Levesque knew that the baron’s managing to make OSI a reality had been (in addition to the fulfillment of Baron Pierre Benac’s sincere dream) a public relations coup of immense proportions. The fact that so many other giants of industry who might have helped had scoffed instead only increased the magnitude of the baron’s apparent victory.
Now, however, with horror and fear loose in this place supposedly sacred to rationality and progress, the scoffers would be back. And now they could do the baron and his various enterprises real harm.
Especially Caderousse. When financial reporters in Paris (and sometimes even London, Bonn, or New York) were at a loss for something to write about, they could always try to determine whether Pierre Benac or Alexandre Caderousse was the richest and most influential man in France. They never were able to determine which it was, but they invariably said it was fortunate that the two men hated each other with an intensity beyond reason, because if they ever decided to work together, they could control the entire country.
It was Paul Levesque’s opinion that Alexandre Caderousse even now attempted to control the entire Republic of France; if anything happened to the baron, he could very likely succeed.
Levesque scanned the front pages of the major newspapers of France and of the world. The word “werewolf” turned up in a few headlines.
Levesque sighed. That much had been inevitable. Still, the PR staffs had done a good job on keeping the focus where Levesque wanted it—not that two grisly murders and an almost-third had taken place at Mont-St.-Denis, but that Monsieur le Baron Pierre Benac has brought in the world’s most famous pursuer of evil (Levesque had given strict orders that the word “detective” in reference to Niccolo Benedetti was to be suppressed at all costs) to bring matters to rights.
Now, if only the world’s most famous pursuer of evil could just catch something, Levesque would feel a lot better about things. Because until he did—or someone did—Caderousse would be sniffing around like a shark who’s scented blood.
What Benedetti was to call the Folly of the Savants began about that same time. It began in the nuclear physics department. In a way, that made sense. For one thing, international cooperation on a face-to-face basis wasn’t the novelty for these scientists that it was for some of the others—most of them worked full-time at the Centre Européen du Recherche Nucléaire in Switzerland. For another thing, they were here more or less for the honor of the thing. All they could do was analyze data. As rich as the baron was, even he couldn’t afford to build a state-of-the-art particle accelerator, especially when the CERN machine, already the biggest in the world, was just a few hundred kilometers away in Switzerland, where the scientists could shuttle to if they needed to run an actual experiment.
But the third thing was probably decisive—the work wasn’t going well. They fed their numbers into the computer, and the computer returned them nonsense.
“Merde,” said Jacques Spaak. “I mean, shit.” Jacky, as he liked to be called, was a Belgian, the son of a Flemish father and a Walloon mother, a combination only slightly less fraught with peril than the union of a Protestant and a Catholic in Ulster. He had assuaged a lonely childhood by immersing himself in science and in detective novels. Hard-boiled American private eye novels with literary pretensions and titles like The Rotating Chasm. No little gray cells for him, despite a previous Belgian’s praise for them. Jacky Spaak devoted his little gray cells to the numbers. In his dreams he was hard and shifty and could deal with babes and hoods and psychos without spilling a drop of his Code of Manly Ethics.
He turned to Peabody, an Englishman at the next console. “I am tired of this shit,” he said. Jacky was glad that English had become the more or less official language of OSI, because even though he was a native speaker of French, Frenchmen found his Belgian accent nothing short of hilarious. It did not sit well with him. Nobody laughed at Humphrey Bogart’s lisp.
Peabody looked like the international caricature of a scientist. He was thin and balding, had an air of distraction, and wore both braces and a belt.
Without looking up from his monitor, he said, “Which shit is that, old boy?”
“The numbers. If there is a graviton in this experiment, I am not going to find it today.”
“Excellent,” Peabody said. “I shan’t have to share the Nobel, then.”
“How can they expect us to concentrate when there is a mad-dog killer stalking us?”
Peabody’s eyes were still riveted to the screen. “We’re scientists, old boy. We’re supposed to concentrate. Just as I can still concentrate on these data with you filling the air with nonsense.”
“It is not nonsense,” Jacky insisted. “What are you calling nonsense?”
Peabody looked up from his console and pushed his half-glasses up his thin nose. “The idea that a killer is stalking us. And what kind of ‘us’ did you have in mind, anyway? You and me? The nuclear physics unit?”
“Stop playing the fool. By ‘us,’ I mean the people at OSI.”
“Jacky, dear boy, there have been two murders. One of a scientist, and one of a policeman. No statistically valid influence can be drawn from that whatsoever. If there were to be a next victim, and it turned out to be a barmaid from one of the resorts, you’d look like a bloody fool with your theory about some madman stalking us, wouldn’t you?”
It wasn’t supposed to go like this. Jacky was supposed to be the cool one, the one with the observation, analysis, and conversational skills to back the person foolish enough to argue with him into a corner. That was how it always worked for Spenser.
Instead, he found himself mentally grasping at straws.
“Perhaps, but what about Dr. Romanescu?”
“What about him?”
“He was a scientist; he was also attacked—the fact that he is alive is a matter of purest luck. And I have heard the fear of what he has seen has driven him insane.”
