The Cause of Death (45 page)

"But you, of course, would play no part in spreading such stories," Georg said, a sneer in his voice.

"No, I would not," said Brox. "But you are welcome to doubt
my
sincerity, if you wish."

Georg glared at Brox 231 and turned back to Wolfson. "So. You want to know exactly how I killed him."

"Yes, sir," said Agent Wolfson. "We need the specifics."

"I see." Georg paused a moment. "Forgive me, but this is a difficult subject, and it has been a difficult night and day for us all."

"Of course, sir. We might start with how you came to be at the Keep at all. When we left you last night, you were planning to return to--forgive me, I don't know its name. The glass-walled place where you have been staying."

"The Finstar Art Gallery. I did go there, yes."

"Then how did you come to the Keep? Did you go there with the intention of killing the Thelm?"

"No, not at all." He gestured toward Marta, standing off to his left. "Marta called me, very upset, and told me to come over right away, that something very bad was likely to happen, and that we had to talk about it right away."

"Why couldn't you talk over the comm net?" Agent Wolfson asked.

Georg smiled sadly. "It doesn't take long to stop trusting the privacy of the communications system around here. The Stannlar jamming devices couldn't protect against a tap inside the comm net. Besides which, I was staying in as public a place as I could, and I had quite deliberately taken no precautions at all against watchers or listeners--in fact I had made sure to make things easy on them. I didn't even carry the Stannlar device most of the time. For a truly private talk, I had to go to Marta."

"I see," said Agent Wolfson. "So you traveled to the Keep. How?"

"My private aircar. I let the autonav system do the flying. The flight data should all be in the car's log recorder and the city autonav system. You can check it."

"We will," said Wolfson. "So you arrive here. You go to your wife in her apartments--well, your apartments, really, I suppose, though you haven't been there much recently."

"That's right," Georg said. "And she told me all about your associate's brilliant idea to ship me off to Penitence."

Wolfson frowned. Agent Mendez shifted his stance a bit but did not speak, though plainly he wanted to.

"As Agent Mendez said at the time, it wasn't a very good idea. It would seem that events have proven him right."

"They certainly have," Georg growled, making no effort to hide his anger. "My wife also reported that it was the Thelm who thought of sending all three of us there. Not the most lovable thing he ever did."

"What if it had only been you that was to be sent to Penitence?"

Georg shook his head. "I can't say for sure. What I'd like to believe is that I would have accepted it, for the sake of saving the Thelm's life and mine. But who can tell what would have happened?"

"But involving your daughter--and your wife--crossed the line."

"Yes," Georg said, answering Wolfson's question cautiously.

"So what happened then?"

"I told Marta that so long as I was there, and since it was late, and since I had scarcely seen either of them in weeks, I might as well spend the night. I waited until my wife went to sleep, then went up to the Thelm's Private Audience Chamber."

"Did you know he was going to be there?" Brox demanded.

"I wasn't absolutely certain, but I knew that, oh, nine nights out of ten, he was up there working late at night. Thelm Lantrall is--was--something of a night owl, to use a human phrase."

"One moment please," said Darsteel. "There was nothing else concerning the matter at hand that took place with your wife? Just the conversation?"

Georg frowned and shook his head. "I'm sorry. Nothing I can think of."

"Nothing? No calls seeking advice, no checking of references, no trips to the Keep's library?"

"Oh, yes! I forgot about that. I logged onto the reference net and got several general texts about succession law. We were looking for anything concerning exiles, and the families of exiles. We didn't find anything. But looking up the material was just part of the conversation, really. I didn't really think of it as something separate until you asked."

"Very good," said Darsteel. "Thank you."

"If we could return to the point in the story you had reached, sir. You arrived at the Thelm's audience chamber. What happened then?"

Everyone seemed to lean in toward him just a trifle, paying just that little bit more attention.

"He was there," Georg began simply. "Working on some sort of papers. I don't know what. He seemed surprised, but not too surprised, to see me. He told me how good it was to see me again, and how sorry he was about how adopting me had turned into a nightmare instead of being the honor he had intended. But I wasn't there to chat. I asked him point-blank about Penitence, whether he had decided for sure whether or not to send my family there."

