LeGrand caught his meaning. “What a glorious day for classical music,” he remarked, “if the legendary elephant graveyard in the Alps really did exist and we were the ones to find it!”
The story goes that when Hannibal the Carthaginian general crossed the Alps with his elephants in 218 B.C., his favorite animal, whom he had named the Big Barcelona after his father Hamilcar Barca, took a misstep on the mountain pass and fell to his death in a remote valley. Sad, but with a war to fight against the Romans Hannibal hurried on. But as the other elephants passed by they looked up at the stars as if marking the place.
Now the Big Barcelona, a patriarch among elephants, had many offspring, including an old Tarmac who had pulled the very Roman harrow used to salt defeated Carthage’s ground so nothing would ever grow there again. One day Tarmac smelled a ghost of edelweiss on the wind and knew he would soon die. There and then, he set out for the Alpine valley that held Big Barcelona’s grave. Tarmac dog-paddled the Hellespont, crossed Turkey, Greece, northern Italy, and down to the French Riviera. When he reached the valley of the Rhone River he turned northward and entered the Alps by the Little St. Bernard Pass. Following Hannibal’s route, Tarmac found the Big Barcelona’s valley, lay himself down beside his grandsire’s bones, and died.
For the next few centuries elephant sightings along the Rhone were common. People called them Hannibal’s strays and after the fall of the Roman Empire they viewed the animals kindly, as relics of a happier time. Later the elephants added their ponderous gray to the Dark Ages. Then the simple folk called them dragon caterpillars, believing they headed up into the mountains to weave cocoons and burst forth as flying dragons to rule the Alpine sky. By the Enlightenment, Big Barcelona’s bloodline had thinned and the elephants came no more.
After the concert, a small reception was held for Gunderson at the Polyhymnia. The musician brought his instrument, which he’d found in an old shop dealing in musical curiosities while attending the conservatorium in Leipzig on the Mendelssohn Scholarship.
When Ganelon examined the tusk-horn at close hand he found a small silver plate on the bell end that read: “Made by Hans Lemke of Geneva. 1842. A genuine Alpine tusk-horn. Accept no substitutes.” The italics added an intriguing emphasis.
Among the other club members present that evening was Cornelius O’Hagen, a craggy-faced Ulsterman who played cello in the San Sebastiano Symphony. An Alpine mountain-climbing enthusiast, in 1859 O’Hagen had lost a leg above the knee to frostbite trying to ascend the then unconquered Schreckhorn. “They gave me a cork leg,” he once told Ganelon in mock indignation. “Cork, and me a dues-paying Ulsterman. Why not a Belfast leg?” O’Hagen lived at the Polyhymnia in a room crowded with papier-maché models of the mountains he’d tried to climb. O’Hagen once dared to tell the short-tempered detective-oboist that he pitied woodwind players who have never breathed in noble mountain air and had to make do with tired stuff that had already passed through a million lungs.
Hans Lemke? Ganelon returned home to the rue Blondin convinced he had heard the Alpine tusk-horn maker’s name before and in an elephant-graveyard context. On the stairs to the family living quarters he passed the small closet on the landing which his young son and namesake had turned into a scientific laboratory, making the hallway reek of rotten eggs.
Entering his library he took down from the shelf Swiss Eccentrics and Eccentricities, a recent acquisition. Some day Ganelon thought he might write a similar work about San Sebastiano’s many colorful citizens, suspecting that if he left the job to someone else, his own name would lead the list of eccentrics.
When he turned to the chapter entitled “The Man Who Believed in the Elephant Graveyard in the Alps” Ganelon read, “In the second quarter of this century Hans Lemke, a musical-instrument maker of Geneva, allowed himself to be the victim of an absurd swindle. Lemke, who specialized in the making of Alpine horns from ivory, was working late in his shop when he heard a wheel grind to a halt on the cobbles outside his door. Then came a knock. He lay aside his auger, brushed the curls of ivory from his lap, and found a large man in mountaineer’s dress with his face concealed in an ample cloak. The man, who said his name was Otto Bauer, asked if Lemke was interested in buying an elephant tusk. Yes, came the reply, if it was African ivory, for Lemke deemed Indian ivory only good for making combs and letter openers. The man uncovered a large tusk on the wheelbarrow behind him, carried it into the shop, and put it down by the stove as Lemke directed. As they waited for the ivory to come to room temperature so Lemke could test its tone, he asked where the man had found it.
