Werewolf Murders

by William L. DeAndrea

  He looked up with a sad smile. “I’m sorry. I—I can’t seem to concentrate. I just...”

  His voice trickled away. There were a few seconds of embarrassed silence.

  “All right, Doctor,” Benedetti’s voice was gentle. “It’s not important any more. Dr. Tebner, would you please attend to it?”

  She had the telescope sighted on Clavius, focused, and locked down in fifteen seconds. She could have done it in ten, but she didn’t want to make Romanescu feel any worse than he already did.

  “Are we supposed to look now at the moon?” the baron asked.

  “You may if you like, baron. It is, after all, your telescope.”

  So they all looked. Even poor Romanescu. Even Benedetti’s assistants. Everyone but Benedetti himself. At the end, Karin took another peek. If the killer’s name was up there, it was beyond her abilities to read it. No wonder Benedetti hadn’t looked.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Most enlightening. And now, I think, we should return to the auditorium.”

  As she followed the crowd, Karin didn’t feel the least bit enlightened. What she felt was creepy. Something was going on here, something more than the revelation of a killer, some kind of mind game, and she didn’t know the rules.

  It occurred to her that she didn’t even know if she was a spectator or one of the participants, and that made her feel creepier than ever.

  When they got back to the auditorium, they all sat in the seats they’d had before, like a bunch of school kids. Benedetti nodded to Ron Gentry, and Gentry picked up a paper bag he’d been carrying since before they’d left the château, opened it up, and began to walk around the room handing out apples.

  Karin looked at the apple in her hand, and remembered Janet’s husband breathlessly gasping the word as though it meant something to him. She stole a glance at Janet, and saw her hefting hers as if she wanted to throw it at somebody.

  “Does everyone have an apple?” Benedetti asked.

  Karin half expected the group to speak in unison, saying “Yes, we do, Professor,” but there was a simple chorus of mumbled assent.

  “Magnifique,” Marx said. “Refreshments.”

  “Va bène. The apples may be eaten later, if you wish. They are, like so much, the largesse of the baron. But what I wish to use them for now is to allow you to see for yourselves the solution to this case.” He touched his bandaged left cheek lightly and smiled. “And I am glad to say you will learn this much less painfully than I.”

  Benedetti was suddenly serious. “Now, I want you all to be werewolves. The apple is helpless flesh. Claw it.”

  No one moved.

  “Do it!” Benedetti shouted. “Use your nails and rip! One set of clawmarks will suffice.”

  Marx shrugged and dug into his apple almost clinically. She saw Paul beside her claw at his as though it was Marx’s face, which inspired Karin to use her nails on her own. One way or another, all the apples got scratched. When Karin looked up, Ron Gentry was already roaming the room handing out paper towels from the men’s room.

  “Excellent,” the Professor said. “Now look at the marks you have made in the skin of the apple. Do you see the narrow triangle, narrowest at the point at which the skin was broken, then wider as the nails penetrated more deeply, stopping, or perhaps tapering off slightly when they are withdrawn?

  “Human nails are not primarily intended for clawing. They do not slice a clean line, like the claws of a cat or an eagle do. Human nails pierce and drag, and they make this characteristic shape. It was a fact I had forgotten, until I attempted to shave this afternoon. Ronald, will you help me?”

  Ron Gentry joined the Professor at the podium. He loosened the old man’s bandage, then pulled it off. There were dark red marks on the old man’s nut-brown face, with whiskers bristling between them. Even from here, Karin could see the triangular shape of the wounds.

  “I angered a person this morning, you see,” Benedetti said, “and got myself scratched. The person was facing me, and scratched with the right hand. Therefore, the scratches are on my left cheek, with the wide end foremost.

  “When I saw that in the mirror, I remembered where I had seen marks like that before. And a very few seconds later, I saw all there was to see.

  “If any of you would like a closer look, you are welcome to approach me.”

  Benedetti sent a look like a flying piece of steel into the audience.

  “Or perhaps,” he went on, “Dr. Romanescu would oblige us by revealing his left cheek.”

