The Two Georges

IX

Shikalimo’s Supermarine saloon held himself, the two local RAMs, and the three travelers. The backseat made a tight squeeze, but Bushell minded less than he might have, for he was pressed up against Kathleen Flannery. As good manners demanded, they both pretended to ignore the close contact. Bushell, though, was very much aware of what he affected to disregard. He wondered if Kathleen was, too.

As he had when he picked up Bushell and Stanley at the train station, Shikalimo drove the powerful Supermarine as if he were in a road race. “Have a care, there,” Charles Lucas protested feebly when he shot around a lorry and then swung back into the lane it occupied so abruptly that his passengers slid from side to side as much as their cramped quarters would allow.

“Haven’t had a wreck yet,” Shikalimo said gaily. He changed lanes again, for no purpose Bushell could see other than horrifying Lucas.

With three large men in the front seat and only the roadster’s small side windows to look out of, Bushell didn’t see as much of Doshoweh as he would have wanted. He did note that, once they got away from the center of the city, it stopped looking quite so much like any other town of similar size in the NAU. For one thing, except in scattered districts, signs written in English almost disappeared. As they were speeding through one such district, Shikalimo remarked, “A lot of whites here.” The houses bore him out: they were clapboards and half-timbered Tudors that wouldn’t have looked out of place in New England or New York.

Away from the white parts of town, though, houses as he knew them largely disappeared. Instead, long, narrow buildings of bark and timber framing stretched on and on, sometimes for fifty or sixty feet, sometimes for twice that. Children too young for school played around them, while women cultivated maize and beans and squashes in gardens that replaced lawns.

Shikalimo said, “Some of our people live in the ganosote, the bark house, because they can afford no better. Others, though, prefer our traditional homes for other reasons: they enjoy the sense of community the ganosote gives them. I mean that literally as well as metaphorically; more often than not, all the families in a bark house will be of the same clan.”

Bushell thought of the block of flats in which he lived. People came and went almost at random. He knew only a handful of his fellow lodgers by name. “Maybe your people have the right idea,” he said.

“Sometimes differences are just - different,” Shikalimo answered with a shrug. “When I went off to university, I wondered how you whites managed to live as naked individuals, so to speak: without the clan structure I’d taken for granted, and with even your families pale things by the standards to which I was accustomed. But, after some years of that life, coming home to the Six Nations was a shock of another sort. What I do, whom I see are dictated more by my position in the clan than my own choice. It sometimes has the feel of a strait-jacket - rather a loose-fitting one, but a straitjacket nonetheless.”

“Isn’t that partly because you’re the Sachem’s nephew?” Samuel Stanley asked.

“Partly, but less than you’d think,” Shikalimo said. “Among us, your place in the clan dictates possibilities no matter who you are.” He chuckled in wry amusement. “I daresay I have more sympathy for the scandalous princesses on the odd branches of His Majesty’s family tree than the rest of you might. Their kicking over the traces so thoroughly makes me jealous.”

“It also makes them fine targets for the scandal sheets the Sons of Liberty turn out,” Bushell said.

“I wonder what sort of scandal I could essay,” Shikalimo murmured. Bushell wouldn’t have been more than half surprised to find he meant it seriously.

Deohstegaa lay northwest of the center of Doshoweh. The shore of the lake the Iroquois called Doshoweh Tecarneodi and the English-speaking world Lake Erie was rocky thereabouts, but quays running out into the water made for a fine harbor. As Shikalimo raced past that harbor, Bushell saw that most of the men working there were of the blood of the Six Nations.

Perhaps catching his gaze in the mirror, Shikalimo said, “We really are part of the twentieth century these days, Colonel.”

“If I were you, I wouldn’t be so proud of it,” Bushell answered.

The house in front of which Shikalimo stopped was in an enclave of British-style homes that spoke of wealth despite being close to the docks. Had the lawns in front of it been a vegetable garden, the crops it yielded might have fed a fair part of Doshoweh. When Bushell pressed the button by the door, chimes played the opening bars of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Fallen Innocents, which the radical composer had dedicated to those who fell to Bonaparte’s guns in the ill-fated French uprising against Louis XVI.

Bushell raised an eyebrow. “If this chap’s not a Son of Liberty, his doorbell doesn’t know it.”

The door opened. A butler in black tie and frock coat peered out at the group on the porch. If he was impressed, he hid it well. “Yes? How may I help you?” he asked, in tones that implied, How may I help you off the property?

Bushell displayed his badge. So did Samuel Stanley. So did the two local RAMs. So did Shikalimo. Kathleen Flannery took something official-looking from her handbag and held it up, too. For all Bushell knew, it entitled her to visit the washroom at her museum. When flashed along with so much highly intimidating and highly genuine tin, it passed muster.

“Where’s Kilbride?”Bushell growled, like a cinema ruffian.

The butler’s mouth worked. For close to fifteen seconds, nothing came out. At last, in strangled tones, he managed, “Mr. Kilbride is not here at present.”

“No reason he should be. I’m sure he’s a busy man,” Samuel Stanley said smoothly. He and Bushell had played nice guy, tough guy at scores of interrogations; they did it now almost without conscious thought.

“Can you tell us where his place of business is?”

“You don’t understand,” the butler said, his voice losing culture and hauteur at about the same speed. “I don’t mean he’s not at home. I mean he’s not in Doshoweh right now.”

“Where’d he go?” Bushell demanded, still sounding tough. “When’d he leave?”

“He’s in Pennsylvania,” the butler answered. “I don’t know anything more about it than that, honest I don’t. He packed up and took off day before yesterday. Nobody knew he was going to do it till he had Foyt drive him to the train station.” He gamely tried to recover his professional persona: “It has thrown the household into rather a muddle.” The persona crumbled again, for he expanded on that, saying, “Everything’s gone to hell in a handbasket, as a matter of fact.”

“Whereabouts in Pennsylvania is he?” Bushell said, at the same time as Sylvanus Greeley was asking, “When will he be back?”

“Don’t know,” the butler replied. He said no more; the answer was evidently intended to be comprehensive.

“Somebody tipped him,” Stanley muttered in disgust. The butler’s face made a fascinating study. Bushell wouldn’t have minded turning Gainsborough loose on him as he tried to figure out what his master might have done.

He agreed with his adjutant: someone had to have warned Kilbride to make himself scarce. And if that was so, Kathleen Flannery really had uncovered a villain - unless this was all an elaborate feint to throw him off the scent. He didn’t find that likely: plans so elaborate had a way of breaking down. Which meant - probably meant - Kathleen was trustworthy.

It also meant they needed to run Joseph Kilbride to earth as fast as they could. “Give me your master’s business address and telephone number,” he told the butler. “Maybe they’ll know there why he’s left town and just where the devil he’s gone.”

The butler plucked a card from a silver box on a table close by the door. “Here is the information you require, sir.”

Bushell put on his spectacles to read the engraved typography on the business card. JOSEPH J. KILBRIDE, PURVEYOR OF FINE FOODS AND SPIRITS, the card declared, and gave the telephone number and an address on Gawehga Road. “Where’s Gawehga Road?” he asked.

“Not far from here,” Greeley, Lucas, and Shikalimo answered in the same breath. Shikalimo added, “Gawehga, in case you’re interested, means snowshoe.” He gave Bushell a mischievous look.

