He flipped rapidly through the rest of the folders, noting down names of other Sons - some Roundheads, some not - who had been charged with relatively recent offenses. Most of the crimes of which they’d been accused were of a simpler nature than that of Hackett and Mansfield. One Joseph Watkins, for instance, had been charged with heaving a brick through the front window of the local office of the League of Colored Citizens, but was released before trial for lack of sufficient evidence. Looking at Joseph Watkins, Bushell would have bet he was guilty of something. He had the same tough, violent stare as Peter Jarrold and, the report noted, a large eagle tattooed on his chest and a smaller one on his right bicep. But the law couldn’t prove beyond reasonable doubt that he’d committed this particular crime, and so he was free.

A couple of other Sons had stomped a Nuevespañolan man nearly to death outside a tavern. They were behind bars; witnesses had identified them beyond doubt. Another gentleman, the late Andrew Kincaid, had tried cracking a Sikh’s skull with a length of lead pipe while shouting, “Go back to India, you stinking wog!” The Sikh, true to the martial tenets of his faith, had been armed with a dagger, and had let the air out of Mr. Kincaid for good.

“And we don’t miss him one bloody bit, either,” Bushell murmured.

When he was done, he stacked the folders in a single pile and stared at them. They’d helped less than he’d hoped. For one thing, the Sons were a close-mouthed bunch. Even when they were caught, they didn’t rat on their friends.

For another, few of the locals, at any rate, seemed to have the brains to have pulled off anything like the theft of The Two Georges. They were bruisers, ruffians, men who couldn’t succeed and sought someone outside themselves to blame for their failure. They knew how to hate, but not how to think. The thieves at the governor’s mansion had been brilliantly effective.

The door to the records room opened. “Colonel Bushell?” someone called. Bushell recognized Lieutenant Thirkettle’s voice.

“I’m here,” he answered mournfully. “Let me refile these. Is it that time already?”

“Yes, sir, it is.” Thirkettle sounded indecently cheerful, but then, he wasn’t about to face a firing squad, or, worse, a pack of ravening reporters. He asked, “Can I get you anything before you speak to the press, sir?”

“A cup of hemlock?” Bushell suggested.

“Sir?” Thirkettle didn’t understand. Bushell shook his head. They weren’t training them in the classics the way they had in his day.

Once, in the cinema, Bushell had watched wolves pull down a moose. They’d flung themselves on the poor beast and started to feed while it still lived. He’d never thought to find himself playing the role of that moose until he walked into the press briefing room and stood before the reporters and photographers from all over the NAU. They jammed it to the point where the New Liverpool fire marshal should have taken notice and ousted a third of them.

The fire marshal and his minions were nowhere to be seen. Even had they been around, throwing out a third of the reporters, however gratifying Bushell might have found it, wouldn’t have done him any good. The survivors would have been plenty to pull him down and eat him alive. A fusillade of flashbulbs greeted him when he entered the briefing room and followed him to the podium. The big tin reflectors behind the flashbulbs sent all their light straight into his face and left him dazzled. By this time tomorrow, his visage would be splashed across half the dailies in the country. His Hawthorne neighbors would no longer be in doubt about what he did for a living. He tapped at the microphone. It was live. Whether it would help him overcome the din - the baying, he thought - of the press was another question. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, and then again, louder:

“Ladies and gentlemen.” The din diminished, but did not vanish. After half a minute or so, Bushell concluded it wouldn’t vanish. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll bear with me, I have a brief statement I’d like to make. Then I’ll take your questions.”

A rather loud quiet descended. Into it, Bushell said, “Last night, Honest Dick the Steamer King was murdered by gunfire outside Governor Burnett’s mansion here in New Liverpool. Not long thereafter, an alarm inside the mansion went off. It was discovered that a gang of at least three individuals had succeeded in absconding with The Two Georges, which was then on private display at the mansion and was soon to have been shown to the public. At present, the perpetrators remain at large. We have had no communication from them since the painting was stolen. This morning, a spokesman for the Independence Party formally denied any connection between his organization and the theft of The Two Georges.”

His pause told the reporters he had finished. Hands flew into the air. Men and women shouted at the tops of their lungs. Bushell heard not a word of it. He cupped his hand behind his ear. The racket abated. The reporter asked his question again: “The Independence Party denies involvement. What about the Sons of Liberty?”

“No spokesman of theirs has denied involvement,” Bushell said dryly. That drew scattered laughs, but also calls for more detail. Reluctantly, Bushell added, “We did find at the crime scene certain things which are consistent with its being the work of the Sons, yes.”

“What sort of things?” four people shouted at the same time.

“I’d rather not discuss that publicly,” Bushell said. “Some people like to imitate infamous crimes or pretend they were involved, and we’d sooner have an easy time than a hard one sorting out imitators from the real Sons of Liberty.” He mentally crossed his fingers. Sometimes that sort of appeal worked, but sometimes it just fanned the hunger of the press.

This time, it worked, at least for the moment. A woman in a royal-blue silk dress asked, “Are you certain there’s a connection between Tricky Dick’s murder and the theft of the painting?”

“As certain as I can be without interrogating the perpetrators, yes,” Bushell answered. “Using a diversion is a common military trick.” He spread his hands. “This time, unfortunately, it worked against us.” He pointed to a man in the third row wearing a gaudy silk cravat. “Yes, sir?”

The reporter preened a moment on being recognized, then said, “We are given to understand that The Two Georges was taken from Governor Burnett’s mansion in a lorry. Why was that lorry allowed to leave?”

“I wish it hadn’t been,” Bushell answered. “No, wait - I know that doesn’t answer your question. When the lorry left, no one outside the mansion had the slightest notion The Two Georges was in it. We did know, however, that Honest Dick had been shot at long range, from the brush-covered knoll across Sunset Highway from the governor’s residence and its grounds. The New Liverpool constable at the turnoff to Sunset Highway reasonably concluded the lorry driver could not have been involved in the murder, and let him go. Reasonable conditions, worse luck, aren’t always right ones.”

“Did the lorry go east or west after it left the mansion grounds?” someone asked.

“East, back toward the central city,” Bushell said. “I personally saw that lorry leave, and I could not tell you of my own knowledge whether it turned right or left. I was concerned about Honest Dick, and paid the lorry little attention. The witnesses who did notice which way it went, though, unanimously say it turned right.”

A man with a military bearing gained his attention. “Up on this grassy knoll, sir: have they recovered the cartridge casings from the rifle that killed Honest Dick?”

“They hadn’t as of last night,” Bushell said. “At the moment, that’s all I know. I haven’t had the chance to speak with the New Liverpool constables today, and they are primarily responsible for investigating the murder. Our efforts - that is, those of the RAMs - will concentrate on recovering The Two Georges.”

“Why aren’t you looking into Tricky Dick’s murder yourself?” three reporters asked, while two others said, “It’s part of the same case, isn’t it?”

“Technically, no, it is not a part of the same case,” Bushell answered. “However much we believe the murder of the Steamer King and the theft of The Two Georges to be related, we have not proved that to be so. And homicide without flight across provincial lines, even homicide by means of a firearm, is not a crime that comes under the jurisdiction of the Royal American Mounted Police. It falls under the authority of the constabulary of New Liverpool and of the province of Upper California.” He smiled wryly.

“Anyone who thinks we’re not going to be working very closely with the New Liverpool constabulary, though . . .”

After that, the questions began to get repetitive: reporters were looking for new ways to say old things. Finally, one overstuffed fellow with a monocle asked, “D’you you think Tricky Dick was involved in the plot to steal The Two Georges and killed to keep him quiet?”

“In a word, no,” Bushell said. “If you are reduced to questions of that sort, I think, the proceedings are at an end. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.” He stepped away from the podium. Lieutenant Thirkettle rushed up to spread a cloud of politeness over the press conference. He was good at what he did. By the time he’d finished, even the reporters whose questions Bushell hadn’t answered or to which he’d given short shrift were in a happy mood. They chattered among themselves as they hurried out of the briefing room to write and file their stories.

The vaults of the Bank of England did not hold enough gold sovereigns to make Bushell take over Thirkettle’s job.

When the last reporters were gone, the public information officer came up and said, “On the whole, that was very nicely done, Colonel, although I do wish you’d been a touch more ... diplomatic there at the end.”

“I was patient as long as I could manage,” Bushell said, meaning as long as I could stand. “I never have suffered fools gladly, though, and I didn’t aim to start with that fat donkey.”

“Er - yes.” Lieutenant Thirkettle looked pained. To carry out his assignment well, he had to get along with the press, which meant getting along with a certain number of fools and donkeys, which meant not referring to them - maybe not thinking of them - as fools and donkeys. Poor sorry devil. Bushell pulled out his pocket watch. It was after five. Yawning, he said, “Lieutenant, with your ever so gracious permission, I’m going upstairs to see how Major Rhodes is doing. Then I am going to go home and, God willing, go to bed. Running on an hour’s worth of sleep is not something I can do every day anymore.” He wanted to laugh at himself for implying once upon a time he’d been able to run on an hour of sleep a day.

Without waiting for Thirkettle’s reply, he headed for the stairs. When he got to Gordon Rhodes’s office, he was surprised not to find Samuel Stanley there. Rhodes said, “He went home about an hour ago, sir said he was so tired, he couldn’t see straight. The way he was acting, I believed him.”

“I know just how he feels,” Bushell said sincerely.

Major Rhodes handed him a manila envelope. “He picked these up for you from Judge Huygens. Says they’re a present to be used carefully.”

Bushell undid the metal clasp on the envelope. Inside were a dozen search warrants, all signed by the judge. The lines for the date and the name and place of the person to be served with the warrants were left bank. Bushell whistled softly. He asked Gordon Rhodes, “Have you seen these documents?”

“No, sir,” Rhodes answered. “What are they?”

“Never mind.” Bushell hadn’t seen many blank warrants, not in all his years as a RAM, and he’d never seen so many together at once. Judge Huygens had indeed given him a present. If any word ever got out about what sort of present it was, though, it would be useless - worse than useless, for it would turn into a weapon against him. If you used shortcuts in the legal system very often, pretty soon you wouldn’t have a legal system. But if you let yourself get hamstrung on time-wasting technicalities, you had problems of a different kind. Being trusted with blank warrants was a compliment, of sorts. Major Rhodes was a smart officer in more ways than one. Some men would have asked questions after that “Never mind,” and found out things they were better off not knowing officially. The only question Rhodes asked was, “What now, sir?”

“Now I’m going home and going to bed,” Bushell told him. “If Sam threw in the sponge an hour ago, I’m entitled to do it myself. That damned train is on the way here from Victoria. It’ll be here day after tomorrow, I expect, and I’ll have to be at my best to deal with Sir Horace and Sir Martin. See you in the morning.”

He almost fell asleep in his car, waiting for steam pressure to build so he could drive home. He drove carefully, as if he’d had too much to drink: not very fast, not very close to the car in front of him. He knew his reflexes weren’t all they might have been.

The early editions of the evening papers didn’t yet have his picture in them. One more day of anonymity, he thought. When he got home, he had to park down the street from his block of flats everyone else was returning from work, too. He picked up his mail - a couple of bills, a couple of advertising circulars, a letter from an old friend from his army days who by now assuredly would have heard about him if not from him - and went upstairs.

He busied himself in the flat’s little kitchen. After tossing a spud in the oven, he made a green salad and pan-broiled a beefsteak he took from the icebox. He also took out some ice, put it in a tumbler, and poured Jameson over it.

He had the tumbler about half empty by the time his supper was ready. The whiskey made him even more tired than he had been, undercutting the layer of alertness he’d borrowed from the coffee to get through the day. He no longer cared. “I made it,” he said to the wall. After he’d washed and dried and put away the dishes, he lit a cigar, pulled out a copy of Pope’s translation of the Iliad, and turned on the wireless. He spun the dial, looking for news. He skidded past a pianist playing the Waldstein sonata, an advertisement for Bovril, some syncopated electric Nawleans music that made him curl his lip, and the postmortem of a rugby match before he finally found some.

“In Pittsburgh earlier today, Governor-general Sir Martin Luther King again pledged every possible effort to recover The Two Georges, stolen last night in New Liverpool in a crime of appalling brazenness,” the newsreader said.

Bushell sighed as he sat down on the couch. He’d been sure Sir Martin would say something like that. It sounded good, didn’t cost anything, and didn’t mean anything, either. The newsreader went on, “In New Liverpool, however local RAM commandant Colonel Thomas Bushell stated that, while the clandestine organization known as the Sons of Liberty is believed to be connected to the theft, no specific clues as to the identity of the criminals or the whereabouts of The Two Georges have yet come to light. It is to be hoped that this unfortunate situation will soon be remedied, as the disappearance of the painting has sent shock waves through both the NAU and the mother country. In London, the prime minister said - ”

With a grunt, Bushell opened his book. He didn’t care what the prime minister said. She was six thousand miles away and knew even less about the matter than he did himself, which, considering how little he knew, was saying something. He smiled at the elegant Augustan verse into which Pope had rendered the Iliad. It wasn’t Homer - he’d read Homer in the original - but it was fine poetry. He wouldn’t have minded a god coming down from Olympus to give him a hand in the investigation. “Why Achilles and not me?” he murmured.

Zeus didn’t answer. Instead, the telephone rang. He went into the bedroom and answered it. It was a reporter. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get to the press conference, Colonel, but if you’d be so kind as to tell me

- ” Bushell hung up. If the fellow couldn’t get where he was supposed to be on time, to hell with him.

“To hell with him anyway,” Bushell said. He stared down at the telephone. After a moment, he took it off the hook and stuffed the handset in the night-stand drawer. He wasn’t supposed to be out of contact with the office, but tonight he needed sleep more than anything else. Reporters were more likely to call than his colleagues, who knew how tired he was. He nodded. He’d take the chance. He went out to the kitchen and poured himself another Irish whiskey. He drank it, washed the glass and put it away, replaced the volume of Pope on the shelf, and switched off the wireless. Then he changed into his pyjamas and got into bed. He remembered nothing more until his alarm clock jerked him headlong out of sleep.

The printing establishment Franklin Mansfield and Titus Hackett ran lay about halfway between downtown New Liverpool and Governor Burnett’s residence in the West End. Two steamers full of RAMs quietly pulled up in front of it. People on the street stared as half a dozen big men in red tunics piled out of the cars and gathered in front of the doorway to the shop. A scrawny bald man in his shirtsleeves threw open the door, not to let them in but to cry angrily,

“What’s the meaning of this? Unless you ugly louts have a warrant, sod off and let an honest man carry on with his trade.”

“I have a warrant here, Mr. Hackett,” Bushell said, recognizing the fellow from his photograph in the files. He displayed the official paper. “As you see, it gives us leave to search these premises pursuant to the investigation of the theft of The Two Georges. Now stand aside and let us do our job.”

“Just a bleeding minute.” Hackett snatched the warrant out of his hands. Franklin Mansfield came out to read it with him: a beefy fellow with curly black hair and bushy side whiskers. “Bah!” Hackett said, and shoved the warrant back at Bushell. “You got your trained seal of a judge to sign it, and you have your Cossacks with you, the same as the damned Tsar would do.”

“Cossacks don’t bother with warrants,” Bushell answered. “Now stand aside.”

Scowling, Hackett and Mansfield got out of the way. The RAMs in red swarmed into the shop and began turning it upside down with the practiced efficiency of men who had performed a great number of searches. Franklin Mansfield spoke for the first time: “I shall make certain they’re planting nothing incriminating.” His voice was deep and smooth and rich; but for a slight lisp, perhaps an affectation, he could have been a newsreader himself.

“What are you doing here, anyhow?” Hackett snarled at Bushell. He had no affectations, only rage.

“You’ve got no call to be tossing the place like that.” He pointed to the chaos the RAMs were making in their search for evidence. “You bloody well ought to leave us alone. That jury found us innocent, it did.”

“No, it found you not guilty, which is not the same thing,” Bushell answered. “As for why we’re here where did you and your partner come by those gold Russian roubles you used to spread your filth far and wide?”

