The Great Game (4 page)

             
"Good afternoon, Herr Davoud," Paul said. "I commend you on a degree of elegance that I imagine is seldom seen within the sound of the Petruskirche bells. I assume that Petruskirche has bells, although come to think of it, I don't remember ever hearing them. Are you coming or going?"

             
"Oh, returning, I assure you, returning. I have just been about the tiresome business of having yet another young rapscallion twig of the nobility
explain
to me why he was willing to allow me to loan him a considerable sum of money." Davoud set the gloves, cane, and hat down and took his coat off; carefully fitting it onto a hanger, pulling out its shoulders and smoothing down the velvet collar before hanging it out of sight behind the back doorway. "Come," he said, opening the door in the counter, "come in the back and have with me a cup of black tea."

             
"Just the thing, Herr Davoud," Paul said, and followed the shopkeeper into a small room in the back. The lighting in this room came from an inverted V-shaped skylight with twelve panes of glass and a web of iron bars beneath to make sure nothing but the light came through.

             
"They were stolen," Davoud commented, settling into one of a pair of overstuffed armchairs. "Take off your coat and hat and hang them over there. Joseph, my boy, put the kettle on."

             
Paul did as he had been bidden and dropped into the other chair. "What was stolen?"

             
"The church bells.
Sometime in the sixteenth century, I believe, they were stolen. It is my opinion that the church itself stole them, as the authorities were planning to take them and melt them down for cannon. The authorities at that moment had a great need for cannon. The Turkish army, I believe, was at the gates and behaving in an unfriendly manner."

             
"Ah!" Paul said.

             
The two sat in comfortable silence while Davoud busied himself filling and lighting a long, curved clay pipe. With a gesture he offered Paul some tobacco from an ornately carved wooden box, and Paul took a well-chewed brown pipe from his jacket pocket and filled it with the strong latakia mixture. "Thank you," he said.
"Cigarettes for action, but a pipe for reflection."

             
"That's what I say myself," the old man replied.

             
"I know." Paul smiled. "I was quoting you."

             
"Ah!" The two men were puffing away contentedly when, a couple of minutes later, Joseph wheeled a tea tray to the space between the two chairs and filled two cups from a silver urn.

             
Davoud took the clay pipe from his mouth and put it aside. "I saw a woman—a lady, actually—smoking a cigarette earlier today," he said, taking his cup in both hands and breathing in the aroma of the fresh-brewed tea. Paul looked at him inquiringly.

             
He nodded. "It was at the Hotel Metropol, where I went to meet the young nobleman who wished to permit me to advance him five thousand kronen. She sat in the lobby. A dainty young thing with her hair up in a bun—so—and a trim black lace bonnet with a satin ribbon and a black velvet half-cape over a hunter-green gown. Elegant, she was. And while I waited for the youth to appear, she lit one of those long Balkan cigarettes and puffed away at it."

             
"You have a better eye for women's clothing than most men," Paul commented.

             
"My wife, God rest her soul, was a dressmaker," Davoud explained.

             
"So, what happened?"

             
"The young branch of a noble bush finally showed up—"

             
"With the lady who smoked," Paul interrupted.

             
"Well, in the end nothing," Davoud said. "The manager and the desk clerk and a couple of other hotel employees gathered in a clutch to discuss the matter in horrified tones, but I heard the name 'Princess Someone-or-Other' mentioned a couple of times, which I gathered referred to the young lady in question, and in the end it was evidently decided that royalty trumps manners, so they retreated. Eventually she put the cigarette out. Now tell me, Herr Donzhof, what can I do for you today?"

             
"A cup of tea," Paul said, "a little conversation."

             
"And perhaps a discreet name or two from my list of distinguished clients?"

             
"If any new ones have come your way ..."

             
Davoud pointed a long, arthritic finger across the tea tray at Paul. "I wonder about you," he said.

             
"I thought you might," Paul said.

             
"You are not what you seem."

             
"You are the second person to tell me that today," Paul said. "Is my nose growing longer? Is there no hope that I'll become a real boy?"

             
Davoud shrugged a tiny shrug. "I am not suggesting that you lie, that would be pointless. Of course you lie. We all lie. Complete honesty would quickly become unbearable. What you do is"—he searched for a word—"more interesting. You allow those you deal with to assume things about you—unspoken things—that they believe they have discovered on their own. But these things, I believe, are not so."