“Actually, it means snowshoe even if you’re not interested.”

Bushell turned back to the butler. “Before we go haring off to this grocer’s shop or whatever it is” - he watched the fellow’s nostrils flare in what might have been anger or might have been half a guffaw “would anybody else around this shack know where Kilbride’s gone? Is there a Mrs. Kilbride, for instance?”

“Sir, if I am not acquainted with Mr. Kilbride’s destination, no one associated with this establishment is, of that I assure you.” The butler had his fancy diction back in place. “And I am not. Mr. Kilbride, furthermore, is a widower. None of his occasional companions is likely to be informed of his comings and goings.”

“Hangs about with tarts, does he?” Bushell waited for the butler’s stilled snort of laughter to prove the guess good, then grinned at Shikalimo. “See if you can run some of them down when you get the chance. Never can tell what a dirty old man might say in between the sheets.”

“Sir!” The butler blushed bright red. But after he glanced back over his shoulder to make sure no one down the hall could hear him, he leaned forward and said, “Not a chance, pal. The boss talks like every word costs him a shilling - and he’s tight with his shillings, he is.” He straightened up and became once more the image of decorum.

That sounded like the truth to Bushell. It also made Kilbride sound like a Son of Liberty, or at least like someone who could be a Son without letting on. If he was a man of that sort, they wouldn’t find out where he’d gone from anyone with whom he worked. They had to try, though. “Let’s go,” Bushell said. He wondered if the butler would slam the door in relief at having them gone, and kept an ear peeled as they walked back toward Shikalimo’s steamer. Rather to his disappointment, he didn’t hear any bang. Kilbride’s Fine Food and Drink, declared the sign above the shop off Gawehga Road. Across the street was open ground, a park or possibly just a meadow. Several dozen people were gathered there, some in clothing that wouldn’t have been out of place anywhere in the Empire, some in Iroquois-style skins and embroidered cloth of like cut, some mixing the two. One of them thrust a torch into a brazier. Whatever was in there burned smokily, a grey-white plume rising toward the sky. The - congregation was the word that sprang to Bushell’s mind - chanted something in the Iroquois language and began a slow, dignified line dance.

“A prayer of thanksgiving to Hawenneyu - the Great Spirit, one would say in English,” Shikalimo said.

“The smoke from the tobacco wafts the prayer up to the heavens. Incense served a similar function in Christian worship at one time, I believe.”

Bushell didn’t know enough about such things to say whether he was right or wrong. He asked, “How many of your people have kept the old ways, and how many gone over to Christianity?”

“We’re about evenly divided,” the Iroquois answered. “A couple of generations ago, there was fear the worship of Hawenneyu might fade away, leaving us without an important piece of our past. Even in this twentieth century, we have long memories, as you British do. But that seems not to have happened; the balance has remained more or less constant for as long as I’ve been alive.” He pointed toward the sign above Kilbride’s establishment. “Just as well, too, I’d say, for it keeps us from seeing more things like that.”

For a moment, Bushell didn’t follow him. Then he realized the sign was only in English, without an Iroquois equivalent. Most businesses in Doshoweh were more likely to be missing English than the language of the Six Nations. Kilbride’s choice said something about the way he thought. When you coupled that with his taste in art and the music of his door chime. . . . Bushell’s pulse quickened. Joseph Kilbride did seem to have all the mental furniture of a Son of Liberty, and he was also a capable, prosperous man. If he was a Son, he ought to be one of high stature. And a Son of high Stature might know quite a lot about The Two Georges. The bell above the door pealed when Bushell and his companions went into Kilbride’s establishment. He saw at once that the fine in the title of the shop was not misplaced. Kilbride sold fancy hams from Virginia and the Germanies, New Scotland smoked salmon, tinned lobster meat, fancy capers, salted olives from the Ottoman protectorates, and a variety of fresh spices whose aromas made Bushell’s nose twitch appreciatively. One wall held fine wines from France and Upper California, the Germanies and the Italian states, along with Russian potato spirits, Holland gin, and whiskey from Scotland and the provinces of Franklin and Tennessee. For good measure, humidors of expensive Havanas stood nearby. Bushell took a look at some of the prices. An eyebrow rose. Everything in the place was expensive. Part of that was quality. Part of it looked to be profit.

“May I help you?” a clerk called from behind a counter.

“Is Mr. Kilbride in?” Bushell asked.

“I’m sorry, sir, no,” the clerk answered, shaking his head. “What’s this in aid of, if I may ask?” As those of Kilbride’s butler had, his eyes grew wide when Bushell and the other officers displayed their badges. He licked his lips. “Uh, let me refer you to Mr. Whitby. He is our senior manager. Excuse me.” He headed for the back of the store at an undignified lope.

When he returned, he brought with him a stout, bald, sour-faced gentleman in a suit of grey worsted whose lines tried without much success to disguise his bulk. The man thrust out a large pink hand. “I’m Anson Whitby.” His voice was a rumbling bass. “Kilbride’s is not accustomed to having constabulary officers inquiring after its proprietor.”

“I’m not a constabulary officer,” Bushell said with a bright smile. “I’m a RAM.”

Whitby proved his face could express something other than glowering disapproval: he looked astonished. “Good heavens!” he said. “What on earth can Kilbride’s have done to deserve this?”

“Not Kilbride’s - Kilbride,” Bushell said, cheery still - it seemed to disconcert Anson Whitby. “Where exactly is Mr. Kilbride, if he’s not at home and he’s not here?”

“He telephoned me morning before last, saying he was called away to Pennsylvania on urgent business,” Whitby answered. “I asked him where in Pennsylvania and how long he would be gone, and he told me to mind my damned business. Beg your pardon, ma’am,” he added to Kathleen Flannery, “but that’s what he said.”

“Is that how he usually talks?” Bushell asked.

“Too right it is,” Whitby said. “And if he could keep his left hand from knowing what his right hand was up to, he’d do that, too.” He cocked his head to one side, so that he took on the aspect of a bulldog deciding whether to bite. “What do you think he’s done, anyhow?”

“I think he’s done all sorts of interesting and unpleasant things,” Bushell answered, not caring to give details. “I think he’ll pay for them with a good many years in gaol once we run him to earth, too.”

Anson Whitby stared at him. So did the clerk, in slack-jawed, round-eyed astonishment. From their reactions, he guessed neither of them was party to Kilbride’s extracurricular activities, though Whitby, at least, had the look of a man who could run a bluff.

The door chime rang. Bushell half turned to see who was coming in. To his surprise, the customer was an Iroquois, an elderly man in the dark suit, waistcoat, and homburg of a prosperous businessman anywhere in the British Empire. By the way he nodded to Anson Whitby, he was a regular here. That surprised Bushell, who hadn’t expected Kilbride’s shop to cater to anyone but whites. The Iroquois made a beeline for the wall of liquors. He chose a bottle of Franklin whiskey and another of potent Russian spirits and carried them to the counter. The clerk hurried behind it to ring up the sale on the register.

“That will be twenty guineas,” he said. The Iroquois gentleman drew a beaded wallet from a trouser pocket. He handed the clerk a red twenty-pound note, then added a gold sovereign to make up the extra twenty shillings. The clerk put the bottles of spirits into a paper sack for him. As the customer turned to go, he caught sight of Shikalimo among the whites in the shop. His smile was sickly as he hurried out the door. He leaped into the steamer he’d parked in front of the Supermarine and sped away.

