The Two Georges

XII

“There is a God in Israel!” Samuel Stanley exclaimed, slamming down the telephone in his hand.

“To say nothing of a British colonial undersecretary holding the Sultan’s pasha to the straight and narrow,” Bushell added less reverently. He turned to Major Harris. “When and how did the tip come in?”

Harris pulled out his pocket watch and held it close to his face so he could peer at the second hand speeding round its own little dial. “I got it three minutes and - twenty-five seconds ago, now. Boston constable spotted the bugger - I beg your pardon, Dr. Flannery - recognized him from the photograph you’d brought, rang back to his station, and his lieutenant phoned me straightaway.”

“Was he going to try to make the arrest himself?” Bushell demanded. “He won’t be armed, poor devil, and the Sons of Liberty pack a bigger punch than anything a city constable will be expecting.”

To his relief, Harris shook his head. “No, sir. The constables know he’s our fish. The chap who spotted him - McGinnity, his name is - is hanging back, making sure the villain doesn’t come out of the shop he’s gone into.”

“What sort of shop is that?” Bushell said, but then waved the question aside. “Never mind. Take us back to the Parker House so Sam and I can get our pistols, and then to - Back Bay, did you call it?”

Harris nodded. “Otherwise known as the Fens - reclaimed land, you know, the same sort of thing the Dutchmen have done.” He seemed to remember Kathleen was in the room, too. “You’ll want to stay here, of course, Dr. Flannery, until we bag the elusive Mr. Kilbride.”

“In a pig’s ear I will,” she replied politely. “Having come this far, I do not intend to be held away from anyone who may know where The Two Georges is.”

“Now really, Dr. Flannery - “ Harris began. “I’m sure Colonel Bushell will tell you this is no place for - “

“Let her come along, Major,” Bushell said. Harris stared at him as if he couldn’t believe his ears. Kathleen’s face lit up like a sunrise; from the glad surprise she showed, she hadn’t expected him to back her, either. Samuel Stanley could have given the Buddha lessons in inscrutability.

“Now really, Colonel,” Harris repeated; evidently now really was what he said when he meant, Are you out of your mind?.

Bushell also repeated himself: “Let her come along.” Kathleen’s grin made her look very fresh and young; it made him feel like grinning, too. He didn’t. The reasons he wanted her with him weren’t all flattering to her, not by a long chalk. In case he was wrong, disastrously wrong, about her, he didn’t care to leave her here with a telephone and no one keeping an eye on her. If she knew where to call, she could do the case a hideous amount of damage.

“Colonel, I trust you know what you are about,” Major Harris said in a tone that belied the words. “I wash my hands of the responsibility for injecting a civilian into the middle of a police investigation. Let me call a steamer to take you to your hotel and then to the scene.” He executed a military about-turn of alarming precision and stalked away.

“Well, well.” Bushell make hand-washing motions. “I didn’t know Pontius Pilate had joined the RAMs.”

Sam Stanley tried to suppress a snort and ended up with a coughing fit instead. When he could speak again, he said, “Go easy on him, Chief. He’ll do what you told him to do, and that’s what counts.”

Major Harris reappeared. “If you will come with me, Colonel, Captain . . . Dr. Flannery.” He might have carved her name from ice. He wasn’t looking at her, though; he was looking at Bushell. Giving your lady friend a thrill, are you, and a chance to see how brave and clever you are? his eyes said. Bushell tried to make his own face answer, It’s not like that, dammit. He didn’t think he had any luck getting the silent message across. He couldn’t say it out loud, either, not without getting into more hot water. Shrugging, he followed Harris down to the underground carpark: space for such amenities of modern life was far tighter here than in New Liverpool.

“This is Sergeant Scriver,” Harris said, nodding to a fellow at the wheel of a Morse steamer that had seen better days. “He’ll take you to the Parker House, and then on to Back Bay. I shall go there directly.” He did another about-turn, this one as sharp as the last; he must have been practicing.

“You bit him like a flea, didn’t you?” Scriver remarked, not sounding altogether dismayed at seeing Major Harris irked. “Pile on in, folks; the teakettle’s all nice and hot and ready to roll.”

Scriver pulled up in front of the Parker House a couple of minutes later. Bushell and Stanley got out. A valet came over to warn Scriver away from the restricted parking area. He routed the functionary with his badge.

Bushell belted on his pistol, then hurried back to the bank of lifts to go downstairs again. He’d moved as fast as he could, but found Sam Stanley there before him. Stanley was tugging at his jacket, trying to make it do a better job of concealing the telltale bulge on his hip. He wasn’t having much luck.

“I already gave up on that,” Bushell said. “We’ll have to look like a couple of bandits till we get out to the motorcar.”

They did, too; both the lift operator and the elderly woman in mourning black who was already in the car drew back in alarm and stared at the two RAMs with frightened eyes. Bushell recognized the temptation to draw his revolver and put a round through the ceiling of the lift as the ignoble impulse it was, which didn’t stop him from enjoying it.

He enjoyed almost running into Michael Shaughnessy halfway across the lobby much less. Whatever you cared to say about his politics - and Bushell might have said a great deal, however little of it would have been complimentary - the reporter had sharp eyes. “Armed, are you?” he said, spotting the pistol under Bushell’s herringbone coat. “And whose funeral are you off to arrange?”

“Yours, maybe, if you don’t move aside,” Bushell answered. He didn’t sound as if he relished the prospect, whatever he might have thought. But he didn’t sound as if he’d shrink from it, either. Shaughnessy got out of his way in a hurry. The man from Common Sense scowled, perhaps angry at his feet for being faster to heed Bushell than the rest of him had wanted. “You’re worse than Bonaparte’s dragoons,” he shouted, shaking his fist. “Doing a tyrant’s bidding was all they knew, but you - “

“Why, Mr. Shaughnessy,” Bushell said, his eyes wide and innocent, “haven’t I heard you apply that name to His Majesty the King-Emperor? You use his laws to protect yourself, and at the same time want to overthrow him? What a surprise when you find you can’t do both at once.” He strode out the door, ignoring the people Shaughnessy’s shout had startled.

Sergeant Scriver made a turn into oncoming traffic that had Bushell cringing and laughing at the same time - police officers everywhere drove as if they were exempt from the traffic laws they upheld for everyone else. Blaring horns and rude gestures expressed the Bostonians’ opinion of the maneuver. Ignoring the unsolicited editorials, Scriver steamed past Kings Chapel, a stately church that had gone up in colonial days, then swung left onto Beacon Street. The turn was not a neat perpendicular, as it would have been in New Liverpool or Doshoweh or even Charleroi. The streets of downtown Boston seemed to have been laid out by someone who’d never heard of neat perpendiculars. They intersected one another at seemingly random angles and, for good measure, changed name every block. When Bushell remarked on that, Sergeant Scriver laughed out loud. “From all I’ve heard, nobody ever laid these streets out, Colonel. They used to be cattle tracks, till one day they paved ‘em.” He sounded serious. Boston was old enough that the story had a chance of being true. Once they rode past the broad meadow of the Boston Common, the streets did begin to follow a grid pattern that made some sort of sense. Back Bay, though, was a newer part of the city, which lent some backhanded support to Scriver’s tale.

