The Mysterious Mickey Finn (14 page)

A tall Arab, who had recovered a bit of his desert philosophy and was watching through a door ajar said to a Duncan disciple he took for a Moroccan: ‘That method of persuasion, you see, O companion in misfortune, is called by the infidels “ the bum's rush”.'

T
HE
commissaire
of the Montparnasse district was unlike the prefect in many respects. He liked lulls. There was nothing, in his way of thinking, as restful as a good lull in the midst of an exacting case. Consequently, when after having been informed of Gring's release he had curled up in an easy chair for a quiet nap, he was annoyed at being awakened merely to be informed that his superiors had decided they must have Gring back again. The
commissaire
roused himself, called his men together, and before embarking them on the man hunt felt called upon to give them detailed instructions. Now the problem was simple in itself. The prefect wanted Gring, but merely to say to such a fine body of men as the officers of that precinct: ‘Go get Gring' seemed inadequate.

‘There's no use looking for Greeng Ambrose on the
terrasses
of
Cafés,
especially the Dôme where he sits for hours. I have noticed a tendency among you, while dragnetting is in progress, to sit at
Café
tables and drink wines and liqueurs which later appear on your expense accounts. This must stop. We are in a period of national economy, the franc is losing value, the budget is so unbalanced that several clerks were injured yesterday in attempting to carry it from the House to the Senate. Therefore, if any man in my unit is found sitting at
Café
tables in the course of this man hunt, such officer will be fined one week's pay. I have never been unreasonable with my officers, nor denied the importance of thirst. Any officer who wants to snatch a quick one at some little bar, and does so without wasting the republic's time, will not be fined unless he does it too often. That's all, men.'

The officers went their ways but in the search for Greeng Ambrose, they avoided like the plague the Café du Dôme, the Coupole, and even the Select and the Rotonde. And, as fate would have it, Ambrose, exhausted and discouraged, had found himself unable to stagger back and forth a moment longer in his search for Miriam, and had slumped into his favourite chair of the Dôme's
terrasse.
Little did he suspect, as he asked for a
crême de cacao,
that he was being sought again by all the minions of the law. His capacity for thought had narrowed down considerably, because of worry and fatigue, and what little was left he tried to apply to Miriam and Evans, so that longing and fierce hatred passed alternately over his unshaven face. For a while the alternation of those expressions and the consequent distortion of a countenance that at best was not attractive, kept timid customers from taking the only empty chair on the
terrasse,
the chair beside Ambrose at his small table. Finally, however, the chair was occupied. Moments, then a couple of hours passed and meanwhile the man who occupied the chair had left the
Café,
as had many of the customers who were planning an early dinner. The rush hour of the apéritif had passed, the crowd was somewhat thin, waiters, sandwich men, tourists, etc., carried on rather indolently, and officers, singly and in pairs, in plain clothes and uniforms, on foot, mounted, or motorized, were trying to comb the quarter without rendering themselves open to suspicion of having violated the
commissaire's
strict orders. For most of the officers, the problem was simple. For
agents
Moue and Serré, however, the situation grew complicated, and
Agent
Moue, from the sidewalk in front of the Dôme
terrasse,
gave a quick involuntary glance at the merrymakers and said:

‘M. Serré, that fat-head in the centre, alone at the little table, looks like Gring, Ambrose.'

‘It may be a trap. After all, a week's pay . . .' Serré said. He was the soul of caution.

‘Hey, Gring. Come here,' shouted Moue, hoping to entice their prey out of his sanctuary.

Ambrose Gring did not move an eyelash.

Both officers shouted, then bawled, and two waiters, after finding out what they wanted, approached Gring's table to inform him he was about to be taken into custody. Would he kindly step off the
terrasse
to the sidewalk? Gring did not appear to hear them. His eyes were half open, his face and hands were pale.

‘Bring him over here, in the name of God,' shouted
Agent
Moue. ‘The man must be deaf, dumb, and blind.'

M. Chalgrin, aware that something unusual was taking place, came anxiously out from behind the bar. ‘What's all this? What's all this?' he demanded. One of the waiters told him that the officer wanted to speak with Ambrose and had been forbidden the
terrasse.

