“False teeth made to hold gems aren’t too uncommon, and an importer once got past us declaring all his diamonds except the big one inside his glass eye.”
Gavigan looked into the bathroom. “Plumbing?” he asked.
“We took most of it apart; the rest we probed.”
Aldo dealt himself four Aces. “Les flics,” he said, “sont formidables. They miss nothing.”
“And what,” Merlini wanted to know, “was the searching routine on our nimble-fingered friend here?”
“I’ll show you,” Hurley said. “On your feet, wise guy.”
The Cheshire-cat grin that had seemed to be permanently affixed to the magician’s moon-like face vanished abruptly.
“Not the pill again! Ça, je refuse absolument!”
“No. We’ll skip the cathartic this time. But start stripping.”
Pierre Aldo put the deck on the floor, scooped up the Aces, turned them face down, snapped his fingers, then counted the cards face up. There were still four, but the Aces were now Kings. He dropped these on the deck, stood up, removed his coat, and began to unknot his tie.
“I do this now three times. Soon I am good enough for the Folies Bergère. Pierre Aldo — Le Prestidigitateur Nu!”
The glum Customs Agent turned the pockets of the coat inside out, then the sleeves. He felt the lining inch by inch and tossed the garment to Merlini who did the same. The man’s necktie, shirt, undershirt, trousers, shoes, socks and, finally, his shorts got the same painstaking inspection.
“New heels, I see,” Merlini said as he examined the shoes.
“Courtesy of the Customs Service,” Hurley explained. “We replaced the ones we cut up.”
“You also pay for les funérailles,” Aldo asked, “when I die from la pneumonie?”
Hurley threw him his shorts. Aldo, grinning again now, climbed into them.
“Well?” Hurley eyed Merlini without much hope. “What did we miss?”
“I think,” the magician said slowly, “that you saw a little too much. One thing — a small piece of misdirection — made you jump unconsciously to a hasty conclusion.”
Hurley didn’t believe it. “Are you telling me there is a place we haven’t looked?”
“I am. As you said — right under our noses. But first I want to ask a favor. If I’m right, Pierre’s next stop will be a Federal prison. Since I may not see him again very soon, I’d like to show him one trick before he goes.”
Aldo who had picked up his shirt nearly dropped it. “You are a magician?” He wasn’t smiling now.
“I do a little magic,” Merlini said. “I liked that Poker deal of yours, but I can top it. You shuffle, cut, and deal four Bridge hands. I won’t touch the cards at all and yet I’ll get a perfect hand,”
“The Bridge?” Aldo said slowly. “I do not know the Bridge so well.”
“Four players,” Merlini told him. “The complete deck is dealt, and a perfect hand is all the cards of one suit. The odds against getting it by chance are 158,753,389,899 to 1.”
Aldo sat on the floor again, picked up the deck, and began shuffling slowly. He looked thoughtful. “You want to make a little bet on that?”
“Sure,” Merlini said. “At those odds I can bet you between two and three ten-thousandths of a cent against the missing half million in diamonds.”
“I think,” Aldo said, “that you lose.” He dealt rapidly but stopped after four cards had been dealt to each hand, and turned those in front of Merlini face up. “How can you get thirteen cards of one suit when the first four are Aces?”
“You might give me a square deal,” Merlini said. “Suppose I shuffle the cards once first.” He held out his hand.
Aldo wasn’t interested. “Non! The trick is impossible. You are talking through the hat.”
George Hurley suddenly lost patience in a battle of magicians that might even have made hocus-pocus history.
He exploded. “You can play games with this character in his cell! I want to know where this hiding place is you say we missed — and right now!”
A Test of Identity
by Michael Innes
“Yes,” inspector Appleby said as we strolled to the far end of his study, “I do keep a bit of a museum in this room. A sign of old age and the reminiscent mood, no doubt.”
He pointed to a range of well-ordered shelves. “You may find them depressing. For these things connect up, one way or another, with every sort of wickedness under the sun.”
“All of them?”
“Well, no. One or two recall affairs that would have to be termed bizarre, I suppose, rather than nefarious. For example, that photograph. What do you make of it?”
I found myself studying a formal, three-quarter length portrait of a young man, taken full face and looking straight at the camera. A professional job, I thought, but of rather an old-fashioned sort.
“Attract you?” No comment had occurred to me, and Appleby appeared to feel I needed prompting. “Or do you prefer a man to be handsome in a more regular way?”
“The features are certainly irregular enough,” I said. “But they have vitality. For what it is worth, then, your specimen does attract me. Was he a great criminal?”
Appleby smiled. “That was the question which confronted us. Did you ever hear of Leonard Morton?”
“Never. Is this his photograph?”
Appleby smiled. “Sit down, my dear chap, and I’ll tell you the tale.”
“It is sometimes said that if the whole population was fingerprinted the police and the law courts would be saved some pretty large headaches. And Morton is a case in point.
“His parents had been wealthy folk who lost their lives in some accident when he was a baby. There were no near relatives, and young Leonard was brought up in a careful enough, but rather impersonal, way. Nobody had much occasion to be interested in him, and he seems to have had no talent for impressing himself upon the world.
“You spoke of vitality. I suspect he shoved most of that into a rugger scrum. And by his companions there, I suppose, he was remembered only as so much heave and shove. He made no print, so to speak, as a personality. Which was awkward, in view of what happened.
“He took off into the skies one day — it was for the purpose of bombing Berlin — and ceased to be a recognizable physical object some hours later.”
I was horrified. “Do you mean,” I asked Appleby, “that he was charred to a cinder?”
“Nothing so drastic. But he was abominably burned. Or that was the story the world was asked to believe later. At the time, Morton was posted as missing, believed killed. No word of him came through, you see, as a P.O.W. or anything else. Then the war ended, and suddenly there was this mutilated man with his story — his story of being Leonard Morton.
“There was nothing out of the way in it. He had baled out; every rag had been blasted or burned off him; and for a long time he had suffered a complete loss of memory. And now here he was back in England, proposing to claim quite a substantial fortune. But was he Morton?
“If he wasn’t, he had certainly known Morton — and known him as quite a young man, before the war started. There could, it seemed, be no doubt about that. If he was an impostor, he wasn’t impersonating a dead man whom he had met for the first time in a hospital or prison camp. But here certainty ended.”
Appleby paused at this to stare thoughtfully at the photograph, and a question occurred to me. “At which point did you come into the affair?”
“In the first few days. There was, you see, an important time element in the matter. For a reason I’ll presently explain, it was essential that the truth be got at quickly.