Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 116, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 709 & 710, September/October 2000

The Gooseberry Fool by James Powell

Readers who enjoyed James Powell’s April 1999 story “Jerrold’s Meat” will he pleased to learn that the tale is currently nominated for Canada’s most prestigious mystery prize, the Arthur Ellis Award. Mr. Powell has ten (yes, ten!) previous nominations for the Arthur Ellis. This year’s winner will be announced in Toronto at the end of May (just a few days from this writing). May this he your year, Jim!

In the early 1880s Europe was visited each year by a plague of assassinations at the hands of the same hired killer. The Continent’s prefects of police christened this man the Gooseberry Fool because his annual itinerary approximated that of the hero in Andre Jurry’s incomparable operetta of the same name.

Jurry’s music told the legend of a nobleman from a northern clime whose passion for gooseberries sent him rattling southward in his carriage as soon as the roads were passable, startling crocuses from the ground and gilding willows along the way as if he were spring itself. Down the Danube valley, down the Adriatic coast to the very heel of the Italian boot he rolled and then was ferried, carriage and all, across to Corfu where Europe’s first gooseberries hung ripe on the bush. Through spring and summer, the nobleman followed the maturing fruit northward in easy stages up into France and Germany, with a final cold, autumnal rush across the gooseberry fields of East Prussia.

But even though the police knew the which-way and the when — MURDER BY RAILROAD SCHEDULE, the newspapers called it — such was the Gooseberry Fool’s skill and mastery of disguise that they could no more prevent his first assassination than stop the arrival of the first robin of the year. The hired killer came with a full order book and claimed his victims until the foliage turned.

Customarily, the police would have sought help from the fearsome Ambrose Ganelon, founder of San Sebastiano’s famous detective agency. But age had dimmed those fabled powers, while his son and namesake remained an untried cub, a tinkerer among test tubes and flammarion flasks.

On a Saturday morning in July, 1885, Ambrose Ganelon II emerged from 18 bis rue Blondin, the family residence and the offices of the Ganelon detective agency, carrying a small suitcase. More than just a taller version of the father, the son’s long legs, so becoming in his cavalry-officer days, now gave him a civilian elegance. Where the Founder, all scowl and armchair, brooded over cases like a python digesting a pig, until only the skeleton of truth remained, the son perambulated, preferring to talk things out on long walks about the city, his companions struggling to match his stride. At a later date, his elegance and tenacity would earn him the nickname, the Bouledogue des Boulevards.

A policeman with dandruff on his cape guarded the agency’s doorway. One had for years now, since the Founder’s faculty of ratiocination was declared a treasure of the principality. Acknowledging his salute, Ganelon went to stand at the curb. He could almost hear the policeman ask himself why a Ganelon was leaving town during Gooseberry Fool alert. Was San Sebastiano to go the way of Paris, protecting itself from the assassin by following its prefect of police on vacation for the month of August, leaving the city to waiters and American tourists?

But the Gooseberry Fool had not yet dared kill in San Sebastiano. Ganelon, who did not want to remain forever in his father’s shadow, wished he would try. In any event, Ganelon was not going far. Young Baron Charles Sandor lived only a few miles away across the Porpentine, the river which until twenty-five years ago marked the eastern boundary of San Sebastiano just as the Tortue marked its western limits (a fact which explains why the supporters of San Sebastiano’s busy coat of arms are that marriage made in heaven, the turtle and the porcupine).

The Sandor money came from Vieux Gaspard’s Ointment, a preparation named after a local of the previous century legendary for his age and limberness of joints. The current baron’s grandfather, Baron Justin, an avid phrenologist (some said he possessed an immense bump of credulity), had assembled for study a collection of plaster heads of murderers.

Ganelon had written some months ago for permission to examine Baron Justin’s collection. Though impressed by the recent anthropometric work of the phrenologist Bertillon, Ganelon considered the man’s fourteen identification measurements clumsy. He hoped to find his own cluster of three or four unique to each individual on the skull near the sphenoid bone.

Having the patience of plaster, the baron’s heads would be far easier to measure than Ganelon’s restless friends. He was beginning to believe the Sandors still bore an ancient grudge against the Ganelons because the Founder brought one of their servants to book for murder. Then yesterday evening he received a hand-delivered invitation to spend the weekend studying the heads and to meet the Hereditary Nawab of Jamkhandi and some of Sandor’s business associates, all come for the hunting.

The Nawab was renowned in his own land as a builder of hospitals, temples, and schools, and famous abroad as a student of the human conscience, eager to promote whatever might increase mankind’s desire to do good and avoid evil.

The Sandor carriage arrived punctually, the crest on the door bearing the same figure of the lean old man leaping in air to kick his heels which graced each bottle of Vieux Gaspard’s Ointment. Ganelon expected it would have first met the early train from Milan and was not surprised to find a passenger inside. His traveling companion looked up from a gilt-edged prayer book; his long, pale face was made longer and paler still by a flourish of black sideburns. The vehicle reeked of lavender cologne.

Ganelon introduced himself. The man closed the book on his finger, ready to flee back into it should the new arrival prove unedifying. “Lars Thorwald of Christiania,” he replied, adding, “The great detective? I expected a much older man.”

“You’re thinking of my father,” said Ganelon, as he had so many times before.

Thorwald bowed, then sniffed the air. “I must explain I do not use a scent. Signor Antonio Cipriani, who left aboard the same train which brought me here, spilled the contents of his atomizer onto the carriage floor while fortifying his handkerchief against the journey. The coachman promises to air things out when we’re in the country and he can whip up the horses.”

Thorwald looked grave. “Several days ago, in Milan, Cipriani and I toured Vieux Gaspard’s new bottling works together. Though his cheeks were as hare as those cherubs which infest Italian art and his straw-colored vest dared to match his gloves and his spats, I judged him a superior type of individual. For a Neapolitan.”

For many, Africa began at Naples. Englishmen swore by Calais. Ganelon understood some Scandinavians said at Lübeck.