Shikalimo sighed. “Even with the taxes we slap on liquor, our people remain too fond of it. You British have been drinking spirits for centuries longer than we have, and they still do you harm. With us, they might as well be poison.”

They were poison for Bushell, too, but that didn’t stop him from drinking them. His body was telling him he hadn’t had enough to drink in a long time. His body, though, thought enough to drink meant drinking till he couldn’t hold up a glass any more. His mind knew better . . . sometimes. Samuel Stanley said, “You won’t have a lot of drunks here, not at ten guineas the bottle you won’t.”

“That’s the idea, yes,” Shikalimo said. He turned a hooded glance on Anson Whitby. “Of course, not all establishments have tariffs quite so high as these.”

“How many Iroquois do come in here?” Bushell asked Whitby.

“A goodly number, that’s as much as I can say,” Whitby answered. “Keeping track of our customers by race would be a gross invasion of their privacy.” He seemed to wrap himself in an invisible banner of rectitude.

“What does Joseph Kilbride think about the Iroquois?” Bushell asked.

“I’ve never heard him express an opinion,” Whitby said.

He was a tough customer. When Bushell put that question to the senior manager, he looked not at him but toward the young clerk. At Whitby’s steadfast denial, the clerk stared down at the countertop and fiddled with some jars of gumdrops on it. The tips of his ears turned pink.

“You, there!” Bushell called, and the clerk jumped. “Have you ever heard Mr. Kilbride express an opinion about the Iroquois?”

“Me?” the clerk squeaked. The tips of his ears got redder. He glanced nervously toward Whitby, who stared back with a gaze a basilisk might have envied. “Uh, no, not really. That is - “

Bushell strode over to him. “Are you afraid of that fat tun? Don’t be. The worst he can do is give you the sack, and a man who’s willing to work won’t lack a situation long. And if you tell us what you know, you’ll be helping us track down The Two Georges.”

He hadn’t mentioned the painting till then. The clerk’s eyes got big again. “Really?” he breathed, and stopped looking toward Anson Whitby. “I remember he said once that he liked having Indians come into the shop because he got their money and he got them drunk, too. I could be wrong, but I think the person he said it to was Mr. Whitby.”

“It was not,” Whitby said evenly. “As I told you, I never heard him express any such opinion - nor any complimentary one, either. He is, as I’ve noted, sparing of speech.”

Shikalimo said, “Mr. Whitby, if you are discovered to be tampering with the truth in this matter, I assure you that you shall regret it.” Had he made the threat in obvious anger, it would have been easier to shrug off. Instead, he stated it as if it were a simple law of nature, inexorable as night following day. Bushell would not have cared to have such a warning leveled at him.

“I regret nothing,” Whitby said. “The facts are as I state them. If you prefer a clerk’s word to mine, I can do nothing but conclude it better fits some theory you have already concocted.”

“Thank you both,” Bushell said to Whitby and the clerk, and headed for the door. Samuel Stanley followed at once, willing to back whatever play he made. Shikalimo began to expostulate, but found himself talking to Bushell’s back. He went after Bushell with obvious reluctance. So did the local RAMs and Kathleen Flannery.

Out on the sidewalk, Charles Lucas exclaimed, “That fast bastard, he’s lying through his teeth, Colonel. What are you doing letting him off like that?”

“Of course he’s lying,” Bushell said, which touched off a fresh round of protests. “So what?”

That startled the others into a moment’s silence. A grin suddenly spread over Samuel Stanley’s face.

“‘So what?’ is right,” he said. “Whitby’s not the chap we’re after, no matter what sort of villain he turns out to be in his own right.”

“You’ve got it,” Bushell agreed. “We want Kilbride. We’ve found out enough to know he leans toward the Sons of Liberty. All I want to do now is go to the train station, find out if he bought a ticket there, where in Pennsylvania he was going, and whether he got on the train. If he did, I’m going after him.”

Shikalimo nodded thoughtfully. “You focus on the essentials, Colonel. This is worth remembering.”

“I wouldn’t have known Kilbride was essential if Dr. Flannery hadn’t recognized his name.” Bushell turned to Kathleen. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she answered. “As I’ve been trying to tell you, Colonel, I really do want to get The Two Georges back.”

“Yes, you have said that,” Bushell agreed, which was not the same as admitting he completely believed her. To his relief, she did not seem to notice the distinction. That she’d spotted Kilbride’s name made him more inclined to trust her, but he could not escape the nagging fear that the pursuit on which he was embarking was intended to distract him from the true trail. A drowning man, though, grabbed for any spar he could reach.

Shikalimo was busy focusing on the essentials: “When we go to the station, we should be armed with a picture of the honorable Mr. Kilbride.” For a man so young, he had a nice command of irony. “I wonder if that butler could be persuaded to part with one without our having to go to the trouble of obtaining a search warrant. If he liked his master better, I should say no, but as things are - “ He let that hang, continuing in a slightly different vein: “I do sometimes find the Anglo-Saxon insistence on having the proper papers even in emergencies a curious bit of superstition.”

“It’s a better way to do things than the one the Russians use, where the Okhrana can knock on your door - knock down your door - with any excuse or none,” Bushell said. Shikalimo shrugged, but was too polite to take the argument any further.

They drove back to Joseph Kilbride’s mansion. “A picture?” the butler said. “I can do that. Just let me nip one out from where it won’t be noticed.” He disappeared. From inside the house came a woman’s voice (perhaps Kilbride’s latest lady friend, Bushell thought, or perhaps just the housekeeper), then his, then the woman’s again, louder. The butler returned, handed Bushell a photograph, and declared in stentorian tones, “As I told you before, you are not welcome here without the due legal formalities.” He tipped Bushell a wink while slamming the door in his face.

In deference to the charade, they went out to Shikalimo’s steamer before looking at the picture. “Lovely chap,” Bushell murmured as Joseph Kilbride stared pugnaciously up from the palm of his hand. Kilbride looked more like a retired prizefighter than an art collector. He had a large Celtic face and a large broken nose. His eyes were pale and hard and shrewd.

“If they sold him a ticket, they’ll remember him,” Samuel Stanley said.

“Then we’ll find out if they did,” Shikalimo said, and put the Supermarine in gear. Returning to the train station was almost like coming home. After you’d been on the road for a while, any place you saw twice seemed intimately familiar - and train stations were all pretty much alike to begin with. The men and women in the ticket cages exclaimed in excitement when Major Shikalimo, the RAMs, and Kathleen Flannery descended on them.

“Oh, him,” a woman with a grey streak in her midnight hair said when she saw Kilbride’s photograph.

“Yes, I sold him a ticket.” She laughed. “He tried to bargain over the price, like a man buying terrapins at the fish market.”

“Where was he going?” Bushell asked.

The ticket seller frowned. “Charleroi, that’s it,” she said after a moment. Seeing Bushell’s blank look, she added, “It’s south of Pittsburgh.”

“Mining town,” Shikalimo put in. “But then, around Pittsburgh they’re all mining towns.” He sighed. “The NAU needs the coal, needs the electricity, but that’s an ugly part of the world - as if someone took a lot of the ugliness from the rest of the Union and dropped it there.”

