The Kaiser Affair (The Drifting Isle Chronicles)

by Lewis, Joseph Robert

  With an awkward stumbling step, Arjuna swept around the old man and steadied him with the side of the steel bow. And as he held the breathless old fellow upright, Arjuna reached out and caught the iron rod as it fell through the air.

  I did it?

  Arjuna staggered back on his one good leg and surveyed the room.

  Three by the elevators, one shot by the guard, two with arrow-shaped holes in them, and one with a broken face right here at my feet. That’s seven. I did it!

  “I got them!” he called out triumphantly as he raised his bow and the iron rod in his outstretched hands.

  The ding of a small metal bell rang out across the vast hall, the sound resonating clearly in the breathless silence of that moment. Arjuna looked up and saw the doors of the left-hand elevator slamming shut before the sweaty and haggard features of Ranulf Kaiser.

  Arjuna felt his intestines shriveling up into a cold tangle behind his belt as his eyes widened and he cried out uselessly, “No!”

  * * *

  The elevator bell rang softly and the doors rolled open, though not very smoothly or very quietly. Light footsteps thumped softly on the carpeting in the hallway, gradually growing louder.

  Coming closer.

  The sound of the footsteps slowed and paused, and then hurried on faster than before, coming even closer still. A hand gripped the door knob and turned it, and the old wooden door swung quietly aside on well-oiled hinges.

  “You!”

  Bettina shot Ranulf Kaiser at point blank range, carefully sending the tiny tranquilizer needle straight into the man’s carotid artery. His eyes rolled back into his skull and he dropped to the floor like a puppet with his strings cut. The papers in his hand scattered across the office floor and the small leather bag that he had been holding inside his jacket fell free as well.

  “Thank you for the use of your office, Mister Hart,” Bettina said as she tucked her stolen coilgun away in her black bag with only the slightest twinge of guilt for the guard downstairs she had pilfered it from. She then began the painful procedure of gathering Kaiser’s papers and the leather bag from the floor while her cane rested against the wall beside her.

  The little fellow behind the desk took off his steel-rimmed spectacles and wiped at them with shaking hands. “Would you please tell me what this is about? Who is he?”

  “As I said a moment ago, Mister Hart, this is all a matter of Ministry internal affairs. This gentleman lying on your carpet was never here, and neither was I.”

  “Which ministry?” he asked with an exasperated whine. “What does any of this have to do with me? Am I in trouble? Do I need a lawyer? I’m just a file clerk, I don’t know anything. I don’t handle important transactions at all. You have to believe me! All I get in here are waterway management complaints, and not even the important ones. Small claims. Really!”

  “I believe you, Mister Hart,” Bettina said wearily as she straightened up and slipped Kaiser’s papers into her bag. A quick glance confirmed that they were in fact naval salvage claims forms, all hastily filled out by… someone with immaculate and flowing penmanship. She cupped the leather bag in her gloved hand and felt the odd weight and shape of the huge angler beetle inside. The leather twitched.

  Ugh! Not dead? Will the madness ever stop?

  Wincing, she took hold of the leather sack by its drawstring and let it dangle beside her own black bag. At that moment the heavy, uneven pounding of a running man’s shoes echoed in the hall, and Arjuna lunged into the doorway, his face awash with sweat. “Had to… take the stairs…”

  Wheezing and clutching his side, Arjuna looked down at the man on the floor, and then up at the man behind the desk. “Everything all right here?”

  “Perfectly, darling. We’re all done here. If you’ll just gather up the mess, we can be on our way. Thank you again, Mister Hart.” She waved politely and strode out of the room, stepped neatly over the snoring body, and began the long walk back to the elevator.

  Behind her she heard her husband grunt as he hauled Kaiser up and flopped the thief over his shoulder, and then set out behind her. He was limping severely and making many unhappy faces with each step, but it wasn’t the limp of a broken bone or any other wound that she recognized. At the elevator she waited for him to step inside, and then she deftly worked the many buttons and levers to close the doors and begin their descent to the first floor.

