"Samuel Jones?" Walton said. "The name is not familiar."
"You will know him better as the Preacher, founder and propagator--propagator, forsooth!--of the House of Universal Deviation." Benjamin Morris seemed intent on finding as many disparaging names for the Preacher's foundation as he could. "How many members of the House his member has sired I am not prepared to say, but the number is not small."
"He embraces his mistresses as they embrace his principles," Athelstan Helms suggested.
Morris laughed, but quickly sobered. "That is excellent repartee, sir, but falls short in regard of truthfulness. For the Preacher has no principles, but ever professes that which is momentarily expedient. No wonder his theology, so-called, is such an extraordinary tissue of lies and jumble of whatever half-baked texts he chances to have recently read. That men can become as gods! Tell me, gentlemen: has mankind seemed more godly than usual lately? It is to laugh!" Like a lot of lawyers, he often answered his own questions.
His beefsteak appeared then, and proved sanguinary enough to satisfy a surgeon, let alone an attorney. He attacked it with excellent appetite, and also did full justice to an Atlantean red with a nose closely approximating that of a hearty Burgundy. After a bit, Helms said, "Few faiths are entirely logical and self-consistent. The early Christian controversies pertaining to the relation of the Son and the Father and to the relation between the divine and the human within Jesus Christ demonstrate this all too well, as does the blood spilled over them."
"No doubt, no doubt," Benjamin Morris said. "But our Lord was not a louche debauchee, and did not compose the Scriptures with an eye toward giving himself as wide a latitude for misbehavior as he could find." He told several salacious stories about the Preacher's earlier days. They seemed more suitable to the smoking car of a long-haul train than to this placid provincial dining room.
Even Walton, who did not love the Preacher, felt compelled to remark, "Such unsavory assertions would be all the better for proof."
"I have documentary proof at my offices, sir," Morris said. "As I told you, I have been following this rogue and his antics for years, like. After supper, I shall go there and bring you what I trust will suffice to satisfy the most determined skeptic."
Having made that announcement, he hurried through the rest of his meal, drained a last glass of wine, and, slapping a couple of golden Atlantean eagles on the table, arose and hastened from the dining room.
Less than a minute later, several sharp pops rang out. "Fireworks?" Walton said.
"Firearms," Athelstan Helms replied, his voice suddenly grim. "A large-bore revolver, unless I am much mistaken." In such matters, Walton knew his friend was unlikely to be.
Sure enough, someone shouted, "Is a doctor close by? A man's been shot!"
Still masticating a last savory bite of oil thrush, Walton dashed out into the street to do what he could for the fallen man. Helms, though no physician, followed hard on his heels to learn what he could from the scene of this latest crime. "I hope it isn't that Morris fellow," the good doctor said.
"Well, so do I, but not to any great degree, for it is likely a hope wasted," Helms said.
And sure enough, there lay Benjamin Joshua Morris, with three bullet wounds in his chest. "Good heavens," Walton said. "Beggar's dead as a stone. Hardly had the chance to know what hit him, I daresay."
Sergeant Karpinski popped up out of nowhere like a jack-in-the-box, pistol in hand. Athelstan Helms' nostrils twitched, as if in surprise. "I heard gunshots," Karpinski said, and then, looking down, "Great God, it's Morris!"
"He was just speaking to us of the perfidies of the House of Universal Devotion." Dr. Walton stared at the corpse, and at the blood puddling beneath it on the cobbles. "Here, I should say, we find the said perfidies demonstrated upon his person."
"So it would seem." Sergeant Karpinski scowled at the body, and then in the direction of the house where he and the Englishmen had conversed with the Preacher. "I should have jugged that no-good son of a.... Well, I should have jugged him when I had the chance. A better man might still be alive if I'd done it."
Dr. Walton also looked back toward that house. "You could still drop on him, you know."
Gloomily, the policeman shook his head. "Not a chance he'll still be there. He'll lie low for a while now, pop up here and there to preach a sermon, and then disappear again. Oh, I'll send some men over, but they won't find him. I know the man. I know him too well."
Athelstan Helms coughed. "I should point out that we have no proof the House of Universal Devotion murdered the late Mr. Morris, nor that the Preacher ordered his slaying if some member of the House was in fact responsible for it."
Both his particular friend and the police sergeant eyed him as if he'd taken leave of his senses. "I say, Helms, if we haven't got cause and effect here, what have we got?" Walton asked.
"A dead man," the detective replied. "By all appearances, a paucity of witnesses to the slaying. Past that, only untested hypotheses."
"Call them whatever you want," Karpinski said. "As for me, I'm going to try to run the Preacher to earth. I know some of his hidey-holes--maybe more than he thinks I do. With a little luck ... And I'll send my men back here to take charge of the body." He paused. "Good lord, I'll have to tell Lucy Morris her husband's been murdered. I don't relish that."
"There will be a post-mortem examination on the deceased, I assume?" Helms said. When Sergeant Karpinski nodded, Helms continued, "Would you be kind enough to send a copy of the results to me here at the hotel?"
"I can do that," Karpinski said.
"He also spoke of papers in his office, papers with information damaging to the House of Universal Devotion," Walton said. "Any chance we might get an idea of what they contain?"
Now the police sergeant frowned. "A lawyer's private papers after his death? That won't be so easy to arrange, I'm afraid. I'll speak to his widow about it, though. If she's in a vengeful mood and thinks showing them to you would help make the House fall, she might give you leave to see them. I make no promises, of course. And now, if you'll pardon me..." He tipped his derby and hurried away.
Athelstan Helms stared after him, a cold light flickering in his pale eyes. "I dislike homicide, Walton," the detective said. "I especially dislike it when perpetrated for the purpose of furthering a cause. Ideological homicide, to use the word that seems all the rage on the Continent these days, makes the crime of passion and even murder for the sake of wealth seem clean by comparison."
"And in furtherance of a religious ideology!" Walton exclaimed. "Of all the outmoded things! Seems as if it ought to belong in Crusader days, as you told that so-called Preacher yourself."
"Those who have the most to lose are aptest to strike to preserve what they still have," Helms observed.
"Just so." Dr. Walton nodded vigorously. "When Mr. Samuel Jones found out that poor Morris here was conferring with us in aid of his assorted sordid iniquities"--he chuckled, fancying his own turn of phrase--"he must have decided he couldn't afford it, and sent his assassins after the man."
Two policemen, both large and rotund, huffed up. Each wore on his hip in a patent-leather holster a stout brute of a pistol, of the same model as Sergeant Karpinski's--no doubt the standard weapon for the police in Thetford, if not in all of Atlantis. "That's Morris, all right," one of them said, eyeing the body. "There'll be hell to pay when word of this gets out."
"Yes, and the Preacher to pay it," the other man said with a certain grim anticipation.
The first policeman eyed Helms and Walton. "And who the devil are you two, and where were you when this poor bastard got cooled?"