Nebula Awards Showcase 2009 (39 page)

“Maybe. Is the body still here?”

“In the kitchen. The autopsy was performed here. Paper lungs—you know about that?”

“I know. Now, if I’ve got it right, you heard nothing in the night—”

“Oh, yes, I did hear something—the barking of my wolf-hounds. One of the servants investigated but found nothing.”

“What time was this?”

“Time?”

“What did the clock say?”

“About two in the morning.”

“When was the body found?”

“About ten—the gardener discovered it in the vine grove.”

“Right—let’s look at the body and then talk to the gardener.”

He took me to the kitchen. One of the windows was opened on to a lush enclosure full of tall, brightly coloured shrubs of every possible shade. An intoxicating scent came from the garden. It made me feel horny. I turned to look at the corpse lying on a scrubbed deal table covered in a sheet.

I pulled back the sheet. The body was naked. It looked old but strong, deeply tanned. The head was big, and its most noticeable feature was the heavy grey moustache. The body wasn’t what it had been. First there were the marks of strangulation around the throat, as well as swelling on wrists, forearms, and legs which seemed to indicate that the victim had also been tied up recently. The whole of the front of the torso had been opened for the autopsy and whoever had stitched it up again hadn’t been too careful.

“What about clothes?” I asked the Police Chief.

Bismarck shook his head and pointed to a chair standing beside the table. “That was all we found.”

There was a pair of neatly folded paper lungs, a bit the worse for wear. The trouble with disposable lungs was that while you never had to worry about smoking or any of the other causes of lung disease, the lungs had to be changed regularly. This was expensive, particularly in Rome where there was no State-controlled Lung Service as there had been in most of the European City-States until a few years before the War when the longer lasting polythene lung had superseded the paper one. There was also a wrist-watch and a pair of red shoes with long, curling toes.

I picked up one of the shoes. Middle Eastern workmanship. I looked at the watch. It was heavy, old, tarnished, and Russian. The strap was new, pigskin, with “Made in England” stamped on it.

“I see why they called us,” I said.

“There were certain anachronisms,” Bismarck admitted.

“This gardener who found him, can I talk to him?”

Bismarck went to the window and called: “Felipe!”

The foliage seemed to fold back of its own volition, and a cadaverous dark-haired man came through it. He was tall, long faced, and pale. He held an elegant watering can in one hand. He was dressed in a dark green, high-collared shirt and matching trousers. I wondered if I had seen him somewhere.

We looked at one another through the window.

“This is my gardener, Felipe Sagittarius,” Bismarck said.

Sagittarius bowed, his eyes amused. Bismarck didn’t seem to notice.

“Can you let me see where you found the body?” I asked.

“Sure,” said Sagittarius.

“I shall wait here,” Bismarck told me as I went towards the kitchen door.

“Okay.” I stepped into the garden and let Sagittarius show me the way. Once again the shrubs seemed to part on their own.

The scent was still thick and erotic. Most of the plants had dark, fleshy leaves and flowers of deep reds, purples, and blues. Here and there were clusters of heavy yellow and pink.

The grass I was walking on felt like it crawled under my feet, and the weird shapes of the trunks and stems of the shrubs didn’t make me want to take a snooze in that garden.

“This is all your work is it, Sagittarius?” I asked.

He nodded and kept walking.

“Original,” I said. “Never seen one like it before.”

Sagittarius turned then and pointed a thumb behind him. “This is the place.”

We were standing in a little glade almost entirely surrounded by thick vines that curled about their trellises like snakes. On the far side of the glade I could see where some of the vines had been ripped and the trellis torn. I guessed there had been a fight. I still couldn’t work out why the victim had been untied before the murderer strangled him—it must have been before, or else there wouldn’t have been a fight. I checked the scene, but there were no clues. Through the place where the trellis was torn I saw a small summerhouse built to represent a Chinese pavilion, all red, yellow, and black lacquer with highlights picked out in gold. It didn’t fit with the architecture of the house.

“What’s that?” I asked the gardener.

“Nothing,” he said sulkily, evidently sorry I’d seen it.