  “Are you hurt, dear?”

  “Not at all. My leg seems a bit sleepy, but it should pass… in a few hours.” He yawned and blinked rapidly. “I can’t believe it’s all over. Just like that.”

  “Nearly over, at any rate.” She paused. “Did you run into any trouble? I heard some commotion downstairs. I was worried. I had to deprive one of the guards of his coilgun. I hope that didn’t exacerbate things for you.”

  “No, no trouble at all.”

  The elevator thumped and Bettina opened the doors. Before her she saw a vast crowd of seated people, and dozens of police officers wading through them distributing blankets and taking statements. Directly before her the floor was covered in a thousand tiny shards of glass and brass. Splashes of blood shone darkly on the floor. On the far side of the room a pair of officers were cutting a man out of his coat, which appeared to be nailed into the wall.

  “No trouble at all, you say?”

  Arjuna grinned. “Well, not much.”

  Chapter 23. A Quiet Confession

  Detective Bettina Rothschild strode smartly down the tiled corridor of the Ministry of Justice, her cane striking the floor with loud sharp strokes. Whatever exhaustion had been leeching into her bones all night and morning had abated, at least for the time being, and she felt almost as alert and steady as after a long night’s sleep followed by an hour of aggressive relations with her groggy husband in the predawn twilight.

  As she approached the closed doors of the minister’s office she noted the short row of people sitting in the upholstered seats along the wall. Four men of various ages and degrees of agitation, all with brief cases and folders and papers resting on their laps. Bettina swept past them without a second glance.

  “Eh, hello, little miss,” said the middle-aged man seated closest to the doors. “There is a line, as you can see.”

  “Yes, there is, Mister Brandt. How astute of you to notice.” She continued past him and pushed through the closed doors.

  Inside the office she saw the minister standing over a pile of papers with the pale figure of Peter Finkel beside her.

  “Good afternoon, Peter,” Bettina said breezily. “You’ll need to reschedule for another time. Good day.”

  “Bett—wha?” Peter straightened up and stared at her as though she had asked him to strip naked and dance on the minister’s desk.

  “Please leave. Now.” Bettina looked past him and met the minister’s gaze.

  “Yes, I’m afraid you’ll have to go, Peter,” Minister Kaiser said.

  “Uhm. Right, well…” The baffled Mister Finkel gathered his papers and left the office, closing the door behind him just as a red-faced Wilhelm Brandt started to shout something from his seat in the hall.

  Gisele Kaiser sighed and sank into her chair, and gestured for Bettina to sit down across from her. “Well, detective, I trust you have some good news for me.”

  “I have news,” Bettina said in her most professional voice. “Detective Rana and I restored the errant Ranulf Kaiser to his private accommodations at Torghast Prison about an hour ago. We told the guards we had been interrogated him pending his release next month. They weren’t particularly interested in the details.”

  “Ah.” The minister nodded. “Well, that’s excellent news. Excellent. Very good work, detective. Very good indeed. And you were able to apprehend him discreetly?”

  “More or less.” Bettina nodded. “There was a small incident at city hall a short while ago, which might be mentioned in the papers, but I believe I managed to keep our names out of that little kerfuffle.”

  Gisele frow
ned slightly and nodded. “I see. And did you happen to discover the purpose of my brother’s sudden flight from prison? Did he confess what he was planning?”

  “No, he didn’t,” Bettina said as she rested her black bag in her lap. “But my husband and I, being the insightful investigators that we are, did manage to piece together a fairly solid theory based on the evidence.”

  “Evidence?”

  “Indeed.” Bettina tapped one finger idly on the clasp of her bag. “You see, after his miraculously quiet escape from prison, Ranulf hired the services of one Magdalena Strauss, a violent character that he had no prior contact with, and whom he couldn’t possibly have managed to afford. She in turn hired some rough fellows, also out of Mister Kaiser’s unlikely budgetary powers at the time. He then recruited the services of one of the Shadows.”