At the western edge of the Common, the sergeant swung south on Arlington to Boylston and then west again. “We’ve got ourselves a couple-three miles to go,” he said. “Address Major Harris gave me is Lansdowne near Ipswich, way out in the Fens.” He sighed. “Not much good happens in that part of town, and hasn’t for a long, long time.”

He turned right onto Lansdowne and pulled to a stop in the middle of a block full of shops that looked dedicated to one purpose and one purpose only: separating the none-too-discriminating customer from whatever small store of shillings he might possess without giving him anything worth having in return. Bushell stared in pained disbelief at the bright red socks on display in a haberdasher’s window. Who would wear such things, and why?

George Harris, looking altogether too dapper to belong on Lansdowne Street, came up to Scriver’s motorcar. “Kilbride was observed going into Yawkey’s Tea Shoppe” - he pronounced the last word as if it had two syllables, so the name of the place nearly rhymed - “by Senior Constable McGinnity, as I told you back at the station, Colonel. He has not been observed to leave.”

“Has the place got a back door?” Samuel Stanley asked.

“It does, but the alley on which it opens has only one egress” - Harris pointed to show where that was “and McGinnity has been able to keep it and the front entrance to the tea shop under observation at the same time.” Now the RAM pronounced shop in a normal fashion. Bushell glanced over at McGinnity, who was leaning against a lamppost trying to pretend he wasn’t doing anything in particular. The pretense wasn’t worth much: if you needed a stage Irishman to play a constable, McGinnity would have been your man. He was big and beefy, red-faced and knobby-cheekboned, with red hair now drifted with gray. Throw in his uniform and he was about as inconspicuous as a chimp in church.

In thoughtful tones, Bushell asked, “Could Kilbride have gone into the Yawkey’s place, out the back door into the alley, and then into another shop on Lansdowne here?”

Harris glanced over to Senior Constable McGinnity. He might not approve of having Kathleen Flannery along here, but he was no fool. “That would complicate our lives, wouldn’t it?” He glanced back over his shoulder. “We’ll have the manpower to find out, though.”

Several constabulary steamers rolled to a stop. Big, burly men in uniform piled out of them. By their looks, a fair number could have been McGinnity’s cousins. More motorcars pulled up at the corner of Lansdowne and Ipswich. The men who got out of them wore suits and waistcoats. Bushell had seen several of those fellows at the RAM station.

“All right, we can search the area,” he said. He unbuttoned his jacket so he could get at his revolver in a hurry. Sam Stanley had already done the same thing. Bushell said, “Let’s have a look at Yawkey’s Tea Shoppe, Sam.”

“Right, Chief,” Stanley said.

“You want backup?” Harris asked quietly.

He’d had all the backup in the world at Buckley Bay. “We’ll go first, anyhow,” he answered, and started down the street. Stanley matched him stride for stride. Harris waited behind him, respecting his judgment. Kathleen Flannery, on the other hand, started after him. Hearing her footsteps on the paving slates behind him, he turned around. “Go on back, Kathleen. This is what they pay us to do. It’s not your job.”

“It’s my painting,” she said stubbornly. “I won’t get in your way, but I want to do whatever I can to help.”

Bushell exhaled through his nose. “The last time I went after the Sons of Liberty, I watched a good man get killed before my eyes because he didn’t take them seriously enough. I’m not keen to run the same risk twice. Now will you go back, or shall I get a pair of manacles from Senior Constable McGinnity?”

Kathleen glowered fiercely, but halted. Bushell wouldn’t have bet that she was going to. He and Stanley walked past a chemist’s, a bakery, an ironmonger’s shop, and a cabinetmaker’s establishment that looked too fine for the neighborhood. A very fat, very blond man was examining the inlay work on a table by the front window.

A tavern, a tobacconist’s, a fish market. . . Yawkey’s Tea Shoppe was only a few doors away now. Bushell heard the sound of a woman’s pumps clacking up the street after him. Samuel Stanley sent him a glance that said only one thing: I told you so.

“God damn it,” he muttered under his breath. He didn’t know whether he was angry at Kathleen for not listening to him (though when had she ever listened to him?) or at Major Harris for not keeping her in better check (though Harris undoubtedly figured she was Bushell’s problem). Then he realized he didn’t have to divide things up. He could be angry at both of them at once - and he was. If he caused a scene on the street, he was liable to spook Kilbride - assuming Kilbride wasn’t spooked already, a dubious proposition at best. Ignoring Kathleen also gave him the chance to savor his anger and let it grow. He stalked on toward the tea shop.

He’d just set his hand on the door latch when Kathleen stopped. That made him turn around where anger hadn’t - had she had a sudden rush of brains to the head? He supposed stranger things had happened, though he was hard-pressed to think of one offhand.

Kathleen was staring into the window of the cabinetmaker’s shop. She can’t possibly be shopping, ran through Bushell’s mind, though he didn’t know what else she could be doing. After a moment, she started running again, not back down toward the steamer that had brought her, but up Lansdowne toward Bushell. Scowling, he turned away from her and started to go into the tea shop. “Wait, Tom!” she called urgently. “Please wait!”

“Why the devil should I?” he demanded as she came panting up to him. “I told you to - “

“To hell with what you told me,” she said. She’d calculated that nicely; hearing her swear startled him into brief silence. She took advantage of that to go on, “That fat man in the front of the cabinetmaker’s - I know him.” She corrected herself: “I’ve seen him before, anyhow. I don’t know who he is, but I’ve seen him.”

Bushell believed her. He’d noticed the fat man himself. If you’d seen him once, you’d remember him. Whether that meant anything was a different question. “Where did you see him?” he asked. Kathleen didn’t even take any vindictive pleasure in dropping her bombshell: “At the showing of The Two Georges in Victoria, just after it got here from London, and then again when the exhibition moved up to Philadelphia.” She surprised Bushell by laughing. “In a cutaway, he looks rather like a penguin that’s swallowed a watermelon.”

Bushell brushed at his mustache with a forefinger. Then, almost absentmindedly, he leaned forward and kissed Kathleen half on the mouth, half on the cheek. “And how will he look in a different suit?” he said, his voice musing. “One decorated with the broad arrow, I mean.”

“Shall we go find out, Chief?” Stanley said.

“Yes, I think we’d better,” Bushell said. “We’re liable to come up with Kilbride at the same time, too, with only a little bit of luck.” He turned to Kathleen. “Will you please wait here now?”

“After I’ve come this far? Not bloody likely.” Again, her deliberate vulgarity surprised Bushell, but it didn’t make him change his mind. The only way he could keep her back, though, was to have Sam hold her, and he didn’t want to do that. Shoulder to shoulder with Stanley, he started down Lansdowne toward the cabinetmaker’s. He hoped Kathleen would at least have the sense to walk behind the two of them rather than alongside.

He didn’t get much chance to test that hope, because he’d taken only a couple of strides when the fat man came out onto the pavement. He looked down the street toward Kathleen. “He recognized her, too,” Stanley said softly.

