As if to throw her support in with all this, Elisalexa Norb stuck her tongue out at him.
Scramsfield smiled. ‘I’m so glad you’re giving me the chance to clear all this up, Miss Norb. To start with, I can tell you that I’ve never had anything to do with anyone’s cousin from Chicago, and I’ve certainly never tried to sell anyone a sham
‘Yes?’
‘Oh boy, you can’t have thought I meant Sergei Diaghilev, Miss Norb? Your clergyman pal from Philadelphia was right, of course, we lost him to tuberculosis a few years ago. I still remember the funeral — Cocteau gave such a moving elegy. No, I was going to introduce you to his brother Fyodor. Every bit as talented.’
‘And I suppose you have similar alibis for Fitzgerald and Picasso and Chanel?’
‘I think you’re being a tad unfair, Miss Norb, but let me say that if I have wandered away from the scientific truth once or twice …’ He shrugged and spread his hands, contrite and self-effacing. ‘Well, I’m a writer, Miss Norb. My imagination is my forge. If you stay in Paris much longer you will find many others like me.’
‘Not good enough, Mr Scramsfield. We are going to the police. Goodbye.’
‘No,’ said Scramsfield. ‘Wait. Please! Don’t be rash.’
‘Nothing you say can persuade me,’ said Margaret Norb, turning away.
‘I can get you an appointment with Voronoff.’
She stopped. ‘The real Dr Voronoff?’
‘Yes.’
‘In a week, I suppose? And we’ll be buying you dinner until then.’
‘No. Not in a week. This afternoon. I can hardly lie about that, can I? If you haven’t had the operation by six o’clock today then you can tell the
He had her. He could tell. He did not have the remotest idea what he was going to do next, but he had put off calamity.
Then she sniffed.
‘What in heaven’s name is that smell?’
The effluvium from his bed and his clothes had reached her. Even knowing that most American tourists learned to shutter their olfactory epithelia as soon as they left their hotels, Scramsfield was surprised it had taken so long. ‘I don’t smell anything,’ he said.
‘It’s revolting.’
‘Might be the people downstairs. I believe they’re French.’
‘Mr Scramsfield, you can hardly expect me to believe that you are a close associate of an important man like Dr Voronoff when your own apartment smells like a sewer.’
‘It must be the monkeys,’ said Scramsfield, and involuntarily squeezed his eyes shut for a second, as if he was thirteen again and had just thrown a baseball that would either win the afternoon’s game or break a neighbour’s window.
‘The monkeys?’
‘Yes. Until the day before yesterday, Dr Voronoff was keeping some stud monkeys here that he had just imported from Morocco. Now they’re at the Chateau Grimaldi. But the stink does linger, ha ha!’
‘You mean to tell me that Dr Voronoff sometimes uses this very apartment as a base of operations?’
‘Quite often,’ said Scramsfield, on a roll now. He pushed the door open wider, so that the Norbs could see into the apartment, and pointed at Loeser, who was still sprawled in Scramsfield’s wooden chair. ‘In fact this is Dr Voronoff himself.’
Loeser went white.
‘This is Dr Voronoff?’ said Margaret Norb.
‘Yes. I’m afraid he was up very late last night operating. And he speaks very little English.’ He gave Loeser a significant look that meant ‘Get up and introduce yourself in a Russian accent’. But Loeser must have misunderstood this because instead he just performed something resembling a palsied military salute and then looked down at his feet. ‘The operation won’t take place here,’ Scramsfield hurried to add. ‘We will come to your hotel with all the equipment. Shall we say four o’clock?’
‘He’ll carry out the operation? For no charge? On both of us?’
‘Both of you?’
‘Elisalexa is young, Mr Scramsfield, yes, but I believe there’s no such thing as being young for too long.’
‘Of course not. Both of you, then. Absolutely. For no charge.’
‘In that case we shall await you this afternoon at the Concorde Sainte Lazare. If you do not appear as promised, you know what will happen. Good day, Mr Scramsfield. Good day, Dr Voronoff.’
The Norbs made their exit and Scramsfield shut the door. He turned to Loeser. ‘That went damned well, I thought.’
‘Do not ever do that to me again,’ said the German.
‘Sorry, pal, but I knew you’d pull it off.’
‘You can’t sincerely expect me to go through with what you have just set in motion.’
‘I can’t have them go to the cops.’
‘It’s not my problem you’re on the run because you murdered your fiancee.’
‘What? I did not murder my fiancee and I am not on the run!’
‘You told me last night you pushed her off a steamship and she drowned,’ said Loeser. ‘That’s why you can’t go home to New York. Something like that.’
‘Were you listening at all?’
‘You rambled on for so long that I may have passed out a short while before the end. But I got the fundamentals.’
‘Phoebe tragically took her own life and it wasn’t my fault. I can go back to Boston whenever I like.’
‘Yes, all right, you’re welcome to type up the footnotes and I’ll give them my careful attention.’ Loeser levered himself out of the chair. ‘You know, when I woke up, I looked around at these squalid and unfamiliar surroundings and for a moment I really thought I might have met some wonderful floozie last night.’ He went to the sink and began to splash his face with water.
‘Come on, old pal. You’ll do this for me, won’t you? Look here: if you do, I’ll take you to see Picquart.’
‘Your French friend? Why should I want to meet him?’
‘He’s a historian,’ said Scramsfield. ‘A scholar. There’s nothing he doesn’t know about Paris. He’ll be able to tell you the truth about Lavicini and … all those other fellows. The dog barber. The Castle of Mystery.’
‘Court of Miracles,’ said Loeser. He looked around for a towel to dry his face, but there was none, so he made the most of his arm hair.
‘Yes. He hates Germans, there’s no way he’d see you otherwise, but if I call in my very last favour with him, he will.’
‘If I believed you, wouldn’t that make me as gullible as the Norbs?’
‘He’s not Hemingway. He’s not Picasso. He’s just an old man I happen to know. Why would I bounce you about that?’
‘I don’t see how you expect this to work, anyway. We don’t have a monkey.’
‘We could use a little black boy,’ said Scramsfield. ‘One of those Algerians.’
‘I think there is some chance the ladies will penetrate that ruse.’
‘Well, if we bring a cage with a sheet over it, it doesn’t matter what’s inside. They’ll never see. They’ll be under anaesthetic.’
‘How are we going to manage that?’
‘I know some Cambodian medical students who will sell us barbiturates.’
‘Barbiturates?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think they’d have any good cocaine?’
‘I don’t know. Probably.’
Loeser went to the window and looked out. ‘This is going to take up the whole afternoon, isn’t it? I was going to visit the site of the Theatre des Encornets today.’