The carriage started off. Thorwald gripped his bowler as if it were self-satisfaction itself. Was it the prospect of meeting the Nawab of Jamkhandi which made Ganelon think of the Solemn Order of Snarks? This secret terrorist brotherhood worshipped the fabulous Snark in its third incarnation:

Years ago, on the Nawab’s first visit to Europe, a bomb had been thrown into his carriage in a Dresden street. The sputtering device passed through one window and out the other and bounced down some steps before exploding in a pastry-shop basement.

The Dresden police had reason to suspect Snarks. Some months before, the Nawab, dressed in the colorful costume of his native land, chose to dine at Aladdin’s, a London restaurant of an Arabian Nights decor. As his party approached the entrance, an English gentleman emerged and, mistaking the Nawab for the doorman, gave him sixpence and ordered he call him a cab. “All right, you’re a cab,” the Nawab replied. “But it will take more money than this to get me to call you hansom.” The pun became famous throughout Europe. Yes, the Snarks hated the punster worst of all.

The carriage containing Ganelon and Thorwald left the city proper by the Porte de l’Est. Ganelon found something of historical interest to point out to Thorwald whenever his eyes crept toward his hook. Suburban villas soon gave way to prosperous farms. Then they crossed the stone bridge with its ruined water mill and entered Transporpentine San Sebastiano.

In 1860, Sardinia ceded Savoy to France. Reviving Savoy’s ancient claim to San Sebastiano, the French attacked at dawn across the winding Tortue river. The principality’s outnumbered little army drove them back. Then, with San Sebastiano committed militarily on the west, the French cavalry appeared in force across the Porpentine. The bridge’s few defenders barricaded themselves in the water mill, knowing no reinforcements could reach them through streets clogged with morning traffic.

The confident French, giving themselves over to brio, bugle blowing, and rushing about with messages, were astonished when San Sebastiano’s crack sharpshooter regiment arrived, mounted behind the amazons of the women’s chapter of the Club Velocipede, who had darted there through traffic on their dashing penny-farthings. Brissac-Charbonelle’s vivid paintings have immortalized the battle, the women in their broad pink-and-blue-striped jerseys, heads bent over the handlebars, the soldier-marksmen seated behind them firing left and right, the panic among the French horses. After the Half-Day War, as it came to be called, France was obliged to cede territory across the Porpentine which doubled the size of the principality.

Several miles onward, the easy slope of Mont St. Hugues and then the tower of the Sandor château appeared above the trees. The baroness, an attractive woman with an English wild-rose complexion, waited on the steps to greet them. Ganelon judged her several years older than her husband. They had met in England during the Sandor firm’s failed merger talks with its principal rival, Old Father William’s Supplifying Salve. Ganelon understood the baroness had been on the London musical stage.

When he and Throwald stepped down from the carriage, she laughed, “What a smell of lavender! For a moment I thought dear Signor Cipriani had come back to us.” Then she apologized for her husband’s absence. The hunters were still in the field.

The baroness impressed Ganelon as a steadfast wife, one who judges others by whether they can help her husband or harm him. Had he only imagined that she seemed particularly grateful he had come? Ganelon had been taught to expect ulterior motive behind social invitations. Fashionable hostesses used to ask the Founder to their affairs to scare off jewel thieves.

The detective was given into the hands of LeSage, a middle-aged servant with an intelligent face who led him down several corridors. For Ganelon’s convenience, his rooms would be in the tower Baron Justin built to house his collection. “It will also be quieter for you, sir,” explained Le Sage. “The old moat has been excavated around the château proper for foundation repairs and installing the new drains. The masons will be back on Monday.”

Reaching the tower, they took an iron circular staircase. The first two floors housed the plaster heads in cubby holes, the third the grandfather’s old living quarters, which were well aired and bright. The study was dominated by a large marble head marked out phrenologically. A framed daguerreotype on one wall showed two men standing before a horse-drawn caravan.

“If the bald gentleman is Baron Justin, the other must be Gaston, the child-killer,” observed Ganelon.

“Bonhomme Pickle himself, sir. In Paris. Usually they set up shop across from the Prison de la Roquette, where heads rolled like cabbages at harvest time. Their wagon held all they needed to make casts before returning the heads to the bereaved.” LeSage pointed to a thick binder on the desk. “The registry, sir. Whenever you’re ready to begin, I’ll fetch the heads you’d like to see.”

Ganelon got quickly to work with calipers and notebook while LeSage brought up four heads at a time in containers resembling hatboxes. After two hours of slow, careful measurements Ganelon heard the growl of iron on stone in the courtyard and went to the window. Gamekeepers were pushing a handcart heaped with dead grouse across the cobbles. Behind them came the hunters in an array of hats and buttoned gaiters.

Arriving with more hatboxes, LeSage joined Ganelon at the window. “There’s his excellency the Nawab, sir,” he said, pointing to a man with a round, café-au-lait face wearing a knickerbocker suit of the latest fashion. “And there, next to him, is Major Leland Sowerby.”

Ganelon knew of Sowerby, whom the Nawab had graciously asked to join his permanent staff after he’d been driven from the Indian Army for gambling debts.

Next came the baron, his face open and boyish, proudly pointing out an aspect of the new drains to a lanky man in an old fringed-buckskin jacket. “Vieux Gaspard’s North American representative?” guessed the detective.

“Mr. Caleb Hardacre, sir,” nodded LeSage.

“And the duelist?” A slighter man marched behind, one jacket lapel tucked in across his shirt front as if to deny an adversary a white target in the meager light of dawn.

“Herr Franz Gruber of Leipzig, sir. Our Central European representative.”

As the hunting party passed from sight, Ganelon returned to his work, which wasn’t going as well as he’d hoped. The next few hours might prove or — as seemed more likely — disprove his thesis. He decided to work through luncheon, taking the meal on a tray. But in the meantime, his concentration became half-hearted. The parade of bald heads kept reminding him of Baron Justin who took “Know Thyself” as his motto and, long before Ganelon was born, had been a familiar sight walking about town thoughtfully reading the bumps on his shaven skull with his fingertips.

