Steeplejack (Alternative Detective, #1)(68)

“Hostile?”

“Let’s say foreign,” I said with a half smile.

He considered me, then conceded the point. “I can see how it would,” he said.

“So this young Mahweni,” I said, regrouping. “You called him strapping.”

“Athletic,” he said thoughtfully, and it struck me that he had a connoisseur’s eye for more than luxorite. “But it was more than that. He had a certain bearing, a poise…”

“Military?” I asked.

The word struck him with the force of inspiration. “Exactly!” he said.

“And the white man?”

Ansveld wobbled his head uncertainly. “Perhaps,” he said. “I really didn’t get a good look at him, and his movement was less—” Something dawned in his face. “He had a limp! I had forgotten, but I’m sure of it. Not too pronounced, but a kind of stiffness down one side that made him shuffle. I remember wondering if he might break something.”

“One more question,” I said.

Ansveld smiled, pleased to show how useful he could be.

“When did the cane appear?” I asked.

“I didn’t see the person who brought it,” said Ansveld Jr. “It wasn’t there the day my father went to see the Lani boy, I’d swear to it, and I closed the shop that night.”

“So someone brought it the following day?” I asked. “The day your father died.”

“Well, that’s the odd thing,” said Ansveld, his face contorted with the effort of remembering. “I’d swear it was already there. I opened the shop before I heard about my father’s death, and I remember seeing it there in the umbrella stand. But that would mean someone put it there overnight, or the previous evening after I had closed up. Whoever it was must have broken in.”

“And left his cane in an umbrella stand?” I said doubtfully. “That doesn’t sound right. Was there sign of forced entry?”

“None.”

“Was there anything else unusual when you opened the shop that morning?”

“Cigar ash,” said Ansveld, staring at nothing and clearly unnerved. “Over there beside that chair. I spoke to the maid about it, but she said my father had told her not to bother cleaning the shop that evening.”

“Was that unusual?”

“Yes.”

“And you did not mention this to the police?”

“I was told my father had died by his own hand. There was no reason to think … But, now…” His face, which had been clouded by doubt, became suddenly focused and intense. “You think he was killed by someone. That’s why you are here asking questions. You think he met with someone here the night before he died, someone who left his cane behind, and that that person typed a suicide note on that infernal machine of his, and then killed him. Murdered him.” He sat down abruptly, face slack as his mind put the pieces together.

“Yes,” I said. “I do. And that person has killed others as well. Billy Jennings was the most recent, but not the youngest. That was the boy called Berrit, who also met your father. There was an old Mahweni as well, though that never made the papers. And me,” I added. “He tried to kill me the night he got Billy, and I am certain that he is going to try again.”





CHAPTER

25

THE DUTY OFFICER TOLD me—somewhat skeptically—that I would find Sergeant Andrews near Szenga Square, where a pair of protests had broken out. One of the protests was largely white and in carnival mood, singing raucous patriotic songs, waving flags, and burning an effigy of the Grappoli king on a bonfire outside their empty embassy. The other was quieter, angrier, a swelling horde of black men and women who chanted antiwar and antigovernment slogans. Mnenga may have been with them, but I couldn’t see him, and as soon as Andrews caught sight of me, he shepherded me around the corner.

I thought of Kalla, wondering how she would weather whatever turmoil was coming to the city, and reminded myself that she would fare no worse for being at Pancaris.

Almost certainly better.

I cared about the child, but I could not care for her. For all the dourness of the orphanage, she was safe there, and I was free to do my job, my duty to my friends and the city. Without her, my mind was clearer, like gazing through clear glass into a blue, empty sky.

I watched the Mahweni demonstrators. You could almost taste their fury and frustration. It was like some great penned beast that had been starved and tormented for years, outrage and injustice heaped on it day after day, till it exploded with lethal, snapping fury. It had just been a matter of when. Mounted dragoons had been called in to Acacia Road, and they waited there, rank upon silent rank, steaming in the heat.

Andrews gave them a long look.

“Will they be sent in?” I asked.

“Let’s hope not,” he answered, avoiding my eyes.

*

MACINNES’S FACE FELL THE moment I walked in, and that was before he saw the uniformed policemen and realized who Andrews was. He tried for righteous indignation first, exclaiming on the barbarism of storming into a respectable place of business in ways that might tarnish his reputation, but Andrews blew through that as if it were steam from a kettle.

“I am Detective Sergeant Andrews of the Bar-Selehm police department,” he said. “And you are Elmsly Macinnes, shined-up lowlife.”