Atlantis And Other Places Part 26

Walton chuckled, a little self-consciously. "By now I ought not to be surprised at your constantly surprising me, what?" He laughed again, louder this time. "A bit of a paradox, that, don't you think?"

"A bit," Athelstan Helms agreed, an unaccustomed note of indulgence in his voice.

The sailor stared at him, then aimed a stubby forefinger in the general direction of his sternum. "I know who you are, sir," he said. "You're that detective feller!"

"Only an amateur," Helms replied.

He might as well have left the words unsaid. As if he had, the sailor rounded on Dr. Walton. "And you must be the bloke 'oo writes up 'is adventures. I've read a great plenty of 'em, I 'ave."

"You're far too kind, my good man." Walton, delighted to trumpet Athelstan Helms' achievements to the skies, was modest about his own.

"But what brings the two of you to Atlantis?" the sailor asked. "I thought you stayed in England, where it's civilized, like."

"As a matter of fact-" Dr. Walton began.

Helms smoothly cut in: "As a matter of fact, that is a matter we really should not discuss before conferring with the authorities in Hanover."

"I get you, sir." The sailor winked and laid a finger by the side of his nose. "Mum's the word. Not a soul will hear from me." Away he went, almost bursting with self-importance.

"It will be all over the ship before we dock," Dr. Walton said dolefully.

Athelstan Helms nodded. "Of course it will. But it can't get off the ship before we dock, so that is a matter of small consequence."

"Why didn't you want me to mention the House of Universal Devotion, then?" Dr. Walton asked. "For I saw that you prevented my doing so."

"Indeed." Helms nodded. "I believe the sailor may well be a member of that curious sect."

"Him? Good heavens, Helms! He's as English as Yorkshire pudding."

"No doubt. And yet the House, though Atlantean in origin, has its devotees in our land as well, and in the Terranovan republics and princ.i.p.alities. If the case with which we shall be concerned in the United States of Atlantis did not have ties to our England, you may rest a.s.sured I should not have embarked on the Victoria Augusta Victoria Augusta, excellent though she may be." Helms paused as another sailor walked past. When the man was out of earshot, the detective continued, "Did you note nothing unusual about the manner in which our recent acquaintance expressed himself?"

"Unusual? Not really." Dr. Walton shook his head. "A Londoner from the East End, I make him out to be. Not an educated man, even if he has his letters. Has scant respect for his aitches, but not quite a c.o.c.kney."

Although Helms' pinched features seemed to have little room for a smile, when one did find a home it illuminated his whole face. "Capital, Walton!" he said, and made as if to clap his hands. "I agree completely. Your a.n.a.lysis is impeccable-well, nearly so, anyhow."

"'Nearly'? How have I gone astray?" By the way Walton said it, he did not believe he'd strayed at all.

"As you are such a cunning linguist, Doctor, I am confident the answer will suggest itself to you in a matter of moments." Athelstan Helms waited. When Walton shook his head, Helms shrugged and said, "Did you not hear the intrusive 'like' he used twice? Most un-English, but a common enough Atlantean locution. Begun by an actor-one of the Succot brothers, I believe-a generation ago, and adopted by the generality. I conjecture this fellow may have acquired it in meetings with his fellow worshipers."

"It could be." Dr. Walton stroked his salt-and-pepper chin whiskers. "Yes, it could be. But not all Atlanteans belong to the House of Universal Devotion. Far from it, in fact. He could have learned that interjection innocently enough."

"Certainly. That is why I said no more than that he might well be a member of the sect," Helms replied. "But I do find it likely, as the close and continuous intercourse amongst members of the House while engaged in worship seems calculated to foster such accretions. And he knew who we were. Members of the House, familiar with the difficulties the Atlantean constabulary is having with this case, may also be on the lookout for a.s.sistance from a foreign clime."

"Hmm," Walton said, and then, "Hmm," again. "How could they know the chief inspector in Hanover-"

"Chief of police, they call him," Helms noted.

"Chief of police, then," Walton said impatiently. "How could they know he sought your aid and not that of, say, Scotland Yard?"

