“See?” Mirella said when I’d tested out the locks on the last window (Cornelia’s upstairs office, back right). “He was already here. What else could make any sense?”
I’d had a little more pleasure finding out things about Mirella. Her name was Mirella Puffer, she’d been with the police force for seven years, she’d been promoted right on schedule and was looking to speed that up a little, and she was single. “Just your average frustrated old maid,” this round, muscular little woman had told me with a big grin.
I sighed. “It might be he was here,” I said. “I mean: of course he was here—and sleeping. While somebody else got in, beamed Cornelia, and got out.”
She looked at me. She put her fists on her hips. We were standing in Cornelia’s office upstairs. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon—I’d spent the whole damn day doing the France house. “Knave,” she said, “you believe him when he says that?”
“Well, yes.”
“Why?”
It was a good question. I did believe it, and I believed that Harris France had slept right through the killing, whether or not he’d done it—if he had, he’d done it while sleepwalking.
But why did I believe it?
Because Euglane had said so, I discovered. Harris France had told his doctor he’d been sleeping, and his doctor had, even in Euglane’s agonized state, sharp enough eyes to know whether the man had been telling the truth.
He’d been treating France for months. Any patient can lie to his psychiatrist, and I suppose most do, at one time or another; but a good psychiatrist is unlikely to be fooled, once he gets to know his patient. Euglane had had the time to do that—and I thought he was probably a good psychiatrist.
I tried explaining some of that to Mirella Puffer. “You think he would know? Man spins him a story, and you think he would know is it true or not?”
“If the man is his patient,” I said.
“Maybe he’s good,” Mirella said. “I mean, he helps sick people. He’s a Giell. They’re supposed to be pretty good, you know?”
“So I understand.”
“But that’s sick people. Look, some of us human types are pretty good liars, right? I mean, France is not a kid, he has been around the block. You think a Giell can tell for sure, a human being is lying to him?”
“If the human being’s been his patient for a while.”
“If the human being’s been his patient for forty years, still I don’t believe it,” she said. “Husbands lie to wives, every day of the week, and the wives do not catch on very quick. People lie to bosses, same thing. I mean, they know each other years and years, and still they can lie good. This Euglane is different?”
“A good doctor, looking at his patient—”
“Can still be fooled,” she said. “Believe it. Not even human, how much can he know?”
“The Gielli are supposed to be pretty good,” I said.
“Maybe for sick people, yes,” she said. “Maybe. For some sick people. But that good? Knave, I am not that good, and I am good. Believe it.”
Well, she had a point. Maybe not enough of a point—and I was going to ask Euglane about possibilities. Still—damn it, if he’d done the job, why had he told the story he’d told? The bolts and locks and the chain on the front door spotlighted him, and he had to know it. I mentioned that to Mirella, too—again. And she gave me the same answer.
“Who can tell what a crazy person will do?” she said. “The job made him crazy. Maybe Cornelia made him crazy too. Did he know what he was saying? Maybe not. He said it. And he did this, Knave. Take my word.”
It was going to be, I realized, a very general opinion.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
By four-thirty—sixteen-thirty, as they say—I was through with the house, or as through as I could be. Mirella was going off duty at five (seventeen), and I had a sudden impulse, and asked her what she was doing for dinner.
“Eating it,” she said. “You mean we should get together tonight?”
“For dinner,” I said.
“Sure for dinner, what do you think I am?” she said. “You know— maybe not such a bad idea. Why the Hell not?”
“Fine,” I said. “I skipped lunch, and when you’re off duty—”
“I skipped it myself,” she said, “but I do that. Diet. When I remember, you know? Sure, an early dinner. You got a place in mind? Because I do.”
City Two’s restaurants had never printed their names on my mind in letters of fire; I was open to any suggestion, and said so.
“It’s sort of a new idea,” she said. “Maybe you don’t take to it.”
Gjenda had suggested a new idea, I remembered. Given Ravenal’s general feeling for tradition—they’re very big on it, making it do instead of imagination, once you get out of the sciences—it was probably the same new idea.
“Let’s find out,” I said.
I borrowed France’s office, which had a phone, and shut the door, leaving Mirella out on post in the rest of the house. I called Euglane, and got him, he told me, just as he’d finished with his last patient for the day.
“What have you found?” he said. “Is there something that clarifies all this, Knave? I spoke to Harris this morning—he’s adjusting fairly well, but of course it’s very difficult.”
“I’m going to have to see him,” I said. “But I’ve been going over the house, and it looks impossible. I mean, impossible that anybody got in.”
“Then you’re telling me that Harris, while sleeping—sleepwalking—did this thing?”
“No, I’m telling you he didn’t,” I said. “If he had, he wouldn’t have had the damn door chained.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” he said. “It’s not impossible for him to have done it while sleepwalking. But it is very improbable; it’s a demanding set of actions, physically, finding the socket and then fitting the knob into it. It doesn’t actually require sight, but without it, I think it would require practice—which didn’t happen.”
“You’re sure it didn’t happen?” I said. “Suppose Harris has been lying to you. Isn’t that possible?”
