“I have another humble opinion, Maestro.”
The old man spread gesso. “Be sure to keep them humble, amico. Humility is the key to discovering the truth. Huxley said, ‘Sit down before the fact as a little child.’ Of course, one must use one’s imagination, but we must never hesitate to change theories when the facts insist we do so.”
Ron looked down from the window. “My humble opinion is that the baron’s security system is woefully negligent against an inside job. We’re about ten, twelve feet from some soft grass below. An army could sneak in here in delivery trucks during the day, disguised as giant escargots, or something—”
“That reminds me, dear,” Janet said. “You cleaned your plate. I’m so proud of you.”
“Let’s not talk about that, okay?”
Benedetti and Janet laughed. Ron went on. “Anyway, they could get smuggled in, then secrete themselves around the grounds until after dark. A guest in one of these rooms turns off the switch, throws one of these fancy sheets out the window, and they all climb in. They overpower the two guards, turn off the alarm, loot the place and drive out through the main gate. Benac would probably sleep through the whole thing.”
“Perhaps,” Benedetti said. “But we were not brought here to be security consultants. I find it hard to generate much concern over the prospect of an assault in force. Do you think it likely?”
“No, Maestro, it’s just that people put in security systems and feel invulnerable. I think they wind up more at risk.”
“And the more impregnable one makes a house,” Benedetti said, “the more one’s life resembles that of a prisoner. Now. Are you, or are you not, going to tell me what you learned today?”
“You go first,” Janet said.
Ron pulled a notebook out of his pocket. He sat down. “Dr. Jacques Spaak,” Ron said. “I spent some time with him, most of which was taken up by him trying to explain to me what a gluon was supposed to be. He was a lot better at outlining his theory of the crime.”
Ron pushed his glasses back up his nose. “You know the background on this guy. Mixed parentage from a society that’s polarized—in a mostly nonviolent, but still acrimonious way. He’s single, wrapped up in his work, kind of a loner. This ‘Task Force’ business is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to him. A little footnote to this case is that our killer, whoever it turns out to be, has probably done Jacky Spaak more good than a battalion of psychologists—sorry, love—ever could.
“He is also just plain nuts over private eyes. He grinned and wiggled like a puppy when I got out my notebook. And he has a theory.”
“He has a theory,” the old man echoed.
“He sure does,” Ron said. “And the hell of it is, it’s not that bad. I don’t believe it, but at least it’s conceivable that events in the known universe could work out the way he suspects.”
“Does this mean,” Benedetti said with just the slightest trace of asperity, “that I am at last to be allowed to know what he said?”
Ron grinned. “Come on, Maestro, you know you always insist on context. The context in this case is that Spaak, with absolutely no experience in what I would call the real world, has taken Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald for gospel.”
“Which means?”
“Which means rich people are either teaming up to destroy little people, or they’re destroying little people in an effort to get at each other. Spaak likes the latter one, in this case. It’s the brainy Belgian’s notion that some other super-rich plutocrat—or is that redundant?”
“Moderately,” the Professor said. “Go on.”
“That somebody in the baron’s income bracket is orchestrating these killings, the real target being Benac. The idea is that if he is discredited, his empire will totter, stock will fall, and the rival can swoop up a spare empire.”
“At least it sounds possible,” Janet said. “I mean, greed is at least a recognizable human emotion. And I read that the baron is famous for the personal control he keeps over his empire. If the public loses faith in him, his empire could still be in trouble. It’s happened before.”
Ron shook his head. “I just don’t buy it. For one thing, they do business differently in Europe.”
Janet rolled her eyes. “Darling, don’t try to tell me they’re above dirty tricks.”
