by John Barnes
The Cochin-Chinese National Police have a middling reputation among the police forces of the world. They are not the gentle sorts that Enzy, Finnish, or Irish cops are reputed to be, but they aren’t any kind of Gestapo, either. They tend to be mildly corrupt, but not enough so that you would want to take a chance on bribing one if you didn’t know him. It seemed like the best thing to do was to cooperate and to keep repeating the truth—that I had no idea what was going on or why.
They commenced a thorough but not brutal search of us and the corpse. The pistol on the table drew some exclamations— none of them had ever seen any weapon of that make before. Searching Helen, they found she was carrying other weapons: a garter derringer, a switchblade in her purse, and a throwing knife in a quick-draw sheath in the back of her underwear. In a low-backed dress like that, I suppose it would have been easy enough to reach in and get it, and might even serve as a diversion in the right situation. How had Helen concealed all that from me while she was dressing? And more importantly, how had she concealed what was apparently a pretty big part of her life from me during five years of courting?
The manager of the Curious Monkey had gotten into the argument, now, too. At least he made sense; he wanted all this crap out of his restaurant in a hurry, and he wanted the addresses of everyone involved so that he could send all of us bills for the damages.
He got part of his wish right away. A plainclothes inspector showed up, had a whispered conference with the manager in Japanese and French, and a short rapid-fire dialogue in Vietnamese with the uniformed sergeant, and barked a few short sentences. They dragged Helen, who wasn’t resisting and seemed to be in some kind of shock, over to one unmarked car and pushed her in. They dragged me to another one and did the same. All the high-level officers got into the car with Helen, so either they had already figured out which of us was really dangerous, or more likely they all wanted to claim a share in arresting the murderer rather than her accomplice.
No one in the car I was in spoke a word of English, French, or German, so although they seemed polite and nice enough, I couldn’t ask basic questions like whether or not I was under arrest or if perhaps this horrible dream might be over with soon.
The people and robots of Saigon apparently had acquired a healthy respect, though probably not any admiration, for the way that police cars drive, because everything and everyone scattered out of the way as we roared through the streets, siren wailing and red lights flashing. Pedicabs went up over the curbs, pedestrians pressed themselves off the narrow sidewalks and up against walls, and the few cars on the street abruptly remembered business elsewhere and made a quick left or right turn. The car slammed over potholes and through the dust of the side streets, roaring by small stands and the wide-open eyes and mouths of people who popped out of their front doors to see what all the fuss was about. It might have been interesting if I hadn’t been sitting in the backseat, hugging myself as tightly as the cuffs would permit, and now and then sobbing with fear.
At the police station, a detective who spoke English explained that Helen was over in women’s incarceration, and that they would need to take a number of statements and record a great deal of information, but fortunately this was not a busy Friday night and chances were good that we could be released within a few hours, especially since virtually all the witnesses from the Curious Monkey were in agreement that Helen had fired only in self-defense.
Fortunately for us, Cochin-China is one of those places that take a sensible attitude about self-defense. In Enzy there would have been a spirited discussion about whether people who try to kill you ipso facto ought to be killed before you have heard and carefully considered their reasons. I was so relieved at being treated reasonably that if I had not been handcuffed I’d gladly have dropped to my knees and kissed their hands.
They put me into a cell with half a dozen quiet drunks and opium addicts; I seemed to be the only person in the cell who was not inebriated. It did smell of urine and puke, but of old urine and puke—and of much more recent soap. I was mildly exasperated, of course, to be in here, with two wooden benches and seven men, not exactly of the sort I usually associated with, when I was also paying for a room at the Royal Saigon.
I was very glad to be alive and almost as glad to be in the hands of a relatively patient and sympathetic police force; they would question me and they probably wouldn’t believe my story, but they wouldn’t torture me into giving them a story they liked. They might, of course, keep me until I was a fungus-covered corpse, but there were probably no rubber hoses or testicle clamps in my immediate future.
Why would someone try to kill me? I couldn’t imagine what I had done. The only explanation I had was one that merely transferred the senselessness of it all one step backward—perhaps someone wanted me to be dead for the same reason that Billie Beard had wanted me to be frightened. Maybe Iphwin was up to something that had deeply infuriated, or even frightened, the German Reich itself—that would explain my first assailant’s being a member of Political Offenses and this dead man’s being obviously German. Or was that what I was supposed to think?
I had no idea even how to begin sorting out the possibilities; this was beyond anything I had ever had to think about.
Since Helen had done the shooting, no doubt they were talking to her first. And yet—after that cool, competent call to the local police—she had seemed pretty bewildered herself, as if she didn’t know what was going on either. Where could she have acquired the skills she had displayed tonight—let alone the hardware?
Just who or what had I just become engaged to?