  “The…the Shadows, you say?”

  “Yes, the quasi-mythical brotherhood of assassins that we don’t like to talk about,” Bettina said absently as her gaze wandered around the room. “The Shadow hired a crow, they stole a flying machine, and we all found ourselves on a rollicking little jaunt through the hills and dales of Inselmond.”

  The minister stiffened in her chair. “You and your husband set foot on the drifting isle?”

  “Oh yes, yes.” Bettina nodded. “We chatted up the locals and strolled through the countryside and shot at people. It was a lovely evening. But then it was back to business and we caught up to your cheeky little brother downtown and took him back home to his cell.”

  “And he… why did… what were you all doing on Inselmond?” Gisele asked quietly.

  “Well, it’s the strangest thing, ma’am. Your brother seems to have gone all the way to the drifting isle for this.” Bettina opened her back and tossed the angler beetle onto the minister’s desk. The huge insect was now very dead indeed, but its black shell still shone with bright metallic hues of blue and green, and the long horn on the creature’s head still glowed with a dim amber light.

  The minister recoiled in her chair and covered her mouth. “What is it?”

  “Evidence. Your brother needed this creature as evidence for his salvage claim, of course.” Bettina produced the papers that she had recovered from Ranulf’s hands as he collapsed on the clerk’s floor. She set the papers on the desk in front of the minister and held them there under the point of her finger. “Per the Schmidt Act, your brother was attempting to file a salvage claim that would give him personal ownership of the entirety of the drifting isle, as well as everything, and everyone, on it.”

  “The Schmidt Act? Oh, I see.” The minister frowned a bit more firmly. “And—”

  “And the strangest thing caught my attention on the bottom of the third page,” Bettina said as her gaze wandered back to meet the minister’s eyes. She took her finger off the papers and stepped back.

  When the detective failed to continue, the minister turned to the papers and found the one in question. “What is this?”

  “It’s the beneficiary’s name,” Bettina said a bit more coldly and sternly. “The name of the person who would inherit Ranulf Kaiser’s fantastical flying island and its thousands of newly indentured serfs in the event of Mister Kaiser’s death. Your name, minister.”

  “I… I can’t imagine what Ranulf was thinking.” The paper shuddered in the minister’s hand.

  “Oh, I’m quite certain you knew exactly what he was thinking, ma’am, because the entire form was completed in your own handwriting.” Bettina sniffed politely. “I assume you wanted to be certain there were no bureaucratic stumbling blocks. It would be awful for a criminal enterprise this ingenious to fall apart over a bit of poor paperwork, wouldn’t it?”

  Gisele Kaiser slowly set the papers down on her desk and leaned back into her chair. The tension in her eyes had faded and her hands rested quietly in her lap. “I can see that I underestimated you, detective.”

  “Yes, you did. Tell me, why did you send me and my husband after your brother?” Bettina asked, tilting her head curiously to one side. “You only gave Ranulf a few hours’ head start before calling us in and setting us on his trail. Why?”

  “I expected you to fail, naturally,” the minister said calmly. “In point of fact, I expected Miss Strauss to kill you both.”

  “Ah, yes. A slender woman who limps with a cane and a Dumastran. We’d be easy to find in any crowd, easy to target.” Bettina nodded. “Still, you were taking an awful chance.”

  “Plans within plans, detective.” The minister took a small tumbler from her desk and sipped her dark liquor. “If Ranulf had succeeded in laying claim to Inselmond, and you had died in the line of duty, then I could retire with honors. After all, I would have done everything possible to stop my brother, including sending two heavily decorated officers to their deaths.”

  “Heavily decorated?”

  “Posthumously, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “And then in a few weeks, my brother would have suffered a tragic mishap and I would have inherited the drifting isle. Then, after graciously selling my claim to the government to free the poor people in the sky, I would have been publicly lauded for my patriotic generosity and made millions at the same time,” Gisele said as she gazed wistfully into her drink. “The perfect retirement plan.”

