by Desmond Cory
“It is a bet.”
“Ah! A bet! Naturally, that explains itself.” The stranger, reassured, ventured on another upward glance. “But he is an adequate climber, that one! A veritable monkey.”
“That is now only too plain,” agreed Johnny lugubriously. “Had I known that – however! He already has the window open, you see. Undoubtedly he should be a professional burglar.” He laughed hollowly.
“Remarkable,” said the stranger. “Remarkable!”
“It is indeed,” said Johnny, as the minute figure of Elder swung itself agilely through the window. “I imagine he will now be able to let us in… Good night, m’sieur. My apologies if our antics have alarmed you.”
“No, no. Not at all. Good night to you.” The stranger shouldered his umbrella with a determined movement and marched stolidly down the street.
“So much for that,” said Johnny. He took out his cigarette-case and extracted a Gauloise, thoughtfulIy eyeing the open window above him. “Let’s go round. I don’t suppose the door will give Pierre any trouble.”
It hadn’t. Pierre was waiting in the corridor when they arrived, flapping his arms up and down.
“Where’ve you been?” he said. “Give me my coat, it’s damned cold” – and walked firmly back into Pinot’s flat, struggling with the sleeves.
Johnny followed Antoine into the room and closed the door behind him. “Now,” he said, coolly surveying the furniture. “we’ll give the place a quick run-through before we start cutting anything open. Pierre, you’d better get cracking on the safe, and – Antoine – have a go at that big desk in the corner. I’ll leave the bedroom to myself.” He knocked a little ash into his overcoat pocket and walked towards the door in the far corner of the room. “Keep your gloves on,” he advised as he went through.
“It’s all right for him,” grumbled Antoine as he went over to the desk. “He’s done this sort of thing before. An amateur like me finds things a bit confusing.”
Pierre, already kneeling before the safe, only grunted.
The desk was amply supplied with enough official-looking papers and documents to keep Antoine fully occupied for almost ten minutes. He had just begun a rather hopeless search for a secret drawer when he heard the soft click of connecting tumblers and, turning round, saw Pierre swinging open the safe door.
“There we are,” he said. “Quite tough. Shouldn’t be surprised if he hasn’t got some nice stuff in here.” He looked inside, hesitated, then turned to Antoine: “Here, you do it. I can’t resist temptation.”
Antoine walked across and took Elder’s place before the safe. It was divided into three compartments; at first sight it appeared that there was no foundation for Pierre’s admirable self-denial, as the total contents of the safe appeared to consist of a few envelopes. Then Antoine picked up the nearest and found it to contain something like five hundred thousand francs in notes of varying denominations.
He quickly flipped through one or two more envelopes and found them to contain purely official correspondence with the War Crimes Commission, none of it in any way connected with himself. The last one he opened contained only a photograph of a thin-faced, dark man that at first glance bore a surprising resemblance to Delacroix. Antoine studied it closely for a few seconds, then turned it over and stared at the inscription typed neatly on the back. It stated quite simply:
Sean Fedora
Antoine turned the photograph over again and looked once more at Sean Fedora’s face. Then he slid it back into its envelope and pushed it hurriedly into his pocket. As he did so he heard Johnny’s voice from the bedroom, unhurried, seeming almost bored.
“I think this might be what we’re looking for.”
Antoine glanced once round the room and saw that Elder had already gone through; he pulled nervously at the top button of his overcoat and went through the door. Johnny was leaning against the wall beside the bed with a flimsy slip of paper in his hands, folding it methodically into its natural creases.
Antoine said: “Well?”
“Yes. This is it. So now we can go home.”
“May I see?”
Johnny handed him the letter; Antoine unfolded it, glanced at the heading and at the signature. He nodded.
“Boehm,” he said. “That’s right. This is what we want.” He continued to look at it with a kind of wondering curiosity, until Johnny took it out of his hands.
“In that case,” he said” “I see very little point in hanging around here.” He took out his wallet and placed the late Colonel Boehm’s message lovingly inside it. “Let’s go back home and give this fascinating document a more careful scrutiny.”
