Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 787 & 788, March/April 2007

Ivory Crossroads by James Powell

Copyright © 2007 by James Powell

Art by Ron Bucalo

“I had a bit of luck researching this one,” James Powell told us. “I discovered there was a narrow-gauge railroad through the Mt. Cenis Pass from 1868 to 1871, when it was destroyed. I suspect it was used to bring up men and equipment for the job of digging the tunnel through Mt. Cenis. But it seemed as if it was put there just for my story.

As a young man in the 1840s, Ambrose Ganelon, founder of San Sebastiano’s famous detective agency, had witnessed the rage for elephant-foot wastepaper baskets and umbrella depositories, when every European gentleman wanted the first of those whimsical furnishings for his den and the second for his front hallway. At the time scrupulous Arab traders added to the slaughter of the animals by rejecting all but the right front foot, the same foot the Moslem used to enter the mosque, considering the others unclean. Thus was born the critical African ivory shortage of 1868.

In that year, Ganelon kept a careful eye on the dwindling ivory supply. Of late, the wealth of his archrival the evil Dr. Ludwig Fong centered on his many European billiard parlors, smoky dens where crimes were planned and stolen goods disposed of, and on his mah-jongg parlors, where ladies of fashion gambled, puffed on opium pipes, and gossiped, providing ample fodder for Fong’s thriving blackmail enterprises. Every click of a billiard ball or a mah-jongg tile, some said, meant a groschen in the Eurasian master criminal’s pocket.

As the ivory shortage grew, Ganelon began circulating stories about the fabled ivory towers of Timbuktu, that center of African Arabic learning. Fong took the bait, and he and his lieutenants left Berlin and set out for the Dark Continent, where they raised a heavily armed band of men and a caravan of ox carts, meaning to loot the city of its ivory.

With Fong away, Ganelon, an amateur oboist of the first rank, had time to visit the Polyhymnia Club, where the music lovers of the principality met to read Vox Humana and other musical periodicals and discuss their avocation. There he found his old friend from university days, Max LeGrand, maker of fine pianos for the concert stage. In better times, LeGrand and Fong had been rivals in the purchasing of African ivory. LeGrand prized it for its density and whiteness and would use no other for his piano keys. The recent ivory shortage had compelled him to close his atelier and put his workers on half pay.

Soon Ganelon and his friend were visiting the theater and musical entertainments together. (Since the arrival of their son ten years before, Madame Ganelon seldom ventured abroad.) The two friends made an interesting couple, for Ganelon was short, stout, and taciturn while LeGrand was thin, above average height, and given to rhetorical turns.

That September, they attended a concert given by Glendening Gunderson, the British North American Alpine tusk-horn prodigy. His unusual musical instrument was an elephant tusk drilled from end to end and fitted with a reed mouthpiece and finger holes. The thick curve of the tusk, the bell end, rested on the concert stage while the artist stood on a folding chair with his back to the audience and blew into the other. In Gunderson’s hands the Alpine tusk-horn sounded like a vast piano. That night he brought the astonished audience to its feet with his performance of J. S. Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.”

Later Ganelon and LeGrand sat in their seats waiting for the aisle to clear, a process that took much longer since the introduction of the hoop skirt. (Someone had recently commented that whatever disguise the Devil took in the Garden of Eden, to tempt today’s fashionable women he’d better come as a hoop snake.) While they waited, Ganelon remarked that he’d heard Alpine tusk-horns before, but Gunderson’s instrument possessed an extraordinary vibrato, as if each note was echoing back and forth between the walls of a small Alpine valley.

LeGrand caught his meaning. “What a glorious day for classical music,” he remarked, “if the legendary elephant graveyard in the Alps really did exist and we were the ones to find it!”

The story goes that when Hannibal the Carthaginian general crossed the Alps with his elephants in 218 B.C., his favorite animal, whom he had named the Big Barcelona after his father Hamilcar Barca, took a misstep on the mountain pass and fell to his death in a remote valley. Sad, but with a war to fight against the Romans Hannibal hurried on. But as the other elephants passed by they looked up at the stars as if marking the place.

