Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 116, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 709 & 710, September/October 2000

Years ago, on the Nawab’s first visit to Europe, a bomb had been thrown into his carriage in a Dresden street. The sputtering device passed through one window and out the other and bounced down some steps before exploding in a pastry-shop basement.

The Dresden police had reason to suspect Snarks. Some months before, the Nawab, dressed in the colorful costume of his native land, chose to dine at Aladdin’s, a London restaurant of an Arabian Nights decor. As his party approached the entrance, an English gentleman emerged and, mistaking the Nawab for the doorman, gave him sixpence and ordered he call him a cab. “All right, you’re a cab,” the Nawab replied. “But it will take more money than this to get me to call you hansom.” The pun became famous throughout Europe. Yes, the Snarks hated the punster worst of all.

The carriage containing Ganelon and Thorwald left the city proper by the Porte de l’Est. Ganelon found something of historical interest to point out to Thorwald whenever his eyes crept toward his hook. Suburban villas soon gave way to prosperous farms. Then they crossed the stone bridge with its ruined water mill and entered Transporpentine San Sebastiano.

In 1860, Sardinia ceded Savoy to France. Reviving Savoy’s ancient claim to San Sebastiano, the French attacked at dawn across the winding Tortue river. The principality’s outnumbered little army drove them back. Then, with San Sebastiano committed militarily on the west, the French cavalry appeared in force across the Porpentine. The bridge’s few defenders barricaded themselves in the water mill, knowing no reinforcements could reach them through streets clogged with morning traffic.

The confident French, giving themselves over to brio, bugle blowing, and rushing about with messages, were astonished when San Sebastiano’s crack sharpshooter regiment arrived, mounted behind the amazons of the women’s chapter of the Club Velocipede, who had darted there through traffic on their dashing penny-farthings. Brissac-Charbonelle’s vivid paintings have immortalized the battle, the women in their broad pink-and-blue-striped jerseys, heads bent over the handlebars, the soldier-marksmen seated behind them firing left and right, the panic among the French horses. After the Half-Day War, as it came to be called, France was obliged to cede territory across the Porpentine which doubled the size of the principality.

Several miles onward, the easy slope of Mont St. Hugues and then the tower of the Sandor château appeared above the trees. The baroness, an attractive woman with an English wild-rose complexion, waited on the steps to greet them. Ganelon judged her several years older than her husband. They had met in England during the Sandor firm’s failed merger talks with its principal rival, Old Father William’s Supplifying Salve. Ganelon understood the baroness had been on the London musical stage.

When he and Throwald stepped down from the carriage, she laughed, “What a smell of lavender! For a moment I thought dear Signor Cipriani had come back to us.” Then she apologized for her husband’s absence. The hunters were still in the field.

The baroness impressed Ganelon as a steadfast wife, one who judges others by whether they can help her husband or harm him. Had he only imagined that she seemed particularly grateful he had come? Ganelon had been taught to expect ulterior motive behind social invitations. Fashionable hostesses used to ask the Founder to their affairs to scare off jewel thieves.

The detective was given into the hands of LeSage, a middle-aged servant with an intelligent face who led him down several corridors. For Ganelon’s convenience, his rooms would be in the tower Baron Justin built to house his collection. “It will also be quieter for you, sir,” explained Le Sage. “The old moat has been excavated around the château proper for foundation repairs and installing the new drains. The masons will be back on Monday.”

Reaching the tower, they took an iron circular staircase. The first two floors housed the plaster heads in cubby holes, the third the grandfather’s old living quarters, which were well aired and bright. The study was dominated by a large marble head marked out phrenologically. A framed daguerreotype on one wall showed two men standing before a horse-drawn caravan.

“If the bald gentleman is Baron Justin, the other must be Gaston, the child-killer,” observed Ganelon.

“Bonhomme Pickle himself, sir. In Paris. Usually they set up shop across from the Prison de la Roquette, where heads rolled like cabbages at harvest time. Their wagon held all they needed to make casts before returning the heads to the bereaved.” LeSage pointed to a thick binder on the desk. “The registry, sir. Whenever you’re ready to begin, I’ll fetch the heads you’d like to see.”