“It wasn’t filth - it was the truth. And we came by ‘em legal, in payment for another job,” Hackett answered. “We took ‘em, and glad enough to have ‘em. Weight for weight, their gold’s as good as sovereigns or francs.” The printer spat on the sidewalk. “There! You can run me in for that, if you’ve a fancy.” He clapped a hand to his forehead. “We’ll be days putting back together the rubbish heap your apes are leaving.”

“If we find nothing of interest, you shall in due course receive a formal written apology from the governor-general’s office in Victoria,” Bushell said, knowing that was the last thing the printer wanted. Hackett stared at him, watery blue eyes going wide. He cocked a fist in anger. Bushell hoped he would swing. Conviction on a charge of battery against one of the King-Emperor’s police would put Hackett in a warm, dry place for some time to come. But, with an obvious effort of will, the printer mastered himself.

One of the uniformed RAMs, a muscular Negro named Clarence Malmsey, brought a typed sheet of paper out to Bushell. “Here’s something interesting, sir,” he said: “a bill paid off by seven hundred gold roubles.”

“Let me see that.” Bushell took his reading glasses from their case, set them on his nose. “Queen Charlotte Islands Board of Tourism?” He frowned. “I didn’t think the Queen Charlotte Islands had a board of tourism. Isn’t that where the imperial naval base is, up by Russian Alaska?” He frowned again, trying to be just. “But since they are up by Alaska, that may account for the roubles.”

“First right thing you’ve said today,” Titus Hackett exclaimed.

“It might be so, sir, but I didn’t see anything that looked like the makings for a tourist brochure in there with the bill,” Malmsey said. “What was in there, among other things, was this.” Now he proffered an eight-by-ten glossy photograph.

Bushell clicked his tongue between his teeth. The photograph showed a prince’s skinny, blond, estranged wife frolicking nearly in the altogether through surf on a beach in a climate much more tropical than that boasted by the Queen Charlotte Islands. He held it out to Hackett. “I take it you and Mr. Mansfield are planning to try to repeat your earlier publishing success, sir? And that you will be retaining the same barrister as before?”

“None of your bloody business,” Hackett said.

“No doubt everyone will be curious to learn why the Queen Charlotte Islands Board of Tourism is so interested in this project,” Bushell remarked.

“So we misfiled the bill,” Hackett said. “You’re a RAM, God’s angel in a little red suit, so I suppose you never misfiled anything.”

“More times than I like to remember,” Bushell said easily, “but never such an - interesting juxtaposition.” He turned to the uniformed trooper. “See if you can find anything in there that has to do with the Queen Charlotte Islands and a tourism brochure: that, or any more of this slime.” He held up the glossy photograph.

“I understand, sir,” Clarence Malmsey said. “If we don’t come up with any brochure, that’ll mean the bill for it is some kind of blind.” He hurried back into the printers’ shop, calling out new instructions to his comrades.

To Bushell’s surprise and disappointment, they did find photographs and copy and a rough layout for a brochure about the distant islands. Titus Hackett gloated at him. The RAM who brought out what Bushell thought of as the bad news said, “Here’s another account paid in roubles,” and handed his chief the bill. The fellow went on, “And here’s something else we found in the same file folder.”

This photograph showed a different princess, with a reputation perhaps even more scandalous than the others, in a costume that left next to nothing to the imagination. Bushell studied it wistfully, then sighed.

“Thank God the direct imperial line has better sense than the side branches of the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Must come of the real royals’ having to work for a living.”

“Ahh, they’re all a pack of bleeding parasites, every one of ‘em,” Hackett said contemptuously. He spat again.

“We could jail this chap and the fat one for possession of salacious material,” the uniformed RAM said hopefully. By the way his eyes kept sliding back to the picture he’d given Bushell, he found it salacious enjoyably so. But Bushell shook his head. “That wouldn’t do, I’m afraid. At the trial, their barrister would make a point - a political point - of dragging the imperial family through the dirt.”

“Aye, that’s right, try and hide the truth away,” Hackett jeered. “Whited sepulchers, that’s what the royals are. If the people knew the truth about the whores and perverts who rule ‘em, they’d - ”

“Mr. Hackett, shut your filthy mouth.” Bushell spoke quietly, but with a snap of command in his voice. Hackett stared and said not another word.

“A Russian connection,” Bushell muttered to himself as the steamer rolled down toward St. Peter’s docks, the harbor district of New Liverpool. He’d wondered about that since Captain Macias told him Tricky Dick had been shot with a three-line rifle. The Sons of Liberty in New Liverpool certainly seemed to be getting aid and comfort from the subjects of the Tsar - but what did that prove? Not enough. Joseph Watkins was on the dole, and living in a dingy rooming house whose front hall reeked of hot grease and stale urine. Expecting Watkins to be out at a tavern or something of the like, Bushell served the warrant on the landlord, a ferret-faced fellow who looked imperfectly delighted to have RAMs in his building.

He unwillingly led the RAMs upstairs to Watkins’s first-floor room. Raucous electric Nawleans music spilled into the hall from behind the door at which the landlord pointed. He pressed the search warrant and a skeleton key into Bushell’s hands, saying, “He’s all yours, mate,” and made himself scarce. Since Watkins did appear likely to be in there, Bushell had to serve the warrant all over again. He rapped on the door. Nothing happened. He rapped again, louder. He heard heavy footfalls coming toward the door. It flew open. Joseph Watkins glowered out at the world at large. “God damn it, I told you not to piss and moan about playing the wireless so - ” he began. Then he realized his visitors were not neighbors complaining about the noise. The realization visibly failed to fill him with joy. “Oh. Robin Redbreasts.” He spotted Clarence Malmsey. His mouth narrowed. “And a tame geechee with ‘em. What the hell do you bastards want now?”

The photograph of Joseph Watkins had shown him to be a tough. It hadn’t shown that he was about six foot four and wide through the shoulders, width emphasized by the strapped vest that was all he wore above the waist. He dwarfed the RAMs with Bushell, and none of them was small. Bushell held up the search warrant. “Mr. Watkins, this warrant gives us leave to search these premises pursuant to an ongoing investigation of the Royal American Mounted Police. Stand aside and let us do our job.”

Watkins studied the opposition. He glared down at Bushell. “You didn’t have your bully boys with you, little man, I’d squash you like the bug you are.” Bushell looked back at him, expressionless. After a moment, Watkins got out of the way.

He inhabited one room, with a tiny alcove that could be screened off and held a toilet and stall shower. Greasy newspapers on the table, on the floor, and in the waste-paper basket said he lived mostly on fish and chips. Everything in the room was nasty and cheap except for the fine crystal sculpture of a fierce-looking eagle that perched atop the mantel and almost matched in pose the tattoo on his arm. On one wall, instead of the print of The Two Georges that would have adorned most homes, he’d nailed a large Independence Party flag, also with a rampant eagle.

He caught Bushell looking at it. “Nothing wrong with a man wanting his country free of the bloody Crown,” he growled.

“In itself, no,” Bushell said. “Whether or not it’s foolish is another question. And crimes remain crimes, no matter in what cause they’re committed.”

“Nice when you can make your own rules, isn’t it, and call trying to get free a crime,” Watkins retorted. His head twisted constantly as he watched the RAMs tearing the furnished room to pieces. Watkins had a laundry hamper, but didn’t bother with it. Instead, he just left his dirty clothes wherever they happened to fall. After the RAMs went through the pockets of each pair of denims and overalls and collarless workman’s shirts, they tossed it into the wicker hamper. In that small way, the room got neater. In every other way, a tornado might have descended on the place.

“Watch that, you big ugly buck,” Watkins snarled when Clarence Malmsey tore down his eagle flag to see if he’d secreted anything behind it. He hadn’t. Malmsey smiled sweetly, crumpled the flag in his hands, and threw it on the floor. Watkins took a step toward him, fists clenched. Two other RAMs reached for the clubs on their belts. Watkins subsided, hate smoldering in his gray eyes. The RAMs pulled out the drawers in which he stored his food, turned them upside down to dump out what they held, and peered into the spaces thus opened to make sure he hadn’t hid anything in back of them. One of the men took out his billy club and poked at the plywood behind the drawers, turning his head to listen for any hollows thus revealed.

Bushell went through Watkins’s reading material himself. There was more of it than he’d expected a Roundhead lout to own: Watkins might not be bright, but he was politically conscious. He had a long shelf of cheaply printed political tracts, some from the Independence Party, others out-and-out calls for insurrection. Mixed with them were back issues of Common Sense (Bushell reminded himself to ring up Kathleen Flannery, whose full dossier was sitting, as yet unstudied, on his desk) and several of what were politely called “novels of imagination” describing the Utopia North America would have become had it long ago freed itself from the British Empire. Bushell had perused a great many examples of the genre, and had a low opinion of it. The hacks who perpetrated them were as politically naive as they were illiterate, which was no small claim.

When the door to Joseph Watkins’s room was open, it hid the only closet the room boasted. Clarence Malmsey swung the door most of the way open so he could search the closet. He tossed out trousers and shirts and jackets, creating a new pile to take the place of the one his colleagues had put in the hamper.

“You’ve found damn all,” Watkins said in tones of injured innocence, “and the reason you’ve found damn all is that I haven’t done a bloody thing. So why don’t you bugger off and let me pick up the rubbish pitch you’ve made of my place here?”

“Don’t you think it looks better now?” Bushell asked. Watkins scowled at him. Once the closet was empty, Malmsey did as his colleagues had and poked at the boards of the wall with his stick. Everyone in the room heard the deeper thock! that came from one blow. “Well, well!” the Negro said happily. “What have we here? Somebody hand me a pry bar.”

Joseph Watkins made a run for it.

Had the door been open rather than almost shut, he would have got out into the hall, and might even have escaped. As things were, Clarence Malmsey sprang out and grabbed at him just as he seized the doorknob. He needed a second to hurl Malmsey aside with a sweep of his thick arm, and the second let another uniformed RAM and Bushell pile onto his back.

Watkins was big and strong and fierce and tough, all of which availed him little. The RAMs were far from weaklings, they outnumbered him, and they had learned to fight in a school every bit as nasty as his and a good deal more skillful to boot. Before long, he lay flat on his belly, still swearing at the top of his lungs, hands manacled and ankles shackled behind him, blood from a cut above one eye running down his face and onto the cheap, already stained carpet.

“Mr. Watkins, sir, in case you didn’t notice, you are under arrest,” Bushell announced. He looked down at himself. In the struggle, one sleeve of his jacket had torn loose. “Damnation!”

Clarence Malmsey said, “Shall we find out what dear Joey boy didn’t want us to find?” He got the pry bar he’d asked for and ripped away with a will. Boards came up with a splintering crunch and the squeal of stout nails pulling loose from wood. The RAM yanked the boards out further, reached into the space behind them.

He brought out a long, thin, rectangular package, wrapped in thick brown paper for passage through the mails. “What’s the postmark?” Bushell asked.

Malmsey turned the package to peer at the blurry inked handstamp. “Place called Skidegate,” he answered. “Don’t know where the devil that is. Wait a moment, there’re more letters here.” He held the package up to his face so he could examine the mark more closely. His voice rose with excitement.

“Here we are: Skidegate, QCI.”

For a moment, that meant nothing to Bushell. Then it did. “Skidegate, Queen Charlotte Islands,” he whispered.

One of the other RAMs asked, “What’s in there? I can make a guess from the shape, but - ”

The top of the package had been neatly slit open. Clarence Malmsey flipped up that end, pulled out some excelsior, and then, with a sigh like a lover’s when he encounters his beloved, a rifle, the yellow wood of the stock polished till it gleamed, the barrel glistening with gun oil. “Not a model I recognize offhand,” he said.

“I do,” Bushell said. “It’s a Nagant.”

IV

Bushell sat down at his desk and slammed his fist down hard enough to make pen stand, inkwell, cigar case, and wooden IN tray jump. “God damn it to hell, Sam,” he ground out, “I thought we had the case half broken, right then and there. I’d have given a thousand pounds for that, just to be able to drop it in Sir Horace’s lap - and Sir Martin’s - when they get into town this afternoon.”

“Would have been fine, Chief,” Samuel Stanley agreed. “Too bad that rifle had never been fired, let alone at Tricky Dick.”

“Too bad, the man says.” Bushell looked up to the ceiling, as if someone invisible up there would nod and tell him he was right. “The other question is, how many more Nagant rifles are sitting in flats and hidden away in houses, just waiting to cause us more trouble? Every time things look bad in this case, they get worse, not better.”

“That’s so,” Stanley said. He looked better for a couple of nights’ sleep. “Other thing is, of course, the Sons may just have set a lucifer to The Two Georges the minute they got out of sight of Governor Burnett’s mansion.”

“Yes, that’s possible, but I don’t believe it,” Bushell said. I won’t believe it, he thought. But he had reasons for doubt: “If they’re going to destroy it, they’ll do that publicly: smuggle it into a city square someplace, maybe, and then touch it off. I still think they’re likelier to be holding it for ransom. They could bring in enough gold to keep themselves in business for years. They might even collect goodwill that way, too.”

“I thought the same thing, right after the painting was stolen,” Samuel Stanley answered. “But if they planned to ransom it, wouldn’t we have heard from them by now?”

“That worries me, too,” Bushell admitted. “It’s still early, though. Maybe they’re waiting for Sir Martin to get here, so they can present the demand directly to him. After all, we’re just police; if anyone is the painting’s patron here in the NAU, he’s the man.”

“Mm, there’s a point,” his adjutant said judiciously. “I hadn’t thought it through like that. I was there when The Two Georges disappeared, so I just assumed the ransom note would be heading in my direction. But it ain’t necessarily so.” Just for a sentence, he dropped into the heavy farm-Negro patois of the southeastern provinces, a dialect his family hadn’t used for four or five generations.

“Go chop your cotton,” Bushell said with a snort. “See if you and Rhodes can pull any magical answers out of that fancy chart the two of you made. I’ve got enough of my own work to do, I can tell you that.”

With a laugh, Samuel Stanley got up and went out the door. He let one hand linger for moment in a wave, then headed down the hall toward the stairs. Bushell lit a cigar. He looked longingly at the locked desk drawer. A good knock of Jameson would make him feel like a new man. But then the new man would want his own knock, and then . . . Regretfully he shook his head. He flipped through a telephone directory until he found the number of the Hotel La Cienega, where Kathleen Flannery was staying. He dialed it, then went through the hotel switchboard to reach her room. He wondered if he’d catch her out for breakfast, but she answered the phone on the second ring:

“Hullo?”

“Dr. Flannery? This is Tom Bushell, from the local RAM office.” Not until he’d introduced himself did Bushell notice he’d used the diminutive for his name. He hadn’t planned to do that. Shrugging in his seat, he went on, “How are you this morning?”

“I’m well enough, thank you, Colonel. And you?” When Bushell admitted he was also well, Kathleen continued, “How can I help you today? Have you learned something important about The Two Georges

?”

“I’m afraid not. I just have some more questions for you.”

“Oh.” As it had risen, her voice fell. “I don’t have anything much new to tell you, either. I was hoping I would. I’ve been ringing up some people I know in the art business - auctioneers, agents, curators, people like that - in the hope they might have heard something about where The Two Georges might be. But I’ve had no luck, and I was wishing you’d call me to tell me you had.” She laughed sadly. “So much for wishes.”

Bushell took a deep breath, slowly let it out. He said, “Dr. Flannery, do not - I repeat, do not - pursue any independent investigations of your own. You may muddy the waters for me, you may alert the thieves, and you may also put yourself in danger. I really must insist.” And besides, you’re already an object of suspicion. Who knows what you were doing with your telephone calls!

“I am sorry, Colonel,” she said. He could all but see her green eyes going wide with surprise. “I didn’t mean any harm, please believe me.”

I wish I could. I wish I could be sure of you. Instead of saying that, Bushell struck hard: “Dr. Flannery, when I questioned you after The Two Georges was stolen, why didn’t you tell me you subscribed to Common Sense! ”

The silence on the other end of the line lasted long enough for Bushell to pull out his pocket watch and see ten or fifteen seconds go by. At last, Kathleen Flannery said, “How in God’s name did you find that out? Next thing you’ll tell me is what sort of underwear I have on.”