Now the Big Barcelona, a patriarch among elephants, had many offspring, including an old Tarmac who had pulled the very Roman harrow used to salt defeated Carthage’s ground so nothing would ever grow there again. One day Tarmac smelled a ghost of edelweiss on the wind and knew he would soon die. There and then, he set out for the Alpine valley that held Big Barcelona’s grave. Tarmac dog-paddled the Hellespont, crossed Turkey, Greece, northern Italy, and down to the French Riviera. When he reached the valley of the Rhone River he turned northward and entered the Alps by the Little St. Bernard Pass. Following Hannibal’s route, Tarmac found the Big Barcelona’s valley, lay himself down beside his grandsire’s bones, and died.

For the next few centuries elephant sightings along the Rhone were common. People called them Hannibal’s strays and after the fall of the Roman Empire they viewed the animals kindly, as relics of a happier time. Later the elephants added their ponderous gray to the Dark Ages. Then the simple folk called them dragon caterpillars, believing they headed up into the mountains to weave cocoons and burst forth as flying dragons to rule the Alpine sky. By the Enlightenment, Big Barcelona’s bloodline had thinned and the elephants came no more.

After the concert, a small reception was held for Gunderson at the Polyhymnia. The musician brought his instrument, which he’d found in an old shop dealing in musical curiosities while attending the conservatorium in Leipzig on the Mendelssohn Scholarship.

When Ganelon examined the tusk-horn at close hand he found a small silver plate on the bell end that read: “Made by Hans Lemke of Geneva. 1842. A genuine Alpine tusk-horn. Accept no substitutes.” The italics added an intriguing emphasis.

Among the other club members present that evening was Cornelius O’Hagen, a craggy-faced Ulsterman who played cello in the San Sebastiano Symphony. An Alpine mountain-climbing enthusiast, in 1859 O’Hagen had lost a leg above the knee to frostbite trying to ascend the then unconquered Schreckhorn. “They gave me a cork leg,” he once told Ganelon in mock indignation. “Cork, and me a dues-paying Ulsterman. Why not a Belfast leg?” O’Hagen lived at the Polyhymnia in a room crowded with papier-maché models of the mountains he’d tried to climb. O’Hagen once dared to tell the short-tempered detective-oboist that he pitied woodwind players who have never breathed in noble mountain air and had to make do with tired stuff that had already passed through a million lungs.

Hans Lemke? Ganelon returned home to the rue Blondin convinced he had heard the Alpine tusk-horn maker’s name before and in an elephant-graveyard context. On the stairs to the family living quarters he passed the small closet on the landing which his young son and namesake had turned into a scientific laboratory, making the hallway reek of rotten eggs.

Entering his library he took down from the shelf Swiss Eccentrics and Eccentricities, a recent acquisition. Some day Ganelon thought he might write a similar work about San Sebastiano’s many colorful citizens, suspecting that if he left the job to someone else, his own name would lead the list of eccentrics.

When he turned to the chapter entitled “The Man Who Believed in the Elephant Graveyard in the Alps” Ganelon read, “In the second quarter of this century Hans Lemke, a musical-instrument maker of Geneva, allowed himself to be the victim of an absurd swindle. Lemke, who specialized in the making of Alpine horns from ivory, was working late in his shop when he heard a wheel grind to a halt on the cobbles outside his door. Then came a knock. He lay aside his auger, brushed the curls of ivory from his lap, and found a large man in mountaineer’s dress with his face concealed in an ample cloak. The man, who said his name was Otto Bauer, asked if Lemke was interested in buying an elephant tusk. Yes, came the reply, if it was African ivory, for Lemke deemed Indian ivory only good for making combs and letter openers. The man uncovered a large tusk on the wheelbarrow behind him, carried it into the shop, and put it down by the stove as Lemke directed. As they waited for the ivory to come to room temperature so Lemke could test its tone, he asked where the man had found it.

“Bauer said he worked with the mountain-climbing parties, where his job was to carry piggyback English tourists unable or unwilling to make the ascent on foot. Once his party was caught in a sudden and unseasonable snowstorm. When his cargo dismounted to huddle with the others around a fire beneath a hastily erected canvas shelter, Bauer moved off a bit to answer the call of nature and in the evening gloom he set his foot wrong and fell off the narrow path, tumbling several hundred feet down a steep, snow-covered mountainside.

