“How far have I lifted it?”
“Four inches,” Brutus said.
Jessie dug in his heels and began to walk faster, feeling the full weight of the lid coming into the rope.
“That’s it, that’s it,” the hound called.
“See anything?”
“A few more inches,” Helena said.
“A few more inches, and I’ll have a hernia,” the detective said. Nevertheless, he continued to back up.
“More, more,” Brutus called, his long tail swishing back and forth like a metronome guiding the rhythm of the detective’s effort. He had bent his front legs and brought his head level with the edge of the grave, as if he were beginning to catch a glimpse of the interior of the coffin.
“Now?” Jessie asked.
“You need some help?” Helena asked.
“No, no,” Jessie said. “I’m doing okay.”
Truthfully, he wasn’t doing okay at all; his heart was thudding, and blood pounded like hammers at both temples. However, he felt he had to make Helena think it was a simple matter for him. Already, though she didn’t know it, he felt himself to be in constant competition with her, to such a degree that he felt their male-female roles had become too equal. He had been born and raised in an era when women’s liberation wasn’t a movement, but an accepted part of society—yet his home life had been at variance with much of modern thought. Neither his mother nor his father had held much truck with sexual equality or freedom, so it was perhaps understandable that he was sometimes worried about such things.
“That’s far enough, Jessie,” Helena called,
“What do you see?”
Neither the woman nor the hound answered, but they both continued to stare into the open hole.
Jessie began to sweat again. Clear droplets rolled across his face, tickled his cheeks, caught saltily in the corners of his mouth. “Is it that terrible?” he asked.
“Well, ‘terrible’ isn’t quite the word for it,” Helena said. “Something like—oh, ‘frustrating’ or ‘maddening’ would do much better.”
“Is the corpse mutilated beyond endurance?” Jessie asked. He had seen corpses mutilated beyond endurance before. “Does it look like the picture of Tesserax we got from Galiotor Fils?”
“No, the corpse isn’t mutilated beyond endurance,” Brutus said. “In fact, it isn’t mutilated at all. In fact, there just isn’t any corpse; they buried an empty casket.”
“Oh,” Jessie said.
“Christ,” Brutus said, with feeling, “am I glad that I didn’t do all that work for nothing.”
“It wasn’t for nothing,” Jessie said.
“It wasn’t?”
The detective let go of the rope and was instantly jerked off his feet as the coffin lid started to go shut. He slammed into the damp grass, face first, bit his lip, tasted blood, and looked up at the woman and the hound, bewildered.
“You had the end of the rope lashed around your wrists,” Brutus said. “Remember?”
Jessie looked down at his hands and nodded, sat up and unwound the cord, let it go again and listened as the empty coffin’s lid fell shut with a soft whump, the rope rattling drily after it.
“You were saying this expedition was worthwhile,” Brutus said.
Jessie crawled to the edge of the grave, opposite them, and he said, “That’s right.”
A flight of bats, perhaps twenty of them, rose out of the white mausoleum perched atop the second hillock in the graveyard. In an unexpected burst of moonlight, they screeched away, into darkness. The moon, which had only momentarily illuminated them, slid behind the storm clouds again, like a Spanish woman’s face slyly shielded by a fan.
“But we didn’t find anything,” Helena protested.
“Oh, yes we did,” Jessie said, “We found that there was no body in Tesserax’s grave.”
“That’s the same thing.”
Jessie got to his feet, brushing himself off, even though he really didn’t feel like standing, yet. “No, it isn’t the same thing,” he said, with brotherly patience, wiping blood from his cracked lips.
“Then I’m no detective,” she said.
The bats from the mausoleum streaked by overhead, squeaking furiously, their leathery wings flapping moistly.
Jessie picked up the shovel and began to take it apart as he talked, to repack it in the satchel. “I’m aware that you’re not as quick in these matters as I am,” he said. “No one would expect you to be; you’ve not had the experience I have.” He was pleased that their roles were now returning to a moderated equilibrium that he could cope with; he no longer felt so damn foolish. “Don’t you see, though…. We’ve got enough evidence to go to Galiotor Fils, enough stuff for him to bring charges against the maseni embassy officials. From here on out, it’s all up to the police and the courts. They’ll find out what really happened to Tesserax, and why such an elaborate cover-up was done. All we have to do is get the facts to Galiotor Fils.”