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.