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 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 with long poles 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 farthings 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."