Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005

When Ganelon left the palace, he went directly to the commissariat of police to check the information Editha Simonova gave the authorities on entering the country. As he headed toward the record office, he passed the gaunt figure of Police Commissioner Medocq. They did not exchange greetings. Ganelon had to smile. Medocq reminded him of a court fool named Captain Cloux who died of the sullens because his royal master brought another fool to court. Rather than a fool, Ganelon saw himself as a guardian angel to the House of Tancredi, whose princes all had a large dash of the simpleton in their composition.

At the records office, he handed in the ballerina’s name and, as an afterthought, that of Stevens the barber as well. The dusty old clerk dottered away, returned in a moment with the ballerina’s card. Ganelon sat down with it at a table by the window.

Name, Editha Simonova; place of birth, Kiev; nationality, Russian. No reason to read any further. That seemed to settle the matter once and for all. Ganelon sat in thought for a few moments. He was about to rise and return to the palace with the bad news when the old clerk, looking even dustier than before, came over to lay a faded folder in front of him.

Ganelon opened it to find Gordon Stevens’s fresh white entry card. Place of birth, London; nationality, British subject; marital status, single. Behind the form were several yellowing items from an older, more suspicious time when the forces of reaction saw treachery at every turn and policemen like then Sergeant Medocq had to scrutinize anything out of the ordinary. And what was more unusual than a traveling sideshow called the Caravan of Wonders?

Unfolding the show’s fragile handbill, Ganelon was suddenly transported back to his boyhood, when he made his living running errands for out-of-town merchants who knew him from his days as a pot boy at the Sign of the Saracen Dog before the authorities closed the place down.

One Sunday long ago, young Ganelon had gone to this very show. He read down the acts remembering: the mathematical goat, a sad-faced creature who did sums and multiplication; a parrot who sang “God Save the King” and told fortunes; and Little Boy Blue, the Welsh trumpet prodigy who played the instrument wearing nothing but a loincloth and blue body dye. Here Ganelon followed a police notation in a spidery hand and rusty ink in the margin to the entry declaration of Thomas Stevens, British subject, owner of the Caravan of Wonders, who declared Gordon to be his son.

On the bottom of this form the police wondered if the father might be connected with a family of English smugglers of the same name. They also suspected the boy to be a midget, an operative of the High Woad, the Secret Council of Welsh terrorists fighting for independence from England.

Ganelon returned to the handbill. He remembered the next act, the Persian ropedancers. He had expected tightrope performers, not a pair of turbaned dervishes who smoked hemp and then danced around in a circle going faster and faster with larger and larger grins on their faces. Could they be Jangalis, the police wondered, a tribe of Persian assassins working to overthrow the Shah?

The next attraction on the handbill was Madam Stevens, the Pig-Faced Lady. She was an extra. To see “Madam at Table” Ganelon paid another sou and stood on tiptoe at the peephole. Inside, by the light of a dim oil lamp, he saw a large woman in a marmalade wig, sitting bent over a table eating cream-filled cakes with clumsy, gloved fingers. She wore a checked dress whose short sleeves revealed arms bare to above the elbow. The woman’s profile was hideous and snouted, her skin’s pallor accentuated by a cheek and lip rouge as red as radishes.

Suddenly, as if sensing the boy’s gaze, Madam Stevens turned full round and faced the peephole with the weariest and saddest eyes young Ganelon had ever seen. Ganelon remembered the boy thinking as he turned from the peephole how sad it must be to have a face so ugly. How could she ever find a husband or earn a living except by putting herself on public display?

What surprised him now was how the hopeless set of Madam Stevens’s shoulders and the cock of her head mirrored the gesture of the veiled woman on the street the night before.

Ganelon glanced back at the barber’s entry card. Pinned to it was the required statement from Stevens’s landlord declaring he was indeed renting an apartment to Stevens and his sister. Sister? Ganelon checked back through the contents of the folder. He found no entry card for a sister. Was she married? Had she filled out the card under another name?

This reminded Ganelon that there had been no entry card for Madam Stevens, the Pig-Faced Lady, in the old file. He tugged at his lower lip thoughtfully before jotting down the barber’s address.