Authors: Edward D. Hoch
Originally, each of the twelve was to be designated, for communication purposes, by a sign of the zodiac. But then it was discovered that the standard British code books contained number groups for the months of the year, but none for the signs of the zodiac. To save the trouble of encoding each letter of each person’s name separately, or adopting a special code, the designations for the twelve had been changed to the months of the year, and the Calendar Network was born. “A little like Chesterton’s book,
The Man Who Was Thursday,
” Brantly-Stowe had remarked at the time.
But their functioning had been short-lived, and the network was disbanded suddenly less than two years after it was born. Nearly all twelve had drifted into other lines of work, with only Rand going on to make a career of intelligence work.
Brantly-Stowe, who had been January, died of a heart attack in 1955. George Fowler, senior member of the network in West Berlin, was February; he had gone into life insurance. March was a man named Gregor, who had been killed by the East Germans shortly after the network disbanded. April was Bruno Norman, a giant of a man who now ran an import-export business in Liverpool. May was Sir Kenneth Kellman, a retired gentleman with distinguished white hair. June was Karl Maass, the only German in the network, and by far the most successful at gathering information during its brief lifetime.
There were three women in the network: Amy Sargent; Elizabeth Smith, who was July and who later had married George Fowler; and Miss Robinson, who was August and who now lived with her husband and family in New York City. September had been a sickly Frenchman named Ourson—he had died of lung cancer in 1961. October was a man named Carruthers, who had dropped out of sight after the network disbanded. Rand had been November, and Miss Sargent, the youngest of the group, barely 20, was December.
Fowler had attempted to track them all down for the reunion which he planned and had come close to succeeding. He’d showed Rand a chronological list of the names:
January—Colonel Brantly-Stowe (deceased)
February—George Fowler
March—Gregor (deceased)
April—Bruno Norman
May—Sir Kenneth Kellman
June—Karl Maass
July—Elizabeth Fowler (nee Smith)
August—Miss Robinson (in New York)
September—Ourson (deceased)
October—Carruthers (missing)
November—Rand
December—Amy Sargent
“I managed to round up seven of twelve,” Fowler had told Rand. “That isn’t too bad after twenty years. After all, three are dead and Miss Robinson’s in America. Carruthers is the only one I couldn’t locate.”
And so the seven had assembled—with cabled regrets from Miss Robinson—at the little hotel on the Cornwall beach that Fowler remembered fondly from summer vacations with his wife. There were plenty of quaint residents, he assured them, but even he could not have predicted the dead whale on their very first night, swept onto the beach not 200 yards from the hotel …
“He’s dead, all right,” Rand repeated. “Murdered.
Bruno Norman’s great bulk moved into the room. “We can see that. Stabbed in the back with a fishing knife.”
Rand nodded. The little German was huddled into a corner of the room, as if he had been fleeing from his attacker when death caught up with him. “Who found the body?”
“I suppose I did,” Mrs. Fowler said. She had aged into a handsome woman, despite a little nervous gesture of her hands. Rand had never known any of the Berlin people well in the old days, since his job was in London with Miss Sargent, but he remembered having liked Elizabeth Fowlers—Elizabeth Smith, then—from their first meeting.
“Were you alone?”
“I knocked on the door to see if he wanted to join us for breakfast. The door was ajar, and he was—the way you see him now.”
“No one heard any sound of a struggle?” Rand asked.
They all shook their heads. Sir Kenneth Kellman volunteered, “The woman who owns this place has telephoned the police. They should be here soon.”
George Fowler had hesitated in the doorway, and now he entered. “I—I think it might be wise if we don’t give the reason for our gathering here—the reunion and all that. The newspapers would make too much out of it. Don’t you agree, Rand?”
“You’re probably right. He walked to the window and stared out of it for a moment, watching the morning crowd near the beached whale. Out over the water a haze of clouds was beginning to bunch. Then he turned to them again—to Fowler and his wife, to Amy and Bruno Norman and Sir Kenneth. “One of us killed him, you know. Nobody else here even knew him.”
“Robbery,” Bruno insisted. “It must have been robbery.”
