“In his own apartment?”

“Why not?”

“And on his own rug? Candlemas might sacrifice an old friend, but why throw in a valuable rug?”

“How valuable?” Ray wanted to know. I couldn’t tell him, and Tsarnoff suggested dryly that we consult the rug peddler in our midst for an evaluation.

“Stop that!” Rasmoulian said. “Why does he do that? I am not an Armenian. I know nothing about carpets. Why does he say these things about me?”

“The same reason you call me a Russian,” Tsarnoff said smoothly. “Willful ignorance, my little adversary. Willful ignorance founded on malice and propelled by avarice.”

“I shall never call you a Russian again. You are a Circassian.”

“And you an Assyrian.”

“The Circassians are legendary. The women are exquisite whores, and the males are castrated young and make great gross eunuchs.”

“The Assyrians at their height were noted chiefly for their savagery. They have dwindled and died out to the point where the few in existence are wizened dwarves, the genetically warped spawn of two millennia of incestuous unions.”

We were making progress, I was pleased to note. For all the verbal escalation, neither Rasmoulian’s hand nor Wilfred’s had moved so much as an inch toward a concealed weapon.

“Candlemas didn’t kill Hoberman,” I said. “Even if he didn’t care about the rug, even if he had some dark reason to want Hoberman out of the picture, the timing was all wrong. Would he risk having a corpse on the floor when I got back with the royal portfolio?”

“He’d kill you, too,” Weeks said.

“And write off another rug? No, it doesn’t make sense that way. It’s a shame, too, because Candlemas makes a very convenient killer.”

“That’s the truth,” Ray said. “Tell ’em why, Bernie.”

“Because he’s dead himself,” I said, “and can’t argue the point. He died within hours of Hoberman, but he took longer to turn up. The cops found him in an abandoned building at Pitt and Madison.”

“That’s the place to find one,” said Mowgli, as one who knew. “A corpse or an abandoned building. Or both.”

“How was he killed?” Tsarnoff wanted to know.

“He was shot,” Ray said. “Small-caliber gun fired at close range.”

“Two different killers,” Tiglath Rasmoulian suggested. “This woodchuck stabbed the ram, and was shot by someone else.”

“If this happened in Anatruria,” Ilona said, “you would know that the woodchuck was shot by a son of his victim, or perhaps a brother. Even a nephew.” She shrugged. “But you would not inquire too closely, because this would not be a police matter. It is merely blood avenging blood, and honor requires it.”

“There’s no honor here,” I said. “And a good thing, too. There was only one killer. He followed Hoberman when he left the Boccaccio, tagged him to the woodchuck’s apartment a few blocks away, and stabbed him right off. Then he abducted Candlemas, took him down to Pitt Street -”

“ Pitt Street,” Mowgli said. “You’re down there, you might as well be dead.”

“-and killed him when he’d learned all he could from him. Or maybe he took him somewhere else, killed him after interrogating him, and took the dead body to Pitt Street.”

“Coals to Newcastle,” Mowgli said.

“Then someone was watching my building,” Michael said.

“No.”

“You mean this Hoberman was under surveillance all along?”

I shook my head. “The ram was visiting his old friend, the mouse. They hadn’t seen each other in years. And when the mouse told me about that visit, he made a real point of saying how the ram was in a hurry to get out of there.”

“Ah,” Charlie Weeks said. “You mean he was going to meet somebody on his way back to the woodchuck’s place.”

“No,” I said. “That’s not what I mean.”

“It’s not?”

“It’s not,” I said. “What I mean is that you wanted me to know that Hoberman was hardly in your apartment for any time at all. That way it wouldn’t occur to me that you had plenty of time to get him settled in with a cup of coffee and excuse yourself long enough to make a quick phone call.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you knew something was up. You didn’t know what, but you were the mouse and you smelled a rat. You couldn’t tag along with Hoberman. He’d be on guard. But you could call a confederate and stall Hoberman long enough for the man you called to post himself within line of sight of the Boccaccio’s front entrance. Whether or not he knew Hoberman by sight, you could supply a description that would make identification an easy matter.”

“Oh, weasel,” Charlie Weeks said. “I’m disappointed in you, coming up with a wild theory like that.”

“You deny it, then.”

“Of course I deny it. But I can’t deny the possibility that somebody followed Cappy home. It seems a little farfetched to me, but anything’s possible. Thing is, I don’t see how you’re going to guess who it was.”

“And if you had called someone, I’d just be guessing as to his identity, wouldn’t I?”

“Since I didn’t call anyone,” he said, “the question’s moot. But we can say that you’d just be taking a shot in the dark.”

“Wait a minute,” Carolyn said. “What about the dying message?”

“Ah, yes,” I said. “The dying message. Could Hoberman have left a clue to his killer? We know what his message was.” I walked over to my counter and reached behind it for the portable chalkboard I’d stowed there earlier. I propped it up where everybody could see it and chalked CAPHOB on it in nice big block caps. I let them take a good long look at it.

Then I said, “Cap hob. That’s what it looks like. That’s because we’re in America. If we were in Anatruria it would look entirely different.”

“Why’s that, Bernie?” Ray asked. “Have they got their heads screwed on upside down over there?”

“I could show you in the stamp catalog,” I said. “The Anatrurians, like the Serbs and the Bulgarians, use the Cyrillic alphabet. This is an important matter of national identity over there, incidentally. The Croats and Romanians use the same alphabet we do, while the Greeks use the Greek alphabet.”

“It figures,” Mowgli said.

“The Cyrillic alphabet was named for St. Cyril, who spread its use throughout Eastern Europe, although he probably didn’t invent it. He did missionary work in the region with his brother, St. Methodius, but they didn’t name an alphabet after St. Methodius.”

“They named an acting technique,” Carolyn said. “After him and St. Stanislavski.”

“The Cyrillic alphabet is a lot like the Greek,” I said, “except that it’s got more letters. I think there’s something like forty of them, and some are identical in form to English letters while some look pretty weird to western eyes. There’s a backward N and an upside-down V and one or two that look like hen’s tracks. And some of the ones that look exactly like our own have different values.”

Carolyn said, “Values? What do you mean, Bern? Is that like how many points they’re worth in Scrabble?”

“It’s the sound they make.” I pointed to the blackboard. “It took me forever to think Cappy’s dying message might be in Cyrillic,” I said, “and for two reasons. For one, he was an American. Early on I didn’t know the case had an Anatrurian connection, or that he’d ever been east of Long Island. Besides, all six of the letters he wrote were good foursquare red-blooded American letters. But it so happens they’re all letters of the Cyrillic alphabet as well.”

“I do not know this alphabet,” Rasmoulian said carefully. “What do they spell in this alphabet?”

“The A and the O are the same in both alphabets,” I said. “The Cyrillic C has the value of our own S. The P is equivalent to our R, just like the rho in the Greek alphabet. The H looks like the Greek eta, but in Cyrillic it’s the equivalent of our N. And the Cyrillic B is the same as our V.”

In a proper chalk talk, I’d have printed a transliteration of the Cyrillic on the slate. Instead I gave them a few seconds to work it out for themselves.