“Knave,” he said slowly, “I am very good at what I do. Even for a Giell, I am very good. No Giell could lie to me with success after months of contact. A human being?” He almost chuckled. “No, Knave. No.”
“So he didn’t do it sleepwalking,” I said.
“And you begin to believe he really did not do this awful thing?”
“I do,” I said.
They’re two dangerous words, in any context at all.
The new idea—and I will say I was curious by this time, having been primed for it, in a way, by Gjenda long before— turned out to be an adaptation of a very old one. And on your average planet, I don’t think it would work very well.
On Ravenal, it works as well, I suppose, as it can. Very interesting notion, in fact. In a way.
We took the police transportation—a small black car, labeled POLICE in large light-red letters—back to the precinct station, a large sandstone building with two dark-blue globes outside—tradition again, though whether a tradition of real police stations on preSpace Earth I can’t say. Stations that look like it turn up in ancient 2D movies a lot, and maybe there were actually some real ones, not just ancient movie sets; a reconstructive archaeologist I asked about it once says there seem to have been.
Mirella drove—she told me later in the evening that Paolo was a nice enough fellow, but not to be trusted with anything larger or more complex than a nail clipper. “And even with that,” she said sadly, “I think he could probably hurt himself a little.” She pulled into the station garage, a dim and open place, and we all piled out. I went around to the front of the building and waited, having had my fill of police stations on a previous visit to Ravenal, and knowing that I was going to have to visit them some more, this trip. It wasn’t something I looked forward to.
It took her twenty-five minutes to turn up again, which is not bad time for signing out and d
oing a full change. She’d been in uniform out at the France house, but now she was dressed in a simple, nicely cut dark-blue jumper, and she’d done something or other to her hair. It looked looser and less official, somehow. She swung up to me briskly.
“Want to stop anywhere before this place?” she said. “Or are you set for it?”
“I’m set,” I said. “What is this new idea, anyhow?”
“The place is called Murray’s Basement,” she said. “Kind of neat, right? You’ll see.”
We took her car. I sometimes drive on-planet, hiring a car as needed, but in City Two I depended on cabs every time. The place has complex traffic laws—six varieties of light, for instance, from red, through orange, purple, yellow and blue, to green, and each color means something different—plus signs and postings, of course; it all seems to work well enough for the natives, but it would take three months of study for me to figure it all out, and I always seem to have something else to do.
But a cab wasn’t for Mirella. “Who knows?” she said. “I might want to get the Hell away in a hurry, no offense. And right around Murray’s, I would have to phone for a cab. Why bother? End of the evening, I will drop you off where you say.”
And she drove. “My car, I am used to how it acts up,” she said casually. It didn’t seem to act up much, and she got us to a small park hidden away in the center of town, parked at a spot where the street widened out about two cars’ worth—there were already a few cars parked there—and led the way to what looked like an iron trap-door smack in the center of the park, surrounded by greenflower cover and maple trees.
“We go in here,” she said. “You game?”
“Why not?” I said, and she opened the trap-door, pulling on a big ring set into it. It opened out easily, and was clearly not iron at all but a lightweight stage set. I followed her down some stairs, which were better lit than I’d expected. The door swung slowly and quietly shut again over our heads.
Down at the bottom of the stairway was a large, cheerful room with the Hell of a high ceiling, half-filled with large, cheerful people. The average weight was perhaps two hundred and sixty pounds, and I may be undercalling it. The patrons of Murray’s Basement clearly liked to eat—a very good sign.
It took me a minute or so to get the place assorted into my head. Mirella watched me, grinning, while I figured it out; it was not much like your usual restaurant.
There is a thing called fondle. The Swiss invented it, I think—some day when we’ve all got time I’ll explain what the Swiss were—and the basic notion was, you collect some cheese, you melt it carefully in some kind of pot over low heat, and then you put things on long metal sticks, you dip the things in the melted cheese, and you eat the things. The things are cubes of meat, cubes of bread or potato, bits of broccoli or carrots, anything you happen to have around that might work with whatever cheese it is you’ve melted.
I don’t know why this was called fondle, and of course the word may have been scrambled over time. But there are restaurants on a variety of planets that specialize in it: you check in, grab a skewer, amble over to the big platters of whatever-it-is that’s available for dipping, and load the skewer. Then you find the cheese pot. You keep on doing this until you are full.
Murray’s Basement had taken this simple, basic notion and expanded it right out of sight. There were tables, some with people sitting and eating; there were longer tables loaded with big platters of food and neat piles of skewers; and there were vats. There were no cheese pots—there were very large, steaming vats more or less all over the place, immense low oblongs perhaps six feet long and two feet wide.
Some of them were filled with melted cheeses, bubbling gently in the bright light. Some seemed to be filled with sizzling fat of some kind. Some held boiling water. One or two held what I later found out—at dessert time—was melted chocolate. Each was connected to piping that, obviously, kept the liquid level nice and high.
Totums rolled everywhere, carrying trays of drinks to the diners, replenishing this or that platter of food, and so on. The place was roomy, and needed to be; and even with the high ceiling, and what was clearly a good air system, it was just a bit steamy.
