Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 17, No. 90, May 1951

The older English people he found more easy to place. He could guess, with reasonable confidence, at their social standing and their mutual relations. He could also make something of the Americans. The French, on the other hand, he found mysterious in the extreme. These ladies, so very smart and so very highly finished — were they or were they not all that they should be? As for the men, he gave them up altogether. Some were clean-shaven, and were not to be distinguished from Englishmen until they spoke. Others wore dark suits and spade-shaped beards, and were at all times indistinguishable from one another.

At night, Mr. Cronk would watch the couples on the dancing-floor, and would think how pretty the girls looked now that long frocks were back in fashion. There was, he learned, to be a big masked ball in a week or so. He found himself looking forward to that with eagerness. In his quiet way he was enjoying himself hugely.

But though Mr. Cronk’s arrival seemed to cause no stir on the surface of life in the Hotel Splendide, it did in fact set in motion some odd crosscurrents below the surface. He would have been astonished and shocked, for instance, if he could have looked in at an extraordinary general meeting held in the back premises of the “Chat Noir” a day or two after he came.

The “Chat Noir” was a rather dubious gambling establishment, to which the respectable visitors to Plage-sur-Mer were accustomed to sneak off when they wanted a glimpse of the seamy side of life. But the meeting was held on the top floor, to which the respectable visitors were never allowed to penetrate; and the subject for discussion was “Cronk, And What To Do About Him.”

The gathering was a mixed one, socially and sartorially. It included several people whom Mr. Cronk might have recognized as denizens of different spheres in the hotel.

There was the extremely smart French Countess, with the blue-black hair and olive skin of the south, who took her meals at the table in the window in conspicuous and haughty solitude. She was now sitting beside, and hobnobbing familiarly with, her own maid. There was also the athletic-looking young English man who had signed the register just after Mr. Cronk on his day of arrival. There were two French guests, one anglicized, one spade-bearded. There was a person in a green baize apron, from the knife-and-boot department. There was a waiter. And there was the second supernumerary junior assistant hall porter.

The rest of the party were recognizable at a glance to any film-fan as thugs, toughs, or Bad Men. Useful fellows, no doubt, for their specialized purpose; but their hair grew too close to the eyebrows for them to appear either decorative or intelligent. Their contributions to the discussion consisted of grunts when they approved of what was being said, and of snarls when they did not.