“No. It—it does not matter. Mrs. Daube claims that Chang told her—”
“He did tell me!”
“I do not doubt you, madame.” Indeed, Svenson was surprised not to find the imprint of Chang's hand still raw on the woman's face. “But when… when did this conversation occur?”
Mrs. Daube licked her lips, as if she did not trust this line of questioning at all.
“Yesterday evening,” she replied.
“Are you sure?” asked Svenson.
“I am.”
“And after this conversation Cardinal Chang departed—”
“He is a churchman?” asked Mr. Bolte.
“He is a demon,” muttered Mrs. Daube.
“A demon you last saw yesterday evening?” asked the Doctor.
Mrs. Daube nodded with a sniff.
“Why are you defending his man?” Mr. Potts asked Svenson.
“I am trying to learn the truth. The boy was attacked only some hours ago, and by his wounds, the father at most only hours before that.”
“That proves nothing,” offered Mr. Potts. “This fellow might have spent the whole next day tracking them, only to make his attack to night.”
“Certainly true,” nodded Svenson. “The question is whether Chang left town in the intervening hours or not. You did not see him yourself, Mr. Potts?”
“Regrettably, no.”
“Mr. Potts and his fellows have each traveled different directions from Karthe,” explained Mrs. Daube, “the better to find the best hunting.”
“And none of your fellows were back either?” asked Svenson.
“I fear I am the first to return, being less of an outdoorsman—”
“Not like the Captain,” said Mrs. Daube with a smile, “who has come and gone again. As handsome a man as this Chang is a terror—”
“No one was here,” Potts insisted, over her words. “Suspicion naturally falls on this man Chang.”
“Who else could have done these things?” asked Mr. Bolte.
“Why else would anyone do them?” asked Mr. Carper.
“Why would Chang?” countered Svenson. “He is a stranger here— like myself and Mr. Potts—and come to Karthe only in order to leave it, and leave before these killings occurred.”
“And yet,” began Carper, “if he is a natural villain—”
“How would we learn whether he had gone?” asked Mr. Bolte.
“Quite simply,” said Svenson. “Did a train depart last night or this morning?”
Mr. Bolte looked at Mr. Carper.
“Last night,” answered Carper. “But we do not know this Chang was on it.”
“Is there anyone who might know?” asked Svenson. “Usually this sort of thing is quite easily proven, you see.”
“Perhaps we could ask at the train yard,” Mr. Bolte said.
AN HOUR later Doctor Svenson walked back with Mr. Bolte—Mr. Carper, connected to the mines, was still speaking with the trainsmen. There had been an incident—the talk of the rail yard—on the previous night's train: a passenger compartment with its window and door shattered, and a mysterious figure, wearing a blind man's glasses and a long red coat, stalking through the corridor like a wraith. The damaged compartment had been splashed with blood, as had the glass on the trackside, but no victim—dead or alive—had been found. How ever, the trainsmen were sure: the strange figure in red had been aboard when the train had finally left.
With Chang regrettably eliminated as a suspect, the two townsmen had speculated about who, or what, might have killed the boy and his father, seizing on the possibility of a wolf with enthusiasm. Svenson nodded where politeness required it.
All of Chang's suspicion had stood before the Doctor in the form of Mr. Potts—obviously no simple hunter. If Potts was on any official Ministry errand there would be no fiction of a hunting party—there would be soldiers in uniform. Since there were not, Svenson had to conclude that the remnants of the Cabal in the city, all those masked guests at Harschmort who had received their instructions in specially coded leather-bound volumes, had not yet claimed power openly. Because of the disaster with the airship? Perhaps there was still time to stop them—the question was what Potts knew. Did he have their names? Was he informed about the glass? Would he denounce Svenson to the town? What were his exact instructions… and from whom?
And of course, to the side of this, there was the unfortunate boy himself. Both he and his father—and, by the similarity of wounds, the two grooms in the fishing village—had been slain by shards from a broken blue glass book. Could this have been one of Potts’ soldiers, penetrating that far north, coming across the glass? But why the grooms and not Svenson himself—surely anyone in the fishing village would have directed the soldiers to Sorge's cabin.
