The Interpretation of Murder

Chapter Two

In 1909, a small device had begun to spread widely in New York City, accelerating communication and forever changing the nature of human interaction: the telephone. At 8 a.m. on Monday morning, August 30, the manager of the Balmoral lifted his mother-of-pearl receiver from its brass base and placed a hushed and hurried call to the building's owner.

Mr George Banwell answered the call sixteen stories above the manager's head, in the telephone closet of the Travertine Wing's penthouse apartment, which Mr Banwell had kept for himself. He was informed that Miss Riverford from the Alabaster Wing was dead in her room, the victim of murder and perhaps worse. A maid had found her.

Banwell did not immediately respond. The line was silent for so long the head manager said, 'Are you there, sir?'

Banwell replied with gravel in his voice: 'Get everyone out. Lock the door. No one enters. And tell your people to keep quiet if they value their jobs.' Then he called an old friend, the mayor of New York City. At the conclusion of their conversation, Banwell said, 'I can't afford any police in the building, McClellan. Not one uniform. I'll tell the family myself. I went to school with Riverford. That's right: the father, poor bastard.'

'Mrs Neville,' the mayor called out to his secretary as he rang off. 'Get me Hugel. At once.'

Charles Hugel was coroner of the City of New York. It was his duty to see to the corpse in any case of suspected homicide. Mrs Neville informed the mayor that Mr Hugel had been waiting in the mayor's antechamber all morning.

McClellan closed his eyes and nodded, but said, 'Excellent. Send him in.'

Before the door had even closed behind him, Coroner Hugel launched into an indignant tirade against the conditions at the city morgue. The mayor, who had heard this litany of complaints before, cut him off. He described the situation at the Balmoral and ordered the coroner to take an unmarked vehicle uptown. Residents of the building must not be made aware of any police presence. A detective would follow later.

'I?' said the coroner. 'O'Hanlon from my office can do it.'

'No,' replied the mayor, 'I want you to go yourself. George Banwell is an old friend of mine. I need a man with experience — and a man whose discretion I can count on. You are one of the few I have left.'

The coroner grumbled but in the end gave way. 'I have two conditions. First, whoever is in charge at the building must be told immediately that nothing is to be touched.

Nothing. I cannot be expected to solve a murder if the evidence is trampled and tampered with before I arrive.'

'Eminently sensible,' replied the mayor. 'What else?'

'I am to have full authority over the investigation, including the choice of detective.'

'Done,' said the mayor. 'You can have the most seasoned man on the force.'

'Exactly what I don't want,' replied the coroner. 'It would be gratifying for once to have a detective who won't sell out the case after I have solved it. There's a new fellow — Littlemore. He's the one I want.'

'Littlemore? Excellent,' said the mayor, turning his attention to the stack of papers on his large desk. 'Bingham used to say he's one of the brightest youngsters we have.'

'Brightest? He's a perfect idiot.'

The mayor was startled: 'If you think so, Hugel, why do you want him?'

'Because he can't be bought — at least not yet.'

When Coroner Hugel arrived at the Balmoral, he was told to wait for Mr Banwell. Hugel hated being made to wait. He was fifty-nine years old, the last thirty of which had been spent in municipal service, much of it in the unhealthy confines of city morgues, which had lent his face a grayish cast. He wore thick glasses and an oversized mustache between his hollow cheeks. He was altogether bald except for a wiry tuft sprouting from behind each ear. Hugel was an excitable man. Even in repose, a swelling in his temples gave the impression of incipient apoplexia.

The position of coroner in New York City was in 1909 a peculiar one, an irregularity in the chain of command. Part medical examiner, part forensic investigator, part prosecutor, the coroner reported directly to the mayor. He did not answer to anyone on the police force, not even the commissioner; but neither did anyone on the force answer to him, not even the lowliest beat patrolman. Hugel had little but scorn for the police department, which he viewed, with some justification, as largely inept and thoroughly crooked. He objected to the mayor's handling of the retirement of Chief Inspector Byrnes, who had obviously grown rich on bribes. He objected to the new commissioner, who did not appear to have the slightest appreciation of the art or importance of a properly held inquest. In fact, he objected to every departmental decision he ever heard of, unless it had been made by himself. But he knew his job. Although not technically a doctor, he had attended a full three years of medical school and could perform a more expert autopsy than the physicians who served as his assistants.

After fifteen infuriating minutes, Mr Banwell at last appeared. He wasn't, in fact, much taller than Hugel but seemed to tower over him. 'And you are?' he asked.