             
Paul leaned back in his chair, his eyes wide. "Really?" he drawled. "What sort of things?"

             
Davoud patted the air with his hand in a calming gesture. "Do not be alarmed. I have no desire to give you away. Besides, I would have no idea to whom to give you or what they would want with you. I have not discovered who you are, merely who you are not."

             
"Do go on!"

             
Davoud laced his hands together over his belly and rested his chin on his thumbs. "What I know about you is little," he said contemplatively. "You are a good conversationalist, highly intelligent, well-educated,
gem
ü
tlich,
and generally agreeable."

             
"How can I deny any of it?" Paul asked, smiling.

             
"You are also of the upper class, a fact which you do your best to disguise, but which comes through in your air of natural superiority and your complete ease in dealing with servants. I have noticed that only born aristocrats treat servants completely naturally; either as equals, as children, or as furniture according to their nature. The middle classes treat their servants with arrogance or suspicion." He peered at Paul, who remained silent.

             
"Also your German, while excellent, is not native. There is something indefinably foreign that lingers about it. Most people would not notice, I grant you, but the accent is nonetheless there."

             
"I went to school in Italy and England," Paul offered.

             
"Perhaps.
Now let us look at our—what shall I say?—business relationship. You approached me last May—"

             
"Was it that long ago?"

             
"I keep a diary. May twelfth of last year it was. You were interested in the names of my clients—"

             
"The politically or socially important, I believe I said.
"

             
"
You did. And military officers of staff rank and above.
"

             
"
Indeed."

             
"And you declined to tell me what you intended to do with the information, but you did assure me that my name would never be disclosed."

             
"Just so."

             
"I thought you were some sort of high-class criminal.
"

             
"
Is that so? You never told me.
"

             
"
It would have been impolite."

             
"Ah! But what would I—if I were a crook—want with the names of people who need your services? They would obviously have little to steal, having pledged everything of value to you."

             
"But if you were a clever crook, and even at the time I could see you were clever, you might wish to use some distressed member of upper-class society as entree into the houses of the rich. Once there—"

             
"How clever of me," Paul commented. "But you didn't," Davoud continued. "Ah!"

             
"Or then again you might offer to advance large sums of money to some of these wastrels against their future inheritance. And then, after a discreet length of time, a carefully arranged fatal accident to the relative with the money would bring a nice profit to you."

             
"Why Herr Davoud, you have a criminal mind!"

             
"I do, I confess it. I came up with a total
of,
I believe it was, twelve different schemes that you might have been engaged in. And I find that, as far as I can tell, you are pursuing none of them." Davoud wiggled an accusatory finger at Paul. "And you led me to believe, in oh-so-subtle ways, that you, also, have the mind of a criminal."

             
"A criminal?"

             
"I discovered that you were letting it be known among certain groups of our, ah, more adventurous citizens, that you were in actuality an agent of a British master criminal known as Professor Moriarty."

             
"I never made that claim," Paul protested. "Someone—I think it was a jeweler named Berkmann—made that assumption, and I admit that I did not disabuse him of the notion."

             
"A master jewel thief named Berkmann, yes. The professor Moriarty had provided him with assistance once or twice, and he is convinced that the professor has a vast criminal network throughout Europe."

             
"Well I assure you that I never heard of this Professor Moriarty until Berkmann mentioned him. But then, well, if being his agent would simplify my life, then I would become his agent."

             
"So again you found the truth, whatever that might be, less than useful. Is that so?"

             
Paul leaned back in his chair and sipped his tea. "Let us go over this in a reasonable manner," he said. "I somehow caused you to believe that I was a criminal. And now you have concluded that I'm not. And you are shocked to discover that I'm an honest man."

             
"I would be at least mildly surprised to discover that anyone was a completely honest man," Davoud said. "It's merely that the manner of your dishonesty eludes me at the moment." He moved his hand in a patting motion, as though he were soothing an invisible cat. "I mean nothing disrespectful."

             
"How do you know that I am not engaged in any of your imaginary nefarious schemes?" Paul asked.

             
"I keep a close eye on several of my, ah, clients," Davoud said. "With one gentleman the eye is that of his valet, and one cannot get much closer than that. Had you been so engaged, I would have heard."

             
"Ah!" Paul said. "Tell me, if you feared that I was some sort of master criminal, why did you supply me with the names?
Surely not for the few kronen that I offered?"