"The easiest way to effect that would be to secret someone belonging to the House of Universal Devotion within the Hanoverian police department, something which strikes me as not implausible," Athelstan Helms said. "Other possible methodologies are bound to suggest themselves upon reflection."

By the unhappy expression spreading over Dr. Walton's fleshy countenance, such methodologies did indeed suggest themselves. But before he could mention any of them, a shout from the bow drew his attention, and Athelstan Helms' as well: "Hanover Light! Hanover Light ahead!"

Helms all but quivered with antic.i.p.ation. "Before long, Doctor, we shall see what we shall see."

"So we shall." Walton seemed less enthusiastic.

Hanover Light was one of the engineering marvels of the age. Situated on a wave-washed rock several miles east of the Atlantean coast, the lighthouse reached more than three hundred feet into the air. The lamps in the upper story guided ships in from far out to sea.

Hanover itself cupped a small enclosed bay that formed the finest harbor on the east coast of Atlantis-a better harbor, even, than Avalon in the more lightly settled Atlantean west. Steam tugs with heavy rope fenders nudged the Victoria Augusta Victoria Augusta to her berth. Sailors tossed lines to waiting longsh.o.r.emen, who made the ship fast to the pier. The liner's engines sighed into silence. to her berth. Sailors tossed lines to waiting longsh.o.r.emen, who made the ship fast to the pier. The liner's engines sighed into silence.

Dr. Walton sighed, too. "Well, we're here."

Athelstan Helms nodded. "I could not have deduced it more precisely myself," he said. "The red-crested eagle on the flag flying from yonder pole, the longsh.o.r.emen shouting in what pa.s.ses for English in the United States of Atlantis, the fact that we have just completed an ocean voyage . . . Everything does indeed point to our being here."

Walton blinked. Was Helms having him on? He dismissed the notion from his mind, as being unworthy of a great detective. Lighting a cigar, he said, "I wonder if anyone will be here to meet us."

"a.s.suredly," Helms replied. "The customs men will take their usual interest-I generously refrain from saying, their customary interest their customary interest-in our belongings." Walton began to speak; Helms forestalled him. "But you were about to say, anyone in an official capacity. Unless I am very much mistaken, that excitable-looking gentleman on the planking there will be a Captain La Strada of the Hanover police."

The individual in question certainly did seem excitable. He wore tight trousers, a five-b.u.t.ton jacket with tiny lapels, and one of the most appalling cravats in the history of haberdashery. His broad-brimmed hat would have raised eyebrows in London, too. Nor did his face have a great deal to recommend it: he looked like a ferret, with narrow, close-set eyes, a beak of a nose, and a wildly disorderly mustache.

And he was looking for the two Englishmen. "Helms!" he shouted, jumping up and down. "Walton!" He waved and pointed-unfortunately, at two other men halfway along the Victoria Augusta Victoria Augusta's deck.

"Here we are!" Walton called. Under his breath, he added, "Shocking they let a dago climb so high, b.l.o.o.d.y shocking."

Inspector La Strada jumped even higher. As if impelled by some galvanic current, his arm swung toward the detective and his medical companion. "Helms! Walton!" he bawled, for all the world as if he hadn't been yelling at those other chaps a moment before. Perhaps he hoped Helms and Walton hadn't noticed him doing it.

He pumped their hands when they came down the gangplank, and undertook to push their trunks to the customs house on one of the low-slung wheeled carts provided for the purpose. "Very kind of you," Walton murmured, reflecting that no true gentleman in London would lower himself to playing the navvy.

As if reading his mind, La Strada said, "Here in Atlantis, we roll up our sleeves and set our hands to whatever wants doing. This is a land for men of action, not sissies who sit around drinking port and playing the fiddle."

"Shall I take my return pa.s.sage now, in that case?" Helms inquired in a voice rather cooler than the wind off the Greenland ice.

"By no means." La Strada seemed cheerfully unaware he'd given offense. "There's work to be done here, and you are-we hope you are-the man to do it."

