Araminta Station (21 page)

“Just a moment!” snapped Spanchetta. “Of what is Arles accused?”

“At the moment there are no charges. Arles, if you wish, you may have Fratano present, or another adviser, or even your mother; or you may choose to speak to us alone or, finally, simply refuse to talk. In the latter case, you will be taken into custody, charged and prosecuted.”

“On what grounds?” cried Spanchetta. “I demand to know!”

“Oh - no doubt we can scratch up something. Arles, have you any ideas?”

Arles licked his heavy lips and looked sidewise toward his mother. In a peevish voice he said: “I don’t need anyone’s advice. I prefer to talk to you alone.”

Spanchetta finally departed and Scharde closed the door behind her.

“Now, then,” said Bodwyn Wook, “answer our questions simply, directly and without evasion. You are not required to inculpate yourself, but you must report the guilt of any other person. To begin with: do you know who killed Sessily Veder?”

“Of course not!”

“Describe in careful detail your actions the night she was killed.”

Arles cleared his throat. “Whatever I did, it had nothing to do with Sessily.”

“So you say. We know that you abandoned your post at the compound, dressed in Bold Lion costume and were seen returning the winery truck to its place at the loading dock.”

“That’s not possible,” said Arles, “I wasn’t there. Your information is wrong.”

‘“Where were you?”

Arles looked toward the door and spoke in a low voice. “I had an appointment with a young lady. I had made it before I knew about the patrol and I didn’t want to break it.”

“Who was the young lady?”

Arles darted another glance toward the door and spoke in a voice so low as almost to be inaudible. “It’s someone my mother does not like. She would fall into a rage if she knew.”

“Who is the girl?”

“Will my mother find out?”

“Quite possibly. Your misconduct cannot be concealed, and no doubt you will be duly punished.”

“Punished for what? It was sheer foolishness, parading along that fence in the dark. One person on patrol was just as good as two.”

“That may well be. Why did not Kirdy report your absence?”

“He knew where I was going; he knew I had been there and nowhere else. He realized that under the circumstances, such a report would cause a great hullabaloo over nothing. So he agreed to say nothing. We’re both Bold Lions, don’t forget!”

“I’ll keep that in mind. You’ll be able to practice roars while you are being flogged.”

“Flogged?” Arles’ voice rose in pitch.

“I can’t predict the penalty. You probably won’t get what you deserve. Who was the young lady?”

“A girl I knew from the Mummers. Her name is Drusilla co-Laverty.”

“And where did you spend time?”

“In a dark corner of the Arbor, where we could watch the Phantasmagoria. Afterward we just sat there talking.”

“Did anyone see you?”

“Of course. Lots of people. I don’t know if anyone took any particular notice.”

There was a pause. Glawen asked a question. “What of your costume? Did you bring that with you on patrol?”

Arles merely shrugged, apparently regarding questions from Glawen as below his dignity. Bodwyn Wook said gently: “Answer the question.”

“I left my costume at Clattuc House. I didn’t want to waste time so I went into the Mummers’ warehouse and used a primordial costume, with a kind of gargoyle head. No one noticed the difference. Not even the Bold Lions.”

“I see. Then what?”

“Before midnight I dropped off the costume and went back on duty and discovered all the patrols had been signed off. Nothing had gone wrong and I felt that I had done no great harm.”

Bodwyn Wook shook his head in deep disparagement. “It is not a pretty story,” he said in his reediest, most nasal voice. “You have scamped your duty. You have falsified official documents and trespassed on the trust of your superior officer . . . What are you saying?”

Arles, who had been trying to interject a remark, apparently in his own defense, thought better of it. “Nothing,” he said in surly tones. “Nothing whatever.”

Bodwyn Wook threw the papers down on the desk. “Whatever else you have done we will discover in due course. You may go now.”

Chapter III

Chapter III, Part 1

Days went past, then weeks. Autumn settled into winter and the rhythm of the seasons, broken by tinkling spangling many-colored Parilia, resumed. The disappearance of Sessily Veder receded into the past; public outrage lost its edge, even though everyone knew that somewhere among them walked a man with a dreadful secret behind his face.

