Bushell strode over to him. “Are you afraid of that fat tun? Don’t be. The worst he can do is give you the sack, and a man who’s willing to work won’t lack a situation long. And if you tell us what you know, you’ll be helping us track down The Two Georges.”
He hadn’t mentioned the painting till then. The clerk’s eyes got big again. “Really?” he breathed, and stopped looking toward Anson Whitby. “I remember he said once that he liked having Indians come into the shop because he got their money and he got them drunk, too. I could be wrong, but I think the person he said it to was Mr. Whitby.”
“It was not,” Whitby said evenly. “As I told you, I never heard him express any such opinion - nor any complimentary one, either. He is, as I’ve noted, sparing of speech.”
Shikalimo said, “Mr. Whitby, if you are discovered to be tampering with the truth in this matter, I assure you that you shall regret it.” Had he made the threat in obvious anger, it would have been easier to shrug off. Instead, he stated it as if it were a simple law of nature, inexorable as night following day. Bushell would not have cared to have such a warning leveled at him.
“I regret nothing,” Whitby said. “The facts are as I state them. If you prefer a clerk’s word to mine, I can do nothing but conclude it better fits some theory you have already concocted.”
“Thank you both,” Bushell said to Whitby and the clerk, and headed for the door. Samuel Stanley followed at once, willing to back whatever play he made. Shikalimo began to expostulate, but found himself talking to Bushell’s back. He went after Bushell with obvious reluctance. So did the local RAMs and Kathleen Flannery.
Out on the sidewalk, Charles Lucas exclaimed, “That fast bastard, he’s lying through his teeth, Colonel. What are you doing letting him off like that?”
“Of course he’s lying,” Bushell said, which touched off a fresh round of protests. “So what?”
That startled the others into a moment’s silence. A grin suddenly spread over Samuel Stanley’s face.
“‘So what?’ is right,” he said. “Whitby’s not the chap we’re after, no matter what sort of villain he turns out to be in his own right.”
“You’ve got it,” Bushell agreed. “We want Kilbride. We’ve found out enough to know he leans toward the Sons of Liberty. All I want to do now is go to the train station, find out if he bought a ticket there, where in Pennsylvania he was going, and whether he got on the train. If he did, I’m going after him.”
Shikalimo nodded thoughtfully. “You focus on the essentials, Colonel. This is worth remembering.”
“I wouldn’t have known Kilbride was essential if Dr. Flannery hadn’t recognized his name.” Bushell turned to Kathleen. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” she answered. “As I’ve been trying to tell you, Colonel, I really do want to get The Two Georges back.”
“Yes, you have said that,” Bushell agreed, which was not the same as admitting he completely believed her. To his relief, she did not seem to notice the distinction. That she’d spotted Kilbride’s name made him more inclined to trust her, but he could not escape the nagging fear that the pursuit on which he was embarking was intended to distract him from the true trail. A drowning man, though, grabbed for any spar he could reach.
Shikalimo was busy focusing on the essentials: “When we go to the station, we should be armed with a picture of the honorable Mr. Kilbride.” For a man so young, he had a nice command of irony. “I wonder if that butler could be persuaded to part with one without our having to go to the trouble of obtaining a search warrant. If he liked his master better, I should say no, but as things are - “ He let that hang, continuing in a slightly different vein: “I do sometimes find the Anglo-Saxon insistence on having the proper papers even in emergencies a curious bit of superstition.”
“It’s a better way to do things than the one the Russians use, where the Okhrana can knock on your door - knock down your door - with any excuse or none,” Bushell said. Shikalimo shrugged, but was too polite to take the argument any further.
They drove back to Joseph Kilbride’s mansion. “A picture?” the butler said. “I can do that. Just let me nip one out from where it won’t be noticed.” He disappeared. From inside the house came a woman’s voice (perhaps Kilbride’s latest lady friend, Bushell thought, or perhaps just the housekeeper), then his, then the woman’s again, louder. The butler returned, handed Bushell a photograph, and declared in stentorian tones, “As I told you before, you are not welcome here without the due legal formalities.” He tipped Bushell a wink while slamming the door in his face.
In deference to the charade, they went out to Shikalimo’s steamer before looking at the picture. “Lovely chap,” Bushell murmured as Joseph Kilbride stared pugnaciously up from the palm of his hand. Kilbride looked more like a retired prizefighter than an art collector. He had a large Celtic face and a large broken nose. His eyes were pale and hard and shrewd.
“If they sold him a ticket, they’ll remember him,” Samuel Stanley said.
“Then we’ll find out if they did,” Shikalimo said, and put the Supermarine in gear. Returning to the train station was almost like coming home. After you’d been on the road for a while, any place you saw twice seemed intimately familiar - and train stations were all pretty much alike to begin with. The men and women in the ticket cages exclaimed in excitement when Major Shikalimo, the RAMs, and Kathleen Flannery descended on them.
“Oh, him,” a woman with a grey streak in her midnight hair said when she saw Kilbride’s photograph.
“Yes, I sold him a ticket.” She laughed. “He tried to bargain over the price, like a man buying terrapins at the fish market.”
“Where was he going?” Bushell asked.
The ticket seller frowned. “Charleroi, that’s it,” she said after a moment. Seeing Bushell’s blank look, she added, “It’s south of Pittsburgh.”
“Mining town,” Shikalimo put in. “But then, around Pittsburgh they’re all mining towns.” He sighed. “The NAU needs the coal, needs the electricity, but that’s an ugly part of the world - as if someone took a lot of the ugliness from the rest of the Union and dropped it there.”
“Charleroi,” Samuel Stanley muttered, half to himself. “Charleroi. . . Why have I heard that name before?” He took a couple of steps back and forth, then suddenly straightened. “Some of the coal miners who were out picketing when Tricky Dick got shot came from Charleroi.” He got a faraway look in his eyes as he went back over the evidence he’d gathered what seemed an age before. “McGaffigan, O’Flynn - somebody else, too, I forget who.”
“Isn’t that interesting?” Bushell said. “Do you think things might be coming together after all?” He laughed. “Probably something in the rules against that, but we’ll find out.”
“You’re going on to Charleroi, then?” Kathleen Flannery asked.
“No, Dr. Flannery - we are.” He’d wanted to take her to Niagara Falls, by all accounts one of the most beautiful spots in the British Empire. The Pennsylvania coal mines did not strike him as an adequate substitute.
When Shikalimo dropped Bushell, Stanley, and Kathleen Flannery at the train station the next afternoon, he said, “We often look over the border and think how lucky we are.” The Pennsylvania Railroad train that would pull out of Doshoweh, bound for Pittsburgh and points south, had no name. It was just a train, doing a job that had to be done but didn’t seem worth commemorating in any way. Bushell took that as a symptom of what the Iroquois was talking about. Nobody much wanted to go to western Pennsylvania. Sometimes, though, you had to, like it or not.
With one exception, service aboard the train reflected its determinedly anonymous status. The upholstery and springs of the seats had seen better days. The dining car was dingy, the beefsteak Bushell ordered for supper overcooked and fatty. The stewards slapped food and dishes around in a way he hadn’t seen since his last army mess hall. And yet, every so often, people would come up from the car in back of the diner with beatific smiles on their faces.