Some of the first work to be done would be explaining the pistols in the travelers' baggage-so Dr. Walton antic.i.p.ated, at any rate. But the customs inspectors took the firearms in stride. They seemed more interested in the reagents Helms carried in a cleverly padded case inside his trunk. At La Strada's voluble insistence that these were essential to the business for which the detective had been summoned to Atlantis, the inspectors grudgingly stamped Helms' pa.s.sport, and Walton's as well.

La Strada had a coach waiting outside the customs house. "Shall I take you gents to the hotel first, to freshen up after your voyage, or would you rather come to the station and take your first look at what you'll be dealing with?" he asked.

Dr. Walton would have plumped for the manifold virtues of a good hotel, a.s.suming Hanover boasted such a marvelous sanctuary, but Helms forestalled him, saying, "The station, Inspector, by all means. Well begun is half done, as they say, and the sooner we finish our business here, the sooner we can go home again."

"Once you spend a while in Atlantis, Mr. Helms, you may decide you don't care to go home after all," La Strada said.

"I doubt it." Athelstan Helms' reply would have silenced an Englishman and very likely crushed him. Inspector La Strada was made of sterner, or, more likely, coa.r.s.er stuff. He let out a merry peal of laughter and lit a cheroot much nastier than the fragrant cigar Walton enjoyed.

Lamplighters went through the cobblestoned and bricked streets with long poles, setting the gas jets alight. The b.u.t.tery glow of the street lights went some way toward mitigating the deepening twilight. Hanover wasn't London-what city was, or could be?-but it did not put its head in its sh.e.l.l with the coming of night, either. The streets and taverns and music halls and even many of the shops remained crowded.

London boasted inhabitants from every corner of the far-flung British Empire. Hanover, the largest urban center in a republic fueled by immigration, had residents from all over the world: Englishmen, Scots, Irish, the French and Spaniards who'd originally settled southern Atlantis, Negro freemen and freedmen and -women, swarthy Italians like La Strada, Scandinavians, stolid Germans, Jews from Eastern Europe, copper-skinned Terranovan aboriginals, Chinese running eateries and laundries advertised in their incomprehensible script, and every possible intermingling of them.

"Pack of mongrels," Dr. Walton muttered.

"What do you say, Doctor?" the inspector inquired. "With the rattle and clatter of the wheels, I fear I did not hear you."

"Oh, nothing. Nothing, really." Walton puffed on his cigar, both to blot out the stench of La Strada's and, perhaps, to send up a defensive smoke screen.

Unlike London, whose streets wandered where they would and changed names when they would, Hanover was built on a right-angled gridwork. People proclaimed it made navigation easier and more efficient. And it likely did, but Dr. Walton could not escape the notion that a city needed to be learned, that making it too easy to get around in reduced it to a habitation for children, not men.

He had the same low opinion of Atlantis' coinage. A hundred cents to an eagle-well, where was the challenge in that that? Four far-things to a penny, twelve pence to the shilling, twenty shillings the pound (or, if you were an aristo, twenty-one in a guinea) . . . Foreigners always whined about how complicated English currency was. To Walton's way of thinking, that was all to the good. Whining helped mark out the foreigners and let you keep a proper eye on them.

And as for architecture, did Hanover really have any? A few Georgian buildings, Greek Revival more pretentious than otherwise, and endless modern utilitarian boxes of smoke-smudged brick that might once have been red or brown or yellow or even purple for all anyone could tell nowadays. Some-many-of these brick boxes were blocks of flats that outdid even London's for sheer squalidity. The odors of cheap cooking and bad plumbing wafted from them.

In such slums, the bra.s.s-b.u.t.toned policemen traveled in pairs. They wore low caps with patent-leather brims, and carried revolvers on their belts along with their billy clubs. They didn't look much like bobbies, and they didn't act much like bobbies, either.

"Do you find, then, that you need to intimidate your citizenry to maintain order?" Dr. Walton asked.

Inspector La Strada stared at him, eyes shiny under a gas lamp. "Intimidate our citizenry?" he said, as if the words were Chinese or Quechua. Then, much more slowly than he might have, he grasped what the Englishman was driving at. "G.o.d bless you, Doctor!" he exclaimed, no doubt in lieu of some more pungent comment. "Our policemen don't carry guns to intimidate the citizenry."

