UPPER CALIFORNIA SECTION

ROYAL AMERICAN MOUNTED POLICE

One of these days, they’d scrape off his name and rank and replace them with someone else’s. The rest of the legend could stay the same. That would save the ratepayers money. He turned the key in the lock, opened the door, closed and locked it after him. The office was twilight gloomy, the Venetian blinds closed so the late-afternoon sun only painted two rows of little glowing dots across the near wall. Instead of opening the blinds, Bushell flicked the switch by the door. A bare bulb mounted in a ceiling fixture filled the office with harsh, yellow light. The wooden swivel chair behind the heavy oak desk squeaked as Bushell lowered his weight into it. It squeaked again when he leaned back and stared at the opposite wall. Between a tall, oak file cabinet that matched the desk and a bookcase crowded with statute books, legal tomes, and criminological texts hung a framed color print of The Two Georges. Just below it was a rectangular patch where the wallpaper was of a slightly darker blue than anywhere else in the office, as if another picture had hung there until recently.

Bushell looked at that darker patch for a couple of minutes, his face utterly empty of expression. Then he reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out his keys once more. They jingled; he had a lot of them. He went through them one by one until he found a short, stubby shiny one, which he inserted into the lock above the top right drawer of his desk.

He pulled the drawer open. It was not packed with papers like the rest of the desk drawers. One of the things it held was a gilt-framed picture, about the size of the darker rectangle on the wallpaper. The picture was face-down. Bushell did not turn it over. On top of the picture lay a flat pint bottle of Jameson Irish whiskey. He picked it up, pulled out the stopper, and took a swig, then another. The smoky taste of the whiskey filled his mouth. Its warmth filled his belly and mounted to his head. He took one more pull and then, with slow deliberation, corked the bottle and put it back in the drawer, which he locked. He went back to staring at the wallpaper. Eventually, the darker patch would fade to the color of the rest and disappear. If only memories faded so conveniently. Someone knocked on the door. Bushell started. The someone tried the knob, which gave Bushell a good notion of who it was. “Half a moment, Sam,” he called, loud enough for his voice to pierce the thick wood. He was relieved to find he sounded sober as a judge (and wasn’t that a laugh, with half of them bloody lushes!).

He used the half a moment to light a hasty cigar. Its aroma would cover that of the Jameson in the room and, more to the point, on his breath.

He went to the door and opened it. Sure enough, there stood Captain Samuel Stanley, his adjutant.

“Welcome back, Chief,” he said, and stuck out his hand.

Bushell shook it, then stood aside. “Come in out of the rain.”

“Don’t mind if I do.” Stanley walked into the office. He was a round-faced, medium-dark Negro, four or five years older than Bushell and several inches taller. His hair was as closely cropped as it had been in the long-ago days when he was staff sergeant in Bushell’s platoon, but the pepper hadn’t been dusted with salt then.

“One thing I have to give you, Sam,” Bushell said with a chuckle: “you don’t dress like most colored men I see.”

Samuel Stanley looked down at himself with considerable dignity. “And why the devil should I?” he asked. “I’m not a petty official trying to pretend I’m better than I am, and I’m not an undertaker, either. I’m an officer of the RAMs in a warm town, and damn proud of it.”

He glared at his longtime comrade, daring him to make something of it. And indeed, his double-breasted light blue blazer and white worsted trousers with thin black stripes were not only acceptable but handsome. As Bushell had said, though, most men of his race would never have appeared in anything save black or navy, nor worn a gold silk cravat dotted with crimson.

“Good. You damn well ought to be,” Bushell said. “Clothes won’t matter tonight, anyway: time to hope the moths haven’t eaten our dress uniforms.”

“As soon as I heard you were back, that’s what I came here to remind you about,” Stanley said. “After all the fuss and feathers in Victoria, there was always the chance you’d lost track of the date.”

“Not bloody likely.” Bushell pointed to the print of The Two Georges. “After looking at that every day I’m here, after seeing it every time I pull out my wallet, after growing up in a house with an enormous lithograph of it hung over the sofa in the parlor, do you think I’d miss the chance to see the original at last?”

“Now that you mention it, no.” Samuel Stanley chuckled. “About as easy to get away from The Two Georges as to flap your arms and fly to the moon, isn’t it? What’s that word the damn Russians use for a religious painting?”

“An icon,” Bushell answered. “That’s about right, too.” He walked over to the small closet behind his desk, pulled the door open, peered inside. “Well, the moths seem to have left something here. You have your dress reds?” The question was purely rhetorical; Samuel Stanley, as best as he could tell, never forgot anything.

The black man nodded. “I brought them in this morning. I’m just a lowly captain, don’t you know” - his voice took on the languid accents of an English milord of Oxonian overeducation - ”so I don’t have a la-de-da closet in my office.”

Bushell snorted. “Go change, then, and meet me back here in fifteen minutes.” He pulled out his pocket watch. “We’re in good time. The reception doesn’t start until half past eight, and the governor’s mansion is only about half an hour from here. That should give us plenty of time to mingle beforehand” - he rolled his eyes to show how much he looked forward to that - ”and to make sure security is as tight in the mansion as it looks on paper.”

“Nothing is ever as good as it looks on paper,” Stanley said with the certainty of a veteran noncommissioned officer, “but you’re right; one more round of checks won’t hurt. I’ll see you as soon as I’m in uniform.” He nodded to Bushell and left the office.

Bushell got out of his civilian clothes, hung them up, and put on the red-striped black trousers and the red tunic he took out of the closet. The tunic had two rows of seven gilt buttons down the breast, and a high stand collar that was damnably uncomfortable. The shoulderboards showed Bushell’s rank with the crown of the British Empire (differenced from that of the military by the letters RAMP beneath) and two pips each.

He belted on his ceremonial sword, pulled his service cap from the shelf above the coat rail, and set it on his desk. The visor had a row of scrambled eggs along the edge, but not by the crown. That and the band of red around the cap also signified his colonelcy.

Samuel Stanley knocked on the door well before the fifteen minutes had passed. That surprised Bushell not at all; he was just glad to be ready himself. Stanley grinned when he saw Bushell. “Don’t we make a fine pair!” he exclaimed.

His tunic bore a single row of buttons. On his shoulder boards were three pips apiece, and the letters RAMP. His cap was plain black, without red band or scrambled eggs. The basket hilt of his sword was plain steel, while Bushell’s had been gilded.

“We’ll break up the monotony of frock coats, white shirtfronts, and toppers, that’s certain,” Bushell said. “Nothing like a uniform to make the pretty girls notice you, eh, Sam?”

Stanley sent him a wary look. He and his wife, Phyllis, had been married for more than twenty-five years. As for Bushell. . . Stanley’s eyes slid to the dark rectangle below the print of The Two Georges. Instead of rising to the bait, he said, “Let’s get going, shall we?”

“I’ll drive,” Bushell said. “I enjoy it, and the steam’s up in my car.”

“Are you all right?” Stanley asked.

“Right as rain,” Bushell answered. “I slept better in the airship the last two nights than I do in my own flat.” That was true. If it wasn’t precisely what his friend had enquired about, he chose not to notice. He and Stanley went downstairs together. As soon as they left the RAM headquarters, they set their caps on their heads, almost in unison, and smiled at each other. Bushell held the passenger door open for his friend, then went around to the right side of the steamer and slid behind the wheel. He backed the car out of its parking space, shifted to the lowest of his three forward gears, and all but silently rolled away. He turned up the burner to give him more pressure in reserve when he got out onto the street. The RAM office building was in what had been downtown ever since New Liverpool belonged to the Franco-Spanish Holy Alliance. The provincial governor’s mansion lay some miles to the west; as at the airship port, Pacific breezes helped moderate the climate there.

Sunset Highway offered the quickest, most direct route between downtown New Liverpool and the governor’s mansion. The highway traversed not only settled districts but also parklands - some green with irrigation, others the semi-desert scrub native to Upper California - and citrus groves whose shiny green leaves perfumed the air.

A patch of light in a dark doorway made Bushell’s head whip around as the steamer passed through an urban stretch. When he saw the doorway belonged to a tavern, he relaxed. “I was afraid that might have been a fire,” he said, “but it’s just a televisor screen.”

“Nothing like getting together with your chums after a hard day, soaking up a pint or two while you watch the cricket matches or rugby or tennis or whatever happens to be showing,” Samuel Stanley said.

“Keep your eyes on the screen and you don’t have to think about what ails you - or much of anything else, come to that.”

They passed a trafficator whose wigwag signs gave cars on the cross street the right of way. “Do you know,” Bushell remarked, “one of the airship passengers was boasting at supper last night that he had a televisor screen in his own home.”

His friend turned to stare at him, incredulous distaste on his face. “You are joking, I hope.”

Bushell raised his right hand, as if he were about to stand in the witness box. “Upon my solemn oath.”

The wigwag switched. He put the steamer back into gear.

“Why would anyone want such a thing?” Stanley said, not so much to Bushell as to the world at large.

“Wireless is one thing: you can read or talk or do anything else you care to while it’s on. But a televisor screen ... if it’s showing something, you bloody well have to watch it. Suppose you have guests? I’ve never heard of anything so, so vulgar in all my life, I don’t think. Besides, televisors don’t come cheap. What did this chap do, anyhow?”

“By what he said, he’s just made a killing in pork futures,” Bushell answered dryly. “What was that last street we just passed? Loring Drive? We should be very near now.”

The governor’s mansion occupied a great tract of land south of Sunset Highway and west of Hilgard Place. The grounds around the mansion were rolled billiard-table flat, the lawn a velvety coat of green as perfect as any in England itself - no mean feat, given New Liverpool’s hot, dry weather. That splendid lawn made the untouched chaparral rising from the north side of the highway all the more wild and impenetrable by comparison.

The view across the lawn, obstructed only by statuary of marble and bronze, let Bushell see the governor’s mansion clearly as soon as he passed Hilgard Place. It also let him clearly see the line of picketers in front of the mansion. One eyebrow rose. He turned to Samuel Stanley. “What the devil’s all that in aid of?”

His adjutant grimaced. “I just got word of them today. They’re a group of coal miners from the eastern provinces - Pennsylvania, Virginia, Franklin - here to protest the way the rest of the NAU treats them. They say the rest of the dominion can stay clean because they’re so dirty.”

“If they have complaints like that, why don’t they take them to their own provincial parliaments?” Bushell held up a finger before Stanley could answer. “Wait, don’t tell me. They came out here because New Liverpool has dirty air, too, and they figured they’d get more attention protesting far from home.”

“Right the first time,” Samuel Stanley said. As the steamer neared the entrance to the governor’s mansion, Bushell saw there were nearly as many reporters as picketers in front of the four-story, foursquare building. Flashbulbs popped like a fusillade of small-arms fire. He turned left onto the grounds of the mansion. A New Liverpool constable in dark blue, a billy club swinging from his belt, gestured with a red lantern to guide the steamer toward the carpark west of the building. “Just put it anywhere, gents,” he said. By the way he sounded, keeping an eye on where cars parked was the least of his worries tonight.

The picketers started a chant: “Clean air, clean water, clean work! Filthy air, filthy water, no work!

Clean air, clean water, clean - ”

The constable rolled his eyes. “God damn me to hell, gents, if one in three of those sons of bitches don’t belong to the Sons of Liberty.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Bushell said solemnly.

“Bloody fools,” Samuel Stanley said. “Some people are never satisfied, don’t know when they’re well off. What would North America be outside the British Empire? Alone and poor, if you ask me.”

“You’re right,” the constable said. “May you have a better time inside there with the nabobs than that rabble does outdoors. Go on and park your steamer, gents.” He pointed the way with his lantern once more.

“There should be a downstairs for buggies like this one, eh, Sam?” Bushell said as he looked at the big, gleaming vehicles crowding the carpark: British Rollses and Supermarines; a low, devilish-looking Franco-Spanish Peugeot; and the cream of the NAU’s automotive crop, Washingtons and Wrightmobiles and two or three battery-powered Lightnings. His own middle-aged, middle-class Henry was definitely below the salt here.

He found a space, turned the burner down, set the brake, and got out. So did Samuel Stanley. The captain grinned and pointed. “Look there, Chief, a couple of rows over. You should have parked by that one. Yours would look a hell of a lot classier by comparison.”

“You’re right about that.” Bushell wondered what the weatherbeaten little Traveler was doing here. Then the driver’s-side door to the old steamer opened. His jaw dropped. “Will you look at that?”

Stanley whistled softly. “I’ll be damned. It’s Tricky Dick, the Steamer King! I didn’t know he was still alive.”

“He must be past eighty by now,” Bushell agreed. “When we meet him inside, you’d better remember to call him Honest Dick, too.”

“I’ll call him whatever I choose,” his adjutant answered. “I remember the last car I bought off one of his lots - too bloody well, I do. How about you?”

“My luck with his machines hasn’t been too bad,” Bushell said. “I wonder how many people all over the NAU bought their first steamer secondhand off one of Tricky Dick’s - Honest Dick’s: there, you’ve got me doing it - lots.”

“About half the people who weren’t born to mansions of their own, is my guess,” Samuel Stanley said. Bushell nodded. For the past half-century, the only way to escape Honest Dick’s relentless promotion was to be blind and deaf. For most of that time, the man had been synonymous with secondhand cars. With its long, swooping nose, his profile was probably the second most recognizable in the NAU, after only the King-Emperor’s. Stanley went on, “No wonder he was invited tonight. He’s got more money than the Bank of England, or I’m a Dutchman.”

“That you’re not,” Bushell replied. “He really does drive one of his old coughboilers, though. I’d heard as much, but I hadn’t believed it.”

“No, no chauffeur for him, and Lord knows he could afford one,” Stanley said. “He’s pretty spry for an old fellow, too.” Although the Steamer King carried a cane and walked with a slight limp, he moved at a good clip as he made his way toward the front entrance to the governor’s mansion. Several of the picketers recognized him. They sent catcalls his way. He scowled at them from under thick, still-dark eyebrows. “Let me say this to you, young men,” he said in the deep, rather throaty voice Bushell had heard countless times on the wireless. “I think you should be ashamed of what you’re doing here this evening. The strength and prosperity of the North American Union depend on her coal. You have no business acting in any way that threatens our prosperity.” He shook the cane to emphasize his words.

The picketers shouted back: “Go peddle your steamers, Tricky Dick!” “Keep your pointy nose out of what you don’t understand!” “If we’re so all-fired important to the NAU, how come nobody treats us decent?” “How’d you like to cough yourself to death before you’re fifty, like two of my brothers did ?”

Honest Dick ignored the jeers and kept walking. Behind him, Samuel Stanley said, “He’s heard worse than that from maybe one customer in three.” Bushell clicked his tongue between his teeth, as if to a naughty child, but he also nodded.

The columned entranceway was surmounted by a severely classical relief of the Hesperides, the nymphs who guarded the golden apples of the sun in their far western land. The golden apples of the sun also appeared on the green field of Upper California’s provincial flag, which rippled with the Union Jack and the NAU’s Jack and Stripes in spotlighted splendor out on the lawn.