“So he did,” Bushell answered, his voice just as quiet. Of itself, his right hand slid to the butt of his revolver. The fat man had his right hand jammed down in to the right outer pocket of his jacket. Bushell wouldn’t have liked that under any circumstances. After the gun battle at Buckley Bay, he liked it even less.

The fat man looked at him and Stanley and Kathleen, and at the carloads of RAMs behind them at the corner of Lansdowne and Ipswich. He turned his head, a quick, nervous gesture, and spotted the Boston constables down toward Boylston. Even at a distance of thirty or forty yards, Bushell saw him lick his lips: his tongue was very wet and pink.

“Sir, we’d like to talk with you,” Bushell said, taking another step or two toward him. “Do you know a man named Joseph Kilbride?”

“I don’t have to talk to you,” the fellow answered, his voice a foghorn bass. “I don’t have to do anything you tell me to, not one damn thing, do you hear me?”

“Careful, Chief,” Stanley muttered out of the side of his mouth. “He’s as ready to go as a handful of fulminate.”

“Don’t I know it,” Bushell whispered back. He raised his voice and spoke to the fat man again: “Take it easy, pal. Nobody’s going to - “

“I’m not your pal!” the fat man shouted. He looked back over his shoulder at the constables. They’d moved toward him while his attention was fixed on Bushell. He made as if to retreat back into the furniture shop.

“Hold it right there!” Bushell said sharply.

Instead of obeying, the man yanked his hand out of his pocket and hurled what looked like a large, dun-colored egg at Bushell. “Grenade!” Samuel Stanley shouted, yanking out his pistol and throwing himself flat at the same time.

Bushell used his forearm to knock Kathleen Flannery to the pavement. She screamed. He didn’t care. He dove down on top of her, shielding her with his body. As it had in the Queen Charlotte Islands, time seemed to stretch like taffy. He drew his own revolver, clenched left hand on right wrist as prescribed in the manual of arms, and aimed the weapon at the fat man.

Stanley fired. The grenade exploded. Instead of stretching, time suddenly crumpled in on itself, so that everything happened at once. Bushell squeezed the trigger. The revolver roared and bucked in his hand at the same instant as what felt like a couple of red-hot needles drilled into his right leg and Kathleen screamed again.

The fat man jerked as if stung. He performed an awkward pirouette, his arms flailing to help him keep his balance. Stanley fired again. So did Bushell, at almost the identical moment. One of those shots Bushell was never sure which - caught the fat man in the side of the head. He crashed to the pavement, surely dead before he hit it. Bright red in the summer sun, a pool of blood spread beneath him and poured over the kerb into the gutter.

Bushell’s ears rang. The stench of smokeless powder was thick in his nostrils. His heart pounded crazily. Kathleen Flannery writhed beneath him. All unbidden, his thoughts went back to the night before. How different that had been! He scrambled to his feet. “You all right?” he asked, including both her and Sam in the question.

“Yes, I’m fine,” Stanley said. “God in heaven, gunplay twice now - three times, if you count Tricky Dick.” He rose too and, revolver still in hand, walked toward the body of the fat man. Kathleen took stock of herself. The green dress was filthy and had a hole above one knee. Her elbow was scraped raw, and a fragment of grenade casing had scored a bleeding furrow along one arm. “I’m all right,” she said, as if she didn’t quite believe it herself. “Thank you, Tom.” Then her eyes went to the corpse on the pavement. “Oh, God,” she whispered. She’d seen violent death twice now in a matter of weeks, twice more than the average civilian saw in a lifetime. Still whispering, she asked, “How are you, Tom?”

“I’ll find out.” Bushell’s trousers were out at the knee, too. He wasn’t sure he would be able to put weight on his right leg, but it held him as he walked, though blood ran down into his shoe. He pulled up his trouser leg. Like Kathleen, he had gashes from grenade fragments, but they didn’t look deep or serious.

He reached down and helped her to her feet. Almost absently, he asked, “Now do you see why I asked you not to come with me?”

She nodded, but then she said, “If I hadn’t, you never would have recognized the fat man, would you?”

“No, I don’t suppose we would,” Bushell admitted. His tone of voice changed as he added, “I’m glad you’re not badly hurt.” He didn’t care to think about what might have happened had they been standing up when the grenade went off.

He followed Sam Stanley toward the fat man’s corpse. All along Lansdowne Street, shopkeepers had come out of their establishments to see what the gunfire meant. They stared in disbelief at the body on the pavement. Had they heard gunfire more often, they would have had the sense to take cover instead of running out to investigate. Bushell envied them their quiet, secure little worlds. Major Harris was also approaching the cabinetmaker’s shop. “Have you got a weapon?” Bushell called to him. When he shook his head, Bushell waved him back: “Then get out of the line of fire.” Whoever ran the cabinetmaker’s hadn’t come out with the rest of the local merchants. Bushell did not think that boded well.

Stanley had not gone right up to the dead body; he’d halted where nobody could shoot at him from the doorway of the cabinetmaker’s. The door was slightly ajar. Bushell glanced at Stanley. “We go in?” he said. It sounded like a question, but it wasn’t.

“We go in,” Stanley said with a nod. “We’ve got the guns, looks like we’ll need them, and it doesn’t look like anybody else thought to bring any.”

“Nobody believes it till it happens in his backyard.” Bushell tried to remember what he’d seen about the layout of the cabinetmaker’s shop when he walked past it on his way to Yawkey’s. He said, “I’ll go in first and break to the left. You’re taller than I am; that’ll give you a shot over my shoulder.”

“Got it.” Stanley shook his head. “And I thought I was done with combat. On three?” He didn’t wait for Bushell to agree, but started counting: “One, two ... “

Yelling like fiends, they ran for the door. Bushell hit it with his shoulder. It flew open. He dashed inside. Behind the counter stood two men. He recognized Joseph Kilbride’s tough Irish face, twisted now into a grimace of hate. “Hold it!” he screamed.

Kilbride was already holding it - a grenade like the one the fat man had thrown. He’d pulled the pin; he was holding the detonator down with his thumb. He drew back his arm. Bushell remembered a Franco-Spanish grenadier springing up from behind a rock, somewhere near the Nuevespañolan border. The man standing beside Kilbride - perhaps the proprietor of the shop - dropped to the floor. As Kilbride’s arm started to come forward, Bushell and Stanley both fired. One slug hit Kilbride in the chest, the other in the flattened bridge of the nose. He let out a grunt of astonishment and toppled. His grenade fell beside him - and beside the man who’d taken shelter in back of the counter. A moment later, the grenade detonated. Casing fragments rattled off the walls and ceiling. A bubbling shriek burst from the throat of Kilbride’s companion, then faded.

Pistols still at the ready, Bushell and Stanley ran around the counter to see what they could do to keep the fellow from expiring on the spot. As soon as they saw him, they looked at each other in dismay. The grenade had fallen by his face and neck. Fragments must have cut his carotids, for he was bleeding like a butchered hog.

“We’ll never save him,” Bushell said. “No point to trying.”

Stanley looked down at his face once more - or rather, the shattered bone and burnt and diced meat where his face had been. “You’re right, Chief,” he said in a faraway voice. “Lucky for him that we can’t, too.”