"Why, then?" Walton asked in genuine bewilderment.

Athelstan Helms spoke before the Atlantean inspector could: "They wear guns to keep the citizenry from murdering them in its criminal pursuits."

"Couldn't have put it better myself," La Strada said. "This isn't London, you know."

"Yes, I'd noticed that," Dr. Walton observed tartly.

La Strada either missed or ignored the sarcasm. "Thought you might, like," he said. "Anyone but a convicted felon can legally carry a gun here. And the convicted felons do it, too-what have they got to lose? A tavern brawl here isn't one fellow breaking a mug over the other one's head. He pulls out a snub-nosed .42 and puts a pill in the b.a.s.t.a.r.d's brisket. And if getting away means plugging a policeman, he doesn't stick at that, either."

"Charming people," the physician murmured.

"In many ways, they are," Helms said. "But, having won freedom through a b.l.o.o.d.y uprising against the British crown, they labor under the delusion that they must be ready-nay, eager-to shed more blood at any moment to defend it."

"We don't happen to think that is a delusion, sir," La Strada said stiffly.

"No doubt," Athelstan Helms replied. "That does not mean it isn't one. I draw your notice to the Dominion of Ontario, in northeastern Terranova. Ontario declined revolution-despite your buccaneers, I might add, or perhaps because of them-yet can you deny that its people are as free as your own, and possessed of virtually identical rights?"

"Of course I can. They still have a Queen-your Queen." La Strada wrinkled up his nose as if to show he could smell the stench of monarchism across the thousand miles of Hesperian Gulf separating the USA and Ontario.

"We do not find it unduly discommodes us," Helms said.

"The more fools you," La Strada told him. There was remarkably little conversation in the coach after that until it pulled up in front of Hanover's police headquarters.

Dr. Walton had not looked for the headquarters to be lovely. But neither had he looked for the building to be as ugly as it was. A gas lamp on either side of the steps leading up to the entrance showed the brickwork to be of a jaundiced, despairing yellow. The steps themselves were of poured concrete: utilitarian, no doubt, but unequivocally unlovely. The edifice was squat and st.u.r.dy, with small rectangular windows; it put Walton in mind of a fortress. The stout iron bars on the windows of the bottom two stories reinforced the impression-and the windows.

After gazing at those, Helms remarked, "They will use this place to house criminals as well as constables." There, for once, the detective's companion had not the slightest difficulty comprehending how his friend made the deduction.

"Come along, gents, come along." La Strada hopped down to the ground, spry as a cricket. Helms and Walton followed. The policeman who drove the carriage, who'd said not a word on the journey from the customs house, remained behind to ensure that their luggage did not decide to tour the city on its own.

The odors greeting the newcomers when they went inside would have told them what sort of place they were finding. Dante might have had such smells in mind when he wrote, All hope abandon, ye who enter here All hope abandon, ye who enter here. Dampness and mold, bad tobacco, stale sweat infused with the aftereffects of rum and whiskey, sour vomit, chamber pots that wanted emptying, the sharp smell of fear and the less definable odor of despair . . . Dr. Walton sighed. They were no different from what he would have smelled at the Old Bailey.

And, walking past cells on the way to the stairs, Walton and Athelstan Helms saw scenes straight out of Hogarth engravings, and others that, again, might have come straight from the Inferno Inferno. "Here we go," Inspector La Strada said, politely holding the door open for the two Englishmen. When he closed the stout redwood panel (anywhere but Atlantis, it would have been oak) behind them, he might have put a mile of distance between them and the h.e.l.lish din behind it.

Another door, equally st.u.r.dy, guarded each of the upper floors. Even if, through catastrophe or conspiracy, a swarm of prisoners escaped, the constables could fortify their position and defend themselves for a long time. "You have firing ports, I see," Helms murmured. Dr. Walton, who'd fought in Afghanistan and was one of the lucky few to have escaped that h.e.l.lhole, slapped at his thigh, annoyed at himself for missing the telling detail.