Johnny sat deep in the armchair, contemplatively surveying the end of his shoe; the smoke trailed up from the tip of his cigarette, forming curious patterns in the air. Antoine was seated opposite him, still reading the letter with a puzzled frown wrinkling his forehead; and Marie-Andrée, seated on the arm of his chair, was reading over his shoulder – for the twelfth time, Johnny reflected. In the corner of the room, away from the fire, Pierre Elder was sitting, his head sunk forward on to his chest and his feet tucked tidily under the chair; a half-emptied bottle of Dubonnet stood on the table beside him. It was almost eleven o’clock, and the confused bumbling of vehicles along the boulevard outside had subsided so that one could pick out with some certainty the noise of an individual motor.
Eventually Antoine laid down the letter, passed a hand across his forehead and reached for the glass he had placed on the mantelpiece. He said:
“Well, we’ve got it all right. What’s the next step?”
Johnny said: “We seem to have examined the thing pretty carefully ourselves, and we can’t find any flaw in it; which is about what we expected. Tomorrow morning I’ll take the thing round to my boss at Headquarters, explain the situation and get him to put his staff on it. They’ve got all the devices they need for that sort of thing – reagents, infra-red lamps, black light, every damned thing you can imagine, and if that letter’s forged they’ll find out. If it isn’t –”
“Yes?” said Marie-Andrée softly, “if it isn’t –?”
“Well, I’ll have to forget all about you and try some other approach to these people. So I hope there is something wrong with it. If there isn’t, I’ll have wasted a devil of a lot of time.” Johnny looked at his cigarette-end and dropped it into an ashtray. “I’ll be able to let you know by tomorrow evening, if the Colonel’s boys get a ripple on.”
He leaned forward, picked up the letter and pushed it once more into his wallet; then stood up. “That’s how it is at the moment. There’s nothing more anybody can do about it, so I should recommend a good night’s sleep.” He walked across the room and shook Elder by the shoulder. “Come on, Pierre. Time for us to be moving.”
Antoine got up from the chair, a shade reluctantly it seemed, and leaned against the mantelpiece. He said:
“Look – how about spending the night here? It’s pretty late.”
“What, on the sofa?” Johnny’s sudden grin flickered across his face and vanished again, so quickly that Marie-Andrée wondered for a second if she had imagined it. “No, thanks; I’m paying for a hotel room anyway, so I may as well use it. Don’t worry about the letter, Antoine; it’s safe enough with me.” He picked up his hat from the table and stood in front of the door holding it in his hand. “Well. See you tomorrow.”
“I’ll see you out,” said Marie-Andrée quickly, moving across the room. Antoine watched them as they went out of the door, then sat down in the chair again and rested his head on the cushions. He looked at the opposite wall through the thin haze of cigarette smoke, at the wall and at the pale water-colour painting on it. Then he took from his pocket the envelope that he had removed from Pinot’s safe and held it on his lap; he was still looking at the painting, but he could not have described its appearance.
Marie-Andrée came in again and walked over to the window. She said: “It’s cold out.”
“Yes. It is pretty cold.
”
She turned and looked at him for a moment before speaking again. Then she said: “How are you feeling? Tired?”
Antoine took the photograph out of its envelope and looked down at it. He said: “Come here and take a look at this.”
She walked across the room to, him and seated herself once more on the arm of his chair. “Who is it?” she asked.
“You don’t know?”
“I’ve never seen him before, to my knowledge.”
“No. Nor have I. I found it in the safe at Pinot’s flat.”
He moved the print slightly so that the light shone on the glossy surface.
“In the safe? Why did you take it, then?”
Antoine reversed the photograph in silence and showed her the name printed on the back.
She said: “But that’s not –”
“No,” agreed Antoine. “It’s not.” He turned the photograph around once more and stared gloomily at it. “There’s very little resemblance. This chap’s face is thin and Johnny’s is full; his hair’s very dark and Johnny’s is fair; the nose is –”
“Yes. It’s a different shape entirely.”
