“A doll…” I said pensively.
“A zombie,” the owner gently corrected me.
“A doll…” I repeated, ignoring him. “What kind of luggage does he have?”
“A couple of the usual suitcases,” the owner said. “And this huge, iron-bound, antique wooden trunk. He brought four porters with him, and the poor fellows exhausted themselves trying to get it into the building. They made a wreck of my door post…”
“Well, so what?” I said, after I’d thought it over. “At the end of the day, it’s his business. I’ve heard of a millionaire who dragged his collection of chamber pots around with him wherever he went… If it pleases a person to have a full-size mannequin of his spouse… no doubt he has time and money to burn… By the way, it’s completely possible that he noticed what our Simone was up to and slipped him the doll instead of his wife… Hell, maybe he carries that doll around with him just for that purpose! Judging from the behavior of Mrs. Moses…” I imagined myself in Simone’s place and shuddered. “Good god, now that’s a first-rate joke,” I said.
“There you go: now everything’s been explained to your satisfaction,” the owner said quietly.
I didn’t like his tone. We watched one another for a few minutes. I still liked him. But damn it all, why did he have to do this—to clog my brain with all this African nonsense? I wasn’t a reporter, after all, and had no intention of advertising his establishment to the detriment of my own reputation… No, I’d had enough. I was done talking with Mr. Alek Snevar about these things. If he wanted to throw me off the scent, he wasn’t going to succeed. He was only making his situation worse. He didn’t want me paying that much attention to him.
“Look, Alek,” I said. “You’re messing me up. Sit here for a while; I’m going to go to the den. I have to think this over.”
“It’s quarter to five,” the owner reminded me.
“So what? We’re not sleeping today anyway. Keep in mind, Alek, I don’t think this is over yet. So stay here in the hallway and be ready.”
“All right. I suppose you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” the owner said.
I went into the den (Lel snarled at me again), picked up the poker and proceeded to jumble the embers. So, the incident with Simone had been more or less explained, and I could put it out of my head. Or was it the other way around, since if that had been a doll in the Mrs. Moses’s room at eleven o’clock, then where had Mrs. Moses been? A first-rate joke, of course… But there was something too cumbersome about it… Was it really a joke? Maybe an attempt to establish an alibi?… Not much of an alibi: it was night, dark, the only way anyone would have known it was her was by touch, and with touch it turned into a joke, not an alibi. Maybe what they were thinking was that poor Simone’s nerves would snap, he’d yell out in horror, get to his feet, stir up a scandal, a hullabaloo… and then what? Most importantly, what did the doll have to do with it? All this could have been done without the doll. So what, essentially, was bothering me about it? Only one thing: that Simone’s room was located next to Olaf’s. This allowed one to suppose, say, that the Moseses needed Simone’s room to be empty for a span of time after eleven o’clock. That’s what was bothering me. But they wouldn’t have needed a doll to distract Mr. Simone. Of course, hypothetically speaking, the doll could have caused Simone to fall into a long and deep faint… but then, to distract Simone, all you needed was Mrs. Moses. That would have been the most natural way, and the one with the greatest hope of succeeding. The only reason to resort to such an unnatural and unreliable method as a doll would be if Mrs. Moses had to be somewhere else. Mrs. Moses… a fragile socialite, pampered to the point of imbecility… No, this wasn’t getting me anywhere. It could still have just been a first-rate joke, after all, though I didn’t see how this story fit yet…
It was a particularly sticky situation. None of the strands led anywhere. First, there wasn’t a single suspect. Second, I had absolutely no idea how the crime had been committed. I didn’t understand the most important thing. Forget about the killer—how had it been done? How? An open window, but no traces on the sill, no footprints in the snow on the ledge. No way to approach the window from below, the right, or the left. That left only one way: from above. From the roof, using a rope. But then there would be traces on the edge of the roof. Of course I could go back up and examine it again, but I remembered it exactly: the snow had been disturbed only around Hinkus’s lounge chair. Of course there was always the possibility that the killer had stuck a propeller in his ass like Karlsson-on-the-Roof. He took off, snapped his countryman’s neck, flew away… So I had only two lousy possibilities. The first were secret passages, hidden doorways and double walls. And the second was that some genius had invented a new technological device that allowed one to turn a key from the outside, leaving no trace behind…
Both propositions led, among other places, directly to the owner of the house and a mechanical inventor. Well, all right. And how does this man’s alibi look to us? Until nine thirty he’d been sitting continuously at the card table. From five to ten until the moment the body was discovered, he had been either where I could see him or within earshot. That left only twenty to twenty-five minutes for him to commit the murder, during which he either hadn’t been seen, or had been seen only by Kaisa, who, according to his own testimony, he’d been yelling at. Hence he could, theoretically, be the killer, if he knew of a secret passageway or had the means to turn a key from the outside without leaving any trace behind… I couldn’t understand what the motive behind all this completely psychologically unjustified behavior might be (definitely not publicity!), but, I repeat, theoretically he could have been the murderer. Let’s make a note of this and move on.
Du Barnstoker. He didn’t have an alibi. But he’s a weak old man, he doesn’t have the strength to break a man’s neck… Simone. He didn’t have an alibi. He could break a man’s neck—he’s a strong fellow, not to mention a little off-kilter. I couldn’t work out how he might have gotten into Olaf’s room. And if he did get in, I couldn’t understand how he got out. Theoretically (of course) he might have stumbled accidentally over the alleged secret door. I didn’t understand his motives, didn’t understand his behavior after the murder. I didn’t understand anything… Hinkus… Hinkus’s double… Another cup of coffee would be nice. Then again, it’d be nice to spit on it all and go to bed…