“Bauer said he worked with the mountain-climbing parties, where his job was to carry piggyback English tourists unable or unwilling to make the ascent on foot. Once his party was caught in a sudden and unseasonable snowstorm. When his cargo dismounted to huddle with the others around a fire beneath a hastily erected canvas shelter, Bauer moved off a bit to answer the call of nature and in the evening gloom he set his foot wrong and fell off the narrow path, tumbling several hundred feet down a steep, snow-covered mountainside.
“Miraculously, he survived the fall uninjured and in the dying light slid right into what he thought was a pile of underbrush on the valley floor. But the sound his crash made was like a large man sitting down on the keyboard of a piano. Bauer’s ears told him he had stumbled on every mountaineer’s dream, the fabled Alpine graveyard where the descendants of Hannibal’s favorite elephant returned to die.
“When the other guides missed Bauer, it was dark and there was nothing they could do until daylight. By then the man had decided he wasn’t going to share his find with anyone. At dawn, when they shouted down to see if he was still alive, Bauer made no answer. So his companions left him for dead.
“When the ivory had warmed, Lemke lay an ear to the tusk and rapped it with his knuckle. The sound told him it was the finest of African ivory and he bought the tusk on the spot. Could Bauer bring him more? Bauer could. But he was a secretive man, coming at night and never entering if a customer was in the shop. A few times he brought his son Conrad, a young mountaineer with a twisted back and his left shoulder higher than the other. Bauer even showed Lemke something wrapped in oilskin, claiming it was the map to the elephant graveyard.
“One day the son Conrad arrived at Lemke’s shop alone bringing a tusk he said would be the last. While passing the ivory to him across a crevasse on the Miage Glacier beneath Mont Blanc, the elder Bauer had slipped and fallen to his death deep inside the glacier. After expressing his regret, Lemke asked if Conrad couldn’t continue his father’s work. But Conrad admitted he’d never been to the elephant graveyard. He said his father always made him wait up there on the Miage, a place the elder Bauer liked because he could see if he was being followed. When his father returned with a tusk, it was Conrad’s job to carry it back to Geneva. When Lemke asked about the map, Conrad shook his head. He knew nothing about any map.
“So with his supply of what he thought was Alpine ivory at an end, Lemke retired from business rather than work with a lesser material.”
The author of Swiss Eccentrics and Eccentricities ended the chapter with this explanation: “Clearly the gullible instrument maker had been taken in by a thief and confidence man. Bauer probably worked as a strongman in one of the several Geneva-based circuses. Traditionally, circus owners hid away the tusks of their dead elephants as a kind of retirement fund. Bauer must have stolen his employer’s cache and concocted the elephant graveyard story to explain how he’d come by the ivory. His swindle had two parts. He would sell Lemke the stolen tusks. Then he would announce he was retiring from the strenuous business and offer to sell Lemke the fraudulent map.
“Now Conrad, a partner in the original theft of the tusks, began to suspect his father meant to abscond with their money once Lemke bought the last one. So the son turned the tables on his father and robbed and killed him and disposed of his body. Then he sold Lemke the remaining tusk and fled the city.”
Ganelon closed the book.
The author’s explanation might have convinced him if he hadn’t heard the wonderful mountain echo in Glendening Gunderson’s Alpine tusk-horn. What if Bauer’s story was true? And if the father’s, why not the son’s?
As luck would have it, Ganelon’s man in Geneva was sick in bed with eavesdropsy, a common affliction among detectives. Early medicine attributed the disease to a parasite of the earwig family that infested thatched roofs beneath whose eaves the detectives stood to listen at windows. Today science holds the ailment comes from the bite of the bitter dust mites that thrive on the surfaces of window glass.
So Ganelon would have to go to Geneva himself. But he could try to save time by first paying a visit to O’Hagen at the Polyhymnia. The Ulsterman greeted him warmly and moved the model of the Schreckhorn from its place of honor across the arms of the room’s other chair so that the detective could sit down.
