The Scarlet Band

"Sounds pretty goddamn thin to me!" a reporter called. Others shouted agreement. "You have any real evidence besides the big nose you're sticking into our affairs?" The gentlemen of the press and Inspector La Strada nodded vigorously.

"I do," Holmes said, calmly still. "Dr. Walton, if you would be so kind...?"

"Certainly." Walton hurried over to the door through which he and his colleague had entered the hall and said, "Bring him in now, if you please."

In came Sergeant Karpinski, a glum expression on his unshaven face, his hands chained together behind him. His escorts were two men even larger and burlier than he was himself: not police officers, but men who styled themselves detectives, though what they did for a living was considerably different from Athelstan Helms' definition of the art.

"Here is Casimir Karpinski," Helms said. "He will tell you for himself whether my deductions have merit."

"I killed Benjamin Morris," Karpinski said. "I'm damned if I'd tell you so unless this bastard had the goods on me, but he does, worse luck. I did it, and I'm not real sorry, either. The House of Universal Devotion needs taking down, and this was a way to do it. Or it would have been, if he hadn't started poking around."

A hush settled over the lecture hall as the reporters slowly realized this was no humbug. They scribbled furiously. "Why do you think the House needs taking down?" Helms asked.

"It's as plain as the nose on my face. It's as plain as the nose on your face, by God," Karpinski replied, which drew a nervous laugh from his audience. "They're a state within a state. They have their own rules, their own laws, their own morals. People are loyal to the Preacher, not to the United States of Atlantis. Time--past time--to bring 'em into line."

"Are these your opinions alone?" the detective inquired.

Karpinski laughed in his face. "I should hope not! Any decent Atlantean would tell you the same."

"The decency of framing the Preacher and his sect for a crime they did not commit I leave to others to expatiate upon," Athelstan Helms said. "But did you act alone, Sergeant, or upon the urging of other 'decent Atlanteans' of higher rank in society?"

"I got my orders from Hanover," Sergeant Karpinski answered. "I got them straight from Inspector La Strada, as a matter of fact."

"That's a lie!" La Strada roared.

"It is not." Helms pulled from an inside jacket pocket a folded square of pale yellow paper. "I have here a telegram found in Sergeant Karpinski's flat--"

Inspector La Strada, his face flushed a deep, liverish red suggestive of extreme choler, pulled from a shoulder holster a large, stout pistol that would have been better carried elsewhere upon his person; even in that moment of extreme tension, Dr. Walton noted that the weapon in question was a Manstopper .465: a recommendation for the model, if one the good doctor would as gladly have forgone. La Strada leveled, or attempted to level, the revolver not at either of the two Englishmen who had uncovered his nefarious machinations, but rather at Sergeant Karpinski, whose testimony could do him so much harm.

He was foiled not by Helms or Walton, but by the reporter sitting to his right. That worthy, possessed of quick wits and quicker reflexes, seized Inspector La Strada's wrist and jerked his hand upward just as the Manstopper discharged. The roar of the piece was astoundingly loud in the enclosed space. Plaster dust drifted down from the ceiling, followed a moment later by several drops of water; the pistol had proved its potency by penetrating ceiling and roof alike.

Another shot ricocheted from the marble floor several feet to Dr. Walton's left and shattered a window as it left the lecture hall. After that, the gentlemen of the press swarmed over the police inspector and forcibly separated him from his revolver; had they been but a little more forceful, they would have separated him from his right index finger as well. The Atlantean policemen in the hall, chagrin and dismay writ large upon their faces, descended to take charge of their erstwhile superior.

"Sequester all documents in Inspector La Strada's office," Athelstan Helms enjoined them. "Let nothing be removed; let nothing be destroyed. The conspiracy against the House of Universal Devotion is unlikely to have sprung full-grown from his forehead, as Pallas Athena is said to have sprung from that of cloud-gathering Zeus."

"Never you fear, Mr. Helms," a reporter called to him. "Now that we know something's rotten in the state of Denmark, like, we'll be able to run it down ourselves." His allusion, if not Homeric, was at least Shakespearean.

"God, what this'll do to the elections next summer!" another reported said. Then he blinked and looked amazed. "Who can guess now what it'll do? All depends on where La Strada got his orders from." Although he casually violated the prohibition against ending a sentence with a preposition, his remarks remained cogent.