“You don’t think we’d tell you?” Jerry Doyle raised an eyebrow in well-crafted dismay. “The press is still free, not the muzzled lapdog of the Crown you’d make it if you had your way.”
“Be careful who you’re talking to,” Shaughnessy warned, mock alarm in his voice. “For if the one here is the famous Colonel Bushell who’s had his pictures in all the papers, the other must be his just as famous aide, Captain Stanley - Sam the spade.” He rocked back on his heels in amusement to see how the RAMs would take that.
Stanley bit his lip. Bushell wondered how long it had been since someone sneered at him on account of his race. Such things happened more often than RAMs getting shot at in the course of their duties, but they weren’t common: Negroes of a given social class were usually treated much like their white counterparts. Why not? Bushell thought. A man couldn’t help his race, but hard work would lift him out of the class into which he’d been born.
“Vulgarians,” Kathleen muttered. It wasn’t meant to be overheard. That made Bushell feel better about catching it. If Kathleen didn’t think well of men who would make a racialist joke, maybe she hadn’t been the one who called Common Sense.
On the other hand, maybe she just hadn’t known whom the periodical would despatch to Charleroi. Bushell looked at the reporters as if he’d bitten into an apple and found them in there. “Do you know a fellow called Joseph Kilbride?” he asked.
He expected them to shake their heads. That was what Shaughnessy did. Jerry Doyle said, “The art collector? What’s he got to do with anything? You think he has The Two Georges hanging in his parlor?” He laughed loud and long at his own wit.
“Stranger things have happened.” Bushell got up from the table. He tossed down banknotes to cover the cost of breakfast. Kathleen and Sam rose, too. Stanley stared at the two men from Common Sense for a couple of seconds. He was taller than either of them, and wider through the shoulders and narrower in the hips. He didn’t say anything; he didn’t move toward them. They drew back a pace anyhow. He strode through the space they had vacated. You got the idea he would have gone through there whether they’d stepped back or not.
“Constabulary station should only be a couple of blocks that way,” Bushell said, pointing toward the Monongehela as he and his companions left the hotel.
“We’ll do better there than we have here, that’s certain,” Sam Stanley said, and set off for the station with the same determined steps he’d shown in the hotel dining room.
Bushell and Kathleen Flannery followed him. Just breathing made Bushell feel as if he’d smoked a dozen cigars in a room without ventilation. The air had a smoky, sulfurous tang to it. Buildings only a few blocks away seemed hazy, indistinct, yet the hot sun beat down out of a clear sky. Bushell thought longingly of the cool, crisp, pine-scented air of the Queen Charlotte Islands. He hadn’t imagined he would look with longing on anything that had to do with the Queen Charlotte Islands. His first glimpse of Charleroi by daylight left him unimpressed. The Ribblesdale House was in the middle of the downtown business district, but most of the businesses, by the look of them, would have quickly failed in New Liverpool. The mannequins in the windows of clothiers’ wore garments either poorly made or overpriced or both. He’d never seen such an expanse of unpainted pine and garish upholstery as the furniture shops displayed. The profusion of secondhand shops argued that not enough people had the wherewithal to buy new goods.
Taverns, pubs, saloons, bars... Charleroi had far more than its share of those. Unlike the other establishments, they were most of them clean and freshly painted. They could afford such luxuries. If you didn’t drink in Charleroi, what else did you have to do with your time?
Kathleen pointed ahead. “Is that the station? The building with the flag in front of it?”
Bushell’s cough had nothing to do with the noxious air he was breathing. “Wrong flag, I’m afraid.” In New Liverpool, Independence Party headquarters lay out in the distant suburbs. In Charleroi, the banner with the eagle and stripes flew in front of a building as impressive as any the downtown boasted. Charleroi being what it was, that didn’t say much, but what it did say, Bushell didn’t like. People inside the Independence Party building were busy. Bushell watched them bustling around as he walked by. Sam Stanley also paid thoughtful attention to the party headquarters. “If we’re lucky,” he said, “we’ll spot Kilbride in there, and make life easier for ourselves.”
They weren’t lucky.
The constabulary station lay a few doors past the building that housed the Independence Party. Comparing them, Bushell suspected the party had more money than the constables did. If anybody had painted the station since the reign of Edward IX, he would have been astonished.
“Help you?” the big, burly sergeant behind the front desk asked in a gravelly voice when Bushell and his companions walked in. The station was even less prepossessing on the inside than its exterior suggested. It stank of sweat and smoke and puke and stale tea leaves. Kathleen looked appalled; Bushell and Stanley had seen the like before. Bushell showed his badge. The constabulary sergeant nodded. “Come on, I’ll take you back to the chief.”
The sergeant’s boss looked like him, but with an extra ten years and a greying beard tacked on. Like his underling, Chief John Lassiter looked as if he’d be more at home down in a mine than keeping order aboveground. He didn’t seem sure of what Kathleen Flannery was doing with the two RAMs, but he didn’t ask any questions about it, either. Since Bushell wasn’t so sure what Kathleen was doing there himself, that was just as well.
He came straight to the point: “Chief, we think a fellow named Joseph Kilbride came down here from Doshoweh the other day. He’s not at the Ribblesdale. If he’s not at the - what was the name of the place? - the Hasting Arms, that’s it, where is he likely to be?”
“You talk about hotels, those two are about it,” Lassiter said. “We got some rooming houses, too, or he could be staying with somebody here, you know. Kilbride, eh?” He chewed on the end of the pencil he used to jot down the name. “That’s liable to be tough. These micks, they stick together like nobody’s business.”
Kathleen Flannery sucked in a long, angry breath. Bushell stepped on her toe. Chief Lassiter’s desk didn’t let him see that. Kathleen glared but subsided.
Lassiter sighed. “Well, we’ll do what we can for you, Colonel.” He glanced over his shoulder at the print of The Two Georges behind his desk. “We got to get that painting back. You have a description of this Kilbride item?”
“Can’t give you height or weight, I’m afraid, but here’s our boy.” Bushell passed Lassiter the photograph of Joseph Kilbride that the butler had given him.
“May I keep this?” the chief asked.
“Long enough to duplicate it, no more,” Bushell said. “If we don’t catch up with him here, we’re liable to need it again.”
Lassiter gnawed on the end of the pencil once more. “Mm, that’s fair. Anything else you can tell me about him?” He glanced down at the picture. “Wouldn’t want to meet him in an alley after dark, not with a phiz like that.”
“He’s supposed to be a tightwad, too, people in Doshoweh say,” Samuel Stanley put in.
“All right, so we won’t catch him in a saloon buying a round for the house,” Lassiter said. In spite of the sarcasm, he wrote that down. “Never can tell what’ll turn up useful, though.” He gave the pencil another couple of gentle nibbles, then set it down. “Anything else I can do for you folks today?”
Bushell pulled out some notes. “We need addresses - records too, if they have any - for three miners: Percy McGaffigan, Michael O’Flynn, and Anthony Rothrock.”