The Kaiser Affair (The Drifting Isle Chronicles)
The Drifting Isle Chronicles:
The Kaiser Affair
by Joseph Robert Lewis
Copper Crow Books
Copyright © 2013 Joseph Robert Lewis
Cover art by Elsa Kroese
Edition: March 2013
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from Joseph Robert Lewis.
Special thanks to
Aimee, Damian, Michael, Paul,
Rachel, Rick, Todd, and Willow
Chapter 1. A Late Summons
Bettina Rothschild stepped down from the steam carriage, carefully balancing her weight with one gloved hand on her gleaming black cane while her other hand held her hat in place against the stiff evening breeze.
“Mister Oster, please wait here. I’ll only be a moment,” she said to the driver. The young lady stepped up onto the sidewalk and limped toward the door of the bar, her back tall and straight, and her expression stern.
After several steps she paused and squinted up at the streetlight overhead, and through the glare of the humming electric bulb she could just barely see a black shape hunched atop the rusty iron lamppost. “Are you waiting for someone in particular?” she asked.
An old raven shuffled along the top of the post away from the lamp so she could see it better. Its feathers were unruly and shuddered in the wind, and there were bright gray claw-marks on the side of its beak. The bird peered down at her and said in a rasping voice, “My business is my own, little one.”
“I think you’ll find I’m quite a bit larger than you, friend.”
The raven shook its head and cackled. “You all look little from up here.” And the black bird spread its wings, flapped up from its perch, and soared off into the darkness.
Bettina watched it fly away.
Damned ravens. What on earth could they want now?
She turned and walked up to the doors of the tavern. Even before she touched the door handle, she could hear the chaos inside. Men were shouting, glasses were shattering, and chairs were splintering. She sighed and turned the handle. Upon entering the public house, a warm cloud of cigar smoke and sweaty male pheromones wrapped about her and she winced as she continued inside. Every face was either pale from shouting or red from drinking, and most were streaked with sweaty oil or soot from the day’s work. Mercifully, the brawl appeared to be contained at the far end of the establishment and involved only five men of various sizes and states of bloody undress.
Bettina glanced at the mustachioed bartender, who returned her look with a weary shrug and nod as he went about his business of cleaning chipped glasses. She grimaced and took several sharp steps toward the fight, slamming her cane on the floorboards upon every other step. “Gentlemen!”
A few of the patrons sitting along the wall grinned at her, but said nothing. The five men on the floor continued shouting and pounding their fists into each other’s stomachs and faces.
“Gentlemen!” She slammed her cane on the floor again. “I must insist that you let Arjuna up.”
“What?” The knot of pugilists unraveled slightly as the exhausted men slumped apart.
“Arjuna?” Bettina scanned the sweaty and battered faces at her feet. “Oh my. You all have my sincerest apologies. I simply assumed he was here. Has anyone seen Arjuna Rana this evening?”
One of the brawlers shoved a pair of legs off his chest and stood up. “If that sorry bastard was here, he’d be bleeding out both ends. The rat’s been sleeping with my sister! What’s he to you, lady?”
“We work together,” she said icily. She stood very still, both gloved hands resting on the cat-shaped head of her cane, her hat resting comfortably on her bound up hair at just the right angle to suit her taste. “But, as he isn’t here, I’ll be on my way.” She turned to leave.
“Why are you always in such a rush?” a young man asked.
Bettina looked back as Arjuna emerged from the little hallway around the end of the bar wearing a smug smile and a worn brown jacket over his white shirt, which was open at the throat because he was clearly either allergic or phobic when it came to appropriate neck wear. He folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the bar, and winked at her. The young Dumastran’s thick black hair hung playfully around his smiling eyes.
“Where have you been?” she asked.
He gestured behind him. “The bathroom. I can provide witnesses to that effect, but some of them may prove hostile if you try to interrogate them before they’ve finished their business.”
“That won’t be necessary,” she said. “We’ve been summoned. Come along.” And she resumed her uneven march back to the door.
“You, you ugly little stain, you stay away from my sister!” the big brawler shouted.
Bettina paused with her hand on the door and watched the stranger launch himself over the other fighters at Arjuna. He was bigger than Arjuna and he swung his fists like steam-rams, but Arjuna ducked around him, still grinning, and landed a few light slaps to the brawler’s ribs. The big man wheeled around and tackled Arjuna to the floor, right on top of the other four men who were all once again trying to choke each other into oblivion at that moment.
Arjuna groaned as he wriggled his arms loose, elbowed his attacker in the ear, and then kicked his legs free and rolled clear of the scrum. He stood up and swept his hair back from his eyes, and he turned to look at Bettina.
“Ready to go?” he asked.
“Kneel!” she snapped.
Arjuna dropped to one knee and Bettina whipped her cane over his head to strike the oncoming brawler in the throat. The big man stumbled back, choking and gasping, and collapsed onto a bar stool, which toppled over and broke as it hit the floor.
Arjuna stood up again. “Now are we ready to go?”
She stepped back and held the door open. “After you, darling.”
He grinned and strode out with a light skip in his step.
“Darling?” the bartender cast her a questioning look.
“Of course,” she said as she tossed a handful of coins onto the bar to apologize for the broken stool. “I’m not without affection for him. He is my husband, after all.”
