He rang up the William and Mary and asked if any messages had come in for him. “Yes, sir,” the hotel operator said. He heard papers being shuffled. “One from Sir Horace Bragg . . . another from Sir Horace Bragg . . . and a third from - Sir Horace Bragg. The last was not fifteen minutes ago. Do you require the number for a reply?”
“No.” Bushell hung up. So Bragg wondered what he was up to? Well, he wondered what Bragg was up to, too, and wouldn’t ring him right back. Instead, he dialed RAM headquarters and asked to be connected to Major Walter Manchester.
“I’m sorry, he’s not at his desk,” the RAM operator answered. “Who’s ringing, please?” Warily, Bushell gave his name. “Oh, very good, Colonel,” the operator said. “He gave me a number where you could reach him: it’s FLodden 2127.”
“Thanks.” Even though he hadn’t been in Victoria for some years, he knew what that number was: the central station for the Victoria city constables. Major Manchester must have made arrests of his own, and must have been as leery as Bushell of bringing his prisoners back to RAM headquarters. Bushell rang the FLodden number and spoke briefly with Manchester, letting him know where he could be reached. “We did catch ‘em napping,” the major said, as Micah Williams had. “I’ll ring you directly I squeeze anything worth knowing out of these chaps.”
“Right. I’ll do the same for you.” Bushell set the phone down. He wondered if he’d done the right thing by telephoning into RAM headquarters. Word that he’d done so was liable to get to Bragg. Still, no one there knew how to reach him. If the men he’d recruited into the cabal - and the men they’d recruited kept quiet, they could operate unsupervised a while longer. God willing, they wouldn’t need much more time. Under his breath, Bushell muttered, “We’d better not.”
The only thing left to do was use the time he’d bought as best he could. The interrogation room had old, battered furniture and walls that needed painting. It stank of stale sweat, stale tobacco, stale coffee. In his expensive tweeds, Phineas Stanage looked out of place there, like a petunia in an onion patch.
“Let me call my solicitor,” the petunia growled.
“We can hold you forty-eight hours first,” Bushell said, “as I’m sure you know perfectly well.” Stanage grunted. Bushell said, “What were you doing, meeting with Michael O’Flynn?”
“Who?” Stanage said. “Never heard of him.”
“How did a Charleroi coal miner get invited to a gathering of commercial travelers from your brewery?”
“Since I never heard of him, how can I tell you that? For all I know, he sneaked in for a pint or two and a bite to eat.”
Bushell glowered. He’d feared Stanage would be tough. “What was Eustace Venable talking about when he said he was going up to Boston to see Joseph Kilbride about it?”
“Probably a cabinet I’d ordered from him,” Stanage answered in offhand tones. “And who’s this Kilbride item? I don’t recall Venable’s ever mentioning anyone by that name.”
The note the RAMs had found referred to Joe. Bushell glowered harder. Stanage was tough. Contemptuously, Bushell said, “Don’t play stupid games with me. You tell me you don’t know Kilbride and I’ll call you a liar to your face. The two of you ran in the same pack.”
“Well, what if I have heard of him? So what? I don’t know that Venable was going up to Boston to see him. If he was, I don’t know why. And I haven’t a clue about what it is.”
“It’s The Two Georges, Mr. Stanage,” Samuel Stanley said, his voice quiet, reasonable. “We know that. You know we know that. Why not make it easy on yourself and tell us what you know?”
Stanage laughed at him. “You dumb smoke, I’ve had enough nosy police officers poke their snouts into my business to know when I’m getting whipsawed between the rough one and the sweet one. Go peddle your papers.”
Stanley walked over to him and backhanded him across the face. “Which one am I now?” he asked, quiet still.
Phineas Stanage’s head snapped back. His cheek glowed red. “I’ve had tougher louts than you work me over, too,” he snarled. “Try some more. Maybe you’ll bugger the job and leave marks my solicitor can see and take to a judge.”
“You may as well give it up,” Bushell told him. “Sir David Clarke’s spilling his worthless guts at RAM headquarters right now.” An artillery unit would sometimes let fly a few shells to see what response they drew. Firing for effect, the gun bunnies called it. Bushell was firing for effect now. Stanage shrugged. “I’ve not done anything, so he can’t hurt me.”
Like a dreadnought’s armor, he turned every question fired at him. The hands of the loudly ticking clock on the wall went round. It chimed the hours, one by one. When midnight came, Samuel Stanley said, “This is the deadline the Sons gave us. Still no word, though - I hope.”
XVI
“No word we’ve heard, anyhow.” Bushell didn’t want to call back to RAM headquarters to confirm that, or to America’s Number Ten, either. “So we go on.” He turned to Lieutenant Hammond. “If nobody else is grilling Michael O’Flynn, fetch him in here.”
“Right,” Hammond said, and, to Stanage, “Come along, you.” The brewing magnate went with him. He looked as worn as Bushell felt, but hadn’t yielded anything. Maybe that was because he didn’t know anything, but Bushell didn’t believe it for a minute. For once in his life, he wished he were an Okhrana man, to feel easy about using more than a slap in the face to squeeze answers from prisoners. Michael O’Flynn looked sleepy and rumpled when Hammond brought him into the interrogation room. He nodded to Bushell, then glanced around the room at the other RAMs and constables. “One of me and a lot of you this time,” he remarked to Bushell. “All right, have your innings.”
Bushell nodded back, not quite happily. Down a quarter-mile under Charleroi, O’Flynn and the other miners could have done anything to him; if they all told the same story afterward, they might well have got away with it, too. They’d let him do his job and go back above ground. Did he owe O’Flynn anything for that? Nothing he would ever have admitted. Even so ...
“What are you doing in Georgestown?” he demanded.
“Visiting my cousin,” O’Flynn answered. “His name’s Dermot Coneval; he sells ale for Stanage Brewery.”
They could check that. Bushell had the bad feeling it would turn out true. The Sons had shown enormous skill at nesting their lies in defensible truths. He said, “You just happened to be here now, the same way you just happened to have driven Joseph Kilbride to the Charleroi train station.”
“That’s right,” O’Flynn said. “Pure chance, every bit of it.”
“That’s your story?” Bushell stood up and stepped closer to the miner, leaning over him and staring down. O’Flynn waited for the hand or the fist or the sap he so plainly expected. Go ahead, his eyes said. Renege. Both Bushell’s hands stayed by his side. “I say you’re a liar.”
“You can say it,” O’Flynn answered. “I’m not calling the shots here.” He laughed wryly. “Not hardly, not me.”
“I say you’re a liar,” Bushell repeated, “and I say I can prove it. You don’t understand the fix you’re in, O’Flynn. We haven’t just netted up you little fish. We’ve got Sir Horace Bragg himself.” Fire for effect.
“He’s down at RAM headquarters, leaking like a cheap roof in the rain.”
“Who?” O’Flynn said. “I never heard of any Sir Horace Whoozis.” Bushell thought he was telling the truth again, but had trouble being sure. Everything the Sons of Liberty did fit into intricate patterns, and when you tried sorting out what was true and what wasn’t, as with O’Flynn’s cousin, you found yourself wandering bewildered after something briefly glimpsed in a maze of mirrors.