“Charleroi,” Samuel Stanley muttered, half to himself. “Charleroi. . . Why have I heard that name before?” He took a couple of steps back and forth, then suddenly straightened. “Some of the coal miners who were out picketing when Tricky Dick got shot came from Charleroi.” He got a faraway look in his eyes as he went back over the evidence he’d gathered what seemed an age before. “McGaffigan, O’Flynn - somebody else, too, I forget who.”

“Isn’t that interesting?” Bushell said. “Do you think things might be coming together after all?” He laughed. “Probably something in the rules against that, but we’ll find out.”

“You’re going on to Charleroi, then?” Kathleen Flannery asked.

“No, Dr. Flannery - we are.” He’d wanted to take her to Niagara Falls, by all accounts one of the most beautiful spots in the British Empire. The Pennsylvania coal mines did not strike him as an adequate substitute.

When Shikalimo dropped Bushell, Stanley, and Kathleen Flannery at the train station the next afternoon, he said, “We often look over the border and think how lucky we are.” The Pennsylvania Railroad train that would pull out of Doshoweh, bound for Pittsburgh and points south, had no name. It was just a train, doing a job that had to be done but didn’t seem worth commemorating in any way. Bushell took that as a symptom of what the Iroquois was talking about. Nobody much wanted to go to western Pennsylvania. Sometimes, though, you had to, like it or not.

With one exception, service aboard the train reflected its determinedly anonymous status. The upholstery and springs of the seats had seen better days. The dining car was dingy, the beefsteak Bushell ordered for supper overcooked and fatty. The stewards slapped food and dishes around in a way he hadn’t seen since his last army mess hall. And yet, every so often, people would come up from the car in back of the diner with beatific smiles on their faces.

Bushell’s curiosity finally got the better of him. When still another obviously satisfied soul went past him, he reached out to bar the fellow’s path, asking, “What do they have back there, friend, the hashish?”

“You ain’t far wrong, buddy. That’s the Pennsy club car, that is,” the man answered in tones of reverence better suited to discussions of St. Paul’s Cathedral. The high-proof fumes he breathed into Bushell’s face added their accent to his words.

After the stewards went clattering off with the last of the china and silverware, Bushell said to Sam and Kathleen, “Well, shall we see if that really is a proper oasis?”

“Why not?” Kathleen said. “It can’t be worse than the rest of the train, and it might be better.”

“Couldn’t have put it neater myself,” Samuel Stanley said as he got up from the table.

“Well, well,” Bushell murmured when they went into the club car, and then again: “Well, well.” The car was cool and dim and seemed quiet, maybe because of that - it rattled along over the rails no different from any other. But none of that was why Bushell had exclaimed.

“Will you look at the display behind the bar?” Stanley said softly. “I’ve seen fancy taverns that don’t stock half as many kinds of hooch. You want anything at all, you can get it here.”

“Amen,” Bushell said. “And catch the mirror behind the bottles - it makes it look as if there are twice as many.” He laughed. “Overkill.”

Four men got up from the bar. Bushell and his companions slid onto three of the stools they’d vacated. He ordered Jameson over ice, Kathleen a gin and tonic, and Samuel Stanley a pint of Molson’s ale. The bartender drew it from the tap with practiced perfection, stopping the flow so the top of the head reached the edge of the glass without a drop spilling over.

After he went off to serve another thirsty soul, Stanley said, “I know why the club car’s so fancy even when the rest of the train’s down at the heels.” Bushell raised a questioning eyebrow. His adjutant explained: “If you were going into the Pennsylvania coal country, wouldn’t you want someplace where you could try and forget it?”

“Many a truth spoken in jest,” Bushell said. He raised his glass. “To finding Joseph Kilbride and some answers, in whichever order we come across them.” They all drank. He savored the smoky taste of the Irish whiskey in his mouth and its warmth in his belly.

When Kathleen Flannery’s drink was done, she excused herself for a moment. Bushell ordered a second round from the bartender. When the new drinks came, he said, “Here’s another toast for you and me, Sam: here’s hoping we didn’t leave Doshoweh too bloody soon.”

Stanley sighed and nodded. “We left a lot behind, didn’t we? I’d like to know more about that printer Shikalimo turned up, I’d like to have found the room where the Sons were hiding The Two Georges, I’d like to have done a whole lot of things. But we can’t be in two or four places at once, and we don’t have a lot of time. We have to follow the trail that looks hottest and remember we have other people looking in other places.”

“The trail that looks hottest,” Bushell repeated. “Here’s one more toast still: here’s hoping it doesn’t look hottest because somebody set it up to look that way.” Without waiting for Stanley to follow suit, he poured the shot of Jameson down his throat and signaled the bartender for another.

“You still aren’t sure about - “ Stanley suddenly clammed up.

Kathleen Flannery slid back onto her stool. “The two of you are pretty quiet,” she said. “You must have been talking about me.”

Samuel Stanley swigged at his Molson’s to give himself an excuse not to deal with that one. “Men always talk about women when they aren’t there,” Bushell answered lazily. “It gives us the chance to - “

“ - To bend your elbow, it looks like,” Kathleen said, pointing to the empty glass the bartender hadn’t taken away.

“To squeeze a word in without getting interrupted, I was going to say,” Bushell finished.

“Were you?” Kathleen picked up her fresh drink, sipped, and peered at him from over the rim of the glass.

“If I wasn’t, you’ll never prove it now,” he said.

“So I won’t. Point to you, Colonel Bushell.” Kathleen Flannery could have said that in tones of Alaskan ice, as she’d spoken when Bushell gave her no choice about coming along with him and Sam Stanley. She didn’t - quite. He took that as progress, all the while wondering whether she was playing the same game as he or a different one altogether.

That was the question in more ways than one, especially when they were almost flirting like this. Is she a suspect? had nearly vanished from his mind, but it was still there. But he also wondered what else lay behind those green eyes. Does she feel anything for me? He couldn’t just ask. That would break the rules of the game. He’d have to find out.

He had that drink, and then another one, and then another. Samuel Stanley nursed his second ale. Bushell wondered if Sam was going to kick him in the ankle to try to get him to slow down. His adjutant had a good deal of mother hen in him. Stanley contented himself with looking worried. Since he looked worried a lot of the time, only Bushell noticed.

Kathleen Flannery finished three drinks. She was starting a fourth when the train pulled into Pittsburgh. Streetlamps and tongues of flame from factory chimneys made the sooty air outside seem thick, almost curdled. “I’ve been through here in the daytime,” Kathleen said. “It’s worse then; you can see the smoke curling and twisting through the valleys that lead down to the rivers.” She spoke slowly and carefully, pausing every couple of words to make sure they’d come out the way she wanted them.

“New Liverpool’s air isn’t all it should be,” Bushell said, “but it’s nothing like this.” His speech did not show that he had considerably more liquor on board than Kathleen. Some of the learned quacks said holding your whiskey well was a sign you were too fond of it. For one thing, Bushell already knew how fond of whiskey he was. For another, he wasn’t in the habit of listening to quacks no matter how learned they were.

The conductor came through the club car. “Liberty Street station!” he called. “All out for Pittsburgh!”

There was a general exodus. No matter how unpleasant a place the grimy industrial city was, a lot of capital resided here, and gold drew men as a lodestone draws iron.

