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son,” Snape said. “Boyle here is very into police brutality. He watches too much TV. The last suspect we had in here ended up in intensive care and he was just in for double parking.”
    “It’s still private,” I said.
    “All right,” Snape grumbled. “If you want to see your big brother arrested for murder . . .”
    “Nick . . . !” Herbert whimpered.
    “Wait a minute,” I said. “We don’t have to break a client’s confidence.”
    “Your client’s dead,” Snape said.
    “I noticed. But he’s still our client.” I gave him my friend liest smile. “Look, Chief Inspector,” I said. “You tell us what you know and we’ll tell you what we know. That seems fair to me.”
    Snape looked at me thoughtfully. “How old are you?” he asked.
    “Thirteen.”
    “You’re smart for your age. If you go on as smart as this, maybe you won’t reach fourteen.”
    “Just tell us.”
    “Why should I? How do I know you know anything at all.”
    “We know about the key,” I said. “And about the falcon.”
    I admit they were two shots in the dark. The Fat Man had mentioned a key, and with his dying breath Johnny Naples had muttered something about a falcon. Neither of them made any sense to me, but I had gambled that they would mean something to this Snape character. And I was right. He had raised an eyebrow at the mention of the key. The other one joined it when I followed with the falcon.
    He finished the cigarette, dropped the butt, and ground it out with his heel. “Okay,” he said. “But you’d better be on the level, Nick. Otherwise I’ll let Boyle spend a little time alone with you.”
    Boyle looked at me like he was trying to work out a new pattern for my face.
    “Johnny Naples flew in here from South America a month ago,” Snape began. “We picked him up when he came through passport control, then we lost him, then—just a few days ago—we found him again at the Hotel Splendide. We’ve had him under observation ever since. You and your brother were the first people to see him, as far as we know. He never went out—not while we were watching.”
    “Why were you watching him?” Herbert asked.
    “That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Snape snapped. He lit himself another cigarette. He didn’t look like a chain-smoker, but that’s the sort of effect my big brother has on people. “Johnny Naples was a nobody,” Snape went on. “A quack doctor with a run-down practice in the backstreets of La Paz, Bolivia. But with his last patient he got lucky. You already know about the Falcon, but I wonder how much you know? His full name, for example—Henry von Falkenberg. I reckon he was out of your league. To be fair, von Falkenberg was in a league of his own.
    “Look—every country has its big crooks. In England, the Fat Man is probably number one. America has its godfathers. In Italy, there are the Fettuccine brothers. But the Falcon—he’s an internationalist. He was half English and half German, loyal to neither country, and living, when we last heard of him, in Bolivia. There wasn’t a single criminal organization in the world that he wasn’t doing business with. You steal a truck-load of mink coats in Moscow? You sell it to the Falcon. You want to buy a kilo of cocaine in Canada? Just have a word with the Falcon. He was the number one, the top man, the king of crime. If there was a country in the world where the police didn’t want him, he’d have taken it as a personal insult.
    “Now, like any big businessman, the Falcon needed funds—a financial platform on which to build his deals. But unlike most businessmen, he couldn’t just open an account at your local credit union. He didn’t trust the Swiss banks. He didn’t trust his own mother—which is probably why he had her rubbed out back in 1965. The only currency the Falcon would deal in was diamonds: uncut diamonds. The franc might fall, the ruble might rise—but diamonds held their own. In every major city he had his own