The Riddle of Monte Verita Page 9

  He paused as Prokosch returned with the refreshments and placed them on the table.

  ‘I wasn’t there,’ said Prokosch, ‘but Monsieur Mestre told me everything.’

  ‘Where were you?’ Lippi asked him.

  Prokosch opened his eyes wide and dropped down in his chair.

  ‘In my room, on the first floor. But I didn’t hear anything. I was asleep.’

  ‘Well,’ continued Mestre, ‘things were proceeding merrily enough when a fellow walked in through the terrace door. I’d never seen him before. It was raining hard and his raincoat was soaked. He asked the barman where the telephone was and ordered him to get the manager. When the barman protested, he pulled out an official card of some kind, thrust it under the fellow’s nose and told him to get a move on. Then he picked up the phone at the end of the bar. He spoke quietly and in German, but it was clear that something serious had happened and he was asking for instructions.

  ‘The manager arrived, half-asleep and dishevelled, still putting on his jacket. The intruder told him to get a passkey to open Hoenig’s bungalow and not to ask any questions. The manager went to his office and returned with a key, excusing himself for having taken so long, due to the necessity of opening the safe. They went quickly out together, taking with them the concierge who was carrying an electric torch. We followed suit.’

  ‘All of you?’ asked Lippi.

  ‘All of us. There was even one of the hotel bellboys who had squeezed in amongst us, but when the manager noticed him he was turned back. We tried to dissuade Madame Hoenig from following us, but we could do nothing to stop her. She was there on the arm of Strahler who had somehow got hold of an umbrella.’

  Pierre had a clear, almost cinematic, image of that night scene: the group hurrying soundlessly down the path in the darkness; the drizzle forming a spectral halo around the rare streetlamps; the black silhouettes of the firs caught in the wavering beam of the flashlight. And Freyja Hoenig bringing up the rear, clinging to her companion’s arm and stumbling in her high heels.

  ‘In front of the bungalow,’ continued Mestre, ‘stood a second man in a raincoat, the twin of the first. He had a torchlight in his hand and appeared to be on guard. He came towards his colleague and whispered a few words. The first man told him to stay in place and keep an eye on the surroundings; he then led the hotel manager to the bungalow door. The manager took out the key and put it in the keyhole. Everyone got closer to get a better view. By then there were quite a few people because it seemed that others had joined in along the way. It was difficult to see who: it was pitch black and, away from the streetlamp next to the door, you couldn’t see two meters in front of you. The policeman told us to stand back, but of course –.’

  ‘He wasn’t a policeman,’ Prokosch interrupted timidly.

  Three pairs of eyes turned to him. But the little Russian waved his hand and said softly:

  ‘I didn’t say anything. Please go on, Monsieur Mestre.’

  ‘Thank you,’ replied Mestre. ‘I must tell you that I was right at the front of those standing on the porch and I saw everything immediately the door opened. But I must first explain the lay of the land. Every bungalow, including the one where I’m staying, is built on the same model. There is a relatively spacious entrance hall which also serves as storage space. Behind that is the lounge and, at the rear, the bedroom which has in one corner a partition, behind which are the bathroom and the toilet. In the lounge there’s a window and –.’

  ‘Let’s keep it short,’ said Lippi impatiently. ‘What did you see?’

  ‘I’m getting there.’ Mestre put on an air of detachment which was far from what he was actually feeling. ‘The door to the lounge was wide open and the room was flooded with light. All the wall lights were on, as well as the standard lamp. The window on the wall to the right, which was framed by heavy velvet curtains, was shut. The shutters were closed and held in place by metal hooks. Opposite the window was a table piled with a sheaf of papers in disarray with a pen on top. A chair had been turned over and, next to it, a burnt-out cigar stub lay on the carpet. There was a smell of tobacco and burnt wool in the air, mixed with the persistent aroma of an expensive woman’s perfume.’