In the 1850s, Christian charity and phrenological inquiry led Baron Justin to establish an orphanage for the care and education of 153 street urchins (the legendary number of Scripture’s miraculous draught of fishes), keeping the boys’ heads shaven to better chart their phrenological development. Their uniform of baggy red trousers, blue short-coat, and red fez earned them the nickname the Petits Zouaves de Vieux Gaspard.

For recruitment, Baron Justin encased his servant, Gaston, in an immense green papier-mâché gherkin and sent him to the spices and condiments fair in the Place Madagascar, where he sold an excellent dill from a tray. A street urchin who let Bonhomme Pickle examine his head got a free dill and a chance at the coveted brass token, which meant entry into the orphanage.

The arrival of the young baron, now changed out of his hunting clothes, interrupted Ganelon’s musings over this story, which would end so tragically. “Welcome, Monsieur Ganelon,” said his host, smiling broadly and setting down the detective’s luncheon tray. “May I intrude on your meal?” At Ganelon’s urging the baron pulled over a chair, sat down, and beamed at the son of a national treasure of the principality. “You know, every birthday and Christmas my father gave me a Marchpane book.” Austin Marchpane wrote popular accounts of the Founder’s most famous cases.

“Until Ganelon and the Pickled Boys?”

“That did hit rather close to home.”

Ganelon imagined that it had. “My father would never let a Marchpane book in the house,” he said. The Founder denounced the many mannerisms the author concocted for him. Yet, Ganelon knew, his father had never uttered his loud accusatory “Ah-ha!” until Marchpane used it in The Bridge of Traded Dreams. And it wasn’t until Spawn of the Corsican Eagle, where Marchpane touched on his hero’s paternity, that the Founder began plastering a forelock down over his brow and posing, fingertips inside his jacket.

The baron’s thoughtful smile lingered. Then he turned grave and leaned forward. “My dear sir, I need your help. One of the Nawab’s cufflinks has been stolen.” When Ganelon cocked a disappointed eye, the Baron added urgently, “A large blue sapphire.”

“And does this sapphire have religious or dynastic significance?” wondered Ganelon. “An eye from a temple goddess, perhaps, whose desecration must be washed away with human blood? Or does the loss foretell some doom for the Nawab or his house?”

The baron blinked. “Not that he mentioned. In fact, he urges me to forget the whole incident. Easier said than done. You see, it means I have invited a thief under my roof.”

“Forgive me. I draw the line at stray cufflinks.”

Sandor appeared crestfallen. In a moment he brightened. “Then how about lurking around a bit? You know, to make the thief think you’re on the case?”

“You mean behind the potted palm?” The detective had to smile. Yet he could understand how the new baron might be unnerved by the thought of tarnishing his family name so soon. He put down his knife and fork. “Why don’t you bring me up to date.”

The baron pulled his chair closer. “The Nawab’s manservant put the cufflinks away in the jewel case Wednesday night. Dressing his master for Thursday dinner, he found one missing.”

“And who was here at that time?”

“Let me see. The Nawab arrived with Major Sowerby on Tuesday, from Rome, to see our orphanage with an eye to starting something similar in Jamkhandi. Mr. Hardacre and Signor Cipriani arrived Wednesday from Milan. This will be my first chance to meet the new Vieux Gaspard representatives my father chose just before his death last year. Of the other two, Herr Gruber didn’t come until after dinner on Thursday. A pickpocket stole his wallet in Milan and lack of identification delayed him at the border. And, of course, Mr. Thorwald arrived with you this morning, bedridden in Milan with traveler’s stomach until yesterday. I am sure the cufflink was stolen late Thursday afternoon.”

When Ganelon asked why, the baron explained, “Because that was when my wife saw the Phantom Balloon.” He smiled and added, “Who else but dear Louise?”

Ganelon understood. With Paris under siege during the Franco-Prussian War, the French evacuated the gold in the national treasury in hot-air balloons of a novel design. Each carried galvanic batteries to heat the air by means of a metal probe. When the balloon flotilla encountered fierce thunderstorms over the Massif Central, one balloon developed a loose battery connection. As it lost altitude, the crew dumped the precious cargo. When that failed to stop the descent, they escaped hand over hand along the tether line to their nearest neighbor. The damaged balloon was cut free and drifted southwestward, coming to rest in the forest north of San Sebastiano, where it became a local legend, rising into the air and coming to earth again at the loose battery connection’s whim. It was said that the Phantom Balloon could pass overhead unseen until noticed by one whose heart was pure. Hence Sandor’s “Who else but dear Louise?”

“When my wife rushed in with the news, the château spilled out onto the lawn, servants and all. I think that was when the thief stole the cufflink. We never saw the balloon, by the way. The wind must have shifted.”

“I understand one of your guests left this morning.”

The baron nodded. “Poor Cipriani. Oh yes, I know how it looks. But he couldn’t have been the thief. With tears in his eyes and the carriage at the door, he begged me, for the sake of his honor, to search his person and his luggage. I reluctantly agreed. LeSage and I were thorough, I assure you. No cufflink.”

Sandor stood up. “So there we are. After luncheon tomorrow I’m going to try a little parlor game suggested by one of our guests. If it doesn’t get the cufflink back and you’re done with the heads, may I put the matter in your hands?”

Ganelon returned to his measurements. But by late afternoon he had thrown down the calipers, closed his notebook, and turned away from the plaster head of Jean-Batiste Troppmann, the Kinck-family murderer. What he was looking for just wasn’t there.

Time to turn his mind to the cufflink. Why steal a single sapphire cufflink when you could just as easily have taken both, a matched pair worth four times as much? Ganelon shook his head. You don’t build a reputation catching stupid thieves. You needed someone like the Gooseberry Fool.

