“Aha,” I said. “He was unable to hook himself up. He fell, he was even good enough to wring his own neck. He must have wrenched it around a hundred and eighty degrees, by the way…”
“There’s no need for sarcasm,” Simone said. “It’s a quasi-agonic phenomenon. Their joints twist, their pseudo-muscles tense asymmetrically… I did not get a chance to tell you that Mrs. Moses also had a twisted neck when I burst in on her.”
“I see,” I said. “Quasi-muscles, pseudo-joints… You’re not a child, Simone, you need to grasp the fact that any crime can be explained away perfectly logically if you deploy enough fantasy and mystification. But reasonable people don’t believe in that kind of logic.”
“I expected you to raise this objection, Peter,” Simone said. “All of this is very easy to verify. Give them the accumulator, they’ll bring back Olaf in your presence. After all, you want Olaf to be alive again…”
“That’s not going to happen,” I said immediately.
“Why? You don’t believe it, they’re offering proof. What’s the problem?”
I cradled my poor, bandaged head.
What was the problem, really? Why was I listening to this nonsense? Give him a rifle and tell him to take up watch on the roof like a good citizen whose duty it was to uphold the law. Lock the Moseses in the basement. And Luarvik too. The basement was made of concrete, it would withstand a direct hit… Put the Barnstokers there too, and Kaisa. And then hunker down. As a last resort I could give them the Moseses. Champ wasn’t to be trifled with. That’s assuming, god willing, that he’d negotiate…
“Well, why are you being quiet?” Simone asked. “Nothing to say?”
But I did have something to say.
“I’m not a scientist,” I said slowly. “I’m a police officer. There are too many lies around this suitcase… Wait a second, don’t interrupt me. I didn’t interrupt you… I am ready to believe everything you say. Really. Let Olaf and the broad be robots. That makes it even worse. Mrs. Moses has already committed… that is to say, she’s been used to commit several crimes already. A terrible weapon like that in the hands of gangsters—no thank you. If I could, I would gladly deactivate Mrs. Moses too. And you’re suggesting that I, a police officer, return the murder weapon to these gangsters! Do you understand what you’re saying?”
Simone slapped his forehead. He was at a loss.
“Listen to me,” he said. “If gangsters fly in, we’re all done for. You lied about the carrier pigeons, right? There aren’t any police coming, are there? But if we help Moses and Luarvik escape, at least our consciences will be clean.”
“Your conscience will be clean,” I said. “But mine will be filthy. A police official would have directly helped criminals get away.”
“They aren’t criminals!” Simone said.
“They’re criminals!” I said. “They’re the real gangsters. You heard Hinkus’s confession. Moses was a member of Champ’s gang. Moses organized and executed several daring attacks, causing the government and many private individuals a huge amount of damage. To be totally frank, Moses has at least twenty-five years of hard labor coming to him, and I’m obligated to do everything I can to make sure he serves them.”
“Dammit,” Simone said. “Don’t you get it? They forced him! They blackmailed him into joining the band. He had no way out!”
“That’s up to the courts to decide,” I said coldly.
Simone leaned back in his chair and looked at me through narrowed eyes.
“You’re turning out to be a real goon, Glebsky,” he said. “I would have never expected it.”
“Watch your mouth,” I said. “You’ve got your own affairs to take care of, anyway. What’s on the menu tonight? Sensual pleasures?”
Simone bit his lip.
“There’s your first contact,” he muttered. “There’s your meeting of two worlds.”
“Get off my case, Simone,” I said angrily. “And get out of here. You’re starting to annoy me.”
He stood up and walked to the door. His head was drooping, his shoulders slumped. On the threshold he paused and half-turned, saying,
“You’ll regret this, Glebsky. You’ll be ashamed. Very ashamed.”
“Perhaps,” I said dryly. “That’s my business… By the way, can you shoot a gun?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Get a shotgun from the owner and go up on the roof. It’s possible that pretty soon we’ll all have to do a little shooting.”
He left without saying another word. I rubbed my swollen shoulder carefully. What a vacation. And as for how it would end, I still had no idea. What the hell, could they really be aliens? It all fits together so well… “You’ll be ashamed, Glebsky”… Who knows, maybe I would be. But what am I supposed to do? What difference did it make whether they were aliens or not? Where did it say that aliens are allowed to rob banks? Earthlings can’t, but aliens… oh well, that’s another matter. Okay. Then what am I supposed to do? The siege was about to start, and my troops were completely unreliable.
I picked the phone up, just in case. Nothing. The line was dead. Alek, that swine. Couldn’t get an alarm system, could you? And what if someone were to suddenly develop appendicitis? The miserable miser, all he wanted to do was charge his clients more…
There was another knock on the door, and once again I quickly grabbed the Luger. This time, I found myself face to face with Mr. Moses himself: the werewolf, the Venusian, the same old rutabaga with the same old mug in his hand.
“Sit by the door,” I said. “There’s the chair.”
“I can stand,” he grumbled, looking severely at me.
“Suit yourself,” I said. “What do you want?”
Still bristling, he took a sip from his mug.
“What more proof do you need?” he asked. “You’re killing us. Everyone understands. Everyone, except you. What do you need from us?”
“Whoever you are,” I said. “You’ve committed a series of crimes. And you will have to answer for them.”
He sniffed loudly, walked to the chair and sat down.
“Of course I should have taken my case to you a long time ago,” he said. “But I kept hoping the whole time that somehow it would work itself out, and that I could succeed in avoiding contact with the authorities. If it wasn’t for that damned accident, I would be long gone from here. There wouldn’t have been any sort of murder. You would have found the Finch tied up and unwound the whole tangle of crimes that Champion accomplished with my help. I swear that all the costs that have fallen to you due to my presence here will be reimbursed. Some of them I can pay right now—I’m ready to hand over official government currency totaling around a million crowns. The rest, your government will receive in gold, pure gold. What else do you require?”
Looking at him wasn’t doing me any good. It wasn’t doing me any good because I was starting to feel sorry for him. I was sitting face to face with an obvious criminal, feeling sorry as I listened to him. It was a sort of delusion, and in order to shake off this delusion, I asked dryly:
“So you were the one who ruined my table and stuck the note to it?”
“Yes. I was afraid that if I didn’t, a draft would blow the note away. More importantly, I wanted you to realize that this wasn’t a hoax.”
“The gold watch?…”
“That was also me. And the Browning. I needed you to believe, and to take an interest in Hinkus and arrest him.”
“It was sloppily done,” I said. “Everything worked out the opposite of what you intended. I didn’t think that Hinkus was a gangster: what I thought was that someone was trying to make me believe he was a gangster.”
“Is that so?” Moses said. “I see… Well, that was to be expected, I suppose. I am not able to pull such things off… that’s not why I’m here…”