Street of the Five Moons (2 page)

“Not we. You.” Schmidt’s rosy face regained its normal good humor. “The police have investigated, naturally. But they have come to a — what is the English? — a dead stop.”

“Dead end?” I suggested.

“Yes, yes. The man on whose body this was found had no identification. His description, his fingerprints, are not known to Interpol. Our police are magnificent, but there is a limit to what they can do. So I turn to the lady whose skill and imagination are like those of the great English Sherlock. I appeal to my Vicky! Find this man for me, this unknown creator of magnificent copies. You have done it before; you can do it now.”

His blue eyes glowed like the cabochon stone in Charlemagne’s talisman.

Modesty is not one of my virtues, but this naive appeal made me feel uncharacteristically modest. It was true that once before I had had moderate success as a sort of historical detective, but I succeeded in that case because the solution to the problem depended on a body of specialized knowledge, which I happened to possess. I am a historian, not a criminologist, and if this was a case of art forgery on a grand scale, I rather suspected that the skills of the latter specialist would be more useful than those of the former.

However… Again my eye was drawn to the soft blue gleam of the great sapphire. Fake? It looked awfully real to me. There was something hypnotic about that stone, and about the appeal Schmidt had made. My work was pleasant but rather dull; even my pornographic novel had bogged down. And it was May, that month of all months when emotion overcomes good sense.

“Well,” I said. I leaned back in my chair and put my fingertips together. (What fictional detective was it who did that? Sherlock Holmes? Schmidt made a wonderful Watson.) “Well, Wat — -I mean, Schmidt, I just might be willing to take this case.”

II

The police official reminded me of Erich von Stroheim, whom I had seen on the Late, Late Show back in Cleveland, except that he didn’t have a monocle. I guess they’ve gone out of style. He kissed my hand, however. I enjoy having my hand kissed. I can’t imagine why American men haven’t taken it up, it gets even us feminists.

I hadn’t expected to have my hand kissed, but I had expected some interest. Bavarians like blondes. Bavaria, in case you didn’t know, is one of the southern provinces of Germany; its people are members of the Alpine subrace, short and stocky and brunette, so they appreciate the Valkyrie type. I was wearing a tight sweater and skirt, and I let my hair hang down over my shoulders. I didn’t care what Herr Feder thought of my brains, I just wanted to get all the information I could out of him.

After all, there wasn’t much he could tell me. All the normal sources of inquiry had drawn a blank. The dead man simply wasn’t known to the police.

“This does not mean he is not a criminal,” Feder explained, rubbing his thick gray eyebrows. “It only means that he is not known to us or to Interpol. He may have been arrested in some other country.”

“Have you checked in the States?” I asked, leaning back in my chair and taking a deep breath.

“What?” Feder’s eyes moved reluctantly back to my face. “Ah —
verzeihen Sie, Fräulein Doktor
…. No, we have not. After all, the man committed no crime — except to die.”

“The museum authorities are rather concerned.”

“Yes, so I understand. And yet, Fräulein Doktor, is there really any cause for suspicion? Like all police departments these days, we are badly overworked. We have too much to do investigating crimes that have occurred; how are we to spend time and money inquiring into a vague theory? If the museum wishes to investigate on its own, we will extend the fullest cooperation, but I fail to see…. That is, I have no doubt of your intelligence, Fräulein Doktor, but—”

“Oh, I don’t intend to pursue criminals into dark alleys, or anything like that,” I said. We both laughed gaily at the very idea. Herr Feder had big, white, square teeth. “But,” I continued, “I am curious about the case; I was about to take leave anyway, and Herr Professor Schmidt suggested I might pursue certain leads of our own, just to see what I could find out. I wonder… I guess I had better see the corpse.”

I don’t know why I made that suggestion. I’m not squeamish, but I’m not ghoulish, either. It was just that I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I had no other lead.

