I reached out and pressed the front doorbell. It went bing-bong, which was a bit of an anticlimax. After all that had gone before, I’d been expecting a massed choir. The door opened and there was another anticlimax. Beatrice von Falkenberg opened it herself. So what had happened to the butler? She looked at me with disinterest and mild distaste. I could see we were going to get along fine.
“Yes?” she asked.
“I’m Nick,” I said. “Nick Diamond. You asked me to come here.”
“Did I?” She shrugged. “I was expecting someone older.”
“Well . . . I can come back in twenty years, if you like.”
“No, no . . . come in.”
I followed her in, suddenly feeling like a scruffy chimney sweep. She was young for a widow; maybe about forty, with black hair clinging to her head like a bathing cap. Her skin was pale, her lips a kiss of dark red. She was wearing some sort of housedress with a slit all the way up to her waist and she moved like she had never left the stage—not walking but flowing. Everything about her spelled class. The slim, crystal champagne glass in one hand. Even the tin plate with the lumps of raw meat in the other.
“I was about to feed my pet,” she explained.
“Dog?” I asked.
She glanced at the plate. “No. I think it’s beef.”
We’d gone into the room with the swimming pool. It had been designed so that you could sit around it in bamboo chairs sipping cocktails from the bar at the far end, watching the guests swim. Only there were no bamboo chairs, the bar was empty, and I was the only guest. I looked around and suddenly realized that although I was in a millionaire’s house, the millions had long gone. There was no furniture. Faded patches on the walls showed where the pictures had once been. The curtain rods had lost their curtains. Even the potted plants were dead. The house was a shell. All it contained was a widow in a housedress with a glass of champagne and a tin of raw meat.
“Fido!” she called out. “Come on, darling!”
Something splashed in the water. I swallowed. Apart from the widow in the housedress with the champagne and the tin of raw meat, it seemed that the house also contained an alligator. The last time I had seen an alligator it was hanging on some rich woman’s arm with lipsticks and credit cards inside. But this one was no handbag. It was very alive, waddling out of the pool, its ugly black eyes fixed on the plate of meat.
“Don’t worry,” the widow said. “He’s very fond of strangers.”
“Yeah—cooked or raw?” I asked.
She smiled and tossed Fido a piece of meat. Its great jaws snapped shut and it made a horrid gulping sound as its throat bulged, sucking the meat down. She held up a second piece. “I want the Maltesers,” she said.
“Maltesers?”
She threw the piece of meat, but this time she made sure that it fell short so the creature had to stalk forward to get it. It stalked forward toward me. “They belonged to my husband,” she went on. “The dwarf stole them; I want them back.”
I pointed at the alligator. It was getting too close for comfort. As far as I was concerned, a hundred miles would have been too close for comfort. “Do you have a permit for that thing?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It was a present from my late husband.”
“Have you ever thought about pussycats?”
“Fido ate the pussycats.”
I thought of turning and running, but I couldn’t be sure I’d make it to the door. The alligator had short, wrinkled legs, but at the moment I can’t say mine felt much better. It was only a few feet or so away. Its black eyes were fixed on me, almost daring me to make a move. The whole thing was crazy. I’d never been threatened by an alligator before.
“I don’t have the Maltesers,” I said. “Tim has them.”
“And where is he?”
“In jail . . . Ladbroke Grove Police Station.”
She paused for a long minute and looked at me with cold eyes. The eyes burrowed into me, trying to work out if I was telling the truth. In the end they must have believed me because she laughed and threw the rest of the meat into the swimming pool. The alligator corkscrewed around and dived after it.
“I like you,” she said. “You’re not afraid.” She walked over to me and put an arm around my shoulders. She hadn’t managed to frighten me, so now she was trying to charm me. She wouldn’t manage that either. Given a choice, I’d have preferred to spend time with the alligator.
“When Henry von Falkenberg died,” she said, “all his money went with him. This house isn’t mine, Nick. I’ve had to sell the contents just to pay the rent. Even Fido is going to the zoo. It breaks my heart, but I can’t afford to keep him. And now I don’t have a friend in the world.” There were tears in her eyes. Crocodile tears, I thought. Or alligator. “There is only one hope for me, Nicholas. The Maltesers. Henry wanted me to have them. They belong to me.”
“What’s so special about them?” I asked.
“To you—nothing,” she replied. “But to me . . . They’re worth five hundred dollars if you’ll get them back for me. That’s how much I’ll pay you.”
“I thought you had no money.”
“I’ll find it. Maybe Fido will end up as suitcases after all.”
She walked me back to the door and opened it.
“Talk to Herbert,” she said. “When the police release him, bring the Maltesers here. I will have the money, I swear it. And to you they are useless. You must see that.”
“What about my taxi fare home?” I asked.
“When you come with the Maltesers . . .” She shut the door.
“See you later, alligator,” I muttered.
So that was Beatrice von Falkenberg! A strange, lonely woman, sharing her memories with a strange, lonely pet. I walked back down the road toward Hampstead, and as I went I turned over two questions in my mind. If the Falcon had been so secretive, how come she had found out about the Maltesers? It seemed unlikely that he had told her. So who had?
The second thing was even stranger. She had telephoned me and asked to speak to Tim Diamond. I hadn’t said anything on the subject of my brother. So how had she known that his real name was Herbert?
KILLER IN THE RAIN
I didn’t go back to the flat that afternoon. It wouldn’t have been the same without Herbert. Quieter, tidier, less dangerous, and generally nicer . . . but not the same. Also I was worried about him. I wouldn’t want to spend half an hour with Snape and Boyle, let alone a whole day. Boyle could have killed him by now. On the other hand, if Herbert told them about the Maltesers, I’d kill him myself. Either way he was in big trouble, and the sooner I found out just what was going on, the better it would be for him.
Things might have been different if Lauren Bacardi had been able to tell me where the dwarf had been when he worked out what the Maltesers meant. If I could see what he had seen, maybe I’d be able to work it out, too. But I had a nasty feeling that the only way I’d be able to talk to Lauren again would be with a Ouija board. The people who had snatched her were playing for keeps. By now she probably had more lead in her than a church roof.
That just left the dwarf. Johnny Naples might be pushing up the daisies himself, but if I could pick up his trail I might still learn something. His book of matches had led me to Lauren Bacardi. I wondered what else I might find in his room. So that afternoon I took the subway to Notting Hill and walked back down the Portobello Road to the Hotel Splendide.
I passed Hammett’s newsstand on the way. The old guy who owned it was standing in the window and he saw me pass. I’m only guessing now, but I suppose he must have picked up the telephone and called the hotel a moment later. And at the hotel, Jack Splendide must have made a phone call of his own. Like I say, I’m only guessing. But it took me ten minutes to walk from the newsstand to the hotel and that was just about all the time they needed to arrange my death.