Or the murderer of the pickled boys. Some ten years after the Sandor orphanage opened, the corpses of four naked boys were discovered swirling slowly around in a solemn follow-the-leader in a sewer eddy beneath the Place d’lota. Using his vast knowledge of the sewer system, the Founder calculated water flow and the modest Mediterranean tidal effect at that phase of the moon to pinpoint the exact sewer grating down which the bodies had been dropped. Brine in the victims’ lungs led him to Bonhomme Pickle’s warehouse only a hundred feet away. At first, old Gaston maintained boys from the neighboring Sandor orphanage had drowned stealing from his pickle barrels, their companions dumping the bodies into the sewer. But he could not explain the battering about the victims’ heads. Taken into custody, Gaston would later confess to the murders and be sent to Duranceville prison for life. As for Baron Justin, his son took over the business and the old man never showed his poor, dog-eared head in San Sebastiano again.

No, they didn’t make cases like the pickled boys anymore. But when Ganelon had voiced that same complaint on a recent visit to Father Sylvanus in his hermitage, the saintly priest had suggested that the Founder had solved his case by force of character alone, implying it was character not cases that Ganelon lacked.

As a boy, Ganelon had been sent to Father Sylvanus to learn the via felix, or the Happy Way, the forgotten medieval art of self-defence. An opponent was rendered horizontal with a hip lift and his body humors (blood, phlegm, choler, and bile) redistributed, producing a radical, if temporary, personality change. Ganelon’s grammar had been a heavy board grooved with a maze in which four lead balls must roll but never collide. He practiced with it on his hip until he was as adept as his teacher. Now Ganelon wondered if the via felix could be self-applied. Might he stretch himself out horizontally, supported by a sawhorse in the small of his back, and redistribute his body humors until he had character or, at least, patience?

To business! If Cipriani wasn’t the thief, and Gruber and Thorwald arrived after the cufflink was stolen, then Ganelon was left with two suspects: Sowerby and Hardacre.

As he concluded this reasoning, LeSage arrived to help him dress for dinner. While the detective stood before the mirror adjusting his white tie, LeSage said, “I think I should tell you, sir, you being a detective, that before your arrival I had the pleasure of caring for Mr. Hardacre’s needs. While brushing out his vests, I discovered a business card. It read ‘Jeremiah Wynne, North American Representative, Old Father William’s Supplifying Salve.’ ”

“So he’s been consorting with the enemy?”

“The Old Father William people are in financial straits and desperate to lay hands on our formula, sir. So I fiddled the lock on a curious flat leather box Mr. Hardacre brought with him. Inside was a full gray beard of the kind that hooks over the ears, and matching eyebrows. I never told the young baron. He’d be furious with my snooping through guests’ things.”

The guests gathered in the music room for a drink before dinner. “What a pleasure to meet the son of the great detective,” said the Nawab of Jamkhandi. “I hope your father is well.”

Ganelon lied and thanked him for his enquiry. Actually, the Founder was deep in the toils of oboe madness, an affliction common among woodwind players, whose compression of breath must eventually drive the upper palate into the very foundations of the brain. When the fit was on him, the Founder would rave about a love affair with a certain high personage whom he called Regina and see at every window the face of his nemesis Dr. Ludwig Fong, Eurasian arch-villain, chiropractor, and would-be master of the world.

Ganelon met the remaining guests. Suspect Sowerby had a flush face and a sad mouth made sadder by a turned-down moustache. Or was it the drink in his hand? Could Sowerby have stolen his benefactor’s cufflink? Some people hate a benefactor most of all.

The duelist Herr Gruber, whose moustache-ends turned sharply upward, appeared something of a fire eater, his eyes aflash with the memory of his last such meal. After they met, Ganelon felt the man had been measuring him for an epee thrust.

Suspect Hardacre was mixing drinks. The American’s weathered face suggested a sunburned neck beneath his collar and tie. “Pink-gilled,” the English say, meaning “country bumpkin.” But Hardacre was no yokel. Ganelon suspected he’d been among his countrymen who had lived in Europe during their Civil War as agents of the North or South. His French was fluent but encumbered, as though learned while he had the American habit of chewing tobacco. Could Hardacre be the thief? Surely a man who once chewed tobacco was capable of anything. And why the fake beard?

Louise Sandor took the detective by the arm, explaining, “Mr. Hardacre is mixing American cocktail drinks. Will you try one? Major,” she asked Sowerby, “how do you find your...?”

“Tarantula Juice, ma’am,” said Sowerby hoarsely, adding, “The name rather understates the taste.”

Hardacre suggested a Lightning Bolt or Calamity Water. Ganelon chose the latter as sounding the least instantaneous. Then he raised his glass to Thorwald across the room. Thorwald wasn’t drinking and replied with a bow. Was the self-righteous gentleman of the teetotal persuasion, too? Ganelon smiled to himself, remembering how Thorwald had shown no real interest in his running commentary during the carriage ride until the part about the Phantom Balloon only being seen by the pure of heart. From then on he missed no chance to sneak a glance skyward.

This reminded Ganelon of the lavender cologne. Could Cipriani’s perfume atomizer have been used to smuggle the sapphire out of the château? He chatted his way over to the baron and asked if the atomizer had been examined. “Yes, I remember,” said his host. “One of those blue glass things. LeSage took it all apart.”

Just then a footman opened the dining room doors and everyone moved toward the table. The Nawab was given the place of honor on the baroness’s right. Ganelon sat on his other side and offered his regrets for the stolen sapphire cufflink.

The Nawab dismissed the loss with a shake of his head. “My people believe that the Devil, that great aper of the Almighty, once tried to make an animal to match the horse in grace and beauty. But his best effort was the camel. And they say that when he saw how much we loved the beauty of God’s flowers, the Devil hurried to his underground smithy and created precious stones, hoping their brightness would lure us from the righteous path. I have made a study of jewels. But they are the Devil’s flower bed. We must never become attached to them.”

“Some say a camel is a horse designed by a committee,” replied Ganelon. “Could it be that the Devil is a committee?”

“He has faces enough to be many committees.”