Just inside the entranceway, a RAM sergeant apologetically asked Bushell and Stanley to show their identification - ”I know you’re really you, Colonel, Captain, but I’m checking everybody” - then lined through their names on a list he held on a clipboard.

“If you hadn’t asked for my papers, Jim, you’d have been in my office tomorrow morning,” Bushell said. The sergeant nodded; he knew how his boss did things.

The RAM chief and his adjutant checked their service caps. The servant who took them hung them on pegs in the crowded cloakroom. She pointed down a hall. “The receiving line and cocktail reception are in the Drake Room, sirs.”

“To the Drake Room we shall go, then,” Bushell said agreeably.

The hallway was paneled in gleaming mahogany and decorated first with portraits of previous governors of Upper California and then, after it had jogged to the right, with the heads of deer, bears, and catamounts some of those governors had slain. A rising tide of talk came from the Drake Room, almost enough to drown the Vivaldi a string quartet was softly playing.

Going down the reception line was like running the gauntlet: Governor John Burnett, bluff, ruddy, and florid, with a fringe of gingery beard; his wife, Stella, in a gown of mulberry silk that did not quite suit her sallow complexion; Jonas Barber, head of the New Liverpool town council, a plump little man with a shiny bald head who in formal attire lacked only orange shoes to make a perfect penguin; his wife, Marcella, several inches taller, looking elegant in a flowered print dress with a bow at the bodice and shirred flyaway sleeves; and the lieutenant governor and other six town councilmen with their respective spouses.

Thomas Bushell shook the men’s hands, bowed over those of the ladies. Small talk set his teeth on edge, but no man who led a large organization could afford to be without it. At the end of the receiving line he looked for one more man, the K. FLANNERY who, documents said, headed the staff of curators and historians of art traveling with The Two Georges.

To his surprise, though, at the end of the line stood not a man but a woman. The dark green gown with thin, matching satin stripes in inverted V’s showed off a figure which left no possible doubt of that. As soon as he saw her face, he had no doubt she was the K. Flannery in question, either. Porcelain-pale skin, high, strong, forward-thrusting cheekbones, and narrow jaw proclaimed her Irish blood, as did green eyes and red-gold hair spilling down over her shoulders in elaborately casual curls.

“Glad you’re on the job, Colonel,” one of the town councilmen said as Bushell moved past him. “ The Two Georges’ll be as safe here as back at the Victoria and Albert in London, eh?”

“Good of you to say so,” Bushell replied, but he’d only half heard the councilman’s remark. His eyes kept sliding back toward the startling curator of The Two Georges. They met hers for a moment. She smiled at him. At first he thought that very forward of her, but then he realized she would have recognized his uniform as that which belonged to the local head of security. She doubtless had her itinerary, as he had his.

The town councilman wanted to blather on about a large load of cannabis the RAMs had recently captured. Bushell had written up that report aboard the Upper California Limited, but he answered in monosyllables till the councilman gave up and let him reach the end of the receiving line.

“You must be Colonel T. Bushell,” the Irish-looking woman said, smiling again. “May I ask what the T. stands for?”

“If you’ll tell me what the K. is for in K. Flannery,” he answered, and added, “The same clerk must have typed both our lists.”

“I shouldn’t be a bit surprised,” she said. “My Christian name is Kathleen. And yours?”

“Thomas,” he said. She nodded slightly, as if in approval. He took her hand and bowed over it, as he had for the other women - overstuffed dowagers, the lot of them, he thought - in the receiving line. He held hers a bit longer and a bit tighter, though: not enough to be in any way offensive, but plenty to convey a small message of admiration. Her eyes said she’d received it.

“Now that you’re here,” she said briskly, “I have leave to quit this line and take you straight upstairs to show you the arrangements we’ve made for displaying The Two Georges here tonight. Or, if you’d rather mingle for a time before you make your inspection, that would be all right, too.”

“Business first,” he said at once. Again she gave him that approving nod. He went on, “As part of that business, allow me to present my adjutant, Captain Samuel - who is probably S. on your list - Stanley. Sam, this is Kathleen Flannery, curator of the traveling exhibit.”

“Pleasure to meet you, ma’am,” Stanley said. He turned to Bushell. “I hope you’ll excuse me for a bit, sir? I see Phyllis in the crowd there.” He pointed. “Odds are, she’s been waiting for me since half past two. She’s more excited about this than I am; seeing The Two Georges isn’t something you get to do every day. Of course, she’s not here on duty, either.”

“Give her a kiss for me,” Bushell said, and Samuel Stanley slid through the crush toward his wife. Bushell dipped his head to Kathleen Flannery. “At your service.”

“I hope I haven’t been rude,” she said. “If your wife is here also, don’t let business get ahead of that. The Two Georges can certainly wait a few minutes.”

“I’m - not married,” he said shortly. As a single man’s will, his eyes slipped, almost of themselves, to the fourth finger of her left hand. It bore no ring. He wondered why - unless he was mistaken (and about such things he seldom was), she’d passed thirty by a year or two. Married to her career, maybe? He gave a mental shrug. None of his business - and The Two Georges was. As they walked to the curving stair of polished marble, he heard Honest Dick the Steamer King complaining to anyone who would listen about the “band of damned Irish hooligans parading outside. Not a one of them with an ounce of respect for the law or an ounce of appreciation for their place in society. Riffraff, the lot of them.” Bushell didn’t need to turn around to imagine the steamer magnate’s jowls wobbling in righteous indignation.

Kathleen Flannery didn’t turn around, either, but her back, already straight, got straighten Quietly, Bushell said, “Landing the position you have now can’t have been easy, not when you’re Irish and a woman both.”

“Thank you, Colonel,” she said, and then went on, sighing, “My family has been on this side of the Atlantic for almost a hundred and fifty years, but people still judge me by my surname. I can’t help that. And women have been taking jobs that require skill for even longer - ever since the typewriter was invented, I suppose.”

“Ah, the typewriter,” Bushell said. “If you knew how many times I’ve listened to Sam go on about how the typewriter made his family what it is today - ”

“I shouldn’t wonder,” Kathleen answered.

“A lot of Negroes left the southern plantations when the Empire outlawed slavery in 1834,” Bushell said,

“and got the education they couldn’t have in bondage. And because they were newly free and looking for work and willing to work cheap - ”

“ - They’ve been typists and clerks and petty officials ever since,” she finished for him. “How did your adjutant end up a RAM instead?”

“He says the army made him realize he didn’t want to be chained to a desk and a file drawer the rest of his life.” Bushell let out a wry chuckle. “That only shows he didn’t know much about police work when he took it on.”

Kathleen Flannery left the stairs at the first-floor landing. Bushell followed her down a hall ornamented with a mural of Royal Navy steamships bombarding Franco-Spanish Los Angeles and landing red-clad marines to cement Britain’s hold on it.

“The Two Georges is in the Cardigan Room,” Kathleen Flannery said. “Here.”

The two RAMs standing in front of the famous painting came to rigid attention as Bushell walked into the room. Each of them was but a stride or two from a button that would set off an alarm at the slightest hint of trouble. Bushell pointed to one of the buttons. “I presume that’s been checked recently?” he asked in a voice that presumed nothing.

“Yes, sir, this afternoon,” the RAM nearer that button answered. “Makes a h - ” - he glanced toward Kathleen and revised his choice of words - ”quite a racket, it does. And if that doesn’t do the trick, we’ve got these.” He rested a hand on the grip of the long-barreled Colt revolver he wore on his right hip.

“Are armed guards really necessary?” Kathleen asked, frowning.

Bushell understood why the notion upset her; civilians who weren’t hunters rarely saw or had anything to do with firearms. But he answered, “I think they are. I have to act on the assumption that someone will try to steal The Two Georges, no matter how farfetched it may seem.”

She still looked unhappy, but said no more. Bushell paced the Cardigan Room, making sure arrangements were as he’d ordained. The room had no windows, and only the one door to the hallway. There were also connecting doors to the chambers on either side, but at the moment they did not connect. To make sure they did not and would not connect, they had been reinforced and fitted with stout new locks, the keys to which resided in the RAM guards’ trouser pockets.

“It should do,” Bushell said grudgingly. “It should.” He didn’t want to admit anything of the sort.

“Emergency exit - ”

“There’s a service lift two doors farther along the hall,” Kathleen Flannery answered, as if she thought he didn’t know. “Two days from now, we’ll take the painting down on it, load it aboard our steam lorry, and move it to the Provincial Museum for public display.”

As soon as she said that, Bushell saw in his mind a floor plan for the Provincial Museum, and began to worry about security precautions there. Things in the governor’s mansion seemed safe enough, but there was so much more to plan for with the general public involved. The guest list here had been carefully screened. You couldn’t do that at the Provincial Museum no matter how much more convenient it would make things. So many people wanted to see The Two Georges. . . . Kathleen brought him back to the here and now: “In case of fire, there’s another stairway just past the lift.”

“Good,” he said, nodding. “Now, about earthquakes - ”

“Colonel Bushell, if in the next two days there is an earthquake strong enough to reduce the governor’s mansion to a pile of rubble, I admit that The Two Georges is unlikely to survive,” she said tartly. “In that unhappy event, however, I am also unlikely to survive, and so I shall spend very little time fretting over it.”

One of the RAM guards snickered, then tried to pretend he hadn’t. Kathleen could tell off his boss without getting called on the carpet for insubordination.

Bushell started another circuit of the Cardigan Room. He pulled out his cigar case; the smoke would help him think. “Do you mind?” he asked Kathleen Flannery, and reached for a cigar in anticipation of the permission that almost always came.

But she said, “I’m afraid I do. There’s no smoking in this room, both to protect the colors of the painting and to reduce the risk of fire.”

Told off again, Bushell thought. But the objection made sense. He tucked the case back into his tunic pocket. After a last look around the room, he reluctantly concluded he could do no more to make The Two Georges safe than he had already done. For the first time, he paid serious attention to the canvas itself.

In one form or another, he, like everyone else in the NAU, saw the painting every day. Taking a long look at the original, he realized how much about it he had never noticed. It was more than a symbol of the union of the colonies with the mother country; it was a great work of art in its own right. A master of color and texture, Gainsborough had outdone himself on the uniforms the two Georges wore. Every fold, every crease in the crimson wool of George Ill’s coat was marked by a subtle gradation in shading. The rough, light-drinking texture of the wool contrasted with the lace at the king’s cuffs, the smoother linen of his breeches, and the shimmer from his silk stockings. Lamplight glittered from the gold buckles of his shoes and from the large sunburst of a medal he wore on his left breast. Bowing before the king, George Washington was made to appear shorter than his sovereign. The blue coat that proclaimed his colonial colonelcy was of wool like that of George III, but of a coarser weave speaking of homespun. Not all its creases were those of fashion; with a few strategic wrinkles and some frayed fringes depending from one epaulette, Gainsborough managed to suggest how long the garment had lain folded in its trunk while Washington sailed across the Atlantic to advance the colonies’ interests on the privy council George III had established.

As a portraitist, Gainsborough more often succeeded with women than with men. Both protagonists in The Two Georges broke that rule. Here was George III, perhaps not the most able of men but earnest, serious, plainly anxious to be doing the best thing for England and her American colonies, his small head leaning slightly forward from its perch atop his pear-shaped body. And opposite him, Washington. The colonial leader was a man to be reckoned with. In his bow,

Gainsborough had caught the strength and athleticism that informed his body. The artist also captured a look in his eyes, a set to his expression, that Bushell had seen in any number of veterans: here, without doubt, stood a man who’d known combat.

You could gather so much from any four-shilling lithograph, or indeed from any banknote in your wallet. But the devil, as always, lay in the details. “There’s so much to see!” Bushell breathed. Kathleen Flannery nodded. “Almost anyone who was anyone in England in the 1760s is there, regardless of whether he was really at the ceremony: Gainsborough was working to produce a piece that would symbolize unity, not just between England and the colonies but also between Tories and Whigs.”

Bushell didn’t answer. He was giving the background of the painting the same careful scrutiny he’d used with the figures of George Washington and George III. Some of the men in the palace chamber he recognized at once, as most subjects of the British Empire would have: there stood the elder Pitt, prime minister at the time, his face thin and intelligent-looking, dominated by a fleshy nose and intense, penetrating eyes, the ermine trim of his robe so perfectly rendered that Bushell could almost count the individual hairs; not far away, his successor, Lord North, plump and soft-faced almost to the point of effeminacy, plucked a roasted chicken leg from a serving girl’s silver tray. Benjamin Franklin stood nearby. He seemed to have one eye on the ceremony, the other on the serving girl, a detail reproductions invariably missed. And there was Samuel Adams, fleshier than Washington but with a face every bit as determined. The colonies had sent their best to London. Kathleen Flannery waited till Bushell took a step back from The Two Georges , then pointed out some of the men whose names, while prominent during their lifetimes, had since faded: Newcastle, first lord of the treasury; George Grenville, who nearly gained the prime ministry; the political pamphleteer Sir Philip Francis; John Wilkes, another firebrand; and more.

“And there, off in a corner” - Kathleen pointed - ”sketching busily away, is Thomas Gainsborough himself. He doesn’t seem to have painted himself into the picture till the very last moment, when he realized he’d created a painting that would live forever.”

“I never noticed him before,” Bushell said, almost angrily, for he hated to overlook anything. “You’re right, Miss Flannery: he’s made himself as immortal as The Two Georges itself.”

“Dr. Flannery, if you don’t mind, Colonel.” She kept her tone light, but he could tell she meant it. A man might not have stressed the title so hard, but a man wouldn’t have had to go through so much to earn it and the respect of the world afterwards - either.

“Dr. Flannery; I beg your pardon,” Bushell said. “After I check the lift and that other stairway, shall we go back down to the reception? If you’ll let me, I’ll get you a drink and do my best to make amends.”

She visibly thought it over before she nodded. He was glad; he hadn’t warmed so to a woman on brief acquaintance since Irene. . . . But if he let himself think too much about Irene, he’d go back down to the reception and drink himself blind. He’d done that too many times before to doubt it. Nodding to the RAM guards, he went out into the hallway and looked over the opening for the lift and the stairs Kathleen had mentioned. “Surely you’ll have seen those in the plans for the mansion,” she said.

“You’re very thorough, to want to inspect them in person.”

“The same here as with The Two Georges,” he answered. “Until you see something for yourself, you never know what you might be missing.”

She studied him as he’d studied the painting. He wondered what she might find lurking in his background to point out. But all she said was, “You must be good at what you do.”

“If a RAM isn’t good at what he does, he should go do something else,” Bushell said. “And shouldn’t we go back to the reception downstairs?”

Kathleen nodded. “Yes. I ought to get back. But making sure The Two Georges is safe came first.”

“As it should.” Bushell patted the sleeve of his scarlet coat. “I’ll look official and soldierly and frighten away all the art thieves with my impressive military bearing.” He raised an eyebrow to show this was not to be taken seriously. As they reached the head of the stairs, he offered her his arm. She took it, and they descended side by side.

Governor Burnett came over as they reached the ground floor. “Everything as it should be, Colonel?” he asked anxiously.

