Atlantis and Other Places (55 page)

“Thank
you
.” The proprietor stowed the money in a cash box. “You’ll get good use from that pistol, if you ever need it.”

“Oh, I expect I shall,” Athelstan Helms replied. “Yes, I expect I shall.”

 

 

“I say, Helms—this is extraordinary. Most extraordinary. Not your usual way of doing business at all,” Dr. Walton said, more than a little disapproval in his voice.

“Really?” Helms said. “How is it different?”

Walton opened his mouth for a blistering reply, then shut it again. When he did speak, it was in accusing tones: “You’re having me on.”

“Am I?” Helms might have been innocence personified but for the hint of a twinkle in his eye and but for the setting: a large lecture hall at Bronvard University, the oldest in Atlantis, a few miles outside of Hanover. The hall was packed with reporters from the capital and from other Atlantean towns with newspapers that maintained bureaus there. Rain poured down outside. The air smelled of wool from the reporters’ suits and of the cheap tobacco they smoked in extravagant quantities.

In the middle of the mob of newspapermen sat Inspector La Strada. He stared ruefully at the remains of his bumbershoot, which had blown inside out. Water dripped from the end of his nose; he resembled nothing so much as a drowned ferret.

“Shall we get on with it?” Walton inquired. At Helms’ nod, the good doctor took his place behind the lectern more commonly used for disquisitions on chemistry, perhaps, or on the uses of the ablative absolute in Latin. “Gentlemen of the press, I have the high honor and distinct privilege of presenting to you the greatest detective of the modern age, my colleague and, I am lucky enough to say, my particular friend, Mr. Athelstan Helms. He will discuss with you the results of his investigations into the murders of certain opponents of the House of Universal Devotion and of Mr. Samuel Jones, otherwise known as the Preacher, and especially of his investigation into the untimely demise of Mr. Benjamin Morris in Thetford not long ago. Helms?”

“Thank you, Dr. Walton.” Helms replaced his fellow Englishman behind the lectern. “I should like to make some prefatory remarks before explicating the solution I believe to be true. First and foremost, I should like to state for the record that I am not now a member of the House of Universal Devotion, nor have I ever been. I consider the House’s theology to be erroneous, improbable, and misguided in every particular. Only in a land where democracy flourishes to the point of making every man’s judgment as good as another’s, wisdom, knowledge, and experience notwithstanding, could such an abortion of a cult come into being and, worse, thrive.”

The reporters scribbled furiously. Some of them seemed to gather that he had cast aspersions on the United States of Atlantis. Despite any aspersions, Inspector La Strada sat there smiling as he dripped. Several hands flew into the air. Other reporters neglected even that minimal politeness, bawling out Helms’ name and their questions.

“Gentlemen, please,” Helms said several times. When that failed, he shouted,
“Enough!”
in a voice of startling volume. By chance or by design, the acoustics of the hall favored him over the reporters. Having won something resembling silence except for being rather louder, he went on, “I shall respond to your queries in due course, I promise. For now, please let me proceed. Perhaps more questions will occur to you as I do.”

Dr. Walton knew he would have been ruder than that. To the good doctor, the reporters were nothing but a yapping pack of provincial pests. To Athelstan Helms, almost all of mankind fell into that category, Atlanteans hardly more than Englishmen.

“It seemed obvious from the beginning that the House of Universal Devotion was behind the recent campaign of extermination against its critics,” Helms said. “There can be no doubt that the House has responded strongly in the past to any and all efforts to call it to account for its doctrinal and social peculiarities. Thus a simple, obvious solution presented itself—one obvious enough to draw the notice of police officials in Hanover and other Atlantean cities.”

He got a small laugh from the assembled gentlemen of the press. Inspector La Strada laughed, too. Why not? Despite sarcasm, Helms had declared the solution the police favored to be the simple and obvious one. Was that not the same as saying it was true?

It was not, as Helms proceeded to make clear: “Almost every puzzle has a solution that is simple and obvious—simple and obvious and, unfortunately, altogether wrong. Such appears to me to be the case here. As best I have been able to determine, there is no large-scale conspiracy on the part of the House of Universal Devotion to rid the world of its critics—and a good thing, too, or the world would soon become an empty and echoing place.”