“Eyeball astronomers are all insane,” Peabody observed. “To actually volunteer to work those ridiculous hours. But fine, he was attacked. So what?”
“All of a sudden it’s two out of three, my friend Peabody. Sixty-six point six repeating percent.”
“The sample is still vanishingly small, old boy.”
Jacky shook his head, half in disbelief, half in disgust. “I don’t understand you. Even if this madman isn’t singling out scientists, are you not shaking in the shoes anyway that he is at large in this town?”
“Your shoes,” Peabody said.
“What?”
“The idiom is shaking in your shoes, not the shoes. At least that’s the way they’d put it in those vile American shockers you’ve always got peeking out of your pocket. The correct English for the thing would be ‘shaking in your boots.’”
“Well, aren’t you?”
“Shaking? Dear Lord, no, Cambridge takes that right out of a boy, no matter how non-U he starts out.”
“Afraid? Nervous? Apprehensive? I don’t mind admitting that I, personally, am wetting the—my pants.”
Peabody smiled at him. “Jacky, my boy, I admire you. You are perhaps the only truly honest Ph.D. in the world. I don’t just mean about the science—I mean about faculty politics and publication credit and all the rest of the mess that goes along with being in the boffin business these days. Aren’t you?”
“I don’t have,” Jacky said, “the slightest idea what you are talking about.”
“I rest my case. Don’t worry about it, old boy, it doesn’t matter. I shall be honest with you in return. Of course I’m afraid. Perhaps not quite wetting the pants, but nervous and apprehensive, as you said. What can one do but trust the police? I can’t see where it does any good to dwell on it.”
“Not dwell,” Jacky said. “Concentrate.”
“Sorry, Jacky, now you’ve lost me.”
“Concentrate on the problem. On the murders. You yourself have said it; we are scientists, that is what we are supposed to do. We have some of the greatest minds on earth here. Surely on
e of us, or all of us working together, can be of help.”
“Let’s not get carried away—”
Jacky’s eyes were gleaming. “I shall call a meeting for tomorrow. I shall have flyers made up and spend the rest of the day hanging them up. We of OSI shall hold a meeting and discuss how we can solve this case!”
Peabody pursed his lips. “Do you think you’re going to get anybody to come?”
Jacky wasn’t listening. “I shall chair the meeting, and invite the police to explain the steps they are taking...”
12
THEY ALL CAME, ALL the scientists of OSI, everybody from every corner of the world, with their spouses, if they had them. They overflowed the original site of the meeting, the main conference hall, and still they came. Paul Levesque, as if he didn’t have enough to worry about, was pressed into service to find a new venue.
His first thought was the Stade de Glace, the local ice-skating rink (a gift to the town, needless to say, from Monsieur le Baron), but that was currently filled with the flower of Alpine French toddlerhood, taking their first uncertain glides on the ice. Even if Levesque were to have been so foolish as to chase the little angels away from their fun, there was the matter of the ice, which could not be removed in less than twenty-four hours. So much for that.
He thought of Champs Benac, the local soccer stadium, which could certainly hold the eager scientists (it could hold the entire town) but decided against it when the radio told him it looked like rain.
Finally, a harried series of phone calls to the local monsignor and the bishop of the diocese had secured permission to use the Cathedral of St.-Denis, which was not a gift from Monsieur le Baron, but a great pile of graven stone erected over the course of the sixteenth century by generations of the shepherds and cheesemakers who used to populate these mountains before the discovery of downhill skiing. They had voluntarily taxed themselves and labored to build the thing, for no other reason than the greater glory of God.
Looking at it now, seeing angels and gargoyles looking back at him, Levesque wondered if, in spite of all the baron’s efforts, mankind was not sometimes backing up as much as moving forward.
Jacky Spaak gaveled the meeting to order just an hour and forty-five minutes late, which, Ron Gentry had learned, wasn’t too bad for France, even when no change of venue was involved.
In keeping with established OSI practice, the Belgian spoke in English.
“...Some of the greatest minds on Earth,” he was saying. “For most of us, these minds are focused on the future, for in the future, we can hope all the problems of the present will be solved.
“But now, the present demands our attention. The here and now. Somewhere in this town is a dangerous killer—”
There was a mumble from the assembled scientists.
“—who strikes brutally and without warning. One of our number has been killed, and another, who has already gone through too much, barely escaped with his life.
“Your presence here today shows that you agree that we owe it to ourselves and to our gracious hosts to help do something about this.”
There were heads nodding in the crowd, approving murmurs.
“I am pleased to say,” Spaak went on, “that the authorities welcome our assistance!”
Applause.
Ron looked around the front row, where he and the rest of the “authorities” had featured seats. He had to keep himself from laughing when he saw the sour looks on the faces of Marx and Diderot. When one of the constables had noticed one of Dr. Spaak’s flyers stuck to a telephone pole last evening, he had torn it down and called the prefect. Diderot had been all set to ban the meeting. Fortunately, Ron and Janet had been there picking up copies of documents and photos to be studied in luxury back at the château. Ron had (somehow) managed to get the prefect to hold off until the Professor could be fetched.