“With the room as neat as this? With Karl obviously opening the door to his killer in the middle of the night or early in the morning? His wallet is still on the table there, untouched.”
“One of us six?” Amy asked. “Why, that’s impossible! None of us has even seen Karl in twenty years.”
“I know that,” Rand said. “But sometimes a motive for murder can last for twenty years.”
They sat down to wait for the police.
It was sometime after noon when Rand found himself alone on the beach with Amy. The police had come, the body had been removed, and the usual questions had been asked. They showed amazingly little interest in the group of friends gathered for a spring vacation at Cornwall, and even less interest in the little German who had been stabbed in the back. Perhaps if he’d been British there would have been more concern.
“Robbery,” one of the policemen had decided. “Some noise scared the killer off before he could get the wallet. Don’t you worry, we’ll find the bloke.”
And so Karl Maass had been removed in an ambulance, and all traces of him were blotted out. The police had taken their names and addresses and promised more questions later, but that had been all.
“Perhaps it really was a robbery,” Amy said.
“No. Not robbery.” Rand sounded positive.
“You’re still in this intelligence business. You look at things differently from the way the rest of us do.”
“It wasn’t a robbery,” he said. “Here’s why.” He removed his hand from his pocket and showed her a torn piece of notepaper. There was one word scrawled on it in pencil.
Taurus.
“What’s that?”
“I found it under Karl’s body. I suppose you might call it a dying message.”
“The name of his killer?”
“Hardly. But it’s enough to point the finger of guilt at the network rather than an outsider.”
“But Taurus—the bull?”
“A sign of the zodiac.”
“Why didn’t you show it to the others or to the police?” she asked.
“I wanted to determine first just what it meant.”
“And have you?” Her hair was blowing in the wind, and at that moment he found her quite attractive.
“Not exactly. Originally, the Calendar Network was supposed to use the signs of the zodiac to identify its members.”
“I remember now!”
“They were never actually assigned, because Brantly-Stowe decided that the twelve months of the year were easier to encode into messages. But for Karl, in his dying moment, Taurus meant the name of his killer.”
“What month is—”
Rand sighed. “That’s the problem. Taurus runs from April twentieth to May twenty-first. Was Karl trying to tell us that April or May was his murderer?”
“April or May—” She was running over the old lineup in her mind. “Why, that would be Bruno or Sir Kenneth!”
“Correct.”
“But which?”
Rand slipped the torn notepaper back into his pocket. “I don’t know.”
“No one would leave a dying message that ambiguous.”
“Someone did. Karl.”
Ahead of them the crowd was still watching the beached whale. The bearded fisherman who had spoken to Rand and Fowler that morning was still on the scene. He walked over to greet them. “Back for more? Should have brought a camera with you. Don’t see a sight like this every day.”
“No, indeed,” Rand agreed.
“What was the excitement at your hotel? We saw the police cars.”
“A man died,” Rand explained. “He was killed.”
“Killed? You mean murdered?”
“Yes.”
“Nothing like that ever happens around here.”
“It did today,” Rand said. “Like the whale.”
At dinner that evening George Fowler cleared his throat and addressed them. His face looked lined and troubled, and Rand guessed that the thrill of the reunion had soured for him. “There’s no reason to prolong this gathering any longer,” he said. “I suggest that we pack up and leave tonight.”
But Rand voiced his disagreement. “That’s exactly what we can’t do now, George. We have to stay together till we’ve gotten to the bottom of this.”
“Are you speaking officially?” Elizabeth Fowler asked.
“I can say that I’ve been in touch with London.”
Bruno Norman heaved his bulk out of the chair. “It’s been twenty years since the rest of us had to follow London’s orders. I say we get the hell out of here before the local police cause us a load of grief.”
“Need I remind you that the motive for Karl’s murder must lie in the past? In the Berlin of twenty years ago, to be exact?”
After some general grumbling they agreed to remain at least until morning. Rand felt that he had won a small victory. Later, going upstairs, the white-haired Sir Kenneth cornered him.
“Rand, wait a minute.”
“Yes?”
“You really think one of us killed him, don’t you? Because of the old network?” Sir Kenneth asked.
“That seems to be the reason.”
