William Bankier: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 92, No. 3. Whole No. 547, September 1988

Onza frowned at him for just an instant. “Oh, yes. You were the man collecting flags.”

“I received the wrong one from you. I’ll have to return it.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Onza started to continue on his way but Nick said, “I understand the flag was stolen from your consulate the following morning.”

“Stolen? I doubt that. It did disappear mysteriously. Apparently it came loose from the pole and was blown away by the wind. We replaced it, as we had planned to do anyway.” He nodded overpolitely and continued on his way. Nick wondered if it was the missing flag that had brought him to Coronado.

Nick had a number of tasks to carry out before morning and was awake much of the night. At three a.m. he stood on the balcony of his room gazing out at the moonlit square and the palace beyond. He felt good about his plans. This time the White Queen would not be quite so impossible before breakfast.

He arrived at the palace guardhouse well before sunrise, dressed in a colonel’s uniform he’d managed to obtain at some expense. An earlier phone call had informed the captain of the guard — convincingly, he hoped — that the President wished a new flag to be flown that day and a colonel would arrive with it before sunrise. The man who met Nick at the door checked his identification and then admitted him. The captain of the guard, a young man with a neat moustache and brooding eyes, took the new flag and produced the old one with some reluctance.

“I understood it was not to be burned until the first of the month,” he said.

“You can see how faded it is,” Nick told him. “There will be special visitors at the palace today and the President wants everything perfect.”

“Certainly.” The captain passed over the flag without further question.

Nick returned his salute and left quickly. It had been as simple as that. The palace flag was much larger than those at the embassies, but he knew it would fit in his suitcase for the flight back to New York. The sun was rising beyond the palm trees by the time he completed his walk to the hotel. As he turned and stood for a moment, watching the honor guard march out to raise the new flag, he saw the white puffs of two exploding smoke bombs, quite near the soldiers, and he knew Sandra was at work. You’re too late this time, Sandra, he said to himself.

He hurried through the lobby and pressed the elevator button as the few guests and employees who were in the lobby rushed outside to see what was happening. Upstairs, unlocking the door to his room, he stepped inside, tossed the folded flag on the bed, and began to shed his uniform. Then he heard a sound from the bathroom, but before he could turn a harsh voice stopped him. “Stand very still, Mr. Velvet. I have a pistol pointed at the back of your spine, and in this country they would award me a medal for shooting you.”

Nick recognized the voice at once. It was Christopher Onza.

“Don’t I deserve an explanation before you shoot me?” Nick asked, keeping his hands carefully raised.

“Of course. Since I am known to have an interest in the matter of the flags, the captain of the guard telephoned me after he received your call. I told him to give you the flag, and then arranged to be here when you returned. I will kill you, take the flag, and avoid having to pay that foolish woman I hired.”

“If you mean Sandra Paris, she’s over there risking her life for you right now.”

“Life is cheap in these parts. Lie down on the floor, please.”

Nick turned instead to face him. “I knew you were the one who hired her.”

“Did she tell you?”

“She didn’t have to. When I met you in the New York consulate, you knew enough to give me a new flag instead of the old one. That told me you were involved in the conspiracy, whatever it was. Sandra still has the flag from Washington, although she told me the New York one has already been delivered. That told me two things — how it was stolen and who hired her.”

“You are a clever man, Mr. Velvet.”

“She didn’t have to deliver the consulate flag to you because you stole it yourself. I first assumed that somehow she had stolen it from the doorway across the street, but actually she was only watching to make certain her device worked properly. It’s the same trick stage magicians use to make a small object vanish from their hands. You ran the flag out to the end of the pole with a heavy elastic band attached. Instead of hooking it to the halyard as usual, you merely secured it with tape. After a few minutes, when the pull of the elastic overcame the resistance of the tape, the flag came free and was yanked back down the pole and into the open window. Right into your hands. Of course, the purpose of the charade was in case someone other than Sandra was watching, someone like me, so that it would appear the flag had been stolen.”

“You should be a detective rather than a thief, Velvet.”

“I’ve been told that before. How do you know my name?”

“We had a report that you had been hired by a private group with ties to the American government.”

“Oh?” Nick thought about Art Schraeder and decided it was possible.

“Enough talk — lie down on the floor!”

“Don’t I have a right to know the flags’ big secret? I already know it involves the shape of the coastline on the seal.”

Onza seemed surprised. “One more reason why I can’t leave you alive. National flags and seals have changed the course of history more than once, and we don’t intend to let it happen again. If you remember your Central American history, you know that Nicaragua lost the canal to Panama because the seal of the country showed an active volcano, which frightened members of the American Congress. In Coronado’s case, both our seal and flag show three sailing ships from the second voyage of Columbus at anchor in Coronado Bay, a place we have insisted to both the Americans and Cubans is too shallow to serve as a naval base. We now contend that Columbus landed at some uncertain place along the coast rather than in the bay. Our seal has been changed to indicate that, and the flags are being changed, too. Reproductions of the flag are too small to show the critical details, and our government thought all of the flags had been safely replaced, but when it became known that the Americans were after one of them I hired this woman to steal the last three in use before they got to them.”

“What does your President think of all this? You’re acting without his knowledge, certainly, or you wouldn’t have needed to steal the flags. He could have ordered them withdrawn at once.”

“Our President—” Onza began. He never finished the sentence. The door burst open and the room was full of uniformed men with automatic weapons pointed at both of them.

Nick was an hour early for his flight back to New York that afternoon. He saw Sandra Paris seated in the private lounge of the airline club and went over to join her. “Returning to New York?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Los Angeles. I heard they found the flag in your room.”

Nick nodded glumly. “It was right there on the bed when the security police burst in. At least I’m alive. Your friend Onza was about to kill me.”

“He’s no friend of mine. He denies now that he ever hired me.”

Nick ordered a couple of drinks for them. “How did those smoke bombs of yours work? I saw them go off.”

“They worked fine, and in the confusion I got the flag away from the honor guard, but when I realized it was a new one I hesitated just long enough for them to capture me. So I figured that if I was having a failed mission, you might as well join me, so I gave them your room number. I hope you didn’t mind.”

“It probably saved my life, even if it did cost me my twenty-five-thousand-dollar fee.”