Someone said something. He looked up, startled. The whiskey vision had been so vivid, he’d almost lost himself in it. There was a hell of a thing. He’d been soberer than usual these past few days, but the bottle had hold of him even when he wasn’t drinking.
Evidently for his benefit, Shikalimo repeated, “Does anyone see any names he recognizes?”
None of the RAMs said anything. Shikalimo looked down at his desk. His faith in the omniscience and infallibility of the NAU’s top police force had just gone down a peg, or maybe two. He was a young man yet, Bushell thought. He had a lot of disappointments ahead of him yet. Then, hesitantly, Kathleen Flannery said, “I don’t know if this is the same Joseph Kilbride as the one I’ve heard of before, but there is a man by that name who collects art from the later colonial period, just before the days when the Union was organized.”
Bushell sent her a sharp glance. He’d been wishing Shikalimo hadn’t given her the list. If she saw on it someone whose name she knew, she could easily keep quiet about it and alert him. Now she’d identified somebody. He didn’t know what to make of that. Maybe she was sincerely trying to help the investigation. Recovering The Two Georges would put her career back on the rails. But if she put suspicion on the wrong man, the right one could carry on unhindered. Sylvanus Greeley had a more basic question: “What does his taste in art collecting have to do with the case?”
Shikalimo shifted in his seat. As clearly as if he’d shouted it, Bushell could read what he was thinking: this man may be a RAM, but he has no imagination. He was thinking the same thing himself. But he let Kathleen explain. She, after all, had raised the issue.
By the tone she took - rather like a teacher explaining fractions to a room full of restive trade-school students - her estimate of Greeley’s candlepower was also none too high. “In the 1760s, there was quite a bit of tension between the mother country and the colonies, and talk of their breaking away. The Sons of Liberty still think that would have been a good idea. It might have happened - or might have been tried, anyhow - if His Majesty’s government and the leaders of the colonies hadn’t worked out a modus vivendi.”
“I still don’t see - “ Greeley began, but then he held up a finger. “Oh, wait. Maybe I do. You’re saying that anybody who’s interested in art from that time would be interested in other things, too, like us breaking off from England.”
Greeley wasn’t an idiot after all. A muttonhead, perhaps, but not an idiot. “And a half plus a half really is one,” Bushell muttered under his breath. “God save the King-Emperor.”
Kathleen sent him a curious look, but then nodded to Sylvanus Greeley. “That’s my idea, anyhow - or that he may be interested in those other things, too. For that matter, I don’t know whether this is the Joseph Kilbride who collects art. It’s not the most common name, but it’s not precisely a rare one, either.”
“I can find out this Kilbride’s avocations, I expect,” Shikalimo said. He too looked toward Bushell, silently asking whether the track was worth pursuing. Bushell sent back an almost imperceptible nod. He didn’t like relying on Kathleen, but he didn’t see that he had much choice. Had she named Joseph Kilbride after someone else had proposed a different target for investigation, he would have thought a red herring more likely.
Shikalimo picked up the telephone. He spoke into it in his own language, but every now and then a name or phrase in English would come through: Joseph Kilbride, colonial art, Sons of Liberty. Hearing them embedded in the throaty Iroquois language bemused Bushell. When Shikalimo hung up, he returned to English to say, “I’ll have four or five people checking on that. We should know soon.”
Sure enough, the phone rang in less than ten minutes. Shikalimo listened, murmured, “Oh, jolly good,” and laid the handset in its cradle. “Hasanoanda gets things done,” he said with a smile. “He rang up the Doshoweh Sentinel, as being most likely to know what hobbyhorses a white man might ride. Sure enough, this is the Joseph Kilbride of whom Dr. Flannery has heard.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Samuel Stanley said.
“I propose we get over to Mr. Kilbride’s residence and ask some questions of him,” Sylvanus Greeley boomed, as if he’d found out about Kilbride through his own skill at detection. Since the move was so obvious even a proved muttonhead could see it, Bushell forbore to argue.
IX
Shikalimo’s Supermarine saloon held himself, the two local RAMs, and the three travelers. The backseat made a tight squeeze, but Bushell minded less than he might have, for he was pressed up against Kathleen Flannery. As good manners demanded, they both pretended to ignore the close contact. Bushell, though, was very much aware of what he affected to disregard. He wondered if Kathleen was, too.
As he had when he picked up Bushell and Stanley at the train station, Shikalimo drove the powerful Supermarine as if he were in a road race. “Have a care, there,” Charles Lucas protested feebly when he shot around a lorry and then swung back into the lane it occupied so abruptly that his passengers slid from side to side as much as their cramped quarters would allow.
“Haven’t had a wreck yet,” Shikalimo said gaily. He changed lanes again, for no purpose Bushell could see other than horrifying Lucas.
With three large men in the front seat and only the roadster’s small side windows to look out of, Bushell didn’t see as much of Doshoweh as he would have wanted. He did note that, once they got away from the center of the city, it stopped looking quite so much like any other town of similar size in the NAU. For one thing, except in scattered districts, signs written in English almost disappeared. As they were speeding through one such district, Shikalimo remarked, “A lot of whites here.” The houses bore him out: they were clapboards and half-timbered Tudors that wouldn’t have looked out of place in New England or New York.
Away from the white parts of town, though, houses as he knew them largely disappeared. Instead, long, narrow buildings of bark and timber framing stretched on and on, sometimes for fifty or sixty feet, sometimes for twice that. Children too young for school played around them, while women cultivated maize and beans and squashes in gardens that replaced lawns.
Shikalimo said, “Some of our people live in the ganosote, the bark house, because they can afford no better. Others, though, prefer our traditional homes for other reasons: they enjoy the sense of community the ganosote gives them. I mean that literally as well as metaphorically; more often than not, all the families in a bark house will be of the same clan.”
Bushell thought of the block of flats in which he lived. People came and went almost at random. He knew only a handful of his fellow lodgers by name. “Maybe your people have the right idea,” he said.
“Sometimes differences are just - different,” Shikalimo answered with a shrug. “When I went off to university, I wondered how you whites managed to live as naked individuals, so to speak: without the clan structure I’d taken for granted, and with even your families pale things by the standards to which I was accustomed. But, after some years of that life, coming home to the Six Nations was a shock of another sort. What I do, whom I see are dictated more by my position in the clan than my own choice. It sometimes has the feel of a strait-jacket - rather a loose-fitting one, but a straitjacket nonetheless.”