“Do you know why the Calendar Network was disbanded?”
“No,” Rand admitted, “I don’t. I never really thought much about it.”
“Find out why, and maybe you’ll know why Karl Maass was murdered,” Sir Kenneth said mysteriously, then continued up the stairs.
Rand paused before Bruno Norman’s door and knocked quietly. “May I come in for a moment?” he asked the big man when the door had been opened a crack.
“If you promise not to stab me in the back.”
Norman’s room was very much like his own—drab and very British, with a few odd pieces of furniture. The place was really more of a large boarding house than a true hotel. “I wanted to ask you about the old network,” Rand said, seating himself carefully on a dusty-looking wicker chair. “Back in London I never really got to know those of you who worked out of Berlin.”
Bruno nodded. “The structure of the thing was such that none of us got to know each other very well. We all reported directly to Fowler, and he reported to the Colonel.”
Rand nodded. “A badly organized network, really. Fowler should have had someone else between himself and the men in the field.”
“Maass was the only one behind enemy lines to any great extent. The rest of us functioned mainly in West Germany.”
“Why was the network disbanded?”
Bruno shrugged his massive shoulders. “Never did know. But we were quite successful in those days—probably got all the information that London needed.”
“What about Karl Maass? Did he have any enemies in the network?”
“None I knew of.”
“I see,” Rand said, but he didn’t see anything. A new thought struck him. “Could Maass have been having an affair with one of the girls—with Elizabeth Fowler, for instance?”
“Impossible! They hardly knew each other. Besides, do you think Fowler would have suggested this reunion if his wife had an old lover in the network?”
Rand got out of the wicker chair and walked to the window. It was dark on the beach now, but there was still the glow of flashlights and lanterns down by the beached whale. What could they be doing to it at this time of the night? Cutting it up for the blubber, perhaps? Inflicting some final indignity on the poor dead creature?
“Why did you go into the import-export business?” Rand asked suddenly.
“Money. Is there ever any other reason?”
“Why didn’t any of you stay in intelligence work?”
“I had a family back in Liverpool. Spying didn’t pay, and my wife never liked the hours.”
“The others?”
Bruno Norman shrugged. “You’d have to ask them.”
“I will.”
“This isn’t much of a job for you, is it, Rand? No codes or secret messages.”
“No.” But Rand was remembering the scrawled word
Taurus.
It was a communication of sorts, from Karl Maass to the rest of them. And just then its meaning certainly was concealed.
He left Norman’s room and went up to bed. On the stairs he passed Elizabeth Fowler, and he wondered fleetingly if she might have been listening at the door.
The screaming woke him just at dawn. It came from somewhere downstairs, and he was out of bed in a flash. The first person he saw was Amy, standing on the lower landing with her hands to her mouth. Fowler was there too, and his wife. They were in front of Sir Kenneth Kellman’s door. Rand pushed through and saw the white-haired old man sprawled in a widening pool of blood.
“Is he alive?”
Sir Kenneth lifted his head weakly, and Band was at his side. He saw at once that although the wound was deep it had gone only into the fleshy part of the left arm. “What happened, Sir Kenneth? Who did it?”
“I—I don’t know. Bearded man. Never saw him before. Knocked at the door and said he was you. When I opened he stabbed me—”
“You’ll need stitches,” Rand said. “Fowler, can you drive him to the hospital? That would probably be the fastest.”
Within five minutes they had Sir Kenneth in the car and on his way. Rand breathed a long sigh and sat down.
“You probably should have left him here for the police,” Bruno said. “Clues and all.”
“And let him bleed to death? Besides, we’ve got the only clue—a bearded man he didn’t know.”
“He wouldn’t know me if I wore a beard,” Elizabeth Fowler observed. “It could have been any of us.”
“I think someone is trying to kill us all,” Amy told them. “All the members of the network!”
“After twenty years?” Mrs. Fowler asked. “Don’t be foolish.”
They waited through breakfast and long after before Fowler finally returned with the wounded man. Sir Kenneth’s face was drained of blood, but he showed no other ill effects. He wore his jacket over his shoulders, and a wide white bandage covered most of his upper left arm.