“I’ll take a look at it anyway.”

He shrugged but did not offer to lead on. I moved between the trellises until I reached the pavilion. Sagittarius followed slowly. I took the short flight of wooden steps up to the verandah and tried the door. It opened. I walked in. There seemed to be only one room, a bedroom. The bed needed making, and it looked as if two people had left it in a hurry. There was a pair of nylons tucked half under the pillow and a pair of man’s underpants on the floor. The sheets were very white, the furnishings very oriental and rich.

Sagittarius was standing in the doorway.

“Your place?” I said.

“No.” He sounded offended. “The Police Chief’s.”

I grinned.

Sagittarius burst into rhapsody. “The languorous scents, the very menace of the plants, the heaviness in the air of the garden, must surely stir the blood of even the most ancient man. This is the only place he can relax. This is what I’m employed for.

“He gives me my head. I give him his pleasures. It’s my pleasure garden.”

“Has this,” I said, pointing to the bed, “anything to do with last night?”

“He was probably here when it happened, but I . . .” Sagittarius shook his head and I wondered if there was something he’d meant to imply that I’d missed.

I saw something on the floor, stooped, and picked it up. A pendant with the initials E.B. engraved on it in Gothic script.

“Who’s E.B.?” I said.

“Only the garden interests me, Herr Begg. I do not know who she is.”

I looked out at the weird garden. “Why does it interest you—what’s all this for? You’re not doing it to his orders, are you? You’re doing it for yourself.”

Sagittarius smiled bleakly. “You are astute.” He waved an arm at the warm foliage that seemed more reptilian than plant and more mammalian, in its own way, than either. “You know what I see out there? I see deep-sea canyons where lost submarines cruise through a silence of twilit green, threatened by the waving tentacles of predators, half-fish, half-plant, and watched by the eyes of long-dead mermen whose blood went to feed their young; where squids and rays fight in a graceful dance of death, clouds of black ink merging with clouds of red blood, drifting to the surface, sipped at by sharks in passing, where they will be seen by mariners leaning over the rails of their ships. Maddened, the mariners will fling themselves overboard to sail slowly towards those distant plant-creatures already feasting on the corpses of squid and ray. This is the world I can bring to the land—that is my ambition.”

He stared at me, paused, and said: “My skull—it’s like a monstrous fish bowl!”

I nipped back to the house to find Bismarck had returned to his room. He was sitting in a plush armchair, a hidden HiFi playing, of all things, a Ravel String Quartet.

“No Wagner?” I said and then: “Who’s E.B.?”

“Later,” he said. “My assistant will answer your questions for the moment. He should be waiting for you.”

There was a car parked outside the house—a battered Volkswagen containing a neatly uniformed man of below-average height. He had a small toothbrush moustache, a stray lock of black hair falling over his forehead, black gloves on his hands which gripped a military cane in his lap. When he saw me come out he smiled, said, “Aha,” and got briskly from the car to shake my hand with a slight bow.

“Adolf Hitler,” he said. “Captain of Uniformed Detectives in Precinct XII. Police Chief Bismarck has put me at your service.”

“Glad to hear it. Do you know much about him?”

Hitler opened the car door for me, and I got in. He went round the other side, slid into the driving seat.

“The Chief?” He shook his head. “He is somewhat remote. I do not know him well—there are several ranks between us. Usually my orders come from him indirectly. This time he chose to see me himself.”

“What were they, his orders, this time?”

“Simply to help you in this investigation.”

“There isn’t much to investigate. You’re completely loyal to your chief I take it?”

“Of course.” Hitler seemed honestly puzzled. He started the car and we drove down the drive and out along a flat, white road, surmounted on both sides by great heaps of overgrown rubble.

“The murdered man had paper lungs, eh?” he said.

“Yes. Guess he must have come from Rome. He looked a bit like an Italian.”

“Or a Jew, eh?”

“I don’t think so. What made you think that?”

“The Russian watch, the Oriental shoes—the nose. That was a big nose he had. And they still have paper lungs in Moscow, you know.”