“Liberty Street?” Bushell raised his glass once more. “Down with liberty - and its sons.” He and Stanley drank to that at once. Kathleen Flannery followed suit, a little more slowly. Did that mean she didn’t care for the toast, or just that she’d had enough to drink? Bushell rubbed at his mustache. How far to rely on her? If he guessed wrong on that - He drained his Jameson.

At some time in the past - whether ten years before or only six months, Bushell couldn’t tell - the Pennsylvania Railroad station in Pittsburgh had been painted white. Now it was a streaky, dingy grey, uglier than it would have been had it not tried defying the soft-coal smoke that made the town what it was.

The train lay over in Pittsburgh for most of an hour, loading and unloading passengers. Some of the people who came into the club car had the sleek and prosperous look of businessmen. More, though, were miners and factory hands heading back to their home towns after coming into the city for whatever they couldn’t get locally.

A lot of the men in overalls and boots and cloth caps and collarless shirts spoke with a brogue. Bushell glanced over to Kathleen. Her English was almost as elegant as Shikalimo’s. He wondered what her father sounded like.

From Pittsburgh to Charleroi was a journey of less than half an hour, and would have taken only half that time had the train not made several stops at other industrial and mining towns along the way. The laborers who packed the club car drank with a grim intensity that made even Bushell raise an eyebrow. No men who were happy with their lot would have needed so much anesthesia before they got home. Some of the drinkers had their hair cropped short in the Roundhead look that set his teeth on edge. Others rolled up shirtsleeves to show off eagles tattooed on forearms or biceps. He wondered how many of them were Sons of Liberty and how many just venting frustration at life in the NAU. They were fools if they thought breaking away from England would get them out of the mines and foundries. An independent North America would need coal and steel no less than the NAU did. He shrugged and knocked back the last of his Jameson. Some people thought change automatically led to improvement. Having been through a great many changes in his own life - and ended up half drunk on a nameless train rattling south toward a grimy coal town - he wondered about that.

“Charleroi!” the conductor called. “All out for Charleroi!” He pushed his way through the club car to make the announcement in the next one back.

The train squealed to a stop. The Charleroi station hardly rated the name. It boasted a ticket booth, an awning over the tracks to keep rain off arriving and departing passengers, and not much more. Bushell, Stanley, and Kathleen Flannery got their bags and then stood under the awning for a moment, wondering where to go next. They drew guarded looks from the miners and the women and children who came to meet them: not only were they strangers, but their clothes proclaimed them to be of a different class from the locals.

Bushell walked over to the ticket booth. “If I want a good hotel, where do I go?”

The ticket seller shifted a pipe to the corner of his mouth and answered, “Somewheres else.” When that failed to shift Bushell, he sighed and pointed south. “Down there just a couple buildings, that’s the Ribblesdale House. Best we got. It ain’t much, and that’s a fact.”

Despite its fancy name, the Ribblesdale House proved to be a down-at-the-heels building with tired wallpaper and carpeting grey with ground-in grime. “Yes, sir, we have plenty of rooms,” the desk clerk said. The unspoken question in his eyes was, Why the devil were you stupid enough to come to Charleroi?

“Do you have a Joseph Kilbride registered here?” Bushell asked.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t give out that information,” the clerk answered. Bushell laid his badge on the counter. The clerk’s eyes went large and round. “Uh, let me check.” He flipped through the registration book. “No, no one by that name here. I didn’t think so.”

“Well, where is he, then?” Samuel Stanley burst out. He rounded on the clerk. “Does this godforsaken hole in the ground have any other hotels?”

The young man’s skin was fair enough to let Bushell see his flush. “There’s the Hastings Arms,” he said, with the clear implication that anyone who’d register at the Hastings Arms was a savage irremediably beyond the pale of civilization.

“We’ll check it in the morning,” Bushell decided. “He may be staying with friends, too. If he has any friends in this town, he deserves to stay with them, and they deserve to have him.”

“Here are your keys, sirs, ma’am,” the clerk said. “I’ve given you three adjoining rooms right upstairs on the first floor: 135, 137, and 139.”

“Thank you, Mr. - “ Bushell peered toward the name badge the fellow wore on his right lapel. “Mr. Devlin. Those will do nicely.”

The Ribblesdale House had an attached dining room. It did not come up to Bushell’s standards. The eggs were greasy, the bacon overcooked, and the pot of English Breakfast he ordered had been steeped so long, it was bitter. The toast came to the table cold, but that was common practice at hotels that tried to ape those of England, so he didn’t know whether to blame it on mere fecklessness or social climbing. He and his companions stolidly worked their way through breakfast, imperfectly satisfactory though it was. He was lighting his first cigar of the morning to get the bitter taste of the tea out of his mouth when a couple of young men in suits and waistcoats paused at the entrance to the dining room. At first he pegged them for businessmen, but their lapels were too wide and too sharp, their trousers too baggy, to let them fit into most reputable businesses. He sucked in more aromatic cigar smoke. Charleroi might not have any reputable businesses.

The pair spotted him, Stanley, and Kathleen - not hard, since they were the only people in the dining room. Side by side, the newcomers walked over to stand close by the table where Bushell and his companions sat. Except to blow cigar smoke in their direction, he ignored them. Samuel Stanley and Kathleen followed his lead, save that they did not have cigars.

One of the two young men had a receding hairline. The other wore a close-trimmed, gingery beard. The balding one whipped out a notebook and fountain pen. In portentous tones, the other asked, “You’re the RAMs who came into Charleroi last night?” The chap with the pen and notebook started scribbling before Bushell spoke a word.

“If you already know the answers, why ask the questions?” Bushell said mildly. Reporters, he thought, in lieu of a stronger pejorative. “Let’s try it the other way: who are you?”

“Michael Shaughnessy,” said the one with the notebook, at the same time as the bearded one was saying, “Jerry Doyle.” Bushell expected them to announce the name of the Charleroi - or possibly Pittsburgh - paper that employed them. Instead, they chorused, “We’re with Common Sense.”

“Are you?” Bushell said, still not sounding very interested. “If you had any, you wouldn’t be.” While the two reporters were adding that up and discovering that it came out to something less than a ringing endorsement, he let his eyes stray casually to Kathleen Flannery.

She was looking straight at him, perhaps expecting that questioning gaze. “I didn’t call them,” she declared. “I’ve never set eyes on them before, I’ve never heard of them, and I didn’t know they were going to be here.”

“Did I say you did?” Bushell answered. But her quick, vehement denial rekindled the doubts that had died to smoldering embers. The edge of a headache he had from last night’s whiskey got worse. He didn’t let any of that show, but nodded affably enough to Doyle and Shaughnessy. “I might have known Mr. Kennedy would send out a vulture, but I didn’t think he’d put a bald eagle on the train with him.”

Michael Shaughnessy reddened as easily as a woman might have. “Now see here, you tyrant’s slave - “

Doyle set a hand on his companion’s arm. “He’s trying to get your goat, Mike, and by the sound of you he has it.” Like Shaughnessy, he had a vanishing trace of a brogue, almost swallowed in a flat New England accent. Turning to Bushell, he said, “We’ll come to keep an eye on the monstrous waste of public money you RAMs are making of the search for that ugly daub, The Two Georges.”

“Isn’t it nice, Sam?” Bushell steepled his fingers. “Common Sense sends the art critics to look after us.”

Samuel Stanley was too angry to enjoy irony. “How the devil did that blasted rag know to send them here? We just got here ourselves.” His not looking at Kathleen was as pointed as the glance Bushell had sent her. Then he glowered up at the reporters. “Who tipped you off?”