“Miraculously, he survived the fall uninjured and in the dying light slid right into what he thought was a pile of underbrush on the valley floor. But the sound his crash made was like a large man sitting down on the keyboard of a piano. Bauer’s ears told him he had stumbled on every mountaineer’s dream, the fabled Alpine graveyard where the descendants of Hannibal’s favorite elephant returned to die.

“When the other guides missed Bauer, it was dark and there was nothing they could do until daylight. By then the man had decided he wasn’t going to share his find with anyone. At dawn, when they shouted down to see if he was still alive, Bauer made no answer. So his companions left him for dead.

“When the ivory had warmed, Lemke lay an ear to the tusk and rapped it with his knuckle. The sound told him it was the finest of African ivory and he bought the tusk on the spot. Could Bauer bring him more? Bauer could. But he was a secretive man, coming at night and never entering if a customer was in the shop. A few times he brought his son Conrad, a young mountaineer with a twisted back and his left shoulder higher than the other. Bauer even showed Lemke something wrapped in oilskin, claiming it was the map to the elephant graveyard.

“One day the son Conrad arrived at Lemke’s shop alone bringing a tusk he said would be the last. While passing the ivory to him across a crevasse on the Miage Glacier beneath Mont Blanc, the elder Bauer had slipped and fallen to his death deep inside the glacier. After expressing his regret, Lemke asked if Conrad couldn’t continue his father’s work. But Conrad admitted he’d never been to the elephant graveyard. He said his father always made him wait up there on the Miage, a place the elder Bauer liked because he could see if he was being followed. When his father returned with a tusk, it was Conrad’s job to carry it back to Geneva. When Lemke asked about the map, Conrad shook his head. He knew nothing about any map.

“So with his supply of what he thought was Alpine ivory at an end, Lemke retired from business rather than work with a lesser material.”

The author of Swiss Eccentrics and Eccentricities ended the chapter with this explanation: “Clearly the gullible instrument maker had been taken in by a thief and confidence man. Bauer probably worked as a strongman in one of the several Geneva-based circuses. Traditionally, circus owners hid away the tusks of their dead elephants as a kind of retirement fund. Bauer must have stolen his employer’s cache and concocted the elephant graveyard story to explain how he’d come by the ivory. His swindle had two parts. He would sell Lemke the stolen tusks. Then he would announce he was retiring from the strenuous business and offer to sell Lemke the fraudulent map.

“Now Conrad, a partner in the original theft of the tusks, began to suspect his father meant to abscond with their money once Lemke bought the last one. So the son turned the tables on his father and robbed and killed him and disposed of his body. Then he sold Lemke the remaining tusk and fled the city.”

Ganelon closed the book. The author’s explanation might have convinced him if he hadn’t heard the wonderful mountain echo in Glendening Gunderson’s Alpine tusk-horn. What if Bauer’s story was true? And if the father’s, why not the son’s?

As luck would have it, Ganelon’s man in Geneva was sick in bed with eavesdropsy, a common affliction among detectives. Early medicine attributed the disease to a parasite of the earwig family that infested thatched roofs beneath whose eaves the detectives stood to listen at windows. Today science holds the ailment comes from the bite of the bitter dust mites that thrive on the surfaces of window glass.

So Ganelon would have to go to Geneva himself. But he could try to save time by first paying a visit to O’Hagen at the Polyhymnia. The Ulsterman greeted him warmly and moved the model of the Schreckhorn from its place of honor across the arms of the room’s other chair so that the detective could sit down.

When Ganelon asked about the Miage Glacier, O’Hagen seemed amused. “Well, I never imagined you interested in mountain climbing,” he said. “We climbers hold that when a man’s circumference bears more than a certain ratio to his altitude he prefers his country flat.”

Ganelon fought back a sharp reply and waited while O’Hagen dragged a model of Mont Blanc from under his bed. Sitting there with the mountain in his lap, the man used a caliper which he swung up the mountain like a stiff-legged stick figure while he described the path he’d taken to reach the peak. Then he swung the caliper down to the Miage glacier on the mountain’s eastern slope and looked at Ganelon.

The detective asked how long it would take a body fallen into a crevasse twenty-five years ago to emerge from the glacier, knowing O’Hagen’s answer could only be approximate since Ganelon did not know the exact location of the crevasse on the ice.

