"The screams of the dying can be sweeter music than any symphony."
—Conrad Bland
Try as he would, Sable could never get used to the outward manifestations of affluence. He sat uncomfortably now, leaning back on a leather vibrochair, wondering if he dared to light up a cigar and certain that if he did his host would immediately offer him a far more expensive one. His gaze swept the massive room, passing over a number of jeweled artifacts and beautifully wrought oils, coming to rest on a solid gold statue of a winged Lucifer who seemed to be laughing at some very private joke.
"Well, John, what'll it be?" asked Pierre Veshinsky, tall, distinguished, immaculately dressed, the very picture of a Walpurgan aristocrat "A little liquor, a happy pill, or perhaps something a little more exotic?"
"Just coffee," said Sable.
That's not like you at all," said Veshinsky with a smile. "What's happened to that voracious Sable thirst?"
"Oh, it's still around," said Sable, returning his smile. "But I'm here on business this time."
"Oh?" Veshinsky raised his eyebrows. "You know I'm always glad to see you at my home, John—but if this, is business, shouldn't you have gone through my office?"
"I tried, but they gave me the runaround."
"I'll have to speak to them about that," said Veshinsky calmly.
"They've got a lot of company. No one in the government seems to want to return my calls, and since I've known you for the better part of fifteen years, I thought I'd better have a little talk with you."
"I'm happy to oblige. What seems to be the trouble, John?"
"I have reason to believe that the Republic has placed an operative on Walpurgis with the intention of assassinating Conrad Bland."
Sable expected Veshinsky to make the Sign of the Horns, or utter a curse, or do something. But the tall man merely sipped his drink as if they were doing nothing more than discussing the weather.
"Why did you seek me out?" asked Veshinsky at last.
"You're a member of the City Council," said Sable, wondering at the lack of a reaction.
"What has one to do with the other?" asked Veshinsky.
"My department is having a difficult time getting necessary documents on this case," said Sable. "Files, records, all manner of things. No one is exactly denying us priority, but they're dragging their feet, and I don't think I've got much more than forty-eight hours to nail this killer."
"Just out of curiosity, John," said Veshinsky, picking up a Satanic idol and fingering it absently, "what makes you so sure you've got an assassin on your hands?"
"We had a killing downtown the night before last"
"Oh? Who was killed?"
"The name isn't important. What is important is that the killing was a very efficient, very professional job, and we were unable to find any motive for it."
"And from this you deduce the presence of a Republic assassin?" Veshinsky laughed. He set the idol down, walked across the thick carpet to the bar, and poured himself a refill.
Sable shook his head. "No. From that we could only deduce that we had a very skilled killer in our midst. But when our standard procedures couldn't turn up any clues we expanded our investigation, and found out that a Republic ship had set down at the spaceport for repairs the night before the murder."
"If you'll permit me to say so, John," said Veshinsky, returning to his chair and carefully setting his glass on an onyx coaster atop an altar-shaped end table, "that is an awfully tenuous chain of logic. If I were you I'd forget the whole thing before I made a public fool of myself."
"There's more," said Sable, trying to control his temper.
"I should hope so," said Veshinsky mockingly. "John, take a little advice from an old friend and give it up. Even if you're right, Conrad Bland is thousands of miles away. He's not your concern."
"No, but Parnell Burnam is."
"Who's that?"
"The dead man. This assassin has committed a murder in Amaymon, and it happens to be my job to solve crimes that occur in Amaymon. Since he could have put his ship down in half a dozen other places on the pretext of needing repairs, I can only assume that he has a contact here. I figure he'll make that contact in the next two days, and if we haven't nailed him by then, he'll be gone."
"What are you doing about him right now?" asked Veshinsky, staring at Sable from beneath half-lowered eyelids.
"I've posted watches on all offworlders who have settled in Amaymon during the past two years. If I had a little more manpower, I'd extend it to all immigrants for the past five or ten years, but I don't."
"What if your supposed killer's contact is a native of Walpurgis?"
"Then we're out of luck."
"I think you're out of luck in any event. You've given me no reason why you should assume Burnam's killer is a Republic assassin."
"Oh, I have a reason, all right. Yesterday afternoon he tried to place a personal advertisement in the paper. Probably it was a code of some sort to apprise his contact of his arrival."
"Why should you think so?" asked Veshinsky, returning to the bar for yet another drink.
"Because he gave his address as the Hotel Hanover."
"So?"
The Hanover is a hotel for women only!" said Sable, his dark eyes shining fiercely. "Our assassin didn't know that. He'd obviously observed the place, seen men entering the restaurant and bar, or going up to visit the residents in their rooms, but he hadn't actually been there himself. More to the point, the hotel is owned by the Sisterhood of Sin. He didn't recognize their talisman, didn't know what it stood for. Only an offworlder would commit a blunder like that. When the hotel got a pair of vidphone calls asking for the phony name he had used, the desk clerk contacted us. Our killer has made his first blunder."