“You don’t think we’d tell you?” Jerry Doyle raised an eyebrow in well-crafted dismay. “The press is still free, not the muzzled lapdog of the Crown you’d make it if you had your way.”

“Be careful who you’re talking to,” Shaughnessy warned, mock alarm in his voice. “For if the one here is the famous Colonel Bushell who’s had his pictures in all the papers, the other must be his just as famous aide, Captain Stanley - Sam the spade.” He rocked back on his heels in amusement to see how the RAMs would take that.

Stanley bit his lip. Bushell wondered how long it had been since someone sneered at him on account of his race. Such things happened more often than RAMs getting shot at in the course of their duties, but they weren’t common: Negroes of a given social class were usually treated much like their white counterparts. Why not? Bushell thought. A man couldn’t help his race, but hard work would lift him out of the class into which he’d been born.

“Vulgarians,” Kathleen muttered. It wasn’t meant to be overheard. That made Bushell feel better about catching it. If Kathleen didn’t think well of men who would make a racialist joke, maybe she hadn’t been the one who called Common Sense.

On the other hand, maybe she just hadn’t known whom the periodical would despatch to Charleroi. Bushell looked at the reporters as if he’d bitten into an apple and found them in there. “Do you know a fellow called Joseph Kilbride?” he asked.

He expected them to shake their heads. That was what Shaughnessy did. Jerry Doyle said, “The art collector? What’s he got to do with anything? You think he has The Two Georges hanging in his parlor?” He laughed loud and long at his own wit.

“Stranger things have happened.” Bushell got up from the table. He tossed down banknotes to cover the cost of breakfast. Kathleen and Sam rose, too. Stanley stared at the two men from Common Sense for a couple of seconds. He was taller than either of them, and wider through the shoulders and narrower in the hips. He didn’t say anything; he didn’t move toward them. They drew back a pace anyhow. He strode through the space they had vacated. You got the idea he would have gone through there whether they’d stepped back or not.

“Constabulary station should only be a couple of blocks that way,” Bushell said, pointing toward the Monongehela as he and his companions left the hotel.

“We’ll do better there than we have here, that’s certain,” Sam Stanley said, and set off for the station with the same determined steps he’d shown in the hotel dining room.

Bushell and Kathleen Flannery followed him. Just breathing made Bushell feel as if he’d smoked a dozen cigars in a room without ventilation. The air had a smoky, sulfurous tang to it. Buildings only a few blocks away seemed hazy, indistinct, yet the hot sun beat down out of a clear sky. Bushell thought longingly of the cool, crisp, pine-scented air of the Queen Charlotte Islands. He hadn’t imagined he would look with longing on anything that had to do with the Queen Charlotte Islands. His first glimpse of Charleroi by daylight left him unimpressed. The Ribblesdale House was in the middle of the downtown business district, but most of the businesses, by the look of them, would have quickly failed in New Liverpool. The mannequins in the windows of clothiers’ wore garments either poorly made or overpriced or both. He’d never seen such an expanse of unpainted pine and garish upholstery as the furniture shops displayed. The profusion of secondhand shops argued that not enough people had the wherewithal to buy new goods.

Taverns, pubs, saloons, bars... Charleroi had far more than its share of those. Unlike the other establishments, they were most of them clean and freshly painted. They could afford such luxuries. If you didn’t drink in Charleroi, what else did you have to do with your time?

Kathleen pointed ahead. “Is that the station? The building with the flag in front of it?”

Bushell’s cough had nothing to do with the noxious air he was breathing. “Wrong flag, I’m afraid.” In New Liverpool, Independence Party headquarters lay out in the distant suburbs. In Charleroi, the banner with the eagle and stripes flew in front of a building as impressive as any the downtown boasted. Charleroi being what it was, that didn’t say much, but what it did say, Bushell didn’t like. People inside the Independence Party building were busy. Bushell watched them bustling around as he walked by. Sam Stanley also paid thoughtful attention to the party headquarters. “If we’re lucky,” he said, “we’ll spot Kilbride in there, and make life easier for ourselves.”

They weren’t lucky.

The constabulary station lay a few doors past the building that housed the Independence Party. Comparing them, Bushell suspected the party had more money than the constables did. If anybody had painted the station since the reign of Edward IX, he would have been astonished.

“Help you?” the big, burly sergeant behind the front desk asked in a gravelly voice when Bushell and his companions walked in. The station was even less prepossessing on the inside than its exterior suggested. It stank of sweat and smoke and puke and stale tea leaves. Kathleen looked appalled; Bushell and Stanley had seen the like before. Bushell showed his badge. The constabulary sergeant nodded. “Come on, I’ll take you back to the chief.”

The sergeant’s boss looked like him, but with an extra ten years and a greying beard tacked on. Like his underling, Chief John Lassiter looked as if he’d be more at home down in a mine than keeping order aboveground. He didn’t seem sure of what Kathleen Flannery was doing with the two RAMs, but he didn’t ask any questions about it, either. Since Bushell wasn’t so sure what Kathleen was doing there himself, that was just as well.

He came straight to the point: “Chief, we think a fellow named Joseph Kilbride came down here from Doshoweh the other day. He’s not at the Ribblesdale. If he’s not at the - what was the name of the place? - the Hasting Arms, that’s it, where is he likely to be?”

“You talk about hotels, those two are about it,” Lassiter said. “We got some rooming houses, too, or he could be staying with somebody here, you know. Kilbride, eh?” He chewed on the end of the pencil he used to jot down the name. “That’s liable to be tough. These micks, they stick together like nobody’s business.”

Kathleen Flannery sucked in a long, angry breath. Bushell stepped on her toe. Chief Lassiter’s desk didn’t let him see that. Kathleen glared but subsided.

Lassiter sighed. “Well, we’ll do what we can for you, Colonel.” He glanced over his shoulder at the print of The Two Georges behind his desk. “We got to get that painting back. You have a description of this Kilbride item?”

“Can’t give you height or weight, I’m afraid, but here’s our boy.” Bushell passed Lassiter the photograph of Joseph Kilbride that the butler had given him.

“May I keep this?” the chief asked.

“Long enough to duplicate it, no more,” Bushell said. “If we don’t catch up with him here, we’re liable to need it again.”

Lassiter gnawed on the end of the pencil once more. “Mm, that’s fair. Anything else you can tell me about him?” He glanced down at the picture. “Wouldn’t want to meet him in an alley after dark, not with a phiz like that.”

“He’s supposed to be a tightwad, too, people in Doshoweh say,” Samuel Stanley put in.

“All right, so we won’t catch him in a saloon buying a round for the house,” Lassiter said. In spite of the sarcasm, he wrote that down. “Never can tell what’ll turn up useful, though.” He gave the pencil another couple of gentle nibbles, then set it down. “Anything else I can do for you folks today?”

Bushell pulled out some notes. “We need addresses - records too, if they have any - for three miners: Percy McGaffigan, Michael O’Flynn, and Anthony Rothrock.”

“There’s four or five Michael O’Flynns in this town I can think of off the top of my head,” Lassiter said.

“Any way to narrow it down?”

“We want the one who went to New Liverpool to picket at the governor’s mansion the night The Two Georges got stolen.”

