I Spy (2 page)

What he was
actually
up to was trying to find out if The Man With the Pencil Mustache (as the story would be called if it was in
Black Ace
magazine) had got on the train with them.
And if he had, was he following them? And
if
he was – why? These questions demanded to be answered and Trey figured that this was a very good time to do some snooping, when everyone
was, like his father, trying to sort themselves out – searching for misplaced luggage, remembering what they’d left behind and complaining about their accommodation to the harassed
steward; under these circumstances, no one was going to pay too much attention to some kid.

The first thing Trey noticed was that, unfortunately, there were a few other kids around his age on board, which meant he was probably going to have to put up with his father trying to make him
get to know them. Even if they didn’t speak a word of English. Which, seeing as they were in
France
, for heaven’s sake, was highly likely. And he did not need any new friends,
especially ones chosen for him purely by circumstance, something his father consistently failed to understand.

Pushing on, Trey made his way towards the rear of the train. Monsieur Mustache, as Trey now thought of him, was nowhere to be seen in any of the sleeping compartments ahead of the dining car
(although a lot of them did have their doors shut, and he made a note of which they were so he could check them out later); the mystery man wasn’t in the dining car either, which wasn’t
altogether a surprise as they weren’t actually serving food yet, so Trey carried on with his search.

Eyes peeled, he sauntered along the gently swaying corridors, the engine picking up speed as they began to hurtle through the night towards Switzerland, and by the time he’d reached the
baggage car there was still no sign of Monsieur Mustache. Trey was sure he’d been as dedicated and professional a snoop as any of the gumshoes he read about, which meant that the man was
either in one of the cabins he’d not yet seen the inside of, or – and he really did
not
want to consider this possibility, but knew he had to – maybe the man hadn’t
got on the train and had never been following them in the first place.

Trey, shoulders slumped, was just pondering this thought when the door next to him, which led to the baggage car, opened and a man came out. He was dressed in a black double-breasted suit, had
on a dark grey fedora and sported a pencil mustache and Trey was so glad to see him he almost cheered out loud.

“E’scuse me,” the man said, in an obviously foreign accent; he smelled of heavy, dark tobacco and cologne and his black hair, Trey noticed as he went past, shone with pomade
like it had been polished.

He hadn’t given Trey a second look...but did that mean the man was just not repeating the mistake he’d made on the platform when he had been spotted staring, or that he really
didn’t
give a darn?

Letting the man have half a carriage start, Trey began to follow to see where he went and whom he might talk to, traipsing behind him until the man stopped by a carriage exit door; he lit a
stubby, yellow cigarette with a match and stared out at the passing night, the pungent smoke drifting down the corridor. Trey hung back, racking his brains trying to think what to do next –
mooch around and try to appear like he was supposed to be there? Walk on past Monsieur Mustache?

And then a hand gripped his shoulder, and he froze...

“Monsieur MacIntyre?
Votre père...excusez moi
...your father, ’e is looking for you, young man.”

Trey turned round and saw one of the conductors looking down at him. “My father?”

“
Exactement
, ’e was worried, telling me you ’ave been
quelques minutes
...some time.” The man examined his fob watch as if to emphasize the point, and then
made a shooing motion with his hands. “
Il attend
...’e is waiting for you in the restaurant car. You ’ad better go.”

Trey nodded, mumbled a “
Merci, Monsieur
” and then, as the conductor walked away, he saw that his target had disappeared! Resisting the urge to run, Trey walked as fast as he
could, desperately trying to catch sight of Monsieur Mustache. He was nowhere in sight, but as Trey hurried past one particular cabin, cursing his luck and the conductor’s bad timing, he got
a sudden, strong whiff of cigarette smoke. Smoke from that yellow cigarette, he was sure of it!

Fishing out his pocket notebook and reporter’s pencil, Trey made a quick note of the carriage and room number and then hurried on towards the dining car and the inevitable lecture from his
father about punctuality, reliability and tardiness...