Under other circumstances, Bushell might have been pleasantly distracted thinking about Kathleen Flannery in her underwear - or out of it. As things were, his main thought was that she was trying to distract him so. “Just answer the question.”

“If you must know, Colonel, my father buys a subscription for me every year,” she answered.

“Common Sense suits his politics, not mine. I hardly ever look at it. If you know I subscribe, you can probably find out that the cheques to the magazine are always in his name - Aloysius Flannery - and drawn on his bank.”

She was right; the RAMs could do that. Bushell wondered if it was worthwhile. Probably not, he judged, at least not yet. “You were so open with your failed engagement, I wondered why you didn’t mention the other.”

“It didn’t cross my mind,” Kathleen said “Half the time I toss Common Sense into the rubbish without even opening it.” Which meant that half the time she didn’t, but Bushell held his peace. She asked, “Is there anything else?”

“Does the name Skidegate mean anything to you?” he asked idly.

He’d expected her to say no, or to ask who Skidegate was. But she answered, “That’s the chief town of the Queen Charlotte Islands, I believe. The Queen Charlottes and southern Alaska are, or rather were, home to the Haida Indians. The All-Union Museum in Victoria has an extensive collection of Haida totem poles and other wood carvings. They were masters of the craft.”

“Why do you say ‘were’?” Bushell asked.

“White men’s diseases hit them hard,” Kathleen said, “and that disrupted their way of life. And a lot of the survivors were resettled to the mainland when the naval base was built there, so few of them still follow their old tribal habits. It’s a pity; as I say, they produced some wonderful woodcarvers.” She paused and came up with a question she might have found sooner: “What on earth does Skidegate have to do with The Two Georges?”

“I don’t know yet,” Bushell said. And if I did, I wouldn’t tell you. Aloud, he went on, “Thank you for your time, Dr. Flannery. And please, for the sake of the painting, don’t do any more investigating on your own. The odds are ten to one - a hundred to one - you’ll do more harm than good. Do you understand me?”

“You make yourself very clear, Colonel. Good morning.” Kathleen Flannery hung up. Bushell stared at the telephone, then uttered a pungent phrase that would have been more appropriate in the barracks than in the office of the chief of the New Liverpool RAMs; a chief, after all was supposed to maintain a certain dignity. The barracks comparison was apt in another way, too: Kathleen sounded like a soldier intent on evading an order that didn’t suit him. Short of having the telephone torn out of her room, Bushell didn’t know what he was supposed to do about that.

He growled the phrase again, louder this time. Just as he was about to pick up the telephone to call Captain Jaime Macias, it rang. He stared balefully at it before he picked it up. “Bushell.”

One of the switchboard operators said, “Colonel, I have on the line a man who claims to have The Two Georges. He’ll only talk to you, he says.”

“Put him on.” Excitement tingled through Bushell. What now? A ransom demand? A threat? A couple of clicks and the operator was off the line. “Hullo?” Bushell said, and gave his name and rank.

“Yeah, uh, Colonel Bushell?” The man talking to him, even though he’d just heard the name pronounced, put the accent on the wrong syllable. “You listen here, Colonel, you ever want The Two Georges back, you got to pay me fifty thousand pounds. You hear me, Colonel? Fifty thousand quid or that there painting’s catmeat.”

You contemptible fraud, Bushell thought. A vulture and a piker at the same time. “How do I know you have it?” he said. “What did you leave behind in the governor’s mansion?”

“What did I leave behind?” the man on the telephone echoed. “Why, uh, that is - ”

“Sir,” Bushell said coldly, “you should be aware that all telephone conversations in this building are routinely traced. You should also be aware that seeking money under false pretenses is a felony. And, sir, you should also be aware that a pair of RAMs will be at your home within the hour to place you under arrest.”

The only answer he got was a loud click! as the man hung up on him. Bushell laughed. He hoped he’d given the bloody fraud an anxious half hour or so. He could see the fellow tiptoeing over to the front window every so often, peeling back the drapes perhaps a finger’s width, and peering out to make sure no RAM steamer had just pulled up in front of his house. If a constabulary car happened to cruise down his street in the next hour, the man might stay panicked for days.

But more calls like this one would come. Some of the liars would have brains as well as gall. Finding out what the Sons of Liberty did to mark their crimes wasn’t impossible. If you knew where to look, it wasn’t even difficult. As if life weren’t hard enough already, it would get harder. If Bushell called out, he wouldn’t have to worry about anyone else calling in for a while. He dialed the number of the New Liverpool constabulary, and was quickly connected to Captain Macias. “Tell me, Colonel,” Macias said, “is my beard black or gray?”

“You don’t wear a beard,” Bushell answered. A split second later, a flashbulb exploded in his head.

“You’ve had cranks ringing you up, too!”

“Haven’t I just,” Macias said ruefully. “You’re the third person this morning who’s claimed to be you and the first one I think may be telling me the truth. What can I do for you, Colonel?”

“You need to know there may be more Nagant rifles floating around in New Liverpool, and not among people you’d want having them.” Bushell explained how his men had found the firearm in Joseph Watkins’s room. “It hadn’t been there long, or he’d have used it: he’s that type. But how many others may have come down from Skidegate, or who has them - I just don’t know yet.”

“We’re liable to find out, you’re telling me. Aii! ” Hit where he lived, Macias sounded for a moment like a man of Nuevespañolan blood, just as Sir Horace Bragg showed he was indeed a Carolinian. “All right, Colonel, we shall do what we can to deal with this.” After the one exclamation, he sounded like a constabulary man again.

“You have anything for me?” Bushell asked.

“Autopsy report: Tricky Dick was shot,” Macias answered laconically. “No, in fact, there’s a bit more. The pathologist found a big enough piece of the bullet that blew out his brains to match it to the other one we recovered. They both came from the same weapon: only one gunman up on the knoll.”

“That is worth knowing,” Bushell said. “It doesn’t surprise me. The fewer people in on a plot, the likelier it is to stay tight. But thinking something is so and having evidence it’s so are different.”

“So is having evidence and having suspects,” Macias said, his voice mournful.

“I know.” Bushell sighed. “And having, say, two dozen rifles loose in New Liverpool doesn’t strike me as any too appetizing, either. Fanatics with guns could kill dozens of people over the next few years. And this used to be such a peaceful city.” He sighed again. Nothing seemed good any more. Captain Macias echoed his gloom: “Some of the people they kill will be my constables, too. We can’t stand up against that kind of firepower.”

“Neither can we,” Bushell said. “I had to pull wires to arrange for the guards in the room with The Two Georges at the governor’s mansion to carry pistols.” He laughed bitterly. “And a whole bloody lot of good that did me. But if we went to court to let all our men wear guns all the time, people would scream for our heads, and I can’t say I’d blame them much.”

“I wouldn’t, either,” Macias said. “But that holds only if nobody does any shooting. If the villains are aiming at my men how can I send them out there unless they’re able to shoot back?”

“You can’t,” Bushell said without hesitation. “But if it comes to that, the British Empire won’t be the same place. Thanks for your information, Captain. I’ll ring you up again directly I learn anything.”

“Call me Jaime,” Macias answered. “We’re going to get to know each other very well. I said as much outside the governor’s mansion the other night.”

“All right, Jaime, then I’m Tom. You did say that. I remember. What I don’t remember, worse luck, is being able to disagree with you.”

The New Liverpool All-Union Train Station lay not far east of RAM headquarters. Getting to it was easy. All the same, Bushell went there with the same enthusiasm he would have given a trip to the dentist. Like so much of New Liverpool, the train station sprawled over a wide area to minimize earthquake damage. Its low buildings were of white stucco with red tile roofs; the old Franco-Spanish flavor of what had been Los Angeles lived on more in architecture, perhaps, than in any other aspect of modern New Liverpool. The style suited the climate better than models imported from England or even from the older provinces of eastern North America.

Reporters and photographers had already jammed the waiting area by the time Bushell got there. Since the train full of dignitaries wouldn’t arrive for another half hour, they turned on Bushell instead. He understood how Canute had felt with the tide flowing up over his shoes. He didn’t think telling the reporters he believed Tricky Dick had been shot by a lone gunman would damage the investigation, so he did that. It was, however, the only piece of new information he had. The reporters complained he wasn’t telling them enough.

“The more time I spend answering questions, the less time I have to ask them,” he said pointedly. “The fewer questions I get to ask, the less I’ll find out, and the less I find out, the less I’ll have to tell you.”

Some of them got what he was driving at; one or two even gave him sympathetic grins. Most of those were veterans of the crime beat. But the theft of The Two Georges was such an important story, more than mere crime reporters were covering it. A lot of the people shouting questions in his face didn’t know grand theft from grand opera, or felonies from feldspar. They didn’t understand that policemen couldn’t deliver answers on silver trays like cartes de visite. “I don’t know” seemed to infuriate them, but Bushell had no better reply to give.

Finally, to his relief, ceiling-mounted speakers blared, “The governor-general’s special train is approaching the station on Track Two.”

Like sheep, the reporters flocked toward Platform Two, carrying the RAM along in their midst. “I see it!” somebody called excitedly. “There’s the plume of exhaust, sure enough,” somebody else added. Bushell couldn’t see anything except the shoulders of the people around him. A little judicious work with his elbows, though, and a few feet trod upon not quite by accident, got him near the edge of the platform, near enough to look down the track when he peered east.

Sure enough, the special train was getting close. Gray-black smoke rose from the stack. The steam whistle roared, warning anything and everything out of its path. The whistle blew again, even louder, as the train approached the platform. The brakes gripped, sparks flew from the wheels and from the track. A third blast from the whistle sent reporters stumbling away from the edge of the platform, hands to their ears. Bushell held his ground. The train stopped.

When an ordinary train came up to the platform, porters and doormen ran over to assist departing passengers and those who were boarding. Not here, not now. The last car in the short train had on its fantail a gleaming maple podium. Governor-General King had used that podium to deliver several speeches on his way across the continent. Unless Bushell had lost his instinct for such things, Sir Martin was about to use it to deliver one more.

Sure enough, he stepped out to the podium, a sheet of paper in hand. In his scarlet robe of office, he still looked like the preacher he had been a generation before. He still had the cadences of a preacher, too: hardly looking at the text of his speech, he began, “My friends, we are not met here today gladly, but in sorrow. Something precious has been taken from our lives. If we work together, and if God is kind and smiles on us, we can recover it once more.”

Sir Martin’s deep, rich voice was made for pulpit or podium. The reporters listened raptly. Some of them were too caught up even to take notes. Bushell would not have been surprised to hear shouts of

“Amen!” ring out from the crowd, as if it were indeed a church congregation. The governor-general’s first few sentences convinced him, though, that the speech would hold little of substance. He didn’t blame Sir Martin for that: with The Two Georges missing and clues few and far between, what was the man supposed to say? But to Bushell, the speech was not the fodder from which news was made, as it was for the press corps. It was just a waste of time, and with The Two Georges stolen, he did not have time to waste.

He spotted red uniforms in a coach several cars up from the one where Sir Martin was addressing the crowd of reporters. He made his way toward it; by the time he got to it, he’d broken out of the crush. He hopped up on to the platform over the coupling and rapped on the door there. A stern-looking face appeared in the window. Bushell held up his badge. The RAM inside the car nodded and opened the door.

The air on the platform had been thick with smoke from pipes, cigars, and cigarillos. The air inside the car was positively blue. Bushell took out a cigar, scraped a lucifer on the sole of his shoe, and added to the clouds.

“Tom!” Lieutenant General Sir Horace Bragg pushed his way down the aisle toward Bushell; the RAMs who had accompanied him across the continent got out of his way. “Good to see you, by God!” He stuck out his hand.

Bushell shook it. “Good to see you, too, sir,” he said. “Good to see any friendly face - I’ve not seen many the past few days, and that’s the truth. You’re looking very well, if I may say so.”

“I’m getting fat,” Bragg said. “It’s only the cut of the uniform tunic that hides it.”

“Sir - rubbish,” Bushell said. Both men laughed. Bragg had been complaining about his weight for as long as Bushell had known him - more than half a lifetime, in other words. Few men ever complained more with less reason. Bragg was lean to the point of gauntness, with hollows under his cheekbones that the graying beard he wore could not disguise. His face was long and pale, with dark eyes peering out at the world from under heavy eyebrows.

He quickly sobered, and set a hand on Bushell’s shoulder. “This is a hell of a mess, Tom,” he said. “The whole dominion’s in an uproar. If we don’t find that painting - ” He shook his head. Lowering his voice, he went on. “There are even more complications than you know.”

“Tell me, then,” Bushell said.

But Sir Horace Bragg shook his head. “Not my place to do that, I’m afraid. Sir Martin will have to take care of it, either him or” - he grimaced apologetically - ”Sir David Clarke.”

“It’s all right,” Bushell said easily. “I expected he’d be coming west with Sir Martin.” But, despite his casual tone, it was not all right. His pulse beat so heavily, he could feel it pounding in the veins of his forehead. Still keeping his voice light, he asked, “Does this ever-so-official railway car boast an ever-so-official railway bar?”

Sir Horace sent him a worried look; he knew the bottle could get hold of Tom Bushell rather than the other way round. Bushell looked back, smiling, open, innocent, bland - with the slightest devilment in his eyes to make sure no one took the rest too seriously. Bragg recognized that look not just from their time in the RAMs but from their army days. He threw his hands in the air, turned to one of the officers who’d sat down to let him pass. “Felix, fix Tom here an Irish over ice, if you’d be so kind.”

“Happy to, Sir Horace, Colonel Bushell.” The officer - like Bragg, he was in dress uniform, with the crown and pip of a lieutenant-colonel on his shoulder boards - went down to the other end of the car, scooped ice from a silver bucket into a highball glass, and poured from a crystal decanter. He brought the glass back to Bushell, presented it with a flourish.

“Thanks very much, Lieutenant-Colonel, ah - ” Bushell glanced to Sir Horace Bragg.

“I beg your pardon,” Bragg said. “I forgot Felix was up in Boston while you were back at the capital; he got in the day after you left. Tom, let me present to you Lieutenant-Colonel Felix Crooke. Felix, my old friend Colonel Thomas Bushell.”

The two men shook hands. Crooke was stocky, pale, clean-shaven, with hair black as a Spaniard’s and eyes so blue they put Bushell in mind of a Siamese cat. He had a powerful grip. “Pleased to meet you at last, Colonel,” he said. “Lieutenant General Sir Horace often speaks of you.”

“I deny everything,” Bushell declared, sipping his drink. Crooke laughed. Sir Horace Bragg said, “Felix is one of our leading students of the Sons of Liberty in Victoria these days. He took over when Thaddeus Bishop retired a couple of years ago.”

“Ah, Thad,” Bushell said. “I remember him from my days at the capital.” He drank again; not all his memories of Victoria were as pleasant as those of Thaddeus Bishop. “I’m sure he enjoys going after trout more than he ever did, going after the Sons.” He nodded to Crooke. “Boston, eh? Find anything you could pin on Common Sense and make it stick?”

“Damn all,” Felix Crooke said glumly. “Their solicitors have kept them just this side of the line for years, and there’s no proof they give money to the Sons. Lord, how I wish there were. That would really hurt the Sons of Liberty, more than arresting some of the bastards every now and again ever could.”

“You know, they may have shot themselves in the foot, stealing The Two Georges,” Bushell said. “The whole NAU loves that painting.”

Sir Horace Bragg chuckled. “Anyone would think you’d been writing Sir Martin’s speeches for him, Tom. That’s one of the things he’s been doing all the way across the Union: saying that whatever people who do things like that want, it can’t be any good, because only people who do things like that could want it.” The commandant of the Royal American Mounted Police nodded in grudging admiration. “He’s clever, you have to give him that.”

“Who, Sir Martin? I should say so,” Bushell answered. “And when you add in a voice he plays like a church organ - ” He shrugged. “It didn’t surprise me when the King-Emperor named him governor-general.” He knocked back the rest of his drink. He wanted another one, but the look Sir Horace had given him made him hold his peace.