I regretted my impulse when I stood in the neat, white antiseptic room that houses the morgue of Munich. It was the smell that got me: the stench of carbolic, which doesn’t quite conceal another, more suggestive, odor. When they turned the sheet back and I saw the still, dead face, I didn’t feel too good. Suggestion — the reminder of my own mortality. There was nothing particularly gruesome about the face itself.

It was that of a man in middle life, though the lines were smoothed out and negated by death. He had heavy black brows and thick, graying black hair; his complexion was tanned or naturally swarthy. The lips were unusually wide and full. The eyes were closed.

“Thank you,” I muttered, turning away.

When we got back to his office, Feder offered me a little sip of brandy. I hadn’t been that upset, but I didn’t like to shatter his faith in female gentleness. Besides, I like brandy.

“He looks like a Latin,” I said, sipping. It was good stuff.

“Yes, you are right.” Feder leaned back in his chair, his glass held lightly between unexpectedly delicate fingers. “Spanish or Italian, perhaps. It is unfortunate that we found no identification.”

“That seems suspicious.”

“Perhaps not. The man was in the alley for hours, no one knows how long. It is possible that some casual thief robbed him. If he carried a wallet or pocketbook, it would have been stolen, for the money it contained. His papers, if any, would have been in that wallet. And a valid passport is always useful to the criminal element.”

“Yes, of course,” I agreed. “A thief would have overlooked the jewel, since it was sewn into his clothing.”

“So we think. There were a few odds and ends in his pockets, the sort of thing a thief would not bother with. Handkerchief, keys—”

“Keys? Keys to what?”

Feder produced a positively Gallic shrug.

“But who can tell, Fräulein Doktor? They were not keys to an automobile. If he had an apartment, the good God alone knows where it might be. We inquired among the hotels of the city, but have had no luck. It is of course possible that he only arrived in Munich yesterday and had not registered at a hotel. Would you care to see the contents of his pockets?”

“I suppose I should,” I said glumly.

I wasn’t expecting anything. I just said that because I felt I shouldn’t overlook any possible clue. Little did I know that in that pitiful collection lay the key that was to unlock the case.

It was a folded piece of paper. There were several other scraps like it, receipts from unidentified shops for small sums, none over ten marks. This particular scrap was not a receipt, just a page torn out of a cheap notebook. On it was written the number thirty-seven — the seven had the crossbar that is used by Europeans for writing that number, in order to distinguish it from their numeral one — and a curious little group of signs that resembled fingernail clippings. They looked like this:

I sat staring at these enigmatic hieroglyphs until Herr Feder’s voice interrupted my futile theorizing.

“A puzzle of some sort,” he said negligently. “I see no meaning in it. After all, the cryptic clue only occurs in
Kriminalromanen
, is that not correct?”

“How true,” I said.

Herr Feder laughed. “It is, perhaps, the address of his manicurist.”

“Were his nails manicured?” I asked eagerly.

“No, not at all.” Herr Feder looked at me reproachfully. “I made a little joke, Fräulein Doktor.”

“Oh.” I giggled. “The address of his manicurist…. Very witty, Herr Feder.”

I shouldn’t have encouraged him. He asked me to dinner, and when I said I was busy, to lunch next day. So I told him I was leaving town. Usually I deal with such matters more subtly, but I didn’t want to discourage him completely; who knows, I might need help from him if the case developed unexpected twists. Although at that point I didn’t even have a case, much less a twist.

It was a gorgeous spring day, a little cool, but bright and blue-skied, with fat white clouds that echoed the shapes of Munich’s onion-domed church spires. I should have gone back to work — I had a number of odds and ends to clear up if I was going to play Sherlock — but there was no point in clearing them up, if I didn’t know where I was going. And I couldn’t face Professor Schmidt. He would expect me to have deduced all kinds of brilliant things from my visit to the police.