Georg hesitated, and looked around the room. Marta gave him a forced half smile. He nodded to her, very slightly. "The Thelm was a politician. He knew how to answer a question--and how to not-answer it--and that's what he did. He went on about how it was only a contingency, a possibility they had to explore. The human lawkeepers were working to prepare the groundwork, so the plan would be ready to go, just in case it was needed. But I knew. It was just a contingency--but there weren't any other options. He wouldn't choose until the last minute--but by the time the last minute came, he would have arranged matters so there would be no choice left but Penitence.

"I asked him again, about my family," Georg went on. "Would I go alone, or would he send us all, just on the off chance that Moira would turn into some sort of bargaining chip if she were somewhere accessible, and was my heir of property?

"He answered me with a question. I can't swear to the exact words, but they were something very like 'Do you think it would be right for Moira to grow up without a father?' It was a brilliant, terrible thing to say. It made my going by myself not a sacrifice to protect my family, but some sort of self-centered indulgence on my part. It would be selfish for me to go to hell alone and leave my daughter to grow up without my guidance, and never mind the killers and psychopaths that passed for the general population."

Georg looked around the room at his audience, and turned his hands palms upward in front of him. "That was when I reached my final, irrevocable decision to kill him," he said. "If it was a choice between the old man who was, ultimately, ready to betray me, and the little girl he was willing to betray as well--well, I made my choice."

He shrugged again, looked helpless, appealed to the spectators. "The rest of it--the rest of it is still kind of a blur for me. It all went by so fast--and it was so terrible, so unpleasant, that I don't think that I'm remembering it all quite right. Maybe later I will, and I'll have nightmares. Maybe it will never come back to me."

"Tell us what you remember," said Wolfson, her voice a study in neutrality.

"Well, you seem to know about the dueling pistol and the head shot," he said.

"There's some guesswork," Wolfson said. "The, ah, corpse was in very bad shape after the fire. We still haven't located the weapon in the debris. But the wound pattern was clear enough to Darsteel and the locals. They'd seen it before. In fact, the corpse was burned and crushed enough that it was easier for them to identify the wound as what a dueling pistol would do than it was to say where, exactly, on his body the round had struck him."

"The head," Georg told her. "Very definitely the head. He turned his back on me. That was his mistake. I went to the table where the guns were on display. He sat back down at his desk to work at his papers again. And I stood a few feet away and fired." He paused. "Fire. Smoke. Dust. It wasn't pretty. I was in shock for a moment or two. When I came back to myself a few seconds later, sparks from the gunshot had already started the fires going. I decided to help them along a little. I fed papers to them, then more papers, then some of the furniture."

"Why?" Brox demanded. "A fire after a murder is almost always used to conceal and destroy the evidence. It was in your best interests to admit to the killing, once you had committed it. It would ensure your ascension to the throne."

"Panic," said Georg. "Shock. Shame. A gut feeling that I had to hide what I had done. I wasn't entirely rational--not by a long shot. Maybe it was just that I wanted to hide what I had done from my Pax Humana oath. I can't really say." He shrugged. "The fire started to get pretty big. It was time to go."

"What about the business with the shoes?" Darsteel asked.

Georg looked at him and frowned. "What shoes?"

"Not important," said Darsteel. "Please go on."

"There is not much more to tell," said Georg. "I came back to our apartments just in time. I sat up and waited for the alarm to be sounded, then I gathered up Marta and Moira and took them downstairs."

"You set a fire in the upper floor of a building, then went downstairs, to where your wife and child were sleeping, in apartments directly below the fire, and sat and waited for the fire alarm to sound?" asked Brox. "Why? Why didn't you rouse them at once and get them out of there, out of danger?"

"All I can say was that I was not entirely rational," Georg said again. He looked straight ahead, at no one, at nothing.