“Yes, Your Excellency,” Bushell answered. To his regret, Kathleen Flannery, seeing him engaged, turned aside to a waiter who carried a tray of shrimp, oysters, and marinated slices of abalone on a bed of ice. She speared a shrimp with a toothpick, popped it into her mouth. Bushell set about reassuring the governor. He had trouble blaming Burnett for sounding nervous. The picketers in front of the mansion were chanting louder now, loud enough for their rhythmic calls to travel down the hall and penetrate the chatter that filled the Drake Room.

“I don’t want trouble of any sort tonight,” Burnett said, “especially not with press people and wireless reporters here from all over the NAU and from England, too.”

“That’s why the picketers are here, too,” Bushell replied. “They want the reporters to take their protest far and wide.”

The governor nodded impatiently. “I know that. It’s just - ” He stopped, perhaps not sure how frank he wanted to be.

“You want the story to be about how Upper California is proud to have The Two Georges here, not about coal miners complaining over the state of their lungs,” Bushell suggested.

“Exactly!” Burnett said, beaming. But his face fell. “For all you do, sometimes the story you get isn’t the story you want.”

“As long as they picket peaceably, they have the right to be here.” Bushell cocked an ear toward the front of the mansion. “No matter how raucous they are.”

The coal miners started a new chant: “Hey, Tricky Dick! Hey, Tricky Dick! Our air stinks worse than your burners!” They seemed to like it; it got louder with every repetition. Bushell glanced around to see how the used-car magnate was taking that. By the way he’d acted outside the mansion, Honest Dick didn’t fancy being the butt of ridicule. Now he slammed his whiskey-and-soda down on the bar and growled, “God damn those sons of bitches to hell, and I hope the devil stokes the fire with their own coal. They’re all full of shit - every fucking one of them, do you hear me?”

Everyone in the Drake Room must have heard him, for he made not the slightest effort to keep his voice down: on the contrary. Women looked away in embarrassment; a couple of men let out significant coughs. That kind of language might have gone unremarked over cigars and port when the sexes separated after supper, but it was more than startling in mixed company.

“Not a gentleman,” someone murmured, a verdict which garnered low-voiced agreement from around the room.

No matter how old the Steamer King was, he still had sharp ears. “Not a gentleman?” he said (shouted, actually; Bushell wondered how many whiskey-and-sodas he’d had before this latest one). “No, I’m not a gentleman, and I’m proud of it - what d’you think of that? My father grew oranges and lemons and ran a general store. He didn’t have two shillings to jingle in his pocket, and I didn’t have two ha’pennies. My wife wore a plain, cloth coat till the day she died, God bless her; no fancy furs and silks for her. I worked my way to where I am with these two hands” - he held them high - ”and anybody who wants to look down on me for not being some toffee-nosed toff, all I have to say is, fuck him, too!”

But for the soft strains of Vivaldi, an awful silence filled the Drake Room, which only made the miners’

chant easier to hear. No one seemed to know where to look, or to want to look at anyone else. Very quietly, for Bushell’s ears alone, Governor Burnett said, “Every word of that is true, you know about his being a self-made man, I mean.”

Bushell wondered what part of Honest Dick’s millions had found its way into the coffers of the governor’s party. At the moment, though, that was not the point. As softly as Burnett had spoken, Bushell replied, “A man who is not a gentleman is one thing; as with Honest Dick, hard work may have kept him from having the chance to become one. But a man who boasts of not being a gentleman .. . he, in my opinion, is something else again.”

“You are of course entitled to your opinion, Colonel,” the governor said in a voice like ice, and pointedly turned away. Bushell realized he’d succeeded in offending another politico. He’d long since got past the point where that worried him.

He looked around to see what Kathleen Flannery was doing, and spotted her deep in conversation with Sergei Pavlov, the Russian Empire’s consul in New Liverpool. When Pavlov wasn’t decked out in knee breeches and dark green velvet swallowtail coat - Russian notions of formal attire being even more conservative than those of the British Empire - he was a leading wholesaler of caviar and the tasteless but potent spirit the Russians distilled from potatoes.

Kathleen said something that made him laugh. They were both speaking French, which educated Russians often preferred to their own language. Bushell could hear that, but not what they were saying. His own French was accented but serviceable; it was a useful language for a RAM to know. He thought about joining the conversation, but couldn’t see a way to do it without being impolite. Another glance round the Drake Room showed him few people with whom he did feel like talking. He drifted toward the bar. He’d just taken his first sip of Jameson over ice when Samuel Stanley materialized at his elbow.

“Everything all right, Chief?” his adjutant asked, his voice studiously casual. That was the second time tonight Stanley had asked him the same question; he realized his hastily lit cigar back at the office hadn’t fooled the other RAM. “It passes muster,” he said. “Seeing The Two Georges from about three feet makes up for a lot.”

Phyllis Stanley came up beside her husband. “Now that’s something I can hardly wait to do,” she declared. “Anyone who tries to slide in there between me and that painting is going to get an elbow where it will do me the most good.”

“I wouldn’t have expected anything else.” Laughing, Bushell kissed her on the cheek. She was a pleasantly plump woman of about his age, slightly darker than her husband, and she carried herself like a queen. Her dress of orange beaded silk brushed the floor but left her shoulders bare.

“Anyone who tries to get between Phyllis and what she wants is going to end up trampled,” Samuel Stanley said: admiration, not criticism. He went on, “Somebody must have rung up headquarters when the coal miners started getting noisy - I’ve seen a few more of our boys in red shirts about.”

“By rights, keeping the miners in check should be a job for the New Liverpool constables.” Bushell shrugged. “Let it go. I’m not about to fret over jurisdiction, not with The Two Georges in town.”

“Just what I thought,” Samuel Stanley said. “As far as I’m concerned, the more, the merrier.”

Governor Burnett strode up to the podium and waited to be noticed. Bushell snuck a look at his pocket watch. Whatever you thought of Burnett for cronyism, he ran his show on time. This was when the schedule called for the guests to troop upstairs and admire The Two Georges - and, no doubt, for Burnett to make a speech the local papers would play up.

But before he could start, the picketing coal miners outside began yet another new chant, this one suggesting an intimate relationship between Tricky Dick and the steam dispersal pipes of the vehicles he sold.

The Steamer King had already shown nothing was wrong with his ears. “Bastards!” he growled, brandishing his cane. “I’ll show them they don’t have Honest Dick to kick around!” He stormed out of the Drake Room. Moments later, Bushell heard him shouting at the picketers. They jeered back. By his face, Governor Burnett now heartily wished he hadn’t invited the used-car magnate to this exhibition. He had no choice, though, but to make the best of it. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began in the rounded tones that made him a master of the wireless, “we are gathered here this evening to celebrate once more our union with the mother country, and to - ”

Again he was interrupted, this time by four or five popping noises from outside. “Fireworks,” someone said. “Boiler tubes bursting in one of Tricky Dick’s steamers,” someone else suggested, and got a laugh. Bushell turned to Samuel Stanley. “That’s rifle fire,” he said in a flat voice. His adjutant didn’t argue; he was already shouldering his way out through the crowd. Behind them, Governor Burnett, unaware anything was seriously wrong, resumed his speech.

The two RAMs sprinted up the hall from the Drake Room to the entrance of the governor’s mansion. Before they reached it, a shrill scream brought the rest of the guests pounding after them: the cloakroom girl had gone outside to see what the popping noises were about. She stood in the entranceway now, hands pressed to her face in horror.

Bushell and Stanley ran past her. The coal miners had fallen silent. They and the RAM sergeant who’d been at the door crowded round a crumpled figure still clutching a stick. One bullet had caught Honest Dick in the neck. Another had taken him just above one eye and blown off most of the back of his head, splashing blood and brains and bits of bone all over the pavement.

II

Along with Bushell and Stanley, the miners stared in horror at the crumpled corpse of the Steamer King. One of them, his eyes wide, his mouth an O of dismay, looked from the still-spreading pool of blood beneath Honest Dick’s head to the tunics of nearly identical hue the two RAMs wore. Seeing those tunics, recognizing them for what they were, may have helped him build up steam to talk.

“Wasn’t us, sirs,” he said. “Wasn’t none of us who done him, swear to God it wasn’t.”

“That’s right,” another picketer said amidst a growing mutter of agreement. “Wouldn’t have minded breakin’ the handle of my sign here over the damn fool’s head, that there’s a fact. But to blow it off like this here - ” He gulped and turned away, as if about to be sick.

Two miners pointed north toward the brush-covered knoll across Sunset Highway from the grounds of the governor’s mansion. “Shots came from over there somewheres,” one of them said.

“That’s correct,” said one of the blue-suited New Liverpool constables who’d been making sure the picketing coal miners didn’t do anything more than march and chant. “Tricky Dick - uh, Honest Dick came out here to the location of his decease and began a, well, a harangue, to which some of these here gentlemen responded, mm, intemperately. He was just commencing his reply when the perpetrator caused him to expire.”

Another New Liverpool constable trotted toward the mansion, saying, “I’m calling Captain Macias.”

Bushell nodded to the New Liverpool constable who’d spoken first. “This is your case, sir. RAMs have no primary jurisdiction in homicide cases, even if the homicide is by gunfire. My adjutant and I will, of course, help you in any way we can.”

The other constable was having a tough time pushing his way into the mansion against the stream of distinguished people emerging to gape at the murder that had been done. “Fools,” Samuel Stanley said.

“If that maniac is still out there, he can pot anybody he pleases.”

“Jesus God, you’re right,” the New Liverpool constable near him exclaimed. He turned to a couple of his comrades. “Hank, Mortimer, go cross the highway and see if you can flush the bugger out.”

Hank and Mortimer obeyed with an alacrity that spoke well of their training and their courage. Bushell wouldn’t have cared to try chasing down a man with a rifle who’d already proved he wasn’t afraid to use it, not in pitch darkness and carrying nothing more lethal than a truncheon. A newspaper photographer touched off a flashbulb next to him, then another reporter on the far side of the Steamer King’s corpse used one, too. That second flash made Bushell blink, filled his eyes with tears, and left a glowing purple spot in the center of his vision. More and more flashbulbs went off; Honest Dick would have nothing to complain about over the publicity his passing would get.

“We’ve got to dust off the obit and bring it up to date,” one of the reporters said to the photographer beside him.

“Yeah,” the photographer answered, squatting to find the shot he wanted. As with policemen, his trade made him think of violent death as part of business, something to be dealt with rather than exclaimed over. “Who d’you suppose would want to do in old Tricky Dick?”

“Somebody who bought a car from him,” the reporter said with a cynical chuckle. He saw Bushell’s uniform and asked him, “Who would want to kill Honest Dick, anyhow?” He poised pencil over pad to take down the RAM chief’s reply.

“I wouldn’t try to guess - that’s your job,” Bushell said. The reporter snorted. Bushell went on, “I’m sure the New Liverpool constabulary will investigate the case most thoroughly - murder by firearm is as vicious a crime as the statue book knows.”

“We’ve already five of ‘em here this year, and it’s only June,” the reporter said. “What do you think of that?”

“I’m against it,” Bushell answered solemnly. “I’m also against cannabis-smuggling and the white slave trade, and for motherhood, the King-Emperor, and the right of trial by jury. Go ahead and quote me on any of those.”

The reporter snorted, then scraped a lucifer against the sole of his shoe and used it to light a cigarillo. When he had the nasty little cheroot going, he said, “Awright, Chief, I oughta know better than to expect a straight answer from you. Next time I will.”

“Fat chance,” Bushell said. The reporter laughed out loud.

Headlamps glowing, a steam lorry chuffed around from behind the mansion and rolled slowly out toward Sunset Highway. The driver stared back at the murder scene and paused to talk for a moment with the lantern-carrying New Liverpool constable at the end of the driveway before vanishing into the night. Governor Burnett came up to Bushell. He was not used to sudden and violent death, and averted his eyes from Honest Dick’s body as he asked in a shaken voice, “Colonel, what does this, this tragedy do to the showing of The Two Georges?”

“I don’t know how interested people will be in the painting now, but you may carry on for all of me,”

Bushell answered. “Since the victim here was murdered from a distance, none of your guests is a suspect. I do suggest, though, that you keep everyone downstairs until the New Liverpool constables finish taking statements. They’ll want to know what made Honest Dick go outside just then, what he said, things of that sort.”

Samuel Stanley said, “I wish the fellow out there hadn’t let that lorry leave, not that the driver would have told us anything we won’t hear from half a dozen other people.”

“Maybe more than half a dozen.” Bushell pointed back toward the mansion. Governor Burnett’s guests crowded the entryway, jostling one another to get a better view of a spectacle vastly different from the one they had been invited here to see. Moreover, servants’ staring faces - like those of the laborers at the airship port, a mixture of light and dark - filled every ground-floor window. The mansion staff and the chauffeurs who had brought some of the richer guests and those more enamored of display were also getting an eyeful.

Burnett, on the other hand, still seemed unable to look at the corpse. “Someone will have to telephone his daughters,” he said.

“You’ll have their numbers?” Bushell asked.

The governor nodded. “My secretary will have them in his files.” He turned back to the mansion, shouted, “Wilberforce!” After some delay, a tall, thin, dignified black man made his way out through the crush. Burnett explained what he wanted.

“I shall locate those numbers directly, excellency,” Wilberforce said. He glanced down at Honest Dick’s body for a moment, then delicately looked away. “You’ll not want me to place the telephone calls, though?”

“No, no.” Burnett sighed. “It’s my responsibility, and I shall attend to it. I just wish to God I didn’t have to.” There, for once, Bushel! believed him perfectly sincere. The governor clapped a melodramatic hand to his forehead. “What else can go wrong now?”

As if to answer him, a loud, insistent bell began to ring, somewhere deep inside the mansion. People looked around and stared at one another, trying to figure out where the noise was coming from and what it meant. A woman shrieked, then cried out, “Mother Mary, that’s the alarm!” It was Kathleen Flannery’s voice.

Bushell threw himself into the crowd at the entranceway, Samuel Stanley beside him. “Move!” they shouted. “Make way, there!” Some of the guests would have moved if they could, but everyone was too tightly packed to make that easy for anybody. Bushell knifed through the crush like a Rugby three-quarterback. He realized he’s stuck an elbow in the ample belly of the lieutenant governor of Upper California only when that worthy grunted and folded up like a concertina. At last he got past the knot of people gathered in the front door to the mansion. He sprinted down the hall toward the stairway. Though he ran with everything he had in him, Samuel Stanley passed him ten yards before the foot of the stairs. His adjutant might have carried a few extra years, but he also had longer legs.

Both RAMs bounded up the stairway two and three steps at a time. Halfway up, Bushell wondered what sort of weapon he’d use to stop the thieves. He yanked his ceremonial sword out of its scabbard. He was no fencer, but the thing had a point. It might frighten someone, if nothing more. The idea of actually having to use such a silly toy certainly frightened him.

As he ran in dress uniform down the first-floor hall toward the Cardigan Room, he thought of how much he looked like the British marines in the patriotic mural on the wall. The marines, though, had had the sense to carry rifles.