  Romanescu shouted, “No!” He jumped to his feet and began clambering over seats, trying to get to the exit. He showed no signs of being the doddering old man he had seemed at the telescope.

  Ron Gentry tried to catch him, but only succeeded in tearing the collar from the back of the man’s jacket. That slowed him down enough for Diderot and Marx to get to the doorway ahead of him. Faced with the guns of the two Frenchmen, Romanescu stopped.

  “Well, I’m good for something after all, am I not, Professor?” Marx said brightly. Benedetti ignored him.

  Diderot spun the Romanian around to put handcuffs on him. Romanescu’s face wore a look of purest hate.

  “There is your Werewolf,” Benedetti said.

  28

  ETIENNE DIDEROT WAS A resort-town cop, not a mastermind. He had a long way to go to catch up with the great Professor Niccolo Benedetti. But he knew that when a mild-mannered old man like Romanescu turns into a snarling athlete bent on escape at the first accusation, somebody was onto something.

  Diderot brought his prisoner before Benedetti. He reached out to the man’s left cheek and pulled the bandage loose. After a month, the scratches were nearly healed, but one could still discern the characteristic triangular shape, with the wide part closest the front. Diderot fondly hoped he would soon be allowed to know what significance that held.

  “It wasn’t necessary to do that, Monsieur Diderot,” the Professor told him.

  Diderot felt indignant. “The man was fleeing. He had to be caught.”

  Benedetti was patient. “Yes, I understand that. It was not, however, necessary to pull off the bandage. You have the slides, have you not?”

  “The slides?”

  “The photographic transparencies you showed to my associates and me on our arrival. When I telephoned you I asked you to bring them with you.”

  “Oh,” Diderot said. He was beginning to get irritated with himself. He did not consider himself a stupid man, but the rapid string of revelations was making him feel stupid. “Yes. We have brought those.”

  “Excellent,” Benedetti told him. “I believe this room has a projection booth. Perhaps the useful Monsieur Marx can be dispatched there to show the slides. Or one particular slide.”

  It was all arranged in less than two minutes. Diderot had rearranged the handcuffs so that his prisoner was chained to his seat, and sat next to him. The crowd had been calmed, the room darkened. Marx rapidly shuffled through the evidence slides.

  “Stop!” Benedetti said. “There it is. There is the clue that should have led me to the identity of the Werewolf before he had even chosen the name.

  “Because those marks show incontrovertibly that whoever made those marks on Romanescu’s cheek was facing him. But what was the story he told the police? That he had been taking a walk when a madman attacked him from behind. He saw nothing, except ‘a man in brown’ fleeing the scene, and even that he was vague about.

  “But that story, my friends, was the work of a brilliant mind, operating under pressure. At one stroke, it accounted for the marks on his cheek; it moved Romanescu directly into the class of ‘potential victims’ rather than of suspects. And he began to lay the groundwork for a chimera, an illusionary entity that could be blamed for the murder, if need be—the ‘man in brown.’ All this, before the first body was even discovered.”

  “I can hardly believe this.” The baron was wringing his hands. “Dr. Romanescu, how can this have happened? After all you went through, when you
were finally free—why did you kill Dr. Goetz? Did you not know he was the one who insisted you be invited in the first place?”

  Romanescu sat and said nothing. There was the suggestion of a smile on his face.

  “I believe,” the Professor said, “you give the man the wrong honorific. It’s not ‘Doctor’ Romanescu, is it?”

  Just as he had at that first briefing session, Diderot saw Benedetti launch a blind pass to young Gentry.

  “My colleague will elaborate,” the Professor said. “Won’t you, Ronald?”

  “Of course, Professor,” Ron said. Ron was ready for him, this time. “I think I can help clear things up if I poll the crowd on a couple of questions. First, Baron, I noticed you addressed your question to Romanescu in English.”

  “I always have,” the baron said. “We all have.”

