Atlantis and Other Places (48 page)

“Unusual? Not really.” Dr. Walton shook his head. “A Londoner from the East End, I make him out to be. Not an educated man, even if he has his letters. Has scant respect for his aitches, but not quite a Cockney.”

Although Helms’ pinched features seemed to have little room for a smile, when one did find a home it illuminated his whole face. “Capital, Walton!” he said, and made as if to clap his hands. “I agree completely. Your analysis is impeccable—well, nearly so, anyhow.”

“‘Nearly’? How have I gone astray?” By the way Walton said it, he did not believe he’d strayed at all.

“As you are such a cunning linguist, Doctor, I am confident the answer will suggest itself to you in a matter of moments.” Athelstan Helms waited. When Walton shook his head, Helms shrugged and said, “Did you not hear the intrusive ‘like’ he used twice? Most un-English, but a common enough Atlantean locution. Begun by an actor—one of the Succot brothers, I believe—a generation ago, and adopted by the generality. I conjecture this fellow may have acquired it in meetings with his fellow worshipers.”

“It could be.” Dr. Walton stroked his salt-and-pepper chin whiskers. “Yes, it could be. But not all Atlanteans belong to the House of Universal Devotion. Far from it, in fact. He could have learned that interjection innocently enough.”

“Certainly. That is why I said no more than that he might well be a member of the sect,” Helms replied. “But I do find it likely, as the close and continuous intercourse amongst members of the House while engaged in worship seems calculated to foster such accretions. And he knew who we were. Members of the House, familiar with the difficulties the Atlantean constabulary is having with this case, may also be on the lookout for assistance from a foreign clime.”

“Hmm,” Walton said, and then, “Hmm,” again. “How could they know the chief inspector in Hanover—”

“Chief of police, they call him,” Helms noted.

“Chief of police, then,” Walton said impatiently. “How could they know he sought your aid and not that of, say, Scotland Yard?”

“The easiest way to effect that would be to secret someone belonging to the House of Universal Devotion within the Hanoverian police department, something which strikes me as not implausible,” Athelstan Helms said. “Other possible methodologies are bound to suggest themselves upon reflection.”

By the unhappy expression spreading over Dr. Walton’s fleshy countenance, such methodologies did indeed suggest themselves. But before he could mention any of them, a shout from the bow drew his attention, and Athelstan Helms’ as well: “Hanover Light! Hanover Light ahead!”

Helms all but quivered with anticipation. “Before long, Doctor, we shall see what we shall see.”

“So we shall.” Walton seemed less enthusiastic.

 

 

Hanover Light was one of the engineering marvels of the age. Situated on a wave-washed rock several miles east of the Atlantean coast, the lighthouse reached more than three hundred feet into the air. The lamps in the upper story guided ships in from far out to sea.

Hanover itself cupped a small enclosed bay that formed the finest harbor on the east coast of Atlantis—a better harbor, even, than Avalon in the more lightly settled Atlantean west. Steam tugs with heavy rope fenders nudged the
Victoria Augusta
to her berth. Sailors tossed lines to waiting longshoremen, who made the ship fast to the pier. The liner’s engines sighed into silence.

Dr. Walton sighed, too. “Well, we’re here.”

Athelstan Helms nodded. “I could not have deduced it more precisely myself,” he said. “The red-crested eagle on the flag flying from yonder pole, the longshoremen shouting in what passes for English in the United States of Atlantis, the fact that we have just completed an ocean voyage . . . Everything does indeed point to our being here.”

Walton blinked. Was Helms having him on? He dismissed the notion from his mind, as being unworthy of a great detective. Lighting a cigar, he said, “I wonder if anyone will be here to meet us.”

“Assuredly,” Helms replied. “The customs men will take their usual interest—I generously refrain from saying,
their customary interest
—in our belongings.” Walton began to speak; Helms forestalled him. “But you were about to say, anyone in an official capacity. Unless I am very much mistaken, that excitable-looking gentleman on the planking there will be a Captain La Strada of the Hanover police.”

The individual in question certainly did seem excitable. He wore tight trousers, a five-button jacket with tiny lapels, and one of the most appalling cravats in the history of haberdashery. His broad-brimmed hat would have raised eyebrows in London, too. Nor did his face have a great deal to recommend it: he looked like a ferret, with narrow, close-set eyes, a beak of a nose, and a wildly disorderly mustache.