His logic seemed a bit off-beat to me but I let it pass. We turned a corner and entered a residential section where a lot of buildings were still standing. I noticed that one of them had a bar in its cellar. “How about a drink?” I said.

“Here?” He seemed surprised, or maybe nervous.

“Why not?”

So he stopped the car, and we went down the steps into the bar. A girl was singing. She was a plumpish brunette with a small, good voice. She was singing in English, and I caught the chorus:

It was “Christine,” the latest hit in England. We ordered beers from the bartender. He seemed to know Hitler well because he laughed and slapped him on the shoulder and didn’t charge us for the beer. Hitler seemed embarrassed.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Oh, his name is Weill. I know him slightly.”

“More than slightly, it looks like.”

Hitler seemed unhappy and undid his uniform jacket, tilted his cap back on his head, and tried unsuccessfully to push up the stray lock of hair. He looked a sad little man, and I felt that maybe my habit of asking questions was out of line here. I drank my beer and watched the singer. Hitler kept his back to her, but I noticed she was looking at him.

“What do you know about this Sagittarius?” I asked.

Hitler shrugged. “Very little. His name, of course, is an invention.”

Weill turned up again behind the bar and asked us if we wanted more beer. We said we didn’t.

“Sagittarius?” Weill spoke up brightly. “Are you talking about that crank Klosterheim?”

“He’s a crank, is he?” I said. The name rang a distant bell.

“That’s not fair, Kurt,” Hitler said. “He’s a brilliant man, a biologist—”

“Klosterheim was thrown out of his job because he was insane!”

“That is unkind, Kurt,” Hitler said reprovingly. “He was investigating the potential sentience of plant life. A perfectly reasonable line of scientific enquiry.”

From the corner of the room someone laughed jeeringly. It was a shaggy-haired old man sitting by himself with a glass of schnapps on the little table in front of him.

Weill pointed at him. “Ask Albert. He knows about science.”

Hitler pursed his lips and looked at the floor. “He’s just an embittered old mathematics teacher—he’s jealous of Felipe,” he said quietly, so that the old man wouldn’t hear.

“Who is he?” I asked Weill.

“Albert? A really brilliant man. He has never had the recognition he deserves. Do you want to meet him?”

But the shaggy man was leaving. He waved a hand at Hitler and Weill. “Kurt, Captain Hitler—good day.”

“Good day, Doctor Einstein.” Hitler turned to me. “Where would you like to go now?”

“A tour of the places that sell jewelry, I guess,” I said, fingering the pendant in my pocket. “I may be on the wrong track altogether, but it’s the only track I can find at the moment.”

We toured the jewelers. By nightfall we were nowhere nearer finding who had owned the thing. I’d just have to get the truth out of Bismarck the next day, though I knew it wouldn’t be easy. He wouldn’t like answering personal questions. Hitler dropped me off at the Precinct House where a cell had been converted into a bedroom for me.

I sat on the hard bed smoking and brooding. I was just about to get undressed and go to sleep when I started to think about the bar we’d been in earlier. I was sure someone there could help me. On impulse I left the cell and went out into the deserted street. It was still very hot, and the sky was full of heavy clouds. Looked like a storm was due.

I got a cab back to the bar. It was still open.

Weill wasn’t serving there now. He was playing the piano-accordion for the same girl singer I’d seen earlier. He nodded to me as I came in. I leant on the bar and ordered a beer from the barman.

When the number was over, Weill unstrapped his accordion and joined me. The girl followed him.

“Adolf not with you?” he said.

“He went home. He’s a good friend of yours, is he?”

“Oh, we met years ago in Mirenburg. He’s a nice man, you know. He should never have become a policeman. He’s too mild. I doubt he’ll ever find his Grail now.”

“That’s the impression I got. Why did he ever join in the first place?”

Weill smiled and shook his head. He was a short, thin man, wearing heavy glasses. He had a large, sensitive mouth. “Sense of duty, perhaps. He has a great sense of duty. He is very religious, too—a devout Catholic. I think that weighs on him. You know these converts, they accept nothing, are torn by their consciences. I never yet met a happy Catholic convert.”