Ron grinned at her. “I wouldn’t dream of it, dear. I will tell you, though, that one of the dirty tricks they’ve come up with that’s not legal in the States is to have two kinds of common stock—the voting kind, that the family or individual who founded the company hangs onto for dear life, and the profit-participation-only kind, which they sell to the peons. That way, the founder of the company can still run things like a private fiefdom—witness the baron—while still raising money from the public. I doubt there’s five shares of voting stock in the baron’s domain that he doesn’t control personally. I’ll get Paul Levesque to tell me for sure tomorrow, but I know how I’m betting.”
“Why doesn’t Spaak know this?” Janet asked. “He’s a European. We’re not.”
“The man reads literally nothing but scientific reports and American private eye novels. What’s he going to learn about business from that? He’ll learn that all business deals are fueled by blackmail or violence; all millionaires have beautiful, sad, lonely daughters; and if you go to work for an oil company, you are bound to kill a few people before too long.
“That’s the real reason I don’t buy his theory, Maestro. Nobody needs to do business like that any more, if they ever did. Even back in the days of the so-called robber barons, they blew up rival oil wells, tore up competitors’ railroad tracks. They didn’t go around offing innocent civilians in the hopes of driving stock prices down. Today, there are too many legal ways to make money—I’m only talking legal, here, not necessarily savory—to go in for the real nasty stuff.”
Benedetti puffed his cigar. “Excellent, amico. I tend to agree. Still, I ask: did Dr. Spaak have a candidate for this insatiable businessman?”
“Alexandre Caderousse.”
“Interesting. Obvious, but interesting.”
“Yeah,” Ron said. “He’s one of the few up there in the baron’s league, and I gather from conversations with Levesque that they’ve always more or less hated each other.”
“Innocent—of murder—as he may be,” the Professor said, “I believe a talk with Monsieur Caderousse might prove fruitful.”
“You’ll have to go to Paris to do it,” Ron said.
Benedetti smiled. “One rarely needs an added inducement to go to Paris. We shall see. It won’t be tomorrow—Hans Goetz’s widow is coming from Germany tomorrow; I am to interview her personally. I still feel a lack in my understanding of the first victim. No one has anything but praise for the man—it seems almost as if he were a perfect victim, singled out for sacrifice.”
“Well,” Janet said. “That’s one I didn’t hear today.”
“Ah, yes, my dear. I am most eager to hear what you did hear today.”
Janet smiled wearily. “I’ll summarize, first, Professor. Then if you want it in more detail, I’ll give it to you. I guess I can stand it if you can.”
Janet’s notebook was about three times the size of Ron’s. “Before I left the office they let me use, I made a table of trends of opinion. It broke down remarkably along geographic lines.
“Southern Europeans—Greeks, Italians, Spaniards—thought it was the CIA, working out some screwy plan. Arabs and Chinese liked the CIA, too, but they like the idea that somehow Goetz and de Blois were in the plot, whatever it was, and have now been killed to shut them up. By this theory, Romanescu is still in a lot of danger, and should be protected.”
“Maybe I ought to go tell him not to open his window,” Ron said.
Janet made a face. “Maybe you should, at that. Romanescu could be in a lot of danger for reasons other than having been in a CIA plot.”
“How so?”
“He still is the only witness, after all.”
> Benedetti looked at the blank white canvas, dabbed a little more gesso in one corner, then screwed the top back on the jar. “Va bène,” he said. “I’ll begin again in the morning.” He turned to Janet. “You may be right, amica. If the killer, as I am theorizing, is not insane, he must realize that after all these days Dr. Romanescu will have told all he has to tell and that there would be nothing to be gained by killing him. Still, we must guard against the possibility that Niccolo Benedetti is mistaken.”
“No matter how unlikely that is,” Ron deadpanned.
The Professor gave no sign of having recognized a joke. “Precisely,” he said. “I personally will ring Dr. Romanescu’s room as soon as we are done here. Please go on, Janet.”
Janet sighed. “Okay, where was I? The Southern Europeans like the CIA. There was a lot of that from the Northern Europeans, too—depending on where in the political spectrum they came from. The Eastern Europeans to a man—I should say to a person—think it’s a last-ditch attempt by the KGB to reestablish the Iron Curtain. The Russians asked not to be quoted directly.”