At the other end of the table, Thorwald had just pulled a bottle of Vieux Gaspard’s Ointment from his coat pocket. “For Scandinavia, may I suggest one small change for the label?” he asked. “This old man smiles and kicks his heels in the air. But health is a serious business.” As he spoke, Thorwald drew on the label with a pencil and sent the bottle around the table. “Conceal the smile thus. Now his eyes challenge us and say, ‘I can do this. Why can’t you?’ ”

When the bottle reached him Ganelon thought the penciled moustache on Gaspard’s lip bore a striking resemblance to Gruber’s. He handed it off to Hardacre, who burst out laughing. The German leaned over to look, turned red, and jumped to his feet. “Are you mocking me, sir?” he demanded of the American.

“Don’t blow your stack, pard.”

“Watch your words, sir,” answered Gruber. “Your bowie knives and knuckle-dusters hold no fear for me. I eat uncouth boobies like you for breakfast!”

Hardacre was on his feet. “Watch what you try eating, friend,” he warned, pulling up his coat sleeves. “Remember the Yankee oyster so big it took ten Germans to swallow it whole? I am that oyster, sir. I can handle shooting irons, too.”

But seeing their outburst had distressed the baron, Hardacre sat back down. He forced a smile, rubbed the back of his neck, and added, “Not like another member of our hunting party.”

Gruber barked out a laugh and sat down, too. “Yes, I hope the rest of the Indian Army shoots better than you do, Major.”

“I believe I have already offered you gentlemen my apologies for the peppering,” replied Sowerby.

“I forgave you when you ran off Cipriani,” Gruber assured him. “Mollycoddles belong by the fireside, charming the ladies.”

“Claimed I meant to murder him,” protested Sowerby.

“You did shoot the hat off his head,” said Hardacre.

The major scowled down at his plate.

“A borrowed hat,” added Gruber. “Imagine tagging along on a hunt with a borrowed hat and stick.”

“Stick or not, I think he shot as many birds as I did,” observed the Nawab.

“It’s your spanking-new hunting outfit that scares off the birds, your excellency,” suggested Hardacre. “Our Henry Thoreau says beware of enterprises that require new clothes. Now, I’d happily sell you my old buckskin jacket.”

As the table laughed, the Nawab wagged a mock-scolding finger and replied, “And I say, beware of enterprising used-clothes salesmen who quote Thoreau.”

In the music room, after dinner, the baroness played the piano for their entertainment. There was talk of a game of whist. Thorwald chose to sit in a corner with his book. Gruber shook his head. “I shall retire shortly,” he said, adding an ominous, “I am accustomed to rising before dawn.”

While the card players were making up their game, Ganelon went over to turn the music for the baroness. “I always considered the Phantom Balloon cut from the same cloth as the emperor’s new clothes,” he remarked. “You have proven me wrong.”

The baroness gave a sigh. “If you must know, I didn’t see the blasted thing and never said I had. I was out on the lawn when Signor Cipriani burst from the woods, eyes like saucers, babbling about a great brown bag in the sky. It had to be our local phenomenon, the Phantom Balloon. So I raced back to the house shouting the news with Cipriani on my heels. Charles just assumed I’d been the one who’d seen it.”

“And you never corrected his thinking?”

The baroness smiled without taking her eyes from the music. “Every wife wants her husband to believe her heart is pure, Monsieur Ganelon. Besides, Cipriani came to me later. His eyes must have been playing tricks on him, he said, and asked I not tell Charles, lest he be judged too excitable to be a Vieux Gaspard representative. I rather like dear, dithery Cipriani. I suspect he colors his hair.”

Leaving the piano, Ganelon watched the men play cards for small stakes. He noticed that when Major Sowerby dealt, the Nawab got excellent cards, which he played very badly. After a bit, the detective bade the company good night and retired.

Thunder came. Then a steady rain began to fall. Ganelon sat on the edge of his bed and pondered how a cufflink could be worth an elaborate ruse like a Phantom Balloon sighting. He now became aware of a cold draft across his bare toes coming from under the carved highboy on the opposite wall. In his carpet slippers he tried to inch the heavy piece of furniture forward and was surprised when, with a click, it swung out into the room on concealed hinges, revealing an upward flight of stone steps.

Armed with a lamp, Ganelon mounted up into the darkness. The room beneath the conical roof was fitted with a cell with stout iron bars, whose door stood open. Crowded inside was an iron bedstead, a treadled potter’s wheel, a box of hard rubber mallets and an ominous-looking bowl: a devilish grail of fire-scorched iron fitted about with large rusting screws. Cocking an eyebrow, Ganelon followed his footprints in the dust back down to bed.

Rising late the next morning, he found Hardacre playing pool alone in the billiard room. The man informed him that Gruber was off at pistol practice and the Sandors hadn’t yet returned from church.

Ganelon said, “By the way, I recently met another American working in your line. Jeremiah Wynne?”

Leaning to make a shot, Hardacre laughed. “I reckon not. I’m Wynne.” He straightened up and explained, “After the baron’s father hired me on, I got wind the Old Father William people needed a North American man, too. So I paid them a visit in a fake beard. Hell, why not? Peddling both meant two salaries and double travel expenses. With the Big Drink between us, who’d be the wiser?”

“The baron deserves better.”

Chalking his cue stick with care, Hardacre said, “A while back I found a thousand-legger — you know, a millipede — on my bedside rug. I stomped it good, and you know what? It was one of my own fake eyebrows. So the jig was up. I told the baron everything. He didn’t mind. He said Old Father William would be bankrupt way before I got back home to the States.”

In the music room, Ganelon found the Nawab deep in the Times of London and Sowerby playing Patience at a table nearby. And there, through a window, was Thorwald walking backwards across a muddy flower bed toward the château, his head thrown back on watch for the Phantom Balloon. He was coming dangerously close to the moat. As Ganelon moved to rap on the window glass, Thorwald reached the gravel path along the excavation work, turned, and walked away.

After a breakfast of coffee and a roll in the empty dining room, Ganelon asked LeSage to show him the hat and stick Cipriani had borrowed. LeSage led him back to the gun room and indicated a cloth hat with a peppering of small holes in the crown and a blackthorn from a rack of walking sticks.