“Well, how come those bastards are dead, then?” a reporter shouted, careless of anything resembling rules of procedure. Inspector La Strada, Dr. Walton noted, was no longer smiling or laughing.

“Please note that I did not say there was no conspiracy,” Athelstan Helms replied. “I merely said there was none on the part of the House of Universal Devotion. Whether there was one
against
the said House is, I regret to report, an altogether different question, with an altogether different answer.”

Walton saw that keeping the proceedings orderly would be anything but easy. Some of the reporters still seemed eager and attentive, but others looked angry, even hostile. As for La Strada, his countenance would have had to lighten considerably for either of those adjectives to apply. As a medical man, Dr. Walton feared the police official was on the point of suffering an apoplexy.

Impassive as if he were being greeted with enthusiasm and applause, Athelstan Helms continued, “To take the particular case of Mr. Benjamin Morris, his killer was in fact not an outraged member of the House of Universal Devotion, but rather one Sergeant Casimir Karpinski of the Thetford Police Department.”

Pandemonium. Chaos. Shouted questions and raised hands. A fistfight in the back rows. One question came often enough to stay clear through the din: “How the devil d’you know that?”

“My suspicions were kindled,” Helms said—several times, each louder than the last, until his voice finally prevailed—“My suspicions were kindled, I say, when Karpinski repaired to the scene of the crime with astounding celerity, and also smelling strongly of black-powder smoke, such being the propellant with which the caliber .465 Manstopper is charged. The Manstopper is the Thetford Police Department’s preferred arm, and the late Mr. Morris was slain with copper-jacketed bullets, which the police department also uses. But the odor of powder was what truly made me begin to contemplate this unfortunate possibility. The nose is sadly underestimated in detection.” He tapped his own bladelike proboscis.

“Sounds pretty goddamn thin to me!” a reporter called. Others shouted agreement. “You have any real evidence besides the big nose you’re sticking into our affairs?” The gentlemen of the press and Inspector La Strada nodded vigorously.

“I do,” Helms said, calmly still. “Dr. Walton, if you would be so kind . . . ?”

“Certainly.” Walton hurried over to the door through which he and his colleague had entered the hall and said, “Bring him in now, if you please.”

In came Sergeant Karpinski, a glum expression on his unshaven face, his hands chained together behind him. His escorts were two men even larger and burlier than he was himself:
not
police officers, but men who styled themselves detectives, though what they did for a living was considerably different from Athelstan Helms’ definition of the art.

“Here is Casimir Karpinski,” Helms said. “He will tell you for himself whether my deductions have merit.”

“I killed Benjamin Morris,” Karpinski said. “I’m damned if I’d tell you so unless this bastard had the goods on me, but he does, worse luck. I did it, and I’m not real sorry, either. The House of Universal Devotion needs taking down, and this was a way to do it. Or it would have been, if
he
hadn’t started poking around.”

A hush settled over the lecture hall as the reporters slowly realized this was no humbug. They scribbled furiously. “Why do you think the House needs taking down?” Helms asked.

“It’s as plain as the nose on my face. It’s as plain as the nose on
your
face, by God,” Karpinski replied, which drew a nervous laugh from his audience. “They’re a state within a state. They have their own rules, their own laws, their own morals. People are loyal to the Preacher, not to the United States of Atlantis. Time—past time—to bring ’em into line.”

“Are these your opinions alone?” the detective inquired.

Karpinski laughed in his face. “I should hope not! Any decent Atlantean would tell you the same.”

“The decency of framing the Preacher and his sect for a crime they did not commit I leave to others to expatiate upon,” Athelstan Helms said. “But did you act alone, Sergeant, or upon the urging of other ‘decent Atlanteans’ of higher rank in society?”

“I got my orders from Hanover,” Sergeant Karpinski answered. “I got them straight from Inspector La Strada, as a matter of fact.”

“That’s a lie!” La Strada roared.

