Helena picked up her flashlight and directed its strong beam down at the point of the shovel, revealing a long, twisting streak of silvery metal like a vein in the earth. The casket lid caught the light and shimmered with it, new and slightly burnished.
"Eureka," Brutus said. "The daring group of coffin prospectors has struck another lode."
"Thank God," Helena said, feeling her biceps.
Jessie set to work more industriously than before, clearing away the last couple of inches of earth, until he had the entire face of the casket revealed. It was a plain model, not what one expected the second-ranking embassy maseni to be laid to rest in, without curlicues or decorations. It was smooth, slightly raised, and very difficult to stand up on, as he was forced to do. Starting at the top, right corner, Jessie worked his way around the oblong box, cutting the dirt away from its lid so that they could open the thing when the time came. At a quarter past four in the morning, he tossed the shovel out of the hole, finished.
"Are we going to have to fill this back in again?" Helena wanted to know, her lips pouted, one hand gingerly testing her other biceps.
The detective said, "Well worry about that later."
"I'm worrying about it right now."
"There's a length of rope in the satchel," Jessie said. "Would you toss it down to me?"
"I'll get it," Brutus told the girl.
"You're a charmer."
The hound got up and walked over to the open satchel, peered inside, plucked out a coil of rope with his teeth, brought that to the open grave and dropped it on Jessie's head.
"Why didn't you warn me, for Christ's sake?" Blake asked, stooping to pick up the rope, rubbing his head with the other hand. "This is steel-link covered by nylon, you know; it isn't quite so light as a feather."
"Why weren't you looking up?" Brutus asked, sitting down beside Helena again.
Still rubbing his head, Jessie said, "I was looking at the twin locks on the casket lid. I thought I'd have to hammer them off, but it looks like they were never engaged."
"They put it down there unsealed?"
"Seems that way," Jessie said.
He uncoiled the line which Brutus had thrown on his head, tied one end of that to the coffin handle, threw the other end up to Helena, then scrambled out of the hole.
"Now," he told them, "I'll just pull the lid up so we can see inside that box. The raising lid's going to block my view, so why don't you two go around to the other side of the hole, where you can look straight in."
Helena got to her feet. "I don't like this," she said. "I didn't like it at the start, and I like it even less now. I'm sure we're being watched."
Jessie looked around the empty cemetery. "Impossible."
"I feel eyes on my neck."
"Just go around the other side and tell me whether Tesserax is laid out to rest in a normal manner."
When she and the hound were around on the other side of the grave, Jessie wiped perspiration out of his eyes, dried his hands on his trousers, then wrapped the rope around his wrists so he wouldn't lose hold of it. Putting his broad shoulders into it, he began to backstep across the yard toward the other aisle of stones, grunting to get himself in the mood, raising the coffin lid an inch at a time.
"Must weigh a couple of hundred pounds," he called to them. "You see anything in there, yet?"
Helena hunkered down and probed the grave with her flashlight beam, squinted prettily, either to see better or to register distaste.
"You'll have to get it open more, Jess," the hell hound said, looking along the beam of Helena's light.
Jessie's feet were slipping on the damp grass, and the job proved to be more difficult than he had originally supposed. Nevertheless, he gritted his teeth and continued to backstep.
Something in the hole creaked loudly.
"Uh — what was that?" Jessie asked.
"I hope it was only an unoiled hinge on the coffin lid," Helena said, her voice quavering.
"How far have I lifted it?"
"Four inches," Brutus said.
Jessie dug in his heels and began to walk faster, feeling the full weight of the lid coming into the rope.
"That's it, that's it," the hound called.
"See anything?"
"A few more inches," Helena said.
"A few more inches, and I'll have a hernia," the detective said. Nevertheless, he continued to back up.
"More, more," Brutus called, his long tail swishing back and forth like a metronome guiding the rhythm of the detective's effort. He had bent his front legs and brought his head level with the edge of the grave, as if he were beginning to catch a glimpse of the interior of the coffin.
"Now?" Jessie asked.
"You need some help?" Helena asked.
"No, no," Jessie said. "I'm doing okay."
Truthfully, he wasn't doing okay at all; his heart was thudding, and blood pounded like hammers at both temples. However, he felt he had to make Helena think it was a simple matter for him. Already, though she didn't know it, he felt himself to be in constant competition with her, to such a degree that he felt their male-female roles had become too equal. He had been born and raised in an era when women's liberation wasn't a movement, but an accepted part of society — yet his home life had been at variance with much of modern thought. Neither his mother nor his father had held much truck with sexual equality or freedom, so it was perhaps understandable that he was sometimes worried about such things.
"That's far enough, Jessie," Helena called,
"What do you see?"
Neither the woman nor the hound answered, but they both continued to stare into the open hole.
Jessie began to sweat again. Clear droplets rolled across his face, tickled his cheeks, caught saltily in the corners of his mouth. "Is it that terrible?" he asked.
"Well, 'terrible' isn't quite the word for it," Helena said. "Something like — oh, 'frustrating' or 'maddening' would do much better."
"Is the corpse mutilated beyond endurance?" Jessie asked. He had seen corpses mutilated beyond endurance before. "Does it look like the picture of Tesserax we got from Galiotor Fils?"
"No, the corpse isn't mutilated beyond endurance," Brutus said. "In fact, it isn't mutilated at all. In fact, there just isn't any corpse; they buried an empty casket."
"Oh," Jessie said.
"Christ," Brutus said, with feeling, "am I glad that I didn't do all that work for nothing."
"It wasn't for nothing," Jessie said.
"It wasn't?"
The detective let go of the rope and was instantly jerked off his feet as the coffin lid started to go shut. He slammed into the damp grass, face first, bit his lip, tasted blood, and looked up at the woman and the hound, bewildered.
"You had the end of the rope lashed around your wrists," Brutus said. "Remember?"
Jessie looked down at his hands and nodded, sat up and unwound the cord, let it go again and listened as the empty coffin's lid fell shut with a soft whump, the rope rattling drily after it.
"You were saying this expedition was worthwhile," Brutus said.
Jessie crawled to the edge of the grave, opposite them, and he said, "That's right."
A flight of bats, perhaps twenty of them, rose out of the white mausoleum perched atop the second hillock in the graveyard. In an unexpected burst of moonlight, they screeched away, into darkness. The moon, which had only momentarily illuminated them, slid behind the storm clouds again, like a Spanish woman's face slyly shielded by a fan.
"But we didn't find anything," Helena protested.
"Oh, yes we did," Jessie said, "We found that there was no body in Tesserax's grave."
"That's the same thing."
Jessie got to his feet, brushing himself off, even though he really didn't feel like standing, yet. "No, it isn't the same thing," he said, with brotherly patience, wiping blood from his cracked lips.