When they finally came for me I had all the lyrics down cold, and had begun to form a theory of the deeper significance of the song, which, luckily, I was never to develop any further. The cell door swung open and the polite inspector who had booked me in called my name and pointed to me. I stood and followed him down the hall to an office; behind me the cell door clanged shut.
He gestured me to a chair and handed me a glass of water; I took a sip.
“Well,” the inspector said, looking at his beautifully manicured hands and brushing his lank gray hair from his heavily freckled forehead, “we are in some difficulty here. Your friend tells us that she knows nothing about anything that has happened, and denies even remembering the shooting. Perhaps you could enlighten us as to why she is making such silly claims.”
“I wish I could,” I said. “I didn’t even know that she had a gun with her, let alone a whole arsenal.”
“The odd part is that she claims that she didn’t know either,” the inspector said. Fussily, he straightened his bright red necktie, and leaned forward toward me, resting his elbows on his knees and gazing into my eyes the way they do in the movies.
“I really don’t know anything,” I said.
“Well, provisionally I’m going to believe you, because I’ve never seen two people look so bewildered after an arrest as you and Dr. Perdita look. But even though I believe you—” there was something vaguely threatening in the way he said that “—let’s just walk through the list of questions with you, Dr. Peripart. First of all, do you have any acquaintance with an American expat who works for the Political Offenses Section, named Billie Beard?”
“My god, I certainly do. Just this afternoon, she attacked me physically, roughed me up, interrogated me, whatever you want to call it, in my own jump boat, in Surabaya harbor.”
“And did you want revenge?”
“What kind of question is that?” I was bewildered. “Is she connected to the man who was shot?”
The inspector stared at me. “What man? The body in the Curious Monkey was—you couldn’t possibly have mistaken her for a man! A hundred-and-fifty-centimeter-tall blonde woman in a tight black dress? According to the ID in her bag, she was Billie Beard, American expat citizen with dual citizenship in the American and Dutch Reichs, which was confirmed by fingerprints on file here, and a wire to Batavia confirmed it.”
“It can’t be. I saw the man clearly.”
The inspector shook his head. “We can sort this out one way or another. Can you at least come down to the morgue with me and confirm that the dead woman we took out of the Curious Monkey is Billie Beard? That would help a great deal.”
“Certainly.”
The morgue was a product of the mercifully brief period when the Emperor had been infatuated with Speerist monumentalism, around 1970, so the ceilings were vaulted and far above our heads, and the corridors echoed like something out of a horror movie. The room itself was big, air-conditioned, and brightly lit. The inspector and the attendant rolled her out of a big walk-in refrigerator and pulled back the sheet; sure enough, it was Billie Beard, or at least it looked very much like her since the face was so distorted by the exit wound near the mouth, and I said so.
She was wounded in the same places that I had seen my “anonymous German tourist” shot.
“This is the body that we picked up in the Curious Monkey. We have not yet found the bullets, so we can’t do the matching just yet, but the wounds are consistent with a high-velocity high-caliber pistol at a range of a few meters, and of course we found just such a pistol on your table, with Helen Perdita’s right-hand fingerprints on it. We’re paraffin testing her right now but we’re sure we’ll get a confirmation that she fired it.”
“She did—I heard her fire all four shots, and saw her fire the last one.” Probably I was naive but just now the only thing that seemed to make any sense was to keep telling the truth until someone got around to telling me what was going on. I stared at the shattered body. “But the person who came in and shot at me was a man, overweight, wearing red shorts and a dirty white safari shirt, shorter than this—” The room was getting dark and it was hard to breathe; I saw the lights of the ceiling for an instant and felt something thump the back of my head, realizing that it must be the floor just as I passed out.
When I woke up my first thought was that I was home in bed and nothing had happened—but the bed was too narrow and uncomfortable to be mine, and when I sat up I was still in evening clothes. The light came on and I saw that I was on a folding cot in a small room, with a desk and two chairs, and the man in the doorway who had just turned on the light was the inspector. So much for that hope, I thought.
The inspector said, “We certainly have a problem here. Are you feeling better? Whatever the truth may be, I’m sure you’ve had a series of unpleasant shocks.” He handed me a glass of water and said, “We can give you a stimulant or a tranquilizer if it will help.”
“I don’t think I want to take any drugs,” I said. “I don’t want my brain to have any excuses other than plain old reality— whatever that may be.”
“I think I understand. Are you well enough for me to continue questioning you?”
“I don’t think I know whether I am. I guess we’ll have to try and see.”
He nodded, dragged the chair over to the cot, and sat down with his elbows on his knees as before. “Just stay where you are and if you pass out again we won’t be put to the trouble of moving you. Well, we’ve interviewed both of you separately, and at this point all I can say is that if it’s a set of alibis, it’s the worst I’ve ever heard, and if it’s not, I have no idea what is going on. Now tell me the whole story of your day.”
I did, starting from getting up in the morning and omitting nothing; Iphwin had not asked me to keep any secrets, and besides, since I couldn’t help thinking that my new job must have something to do with all this, I wasn’t so sure that I was particularly fond of Iphwin, or owed him anything, anyway.
When I finished, the inspector sighed and said, “Well, your story is consistent with Dr. Perdita’s. And there are a surprisingly large number of anomalies that tend to bear you out, which I can’t tell you about because they are the sort of thing our prosecuting judges like to hold in reserve. This means that I am being driven, very reluctantly and uncomfortably, to conclude that you may just be telling me the truth as you know it. What we must now account for is how you know and believe that particular version of the truth.” He sighed. “It is not a criminal offense to be shot at, although it is generally regarded as a highly suspicious activity. And Cochin-China does recognize a right of lethal force in self-defense. Furthermore, Helen Perdita had in her handbag a permit for all of the weapons she was carrying, issued by His Most Catholic Majesty’s secret service—oddly enough, along with similar permits from half a dozen other nations. I don’t know what she does for a living, but it can’t be just teaching history, and she can’t seriously have expected us to believe it. And yet when confronted with the permits, although she agreed that the picture and the signature were hers, she denied ever having applied for or gotten the permits, or even knowing that they were in her bag. Since our secret service has said a number of reassuring things to us, we might perhaps just let all of this drop, as an intelligence matter with which we do not wish to meddle, except that none of the intelligence agencies, ours or others’, that we would expect to have contacted us by now, have done so. Our relations with the Dutch Reich are rather bad, and Billie Beard was wanted on suspicion of three assassinations we have jurisdiction over, so by itself her death does not greatly trouble us, but we would really like to be told, officially, that the whole thing is none of our business.”