When Ganelon asked about the Miage Glacier, O’Hagen seemed amused. “Well, I never imagined you interested in mountain climbing,” he said. “We climbers hold that when a man’s circumference bears more than a certain ratio to his altitude he prefers his country flat.”
Ganelon fought back a sharp reply and waited while O’Hagen dragged a model of Mont Blanc from under his bed. Sitting there with the mountain in his lap, the man used a caliper which he swung up the mountain like a stiff-legged stick figure while he described the path he’d taken to reach the peak. Then he swung the caliper down to the Miage glacier on the mountain’s eastern slope and looked at Ganelon.
The detective asked how long it would take a body fallen into a crevasse twenty-five years ago to emerge from the glacier, knowing O’Hagen’s answer could only be approximate since Ganelon did not know the exact location of the crevasse on the ice.
O’Hagen worked with a protractor, his calipers, and a pencil and paper for a few minutes. Then he announced that either the body had already emerged or would do so in the next five years or so. Then, setting the model aside, he crossed to the window and, standing with his back to the room, he began to outline the four principal theories of glacial movement beginning with James David Forbes’s viscous theory, which declares a glacier to be an imperfect fluid or viscous body which is urged down the slopes of a certain inclination by the mutual pressure of its parts.
Ganelon made his quiet escape from O’Hagen’s room amid this torrent of words. Downstairs in the club lobby he ran into LeGrand. The piano maker grew excited when Ganelon told him he now believed the Alpine elephant graveyard actually existed. Laying his hand on Ganelon’s arm, LeGrand insisted, “Then you must find it before Dr. Ludwig Fong does. My fortune is at your disposal in all this. Ambrose, Europe stands at a crossroads. Will we choose the road to sublimity or to degradation, the road to the concert hall or to the pool hall?”
Out on the street again, with LeGrand’s rhetoric still ringing in his ears, Ganelon turned back for a moment and there at an upper window of the Polyhymnia was O’Hagen, arms waving, still in full monologue. Ganelon tipped his hat but was not sure he caught the Ulsterman’s attention.
In the late eighteenth century, under the influence of Goethe’s romantic novel The Sorrows of Werther, Europe’s young people turned gloomy and suicidal in the face of unrequited love. Among the economical, death by throwing oneself into glacial crevasses became popular for it saved families the expense of funerals and cemetery plots.
The Biblical injunction to bury the dead inspired some devout Protestant laymen to form a community to deal with suicides and those who died on the ice by accident. People called them the Weir Brotherhood because they built traps beneath the glaciers to catch emerging bodies. They also provided small chapels and churchyards for the dead. The Brotherhood had an establishment beneath the Miage Glacier beside a rushing stream that was one of the sources of the Isére River.
The talking head of a young gravedigger hard at work in the churchyard directed Ganelon to a side door of the chapel where he found the Weir Brother in charge, a large-nosed man who gave him that half-interested look those preoccupied with the dead save for the living. “Yes,” he said, consulting a ledger, “we recovered the body of an Otto Bauer on the seventeenth of August two years ago. We seldom know the names of our charges. But I found his written on a map wrapped in oilskin and sewn into the jacket lining. If you have proof you are a relative I will turn his belongings over to you.”
Admitting he had no such proof, Ganelon asked if he might at least have a look at the map of which the man spoke. The Brother gave a sniff, consulted his ledger again, and led the way down into the chapel cellar. Behind a counter stood a wall of shelves holding numbered cardboard boxes. He took one down and dumped its contents — several copper coins, a short-stemmed clay pipe, and a pocketknife — onto the counter.
He stuck his nose back into the box. “Strange,” he said. “The map is gone.” He grew thoughtful. “And now I recall something odd. The day after we found the body, Old Schmidt, our sexton and gravedigger who had worked for us for twenty-five years, vanished without a word, leaving behind a month’s wages due to him.”
Raising his left shoulder, Ganelon ventured, “Conrad Schmidt from Geneva?”
Traveling on by carriage, Ganelon pondered this new development. Conrad Bauer had spent twenty-five years waiting for his father’s body. Two years ago he had recovered the map. But no new supply of ivory had appeared on the market. Why was that? Ganelon thought he knew. When he reached Geneva he telegraphed LeGrand to join him there at the Bristol Hotel.
