"Yes, I'd noticed that," Dr. Walton observed tartly.
La Strada either missed or ignored the sarcasm. "Though you might, like," he said. "Anyone but a convicted felon can legally carry a gun here. And the convicted felons do it, too--what have they got to lose? A tavern brawl here isn't one fellow breaking a mug over the other one's head. He pulls out a snub-nosed .42 and puts a pill in the bastard's brisket. And if getting away means plugging a policeman, he doesn't stick at that, either."
"Charming people," the physician murmured.
"In many ways, they are," Helms said. "But, having won freedom through a bloody uprising against the British crown, they labor under the delusion that they must be ready--nay, eager--to shed more blood at any moment to defend it."
"We don't happen to think that is a delusion, sir," La Strada said stiffly.
"No doubt," Athelstan Helms replied. "That does not mean it isn't one. I draw your notice to the Dominion of Ontario, in northeastern Terranova. Ontario declined revolution--despite your buccaneers, I might add, or perhaps because of them--yet can you deny that its people are as free as your own, and possessed of virtually identical rights?"
"Of course I can. They still have a Queen--your Queen." La Strada wrinkled up his nose as if to show he could smell the stench of monarchism across the thousand miles of Hesperian Gulf separating the USA and Ontario.
"We do not find it unduly discommodes us," Helms said.
"The more fools you," La Strada told him. There was remarkably little conversation in the coach after that until it pulled up in front of Hanover's police headquarters.
Dr. Walton had not looked for the headquarters to be lovely. But neither had he looked for the building to be as ugly as it was. A gas lamp on either side of the steps leading up to the entrance showed the brickwork to be of a jaundiced, despairing yellow. The steps themselves were of poured concrete: utilitarian, no doubt, but unequivocally unlovely. The edifice was squat and sturdy, with small rectangular windows; it put Walton in mind of a fortress. The stout iron bars on the windows of the bottom two stories reinforced the impression--and the windows.
After gazing at those, Helms remarked, "They will use this place to house criminals as well as constables." There, for once, the detective's companion had not the slightest difficult comprehending how his friend made the deduction.
"Come along, gents, come along." La Strada hopped down to the ground, spry as a cricket. Helms and Walton followed. The policeman who drove the carriage, who'd said not a word on the journey from the customs house, remained behind to ensure that their luggage did not decide to tour the city on its own.
The odors greeting the newcomers when they went inside would have told them what sort of place they were finding. Dante might have had such smells in mind when he wrote, All hope abandon, ye who enter here. Dampness and mold, bad tobacco, stale sweat infused with the aftereffects of rum and whiskey, sour vomit, chamber pots that wanted emptying, the sharp smell of fear and the less definable odor of despair ... Dr. Walton sighed. They were no different from what he would have smelled at the Old Bailey.
And, walking past cells on the way to the stairs, Walton and Athelstan Helms saw scenes straight out of Hogarth engravings, and others that, again, might have come straight from the Inferno. "Here we go," Inspector La Strada said, politely holding the door open for the two Englishmen. When he closed the stout redwood panel (anywhere but Atlantis, it would have been oak) behind them, he might have put a mile of distance between them and the hellish din behind it.
Another door, equally sturdy, guarded each of the upper floors. Even if, through catastrophe or conspiracy, a swarm of prisoners escaped, the constables could fortify their position and defend themselves for a long time. "You have firing ports, I see," Helms murmured. Dr. Walton, who'd fought in Afghanistan and was one of the lucky few to have escaped that hellhole, slapped at his thigh, annoyed at himself for missing the telling detail.
Inspector La Strada opened one of those fortified portals. A rotund constabulary sergeant with a large-caliber revolver sat just beyond it, ready for any eventuality. Not far away, a technician had a dissipated-looking young man in a special chair, and was measuring his skull and ear and left middle finger and ring finger with calipers and ruler. A clerk wrote down the numbers he called out.
"You still use the Bertillon system for identifying your miscreants, then?" Athelstan Helms inquired.
"We do," La Strada replied. "It's not perfect, but far better than any other method we've found." He thrust out his receding chin as far as it would go. "And I haven't heard that Scotland Yard's got anything better, either."
"Scotland Yard? No." Helms sounded faintly dismissive. "But I am personally convinced that one day--and perhaps one day quite soon--the ridges and crenelations on a man's fingertips will prove more efficacious yet, and with far less labor and less likelihood of error and mistaken identity."
"Well, I'll believe that when I see it, sir, and not a moment before." La Strada picked his way through chaos not much quieter and not much less odorous than that downstairs. He finally halted at a plain--indeed, battered--pine desk. "My home from home, you might say," he remarked, and purloined a couple of cheap, unpadded chairs nearby. "Have a seat, gents, and I'll tell you what's what, like."
Before sitting, Dr. Walton tried to brush something off his chair. Whatever it was, it proved sticky and resistant to brushing. He perched gingerly, on one buttock, rather like the old woman in Candide. Either Helms' chair was clean or he was indifferent to any dirt it might have accumulated.
La Strada reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a brown glass bottle and, after some rummaging, three none too clean tumblers. "A restorative, gentlemen?" he said, and started to pour before the Englishmen could say yea or nay.
It wasn't scotch. It was maize whiskey--corn liquor, they called it in Atlantis--and it might have been aged a week, or perhaps even two. "Gives one the sensation of having swallowed a lighted gas lamp, what?" Dr. Walton wheezed when more or less capable of intelligible speech once more.
"It intoxicates. Past that, what more is truly required?" Helms drank his off with an aplomb suggesting long experience--and perhaps a galvanized gullet.
"This here is legal whiskey, gents. You should taste what the homecookers make." La Strada shuddered ... and refilled his glass. "Shall we get down to business?"
"May we talk freely here?" Helms asked. "Are you certain none of your colleagues within earshot belongs to the House of Universal Devotion?"
"Certain? Mr. Helms, I'm not certain of a damned thing," La Strada. "If you told me a giant honker would walk up those stairs and come through that doorway there, I couldn't say I was certain you were wrong."
"Aren't honkers as extinct as the dodo?" Dr. Walton asked, sudden sharp interest in his voice: he fancied himself an amateur ornithologist. "Didn't that Audubon chap paint some of the last of them before your slave uprising?"
"The Servile Insurrection, we call it." La Strada's face clouded. Like most Atlanteans his age, he would have served in the fight. "I've got a scar on my leg on account of it.... But you don't care about that. Yes, they say honkers are gone, but the backwoods of Atlantis are a mighty big place, so who knows for sure, like? ... But you don't care about that, either, not really. The House of Universal Devotion."
"Yes. The House of Universal Devotion." Helms leaned forward on his hard, uncomfortable seat.
"Well, you'll know they're killing important men. If you attended to my letter, you'll know they're doing it for no good reason any man who doesn't belong to the House can see. And you'll know they're damned hard to stop, because their murderers don't care if they live or die," La Strada said. "They figure they go straight to heaven if they're killed."