That gave me plenty to think about, and the night was still young, so I can’t really say I was bored. After a while the door opened and they brought in another prisoner, who took the only open seat, next to me. His black pajamas reeked of several kinds of smoke, and he appeared to be extremely drunk. He sang the same little song over and over.
I had never conducted my life in any way that could possibly have led to this kind of circumstance. I could not even think of any friends or acquaintances—other than perhaps Helen or Iphwin—who had any connection to the kind of world where things like this happened.
I retraced my life, three times, all the way from my earliest memories of my parents, up till I sat down and read an ordinary, dull newspaper earlier that day, and in all of it I could find no hint that anything like this could happen to me. Meanwhile, I figured out that the fellow beside me was singing in heavily accented French, and that it was a translation of an English song I had learned from my mother while I was small:
I was drunk last night, dear Mother.
I was drunk on the night before.
But if you’ll forgive me, dear Mother,
I’ll never get drunk any more.
He sang that single verse over and over with a strange determination, as if he knew he would get it right, one of these times, but he hadn’t yet, and each experiment brought him some infinitesimal step closer to the magical moment when the song, or at least that verse of it, would be as perfect as he could make it. He didn’t hurry and he didn’t dawdle; he worked with concentration but not with anxiety. Sooner or later the definitive Viet-accented a cappella French version of “I Was Drunk Last Night” would emerge, and meanwhile, the rest of the world could listen, or not. He would succeed, given time enough.
When they finally came for me I had all the lyrics down cold, and had begun to form a theory of the deeper significance of the song, which, luckily, I was never to develop any further. The cell door swung open and the polite inspector who had booked me in called my name and pointed to me. I stood and followed him down the hall to an office; behind me the cell door clanged shut.
He gestured me to a chair and handed me a glass of water; I took a sip.
“Well,” the inspector said, looking at his beautifully manicured hands and brushing his lank gray hair from his heavily freckled forehead, “we are in some difficulty here. Your friend tells us that she knows nothing about anyth
ing that has happened, and denies even remembering the shooting. Perhaps you could enlighten us as to why she is making such silly claims.”
“I wish I could,” I said. “I didn’t even know that she had a gun with her, let alone a whole arsenal.”
“The odd part is that she claims that she didn’t know either,” the inspector said. Fussily, he straightened his bright red necktie, and leaned forward toward me, resting his elbows on his knees and gazing into my eyes the way they do in the movies.
“I really don’t know anything,” I said.
“Well, provisionally I’m going to believe you, because I’ve never seen two people look so bewildered after an arrest as you and Dr. Perdita look. But even though I believe you—” there was something vaguely threatening in the way he said that “—let’s just walk through the list of questions with you, Dr. Peripart. First of all, do you have any acquaintance with an American expat who works for the Political Offenses Section, named Billie Beard?”
“My god, I certainly do. Just this afternoon, she attacked me physically, roughed me up, interrogated me, whatever you want to call it, in my own jump boat, in Surabaya harbor.”
“And did you want revenge?”
“What kind of question is that?” I was bewildered. “Is she connected to the man who was shot?”
The inspector stared at me. “What man? The body in the Curious Monkey was—you couldn’t possibly have mistaken her for a man! A hundred-and-fifty-centimeter-tall blonde woman in a tight black dress? According to the ID in her bag, she was Billie Beard, American expat citizen with dual citizenship in the American and Dutch Reichs, which was confirmed by fingerprints on file here, and a wire to Batavia confirmed it.”
“It can’t be. I saw the man clearly.”
The inspector shook his head. “We can sort this out one way or another. Can you at least come down to the morgue with me and confirm that the dead woman we took out of the Curious Monkey is Billie Beard? That would help a great deal.”
“Certainly.”
The morgue was a product of the mercifully brief period when the Emperor had been infatuated with Speerist monumentalism, around 1970, so the ceilings were vaulted and far above our heads, and the corridors echoed like something out of a horror movie. The room itself was big, air-conditioned, and brightly lit. The inspector and the attendant rolled her out of a big walk-in refrigerator and pulled back the sheet; sure enough, it was Billie Beard, or at least it looked very much like her since the face was so distorted by the exit wound near the mouth, and I said so.
She was wounded in the same places that I had seen my “anonymous German tourist” shot.
“This is the body that we picked up in the Curious Monkey. We have not yet found the bullets, so we can’t do the matching just yet, but the wounds are consistent with a high-velocity high-caliber pistol at a range of a few meters, and of course we found just such a pistol on your table, with Helen Perdita’s right-hand fingerprints on it. We’re paraffin testing her right now but we’re sure we’ll get a confirmation that she fired it.”
“She did—I heard her fire all four shots, and saw her fire the last one.” Probably I was naive but just now the only thing that seemed to make any sense was to keep telling the truth until someone got around to telling me what was going on. I stared at the shattered body. “But the person who came in and shot at me was a man, overweight, wearing red shorts and a dirty white safari shirt, shorter than this—” The room was getting dark and it was hard to breathe; I saw the lights of the ceiling for an instant and felt something thump the back of my head, realizing that it must be the floor just as I passed out.