At the same time, Diderot sent for Captain Marx, and had him pulled right out under the umbrella of a café in a side street of the town, where he was sharing an aperitif with Dr. Tebner, the American astronomer. Ron had noticed no great love between Marx and Diderot, but Marx was unstinting in his moral support of the prefect during the conversation that ensued.
“The whole idea is nauseating,” Marx said. “It is madness to let civilians meddle with a homicide investigation.”
“Under ordinary circumstances, I would agree with you,” Benedetti said.
“Ordinary circumstances!” Diderot didn’t precisely tear his hair, but his voice indicated he wanted to. “This case is difficult enough without several hundred geniuses, bon Dieu, trampling over the landscape.”
“How are you going to stop them?” Ron said. “House arrest? These aren’t ordinary schmoes, you know—”
Marx frowned darkly. “Schmoes? What does this mean, this ‘schmoes’?”
“People of no special significance,” Ron explained. A stray French phrase sprang to mind. “Like ‘Jacques Bonhomme,’ only less respectful.”
Marx nodded. “I see. Schmoes.”
“Yeah. That’s what we’re not dealing with here,” Ron said. “These people are world-famous in their fields, and they are the honored guests of the baron, the Republic of France, and the town of Mont-St.-Denis.”
“God help me,” Diderot said ruefully while crossing himself. “Then what am I to do? I certainly cannot allow these people to come in and out of my office like what do you call it—Jacks-in-the-boxes. Can we find no way to dampen this enthusiasm?”
“It’s not enthusiasm,” Janet said. “It’s fear.”
Diderot looked at her. “It pains me to differ with you, dear lady, but what I see is a horde of desk-bound pencil-pushers grabbing at something they would like to think of as a great adventure. Sherlock Holmes with his game afoot or some similar nonsense.”
Janet shook her head. “No,” she said. “Oh, there’s some of that, but it’s a mask for what’s really going on.”
“Please then, tell us what is really going on.” There was a frank sneer on Captain Marx’s face when he said it.
“These people live in a different world from the rest of us,” Janet began.
Diderot smiled in spite of himself. “That, madame, we have already been able to discover for ourselves.”
“It goes deeper than you might think. These are people whose deepest commitment is not to a cause or a country or even to another person. The scientists at OSI have made their commitment—and make no mistake, it is a deep, emotional bond—with their own ideas of reason, or maybe rationality is a better word.
“Their entire lives are devoted to making things make a special kind of sense—scientific sense. Some of them, especially those from more prosperous societies, may have turned to science because they were not very successful at making sense of the rest of the world.
“Then Dr. Goetz, a man at the top of his profession, a man who had just made an historic scientific discovery, whose success in his field each of them would like to duplicate in his or her own, is killed. Dr. Romanescu is savagely attacked.
“And no one knows why. No one knows by whom. It makes no sense. Not even to us, at least not yet, and we specialize in this sort of thing.”
Diderot’s grunt implied the French equivalent of “Leave me out of it, lady.”
Janet went on. “They want some way to get control of this situation, or at least to tell themselves they’ve done so. They want to prove that with the exercise of the great skills they’ve developed, they can make this situation be rational. I think we ought to let them try.”
For the first time since Ron met him, Captain Marx opened his sleepy eyes. “Do you actually think they can help?”
Janet used her eyes to shift the question to Benedetti. “One never knows,” the old man said. He began to light a cigar. “I rather think not. When we finally clap our hands on the shoulder of this one, I believe he will prove to have been logical, but not rational.”
“I’m afraid you must elaborate on that for a policeman, Professo
r,” Marx said. His tone was neither as polite nor as patient as his words.
“Gladly,” the old man said around puffs. “Logic is merely a method. If A, then B. Any premise will do as a start. The madder a criminal is, the more logical he is likely to be. If my mother has been replaced by an alien invader from Mars, then it is supremely logical to kill her with an ice pick.
“Reason, on the other hand, implies the attempt to use logic taking as one’s premise the facts of the observable world.”
“You think the killer is mad, then,” Diderot said. “Earlier, you denied it.”
“He is not mad,” Benedetti snapped. “Despite the full moon and the savagery of the attacks, I am sure of it. Not mad, only logical. He is proceeding brilliantly after starting with the premise that epitomizes the choice of evil: that one human being may, for pleasure, profit, or convenience, dispose of the life or property of another.”
“That is very profound, Professor,” Marx said. “But I fail to understand why you think it wise to let the scientists have their Junior Detective Club meeting. Or do you? Now that I think of it, you haven’t said.”
“I do,” Benedetti said. “My colleague will explain.”
Once again, the old man had handed Ron a zinger. Ron had learned not to jump when Benedetti put him on the spot like that, but he was never going to learn to like it. These things were the pop quizzes that went along with being the student of Niccolo Benedetti.
Ron took a deep breath and ran with it. “Okay,” he said. “First, if you don’t let them have their meeting, they’re going to resent it. Geniuses, as I have reason to know, have enormous egos.”
Benedetti chuckled.
Ron continued, “If you don’t accept what they insist is going to be their ‘help,’ they’ll get in a snit; they’ll say you’re treating them like children.”
“But they are acting like children!” Diderot protested.
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