“You also examined Cipriani’s atomizer?” asked the detective, running his fingers over the stick.

“And needed several washings to rid my hands of the smell of lavender, sir.”

“Could the blue bottle have hidden a blue sapphire?”

“The stone was much too large to pass through the neck of the bottle, sir,” LeSage replied and took his leave.

The Nawab appeared in the doorway. “May I share a moral dilemma, Monsieur Ganelon?”

“You mean, should you admit you shot off Cipriani’s hat, not Major Sowerby?” The Nawab’s astonishment obliged Ganelon to add, “A great-aunt on my mother’s side who was afflicted with flatulence late in life always kept an old cocker spaniel close by for scolding purposes should the need arise.”

The Nawab understood. “Yes, Major Sowerby has very kindly taken upon himself my shortcomings with the shotgun,” he admitted. “Yet I don’t know how it happened. I knew Cipriani was there behind the bushes. I swear I shot high enough. Well, perhaps some day I will master the weapon.”

“And whist, your excellency?” asked the detective.

The Nawab laughed at himself. “You can’t become an English gentleman overnight. Still, I’d rather not call attention to my ineptitudes. But no one has ever left the table out of pocket because of the help Major Sowerby gives me.”

Ganelon decided he needed a long walk in the open air to think things out. Leaving the château, he took the path toward the summit of Mont St. Hugues. If the perfume atomizer hadn’t been used to smuggle out the sapphire, then nothing really made sense. Cipriani steals a single cufflink when he could have stolen the pair. To give himself an excuse to carry off his modest prize, he intrudes a borrowed hat on a borrowed stick into the hunters’ line of fire, leaving telltale scratch marks of shot on the blackthorn. Sowerby, having been apologizing all morning for the Nawab, takes responsibility once more. Cipriani cries murder and decamps without the sapphire. No, it made no sense at all.

Up ahead, beyond where the path diverged, Gruber was sitting on a rustic bench, putting the finishing touches on cleaning his dueling pistol. Rising to go down to the nearby creek to wash the gun oil from his hands, he saw Ganelon and gave a polite bow. The detective bowed back before taking the upward path.

But the focused mind which came to Ganelon walking familiar streets eluded him in the country. Every step was a pleasant distraction. It would please the Nawab to know that wildflowers could hold him where the jeweler’s window could not. He thought of the Doctrine of Signatures, which taught that plants of medicinal value bore a mark specifying their curative powers. He thought of Baron Justin trying to deduce character from bumps on the skull.

Reaching the summit, he stood beneath a blasted oak to admire the view. Beyond the Porpentine’s curl he could make out a gray suggestion of the roofs of San Sebastiano, then the definite blue of the sea. Somewhere beyond lay the coast of Africa.

At the time of the Dresden bomb attempt on the Nawab, Ganelon had been serving in the Tripolitanian wars. One night, wrapped in his cape and staring into the campfire at the Sidi oasis, he wondered if the bomb thrower could have been Ludwig Fong. Killing doers of good deeds and thinkers of good thoughts was Fong’s recreation, after all. Hadn’t he himself set the fire that destroyed the convent where the blessed mystic, Mother Inez, communed with God? Hadn’t he brewed the ink whose fumes killed the peacemakers about to sign the pact ending the Turco-Balkan War? And how many medical missionaries hurrying on some errand of mercy had taken a turning in the jungle trail and met a smiling Fong in the act of stripping off his goat-skin gloves?

But all that was idle speculation now. Fong was done killing with his own hands. During a recent medical missionary hunt he had contracted Zambezi, or Simpering Fever. Now even his felonious children fled his terrible doting smile. He shunned the light of day, living alone amid draped mirrors lest he stumble upon his smirk unawares. In an ironic intersection of crime and punishment his last victim, a world authority on Simpering Fever, had reportedly been on the verge of a cure.

The baron looked interested at luncheon when Ganelon mentioned his walk to the top of Mont St. Hugues. “That blasted oak was Grandfather Justin’s favorite thinking spot,” he said. “By then he’d turned to applied phrenology.”

“Changing character by changing the bumps on the head?”

“Quite so. He designed the Sandor Corrective Cap, an iron skullcap with adjustable screws to apply pressure where needed. He wore it himself for three years with nothing for his trouble but bad headaches. Then one night he was surprised by a violent thunderstorm atop Mont St. Hugues. As he stood hurling science’s cool defiance into the teeth of wild nature, a bolt of lightning struck. Instantly, Grandfather’s headache went away and he realized he must find a solvent to make bone malleable. Many thunderstorms later he hit on pickle brine. For hours he’d soak his head in brine, breathing through a straw, and then work at amending his character with a hefty rubber mallet. He was never successful. Perhaps he needed younger, more mutable bone.

“But by the time I came along he’d abandoned phrenology for pottery. I remember vividly his wild-eyed look when he talked of shaping base clay into splendid little receptacles.”

Unwittingly, Sandor had told Ganelon why they never spoke of the pickled boys at home. The Founder suspected Baron Justin was the real killer. So did the young baron’s father, who confined Baron Justin in the tower. And Gaston, given the choice of being the madman’s keeper for the rest of his life or spending it in a quiet Duranceville cell, confessed to the murders. Ganelon found some satisfaction that the Founder had botched a famous case. But it still left him chasing after a stolen cufflink.

Once again, the table talk was Vieux Gaspard’s Ointment. Barking his grim laugh, Gruber promised his shop owners would give the product prominent display or face him on the dueling piste. Hardacre, afraid his countrymen couldn’t work their tongues around Vieux Gaspard, proposed a name change for the American market. Oil of the Limberlost, perhaps. Or Calaveras Frog Oil. A hop in every drop.

During dessert the Nawab turned to Ganelon. “After all I said last night about jewels, I find, on reflection, there is one I sorely covet, the Ararat Red, the legendary ruby which illuminated Noah’s Ark during the forty dark days and nights of the Flood. It was stolen years ago from the Sultan of Turkey. I understand it may soon be on the market again.”