Bushell made himself turn away from the horridly compelling sight. He waved the barrel of his revolver toward the open door to the back room. “We’d better see if we’ve missed anyone,” he said, adding, “It would be nice if we had someone left alive to question, don’t you think?”

“Could be useful, yes,” Stanley answered, matching him dry for dry. “Shall I go first this time?”

“I’m still shorter than you are,” Bushell said. “One, two ...” They ran through the doorway one after the other.

Instead of powder and blood and the latrine stink of bowels loosed in sudden death, the back room smelled of sawdust and varnish and turpentine - clean, friendly odors that grated on Bushell’s keyed-up senses. He spun wildly, looking for an enemy who was not there. Sam Stanley kicked over what was going to be a tabletop that leaned against the wall. No one crouched behind it. Bushell went to the door leading to the alley. He opened it and peered outside. No one waited with a gun or another grenade. The alley was as empty as it might have been at midnight.

“I think that’s everybody,” Bushell sounded disbelieving, even to himself. He closed the alley door again and locked it.

“I think you’re right.” Stanley shook his head. “Dear sweet Lord, what a mess we have here.” With a soldier’s practicality and a baring of teeth that was not a grin, he added, “We came out on the right end of it this time, too.”

Bushell was about to nod when voices came from the front of the store. He and Stanley stared at each other. Neither Kilbride nor his chum could possibly be breathing - could he? One thing Bushell remembered from his army days was that human beings could be devilishly hard to kill. Even so “Impossible,” he mouthed to Stanley. His adjutant nodded, but then waggled his hand back and forth, downgrading the word to something like damned unlikely.

Moving quietly as they could, they went back to the door that had admitted them to the room on the alley. Bushell’s gun barrel went into the doorway before he stuck out his head.

“Major, you’re very brave, but you’re also very foolish,” he said, standing straight and showing himself. George Harris had just come into the shop by the street entrance, a constabulary truncheon clutched in his right fist. Bushell pointed the index finger of his left hand at the RAM. “Bang! You’re dead.”

Harris shrugged. “The chance one takes in this business now and again.” Bushell admired his nonchalance, if not his good sense.

Behind Harris crowded a couple of other RAMs, a couple of uniformed constables, and Kathleen Flannery. One corner of Bushell’s mouth turned down. As he’d told her, mixing it with villains was not her business. Then his expression cleared, to be replaced by one of mild surprise. Villains might not be her business, but after last night he definitely was.

She pushed her way up to stand at Major Harris’s elbow. None of the police officers seemed to have the nerve to stop her. Bushell understood that down to the ground. “Are you all right?” she demanded, and started to shove past Harris.

“Not a scratch on me or Sam, except from where we hit the pavement,” Bushell assured her. He held up a hand. “You don’t want to come any farther, Kathleen. It’s - not pretty back of the counter there.”

For a wonder, she heeded him. Major Harris did come up to look at the carnage. He went faintly green.

“Good heavens,” he murmured. “We’ve not seen anything like this in a good many years.” He ran a finger under his collar, as if to loosen it. “I tell you frankly, I could have gone a good many more years without it, too.”

“There is that,” Bushell agreed. “Here we have the late Mr. Kilbride.” Nodding at the other corpse, he added, “Could Constable McGinnity tell us if this is - or rather, was - the proprietor of the establishment here?”

Major Harris looked at that body, then averted his eyes. “At the moment, I doubt whether his mother could tell who he was. McGinnity may perhaps know him by his clothing, though, so we’ll find out about that.”

“Careful there!” someone out on the sidewalk exclaimed, at the same time as someone else was going, “Watch out!” That sounded interesting - and alarming - enough to send Bushell and Stanley out to see what was going on. The RAMs had been searching the pockets of the fat man. One of them held in the palm of his hand a khaki-painted metal spheroid a bit bigger than a cricket ball. “Grenade,” he said unnecessarily.

“Russian Army model,” Samuel Stanley put in.

“If you say so,” the Boston RAM answered with a shrug. “Far as I’m concerned, it’s bad enough no matter who made it.” For him it was just evidence of depravity, not evidence in a case. His colleague had found a wallet in the fat man’s left hip pocket. He opened it. “Here’s his permit to operate a motorcar,” he said, drawing forth one of the documents within. “Gives his name as Eustace Venable; his home address is in Georgestown, province of Maryland.” He pawed through the wallet. “A little stack of business cards in here, too: Eustace Venable, Fine Cabinetry, and another Georgestown address, with a telephone number.”

“Georgestown.” Bushell tasted the word. “Right next door to Victoria. Why does that not surprise me?”

He glanced up to the heavens, as if expecting a choir of angels to come down and announce he ought to be surprised.

Instead, Sam Stanley said quietly, “We should have known the trail would lead us there sooner or later.”

“That’s true,” Bushell said. The King-Emperor was coming to Victoria - coming all too soon now. Bushell still had no idea whether The Two Georges was in or around the capital, but it seemed inevitable that some of the people who had stolen it would be there.

“Begging your pardon, sir,” someone said behind him. He turned. It was Senior Constable McGinnity. The big Irishman went on, “Sir, I think that’s Mr. Cavendish in there, though with him so torn up and all I’ve the devil’s own time being sure.”

“His papers and his fingerprints will identify him for certain,” Bushell said. “Do you know whether he’s got a wife or children?”

“Neither the one nor t’other,” McGinnity answered. “He lived by his lonesome, Mr. Cavendish did. I’ve heard tell he was - you know” - a delicate shrug of the shoulders conveyed what Bushell was supposed to know - “but I can’t say for a fact that that’s so.”

“If he was, he won’t have let the other Sons find out,” Bushell said. “They’re harder on that sort of thing that the Crown’s law courts ever dreamt of being.”

A couple of constables came toward the cabinetmaker’s shop along with a red-faced, gray-haired man with broad shoulders. One of them said to Bushell, “Sir, here’s Mr. Yawkey from the tea shop back yonder. Reckoned you might be interested in having a word or two with him.”

“Why, so I might,” Bushell said, as if the notion hadn’t crossed his mind till that moment. But his air of nonchalance fell away like a discarded cloak when he rounded on Yawkey. “So - you and Joseph Kilbride were friends, eh?”

“You might say so,” Yawkey answered. “We’ve always got on well, anyway.”

Bushell rubbed at his mustache. He hadn’t expected such a forthright admission. Maybe Yawkey would sing like a crooner on the wireless. “And what did your friend” - he fought hard to keep an ironic twist off the word - “talk about when he dropped in on you today?”

“Why, tea, of course,” Yawkey exclaimed, his shaggy eyebrows rising in surprise at the question. “What else?”

“Tea?” Bushell echoed, taken aback.

“Sir, if a man comes into a tea shop to ask after shoe-blacking, wouldn’t you say he’s in the wrong place?” Yawkey inquired with exaggerated patience; he’d evidently decided Bushell was on the slow side. “I’ve been selling tea to Joseph Kilbride for more than twenty years. He came in to ask after some Orange Pekoe.”