Stanley stopped dead in the doorway to the Cardigan Room. Stumbling to a stop behind him, Bushell almost ran him through. “Let me by,” he panted. Silently, his adjutant stood aside. The wall on which The Two Georges had hung was bare. Bushell took in that single catastrophe first. Everything else followed, a piece at a time.

One of the RAMs guards sprawled on the floor, unconscious or dead. Unconscious - he was breathing. The other guard seemed to be holding himself up by main force of will. He staggered toward Bushell, croaking in a thick, slurred voice, “Sh-sir, regret to report that - ” He clutched his stomach, doubled over, and was noisily sick on the fine Persian carpet.

The stink of the vomit mixed with another odor, strong, heavy, sweetish. Bushell had smelled it before, but couldn’t place it. Stanley did. “Chloroform!” he exclaimed.

“You’re right,” Bushell said. “I had a dentist use it to pull a wisdom tooth, years ago. That explains what happened to these poor devils, but not how.” He turned to the conscious guard, who was wiping at his mouth with a pocket handkerchief. “How did they get close enough to chloroform you?” How did you let them get that close? underlay the question.

“We heard the shots outside, sir, and then everyone raising the most hellish commotion.” The guard still spoke slowly, often pausing between words, partly from the direct effect of the anesthetic, partly because his memory was still blurred. Gathering himself, he went on, “Hiram and I, we stuck to our post here, of course. Then these three RAMs came running into the room.” He grimaced ruefully. “Or men in RAM

uniforms, I should say. We found out about that.”

Behind Bushell, someone let out a gasp of horror. He spun around and saw Kathleen Flannery staring at the blank wall in the Cardigan Room with as much horror as the cloakroom girl had shown at Honest Dick’s bleeding corpse. “Yes, it’s gone,” he said roughly, and turned back to the guard. “Did you recognize them?”

“No, sir.” The guard started to shake his head, then stopped abruptly; it must have hurt. “But we didn’t think anything of it. I don’t know what went through Hiram’s head, but my guess was that they were boys from out of province, here along with The Two Georges.”

Kathleen shook her head. “We relied on the authorities in each town for security personnel. Up to now, everything had gone perfectly.” She withered Bushell with a glance.

He wanted a drink - Christ, he wanted a bottle. The first interesting woman he’d met in a long time, and now she had to hate him. And, he realized, he had to suspect her.

The guard said, “We found out what they were, sir, when one of them pulled out his revolver and told us to put up our hands and freeze if we wanted to go on living. The other two went round behind us and jammed these stinking sponges over our faces. They were professionals, sir, nothing else but. We never had a chance to try and fight back, and next thing I knew, I was lying on the floor and the painting was gone. I hit the alarm button, and - ” He shrugged helplessly.

A flashbulb went off behind Bushell, printing his shadow for a moment on the wall where The Two Georges had hung. Some of the reporters had broken away from the murder in front of the mansion, then. He turned around and said, “Boys, no more of that. This is a crime scene under investigation. No photographs in the papers.”

“Why the devil not?” The photographer who’d just shot was screwing in a new bulb, and hissing between his teeth because the old one was hot. “How can photos from out in the hall here mess up your investigation?”

“Because if they’re published, they’ll help tell the criminals what we know,” Bushell answered. “You know me, most of you. You know I play fair. I tell you what I can as soon as I can. Till then - ” He gestured to Kathleen Flannery to come inside, then closed the door to the Cardigan Room in the reporters’ faces.

“They won’t be happy,” Samuel Stanley warned.

“Too bad for them,” Bushell answered. Then something new occurred to him. “Sam, go and tell those New Liverpool constables not to let anybody else off the mansion grounds, no matter what.” He slammed one fist into the palms of his other hand in lieu of swearing. “What do you want to bet that lorry pulled out of here with The Two Georges in its bed?”

Stanley groaned. “I have the terrible feeling you’re right, Chief, but just in case you’re wrong, I’ll go talk to the New Liverpool men.” He opened the door. The hubbub outside doubled. When he closed it again, the noise redoubled, angrily.

Bushell took another look around the Cardigan Room. Close to the wall opposite the one on which The Two Georges had hung sat a lacquered metal box with a crank on one side and a trumpet-shaped speaker coming out of another: a wind-up phonogram, of the sort a young man and his sweetheart might take on a picnic in the country.

“That has no business being here,” Kathleen Flannery said, pointing to it.

“No business of ours,” Bushell said in abstracted tones; he’d seen such portable phonograms at crime scenes once or twice before. “But I know what tune the platter inside will play.”

“What tune is that?” The vertical crease between Kathleen’s eyebrows said she didn’t know what Bushell was talking about, or care.

“An old one called ‘Yankee Doodle,’“ he answered, and watched her narrowly.

“God in heaven,” she said quietly. “The Sons of Liberty. Our worst nightmare.” The Sons of Liberty had been a tiny splinter group for more than a century, and seldom impinged on the awareness of the average citizen of the NAU, who was not only content but proud to be a subject of the British Empire. But a curator in charge of The Two Georges had to know extremists might want to strike at the symbol of imperial unity. No, not might - did.

If she was faking, she was a good actress. A couple of hours before, she’d just been K. FLANNERY

on a list to Bushell; for all he knew, she was a good actress. Someone knocked on the door to the Cardigan Room. Bushell was ready to ignore it, but Samuel Stanley called, “It’s me, Chief.” For his adjutant, Bushell opened the door. Stanley came in with two men: a dark-skinned fellow in New Liverpool blues, complete with a turban matching his uniform, and a graying blond man wearing a doctor’s white coat with several fresh bloodstains on it. Stanley pointed first to one, then to the other. “This is Sergeant Singh, a New Liverpool forensics specialist, and here we have Dr. Foxx, the coroner.”

“We’ve met, I think,” Bushell said to Foxx, who nodded. The RAM colonel turned to Sergeant Singh.

“Can you dust that phonogram for fingerprints, Sergeant?” He pointed to the wind-up machine by the far wall. Samuel Stanley had not noticed it before. Recognizing it for what it was, he whistled softly.

“Oh my yes, I shall certainly do that,” the forensics sergeant said, his words precise but his accent singsong and nasal.

Dr. Foxx stooped by Hiram, the still-unconscious RAM. “Pleasant, working on a live one,” he remarked, seizing the fellow’s wrist. “Makes for a bit of a change.” He glanced at his pocket watch for a measured half minute, then stowed it in his waistcoat. “Pulse is a firm seventy, respiration also normal. Nothing to do but wait till he comes round, I’d say.”

“Closest thing to good news I’ve had tonight, I’d say,” Bushell answered. “They called you out to look at Honest Dick?”

“Just so.” With a grunt, Foxx got to his feet. “He might have survived the throat wound; witnesses say that one was first. But the bullet to the head - ” He held out his hand, fingers in a fist, thumb pointing down. “Nasty thing. Glad I don’t see those every day, that I tell you.”

Sergeant Singh said, “No fingerprints do I find on the outer casing, no, none.”

“In that case - ” Bushell took out his pocket handkerchief and covered his own fingers with it as he worked the catch that held the phonogram closed. He opened the lid. Inside, along with the labelless shellac platter he’d expected, was a sheet of cheap notepaper. He glanced to Sergeant Singh. “May I?”

The forensics man nodded. Taking care not to touch the paper with his bare fingers, Bushell unfolded it. Singh read the two-line typed message with him. So did Samuel Stanley and Kathleen Flannery, who had stood over him while he opened the phonogram.

THE COLONIES SHALL BE FREE.

WASHINGTON WAS A TRAITOR.

“Bastards,” Stanley muttered, and then, “I’m sorry, ma’am; I’m upset.”

“It’s all right,” Kathleen Flannery said, her voice quivering with suppressed fury. “They are bastards. To steal The Two Georges . . .”

“It’s a blow at the Empire itself,” Bushell said grimly. On his knees, he moved backward, away from the phonogram. He took out his cigar case and showed it to Kathleen Flannery. After a small, helpless shrug, she nodded. She had no reason to keep him from smoking in the Cardigan Room now. Sergeant Singh dusted the inside of the phonogram case and the platter with a fine white powder, then used what looked like a miniature badger-hair shaving brush to sweep it away. “Also I see no fingerprints here,” he said when he was done. His liquid brown eyes were gloomy. “Very careful they must have been.”

“The Sons of Liberty? They’re good at what they do.” Bushell looked round for an ashtray. Not finding one, he knocked his ash onto the floor. Samuel Stanley ground it into the carpet with his heel. Bushell wrapped his handkerchief around the crank and wound up the phonogram. When he released the crank, the platter began to spin. He picked up the tone arm, again without touching it with his bare skin, and set the needle in the outer groove of the platter.

“Yankee Doodle” blared out. Bushell listened to a few bars of the jaunty, hateful tune, then lifted the needle off the platter and flicked the catch that kept the spring from unwinding further.

“You didn’t need to do that, Chief,” Samuel Stanley said quietly. “The phonogram here, the note inside they tell us it was a Sons of Liberty job. Even without ‘em, I’d have bet it was, just from how the villains carried it off.”

“Maybe I’m thorough, the way Dr. Flannery said. Or maybe I just like hurting myself.” Bushell shook his head like a man emerging from cold, deep water. “That’s about all we can do here right now. We’ll keep this room sealed off until Sergeant Singh and our own people can go over every inch of it, top to bottom. I want to talk with this Captain Macias before I call Sir Horace Bragg back in Victoria.”

“But he’s just here for the mur - ” Kathleen Flannery stopped. When she began again, she sounded almost accusatory: “You think there’s a connection.”

“Between blowing Tricky Dick’s head off and stealing The Two Georges , you mean? No, just a coincidence.” Bushell’s tone belied his words.

“But what if he hadn’t decided to come out just then?” she asked, frowning. “They couldn’t have known he would.”

“They probably would have shot someone else,” Bushell answered. “One of the picketers, one of the constables, one of the reporters out there . . .” He shook his head. “No, no one would have cared if they shot a reporter.” At Kathleen’s scandalized expression, he added, “Joke,” and knew he was telling some of the truth.

Leaving Samuel Stanley to hold the fort in the Cardigan Room, Bushell went out into the hallway and fought through the mob out there toward the stairs. Photographers fired enough flashes to make him think he’d been looking straight into the sun. Reporters yelled questions at him. He tried to limit his answers to the obvious: yes, The Two Georges was gone; yes, he thought there was a connection between the shooting of the Steamer King and the theft; no, he had no idea where the purloined painting was at the moment.

“Do you think a group you know stole the painting?” someone asked. “Or was it somebody, say, who wanted The Two Georges for itself and would try to pass it off as a copy or something like that?”

“We’ll be investigating that for some time,” Bushell answered, wishing he thought he was dealing with a fanatical art collector.

“Are the Sons of Liberty involved?” another reporter called.

“We’ll be investigating that for some time,” Bushell repeated in carefully neutral tones. “Now if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen - ”

He had to answer the same questions from the herd of dignitaries who now would not be seeing The Two Georges. Men and women of wealth, power, and influence, they waxed indignant when he was no more forthcoming with them than he had been with the press. Jonas Barber shook a forefinger in his face and almost stuck it in his eye. “See here, Colonel,” the little bald town council president snapped, “you have an obligation to make amends for your incompetence.”

“My only obligation, Your Honor, is to get The Two Georges back.” Bushell pushed past, leaving the politico dissatisfied.

The New Liverpool constables had cordoned off the area around Honest Dick’s corpse. They did not object, though, when Bushell stepped over the tape they’d laid down to keep back curious civilians. A brown-skinned man in a wide-shouldered, double-breasted suit of brown worsted came up to him, hand extended. “You would be Colonel Bushell?” he asked. “I’m Jaime Macias, captain of grand felonies.” Macias was a handsome man in his mid-thirties - young for a captain - with black hair so thick it amounted almost to a pelt and bushy black side whiskers and mustache. He glanced up toward the first floor. “I think we are going to be living in each other’s pockets with this investigation.”

“I think you’re right, Captain,” Bushell said, shaking the New Liverpool man’s hand. He glanced toward the body. “Found out anything past the obvious here?”

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Captain Macias answered. He had an intonation, the ghost of an accent, that said his family had spoken Spanish in the not too distant past. “We’ve recovered one of the bullets.”

“The devil you say!” Bushell burst out. “That is good news.”

Macias nodded. His hair, shiny with pomade, glistened under the lights of the mansion. “We were lucky, too - it’s not badly damaged,” he said. He glanced down at the rubberized sheet someone - probably one of the coroner’s aides - had thrown over Honest Dick’s body. “Likely to be the one that made the neck wound, I’d say. A bullet hitting bone would have taken much more deformation.”

“No doubt.” Bushell nodded, too. When Macias didn’t go on right away, the RAM chief said, “All right, you found it. What does it tell you? Spill, Captain.”

“Interesting caliber,” Macias remarked. “It’s not a .303, which is what we thought it was when we first came upon it.”

“Interesting, indeed.” Bushell combed at his mustache with a forefinger. “Not a rifle from the British Empire, then.”

“No, not our standard caliber,” Macias agreed.

“Let me guess,” Bushell said: “A .315.”

Captain Macias shook his head. “No, it’s not a weapon from the Holy Alliance, either. With Nueva España so close, that was our next guess.”

“Well, where is it from, then?” Bushell demanded. “Prussia? One of the other German states? An Italian kingdom?”

Macias shook his head again. “It’s what some people would call a three-line rifle. Do you happen to know what a line is?”

“A tenth of an inch,” Bushell answered. “So it’s exactly .30-caliber, is it?” He ran a ringer over his mustache once more. “You don’t often see a rifle from the Russian Empire in this part of the NAU.”

“I’ve never seen one,” Jaime Macias said. “Franco-Spanish stuff, yes, that comes over the border all the time. But the Russians? No.”

“I don’t think we worry enough about the Russians, myself,” Bushell said. “The Holy Alliance is an obvious rival: France and Spain so close to England, all the wars between us and them, the long border between the NAU and Nueva Espana, the rivalries in Africa. . .. But the Russians aren’t our friends, either. They want to dominate the Germanies, they bump up against us and the Japanese in China, they loom over India and the Ottoman protectorates, and they keep that foothold along our northwestern frontier, too.”

“Alaska,” Macias said.

“We started offering to buy Alaska from them back in Victoria’s day,” Bushell said, “but the tsars kept saying no. Russians are good at no. But why would a Russian or somebody with a Russian rifle want to gun down the Steamer King?”

The New Liverpool constable glanced up toward the first floor of the governor’s mansion. He picked his words with some care: “Did I hear rightly that the Sons of Liberty may have had a hand in tonight’s events?”

“You heard rightly, Captain.” Bushell scowled. “And you have a point, too, worse luck. The Sons of Liberty will take anything they can get from anybody who will give it to them.” He scuffed a foot on the pavement; the toe of his shoe just missed a small, drying puddle of blood. “I don’t like thinking of the Russians and the Sons operating hand in glove here in New Liverpool.”

“I don’t like thinking of anything that’s happened here tonight,” Macias said somberly. “Homicide by firearm is bad enough. But The Two Georges on top of it - ” He broke off, anger distorting his regular features. Nuevespañolan blood might run through his veins, but he had any British subject’s outrage at the theft of the famous painting.

