men to justice, as far as I am concerned, it is simply a by-product of my true work.”
The Professor’s voice grew softer. “I study human evil, Monsieur Levesque. Where it comes from, what it does to the evildoer and to those who know him, and how it is to be resisted. I have studied this topic for more than half a century, and I am still not ready to publish my findings.”
“But you do investigate crimes,” Levesque insisted.
Benedetti shrugged inside his baggy tweed suit. “To study evil, you must confront evil men and women. Such do not line up at your desk to grant interviews. Sometimes, they must be sought. While I feel it proper, I seek them.”
“I assure you, Professor, this is a proper occasion to use your genius.”
“It may be so,” Benedetti conceded. “But you have still come to me too soon.”
Looking at Levesque, Ron could tell that the Frenchman had reached the point of wondering exactly how he’d gotten on this merry-go-round, and wanting desperately to think of a way off. Ron could sympathize; the Professor had often had that effect on him, too.
Levesque’s eyes lit up. He’d thought of something. “Let me ask you this, Professor. Do you not believe the Olympique Scientifique Internationale to be a good thing?”
“I believe anything that encourages men and women to use their brains constructively to be good.”
“I shall not even insult you by asking you if you think murder is evil. In this case, we have not only a murder, but a murder, and an attack on another scientist—”
“You have not told me of this.”
“It was a detail the police are saving. I understand they do that to screen false confessions. Does that knowledge make a difference?”
“It may.”
“Then I am indeed sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. In any event, these incidents are jeopardizing a project that I believe, and the baron believes, has been of great symbolic good to mankind, and may be a great deal more than that. Is that not evil? Does not every second that passes with the killer at large increase the harm done? How can you say we have come too soon?”
“Because of your attitude. You are too used to wielding the power of an enormously wealthy man. You have walked into the home of my friends and colleagues, in which I have the honor to be a guest, and you begin by telling me I will fly here, I must do this, it would be best if I said the other to the press.
“Monsieur Levesque, when I engage to seek out a malefattore, I do not accept what others tell me. I do not negotiate. I state my requirements, and if they are met, I then use the brain il buon Iddio has given me.”
Ron could see Levesque relax. Just eat a little crow, or the French equivalent thereof, he had to be thinking, and this was in the bag.
“My apologies, Professor, I did not realize.” The Frenchman gave the impression of bowing to the Professor without actually bending much more than a fraction of an inch. “I believe I can speak for the baron when I say you have simply to state your requirements, and they will be met.”
It was a struggle, but Ron kept himself from grinning. Now, Benedetti would hit them up for his fee, and Levesque would come back with something about how can you put such a price on human life, and Benedetti would get huffy and—
“Va bène. I hope you can meet them. In this case, I will waive my usual fee.”
Ron turned a startled exclamation into a cough. This was unprecedented. Ordinarily, Benedetti charged so much money it took whole towns to hire him. He told everyone it was a mark of the community’s sincerity in asking his help, that the money itself didn’t matter.
To be honest, Ron had to admit that that might even be the truth. Nobody, as far as Ron knew, had ever caught the Professor actually spending any money, but the old man didn’t seem particularly excited about bringing it in, either. As long as he had food, shelter, books, paints, brushes, and canvas, he was happy. He never seemed to care much about what happened to the money once he got it. Ron’s wife, Janet, in addition to being a psychologist and a former musical prodigy, was a whiz with figures. She handled the Professor’s finances as well as hers and Ron’s. As far as the old man knew, Janet could be robbing him blind—he never so much as asked to see a bank statement.
Still, in all the years Ron had known the old man, that huge fee had been sacrosanct. There were only two possibilities—Benedetti’s mind was going, or he was up to something.
“I do this,” Benedetti went on, “because I deduce from the presence of Mr. Pecson that my adopted country would like me to do this.”
Pecson looked a little sheepish. “Baron Benac is a great friend of the United States,” he said. “We owe him a favor or two.”
Benedetti laughed. “Then I am drafted,” he said. “After I fled Italy to avoid Mussolini’s army all those years ago. Va bène.”
The Professor was serious again. “That will be fine for me—I would require only my expenses. But what of my colleagues?”
“Well, of course their expenses would be met, too.”
“It is more than that. Mr. Gentry is a private investigator. He has his business in this city; he would have to leave it to accompany me. His wife, Dr. Higgins, has her practice and her classes at the university. I could not ask them to come without compensation, and I cannot function properly without them.”
