She hung up, shaking her head, and said, “Well, brace yourself. We’re on our way to Mexico City. Maybe we can manage to visit Colonel Sykes while we’re in the country, eh?”
“What’s in Mexico City?”
“There’s a ConTech employee, a woman from Uppsala in the province of Sweden in the Danish Empire—whatever the hell that may be, but it doesn’t seem to bear much of a resemblance to any arrangement I’d heard of before—whose name is Ulrike Nordstrom. She’s being held by the police in Mexico City, on suspicion of murder. Iphwin seems to think that Nordstrom really did the murder, but that the evidence the Mexico City cops have on hand isn’t enough to hold her, so our job is to go there, with big wads of Iphwin’s money, pay Nordstrom’s bail, bribe some public officials, and get Nordstrom safely back into the keeping of ConTech.”
“Why us? He must have thousands of employees who can do that job.”
“He does. But he thinks we’ll help to stir matters up a bit, as he puts it. It so happens that the deceased appears to be Billie Beard.”
Who knew what I might have thought of this last week? By now I was getting so used to the way the world had started to work that all I did was sigh and say, “Billie Beard has a knack for turning up dead in an extremely inconvenient fashion. I hope that woman knows how much trouble she is.”
“At least one of her is less aware of it right now than she was a while ago. Come on, we’ve got to pack—Iphwin wants us to get on a jump flight in about two hours.”
We got off the elevator at our floor in comfortable silence; I know I was mainly thinking that this had to be more interesting than sitting in an office, playing phone pranks and tabulating the results. I suppose Helen was thinking the same.
We were less than a step from the door to our apartment when Helen froze and stuck her hand out, against my chest. I was about to say “What?” loudly, but I had heard it too— something in the apartment had gone thump, loudly, and as I listened there was a softer thud, and the not-quite-consciously-perceptible sense that something was moving near the door.
Helen pointed to the wall by the hinges of the door, and I flattened myself against it. Then she pressed her back against the wall on the doorknob side of the door, took out her key, and put that in her left hand. She nodded at me, meaningfully, and I wondered what she meant for just an instant before I saw her pull a pistol from her purse and soundlessly set the purse down on the floor beside her.
She unlocked the door and shoved it open, burst into the room taking up a firing stance—and let out the happiest little cry I had ever heard from her. “Fluffy!”
There on the rug, rolling around, clearly overjoyed to see her, was her ratty old Persian cat from years ago, the one that I remembered as dying of old age two years ago, and Helen had told me she remembered as having gotten run over. Fluffy looked pretty old—the fur was thin, fine, and dry, she was now terribly scrawny, and pretty clearly she was a little stiff in the hips—but otherwise about the same cat that I remembered. “You know how to use a gun again,” I said, because it was the first thing I thought of.
“And you’re not in a wheelchair,” she said, scooping up the cat and hugging it to her chest. “And Fluffy is obviously a whole lot better too.” I stood and stared at her as she set the gun down on the counter to have both hands free to play with the cat. After a long moment she looked back at me and said, “Oh, don’t look so surprised. I’m sure I didn’t understand half of it, but just ten minutes ago, at our meeting with Iphwin, you explained everything that’s been happening since last Friday, and it made perfect sense to me.”
The whole way to Mexico City, including almost an hour of weightlessness, we talked, with me trying to piece together enough information from Helen’s memory to be able to figure out what I had explained to her before. This Helen was perhaps ten pounds heavier than the one I was used to, much more solidly built and muscular, and had led rather a more adventurous life; she seemed fond enough of me, but she didn’t have the complex, thoughtful approach to the world that, the Helen I was used to did, and I had a distinct sense that whatever it was that my other self, over in some other stream of time, had figured out, this one had not listened as carefully or asked as many questions as the Helen I had had lunch with. Therefore, she just didn’t provide enough information for me to reconstruct whatever the solution that some other I had arrived at had been.
The ConTech company ship made a swift, safe landing on the lake; since the beginning of jump boat travel, cities had gone to great lengths to open up bodies of water near themselves for landing areas, and Mexico City was now about half lake, at least as much as it had been during early Aztec times. We hit the water, motored up to a company slip, and were waved right through all the usual formalities; it was dark out on the lake, at five A.M. We had flown right through most of the night, into the previous day, in a bare couple of hours—it had been Tuesday, five-thirty P.M. when we left, and now it was Monday, five A.M. We knew that we’d be exhausted soon enough, but for the moment the effect was of being oddly wide awake for the time of day it was.
As we approached the company slip, we saw there was a sizable group of men waiting for us. The moment the boat tied up and the gangplank extended, as we walked off the boat, a slim man approached me. In the lights of the pier, I could see that he had black, tightly curled hair and an aquiline nose; he wore a small goatee, a plain white shirt, and dark trousers and coat.
“Are you Mr. Lyle Peripart?” he asked, in accentless English.
“Yes, I am.”
“And you are Miss Helen Perdita?” he asked.
“Yes.”
With a very slight shrug and nod he commanded the big men who lunged forward to handcuff us. “Then I am afraid that I shall have to place both of you under arrest. We understand that you are coming here in the matter of a murder, and we rather suspect that your presence here was ordered by Geoffrey Iphwin or by ConTech, both of which have been indicted in absentia for conspiracy to commit murder. You may enter a guilty plea now if you wish, or wait until a later meeting with a police interrogator.”
They relieved Helen of a frightening array of weapons, more or less politely, and then pushed us into a police van, not too roughly, and drove us to the station. It turned out that the slim man who had arrested us was going to be our interrogator, a detail he had somehow failed to mention before, and that interrogation would begin immediately.
“My name,” he said, standing over me, after Helen had been taken out, and I had been cuffed to a small stool, bolted to the floor in the center of the room, “is Jesús Picardin.”
“Thank you very much for faxing the file of documents that got us released,” I said.
He stared at me incredulously. “What in the sweet name of Our Savior are you talking about?”
I told him the story of our rescue from the jail in Saigon, and he said, “This is the most preposterous set of alibis that I’ve ever heard. First of all, my chief investigator, Senora Beard, would have had no reason to be anywhere in the People’s Republic of Vietnam, and in any case that city is called Ho Chi Minh City, so far as I know. And if Helen Perdita had indeed shot her there, I would hardly have been working to free Helen Perdita. As for your mention of Esmé Sanderson, this is the most preposterous part of the whole story—who do you think you are trying to fool? She’s shared an office with Billie Beard for the better part of ten years, and the two are old partners; now that Billie is gone, in fact, Esmé is going to be my acting second in command. How you could expect her to give you an alibi is beyond me.”