“Yes,” Bushell said. “The next thing to worry about, I suppose, is what they’ll do with - or to - the painting now that they have it.” He twisted away, more from that thought than from Macias. “As you said, Captain, we’ll be seeing a lot of each other in days to come. I’d sooner have met you under more pleasant circumstances, but - ”

“If we required pleasant circumstances, Colonel Bushell, we should have chosen a different line of work, you and I,” Macias said, and Bushell nodded.

He stepped out over the tape that fenced off the spot where Honest Dick had fallen. Most of the dignitaries had gone back inside the governor’s mansion. Bushell went inside, too, and headed for the Drake Room: with a bar set up there, that was where people - including Governor Burnett, for whom he was looking in particular - were likely to be.

He was halfway down the hall when he spotted the governor’s secretary, who would do as well as Burnett. “Mr. Wilberforce!” he called.

“How may I be of assistance to you, Colonel?” the Negro asked gravely.

“I need a telephone,” Bushell said.

“Let me take you to my office,” Wilberforce said at once. “You may use my private line for as long as you like.” He hesitated, then drew out his pocket watch. “It will be well after midnight in Victoria, Colonel. Will whomever you call be glad to hear from you?”

“With all this? Not bloody likely,” Bushell answered. “But my boss will be more angry if I wait than if I wake him.”

“The proper sort of a superior to have,” Wilberforce said, approval in his voice. He led Bushell to his office, unlocked it, and stood aside to let the RAM chief precede him in. The engraved ebony plaque on his desk proclaimed that his Christian name was Harrington. Nodding to Bushell, he said, “This, no doubt, is a conversation you will wish to conduct in privacy.” He left the office, closing the door behind him as he went.

He was the proper sort of aide to have. Bushell wondered how fully Governor Burnett realized that. He shrugged; it wasn’t his affair, and he didn’t have time to worry about it anyhow. He sat down behind Wilberforce’s desk and picked up the telephone.

A woman’s voice came on the line. “Operator Fitzwilliams speaking. How may I help you?”

“I need to place a call back to Victoria, operator. The number I want is PLassey 4782. My name is Thomas Bushell.”

“PLassey 4782,” the operator echoed. “Very good, Mr. - Bushell? Do I have that right? Mr. Bushell, yes. Your call will take a few minutes to complete, sir.”

“Then you’d better get busy, hadn’t you?” Bushell listened to the call wending its way from one phone corporation to the next across the NAU: hisses, pops, and the faint voices of operators talking to one another over the miles. His time in the army had taught him how to wait. At last, faintly, a bell chimed in his ear.

It chimed several times before a southeastern-accented voice, sodden with sleep, mumbled, “Hullo?

Bragg here.”

“Mr. Bragg, sir, I have a call for you, from Mr., uh, Thomas Bushell in New Liverpool, Upper California,” operator Fitzwilliams said.

As if he were focusing field glasses, Lieutenant General Sir Horace Bragg made his voice sharper. Sleep audibly fell away from him: “Yes, I’ll accept that call. Thank you, operator.” A click announced the woman leaving the circuit she’d completed. “All right, Tom, what’s gone wrong?” Bragg demanded.

“You wouldn’t have called at this ungodly hour if it weren’t something dreadful.” He took his mouth away from the handset; rather more faintly than he’d spoken before, he said, “It’s business, I’m afraid, Cecilia. Go back to sleep if you can.” Then, louder again: “Sorry. I’m back.”

“ The Two Georges has been stolen from Governor Burnett’s mansion, sir,” Bushell said baldly. “Almost at the same time, and probably as a diversion, Honest Dick the Steamer King was murdered by rifle fire when he stepped outside the mansion to continue a quarrel with a group of picketing coal miners parading there.”

After several seconds of silence broken only by the gentle hiss of the telephone line, Bragg whispered,

“My God.” He was not an easy man to take aback, but Bushell had done it. The RAM commandant recovered quickly. “Give me all the details you know.”

“Yes, sir,” Bushell said, and obeyed. He told Bragg what he’d learned in the Cardigan Room, and what Captain Macias had told him about the murder of Honest Dick.

“Never mind the late, not particularly lamented Steamer King,” Bragg said when he was done. “We have local constabularies to run murderers to earth. I want you - in fact, I order you - to concentrate all your efforts on recovering The Two Georges. If anything happens to that painting, the NAU won’t be the same.”

“You’re right, sir,” Bushell said. On the wall to one side of the desk, Harrington Wilberforce had a fine print of The Two Georges. Till that moment, Bushell hadn’t truly noticed it: he took its presence in any official setting altogether for granted. He went on, “That was what I was going to do, anyhow.”

“Only possible course to take,” Bragg said. “RAMs deal with crimes of an interprovincial nature. If the NAU has anything more interprovincial than The Two Georges, I’m damned if I know what it is.” From his choice of words, Bushell inferred that Cecilia Bragg had gone back to sleep. Sir Horace continued,

“What do you intend to do now?”

“You mean, besides slitting my wrists? Get statements from all the people here, find out where they were, whom they were with, what they saw - probably not much, but you never can tell. I especially want to talk with Hiram, the other guard who was chloroformed, when he comes around. He really may have seen something worth knowing.”

“Might could be you’re right.” Bragg hesitated, then laughed at himself. “You know I’m all in a twitter when you can hear backwoods North Carolina in the way I talk.” Bushell nodded; he couldn’t remember the last time Sir Horace had slipped so. Bragg asked, “Have you telephoned the governor-general yet?”

“No, sir. You’re the first call I’ve made; Sir Martin was next on my list.”

“I’ll ring up Sir Martin,” Bragg said. “You sound as if you have quite enough on your hands out there as things stand.”

“Thank you, sir. Please tell him I take full responsibility for the theft.”

“Don’t beat yourself too hard, Tom,” Bragg said. “If you were perfect, they wouldn’t have got away with it. You’re not perfect. Nobody is. If the world were a perfect place, we wouldn’t need police, and then you and I would both be out of a job.”

Easy enough for you to say, Bushell thought. Your career hasn’t just fallen into the jakes. But Bragg was trying to help, as best he could across close to three thousand miles. “Thank you,” Bushell repeated.

“If you’re going to ring the governor general, I’ll get back to it here.”

He hung up and started out of Wilberforce’s office to begin asking questions. Before he got to the door, he stopped and frisked himself. His snort was rueful. In dress uniform, he had neither notebook nor pencil. When he left the office, he was anything but surprised to find Governor Burnett’s secretary waiting in the hall. He explained his plight. Wilberforce ducked into the office next to his own - ”My clerk’s, you understand” - and returned with two stenographic notebooks and a pair of already sharpened pencils.

“Mr. Wilberforce, you are a wonder,” Bushell said.

“I do endeavor to provide what assistance I can, sir,” Wilberforce answered. Now armed, Bushell found Samuel Stanley, gave him a notebook and pencil, and said. “Let’s divide ‘em into two groups and run straight through it: who they are, where they live, telephone number, what they saw, and whom they saw it with. If we have a few people nobody else saw, or a small group who saw only one another - ”

“Then that may give us something to go on,” Stanley said. “Or it may not mean a bloody thing, depending.” He hesitated, then asked. “Have you rung up Lieutenant General Bragg yet?” At Bushell’s nod, he tried another question: “How did he take it?”

Bushell searched for a judicious word, and by luck found one: “Professionally.”

“Could be worse,” Stanley said, nodding. “Did you ring Sir Martin, too?”

“No. Sir Horace told me to get on with the investigation here - he’d telephone the governor himself.”

“Did he? That’s a conversation I wouldn’t mind listening in on. It should be - interesting.” Samuel Stanley’s face bore a peculiar expression, or rather lack of expression: it didn’t quite fit the prospect of the RAM commandant’s having to announce the disappearance of The Two Georges to the King-Emperor’s chief official in the North American Union. Bushell almost asked him about it, but the pressure of other matters of greater urgency and consequence drove it from his mind. The ubiquitous and apparently omnicompetent Harrington Wilberforce found him and Stanley adjoining offices. The New Liverpool constables rounded up the picketers, the reporters, the guests, and the staff of the governor’s mansion and split them into two groups, one for each RAM officer. Then the grilling started.

Hiram, the RAM guard, was the second man Bushell questioned. He was still pale and shaky from the chloroform he’d had to breathe, but eager to tell what he knew. Unfortunately, that added little to what Bushell had learned from his comrade. All three of the false RAMs had been white men. . . . Hiram managed a wan smile. “No surprise there, not if the sons of bitches are Sons of Liberty, eh, sir?”

“No.” Bushell bared his teeth, too, but more in a snarl than a smile. Not only did the Sons of Liberty want North America free from Britain, they wanted it free of Negroes, Jews, East Indians, Chinese . . . everyone but the pure and original settlers of the land - or so they said. Just how they managed to want to be rid of the Red Indians, too, Bushell wasn’t quite sure, but they did; one of their grievances against the Crown was that it had acted to slow white settlement of the continent and let a few Indian nations remain intact and locally autonomous, much like the princely states of East India. Hiram said, “Sorry I didn’t observe more closely, sir, but I didn’t give the buggers a second thought till it was too late.”

“You did the best you could,” Bushell said, sighing. “Go on, get home, get some rest. Your family will be worried about you when they hear the news, I’m sure. If you’re a praying man, spend a minute thanking God you’re alive.”

“Yes, sir, I’ll do that. Thank you, sir.” Still a bit wobbly on his pins, Hiram left the office. Before Bushell questioned the next witness, he slammed a fist down on his borrowed desk, hard enough to make pain shoot up his arm. He had more for which to reproach himself than Hiram did. Sam Stanley had said extra RAMs were about. He’d assumed they’d either come from the New Liverpool office or were traveling with the exhibition. He hadn’t asked any questions about them. That the guards had made the same mistake didn’t excuse his own negligence.

The next person in to see him was Marcella Barber, the wife of the town council head. He threw questions at her until she snapped, “See here, Colonel, I assure you I am quite as sorry as anyone else to see The Two Georges stolen, but you have no cause to address me as if you were certain I personally carried it away in my handbag.”

“How large a handbag do you carry, madam?” he asked, deadpan.

She stared, then laughed, but her eyes were shrewd as she said, “You’d sooner be screaming at yourself, wouldn’t you?”

“Mrs. Barber, whatever makes you think I’m not?” he replied mildly. She pursed her lips, then nodded, like a judge pleased with an obscure but telling citation. Bushell finished interrogating her in a much softer tone of voice.

After her came Kathleen Flannery. He couldn’t take out his anger on her; she had every right to take out her anger on him. “We’re doing everything we can to get that painting back, Dr. Flannery,” he said.

“I’m certain you are,” she said in a tone of brittle politeness. “It should never have been lost in the first place, though.”

He flipped to the next page in the spiral-bound notebook Harrington Wilberforce had given him. Scrawling Kathleen’s name at the top of the page, he asked, “Where are you staying while you’re in New Liverpool, Dr. Flannery?”

“I’m at the Hotel La Cienega, here on the west side of town. They’ve put me in room 268. It’s very close to the mansion here, and . . . Why are you smiling, Colonel?”

“People in New Liverpool have a habit of using Spanish names to make a place or a business sound exotic,” he answered. “They often don’t care what those names mean. That one, for instance, means ‘the swamp.’“

“Does it?” she said. “That is amusing - or would be, under other circumstances.”

Under other circumstances, Bushell would have tried to find out where she was staying for reasons which had nothing to do with police business. As it was, he said, “I know you were part of the crowd at the entrance to the mansion when the alarm went off. I saw you there, and heard you cry out.”

“That’s correct,” she said tonelessly.

Bushell jotted the information on the page under her name. He already knew it, but his would not be the only eyes examining these notes. He asked, “Whom did you recognize as also being there?”

She frowned in thought. “So much has happened since then - Let me see. The lieutenant governor had just stepped on my foot, and apologized very handsomely for it. One of the town councilmen was right in front of me, blocking my view. I don’t recall his name, but he was the wide-shouldered chap with the walrus mustache.”

“That’s Lionel Harris,” Bushell said, writing it down. “Was his wife with him?”

“She was in the teal, wasn’t she? Yes, she was there. And I remember noticing the viola player from the string quartet, and thinking he shouldn’t have left the Drake Room.”

“I agree with you. You’re certain it was the viola player?” Bushell had enjoyed the Vivaldi, but hadn’t paid much attention to the musicians performing it.

Kathleen Flannery nodded decisively. “Yes - he was the blond with the hair spilling down over his collar.”

“I shall take your word for it.” Bushell wondered if she’d noticed the man because she found him attractive. She had the right, of course. Somehow that only made the idea more irksome. “Anyone else?”

he asked. “Any of your colleagues from the exhibition?”

“No, I didn’t see any of them,” Kathleen said, “but I resent the implication that they might somehow be involved in this, this - horrible crime.”

“Dr. Flannery, you may condemn me for allowing The Two Georges to be stolen, or you may condemn me for being too zealous in pursuit of the thieves.” Bushell held the pencil between his two index fingers, one at the point, the other at the rubber. “In logic, though, I truly don’t see how you can condemn me for both those things at once.”

“Logic, at the moment, has very little to do with it,” she retorted. “I do know, though, that my assistants would no more harm The Two Georges in any way than I would.”

Bushell looked down at his notes. He wished he could be sure she was above suspicion. He knew too well that he couldn’t. Answering her indirectly, he said, “Many of the most infamous crimes are committed by people in positions of trust. Because they’re trusted, they can do things more ordinary criminals can’t.”

“Not this time, Colonel Bushell,” Kathleen Flannery said through tight lips and clenched teeth.

“I hope you’re right, but I can’t overlook the chance that you might be wrong,” Bushell said. “Not very long ago, if you’ll remember, you called me thorough. I was pleased to take it for a compliment.”

That reached her. Her nod was reluctant, but it was a nod. “All right, Colonel, I understand that. As you’ve said, you have your job to do. It’s just that - ” She didn’t go on, but buried her face in her hands. She saw her career crashing in flames like a hydrogen-filled airship from her great-grandfather’s day, just as Bushell did his. He said, “I - will - get - it - back, Dr. Flannery.”

She looked up at him. “You sound like the Lieutenant Colonel Bonaparte, blasting the rabble away from the Bastille. He must have used that same tone of voice when he said, ‘Ils ne passeront pas.’ “

“He made himself a great man in France that day,” Bushell answered. “I don’t care about being a great man. I just want to beat those” - the presence of a lady inhibited him in language - ”individuals who are laughing up their sleeves because they got the better of me here tonight.”

“That’s all well and good, but what will they do with The Two Georges while they have it?” Kathleen asked. “If any harm should come to the painting - ”

“What will they do with it?” Bushell had already started thinking about that. He rubbed at his mustache.

“One of two things, I think. They may destroy it, perhaps publicly, to show what they think of the British Empire and of the NAU’s being part of it.” At that, Kathleen Flannery looked physically ill. Bushell went on, “Or they may try to ransom it. That might fit their sense of humor, to get some great sum of money for The Two Georges and then turn around and use that money to subvert the union the painting symbolizes.”

