The Scarlet Band

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."

"Like the Hashishin," murmured Walton, who, from his service in the East, was steeped in Oriental lore.

La Strada looked blank. "The Assassins," Athelstan Helms glossed.

"They're assassins, all right," the inspector said, missing most of the point. Neither Englishman seemed to reckon it worthwhile to enlighten him. La Strada went on, "We aim to find a way to make them stop without outlawing them altogether. We have religious freedom here in Atlantis, we do. We don't establish any one church and disadvantage the rest."