I
t was at lunchtime the next day, somewhere in between Milan and Venice, that Trey saw Monsieur Mustache again. The man, who was sitting at a table
in the dining car when he and his father came in, had his back to them, but Trey knew exactly who it was: no one else on the train had hair
that
shiny. And now he also knew his name.

Trey had not wasted his morning. This time, when his father had hauled a sheaf of papers out of his attaché case and uncapped his fountain pen, he hadn’t sighed
and rolled his eyes because this gave him the excuse he’d been looking for to leave his father to whatever work he just
had
to do and go investigating.

There had been a
Ne Pas Déranger
sign on what he thought was Monsieur Mustache’s room when he’d gone past and Trey hadn’t found him anywhere else on the train,
which had meant that there wasn’t much else he could do except go back to his own cabin and read, or watch the Italian countryside go by out of the window. It was as he disconsolately made
his way towards his own carriage, dragging his feet, that he spotted the box of matches on the ground.

He stopped and lifted the nearby ashtray cover. Inside were a couple of yellow cigarette butts which, from the smell, had quite recently been stubbed out. Deduction? Why that Monsieur Mustache
had not long ago been out for a smoke!

Trey bent down, picked up the matchbox and examined it; the glossy black cover with gold lettering advertised something called
La Plume Indigo Cabaret
and closer inspection revealed that,
while it sounded full, it in fact contained only spent matches. Another deduction: Monsieur Mustache was a somewhat tidy man. And the find gave Trey an idea.

He set off and eventually found a door with a small black and white enamel sign on it which read
Bureau de Steward
– the Steward’s Office. Trey knocked on the door, aware that
Trent Gripp would probably just have walked in; it opened to reveal the office to be more of a cubbyhole, really, in which a tiny desk, a chair and the steward himself just about all fitted. Acting
as innocent and honest as he possibly could, he handed in the “lost property”, which he said he
believed
belonged to the man back in Room 6, the one with the grey hat.

“That’s right, isn’t it, Monsieur?” Trey asked, smiling his most open and sincere smile.

“
Numéro six
?” the steward replied, arching one eyebrow; then, making a face like he’d smelled an old sock, he glanced from the matchbox in Trey’s hand to
the list on the wall behind him. “You must mean Monsieur Giovedi...”

“That’s him,” beamed Trey, holding out the matchbox. “Will you give this back to him – I would’ve, but it said ‘Do not derange’ on his door, and I
didn’t want to make him mad...”

“When I next see him.” The steward nodded curtly, taking the object from Trey’s hand as if it was quite possibly infectious.

So “Monsieur Mustache” turned out to be called Monsieur Giovedi, which Trey thought sounded as if he maybe came from somewhere like Italy, which meant that he was
more than likely called Signor Giovedi. But the real surprise, as he and his father came into the dining car, was that Signor Giovedi had a travelling companion. And she was a platinum blonde
looker, in the style of that actress Thelma Todd, right off the cover of one of his magazines!

His father didn’t seem to notice as he was in mid-flow, telling Trey about all the things they were going to be doing during their three-day stay in Venice. And, as Trey had figured, it
boiled down to yet more museums and galleries, but so far there had been no mention of theatres, which was what his mother would call “a small blessing”.

The head waiter beckoned them down the carriage and then pulled a chair out from the table he’d chosen for them; Trey’s father ushered him forward, and as he went past Signor Giovedi
and his companion he realized the woman was wearing the exact same perfume his mother liked to use. This really did
not
fit with the way she looked – because she looked absolutely
nothing
like his mother, who was undoubtedly very pretty, but would never make the cover of
Black Ace
in a million years.

The seat that Trey was shown to gave him no view at all of the Giovedis (he was assuming they were married – although he knew that any sleuth wishing to stay alive till the end of a story
should
never
assume anything and always worked on the facts alone – as he hadn’t thought to check the woman’s left hand as he went past).

“Close your mouth, Trey, you look like a galumph...and whoever it is you’re staring at, stop.”