“The King-Emperor, yes,” Bragg said slowly. Then he brightened, as much as any man with a countenance two parts basset hound could brighten. “Here, Tom, let me introduce you to some of the other men I’ve brought to Upper California. You won’t have met all of them when you were in Victoria.”

Bushell wished he could whip out a notebook and jot down names and ranks, as if the RAMS were suspects; that would have helped him keep them straight. Except for Felix Crooke, Bragg had left most of his top people behind in the capital, and had with him captains and majors who probably had more recent active-duty experience than their superiors.

Major Michael Foster would be in charge of forensics investigation. He looked too young to be in charge of anything: he looked too young to be anything more than a university undergraduate. But he had two service hashmarks on the left sleeve of his dress tunic, so he’d been a RAM at least ten years. Bushell said, “You’ll need to talk with Sergeant Singh of the New Liverpool constabulary. He did the first workup of the crime scene.”

“I’ll talk with him,” Foster said, “but I’ll go over the site myself, too.” That could have meant he was eager to inspect it personally. From his tone, though, he sounded more condescending, as if wondering whether someone named Singh could possibly have done an adequate job. Looking around the car, Bushell saw that everyone in it was white. He’d lived in New Liverpool long enough to find that noteworthy, as he had at Independence Party headquarters. Victoria didn’t have the large concentrations of Nuevespaftolans and East Indians that New Liverpool did, but it had a great many Negroes: with so many of them in clerical and bureaucratic positions, only natural for the capital to draw them like a lodestone.

But just because they lived in and around Victoria, Bushell reminded himself, didn’t mean they had to join the RAMs in any significant numbers. Though a lot of police work was bureaucratic in nature, the RAMs were not the sort of bureaucracy to which people of cautious, conservative bent often aspired. Sir Horace Bragg said, “And here is Captain Patricia Oliver, whose area of expertise is handwriting and typewriter analysis.”

“Captain.” Since this was business, Bushell stuck out his hand as he would have for a man. Smiling in approval, Patricia Oliver pumped it briskly. She was somewhere not far from forty, her light brown hair touched with gray, her skin pale under powder and rouge: like a lot of RAMs with specializations such as hers, she didn’t spend much time in the sun.

“I’m pleased to meet you, Colonel Bushell,” she said. “I’ll want to see that note you recovered from the phonogram, match it to others we have from the Sons. I’ve brought along several dozen samples for comparisons. With luck, I’ll be able to identify the typewriter.” Her voice showed the same no-nonsense attitude as her handshake.

“I’ll take care of that for you.” Bushell promised, pleased with her. Few women reached captain’s rank in the RAMs. She filled out her uniform tunic in a different and pleasant way. Beneath it, instead of trousers, she wore an ankle-length skirt of black wool.

He glanced at her left hand. The fourth finger bore a slim gold band with a sparkling diamond. I might have known, he thought. The good ones are mostly taken. Kathleen Flannery wasn’t, but she would have been had Kyril Lozovsky proved himself something other than a bounder. Or was she not taken because she wasn’t a good one? He’d have to think about that.

“Captain Oliver’s husband is one of the prosecuting attorneys for the province of Virginia,” Sir Horace said.

“Is he?” Bushell murmured. He wondered if Captain Oliver had met her husband while they were both involved with the same case. Or had she got her interest in police work from him? It wasn’t any of Bushell’s business. Politely, he said, “A prominent man.”

“A busy man,” she answered, looking him straight in the eye. “And because I’m also busy, I don’t see him nearly as much as I’d like.” After a second or two, he recognized the way she was studying him with much the same hopeful speculation he’d used when he met Kathleen Flannery. Under other circumstances, that would have been flattering, perhaps delightfully so. As things were, he found it disturbing.

Outside on the platform, the reporters started streaming away from the car where Sir Martin Luther King had spoken. Sir Horace Bragg took Bushell by the arm. “Now that His Excellency has finished out there, Tom, we throw you to the wolves.”

He laughed to show that was meant as a joke, but it held too much truth for Bushell to do anything more than skin his lips back from his teeth in the pretense of a smile. If any audience would be tougher than the press, it was Sir Martin’s staff. Bushell had embarrassed their patron. To any politico’s aides, that was more dastardly than murder.

None of the RAMs save Sir Horace accompanied Bushell into the next coach back. He had the idea they wanted as little to do with the governor-general’s staff as they could manage. From everything he’d seen of the men who worked for politicos, he was willing to believe the feeling mutual. The RAMs’ red tunics had provided a splash of color against the earth tones of leather and polished mahogany in their car. The governor-general’s men dressed like bankers and brokers, in muted grays and blues or funereal black. Bushell wondered if they did so in the hope of convincing people that they, like prominent capitalists, served a useful purpose.

His voice cool and formal, Sir Horace Bragg said, “Gentlemen, allow me to present to you my friend Colonel Thomas Bushell, commandant of the Royal American Mounties based in New Liverpool.” That my friend took courage. Not many commanders would have publicly identified themselves with a subordinate on whose watch disaster had struck.

The governor-general’s men realized as much. They came up one by one to introduce themselves to Bushell: Roy Saunders, deputy minister of the exchequer, thin and sandy and acerbic; Hiram Defoe, postage minister and Sir Martin’s chief political fixer, who, if he didn’t know everything and everyone, made a good game try of not letting on; Sir Devereaux Jones, NAU Tory Party chairman, his ebony face clever and closed; and a couple of others whose names Bushell missed. In back of them, not pushing his way forward, stood Sir David Clarke. Before long, though, the moment could be avoided no more. The governor-general’s chief of staff came up to Bushell. “Colonel,” he said quietly, and held out his hand.

Bushell’s eyes flicked to the well-groomed appendage, then up to Clarke’s handsome, craggy face. The two men were about the same age, but somehow Clarke had managed to hide ten or fifteen years where they did not show. His smile was broad and perfect, his teeth even and gleaming, the whites of his blue, blue eyes untracked by red. He looked too good to be true.

“Sir David,” Bushell said. A quarter of a heartbeat late, he shook Clarke’s hand. A couple of Sir Martin’s aides whispered behind their hands to the rest. Bushell could not hear what they were saying, but he knew. He wanted to hit Sir David in those sparkling teeth, to wipe that condescendingly uncondescending smile off his face. He’d done it once. He couldn’t now. He rubbed at his mustache. Sometimes the price of duty was almost more than a man could bear to pay.

He asked the question Clarke was waiting for: “I hope Irene is well?”

“Quite well, yes, thank you,” Sir David answered, the picture of civilized restraint. Bushell hated him more than ever. Clarke twisted the knife a little: “When she learned I was coming to New Liverpool, she asked me to say hello for her.”

“Tell her hello from me,” Bushell said tonelessly. The inside of the railway car had gone very quiet; he could hear his words echoing from the walls and ceiling.

In the quiet, footsteps echoed on the platform at the rear of the car. “Here is Sir Martin now,” Sir Horace Bragg said as the governor-general came in. The two men got along imperfectly well; Bushell had never imagined his old friend sounding so glad and relieved to report the arrival of Sir Martin Luther King.

The governor-general of the North American Union had doffed his robe of office before coming up into the car in which his aides worked. Now he wore a suit and waistcoat of darkest navy, so dark the eye mistook it for black at first glance. With that as background, his skin seemed almost pale; he was a couple of shades lighter than Sir Devereaux Jones.

As Sir David Clarke had, he held out his hand to Bushell and said, “Colonel.” His orator’s voice filled the car. Bushell found it daunting to have that voice, trained to sway thousands in a crowd or millions over the wireless, turned on him alone.

He shook the governor-general’s hand and said, “Your Excellency, honored as I am to meet you, I wish it were under happier circumstances.”

“So do I, Colonel Bushell,” Sir Martin answered. Beneath the trained phrasing, he sounded worn. He was in his sixties, his hair and mustache graying, tired pouches under his narrow, slanting, almost Oriental eyes. Cross-country railway travel, even at its most luxurious, would tell on a man no longer young. “So do I, for more reasons than you yet know.”

“Sir Horace alluded to those reasons, sir,” Bushell said, glancing toward his commandant. “He said he was not the proper person to elaborate on them: that was your province, no one else’s.”

“He was correct.” Sir Martin Luther King also let his eyes slide toward Sir Horace, just for a moment, as if granting even so much praise pained him. After a brief hesitation, the governor-general went on,

“We have a need more pressing than you can imagine to recover The Two Georges quickly. Were you not involved in this case, you would not hear of it for some time to come.”

“Your Excellency, I assure you that Tom Bushell is reliable in every way,” Sir Horace Bragg declared. Sir Martin did not answer. He did not need to answer. Had Bushell been reliable in every way, The Two Georges would not have been stolen, and he himself would have been comfortably back in Victoria.

“Your Excellency, if you don’t think I should have whatever this information may be, don’t tell me,”

Bushell said. “I understand secrets and the need for them.”

“Well said,” Hiram Defoe murmured. Several of the governor-general’s aides nodded. Sir David Clarke stood unmoving. He understood secrets, too, and what they could do when they were secret no more.

“Colonel, I tell you frankly that I would withhold this information if I could,” Sir Martin said. “I am far from convinced you should know it. But I am convinced you must know it, to appreciate the urgency of our predicament. The Two Georges was scheduled to return to Victoria on 15 August - two months from now, less three days. That much you already know.”

Bushell nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Very well. What you do not know is that His Majesty Charles III is scheduled to arrive in Victoria on the following day aboard the imperial yacht Britannia, to view the painting in its colonial setting and deliver an address touching on the importance of the ties between the N AU and the mother country. Surely I need not emphasize for you the unfortunate symbolism which would be conveyed were The Two Georges to be missing upon his arrival.”

“No, Your Excellency, you don’t,” Bushell said. He had as little to do with politics as he could, but he didn’t have to be a fixer of Hiram Defoe’s caliber to figure out what would happen if the King-Emperor gave his speech in front of a blank wall rather than before the painting. A generation might pass before London again trusted the NAU to handle anything important on its own.

“I hate it when political considerations interfere with the investigation of a crime,” Sir Horace Bragg said,

“but sometimes they do, and that’s a fact we can’t ignore.”

“Yes, sir,” Bushell said; Bragg might have been reciting any competent policeman’s creed. Of Sir Martin Luther King, Bushell asked, “Your Excellency, would the Sons of Liberty have had any idea the King-Emperor is sailing to the NAU? Is that part of the reason why they stole The Two Georges!”

“That’s an ugly thought, Tom,” Sir Horace Bragg said before the governor-general could answer.

“It is indeed an ugly thought,” Sir Martin echoed. His glance slid to Bragg once more, either in annoyance at being anticipated or, perhaps more likely, in surprise at agreeing so much with the RAM

commandant. After a moment, he went on, “To the best of my knowledge, Colonel, you are the first person outside London and Victoria to be entrusted with that secret. We shall presently make the great to-do appropriate for a visit from His Majesty, but for the time being all arrangements are tightly held, the better to keep the King-Emperor safe and secure.”

“If the Sons of Liberty did get word of Charles’s impending visit, they got it from someone on this train,”

Sir Horace Bragg said. “I can’t believe any of us here would violate a sacred trust in such a way. The timing of the theft has to be coincidental.”

“Once more, I find myself agreeing with Lieutenant General Bragg,” Sir Martin said. He spoke the words through slightly pursed lips, as if they tasted sour. “That the Sons of Liberty could have penetrated our inmost councils - inconceivable, sir, inconceivable.”

“Fewer things are truly inconceivable than we’d like to believe, Your Excellency,” Bushell said, “and some people know more about betrayal than they should.” He was speaking to the governor-general, but looked straight at Sir David Clarke.

That evening, over beefsteak in the dining room of the Grosvenor Hotel - the closest to RAM

headquarters - Sir Horace Bragg said, “You did yourself no good there, Tom, pitching dirt at Sir Martin’s fair-haired boy.”

“I didn’t give a damn,” Bushell said savagely. He tossed down his Jameson and waved for a waiter to fetch him another. “That toffee-nosed bastard, standing there all smooth and smug and sweatless, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. If I had my druthers, I’d have put him in hospital for a week or two.” He sliced away at his beefsteak. He’d ordered it blood rare, and wished the red juice spurting from it poured from the veins of Sir David Clarke.

“It’s done, Tom,” Bragg said. “No point dwelling on it, brooding over it, now.”

“I know,” Bushell answered. “Intellectually, I know. But it’s been years now, and I can’t let go of it, not for good.” He cut off another bite of rare, rare meat, raised it to his mouth. The waiter, black satin cummerbund glistening in the lamplight, set a fresh Irish whiskey before him. He swallowed the beefsteak and took a long pull at the drink.

“When I learned Smithers was going to retire, I sent you out here to take his place so you would get a fresh start on life,” Bragg said. He sent Bushell a reproving stare with his houndlike eyes. “That was a long time ago. You’ve done very well here, by all accounts and by your record. I really thought you’d managed to forget. But then today - ” He shook his head.

“I’m sorry,” Bushell said. “I didn’t intend to embarrass you, sir. And I do forget, sometimes for weeks at a stretch. But it keeps coming back, like memories from a bad stretch of combat. And when I saw Sir David’s face - ”

He slammed a fist down on the snowy linen of the tablecloth. China and silverware jumped. Jameson shook in his glass, an Upper California Burgundy in Bragg’s. The sudden sharp noise made people’s heads turn all over the dining room. The newly arrived RAMs resolutely pretended Bushell had done nothing out of the ordinary, which made him feel worse than the civilians’ stares. Only Patricia Oliver met his eyes. He thought she looked sympathetic, but had reason to distrust his own judgment. As the hum of conversation slowly revived, Bushell mumbled, “I do apologize. Another unseemly display to put in my file.”

“Oh, nonsense.” Sir Horace Bragg waved that away. “You’re a human being, Tom, and human beings have a way of doing unseemly things every so often.” He hesitated, then added, “You might get along better if you remembered you’re human a little more often. Then you wouldn’t be so taken by surprise when it happens.”

“Duty comes first,” Bushell answered, as automatically as he would have given his name had someone asked him that. Bragg glanced up to the ceiling and said no more.

After fruit and cheese, cigars and brandy, after he paid the bill, Sir Horace yawned and got to his feet.

“I’m for bed,” he declared. “Everyone tells me the rumble of a train rolling down the tracks is restful, but I’ve never found it so. Peace and quiet suit me better. I must be getting old.” He squeezed Bushell’s shoulder. “See you in the morning, Tom.”

“Yes, sir,” Bushell said. He knew that meant he should get into his steamer, drive back to his flat, and get some rest himself. Instead, he walked into the bar next to the dining room, caught the bartender’s eye, and said, “Jameson over ice, if you’d be so kind.”

He drank two Irish whiskeys in rapid succession, then paused, thoughtful and numb at the same time. If he went on from here, he wouldn’t stop until he fell asleep with his head on the polished wood of the bar. He’d done that more times than he cared to remember. But if he stopped at this point, all the memories would well up, and the Jameson had dissolved the shields he usually held against them. Could he bear that? If he could, why did he have the shields?

He looked around. The bar was nearly empty. If he did make a sodden mess of himself, he didn’t think any of his colleagues would find out about it. Like Sir Horace Bragg, they’d doubtless headed upstairs for a good night’s sleep. Most RAMs were fine, upstanding citizens. The drunken reprobates like me are few and far between, he thought.

He lifted the forefinger of his right hand. The bartender didn’t see it. Bushell opened his mouth to call the fellow. Just then, one of the newly arrived RAMs paused at the entrance to the bar. Bushell’s call turned into a cough. He let his forefinger fall.

His colleague saw him and came striding up. “May I join you?” Patricia Oliver asked. She’d changed from uniform tunic and skirt to a skirt checked in light and dark green and a light green jacket with bow, cuffs, felt, and pocket edges checked to match the skirt. The sports outfit made her look less severe and several years younger.

Bushell let his hand rest for a moment on the round leather seat of the bar stool next to him. “Please do,”

he said. “What can I get for you?”

“Scotch and soda,” she answered as she sat down. Bushell gave the bartender the order. He did not ask for anything for himself. Patricia Oliver sent him a curious look. “You’re not drinking, Colonel?”