The urgency of Glawen’s emotions likewise dwindled, although often at night he lay staring into the dark, trying to look into the face of the murderer. At times he felt himself standing on the loading dock with the event occurring before his eyes. There! The truck and there in the cargo space! a silent dark shape. And here came Sessily: running as fast as butterfly wings allowed: out upon the dock, stopping short and innocently approaching the truck at a call from someone she knew, while Glawen strained to drive his vision into the face which Sessily saw as she approached the truck. At times Glawen glimpsed the features of Arles, but often the face remained no more than a pallid blur.

By all tenets of logic - so Glawen told himself - the guilty person was Arles. Drusilla had proved an extremely weak reed when asked to verify Arles’ account of the evening. Her manner was careless and flippant; the alibi she provided Arles was almost worse than none at all.

The interview with Drusilla had been conducted on the seaside terrace of the Hotel Araminta, where Drusilla had just finished her breakfast. Now she sat sidewise on a bench, arms clasping her knees, a breeze rippling her pale pinkish-blond hair, her lavish buttocks stretching taut the fabric of her white knee-length trousers. As she thought back to the fateful night of the Grand Masque, a coy smile brought dimples to her cheeks.

“Do you want the plain truth? You do? Then here it is! I was drunk, far beyond the call of duty.” She shook her head in rueful pride for the magnitude of her achievement. “No question about it, and I feel no remorse whatever. I had just decided that everyone I knew was either a sour fish, a yahoo or a stinken scoundrel. I was furious with Florrie” - here she referred to Floreste - “and my fiancé just laughed when I told him about it. That’s Namour, as you probably know: charming and debonair, but something of a cad. I really don’t know how I put up with him! Spanchetta, strange to say, can twist him around her finger. My word, how she hates me! Foof!” The sound was intended to convey the intensity of Spanchetta’s dislike. “Anyway I thought I’d just show them all; I went tinkety-tanko and had a famous time all to myself, and I still don’t care!”

“What of Arles?”

“Yes, true. Arles was there, for a while - I remember watching part of the Phantasmagoria with him; we couldn’t miss that since we’re both Mummers. But I haven’t a clue as to what happened next - at least after he tried to take me off down the riverbank – I remember that well enough - but I wouldn’t go, down there among all those frogs and brambles and pinchbugs, and he marched off in a huff. After that it’s all a great glorious whirl. I think I went to sleep on the bench; at least that’s where I woke up, and it was already long after midnight, with the dismasking already done. Arles came back and I made him take me home as I wasn’t feeling my best.”

Drusilla’s testimony brought only gloom to Bureau B. Arles was considered probably guilty, but no one could formulate a decisive case against him, since another person, using the second primordial costume, could easily have done the deed.

The uncertainty was reinforced by a peculiar circumstance, which cost Sergeant Kirdy Wook dear. He was ordered to go to the Mummers’ wardrobe and take the two primordial costumes into custody. The time was late in the day; Kirdy’s schoolwork urgently needed attention; he postponed the task until the next day. At that time, when he went to take up the costumes, they were gone, and the wardrobe attendant could only say that they had been there the day previously.

Kirdy’s negligence on this occasion, compounded by his failure to report Arles’ absence from patrol, earned him a demotion and a reprimand from Bodwyn Wook.

Kirdy listened to the admonitions with a wooden half-smiling composure which only irritated Bodwyn Wook the more. He snapped: “Well, then, sir, what do you have to say for yourself?”

Kirdy said: “I was prepared for the reprimand and I accepted it, as I’m sure you noticed, with good grace. The demotion however is excessive, and truly not fair!”

“Indeed!” said Bodwyn Wook. “How so?”

Kirdy frowningly considered the matter and expressed himself as delicately as he could. “Sometimes, sir, a person must be guided by his principles.”

The statement jerked Bodwyn Wook bolt upright in his chair. He responded in a voice ominously gentle: “You feel then that the orders of your superiors must run in concert with your personal convictions before you feel obliged to obey them?”

Kirdy hesitated, then said: “I suppose that, to be honest, I would have to answer yes.”

“Amazing. Where and how did you develop this inconvenient idea?”

Kirdy shrugged. “Last summer with the Mummers I did a great deal of thinking, and also exchanged views with Floreste.”

Bodwyn Wook eased back into the depths of his chair. He placed the tips of his fingers together and studied the ceiling. At last he said: “Ha-hah! Let us review your case.”