I wandered toward the
Alter Peter
. I guess I should explain that this doesn’t refer to an elderly gentleman, but to Munich’s oldest church, dedicated to the Apostle. It was begun in 1181, which puts it into my period, but the redecorating of the eighteenth century converted it into a Baroque church, at least internally. Baroque sculpture and decoration take some getting used to; they look frivolous and overdone to modern tastes. But I like them. It seems to me a church ought to express the joy of religion as well as its majesty. The Zimmerman stuccowork at old St. Peter’s always cheers me up. But I didn’t go in. I walked through the neighboring streets for a while. It was a waste of time, actually. I didn’t know which of the alleys in the vicinity had harbored my dead man, and if I had known, there was nothing to be gained from staring at the vacated space. The police would have searched the area thoroughly.

I passed through the Viktualenmarkt, with its booths of fresh fruits and vegetables and its glorious flower stalls. They were masses of flaming color that morning, all the spring flowers — yellow bunches of daffodils, great armfuls of lilac, fat blue and pink hyacinths perfuming the air. I ended up on Kaufinger-strasse, which was a favorite haunt of mine, because I adore window-shopping. It was just about the only kind of shopping I could afford. Some of the most delectable windows were those of the shops that sold the lovely peasant costumes of southern Germany and Austria. People still wear them, even in sophisticated Munich — loden cloaks of green or creamy-white wool, banded in red, with big silver buttons; blouses and aprons trimmed with handmade lace; and, of course, dirndls. They differ in style according to the area where they originated: the sexy Salzburger dirndl, with its lowcut bodice, artfully designed to make the most of a girl’s secondary sex characteristics; the Tegernsee type, which has a separate skirt and jacket, the latter lengthened behind into a stiff, pleated peplum. I love those brilliant costumes, of bright cotton print or embroidered velvet; but I am not the dirndl type. However, I had my eye on an ivory wool cape with buttons made out of old silver coins, so I stopped by the shop to see if by any chance they were having a sale. They weren’t. I turned away, and then something across the street caught my eye.

It was only an advertising sign for Lufthansa airlines. “Rome!” it exclaimed, above a huge photograph of the Spanish Steps lined with baskets of pink and white azaleas. “See Rome and live! Six flights daily.”

All the pieces came together then, the way they do sometimes when you leave them alone and let them simmer. The swarthy skin and Latin look of the dead man; Herr Feder’s joking suggestion that the cryptogram represented an address; the atmosphere of antiquities, treasure, and jewels that colored the whole affair.

I had been thinking vaguely of going to Rome on my holiday, and wondering where I was going to get the money. There was one particular area I longed to explore at leisure — a region near the Tiber, where Bernini’s windblown angels guard the bridge that leads to the Castel Sant’ Angelo. A region of narrow twisted streets and tall frowning houses. The Via dei Coronari is the antique lovers’ paradise. And not far from the Via dei Coronari is a street called the Via delle Cinque Lune — the Street of the Five Moons.

It was only a hunch. I couldn’t even call it a theory. But the five curved signs might represent crescent moons; and surely it was more than a coincidence that that particular part of Rome specialized in antiques of a very expensive nature.

At any rate, it wouldn’t do any harm to investigate number 37, Via delle Cinque Lune. I turned and walked toward the museum, planning some mild larceny.

I can be reasonably glib when I try. Tony, one of my former colleagues at the University, refers to me as Old Slippery Tongue. But I couldn’t have put this deal across with anyone except Professor Schmidt. Goodness, but that man is gullible! I worry about him sometimes. Fortunately he is not quite as gullible about other swindlers as he is about me. He has a slightly exaggerated idea of my intelligence. I didn’t even have to lie to him. He thought my interpretation of the cryptogram was absolutely super. “But of course,” he shouted, when I had explained. “You have it! What else could it possibly mean?”

Well, I could think of about a dozen other possibilities. It’s funny that Schmidt, who is so sharp in his own field, can’t tell the difference between a fact and a feeble theory in any area other than medieval history. But I guess a lot of experts are like that. Heaven knows they fall for spiritualists and con men just as often as those of lesser brain power.