“I’ve been drinking,” he said. “Perhaps in a while, I’ll drink some more. Right now” - he shrugged - ”I’m not drinking.” The bartender returned with the Scotch and soda. Bushell set a pound note on the bar, with half a crown for a tip. One more argument against getting drunk here was that it cost even more than it would have aboard the Upper California Limited. He took out his cigar case. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Not at all.” Patricia reached into her handbag and produced a monogrammed gold cigarette case. She drew one of the slender white tubes from it, tapped the end of the cigarette against the bar. “Do you mind if I join you?”

By way of reply, Bushell scraped a lucifer afire. He held it out for her. She lighted her cigarette; her cheeks hollowed as she sucked in smoke. Bushell thought cigarettes harsh and acrid, but Patricia Oliver had not asked his opinion. He got his cigar going. Its savory aroma helped mask that of the cigarette. Patricia reached out and knocked ash into the crystal tray in front of Bushell. Her lipstick had drawn a band of red around the cigarette. She raised her glass. “Down with the Sons of Liberty!” she said, and sipped.

Bushell shifted his cigar to his left hand. He lifted an imaginary glass high with his right, brought it to his mouth, and tipped his head back. “Consider that drunk to.”

Her laugh exposed small, white, even teeth. “Are you serious enough to make a proper RAM? We’re a sobersided lot, most of us.”

He considered that - seriously. “I’m serious on duty,” he said. “Off duty, I’m no more serious than I have to be.” Even with whiskey in him, sobersided was an adjective that fit well, maybe too well, but he didn’t have to acknowledge it.

“That’s fair,” Patricia Oliver said with a nod. “Too many people take the office wherever they go, though.” She sipped her drink, staring pensively at the glowing coal of her cigarette and the thin, twisting ribbon of smoke that rose from it. After a moment’s silence, she asked, “Do you think we have any chance at all of recovering The Two Georges intact?” No sooner had the words passed her lips than she burst out with a long peal of laughter. “There I was, mocking people who bring their work with them no matter where they are, and now I’ve done it myself.”

“It’s all right,” Bushell said. “It’s what we have in common, after all.” He thought about the question, slowly answered, “The only way we’ll see it, I think, is if the Sons of Liberty think that’s to their advantage. Otherwise - ” He looked down at the bar and wished the imaginary shot of Irish whiskey he’d downed had been real. “Otherwise, I’ll have found a way of going down in history that isn’t the one I had in mind.”

Patricia Oliver’s red mouth closed on the cigarette. She took a long drag and let the smoke out a little at a time, so that she sat as if shrouded in fog. “It’s not your fault, or not altogether,” she said.

“I was in charge. By God, I was there,” Bushell said. “My duty was to keep that painting safe, and I didn’t do it.” He started to signal the bartender, but hesitated once more. Too soon since the last one, if he wanted to stay on the dry side of the slough of despond.

“It’s not that simple,” she answered. “It’s Sir Horace’s responsibility, too, but he’s not losing sleep over it.” That was literally true; Sir Horace had gone up to bed. Patricia continued, “Anyone who expects perfection is asking too much. The Sons of Liberty can try a hundred outrages; if they succeed with one, they come out ahead. If we fail one time in a hundred, we lose. That’s not right. You can’t blame yourself for not being perfect.”

“I found out I wasn’t perfect a long time ago,” Bushell said with a rueful twist to his lips that wasn’t quite a smile. “Of me as me, I expect what I can get by doing the best I know how. Of me as RAM

commander here - the job needs to be perfect, even if the man isn’t.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said, almost angrily. “Not even priests ask that much of themselves.”

Bushell shrugged.

“How do you live with yourself?” Patricia Oliver wondered. He shrugged again, not sure if she was asking the question of some higher authority. She knocked back her drink with a flick of the wrist, man-fashion, and signaled the bartender for a refill. He’d been polishing the already gleaming wood of the bar for some time, and looked grateful for something better to do.

This time, Bushell, having exhausted his singles, handed the man a blue two-pound note. This time, too, he consciously noticed the reproduction of The Two Georges on the banknote. He grimaced and looked away; the image too vividly called to mind the original he’d seen and then lost. The bartender, mindful of his own tip, gave back a pound’s worth of change in a jingle of silver. Bushell left one gleaming coin on the bar and scooped the rest into his trouser pocket.

Patricia Oliver said, “Are you going to drink another imaginary toast with me?” Her eyes challenged him. Sighing, he dug out the change he’d just put away, and more besides. The bartender brought him a shot of Jameson and then went back to plying his cloth.

“Anyone would think you were a Son yourself, drinking Irish whiskey like that,” Patricia said, one eyebrow quirking up.

“I like it,” Bushell said. “I got a taste for it in my army days, maybe even before I’d ever heard of the Sons of Liberty. It doesn’t taste like medicine, the way Scotch does for me.” He sipped; Jameson was the medicine he needed, all right. “And I wish to God I still hadn’t heard of the Sons.”

“I don’t blame you.” She set her hand lightly atop one of his. He looked up at her face. He saw sympathy and - something else? He wasn’t sure. She went on, “You’re blaming yourself enough as is. This must be hell for you.”

“Now that you mention it,” he said, “yes.”

The weight of her hand on his grew slightly. Her skin was warm and very smooth. She said, “If it weren’t for the Russians and the Holy Alliance, the Sons would long ago have dried up and blown away for lack of blood - I mean, money.”

“Not much difference between the two, not when it comes to politics,” he said, nodding. He told her of what he’d uncovered while the special train was traveling west from Victoria: the Nagant rifle posted from Skidegate and the scandalous pamphlet commingled with accounts paid in gold roubles for the travel brochure about the Queen Charlotte Islands.

“Russian money,” she said with a quick indrawn breath, “and Russian guns, too. No telling how many more Russian guns are loose in New Liverpool, either.”

“I had that same happy thought,” Bushell agreed. “Of course, it doesn’t necessarily prove anything: men who aren’t Russians can lay hands on gold roubles, and on Nagants, too, I suppose, though that would be harder. But it gives us a place to start looking, and in a case like this - ”

“We’re grateful for any place to start,” she finished for him.

They spent the next considerable while talking about the case, and about other things. But for them, the bar was dead quiet: a slow weekday evening. Bushell had another drink, and then another. He nursed them instead of leaping headlong into them as he had before. He knew they were in him, but somehow they lacked the power over him whiskey sometimes seized.

With a yawn, the bartender sat down on a stool in the far corner of his little domain. He leaned against the wall, giving every sign of being about to fall asleep. Bushell pulled out his pocket watch, “Good heavens,” he said, staring at it. “How did it get to be a quarter to one?”

“For me, it was the pleasant company,” Patricia Oliver said.

Pleasant company was all very well. Bushell was thinking he was most of an hour from home, most if not all of another hour back to RAM headquarters, and not enough hours of sleep sandwiched in between there. Having gone through a day on no sleep a short while earlier, he did not want to do it again. “I think I’ll go over to the office and put my feet up on my desk,” he said. “I’ve done that before, a time or two.”

“Why don’t you come up to my room instead?” Patricia said.

He looked up from his glass to her. She met his eye with the same directness she’d shown in the railway coach. “What sort of invitation is that?” he asked slowly.

“Whatever sort you want it to be,” she answered. The pink tip of her tongue lingered between her teeth for a moment before she drew it back once more. “I hope you find the idea . . . inviting.”

That told him what sort of invitation it was. He had not been a monk since his marriage to Irene exploded, but this. . . “Mrs. Oliver - ” he began.

‘“Mrs. Oliver’?” she echoed, her voice still low, but mocking. “Not Patricia, not even Captain Oliver, but Mrs. Oliver? What on earth has this” - she held out her left hand: even in the muted light of the bar, the diamond on the fourth finger sparkled - ”got to do with anything?”

“Quite a lot,” he answered quietly.

She laughed out loud. She remained very much in control, so as not to rouse the bartender (whose eyes had fallen closed), but she was also very much amused. “How could it possibly matter?” she exclaimed.

“My husband is on the other side of the dominion, and what dear Roland doesn’t know will never, ever hurt him. I’m sure I don’t know a great many things of his doing, and I’ve not lost a moment’s sleep over any of them.”

“Mrs. Oliver - ” Bushell said again.

“Stop that!” Now her eyes sparked. “If you do it again, you will make me angry. Don’t tell me you’re not interested. I’ve been watching you for hours. I know better.”

“I wasn’t going to tell you that,” he answered. His face felt wooden; getting each word out took a separate effort. “But what I am interested in doing and what I do are not necessarily one and inseparable.”

She stared at him. “What on earth?” she said in honest bewilderment. Then her gaze happened to fall to the ring she’d displayed a moment before. “Don’t tell me this bothers you?” she said. When he nodded like a machine whose mechanism needed oiling, she took it off and put it in her handbag. “There! Is that better?”

He shook his head, as jerkily as he’d nodded.

“A man of scruples!” she exclaimed in wonder. Bushell had always thought of himself so, but not in the way she said it. From her red lips, it sounded foolish, outmoded, useless. She cocked her head to one side, studying him like some strange biological specimen. “You shan’t even let me seduce you?”

He discovered the Jameson he’d taken on board was still with him after all. It had just been lying low. Without it, he never would have replied as he did: “Mrs. Oliver” - he stared at her, through her, so fiercely that she did not correct him - ”were that ring not on your finger, I should like nothing better than taking you upstairs and” - not even the whiskey could make him say to a woman fucking your brains out, which was the thought uppermost in his mind - ”making love to you. You may forgive me for declining or not, as you see fit, but I have a” - he hesitated again before coming up with the right word ”a horror of adultery.”

He waited for Patricia to say something else cutting. How quaint was what he thought most likely. But she was a RAM, and a good one, or she wouldn’t have been in New Liverpool, and she had a police officer’s itch to know. Very quietly, she spoke one word: “Why?”

He wanted another drink, wanted it with a sweaty passion not much different from lust. But the Irish whiskey already in him kept his tongue loose in his mouth. “I used to work out of Victoria myself, some years back now. Once, I finished a piece of business up in the Oregon country a couple of days sooner than I’d thought I would. I didn’t telegraph or telephone - I thought I’d come home early and surprise Irene.”

“That’s enough,” Patricia Oliver said, looking not at him but down at her hands. “You don’t need to tell me anymore. I don’t want you to tell me anymore.”

Obediently, he fell silent. But he did not need to tell the rest of his story to have it unwind in his head as if played on a cinema a finger’s breadth in front of his eyes. He’d opened the front door, set down his bags, and heard some small noise in the bedroom that told him Irene was there. He’d walked in quietly and . . .

She’d been naked, straddling Sir David Clarke, sliding up and down on his thick, hard tool, her head thrown back in abandon, little whimpering noises coming from her throat. Then she’d gasped, and then he had, and then, as they’d slowly begun to come back to themselves, they’d noticed Bushell standing in the doorway.

“You never know for certain where anyone is until you actually see him,” he remarked, not so much to Patricia Oliver as to Irene back in the days when he’d thought he was a happy, lucky man. Patricia had grit. She slid the wedding ring back onto her finger. Then she raised her eyes to his face and said, “I hope this won’t interfere with our working together.”

“Captain Oliver, if I can work with Sir David Clarke - I’m not giving out any great secrets there; you’ll hear it from others if not from me - I can work with you.”

She nodded at that, and then again to show she’d noticed him using her title. “I am going up to bed now,” she said, sliding off the bar stool. “Good night, Colonel.” He dipped his head in return. Formality was a grease that could help people from grinding against one another. Bushell rose, too. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a couple of shillings, and set them on the bar: quietly, so as not to disturb the dozing bartender. He walked out into the lobby. Patricia had already disappeared; catching a lift upstairs at this hour must have been easy. Under the glow of electric lamps, the streets were almost deserted. Every now and then, a steamer rolled past, nearly as silent as the rest of the night. A couple of women who probably were not ladies stood on a street corner, talking in low voices. Here and there, in shadows where the streetlamps did not reach, men with no better place to stay slept curled in ragged blankets or wrapped in newspapers to hold chill at bay. Some of them clutched the bottles that were at once their solace and ruination. A tavern just a few doors down from RAM headquarters was an oasis of light and noise. Flickering images from the large televisor screen at one end of the bar showed a London soccer match that had to have been filmed a couple of weeks before. As Bushell walked past, one of the teams scored a goal. The tavern erupted in cheers, as if the action itself, not a faded, tardy simulacrum, had taken place before the eyes of those who watched it. Bushell rubbed at his mustache, marveling that so many people confused with reality what the televisor showed.

Televisor or no, he thought about going in, and even took one step halfway in the direction of the door. Another drink, or two, or three? Why not? But even as the temptation formed in his mind, he forced it to dissolve. He knew why not, all too well. Another drink, or two, or three, another drunk, or two, or three, and he might find himself one of those broken men on the sidewalk, a bottle in hand, oblivion all he craved. He shuddered and walked on.

The sergeant at the duty desk nodded to Bushell when he strode in. If he found anything in the least unusual about his chief’s appearance there in the wee small hours of the morning, he did not presume to show it.

A Nuevespañolan janitor sweeping the hall in front of his office did give Bushell a curious glance as he went in, but said nothing. Bushell locked the door after himself, took off his shoes, loosened his tie, and sank down in his swivel chair. He put his feet up on the desk, as he’d told Patricia Oliver he would, and did his best to sleep.

But sleep would not come. Despite weariness, despite Jameson, behind his eyelids he kept seeing Irene’s white buttocks clench and loosen, kept hearing her moans of delight, kept smelling her sweat and her lover’s. The images came to him all too often, even now, but seldom with such force as tonight.

“Damn that Oliver woman,” he muttered, shifting in the chair as he searched for some spot that was comfortable, or at least restful.

The bells of the Anglican cathedral chimed two. He did not hear them chime three. Bushell’s chin came up off his chest. Light was leaking in through the closed Venetian blinds. He pulled out his pocket watch: a quarter to seven. Four hours’ sleep would get him through the day. He snorted. If he’d managed on one, he could manage on four.

His head throbbed dully. It wasn’t a hangover, not quite, but it wasn’t the way he cared to start the day, either. He jerked open the middle drawer of his desk, unscrewed the lid from a bottle of paracetamol tablets, and dry-swallowed two. When he got out of the chair and stood up, he discovered his head was not the only part of him that ached. In his army days, he’d slept on hard ground as if it were a feather mattress. His army days, he had to keep reminding himself, were well behind him. He hoped the paracetamol would start working soon.

He looked down at himself. Sleeping in a swivel chair had done nothing for the press of his suit. If he left it on, he’d look like a derelict in secondhand clothes. He rubbed his chin. Whiskers rasped under his fingers. They’d only add to the impression of seediness.

Then he looked to one of the file cabinets across from his desk. On it, still neatly folded, lay his dress uniform. He’d never found time to take it to be cleaned, but it was in far better shape than the clothes he was wearing. Without hesitation, he got out of his suit and put on the red tunic and striped trousers. Some of his men would raise an eyebrow at seeing him in uniform, but not so high as if he’d stayed in the suit. He telephoned the duty desk. “This is Colonel Bushell. I’ve been, ah, working up here all night. Could you fetch me up a razor and some shaving soap?”

“I’ll send them directly, sir,” the sergeant at the desk said. “I heard you were in the building, so I thought you might be wanting them.”

“Thank you,” Bushell said, and hung up. The night man had warned his replacement, then, Some things didn’t change from the army to police work.

The RAM who brought him the shaving implements did indeed blink to confront him all gleaming in crimson and gold, but held his incredulity to the one blink. Bushell was certain that, by the time he came downstairs, the entire headquarters building would know how he’d chosen to dress. He walked into the lavatory, turned on the hot water at a faucet, lathered up, and scraped the straight razor across cheeks and chin and throat. He nicked himself a couple of times; the blood matched the red wool of his tunic. That tradition went back more than two thousand years to the Spartans, who hadn’t wanted their clothing to betray their wounds. He dabbed at the nicks with a paper towel, then surveyed himself in the mirror. His eyes were redder than they should have been, the hollows under them deeper and darker, but he’d do.