Lassiter thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Yeah, of course you do. I’m stupid this morning - sue me. I can dig that out. You’re at the Ribblesdale, I think you said? Somebody will ring you tonight. We got a lot of McGaffigans, too, but not a lot of Percys, I bet. The other one was Rothrock?

Come on in the back room with me. We’ll see what we find.”

The back room was a miniature and rather disorganized version of the records room at the New Liverpool RAM station. Chief Lassiter seemed to know where the bodies were buried, though. He shoved aside two boxes of files to get at the bottom drawer of a cabinet.

“McGaffigan, Fred; McGaffigan, Liam, McGaffigan, Percy - here we go.” He pulled out the file folder.

“Last address we have for him is 39 Lantern Way.” The curl of his lip said what he thought of that address. He flipped through the reports in the file. “Drunk and disorderly five years ago, public drunkenness year before that, drunk and disorderly last year - paid a twenty-quid fine for that one. Sounds like a miner, in other words.”

Bushell scribbled the address into a notebook. “What about Rothrock?”

“Name rings a bell,” Lassiter said. “Let’s have us a look.” The folder in question was in one of the boxes he’d move to get to McGaffigan’s. “Here we go. Anthony Aurelius Rothrock, last address 2 Coker Drive.” From his face, that was a worse place to live than Lantern Way. “Drunk and disorderly; wife beating, but his old woman wouldn’t press the charge; D and D again ... ah, here’s why I remember him. Assault with intent to maim: he went after a fellow with a broken bottle in a tavern brawl a couple of years ago. Carved him up proper, too.”

“Why isn’t he in gaol, then?” Bushell and Stanley asked in the same breath.

“A pack of his mates were in the place with him, and they all swore up and down it was self-defense.”

By the way Lassiter’s eyebrows climbed toward his hairline, he was less than convinced. He shrugged a constable’s shrug, as if to say, What can you do?

“Have you got a town plan, so we can find these places?” Bushell asked.

“Come back to my office with me, and I’ll get you one,” the local chief said. While rummaging through his desk, he looked up toward Kathleen Flannery for a moment. “These places you’re going, they might not be the sort where you’d want to take a lady.”

Bushell didn’t answer. He’d figured that out for himself. On the other hand, he didn’t want to leave Kathleen by herself, either - no telling what sort of mischief she might get into. It was a poser. Kathleen solved it for him, saying indignantly, “If these gentlemen” - she freighted the word with meaning it was not altogether intended to bear - “can make their visits, I think I shall be able to accompany them.”

Chief Lassiter’s eyebrows rose again, this time in a slightly different way. “However you like, then,” he said, and ran one hand over the other in a gesture of which Pontius Pilate would have approved. “Ah, here we are,” he added with a grunt of triumph, and presented Bushell a much-folded map.

“Can you find out whether McGaffigan and Rothrock are on day shift or nights?” Bushell said. Lassiter nodded. “No point going to see ‘em if you won’t find ‘em home, is there?” He plucked at his beard. “Let me call the colliery for you.” He picked up the telephone, dialed a number without having to look it up. “Stephen? John here, down at the station. Need a bit of information from you - “ He asked a couple of questions, scribbled, asked again, scribbled some more, said, “Thanks,” and hung up. Turning to Bushell, he said. “They’re both on days. Day shift lets off at five. If you get there at half past or a bit later, you’ll catch them at home, probably before they’ve started supper. You’d not want to get them then, I shouldn’t think.”

“Too right,” Bushell said. “They don’t have to say a thing to us. If we get them angry, they won’t want to talk.”

“Don’t know that they will anyhow,” Lassiter said, “but that’s your lookout. I’ll start beating the bushes about Kilbride, and I’ll track down which O’Flynn was gone from the mine when The Two Georges got nicked. Stephen should know, or be able to find out. I’ll ring you when I have what you need.”

“Why don’t you give us the address of the Hastings Arms?” Samuel Stanley said. “If it’s not too far, we can check it ourselves - give us something useful to do the rest of this morning.”

“That makes sense,” Lassiter agreed. “The Hastings is at 137 Royal Street - that’s two streets north of here, down close to the river.”

By the time they left the constabulary station, summer heat and stickiness were out in full force. They made Bushell’s shirt cling greasily to his torso; he took off his hat and fanned his head with it. The smoke and the harsh, sulfurous tang of the air left his lungs stinging from every breath. At the end of the ten-minute walk, he felt more worn than he had during the hike to Buckley Bay. In front of the Hastings Arms, he paused a moment to look out at the Monongahela. The river was wide and swift and should have been beautiful, but no river full of coal barges and stained with the effluents of factories uncounted could look anything but grim.

Sam Stanley’s gaze followed his. “That’s the water that comes out of the taps at the hotel,” he said, sounding unhappy at the notion.

Bushell considered. “Best argument I’ve heard yet for drinking whiskey.”

“Let’s go inside,” Kathleen said, dabbing at her forehead with a linen handkerchief. “Maybe they’ll have ceiling fans working.”

“And you’re from Victoria,” Stanley said. “In New Liverpool, they don’t have this kind of muggy heat. You can stick a fork in me, because I’m baked.”

No ceiling fans spun inside the lobby of the Hastings Arms. The place was almost as shabby as the supercilious clerk back at the Ribblesdale had said it would be. The potted plant that had been set up as an ornament was now brown and dead, but nobody had bothered taking it away. To Bushell’s mind, two even more unlovely growths had sprouted in the lobby: Michael Shaughnessy and Jerry Doyle. The reporters from Common Sense moved to cut Bushell off as he walked toward the front desk.

“What took you so long to get here, Colonel?” Shaughnessy asked, as Doyle readied pad and pen to record Bushell’s reply for posterity. “We’ve been waiting half an hour, maybe longer.”

“So very sorry to inconvenience you,” Bushell replied. “Had I but known you were here, I would have dropped everything else I was doing and rushed right over. I’m sure you understand that.”

Jerry Doyle smiled for a moment. Shaughnessy turned an angry red. Bushell strode past both of them. He hoped they hadn’t worked on the desk clerk.

Shaughnessy said, “Dr. Flannery, what are you doing coursing with the hunting dogs of the filthy, corrupt Crown?”

Bushell stiffened. So they knew who she was, did they? They might have found out from the register at the Ribblesdale, or ... “Help you, sir?” the desk clerk asked, distracting him. He showed the fellow his badge. “Do you have a Joseph Kilbride registered here?” he asked; since he’d left Kilbride’s photograph with Chief Lassiter, he had to use a verbal description. Behind him, Kathleen Flannery was answering Shaughnessy’s question. Since he was talking himself, he couldn’t hear what she said.

“These guys here were asking me the same thing.” The clerk pointed to Doyle and Shaughnessy. “I told them no, and I got to tell you the same thing.” The register was on a plate that spun. The clerk spun it so it was right side up for Bushell. “You can see for yourself.”

The pages open for Bushell’s inspection showed people who’d registered at the Hastings Arms for the past ten days: a good sign the place wasn’t doing much business. A look at the lobby would have sufficed to tell Bushell that, though. The register showed no sign of tampering, but he looked at some earlier and later leaves all the same. As Chief Lassiter had said, you never could tell. But he found nothing out of the ordinary elsewhere in the register, either.

“All right, the man’s not staying here,” he said. “Have you seen him in town?”

