Bushell spent the next forty-five minutes taking notes. The pace was less frantic than it had been the night before: Sally Reese would find a tidbit, pass it on, and then continue for another couple of pages before finding another.
Not all of what she found struck him as relevant, either. That Dr. Malcolm Desmond, the Gainsborough scholar, had been expelled from a preparatory school for unnatural vice might have been important in a different case. But the Sons of Liberty despised that sort of thing far more than the authorities did. Dr. Desmond was unlikely to be one of theirs.
Dr. Walter Pine, the historian of George Ill’s long reign, had signed several petitions protesting the conciliatory stance the NAU had taken in the latest round of border talks with the Holy Alliance. The Independence Party had circulated some of those petitions. How much that meant, Bushell couldn’t say. The scene designer (Bushell snorted when he heard that - as if The Two Georges needed a fancy setting for display!), Christopher Parker, had two arrests for driving a steamer while intoxicated. Sally Reese made little clicking noises at such depravity, but Bushell didn’t think it was the sort of thing likely to turn a man into a Son of Liberty.
Then Sir Horace’s secretary got to the dossier on Kathleen Flannery. The first thing she reported was Kathleen’s broken engagement to Kyril Lozovsky. “Yes, I know about that,” Bushell said. “She mentioned it last night.”
“She must have reckoned you’d find out anyway,” Sally Reese said, accurately enough, but in a way that irked Bushell. She flipped through pages one after another. After a moment, she let out a little hiss of almost malicious triumph. “Here’s something else. She’s been subscribing to Common Sense for the past eight or nine years. Did she mention that, Colonel Bushell?”
Bushell pursed his lips, as if tasting something sour. “No, as a matter of fact, she didn’t.” He wished Kathleen had told him that. Common Sense was as near to an official journal as the Sons of Liberty had. With Boston Irish money behind it, it lambasted the Crown and the Empire every month, but somehow managed to stay just this side of open treason.
“You want to know what I think, Colonel, I think that’s a disgraceful rag, and anybody who puts down good money to buy it ought to be ashamed of himself.” Sally Reese was a little on the deaf side, and spoke loudly over the telephone. She also had a harsh prairie accent that took any possible element of compromise from what she said: she sounded like a preacher sure of his own righteousness.
“You may be right,” Bushell answered. Had anyone asked him he would have said much the same thing himself. But hearing it in tones Moses wouldn’t have presumed to use coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments reflexively made him want to disagree. He didn’t; he couldn’t afford to argue with her, not when he needed her help. “Can you arrange for those to go out by air today?”
“I’ll do it, Colonel,” she answered. “I’ll do it right now, and take my luncheon later. We have to get The Two Georges back.”
There he found no room for disagreement. “Thank you, Sally,” he said. “Good-bye.” He hung up and lit a cigar. “Common Sense,” he muttered, shaking his head. She should have told him that. Maybe she’d assumed the RAMs wouldn’t know. Or maybe she’d thought it nothing out of the ordinary. He couldn’t decide which idea bothered him more.
He got no time to brood about it. Samuel Stanley walked into the office. Bushell waved him to a chair. His adjutant took out a cigar, too. When he lit it, the lucifer in his hand shook. Bushell nodded, recognizing the symptoms. “How much coffee have you had this morning?” he asked.
“Enough to let me live through the day - I hope,” Stanley answered. “With the sort of luck we’ve been having, enough to keep me from sleeping tonight, so I can start the same way tomorrow.”
Bushell looked up to - and through - the ceiling. “Don’t listen to him, God. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Samuel Stanley chuckled. He blew a smoke ring. “Here’s hoping you’re right. A couple of things I need to ask you, Chief: who’s going to head up the investigation team for The Two Georges, and whom will you send out into the held to interview the Independence Party people and whatever Sons of Liberty we can get to in the next couple of days?”
“Me,” Bushell said.
Stanley nodded. A good many years in the army had taught him to think well of officers who led from the front. But, in the reasonable tones he would have used to remind a subaltern to think things through before he started spewing words, he asked, “You for which, sir? You can’t do both.”
Bushell was in no mood to be reasonable. “The hell I can’t,” he said. “I was personally responsible for The Two Georges’ going missing, and I am personally responsible for getting it back. I have no intention of sitting here on my arse shuffling papers at a damned desk.” He looked up at Stanley, who was grinning. “Does that particular speech remind you of anyone you know, Sam?”
“You mean me?” His adjutant’s brown face was a study in innocence. Nonetheless, he persisted, “If you’re going to be in the field, Chief, we’ll need somebody back here coordinating what everybody’s doing. You won’t have the time to handle both assignments at once.”
That was common sense, too, and of a better sort than came out of Boston. Bushell yielded - up to a point. “All right, Sam, here’s what I’ll do: I’ll make, hmm, Major Rhodes headquarters coordinator for the investigation. I like Gordon, and he’d be right for the job - he’s patient, he doesn’t panic, and he has an eye for detail. But when I’m in the office, things will go to me before they go to him.”
“Yes, sir,” Samuel Stanley said, as Bushell had to Sir Martin Luther King. “I hope it works out all right.”
That was as close to criticism as he would come.
Bushell got up from behind his desk. He walked over to a bookcase and pulled out a telephone directory: not an obvious tool of police work, perhaps, but an important one. Sure enough, Independence Party headquarters had a listing. He scrawled the address down on a sheet torn from a scribbling-block.
Samuel Stanley read over his shoulder, as he had when Bushell unfolded the note from the Sons of Liberty. That had been only half a day earlier; it seemed half a lifetime. Stanley grunted. “They’re out there in the back of beyond, are they? Good place for them.”
“Isn’t that the truth?” The valley north and west of the central city of New Liverpool was still half given over to farming: oranges and lemons, strawberries and maize, chickens and turkeys and pigs. But more and more homes had gone up there in the past generation, and business districts to serve their needs. The people in the valley, or many of them, had a clannish streak: no wonder the Independence Party was trying to take root there.
Stanley said, “You’ll be an hour getting out and another hour coming back. That won’t leave you a whole lot of time for work this afternoon before your press conference.”
“What a pity,” Bushell said, as he had to Thirkettle. He sighed. “This once, the reporters get a fair shot at me. From now on, God willing, I’ll be too busy.”
“That’s why you want to spend all your time in the field,” Samuel Stanley said, with the air of a man who has had a revelation.
“Who, me?” Bushell said. “While I’m gone this morning, Sam, I want you to give your notebook from last night, and mine, too, to Gordon Rhodes. Tell him I want him to put all the pieces together by the time I get back, so we know who was where and who saw whom.”
“That’s a lot of work for a few hours,” his adjutant said doubtfully.