“The baron will make up for their loss of income. He is already doing so for the residents of Mont-St.-Denis. How much will be required?”
Benedetti proceeded to name a fee so high, Ron was almost embarrassed.
Levesque didn’t bat an eyelash. “Of course,” he said.
“Each,” the Profe
ssor added.
Levesque simply nodded.
Ron shook his head in admiration, not even caring if Levesque or the diplomat saw him. So that’s what the old sinner had been up to. He waives his own fee, to look like Signor Generosità, then uses Ron and Janet as an excuse to bring a ton of money into the household. It would be a long time before the Professor had to worry about where the next tube of paint was coming from.
“You will find them worthy of their hire,” the Professor said. “I trust and depend upon them without limit. But there is one more thing, and I fear it might be the most difficult condition of them all.”
“What is that?”
“I require the full cooperation of the local authorities.”
Pecson of the State Department cleared his throat. “Surely, Professor, you don’t mean you wish to tell the police how to conduct their investigation,” he said.
“No. But I do expect them not to interfere with my investigation. At times, I have worked closely with the authorities; other times, my work has paralleled theirs. But if I need a car, I expect a car. If I wish to question a witness or examine any evidence or visit a crime scene, I do not want the witness or the evidence or the scene to be inaccessible to me.”
“Professor,” Levesque began, “I assure you—”
“Forgive me, monsieur, but you cannot give me that assurance. For that, I must reach an understanding directly with the official in charge of the case. The Prefect of Police?”
Levesque nodded. “With the assistance of the Sûreté, of course.”
“I must speak to both. The prefect, and the ranking Sûreté officer present.”
“They will cooperate,” Levesque said. “The baron owns the very land on which the town is built.”
“But he does not own the Sûreté, I trust, or the prefect. I sincerely hope not, since men who can be owned are useless or worse. I will know more after I have spoken to them. Can you reach them by telephone?”
Levesque looked at his watch. “It is late afternoon in Mont-St.-Denis. I can try. May I use this telephone? I will use my credit card.”
The Professor looked the question over to Ron, who said, “Go right ahead.”
The Frenchman reached for the phone, but before he could pick it up, the door opened.
“Excuse me,” Dr. Janet Higgins said. She was tall and thin and thought she was bony. Ron thought she was gorgeous, and had fallen in love with her the first time he’d ever seen her.
“Monsieur Levesque?” she said. “There’s a phone call for you. A Monsieur Diderot.”
Levesque grinned. “Fortune smiles on us, Professor. That is the Prefect of Police himself calling.”
Ron picked up the phone, pushed the button for the right line, and handed the receiver to Levesque.
“Diderot!” he said, and went on talking.
Ron was rather stupidly peeved that he went on talking in French. Ron had taken French in high school, but its place in his brain had been taken over by the Italian the Professor had made him learn. He did recognize a phrase that meant “good news,” but the rest was noise.
Levesque stopped talking and listened. The smile fell from his face like crumbling plaster from a wall. He said, “Mort? Assassiné?”
Everybody knew those two words.
Levesque handed the phone to the Professor. There was more French; The Professor nodded a few times, then hung up. He pursed his lips and put the tips of his fingers together.
“What is it, Maestro?” Ron asked.
“There has been another murder. The prefect found the body this morning.”
“The prefect found it?”
“That is less remarkable than it seems, amico. The body was in his office. Captain de Blois of the Sûreté was sprawled across the prefect’s desk with his throat torn out.”
The Professor closed his eyes for a second, then nodded sharply, as though punctuating his decision. “Mr. Levesque,” he said.
“What? Oh. Yes, Professor, forgive me. De Blois was my friend. We were at university together.”
“My condolences. He shall be avenged. My colleagues and I will be there in twenty-four hours. I have already asked Monsieur Diderot to preserve the crime scene as much as decency permits.”
Levesque took a deep breath and got himself together. “Excellent, Professor. I thank you on my own behalf as well as that of the baron.”
“There is just one more condition.”
“What is that?”
“When we bring this creature to heel, I must have one hour with him—or her—alone.”
4
ETIENNE DIDEROT HAD JOINED the police of Mont-St.-Denis at the age of eighteen, as had his father before him. And like his father before him, in the fullness of time, he had become prefect.