“So this fellow Johnny isn’t the real Fedora at all, if we go by this photograph. And, in that case, then who the hell is he and what does he want?”
Marie-Andrée got to her feet and moved over to the chair that Johnny had recently vacated; the cushion still bore the shallow imprint of his body. She patted it smooth and sat down on it. She said: “Whoever he is, I think he’s on your side.”
“We don’t know that. I’ve reached the stage where I don’t know anything anymore.”
“The next stage, dear, is when you don’t care about anything any more.”
“Damn,” said Antoine. He dropped the photograph on the table and looked at her. “He might be a Nazi.”
“What, with the influence he seems to have?”
“The –? Yes, that’s a point… No, he’s something to do with Intelligence all right, probably the Foreign Office. Why else should Pinot have his photograph? But, in any case, why should Pinot have his photograph? The whole thing fails to make sense to me.”
“We’ll have to wait till tomorrow, as he says.”
“Yes. He’s got the letter, that’s the hell of it. I couldn’t refuse to let him have it, but I wish I’d kept it all the same. The secret of this whole mess-up is in that letter; I’m sure of that.”
“You couldn’t find anything wrong with it,” Marie-Andrée pointed out, “and the chances appear to be that he can. There was nothing else you could do.”
Antoine said: “You trust him, don’t you?”
“Yes. There is nothing else to do.”
“Rubbish. He merely has the kind of face and the kind of manner that a woman tends to trust instinctively,” said Antoine with some force. “You don’t suppose he trusts us, do you? He’s merely using us to obtain his own ends, whatever they are. To say that there is nothing else to do is utter piffle. However,” he added thoughtfully “one must admit that no really workable alternative appears to present itself. That is the trouble.”
Marie-Andrée said: “What if he is using us, as you put it? If he is really of the Intelligence, that is his job. I respect him for it.”
Antoine made no comment; he had not, in fact, heard her remark. He continued to sit in the chair, swinging his right foot from side to side. Eventually he said:
“I think I’ve got it. You must hire a detective.”
“What?”
“A detective. Somebody to keep an eye on this pseudo-Fedora and to report on his movements. It’s obviously impossible for us to do it ourselves, and if we’re to make any headway in this matter we must find out if Johnny is what he says he is, or, at least, if he does what he says he will do. That is what we must do.”
“But if –?”
“It should be quite simple. Ring up or call on one of the best detective agencies and instruct them to follow your husband, Monsieur Darreaux, at present staying at Rostand’s Hotel – ostensibly on business. Say that you require evidence for divorce proceedings, the usual thing, you understand; you require a daily report of his activities delivered at, let us say, nine o’clock every evening. It’s easy.”
“But surely a reputable detective agency will check up on a prospective client and –”
“And will find that you have plenty of money – that is all they’re interested in. You are secretly married, of course; your position as Fashion Editress demands that you remain a single woman as far as the public are concerned. Please don’t be a fool.”
Marie-Andrée looked quickly at him; it was the first time that Antoine had been even remotely rude to her. Surprisingly enough, Antoine caught her glance.
“I’m sorry,” he said at once. “I’m afraid the strain of this business is beginning to tell on me… God, you must know how grateful I am for all that you’ve done for me. But there are times… Well. How do you feel about the idea?”
Marie-Andrée leaned back in the chair and reached for the telephone directory.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“SO the results are negative?” said Johnny, pacing quietly up and down in front of the big, low-slung desk.
“I didn’t say exactly that, old boy,” said Captain Madison. “There are one or two vaguely interesting things about this letter of yours, actually. Stop leaping about like a frustrated ruddy tigress and take a look at this reproduction…
“Now, the signature’s undoubtedly genuine; there’s no shadow of doubt about that. You see the slight deepening of the serif on the downstroke of the ‘h’? And the rather individual double stroke just here? Yes – well, here’s a genuine Boehm signature, for purposes of comparison, as we say – See? Identical. And, as I said before, Boehm was commanding the 9th Brigade at Siegen on the date given; the franking stamp also appears to be genuine, but that, of course, is very easily forgeable.