Inspector La Strada opened one of those fortified portals. A rotund constabulary sergeant with a large-caliber revolver sat just beyond it, ready for any eventuality. Not far away, a technician had a dissipated-looking young man in a special chair, and was measuring his skull and ear and left middle finger and ring finger with calipers and ruler. A clerk wrote down the numbers he called out.

"You still use the Bertillon system for identifying your miscreants, then?" Athelstan Helms inquired.

"We do," La Strada replied. "It's not perfect, but far better than any other method we've found." He thrust out his receding chin as far as it would go. "And I haven't heard that Scotland Yard's got anything better, either."

"Scotland Yard? No." Helms sounded faintly dismissive. "But I am personally convinced that one day-and perhaps one day quite soon-the ridges and crenelations on a man's fingertips will prove more efficacious yet, and with far less labor and less likelihood of error and mistaken ident.i.ty."

"Well, I'll believe that when I see it, sir, and not a moment before." La Strada picked his way through chaos not much quieter and not much less odorous than that downstairs. He finally halted at a plain-indeed, battered-pine desk. "My home from home, you might say," he remarked, and purloined a couple of cheap, unpadded chairs nearby. "Have a seat, gents, and I'll tell you what's what, like."

Before sitting, Dr. Walton tried to brush something off his chair. Whatever it was, it proved sticky and resistant to brushing. He perched gingerly, on one b.u.t.tock, rather like the old woman in Candide Candide. Either Helms' chair was clean or he was indifferent to any dirt it might have acc.u.mulated.

La Strada reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a brown gla.s.s bottle and, after some rummaging, three none too clean tumblers. "A restorative, gentlemen?" he said, and started to pour before the Englishmen could say yea or nay.

It wasn't scotch. It was maize whiskey-corn liquor, they called it in Atlantis-and it might have been aged a week, or perhaps even two. "Gives one the sensation of having swallowed a lighted gas lamp, what?" Dr. Walton wheezed when more or less capable of intelligible speech once more.

"It intoxicates. Past that, what more is truly required?" Helms drank his off with an aplomb suggesting long experience-and perhaps a galvanized gullet.

"This here is legal whiskey, gents. You should taste what the homecookers make." La Strada shuddered . . . and refilled his gla.s.s. "Shall we get down to business?"

"May we talk freely here?" Helms asked. "Are you certain none of your colleagues within earshot belongs to the House of Universal Devotion?"

"Certain? Mr. Helms, I'm not certain of a d.a.m.ned thing," La Strada said. "If you told me a giant honker would walk up those stairs and come through that doorway there, I couldn't say I was certain you were wrong."

"Aren't honkers as extinct as the dodo?" Dr. Walton asked, sudden sharp interest in his voice: he fancied himself an amateur ornithologist. "Didn't that Audubon chap paint some of the last of them before your slave uprising?"

"The Servile Insurrection, we call it." La Strada's face clouded. Like most Atlanteans his age, he would have served in the fight. "I've got a scar on my leg on account of it. . . . But you don't care about that. Yes, they say honkers are gone, but the backwoods of Atlantis are a mighty big place, so who knows for sure, like . . .? But you don't care about that, either, not really. The House of Universal Devotion."

"Yes. The House of Universal Devotion." Helms leaned forward on his hard, uncomfortable seat.

"Well, you'll know they're killing important men. If you attended to my letter, you'll know they're doing it for no good reason any man who doesn't belong to the House can see. And you'll know they're d.a.m.ned hard to stop, because their murderers don't care if they live or die," La Strada said. "They figure they go straight to heaven if they're killed."

"Like the Hashishin," murmured Walton, who, from his service in the East, was steeped in Oriental lore.

La Strada looked blank. "The a.s.sa.s.sins," Athelstan Helms glossed.

"They're a.s.sa.s.sins, all right," the inspector said, missing most of the point. Neither Englishman seemed to reckon it worthwhile to enlighten him. La Strada went on, "We aim to find a way to make them stop without outlawing them altogether. We have religious freedom here in Atlantis, we do. We don't establish any one church and disadvantage the rest."