The pair of men in the next folder seemed more interesting. The year before, Titus Hackett and Franklin Mansfield had been charged with printing and distributing an obscene publication: a lampoon of the marital troubles of the grandchildren of George, Duke of Kent, the younger brother of Edward VIII. A copy was in the file. Bushell glanced at it. It had funny spots, but looked obscene to him, too. A jury, though, had disagreed, and let Hackett and Mansfield go free.
Bushell thought that unfortunate, but it wasn’t what really interested him about the case. The rascals’ pamphlet had got a surprisingly wide distribution around New Liverpool; they’d been able to afford to print a lot of copies. At Mansfield’s house, the arresting officer had found out how they’d been able to do so: with a goodly supply of gold Russian roubles.
No one had been able to prove Mansfield came by those roubles illegally. At the time, they hadn’t seemed to mean much. But when you put them together with a three-line rifle, you had to start wondering what the Russian Empire was up to in and around New Liverpool. Bushell noted Mansfield’s home address, and Hackett’s, and that of the print shop they ran together. Come the morning, he would have some questions to put to them.
He flipped rapidly through the rest of the folders, noting down names of other Sons - some Roundheads, some not - who had been charged with relatively recent offenses. Most of the crimes of which they’d been accused were of a simpler nature than that of Hackett and Mansfield. One Joseph Watkins, for instance, had been charged with heaving a brick through the front window of the local office of the League of Colored Citizens, but was released before trial for lack of sufficient evidence. Looking at Joseph Watkins, Bushell would have bet he was guilty of something. He had the same tough, violent stare as Peter Jarrold and, the report noted, a large eagle tattooed on his chest and a smaller one on his right bicep. But the law couldn’t prove beyond reasonable doubt that he’d committed this particular crime, and so he was free.
A couple of other Sons had stomped a Nuevespañolan man nearly to death outside a tavern. They were behind bars; witnesses had identified them beyond doubt. Another gentleman, the late Andrew Kincaid, had tried cracking a Sikh’s skull with a length of lead pipe while shouting, “Go back to India, you stinking wog!” The Sikh, true to the martial tenets of his faith, had been armed with a dagger, and had let the air out of Mr. Kincaid for good.
“And we don’t miss him one bloody bit, either,” Bushell murmured.
When he was done, he stacked the folders in a single pile and stared at them. They’d helped less than he’d hoped. For one thing, the Sons were a close-mouthed bunch. Even when they were caught, they didn’t rat on their friends.
For another, few of the locals, at any rate, seemed to have the brains to have pulled off anything like the theft of The Two Georges. They were bruisers, ruffians, men who couldn’t succeed and sought someone outside themselves to blame for their failure. They knew how to hate, but not how to think. The thieves at the governor’s mansion had been brilliantly effective.
The door to the records room opened. “Colonel Bushell?” someone called. Bushell recognized Lieutenant Thirkettle’s voice.
“I’m here,” he answered mournfully. “Let me refile these. Is it that time already?”
“Yes, sir, it is.” Thirkettle sounded indecently cheerful, but then, he wasn’t about to face a firing squad, or, worse, a pack of ravening reporters. He asked, “Can I get you anything before you speak to the press, sir?”
“A cup of hemlock?” Bushell suggested.
“Sir?” Thirkettle didn’t understand. Bushell shook his head. They weren’t training them in the classics the way they had in his day.
Once, in the cinema, Bushell had watched wolves pull down a moose. They’d flung themselves on the poor beast and started to feed while it still lived. He’d never thought to find himself playing the role of that moose until he walked into the press briefing room and stood before the reporters and photographers from all over the NAU. They jammed it to the point where the New Liverpool fire marshal should have taken notice and ousted a third of them.
The fire marshal and his minions were nowhere to be seen. Even had they been around, throwing out a third of the reporters, however gratifying Bushell might have found it, wouldn’t have done him any good. The survivors would have been plenty to pull him down and eat him alive. A fusillade of flashbulbs greeted him when he entered the briefing room and followed him to the podium. The big tin reflectors behind the flashbulbs sent all their light straight into his face and left him dazzled. By this time tomorrow, his visage would be splashed across half the dailies in the country. His Hawthorne neighbors would no longer be in doubt about what he did for a living. He tapped at the microphone. It was live. Whether it would help him overcome the din - the baying, he thought - of the press was another question. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, and then again, louder:
“Ladies and gentlemen.” The din diminished, but did not vanish. After half a minute or so, Bushell concluded it wouldn’t vanish. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll bear with me, I have a brief statement I’d like to make. Then I’ll take your questions.”
A rather loud quiet descended. Into it, Bushell said, “Last night, Honest Dick the Steamer King was murdered by gunfire outside Governor Burnett’s mansion here in New Liverpool. Not long thereafter, an alarm inside the mansion went off. It was discovered that a gang of at least three individuals had succeeded in absconding withThe Two Georges, which was then on private display at the mansion and was soon to have been shown to the public. At present, the perpetrators remain at large. We have had no communication from them since the painting was stolen. This morning, a spokesman for the Independence Party formally denied any connection between his organization and the theft of The Two Georges.”
His pause told the reporters he had finished. Hands flew into the air. Men and women shouted at the tops of their lungs. Bushell heard not a word of it. He cupped his hand behind his ear. The racket abated. The reporter asked his question again: “The Independence Party denies involvement. What about the Sons of Liberty?”
“No spokesman of theirs has denied involvement,” Bushell said dryly. That drew scattered laughs, but also calls for more detail. Reluctantly, Bushell added, “We did find at the crime scene certain things which are consistent with its being the work of the Sons, yes.”
“What sort of things?” four people shouted at the same time.
“I’d rather not discuss that publicly,” Bushell said. “Some people like to imitate infamous crimes or pretend they were involved, and we’d sooner have an easy time than a hard one sorting out imitators from the real Sons of Liberty.” He mentally crossed his fingers. Sometimes that sort of appeal worked, but sometimes it just fanned the hunger of the press.
This time, it worked, at least for the moment. A woman in a royal-blue silk dress asked, “Are you certain there’s a connection between Tricky Dick’s murder and the theft of the painting?”
“As certain as I can be without interrogating the perpetrators, yes,” Bushell answered. “Using a diversion is a common military trick.” He spread his hands. “This time, unfortunately, it worked against us.” He pointed to a man in the third row wearing a gaudy silk cravat. “Yes, sir?”
The reporter preened a moment on being recognized, then said, “We are given to understand that The Two Georges was taken from Governor Burnett’s mansion in a lorry. Why was that lorry allowed to leave?”
“I wish it hadn’t been,” Bushell answered. “No, wait - I know that doesn’t answer your question. When the lorry left, no one outside the mansion had the slightest notion The Two Georges was in it. We did know, however, that Honest Dick had been shot at long range, from the brush-covered knoll across Sunset Highway from the governor’s residence and its grounds. The New Liverpool constable at the turnoff to Sunset Highway reasonably concluded the lorry driver could not have been involved in the murder, and let him go. Reasonable conditions, worse luck, aren’t always right ones.”