  ‘Now we’re getting somewhere,’ said Prokosch. Once again, the others looked at him quizzically but he merely whispered, with a mysterious smile: ‘I’ll explain later.’ Mestre continued:

  ‘Of course, I only registered those details later. At the time, all I could see was Dr. Hoenig lying on his stomach at the foot of the standard lamp. There was nobody else in the room. The body was wrapped in a dressing-gown tied at the waist. His cheek was pressed to the floor and, with his head turned towards the door, he looked at us with those little beady eyes. His glasses had been broken in the fall and one lens had gashed the left eyelid, causing a thin trickle of blood. The knife had been planted between his shoulder blades and the wooden handle pointed straight up in the middle of a bloodstain that the material had absorbed. The downward stroke of the blade must undoubtedly have caused instant death.’

  ‘You could have been a detective,’ said Lippi drily. ‘I’ve never heard such a precise report, certainly not from the mouth of a metaphysician. Now, you said he was dead. How could you be sure?’

  Mestre shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘His eyes were rolled upwards, his mouth was wide open, and it was obvious he was no longer breathing. But please let me go on. The “policeman” – I don’t know if he really was one, but he certainly seemed like one to me – was the first in the room and he rushed straight to the door in the rear; he opened it and disappeared into the bedroom, only to reappear three minutes later with a completely baffled expression. He then set about searching every inch of the lounge; he looked behind the curtains, he wrapped his hand with a handkerchief from his pocket before opening the window and thoroughly examining the shutters. Then he moved to the table, where he examined the papers without touching them. That was when he noticed an object that was partially covered by one of the papers.

  ‘He asked for a pencil and I stepped forward and gave him mine, which he used to bring the object towards him. From where I was standing, I could see it clearly: it was the key of the bungalow. They’re all made the same way, including mine. The bungalow number is cut rather crudely into a copper tag that’s attached to the key by a solid metal ring. There’s no way to detach the tag from the key. In this case the tag bore the number 12, which was Hoenig’s bungalow.’

  ‘Let’s keep it short,’ growled Lippi. ‘All the cheap hotels use the same system.’

  ‘You asked me to tell you every slightest detail and that’s what I’m doing,’ said Mestre, obviously miffed. ‘To continue: the man passed my pencil through the ring to pick up the key which he then wrapped in his handkerchief and placed in his pocket.

  ‘While this was going on, the people outside came onto the porch to get out of the rain and a number of them squeezed into the entrance hall. They jostled each other to try and see what was going on behind the wide shoulders of the manager who was blocking the way into the lounge. A voice, which turned out to be Strahler’s, cried out “Give me some room. Let me pass.” He finally announced he was a doctor and the manager let him through.

  ‘He knelt down in front of the body, lifted the eyelids, examined the pulse and generally did everything that’s done in such cases, before finally turning to the crowd and shaking his head in an exaggerated mime. But it wasn’t really necessary because it was obvious Hoenig was dead.

  ‘At that point someone moaned. It was Madame Hoenig, who had managed to push her way to the lounge door, and who now collapsed into the arms of the hotel manager. Everything after that happened very fast. People rushed to her side without really knowing what to do. It was almost comical: some rubbed her hands, others patted her cheeks; the manager threw a fit when he saw that the bellboy he had sent back to the hotel earlier had returned, so he ordered him to the Albergo again to fetch a cordial for Madame Hoenig. Finally, af
ter the man in the raincoat had managed to get everyone back outside the bungalow, the widow recovered thanks to Strahler’s diligent attention.

  ‘What else can I tell you? After a final look at the inside of the bungalow, the man in the raincoat asked the hotel manager to double-lock the door and place the key in the safe from whence it came. His colleague entered the names of everyone who was there in his notebook. He told us to go back to our rooms and stay there. We were all soaking wet and shivering with cold, so we didn’t need telling twice.

  ‘Everyone, including the two men in raincoats, went back to the Albergo. The hotel manager asked timidly whether it was prudent to leave the bungalow without surveillance. The one who had made the phone call, and who appeared to be in charge, said there was little likelihood their “customer” would sprout wings. “Perhaps we should alert the authorities,” the manager suggested. The man retorted that he and his colleague were the authorities. According to him, the death of Dr. Hoenig was an affair of state, involving issues of national security and their instructions were not to touch anything, leave things where they were and await the arrival of a highly-placed official from Berne, who was already on his way and would be there by the morning. He concluded by asking us not to talk to anyone about what we had witnessed. After which, needless to say, the news spread like wildfire.