“It is not.” Helms pulled from an inside jacket pocket a folded square of pale yellow paper. “I have here a telegram found in Sergeant Karpinski’s flat—”

Inspector La Strada, his face flushed a deep, liverish red suggestive of extreme choler, pulled from a shoulder holster a large, stout pistol that would have been better carried elsewhere upon his person; even in that moment of extreme tension, Dr. Walton noted that the weapon in question was a Manstopper .465—a recommendation for the model, if one the good doctor would as gladly have forgone. La Strada leveled, or attempted to level, the revolver not at either of the two Englishmen who had uncovered his nefarious machinations, but rather at Sergeant Karpinski, whose testimony could do him so much harm.

He was foiled not by Helms or Walton, but by the reporter sitting to his right. That worthy, possessed of quick wits and quicker reflexes, seized Inspector La Strada’s wrist and jerked his hand upward just as the Manstopper discharged. The roar of the piece was astoundingly loud in the enclosed space. Plaster dust drifted down from the ceiling, followed a moment later by several drops of water; the pistol had proved its potency by penetrating ceiling and roof alike.

Another shot ricocheted from the marble floor several feet to Dr. Walton’s left and shattered a window as it left the lecture hall. After that, the gentlemen of the press swarmed over the police inspector and forcibly separated him from his revolver; had they been but a little more forceful, they would have separated him from his right index finger as well. The Atlantean policemen in the hall, chagrin and dismay writ large upon their faces, descended to take charge of their erstwhile superior.

“Sequester all documents in Inspector La Strada’s office,” Athelstan Helms enjoined them. “Let nothing be removed; let nothing be destroyed. The conspiracy against the House of Universal Devotion is unlikely to have sprung full-grown from his forehead, as Pallas Athena is said to have sprung from that of cloud-gathering Zeus.”

“Never you fear, Mr. Helms,” a reporter called to him. “Now that we know something’s rotten in the state of Denmark, like, we’ll be able to run it down ourselves.” His allusion, if not Homeric, was at least Shakespearean.

“God, what this’ll do to the elections next summer!” another reported said. Then he blinked and looked amazed. “Who can guess now
what
it’ll do? All depends on where La Strada got his orders from.” Although he casually violated the prohibition against ending a sentence with a preposition, his remarks remained cogent.

“Why would anybody need to try to take down the House like that?” yet another man said. “Its members have sinned a boatload of genuine sins. What point to inventing more in the hope that they’ll provoke people against the sect?”

“Such questions as those are not so easily solved by detection,” Helms replied. “Any remarks I offer are speculative, and based solely on my understanding, such as it is, of human nature. First, the Preacher and his faith continue to attract large numbers of new devotees nearly half a century after he founded the House. His sect, as you rightly term it, is not only a religious force in Atlantis but also a political and an economic force. Those representing other such forces—I name no names—would naturally be concerned about his growing influence in affairs. And a trumped-up killing—or, more likely, a series of them—allows the opposing forces to choose their timing and their presentation of the case against the House, which any possible natural incidents would not. Some of you will perhaps grasp exactly what I mean: those whose papers have been loudest in the cry against the Preacher.”

Several reporters looked uncomfortable; one or two might even have looked guilty. One of those who seemed most uncomfortable asked, “If all these charges against the House of Universal Devotion are false, why would Inspector La Strada have brought you over from London? Wasn’t he contributing to his own undoing?”

“Why? I’ll tell you why, by Jove!” That was the good doctor, not the detective. “Because he underestimated Mr. Athelstan Helms, that’s why! He thought Helms would see what he wanted him to see, and damn all else. He thought Helms would give his seal of approval, you might say, to whatever he wanted to do to the House of Universal Devotion. He thought Helms would make it all . . . What’s the word the sheenies use?”

“Kosher?” Helms suggested, murmuring, “Under the circumstances, an infelicitous analogy.”

Dr. Walton ignored the aside. “Kosher!” he echoed triumphantly. “That’s it. He thought Helms’ seal of approval would make it all kosher! But he reckoned without my friend’s—my particular friend’s—brilliance, he did. Athelstan Helms doesn’t let the wool get pulled over his eyes. Athelstan Helms doesn’t see what other blokes want him to see or mean for him to see. Athelstan Helms, by God, sees what’s there!”