The RAMs he encountered ostentatiously ignored his uniform as he made his way to the little kitchen not far from the duty desk. There he almost bumped into Samuel Stanley, who was fixing himself a spicy-smelling cup of Earl Grey. As an old friend, Stanley enjoyed - and took advantage of - the privilege of staring.

Bushell took a waxed cardboard cup and advanced on the coffeepot. He poured steaming coffee into the cup, drank it down hot and black and bitter. “All the rankers from Victoria are in their fancy dress, so I thought I’d match them,” he said. The explanation did not sound especially convincing, even to himself.

“Uh-huh,” Stanley said, which meant he hadn’t convinced his adjutant, either. Stanley went on, “Chief, you’re going to kill yourself if you spend all your time here, and you won’t do the case any good if you’re too worn to think straight.”

“I know,” Bushell said, “but I was so busy talking with the people from Victoria last night that time got away from me.” That was even true, though he didn’t mention what he and Patricia Oliver had been talking about. He went on, “I thought I’d get more rest here than by driving down to my flat and back.”

“Mm, maybe.” Samuel Stanley watched him gulp another cup of coffee. “However much rest you got, it wasn’t enough.”

“It’s never enough,” Bushell answered. “I’ll make it up after we have The Two Georges back.” When he said it, he believed it. By the way Samuel Stanley swallowed wrong and started coughing, he didn’t. After a moment, neither did Bushell. Something else would come up, and he’d push himself just as hard for that. And then there would be yet one thing more. . . . “If we don’t push ourselves every day, we don’t belong in this business.”

“Can’t argue with you there,” his adjutant conceded. He cocked an eyebrow at Bushell. “I suppose Lieutenant General Sir Horace Bragg and his band of merry men are certain they’ll have the case wrapped up in tinsel and string by about day after tomorrow? That’s the way it usually goes when they deign to come down from their mountain and do some real work.”

“You’re a cynical soul today,” Bushell said. “Anyone would think you were a police officer, or something similarly disreputable.” He and Samuel Stanley both laughed. The humor had a bitter edge to it, though, for Stanley had spoken unvarnished truth - and any police officer with more than a year on the job was steeped, indeed pickled, in cynicism. Learning what your fellow man was capable of all too often failed to endear him to you.

Stanley lowered his voice: “The other thing is, Chief, that if you say that too loud, somebody besides me will hear you.”

“Me? What about you, Sam? Why, if you weren’t dead right, I’d have to speak sharply to you about lack of proper respect for those illustrious enough to work out of Victoria.”

Bushell did not bother to keep his voice down. Sir Horace knew his views on the ivory tower - or perhaps the whited sepulcher made a better comparison - that was Victoria. And if Sir Horace hadn’t known them, Bushell wouldn’t have cared if he heard. His commandant had done him a favor in more ways than one in getting him out of the capital after his marriage so spectacularly collapsed. Samuel Stanley said, “Well, I’d better get back to it. And so had you, or the redcoats from Victoria will land on your back, knock you over, and kick you while you’re down.”

“It’s not the redcoats I worry about. After all, they’re policemen, too, after a fashion.” Bushell chuckled, both at his adjutant’s scandalized expression and his own wit, but he wasn’t more than half joking. He went on, “The ones who scare me are the politicos. They want the rabbit pulled out of the hat right away, and if the rabbit’s not there to begin with - ”He spread his hands, palms up.

“Watch yourself, Chief. That’s all.” Stanley hurried out of the little room. After a moment, Bushell left, too. He was only slightly surprised to find Sir Horace Bragg talking with the sergeant at the duty desk. Sir Horace might not have gone into the field for a good many years before this, but he worked hard at whatever he did. More than brilliance, dogged, unyielding persistence had got him the lieutenant general’s uniform he wore today.

He spotted Bushell in turn and hurried up to him. “Good morning, Tom. I was just asking your man there where I could get myself round a cuppa. I gather you had the same notion.”

“I just got myself round two coffees,” Bushell answered. “Now that I’ve topped up the boiler, I’m ready to hit the day head-on.”

“You’re ahead of me, then.” Bragg raised one of his bushy eyebrows. “In uniform, are you? Not on my account, I hope. Unless I’m no more senile than I think, I don’t recall you being much one for such fripperies. Or did you sleep in your office and put on the only fresh things you had?”

“Sir, you know me too well,” Bushell said with rueful admiration. “Tomorrow you’ll see me in civilian clothes again, I expect. You’d better, because if I’m still in uniform then, the sky will be falling.”

Without waiting for a reply, he bounded upstairs to his office. As long as he had the coffee surging in him, he intended to take advantage of the energy it lent. He tore through paperwork, then telephoned down to Gordon Rhodes to see if any fresh evidence or leads had come in while he snatched sleep. The call, unfortunately, proved a waste of time: Rhodes had heard nothing new. A RAM came into Bushell’s office and dumped the morning mail delivery onto his desk. He had a secretary next door, but made as little use of her services as he could: he was better at doing his job than at handing off parts of it for others to do. He rapidly sorted through the envelopes. Some went into the waste-paper basket unopened. Others got a quick skim and then joined them there. After a few minutes, only half a dozen items were left. He set them aside to be dealt with individually. One was from the New Liverpool constabulary, the detailed report on the autopsy of Honest Dick the Steamer King. Bushell glanced through it, then put it away for detailed consideration later - it didn’t offer any immediately obvious clues to the murderer’s identity.

Most of the remaining envelopes held forms he had to complete for the budgetary process back in Victoria. On any other day, those would have taken priority. They might still, but Bushell, after examining them, shoved them aside. Hard as it was to believe inside the bureaucracy that bound together the greatest empire the world had ever known, budgets were not always the be-all and end-all of a man’s career.

“And then there was one,” Bushell said, picking up the last envelope, a large manila. His name, title, and address were neatly typed in the center of the envelope: the upper left-hand corner bore no return address. The manila envelope did not bend when he picked it up.

His letter opener was in the shape of a cavalry saber, and as sharp as one of the swords it mimicked. He slit the envelope and drew out two sheets of cardboard and the photograph they protected. He stared at that photograph for a long time. One of the people who’d sent it obviously knew how to develop film himself; it could hardly have been entrusted to a commercial developing service. It showed The Two Georges leaning against a blank plaster wall, with a hand and arm thrusting into the picture the front page of a newspaper whose headline screamed of the theft of the painting. Bushell set down the photo, picked up the envelope, and looked inside. Sure enough, it held a note-sized sheet of paper he hadn’t seen before. On the paper, typed by a machine different from the one that had addressed the envelope, was a note:

IF YOU WANT THIS STINKING PAINTING BACK, YOU WILL PAY US £50,000,000 BY 15

AUGUST. OTHERWISE, THE SYMBOL OF OPPRESSION WILL BE CAST INTO THE FIRE

OF LIBERATION. INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO PAY THE RANSOM SO WE CAN SAFELY

RECOVER IT WILL REACH YOU. OBEY THEM. DO NOT THINK YOU CAN KEEP THIS A SECRET FOR YOUR OWN TREACHEROUS ENDS - COPIES ARE GOING TO THE

NEWSPAPERS. AMERICA SHALL BE FREE.

V

Major Michael Foster’s boyish face was petulant, as if his mother had forbidden him a hoped-for sweet.

“Nothing,” he said glumly. “Not a fingerprint anywhere except your own, Colonel Bushell. Not on the photograph, not on the ransom note, not on the cardboards. There are prints on the envelope itself, of course, but a hopeless jumble of them: it went through the mails, after all. But I would wager any amount you care to name that none of them will prove in any way connected to the Sons of Liberty.”

“You’re only too likely to be right,” Bushell answered. “The Sons are all too good at what they do. But have you by any chance examined the stamps? There, if anywhere, some significant fingerprint might be lurking: a Son would have bought them at a post office, would he not? He probably wouldn’t have worn gloves for such a purchase, not in summertime.”

The forensics specialist from Victoria respectfully dipped his head. “Well reasoned, Colonel. But take a closer look at the stamps.” He pointed to the envelope on the conference table. “Notice how the top edges are imperforate. That means they came from inside a booklet, whose outer covering could be handled by any number of Sons of Liberty without our being any the wiser from the stamps themselves.”

Bushell ran a forefinger across his mustache. He wanted to express his detailed opinion of the criminal competence of the Sons of Liberty, but was inhibited in his choice of language by the presence of Patricia Oliver, who sat next to Major Foster. “Captain, are they using a familiar machine?” he asked, curious to see how she’d react after the previous night’s scene.

“As far as I can tell on hasty first examination, no,” she answered coolly. “I hope further study will show I’m wrong there. If we can identify the typewriter, we’ll have a start on knowing where the ransom note was composed. It was posted locally, of course, but that doesn’t have to mean anything.”

“My guess is that the photograph isn’t local,” Bushell said. “I brought all the New Liverpool dailies the morning and afternoon after The Two Georges was stolen, and I don’t remember any headline from them exactly matching the one we see there. It’s something to research, at any rate.”

“So it is.” Sir Horace Bragg rested his chin in his hands. His expression was dolorous. “We have so much to research, and so few answers.”

“Have you spoken with Sir Martin Luther King yet?” Bushell asked. “Would His Majesty’s North American government pay ransom to the Sons of Liberty to get The Two Georges back?” If one such theft is paid, how many more would come in future?

“Were it up to me, I’d not give them a counterfeit ha’penny,” Sir Horace said. “What Sir Martin will choose to do, however, who can say? And I did find the timing of the ransom deadline . . . intriguing. Wouldn’t you agree, Tom?”

“Intriguing is a good word for it, sir,” Bushell said slowly. “Disturbing is another one that springs to mind.” The Sons of Liberty had threatened to destroy The Two Georges if they didn’t get their fifty million pounds by the day before that on which Charles III, King of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the North American Union, Australia, and New Zealand, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India and the African Possessions, Lord of Gibraltar, Malta, and Cyprus, Protector of the Ottomans, the Chinese, and the Hawaiians, was scheduled to arrive on his state visit to Victoria. Coincidence? Bushell didn’t believe in coincidence, not in a case like this.

The rest of the RAMs in the room looked curiously from him to Bragg. He realized they hadn’t yet been told of the King-Emperor’s impending visit. He also realized that, if the Sons of Liberty knew about it, they must have heard from someone who did know: either someone from London or, more likely, someone close to Sir Martin Luther King. He took out a cigar and, after a nod from Patricia Oliver, struck a lucifer and lit it.

He’d already known she didn’t mind smoke, of course, but he was doing his best to pretend - perhaps to himself as much as to the outside world - their encounter had never happened. By the casual, practiced way she responded to his silent question, she had plenty of experience with like pretenses. That eased his mind and saddened him at the same time.

Sir Horace said, “Matters of timing notwithstanding, we have our preliminary lines of inquiry laid out for us. Seeing if we can match the typewriter’s typeface and identify the newspaper whose headline is being utilized here will - or at least may - give us some notion of the locality in which this demand originated. We should also investigate the local post office from which the missive was actually sent, in the hope that a clerk will recall the person who handed him the envelope - if it was handed in rather than dropped into a letter box, that is. And, of course, I shall have to convey the ransom demand to the governor-general for his response.” A twitch of his shaggy eyebrows showed how much he looked forward to that. The RAMs who’d accompanied him from Victoria rose and left the conference room. So did most of the officers from New Liverpool with whom they’d be working. After a couple of minutes, the room held only Bragg and Bushell.

When Bushell made no move to go, Sir Horace looked at him in some surprise and said, “Is anything wrong, Tom?”

“Oh, not much,” Bushell answered, a sardonic bite to his voice. “I just wanted to thank you for coming and taking the investigation right out of my hands. ‘We need to do this. We need to do that. I’ll tell Sir Martin.’ Thank you very much, Lieutenant General Bragg, sir.”

Bragg held up a placating hand. “Take it easy, will you, please? For now, I’m the senior officer on the scene, that’s all. In a few days, a couple of weeks at most, I’ll be back in Victoria and the case will be yours again.”

“When an admiral comes aboard a ship commanded by a captain, that doesn’t make him ship’s commander, not unless he’s been ordered to take over,” Bushell said stubbornly. “Either this is my case or it isn’t. And you may go back to Victoria, sir, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be running things by telephone and wire. If you’re going to do that, please give me formal orders so I know where I stand. Sir.”

“You can be most exasperating when you’re nominally most obedient, do you know that?” Sir Horace said.

Bushell stood mute.

Bragg sighed. Just for a moment, as he exhaled, his hollow cheeks filled out and made him look like a well-fleshed man. Then they sagged again. He seemed older, more tired, than Bushell had ever seen him.

“What am I supposed to do with you, Tom?” he asked quietly.

He hadn’t intended that as a question to be answered; he’d started to say more. But Bushell, given the opening, charged into it: “Stand back, get out of the way, and let me do my job.”

“It’s not as simple as that.” Now Sir Horace sounded almost pleading. “Don’t you see? This isn’t just a criminal case - it’s a political one, too.”

“I don’t give a damn about politics,” Bushell said. “Find the painting and all the political nonsense goes away, anyhow.”

“If we rescue it, yes,” Sir Horace Bragg said. “If, on the other hand, we cause it to be destroyed, Sir Martin Luther King - to say nothing of everyone else in the NAU and the mother country - will be looking for a scapegoat. Do you really want everyone looking straight at you?”

Bushell’s eyes widened. “Of course I do. Hell, I’ll be looking at myself, too, and pointing a finger at my face in the mirror.”

“You mean it.” Bragg shook his head. At first Bushell thought that was wonder; after a moment, he realized it was more resignation. Sir Horace went on, “It’s no good arguing with you. I’ve known that for years, just as I’ve known you truly don’t care a fig for politics. I’ve always thought you were more able than I am, Tom, but not caring about politics is a fatal flaw for a man in public service. It’s why I am where I am today, and why you are where you are.”

Would changing his nature be worth a lieutenant general’s crown and crossed sword and baton? Would it be worth a knighthood, with the hope of a patent of nobility upon retirement? Bushell shrugged. The questions were irrelevant, since he could no more change his nature than the shape of his face. He said, “I suppose I’ll have to live with that, sir. Now, who is running this investigation?”

“I didn’t come to New Liverpool to take it away from you,” Bragg answered.

“No, sir. But it seems to have worked out that way.” With a quick-snapped salute and a precise about-turn, Bushell strode out of the conference room, leaving Sir Horace Bragg staring at his back. The telephone jangled. Bushell made a typographical error. Muttering a low-voiced curse, he spun his chair around so he could pick up the phone. It was not the first such interruption he’d had today.

“Bushell,” he said.

A woman’s voice spoke into his ear. “I have a long-distance call for you from New Orleans, Colonel, uh, Bushell.” She hesitated over his name, but pronounced it correctly.

“Go ahead,” he said wearily.

“Go ahead,” the operator echoed, and a man came on the line: “Good afternoon, Colonel; I am Chauncey Dupuy, of the Herald-Leader and Picayune.” He sounded like a New Orleans man, with an accent that at first hearing sounded more nearly northeastern than southern. “I wish to ask you some questions about this outrageous ransom demand for the return of The Two Georges.”

“Go ahead,” Bushell repeated. He knew what the questions would be before they were asked, and answered them with mechanical competence. Yes, he had received the ransom note. Yes, the photograph appeared genuine. No, he couldn’t say anything more about it than that. Yes, fifty million pounds was, as far as he knew, the largest ransom demand in the history of the NAU (Dupuy was thorough; not all the newshounds asked that one). Yes, the demand had been passed on to Sir Martin Luther King. No, Bushell didn’t know whether Sir Martin intended to meet it.

“What would you do if it were up to you, Colonel?” Dupuy asked.

“Go on with my work without having to answer some reporter’s questions every half hour,” Bushell answered. “Good day, sir.” With that, he hung up.

He turned the swivel chair back toward the typewriter. After he’d erased his error, though, he hesitated, then spun around to the desk again. He picked up the telephone, rang up the RAM switchboard. He told the operator who answered, “Direct any more calls for me from reporters to Lieutenant Thirkettle, if you’d be so kind. He can tell them as much as I can.”