'The coroner of the City of New York,' said Hugel, trying to express condescension. 'I alone touch the deceased. Any disturbance of evidence will be prosecuted as obstruction. Am I understood?'

George Banwell was — and plainly knew it — taller, handsomer, better dressed, and much, much richer than the coroner. 'Rubbish,' he said. 'Follow me. And keep your voice down while you're in my building.'

Banwell led the way to the top floor of the Alabaster Wing. Coroner Hugel, grinding his teeth, followed. Not a word was spoken in the elevator. Hugel, staring resolutely at the floor, observed Mr Banwell's perfectly creased pinstriped trousers and gleaming oxfords, which doubtless cost more than the coroners suit, vest, tie, hat, and shoes put together. A manservant, standing guard outside Miss Riverford's apartment, opened the door for them. Silently, Banwell led Hugel, the head manager, and the servant down a long corridor to the girl's bedroom.

The nearly naked body lay on the floor, livid, eyes closed, luxurious dark hair strewn across the intricate design of an Oriental carpet. She was still exquisitely beautiful — her arms and legs still graceful — but her neck had an ugly redness around it, and her figure was scored with the marks of a lash. Her wrists remained bound, thrown back over her head. The coroner walked briskly to the body and placed a thumb to those wrists, where a pulse would have been.

'How was she — how did she die?' Banwell asked in his gravelly voice, arms folded.

'You can't tell?' replied the coroner.

'Would I have asked if I could tell?'

Hugel looked under the bed. He stood and gazed at the body from several angles. 'I would say she was strangled to death. Very slowly.'

'Was she — ?' Banwell did not complete the question.

'Possibly,' said the coroner. 'I won't be certain until I've examined her.'

With a piece of red chalk, Hugel roughed a circle seven or eight feet in diameter around the girl's body and declared that no one was to intrude within it. He surveyed the room. All was in perfect order; even the expensive bed linens were scrupulously tucked and squared. The coroner opened the girl's closets, her bureau, her jewelry boxes. Nothing appeared to be amiss. Sequined dresses hung straight in the wardrobe. Lace underthings were folded neatly in drawers. A diamond tiara, with matching earrings and necklace, lay in harmonious composition inside a midnight-blue velvet case on top of the bureau.

Hugel asked who had been in the room. Only the maid who had found the body, the manager answered. Since then, the apartment had been locked, and no one had entered. The coroner sent for the maid, who at first refused to come past the bedroom door. She was a pretty Italian girl of nineteen, in a long skirt and a full-length white apron. 'Young lady,' said Hugel, 'did you disturb anything in this room?'

The maid shook her head.

Despite the body on the floor and her employer looking on, the maid held herself straight and met her interrogator's eyes. 'No, sir,' she said.

'Did you bring anything in, take anything out?'

'I'm no thief,' she said.

'Did you move any article of furniture or clothing?'

'No.'

'Very good,' said Coroner Hugel.

The maid looked to Mr Banwell, who did not dismiss her. Instead, he addressed the coroner: 'Get it over with.'

Hugel cocked an eye at the owner of the Balmoral. He took out a pen and paper. 'Name?'

'Whose name?' said Banwell, with a growl that made the manager cower. 'My name?'

'Name of deceased.'

'Elizabeth Riverford,' Banwell replied.

'Age?' asked Coroner Hugel.

'How do I know?'

'I understood you were acquainted with the family.'

'I know her father,' said Banwell. 'Chicago man. Banker.'

'I see. You wouldn't have his address, by any chance?' asked the coroner.

'Of course I have his address.'

The two men stared at each other.

'Would you be so good,' asked Hugel, 'as to provide me the address?'

'I'll provide it to McClellan,' said Banwell.

Hugel began grinding his molars again. 'I am in charge of this investigation, not the mayor.'

'We'll see how long you're in charge of this investigation,' answered Banwell, who ordered the coroner for a second time to bring his business to a close. The Riverford family, Banwell explained, wanted the girl's body sent home, a duty he would be seeing to immediately.

The coroner said he could by no means allow it: in cases of homicide, the decedent's body must by law be taken into custody for an autopsy.

'Not this body,' answered Banwell. He instructed the coroner to ring the mayor if he required clarification of his orders.