He had been prefect for nine years now—he was forty-seven—and he was facing emotions he was too old to have to learn to deal with. It wasn’t that he hated the murders. Every good cop hated crime. Every good citizen. And it wasn’t just fear. If he hadn’t felt some fear in the face of somebody who killed so brutally and disposed of the bodies so contemptuously, he would have scheduled himself for a mental examination. Fear was the proper reaction, considering the circumstances.
It wasn’t even embarrassment, though the good God knew it was a humiliation for a policeman to find a colleague very messily dead and sprawled across his desk.
It was resentment. It wasn’t supposed to be this way in a town like Mont-St.-Denis. Eighteen years as a policeman’s son, twenty years on patrol, and nine as prefect had taught Etienne Diderot (or so he had believed) everything there was to know about crime in a resort town.
First of all, there were the small-scale swindles—shortchanging the tourists, or gouging them on prices. That was hardly a crime at all, and was treated that way. After all, the Germans and British and Americans and, recently, the Japanese only came to Mont-St.-Denis at all because they had money to spend on foolishness. The small-scale swindlers, working men in their way, were left alone unless they became so greedy as to become an embarrassment.
Next came the petty thieves, the pickpockets and room pilferers. These must be held in check, not too hard a task, since Diderot knew who they all were, and arrested them on sight. He kept them overnight in jail (subjecting them to a lye-soap-and-scrub-brush “prison prophylactic disinfection” in the process), then let them go, simply to arrest them again at next sighting. They soon moved on.
Next up the scale came the major swindlers, the smooth talkers who could flatter an aging widow out of her jewels or her inheritance; the young adventuresses who did the same to foolish men afraid of facing the fact that they were old. The prefecture, aided by Interpol, the Sûreté, and the police of the other Alpine resorts in Austria, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, kept an up-to-date file on these. Not much could be done about them, except to warn the potential victim. This was a course, Diderot reflected sadly, that seldom worked, since the potential victims were working at least as hard as the swindlers to maintain the illusion of romance. For his part, the prefect was a realist—while the warnings might be useless to the victims, they at least ensured that the police could not be blamed.
Then there were the master thieves, the men who cracked hotel vaults, or snatched at gunpoint the jewels from the neck of a woman. These, paradoxically, were much the simplest to foil, for one simple reason. Everyone, on both sides of the law, was dedicated to keeping them out of Mont-St.-Denis. If more than one serious attempt at crime per decade were to be successful, the Germans and British and Americans and Japanese would go elsewhere to spend their money. There would be fewer pockets to pick and fewer lonely widows to swindle, as well as fewer people leaving their money in town for more legitimate reasons. Bad for everybody.
This was not to say there was never violence. Of course there was violence. Mont-St.-Denis was not a collection of picturesque buildings dropped near the top of a mountain in order to look quaint on a picture postcard, no matter how ardently the tourist
s longed to believe this. It was a true, functioning community, filled with human beings who came complete with a full set of passions and emotions, including the negative ones.
Some men beat their wives in Mont-St.-Denis, some youths stole motorbikes or smashed shop windows. But it was a small town. It was hard for a guilty one to hid among people who had all known him since he was a child.
The tourists, of course, did not all glow with the righteousness of saints, either. They got into fights with each other, stole from each other. Practically the entire incidence of rape in Mont was due to tourists too drunk or too stupid to understand what “no” meant. They did not get off lightly.
Diderot had, in fact, been looking forward to a year without ordinary tourists. Not only were these scientists respected people in their fields, they were here to work more than play. Diderot had expected a year of relative decorum, a sort of sabbatical from the more taxing of his prefect’s duties.
But what did he get?
A nightmare! Two horrible murders, one in his very office, into which he did not dare now go. The kind of murders one expected in a big city, where the world had already gone mad.
Diderot was working in a small interrogation room. He didn’t like it there. There was a one-way mirror in the wall that allowed what went on in this room to spied upon from the next. It made the prefect nervous, even though he himself had locked the next room and secured possession of the only key. He knew his nervousness wasn’t rational, but he still couldn’t make it go away.
Now Diderot happened to see his own face in the mirror. It wore an expression so sour, he had to laugh. Come now, he told himself. Think about the task at hand. Two saviors were on their way to help him—a new man from the Sûreté, and Professor Niccolo Benedetti, the wonder worker from Italy by way of America. Diderot planned to have a report ready for their briefing upon their arrival.
Carefully, Diderot set down all the facts he had managed to gather since the dawn Dr. Goetz had been found hugging the torch. He hoped they did this Benedetti more good than they had done him.
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