‘Indeed, I shall complain to the prefect. Am I to be deprived of the patronage of detectives and
agents
? Are they to be sent to other
Cafés
? Is there, perchance, a rakeoff? Graft? I shall, as a taxpayer and a business man, insist on a shakeup of the entire department.'

Just then a woman screamed. ‘He's dead !'

‘Impossible,' said M. Chalgrin. ‘I've had trouble enough.'

Other clients had taken up the cry, however. Some were crowding around Gring's table and others, anxious not to have their merry-making spoiled by a corpse or corpses, tried to go away. Both were rebuked by M. Chalgrin, the former for disturbing the area to be known as ‘X', the latter because each one of them had become suspect and suspects, M. Chalgrin knew, should be detained.

‘Do you want him brought to the sidewalk, dead or alive?' asked Chalgrin.

‘Touch nothing,' said the cautious cop. ‘I shall telephone the
commissaire
for instructions.'

Serré made a dash for a neighbouring
bistrot
where there was a phone. The
commissaire
was at his desk impatiently waiting for news.

‘Agent
Serré,' Serré said.

‘Well, what of it? Have you got him?'

‘I know where he is, but I wanted to ask ...'

The
commissaire
exploded. ‘In God's namd, if you know where he is, why don't you bring him in? He'll go away.'

‘I think it's unlikely, sir,' said
Agent
Serré. ‘In fact, the man is dead.'

‘Dead? Impossible,' shouted the
commissaire.

‘Several alcoholic foreigners and M. Chalgrin of the Café du Dôme have pronounced him dead,' the officer said.

The
commissaire
waited to hear no more. With surprising agility for a man of his age and habits he started running toward the Café du Dôme and was on the scene almost before
Agent
Serré had returned to his post on the sidewalk.

‘Come here, you dunderheads,' the
commissaire
shouted. ‘Because I warn you about drinking, you let a murder take place right under your noses.'

‘Who said it was murder?' demanded Chalgrin. Some of the tourists and merrymakers screamed.

‘Has anything been touched, the table, the glass and its contents?' Cautiously the
commissaire
sniffed. ‘Smells like cocoa to me. There might be at least have been a bitter almond odour. Here, you two blockheads, take a sniff, each one of you.'

Even the cagey Serré admitted that the liquid smelled like cocoa.

‘It's
crême de cacao.
He always drank that, God knows why,' the proprietor said.' Well. Can't you take him away from here? My night's business will be ruined. No one wants to sit on a
terrasse
with a corpse.'

‘You might screen off the area,' suggested the
commissaire.

‘Screen off, hell. Some drunk would push the screen down, then there'd be a panic, and if any of my clients got hurt in the crush I'd be responsible.'

The
commissaire
was not the brightest officer in the world but he was not the dumbest, either. He decided to pass the buck.

‘Inform the prefect,' he roared, and to the crowd, which had gathered from all corners of the quarter and was blocking the traffic on both boulevards and all the side streets, he said, in a more moderate tone: ‘Keep back, but no one is to leave the vicinity'. Since few of them had had any intention of leaving the vicinity before dawn, there was no murmur of protest. The word that Ambrose Gring, formerly a quarterite and, according to the latest papers, one of the picture bandits, had died and that murder was suspected had permeated every nook of Mont-parnasse. The proprietors of the Coupole, the Select, and the Rotonde were tearing their hair. It was true, they knew, that while Gring's corpse was actually on the Dôme
terrasse,
the Dôme's business would suffer, but for days afterward curiosity-seekers would want to view the spot marked X and, if possible, to sit in the chair about to be labelled G, and the more daring of them would insist on sipping a
crême de cacao,
an expensive drink. To their credit must be said that none of the aforementioned proprietors thought about murdering anyone in order to furnish a counter attraction, but their thoughts and comments on the deceased were less sympathetic or charitable than otherwise they might have been had he died in a tramcar to the Jardin du Luxembourg, for instance.

Sirens announced the arrival of the prefect and Sergeant Frémont, whose loud words, nevertheless, were overheard by some of the loiterers along the sidewalk.