“Very good, Colonel,” the operator said sympathetically. “I’ll pass the word on to the rest of the crew. Shall we brief the next shift in the same way?”

“Probably a good idea,” Bushell replied after a moment’s thought. “I’m liable to stay on after you’ve gone home.” He was liable to fall asleep in his chair again, too. He thought about ordering a cot sent up and installing it in his office. If things got worse, he would. How could things get worse? he asked himself, and was afraid he might find out.

He knew brief guilt at dumping the reporters in Lieutenant Thirkettle’s lap. But what was a public information officer for, if not to give the public information? And reporters, as they themselves like to brag, were part of the public.

Conscience thus assuaged, Bushell rang the Hotel La Cienega and asked to speak to Kathleen Flannery. After a moment’s silence, the hotel operator replied, “I’m sorry, sir, but Dr. Flannery checked out earlier this morning.”

“Thank you,” Bushell said, and hung up. He hadn’t told Kathleen she couldn’t leave town; he’d had no reason to justify telling her anything of the sort. But she’d be in transit for the next two or three days if she was going back home to Victoria, and so hard to reach. He supposed he could track down which train or airship she’d taken and wire ahead to one of its stopping points, but a moment’s thought told him it wasn’t worth the effort. All he’d wanted to know was her view of ransoming The Two Georges, and her view wouldn’t count. That decision rested on the shoulders of Sir Martin Luther King. Now that he’d given Thirkettle the joy of dealing with reporters, he had some small hope of catching up on the paperwork the reporters had been interrupting. He turned back to the typewriter and plunged ahead. Just as he was beginning to concentrate on the report in front of him, someone knocked on the frame of the open door.

He looked up with a snarl, ready to rend whoever had the temerity to break in on his thoughts at the exact moment when he was starting to accomplish something. Lieutenant General Sir Horace Bragg, however, was not rendable, not by a mere colonel. “Sorry to bother you, Tom,” Bragg said, as if they had not quarreled a few hours before, “but Sir Martin had summoned both you and me to a meeting in his suite at the Grosvenor to discuss our proper response to the demand you received this morning.”

“I wasn’t the only one who got it,” Bushell answered. “As best I can tell from the telephone calls I’ve got, word of the ransom demand went out to every newspaper in the civilized world except maybe the St. Petersburg lskra. I’ve not had a call from Russia, at any rate.”

As he spoke, he covered the typewriter and got to his feet. The governor-general had the power to bind and to loose. If he wanted to see Bushell, Bushell would indeed go see him. And if that meant Bushell didn’t get any paperwork done the rest of the day, he bloody well didn’t, and that was all there was to it. No denying the subject Sir Martin wanted to discuss was an important one - the important one, at the moment.

“Let’s go,” he said. With luck, he might even turn the meeting to his own ends. Sir Martin Luther King was staying in the Royal Suite at the Grosvenor Hotel. So far as Bushell knew, the suite had never actually been occupied by royalty, but, as the King-Emperor’s direct representative essentially, viceroy - for the NAU, Sir Martin came close to that exalted status. Only Bragg and Bushell represented the RAMs at the meeting. Sir Martin had with him but a single civilian aide: Sir David Clarke. Bushell nodded coldly to the man who’d taken Irene away from him.

“Thank you for joining me this afternoon, gentlemen.” The governor-general pointed to a sideboard atop which sat a silver tea and coffee service. “Please help yourselves. We’ll stand on no ceremony here, and the presence of servants would be not only distracting but possibly disastrous.”

Sir Horace Bragg poured himself a cup of tea - English Breakfast, Bushell thought it was, a safe choice whatever the hour. Sir Horace also picked up a couple of biscuits and set them on the saucer’s outer rim. Bushell took coffee. He looked at the biscuits but decided he didn’t care for anything sweet. He and Sir Horace set their saucers on the mahogany table in front of the couch where Sir Martin and Sir David were sitting, then brought up velvet-upholstered chairs. Bushell didn’t like the arrangement - it smacked of civilians vs. police - but could do nothing about it. He sat down. The chair’s upholstery enfolded him, almost like a lover’s embrace.

Sir Horace Bragg laughed. “We’d best get down to business, Your Excellency, because if we sit quietly here for long, these chairs are plenty comfortable enough to sleep in.” Having put his fundament at the none-too-tender mercy of a hard, wooden swivel chair the night before, Bushell could only nod.

“The business is simple, but unpleasing,” Sir Martin Luther King said. “Do we pay the Sons of Liberty their ransom, or do we say be damned to them? Neither course seems appetizing.”

“Were it up to me, I’d not give them a farthing,” Bushell said. Bragg sent him a surprised look; he seldom threw his opinion out with such reckless abandon.

“You’d let The Two Georges be destroyed?” Sir David Clarke said, shock in his voice. He put a little too much shock there, like an actor overemoting on stage. Bushell had been sure Sir David would oppose him - and sound shocked doing it - no matter what he said.

He answered, “Yes, I would. Why not? It would show the Sons of Liberty up for what they are: a pack of bloody-minded know-nothings who care only for themselves, not the NAU. As for The Two Georges, it’s very fine, but there’s more to bind the NAU to England than a stretch of oil paint on canvas. People know it, too.”

“You have no understanding of symbolism,” Clarke said.

“Maybe not, but I understand what giving the Sons of Liberty fifty million pounds will do. I understand that all too well.” Bushell leaned forward in his chair, even though it did not seem to want to let him go.

“And if you make one more smart crack, you’ll regret it for a long time.”

Sir Horace Bragg held up a hand. “Gentlemen, please - this is not quite an either-or proposition. We can negotiate with the Sons of Liberty for the picture’s safe return while we keep on trying to find it. Should our investigation prove fruitless as the deadline approaches, we can then decide what we ought to do next.”

“However attractive that may seem, it may also prove impracticable,” Sir David said. “Suppose the Sons of Liberty demand, as a condition for the safe return of The Two Georges , that we cease our search for it until the ransom be paid? Such a proviso, I fear, strikes me as all too likely.”

Bushell waited for Sir Horace to knock that into a cocked hat. When his superior sat silent, he gave Sir David Clarke his own answer: “Bugger the Sons of Liberty and what they want.”

Sir Martin Luther King had let the other men wrangle; he’d listened, fingers steepled, face inscrutable. Now he spoke for the first time: “Come what may, investigation into the theft shall continue. The Sons of Liberty would assume we made any pledge to refrain under duress, and that we would clandestinely break it whenever opportunity presented itself. They would not, in my judgment, hold such investigation against us despite their rhetoric to the contrary.”

“There is that, of course,” Sir David said. Flexible as a stem of grass, he bent to his chief’s opinion, whatever it might be.

“I can tell you one thing I’d like to see investigated, Your Excellency,” Bushell said, “and that’s how the Sons learned the King-Emperor was coming to the NAU. It can’t be a coincidence that the date they set for their deadline is one day away from the one on which His Majesty reaches Victoria. If we pay the ransom then, our humiliation is at its peak. If we don’t pay, they’ll greet Charles III by destroying the painting. How did they know?” By the way he scowled at Sir David Clarke, he had one possible answer in mind.

Clarke glared back. “See here, sir,” he said angrily, “I find your demeanor insulting.” Bushell folded his arms and said nothing, relishing the moment. Dueling was illegal in Upper California, as it had been in every province of the NAU for many years. Nevertheless, it did happen now and again. If Sir David said one more word, it would constitute a challenge. As challenged party, Bushell would choose pistols - and blow off Sir David’s handsome head.

“If we fight among ourselves, gentlemen, the only gainers are the Sons of Liberty,” Sir Horace Bragg said. “If it suits Your Excellency, I will take personal charge of finding out how - or if, if you’d prefer, Sir David - the Sons learned His Majesty was sailing to this side of the Atlantic on that particular date.”

“Please do, and I thank you,” Sir Martin said. “As you rightly pointed out, personal animosities serve no helpful purpose here.”

“You’re right, of course, Your Excellency,” Bushell said. “I apologize to you for the inconvenience I may have caused.” He did not apologize to Sir David Clarke.

“I have but one reservation, and that purely hypothetical, in regard to Sir Horace’s undertaking this investigation,” Sir David said. “If he is the guilty party, he would naturally be able to suppress that fact.”

Bushell sprang to his feet. Had the table not stood between him and Sir David, he would have gone for the bigger man’s throat. Easy, he told himself. And it would be easy, all too easy, for the real hatred he bore Sir David to turn on him and wreck everything he’d been trying to do here. Use the rage, don’t let it use you. “Listen to me, Clarke,” he hissed, all but spitting the unadorned surname, “you’ve already done your worst as far as I’m concerned, but if you start smearing tar on my friends, I’ll give you a thrashing to make the last one you got seem like a pat on the cheek. Do you hear me?”

“For God’s sake, Tom, sit down,” Sir Horace Bragg said, reaching out to take his arm and restrain him at need. “I’m not insulted, and there’s no call for you to be insulted on my behalf. Sir David said he was speaking hypothetically. He would be failing His Excellency if he didn’t examine all possibilities.”

“Quite,” Sir Martin Luther King said, his voice icy. “Please sit down, Colonel. You are most definitely out of order.”

Like a dirigible unable to stay airborne because of a leak, Bushell sank slowly back into his seat. He knew what he had to do next. And if it was to be done, it had to be done well. Looking Clarke in the eye, he said, “Sir David, I apologize for my violent, intemperate remarks.” Every word came out burning like vitriol.

“Let it pass,” Sir David Clarke said. “We are not friends, and we shall not be friends: I understand that. Your loyalty to a man who is your friend deserves nothing but commendation.”

If anything, giving Sir David the chance to be magnanimous at his expense hurt worse than apologizing. Sir Horace Bragg pulled the meeting back toward the purpose for which it had been called: “Your Excellency, let us suppose it draws near the middle of August. His Majesty the King-Emperor is on the high seas, sailing nearer to Victoria day by day. Despite our best efforts, we have not succeeded in recovering The Two Georges . What then? Do we pay what the Sons of Liberty demand? Or do we cast defiance in their face?”

Bushell knew his answer. He’d already given it. But then he’d proceeded to discredit that answer by his own conduct, just as the actions of the Sons of Liberty discredited what they called patriotism. That was more humiliating even than Sir David’s magnanimity. As Sir Horace had said, a public servant should have a certain rudimentary feel for politics.

Sir Martin Luther King looked unhappy. No politico enjoyed being put on the spot. But no man of sense

- which Sir Martin certainly was - faced the future without a plan. Reluctantly, the governor-general said,

“If worse comes to worst, Sir Horace, my thought is to pay the ransom, recover the painting, and then bend every effort toward capturing those responsible for the theft and regaining the money. They may get their ransom, but they shall not employ it.”

Sir David Clarke beamed as if his favorite football club had just won the All-Empire Cup. Sir Horace Bragg, by contrast, was utterly expressionless. “I shall conduct myself according to your decision, Your Excellency,” he said, his voice empty.

“And you, Colonel Bushell?” Sir Martin asked. He was justly proud of his powers of persuasion, and wanted everyone to be happy with his choices once he’d made them.

“Your Excellency, you represent His Majesty in North America, so of course I shall obey your orders,”

Bushell said. Even now, though, he would not leave well enough alone: “If you’re asking my personal opinion, however, I believe you are making a dreadful mistake. If you once treat with these bandits and murderers, you and your successors will have to do it again and again for the next hundred years.”

“Thank you for expressing your views so forthrightly, Colonel.” Sir Martin’s tone was anything but grateful. He got to his feet. “I think everything that needs saying for the moment has been said.” Bushell would have bet he thought a good deal more than needed saying had been said. The formalities as the meeting broke up were perfunctory at best.

Walking back to RAM headquarters, Sir Horace Bragg sadly shook his head. “You do look for new and different ways to stick your foot in it, don’t you, Tom?”

“If you mean I won’t say chalk is cheese just because someone wants me to, you’re right,” Bushell said.

“You didn’t seem any too happy with the notion of ransom, either. What policeman would?”

“Even if we have to pay it, it may work out all right.” Bragg sounded like a man trying to convince himself. “One thing’s sure: if the Sons start spending sterling like a sailor home from six months at sea, they’ll every one of them be wearing the broad arrow in short order.”

“That’s so,” Bushell said, “but if they were stupid enough to do that, they’d not be the problem they are.” He walked on a few paces in silence then changed the subject: “Just how long do you expect to be heading up the investigation here in New Liverpool, sir?”

“A fortnight or so at most, as I said before,” Sir Horace answered. “Why?”

“Just wondering, sir,” Bushell answered innocently.

At a little past nine the next morning, Bushell walked into Major Gordon Rhodes’s office. That he’d had a decent night’s sleep was shown by the gently steaming cup of tea he held in his hand. He was unsurprised to find Samuel Stanley huddled with Rhodes over their charts. Both men glanced up as he came in and shut the door behind himself.

“Uh-oh,” Stanley said. “I don’t like the look on your face, Chief.”

Bushell could not see the expression he was wearing, but had no trouble figuring out what it was. “I don’t like it, either,” he said. “Now, gentlemen, I want your promise that what I’m going to tell you will not go beyond this room.”

Stanley nodded at once, Rhodes after a moment’s hesitation. Bushell did not think ill of him for that pause; he was visibly deciding whether he could in good conscience make such a promise. “Go ahead, sir,” he said at last.

“I met with Sir Horace, Sir Martin, and his chief of staff yesterday,” Bushell began, unwilling even to name Sir David Clarke. He explained what Sir Martin had decided to do, and also how long Sir Horace was likely to stay in New Liverpool to head up the investigation.

When he was through, Samuel Stanley’s face twisted. “Paying ransom,” he said, as if someone had dropped a large, dead, stinking fish in front of him. “You just can’t do anything worse than that.”

“You’re right, Sam,” Rhodes said. “You beat me to it, that’s all.”

“You both knew it, and I know it, and Sir Horace knows it, too, but the politicos don’t know it, and that ties Sir Horace’s hands, and that ties ours,” Bushell said. “The only thing I can think of to do is to make sure The Two Georges is safe before the deadline gets here. I can’t do everything I would be doing to make sure we recover the painting, because Sir Horace will be doing most of those things himself. I am not going to let myself be taken out of this game, either. I’m responsible for The Two Georges’ going missing, and I’m not about to sit on the shelf while it’s being found.”

“What will you do, Chief?” Stanley asked. “What can you do, in a fix like that?”

Bushell’s smile was half predatory, half beatific. “For some reason or other, Sir Martin’s chief of staff and I had a disagreement yesterday. I don’t think Sir Martin is happy with me for that, or for saying I didn’t want to ransom The Two Georges. If I suggest that I go off investigating at places far, far away from New Liverpool, I doubt the prospect will break His Excellency the governor-general’s heart. In fact, I think he’ll leap to say yes before I change my mind. And that, by God, will get me out from under Sir Horace’s thumb.”

“And let you do what you wanted to do all along,” Stanley said admiringly. “Tell me, did you pick the fight with Sir David on purpose?”

“Who, me?” Bushell said, as if in surprise. “But he is a piece of work, that one. He even had the cheek to insult Sir Horace, for no better reason than to bait me.” Scowling, he shook his head again, then turned to Major Rhodes. “When I go into the field, Gordon, the weight of coordinating the investigation will fall even more heavily on you. You’ll be Sir Horace’s prop, that’s certain. You may have to be his brains as well; I have no notion of how good he is at casework these days.”

“I can see where you might be worried, sir, but I think I can handle it,” Gordon Rhodes said, without arrogance but also without false modesty. He would have been doing most of the job under Bushell; now he might be doing more still, but his shoulders seemed wide enough to carry the weight. Bushell clapped him on one of those shoulders. “Stout fellow!” He resolved to do something to get Rhodes a promotion when this mess finally ended. What with the political odor he was in at the moment, the best thing he might be able to do for the up-and-coming major was to stay as far away from him as possible. Well, he was taking care of that.

