“No, sir, you do not understand. I’ve been told up in Antwerp my mother’s nephew could be working in these parts, in a fun fair. Paul Marchais?”
Van Eyck’s brow furrowed and he shook his head.
“I know all my staff. We have no one of that name.”
“Great big guy. Big Paul, they call him. Six feet six, wide as this, tattoo on his left hand ...”
“Ja, ja, but he is not Marchais. Paul Lefort, you mean.”
“Well now, maybe I do mean that,” said Quinn. “I seem to recall his ma, my mom’s sister, did marry twice, so probably his name was changed. Would you by any chance know where he lives?”
“Wait, please,”
Bertie Van Eyck was back in two minutes with a slip of paper. Then he fled back to his football match. Tournai had scored and he had missed it.
“I have never,” said Sam as they drove back into Wavre town, “heard such an appalling caricature of an American meathead on a visit to Europe.”
Quinn grinned.
“Worked, didn’t it?”
They found the boardinghouse of Madame Garnier behind the railway station. It was already getting dark. She was a desiccated little widow who began by telling Quinn that she had no rooms vacant, but relented when he told her he sought none, but simply a chance to talk to his old friend Paul Lefort. His French was so fluent she took him for a Frenchman.
“But he is out, monsieur. He has gone to work.”
“At the Walibi?” asked Quinn.
“But of course. The Big Wheel. He overhauls the engine for the winter months.”
Quinn made a Gallic gesture of frustration.
“Always I miss my friend,” he complained. “Early last month I came by the fair, and he was on vacation.”
“Ah, not vacation, monsieur. His poor mother died. A long illness. He nursed her to the end. In Antwerp.”
So that was what he had told them. For the second half of September and all of October he had been away from his dwelling and his workplace. I bet he was, thought Quinn, but he beamed and thanked Madame Gamier, and they drove back the four kilometers to the fun fair.
It was as abandoned as it had been six hours earlier, but now in the darkness
it seemed like a ghost town. Quinn scaled the outer fence and helped Sam over after him. Against the deep velvet of the night sky he could see the inky girders of the Ferris wheel, the highest structure in the park.
They walked past the dismantled carrousel, whose antique wooden horses would now be in storage, the shuttered hot-dog stand. The Ferris wheel towered above them in the night.
“Stay here,” murmured Quinn. Leaving Sam in the shadows, he walked forward to the base of the machine.
“Lefort,” he called softly. There was no reply.
The double seats, hanging on their steel bars, were canvas-shrouded to protect the interiors. There was no one in or under the bottommost seats. Perhaps the man was crouching in the shadows waiting for them. Quinn glanced behind him.
To one side of the structure was the machine house, a big green steel shed housing the electric motor, and on top of it the control cabin in yellow. The doors of both opened to the touch. There was not a sound from the generator. Quinn touched it lightly. The machine contained a residual warmth.
He climbed to the control booth, flicked on a pilot light above the console, studied the levers, and depressed a switch. Beneath him the engine purred into life. He engaged the gears and moved the forward lever to “slow.” Ahead of him the giant wheel began to turn through the darkness. He found a floodlight control, touched it, and the area around the base of the wheel was bathed in white light.
Quinn descended and stood by the boarding ramp as the bucket seats swung silently by him. Sam joined him.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
“There was a spare canvas seat-cover in the engine house,” he said. To their right, the booth that had once been at the zenith of the wheel began to appear. The man in it was not enjoying the ride.