  “And if Ranulf had failed?”

  “Actually, I assumed he would fail as well,” the minister said. “In which case Strauss was to simply kill him and then no one would have been particularly concerned about his escape. Meanwhile the Ministry would have been in mourning over the tragic loss of two of its youngest and more… diverse detectives. I would have made many fine speeches on the subject and the papers would have eaten it up with a spoon. And after the brutal murder of my brother, due in part to an inept prison warden, and my very public role as a beacon of progressivism and multiculturalism, the Senate would have had no choice but to allow me to remain in office following my professional review. Politics, you see.”

  “Politics.” Bettina nodded. She snapped her black bag closed and rose to her feet.

  “What will you do now?” the minister asked, her eyes narrowing.

  “I’m going home, ma’am. My husband needs tending and I’m quite exhausted myself. We’ll be taking the day off tomorrow, but we’ll be back on duty the following morning.” Bettina flashed a brief but professional smile.

  “And what do you intend to do with me?”

  “Nothing at all.” Bettina smoothed her hair back behind her ear. “You will of course be increasing my salary as well as my husband’s. Substantially.”

  “That’s the price of your silence? Money?”

  Bettina shrugged. “You saw an opportunity for profit and you took it. I don’t respect that, but I do understand it. And it doesn’t change the fact that you are still a preferable minister to Wilhelm Brandt. Politics, you see.”

  Gisele nodded.

  “More importantly, you’ve no doubt exhausted quite a bit of your retirement funds on this little fiasco, haven’t you? You financed Ranulf’s escape as well as the services of his many, many confederates. So I doubt you’ll be able to afford hiring the likes of Magdalena Strauss to kill me any time soon. However, if that thought does cross your mind, or should I ever have reason to suspect you of participating in another escapade such as this, then you should be aware that I have recently made some rather powerful friends among the Shadows. If anything happens to me or my husband, you can be assured that you won’t live long enough to regret harming us.”

  The minister’s face lost a bit of color and she set her glass aside. “I see. Well played, detective. Ruthless and yet compromising at the same time.”

  “Yes, well, I’m of the opinion that there are worse things in this world than an old police officer trying to make a little money, even if you were willing to kill your brother and two of your detectives in the process.” Bettina fixed the older woman with a stern contemptuous sneer. “This Ministry is a just organization, perhaps the onl
y just one left. We have integrity. We safeguard the public, more often than not, and I know that is largely thanks to your leadership. If the politicians ever get their claws into this place, then the public will suffer. The poor will suffer. Children. Immigrants. The sick. You may be a self-serving viper, ma’am, but you’re still better than Brandt or any other blue-blood politician.”

  The minister sighed wearily. “Thank you ever so much for that.”

  “You’re quite welcome, ma’am. And here, let me take care of this for you.” With a dainty hand she plucked the angler bug from the desk and dropped it into the waste bin, and then crushed the creature with several sharp jabs of her cane. The butt of her cane came away dripping with dark green slime. “Good day, minister.”

  She turned and strode out of the room, leaving a trail of noxious green puddles where her cane struck the carpet.

  Epilogue: A Late Visit

  It was close to midnight when Arjuna finally awoke from the effects of the tranquilizer, which gave Bettina more than enough time to prepare. Her husband opened his eyes to find his wrists and ankles bound to the posts in each corner of the bed. A white silk cravat covered his throat, and nothing else. Bettina set aside her chemistry textbook and moved toward him. A string of shining pearls hung around her neck, and a white satin corset hugged her ribs tightly, and long white satin gloves covered her hands and arms.

  Arjuna smiled. “I see our brief time at the opera house made quite an impression on you.”

  “It did indeed.” She smiled back as she began to teasingly explore the smooth contours of his chest and stomach with her fingertips. She kissed him, and bit him. They laughed and kissed and moaned…

  “Please don’t stop on my account,” a voice said from the doorway.