“The last name you mentioned,” Tsarnoff said. “Say it again, sir, if you please.”
“Vassily Souslik.”
“Souslik,” he said, and chuckled. “Very good, sir. Very good indeed.”
“What is so good?” Rasmoulian demanded. “It is good because he has a Russian name? I do not understand.”
“Now that you mention it,” Ray said, “neither do I. I’m the one told you about those names, Bernie, and they didn’t mean a thing to me, an’ if they meant anything to you I never heard a peep out of you about it. What in hell’s a sousnik, anyway?”
“A souslik,” I said. “Not a sousnik. And it’s a Russian word, which is why Mr. Tsarnoff understood it and why the rest of us didn’t, although you’ll find it in some English dictionaries and encyclopedias. And it means a large ground squirrel indigenous to Eastern Europe and Asia.”
“Well, for Christ’s sake,” Ray said, “that explains everything, don’t it? A big fat squirrel. That cracks the case wide open, all right.”
“What it does,” I said, “is identify Candlemas for us. So does his French alias, because a marmot is pretty much the same thing as a souslik. But I should have known earlier on if I’d been paying attention to what he called himself this time around. Candlemas is a church festival commemorating the purification of the Virgin Mary and the presentation of the infant Christ in the temple. But it’s celebrated on the same date every year like Christmas, not tied to the lunar calendar like Easter.”
Someone asked the date.
“February second,” I said.
They met this with mystified silence and shared the silence like Quakers through whom God had, for the moment, nothing to say. Then Wilfred, silent skulking Wilfred, said, “My favorite holiday.”
Everybody looked at him.
“Groundhog’s Day,” he said. “Second of February. Most useful holiday of the year. He pops out, he don’t see his shadow, you got yourself an early spring. Bright sunny day, he sees his shadow, forget about it. Six more weeks of winter.”
I said, “The groundhog, the souslik, the marmot. All names for-”
“The woodchuck,” said Charlie Weeks, smiling his tight little smile. “Alias Chuck Wood, alias Charles Brigham Wood. Disappeared into Europe after the balloon went up in Anatruria. Some people thought he was killed. The rest of us figured he was the one who sold us out.”
I let that last pass. “Candlemas was the woodchuck,” I agreed. “I guess he kept tabs on people from afar. He knew where Michael was living, and he knew that his old friend the mouse was in the same building. But he couldn’t approach the mouse himself.”
“I’d had enough of him in Anatruria,” Weeks said.
“So he used Hoberman as his cat’s-paw,” I said, and frowned at the metaphor, an inappropriate one among all these rodents.
“And when Cappy had served his purpose,” Weeks said, “the woodchuck killed him.”
“In his own apartment?”
“Why not?”
“And on his own rug? Candlemas might sacrifice an old friend, but why throw in a valuable rug?”
“How valuable?” Ray wanted to know. I couldn’t tell him, and Tsarnoff suggested dryly that we consult the rug peddler in our midst for an evaluation.
“Stop that!” Rasmoulian said. “Why does he do that? I am not an Armenian. I know nothing about carpets. Why does he say these things about me?”
“The same reason you call me a Russian,” Tsarnoff said smoothly. “Willful ignorance, my little adversary. Willful ignorance founded on malice and propelled by avarice.”
“I shall never call you a Russian again. You are a Circassian.”
“And you an Assyrian.”
“The Circassians are legendary. The women are exquisite whores, and the males are castrated young and make great gross eunuchs.”
“The Assyrians at their height were noted chiefly for their savagery. They have dwindled and died out to the point where the few in existence are wizened dwarves, the genetically warped spawn of two millennia of incestuous unions.”
We were making progress, I was pleased to note. For all the verbal escalation, neither Rasmoulian’s hand nor Wilfred’s had moved so much as an inch toward a concealed weapon.
“Candlemas didn’t kill Hoberman,” I said. “Even if he didn’t care about the rug, even if he had some dark reason to want Hoberman out of the picture, the timing was all wrong. Would he risk having a corpse on the floor when I got back with the royal portfolio?”
“He’d kill you, too,” Weeks said.
“And write off another rug? No, it doesn’t make sense that way. It’s a shame, too, because Candlemas makes a very convenient killer.”
“That’s the truth,” Ray said. “Tell ’em why, Bernie.”
“Because he’s dead himself,” I said, “and can’t argue the point. He died within hours of Hoberman, but he took longer to turn up. The cops found him in an abandoned building at Pitt and Madison.”
“That’s the place to find one,” said Mowgli, as one who knew. “A corpse or an abandoned building. Or both.”
“How was he killed?” Tsarnoff wanted to know.
“He was shot,” Ray said. “Small-caliber gun fired at close range.”
“Two different killers,” Tiglath Rasmoulian suggested. “This woodchuck stabbed the ram, and was shot by someone else.”
“If this happened in Anatruria,” Ilona said, “you would know that the woodchuck was shot by a son of his victim, or perhaps a brother. Even a nephew.” She shrugged. “But you would not inquire too closely, because this would not be a police matter. It is merely blood avenging blood, and honor requires it.”
“There’s no honor here,” I said. “And a good thing, too. There was only one killer. He followed Hoberman when he left the Boccaccio, tagged him to the woodchuck’s apartment a few blocks away, and stabbed him right off. Then he abducted Candlemas, took him down to Pitt Street -”
“ Pitt Street,” Mowgli said. “You’re down there, you might as well be dead.”
“-and killed him when he’d learned all he could from him. Or maybe he took him somewhere else, killed him after interrogating him, and took the dead body to Pitt Street.”
“Coals to Newcastle,” Mowgli said.
“Then someone was watching my building,” Michael said.
“No.”
“You mean this Hoberman was under surveillance all along?”
I shook my head. “The ram was visiting his old friend, the mouse. They hadn’t seen each other in years. And when the mouse told me about that visit, he made a real point of saying how the ram was in a hurry to get out of there.”
“Ah,” Charlie Weeks said. “You mean he was going to meet somebody on his way back to the woodchuck’s place.”
“No,” I said. “That’s not what I mean.”
“It’s not?”
“It’s not,” I said. “What I mean is that you wanted me to know that Hoberman was hardly in your apartment for any time at all. That way it wouldn’t occur to me that you had plenty of time to get him settled in with a cup of coffee and excuse yourself long enough to make a quick phone call.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because you knew something was up. You didn’t know what, but you were the mouse and you smelled a rat. You couldn’t tag along with Hoberman. He’d be on guard. But you could call a confederate and stall Hoberman long enough for the man you called to post himself within line of sight of the Boccaccio’s front entrance. Whether or not he knew Hoberman by sight, you could supply a description that would make identification an easy matter.”
“Oh, weasel,” Charlie Weeks said. “I’m disappointed in you, coming up with a wild theory like that.”
“You deny it, then.”
“Of course I deny it. But I can’t deny the possibility that somebody followed Cappy home. It seems a little farfetched to me, but anything’s possible. Thing is, I don’t see how you’re going to guess who it was.”
“And if you had called someone, I’d just be guessing as to his identity, wouldn’t I?”