Now, on your average planet, immense vats full of bubbling cheese or fat or water are not what you want in a public restaurant room. People will get drunk and fall in. (If you are going to stick skewers loaded with food into the vats, there is a definite limit on the guard rails you can be provided with.) People will get spattered by the sizzle of something. There are even a few pathogens that live nicely in heat, and work out badly if introduced into human beings.
But this was Ravenal. The pathogens were no worry, I was sure—things on Ravenal tend to be as safe as some very ingenious people can make them—and for sizzle, splatter or the occasional drunk, there were fields. Very sophisticated fields. They’d pass the skewers, they passed air and light—and they’d pass nothing else. If it wasn’t attached to a skewer, it couldn’t get in or out, and if it were the mass of a human being it was entirely locked out. The skewers were coded for the field somehow—don’t ask me, for God’s sake—and the process worked perfectly.
Mirella waited for me to catch up to the place, and then led the way to a small table not too near the vats. We sat down, and she said: “We wait for a Totum to come for drink orders. That registers us. Then we go pick up stuff.”
“Fine,” I said, and the Totum was there inside four minutes, though the place was slowly crowding up. Even when the basic idea looks fantastic, Ravenal tends to be efficient.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A while after that, we were cleaning up a first portion—I’d had some beef cubes in a sort of cheddar cheese, and chunks of broccoli in a thick white sauce that was more highly spiced than I’d expected, as well as some potato cubes quick-fried in oil, and Mirella had taken the beef, and gone for two basket items. There were metal-mesh baskets you could attach to the skewers. She’d filled one with peas in the white sauce I was trying, and one with slivers of potato for french-frying. We were drinking, at her suggestion, a house wine cooler that came along in a large pitcher, and was surprisingly drinkable, with a good deal of fruit and some spice added to the basic red.
“So tell me,” she said, and picked up a potato sliver, “why is it you asked me out to eat?”
“No particular reason,” I said, truthfully. “It seemed like a good idea.”
“You usually make dates with police?”
I thought back. “Never before in my life,” I said.
“And I am so marvelously attractive you just could not resist,” she said, and ate the french-fry.
“Well,” I said, “you’re interesting.” I had the feeling Mirella didn’t take well to compliments; some don’t.
“I’m fascinating,” she said. “It wouldn’t be you want a friend you can talk into believing Harris France? Because I am not that friend.”
“I never thought you were,” I said. “This is purely social.”
Whereupon, of course, it stopped being.
In the bustle, I wasn’t sure I had heard someone come up behind me; it might have been a diner passing through on his way a vat. But Mirella looked up past me, and I turned around.
Master Higsbee, leaning on his cane, said: “Gerald, I thought I recognized your voice.”
Mirella said: “Gerald?” and stifled a small laugh. “People call you that?”
“Gerald, damn it,” I said. “People call me Knave. Most people.” Then: “Master, it’s good to see you, but what the Hell are you doing here?”
He chuckled. “It is a new experience,” he said, “and an interesting one. This city has several acceptable restaurants, but few if any remarkable ones. I was told that this was an exception, and I am here with a friend. As are you, I think.”
“I hope so,” I said. “Master Higsbee, this is Mirella Puffer. With the police—Lance-Corporal—but she’s off duty just now. Mirella, this is Master Higsbee. He’s a Consultant.”
“Hey,” Mirella said. “What kind consulting? Hi.”
“Very various,” the Master said. “And you?”
“I work with the police,” she said. “You know that, right? I mean, he told you.”
I watched the Master’s eyebrows go up. “Gerald,” he said. “You actually have a friend with the police? I had thought you were spoofing.”
“I hope I do,” I said again. “But we’ve just met. Purely social.”
He nodded. “Of course,” he said, and then: “May we join you?”
Well, I had never met any of the Master’s lady friends, though I was sure they had to exist, somewhere or other. “Shall I ask her over?” I said.
“I will perform it, and my thanks, Gerald,” he said, and raised an arm, leaning on the cane. “But it is not a female friend with whom I dine.”
I was about to say something, and then I caught sight of the Master’s friend standing up—he hadn’t relaxed, of course, in a crowded restaurant full of people moving around—and only nodded.
Purely social, I told myself, and watched Euglane come on over.
Euglane was happy to meet Mirella, and for a little while the talk was about Murray’s Basement. Mirella began to thaw toward the Master after a minute or so—he’s intimidating when he wants to be, but now and then he doesn’t want to be—and was enthusiastic about the place. The Master called it “unusual, but in its way a fascinating study.” Only Euglane (who had a plate of water-cooked vegetables in a very mild sauce, no potatoes or tubers, and of course nothing animal whatever) seemed to dislike the restaurant.
“I do understand that, for humans, ingestion of food and drink is not only a social occasion of sorts, but almost a celebration, a party,” he said. “I see the point—a lot of people sharing the fact that their lives are connected to other lives, both plant and animal. But for me—for Gielli generally—eating’s no more a social occasion than breathing, if no less. This sort of—mass convocation of eaters—is just a bit disturbing. Like a mass of people gathering somewhere to breathe in and out.”
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