Street of the Five Moons Read Free Page A

upset, but I didn’t like to shatter his faith in female gentleness. Besides, I like brandy.
    “He looks like a Latin,” I said, sipping. It was good stuff.
    “Yes, you are right.” Feder leaned back in his chair, his glass held lightly between unexpectedly delicate fingers. “Spanish or Italian, perhaps. It is unfortunate that we found no identification.”
    “That seems suspicious.”
    “Perhaps not. The man was in the alley for hours, no one knows how long. It is possible that some casual thief robbed him. If he carried a wallet or pocketbook, it would have been stolen, for the money it contained. His papers, if any, would have been in that wallet. And a valid passport is always useful to the criminal element.”
    “Yes, of course,” I agreed. “A thief would have overlooked the jewel, since it was sewn into his clothing.”
    “So we think. There were a few odds and ends in his pockets, the sort of thing a thief would not bother with. Handkerchief, keys—”
    “Keys? Keys to what?”
    Feder produced a positively Gallic shrug.
    “But who can tell, Fräulein Doktor? They were not keys to an automobile. If he had an apartment, the good God alone knows where it might be. We inquired among the hotels of the city, but have had no luck. It is of course possible that he only arrived in Munich yesterday and had not registered at a hotel. Would you care to see the contents of his pockets?”
    “I suppose I should,” I said glumly.
    I wasn’t expecting anything. I just said that because I felt I shouldn’t overlook any possible clue. Little did I know that in that pitiful collection lay the key that was to unlock the case.
    It was a folded piece of paper. There were several other scraps like it, receipts from unidentified shops for small sums, none over ten marks. This particular scrap was not a receipt, just a page torn out of a cheap notebook. On it was written the number thirty-seven — the seven had the crossbar that is used by Europeans for writing that number, in order to distinguish it from their numeral one — and a curious little group of signs that resembled fingernail clippings. They looked like this:

    I sat staring at these enigmatic hieroglyphs until Herr Feder’s voice interrupted my futile theorizing.
    “A puzzle of some sort,” he said negligently. “I see no meaning in it. After all, the cryptic clue only occurs in Kriminalromanen , is that not correct?”
    “How true,” I said.
    Herr Feder laughed. “It is, perhaps, the address of his manicurist.”
    “Were his nails manicured?” I asked eagerly.
    “No, not at all.” Herr Feder looked at me reproachfully. “I made a little joke, Fräulein Doktor.”
    “Oh.” I giggled. “The address of his manicurist…. Very witty, Herr Feder.”
    I shouldn’t have encouraged him. He asked me to dinner, and when I said I was busy, to lunch next day. So I told him I was leaving town. Usually I deal with such matters more subtly, but I didn’t want to discourage him completely; who knows, I might need help from him if the case developed unexpected twists. Although at that point I didn’t even have a case, much less a twist.
    It was a gorgeous spring day, a little cool, but bright and blue-skied, with fat white clouds that echoed the shapes of Munich’s onion-domed church spires. I should have gone back to work — I had a number of odds and ends to clear up if I was going to play Sherlock — but there was no point in clearing them up, if I didn’t know where I was going. And I couldn’t face Professor Schmidt. He would expect me to have deduced all kinds of brilliant things from my visit to the police.
    I wandered toward the Alter Peter . I guess I should explain that this doesn’t refer to an elderly gentleman, but to Munich’s oldest church, dedicated to the Apostle. It was begun in 1181, which puts it into my period, but the redecorating of the eighteenth century converted it into a Baroque church, at least internally. Baroque sculpture