“That would be - better,” Kathleen Flannery said. “The NAU can defend itself; the poor painting can’t.”

She hesitated. “The Sons of Liberty seem to have quite enough money for subversion already. Where do they get it?”

“Their political wing, the Independence Party, isn’t clandestine; we’re sure some party dues end up with the Sons, though we’ve never been able to prove it in a court of law,” Bushell answered. “But they’ll take money from whoever will give it to them. The Holy Alliance and the Russians both funnel gold their way now and then: if we’re tied up with troubles inside the Empire, that works to their advantage.”

“The Russians?” Kathleen Flannery bit her lip. Bushell nodded. She said to him, “Because you’re thorough, you’ll be investigating me in more detail than just these few questions, won’t you?” He nodded again. She sighed. “In that case, let me tell you now that a few years ago I was engaged to be married to a gentleman named Kyril Lozovsky. He was the assistant commercial secretary at the Russian ministry in Victoria.”

Bushell wrote the information down without changing expression. “You were engaged, you say? The marriage did not take place?”

“No.” Kathleen looked down into her lap. A blush mounted from her throat to her forehead. “A couple of weeks before we were to wed, I learned Mr. Lozovsky was also engaged to a young woman back in Tsaritsin. I’ve heard he married her after he went back to Russia, but I don’t know that for a fact.”

“I - see,” Bushell said. “Thank you for telling me. If Mr. Lozovsky already had a fiancée in Russia, he was less than a gentleman to acquire one here.” And if something like that had happened to her, no wonder she hadn’t married since. One rotten apple must have spoiled the barrel of men for her. He shook his head. Too bad. Flipping his notebook to the next empty page, he said, “I think that will be all for now. I have a great many more people to question tonight.”

“I understand,” she said. “I’ll do everything I can to help get The Two Georges back.”

Bushell was in the middle of his next interview, this one with a plump pastry chef, when someone knocked on the closed door to the office he was using. He frowned. “Excuse me,” he told the chef, and went to the door, expecting some impatient dignitary demanding his turn at once. But instead of an indignant politico or a wealthy baronet, he found himself face to face with Harrington Wilberforce. “I beg your pardon for interrupting, Colonel,” the Negro said, “but the governor-general has telephoned Governor Burnett, and also expresses the desire to speak with you. If you will please follow me?”

“Of course,” Bushell said, and hurried with Wilberforce past the line of prominent people, coal miners, mansion staff members, and reporters outside the office he had commandeered. A couple of them called after him as he went. “Back as soon as I can,” he said several times. Governor Burnett’s office was decorated and furnished in the same gaudy Rococo Revival style as the observation lounge in the Upper California Limited had been. It was also big enough to swallow both Wilberforce’s and Bushell’s offices with room to spare. The governor sat behind an oak dreadnought of a desk. He spoke into the telephone: “Here he is, Your Excellency.” He thrust the handset at Bushell.

“Your Excellency?” Bushell said. “How can I help you?”

“The greatest service you can do me, Colonel Bushell, and do the people of the North American Union, is to recover The Two Georges unharmed, and quickly.” Even across a telephone connection spanning the continent, Sir Martin Luther King’s deep, rich voice was unmistakable. It made Bushell want to push the investigation even harder than he was already.

“I’ll do everything I can, Your Excellency,” he said. He had to fight down the urge to hang up on the governor-general and rush back to interrogating the pastry chef.

“I’m sure of that, Colonel, and I shall pray for your success.” A minister before he entered politics, Sir Martin was able to imbue that sentiment with far more sincerity than most officials could have conjured up. He went on, “Lieutenant General Bragg gave me a brief summary of what happened in New Liverpool, and Governor Burnett has told me more. I want to hear the details from the man on the spot, however.”

“Yes, sir.” Bushell knew he was the man on the spot in more ways than one. Unconsciously, he drew himself up to attention, as if reporting to a military superior. He gave Sir Martin Luther King the same account he had to Horace Bragg, and also described what he was trying to learn from questioning the people who had been in and around the mansion: “I have no direct reason to suspect anyone here of aiding the thieves. I’m trying to eliminate indirect reasons as well.”

“A prudent course, Colonel.” Sir Martin sighed. “You are certain the Sons of Liberty are responsible for this - outrage?”

By way of reply, Bushell whistled the opening bars to “Yankee Doodle.” Not recognizing the song from that snatch, Governor Burnett looked puzzled. Harrington Wilberforce’s lean features contracted further: he knew what Bushell was whistling.

So did Sir Martin Luther King. “When Rome fell, Colonel, the barbarians poured in from over the borders,” he said, sighing again. “We raise up our own barbarians inside the nation.”

“That’s true, Your Excellency. What comes over the border for our barbarians is money and guns,”

Bushell said.

“Yes, you told me they used a Russian rifle to murder the Steamer King,” Sir Martin said, as if reminding himself. He clicked his tongue between his teeth. “That grasping little man courted fame all too successfully, I fear.” Bushell did not answer; the governor-general seemed to be talking more to himself than to anyone else. When Sir Martin resumed, he was brisk once more: “Carry on there, Colonel. All the resources of the North American Union shall be at your disposal. And as a symbol of that and a show of the national government’s concern for this horrendous crime, I, Lieutenant General Bragg, and leading members of our staffs will depart by train for Liverpool as soon as dawn breaks here, to lend you our support in this time of shock and crisis.”

“That’s kind of you, Your Excellency, but, between the RAMs and the New Liverpool constabulary, we have everything we need here for the time being,” Bushell replied quickly.

“Good of you to say so, but my plans are already in motion,” Sir Martin answered. Bushell said the only thing he could: “Yes, sir.” Without a doubt, Sir Martin would make a speech every time the train stopped. Without a doubt, he would arrange for it to stop a great many times. Without a doubt, once he got to New Liverpool he would not only make more speeches but spend the time when he wasn’t making speeches looking over Bushell’s shoulder. Without a doubt, Sir Horace would be looking over Bushell’s shoulder, too. And, without a doubt, so would all the bright young solicitors on Sir Martin’s staff and all the bright young investigators on Sir Horace’s. And, as if that weren’t enough, Sir Martin’s chief of staff was Sir David Clarke. Had Bushell thought Sir David Clarke would stay back in Victoria, he would have been willing to put up with the rest. But he was grimly certain Clarke would accompany the governor-general.

Sir Martin said, “I know you still have a long night ahead of you out there, Colonel, so I shan’t keep you any longer. I’ll see you in three days’ time. Good night.” He hung up. The line went dead. Bushell hung up the telephone. “Is there anything I should know from that?” Governor Burnett asked.

“As a matter of fact, there is: Sir Martin will be coming out to lend his support to the investigation. He’ll be here in three days.” Bushell bared his teeth in what a wolf might have used for a smile. “Huzzah.”

He found his own way back to the office he’d borrowed from Wilberforce. For some time, he became an interrogating machine, asking questions and scrawling down answers with next to no conscious thought in the process. Finally, to his exhausted surprise, he discovered no one left waiting outside to be interviewed.

Two people were still standing in front of the office Samuel Stanley was using. Bushell took one of them back into his own temporary office and grilled her. The moment she’d left, he realized he didn’t remember a thing she’d said, not even her name. Shaking his head, he glanced at the notebook. No, it didn’t matter. The notes were there.

He walked out into the hallway again. Now only Stanley stood there, looking as worn as Bushell felt.

“What time is it, anyway?” Stanley asked. He shook his hand, trying to work feeling back into it. Bushell took out his pocket watch. “Quarter to two,” he answered. “God, what a night.” The hall, the whole mansion, was eerily quiet. The two RAMs were a goodly chunk of the people still awake inside the massive building.

Stanley held up his notebook. “I didn’t get anything that leapt right out at me. How about you?”

“The same, I’m afraid. A lot of people who didn’t see anything much.” Bushell sighed. Witnesses so often disappointed. Then, remembering, he held up a forefinger. I don’t suppose you’ve heard this yet - ”

He recounted his conversation with the governor-general.

“Sir Martin and Sir Horace and their staffs?” Samuel Stanley said when he was done. He rolled his eyes. “They’ll all just stand around telling us what to do, and then they’ll blame us when their brilliant ideas don’t work.”

“You wouldn’t expect them to blame themselves, would you?” Bushell said. “No help for it, either. They all outrank us.” He covered a yawn with his hand. “Lord, I’m worn.”

“Me, too,” Stanley agreed. “Phyllis is resting in one of the guest rooms. I’ll wake her up and take her home in our car. You ought to go back to your flat and get a little rest.” He assumed Bushell intended to be at RAM headquarters at eight o’clock. He was right.

Even so, Bushell protested. “Then she’ll have to bring you in tomorrow - your steamer’s still downtown. I’ll take you back there to pick it up.”

“No, sir,” his adjutant said firmly. “That would cost us close to an extra hour apiece before we finally got to bed. We’ll be running on coffee and smoke tomorrow as is; we’ll need as much sleep as we can find.”

He spoke with a platoon sergeant’s insistence.

Bushell surrendered. “You’re right.” Learning when to obey your sergeant was not part of the standard officer’s training course, but Bushell, like any subaltern with promise, had picked it up in a hurry. “Tell Phyllis I’m sorry I ruined her evening.”

“She’ll be all right,” Stanley said. “The bed in there looked more comfortable than the one at home.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Bushell’s voice went bleak. “She didn’t have the chance to see The Two Georges.”

“Oh.” Samuel Stanley looked down at his shoes. “We’ve been friends a long time now. She’ll probably forgive you in eight or ten years.”

His delivery was so perfect that Bushell flinched before he saw the smile his adjutant was hiding. He wagged a finger at him. “God will get you for that, Sam, and if He doesn’t, I will.”

“Go home and go to bed, Chief.”

“Right.” Bushell trudged out to the cloakroom. His uniform cap and Samuel Stanley’s were the only ones still on their pegs. The cloakroom girl had long since retired to the servants’ quarters. Bushell retrieved his own cap. He left a couple of shillings under an ashtray, where the girl would be more likely to find them than anyone else, and walked out into the night.

The New Liverpool constables had taken Honest Dick’s body away. Only their tape and the large, dark stain on the pavement spoke of what had happened in front of the governor’s mansion. His Henry and Phyllis Stanley’s little red Reliable were the last two machines left in the visitors’ carpark. He got into his car, turned up the burner to make sure he had plenty of pressure for the trip home, and drove out toward Sunset Highway.

He had the road almost entirely to himself. Few headlamps besides his own were to be seen. The street cleaners and rubbish haulers wouldn’t be out and about for another hour or so, while even the latest of the late-night theater crowd had for the most part sought their beds. Bushell snorted when that thought crossed his mind. The neighborhood in which he lived had a far larger proportion of the late-night hooligan crowd than that devoted to the late-night theater. The suburb of Hawthorne, its bucolic name notwithstanding, was a working-class town not far from the airship port. He’d had a fancier residence before he came to New Liverpool, but. . .

“A single man doesn’t need fancy digs,” he told the black, empty street. It did not argue with him. He parked the steamer in front of his block of flats. When he got out, he made sure the car’s doors were locked. In most neighborhoods, he wouldn’t have bothered, but Hawthorne abounded with light-fingered types. He’d taken a couple of steps toward the entrance when he remembered the bags in the boot. He went back and got them and carried them upstairs.

He was glad no one saw him in his dress uniform. It would have ruined his reputation among his neighbors. So far as he knew, none of them had the slightest idea how he made his living. He preferred it that way.

He set the bags down in front of his door. One key opened the cheap lock the landlord had installed. Another drew back the much sturdier deadbolt Bushell had paid for when he moved into the flat. He plopped the bags down by the door, closed it, and locked both locks. Only then did he reach up and yank the chain on the ceiling lamp near the doorway.

The furnished flat was astringently neat: a soldier’s housekeeping, not a woman’s. Everything was exactly and obviously where it belonged, and it belonged where it was for a reason that was practical, not decorative. The coffee table in front of the sofa and the end table by it were bare and clean, as if waiting to be shown to a prospective new tenant.

Only a wireless receiver, a phonogram, and several bookcases gave the room any individuality. They all belonged to Bushell; he’d brought them into the flat. The bookcases were bare of ornamental gewgaws. The books in them were grouped by subject (police work; militaria; history; half a shelf of Greek and Latin classics from his university days; the works of Pope, Swift, Defoe, and Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson filling out that shelf; a few modern historical novels) and alphabetically by author within each subject.

Bushell opened the suitcases. He put soiled clothes in a duffel bag he kept in the hall closet. Tomorrow no, later today, it was - he would take them to the cleaning establishment around the corner. He stripped off his dress uniform, folded tunic and trousers, and set them in the carpetbag he would take to headquarters come the dawn. The RAMs had their own cleaning establishment for such articles of dress. He laid his sword by the bag.

Undershirt, shorts, and socks went into the duffel bag. The pyjamas he pulled from a dresser drawer in his bedroom were folded as precisely as if they, like his dress uniform, were liable to be inspected without warning.

All the patent medicines on the glass shelves below the bathroom mirror also stood in ranks at attention. He reached for his toothbrush and the red-and-white tin of tooth powder, then drew back his hand. Barefoot, he padded back out to the kitchen. The liquor bottles in the pantry above the sink were lined up in a row. He poured a hefty dollop of Jameson into a tumbler, drank it down, replaced the bottle, washed the glass, dried it, and put it away. Then he brushed his teeth, set the loudly ticking alarm clock on the nightstand by the bed, and settled down for three hours’ sleep. The telephone rang. He jerked bolt upright in bed. He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep. He did know it hadn’t been long. He groped for the telephone with one hand and the nightstand lamp with the other. A call at this time of night had to be important: Sir Martin Luther King, Sir Horace . . .

“Hullo? Bushell here,” he said in a voice that sounded much like his own.

“Good morning, Colonel Bushell.” Whoever was on the other end of the line, he sounded indecently cheerful for the hour. That meant he was a reporter. Reporters thought they could call anyone at any time for any reason. They had stories to write, after all. “This is Ted McKenzie of the New Liverpool Ledger. I wonder if you could give me a brief statement on the murder of Tricky Dick” - he used the Steamer King’s unflattering nickname with relish - ”and the theft of The Two Georges.”

“I can give you a very brief statement: go to hell.” Bushell slammed the handset down on the hook.

“Newshounds,” he muttered. He turned off the light and lay down on his back, hands clasped behind his head. His heart was still pounding in his chest from being jolted out of exhausted sleep. He breathed slowly and deeply, trying to calm himself. Initial startlement faded, but not the anger at Ted McKenzie’s gall. He wondered how long he would need to fall asleep now.

He was still awake fifteen minutes later when the phone rang again. This time it was a reporter from the North American Broadcasting Corporation. Like McKenzie, she put the accent in Bushell’s name on the first syllable, as if it were bushel. He declined to give her a statement, too, though in more temperate terms than he’d used with the fellow from the Ledger. When he hung up after that second call, he felt more resigned than furious. This was the biggest story in the NAU for years. The bright glow of publicity wouldn’t make investigating any easier, either. He wished he could do something about that, and knew he couldn’t.