  “I think you’re right,” Ron said. He addressed the whole group. “Anybody know anything different? Has anyone ever addressed a word in French to Romanescu and gotten an answer? Think hard, now. Anybody ever hear him speak a word of French?”

  There was a general shaking of heads.

  “Neither have I,” Ron said. “The prefect will remember the day Romanescu tried to ‘flee’ town—in reality, just calling attention to the werewolf idea. Why was I able to persuade him to come back after you weren’t? Because I spoke English. The prefect spoke French—Romanescu simply didn’t understand him. And this is supposed to be a man whose official biography says he taught at a French university for several years before he fell out of favor with the Romanian government, was ordered to return, and was placed under house arrest.

  “I mean, I know it’s been a long time, but he can’t have been in France for a couple of years and not have learned anything. I’ve been here less than a week—”

  “Seems longer,” Janet mumbled so only Ron could hear.

  He suppressed a smile and went on. “—and I’ve learned enough French to tell a taxi driver where to go. Romanescu had to have the hotel clerk do it for him.

  “No, I think our friend here is someone who’s never been in France before. I think he’s learned a good few months’ worth of the language in the time he’s been here. But he found himself facing an interesting problem. If he used the French he’d picked up since OSI began, he might remind someone that he ought to be considerably more fluent than he is. No, safer to get by with no French at all, and possible because so many people here speak English.”

  “Sacrebleu!” said the man in the handcuffs. He was enjoying this. Ron wondered if this was just bravado or what. It was too bad, Ron decided, that it hadn’t been Marx who’d gotten the handcuffs on Romanescu. Those two deserved each other.

  “Now about that demonstration with the telescope earlier. That wasn’t—”

  “He couldn’t find Clavius,” Karin Tebner said. “I felt so sorry for him, because he had been a great astronomer, and now he couldn’t even find Clavius.”

  Ron nodded. “Now you know that Clavius had nothing to do with it. That the Professor didn’t give a damn about Clavius.”

  Ron could say that now, of course. What he couldn’t forget was the way his brain did twisting somersaults when the Professor had first come up with this, trying to decide what the hell a crater on the moon had to do with murders in the here and now.

  “The idea was for you to see that this man—as Dr. Tebner said, a great astronomer—didn’t even know how to use a simple telescope to find one of the most prominent features on the moon.

  “How am I doing, Maestro?”

  “Excellent,” the old man said. “Please continue.”

  Ron grinned at the old man for a change. “I had no intention of stopping.” Again, he addressed the audience. “The question now was, since he obviously wasn’t Dr. Ion Romanescu, noted astronomer, who was he?

  “As the Professor said, we’ve been applying the wrong honorific. I forget what the right one was.” He turned to the prisoner. “What was it? Major? Colonel? We can look it up.

  “I say nothing. I admit nothing. I will trust to French law.”

  Ron caught a glimpse of the Professor. For some reason the old man was grinning almost wide enough to make his cheek bleed again. Which reminded him that the Professor’s bandage had yet to be replaced. That was all he needed, something else to worry about.

  “Fine,” Ron said. “We’ll look it up. Some of you may not know this, but the brother I mentioned earlier, the one who caused the disgrace and arrest of Ion Romanescu so many years ago, was an officer in the Romanian secret police, in tight with the recently deposed Ceausescu regime. He was a wanted man when Ceausescu fell, hunted assiduously until his body was found among those of rioters and Ceausescu’s guards outside a government building.

  “That’s the story, anyway. I think it was the astronomer’s body that was found, dumped there by his brother, who assumed his identity. Maybe even identified the body for the new government, huh? Then waited on tenterhooks for some chance to get out of Romania. OSI must have seemed like a gift from the angels. Not only would it get you out of Romania, where a slip at any moment could put you in front of a summary firing squad, it put you in a position to stay permanently in the West.”

  “I say nothing. I admit nothing.”

  Marx, the spy, formerly Captain Marx, cleared his throat. “I—uh—think you are forgetting something.”

  “I forget nothing,” Benedetti said.