When I woke up my first thought was that I was home in bed and nothing had happened—but the bed was too narrow and uncomfortable to be mine, and when I sat up I was still in evening clothes. The light came on and I saw that I was on a folding cot in a small room, with a desk and two chairs, and the man in the doorway who had just turned on the light was the inspector. So much for that hope, I thought.
The inspector said, “We certainly have a problem here. Are you feeling better? Whatever the truth may be, I’m sure you’ve had a series of unpleasant shocks.” He handed me a glass of water and said, “We can give you a stimulant or a tranquilizer if it will help.”
“I don’t think I want to take any drugs,” I said. “I don’t want my brain to have any excuses other than plain old reality— whatever that may be.”
“I think I understand. Are you well enough for me to continue questioning you?”
“I don’t think I know whether I am. I guess we’ll have to try and see.”
He nodded, dragged the chair over to the cot, and sat down with his elbows on his knees as before. “Just stay where you are and if you pass out again we won’t be put to the trouble of moving you. Well, we’ve interviewed both of you separately, and at this point all I can say is that if it’s a set of alibis, it’s the worst I’ve ever heard, and if it’s not, I have no idea what is going on. Now tell me the whole story of your day.”
I did, starting from getting up in the morning and omitting nothing; Iphwin had not asked me to keep any secrets, and besides, since I couldn’t help thinking that my new job must have something to do with all this, I wasn’t so sure that I was particularly fond of Iphwin, or owed him anything, anyway.
When I finished, the inspector sighed and said, “Well, your story is consistent with Dr. Perdita’s. And there are a surprisingly large number of anomalies that tend to bear you out, which I can’t tell you about because they are the sort of thing our prosecuting judges like to hold in reserve. This means that I am being driven, very reluctantly and uncomfortably, to conclude that you may just be telling me the truth as you know it. What we must now account for is how you know and believe that particular version of the truth.” He sighed. “It is not a criminal offense to be shot at, although it is generally regarded as a highly suspicious activity. And Cochin-China does recognize a right of lethal force in self-defense. Furthermore, Helen Perdita had in her handbag a permit for all of the weapons she was carrying, issued by His Most Catholic Majesty’s secret service—oddly enough, along with similar permits from half a dozen other nations. I don’t know what she does for a living, but it can’t be just teaching history, and she can’t seriously have expected us to believe it. And yet when confronted with the permits, although she agreed that the picture and the signature were hers, she denied ever having applied for or gotten the permits, or even knowing that they were in her bag. Since our secret service has said a number of reassuring things to us, we might perhaps just let all of this drop, as an intelligence matter with which we do not wish to meddle, except that none of the intelligence agencies, ours or others’, that we would expect to have contacted us by now, have done so. Our relations with the Dutch Reich are rather bad, and Billie Beard was wanted on suspicion of three assassinations we have jurisdiction over, so by itself her death does not greatly trouble us, but we would really like to be told, officially, that the whole thing is none of our business.”
“I am finding all sorts of things hard to believe,” I said.
“I can let you go, but I have a sense that you might prefer to wait around until we can also release Helen Perdita. That may be a while, or perhaps we won’t release her for some time to come, or at all. Delicate matters are involved of which nothing can be said, but they may lead to a happier situation than the present one. I hope you’ll understand.”
“Even if I don’t understand, I don’t suppose it matters much.”
“It’s good that you’re so perceptive—it makes communication with you easier.”
They took me back to the cell, then, and I got to hear a few dozen more renditions of “I Was Drunk Last Night.” There wasn’t any notable improvement, but it wasn’t for lack of effort or patience.
* * * *
About ten-thirty that night, a cop in uniform came by and said, “You. Come on. You’re being released.”
“Is the woman I was ar
rested with—”
“Dr. Perdita is already waiting for you, and so are the men from ConTech.”
He unlocked the door and I followed him out; we went directly to the front desk, where Helen was waiting, still in her evening dress. Her long brown hair was down and looked disheveled—probably they had searched her coif. She was pale with anxiety, so that her makeup looked like a bad paint job on her white skin, but she didn’t seem to be hurt otherwise. There were a bunch of men I’d never seen before standing there, most of them in suits, all of them battered, beaten, and bruised. The heavyset older one said to me, “Sir, we really must apologize. We got here as soon as we could.”
“You’re from ConTech?”
“We’re your bodyguards. We just broke out of an attic where we were being held. Two that you don’t see here are in the hospital. And we’re all feeling like a bunch of clowns, sir. While we were tied up in that attic, you took awfully good care of yourselves—or at least Dr. Perdita took very good care of both of you. It should never have happened—we should have been there to stop Billie Beard—but at least you’re unhurt, and we did come as fast as we could.”
