Tourist Bożenka called the resident representative and announced that a theft had taken place in her room. Someone had broken into a little suitcase locked with a padlock. The resident representative notified the receptionist Hassan, who was deeply offended by this insult to his hotel guest. He took a report form with him to record the theft victim’s statement.
“At what time did you leave your room?” he asked, which the resident representative eagerly translated for the tourist.
“It was ten o’clock today,” Bożenka replied, highly excited by her dual role as witness and victim.
“At what time did you return to your room and notice the theft?” Hassan asked his next question in a serious tone.
“At three o’clock,” Bożenka replied without hesitation.
As he recorded the statement, Hassan said aloud: “The incident took place between 10:00 and 15:00 today.”
“What was stolen from you?” He raised an inquisitive gaze to the tourist, while being extremely curious himself.
Bożenka drew a gulp of air into her mouth, thrust out her chest and replied without hesitation: “A pair of scissors went missing.”
Hassan’s hand above the report form trembled slightly and froze, as did the corners of the resident representative’s mouth in a fit of suppressed laughter.
“A pair of scissors,” Hassan repeated, and from the tone in which he said it, one could conclude that he considered the matter closed.
“A pair of scissors,” the two women repeated. Bożenka politely, and the resident representative incredulously.
“Are we writing a report about missing scissors?” Hassan asked the resident representative in a foreign language, over the tourist’s head.
“Stolen, not missing,” the resident representative corrected him.
Hassan cleared his throat and turned to the client again:
“Was anything else stolen?” he asked politely.
“No,” Bożenka replied, and seeing the consternation of her interlocutors, decided to elaborate. As she developed the subject, the two pairs of eyes—Hassan’s and the resident representative’s—grew ever wider with unimaginable astonishment.
According to tourist Bożenka, the perpetrator had entered her first-floor room through an open window. He had used a ladder for this purpose. Since this was only the beginning of her description of the circumstances of the break-in, Hassan still had the strength to object. He explained how difficult it would be to place a ladder against the hotel wall in broad daylight, when not only the staff and security personnel but also hundreds of tourists were at the scene. Bożenka quickly analyzed this incongruous technical detail and concluded that two adult men, approximately six feet tall, could have climbed the wall by stepping onto each other’s backs. Hassan fell silent under the force of this argument.
Once the tourist had described how the perpetrator had entered the room—which was simultaneously conclusive proof that the break-in had taken place—Hassan made one last attempt to retain his sanity:
“But why did they steal your scissors?”
“He wanted to use the scissors to break into the suitcase locked with a padlock.” The tourist sighed and answered him gently, the way one treats a slow-witted child.
“But why didn’t he steal the entire suitcase?” Hassan asked, now more out of curiosity than from any need to conduct an investigation.
And here Bożenka—the tourist Arthur Conan Doyle—introduced yet another character into the mystery.
“He didn’t steal anything because the cleaner scared him away,” she retorted. “And since he had most probably broken the scissors while trying to break into the little suitcase, he grabbed them in fright and ran off so as not to leave any evidence,” Bożenka concluded triumphantly.
That was the end of the investigation. The report was closed. The scissors were never found. There were no more break-in attempts. Hassan patrolled the area beneath the first-floor windows himself. The moral of this story is that everyone has the kind of thief their imagination creates.
Grażyna Hanaf