  “Fingerprints,” Marx said. “The fingerprints Diderot and de Blois had collected and were matching. I was there when Reggiani, the greatest fingerprint man in Europe, went over them. That Italian genius said categorically there was no impostor at the Olympique Scientifique Internationale.”

  “That Italian genius,” Benedetti echoed, “overstepped the bounds of his expertise. All Signor Reggiani could truthfully say is that the fingerprints he was given to examine matched. That is all. That he said more one must attribute to the regrettable weakness of some of my countrymen for the theatrical gesture.”

  Ron choked back a laugh; so did Janet. Nobody else bothered. The Professor pretended not to notice.

  “The fingerprints did match,” the old man went on. “That is the whole point.”

  “What whole point?” Marx asked.

  “The point that unlike you, dear ‘Captain,’ our killer does think like a policeman. Even in totalitarian regimes, there is a certain amount of professionalism attached to the job. Even Mussolini’s thugs, with whom I had some experience as a young man, were aware of the concept of evidence, and liked to find it, as long it didn’t interfere with their use of the truncheon.

  “And those things, the fact of the imposture, and the background of the impostor, explain so much. They answer almost all the questions remaining.

  “It answers Frau Goetz’s questions about why her husband, about whom no bad word has ever been heard that was not planted by you, Monsieur Marx, was killed. Quite simply, Dr. Goetz was killed because he was too good a man. A more self-centered man, especially one who was in charge of a section of OSI, especially one who had made a rare and spectacular discovery, would not have spent time worrying about a contemporary who didn’t seem to be able to run the simplest equipment any more. That man would have ignored the incompetence and gotten on with his own work, much to the false Dr. Romanescu’s delight.

  “But Hans Goetz cared. It was he who had arranged for the invitation to Romanescu in the first place. And undoubtedly he was there with sympathy, advice, offers of help. Eventually, he must have seen something that caused suspicion even in a mind as generous as his.

  “Still, he does not act. He waits until the inevitable time everyone is off from work, and away from the observatory, and arranges a secret late-night walk. Perhaps this impostor is a poor refugee. Perhaps Hans Goetz can still be of help.

  “Of course, the impostor is a killer, and Hans Goetz is a deadly danger. Romanescu reaches for his throat—in the struggle, fighting desperately to his last breath, Goetz claws Romanescu ac
ross the cheek.

  He looked at the Romanian. “How delightful you must have found it to tell me—in perfect truthfulness—how frightened you were during that first attack. You weren’t frightened by it, as I was meant to believe; you were frightened into making it, by Dr. Goetz’s suspicions.

  “And this answers your question, as well, Dr. Tebner. Why was the body held in the flames of the torch in the Place du Science? Very simple. The policeman’s mind knows that not only is he standing there with a scratched cheek, but that particles of his flesh are under the dead man’s fingernails. That evidence must be obliterated. A simple crime of convenience must become an act of horror so great it overwhelms rational thought. One victim and one killer must become one victim and one near-victim of some bestial fiend. So the body goes into the fire, to burn the flesh of both the killer and the victim. And Romanescu goes into the police station with his story of a vicious attack—we have all seen tonight what a good actor he is—and in that moment, the Werewolf is born.”

  29

  THERE WAS SILENCE FOR a minute or so, broken only by soft sobs from Frau Goetz.

  “I am sorry, madam,” the Professor said softly. “In the end, I think you will find it better to know the truth.”

  The old man went on to outline the second murder. Ron had spent most of the trip up on the cable car working it out for himself.

  Romanescu had made a mistake. Two mistakes, really. He had underestimated the uproar the murder would cause, maybe because of his lifelong immersion in a terrorist state. And, figuring he’d be safe with Goetz gone, he had gone back to “work.”

  Ron could almost feel the pressure mounting on the man, coming up here night after night, while down below Diderot and de Blois were doing their good solid job of police work. Then came the universal fingerprint canvass. Romanescu fights panic—he knows what’s coming next. He knows they’ll wire back to Bucharest for his brother’s prints, and he knows they won’t match.