  ‘There. Now you know as much as I do. I can’t wait to hear your suggestions. What’s your reaction to all this?’

  He sat silent, staring at his hands while he rolled himself a new cigarette. Everyone had so many questions that no one knew where to start. Lippi stroked his chin.

  ‘I wonder,’ he said slowly, ‘how long a cigar takes to burn down to the stub.’

  ‘That depends,’ replied Harvey thoughtfully. He had just joined them and so had missed much of Mestre’s report.

  ‘Where have you been?’ asked the Italian brutally.

  ‘I was in my bungalow. It’s crawling with policemen down there. They’re hanging around Hoenig’s bungalow. Apparently they’re waiting for someone – no doubt the big cheese from Berne that Mestre mentioned – and they’re in a perfectly foul mood.’

  ‘Put yourself in their place,’ said Prokosch mildly. They’re called to the scene of the crime and then they’re told to stand there and do nothing.’

  ‘You’d never see that in England,’ growled Harvey. ‘These Swiss don’t do anything the same way as everyone else. I have to say, however, that the inspector who questioned me seemed like a gentleman. He was a tall fellow, blond and very correct, and he obviously had his suits made in London.’

  Prokosch gave an approving smile.

  ‘Superintendent Brenner of the Lugano police. He’s an ace detective.’

  ‘He asked me if I’d seen or heard anything. In fact, as I told him, I was awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of footsteps on the path and voices murmuring. I got up and put a trench-coat over my pyjamas. There was a crowd gathered in front of the German’s bungalow. When I tried to get closer a rather disagreeable individual told me to go back to bed. Which is what I did.’

  ‘You don’t seem very curious,’ observed Lippi acerbically.

  ‘I don’t poke my nose into other people’s business and there was no cause to suspect the doctor had been killed. Of course, if I’d known there was a corpse in one of the nearby bungalows, I wouldn’t have slept so soundly. In any case, I had a dreadful nightmare which I don’t wish to remember.’ He shivered and shook his head. ‘But you were asking about cigars….’

  ‘Quite so. Mestre was telling us about a cigar which was just about to go out, lying on the carpet next to the body. So I was wondering….’

  ‘How long it would take? That depends.’

  ‘On what?’ asked Mestre, suppressing a giggle.

  ‘On where the tobacco came from, the make of cigar and, of course, its length. Let’s see, Hoening smoked Havanas, fat ones. Basing my calculations on the work of dear old Holmes, I’d say between twenty and twenty-four minutes.’

  Lippi thought hard.

  ‘How long does it take to walk from the Albergo to the bungalow’

  ‘At a brisk walk, less than ten minutes.’

  ‘And ten more for the return plus two or three minutes for the man to make the telephone call. So that means that Hoenig had been dead for just over twenty minutes when his body was found. From which I deduce that the man in the raincoat who came into the bar must have been a witness to the murder.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Prokosch, approvingly. ‘But I could have told you that immediately if you’d only asked.’

  ‘And furthermore,’ continued Lippi, ignoring him completely, ‘that raises another question. We don’t know anything about that man or his colleague. Who exactly were those two?’

  ‘Why don’t you let Prokosch speak?’ suggested Pierre, who was becoming irritated by all the chatter. ‘He has something to tell us.’

  ‘Oh!’ exclaimed the little Russian apologetically. ‘I just wanted to clarify a couple of obscure points in our friend’s report.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I’d gone to bed early, so I was up early too and went to the bar. It was not yet open but I saw the two men the professor was talking about. They’re – I expect you’ve guessed already – Secret Service agents. It turns out I know them, or more precisely I know their boss in Berne, whose name I’m afraid I can’t give you. But he’s highly placed in the Bureau Fédérale de Surveillance de Territoire: the Swiss equivalent, Monsieur Mestre, of your Sûreté Générale.’

