“My God! He sounds like Divine Correction out of a medieval play. Does Dr. Dahl-Soot know? Does Geraint Powell know?”

“I suppose they do. You’re the liaison man, or so I understood. Didn’t you tell them?”

“I don’t think I knew. Or fully realized.”

“You’d better tell them, then. Al and Mabel will be seeing you right away. They’re eager.”

“Who’s Mabel?”

“I’m not sure. I think she’s not quite Mrs. Crane, but she’s with him. Not to worry. Al has a big grant from the Pomelo Further Studies Fund to look after him. This is a courtesy schools of music frequently extend to one another. It’ll be all right.”

How lightly the Dean took such things! Doubtless that was the secret of being a dean. When, a couple of hours after his call, Darcourt gazed at Al and Mabel Crane, as they sat in his study, he wondered if it would really be all right.

Not that the Cranes looked menacing. Not at all. They had the look of expectancy Darcourt knew so well as an attribute of a certain kind of student. They wanted something to happen to them, and they wanted him to make it happen. They were probably in their middle twenties, but they had still the unfledged, student look. Apparently they travelled light and informally. It was cool in the Canadian spring, but Al Crane was dressed as if for a hot day. He wore chinos, a much crumpled seersucker coat, and a dirty shirt. The breast pocket of the coat hung heavily with a number of ball-point pens. His bare feet were thrust into sandals that would not last much longer. He had not shaved for two or three days, and his lantern jaws were dark. As for Mabel, the one arresting thing about her was that she was monstrously pregnant. The child she carried, though still unborn, was already sitting in her lap. Like Al, she was dressed for summer, the summer of Southern California, and she too was in a bad way for footwear. They both smiled, in a dog-like manner, as if hoping to be patted.

Al, however, knew what he wanted. He wanted several days with Hulda Schnakenburg, to go over the score of the opera and examine all the scraps of Hoffmann, which he called The Documentation, and then he wanted a few days with Dr. Dahl-Soot, whose presence in the matter was, he declared, awesome. Just to talk with Gunilla Dahl-Soot would be an enrichment. He wanted access to a Xerox machine, so that he could get facsimiles of everything, every inch of Hoffmann, every draft of Schnakenburg, every page of the completed score. He wanted to go over the libretto with whoever had prepared it, and he wanted to compare it with anything by Planché, from which it derived, or did not derive. He wanted to talk with the director, the designer, the designer of lighting, and the scenic artists. He wanted copies of every design, and every rejected design. He wanted to photograph the stage that would be used, and he wanted all its measurements.

“That’ll do to be going on with,” he said. “Then of course I’ll sit in on all the rehearsals and all the musical preparation. I’ll need a full C.V. from everybody involved. But right now, we’re wondering where we are to live.”

“I haven’t any idea,” said Darcourt. “You’d better talk to Dean Wintersen about that. There are lots of hotels.”

“I’m afraid a hotel would be way beyond us,” said Al. “We’ve got to watch the pennies.”

“I understood the Dean to say that you had a generous grant from Pomelo.”

“Generous for one,” said Al. “Tight for two. For three, I should say. You can see how it is with Mabel.”

“Oh, Al, do you think there’s been a slip-up?” said Mabel.

She was the kind of woman, Darcourt saw with alarm, who cries easily.

“Not to worry, Sweetness,” said Al. “I’m sure the professor has everything lined up.”

Don’t be too sure, thought Darcourt. There had been a time, before he recognized himself as the Fool, when he would have been badgered into assuming full responsibility for these Babes in the Wood. But as the Fool he had other things to attend to. So he gave the Cranes the name of Dean Wintersen’s secretary, and the telephone number at which the Doctor could be reached, and, by means of well-developed professorial will-power—the spiritual equivalent of the Chinese Chi-Kung—he shifted them off his chairs and out of his sight.

They went, thanking him profusely and assuring him that they looked forward to seeing him again. It had already been a terrific experience, they said, just meeting him.

Darcourt was not sure how he should approach Arthur and Maria about his discovery, now his certainty, of what The Marriage at Cana really was. Although the Cornish Foundation was in no way underwriting his biography of Francis Cornish, friendship and a sense of decency about a family with whom he was strongly involved made it obligatory that he should tell them what he had found, before he said anything to Princess Amalie and Prince Max. The picture belonged to the New York people, and who could guess what they might say to his information about their treasure? Was it a brilliant piece of detection in the world of art history, or was it the harsh unmasking of a fake? And if a fake, what did that mean in loss of money? That was trouble enough, but the touchiness of the Cornishes about anything that might reflect, however faintly, on the integrity of the great financial house was incalculable. So he dawdled, dotting i’s and crossing t’s in his documentation, and hoping that a favourable moment would declare itself.

The declaration came from an unexpected source. Wally Crottel was apprehended by the police selling marijuana to schoolchildren. In the playground of the Governor Simcoe Public School, Wally was plying a brisk trade in joints at the end of each school day, and some children, with that mixture of innocence and stupidity that marks a certain sort of childish mind, were walking home puffing proudly. Before the police could put the handcuffs on him Wally made an ill-advised break for freedom and was knocked down by a passing car; he was quite badly hurt, and was now in the General Hospital, with a policeman sitting outside his room, with nothing to do but read a paperback book which Mr. Carver told Darcourt was Middlemarch, an unexpected choice. Mr. Carver had tipped off the police about Wally’s profitable sideline, and Mr. Carver could not conceal a deep satisfaction at Wally’s fall.

“But you have to admit the guy was very well organized,” he said. “He was growing the stuff in a corner of a parking lot behind the boarding-house building where he lived. It was quite a small job, but you don’t need an awful lot of the old Mary-Jane to make a few joints, and Wally included a good deal of dried mint with it, to make it go as far as possible, and give a flavour kids liked. Wally was doing very well, for a small operator. Where the kids got the money to pay his price I don’t know, but there are quite a few rich kids in that district, and I think some of them were retailing what they bought from Wally, adulterated with dried grass and God knows what. Little bastards! Imagine kiddy pushers! But we live in a very strange world, professor.”

“We do, indeed. How did you get wise to Wally?”

“There’s a guy lives in the basement of that building where Mr. and Mrs. Cornish have the penthouse that I’ve known for years. Looks like a slob, but he’s not a real slob. I think he had it in for Wally, who was always snooping around that basement apartment, trying to find out how this man and his sister came to be living there. Now, the sister’s a bit of a psychic, and sometimes the cops use her, when they want one. Oh, yes; we cops are not above tips from psychics, and sometimes they’re very useful. You can’t discount anything you hear, in the detective business.”

“Will it go hard with Wally, when he comes to trial?”

“That crook Gwilt is hard at work, building up a case that Wally comes from a broken home—you know what I mean? He’ll do his best to keep Wally in the hospital as long as possible, so he can do whatever he can to get Wally tried before an easy judge. Fat chance! There aren’t any easy judges when it comes to pushing drugs to kids. Wally is headed for a long, reflective retirement as a guest of the Crown.”