Was it possible someone else had survived the airship? Svenson recalled the crude map drawn on Sorge's table, the killings ascribed to two sources. He groaned aloud. Did that mean two survivors?
“Are you quite well, Doctor?”
“Perhaps I ought to eat,” he replied, smiling weakly.
“I will show you back to the inn,” said Bolte, “and have one of the men on watch collect you later.”
“Watch?”
“Indeed yes!” Bolte patted Svenson heartily on the shoulder. “While you are having your dinner, Mr. Carper and I must rouse the town. We have a wolf to hunt!”
MR. POTTS was not at the inn when Svenson returned. After Mr. Bolte had explained Chang's innocence, and how it was certain their culprit was a wolf, Mrs. Daube had grudgingly shown the Doctor upstairs to a small room with a bare mattress on a wooden frame. The woman sniffed, not at all ready to ease her disapproval, and asked again what place Svenson was from (this being a clear implication Macklenburg did not truly exist). Svenson took the opportunity to draw a map with his finger on the dusty top of the room's one little table, but he had not finished placing Macklenburg to the far side of Schleswig-Holstein before she broke in to ask what he desired for his meal. The Doctor swept his hand across the dust with a thin smile and replied that anything ready and warm would do—along with, if she had it, a pot of beer. Mrs. Daube briskly announced what this would cost and told him he was free to sit in the common room or to come down to the table in half an hour.
He listened to her footsteps on the stairs, sitting in his coat on the bed, and then stretched out on his back. The discovery of the boy had launched him into hours of unexpected activity, the obligations of medicine that provided—as they had so often in his life—an illusion of purpose and place. But now, staring up at the slanted split pine roof of an over-priced, underkempt room in a town he had no desire to know, the Doctor felt the weight of his isolation. Chang, by catching that train, could even at that moment have reached Stropping Station—back in a city where he lived as easily as a crow amongst carrion. But Svenson's escape from Karthe meant merely another destination for exile.
Should he offer himself to a workhouse hospital? Or to the brothels as an abortionist? He lit a cigarette and blew smoke above his head. How recently—how very recently—had his heart been as light as a fool's? What ridiculous visions had inflected the corners of his mind? During one evening meal at Sorge's, Elöise had described her uncle's cottage, near some park, her summers there as a child… a glimpse of another sort of life. It was all veneer, the very idea of taking walks, for goodness sake, or possessing genuine concern for a garden, or tending the feelings of another. The more the Doctor imagined it, the more it seemed beyond his abilities—as well as quite beyond hope.
SVENSON SAT listening to Mrs. Daube's distant puttering, and used both hands to quickly remove his boots. Walking softly in his stocking feet, the Doctor crept with the candle to the other guest rooms. The first was empty, the pallet rolled up against the bed frame. The next held Mr. Potts' things—travel valise, trousers and two shirts hanging from hooks on the wall, and a small pile of books on the bedside table— the navy's official book of tide tables, an engineering pamphlet on salvaging shipwrecks, and a distressingly thick serial novel, Handmaids to Messalina, which from randomly opened pages proved to be quite vigorously obscene.
Svenson peered beneath the bed. A second pair of shoes, a ragged newspaper—the Herald, folded to dire proclamations on “Privy Council Defiance” and “Epidemic Silences Industry”—and beyond them both, poking out from the far side of the bed frame, what looked like another book. Svenson stood, leaned carefully over the bed, and extracted a thin volume of poetry—without question the same he had seen belonging to Chang. Svenson craned his head toward the stairway, heard no one, and flipped through the book with both hands. What could have made Chang forget it—especially if his time with Mrs. Daube was so fraught with suspicion?
Chang would not have forgotten it—the man was, in his habits if not in his person, fastidious as a cat. He had left it for a reason, but it had been discovered by Mr. Potts. Svenson found a folded down page and Chang's terse note: “Our enemies live. Leave this inn …”
He crept back to his own room and hid the book beneath his bed.