And he was looking for the two Englishmen. “Helms!” he shouted, jumping up and down. “Walton!” He waved and pointed—unfortunately, at two other men halfway along the
Victoria Augusta
’s deck.

“Here we are!” Walton called. Under his breath, he added, “Shocking they let a dago climb so high, bloody shocking.”

Inspector La Strada jumped even higher. As if impelled by some galvanic current, his arm swung toward the detective and his medical companion. “Helms! Walton!” he bawled, for all the world as if he hadn’t been yelling at those other chaps a moment before. Perhaps he hoped Helms and Walton hadn’t noticed him doing it.

He pumped their hands when they came down the gangplank, and undertook to push their trunks to the customs house on one of the low-slung wheeled carts provided for the purpose. “Very kind of you,” Walton murmured, reflecting that no true gentleman in London would lower himself to playing the navvy.

As if reading his mind, La Strada said, “Here in Atlantis, we roll up our sleeves and set our hands to whatever wants doing. This is a land for men of action, not sissies who sit around drinking port and playing the fiddle.”

“Shall I take my return passage now, in that case?” Helms inquired in a voice rather cooler than the wind off the Greenland ice.

“By no means.” La Strada seemed cheerfully unaware he’d given offense. “There’s work to be done here, and you are—we hope you are—the man to do it.”

Some of the first work to be done would be explaining the pistols in the travelers’ baggage—so Dr. Walton anticipated, at any rate. But the customs inspectors took the firearms in stride. They seemed more interested in the reagents Helms carried in a cleverly padded case inside his trunk. At La Strada’s voluble insistence that these were essential to the business for which the detective had been summoned to Atlantis, the inspectors grudgingly stamped Helms’ passport, and Walton’s as well.

La Strada had a coach waiting outside the customs house. “Shall I take you gents to the hotel first, to freshen up after your voyage, or would you rather come to the station and take your first look at what you’ll be dealing with?” he asked.

Dr. Walton would have plumped for the manifold virtues of a good hotel, assuming Hanover boasted such a marvelous sanctuary, but Helms forestalled him, saying, “The station, Inspector, by all means. Well begun is half done, as they say, and the sooner we finish our business here, the sooner we can go home again.”

“Once you spend a while in Atlantis, Mr. Helms, you may decide you don’t care to go home after all,” La Strada said.

“I doubt it.” Athelstan Helms’ reply would have silenced an Englishman and very likely crushed him. Inspector La Strada was made of sterner, or, more likely, coarser stuff. He let out a merry peal of laughter and lit a cheroot much nastier than the fragrant cigar Walton enjoyed.

Lamplighters went through the cobblestoned and bricked streets with long poles, setting the gas jets alight. The buttery glow of the street lights went some way toward mitigating the deepening twilight. Hanover wasn’t London—what city was, or could be?—but it did not put its head in its shell with the coming of night, either. The streets and taverns and music halls and even many of the shops remained crowded.

London boasted inhabitants from every corner of the far-flung British Empire. Hanover, the largest urban center in a republic fueled by immigration, had residents from all over the world: Englishmen, Scots, Irish, the French and Spaniards who’d originally settled southern Atlantis, Negro freemen and freedmen and -women, swarthy Italians like La Strada, Scandinavians, stolid Germans, Jews from Eastern Europe, copper-skinned Terranovan aboriginals, Chinese running eateries and laundries advertised in their incomprehensible script, and every possible intermingling of them.

“Pack of mongrels,” Dr. Walton muttered.

“What do you say, Doctor?” the inspector inquired. “With the rattle and clatter of the wheels, I fear I did not hear you.”

“Oh, nothing. Nothing, really.” Walton puffed on his cigar, both to blot out the stench of La Strada’s and, perhaps, to send up a defensive smoke screen.

Unlike London, whose streets wandered where they would and changed names when they would, Hanover was built on a right-angled gridwork. People proclaimed it made navigation easier and more efficient. And it likely did, but Dr. Walton could not escape the notion that a city needed to be learned, that making it too easy to get around in reduced it to a habitation for children, not men.