  Mestre dropped his matchbox in surprised and stared incredulously at the Russian.

  ‘You’re joking! How do you know him?’

  Prokosch cleared his throat again and his embarrassed smile seemed more like a grimace.

  ‘Well, you see, I had to deal with him when I applied for political asylum in Switzerland. He helped me to get it and, in return, he required me to perform certain services. Nothing very serious: reports on the situation in the Soviet Union, translation of a few documents, passing on trifles of information. When he found out I’d been invited to this symposium, he entrusted me with a mission that I couldn’t refuse: my naturalisation depended on it, you understand. I was to observe what Hoenig said and did inside the symposium, while the other two agents looked after what happened outside.’

  ‘But what for?’ asked Mestre.

  ‘He had good reason to believe that the conference would serve as cover for a meeting between Hoenig – who, it’s no secret, is the assistant director to Rosenberg in the Foreign Affairs service of the Nazi party – and an emissary of Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister. The Swiss, as far as I could make out, had been told about it by French Intelligence.’

  He paused and looked around the table with his soft, myopic gaze. His habit of stooping while batting his eyelids gave the impression he was about to apologise profusely at any given moment. The others could not believe their ears. The very idea that beneath the mask of a dreamer lost in the clouds lurked a first-class intellect – a man sufficiently important to be entrusted with state secrets – had never crossed their minds. Nevertheless the “specialist in fairy tales” spoke five languages fluently and knew all the secrets of international politics; he had, after the revolution, been a member of Trotsky’s inner circle and had followed him into exile. The four others, sitting at the table in the morning sunshine on the terrace at Monte Verita, knew none of this – and didn’t know any more when, two years later, the inoffensive little scholar was killed by an unknown assailant shortly after his master’s assassination. But that, as Kipling would say, is another story.

  ‘I say, old man,’ said Harvey, breaking the long silence that had descended on the conversation. ‘Why are you telling us all this? Surely divulging this kind of information is a serious offence?’

  Prokosch sat for a while with his head bowed and his bony hands gripping the table. Then he looked up and they were astonished to see him smile gently.

  ‘A serious offence,’ he
repeated. ‘Really? Quite frankly, gentlemen, there was no other way to make you understand what really happened. As for divulging secrets – .’

  ‘It’s just another of your fairy tales, Prokosch,’ Lippi declared affably. ‘A deal between Hitler and Stalin ! It’s about as likely as Bluebeard and the fairy Carabosse.’

  ‘Why not?’ commented Mestre as an aside. But nobody heard him.

  ‘There you have it!’ exclaimed the little Russian with a gleam of amusement in his eye. ‘You’ve just heard the reaction of our narrative specialist. It goes without saying that because of the rules of the art form, he holds this situation reversal to be inadmissible… even thought it’s used frequently in fairy tales which do not, any more than the history of the universe does, submit to Aristotle’s rules. Very well. I will now lay out for you the facts as described to me by the two agents this morning and you can draw your own conclusions. I need to warn you that, though true, they are utterly improbable.

  ‘Last night, around eleven o’clock our two men were at their posts in the bungalow under repair, which is downhill from Hoenig’s and about fifty metres from it. One was sleeping on a camp bed; the other, sitting in darkness, was observing the bungalow opposite through the door opening. The lounge shutters were wide open and he had, despite the rain, a clear view of the interior – which was brilliantly illuminated as Monsieur Mestre has verified. Hoenig was sitting behind the table, facing the window, his head down peering at his papers. The light from the standard lamp shone right on him. He was writing.’

  ‘A perfect target,’ observed the Italian. ‘A good marksman –. ’

  ‘Yes, but that wasn’t the case.’ Prokosch cut Lippi off with an authority that surprised those who thought they knew him. ‘As I was saying: at some point Hoenig looked at his watch, put down his pen, stood up and went into the bedroom where he stayed several minutes. Forgive me for boring you with all these details but the agents are trained to note the slightest incident. Hoenig sat down again at the table and started to write.