for a minute once it gets dark. He's a lunatic, but that doesn't mean he can't kill you in seconds."
"Shouldn't we stop by Notre Dame for a crucifix, then?" A smile struggled on his face.
Asher remembered a lieutenant he'd known on the Veldt- Pynchon? Prudhomme? He'd had an East Anglian glottal stop, anyway-standing, hands on hips, staring out at the hot, dense silence of lion-colored land. Well, they're just a lot of farmers, when all's said, aren't they? "It's the silver that keeps them away," Asher said.
Cramer did not seem to know what to reply.
Even at the Palais Royale it was difficult to find an empty cab in the rain.
They ended by taking the Underground to the Gare St. Lazare and crossing the square to the Hotel Terminus. "Should we ask at the cab rank?" Cramer indicated the line of light, two-wheeled fiacres along the railings of the place, the horses head down, rugged against the ram, the men grouped beneath the trees, wrapped in whatever they could find to keep warm.
Asher shook his head. "He'll have used a cartage company. It's a big trunk. A London four-wheeler could barely take it; a Paris fiacre's too lightly sprung. We'll just check here..." He ascended the gray granite steps of the Terminus, crossed the dark Turkey carpets to the lobby desk, Cramer at his heels like a well- bred but very large dog.
"Pardon," Asher said to the clerk, in the Strasbourg French of a German. He stood as the Germans stood, the set of his shoulders like that he had seen in South German officers, but without the Prussian stiffness which might have gotten him little help in this city of long memories. "I am trying my sister Agnes to locate; she was on the Dieppe train this morning to have come, and nothing of her I have heard. The matter is I do not know whether she travels under her own name, or that of her first husband, who was killed in Kenya, or of her second..."
As he and Cramer crossed the square again, Asher said, "Karolyi's checked in, all right." He ducked between a bright red electric tram and the shined and chauffeured automobile of one of the old gratin, turned up the Rue de Rome and again on the Rue d'Isly. "Name's on the register, or at least the name of one of his lesser titles. Now we get to do the boring and soul-destroying part..."
"I refuse," Cramer said cheerily, turning up his collar against the cold, "to believe there's anything more boring and soul-destroying than combing through a hundred fifty French newspapers per day-and that's just the political ones, mind, and just the Parisian ones-in search of 'items of interest' to the War Department. Do your worst."
Asher grinned and led the way up the steps of the modest Hotel d'Isly, no more than a door between a state-run tobacconist's and a workingmen's estaminet.
"There speaks a brave soul and true agent." He had almost forgotten, he thought, the light camaraderie of the King's secret servants. The boy had promise. Pity he had no better teacher for the time being than Streatham.
Resuming the stance and speech of the Strasbourg German, he presented the clerk on duty in the narrow upstairs lobby with a tale, not of a vanished sister, but of a vanished trunk: a meter and a half long, leather-covered oak with iron strapping. A confusion in the Gare, misplaced labels... No? No. Perhaps the gnadige Herr could give some advice on the local cartage companies, such as a man might have summoned to the Gare? The city directory, to be sure, could be purchased, but it gave little idea...
"The Bottin, pff!" The clerk gestured. "Here is the list we use, m'sieu, when we have a client with such a trunk. Not all are on the telephone, you understand, but for such as are, there is the cabinet..."
"Wunderschoen! The Herr is entirely too kind. Certainly all the calls will be compensated for. Please accept this token..."
"It's up to you now," Asher said softly as the clerk returned to his counter and Asher and Cramer were alone by the wooden confessional of the telephone cabinet.
"You'll have to go along on foot and check the companies that aren't on the phone, but those are near enough to send a page with a note. I'll go back to the Terminus and keep an eye out for Karolyi. There's a cafe on the Rue d'Amsterdam corner of the Place du Havre, and