“I am finding all sorts of things hard to believe,” I said.
“I can let you go, but I have a sense that you might prefer to wait around until we can also release Helen Perdita. That may be a while, or perhaps we won’t release her for some time to come, or at all. Delicate matters are involved of which nothing can be said, but they may lead to a happier situation than the present one. I hope you’ll understand.”
“Even if I don’t understand, I don’t suppose it matters much.”
“It’s good that you’re so perceptive—it makes communication with you easier.”
They took me back to the cell, then, and I got to hear a few dozen more renditions of “I Was Drunk Last Night.” There wasn’t any notable improvement, but it wasn’t for lack of effort or patience.
About ten-thirty that night, a cop in uniform came by and said, “You. Come on. You’re being released.”
“Is the woman I was arrested with—”
“Dr. Perdita is already waiting for you, and so are the men from ConTech.”
He unlocked the door and I followed him out; we went directly to the front desk, where Helen was waiting, still in her evening dress. Her long brown hair was down and looked disheveled—probably they had searched her coif. She was pale with anxiety, so that her makeup looked like a bad paint job on her white skin, but she didn’t seem to be hurt otherwise. There were a bunch of men I’d never seen before standing there, most of them in suits, all of them battered, beaten, and bruised. The heavyset older one said to me, “Sir, we really must apologize. We got here as soon as we could.”
“You’re from ConTech?”
“We’re your bodyguards. We just broke out of an attic where we were being held. Two that you don’t see here are in the hospital. And we’re all feeling like a bunch of clowns, sir. While we were tied up in that attic, you took awfully good care of yourselves—or at least Dr. Perdita took very good care of both of you. It should never have happened—we should have been there to stop Billie Beard—but at least you’re unhurt, and we did come as fast as we could.”
“Then Mr. Iphwin secured our release?”
“Geoffrey Iphwin and ConTech don’t swing much weight here,” the inspector said, behind me. “At least, that is, at any level of which I’m aware. You got released by direct order of His Most Catholic Majesty. And so far as I can tell the reason for that was a protest lodged by the Ambassador from the Free Republic of Diego Garcia, based on Dr. Perdita’s dual citizenship.”
I stared at him. I had never heard of the Free Republic of Diego Garcia. Helen looked more shocked than I’d ever seen her, even more shocked than in the moments after the shooting.
But getting out of jail when you’re being held for murder is not the kind of thing you turn down just because you don’t know what’s going on. We and Iphwin’s men hurried out into the night.
The heavyset guy said, “My name is McMoore. I apologize again, sir.”
“It’s quite all right,” I said, “since neither of us can figure out what is going on, anyway. Helen, what do you want to do?”
“Talk privately and then sleep, I think.” She seemed terribly distracted, but then that was hardly a surprise. “I guess we could go back to the hotel.”
“We’ll do our best to guard you this time, properly,” McMoore said. “It’s not a far walk—just a few blocks—do you want to let us just form a phalanx around you and walk there slowly? I would be pretty leery of flagging down any public transport right now, eh?”
“Absolutely agreed,” I said.
I felt like I was moving at the center of an infantry patrol in enemy territory; the ConTech men were all around us, and I had a distinct sensation that every one of them had his shooting hand close to a weapon.
Nothing happened. In the last two blocks before the Royal Saigon, we passed through a cluster of brightly lit, noisy nightclubs, all of them clamoring for attention, but Helen walked slumped over, not looking around despite all the noise and color that swirled around our phalanx of bodyguards like a chaotic wake around a ship of order. Probably jail had been much tougher on her than on me—I wasn’t the one charged with murder.
I kept turning that over in my head. How could Helen possibly have concealed so much about herself? She was apparently a spy or agent of some kind for a country that as far as I knew didn’t exist. And yet I didn’t think there had been three days of her life in the last few years that I didn’t have at least some knowledge of. For that matter, how could she have gotten all those weapons concealed in her clothing when we were both dressing in the same room, and she was wearing a form-fitting backless and sleeveless dress?
Despite all the streetlights, the street was dark, and in the thick humid air we didn’t feel like moving fast anyway. This morning I had gotten up to go interview with Iphwin, hoping to get a job and then spend a weekend in Saigon with Helen. So far that much of the plan was going perfectly, but with a bewildering array of additions and changes that made no sense to me; it was as if some exceptionally stupid maker of action movies had decided to parodize my life. Helen and I drooped along, surrounded by our armed guards, who were probably pretty angry at having been so outwitted and outfought by the enemy—whoever the enemy might be.
By the time we got back to the hotel I was stumbling, falling asleep on my feet, as the adrenaline drained out of me and the reality of how complex and difficult our situation had become set in. McMoore told me that they’d take care of posting the guard, and two of his men went into the room ahead of us and searched it, finding no bugs, no weapons, and no lurking attackers. So far as we could determine, none of our possessions had been touched. “Sleep well, then, sir,” McMoore said. “Once again—”
“You’re terribly sorry, I know,” I said. “And once again, I can’t even begin to think what you could possibly have done differently. None of us had any idea how much trouble was about to erupt. I know I’ll sleep better, knowing that you’re out here guarding us, and truly, if Iphwin gives you all trouble, I’ll be sure to speak up for you.”
“I appreciate that, sir.”
“And I’m glad you’re here too,” Helen said, the first words she had spoken since we left the police station.
McMoore nodded and left; Helen and I undressed slowly, turned out the lights, and got into bed.
After a long pause, I said, “First of all there’s a small thing I want to ask you. When and where did you ever learn to use those weapons, let alone to go so heavily armed to dinner? I didn’t even see you put them on—you must have been really quick.”
She groaned, a sound so painful that I thought for a moment that she was ill, and thumped the bed with a fist. “I don’t have the foggiest idea. I don’t know how to shoot, Lyle, I don’t, I never learned, I can’t remember even ever holding a gun. All I know is that you and I went to dinner, after getting engaged, and then I don’t remember much about dinner, except that it was some kind of Italian veal dish—I remember the attack, but the strangest part is that my impression was that she was aiming at me, and I remember getting under the table and you standing up, and some gunfire, and your body falling backwards with blood all over. I saw that my purse had fallen off the table, so I grabbed my phone and hit the emergency key—and then there I was, not under the table, but standing up, talking on the phone to the police, with a pistol in front of me on the table, a cloud of smoke all around me, and the dead body of a fat German tourist that didn’t look remotely like the tall blonde woman who had attacked us. I had no idea what the things the police were saying meant, but I could tell they were on their way, so I hung up, looked around, and saw that you were perfectly fine, the German man was perfectly dead, and it was like I had just stepped into some other life—the dress I was wearing wasn’t mine, I looked at it in the store and decided it was too expensive—and I had a bunch of heavy objects tied to me under my clothes. You can’t imagine how strange it was when the police searched me and found out that they were weapons.”