There was no door, just a long rag that offered minimal privacy. From behind it, apparently hearing me approach, a young woman said, “Come in, Mr. Hammett.”
The interior stank of mud. The floor was covered with large, heavy, spade-shaped leaves that the burghers had been bringing back from the forest and charitably sharing with others, proving that not all capitalists are bad folks, even to Communists like me.
She was a fetching one, she was. She crouched near the back of the hut wearing some kind of white dress made grubby from life along the River. But even so, her sweet-sad face and her small but rich body marked her as a true beauty. “I told him you’d come.”
“Edgar?”
“Yes. He doesn’t have much faith in humanity, I’m afraid. But then, I wouldn’t either. Not with the kind of life he’s led. His stepfather used to beat him mercilessly for one thing. Edgar still has nightmares about it.”
She was succeeding in making me feel sorry for Poe.
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But he was easier to deal with when he came off as a self-indulgent artiste.
“What era are you from?” I asked.
“The 1930s. My father is a great admirer of yours. He’s a judge and a very avid mystery reader.” She reached out and touched a large pile of flowers that were dying inside the hut. Even their scent was gone here in the rain and the chill and the shadowed interior.
Then her face changed. Here she’d been this fetching young girl—the impolite name, in my time, being “jailbait” —and then she abruptly became this drawn, anxious young woman. “Look.”
From somewhere among the leaves that gave the mud hut its floor, she produced a long arrow with a metal tip. Metals being as precious as they are on this world, I was impressed despite myself.
She handed it over. I rolled it around in my fingers and examined it, not worried about getting prints on it. Riverworld has a lousy crime lab.
The workmanship was very good, point, shaft, and nock perfectly designed. Having been an informal student of medieval history, I recognized the arrowhead as made of iron pile, the same metal an arrowsmith of the 1300s would have used.
“Edgar told you what happened?”
“Yes.”
“Somebody’s trying to kill me, Mr. Hammett.”
“You could always call me Dashiell.”
Her shy response was to tilt her head down in such a way that she looked younger and even more vulnerable.
She said, “I’m afraid. I don’t want somebody to send me to some other time.”
“I don’t blame you.”
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Ed German
She raised her eyes. “I think it’s O’Brien.”
“Who?”
“Richard O’Brien. One of the Baltimore businessmen. He’s married, but that doesn’t seem to bother him.”
“Has he ever threatened you?”
“Not exactly. But he waits till Edgar goes down to the River and then he sneaks up here. He’s a real pest.”
“Pests aren’t usually violent.”
“Oh, he’s very violent. Very violent. He grabbed Edgar one night and tried to drown him. This was before you were here, I think.”
“Anybody else I should talk to?”
She thought a moment. She was about to speak when a small birdlike cry filled the air.
We sat in the rain-smelling silence and looked at each other, Edgar’s sweet-sad little girlfriend and I. The bird cry had been plaintive, so much so that I touched my arm and felt tiny cold pebbles of goose bumps there.
“What kind of bird sound was that?” There were no birds on Riverworld.
She smiled. “That was Robert.”
“Who’s Robert?”
But I needn’t have asked, because suddenly the long rag that served as a door was thrown back and there stood a boy of perhaps ten, brown as an American Indian, streaked with mud so fierce it looked like war paint. He had sandy blond hair and furtive blue eyes. His hips were wrapped in a towel held up by a magnetic clip. He managed to look both frightening and pathetic in the way of street urchins from time immemorial. Even given the soaking he’d taken in the rain, he smelled of sweat and feces.
From his belt dangled a knife holster, the stone blade it