Hugel responded that he would take no orders except from a judge. If anyone tried to stop him from taking Miss Riverford's body downtown for an autopsy, he would see that they were prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. When this admonition failed appreciably to move Mr Banwell, the coroner added that he knew a reporter for the Herald who found murder and obstruction of justice highly newsworthy. Reluctandy, Banwell yielded.

The coroner had brought his old, bulky box camera with him. This he now put to use, replacing the exposed plate with a fresh one after each smoky detonation of his flashlight. Banwell remarked that if the pictures made their way to the Herald, the coroner could be sure he would never be employed in New York or anywhere else again. Hugel did not reply; at that moment a strange whine began to fill the room, like the quiet cry of a violin stretched to its highest note. It seemed to have no source, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. It rose louder and louder, until it became almost a wail. The maid screamed. When she finished, there was no sound in the room at all.

Mr Banwell broke the silence. 'What the devil was that?' he asked the manager.

'I don't know, sir,' replied the manager. 'It's not the first time. Perhaps some settling in the walls?'

'Well, find out,' said Banwell.

When the coroner finished his photography, he announced he was leaving and taking the body with him. He had no intention of questioning the help or the neighboring residents — which was not his job — or of waiting for Detective Littlemore. In this heat, he explained, decomposition would rapidly set in if the corpse was not refrigerated at once. With the assistance of two elevator men, the girl's body was taken down to the basement in a freight elevator and from there to a back alley, where the coroner's driver was waiting.

When, two hours later, Detective Jimmy Littlemore arrived — not in uniform — he was flummoxed. It had taken some time for the mayor's messenger boys to find Littlemore; the detective had been in the basement of the new police headquarters still under construction on Centre Street, trying out the pistol range. Littlemore's orders were to make a thorough inspection of the murder scene. Not only did he find no murder scene, he found no murderee. Mr Banwell would not speak with him. The staff also proved surprisingly untalkative.

And there was one person whom Detective Littlemore did not even get a chance to interview: the maid who had found the body. After Coroner Hugel left but before the detective arrived, the manager had called the young woman to his office and handed her an envelope with her month's pay — minus one day, of course, since it was only August 30. He informed the girl he was letting her go. 'I'm sorry, Betty,' he said to her. 'I'm really sorry.'

Before anyone else was up, I examined the Monday morning newspapers in the opulent rotunda of the Hotel Manhattan, where Clark University was housing Freud, Jung, Ferenczi, and myself for the week. (Brill, who lived in New York, did not require a room.) Not one of the papers carried a story about Freud or his upcoming lectures at Clark. Only the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung ran anything at all, and this was a notice announcing the arrival of a 'Dr Freund from Vienna.'

I never intended to be a doctor. It was my father's wish, and his wishes were supposed to be our commands. When I was eighteen and still living in my parents' house in Boston, I told him I was going to be America's foremost scholar of Shakespeare. I could be America's hindmost scholar of Shakespeare, he replied, but fore or hind, if I did not intend to pursue a career in medicine, I would have to find my own means of paying Harvard's tuition.

His threat had no effect on me. I didn't care at all for the family's Harvardiana, and I would be happy, I told my father, to complete my education elsewhere. This was the last conversation of any length I ever had with him.

Ironically, I was to obey my father's wish only after he no longer had any money to withhold from me. The collapse of Colonel Winslow's banking house in November 1903 was nothing compared to the panic in New York four years later, but it was good enough for my father. He lost everything, including my mother's bit. His face aged ten years in a single night; deep creases appeared unannounced on his brow. My mother said I must take pity on him, but I never did. At his funeral — which compassionate Boston avoided in droves — I knew for the first time I would go on in medicine, if able to continue my studies at all. Whether it was a newfound practicality that drove my decision or something else, I hesitate to say.

It was I, as things fell out, on whom pity had to be taken, and Harvard that took it. After my father's funeral, I notified the university that I would be withdrawing at year's end, the two-hundred-dollar tuition being now far beyond my means. President Eliot, however, waived the fee. Probably he concluded that Harvard's long-term interests would be better served not by giving the boot to the third Stratham Younger to trudge through the Yard, but by forgiving the demi-orphan his tuition in expectation of future rewards. Whatever the motivation, I will be forever grateful to Harvard for letting me stay on.

