'I buy that,' said Mann. He looked round the tiny room. 'You know something,' he said. 'This is just about the dirtiest, smelliest dump I've ever been in.' He looked at me to get my reaction.
'Well, you're always complaining about the crummy places you find yourself in,' I told him. 'If this is the worst, it must be something for the record books.'
Mann gave me a humourless little smile. 'Look at that frying-pan. It hasn't been cleaned in an age.'
'It's an omelette pan,' I explained. 'You never wash omelette pans, it spoils the surface for all time.'
'I should have known you'd find an excuse for filth,' said Mann. 'Now you're going to tell me the downstairs toilet never has to be cleaned, in case it spoils the surface for all time.'
'I don't spend as much time in the toilet as you do,' I said. 'I get in and get out again, I don't spend a lot of time looking around.'
'Yuck,' said Mann.
'But you start me thinking,' I said.
'You mean you're going to start using laundries and showers, and take a haircut from time to time?'
'Suppose Hank Dean's courier felt the same way about this place that you do.'
'He'd arrive after lunch and take off at tea-time,' said Mann.
'Complicated material,' I said. 'You said it would need six or seven hours of explanation.'
'Well, I'll stick by that,' said Mann.
'So suppose the courier checked in to the Hostellerie.'
'Hostellerie du Chateau?' said Mann. This flea-pit at the end of the alley?'
'No other,' I said.
'You don't imagine he left a forwarding address, do you?'
'I'll take a look if you don't mind, Major,' I said.
'I'll come with you. What have we got to lose.'
The roadway was surfaced in loose gravel. This back road did not even qualify for a French map numeral. Not many cars came along here. Outside the Hostellerie, a battered van was parked, and a mangy dog tried to break from its chain and, having failed to do so, snarled at us. There were two people in the bar, both dressed in greasy black suits. Behind the bar there was a fragile-looking man, in a threadbare shirt and denim trousers. His hair was wispy and grey, and he peered myopically from behind thick, rimless spectacles.
'Two beers,' I said.
He reached behind him, opened a wood-faced refrigerator, found two Alsace lagers and slammed them on the counter. The men in black suits ended their conversation abruptly. The barman rinsed two glasses under the tap and pushed them towards us. 'Visiting the doctor,' he said. It was not a question.
'That's right,' I said. I had already discovered that all the villagers called Hank Dean the doctor. It was probably the way he was referred to on his pension envelope.
'Not many visitors at this time of year,' said the barman. If he had seen the policemen arrive to collect Dean, he was not admitting it.
'I want to talk to you about that,' I said. There is one particular friend of the doctor whom we must get in touch with.'
'Oh,' said the barman.
'Came every few weeks,' I said.
'Perhaps,' said the barman.
'Did he stay here?' Mann put the question too hurriedly.
'Are you the police?' said the man.
'Yes,' I said, but Mann had already said no. The barman looked from one to the other of us, and allowed himself that vacuous smile which peasants reserve for government officials. 'A sort of police,' I continued. 'A sort of American police.'
'The F.B.I.?' offered one of the men in black.
'Exactly,' I said.
'What has the doctor done?' asked the barman.
I tried to see in his face whether he would prefer to see the doctor exonerated, pursuing criminals or taken away in a small black van. Unsure of myself I said, 'The doctor is accused of defrauding an American bank.' I turned to Mann and raised an eyebrow as if seeking his permission to take the old man further into our confidence. Mann, playing along with the game, nodded sagely. I leaned across the counter and said, 'Now we are beginning to think he is innocent. We need to find this man who visited the house.'
'Why won't the doctor tell you?' the man asked.
It was a hell of a good question. 'That's a very good question,' I told him. 'But it's a rule of the underworld. Even when you can help yourself, you never help the police.'
'Of course,' said Mann hurriedly. 'That doesn't apply to citizens. It doesn't apply to people who obey the law, and suffer from the criminals. Especially,' he added archly, 'especially it doesn't apply to licensed innkeepers.'
'The man you seek is young and slim, with hair that covers his ears. He wears the sort of clothes they wear in the Riviera- fancy silk neckerchiefs, tightly tailored trousers that show everything, and cheap imitation-leather jackets of all shapes and sizes and colours.'
'Shut your mouth, you old fool.'
A young man had entered the bar from a door marked 'private'. He was about twenty years old, wearing a large black droopy moustache and dressed in a phoney U.C.L.A. sweat-shirt and faded jeans. Around his wrist he wore a studded leather support, of the sort that old prize-fighters sometimes need. Tell these people nothing,' he said. 'They are Americans, capitalist police spies…'
'Now hold it, son,' said Mann mildly.
I think it was the gentleness of Mann's tone that incensed the boy. Feeling that he was not being taken seriously, he called us pigs, reactionary oppressors and Gestapo. One of the old men at the other end of the bar smiled derisively. Perhaps he remembered the Gestapo.
The boy saw the old man smile. He grabbed my sleeve in an attempt to drag me from the bar. He was stronger than he looked, and I felt a seam give way under his grip.
'Pig, pig, pig,' said the boy as if the physical exertion had driven all reason, and vocabulary, from his head. All the while he was tearing at my coat, so that I must either move with him or watch it tear apart.
I hit him twice. The first punch did no more than position him, head down and off balance, for the hook that sent him flying across the room. It knocked the breath out of him, and he made that sort of whistling howl with which an express train acknowledges a country station. Two chairs toppled with him, and a table was dislodged, before the boy struck a pile of crates and collapsed to the floor.
'Paid cash,' said the barman continuing as if nothing had happened. 'Never cheque, or those fancy travellers' things; always money.'
'Stayed overnight?' I said. I straightened my clothes and sucked the blood off my grazed fist, which hurt like hell. The boy remained on the floor in the far corner. He was blinking and watching us and mouthing obscenities but he did not get to his feet.
'It varied,' said the barman. 'But he seldom had any baggage with him. Just shaving things.'
'Give me the car registration,' I said.
'I don't have that,' said the man.
'Come along,' I said. 'A hotelier who takes clients without baggage, and doesn't make a note of the car registration. I'm sure you'll find it somewhere. I'll pay you twenty francs for it.'
The man reached below the bar to get a battered hotel register. It was a mess of illegible signatures and unlikely addresses. Its pages were creased and ringed with the marks of wine and beer, and goodness knows what else. Hank Dean's guest had not entered his name here but the barman was able to find his own scribbled note of the car registration. He read the number aloud, and I wrote it into my notebook and passed him the twenty francs. He smoothed the note carefully and inspected both sides of it before putting it into his bulging wallet.
'Thank you,' I said.
'There are more,' he said.
'More registration numbers?' I asked.
'Certainly there are.'
'Different ones?'