The baron now asked his guests to adjourn to the music room for the parlor game he had promised. Ganelon was so shaken by the Nawab’s words, he hardly heard him. The Ararat Red, he knew, was the pride of Dr. Ludwig Fong’s fabled collection. Could Fong have used the ruby to hire an assassin to kill the Nawab? And wasn’t it said that the Gooseberry Fool had a weakness for precious stones?

Pondering this grim possibility, Ganelon followed the others into the music room. The curtains had been drawn shut and seven armchairs set around the walls at ten-foot intervals. The baroness had taken her place at the piano. Ganelon wondered if the parlor game was to be musical chairs. He had been bringing up the rear and found the only chair left was between the baron and Gruber, directly across the room from the Nawab.

The baron cleared his throat and said, “In a moment the servants will take away the lamps and leave us in darkness. Then my wife will begin to play. With the darkness and the music to protect his identity, I beg the one who stole the Nawab’s cufflink to return it. Place it in that bowl on the piano and the matter will be closed forever.”

Ganelon shook his head firmly and went over and protested in the baron’s ear, “I don’t like this. The Nawab’s life...”

“But it was the Nawab who suggested this little bit of entertainment,” replied the baron.

His words made Ganelon’s resolve stumble. The detective went back and sat down in confusion.

“My dear baron,” called the Nawab, who seemed to be enjoying himself, “I hope you’re not placing a valuable bowl in harm’s way. Major Sowerby knows silver. May he...?”

The baron agreed. Sowerby went and picked up the bowl, turned it over, and judged it a very fine piece.

“Which I am prepared to risk,” said the baron.

Suddenly the Nawab’s little manservant rushed into the room in considerable distress and whispered to his master. The Nawab smiled, patted his forearm reassuringly, and dismissed him. At the baron’s signal the lamps were removed and the baroness began a vigorous polka.

Ganelon sat in the darkness for several minutes contemplating how very close he had come to making a fool of himself. Then he thought of what Father Sylvanus had said. Fool or not, at least he could have the courage of his convictions. Suppose the whole business about the cufflink had been leading up to this dark moment. What if the Gooseberry Fool was in the room?

Ganelon sprang up, stumbled to a window, and threw open the curtains.

The piano stopped. Everyone sat, blinking at the afternoon light. Except for the Nawab. He was quite dead in his chair, his head thrown back, lifeless eyes staring at the ceiling, the mark of the strangler’s thumbs on his windpipe.

The baroness uttered a small cry.

Ganelon had failed the Nawab. But he resolved to do everything he could to find his murderer. “Send for the police,” he told the baron. He looked around at the guests and added, “No one must leave this room until they arrive.” Then he turned to Sowerby. “Can you clarify things, Major?”

Sowerby started to protest. Then the wind went out of him. “I didn’t kill him, I swear to that. The Nawab was very embarrassed by the baron’s fuss over the cufflink. So I proposed this little parlor game. He passed the suggestion on to our host. What his excellency didn’t tell the baron was that he was going to give me the remaining cufflink to slip into the bowl. When the lights came back on, there it would be. The baron’s honor would be satisfied. The Nawab would get the cufflink back and be no worse off than before.”

“So that’s what the Nawab’s manservant came to tell him, that now the second cufflink was missing?”

“Correct.”

Thorwald had gone to the piano. “But the bowl’s empty,” he said.

“Because you never put it there, did you, Major?” said Ganelon. “You palmed the second cufflink. Now you had the pair.”

Avoiding everyone’s eyes, Sowerby produced the two sapphire cufflinks and handed them to Ganelon, who passed them on to the baron. “Cipriani gave me the first cufflink the morning he left,” Sowerby told them. “Said he found it. Said I could return it to the Nawab. Or, he said, I could suggest this little game and end up with both. Somehow he knew I was being pressed hard to repay certain gambling debts. As he pointed out, a matching pair would go a long way to settling things.”

“But when the second cufflink went missing, wouldn’t the Nawab have suspected you?” asked Hardacre.

“Not if Sowerby killed the Nawab to shut him up,” said Gruber.

Sowerby shook his head. “Cipriani had the answer to that one, too. He knew how the Nawab liked his little ethical puzzles. He suggested I cloud the issue by wondering out loud what might happen if the thief actually tried to return the stolen cufflink in the darkness and discovered its mate in the bowl. Might he not consider the second cufflink a reward for his newfound honesty and keep both? This possibility intrigued the Nawab.”

Suddenly Ganelon understood the part the perfume atomizer played. Having suggested the parlor game, the master assassin couldn’t afford to be there in the room when the Nawab was found dead. So he said his goodbyes and left the château. His plan was to change out of his Cipriani disguise at the railway station and return as Lars Thorwald. But on the way he realized he wouldn’t have time to wash off all traces of Cipriani’s lavender scent. By dumping the atomizer on the floor of the carriage, he gave himself an excuse for reeking of lavender when he came back as Thorwald.

Here the baroness cried out again. There were faces at the window. Now a commotion broke out in the hallway. The doors flew open and Chief Inspector Flanel burst into the room followed by several of his men. Vain and slow-witted, the chief inspector’s rise on the police force showed how much it had deteriorated as the Founder’s reputation grew and the superior criminal found other places to practice his trade.

Flanel introduced himself to the astonished room. With a nod toward the corpse he said, “An hour ago, the prefecture received an anonymous message that the Nawab of Jamkhandi had been murdered and that his killer was still on these premises.”

“Chief Inspector...” began Ganelon.

“Ah, young Ganelon,” said Flanel. “Letting them get murdered right under your nose, eh? Well, never mind. Keep your eyes open and your mouth shut and you may learn something.” Flanel turned abruptly and went to examine the body. Then he had the baron explain the chair arrangement and give him the names of the other guests, which he wrote down in his notebook. When he was done he looked much like the cat that had swallowed the canary.

“Chief Inspector...” Ganelon began again.

