Hugger-Mugger in the Louvre (11 page)

In front of the Hotel Murphy et du Danube Bleu, in the neighboring street, the taxi driver waited patiently until after breakfast time. Then he began to grumble and to fidget. Eventually he got out and paced the sidewalk so nervously that Bridgette Murphy, who had inherited a certain aggressiveness from her Irish father and more than her share of curiosity from her French mother, pushed open her front-room windows and said:

“What's eating you?”

“Don't speak of eating, I beg of you, madam. I was cruising along peaceably when a man who claimed to be a police officer hopped my running board . . .”

“Claimed to be,” repeated Bridgette. “That's a good one! His claim was a pippin! You were driving the Chief of Detectives Frémont, the best of luck to him.”

“That doesn't take the place of breakfast,” the chauffeur said. “And what would the chief of detectives be doing so long in a dump like this?”

“That's none of your business,” said Bridgette, thoroughly nettled. “So you're calling it a dump, my respectable hotel. I was on the point of feeding you, you big palooka, never having turned away a man who was hungry. But I draw the line at a bum like you. A dump, indeed! I'll have you know that if I hadn't heard the Chief himself tell you to wait, I'd crown you with a mug I've got handy.”

“I spoke hastily, madam,” the taxi driver said, for he saw that he had made a tactical error. “Had I reflected, I should have remarked that your establishment would do honor to a classier quarter than this.”

“And what's wrong with this quarter? Respectable workingmen we have here, all up and down the street, as far as the Gobelins, I'll have you know. Who are you, with a rattle-trap a decent moth would pass up, there's such a stink
in
the cushions, and the parts clanking underneath like tin cans in an ash wagon, to be casting aspersions on the men who have to work for pay, and not have tips thrown at 'em like dogs at the feast of Nebuchadnezzar?”

“I'm a union man myself,” the driver said.

“In that case, shut your trap and come in,” said Bridgette. “Did you think that I'd let you starve right in front of my window?”

So it happened that the driver, after coffee spiked with rum and a couple of crisp rolls, lost much of his impatience, and with a glance to make sure the meter was running properly, curled up in the back seat of his taxi, to which Bridgette in her description had not done full justice, and was soon fast asleep.

Now Frémont had mentioned to Hydrangea that he was due at the prefecture at eleven o'clock, to interview some countrymen of hers who had been brought in drunk the night before, so at half-past ten her alarm clock sounded and she sat up, rubbed her large dark eyes, and saw she was alone in the room. Bewildered, she dressed hastily and hurried down stairs.

“At what time did the Chief go out?” she asked anxiously of Bridgette.

“He didn't go out, he came in,” the proprietress said, “and furthermore he left a taxi waiting at the door that will cost the state aplenty.”

“But he's not upstairs,” Hydrangea said, now thoroughly alarmed.

“The hell you say,” retorted Bridgette and together they made a quick search of the building. The cook, who had been unavoidably absent at the moment the Chief had hurried through the kitchen, swore no one had left by the back door, and the situation was further complicated by the arrival of Sergeant Schlumberger who informed them that Frémont had not put in an appearance at the prefecture. Hydrangea began to shudder and to wail. The taxi man was aroused and questioned but he stuck to his original story, namely, that a man who had represented himself as a police officer had leaped on his running board about five-thirty in the morning in front of the statue of Henri IV; had been driven full speed to the hotel; and had not been heard from since. At that point Hydrangea began to moan and to call for Mr. Evans.

“He should be at the prefecture by now,” Sergeant Schlumberger said. With that he bundled the terrified ex-Blackbird into the taxi and told the driver to take them to the prefecture. There they found Miriam, Evans and Dr. Hyacinthe Toudoux, the latter having snatched a very few hours of the deep and dreamy on the couch in the salon of Professor de la Poussière.

What Evans would have said, had he not given thought to the fears of Hydrangea, was that he did not like the look of things at all. As it was he said: “Don't worry about the Chief. No doubt he's hot on the trail of a suspect,” and knowing that action of some sort would relieve her troubled mind he asked her to go to the kitchen of the Salle Ste. Anne near by and prepare three orders of American ham and eggs, as only she could prepare them. This having been done, he placed a steaming plate in each of the cells occupied by the slumbering Jansen, Tom Jackson and Lvov Kvek, and waited.