The real sun would be rising too soon. Bushell turned out the bedside lamp, flipped over onto his side, and did his best to sleep. In his army days, he’d had a knack for dropping off whenever he got the chance. Somewhere, over the years, he’d mislaid it.

Even had he found it, it wouldn’t have done him much good. The telephone rang twice more in the waning hours of the night: a reporter from the New Liverpool Citizen-Journal and another from the Toronto American. “I’ll schedule a press conference for this afternoon.” Bushell said at last, yielding to the inevitable.

Thanks to the interruptions, he’d had a bit more than an hour’s sleep when the alarm clock went off beside his head like a bomb. Groggily, he picked up the telephone. “Bushell.” Only when the clock kept on clattering did he realize what it was and turn it off.

He got into the bathtub and stood under a cold shower for as long as he could bear it. Emerging with the shivers and chattering teeth, he shaved, dressed, and went into the kitchen. He had tea canisters in the same neat row as his liquor bottles - Earl Grey, Lapsang Souchong, Irish Breakfast, vintage Darjeeling, blackcurrant. He ignored them all and made himself a pot of coffee with twice as much of the ground bean as he normally would have used. While it was brewing, he cut two slices from the loaf of egg bread on the counter by the stove, toasted them, and spread them with orange marmalade. He washed down each slice with a large, black cup of the snarling coffee.

Thus fortified, he picked up the carpetbag and his ceremonial sword and went out to face the day. III

Long before he got to the RAM headquarters in downtown New Liverpool, Bushell knew what sort of day it would be. Newsboys on every other street corner waved papers with screaming headlines. The big one was always the same, regardless of the daily: TWO GEORGES STOLEN! The number of exclamation points following the head did vary, from none in the staid New Liverpool Tory to four in the Citizen-Journal.

Subheads also varied. SHAME! cried one. Another wailed, MONSTROUS CRIME! And a third declared, THE EMPIRE MOURNS! Some mentioned the Steamer King’s demise (only the Citizen-journal called him Tricky Dick, while the headline man for the Ledger was clever enough to link his murder to the theft of The Two Georges), while others went on talking about the theft itself. The newsboys were doing a land-office business. Men and women crowded round them, pressing shillings into their hands. Several of the boys sold every copy they had and stood disconsolate, waiting for a steam lorry to bring them more from their paper’s printing plant. Bushell stopped and bought a copy of every newspaper. Reporters were detectives of a sort; he’d often heard things from them that he hadn’t been able to find out for himself. But each new inky-smelling daily he tossed onto the front seat of his steamer was also a fresh goad to get the painting back. In spite of his stops, Bushell pulled into the RAM carpark at five minutes to eight, as usual. He nodded to the men coming in to work with him, and to the night workers leaving their shift. Few greeted him in return, and no one seemed to know what to say.

He walked into the little kitchen down the hall from the main entrance. They had a coffeepot there, too, along with hot water for tea. He was anything but surprised to find Samuel Stanley pulling a cardboard cup from the box between the hot-water dispenser and the coffeepot. Beneath his brown skin, Stanley looked gray. He normally favored tea, as did Bushell, but not today.

“You’d better leave some of that for me, Sam,” Bushell said.

“Depends on how much I need.” Stanley yawned enormously. “Way things worked out, I’m just as glad Phyllis had to drive me here today. I was so deep underwater, I probably would have crashed the steamer.” He poured cream into his coffee, stirred it with a wooden stick. “I haven’t been that tired since the last time we had a baby in the house.”

“When I was what they called a flaming youth, I’d stay up till all hours and be fresh the next morning,”

Bushell said, reaching for the coffeepot when his adjutant put it back on the hotplate. “No more.”

“Lord, no.” Samuel Stanley blew on his coffee, then drained half the cup. “When I was in the army, nights I got leave I’d be drinking and playing the piano and watching the sun come up. I just wanted to do things all the time. If I lose that much sleep now, I’m a dead man the next day.”

Bushell didn’t say anything about his own aborted tries at slumber. There wasn’t enough difference between one hour of sleep and three hours’ worth to talk about. You were a shambling wreck either way.

The coffee burned his mouth when he gulped it down. He didn’t care. If he drank enough, he could build a brittle crust of energy over his exhaustion. That might get him through the day, and, if he was lucky, he’d go home and collapse when evening came. He poured the cardboard cup full again. Samuel Stanley was right behind him. “What’s first on the list, Chief?” he asked, as he held the cream pitcher over his cup.

“I’m going to tell the public information officer to arrange a press conference for me in the afternoon.”

Bushell sighed. “I’m looking forward to that. Then I want to ring up the Victoria office and get everything they have on Kathleen Flannery and the rest of the people who were traveling with The Two Georges.”

His adjutant nodded. “Makes sense to me. The Sons of Liberty would have had an easier time of it with inside help.”

“Just what I’m thinking,” Bushell said. “After that, I think I’ll pay a call on Independence Party headquarters - ”

“They’ll deny everything,” Samuel Stanley said.

“Of course they will. Has to be done, though. There’s always that one-in-a-hundred chance. And then,”

Bushell said, as much to get things straight in his own mind as to keep on talking with Stanley, “I’ll pull the files on some of the Sons of Liberty and see what we can pry out of them. We’ll visit them warrants in hand, I think. Every so often, they get sloppy and we learn something. Make sure we have the papers we need, will you? Judge Huygens cooperates with us pretty well.”

“Yes, I’ve gone to him before. That sounds good to me,” Stanley said. “If I may make a suggestion . . .

?” He waited for Bushell to nod, then went on, “You might do well to have me or one of our other colored RAMs along when you question the Sons of Liberty. Just because they look down their noses at us, they might let something slip that they’d keep a secret from a white man, because they’d assume we wouldn’t notice it anyway.”

“That is a devilish notion,” Bushell said with a slow smile, “and I shall take you up on it. If the foe offers us his petard, the least we can do is hoist him on it.” He drank the last of his coffee, crumpled the cup, and chucked it into the rubbish bin by the door. “And now, off to public information.”

The public information officer was a young lieutenant named Robert Thirkettle. “When would you like to take questions from the press, sir?” he asked.

“When would I like to? Ten years from Tuesday strikes me as a good date,” Bushell said. Lieutenant Thirkettle looked pained. If he’d had his way, Bushell would have spent so much time talking with reporters that he’d have got precious little actual work done. Sighing, Bushell said, “Set up the conference for late this afternoon - three would be fine, four would be better.”

“Four won’t let your remarks get into most editions of the afternoon dailies,” Thirkettle pointed out.

“Oh? What a pity.” Bushell strode out of the public information officer’s cubicle without giving him a chance to reply.

On his way up to his own office, he paused to light a cigar. His hand quivered as he brought the lucifer up to the tip of the tobacco tube. That told him how much coffee he’d poured into himself. He got the cigar going and gratefully sucked smoke. It relaxed him and left him alert at the same time. The Jameson in his desk couldn’t match that. Pity, he thought.

He couldn’t lock the world away from him now, as he had the evening before. He set his sword on the closet shelf, took the trousers and tunic of his dress uniform out of the carpetbag, and set them on top of a file cabinet. If they were someplace where he could see them, maybe he’d remember to take them down to be cleaned if he had a spare moment.

He telephoned the RAM headquarters in Victoria and asked for Sally Reese, Lieutenant General Sir Horace Bragg’s longtime secretary. “Everything’s all in a twitter here today, Colonel,” she said; Bushell wondered whether she’d borrowed the phrase from Bragg or the other way round. “How can I help you?”

“I assume you people have compiled full dossiers on Dr. Flannery and the others traveling with The Two Georges ,” he said.

“Oh, yes,” Sally Reese answered at once. “Scotland Yard wouldn’t let any colonials” - she sniffed - ”get within ten yards of the painting till they’d been fully vetted.”

“Good. Do you have those where you can get your hands on them?”

“Oh, yes,” Sir Horace’s secretary repeated. “Wait there just one minute.” Bushell duly waited. He heard a faint thump, as of a thick pile of manila folders landing on a desk. Sally Reese returned to the line:

“Here they are. Now what do you want me to do with them?”

“Two things,” he said. “First, skim through them and tell me over the phone anything that makes you think of a connection to the Sons of Liberty.”

“I can do that,” she said. “It’ll take a while, but I can do it.”

“You’re a sweetheart,” Bushell told her, which made her giggle. “After you’ve done that, send carbons or your originals, if you don’t have carbons - to me by military aeroplane. Sometimes speed does matter. I want them here tomorrow, or next day at the latest.”

Now doubt filled her voice: “Oh, I don’t know about that, Colonel. It’s not normal procedure at all.”

Sally Reese was a spinster but, like a great many secretaries, wedded to routine. Bushell said, “These aren’t normal circumstances, either. And when I spoke to Sir Martin last night, he promised me all the cooperation the NAU could give. If that doesn’t include an aeroplane to carry important documents, it isn’t worth much, is it?”

“I don’t know .. .” Sally Reese said again. Bushell wanted to shake some sense into her, but couldn’t, not across the continent. At last she said, “All right, Colonel, since it’s you that’s doing the asking. You and Sir Horace have been friends for so long, I know he’d want me to do whatever I can for you.”

“Thank you, darling,” Bushell breathed. “You’re doing the right thing.”

“I hope so,” she answered, not altogether convinced despite the endearment. “Here, let me give you some of this over the wire now.”

Bushell spent the next forty-five minutes taking notes. The pace was less frantic than it had been the night before: Sally Reese would find a tidbit, pass it on, and then continue for another couple of pages before finding another.

Not all of what she found struck him as relevant, either. That Dr. Malcolm Desmond, the Gainsborough scholar, had been expelled from a preparatory school for unnatural vice might have been important in a different case. But the Sons of Liberty despised that sort of thing far more than the authorities did. Dr. Desmond was unlikely to be one of theirs.

Dr. Walter Pine, the historian of George Ill’s long reign, had signed several petitions protesting the conciliatory stance the NAU had taken in the latest round of border talks with the Holy Alliance. The Independence Party had circulated some of those petitions. How much that meant, Bushell couldn’t say. The scene designer (Bushell snorted when he heard that - as if The Two Georges needed a fancy setting for display!), Christopher Parker, had two arrests for driving a steamer while intoxicated. Sally Reese made little clicking noises at such depravity, but Bushell didn’t think it was the sort of thing likely to turn a man into a Son of Liberty.

Then Sir Horace’s secretary got to the dossier on Kathleen Flannery. The first thing she reported was Kathleen’s broken engagement to Kyril Lozovsky. “Yes, I know about that,” Bushell said. “She mentioned it last night.”

“She must have reckoned you’d find out anyway,” Sally Reese said, accurately enough, but in a way that irked Bushell. She flipped through pages one after another. After a moment, she let out a little hiss of almost malicious triumph. “Here’s something else. She’s been subscribing to Common Sense for the past eight or nine years. Did she mention that, Colonel Bushell?”

Bushell pursed his lips, as if tasting something sour. “No, as a matter of fact, she didn’t.” He wished Kathleen had told him that. Common Sense was as near to an official journal as the Sons of Liberty had. With Boston Irish money behind it, it lambasted the Crown and the Empire every month, but somehow managed to stay just this side of open treason.

“You want to know what I think, Colonel, I think that’s a disgraceful rag, and anybody who puts down good money to buy it ought to be ashamed of himself.” Sally Reese was a little on the deaf side, and spoke loudly over the telephone. She also had a harsh prairie accent that took any possible element of compromise from what she said: she sounded like a preacher sure of his own righteousness.

“You may be right,” Bushell answered. Had anyone asked him he would have said much the same thing himself. But hearing it in tones Moses wouldn’t have presumed to use coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments reflexively made him want to disagree. He didn’t; he couldn’t afford to argue with her, not when he needed her help. “Can you arrange for those to go out by air today?”

“I’ll do it, Colonel,” she answered. “I’ll do it right now, and take my luncheon later. We have to get The Two Georges back.”

There he found no room for disagreement. “Thank you, Sally,” he said. “Good-bye.” He hung up and lit a cigar. “Common Sense,” he muttered, shaking his head. She should have told him that. Maybe she’d assumed the RAMs wouldn’t know. Or maybe she’d thought it nothing out of the ordinary. He couldn’t decide which idea bothered him more.

He got no time to brood about it. Samuel Stanley walked into the office. Bushell waved him to a chair. His adjutant took out a cigar, too. When he lit it, the lucifer in his hand shook. Bushell nodded, recognizing the symptoms. “How much coffee have you had this morning?” he asked.

“Enough to let me live through the day - I hope,” Stanley answered. “With the sort of luck we’ve been having, enough to keep me from sleeping tonight, so I can start the same way tomorrow.”

Bushell looked up to - and through - the ceiling. “Don’t listen to him, God. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Samuel Stanley chuckled. He blew a smoke ring. “Here’s hoping you’re right. A couple of things I need to ask you, Chief: who’s going to head up the investigation team for The Two Georges, and whom will you send out into the held to interview the Independence Party people and whatever Sons of Liberty we can get to in the next couple of days?”

“Me,” Bushell said.

Stanley nodded. A good many years in the army had taught him to think well of officers who led from the front. But, in the reasonable tones he would have used to remind a subaltern to think things through before he started spewing words, he asked, “You for which, sir? You can’t do both.”

Bushell was in no mood to be reasonable. “The hell I can’t,” he said. “I was personally responsible for The Two Georges’ going missing, and I am personally responsible for getting it back. I have no intention of sitting here on my arse shuffling papers at a damned desk.” He looked up at Stanley, who was grinning. “Does that particular speech remind you of anyone you know, Sam?”

“You mean me?” His adjutant’s brown face was a study in innocence. Nonetheless, he persisted, “If you’re going to be in the field, Chief, we’ll need somebody back here coordinating what everybody’s doing. You won’t have the time to handle both assignments at once.”

That was common sense, too, and of a better sort than came out of Boston. Bushell yielded - up to a point. “All right, Sam, here’s what I’ll do: I’ll make, hmm, Major Rhodes headquarters coordinator for the investigation. I like Gordon, and he’d be right for the job - he’s patient, he doesn’t panic, and he has an eye for detail. But when I’m in the office, things will go to me before they go to him.”

“Yes, sir,” Samuel Stanley said, as Bushell had to Sir Martin Luther King. “I hope it works out all right.”

That was as close to criticism as he would come.

Bushell got up from behind his desk. He walked over to a bookcase and pulled out a telephone directory: not an obvious tool of police work, perhaps, but an important one. Sure enough, Independence Party headquarters had a listing. He scrawled the address down on a sheet torn from a scribbling-block.

Samuel Stanley read over his shoulder, as he had when Bushell unfolded the note from the Sons of Liberty. That had been only half a day earlier; it seemed half a lifetime. Stanley grunted. “They’re out there in the back of beyond, are they? Good place for them.”

“Isn’t that the truth?” The valley north and west of the central city of New Liverpool was still half given over to farming: oranges and lemons, strawberries and maize, chickens and turkeys and pigs. But more and more homes had gone up there in the past generation, and business districts to serve their needs. The people in the valley, or many of them, had a clannish streak: no wonder the Independence Party was trying to take root there.