O’Hagen worked with a protractor, his calipers, and a pencil and paper for a few minutes. Then he announced that either the body had already emerged or would do so in the next five years or so. Then, setting the model aside, he crossed to the window and, standing with his back to the room, he began to outline the four principal theories of glacial movement beginning with James David Forbes’s viscous theory, which declares a glacier to be an imperfect fluid or viscous body which is urged down the slopes of a certain inclination by the mutual pressure of its parts.

Ganelon made his quiet escape from O’Hagen’s room amid this torrent of words. Downstairs in the club lobby he ran into LeGrand. The piano maker grew excited when Ganelon told him he now believed the Alpine elephant graveyard actually existed. Laying his hand on Ganelon’s arm, LeGrand insisted, “Then you must find it before Dr. Ludwig Fong does. My fortune is at your disposal in all this. Ambrose, Europe stands at a crossroads. Will we choose the road to sublimity or to degradation, the road to the concert hall or to the pool hall?”

Out on the street again, with LeGrand’s rhetoric still ringing in his ears, Ganelon turned back for a moment and there at an upper window of the Polyhymnia was O’Hagen, arms waving, still in full monologue. Ganelon tipped his hat but was not sure he caught the Ulsterman’s attention.

In the late eighteenth century, under the influence of Goethe’s romantic novel The Sorrows of Werther, Europe’s young people turned gloomy and suicidal in the face of unrequited love. Among the economical, death by throwing oneself into glacial crevasses became popular for it saved families the expense of funerals and cemetery plots.

The Biblical injunction to bury the dead inspired some devout Protestant laymen to form a community to deal with suicides and those who died on the ice by accident. People called them the Weir Brotherhood because they built traps beneath the glaciers to catch emerging bodies. They also provided small chapels and churchyards for the dead. The Brotherhood had an establishment beneath the Miage Glacier beside a rushing stream that was one of the sources of the Isére River.

The talking head of a young gravedigger hard at work in the churchyard directed Ganelon to a side door of the chapel where he found the Weir Brother in charge, a large-nosed man who gave him that half-interested look those preoccupied with the dead save for the living. “Yes,” he said, consulting a ledger, “we recovered the body of an Otto Bauer on the seventeenth of August two years ago. We seldom know the names of our charges. But I found his written on a map wrapped in oilskin and sewn into the jacket lining. If you have proof you are a relative I will turn his belongings over to you.”

Admitting he had no such proof, Ganelon asked if he might at least have a look at the map of which the man spoke. The Brother gave a sniff, consulted his ledger again, and led the way down into the chapel cellar. Behind a counter stood a wall of shelves holding numbered cardboard boxes. He took one down and dumped its contents — several copper coins, a short-stemmed clay pipe, and a pocketknife — onto the counter.

He stuck his nose back into the box. “Strange,” he said. “The map is gone.” He grew thoughtful. “And now I recall something odd. The day after we found the body, Old Schmidt, our sexton and gravedigger who had worked for us for twenty-five years, vanished without a word, leaving behind a month’s wages due to him.”

Raising his left shoulder, Ganelon ventured, “Conrad Schmidt from Geneva?”

Traveling on by carriage, Ganelon pondered this new development. Conrad Bauer had spent twenty-five years waiting for his father’s body. Two years ago he had recovered the map. But no new supply of ivory had appeared on the market. Why was that? Ganelon thought he knew. When he reached Geneva he telegraphed LeGrand to join him there at the Bristol Hotel.

Early the next morning, the detective went to the Geneva Prefecture, whose people were under some obligation to him for recent help he had rendered the Swiss police.

“Here is the man who will know if your Conrad Bauer is in Geneva,” said the prefect, introducing Ganelon to a broken-nosed, plain-clothed policeman with a slouch and well-scuffed shoes. Then, as he turned to leave them together, the prefect added words that gave fresh urgency to Ganelon’s mission. “I assume you’ve heard that Dr. Fong has returned to Berlin wounded in the arm by a Tuareg blade.”

Ganelon’s policeman guide was long of limb and jaw and wore a goatee. He winked at the detective as they left the prefecture and said, “Here in Geneva we have men who walk about all day with sticks with pins on them to collect cigar ends and cigarette butts which they take to a certain man who buys them for a few sou. He grinds them up in a mull — you know, a snuff-grinder — and sells the tobacco powder to people who sprinkle it around their garden plants to ward off pests.