“The interesting points are these – firstly, the typing, Now we have here facsimiles of some of the orders issued from time to time in Boehm’s Brigade Office.” He moved over to a complicated piece of apparatus resting on the desk and applied his eye to the lens that curved across the front of it.
“M-m-m-m – yes. Now, the type is not particularly distinctive, but there are certain slight differences that have enabled us to come to the conclusion that there were three typewriters in use in the office at that time. We shall call them A, B and C, or – if you prefer it – Arabella, Babs and Clara… Arabella, you notice, has a distinct – or rather, a slight – Hell!” He stood up. “Corporal West?”
“Sir?”
“I am confused, West, lost in the ramifications of calligraphy. You checked on this blinking Siegen stuff, didn’t you?”
“That’s right, sir. Me and Miss Henri-oh.”
“Really? You old devil, West! Explain to Mr. Darreaux here just what you found out.”
“Certainly, sir. If you’ll look into the lens, sir.”
Johnny obediently bent down and tried to focus his eyes on a scrap of paper, magnified in the lens to the dimensions of a large poster and criss-crossed with measuring lines which, after a moment’s deliberation, he realised were on the lens itself.
“Right you are, sir. Now here we have number one.”
“Arabella, West.”
“Arabella, sir. Take especial note of the letter ‘t’, slightly out of alignment.” He indicated the letter with a strip of metal of the thinness of a needle, magnified in the lens to the size of a thick lead-pencil. “And of the letter capital ‘B’, sir, with a slight flaw in the stem.” The pencil moved on. “And the letters ‘s’and ‘e’ are quite normal, as you see.” He reached up to a small knob on the side of the machine. “Now for the next, slide, sir. This is –”
“Babs, West.”
“This is Babs. Babs seems to have been the special property of the senior clerk, sir; the pressure of the fingers on the – but there, that’s irrelevant. Point is, the ‘t’ is in perfect alignme
nt, and the ‘s’ has a major flaw in the lower loop, Quite unmistakable, that – you can see it with the naked eye. Obviously a different machine to Arabella, you see, sir.”
“Quite a different type,” agreed Johnny wittily.
“And this is Clara,” continued West, unamused, “Now Clara’s almost identical to Arabella, sir; but the ‘t’ and the capital ‘B’ give her away; they’re in perfect condition. And the ‘s’ is, too; so it’s not – er – Babs. All the letters we have from the Siegen office have been typed on one of these three typewriters.
“But now we have this letter of yours, sir, signed ‘Boehm’.” A fourth image joined the other three on the screen. “And that’s not one of these three, it’s another one. If we superimpose it with them, sir” – the pencil was replaced by a fat pair of tweezers, and the papers began a sort of mysterious shuffling – “thus – we can see that the letter ‘g’ is different to all of them. It’s not out of alignment, but the key’s slightly twisted and the impression of the lower loop is far deeper than any of the others. The red’ll show that better.” He switched on a small lamp at the top of the machine and the shadows of the type leapt into prominence under the infra-red light.
“Yes,” said Johnny slowly. “I see.”
“And the flaws that we’ve already seen on the other machines don’t have no counterparts on this one, if you take my meaning.”
“You mean,” said Johnny, turning to Madison, “that it’s strange this one letter should be typed on a different machine from those generally used in Boehm’s office.”
“Quite right, old chap. And the second curious point is that the actual imprint of the type is uneven, the pressure of the keys is not uniformly the same as you find in an epistle typed by a fully-trained typist. There aren’t any actual typing errors, or anything like that; the typist wasn’t a rank tyro, but, on the other paw, he wasn’t an expert at the job as one would expect a clerk at an S.S. Brigade Office to be.”
Johnny said: “You know, this is a wonderful device you have here.”