Stanley said, “You’ll be an hour getting out and another hour coming back. That won’t leave you a whole lot of time for work this afternoon before your press conference.”

“What a pity,” Bushell said, as he had to Thirkettle. He sighed. “This once, the reporters get a fair shot at me. From now on, God willing, I’ll be too busy.”

“That’s why you want to spend all your time in the field,” Samuel Stanley said, with the air of a man who has had a revelation.

“Who, me?” Bushell said. “While I’m gone this morning, Sam, I want you to give your notebook from last night, and mine, too, to Gordon Rhodes. Tell him I want him to put all the pieces together by the time I get back, so we know who was where and who saw whom.”

“That’s a lot of work for a few hours,” his adjutant said doubtfully.

“Gordon will figure out a way to do it,” Bushell predicted. “He’s the best-organized man I know.”

He grabbed two pens, a notebook, and his hat, and was out the door and heading for the stairs before Sam Stanley could say anything else. The drive up through the Cowanger Pass was pleasant enough (Bushell idly wondered, as he had once or twice before, what Spanish name had been corrupted to give that English version). Even before the narrow, winding road reached the top of the pass, he’d left most of New Liverpool behind. Tumbleweeds and yuccas clung to the hills on either side of the road. Butterflies flitted from one plant to another. Birds pursued them. He normally sympathized with the butterflies. Today, a pursuer himself, he pulled for the birds.

From the top of the pass, the valley spread out before him. Most of it was a study in green and brown: the dark shiny green of citrus groves; a lighter shade for growing maize; gray-brown dirt not under irrigation; dark, rich earth that felt the life-giving touch of water. A grid of widespread streets carved the farm country into squares, as if it were a draughts board.

Independence Party headquarters lay on Laurel Canyon Highway, though well to the north of the eponymous canyon. It was a neat, one-story white stucco building with a red tile roof, vaguely Spanish in style, with the party’s name painted above the large window that fronted the street in big black letters that might have come off a Roman inscription.

But for that name, and for the flagpole that took the place of a red-and-white striped pole, the place resembled nothing so much as a moderately successful barbershop. Bushell glanced at the flag rippling in a light breeze atop that staff. A moment later, his eyes snapped back to it. It was not the NAU’s Jack and Stripes, though it resembled the dominion’s flag. But instead of the superimposed crosses of St. George, St. Andrew, and St. Patrick, the dark blue canton bore a bald eagle, wings outstretched, beak agape.

He shook his head as he walked toward the doorway. There was nothing illegal about that flag. It offended him all the same.

He’d visited Tory and Whig headquarters before. This one was much like those, if smaller: women at typewriters, men and women talking on telephones, some private offices toward the back of the building for more important functionaries. The place smelled of tobacco smoke, coffee, and sweet pastries. All the faces that looked up at him when he came in were white. That was out of the ordinary, especially in New Liverpool. Blacks here, as elsewhere, were mostly staunch Tories; people of Nuevespañolan and East Indian blood most often backed the Whigs.

“How may I help you, sir?” asked a middle-aged woman in a gingham frock.

“Take me to the chairman: that would be Mr. Johnston, would it not?” Bushell could see she was going to say the illustrious Mr. Johnston couldn’t speak to just anyone. He held up a hand and beat her to the punch. “I am Colonel Thomas Bushell of the Royal American Mounted Police. I am here to investigate last night’s theft of The Two Georges .”

Everyone in the office stopped talking and stared at him. The woman in gingham had spunk: “We had nothing to do with that, and you have your nerve insinuating that we did. The very idea!” She sniffed indignantly.

“The very idea, madam, has probably crossed the minds of half the people in New Liverpool this morning,” Bushell answered.

“Then half the people in New Liverpool are mistaken,” a big, beefy man said, emerging from one of the offices in the back. “I’m Morton Johnston, Colonel - Bushell, was it? Come with me, if you please, sir.”

“Thank you,” Bushell said, and took a seat across from Johnston’s desk. The Independence Party chairman looked like a prosperous barrister or a politico: handsome, ruddy, mustachioed, his graying brown hair combed across his scalp to try to conceal a growing bald spot. He dressed the part: white shirt, wing collar, black bow tie, dark blue pin-striped suit and waistcoat; a black homburg hung on a rack to one side of the desk.

His office also resembled that of a typical barrister or politico, with one exception. Where a reproduction of The Two Georges would normally take pride of place, he had instead a lithographic copy of the flag that flew outside the building.

“Tea, Colonel, or coffee?” he asked. When Bushell said he wanted coffee, Morton Johnston called to one of the secretaries out front. She fetched in a cup. It was not very good coffee, but it was strong. At the moment, that counted for more. Johnston let Bushell sip for a moment, then said, “Colonel Bushell, I can authoritatively state that the Independence Party had nothing whatever to do with the unfortunate disappearance of The Two Georges .”

“I can authoritatively state a lot of things,” Bushell answered. “That doesn’t make them true, just authoritative.”

Johnston went from ruddy to unabashed red. “You would be hard-pressed, sir, to find a more law-abiding group of citizens than the members of the Independence Party.”

“That’s true,” Bushell said. “You make a point of it. But I’d also be hard-pressed to find a nastier bunch of thuggees than the Sons of Liberty - and they and you are ... how shall I put it? Half brothers, perhaps?”

“Colonel Bushell, I resent that remark,” Johnston said, donning an expression of such stern rectitude that Bushell was convinced he had to make his living as a barrister. “No formal connections whatever exist between the Independence Party and the Sons of Liberty.”

“None we’ve proved, anyhow,” Bushell said cheerfully. “But I didn’t come here to talk about proof. I came to talk about help. If the Independence Party is as simon-pure as you’ve always claimed, you’ll want to do your duty and help us recover The Two Georges. You said yourself it was unfortunate that someone stole it. We have excellent reason to believe the someone belongs to the Sons of Liberty. We also have excellent reason to believe you’re in a good position to know more about the Sons than, say, the local Tory chairman. So share what you know with us, Mr. Johnston.”

Johnston licked his lips. After a moment, he said, “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Colonel Bushell. I’ve told you what I know and what the Independence Party knows, which is nothing. You aren’t interested in my guesses - ”

“Who says I’m not?” Bushell broke in.

“ - and, given His Majesty’s statutes on slander, I don’t care to make them,” Johnston went on, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Even if I did, they would be my guesses, not the party’s. We aim to free North America from the British Empire by peaceful means, not the violence the Sons of Liberty use.”

“You want to get out of the Empire,” Bushell said, “but you hide behind its laws while you’re in it.” He hadn’t expected anything else, not really, but disappointment ate at him all the same. He’d hoped for better, even from the Independence Party, in a crisis like this.

Morton Johnston stood and glowered down at him. “Good day, Colonel,” he said pointedly. Bushell rose, too. He turned and pointed to the eagle on the banner with which the Independence Party wanted to replace the Jack and Stripes. “You’ve chosen a good mascot.”

“What do you mean?”

“That bird is a carrion-eating scavenger that makes a good part of its living by stealing fish from seahawks honest and hardworking enough to do their own hunting. I can find my own way out, sir.”

He felt Johnston’s eyes boring into him as he strode toward the door, but did not look back. He was on his way to his steamer when his stomach growled angrily. It wasn’t happy anyway, not with all the black coffee he’d poured into it. He looked at his pocket watch. It lacked but a few minutes of noon. There was a fish-and-chips shop a few doors down, and a Nuevespañolan-style cafe across the street. After a few seconds’ hesitation, he decided on fish and chips. The fish was Pacific red snapper, not the cod it would have been in London, but the two elderly Scotsmen - brothers, by the look of them - who ran the shop knew their business. They dipped the fillets in batter and fried them just firm, wrapped them in newspaper, and handed them to him along with a generous helping of golden-brown fried potatoes.

“That’ll be ten and sixpence, sir,” one of the brothers said. “Half a guinea, if you like.” He laughed. A fish-and-chips shop was hardly the sort of establishment where prices were quoted in guineas. Bushell doused the fish and chips in malt vinegar and spread salt over them from a big tin shaker. They burned his fingers through the newspaper. One of the stories that wrapped his fish was about The Two Georges. He was just as glad when spreading grease made it illegible. He ate quickly, gulped yet another cup of coffee, wiped his hands on a brown paper serviette, and headed for his car, well enough pleased with his luncheon. Had the brothers’ shop been downtown rather than in this backwater, he thought, they would have been well on their way to being wealthy men. The breeze had picked up while Bushell was eating. The Independence Party flag flapped loudly on its pole. He gave it one last scowl as he turned up the burner and headed back toward the office. When he got there, he went straight to Major Gordon Rhodes’s office. As he’d expected, he found Rhodes and Sam Stanley there. The major was a few years younger than Bushell, on the chunky side, with blond hair and a face as florid as Morton Johnston’s, but scholarly rather than bluff. From somewhere, Rhodes had commandeered a big table and spread a sheet of white butcher paper over it, holding the paper down at the corners with knickknacks from his bookshelves. He’d used a yardstick to rule the paper into small squares. As Bushell came in, he was asking Stanley, “Who’s next?”

Stanley turned the page on one of the notebooks he and Bushell had used the night before to interrogate the people at the governor’s mansion. “Malcolm Desmond,” he answered.

“Very good.” Rhodes ran his finger down the names written in the left-hand cells until he came to Desmond’s. “And whom did he see?”

“He was still back in the Drake Room,” Stanley answered, checking his notes. “He saw Gavagan the bartender, three of the four people in the string quartet, and Mrs. Town Councilman Gilbert. Some others, he said, but he’s not sure of them.”

“Very good,” Rhodes repeated. “We have other testimony that Jorkens was by the entranceway, so that leaves Brassman, Cooper, and Campbell, along with Gavagan behind the bar.” He bent over the spread sheet. Bushell saw names at the top of the columns, too. Rhodes put marks in the appropriate columns along Desmond’s row. “And I shan’t forget Mrs. Gilbert, either.”

The chart was already well measled with checks. Bushell studied it with nothing but admiration. “This is splendid, Gordon,” he said. “We should have your sheet here photographed when you’re done, and reproductions furnished to everyone working on the case.”

“You were right, Chief,” Stanley said. “I didn’t see how he’d do it, but he worked out this scheme almost as fast as we’re talking now.”

“You’re too kind, both of you.” Rhodes had a way of taking what he did for granted, not thinking it anything out of the ordinary. Maybe that was one of the reasons he remained a major. He said, “When we’re done here, we’ll make a similar chart showing everyone’s location when the alarm bell began to ring. Between the two of them, they may tell us quite a lot. Or, of course, if no one in the mansion was involved in the plot, they may well tell us nothing.”

“Nothing else had told us anything thus far,” Bushell answered. “Why should this be any different?”

“It’s not so bad as that, Chief,” Samuel Stanley said. “We know a Russian rifle killed Tricky Dick, and we know the Sons of Liberty stole the painting. Put those two together and we have - ”

“Inference,” Bushell said. “Nothing else but.”

“Pretty solid inference, I think,” Gordon Rhodes protested.

“I’d rather have evidence,” Bushell said.

“We are working on it, Chief,” Samuel Stanley reminded him. “The damned painting’s been gone less than a day, after all. You ask me, even having the start of an idea about which way we’re going is one for our side. Oh.” He paused. “Speaking of going, we got a ring this morning from one of those coal miners who were picketing out in front of the governor’s mansion. They’re all booked aboard a train that heads east tonight. He wanted to make sure it’s all right for them to leave. I didn’t see any reason why not, but I told him I’d have to check with you.”

Bushell considered. “I think we can let them go,” he said at last. “As the constable in front of the mansion said, some of them are probably Sons themselves, but they weren’t directly involved in the theft or the shooting, so we can’t in law hold them. We might do well, though, to telegraph lists of their names back to the RAMs in their home provinces.”

“I’ve already taken care of that,” Stanley said without a hint of smugness.

“Have you?” Bushell said. “Well, good. I’m going back to the files, remind myself what the Sons have been up to lately, and pick out a few lovely chaps to question this afternoon - ”

“The press conference,” his adjutant broke in.

“Damnation take the press conference,” Bushell snapped. But damnation would take him if he wasn’t there to give it. Press and politicos would band together to howl for his head. He didn’t need his elbow joggled that way, not now. And so, this afternoon, he would be questionee, not questioner. Sighing, he yielded: “I’ll pick out a few lovely chaps to question tomorrow, then.”

Samuel Stanley nodded approvingly. He and Rhodes went back to work on their butcher-paper chart. Bushell went down to the RAM record room, which took up most of the first floor. The musty smell of old paper wrapped itself around him as he went inside. The record room was nothing but old paper, and cabinets to hold it. It was also the only room in headquarters where smoking was forbidden: one not-quite-extinguished lucifer or a carelessly dropped coal from a cigar or pipe could spark a conflagration.

The Sons of Liberty had a couple of file cabinets all to themselves. Bushell pulled open the top drawer of the wrong one, only to be confronted by yellowing file folders and the old-fashioned typewriter letter styles and copperplate handwriting of the end of the last century. One corner of his mouth twisted. The Sons had a long and dishonorable history.

He got the right cabinet and drawer on his next try. He pulled out the half-dozen most recent folders (which, but for their fresh manila board and the more modern typefaces on their labels, looked all but identical to their centenarian ancestors) and carried them over to a table. When he opened the first one, an unflattering police photograph of a Son of Liberty stared out at him. Peter Jarrold had been arrested the winter before on suspicion of setting fire to a synagogue in the eastern part of New Liverpool. Bushell’s mouth twisted again. Jews were so thin on the ground in the NAU that only a madman could reckon them any sort of threat to anyone. Peter Jarrold didn’t look like a madman, but he didn’t look particularly bright, either. He looked like what he was: a street tough in his early twenties, with a scar over one eye and another on his chin. Like a lot of the younger Sons of Liberty, he wore his hair cropped short. The Roundhead look, they called it, after the followers of Oliver Cromwell the regicide. To the Sons, that made Cromwell a hero. Bushell flipped through the folder. Jarrold was currently starting ten years’ penal servitude, so he hadn’t had anything to do with stealing The Two Georges.

The pair of men in the next folder seemed more interesting. The year before, Titus Hackett and Franklin Mansfield had been charged with printing and distributing an obscene publication: a lampoon of the marital troubles of the grandchildren of George, Duke of Kent, the younger brother of Edward VIII. A copy was in the file. Bushell glanced at it. It had funny spots, but looked obscene to him, too. A jury, though, had disagreed, and let Hackett and Mansfield go free.

Bushell thought that unfortunate, but it wasn’t what really interested him about the case. The rascals’

pamphlet had got a surprisingly wide distribution around New Liverpool; they’d been able to afford to print a lot of copies. At Mansfield’s house, the arresting officer had found out how they’d been able to do so: with a goodly supply of gold Russian roubles.

No one had been able to prove Mansfield came by those roubles illegally. At the time, they hadn’t seemed to mean much. But when you put them together with a three-line rifle, you had to start wondering what the Russian Empire was up to in and around New Liverpool. Bushell noted Mansfield’s home address, and Hackett’s, and that of the print shop they ran together. Come the morning, he would have some questions to put to them.