She returned to her notes. “Let’s see...Americans, Canadians, British, and Australians lean toward your common-or-garden variety homicidal maniac, with scattered votes for the CIA from those farthest left.
“Here’s the best part. A lot of the Africans, and quite of few of the Pacific Island people, think it might really be a werewolf.”
“Janet, come on, these people are scientists, no matter where they come from.”
“Don’t be such a racist, dear.”
“Me? You’re the one—”
“I’m the one who’s not finished talking yet. To me, these people make the most sense of anything I’ve heard yet. These people are scientists, yes. They are not telling me the murders were carried out by a shape-changing supernatural being that could only be killed with a silver bullet or whatever.
“These are people from societies where the belief in magic still plays a major part of life for large portions of the population. One Zimbabwean was telling me how a tribal medicine man he remembered as a child would work the village up with dancing and chanting (and maybe some drugs, he wasn’t sure of that) and become a leopard. Whether he convinced himself, or just playacted, he never broke character, and had to be chained up for three or four days until the Leopard Spirit was satisfied.
“Even in western cultures, lycanthropy is a rare but documented mental condition. I was going to start checking up on it tomorrow.”
“Ottima idea,” Benedetti said. “Excellent idea. We have been too passive on this case. I have allowed us to be.”
“We’ve only been here a couple of days, Maestro,” Ron said.
“It doesn’t matter. We are here to fight the evil in this place, not to wait for it to come to us. Let us be vigorous. Let us chase up any path, no matter if it be a blind alley. Let us cause things to happen.”
The Professor smoothed his hair. He looked about fifteen years younger than he had at the beginning of the evening. “And now,” he said, “let us get a good night’s rest, and attack the problem tomorrow.”
Ron and Janet allowed as how that sounded good to them. Ron reminded the Professor to caution Dr. Romanescu, then he and Janet returned to their room and got ready for bed. Ron turned off the window alarm and let in some cool Alpine night air. Janet joined him. She looked up at the moon for a moment.
“What condition did you say the moon was in?” she asked.
“Waning gibbous,” Ron said.
“Looks pretty full to me,” she said.
15
THE ROMANIAN LAY AWAKE on his bed and wondered without really caring what the people of Mont-St.-Denis thought of Ion Romanescu.
Did they think him mad because of his outburst on the mountainside? Let them. If he was mad, he was making the most of it, cosseted in the baron’s château, not exposed to the inevitable risk the rest of the community assumed.
Perhaps they thought him a coward.
It was true he had been frightened. The shock of the first attack (he never said it, but “of the Werewolf” lingered in the air every time he spoke the phrase) was something he would remember the rest of his life. The sudden feeling of being doomed, trapped. The panic as he sought a way out. The pain and blood as he felt desperate nails clawing his cheek. The sudden elation when he realized that, against all odds, he was going to survive after all. He had told all this in these very words to Professor Benedetti, earlier in the day, with an unfeigned sincerity and truthfulness that amazed him.
He had told Benedetti that, too.
He had been frightened, then, and he still knew fear. Both the day and night held their terrors for him. Romanescu could only lie low and hope those who might pursue him found other things to occupy themselves.
No. He would do—he was already doing more than hoping. He was, after all, a survivor. He had survived the years of dictatorship in his homeland, and the bloody end of that dictatorship. That hadn’t been easy, either. Neither was this, but there were things he could do. He would ask to leave Mont-St.-Denis and OSI, perhaps to stay in England or the United States. Surely they must soon let him go, on grounds of health, if not the putative danger he was in. He would of course promise to be available to return for further questioning, or to testify at a trial, if anybody ever arrested anyone in this case.
He had to make many decisions, some quite soon. What would help him; what would keep him here exposed to danger?