“Other people walk about all day with their eyes and ears wide open, then come to me when they’ve something to sell. I put it all in my mull.” He tapped his head and pulled on his beard. “And I grind it up.”

Ganelon smiled, for most snuff mulls were shaped like a ram’s head.

“Awhile back,” continued the policeman, “an old man asked if I knew Conrad Bauer was back in Geneva. Now, years ago, this Bauer fled the city before the police could question him about his father’s disappearance. Before I paid my informant I had him point this Bauer out to me. I’ve kept my eye on him ever since. I think I can tell you where he’s been.”

“Please do,” said Ganelon.

“Doing a long stretch in prison. Oh, I’ve seen it before, an ex-convict returns to the old neighborhood and his old life of crime. But his underworld connections are long dead. The living, the young criminals, don’t know or trust him.”

Ganelon couldn’t correct the policeman. The fewer people who knew about the map the better. But his description of Bauer’s situation wasn’t that far wrong.

The policeman led him to where two narrow streets intersected at a small fountain. Several old men sat around the edge of the fountain. Off from the others was one whose left shoulder was higher than its mate.

“Thank you,” Ganelon told the policeman. “Your superiors will learn how helpful you have been.”

Then he went over and sat down beside the old man. “Conrad Bauer, is it not?”

The man cocked his right eyebrow as high as his left shoulder. After a long moment he asked, “And if it is?”

“You have a certain map,” said Ganelon. “One you cannot use.” The man opened his mouth to protest. But Ganelon continued. “If I know about the map, others more dangerous than I will find out about it, too. So listen. You are not a young man anymore. You cannot remove the ivory from the valley by yourself. You would need a team. But you’re your father’s son and have inherited his deep distrust of others.”

After another long moment the old man said, “I didn’t murder my father, you know. The snow bridge across the crevasse gave way from the weight of the ivory. As he felt it go he handed the tusk to me. I took it when I should have grabbed his arm. In an instant he had vanished from sight.”

Conrad Bauer looked away. “All those years working for the Weir Brotherhood while Father’s body dawdled inside the glacier,” he said, shaking his head. “He might have hurried himself along. And so might you have, sir. Yes, I see now that my only choice was to wait until an honorable person like yourself came along to offer a fair price for the map.”

That same afternoon LeGrand, fresh from the train, signed a document in the presence of a notary and witnessed by Ganelon agreeing to pay Bauer a quarterly sum for the rest of his natural life provided his map proved true.

Ganelon and LeGrand had a carriage waiting at the door to take them from the city. They stopped that night just short of the Little St. Bernard Pass. The next morning they traveled up into the mountains on the road Napoleon built in the 1800s leading all the way to the Mt. Cenis Pass down through which Hannibal was said to have entered Italy.

In midafternoon they stopped their carriage and struck out on foot through the cold mountain air the three kilometers to the valley marked on the map. Its steep slopes of dark rock and snow were decked round with snowy overhangs. Standing there on the rim, Ganelon used his three-pull pocket telescope to examine the valley floor. In one corner the wind had blown the snow from the rock. He passed the telescope to LeGrand, who looked and nodded. Yes, they had found the legendary elephant graveyard.

Their carriage now set off for the Auberge de L’Aiglon, a hotel on the slope of Mt. Cenis some fifteen kilometers away. It would be their command center.

On the way LeGrand said, “We will use the Right-Headed League.” This alliance of top-lofty organizations sought the improvement of the human race, some, like the Polyhymnia Club, by promoting classical music; others through physical fitness; others by church work, whether by distributing tracts or forming soup societies to feed the needy. The league’s leadership had recently pledged to work in concert whenever the need arose.

Ganelon had never taken sides in the great debate over whether making people happy would make them good, or making them good would make them happy. But he knew the more people involved, the more chance Fong, who had eyes and ears everywhere, would find out about it. So he insisted that the Right-Headed League’s people must converge on the site simultaneously and all the ivory must be extracted and transported away in a single day.

When they reached the hotel they set telegraph wires humming across Europe.

The night before the recovery operation Ganelon and his companion went to bed early for they had to rise by dawn to oversee the moving of the ivory.