Bushell muttered something under his breath. If all you thought about was Joseph Kilbride the Son of Liberty, you were liable to forget Joseph Kilbride the grocer. “Has he been traveling to Boston to buy from you in person for all that time?” he asked after pausing to think. Yawkey shook his big, blunt-featured head. “Up until three or four years ago, we dealt entirely by post. But he’s come into Boston several times now. I enjoy his company.” He chuckled at Bushell’s expression. “Oh, I’d guess he’s not the easiest sort for most to get along with. But him and me, we were both in the prize ring a time or three, and we tell stories long into the night. Him and Phineas Stanage, the brewer down in Victoria, it’s the same thing with them.”

So Kilbride hadn’t got his nose bent by accident then. But that was only a small part of what went through Bushell’s mind. “Three or four years?” he murmured, as much to himself as to Yawkey. Business trips into Boston would have given Kilbride a perfect cover for any other visits he made here. And Stanage wasn’t just a brewer; all the RAMs in Victoria knew perfectly well he was a Son of Liberty, though nobody had been able to prove a thing - not till now, anyway.

“I can give you exact dates, if you like,” Yawkey answered. “I’ll have ‘em all written down in my account books.”

“I may take you up on that,” Bushell said, his voice still abstracted. Had the plot to steal The Two Georges been ripening for four years? Or had Kilbride got involved in it only lately? He couldn’t ask the man now.

Samuel Stanley said, “Why did you let Kilbride go out your back door and down the alley?”

“We spent a deal of time in the storeroom in back of the shop,” Yawkey answered. “He was buying in bulk and seeing for himself what all I had back there. Let me think back, so I can tell you just how it was. . . . We’d come close to finishing when he went to the front for a moment. Then he came back and just sort of asked if he could stroll out that way. I told him there wasn’t anything to see in the alley but rubbish bins, but I didn’t think much about it at the time.”

“He must have spied McGinnity being inconspicuous,” Stanley said to Bushell, who nodded.

“Can I go back to my shop now?” Yawkey asked. “I’m the only one minding it, and I’m apt to be losing trade standing around here making chitchat.”

“A couple of more questions,” Mr. Yawkey,” Bushell said. The merchant’s brows came down like shutters; he wasn’t used to hearing no. Bushell pointed over to the cabinetmaker’s shop in front of which they all stood. “How long has Mr. Cavendish been in business here?”

“Him?” By the tone, Yawkey’s opinion of the late cabinetmaker was not high. Part of the reason emerged in his reply: “He’s a Johnny-come-lately, he is: bought the place from old Fred Jenkins maybe four years back. Hasn’t done any too well with it, either,” he added with a certain somber satisfaction.

“Isn’t that interesting?” Sam Stanley said, and Bushell nodded again. If the timing was coincidental, it made for a very large and robust coincidence.

“Did Joseph Kilbride ever go into Cavendish’s shop before or after he came to yours?” Bushell asked Yawkey.

“I never saw him do it, but I don’t know what that proves. I’m better at minding my own business than my neighbors’.”

Most of the time, people who said things like that were lying through their teeth. Bushell got the feeling Yawkey was telling the truth. He said, “That’s all for now. We may have more questions for you later.”

“If you do, ask ‘em in the shop,” Yawkey said firmly. “Good day to you.” He stumped on up Lansdowne Street as if it had been made for no one but him.

Major Harris came out of the furniture shop. “We’ll need a statement from you, Colonel, and one from Captain Stanley, and one from Dr. Flannery, too. The forms must be observed, as you know.”

“Oh, indeed they must,” Bushell said. “In triplicate.” It would be a long afternoon’s journey into night. And the Boston papers would have a field day, too. Three men killed in the course of an investigation?

Gunfire? Hand grenades? Newsboys would be shouting extras on the street corners tomorrow morning no, more likely tonight. Well, soonest begun, soonest done. “Let’s go,” he said. Sitting on the edge of Kathleen Flannery’s bed, Bushell blew a smoke ring up toward the ceiling. She made silent clapping motions, which set her bare breasts bobbing prettily. Bushell didn’t feel like applause. He walked over to the bottle of Jameson he’d ordered from room service, poured a glass three-quarters full, and then, after due reflection, used silver-plated tongs to add a couple of ice cubes.

Standing there naked by the chest of drawers on which he’d put the bottle, he said, “Victoria,” and then drank. It was not a toast. It was nothing like a toast. It was more on the order of getting the taste of the word out of his mouth.

But neither the whiskey’s complex, smoky flavor nor the burning it set up in his belly could take away that taste. No matter what happened here in Boston, no matter what the local RAMs and constables turned up, his trail, as best he could see it, led straight on toward the capital of the NAU. He hated the idea.

Kathleen watched him gulp down the glass of Jameson, pour himself another, and pour that one down, too. “Fix me a drink, please,” she said. “With some water, not just ice.”

“I thought you’d sooner have gin,” he said.

“I would,” she answered, “but this will be all right. After the grilling in the RAM offices, anything this side of chloroform would be all right.”

He grunted, took another crystal tumbler from its silver tray, put in ice and poured Jameson over it, then had to walk into the bathroom for some water. When he came back and handed Kathleen the glass, she murmured a word of thanks and patted the mattress beside her.

Bushell sat down. She sipped her drink. Her eyes widened slightly. “You didn’t put in much water.”

“You didn’t ask for much,” he said. After a moment, he pointed a finger at her. “I know what you’re doing.” Two fast knocks of Jameson hadn’t fuzzed his thoughts, but they might have made him less reticent about letting her know what those thoughts were: “You’re distracting me.”

“Why, Colonel Bushell, sir, I certainly do hope so,” she said, and stretched just enough to make his eye travel the whole long, smooth length of her: a length marred at the moment by gauze pads and adhesive tape on both knees, a forearm, and one elbow. Bushell was similarly decorated. He grunted again, this time in amusement. “Not what I meant - and you know it,” he added, stabbing out that accusing forefinger once more. “If I’m making drinks for you, I can’t very well be making any for me, and if I don’t make them for me, I can’t very well drink them, and if I don’t drink them I can’t very well get drunk - now can I?”

“No,” she answered, a little angrily. “And why should you want to, anyway? The only people I knew who turned the name Victoria into a swear word were the Sons of Liberty - till you.”

“And do you know what else?” he said after mulling that over. “We have the exact same reason, too.”

He waited for her to gape at him, and was not disappointed. Then he explained: “The Sons think Victoria, just by existing, puts a control on them they don’t want to accept.”

“Yes, of course they do,” she said. “But if there’s any man in the NAU more loyal to Crown and Country than you, I haven’t met him.”

“For which I thank you,” Bushell said, even if he wasn’t altogether sure she’d meant it as a compliment.

“And as long as I’m in Prince Rupert or Doshoweh or Charleroi or even here in Boston, I’m the man who’s in charge of getting The Two Georges back for Crown and Country, too.”

He wondered if she would understand what he was driving at. She did: a point for her. “I see,” she breathed, nodding slowly and thoughtfully. “When we get to Victoria, you won’t be able to handle the case your way anymore. You’ll be under orders from your - commandant, is that the right title?”

“That’s the right title,” Bushell agreed. “Lieutenant General Sir Horace Bragg and I are old friends, but that makes things worse, not better. When Sir Horace gets orders from the governor-general, he has to hit me with them twice as hard as he would otherwise, just to let people know his friend isn’t getting any special treatment. I understand why he does it, but that doesn’t make life easy for me.”

