The Dead Mountaineer's Inn (25 page)

“You were lucky, Inspector,” he said, beaming. “Another second and he would have broken your head. Where did you fall? On your shoulder?”

I nodded. I couldn't speak: the wind had been knocked out of me.

“Wait a second,” Simone said and ran into the dining room, tossing the broken cue on the table.

I walked around to the other side of the table and sat in the shade so I could see Hinkus. He was still lying there motionlessly. A real son of a bitch, though he didn't look like much … Yes, gentlemen, a gangster in the best Chicago tradition. But what was he doing in our respectable country? And just think: Zgut and I make the same salary. They should shower him with gold!… I pulled a handkerchief out of my pocket and carefully dabbed at the cut on my forehead.

Hinkus started groaning; he rolled over and tried to stand up. He was still holding his head. Simone returned with a carafe of water. I took it, somehow made my way to Hinkus and poured some on his face. Hinkus growled and removed one of his hands from his head. His face was pretty green again, though that was understandable now. Simone squatted down beside him.

“I hope I didn't overdo it,” he said, worried. “I didn't have time to think, you know.”

“Don't worry about it, old man, everyone will be fine,” I raised my hand to pat him on the shoulder, and groaned in pain. “I'll take it from here.”

“Should I leave?” Simone asked.

“Not at all, I think you'd better stay. Otherwise he might turn the tables again. Get some more water … In case there's any fainting …”

“And brandy!” Simone said enthusiastically.

“Right,” I said. “That'll bring him around quickly. Only don't tell anyone what's happened.”

Simone brought some more water and an open bottle of cognac. I pried Hinkus's mouth open and poured in a neat half glass. I drank the other half myself. Simone, who had presciently brought in a second glass, drank with us. Then we dragged Hinkus over to the wall and leaned him up against it. I poured more water out of the carafe over him and slapped him twice on the cheeks. He opened his eyes and took a loud breath.

“Another brandy?” I asked.

“Yes …” he whispered hoarsely.

I gave him another glass of cognac. He licked his lips.

“What did you mean about the seventy-second ‘D'?” he said intently.

“All in good time,” I said.

He shook his head and winced.

“No, it won't work. It's life for me.”

“Wanted and listed?” I said.

“Bingo. Now I only want one thing: to avoid the gallows. And by the way, I've got a pretty good shot. I didn't have anything to do with Olaf, you know that, and what else is there? Illegal possession of a weapon? You've still got to prove that I had it on me …”

“How about assaulting a police officer?”

“Well, that's what I'm talking about!” Hinkus said, carefully feeling the top of his head. “As far as I'm concerned, there wasn't any attack: there was only a full confession before the beginning of the official investigation. What do you think, chief?”

“I haven't heard any confession yet,” I reminded him.

“You will,” said Hinkus. “But you have to promise me, in the presence of this physicist. The seventy-second ‘D'—promise?”

“All right,” I said. “Let's say it was a fight on personal grounds, due to intoxication. That is, you were intoxicated and I tried to reason with you.”

Simone snickered.

“What about me?”

“You helped me handle him … All right, enough jabber. Talk, Finch. And think twice before lying to me—you've knocked two of my teeth loose already, you bastard …”

He just looked at me with his yellow eyes. Then he started talking.

“It's like this,” he began. “The Champion sent me here. You never heard of Champ? Of course you have … So two months ago Champ dug up this guy. Where and how he dug, I don't know. I don't know his real name either. We called him Beelzebub. It fit, he gave us the creeps … He only worked two jobs with us, but these weren't easy lifting by any means, and he did them clean, beautiful … Well, you know all about it. The Second National Bank was one, the armored car full of gold bars was the other. You know about those, huh, chief? There you go. Unsolved cases, and even the police know that the guys you've locked up don't have anything to do with it. Anyway, he did these two jobs for us and then suddenly decided to cut us off. Why he did this, that's another question, but our little Beelzebub ran away, and they sent us to intercept him. To find
out where he was, to get him in our sights and then whistle for Champ … If worst came to worst, we were supposed to finish him off on the spot. I was the one who managed to corner him here, and there you have my full confession.”