But just before midnight a caravan of diligences arrived at the hotel, disgorging a horde of noisy men and women guests who took up quarters on the floor above them and shouted and sang drunkenly into the early morning.

The last time the revels woke Ganelon he heard a small carriage stop beneath his window. After a few minutes a door slammed above him, then another and then another. The noise diminished with each slam until the floor above was totally silent. The hair on the back of Ganelon’s head stirred. Something told him that he and Ludwig Fong, his archrival, were staying at the same hotel.

Ganelon and LeGrand, deep in woolly capes smelling strongly of sheep and shepherds, stood on the valley rim in the early morning chill as contingents of the Right-Headed League arrived: Here the young men of the Mens Sana in Corpore Sano Verein in lederhosen singing songs of wandering which they could not bring down into the valley with them for fear of triggering avalanches; there a seminary rifle club called Sharpshooters for Peace, whom Ganelon assigned to lookout posts and to guard the ivory when it was brought out of the valley; next the Excelsior Society, mountain climbers for a better world. Now came the sturdy nuns from the nearby Convent of Saint Goliath, who rescued snowbound travelers from the mountain slopes in winter. After them strode the soup-society ladies dressed in skirted bloomers, warm gloves, and hats and climbing sticks. Manhandling sacks of onions and potatoes and sides of mutton for their nourishing soup kettles made these ladies well fitted for the work at hand.

A rope was doled out to the valley floor. Then began the job of collecting the tusks and passing them up from shoulder to shoulder to the valley rim. There they were loaded onto the sleighs of Les Amis du Saint Bonhomme-de-Neige, The Friends of Saint Snowman, French Canadian teamsters in gray homespun and bright toques and sashes who happened to be in Europe for the Tour de Suisse sleigh races. Their conveyances would take the ivory over to the recently built light railroad through the Mt. Cenis Pass and down to Italian trains for transportation to San Sebastiano.

By midmorning the work was done. Just as a sleigh sped away with the last of the ivory, the wigwag semaphore from the Sharpshooters’ lookout sprang to life. Ganelon took out his telescope. Coming over the rim on the other side of the valley he saw a strange column of people. The men came first, overweight, stoop-shouldered, pigeon-chested, with unhealthy, indoor faces, blinking in the glare off the snow. He watched as they slid and stumbled down in striped and checked trousers, narrow shoes, and tight jackets unequal to the weather: pimps, cat’s-paws, cut-purses, and pool sharks marching to the noise of their own barking coughs and phlegmatic wheezing. Next came their female counterparts beneath the Heart-of-Gold banner of the Sisterhood of the Ladies of the Night, all powdered and rouged in their soiled finery and bright, impractical parasols.

Turning his telescope back to the top of the valley, Ganelon saw Fong himself dressed in furs with one arm in a black sling, his free hand holding a riding crop, frowning down on this ragtag collection of late risers, the best he could put together at a moment’s notice to race the Right-Headed League to the elephant graveyard.

Suddenly a loud fit of coughing rose up from Fong’s men and echoed across the valley. A moment later a large shelf of snow above them broke off from the main and came crashing down, engulfing the front of the column.

The women in the rear immediately turned around and started back up to the top of the valley where Fong stood, raging and threatening them with his riding crop. But the women furled their parasols and gripped them firmly as they came within striking distance. Daunted, Fong stood aside.

Then the arch-villain looked over sharply, as if feeling the weight of the telescope’s gaze. When he saw Ganelon, his face went white with rage. To Ganelon, Fong always looked his most German when angry. But now as he watched he saw the villain’s expression turn abruptly Oriental. Ganelon knew Fong was scheming something. He wondered what.

Back in San Sebastiano, with LeGrand’s piano atelier humming again, Ganelon returned to pondering cases during long walks, “constitutionals” as the English were starting to call them. Not long afterwards he received by special messenger an ebony walking stick with a golden five-fanged dragon’s-claw pommel. The shaft of the stick concealed a two-foot sword blade of Damascus steel. In the accompanying note Ludwig Fong urged him to accept the gift. “Now that you are moving abroad again, I fear someone may succeed in an attack on your life before I can make time in my busy schedule to kill you myself.”

Smiling, Ganelon decided yes, he’d use the walking stick. It was a handsome piece. And the dragon’s claw, Fong’s emblem, would focus his mind on his rival.