"And so the good Pavlats of Reqwar can look forward to life under a Thelm who becomes irrational in moments of danger and crisis?" Brox asked.

But before Georg could protest, a new and completely unexpected attack came from another side. "Thank you, sir," said Agent Wolfson. "That was an excellent summing-up. I think it will suit our needs admirably. But there is one other item." She gestured to the other agent, Mendez. He stepped forward. "Agent Mendez is our resident expert on weaponry," Wolfson said.

Georg's eyes flitted to the table off to one side with the cloth concealing whatever was on it "Weaponry?" he echoed.

Mendez crossed to the table and stripped off the cloth to reveal a scorched and damaged, but still largely intact, dueling-pistol display case. One of the pistols was gone. The other was blackened by smoke, its ornate decoration masked by soot and ash, but otherwise quite undamaged. Mendez moved to the center of the room and removed the cloth from the large and ungainly shape it concealed. Underneath it was a tailor's dummy with bendable arms and legs, borrowed from somewhere in the Keep. It was balanced, rather unsteadily, on a perching stool, with its back to Georg.

"This is our best guess as to how the Thelm was sitting when he was shot," said Agent Mendez. "It sounds like it more or less matches up with what you just described." He nodded toward the display case and the remaining gun. "Both case and weapon are just as they were when we found them in the audience chamber," he said. "You can use the duplicate gun."

"What--what are you asking of me?" Georg demanded.

"The devil is in the details," said Mendez. "You have given a quick and sketchy account of what you did, and how, and why. That's all very well for things like what books you consulted, or how you left the scene. But the shooting itself is the center of it all." Mendez gestured at Wolfson and himself. "We two humans are mainly interested in confirming the mechanics of the shot. The angle, the distance, the direction, that sort of thing. The Reqwar Pavlat authorities have another emphasis."

Darsteel spoke. "The people and nobles of Reqwar want their Thelm to be strong, resolute, ready to act. They will want to know what your actions say about your character. And there is no recording, no imagery, of how the Thelm died. We Pavlat need to see that you could have done it, that you
did
do it. That you can handle the weapon, aim it, operate it, understand it. That you can aim it and fire it at another living being."

Georg pointed at the tailor's dummy. "That is no living being."

"No, sir. Of course not. But it would be a very rare being indeed who could aim the same kind of gun he used a few hours ago and point it at something representing the victim, and
not
have a very strong emotional reaction. We will see it. We will believe. And then it will be all over."

Georg stood there, staring at the gun, then at the dummy, for a long time. "The gun," he said. "It has live ammunition in it?"

"We haven't done anything to change it in any way, sir," Mendez replied. "It is just as it was when we recovered it from the wreckage, less than an hour ago."

"And 'one must be ready to resolve a question of honor at once.' The Thelm kept the damned things loaded. But what if the gun was damaged in some way by the fire?"

"I have examined it carefully sir. There was some ash that was blown into the barrel. I cleared that out. Other than that, it does not appear to be damaged in any way. And it is an extremely simple mechanism. Either it will work perfectly, or it won't work at all. Please, sir. Take up the gun. Position yourself by the dummy as you did by the Thelm. Aim. Fire. And we will be done. It will satisfy us, and buttress your claim to the Thelmship."

Georg hesitated one last time, then walked toward the table that held the ruined display case.

"Georg!" It was Marta, calling out to him. He did not answer, did not look behind him. He stretched out his hand and picked up the pistol. A little loose ash and dust fell off it as he did so, and sprinkles of soot hung in the air for a moment. The grip, designed for the Pavlat hand with two thumbs and four fingers, was awkward for a human hand, but he did not have any great difficulty.

"Georg! Please! Please don't!"

He did not respond. He turned and walked the few steps back to stand facing the back of the dummy's head. He moved as if he were underwater, in slow motion, through some medium that offered firm resistance but gave way under steady pressure. He raised the weapon--then lowered it again and released the safety mechanism's twist-and-slide switch. He lifted the gun and aimed it straight at the back of the dummy's head. The sweat was streaming down his face, his back, his arms.