The fragrance of grilled ham and fried eggs soon permeated the entire corridor and when to this was added the aroma of black coffee, Jansen sat up and rubbed his eyes.

“Good morning, folks,” Hjalmar said, seeing his friends out in front and only a rickety set of bars in between. He was accustomed to awakening in all sorts of circumstances. Tom Jackson, on his right, was blinking, by that time, and reached for his breakfast without vouchsafing a word, after having ascertained that he had not lost his glasses.

Kvek, however, was less passive in his reactions. He rose to his feet, clutched at his falling trousers, and began to roar. “Where is K. Parker Seldon?” he demanded. “I insist that he be produced at once. He was sent abroad in my charge, and I must find him. Where is Frémont? Where am I, for that matter? . . . Ah, Evans, my friend!”

The sight of Homer Evans inspired the colonel with such hope and vigor that he broke open his cell door with a lusty shove. The lock, in several pieces, went clanking to the floor. In a second the Russian was holding Homer in an affectionate embrace and pouring out his story. Before he had finished, Sergeant Schlumberger lost his usual calm.

“In the name of all that's holy,” he said, “I plead for moderation. Is it not enough that Professor Zacharie de la Poussière, professor emeritus of the Sorbonne, is lost without trace; that our Chief of Detectives Frémont is unaccountably missing: that a priceless Watteau has been spirited away? Now you tell us that an American, who makes bottles, has added himself to this already imposing array. May the devil take all business men, American or otherwise. He'll have to wait his turn.”

An officer who had just returned from Montparnasse stepped up, saluted the sergeant, and said: “I have information about this so-called business man, sir.”

“Out with it,” said the sergeant, and Kvek caught the officer in a suffocating embrace.

The latter, having with difficulty extricated himself, reported that early in the evening preceding, a dapper middle-sized American had entered a book shop in the
rue
Delambre and had purchased a copy of a book called
Ulysses
which he said his daughter, then in high school, had asked him to give her as a graduation present. It was a large blue book with paper covers, the officer said, and although he knew very little English he was convinced that it was not the book for a high-school girl to read.

“Never mind the book. What happened then?” asked the sergeant impatiently.

The officer replied that the middle-sized purchaser had then started walking down the
rue
Delambre, in the direction of the river, and had narrowly been missed by a mail truck in attempting to cross the street while reading aloud.

“You say Mr. Seldon was registered at the Plaza Athènée?” asked Evans.

“Check up there at once,” the sergeant told the officer. “If the book is as large as you say it is, he won't have got half way through it yet. Ah, these Americans.”

The officer saluted and was instantly on his way.

B
EFORE
continuing with the account of what was happening at the prefecture, it will be well to relate the adventures of Evans and Miriam between the time they left the
place
Dauphine and the hour when they kept their official rendezvous at eleven o'clock. As they walked along the
quai
and crossed the Pont St. Michel, Aurora, rosy-fingered goddess of the morning, had got in some of her snappiest work. The windows of the grim Conciergerie were aglow with faintly colored light, reflecting the earliest beams of the rising sun. Cafés were opening, sleepy
patrons
were greeting their matutinal customers and serving them with brandy and coffee, bakers' boys were bringing in the fresh hot rolls and sticks of golden-crusted bread.

It was but a step from the
place
St. Michel to the adjacent
place
St. André des Arts and, as if the patron saint were aware of the desecration of his favorite national museum, the shadows in his narrow street seemed reluctant to respond to Aurora's ministrations. Facing the entrance, near which some early buses were waiting, Evans found at once the shop named
Au Sens de Mesur,
in the windows of which were stuffed cats, glaring hostilely at the intruders; pug dogs with beady eyes; great horned owls with snowy plumage; peacocks with tails stiffly spread. There were mounted heads of deer and mountain goats, brought by hunters to untimely ends; on a branch was neatly coiled an Asiatic python; there were hat racks fashioned of antlers, for customers who were not superstitious, and in the center a brown cub bear.