“A man of antique virtue,” Kathleen said. Was she being ironic? He couldn’t tell. She drank from the tumbler again. “That’s not bad,” she murmured, her voice judicious. “Different from Scotch. But what sort of orders that you won’t like is the governor-general likely to give Sir Horace to pass to you?”

“Arrangements for paying ransom for The Two Georges comes to mind,” Bushell answered bleakly. He wondered how she’d take that; given her position, she was liable to want the painting back at any price. What she said, though, was, “Sir Martin Luther King strikes me as having more spine than that.”

“If we were speaking only of Sir Martin, I’d say you were right,” Bushell answered. “But his chief of staff is Sir David Clarke, and Sir David has all the spine of your average - actually of your rather sub-par- blancmange.”

Kathleen’s eyes glinted; maybe it was the Irish in her reacting to the prospect of a feud. “You don’t sound as if you like Sir David Clarke,” she observed, drawing out like to exaggerate the innuendo in her words.

“As a matter of fact, I don’t,” Bushell said. He regretted those two drinks; without them, he wouldn’t have spoken so much of his mind. Now, unless he got lucky, he was going to have to say a lot more. He didn’t get lucky. “And why is that?” Kathleen asked. Sure enough, she did scent a feud, and she wouldn’t be happy - more to the point, she wouldn’t shut up - till she found out what was going on, and why.

Bushell got up from the bed and poured himself another tumbler of Jameson. In spite of Kathleen’s disapproving look, he drank it down in a couple of swallows. Two drinks weren’t enough to ready him for what he had to tell her. By the time he was through with the sordid story of Irene and Sir David, he’d had more than three, also.

He smiled crookedly at Kathleen. “Now you know how I come by the uneven tenor of my ways.”

“So I do,” she said, and then went on in a meditative voice, “When I found out Kyril had another fiancée, at least I didn’t do it by finding him in bed with that other fiancée. I hadn’t thought my situation had much to recommend it, but I see I had something to be thankful for after all.”

“That’s true.” Bushell’s words came out clear enough, but slightly lower than they should have, as if emerging from a wind-up phonogram whose spring was starting to wear out. Ever so casually, he scratched at the tip of his nose. He couldn’t feel it. Yes, he’d had considerably more than three drinks. He waited for Kathleen to say something sympathetic, or possibly - and even better - something unkind about Sir David Clarke. But the way she cocked her head to one side and studied him made him remember how much less she’d drunk than he. She asked, “Why do you suppose your wife - your ex-wife, I should say - chose to be unfaithful to you!”

That was a question he’d avoided asking himself for years; what had happened was far easier to understand than why. He didn’t like facing it now. Slowly, he answered, “I took her for granted, I expect. You don’t think that can possibly happen, not when you first meet, but it does - unless you know enough to watch out for it. And I won’t deny being married to what I do, either.” He turned and patted the side of the whiskey bottle; a lot of the whiskey was out of it and inside him. The crooked smile came back. “In Jameson veritas.”

“Maybe,” Kathleen said. “And maybe your Irene wasn’t altogether blameless, either - in fact, she couldn’t have been, or she wouldn’t have been doing what you caught her doing.”

Absurdly, that angered Bushell for a moment. He’d concentrated all his fury on Sir David Clarke. In clinging to his memories of happier times with Irene, he’d forgotten - he’d made himself forget - he hadn’t walked in during the middle of a rape. Women had been deceiving their husbands for as long as men had been straying from their wives. But he hadn’t strayed, he hadn’t wanted to stray, and he hadn’t let himself think Irene would have.

“I certainly don’t think well of Sir David for taking advantage of your situation, whatever the reasons for it,” Kathleen said. Bushell nodded, glad for the chance not to think about Irene. Kathleen went on, “How could he be Sir Martin’s chief of staff with that on his record?”

“Three reasons.” With drunken precision, Bushell ticked them of on his fingers: “First, he did marry her. Second, chief of staff is not an elective post, of course. And third,” he finished reluctantly, “he’s good at what he does.” One side of his mouth twisted into a wry smile. “Irene certainly thought so.”

“Good you can joke about it,” Kathleen said.

Bushell stared owlishly at her, then went back and listened to what he’d just said. “I did, didn’t I?” he said in some surprise. “It’s the first time I ever have, I’ll tell you that. That calls for another drink.” He picked up the bottle of Jameson, looked at it, and set it down. “As a matter of fact, maybe that calls for not having another drink.”

“Yes, maybe it does,” Kathleen said, with so much enthusiasm that Bushell knew she thought he’d already had one - or several - too many. Perhaps ill-advisedly, she asked, “And what is Sir David so good at?”

“Besides adultery, do you mean?” Bushell said. Snide comments about Sir David Clarke didn’t count as jokes to him - nor, evidently, to Kathleen, either. She sat quietly, waiting for his answer. After a bit of thought, he said, “What he’s good at, what he’s good for - however you like - is keeping his boss out of trouble, making sure Sir Martin doesn’t do anything to offend any large number of his constituents. In small doses, that’s all well and good. But Sir David thinks - or I think Sir David thinks - that if a small dose is good, a large one will be better. If Sir Martin listened to him all the time, he’d be so bland he couldn’t possibly lead us anywhere. He’d follow whichever way the people blow, and the people, given half a chance, blow every which way.”

“He’s more interested in having Sir Martin look good than in having him be good, you’re saying,” Kathleen remarked.

Bushell looked at her in an admiration that had nothing to do with the physical charms she still displayed so invitingly. “That’s just what I’m saying. It’s just what I would have said, as a matter of fact, if I had my wits about me.” He smiled that lopsided smile again. “Must be love.”

“If you weren’t drunk, you wouldn’t talk foolishness.” Kathleen was brisk almost to coldness. He remembered life had bruised her, too. She went on, “Tell me that when you’re sober and I’ll - I’ll think about believing it.”

Thinking about being sober made him think about the morning, and about black coffee and paracetamol. By the way he felt now, he knew how he’d feel then, and how little the pain relievers would help. Well, he’d been through that before, too, more times than he cared to recall. “I think I’d better get back to my room and get what sleep I can,” he said.

“Good,” Kathleen answered. “For a moment there, I thought you had no common sense left at all.”

“Hrmp,” he said in mock dudgeon. He’d draped his clothes neatly on a chair. As he walked over to it, Kathleen rose from the bed to go over to the chest of drawers. He reached out and swatted her lightly on her bare backside when she bent to open a drawer. She straightened with an indignant squeak. “There, you see?” he said. “If you insult me, I beat you.”

“And here I’d been thanking God I left Anthony Rothrock behind in Charleroi,” she said, pulling out a pair of cotton pyjamas comfortable and sensible for someone traveling by herself. She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “Shall I scream for the police?”

“If you do, you’ll probably find an officer close by,” he answered. They both laughed, as easy with each other as if they’d been together a long time. Bushell took that for a good sign. Now, he thought, if the damned case would only give me one . . .

