Нэнси Пикард - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 128, No. 6. Whole No. 784, December 2006

It was Friday. Two young monks were out on the pond in a rowboat trying to net carp for dinner. Ganelon recalled Father Boniface’s complaint, “English monks always chose salmon rivers when they built their cathedrals. We must do with carp.”

Suddenly a monk gave a shout and jumped into the water. His companion followed. Wading across to a large willow, they struggled, trying to extricate something from the submerged tangle of the tree’s roots. As Ganelon reached them they were dragging the body of a man in a dark suit up onto the grass. One monk hurried off to fetch Father Boniface.

Ganelon knelt to examine the body, noting the wound from a heavy blow to the back of the head. The other monk said they’d seen the dead man’s heels floating beneath the willow branches. The detective found that the most interesting thing, the torso and head floating below the feet, so deep in the water.

“It’s Mr. Elmer Shypoke, the missing guest,” said a woman’s voice.

Ganelon looked up. The beautiful driver of the blue roadster was standing there. He was sorry he’d surrendered his Hrosco. The cockeyed grin it gave him charmed the ladies.

“Strange the way he was floating,” she added, pushing her black hair out of an alert and intelligent face.

“You’ve a good eye,” said Ganelon.

A male voice with an English accent said, “A shoulder money belt filled with gold guineas will do that to you.” The speaker was a tall, fair-haired man wearing a blazer and a Royal Flying Corps tie. He had a twisted chin and an indentation like a deep thumbprint low on one cheek. A casse-gueule, as the French called those who brought face wounds out of the War. The man introduced himself. “Timmons,” he said.

Ganelon opened the dead man’s jacket to reveal the bulging shoulder money belt. Well, the killer’s motive hadn’t been robbery. “You the one who led Jerome around in the hospital when he couldn’t see?” he asked Timmons. Jerome had been caught on the ground during one of Baron Waldteufel’s aerial gas attacks. Temporarily blinded, he’d been led away in a crocodile of like-injured. During his long recuperation in a San Sebastiano hospital, Jerome and Timmons had become fast friends.

“My jaw was all wired up,” said Timmons. “It was the dumb leading the blind. Have you met Miss Khalila Assad?”

“So you are the famous private detective,” said the young woman. “Please call me Khalila. May I help you in your investigation? I am not without experience in such matters.”

Ganelon remembered something from one of the magazines he subscribed to — was it P.I. Tidbits? — about a Levantine religious youth group solving crimes in the city of Nancy. “Better leave this to the police,” he said. He could tell she was disappointed. But he had his reasons.

Jerome and Father Boniface came hurrying down the path. While the priest knelt to pray beside the body, Khalila told Jerome, “Mr. Ganelon says this is a police matter. That’s fine with me. I don’t work well with men who talk to trees.”

“You were driving fast,” protested Ganelon. “This old man came out of the orchard to help me change a tire.”

Khalila frowned at him, put her arm in Jerome’s arm, and led him away. As he went the pilot shot Ganelon a puzzled look over his shoulder.

Ganelon watched the woman go. “Something of a coquette,” he said to Timmons.

“Don’t ask me,” replied the Englishman.

“The money belt, how come you knew about it?”

“We flew over from Croydon to Paris together, Shypoke, Baron Waldteufel, and I. Shypoke bragged about the gold and showed off what he called his shooting iron to keep it safe.”

Then he added, “If you ask me, Standard Oil sent the man to fish in troubled waters. Anglo-Persian Oil’s agreement is with a local warlord. The Shah could invalidate it.”

“I hear the country’s oil production could one day equal that of the U. S.,” said Ganelon.

“So they say,” said Timmons. “Perhaps Shypoke thought the gold might help him with the Shah’s man Massoudi. Shypoke’s arrival certainly spooked the Anglo-Persian people. Instead of waiting for Massoudi, they left this morning for Teheran to deal with the Shah directly.”

“And Waldteufel was on your Paris flight, you say?”

“Yes, our plane was a tri-engine Prentiss-Jenkins Gladiator, the ‘box kite,’ as they call them. A noon takeoff followed by a leisurely lunch on a wide table in a spacious cabin made it a very popular flight. Waldteufel was on board, but just barely. We were powering up when a chauffeured Daimler drove out onto the field to deliver him and his baggage.”

“The Daimler driver, did he have a club foot?” asked Ganelon, describing Eustace, Dorian Fong-Smythe’s chauffeur. Timmons hesitated. “I didn’t notice,” he said.

Ganelon set out for Father Sylvanus’s hermitage again, taking a path beside the nearby retreat-house chapel which led deep into the woods.

It was perhaps ironic that a private detective of the two-fisted school would be a student of the art of nonviolent self-defense called the via felix, the Happy Way. Invented by Saint Magnus for his monks’ use in protecting the holy places of Europe during the early Middle Ages, it involved a hip lift and the redistribution of an adversary’s body humors (blood, phlegm, choler, black bile), changing him temperamentally, from, say, a homicidal maniac into a hail-fellow-well-met sort. An adept practiced using a heavy wooden planchette grooved with elaborate channels and four colored balls. Ganelon had just mastered a very difficult maneuver called Navigating between Presumption and Despair which was the door to a higher level of the Happy Way.

The detective followed the narrow path for some distance before he reached a small clearing where a fat blue-green cedar tree built of galvanized metal stood. During the War, Fong Armaments manufactured these sniper boxes and observation posts for the German army. Ganelon remembered the festive note they added to the forward saps and no-man’s-land at Christmas. After the Armistice, the Fongs sold some off as outhouses, toolsheds, and, in Father Sylvanus’s case, a hermitage.

Ganelon’s father once described Father Sylvanus as the very image of El Greco’s famous portrait of Saint Ildefonso, the patron saint of dart players. Curious, Ganelon had looked the painting up in an art book. The saint had been sitting at a small table reading his breviary. As El Greco captured him, he is holding up a dart which probably served as his bookmark and is about to let fly at a dartboard somewhere off the canvas.

Father Sylvanus certainly had the saint’s high forehead, long aristocratic nose, and whimsical smile. But today he was solemn and preoccupied. He invited Ganelon in and congratulated him after watching his work with the planchette. “Your father had not come this far.” Then his eyes went to the open door. “The trees are restless,” he observed.

“You’re the second person to tell me that today. It’s the wind.”

The hermit shook his head. “I grew up near woods like these. When I was a boy people used to say: ‘Elms do grieve. Oak he do hate. Willows do walk if you travels late.’”

“Willows walk?”

“Indeed,” said Father Sylvanus. “Uproot themselves at night and stalk unwary travelers muttering all the way.”

“Then Willow-Walk-Behind didn’t take its name from the willows and the walk behind the retreat house?”

“It was called that and shunned locally long before our order bought the old abandoned mill and ancient willows around the millpond. We wanted the property because our founder and his early followers lived as hermits hereabouts.”

In a voice as casual as he could make it, Ganelon said, “Father Boniface thinks you have been in the woods too long.”