Early the next morning, the detective went to the Geneva Prefecture, whose people were under some obligation to him for recent help he had rendered the Swiss police.
“Here is the man who will know if your Conrad Bauer is in Geneva,” said the prefect, introducing Ganelon to a broken-nosed, plain-clothed policeman with a slouch and well-scuffed shoes. Then, as he turned to leave them together, the prefect added words that gave fresh urgency to Ganelon’s mission. “I assume you’ve heard that Dr. Fong has returned to Berlin wounded in the arm by a Tuareg blade.”
Ganelon’s policeman guide was long of limb and jaw and wore a goatee. He winked at the detective as they left the prefecture and said, “Here in Geneva we have men who walk about all day with sticks with pins on them to collect cigar ends and cigarette butts which they take to a certain man who buys them for a few sou. He grinds them up in a mull — you know, a snuff-grinder — and sells the tobacco powder to people who sprinkle it around their garden plants to ward off pests.
“Other people walk about all day with their eyes and ears wide open, then come to me when they’ve something to sell. I put it all in my mull.” He tapped his head and pulled on his beard. “And I grind it up.”
Ganelon smiled, for most snuff mulls were shaped like a ram’s head.
“Awhile back,” continued the policeman, “an old man asked if I knew Conrad Bauer was back in Geneva. Now, years ago, this Bauer fled the city before the police could question him about his father’s disappearance. Before I paid my informant I had him point this Bauer out to me. I’ve kept my eye on him ever since. I think I can tell you where he’s been.”
“Please do,” said Ganelon.
“Doing a long stretch in prison. Oh, I’ve seen it before, an ex-convict returns to the old neighborhood and his old life of crime. But his underworld connections are long dead. The living, the young criminals, don’t know or trust him.”
Ganelon couldn’t correct the policeman. The fewer people who knew about the map the better. But his description of Bauer’s situation wasn’t that far wrong.
The policeman led him to where two narrow streets intersected at a small fountain. Several old men sat around the edge of the fountain. Off from the others was one whose left shoulder was higher than its mate.
“Thank you,” Ganelon told the policeman. “Your superiors will learn how helpful you have been.”
Then he went over and sat down beside the old man. “Conrad Bauer, is it not?”
The man c
ocked his right eyebrow as high as his left shoulder. After a long moment he asked, “And if it is?”
“You have a certain map,” said Ganelon. “One you cannot use.” The man opened his mouth to protest. But Ganelon continued. “If I know about the map, others more dangerous than I will find out about it, too. So listen. You are not a young man anymore. You cannot remove the ivory from the valley by yourself. You would need a team. But you’re your father’s son and have inherited his deep distrust of others.”
After another long moment the old man said, “I didn’t murder my father, you know. The snow bridge across the crevasse gave way from the weight of the ivory. As he felt it go he handed the tusk to me. I took it when I should have grabbed his arm. In an instant he had vanished from sight.”
Conrad Bauer looked away. “All those years working for the Weir Brotherhood while Father’s body dawdled inside the glacier,” he said, shaking his head. “He might have hurried himself along. And so might you have, sir. Yes, I see now that my only choice was to wait until an honorable person like yourself came along to offer a fair price for the map.”
That same afternoon LeGrand, fresh from the train, signed a document in the presence of a notary and witnessed by Ganelon agreeing to pay Bauer a quarterly sum for the rest of his natural life provided his map proved true.
Ganelon and LeGrand had a carriage waiting at the door to take them from the city. They stopped that night just short of the Little St. Bernard Pass. The next morning they traveled up into the mountains on the road Napoleon built in the 1800s leading all the way to the Mt. Cenis Pass down through which Hannibal was said to have entered Italy.
In midafternoon they stopped their carriage and struck out on foot through the cold mountain air the three kilometers to the valley marked on the map. Its steep slopes of dark rock and snow were decked round with snowy overhangs. Standing there on the rim, Ganelon used his three-pull pocket telescope to examine the valley floor. In one corner the wind had blown the snow from the rock. He passed the telescope to LeGrand, who looked and nodded. Yes, they had found the legendary elephant graveyard.
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 787 & 788, March/April 2007 Page 5