Several large, muscular men stood in front of the lifts when Bushell, Stanley, and Kathleen Flannery walked over to them to do downstairs for breakfast. They did not have the look of men waiting for a car themselves. After a moment, Bushell recognized one of them. “Hullo, Scriver,” he said. “What’s all this in aid of?” He spoke as softly as he could; the paracetamol he’d gulped in his first waking action hadn’t yet started taking the edge off a headache that bored through his skull like the electric bandsaw slicing into a seam of coal deep down under Charleroi.

The RAM who’d driven him to Lansdowne Street answered, “We’re here to keep the reporters away from your room, sir. Major Harris asked the hotel to stop incoming calls last night, too, to give the three of you some rest. But you’d better know there’s a great ravening pack of newspapermen down in the lobby, just waiting for you to show your faces.”

Bushell groaned. “They would be there, wouldn’t they?” Samuel Stanley said. “Death by gunfire, hand grenades - all sorts of juicy things to put on the front page.”

“Right,” Bushell said in a tight, controlled voice. The prospect of facing the press never sent him into transports of delight. Facing them with a hangover, and with them standing between him and several cups of black coffee - He groaned again. What did Marlowe have the devil say in The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus? Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it: that was the line. At the moment, he had considerable sympathy for the devil.

“Shall we go back and ring down for room service?” Kathleen asked.

Bushell thought of the devil again, this time as tempter. Reluctantly, he shook his head - only a little, because it hurt. “Go ahead, if you like,” he told her. “You’re not officially part of the case. Me, I’d have to face them sooner or later anyhow. It might as well be now.” With a martyred sigh, he turned back to Scriver. “Tell Major Harris I only regret I have but one life to lose for His Majesty.”

“Er - right sir,” Scriver said. “It won’t be so bad as that.”

“No - it’ll be worse.”

“I’ll come with you,” Kathleen declared, in a tone that said she didn’t want him to go down there and die alone. It touched him absurdly; he wasn’t used to having anyone but Sam cover his back. A bell clanged and a light came on to signal the arrival of the lift. Scriver and his companions let Bushell, Kathleen, and Stanley board ahead of them, then climbed on themselves. On his little stool in one corner of the car, the operator muttered something about crowding. When no one paid him any attention, he sighed, closed the doors, and let the lift descend to the lobby.

More RAMs guarded the bank of lifts down there. Bushell idly wondered how a genuine guest of the Parker House was supposed to get up to his room. He found out when one such guest used his doorkey as a talisman to get him past the warders of the way up.

Bushell had hoped he wouldn’t be recognized the instant he stepped out of the lift. That hope proved forlorn. “There he is!” half a dozen voices cried from all parts of the lobby, and reporters stampeded toward him. The Boston RAMs got in front of him like rugby forwards battling to keep the nasty devils on the other side away from the three-quarterback with the ball.

Getting from the lifts to Parker’s was a pretty fair approximation of a scrummage. Elbows flew; some of the reporters were as big and burly as the RAMs. Neither Jerry Doyle nor Michael Shaughnessy was, but the two reporters from Common Sense made up in stridency what they gave away in pounds and inches.

“How does it feel to be a murderer of innocents?” Shaughnessy screamed into Bushell’s ear.

“I don’t know,” Bushell answered. “If I ever try it, you’ll be the first to hear.”

“Most places I go to, innocents aren’t in the habit of carrying hand grenades,” Samuel Stanley said.

“Or throwing them at people,” Kathleen added. Shaughnessy sent her a pained look, perhaps because she’d abandoned a cause he thought she held, or perhaps because the foot Bushell was stepping on belonged to him.

“Why were you armed when you went in search of Joseph Kilbride?” a reporter asked, notebook poised to receive Bushell’s pearls of wisdom.

“If you’re trying to arrest a gun runner, there is some small possibility that he might have a gun - or some other bit of nasty pyrotechnics - concealed about his person,” Bushell answered.

“Pyro - “ the reporter muttered, and sent Bushell a wry grin. “Why the devil didn’t you pick a word I can spell?”

“Why the devil can’t you spell the words I pick?” Bushell retorted. The reporter was only a little more than half his age. He rubbed it in: “Sorry state our schools have got to these days, isn’t it?”

“I did that story last week, pal,” the reporter said, not a bit put out. “You’re what’s news today.”

Another newshound said, “What’s the connection between Kilbride, Venable, and Cavendish on the one hand and The Two Georges on the other?”

“We’re still investigating that,” Bushell answered, a reply that had the twin virtues - as far as he was concerned - of being true and altogether uninformative. He’d hoped none of the reporters would make the connection, but what you hoped for and what you got too often had only the most distant relationship to each other.

“What’s this I hear about your firing at poor Kilbride without even the slightest reason for it?” Jerry Doyle shouted.

“What is it?” Bushell said. “It sounds like a lie to me.”

His voice an angry growl, Samuel Stanley added, “I suppose you think we dropped the hand grenade that blew Cavendish’s face to bits. I hate to tell you, Mr. Doyle, but hand grenades aren’t standard RAM issue - and how would we know to have them handy after Venable flung the first one at us?”

“ If that happened,” Doyle said stubbornly.

“Of course, if,” Bushell agreed, reaching out to pat the man from Common Sense on the shoulder.

“And if the sun goes down tonight - just on the off chance, mind you - it’ll get dark in Boston.”

“Give it up, Jerry,” one of the other reporters told Doyle, his tone half amused, half sympathetic. “It really happened, and there’s damn all you can do about it but take your lumps and come out fighting the next time.”

Doyle frowned and didn’t say anything. Michael Shaughnessy did: “If it was a RAM told me the sun was setting, I’d step outside before I believed him.”

If Common Sense claimed the sun was setting, Bushell was ready to take that for proof it wasn’t. He didn’t bother saying so. For one thing, he and the men from John Kennedy’s magazine would have sounded like a pack of five-year-olds. “If you say this - “ “Oh, yeah? Well, if you say that -“ For another, the RAMs had finally waded through the press of the press to the entrance to Parker’s. Given the choice between arguing with reporters and getting some hot coffee outside, Bushell didn’t think twice. Some of the reporters did get into Parker’s, but only as customers. The waiters there were more zealous in keeping them away from Bushell’s table than were the RAMs. “Sirs, ma’am, if you come in here, we assume you want the chance to take things at your own pace and enjoy your meal,” one of them said.

“I like this place,” Samuel Stanley declared in ringing tones.

After breakfast, Major Harris laid on a RAM steamer to take Bushell and his companions to the local headquarters. That frustrated the reporters who’d hung about while they ate. Newsboys hawked dailies on every corner. One headline read, BUSHELL STRETCHES TRAIL OF GORE FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA.

He pointed to it and asked the driver, “That would be the New England Courant?”

“Yes, sir,” the local RAM answered. “Heard of it already, have you?”

“How could I keep from hearing about such a fine patriotic paper?” Bushell asked. The driver chuckled. When they got to the RAM headquarters, Major Harris met them again and said, “I expect you’ll want to telephone Victoria from a more secure line then you could hope to get at the hotel.”

“Yes, just so,” Bushell agreed. Fear of listeners on the line wasn’t what had kept him from ringing up Sir Horace Bragg the night before. He’d unburdened himself to Kathleen instead. Rather than dwelling on what that might mean, he asked Harris, “Have you already made a preliminary report to the capital?”

