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

“You mean behind the potted palm?” The detective had to smile. Yet he could understand how the new baron might be unnerved by the thought of tarnishing his family name so soon. He put down his knife and fork. “Why don’t you bring me up to date.”

The baron pulled his chair closer. “The Nawab’s manservant put the cufflinks away in the jewel case Wednesday night. Dressing his master for Thursday dinner, he found one missing.”

“And who was here at that time?”

“Let me see. The Nawab arrived with Major Sowerby on Tuesday, from Rome, to see our orphanage with an eye to starting something similar in Jamkhandi. Mr. Hardacre and Signor Cipriani arrived Wednesday from Milan. This will be my first chance to meet the new Vieux Gaspard representatives my father chose just before his death last year. Of the other two, Herr Gruber didn’t come until after dinner on Thursday. A pickpocket stole his wallet in Milan and lack of identification delayed him at the border. And, of course, Mr. Thorwald arrived with you this morning, bedridden in Milan with traveler’s stomach until yesterday. I am sure the cufflink was stolen late Thursday afternoon.”

When Ganelon asked why, the baron explained, “Because that was when my wife saw the Phantom Balloon.” He smiled and added, “Who else but dear Louise?”

Ganelon understood. With Paris under siege during the Franco-Prussian War, the French evacuated the gold in the national treasury in hot-air balloons of a novel design. Each carried galvanic batteries to heat the air by means of a metal probe. When the balloon flotilla encountered fierce thunderstorms over the Massif Central, one balloon developed a loose battery connection. As it lost altitude, the crew dumped the precious cargo. When that failed to stop the descent, they escaped hand over hand along the tether line to their nearest neighbor. The damaged balloon was cut free and drifted southwestward, coming to rest in the forest north of San Sebastiano, where it became a local legend, rising into the air and coming to earth again at the loose battery connection’s whim. It was said that the Phantom Balloon could pass overhead unseen until noticed by one whose heart was pure. Hence Sandor’s “Who else but dear Louise?”

“When my wife rushed in with the news, the château spilled out onto the lawn, servants and all. I think that was when the thief stole the cufflink. We never saw the balloon, by the way. The wind must have shifted.”

“I understand one of your guests left this morning.”

The baron nodded. “Poor Cipriani. Oh yes, I know how it looks. But he couldn’t have been the thief. With tears in his eyes and the carriage at the door, he begged me, for the sake of his honor, to search his person and his luggage. I reluctantly agreed. LeSage and I were thorough, I assure you. No cufflink.”

Sandor stood up. “So there we are. After luncheon tomorrow I’m going to try a little parlor game suggested by one of our guests. If it doesn’t get the cufflink back and you’re done with the heads, may I put the matter in your hands?”

Ganelon returned to his measurements. But by late afternoon he had thrown down the calipers, closed his notebook, and turned away from the plaster head of Jean-Batiste Troppmann, the Kinck-family murderer. What he was looking for just wasn’t there.

Time to turn his mind to the cufflink. Why steal a single sapphire cufflink when you could just as easily have taken both, a matched pair worth four times as much? Ganelon shook his head. You don’t build a reputation catching stupid thieves. You needed someone like the Gooseberry Fool.

Or the murderer of the pickled boys. Some ten years after the Sandor orphanage opened, the corpses of four naked boys were discovered swirling slowly around in a solemn follow-the-leader in a sewer eddy beneath the Place d’lota. Using his vast knowledge of the sewer system, the Founder calculated water flow and the modest Mediterranean tidal effect at that phase of the moon to pinpoint the exact sewer grating down which the bodies had been dropped. Brine in the victims’ lungs led him to Bonhomme Pickle’s warehouse only a hundred feet away. At first, old Gaston maintained boys from the neighboring Sandor orphanage had drowned stealing from his pickle barrels, their companions dumping the bodies into the sewer. But he could not explain the battering about the victims’ heads. Taken into custody, Gaston would later confess to the murders and be sent to Duranceville prison for life. As for Baron Justin, his son took over the business and the old man never showed his poor, dog-eared head in San Sebastiano again.

No, they didn’t make cases like the pickled boys anymore. But when Ganelon had voiced that same complaint on a recent visit to Father Sylvanus in his hermitage, the saintly priest had suggested that the Founder had solved his case by force of character alone, implying it was character not cases that Ganelon lacked.