each other, wordlessly confirming that the dead clown had been in possession of a full complement of digits.”
“See that Espy gets that finger,” I said. “Maybe we can find out whose it was.”
“It’s a woman’s,” Ganz said. “Look at that nail.”
I took it from him, holding it by the chewed and bloody end so as not to dislodge any evidence that might be trapped under the long nail. Though rigid, it was strangely warm, perhaps from having spent a few days in the vengeful grip of the animal who had claimed it from his master’s murderer. It appeared to be an index finger, with a manicured, pointed nail nearly three-quarters of an inch long. I shook my head.
“It isn’t painted,” I said. “Not even varnished. How many women wear their nails like that?”
“Maybe the paint rubbed off,” one of the policemen suggested.
“Maybe,” I said. I knelt on the ground beside the body of the baboon. There was, I noted, a wound on the back of his neck, long and deep and crusted over with dirt and dried blood. I now saw him in my mind’s eye, dancing like a barefoot child around the murderer and the victim as they struggled down the path to the clearing. It would take a powerful man to fight such an animal off. “I can’t believe you killed our only witness, Detective Ganz. The poor bastard was just giving me a hug.”
This information seemed to amuse Ganz nearly as much as it puzzled him.
“He was a monkey, sir,” Ganz said. “I doubt he—”
“He could make signs, you fool! He told me he was hungry.”
Ganz blinked, trying, I supposed, to append to his personal operations manual this evidence of the potential usefulness of circus apes to police inquiries.
“If I had a dozen baboons like that one on my staff,” I said, “I would never have to leave the office.”
That evening, before going home, I stopped by the evidence room in the High Street annex and signed out the two books that had been found in the cave that morning. As I walked back into the corridor, I thought I detected an odd odor—odd, at any rate, for that dull expanse of linoleum and buzzing fluorescent tubes—of the sea: a sharp, salty, briny smell. I decided that it must be some new disinfectant being used by the custodian, but it reminded me of the smell of blood from the specimen bags and sealed containers in the evidence room. I turned the lock on the room’s door and slipped the books, in their waxy protective envelope, into my briefcase, and walked down High Street to Dennistoun Road, where the public library was. It stayed open late on Wednesday nights, and I would need a German-English dictionary if my college German and I were going to get anywhere with Herr von Junzt.
The librarian, Lucy Brand, returned my greeting with the circumspect air of one who hopes to be rewarded for her forebearance with a wealth of juicy tidbits. Word of the murder, denuded of most of the relevant details, had made the Ashtown Ambler yesterday morning, and though I had cautioned the unlucky young squirrel hunters against talking about the case, already conjectures, misprisions, and outright lies had begun wildly to coalesce; I knew the temper of my home town well enough to realise that if I did not close this case soon things might get out of hand. Ashtown, as the events surrounded the appearance of the so-called Green Man, in 1932, amply demonstrated, has a lamentable tendency toward municipal panic.
Having secured a copy of Köhler’s Dictionary of the English and German Languages, I went, on an impulse, to the card catalogue and looked up von Junzt, Friedrich. There was no card for any work by this author—hardly surprising, perhaps, in a small-town library like ours. I returned to the reference shelf, and consulted an encyclopedia of philosophical biography and comparable volumes of philologic reference, but found no entry for any von Junzt—a diplomate, by the testimony of his title page, of the University of Tübingen and of the Sorbonne. It seemed that von Junzt had been dismissed, or expunged, from the dusty memory of his discipline.
It was as I was closing the Encyclopedia of Archaeo-Anthropological Research that a name suddenly leapt out at me, catching my eye just before the pages slammed together. It was a word that I had noticed in von Junzt’s book: “Urartu.” I barely managed to slip the edge of my thumb into