“It was in his hand. The scarf. Chances are she was wearing it when she shot him, at pretty close range, too. There was a powder burn on his shirt. So it must have been someone he trusted. That’s what my friend says, anyway.”

“Hmm.”

“What does ‘hmm’ mean?”

“I’m not a detective. So it means I really don’t know what to think about it, Henri.”

Of course this was hardly a surprise, given everything else that was now crowding in upon my mind; my head must have looked like a stowaway’s cabin on the ship in that Marx Brothers film. But most of the floor space was taken up with the realization that the whole thing involving Maugham hadn’t been much to do with blackmailing him, at all. Not really. That had just been the hors d’oeuvre. Hebel had something else for sale. Something much more important than a photograph of some naked men cavorting around a swimming pool in 1937. That had been nothing more than a lure, designed to secure everyone’s attention. To establish some credentials. Well, now he had them established, as if he had just presented them at the court of St. James while wearing white gloves and carrying a cocked hat with ostrich feathers.

“I did what you asked,” he said resentfully. “He was a good man, Spinola.”

“Sure, sure. I’ll look into it, okay, Henri? Maybe I’ll find something relevant. Maybe.”

But somehow the name of the woman who’d shot and killed our friend Spinola seemed of lesser importance besides an elaborate plot to blackmail the British Secret Intelligence Service.

FOURTEEN

Up at the Villa Mauresque they were finishing dinner; at least they were until I showed up with the money and the photograph. For a while I let them all think I’d done a great job of getting back the prints and the neg and somehow the fifty thousand dollars as well. I couldn’t have felt more popular there if I’d been Noël Coward wearing just a pair of sandals. I hadn’t the heart to tell any of them that the whole thing had been merely the first act in an opera that threatened to be longer than Tristan und Isolde. So we sat on the terrace under the starry sky, watched by a Pekingese dog and a couple of blackamoor wooden bishops, and I ate some corned-beef hash and drank amarone and even permitted Somerset Maugham to put my hand to his pink, rictus mouth and say that whatever they were paying me at the Grand Hôtel, he would double it if I came to work for him at the Villa Mauresque.

“Doing what, exactly?” I asked.