Only at Harvard could I have attended Professor Putnam's famous lectures on neurology. I was a medical student by then, having won a scholarship, but was proving an uninspired doctor-to-be. One spring morning, in an otherwise dust-dry account of nervous diseases, Putnam referred to Sigmund Freud's 'sexual theory' as the only interesting work being done on the subject of the hysterical and obsessional neuroses. After class, I asked for readings. Putnam pointed me to Havelock Ellis, who accepted Freud's two most radical discoveries: the existence of what Freud called 'the unconscious' and the sexual aetiology of neurosis. Putnam also introduced me to Morton Prince, who was then just starting his journal on abnormal psychology. Dr Prince had an extensive collection of foreign publications; it turned out he had known my father. Prince took me on as a proofreader. Through him, I got my hands on almost everything Freud had published, from The Interpretation of Dreams to the groundbreaking Three Essays. My German was good, and I found myself consuming Freud's work with an avidity I had not felt for years. Freud's erudition was breathtaking. His writing was like filigree. His ideas, if correct, would change the world.

The hook was sunk for good, however, when I came across Freud's solution to Hamlet. It was, for Freud, a throw- away, a two-hundred-word digression in the middle of his treatise on dreams. Yet there it was: a brand-new answer to the most famous riddle in Western literature.

Shakespeare's Hamlet has been performed thousands upon thousands of times, more than any other play in any language. It is the most written-about work in all of literature. (I do not count the Bible, of course.) Yet there is a strange void or vacuum at the core of the drama: all the action is founded on the inability of its hero to act. The play consists of a series of evasions and excuses seized on by the melancholy Hamlet to justify postponing his revenge on his father's murderer (his uncle, Claudius, now King of Denmark and wed to Hamlet's mother), punctuated by anguished soliloquies in which he vilifies himself for his own paralysis, the most famous of them all beginning, of course, To be. Only after his delays and missteps have brought about ruin — Ophelia's suicide; the murder of his mother, who drinks a poison Claudius prepared for Hamlet; and his own receipt of a fatal cut from Laertes' envenomed sword — does Hamlet at last, in the play's final scene, take his uncle's triply forfeited life.

Why doesn't Hamlet act? Not for lack of opportunity: Shakespeare gives Hamlet the most propitious possible circumstances for killing Claudius. Hamlet even acknowledges this (Now might I do it), yet still he turns away. What stops him? And why should this inexplicable faltering — this seeming weakness, this almost cowardice — be capable of riveting audiences around the world for three centuries? The greatest literary minds of our era, Goethe and Coleridge, tried but failed to pull the sword from this stone, and hundreds of lesser lights have broken their heads on it.

I didn't like Freud's Oedipal answer. In fact, I was disgusted by it. I didn't want to believe it, any more than I wanted to believe in the Oedipus complex itself. I needed to disprove Freud's shocking theories, I needed to find their flaw, but I could not. My back against a tree, I sat in the Yard day after day for hours at a time, poring over Freud and Shakespeare. Freud's diagnosis of Hamlet came to seem increasingly irresistible to me, not only yielding the first complete solution to the riddle of the play, but explaining why no one else had been able to solve it, and at the same time making lucid the tragedy's mesmerizing, universal grip. Here was a scientist applying his discoveries to Shakespeare. Here was medicine making contact with the soul. When I read those two pages of Dr Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, my future was determined.

If I could not refute Freud's psychology, I would devote my life to it.

Coroner Charles Hugel had not liked the peculiar noise that came from the walls of Miss Riverford's bedroom, like an immured spirit wailing for its life. The coroner could not get that sound out of his head. Moreover, something had been missing from the room; he was sure of it. Back downtown, Hugel rang for a messenger boy and sent him running up the street for Detective Littlemore.

Yet another thing Hugel did not like was the location of his own office. The coroner had not been invited to move into the resplendent new police headquarters or the new First Precinct house being built on Old Slip, both of which would be equipped with telephones. The judges had got their Parthenon not long ago. Yet he, not only the city's chief medical examiner but a magistrate by law, and far more in need of modern utilities, had been left behind in the crumbling Van den Heuvel building, with its chipping plaster, its mold, and, worst of all, its water-stained ceilings. He abhorred the sight of those stains, with their brownish- yellow jagged edges. He particularly abhorred them today; he felt the stains were larger, and he wondered if the ceiling might crack open and fall down on him. Of course a coroner had to be attached to a morgue; he understood that. But he emphatically did not understand why a new and modern morgue could not have been built into the new police headquarters.

