“Yankee Doodle” blared out. Bushell listened to a few bars of the jaunty, hateful tune, then lifted the needle off the platter and flicked the catch that kept the spring from unwinding further.
“You didn’t need to do that, Chief,” Samuel Stanley said quietly. “The phonogram here, the note inside they tell us it was a Sons of Liberty job. Even without ‘em, I’d have bet it was, just from how the villains carried it off.”
“Maybe I’m thorough, the way Dr. Flannery said. Or maybe I just like hurting myself.” Bushell shook his head like a man emerging from cold, deep water. “That’s about all we can do here right now. We’ll keep this room sealed off until Sergeant Singh and our own people can go over every inch of it, top to bottom. I want to talk with this Captain Macias before I call Sir Horace Bragg back in Victoria.”
“But he’s just here for the mur - ” Kathleen Flannery stopped. When she began again, she sounded almost accusatory: “You think there’s a connection.”
“Between blowing Tricky Dick’s head off and stealing The Two Georges , you mean? No, just a coincidence.” Bushell’s tone belied his words.
“But what if he hadn’t decided to come out just then?” she asked, frowning. “They couldn’t have known he would.”
“They probably would have shot someone else,” Bushell answered. “One of the picketers, one of the constables, one of the reporters out there . . .” He shook his head. “No, no one would have cared if they shot a reporter.” At Kathleen’s scandalized expression, he added, “Joke,” and knew he was telling some of the truth.
Leaving Samuel Stanley to hold the fort in the Cardigan Room, Bushell went out into the hallway and fought through the mob out there toward the stairs. Photographers fired enough flashes to make him think he’d been looking straight into the sun. Reporters yelled questions at him. He tried to limit his answers to the obvious: yes, The Two Georges was gone; yes, he thought there was a connection between the shooting of the Steamer King and the theft; no, he had no idea where the purloined painting was at the moment.
“Do you think a group you know stole the painting?” someone asked. “Or was it somebody, say, who wanted The Two Georges for itself and would try to pass it off as a copy or something like that?”
“We’ll be investigating that for some time,” Bushell answered, wishing he thought he was dealing with a fanatical art collector.
“Are the Sons of Liberty involved?” another reporter called.
“We’ll be investigating that for some time,” Bushell repeated in carefully neutral tones. “Now if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen - ”
He had to answer the same questions from the herd of dignitaries who now would not be seeing The Two Georges. Men and women of wealth, power, and influence, they waxed indignant when he was no more forthcoming with them than he had been with the press. Jonas Barber shook a forefinger in his face and almost stuck it in his eye. “See here, Colonel,” the little bald town council president snapped, “you have an obligation to make amends for your incompetence.”
“My only obligation, Your Honor, is to get The Two Georges back.” Bushell pushed past, leaving the politico dissatisfied.
The New Liverpool constables had cordoned off the area around Honest Dick’s corpse. They did not object, though, when Bushell stepped over the tape they’d laid down to keep back curious civilians. A brown-skinned man in a wide-shouldered, double-breasted suit of brown worsted came up to him, hand extended. “You would be Colonel Bushell?” he asked. “I’m Jaime Macias, captain of grand felonies.” Macias was a handsome man in his mid-thirties - young for a captain - with black hair so thick it amounted almost to a pelt and bushy black side whiskers and mustache. He glanced up toward the first floor. “I think we are going to be living in each other’s pockets with this investigation.”
“I think you’re right, Captain,” Bushell said, shaking the New Liverpool man’s hand. He glanced toward the body. “Found out anything past the obvious here?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” Captain Macias answered. He had an intonation, the ghost of an accent, that said his family had spoken Spanish in the not too distant past. “We’ve recovered one of the bullets.”
“The devil you say!” Bushell burst out. “That is good news.”
Macias nodded. His hair, shiny with pomade, glistened under the lights of the mansion. “We were lucky, too - it’s not badly damaged,” he said. He glanced down at the rubberized sheet someone - probably one of the coroner’s aides - had thrown over Honest Dick’s body. “Likely to be the one that made the neck wound, I’d say. A bullet hitting bone would have taken much more deformation.”
“No doubt.” Bushell nodded, too. When Macias didn’t go on right away, the RAM chief said, “All right, you found it. What does it tell you? Spill, Captain.”
“Interesting caliber,” Macias remarked. “It’s not a .303, which is what we thought it was when we first came upon it.”
“Interesting, indeed.” Bushell combed at his mustache with a forefinger. “Not a rifle from the British Empire, then.”
“No, not our standard caliber,” Macias agreed.
“Let me guess,” Bushell said: “A .315.”
Captain Macias shook his head. “No, it’s not a weapon from the Holy Alliance, either. With Nueva España so close, that was our next guess.”
“Well, where is it from, then?” Bushell demanded. “Prussia? One of the other German states? An Italian kingdom?”
Macias shook his head again. “It’s what some people would call a three-line rifle. Do you happen to know what a line is?”
“A tenth of an inch,” Bushell answered. “So it’s exactly .30-caliber, is it?” He ran a ringer over his mustache once more. “You don’t often see a rifle from the Russian Empire in this part of the NAU.”
“I’ve never seen one,” Jaime Macias said. “Franco-Spanish stuff, yes, that comes over the border all the time. But the Russians? No.”
“I don’t think we worry enough about the Russians, myself,” Bushell said. “The Holy Alliance is an obvious rivaclass="underline" France and Spain so close to England, all the wars between us and them, the long border between the NAU and Nueva Espana, the rivalries in Africa. . .. But the Russians aren’t our friends, either. They want to dominate the Germanies, they bump up against us and the Japanese in China, they loom over India and the Ottoman protectorates, and they keep that foothold along our northwestern frontier, too.”
“Alaska,” Macias said.
“We started offering to buy Alaska from them back in Victoria’s day,” Bushell said, “but the tsars kept saying no. Russians are good at no. But why would a Russian or somebody with a Russian rifle want to gun down the Steamer King?”
The New Liverpool constable glanced up toward the first floor of the governor’s mansion. He picked his words with some care: “Did I hear rightly that the Sons of Liberty may have had a hand in tonight’s events?”
“You heard rightly, Captain.” Bushell scowled. “And you have a point, too, worse luck. The Sons of Liberty will take anything they can get from anybody who will give it to them.” He scuffed a foot on the pavement; the toe of his shoe just missed a small, drying puddle of blood. “I don’t like thinking of the Russians and the Sons operating hand in glove here in New Liverpool.”