"Oh, come now, John," scoffed Veshinsky. "How do you know that it wasn't just a prank?"
"I don't know anything," explained Sable patiently. "I am simply making an educated guess. If I waited for hard information on a man like this, he'd have completed his mission and left the planet before I had a single verifiable fact on him."
"All right, John," said Veshinsky, his face suddenly hard. "Let me ask you a few simple questions, all right?"
"Go ahead."
"Have you found any connection between Parnell Burnam and Conrad Bland?"
"No."
"Have you any tangible proof that anyone got off the Republic ship?"
Sable shook his head. "No."
"Have you any reason to believe that any immigrants are working for the Republic?"
"Only the presence of the assassin."
"If there's an assassin," corrected Veshinsky. "Have you any proof that other departments are dragging their feet on this?"
"Hard proof? No."
"Then allow me to suggest that perhaps what you need is not a manhunt but a vacation," said Veshinsky. "If I were you, I wouldn't jeopardize my health by remaining on the job one minute longer than I had to."
"It's out of the question," said Sable firmly. "We've got an assassin on our hands, and he's not going to wait around Amaymon until we're ready to trap him. He's going to make his contact, and then he'll be off to Tifereth."
"If not a vacation, then perhaps a medical leave of absence," said Veshinsky. "I'll see to it that you don't lose any pay."
"Why don't you spend a little less time worrying about me and a little more worrying about Bland?" said Sable. "Despite the fact that I seem unable to convince you, there is an assassin in Amaymon, and Bland has got to be his target."
"Ah, John," sighed Veshinsky, "subtlety was never your strong suit, was it? You have convinced me that what you said is true; I only wish I could do the same."
"What are you talking about?"
"What do you think of my house, John?" said Veshinsky.
"Why?"
"Just answer the question."
"It's a very nice house."
'It's more than a very nice house. It's a palace. It has seventeen rooms, video-cinema tie-ins in each room, fireplaces and bars almost beyond counting, thick white carpeting, objects of art that you couldn't afford if they multiplied your salary by a factor of ten. I have four butlers, two maids, a robot housekeeper, two manservants, a doctor on twenty-four-hour call. I have—"
"I know what you have," interrupted Sable. "What's the point?"
"The point, my friend John, is that I didn't acquire all of this by sticking my nose in where it didn't belong."
"Let me get this straight, Pietre," said Sable. "Are you bribing me not to get involved in this thing?"
"Nothing of the sort, John," answered Veshinsky. "A man has been murdered. You are Chief of Detectives. It is certainly your job to try to solve it."
"But my job ends three thousand miles south of Tifereth, is that it?" persisted Sable.
"I never said that, John," said Veshinsky. "Though, of course, it's quite true."
"Are you seriously telling me that the government knows that someone's out to kill Conrad Bland and they won't lift a finger to stop him?"
"I am telling you no such thing."
"But you would if you were free to," said Sable.
"Nonsense."
"Then I presume that I can depend upon you to facilitate my job?"
"I'll do what I can," said Veshinsky. He reached behind the bar and pulled out a large box. Opening it, he handed six carefully wrapped cigars to Sable.
"Take these with you. I think you'll enjoy them."
"I really shouldn't," said Sable, but he reached out and took them anyway.
"Aren't you going to have one now?" asked Veshinsky as Sable put the cigars into a lapel pocket.
"These are too good to smoke while I'm working. I'll have one a night. And thanks."
"My pleasure. I'll walk you to the door."
"I can find my way out," said Sable. "Goodbye, Pietre."
"Goodbye, John," replied Veshinsky. He touched a button behind the bar and surrounded himself with quadraphonic holograms of his favorite symphony orchestra.
Sable left Veshinsky's home, signaled to his driver to pick him up, and was back in his office twenty minutes later, wondering why the government didn't seem concerned about the threat to Bland, but indeed seemed to welcome it. He spent a little while thinking about that, finally shook his head as if to rid himself of the problem by a physical action, and summoned Davies and six other members of his staff, two men and four women.
"How did things go with Veshinsky?" asked one of the women when all were seated.
"Not very well," replied Sable. "How about our offworld travelers?"
He had wanted to interview the five Amaymon businessmen who had recently been to other planets for the simple reason that while the assassin was a stranger to Walpurgan customs, neither Sable nor anyone on his staff had ever been off the planet and thus couldn't begin to know precisely how their customs differed from those of the other Republic worlds. He was hoping someone would be able to tell him how to differentiate between eccentric behavior and wrong behavior.
"They're making lists," replied Davies sardonically. "What else are experts good for?"