But Flanel lay a side of his forefinger across his lips. Then he addressed the room while pacing back and forth with the plodding, bearlike walk he had affected ever since Marchpane’s The Eye of the Snowstorm, in which the author had the Founder comment on then Sergeant Flanel’s prancing step. “I now intend to interrogate you one at a time, beginning with Herr Franz Gruber. Since this may be a lengthy process, you may all occupy yourselves as you wish until I need to see you. Be warned that I have men at all the entrances and on the grounds.” At Flanel’s signal the policemen began clearing the room.

Ganelon came over and said firmly, “Chief Inspector, the Nawab’s killer is the Gooseberry Fool.”

Flanel’s jaw sagged.

Ganelon gave him a moment to let that sink in. Then he said, “And the Gooseberry Fool is...”

“Not another word,” said Flanel, gloating like a peacock. “This is my investigation.” Rubbing his hands together vigorously as though washing them in glory, the chief inspector turned to Gruber. “Actually I’m surprised to find you here, Franz Gruber.”

“And why is that?” asked the German, clearly outraged at being questioned first.

“Because, sir, yesterday we received a report circulated by the Milan police that your body was found three days ago in a room at the Hotel Europa. You had been strangled and your face battered in. You are an imposter. You are the Gooseberry Fool.”

Gruber barked a contemptuous laugh. No amount of badgering could shake the man’s pickpocket story. After half an hour Flanel had him taken away to be held until the Leipzig police verified his identity.

The chief inspector scowled over his suspect list again, shrugged hopelessly, and looked in Ganelon’s direction. When Ganelon mouthed Thorwald’s name, Flanel had him sent for.

Now a stranger appeared in the doorway, a man with an air of serious purpose wearing a close-cropped heard in the style made popular by Cavour. “I must speak to Baron Sandor,” he said.

“I am Chief Inspector Flanel, sir. Who are you?”

“My name is Antonio Cipriani, Vieux Gaspard’s sales representative for Italy and Spain.”

“How the hell did you get in here?” demanded Flanel.

“I had come expecting villainy,” said the new arrival. “When I found men lurking around outside, I assumed they were up to something dark. I should have realized they were police. Villains don’t lurk about with their hands in their pockets. In any event, when the man at the front door went into the bushes to relieve himself, I saw my chance and slipped inside.

“A week ago I was kidnapped on my way to visit the baron’s new manufacturing facility in Milan and held in an old farmhouse north of Naples. From what my kidnappers said among themselves, I gathered I was being held so that someone could impersonate me here. I suspected the Old Father William people meant to steal our formula.” The new arrival struck a kick-boxing stance. “No novice at the art of self-defence, I waited for my chance, knocked one of my captors down with a kick to the solar plexus, and escaped. But what was I to do then? Go to the police and they’d waste precious time confirming my story. So I decided to come directly here. In San Sebastiano I rented a rig, rode out here, and approached the chateau on foot. The rest you know.”

Cipriani put on pince-nez glasses, drew the Friday edition of the Milan Correro out of his pocket, and said, “Oh yes, and this may interest you. It seems I wasn’t the only Vieux Gaspard representative to be kidnapped.” The article he tapped with his glasses read: “The police, acting on an anonymous informant, have determined the murdered man discovered Sunday last at the Hotel Europa and previously identified as Franz Gruber of Leipzig was, in fact, Lars Thorwald of Christiania.”

Flanel snatched an invisible fly out of the air and shook it in his tight fist. “Got him!” he said. Then, as footsteps approached down the hall, he turned triumphantly to face the door.

But the policeman sent to find Thorwald had returned alone. “He’s gone, sir, escaped from his room down a rope of knotted bed sheets.”

“After him!” shouted Flanel, prancing out of the room. “He can’t have gotten far! Lars Thorwald is the Gooseberry Fool!”

Ganelon stayed behind to explain to the amazed Cipriani how his identity had been used in the Gooseberry Fool’s plan to murder the Nawab. When he had finished, Cipriani bowed and said, “I come at an inconvenient time. I will return tomorrow to put myself at the baron’s disposal.”

Ganelon pointed to the window where Flanel and a crowd of shouting policemen were dashing across the lawn. “Don’t leave yet. You’ll miss all the excitement.”

“It looks like they’ve picked up his trail,” said Cipriani. As the pursuers entered the trees he added a worried, “If that’s the way the villain went, and he holds to that course, he should emerge from the woods near where I tied my rig.” Ganelon made no reply. “But hell get away!” Cipriani insisted, starting toward the door. “Somebody has to warn the police.”

“No need. Thorwald’s still here in the chateau. As for the trail, I saw him fake those footprints this morning. At the time, I thought he was looking for the Phantom Balloon.”

“The Phantom Balloon?”

Ganelon sighed. “Please, let us avoid these needless explanations, Mr. Fool. Or may I call you Gooseberry? You are a regular one-man band. First you were one Cipriani, then Thorwald. And now you are another Cipriani, sneaking downstairs like you’d just arrived fresh from the arms of your kidnappers.”

The master of disguise gave a resigned smile. Then his eyes turned cold, he shifted his feet, and asked, “What gave me away? After all, if we don’t profit from our mistakes, why make them?”

“You’d thought everything through so carefully I knew you’d have a safer escape plan than dropping from a rope of knotted bed sheets into the rubble of an excavated moat and then limping off across country with the police close behind.”

The assassin shifted his feet again. “I really am a kickboxing expert, you know. And you, I understand, are a master of the via felix, the Happy Way. Or is that your father?”

“You were right the first time. Shall we find out which martial art is the better?”

“I’m tempted. But tell me, does the via felix actually change your opponent’s character?”

Ganelon nodded. “By redistributing the bodily humors. But the effect is only temporary.”

The assassin grimaced. “Then I’m afraid I am your prisoner. Temporary or not, a human chameleon must treasure his own personality, his inner core, above all else.”

“Come along, then,” ordered Ganelon. “We’ll hunt up your rig where you really left it and drive in to the prefecture. I hope we don’t meet Chief Inspector Flanel along the way. You are my prisoner. Besides, an afternoon’s run in the woods will do his character no end of good.”