"Now you can buy them in Algiers," Harding said, "courtesy of the U.S. Army." He went into the supply room, shaking his head in disgust.
"If you're all done here, Corporal, go see what's taking Graves Registration so long. It's too hot to keep a dead body lying around," I told him.
"Yes, sir." He handed me the inventory report and took off. People are always glad to leave when there are dead bodies around. I went inside. Casselli was starting to smell. He didn't look peaceful, like Jerome. He looked like a corpse with a slit throat decomposing in the'? heat of North Africa.
"Professional job," Harding said. "The killer could have been trained by the Commandos. Or me."
"I was thinking more along the lines of the Mob," I said.
"Sicilians?"
"There's lots of organized crime out of Marseilles. Maybe there's some connection between them and smuggling here. Or maybe it was! an Arab, using one of those curved knives."
"It was a sharp knife, I can tell you that much," Harding said.
"Major," I asked. "How would you train somebody to slit a throat?"
"Hopefully you won't need to, Boyle."
"No, really, show me how you'd do it, sir."
Harding pulled me away from Casselli's body and stood behind me. With his left hand he grabbed my chin. "First, you pull up the chin so you can get at the throat." He pulled his right hand across my bare neck. This must have been the last thing Casselli felt. I thrust my right hand up, protecting my neck.
"Would that work?" I asked. Harding drew his hand across my wrist. We both looked at Casselli's right arm. He had a slice across the cuff, at exactly the same spot.
"It only delayed the inevitable," Harding said. "If someone had him from behind, and knew what they were doing, his arm wouldn't protect him for long."
"Try it again," I said, giving Harding a pencil. "Use that as the knife."
He grabbed my chin and brought his right arm around with the pencil. I grabbed it with my right hand and pushed it away and then to the left, dragging the pencil across his left hand as it held my chin. He broke my grip and went at my neck again. I protected it with my right hand. Harding let go.
"Do you know someone with slash marks on his left arm?" he asked.
"Lieutenant Phillipe Mathenet. A Vichy cop who said he got hit by shrapnel in the left arm. His sleeve was in shreds."
"You said earlier that you knew Villard had killed Casselli."
"That was before we worked this out. Mathenet s sleeve bothered me. It seemed too coincidental. But Villard was here at the same time he was, and he had to be in on it."
"Why?"
"Who else held Casselli's right arm so Mathenet could make a clean cut? One on one, Casselli was holding him off."
Harding thought for a minute, then lit a cigarette, the blue smoke helping to cover up the coppery smell of dried blood and the fouler odors of the shit and piss Casselli had let go when his lights went out. I looked down at Casselli, the supply sergeant, and wondered at the struggle he had put up. The dead eyes looked up at me, pupils wide in amazement, as if the thought of death had never occurred to him before. Probably hadn't.
We walked outside, leaving the smell of decay and dried blood behind. Harding stood in the sun and drew on his cigarette. My head was spinning. It was way past chow time and I needed some. And some coffee, or sleep. Food and sleep. That sounded great. Then I'd worry about these dead bodies, and getting out of here to find Diana, and… I couldn't even think about what else. I rubbed my eyes. My eyes. Something about my eyes nibbled at the back of my mind. What? My eyes or someone else's? I had no clue. Literally.
"I need some chow and a cup of joe, Major, before I fall asleep in my tracks."
"Let's check on Lieutenant Kazimierz first. I'd like to know when they're going to release him."
I trudged after Harding, wondering who was going to release me, and what was it about eyes? Damn his eyes? The ayes have it? The eye of the beholder? I want to go home? I gave up and shuffled along to Kaz's room.
Kaz held up a slip of paper as we walked in with "Carrefour" and "Le Bar Bleu" written on it.
"I already told you the password and about the bar," I said. I wasn't thinking quickly.
"You cracked the code," Harding said.
"It's hardly a code at all," said Kaz, sounding disappointed. "It's more like an improvised shorthand. In a proper code, one doesn't leave spaces between the words. This is nothing more than a single letter displacement. B for A, C for B, and so on. DBSSFGPVS is Carrefour if you shift each letter one place."
"Simple," I said, now that I understood.
"Simple enough to be able to write and read it quickly if you know the secret, but still enough to keep prying eyes from understanding it right away," said Harding.
Prying eyes. Eyes again. I almost had it… then Rita the nurse walked in, a ray of cheery sunshine, visiting her prince.
"Baron, time for your medicine! Excuse me, gentleman." She set down her tray and gave Kaz four pills as she poured a glass of water. She did have very pretty green eyes. Green eyes like Jerome. Kaz beamed at the attention and scooped up the pills. His eyes were blue. Different eyes. That was it!
"What are all those for?" I asked.
"That's for his blood pressure, it's a little high," she said chattily, pointing out different pills, "and this is something to help him sleep." The elevated blood pressure was probably due to his heart condition but I didn't want to say anything about that. Kaz was having an adventure, and would hate being sent back to a real hospital in England. I had to humor him.
"Chloral hydrate?"
"Why, yes, Lieutenant. You certainly know something about drugs. Were you a medical student before the war?"
"No, a student of human nature. How much longer is he going to be taking that penicillin?"
"I'll have to ask Doctor Dunbar."
"Please do that. Now."
"I have to finish-"
"Now!" Sometimes I surprise myself. I can actually sound like a tight-ass officer when I need to. Nothing to be proud of, but it got her out of the room.
"Jerome didn't die of complications. He was murdered, and we've got to get Kaz out of here."
Harding and Kaz just looked at me like I was a blithering idiot.
"Now!" Why not try it on them?
"Explain yourself, Boyle!" Harding yelled without raising his voice.
"It's the eyes! I'm not a hundred percent certain, but one thing I do know is that a morphine overdose makes your pupils shrink down to a pinpoint. I've seen the look on the faces of addicts who checked out plenty of times. Jerome's eyes were just like that."
"But Boyle, maybe it was just the light in the room," said Harding patiently.
"No, it couldn't be. Listen, sir, I know you've seen plenty of dead men in the Great War. Probably a lot more than me, but my job is to study them when we find them murdered. One thing my Dad told me when he took me to my first crime scene was about the Dead Man's Stare."
"The dead do look as if they're seeing something beyond us," Kaz said quietly.
I took a breath before going on. I knew he was thinking about Daphne now and I hated to get clinical, but I had to.
"Yeah, and a lot of rookies get spooked by that. But he taught me that the pupils in your eyes widen right after death. It's the muscles relaxing or something like that. He said knowing why made it easier to look at them. It did."
"Didn't Jerome's eyes look like that?" Harding asked, sitting down on one of the empty beds and folding his arms.
"They probably will soon. But the effects of the morphine trumped the natural process."
"So he overdosed on morphine?" asked Kaz.
"No. Somebody gave him an overdose. Bit of a difference. That makes two people murdered in this hospital, both of whom knew about this missing notebook. And anyone can walk in here and give Kaz! whatever kind of pills or injections they want, night or day!" I tried to slow down. I knew I sounded hysterical, but things were beginning to fall into place.