“Officially,” Bushell said in a musing voice, “officially, mind you, we don’t know that Kilbride’s involved with the theft of The Two Georges. Officially, we just suspect him of being involved with running Russian rifles from the Queen Charlotte Islands down to New Liverpool. If we were on the lookout for a gun runner, don’t you think that would be news important enough to make the local papers?”
Harris’s eyes gleamed. “That’s perfect, Colonel. We’ll play it exactly like that, as if we didn’t have any other cares about him.”
“Are you sure it’ll be all right, Tom?” Kathleen Flannery asked anxiously. “The Sons of Liberty will know Kilbride’s involved with more than the rifles. Won’t they assume we know as much, too? And if they do assume that, what will they do to The Two Georges’!” Keeping the painting safe plainly remained uppermost in her thoughts.
George Harris reached for a sheet of foolscap and a pencil and scribbled a note to himself. As he did so, he glanced over at Kathleen from under lowered lids. Bushell could all but read Harris’s mind: she hadn’t called him by his Christian name the day before. RAMs were trained to notice such things.
“I don’t think they’ll destroy The Two Georges till they’re sure they won’t be able to ransom it,” he said. “If they were going to do that, they would have done it already. Am I sure it’ll be all right, though?”
He shook his head. As he had with Sam Stanley, he answered, “In this case, I’m not sure of anything. There’s too much that doesn’t add up yet.”
“Do we dare take the chance, then?” Kathleen said.
“In my judgment, we haven’t got any other choice,” he said, and waited to see if that would make her boiler burst. She bit her lip but finally nodded. Whether that had anything to do with the previous night, he couldn’t guess. He didn’t know her well enough yet. Looks as if I’m going to, though, he thought, and she me. He hadn’t felt that particular nervousness since he was in his twenties. He’d been comfortably intimate with Irene, and with no one else since he’d divorced her. He contemplated shells - and coming out of them.
“I’ll plant the story in the Globe,” Major Harris said. “That’s our solid Tory paper, and I know the perfect fellow to ring up. The Pilgrim would likely give it the right slant, too. If it’s all the same to you, though, I’ll steer clear of the New England Courant. It’s not that Common Sense owns the miserable rag, but it takes that kind of line.”
“I leave the details in your hands,” said Bushell, who hated leaving details in anyone’s hands but his own.
“You know Boston; we don’t.”
Harris scrawled more notes. “Let’s see,” he said, obviously thinking aloud, “do I want to ring Bill Tobin or Gabriel Pruitt over at the Pilgrim? Bill will run anything that has a juicy crime angle to it, but Gabe’s less likely to ask me a pack of questions I can’t conveniently answer.”
That was a calculation with which Bushell could help. “Go with the fellow who doesn’t ask questions,” he said at once. “You’re right - we can’t afford to answer them.”
“Good enough, Colonel. I’ll tend to that directly,” Harris said. “And, as I told you, I’ll talk with Michael Young at the Globe, too. There won’t be any difficulties with him; he’s our unofficial mouthpiece in this town.”
“Useful sort of fellow to have around,” Bushell observed. He had his own pet reporters in New Liverpool - not that that had done him much good, since he hadn’t had any good, or even interesting, news to give them after The Two Georges disappeared.
“That he is,” Major Harris agreed complacently. “And what will you be doing while we wait to see if the stories flush our bird?”
“You mean, aside from gathering moss?” Bushell said, which got him a chuckle from Harris. “I expect I’ll be on the telephone a good deal myself. Have you someone’s desk I could usurp for the afternoon?”
“Two desks,” Sam Stanley corrected. “I can split that load with you, Chief. We’ve left a trail all the way across the NAU.”
“Three desks,” Kathleen Flannery said. “I’ve been out of touch with my own colleagues since I left Doshoweh, and they may have come across something that hasn’t reached the RAMs.”
“I hardly think that’s likely, Dr. Flannery,” Major Harris said. He glanced toward Bushell, confident his fellow RAM - his fellow man - would support him.
“I don’t know whether it’s likely or not,” Bushell said, “but it’s already happened once with Kathleen.”
There - now he’d used her Christian name in public, too, and yes, Harris had noticed, and yes, Harris was drawing his own conclusions. Now that Bushell had shared a bed with Kathleen, he was in a way less eager to back her than he might have been before, for he knew he wasn’t disinterested. Nevertheless, he was scrupulous about giving credit where due, so he went on, “Kilbride’s an art collector, too. She may just come up with a line on him where we can’t.”
George Harris looked as if he’d bit into a lemon while expecting an orange. He put the best face he could on it, though, saying, “I’ll see what I can find for you. If you’ll wait here for a few minutes - “
By the look and smell of it, the room he got for the three of them probably belonged to sergeants or other such easily displaced types. Though they were gone, the memory of their cheap cigarillos lingered in the air. Their desks were old and battered; one of them had a paperbound novel stuck under a leg to hold it level. Some of the photographs on the walls, Bushell judged, were of suspects from cases that belonged to the RAMs here. Some were of crime scenes. And some, lovingly clipped from magazines, were of pretty young ladies - women, anyhow - wearing a good deal less than they might get by with in public.
Kathleen glanced at those, let out a loud sniff, and turned the battered desk chair in which she sat down away from the wall, letting her look out the window instead. As far as Samuel Stanley was concerned, the pretty girls might as well not have been there; he had eyes only for Phyllis. Bushell gave one smiling brunette a thoughtful and thorough inspection before he sat down and placed a call to Jaime Macias in New Liverpool.
He’d got used to waiting for a long-distance call to go through. When you made long-distance calls from places like Prince Rupert and Charleroi, you had to get used to waiting. But Boston was an important commercial hub, and had plenty of long-distance lines. Only a couple of minutes after Bushell picked up his telephone, the one on Macias’s desk rang.
“Good to hear from you, Tom,” the constabulary captain said when Bushell identified himself. “I was meaning to try to get in touch with you, because I have some news for you - “
George Harris burst into the sergeant’s room. “Hold on a second, Jaime,” Bushell said.
“Just got word,” Harris exclaimed. “We’ve spotted Kilbride, over in Back Bay.”
Bushell brought the handset back up to his mouth. “Jaime, I’ll have to talk with you later,” he said, and hung up.
XII
“There is a God in Israel!” Samuel Stanley exclaimed, slamming down the telephone in his hand.
“To say nothing of a British colonial undersecretary holding the Sultan’s pasha to the straight and narrow,” Bushell added less reverently. He turned to Major Harris. “When and how did the tip come in?”