“Chief - “ Samuel Stanley began in worried tones. He hadn’t cared for Sergeant Fuller’s suggestion either, then. The sergeant, though, grinned from ear to ear. Bushell would not have cared to be on the receiving end of that grin.
Elgin Goldsmith started to shrug, winced, and stopped halfway. “Go on, then, you damned Okhrana man, if you’re about to. Couldn’t make me hurt no worse than I do already.”
“Oh yes, he could,” Sergeant Fuller said, sounding as if he looked forward to the prospect - and also as if he knew what he was talking about.
Bushell turned his head away from the prisoner before he sighed. One of the things he’d learned was that, unfortunately, courage did not reside only in the hearts of those who were by his standards good men. Villains had their share of it, too: and, of course, no man was ever a villain in his own eyes. Goldsmith no doubt reckoned himself a martyr to the cause of liberty. To him, the cause justified gunrunning, murder, and whatever other crimes he’d committed.
To Bushell, no cause justified crimes. While he might threaten torture, he would not inflict it. “How many rifles have you sent to New Liverpool?” he asked. Goldsmith said nothing. Bushell tried again: “Who pays you to send the rifles, and how much?”
When Goldsmith still refused to talk, Sergeant Fuller said, “Why don’t you walk out into the woods, Colonel? I’ll get your answers for you, and you won’t have to know how I did it.” Noncommissioned officers did many useful things for their superiors in that fashion, but Bushell shook his head. He might not see what Fuller did, but he’d know.
The Marine sergeant shrugged; his was not to argue with a colonel. Elgin Goldsmith visibly gloated. That came closer than any of Fuller’s suggestions to making Bushell want to let the Marine loose on him. Instead, he turned away himself. “Let’s see what we can find in the building where they were living,” he said to Samuel Stanley. “Maybe that will tell us what our charming friend won’t.”
“Maybe,” Stanley said. As they walked toward the grocer’s shop, he added quietly, for Bushell’s ears alone, “For a second there, Chief, I thought you really were going to knock that bugger around.”
“The only time I was tempted was when he sneered at me,” Bushell answered. “If he’d caught me instead of the other way round, he wouldn’t have thought twice.” He stepped into the gloom inside the shop. “To hell with that. What have we here?”
As his eyes adjusted, he saw dark stains on the rammed-earth floor. A trail of blood led toward the back and, when he followed it, out into the alley behind the grocer’s shop. Maybe he hadn’t fired at an imaginary target back there after all, then.
Behind him, Samuel Stanley whistled softly. “Will you just look at this, Chief?”
Bushell had followed the blood trail into the back room without paying attention to anything else there. Now he ducked back inside and turned around. He sucked in his breath in what was almost a gasp: a couple of dozen Nagant rifles hung on nails that had been driven into the boards of the wall. On the floor were piled wooden chests. The top one was open, and half empty. He reached in and picked up a metal five-round box magazine of slightly different shape from the one that fed his Lee-Enfield.
“They had all the ammunition they needed, didn’t they?” Stanley said.
“Enough to fight a small war,” Bushell agreed. “All of it Russian gear.” He looked north, toward Alaska. Stanley nodded, understanding that huntsman’s gaze without a word of explanation. Next to the wooden ammunition chests stood a smaller one made of painted metal. A lock held it closed. Bushell attacked the chest with the butt of his rifle, venting some of the fury he hadn’t let himself turn on Elgin Goldsmith. The lock was made of stern stuff; it did not yield. After a few strokes, though, the hasp that held it to the chest broke off.
Bushell lifted the lid. For a moment, he just stared. “Lord have mercy,” Samuel Stanley said softly.
“How many roubles d’you reckon there are?”
“A great bloody lot of them,” Bushell answered. Even in the dim light of the back room, the gold coins gleamed and sparkled. Next to English sovereigns, they were little things, each one worth two shillings, a penny ha’penny. Enough of them, though, added up to a good sum of money. There were more than enough here for that.
“I wonder how often those four shipped roubles out of here along with rifles,” Stanley said. “The money and the guns all ended up in the wrong hands.”
“I know one set of hands that closed on the money,” Bushell said: “that printer I raided. He got paid in roubles for sightseeing brochures about the Queen Charlotte Islands, and spent them on those obscene pamphlets about the princesses.”
“You’d have the devil’s own time proving it before a magistrate,” Stanley said. “A smart barrister would talk about circumstantial evidence and reasonable doubt until a jury couldn’t tell right from Tuesday.” He quoted Shakespeare, something he was fond of doing: “ ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’“
Normally, Bushell would have joined him for a round of cursing at men whose principal task, as he saw it, was keeping villains out of the gaol cells they deserved. Here, though, he kept his equanimity. “I don’t care about barristers and judges. I know what I know. The Sons of Liberty here got the Nagant that killed Tricky Dick, and they got the roubles for Titus Hackett to spread his filth around. That means those two are connected here, even if neither one knew what the other was doing.”
His adjutant nodded. “It also means both operations were getting their money from the same place.”
Now he turned his head toward Russian Alaska.
“We’ll have a day of reckoning,” Bushell said. “First, we need to put our own house in order. Once we get The Two Georges back, we’ll be in a better position to ask questions of Duke Orlov in Victoria and also of Sergei Pavlov back in New Liverpool.”
“Indeed we will,” Stanley said with a certain anticipatory relish. “One always assumes Russian consuls are spies. Now we’ll have evidence to ship Sergei back to St. Petersburg. And speaking of evidence, let’s see what else we can come up with here.”
Before continuing the search, Bushell lowered the lid to the little metal chest, lest a Royal Marine find temptation stronger than duty. The trouble with gold was its very anonymity; any banker anywhere in the world would give you two shillings, a penny ha’penny for every gold rouble you handed him. Away from a setting like this, the coins weren’t evidence, they were just money. As Stanley had said, a barrister would have no trouble establishing reasonable doubt about the provenance of the printer’s roubles. Up here near the border, a lot of Russian gold would be in circulation, just as a good many British sovereigns were apt to be floating around in Sitka and Kodiak.
But for the rifles and money, the interior of the grocer’s shop yielded little in the way of evidence. Geoff, Patrick, Elgin, and Benjamin had apparently whiled away some of their time with tracts full of hatred similar to those Joseph Watkins had had in his flat, but those, however distasteful, were not against the law. The traps and lines stored in the front room said the Sons of Liberty truly had made part of their living hunting and fishing, as they’d claimed.
“This place is too bloody neat,” Samuel Stanley complained. “It’s almost as if they knew they were going to have visitors, but we made sure they hadn’t a clue.”
“Just because we haven’t found everything doesn’t mean it’s not here,” Bushell said. He snapped his fingers. “For instance - where’s their rubbish pitch?”