"Any word when they'll be ready to talk to us?"
"Nope. I also get the distinct impression that certain powers in the government would prefer that we didn't rush them."
"It's an impression I share," said Sable. He surveyed his seven senior staff members for a long moment. "All right," he announced at last. "I'm no expert, but I have a feeling that if we wait for our bona fide authorities to help us out we're all going to die of old age. So let me lay out some broad general guidelines for you to pass on to the people working under your supervision.
"First," he continued, "forget about language. There are already a number of accents on Walpurgis, and everyone in the Republic uses the same base tongue. If our killer knows the name of a distant city, and he must by now, all he has to do is say he comes from there.
"Second, forget about physical descriptions. He's a chameleon, and you can bet that by the time you think you know what he looks like, he's already discarded that identity."
"So what do we look for?" asked another of the women.
"Little things," replied Sable. "Things he hasn't had a chance to learn yet. Don't watch for huge blunders, because he isn't going to make any."
"Give us a for-instance," she persisted.
"All right. If he's as thorough as I think, he'll make sure his hotel maid sees burnt-out candles and offerings to the demon of his choice. I think we should look for a room where the candles are placed in a strange configuration, or where he offered, say, fruit to Belial. I think we should look for a man who is ignorant of the letter of our customs, but not of the customs themselves. For example, we know that a man who makes the Sign of Five will never make the Sign of the Horns or the Sign of Satan, but he probably doesn't know it yet, and he won't know it until he makes a mistake and someone notices. He can also be expected to have a little trouble with our symbols at first: he may very well deduce that a man wearing the Talisman of Saturn over his left breast is a member of the Order of the Golem but he may never know that the same token worn over the right breast makes the wearer a warlock in the Church of the Inferno. If you see him on the street wearing the talisman you may not know that he's blundered, but sooner or later he's going to walk into the wrong church or make the wrong sign and someone will know."
"It makes finding a needle in a haystack look easy by comparison," said one of the men.
The whole trick is to approach the problem at the proper angle," said Sable. "Look directly at a godsnake in a patch of silverweeds for an hour and you might never see him; blink once and cock your head and there he is, big as a mountain. We've got to get used to blinking—and we've got to get used to it soon. With every minute that passes his education continues—and the obvious corollary is that the more he learns about us, the less likely we are to learn anything about him."
"Not to sound defeatist," said the other man, "but this doesn't sound very hopeful. Maybe a massive dose of publicity, even public panic, might prod this guy out into the open."
Sable shook his head. "Not this man. One thing he's not going to do is lose his composure."
"What makes you so sure?"
"Because the Republic hasn't sent in an amateur. We're dealing with a man to whom this is strictly routine. He does it all the time, knows all the tricks of the trade, probably feels right at home hiding out in a crowd. He came in absolutely cold, and he's managed to maintain at least two identities and pull off a murder right under our noses. He's made only one mistake, and it was a very minor one." Sable looked around the room grimly. "Just how many more mistakes do you think a man like this is going to make?"
He received no answer, nor had he expected one, and a moment later his staff filed silently out of his office.
Think it'll do any good?" asked Davies, who stayed behind.
"Who knows?" shrugged Sable. "But we've got to do something. I'm open to alternatives."
"I wish I had one," admitted Davies.
They sat in silence for perhaps five minutes. Then his secretary put through a vidphone call from Pietre Veshinsky.
"Hello, John."
"Hello," replied Sable. "I hadn't expected yon to get back to me so soon."
"There wasn't much sense waiting," said Veshinsky. "I made a few calls, spoke to a few people, and didn't see any sense procrastinating."
"Can you help us?"
"No, John, I can't."
"Can anyone?"
"That's an awkward question, John."
"It's an awkward situation, Pietre. The man's a hired killer. He's already murdered a citizen of Amaymon. I can't just sit on my hands."
"I know that, John."
"Can I expect out-and-out physical or legal hindrance if I catch him?"
"I doubt it."
"You doubt it?" demanded Sable. "You mean to say that there's a chance of it?"
"No, John. Let me word that more definitely: No one will hinder you in any way."
"They just won't help me, is that it?"
"In essence."
"Well, fuck them, Pietre!" snapped Sable. "I don't know the first damned thing about Bland, but I know my job and you can tell your friends I'm going to do it!"
He broke the connection and started stalking around his office, feeling constricted by the walls, the ceiling, the government, his clothing, everything.
"Well said," said Davies.
"Don't be an ass, Langston," snapped Sable.
"Huh?"
"'I know my job!'" he repeated mockingly. "Damn it, Lang, right now my job consists of sitting around waiting until he kills someone else!"
He walked over to the window and looked out onto the winding streets of Amaymon, cursing under his breath and wondering if the killer was even now within his field of vision—or, if not, where he was and what he was doing.