Trey snapped back, automatically sitting up straight and looking at his father. “Just daydreaming, Pops...wondering what was for lunch.”

“Well
I’d
recommend looking at the menu, rather than anywhere else...” Putting on his horn-rimmed reading glasses, T. Drummond MacIntyre II picked his menu up and
followed his own advice, nodding to himself as he turned over the pages. “All very nice...”

A cursory glance told Trey that, in his father’s own words, he begged to differ. For a start the menu was all in Italian and just looked so darned
classy
that it was obvious there
wouldn’t be anything on it he’d like. “I suggest you have the
Fettuccine alle polpette
, Trey, followed by the
Gelato alla fragola
,” he said as the waiter came
and stood by their table. “That should keep you going until we reach the hotel.”

“But Pops!” Trey watched the waiter’s pencil hover over his pad. “Can’t I just have a baloney sandwich, please?”

“My suggestion is that you have something very like your beloved spaghetti and meatballs, Trey, followed by strawberry ice cream.”

Trey looked up from the menu to find his father smiling back at him. “It is?”

“Sure. But if all you want is a sandwich, I’m sure I can ask the waiter here to see what they can rustle up for you...”

“Spaghetti and meatballs, right?”

Trey’s father nodded.

“Okay...”

A
fter a very satisfactory lunch, try as he might, Trey had been unable to get away from his father to continue his investigations on the train,
and, now here they were, with their luggage, chugging off towards the Hotel Excelsior on some overcrowded water taxi.

“...they call this a
vaporetto
, son,” came the answer to an unasked question, “because it’s steam-powered.”

Frankly, as far as Trey was concerned, they could call the boat whatever they darn well liked, because he was not happy. Not happy at his failure to come up with the goods on the mystery couple,
or
that the chances of him
ever
finding out whether he’d been on to anything or not had vanished into thin air.

The last time Trey had seen Signor Giovedi (and the woman who might, or might not be Signora Giovedi) was when he’d caught a glimpse of them on the platform after the Orient Express had
arrived in Venice at the Santa Lucia train station. In all the chaos which had accompanied their exit from the train, and the subsequent turmoil caused by their transfer to the
vaporetto
,
Trey found it completely impossible to keep track of the dark grey fedora, and so the story of The Man With the Pencil Mustache stuttered to a somewhat disappointing conclusion. Unless, of course,
he saw them again...

As Trey had disconsolately traipsed after his father, following him through the station hall, the chance sighting of a freshly stubbed-out yellow cigarette butt had given him a moment’s
hope that he was going to be able to pick up the trail, but it was not to be. The Giovedis had gone.

Standing on the wooden deck of the small steamer, Trey held on to the brass rail, aware that his feelings of disappointment were fading as he stared around him...at least the latest stage in his
summer journey looked like it was getting off to a good start, if the view from the boat was anything to go by. Whatever bones he had to pick with his father about his definition of “not
working” (and there were so many of them they would make up an
entire
chicken’s carcass, in his opinion) Trey had to admit that, despite all the telegrams and such, he had
certainly seen some sights on the trip so far. And here he was staring at another one: the city of Venice.

All the stuff he’d read in the guidebook that his father had handed over the moment he’d asked a question (“Look it up for yourself, son...it’s the best way to
learn”) hadn’t done anything to prepare him for the real thing –
a whole city built on the water!
Unfortunately,
not
on actual stilts, as he’d first imagined.
The place was incredibly old, and looked like something out of a storybook where pirates and swashbucklers were to be found –
and
it had canals for streets!

Everywhere Trey looked there were people going this way and that in small boats the guidebook had said were called gondolas. The stories he was going to be able to spin when he got back to
Chicago! The gang at school were just
not
going to believe what he’d have to tell; he wished he’d tried that bit harder to get his father to buy him a camera so he could prove
what he’d seen as he knew that Morty, Will, Stan and Ronnie would be spending the summer at their families’ South Shore houses.