“All right, then, which one of our guests is Beelzebub?”

“Well. that's where I blundered, as you so correctly put it, chief. I figured it was the magician, Du Barnstoker. In the first place, he's got those magic tricks. In the second, I thought, ‘If Beelzebub wanted to go around incognito, how would he disguise himself?' Without making a fuss, I mean—then I saw it: a magician!”

“You've mixed something up here,” I said. “A magician, okay, I get that. But Barnstoker and Moses are fire and water. One's skinny and tall, the other's squat and fat.”

Hinkus waved his hand.

“I've seen him look different at different times, sometimes fat, sometimes skinny. No one knows what he looks like normally … You got to understand, Chief: Beelzebub's not an ordinary guy. He's a sorcerer, a werewolf! He has power over dark forces …”

“Baloney …” I said.

“Right,” Hinkus said. “Naturally no one's going to believe it who hasn't seen for himself … Like for example, this broad he travels with—who do you think she is, chief? With my own eyes I saw her wrench a two-ton safe out of the wall and carry it along the eaves of a building. She had it under her arm. She was small then, puny, nothing to her—a kid, a teenager like this Barnstoker girl … but with these arms, two meters long—no, three meters …”

“Stop lying, Finch,” I said sternly.

Hinkus waved his hand and looked frustrated, but then he perked up again.

“Well, all right, then,” he said. “Maybe I'm lying, maybe I'm
not. But then excuse me for mentioning it, but I did manage to get the best of you with my bare hands, Chief, and here you are, a big guy, a guy who knows how to fight … So just ask yourself, who could have taken care of me that way, as if I were a baby, and shoved me under the table?”

“Who?” I asked.

“She could! Now I get how it all happened. He recognized me—must have remembered me, the bastard. And when he realized that I was sitting up on the roof, and wasn't going to let him leave the building alive, he sent his girl up to get me. He made her look like me, too!”—Hinkus's eyes grew wide with horror—“Mother of mercy, there I was, sitting, and here it is standing in front of me, that is, there I am, standing, naked, a corpse, eyes dripping … How I didn't kick the bucket right then out of sheer terror, I have no idea. I blacked out three times, I swear … The weirdest part was, I drink plenty, but I don't get drunk, it's like I'm pouring it out on the ground … But then somehow he knew that something isn't right with me, in my skull I mean, that I'd gotten it from my old man. He used to imagine weird stuff too, and then he would grab his gun and start to shoot … Beelzebub must have decided to either drive me nuts or scare me until I passed out, so he could slip away. And when he saw that it wasn't working, well, then he decided to use force …”

“So why didn't he just kill you?” I asked.

Hinkus shook his head.

“He can't. I mean, why else would he tie me up? When we hit the armored car, you know, we had to get rid of its protection first. Guys got worked up, and it looked for a second like he'd gotten blood on his hands—Beelzebub, I mean … But he could lose all of his infernal power if he took a human life. Champ told us that. Otherwise why would we be tracking him down? God forbid!”

“I see …” I said uncertainly.

Once again, I was in the dark. Hinkus was undoubtedly psychotic—as he himself had admitted. But there was a method to his madness. Within the frame of his craziness all the means eventually became ends—even silver bullets had a place in the picture. And all of it seemed to be interwoven in some strange way with things that had actually happened. The safe from the Second National Bank really had disappeared astonishingly into thin air, baffling everyone. The experts shook their heads, the only tracks leading from the scene of the crime were found on the eaves of the building. And witnesses to the armored car robbery had persistently repeated under oath—as if they'd all agreed on it beforehand—that it had begun when a man grabbed the armored car under its carriage and flipped it on its side … God only knew how to explain it all.

“What about the silver bullets?” I asked, just in case. “Why's the gun loaded with silver bullets?”

