“It’s difficult to fit a double bass into anything smaller.”
Basso shook his head amusedly. “You’ll still be saying the same thing when that car’s forty years old. Now come in and have some tea.”
Floyd removed his fedora. “Actually, I could really use some coffee. As strong as you can manage.”
“Like that, is it?”
Basso ushered Floyd into his dark living room. An unfeasible number of clocks ticked and whirred to themselves, some mounted on the walls, others perched on shelves and on the long granite mantelpiece. Supporting himself with a stick, Basso shuffled to one of the clocks, swung open its case and made some tiny adjustment with a tool he carried in his pocket.
“I was thinking about what you said about the spheres,” Floyd said. “Being bells, I mean.”
Basso wandered into his kitchen and raised his voice. “What about them?”
“I don’t see how they could be. I’ve never heard of a completely round bell. How would it chime?
“I didn’t mean that kind of bell, you buffoon. I meant diving bells, the kind you climb into. The size seemed about right.”
“But they’re solid.”
After a little while, Basso came back in with a single cup of coffee. It had the stiff, black consistency of marine fuel oiclass="underline" just the ticket, as far as Floyd was concerned.
“When you said solid, I didn’t think you meant solid all the way through. I assumed you meant that the shells were to be formed from solid metal with no perforations or joints.”
“I’m pretty sure they’re solid spheres.”
“Let me see the sketch.”
Floyd passed him the paper and sat quietly, ingesting the coffee, while Basso turned the paper this way and that, squinting and frowning. A few seconds before eleven, there came a series of near-simultaneous clicks and ratcheting sounds from the clocks, as of mechanisms gearing up, and precisely on the hour the assembled clocks emitted a cacophony of chimes that lasted the better part of a minute. During this time, Basso continued studying the sheet of paper as if nothing was happening.
When the clocks had settled down again, he lifted his face towards Floyd and said, “Well, you’re right. It is solid, and it does seem to be about the size you mentioned.” With a blunt forefinger he traced the other faint lines marked on the paper. “This seems to be some kind of support arrangement, to suspend the sphere. Why the fine cables, I wonder?” His finger moved again. “This seems to be a kind of cross-section through a vat or tub. At a guess, I suspect that the sphere is supposed to be immersed in whatever goes into this tub.”
“Ring any bells? Other than the submarine kind, I mean.”
“I’m afraid I’ve never seen anything like this. Do you have any other information?”
Floyd offered him the letter from Berlin. “Just this.”
“It clearly refers to the same contract,” Basso said, reading down the paper, his lips moving softly as he mouthed the German. “Three spheres. Copper-aluminium alloy, with very high machining tolerances. Here’s something about the support mechanism. Acoustic dampening, if I’m not misreading it.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s an arrangement designed to cut down on the transmission of vibrations.”
“And how would it work?”
“That would depend on the application. If the sphere was the source of the vibrations, like the engine in a submarine, then it might need to be cushioned so that those vibrations didn’t escape out through the hull and into the surrounding water, where they could be picked up by enemy sonar.”
“It doesn’t look like any kind of marine engine to me,” Floyd said.
“No… it doesn’t. Which raises the other possibility, which is that the sphere is the thing that has to be protected from vibrations.”
“What sort of thing are you thinking of?”
“It could be almost anything,” Basso said. “Any kind of sensitive scientific or commercial apparatus might benefit from that kind of protection.”
“Guess that narrows it down slightly,” Floyd said. “For a while back there we wondered if it might be some kind of bomb.”
“No, I don’t think that’s what it is. The apparent solidity,” he mused, ticking off key points on his fingers, “the very precise machining specifications, the need for dampening—they all point to it being some kind of measurement apparatus. What kind, I couldn’t begin to imagine.” Basso returned the paper to Floyd. “Of course, I could be completely wrong.”
“But you might be on the right track.” Floyd finished the thick, black coffee. It was like pouring hot asphalt down his throat. “Thanks, Basso. You’ve been helpful.”
“Although it probably wasn’t worth your driving all the way over here to see me.”
“That’s all right,” Floyd said. “I had to bring the patient with me, didn’t I?”
Basso rubbed his hands. “Let’s have a look at her, shall we?”
Floyd stopped on the way home to pick up provisions and have a leisurely lunch at a café near the Trocadero. By two he was back at his desk, pulling out his notebook and thumbing through to Blanchard’s number. It was much earlier than the time he had arranged to call Custine, but he was anxious to know if there had been any progress with the wireless set.
Floyd let the telephone ring for half a minute, hung up and then waited a minute or two before trying again, with no success. He concluded that Blanchard must have been elsewhere, perhaps upstairs in Susan White’s room, if he hadn’t left the building entirely. He tried once more five minutes later, but still there was no answer.
Floyd was placing the receiver back on its cradle when he noticed something that had been pushed beneath the squat, black pedestal of the telephone. It was a sheet of folded paper, and it had not been there that morning. He pulled it out and opened it up. He recognised a block of text in Custine’s very neat, curlicued handwriting. The message read:
Dear Floyd
I hope and pray that you find this letter in good time. I could have placed it openly on your desk, or even in your pigeonhole, but for reasons that will shortly become apparent, I believe this would have been a very unwise course of action.
I have just returned by taxi from rue des Peupliers. I find myself in a great deal of trouble. I must not say too much, for the less you know about it, the less chance there will be of my friends from the Quai finding some way of connecting it to you. In any case, I am sure they will be in touch with you soon. In the meantime, I must make myself scarce. I do not think it is safe for me to remain in Paris for very much longer. I will try to make contact, but for both our sakes, I suggest you make no effort to find me.
Now destroy this message. And then take very good care of yourself.
PS—I do not think Heimsoth and Reinke make typewriters.
Floyd sat, stunned. He re-read the message, hoping that he had been hallucinating, but nothing about the letter had changed. Something had happened and now Custine was on the run.
He felt as if he needed a drink. He picked up the bottle to pour himself a finger of brandy, but then returned it to the table unopened. What he really needed, some quiet, detached voice told him, was utter clarity of mind, and he needed it fast.
The case had been progressing smoothly. They were on to something big—he’d become increasingly sure of that—but nothing had prepared him for this sudden, savage turn of events. What could possibly have happened? He replayed the sequence of events in his mind, thinking about Custine’s intentions for the day. Everything had been normal when he left Custine at Blanchard’s building earlier that morning, complete with his tools. The big man had planned to have another listen to the wireless, to see if those Morse signals came through again. He’d also intended to quiz the missing tenant on the second floor, and to nibble around the delicate matter that Blanchard might have had something to do with the murder. There was scope for the old man to have taken offence if Custine had barged in with a tactless line of questioning, but that was the last thing Custine would have done. His experiences in the Quai had made him much better at that tact and diplomacy stuff than Floyd.