Sir Horace Bragg had been installed in an office not far from Rhodes’s; the two captains who had shared it were now squatting with a couple of other officers of similarly unexalted rank. “Good morning, Tom,” Bragg said, looking up from a copy of the New Liverpool Tory. Like all the other dailies, the conservative newspaper headlined the Sons’ demand for fifty million pounds. Bragg neatly folded the paper and set it on his desk. “What can I do for you?”

“You can say good-bye, sir, and wish me luck,” Bushell said.

Behind his reading glasses, Bragg’s eyes widened. He peered over the rims of the spectacles to see Bushell clearly. “My God, Tom, you’re not so upset about yesterday that you’re quitting on me?” he said, something like horror in his voice.

“Quitting on you? No, sir,” Bushell answered. A great many things had passed through his mind since The Two Georges was stolen, but resigning from the RAMs was not among them. He explained what he did have in mind.

Sir Horace took off his glasses and set them atop the Tory. His usually doleful expression grew even more so. “I know why you want to leave, but please reconsider,” he said. “If you go gallivanting off into the wilderness, it will be like cutting off my right hand here.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t see it that way,” Bushell answered. “With you here, I don’t have either enough work or enough responsibility to make staying worth my while. From where I stand, I’m not your right hand now; I’m put away on a shelf. I can’t bear that.”

“Then I’ll go back to Victoria,” Sir Horace said, getting up from his chair as if he intended to start walking that very instant. “I’ll stay in overall charge of the case from the capital, but the day-to-day search here will be in your hands.”

“That’s - extraordinarily generous of you, sir,” Bushell said, touched at the confidence his old friend and present superior vested in him. But, gently, he continued, “It’s impossible, though, and you know it as well as I do. After yesterday afternoon, Sir Martin would never let you go away and leave me at the top of the tree here - and if the thought even crossed his mind, Sir David would talk him out of it.”

“I’ll speak to Sir Martin - ” Bragg’s voice stumbled and faltered. He didn’t imagine he could change the governor-general’s mind, either. He glared at Bushell. “I’m sorrier than I can say that you feel the need to do this, Tom. I would have stayed home had I thought my coming here would make you want to leave. But since you do, I wish you Godspeed and good luck.” He stuck out his hand. Bushell took it, squeezed hard. “Thank you, sir. I’ll bring that painting back.” Without waiting for Sir Horace’s reply, he turned and left the office. He hadn’t even got to the hall before a wide smile spread over his face. He’d been difficult, he’d been stubborn, and he’d got away with it. He hadn’t been up in his own office long before someone tapped on the door frame. He looked up from paperwork to find Lieutenant-Colonel Felix Crooke standing there. “Yes?” Bushell asked, wondering if Sir Horace had sent up the expert on the Sons of Liberty to try to change his mind.

“Lieutenant General Bragg tells me you’ll be leaving New Liverpool to pursue your investigation of the theft,” Crooke began. Bushell nodded cautious agreement, still not sure what the RAM from Victoria had in mind. Then Crooke’s very blue eyes kindled. “Would you be so kind as to consider letting me accompany you, sir? When I bearded Sir Horace about it, he didn’t look happy, but - ”

“ - Then again, he never looks happy,” Bushell finished.

“Well, yes,” Crooke beamed. “In the end, he gave his permission: said he would have told me no if he could, but he didn’t see the way to do it.”

“He told me very much the same thing, but he didn’t find a way to say no to me, either,” Bushell answered. “There’s a certain freedom you find when you defy authority and pull it off, isn’t there?”

“Yes, sir,” Felix Crooke said enthusiastically.

“I’d be delighted to have you along,” Bushell said, warming to that enthusiasm. “Do you have the gear you’ll need? We may be going into rugged country now and again, and I aim to leave New Liverpool tomorrow, by airship if possible. I’ve no idea how long we’ll be gone.”

“What I don’t have, I’ll beg, borrow, or buy when we get where we’re going,” Crooke replied. He hesitated. “Where are we going?”

“First stop I have in mind is Skidegate,” Bushell said. Crooke nodded; he remembered where the little town was. Bushell went on, “From there, I have no idea. With luck, either we’ll find leads there or more will turn up here to give us our direction.” Without luck, he’d be stuck on the Queen Charlotte Islands utterly devoid of ideas, a notion he found too depressing to contemplate. Felix Crooke must have felt the same way. “Capital!” he exclaimed. “I shall have to lay in a mackintosh, then, or something of the sort. I didn’t think I’d need one, coming to New Liverpool in June.”

“I expect we’ll be able to fit you out with one here at headquarters,” Bushell said. “It does rain in New Liverpool, though not in June. I have one question: did you bring a weapon with you?”

“A weapon?” Crooke stared at him as if he’d suddenly started speaking Finnish. “Colonel, I tell you honestly, the thought never once crossed my mind.”

“Well it bloody well should, for this jaunt,” Bushell said. “The Sons killed Tricky Dick with a rifle. They’ve been shipping more rifles into New Liverpool, how many God only knows. One of the men who actually lifted The Two Georges menaced the guards with a pistol. These are not chaps who play by the rules.”

“You’re right, of course, and I thank you for reminding me,” Crooke murmured. “The need would never have occurred to me if you hadn’t. Even the Sons don’t, or rather didn’t, commonly go in for firearms. Can I draw a revolver from your armorer?”

“If you can’t, we’ll have a new armorer this time tomorrow.”

Felix Crooke smiled. “Capital!” he said again, and looked excited, from which Bushell concluded he’d never been under fire. “Where do I find the gentleman?” Bushell gave him directions. He set off with a spring in his step. Bushell envied him his innocence.

The RAM chief was pounding away on the typewriter when another knock made him spin in his chair. Samuel Stanley had already stridden into the office and now shut the door behind him. Bushell studied his face, then said, “All right, Sam, what’s gone wrong this time?”

“Sir, I have a favor to ask of you.” Stanley sounded so solemn and formal, dread grew to flower in Bushell’s heart. He didn’t remember the last time his adjutant had called him sir, as opposed to chief, when the two of them were alone together.

“Whatever you need,” he said expansively. Only after the words were out of his mouth did he remember the trouble Herodotus said Xerxes the Persian king had found for himself with a similar rash promise. The trouble with a classic education was that you commonly didn’t remember the wise precepts you’d picked up till it was too late to use them.

But Samuel Stanley, instead of asking for the moon, the stars, or something equally unattainable, said,

“Sir, when you go after The Two Georges, please take me with you.”

“You’re the second one to ask me that in the past couple of hours,” Bushell said, bemused. “I just said yes to Lieutenant-Colonel Crooke, but why you? I’d counted on your staying here to help Gordon Rhodes keep things running steady while Sir Horace is at the helm.”

“Sir, I’d be just as much spare baggage under Major Rhodes as you are under Lieutenant General Sir Horace Bragg.”

“I’m sorry, Sam, but that doesn’t strike me as reason enough,” Bushell said. “There’ll be plenty down here for you to do, and - forgive me - you’re not having your command taken away from you, as I am.”

“Oh, I understand all that, sir.” Stanley looked as miserable as Bushell had ever seen him. “I don’t really know how to explain the problem to you.”

“You’d better try. Forgive me again, but you’re not making much sense now.”

“I know, sir. Part of the trouble is, you and Sir Horace, you’ve been friends a long time, and you and I, we’ve been friends a long time, too. But it doesn’t follow from that - ” Samuel Stanley turned away.

“Forget I ever asked you, sir. I shouldn’t have come up here. I see that now.”

“No, wait - don’t go,” Bushell said. His adjutant halted with obvious reluctance. Bushell said, “It doesn’t follow that. . .” His voice trailed off, though not in the same way Stanley’s had. He’d just been thinking about classical allusions. Classical logic had its place, too. “It doesn’t follow from my being friends with you and Sir Horace both that you and he are friends with each other. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes, sir,” Stanley answered unhappily.

“Well, I can see that,” Bushell said. “His family used to be aristocrats some generations back, to hear him tell it, but he’s the first Bragg in a long time to amount to much. In his own fashion, I suppose, he’s been almost as driven to make good as old Tricky Dick. It never much bothered me, but I can see how it might set your teeth on edge. Is that what’s troubling you?”

“That’s - some of it, Chief.” When Samuel Stanley used the more familiar title, Bushell knew a good deal of relief. After a moment’s hesitation, Stanley added, “Most people now, they’ve let go of those plantation days. Sometimes I think Sir Horace wouldn’t mind seeing them back.”

“If he has a successful term as RAM commandant, he may end up with a patent of nobility to pass down to his eldest son.” Bushell had a sudden burst of insight. “That’s probably one of the reasons he’s so worried about this case. If The Two Georges is gone for good, he’ll never be a baronet, much less a baron.”

“As may be, Chief. But I wouldn’t be doing all I should for the case if I stayed here. A lot of people can fill in for me with Major Rhodes. You, Chief, you’re going to need all the help you can get.”

“God knows that’s true.” Bushell stabbed a forefinger out at his friend. “What will Phyllis have to say about your taking off for parts unknown for only heaven can guess how long?”

“Phyllis knows about the trouble I have with Sir Horace,” Stanley answered quietly. “She’ll understand why I need to do this.”

“Which is still more than I do,” Bushell said. Sam Stanley sounded very sure about his wife’s views, which surprised Bushell; his adjutant usually left work behind at the office. If he’d been talking about Bragg with Phyllis, the RAM commandant was indeed on his mind. Bushell threw his hands in the air. “All right, Sam, you’ve argued me down.”

“That’s first-rate, Chief,” Stanley said. “Now: details. Do you want to go by train or airship?”

“Airship’s faster, at least up to Wellesley on the Puget Sound,” Bushell answered. “I’ve been making inquiries, as you’ll gather. They won’t fly dirigibles north of the Puget Sound: the winds make safe passage too risky. We go by train up to Prince Rupert and then by ship across to Skidegate. There’s an airship leaving for Wellesley at eight o’clock tomorrow morning, so I’ll see you at the port then. I’ll call and book another stateroom for you.”

“Very good, Chief. That’d be the Empire Builder, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, it would.” Bushell paused and gave his adjutant a suspicious stare. “You’ve been checking up on this yourself.” He laughed at how accusatory he sounded.

“Guilty as charged,” Samuel Stanley said, laughing, too. He abruptly grew serious again. “You’re going to want us to go armed, aren’t you?”

“I’m damned glad you think straight, Sam,” Bushell said. “Felix Crooke gaped at me as if I’d just grown a second head when I suggested that he draw a pistol from the armorer. After he thought for a bit, he conceded the need, but he never would have seen it for himself.”

“Not an army man, then,” Stanley judged. “You get shot at once or twice, you don’t want the other fellow to have himself a gun when you’re without one. I wish I had a rifle to bring along; going up against a Nagant with a revolver isn’t my idea of a pleasant holiday, either.” He shrugged. “At a pinch, I suppose we can borrow longarms from the navy chaps.”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that.” Bushell reached for the telephone. “Go on, get out of here now that you’ve had your way with me. I’ll book that stateroom - and I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Right you are, Chief.” Stanley closed the door behind him as he left. Bushell called Sunset Airships, Ltd., and confirmed a stateroom for Samuel Stanley. Then he leaned back in his seat, put his hands behind his head, and laced his fingers. He took a deep breath, let it out. Almost for the first time since The Two Georges was stolen, he had a moment to think of something else. After a few seconds, he sat up straight again and unlocked the upper right-hand drawer of his desk. He picked up the pint of Jameson, looked at it, and set it on the floor by the desk. Then he turned over the framed photograph of Irene.

Her black-and-white image smiled sunnily up at him: dark hair, light eyes, wide, happy mouth in a pleasantly plump face. Her hair was cut in the shingle bangs that had been the height of style ten years before, when the photograph was taken. Even after he came out to New Liverpool, he’d hung her portrait on the wall below the print of The Two Georges until, at last, he could bear to look at her no more.

“Why?” he asked the flat, blank, dead photo.

Getting no reply, he turned it facedown once more. He picked up the whiskey bottle, yanked out the stopper, and gulped down a long harsh swallow. Then he closed it and stuck it back in the drawer, which he locked. The whiskey burning in him, he went back to work.

The airship port was cool and foggy. The sun might not burn through for several hours yet. The rolling mist now revealed, now hid the dirigibles at the mooring towers. The leviathans of the air reminded Bushell of the great whales of the Pacific, yet were vaster by far than any creatures of mere flesh and blood.

He pushed the baggage cart he’d hired for a florin toward the Empire Builder, which, by luck, was moored at the tower closest to the garage where he’d parked his steamer. Men and women were already ascending the stairway to the passenger gondola. The airship would depart in less than a half an hour.

A Negro clerk carefully examined Bushell’s ticket and checked his name off on the passenger list.

“You’ll be in stateroom twelve, sir,” he said. “Stateroom twelve is on the starboard side. Turn right once you go up the stairs, then left at the first hallway. Your stateroom will be the third one on the left. Here is your key - yes, this is number twelve. I hope you have a pleasant flight.”

“Thank you,” Bushell said, smiling a little at the man’s fussy precision. He handed his bags to a muscular fellow with green eyes, carroty hair, and a face full of freckles.

The loader started to haul them up the ladder to the baggage compartment, then stopped and looked back at Bushell. “You’re the chap trying to get The Two Georges back, ain’t you, sir?” he asked.

“So I am,” Bushell said. He was glad no reporters had got wind of his imminent departure.

“Hope you find it, sir, and catch the ones what took it, too,” the loader said. “Right bunch o’ bastards they are, you ask me.” His large, knobby-knuckled hands curled into fists. Bushell sent him a grateful smile; he was always delighted when such an obvious Irishman showed his loyalty to King-Emperor and country.

The Negro clerk, however, sniffed and said, “Please don’t vex the passengers with conversation, O’Leary.” The loader brushed a forefinger to the bill of his cap to show he’d understood and would obey.

“I wasn’t vexed,” Bushell said. The clerk looked through him as if he hadn’t spoken. Plainly, the fixed policy of Sunset Airships, Ltd., took precedence over the whim of any one traveler. The brief delay let Felix Crooke come up to join Bushell. He was carrying his bags himself. “Bloody fog!” he said. “The cabby I hired lost his way twice. I was afraid you’d have to depart without me. This isn’t the weather for which New Liverpool is famous, you know.” He looked at Bushell as if holding him personally responsible.

“It’s often like this in June,” Bushell answered. “By the way, Sam Stanley, whom you will have met, is accompanying us on our flight north.” He turned to the clerk, who was droning through the formalities of Crooke’s finding his stateroom. “Could you tell me if Samuel Stanley is abroad the airship yet?”

The Negro made a point of finishing his business with Felix Crooke before deigning to consult the passenger list for Stanley’s name. At last he said, “Yes, sir, that gentleman has checked in.” He made it sound as if the admission had been forced from him by a clever barrister in a court of law. One after the other, Bushell and Crooke climbed the detachable stairway to the passenger gondola. A Nuevespañolan steward in a morning coat stood at the entrance to make sure they did not stumble.

“I’m going to my room,” Crooke said. “How about you, sir?”

“I like to watch takeoffs from the lounge,” Bushell answered. “Probably won’t be much to see today, what with this mist, but you never can tell.”

Signs led him to the lounge; as on the Upper California Limited, it lay on the starboard side of the gondola, though some airship lines preferred to put it to port. As he’d expected, Bushell found himself alone in the hall that led to the lounge entrance. Watching gray tendrils of fog swirl around the Empire Builder as it rose was not a pastime which held mass appeal. But he would not be alone in the lounge: he realized that as he neared the door. Someone was playing the piano in there - quite well, too. Bushell set his jaw before he went in; “I Remember Your Name,” a sentimental favorite from two decades before, had been the song he and Irene always thought of as theirs. Whenever he heard it now, it was a dash of salt in the wound that never quite seemed to close.

“I Remember Your Name” came to a sudden, jangling halt when Bushell walked into the lounge. Samuel Stanley sprang up from the piano bench, guilt and worry on his face. “I’m sorry, Chief,” he said quickly.

“Been too long since we’ve flown together, dammit. I forgot you’ve got the lounge habit, too.”

“It’s all right,” Bushell said. “Go ahead and play it, Sam. You might as well take it all the way through to the end. I know how it goes.”