He had the same low opinion of Atlantis’ coinage. A hundred cents to an eagle—well, where was the challenge in
that
? Four far-things to a penny, twelve pence to the shilling, twenty shillings the pound (or, if you were an aristo, twenty-one in a guinea) . . . Foreigners always whined about how complicated English currency was. To Walton’s way of thinking, that was all to the good. Whining helped mark out the foreigners and let you keep a proper eye on them.

And as for architecture, did Hanover really have any? A few Georgian buildings, Greek Revival more pretentious than otherwise, and endless modern utilitarian boxes of smoke-smudged brick that might once have been red or brown or yellow or even purple for all anyone could tell nowadays. Some—many—of these brick boxes were blocks of flats that outdid even London’s for sheer squalidity. The odors of cheap cooking and bad plumbing wafted from them.

In such slums, the brass-buttoned policemen traveled in pairs. They wore low caps with patent-leather brims, and carried revolvers on their belts along with their billy clubs. They didn’t look much like bobbies, and they didn’t act much like bobbies, either.

“Do you find, then, that you need to intimidate your citizenry to maintain order?” Dr. Walton asked.

Inspector La Strada stared at him, eyes shiny under a gas lamp. “Intimidate our citizenry?” he said, as if the words were Chinese or Quechua. Then, much more slowly than he might have, he grasped what the Englishman was driving at. “God bless you, Doctor!” he exclaimed, no doubt in lieu of some more pungent comment. “Our policemen don’t carry guns to intimidate the citizenry.”

“Why, then?” Walton asked in genuine bewilderment.

Athelstan Helms spoke before the Atlantean inspector could: “They wear guns to keep the citizenry from murdering them in its criminal pursuits.”

“Couldn’t have put it better myself,” La Strada said. “This isn’t London, you know.”

“Yes, I’d noticed that,” Dr. Walton observed tartly.

La Strada either missed or ignored the sarcasm. “Thought you might, like,” he said. “Anyone but a convicted felon can legally carry a gun here. And the convicted felons do it, too—what have they got to lose? A tavern brawl here isn’t one fellow breaking a mug over the other one’s head. He pulls out a snub-nosed .42 and puts a pill in the bastard’s brisket. And if getting away means plugging a policeman, he doesn’t stick at that, either.”

“Charming people,” the physician murmured.

“In many ways, they are,” Helms said. “But, having won freedom through a bloody uprising against the British crown, they labor under the delusion that they must be ready—nay, eager—to shed more blood at any moment to defend it.”

“We don’t happen to think that is a delusion, sir,” La Strada said stiffly.

“No doubt,” Athelstan Helms replied. “That does not mean it isn’t one. I draw your notice to the Dominion of Ontario, in northeastern Terranova. Ontario declined revolution—despite your buccaneers, I might add, or perhaps because of them—yet can you deny that its people are as free as your own, and possessed of virtually identical rights?”

“Of course I can. They still have a Queen—your Queen.” La Strada wrinkled up his nose as if to show he could smell the stench of monarchism across the thousand miles of Hesperian Gulf separating the USA and Ontario.

“We do not find it unduly discommodes us,” Helms said.

“The more fools you,” La Strada told him. There was remarkably little conversation in the coach after that until it pulled up in front of Hanover’s police headquarters.

 

 

Dr. Walton had not looked for the headquarters to be lovely. But neither had he looked for the building to be as ugly as it was. A gas lamp on either side of the steps leading up to the entrance showed the brickwork to be of a jaundiced, despairing yellow. The steps themselves were of poured concrete: utilitarian, no doubt, but unequivocally unlovely. The edifice was squat and sturdy, with small rectangular windows; it put Walton in mind of a fortress. The stout iron bars on the windows of the bottom two stories reinforced the impression—and the windows.

After gazing at those, Helms remarked, “They will use this place to house criminals as well as constables.” There, for once, the detective’s companion had not the slightest difficulty comprehending how his friend made the deduction.

“Come along, gents, come along.” La Strada hopped down to the ground, spry as a cricket. Helms and Walton followed. The policeman who drove the carriage, who’d said not a word on the journey from the customs house, remained behind to ensure that their luggage did not decide to tour the city on its own.