Then he turned to Dermot.
“Let me indicate what happened, and you shall confirm it! Miss Weatherill asked you to meet her here, even specifying the table you were to occupy, and said she would arrive after tea?”
“Yes,” said Dermot.
“At half-past five she came through the arbor — first making certain that Dr. Vanderver was on the terrace in the place he always occupied, every day, to smoke a cigar at that hour?”
“I... yes.”
“Miss Weatherill was easily persuaded to have a fresh cup of tea?”
“Well, I asked her to.”
“The waitress, Alys, was then pottering round for no apparent reason among otherwise deserted tables?”
“She was.”
“You gave the order to Alys,” said Monsieur Lespinasse grimly. “She picked up your tray — a big tray — whisking over it a large cloth to cover the dishes? Just as we later saw her do?”
“I admit it.”
“Alys then walked away from you through the arbor. As she did so,” leered Lespinasse, so intent that he made a face, “Miss Weatherill distracted your attention by getting a light for her cigarette. And kept your attention fixed on herself by dropping the cigarette, and pretending an agitation she did not feel.”
Dermot gave a quick look at Betty. Whatever else this might be, it was not a hoax or a joke. Betty’s face was white.
“Miss Weatherill held your attention,” said Lespinasse, “so that Alys could slip back out of the arbor unnoticed. Alys did not really go through the arbor at all! Carrying the tray, she merely darted round the side of the arbor and returned unseen to the hotel by another way.
“Miss Weatherill was then ready to play the rest of the comedy. ‘Discovering’ the loss of her compact, she enters the arbor. Halfway up, in the darkness, is lying a stage-property these two have already left there. This is another tray: like the first, and covered with a cloth. But this cloth does not cover dishes. It covers—”
Monsieur Lespinasse broke off.
He looked flustered and dishevelled, but in his wicked eye there was a gleam of admiration.
“Monsieur Dermot, I tell you a psychological truth. The one person in this world whose features nobody can remember are those of a waitress. You see her at close range; yet you do not see her. Should you doubt this, the next time in your abominable London you go into a Lyons or an A.B.C., try calling for your bill in a hurry and see if you can identify the particular young lady who served you with a cup of tea. I know it. So did Miss Weatherill.
“She was already wearing a thin black frock under her white one. The tray in the arbor contained the other properties by which a blonde is changed into a brunette, white stockings and shoes change to black, a tanned complexion is heightened to a vivid ruddiness. It was the clumsiest possible disguise because it needed to be no more. Dr. Vanderver never glanced twice at the black-clad figure in cap and apron who walked out of the arbor carrying a tray. He saw no black wig; he saw no false complexion; he saw nothing. In his mind there registered, ‘waitress-has-passed’: no more. Thus Miss Weatherill, inexpertly got up as Alys, passed safely through the dense shadow which the arbor casts on the terrace — carrying before her the tray whose cloth nearly hid the discarded white dress, stockings, and shoes.”
The juge d’instruction drew a deep, whistling breath.
“Very well!” he said. “But what I wish to know is: why?”
“You don’t see it even yet?” asked Betty.
“My deepest apologies,” said Lespinasse, “if I am dense. But I do not see it. You cannot have liked cutting yourself so that you might get real blood to put on the knife you buried. But why? How does all this nonsense help us, when Dr. Vanderver has committed no crime?”
“Because he’s Embassy,” answered Betty simply.
“Mademoiselle?”
“He has diplomatic immunity,” said Betty. “The government can’t search him; can’t even touch him. And so, you see, I had to get him arrested by the civil authorities so that his papers could be searched.”
She turned to Dermot.
“Derry, I’m sorry,” she went on. “That is, I’m sorry I’m not quite the candid-camera schoolmistress burbling to high heaven that I pretended to be. But I want to be just that. I want to enjoy myself. For the first time in all my life, I’ve enjoyed myself in the last month. What I mean is: I want to be with you, that’s all. So, now that I’m chucking the beastly job—”
Monsieur Lespinasse swore softly. After remaining rigid for a moment, he picked up the brief-case and the valise he had dropped.
Both were in green leather stamped in gold with the royal arms of Sylvania.
“—and of course,” Betty was saying almost wildly, “the fellow’s name wasn’t ‘Dr. Vanderver,’ and he’s no more a neutral than I am. Only he’d got that job on forged credentials, and he was safe. So I had to keep telling the juge d’instruction I suspected him of being a murderer. His real name is Karl Heinrich von Arnheim; and when Sir George — you know to whom I refer, Monsieur Lespinasse — asked me to go after him—”
Monsieur Lespinasse could not break the lock of the brief-case. So he opened a wicked-looking knife of his own to slit the leather; and so he found the secret.
“The English,” he said, “are not bad.” He waved the knife, which glittered against the light from the windows. “Dr. Vanderver will not, I think, leave the police station after all.” He swept Betty Weatherill a profound bow. “The complete plans,” he added, “of the underground fortifications whose fall would break the whole line of defense along this front.”
MacKinlay Kantor
The Hunting of Hemingway
MacKinlay Kantor, who writes equally well about grandmothers and soldiers, Ozark cats and Scottish pipers, ghosts and moths, Western outlaws and movie queens, has the enviable ability to fuse literary quality and popular appeal. Here is one of his sharp and pungent detective stories — a cops-and-robbers tale that sprang out of the old Chicago days...
Inspector Bourse looked very tired. He had been awake all night, and he was not as young as he had been in the days when he wore a gray helmet and sported a walrus-mustache.
The two young men and the two blowsy, over-dressed women crowded close around him as he sat crouched in the deep, gaudily upholstered chair.
Bourse asked, “How’s your watch, Ricardi? And yours, Nick Glennan?”
Coonskin cuffs slid back from two husky wrists, and for a moment there was silence.
“Eight-eight, sir.”
“That’s me, Inspector. Eight-eight.”
“You ladies” — he slurred the word — “got your guns in your pocket-books?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then,” said old Inspector Bourse, “I’d like to know what’s keeping you. Go to it. Don’t give ’em a break. They never gave a break in their lives, least of all Hemingway. And remember them vests. Shoot ’em in the kisser.”
Said one of the women, whose name was Cohen, “That reminds me—”
“Shoot him in the pants,” nodded the old chief, “the coat and vest is mine. All right, gentlemen.”
They went out through the kitchen, and a uniformed patrolman opened the rear door. They went down two flights of bleak stairway and crowded into a red and black taxicab which had been waiting at the alley entrance with idling motor. Nobody said anything. The driver seemed very husky for a taxi driver — he should have been able to command an occupation more fitting to one who scaled two hundred and eight pounds and whose shoulders were all steel and wire.