“That was what I hoped you’d say, sir.”

Bodwyn Wook paid him no heed. “First, you are a Wook. Few Wooks indeed have become prancing, dancing, gallivanting performers. We do not consider histrionics to be a dignified profession. Therefore I make the following analysis with extreme reluctance.”

Kirdy’s large earnest features sagged. “And how is that, sir?”

Bodwyn Wook slowly brought his gaze down from the ceiling. “On the basis of what you have told me, you apparently have two options for a career: the Mummers or Bureau B. Much can be said for the Mummers. You can indulge your fantasies to the utmost, and your temperament is allowed full sway. If you are chanting a popular ditty and Floreste requires that you make an ogling grimace to the right while thrusting your pelvis to the left, you can claim that your ‘principles’ stand in the way. Floreste will perhaps blink at you nonplussed, but because of his insights, he will concede your right to thrust your pelvis in whatever direction you choose. So much for the Mummers. At Bureau B conditions are different. Oh my word but they are different! Here ‘principles’ mean the same as orders from high-ranking officers. The philosophy which guides your professional life is not your own, not Floreste’s, but mine. Is all this absolutely clear?”

“Certainly, but surely there are -”

“None whatever.”

“What if I am ordered to perform tasks contrary to my conscience?”

“If you have even a twinge of apprehension, as of this instant I will accept your resignation from Bureau B.”

Kirdy said mulishly: “I could with as much justice ask you to resign.”

Bodwyn Wook could not restrain a chuckle. “So you could. In five seconds, which of us do you think would be ejected from the office?”

Kirdy stood silent, his large pink features disconsolate.

Bodwyn Wook asked briskly: “Well, then: which is it to be?”

“It is obviously in my best interests to make a career with Bureau B.”

“That is not the point, and you have not answered my question.”

“I choose Bureau B. I have no choice.”

“And what of the ‘principles’?”

Kirdy’s round blue eyes were limpid with hurt and resentment. “I suppose that I must compromise them.”

“Very well.” Bodwyn Wook jerked his thumb toward the door. “That is all.”

Kirdy made a final bitter complaint: “I still do not consider the demotion justified!”

“That sort of reaction is not unusual,” said Bodwyn Wook. “Out with you, before I stop laughing and start thinking.”

Kirdy swung about and departed.

Chapter III, Part 2

Winter ran its course and spring came to Araminta Station. Grudgingly the obsessions which gripped Glawen’s mind yielded to the vernal influences. He had done his utmost; he could do no more - at least, not for the moment. Sessily Veder receded to a melancholy ache in his memory.

Glawen turned his pent energies into schoolwork and won to his usual high levels of achievement. Arles, compelled by the most urgent pressures, performed well enough to avert the imminence of expulsion.

The year went its course, and another year followed. Glawen arrived at his nineteenth birthday with an SI, or Status Index, of 23: somewhat too high for comfort, and Glawen began to feel cold fingers of apprehension, although Scharde assured him that there was definitely no cause for panic. “At least not yet,” said Scharde.

In the three years since his sixteenth birthday Glawen had changed little. He had grown as tall as Scharde, and from some source had gained an indefinable air of competence and decision, which was almost precocious. Like Scharde he was now spare and slender, with square shoulders and narrow hips. Again like Scharde, he carried himself with an understated economy of motion, almost elegant in its simplicity. His face, while less gaunt, bony and predacious than that of Scharde, was further softened by luminous dark hazel eyes, a cap of short thick black hair and a long generous mouth with a pensive droop at the corners: a face somewhat irregular and by no means classically handsome but one which romantic maidens found fascinating to consider. Glawen nowadays seldom thought of Sessily Veder except sometimes when he walked alone in the country or stood on the shore looking out to sea, when he might whisper: “Sessily, Sessily, where have you gone? Is it lonesome out there?”

Across the years the facts of the case, as known to Bureau B, had seeped into the public awareness, and Arles’ guilt had become accepted as fact, provable or not. The situation titillated some and repelled others, while Spanchetta could hardly speak for mortification. Only the Bold Lions provided refuge for Arles - not so much from either loyalty or tolerance, but because it was felt that Arles’ membership lent a special rakehelly devil-take-all panache to the group.