“Oh, yes, sir, that I have.” Harris stifled a yawn. He’d probably been up till all hours. “But you know more of the picture - and you can take that any way you please - than I do. The commandant’ll be glad to hear from you, I’m sure he will. Why don’t you just come along with me?”

He took Bushell and his companions to the same room they’d occupied the afternoon before when word came that Joseph Kilbride had been spotted. As she had then, Kathleen Flannery sniffed at the photographs of scantily dressed women and then ostentatiously ignored them - not the sort of art of which she was a connoisseur.

The connection to NAU RAM headquarters in Victoria went through quick as boiled asparagus (ah, the classics, Bushell thought). When he identified himself, the RAM operator said, “Yes, sir! I’ll ring you straight through to Sir Horace’s office.”

That didn’t take long, either. “Office of Lieutenant General Sir Horace Bragg, Commandant, Royal North American Mounted Police, Sally Reese speaking,” his secretary said, apparently without pausing for breath. Bushell moved the handset farther from his ear; as usual, Sally spoke as if she held a megaphone in front of her mouth.

He identified himself again, then said, “I’d like to speak to Sir Horace, please.”

“I’m sorry, Colonel Bushell,” Sally blared, “but you can’t.”

“It’s urgent,” Bushell said. “If he’s in a meeting, please pull him out. I’ll take responsibility.”

“It’s not that, Colonel,” she answered, still at the top of her lungs. “I know he’s always ready to talk to you, but he’s not here this morning. He called in first thing to say he wouldn’t be. He broke a tooth on a chicken bone last night, and he’s going in to the dentist to get a crown put on.”

“Oh,” Bushell said, and touched his own jaw in sympathy. The miserable flesh of which men were made had a way of interfering with even the weightiest affairs. “He’s lucky to have got an appointment on such short notice. Must come of being the commandant.”

Sally Reese’s shrill giggle reminded him of a saw blade biting into a nail. “That’s the very same thing I told him myself, Colonel, the very same thing. This is to do with that horrible mess up in Boston yesterday, isn’t it? Do you want I should transfer you to Brigadier Arthurs? He’d be glad to take your report, I know he would.”

“No, never mind,” Bushell said. Benjamin Arthurs was a sound enough man, but Bushell didn’t care to put any more people than he had to between himself and the case. Like every RAM in the NAU, he had Sir Horace Bragg over him, but he wanted the chain to run directly from Sir Horace to him without developing intermediate links. To propitiate Sally Reese, he went on, “I really have little to add to Major Harris’s report, and I’ll ring back this afternoon to make sure I bring Sir Horace fully up to date.”

“Well, I suppose it’s all right, then.” Bragg’s secretary was loudly dubious, but not dubious enough to make an issue of it. “I’m sure he’ll be looking forward to hearing from you. Good-bye for now.” She hung up.

Samuel Stanley had got off his telephone in time to listen to the last part of Bushell’s conversation.

“You’re going to call Victoria this afternoon?” he said in some surprise. “I thought sure we’d be - “

“-On our way to Victoria by then?” Bushell interrupted. “Of course we will, Sam; don’t be absurd. And when we get in to the capital, I’ll be so apologetic; it would make a dog lose his lunch to watch me. I had to get on the train or the airship or whatever the devil we’ll get on. I couldn’t possibly stay around the office to telephone. Oh, please, Sir Horace, won’t you find it in your heart to forgive me this once?” He let out an alarmingly convincing sob.

Kathleen had been talking with one of her associates, not paying much attention to Bushell or Stanley. She looked up in surprise and concern at that sob. Bushell winked at her. She stared, then stuck out her tongue and went back to her own conversation.

Sam Stanley laughed, but quickly sobered. “Sir Horace isn’t going to buy it, Chief. He’s no fool” - whatever else you can say about him, his eyes added silently, letting Bushell ignore him if he so chose: and he did - “and he’ll know just what you’re up to.”

“I don’t care,” Bushell said, so gleefully that now he startled his adjutant. “What he knows and what he can prove are two different beasts.”

A slow smile spread across Stanley’s face. “That’s no pipsqueak lieutenant talking,” he said. “You sound like any sergeant who’d been around the block with his superiors too bloo - ah, blinking many times. My hat’s off to you.” His hat was already off, sitting on the desk in front of him. He lifted it in salute, then set it down once more.

“Where d’you think I learned such things?” Bushell said. “Once upon a time I was straight and true as could be, and they put me in your hands, and you - you twisted me.” He showed how with his hands; he might have been wringing out a washrag. Then he picked up his own hat. “Thanks, Sam.”

“Any old time,” Stanley said. “Who’s next on your list?”

“I thought I’d call Shikalimo,” Bushell answered. “He’s the mover and shaker in the Six Nations, not the RAMs. I want to see if he’s found anything at Joseph Kilbride’s house yet.”

“Yes, that will be interesting,” Stanley agreed. “If we’re lucky there -“ his shoulders sagged. “We haven’t been lucky so far, not this case.”

Bushell glanced over toward Kathleen Flannery. She was concentrating on her telephone conversation, paying him no heed whatever. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said quietly. “It all depends on how you look at things.” He contemplated that as if it were some new cocktail, then nodded in slow approval. “Yes, it all depends on how you look at things.”

He called the Doshoweh constabulary station. Shikalimo was already on his way out to Kilbride’s house. Bushell muttered in frustration, then remembered that Jaime Macias had been on the point of telling him something interesting when Major Harris brought work Joseph Kilbride had been spotted. But when he telephoned New Liverpool, he found that, despite the early hour back there, Macias, like Shikalimo, was out on a case. “Can we have someone else help you, sir?” the constabulary operator asked.

“No, that’s all right; I’ll ring back tomorrow,” Bushell answered, and hung up. “Can’t get hold of anyone this morning,” he grumbled in not-quite-mock indignation. “The constables are all out working for a living, and Sir Horace no doubt wishes he was.”

He had to explain that to Samuel Stanley, who clapped a hand to his jaw. “I’d sooner be working, if you gave me those choices,” Stanley said. “And speaking of which, how are we going to get to Victoria?”

“Let’s check the schedules,” Bushell answered. “I’m sure there’ll be plenty of trains; it’s just a question of whether they have airships leaving at a convenient time - and how long we’d have to spend floating above the airship port before we could land.” The time wasted over Astoria remained burned in his memory.

That turned out not to be an issue. Trains ran almost as fast as airships, and so many of them traveled the crowded Boston-New York-Philadelphia-Victoria corridor that he had only to pick a departure time that would let him and his companions finish up their work here, collect their belongings and check out of the Parker House, and reach the railway station. A young, eager lieutenant made the arrangements and volunteered to chauffeur them to the station.

When they left the RAM offices, newsboys were still shouting about the bloody events on Lansdowne Street, but they had another headline to cry, too:

KING-EMPEROR PREPARING TO SAIL FOR VICTORIA.

One of the papers - Bushell didn’t notice which one - ran a subhead just below:

TWO GEORGES STILL MISSING.

He turned to Stanley. “We’re running out of time.”