The Scarlet Band

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."

"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.