“Afraid I haven’t, sir,” the desk clerk replied, spinning the hotel register so it faced back toward him once more. “If I had, I expect I’d know it, too. You make him sound like a right bruiser, and that’s a fact.”

“He is, I think,” Bushell said. “If you do see him, ring me at the Ribblesdale straightaway.” The clerk touched a knuckle to his forehead, just below the hairline, in token of obedience. From the look in his eyes, though, Bushell figured the chance he would telephone was at best one in three. When you factored that in with a one-in-a-million chance of the man’s actually spotting Kilbride, the odds of hearing from him again weren’t what you’d call good.

Bushell turned away. The Jameson headache with which he’d got up still throbbed at his temples. The best cure he knew was more of the same, especially since frustration was making his head hurt more than it would have otherwise. Charleroi didn’t have much going for it; even here downtown, it was a grimy, depressing place. But one thing it did have was plenty of watering holes. A voice inside his head jeered at him: Go ahead, drink your luncheon, it said. Maybe tomorrow you’ll drink your breakfast, too. Maybe the day after that you’ll drink your breakfast and forget you’ve done it.

Shut up, he told the voice fiercely. I’ve only done that once. Discovering he’d had half a day carved out of his memory had frightened him enough that he’d stayed teetotal for - longer than usual when he tried laying off, anyhow.

Kathleen Flannery was saying, “Why don’t you go away and quit pestering us and let us do our job?”

That pleased Bushell enough to take his mind off whiskey for a while.

“It’s just our own jobs we’re doing,” Michael Shaughnessy answered, striking a dramatic pose.

“Keeping the people informed, you might say - more than the tame papers in every town do, that I tell you. And you, you’re no police dog. Talk of your job, why aren’t you back at your precious art museum?”

“Because something precious is missing,” she said in the controlled snarl Bushell had more often heard aimed at him. “If you haven’t the eyes to see that, God and the saints help you.”

“But Dr. Flannery, all we’re trying to do is make North America free from the Crown that - “

Shaughnessy’s voice rose shrilly.

Kathleen cut through his tumbled words: “Go away.” She turned her back to make it plain she was taking no further notice of the man from Common Sense.

He kept on talking. Bushell stepped between him and Kathleen. He was older, smaller, and lighter than Shaughnessy. “Don’t you think it would be polite to do as the lady asked you?” he asked quietly. Shaughnessy turned to Jerry Doyle. “Do you hear him threatening me?” he said in a loud voice.

“I asked you to be polite, sir,” Bushell said. “If you find that a threat - well, you’re working for the right publication.”

“Come on, Mike,” Doyle said. “If we go on with it, they’ll find some way to make trouble for us.”

Reluctantly, his colleague accompanied him toward the street door of the Hastings Arms. As they went out, Doyle fired a Parthian shot at the RAMs: “You’ve not seen the last of us, I’ll have you know.”

“Thus unlamenting let me die,” Bushell said, slightly changing Pope’s “Ode on Solitude” to good effect. By then, though, the door had closed, so the reporters didn’t hear him.

“Thank you,” Kathleen said, turning toward Bushell. “I don’t like being badgered - by anyone.”

“Really?” His mouth dropped open in surprise. “I hadn’t noticed.” Her eyes sparked dangerously for a moment. Then she let out a strangled snort that was evidently intended as a laugh: as if she didn’t want to admit, even to herself, that he’d amused her.

“Where now, Chief?” Samuel Stanley asked.

Bushell didn’t answer till after he led his companions out onto the sidewalk: no telling what affiliations the desk clerk had. Doyle and Shaughnessy were already a long block away, and by all appearances arguing with each other. He approved.

“Where now?” he said. “I’ve been thinking about that.” It was a thumping lie, but his mouth was smarter than his brain, because he came up with a good answer: “Aside from art, what does Kilbride do? He sells food and spirits. A business trip would give him a coronium-tight alibi for coming here. If we check some of the taverns around here, we might find someone who’s seen him.”

“That’s a fine notion,” Kathleen said, nodding vigorously.

Sam Stanley looked at Bushell out of the corner of his eye. Any time Bushell proposed going into a tavern, he turned suspicious. Since the idea did make sense, though, he too nodded after a moment.

“Maybe one of them will have a decent luncheon spread set out, too,” he said. “I’m getting on toward feeling peckish. You can’t be sure with things like that - they might not, too, what with so many of their customers down underground right now. Only one way to find out.”

They started working their way west along Royal Street, away from the Monongehela. The impressively named avenue had as rich a supply of drinking establishments as any of the other streets Bushell had seen in downtown Charleroi. They didn’t lack for customers, either, despite the early hour. None of the bartenders and proprietors with whom Bushell spoke admitted to having heard of Joseph Kilbride. One of them said, “Wish I had, pal. If he can keep himself in business up in the Six Nations, what with the taxes they charge there, I bet he’s a man I could deal with.”

A couple of saloons had Independence Party flags prominently displayed in back of the bar along with sparkling rows of liquor bottles. Since that wasn’t illegal - and since he hoped his barroom brawling days were behind him - Bushell didn’t make an issue of it. He garnered quite enough suspicious looks just by walking into those places in a suit and tie and wearing a fedora rather than a shapeless cloth cap.

“Here we go!” Samuel Stanley said when they found an establishment that catered to a somewhat higher class of customer: it was across the street from the Charleroi Central Bank, and full of earnest young men in somber business clothes and young women in flowery dresses and hairstyles that had been all the rage in New York and New Liverpool the year before. As many of them were eating as drinking. “Something better than tinned steak-and-kidney pie, with luck.”

“Business first,” Bushell said, but the man behind the counter (who also proved to be the owner) denied any knowledge of Kilbride. Still, the place did seem about as good as they were likely to find for luncheon. They grabbed a table. When a waitress came by, Bushell ordered corned beef and cabbage and a Jameson to go with it. Samuel Stanley coughed significantly. Bushell had expected that, and pretended not to hear it - Sam was his adjutant, not his nursemaid. He hadn’t expected a dirty look from Kathleen, who’d chosen a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich for herself.

She gave him another dirty look when the food arrived. He didn’t think it was because he spread mustard on both the fragrantly steaming meat and the cabbage. In fact, he didn’t see any reason for it. But when her glare didn’t go away, he finally asked, “Is something wrong?”

“That,” she said through tight lips, pointing to his plate. “While you’re at it, why don’t you give us a few choruses of ‘McNamara’s Band’?”

“Oh,” Bushell said, and then muttered, “Hommony grits,” under his breath. Stanley, who was with great gusto carving a piece off a slice of roast beef while eating another, swallowed wrong. Bushell pounded him on the back. When he decided Sam wasn’t going to choke to death after all, he gave his attention back to Kathleen. “The only reason I ordered that” - he tapped the corned beef with his fork - “was that I figured it had better be good in a town full of Irishmen.”

She studied him as if he were a painting that had come before her for authentication: was he an Old Master or just a worthless modern forgery? “All right,” she said after that long, measuring stare, and then, perhaps feeling that wasn’t enough, “If you knew how many times I’ve had being Irish thrown in my face - If I do my job well, who my father is shouldn’t matter a farthing’s worth.”

Bushell raised his glass of whiskey and solemnly drank in salute to that. All the same, he could not help remembering that Kathleen’s father - Aloysius Flannery, that’s what his name was - bought her a subscription to Common Sense every year.