Littlemore ambled into the coroner's office. The detective was twenty-five. Neither tall nor short Jimmy Littlemore wasn't bad-looking, but he wasn't quite good-looking either. His close-cropped hair was neither dark nor fair; if anything, it was closer to red. He had a distinctly American face, open and friendly, which, apart from a few freckles, was not particularly memorable. If you passed him in the street, you were not likely to recall him later. You might, however, remember the ready smile or the red bow tie he liked to sport below his straw boater.

The coroner ordered Littlemore to tell him what he had found out about the Riverford case, trying his best to sound commanding and peremptory. Only in the most exceptional matters was the coroner placed directly in charge of an investigation. He meant Littlemore to understand that serious consequences would follow if the detective did not produce results.

The coroner's magisterial tone evidently failed to impress the detective. Although Littlemore had never worked on a case with the coroner, he doubtless knew, as did everyone else on the force, that Hugel was disliked by the new commissioner, that his nickname was 'the ghoul' because of the eagerness with which he performed his postmortems, and that he had no real power in the department. But Littlemore, being a fellow of excellent good nature, conveyed no disrespect to the coroner.

'What do I know about the Riverford case?' he answered. 'Why, nothing at all, Mr Hugel, except that the killer is over fifty, five-foot-nine, unmarried, familiar with the sight of blood, lives below Canal Street, and visited the harbor within the last two days.'

Hugel's jaw dropped. 'How do you know all that?'

'I'm joking, Mr Hugel. I don't know Shinola about the murderer. I don't even know why they bothered sending me over. You didn't happen to lift any prints, did you, sir?'

'Fingerprints?' asked the coroner. 'Certainly not. The courts will never admit fingerprint evidence.'

'Well, it was too late by the time I got there. The whole place was already cleaned out. All the girl's things were gone.'

Hugel was incensed. He called it tampering with evidence. 'But you must have learned something about the Riverford girl,' he added.

'She was new,' said Littlemore. 'She only lived there a month or two.'

'They opened in June, Littlemore. Everyone has lived there only a month or two.'

'Oh. Well she was a real quiet type. Kept to herself.'

'Is that all? Was anyone seen with her yesterday?' asked the coroner.

'She came in around eight o'clock. Nobody with her. No guests later. Went to her apartment and never came out, as far as anybody knows.'

'Did she have any regular visitors?'

'Nope. Nobody remembers anybody ever visiting her.'

'Why was she living alone in New York City — at her age and in so large an apartment?'

'That's what I wanted to know,' said Littlemore. 'But they clammed up on me pretty good at the Balmoral, every one of them. I was serious about the harbor though, Mr Hugel. I found some clay on the floor of Miss Riverford's bedroom. Pretty fresh too. I think it came from the harbor.'

'Clay? What color clay?' asked Hugel.

'Red. Cakey, kind of.'

'That wasn't clay, Littlemore,' said the coroner, rolling his eyes, 'that was my chalk.'

The detective frowned. 'I wondered why there was a whole circle of it.'

'To keep people away from the body, you nitwit!'

'I'm just joking, Mr Hugel. It wasn't your chalk. I saw your chalk. The clay was by the fireplace. A couple of small traces. Needed my magnifying glass before I saw it. I took it home to compare with my samples; I got a whole collection. It's a lot like the red clay all over the piers at the harbor.'

Hugel took this in. He was considering whether to be impressed. 'Is the clay in the harbor unique? Could it come from somewhere else — the Central Park, for example?'

'Not the park,' said the detective. 'This is river clay, Mr Hugel. No rivers in the park.'

'What about the Hudson Valley?'

'Could be.'

'Or Fort Tryon, uptown, where Billings has just turned over so much earth?'

'You think there's clay up there?'

'I congratulate you, Littlemore, on your outstanding detective work.'

'Thanks, Mr Hugel.'

'Would you be interested in a description of the murderer, by any chance?'

'I sure would.'

'He is middle-aged, wealthy, and right-handed. His hair: graying, but formerly dark brown. His height: six foot to six-foot-one. And I believe he was acquainted with his victim — well acquainted.'

Littlemore looked amazed. 'How — ?'

'Here are three hairs I collected from the girl's person.' The coroner pointed to a small double-paned rectangle of glass on his desk, next to a microscope: sandwiched between the panes of glass were three hairs. 'They are dark but striated with gray, indicating a man of middle age. On the girl's neck were threads of white silk — most probably a man's tie, evidently used to strangle her. The silk was of the highest quality. Thus our man has money. Of his dexterity, there can be no doubt; the wounds all proceed from right to left.'

'His dexterity?'

'His right-handedness, Detective.'