Romanescu made his first decision. He knew Benedetti had advised him otherwise, but the Romanian wanted to show he was not completely intimidated either by the danger or by the Great Man’s warnings. He switched off the alarm and opened the window, then went back to his bed.
He never even bothered to look at the moon. His astronomical contributions to this gathering, never destined for greatness in any event, were now over.
Jacky Spaak could barely contain his excitement. This was too good. He was on an adventure worthy of Sam Spade, a middle-of-the-night meeting with a key informant, with secrecy the key word.
Of course, Jacky had to concede to himself that the adventure did lack one element—danger. He knew well the voice that had spoken to him over the phone (indeed, with television and radio news, it was unlikely anyone in town could fail to recognize it), and he knew that this was one person—perhaps the one person on the whole mountain—with whom he might feel completely safe.
The meeting place, too, had been selected with care. In the unlikely (or more realistically, impossible) event that his informant wished to do him harm, he still wouldn’t be able to reach Jacky to do it. Furthermore, help was no more than an arm’s reach away.
Jacky turned off the alarm clock in his room at a quarter to three, five minutes before it had been due to go off. He had been too excited to sleep, anyway. He dressed in a soft black suit, with crepe-soled black brushed leather shoes. He knotted his black knit tie, then lit a cigarette and looked at himself in the mirror.
Not bad, he thought, suppressing the urge to giggle. Still, he thought, he might as well indulge himself. This was the one night when he could put aside the pencil-pushing reality of his life and act like, seem like, be a private eye. He might as well enjoy it to the full, and dress the part.
He regretted that the night was too warm for a trench coat. He regretted that he did not in fact own a trench coat. That was something he would have to rectify at his earliest convenience.
He walked quietly down the back stairs on his crepe soles. The word “gumshoe” resounded happily in his heart. Outside the hotel, he made his way to his old German Opel, climbed in, and started the motor. The muffler was bad, and the popping noises echoed strangely in the quiet streets.
As he drove by the Prefecture of Police, his conscience gave a twinge. He was not, as much as he enjoyed imagining it, a Private Eye, and this could be vital information he was about to pick up. The police should be told—
No! They should not be told. The very importance of the in
formation made that imperative. Jacky’s informant had said that if anyone learned of their meeting, the informant would deny the phone call had ever taken place, and would maintain silence forever. There was information to impart, and it would be imparted to Dr. Jacky Spaak and no other, to do with as he judged right. The informant trusted Jacky, it was that simple.
Jacky parked his car a few hundred yards away from his objective. The way the road curved, he could just see the topmost spires of Château Benac. He began walking toward it. He did not however, approach the main gate, but veered off to the right, toward the east wing of the building. He began counting the stone pillars of the fence, as he had been instructed.
It was a longer walk than he had expected; the château and grounds were huge, considering it was perched on the side of a mountain. “...Thirteen.” Jacky walked on. “Fourteen.” He was beginning to get breathless. “Seventeen...eighteen.”
It should be right about here....
“Spaak!” hissed a voice from the darkness. It was a good name for hissing.
“Ah!” Jacky said aloud.
“Quiet!” the voice cautioned him.
“Sorry,” Jacky whispered. He was glad he remembered to speak English. That had been another one of the conditions. “I’m happy you’re here. I was beginning to get nervous.”
“This will be easier if you come closer,” the voice said.
Jacky laughed self-consciously and stepped forward. A claw lashed out of the darkness and caught him under the chin. He tried to grab for it, but the claw was in deep, in the softness of his throat, lifting him, pulling him.
It was over in seconds. Jacky Spaak fell to the ground outside the fence, eyes open, facing the guest wing of the baron’s château. The claws were disengaged from his throat. Retreating footsteps made no sound on the soft grass.
Despite the fact that he was descended from bakers as far back as the records in the church could show, Antoine Martin, the latest fils in the very excellent firm of Martin et Fils Pâtisserie, could never quite reconcile himself to rising so early in the morning.
Werewolf Murders Page 10