One afternoon later that week, Ganelon decided to buy a newspaper and sit on a particular bench in the cliff-side Parc Belvedere above the Mediterranean, whose blue, local legends say, was so beautiful the very sky stole it for its own. In the newspaper he happened on an account of Swiss missionaries in German East Africa who were trekking to a new parish. As they passed a herd of elephants their cart hit a pothole, causing a cuckoo clock among their belongings to strike the hour. This alien sound so startled the elephants that they stampeded northward out of sight.

As he smiled at the story Ganelon noticed a bent-over man as gray as an apparition coming up the path toward him. Reaching Ganelon’s bench, the man stopped and introduced himself. “Mr. Ganelon, my name is Leander Crisp,” he said, presenting a visiting card which described him as a “Jocular Archaeologist.”

Now Ganelon placed the man. Crisp was the author of a book called Chuckling Down Memory Lane: Knee-Slapping Jokes and Riddles From Our Grandsires’ Day that had been severely handled by reviewers. For his part, Ganelon saw little point in rooting around in the slagheap of old jokes. Only the fittest of such things survive. Whatever has not come down to us, ought not come down to us.

Mr. Crisp took a seat beside him and said, “You are a solver of riddles, I believe, sir. Here is one you should enjoy: Why is the city of Rome like a candlewick?”

“Like a—”

“Like a candlewick. The city of Rome,” repeated Crisp, waiting. Then he stood up. “Perhaps you need time to consider my little riddle. Let us meet here again.”

After the man had gone, Ganelon sat there on the bench for some time, puzzling over the riddle. Then he walked home shaking his head, embarrassed that he, the great detective, didn’t know the answer.

That evening at dinner when Madame commented on his lack of appetite he told her, “Here’s a riddle for you. Why is the city of Rome like a candlewick?” She thought for a moment before starting to clear the table.

Later Ganelon played his oboe for several hours, something he only did when trying to solve a most difficult case. But he went to bed that evening and tossed and turned, the riddle unsolved.

Early the next morning Ganelon went directly to the park bench, hoping Crisp might reappear. By noon the sky turned gray and a light rain began to fall. Ganelon stayed until the rain grew brisker. He returned home sopping wet, unsure what he hated most, Crisp, the city of Rome, or candlewicks.

After another bad night, he woke feeling he was coming down with a cold. Nevertheless, he made his way back to the park bench, ready to admit that the damned puzzle had him stumped and to have Crisp tell him the answer.

Near eleven in the morning, Ganelon saw Crisp coming up the path and his heart quickened. The archaeologist of the jocular seemed pleased with himself as he approached Ganelon, who sat with his walking stick between his legs.

“All right,” said the detective. “Why is the damn city of Rome like a damn candlewick?”

Crisp beamed triumphantly. “Because it’s in the middle of grease,” he said.

Ganelon blinked. Then he understood and shouted, “But Rome isn’t in the middle of Greece. It’s in the middle of Italy!”

Crisp’s pitying look threw Ganelon into a rage. He realized all the time he’d wasted over this geographic ignoramus’s silly riddle. Suddenly he heard a click. Looking down, he saw he’d released the button on the sword cane and drawn the blade six inches out of its scabbard. In horror, he slammed the sword cane shut again.

The noise brought two plain-clothed policemen rushing out from behind some nearby trees. As they grabbed the protesting Crisp, one of them told Ganelon, “Sir, we were alerted this morning by telegram from Berlin that this man intended to murder you.”

“You were misinformed,” Ganelon replied. “He was to be the murder victim and you the witnesses. Escort him to the border and let him go.” Then, as the policemen marched Crisp away Ganelon shouted after them, “But if he tries to tell you a riddle along the way, feel free to shoot him down like a dog.”

When he was alone, Ganelon crossed the park and stood at the cliff’s edge shaking his head. A moment ago he had almost killed a man. Now he knew what his archenemy had been scheming back up there in the Alps. Fong wanted to make Ganelon a murderer, to make the two of them brothers in spirit. And he had almost succeeded.

Cursing his own frailty, his face burning with humiliation, Ganelon grabbed the sword cane by its ferrule end, swung it around, and threw it out into the air as far as he could. Then he watched as it fell into the blue water below.