'But how do you know he knew her?'

'I do not know. I suspect. Answer me this: in what posture was Miss Riverford when she was whipped?'

'I never saw her,' the detective complained. 'I don't even know cause of death.'

'Ligature strangulation, confirmed by the fracture of the hyoid bone, as I saw when I opened her chest. A lovely break, if I may say, like a perfectly split wishbone. Indeed, a lovely female chest altogether: the ribs perfectly formed, the lungs and heart, once removed, the very picture of healthy asphyxiated tissue. It was a pleasure to hold them in one's hands. But to the point: Miss Riverford was standing when she was whipped. This we know from the simple fact that the blood dripped straight down from her lacerations. Her hands were undoubtedly tied above her head by a heavy- gauge rope of some kind, almost certainly attached to the fixture in the ceiling. I saw rope threads on that fixture. Did you? No? Well, go back and look for them. Question: why would a man who has a good sturdy rope strangle his victim with a delicate silk? Inference, Mr Littlemore: he did not want to put something so coarse around the girl's neck. And why was that? Hypothesis, Mr Littlemore: because he had feelings for her. Now, as to the man's height, we are back to certainties. Miss Riverford was five-foot-five. Judging from her wounds, the whipping was administered by someone seven to eight inches above her. Thus the murderer's height was between six foot and six-foot-one.'

'Unless he was standing on something,' said Littlemore.

'What?'

'On a stool or something.'

'On a stool?' repeated the coroner.

'It's possible,' said Littlemore.

'A man does not stand on a stool while whipping a girl, Detective.'

'Why not?'

'Because it's ridiculous. He would fall off.'

'Not if he had something to hold on to,' said the detective. 'A lamp, maybe, or a hat rack.'

'A hat rack?' said Hugel. 'Why would he do that, Detective?'

'To make us think he was taller.'

'How many homicide cases have you investigated?' asked the coroner.

'This is my first,' said Littlemore, with undisguised excitement, 'as a detective.'

Hugel nodded. 'You spoke with the maid at least, I suppose?'

'The maid?'

'Yes, the maid. Miss Riverford's maid. Did you ask her if she noticed anything unusual?'

'I don't think I — '

'I don't want you to think,' snapped the coroner. 'I want you to detect. Go back to the Balmoral and talk to that maid again. She was the first one in the room. Ask her to describe to you exactly what she saw when she went in. Get the details, do you hear me?'

On the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-third Street, in a room no woman had ever entered, not even to dust or beat the curtains, a butler poured from a sparkling decanter into three etched-crystal goblets. The bowls of these goblets were intricately carved and so deep they could hold an entire bottle of claret. The butler poured a quarter inch of red wine into each.

These glasses he offered to the Triumvirate.

The three men sat in deep leather armchairs arranged around a central fireplace. The room was a library containing more than thirty-seven hundred volumes, most of which were in Greek, Latin, or German. On one side of the unlit fireplace stood a bust of Aristotle atop a jade- green marble pedestal. On the other was a bust of an ancient Hindu. Over the mantel was an entablature: it displayed a large snake curled into a sine wave, against a background of flames. The word charaka was engraved in capital letters underneath.

Smoke from the men's pipes caressed the ceiling high above them. The man in the center of the three made a barely perceptible motion with his right hand, on which he wore a large and unusual silver ring. He was in his late fifties, elegant, gaunt in the face, and wiry in build, with dark eyes, black eyebrows below his silver hair, and the hands of a pianist.

In response to his sign, the butler put a spark to the hearth, causing a thick set of papers therein to catch and burn. The fireplace glowed and crackled with dancing orange flames. 'Be sure to preserve the ashes,' said the master to his servant.

Nodding his assent, the butler silently withdrew, closing the door behind him.

'There is only one way to fight fire,' continued the man with pianist's hands. He raised his goblet. 'Gentlemen.'

As the two other men raised their crystal glasses, an observer might have noticed that they also wore a similar silver ring on their right hands. One of these other two gentlemen was portly and red-cheeked, with muttonchop sideburns. He completed the elegant man's toast — 'With fire' — and drained his glass.

The third gentleman was balding, sharp-eyed, and thin. He said not a word but merely sipped his wine, a Chateau Lafite of the 1870 vintage.

'Do you know the Baron?' asked the elegant man, turning to this balding gentleman. 'I suppose you are related to him.'

'Rothschild?' the balding man replied blandly. 'I've never met him. Our ties are with the English branch.'