The iron grille was loosely padlocked but the officer on the beat, in response to Evans' question, said that Lazare, the proprietor, lived near by in the
rue
de la Huchette and, although an early riser, rarely opened his shop before nine or ten in the morning, he having found by long experience that purchasers of stuffed birds or animals seldom had the urge to buy in the early morning hours.

“I can't say that I blame them,” the officer said. “For my part, when a beast is dead, I'm willing to let it go at that. I'm fond of plants and flowers, within reason, but deliver me from stuffed kittens or Pekingese.”

Having thanked the officer, and agreed with him, Homer set out for the Hotel du Caveau. M. Julliard, the proprietor, knew everyone on the street and after having greeted Evans and Miriam and cheered them with a quick but substantial breakfast, he told them that the man they sought lived in his own hotel.

“I served him his coffee half an hour ago,” M. Julliard said. “His room is on the top, right under the roof. I've offered him a better one but he says he likes the view. Well, who can blame him?”

In single file, Evans and Miriam mounted the narrow flights of stairs and, from the fourth floor upward, were aware of hearty laughter. At the sixth floor, the stairs petered out and they were obliged to climb a ladder. Aloft they paused for breath and tapped gently on the only door. Inside, the laughter continued, and Homer had to knock quite forcibly before it stopped and the door was opened by a man with thick steel-rimmed spectacles and sparse gray hair. Seeing Miriam, and because he was wearing slippers and a night shirt, the gray-haired man stepped back and hastily closed the door.

“I was sent by Dr. Hyacinthe Toudoux,” said Evans, gently.

“Toudoux. Ah, yes. Toudoux. I'll slip some clothes on,” said a voice from within, and the sounds the man made as he dressed in haste were punctuated by chuckles and subdued guffaws.

Evans, who had expected a more melancholy reception, adjusted his agile mind as best he could. When Lazare finally admitted them, with an apologetic glance at the rumpled bed and the disarray of books, plans and scattered papers, he had what seemed to be a letter in his hand. Without preliminary words he handed the missive to Evans and sat down on the bed, holding his sides and trying to control his merriment.

The dismay Evans felt cannot be reduced to prose, for he saw scribbled over five sheets of unlined notepaper rows of hieroglyphs which to him meant volumes less than nothing.

“I'm sorry,” he said at last. “I'm ignorant of ancient writings, an ignorance I'm determined to remedy at the earliest possible moment.”

“At your leisure, my lad,” the old man said, still chuckling. “What's a year or two, in the infinity of time?”

“What, indeed?” agreed Evans, and Miriam stifled the objections that arose in her mind. Having been brought up on a Montana ranch, in a country that was admitted to have practically no past, and a fairly uncertain future, she found the long view of things disconcerting. Homer, noticing her slight agitation, murmured a favorite quotation: “Eternal enemy of the absolute.” Then he glanced again at the letter in his hand and saw the signature, a loosely scrawled “Z” that in his former haste he had mistaken for an Egyptian character which might have meant anything at all.

“This document, I take it,” he said to Lazare, “was sent you by Professor de la Poussière.”

“Who else would have been so thoughtful?” Lazare replied. Under ordinary circumstances, with strangers, Lazare was shy and awkward, but in Homer Evans, notwithstanding that the latter had no ancient Egyptian, the old man had instantly recognized a kindred soul, a man of understanding, tolerance and boundless good will. And such men, wherever they may be found, are members of a closely knit fraternity.

“When did you see the professor last, may I ask?” Evans inquired.

“I think it was Easter morning,” Lazare replied. “It happened that this year the Christian Easter coincided with the opening of the old Egyptian spring festival, in celebration of the rebirth of the nature god. So Zacharie and I slipped over to Pharamond's for a breakfast of tripe and a bottle of wine, and after the second bottle we were able, quite successfully, to imagine we were back in the good old days. We chose, I believe, the reign of Otlas, whose Hawk name was Sekhemib Uothnes (3019-3003
B.C
.), although, had we known then what the professor has discovered since, we should undoubtedly have spent the morning in the court of another pharaoh, who, although little known to scholars today, is soon, thanks to de la Poussière, to take his proper place in the hall of fame.”