“Come on,” Hinkus explained condescendingly. “Lead bullets aren't any good against werewolves. Champ made some up beforehand, just in case. He showed them to Beelzebub and said, ‘Rock the boat, and here's how you'll die. Remember that.' ”

“But then why did they stay in the inn?” I said. “They tied you up and then stuck around …”

“That I don't know,” Hinkus admitted. “That I don't understand myself. When I saw Barnstoker this morning, I was flabbergasted. I thought they'd have taken off a long time ago, vanished without a trace … Huh, it wasn't Barnstoker, of course, but at the time I thought it was Barnstoker … Yeah, Beelzebub is here, but why he stayed, I don't know. Maybe he couldn't get through the avalanche either? He may be a wizard, but he's not God. For example, he can't fly, everyone knows
that. Can't walk through walls either … However, that woman with him—or whatever it is—could clear up any obstruction in a second. Instead of hands, he could've attached scoops to her, like a dump truck's, and that would've been it …”

I turned to Simone.

“Well,” I said. “What does science have to say about all this?”

The look on Simone's face surprised me. The physicist was taking it seriously.

“Mr. Hinkus's arguments contain at least one very interesting detail,” he said. “Beelzebub is not omnipotent. You see that, Inspector? A very important point. And very strange. One would think there would be no laws or limits to the fantasies of such ignorant people, but there are … But then how was Olaf killed?”

“That I don't know,” Hinkus said firmly. “I don't know anything about Olaf, Chief. I swear it.” He put his hand over his heart. “All I can say is that Olaf was not one of ours, and if Beelzebub really did finish him off, for a reason I don't understand … Then Olaf isn't a person, but some kind of creature, like Beelzebub himself. I told you already, Beelzebub isn't allowed to kill people. He's not his own worst enemy—you understand me?”

“Well, well,” Simone said. “So how was Olaf killed, Inspector?”

I briefly laid out the facts for him: the door locked from the inside, the twisted neck, the spots on the face, the pharmaceutical smell. I watched Hinkus the whole time I was talking: he twitched, shivered, his eyes darting all over the place, and finally, asked desperately for another sip. It was clear that all this was new information to him, and that he was so scared he was practically shuddering. Simone frowned deeply. His eyes had grown vacant, and his yellowish, shovel-shaped teeth
were barred. When I was finished, he swore softly. He didn't say anything else.

I took a sip of cognac and treated Hinkus to one too—we were both feeling under the weather. I don't know how I looked, but Hinkus was quite green; from time to time he touched his head carefully. I left the physicist to his thoughts and started in on Hinkus again.

“All right, Finch—but how did you manage to track him down? You didn't know beforehand what form he'd taken …”

Hinkus smiled, looking smug despite his greenish tinge.

“You aren't the only ones who can track people down, Inspector,” he said. “First of all, Beelzebub may be a wizard, but he's also a fool. He drags that trunk around with him wherever he goes. It's the only one like it in the world. So all I had to do was ask around until I found out where the trunk had gone. Second, he's got money to burn … Whatever he pulled out of his pocket, that's what he paid. People like that are rare, as you yourself know. Wherever he'd been, they only talked about him. There's no trick to it. Generally speaking, I find who I'm looking for … That Barnstoker turned out to be a mistake—I can't deny it: the old man pulled the wool over my eyes. Those damned lollipops of his … And then, I go out into the lobby, he's sitting there alone, thinking that no one was watching him, holding some kind of wooden doll in his hands. You guys should have seen what he was doing with it!… Yup, I messed up with that one, of course …”

“Not to mention that he was always with that woman …” I said thoughtfully.

“No,” said Hinkus. “The woman isn't necessarily always with him, Chief. When there's a job to be done, he gets her from somewhere … And anyway, she's not a woman, she's some sort of werewolf like him … No one knows where he stows her when she's not around.”

And then I caught myself: there I was, a respectable, experienced police officer, no longer a young man, sitting discussing werewolves, wizards and sorcerers completely seriously with a partially insane criminal … I looked at Simone guiltily, but found that the physicist had disappeared, and that in his place, leaning against the doorway, stood the owner with his Winchester under his arm, and I remembered all the hints, all the little conversations about zombies, and his fat index finger wagging meaningfully in front of my face. I felt even more humiliated; I lit a cigarette and with deliberate severity turned to Hinkus.