‘It was your idea, not mine, letting that lizard roam at large again,' the sergeant said. ‘Now he's got himself killed, and at the least convenient time.'

‘I told you to have him followed and watched,' said the prefect. ‘The responsibility is yours.'

‘Then later you told me to put every man I had at work collecting Arabs,' said the sergeant.

‘You couldn't even collect the right Arabs. Of all the Arabs in existence, I only gave a damn about two, and those were the two you failed to collect,' the prefect said.

‘Well, here we are,' said the sergeant, as the official car ploughed its way through the crowd and brought up at the corner of the boulevard Montparnasse.

J
AMES
J
OYCE
was making the sixth revision of page two thousand and forty of his
magnum opus
called ‘Work in Progress'; Harold Stearns was sitting at the Select bar, murmuring that murders were unusual, therefore banal, consequently uninteresting; Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas were drinking brandy and soda, Gertrude the brandy and Alice the soda; Ernest Hemingway was in the Bois thinking what he would do if the Bois was Wyoming, the swans were wild ducks, and he had a gun.

Homer Evans and Miriam Leonard, however, were sitting on a Han stone slab, 202
B.C
. – 220
A.D
. in the Cernuschi Museum where the single attendant still slept at his desk.

‘Are you going to be reticent and mysterious, or shall your helpers be enlightened from time to time?' Miriam asked. ‘You said you got exactly what you wanted in the gallery,' she continued. ‘If that is true, your wants verge on the eccentric. I got one of the principal frights of my life. My old dad may not have stuck oil, but he'll cut off my allowance and beat hell out of me if I figure in the police news.'

‘We shall spare your parent any undue alarm,' Evans said. ‘Perhaps this all will be clearer if I tell you that the candlelight Greco I saw this morning, contrary to the intentions of Heiss and Lourde, was not the same painting as the candlelight Greco produced by poor clerk Dinde, after some prompting by reporter Jackson. And both paintings were painted on very old canvases.'

‘One would not expect to find Old Masters on a new canvas, would one?' asked Miriam.

‘All too often, that is precisely what one finds,' Evans said, ‘and then one knows one has been stuck. I must go back some years and tell you first of my little favour to Hugo Weiss, which involved, strangely enough, still another candlelight Greco on very old canvas, too. The copy, for a copy it was, had been done with great skill, so skilfully that it passed for an original with a number of experts. I, however, had just been perusing an odd volume on chemistry and knew that a certain crimson Greco used later had not been found at the time the master did the candlelight series. And there was a touch of that same crimson in the candle flame of the painting for which Hugo Weiss was to have paid a huge sum. That would not have hurt him. He was also to have been exposed by a rival of his, another millionaire-philanthropist who hated Hugo and would go to any length to get the best of him. I saved not only Hugo's purse but his face. He has been kind enough to remember that and it may have been a factor in inducing him to be so well disposed towards our friend, Hjalmar. I can't help feeling a certain responsibility. Hugo must be found, but just now I'm consumed with impatience for the taxi driver to return with our clothes. I must confess that I feel a deep anxiety for the safety of Ambrose Gring.'

‘He can't be that important,' Miriam said.

‘Ambrose himself is certainly unimportant, but he either has, or is suspected of having, information which is dangerous in the extreme. If it is worth the while of interested parties to risk kidnapping such a prominent man as Hugo Weiss, would men in such straits hesitate a moment in doing violence to Gring?'

‘Why don't you have him arrested again? A word to Sergeant Frémont. ...'

‘Precisely what I intend to do, but delay is fatal... Ah, here comes our indispensable taxi. How fortunate the attendant sleeps so soundly.'

The taxi driver tiptoed in with two bundles of clothes in his arms, grinned appreciatively at the sleeping guardian of the Oriental treasures, and indicated by grimaces and gestures that he had something important to convey. It was a matter of moments before Miriam and Evans had descended to the facsimile of the tomb of Liang Hse,
B.C.
224, and emerged in their everyday clothes. The fezzes and burnooses Evans had tucked into a mortuary vase, the date of which was still in dispute. Miriam, of course, still had her boyish haircut but her hat—Schiaparelli 1870 – 19. .– concealed the fact that her ringlets were missing.