Arjuna was waiting for her outside and she took his arm as they returned to the steam carriage. She allowed him to help her up into her seat, and then he leapt up lightly beside her and thumped his hand on the roof. The idling engine puttered louder and the carriage shook as the driver put it in gear and they set out down the dark street with a thin trail of smoke stretching out behind them.
As soon as they were moving, Arjuna slipped his arm around Bettina’s shoulders and pressed his lips to the side of her neck. “You look beautiful. Did you know that you look beautiful? It’s important that you know that. Because you do look beautiful.” He kissed her again.
She smiled briefly. “And you smell like a sewer.”
He leaned back. “Well, I didn’t know we were working tonight.”
“That’s hardly an excuse. You don’t even drink, so I can’t begin to fathom why you insist on visiting these horrible establishments.”
“I like Steiner’s,” he said, glancing out the window at the dark houses rolling past. “It reminds me of home. Loud, hot, arguing, laughing, talking about the big game or the news of the day. Sometimes this city just feels so… cold, and gray, and tired. I just wanted a litt
le friendly carousing. Some noise and color. Is that such a crime?”
“No. But assaulting people and destroying private property are.”
He nodded. “I’m sorry about that. It won’t happen again.”
“Of course it will. What was that business about someone’s sister?”
“Oh, that? That’s nothing. The poor girl sends me poetry sometimes.”
“And you encourage this?” Her eyes narrowed.
“Of course not. Even if I wasn’t happily married to the most ravishing creature in Eisenstadt, there is still the matter of the unfortunate lady’s mustache to consider.”
Bettina smiled ever so slightly. “Well, I suppose you can be forgiven then.”
He grinned. “At least let me say thank you for saving me back there.” He slipped his arm around her again and she let him kiss her neck and ear and cheek for a moment before she turned and kissed him back.
She pulled away from him as the smell of stale beer assaulted her nose. “Why exactly were you there tonight? It’s the middle of the week.”
“Why else? To celebrate the big flight,” he said, leaning back into the seat. “It’s not every day that someone walks on the drifting isle.”
“Oh, that.”
“What? You don’t care?”
“I do care. And I’ll care even more when there’s more proof than the incoherent ramblings of some eccentric inventor to substantiate the claim,” she replied. “No one has ever set foot on Inselmond, and no one has ever flown higher than our house in an autogyro, so you’ll excuse my skepticism.”
Arjuna smiled and shook his head. “You know, everyone in the city is celebrating today, everyone except for you.”
“If everyone were celebrating, we wouldn’t be on our way to the Ministry right now, would we?”
Her husband’s face took on a more serious aspect. “Why are we going to the office tonight? And why did they send an autocarriage for us?”
“We are going to the Ministry because that’s where the Minister is. That’s all I know.”
His eyes widened. “We’re meeting with Minister Kaiser tonight?” He glanced down at his wrinkled shirt and jacket. “We never meet with Minister Kaiser. Minister Kaiser is up here,” he held one hand by the ceiling of the carriage, “and we’re down here,” he held his other hand down by the seat. “How does the Minister of Justice even know who we are?”
Bettina smiled thinly. “She is the Minister of Justice. I would think she could find out the names of the people who work for her if she really wanted to.”
“And you have no idea why we’re meeting with her?”
“A messenger came by the house at eight. She said to come immediately.”
Arjuna winced. “It’s already after nine.”
It was nearly nine-thirty when the carriage squealed to a halt in front of the Ministry of Justice and Arjuna helped Bettina down to the street. Before them rose the huge stone slab of the Ministry headquarters, a massive old building that had once been one of the plainer palaces of the lesser nobility, long before the Steel Era when the skyscrapers began going up.
Only a handful of these stone buildings still remained in the city, crumbling reminders of another time, another world. But even now, with its hopelessly antiquated and inadequate lights and plumbing, there was no talk of ever moving the Ministry to a newer facility. It could take years to safely pry all of the Ministry’s secrets out of the walls and floors of the old palace, and no one ever mustered the political will to start that process. No one wanted to see what secrets might shake out of the shadows.
Bettina and Arjuna strode in through the front gate, showing their brass badges to the guards outside, and then to the guards inside where they signed the log, and then they continued inside to the creaking elevator halfway down the hallway. The operator gave them a nod as they stepped inside, closed the cage door, and flipped the lever to start the lift. The metal box rattled and shrieked for a moment, and they were off.
At the fifth floor, the elevator shuddered to a halt and they stepped out into a carpeted hall where various documents and historical relics from the Ministry’s storied past were on display on small marble plinths under small glass domes. Bettina took her husband’s arm and steered him down the hall, but stopped short by a slender door, and nodded at it.
Arjuna sighed. “I’ll just be a moment.”
He ducked inside the bathroom and she listened to the running water and her husband’s humming.
At that moment, a slender gentleman in a blue suit hurried by, but slowed to a stop beside her. “Bettina Rothschild?”
She didn’t turn to look. “It’s Rothschild-Rana, Mister Finkel, as you well know.”
“Ah. Still? How disappointing,” he said. “Yes, well, I suppose we all need to make our youthful mistakes. No real harm in that, unless it goes on too long.”
“I don’t think anyone has ever called me youthful, even in my youth,” Bettina said. “And the last person who claimed I had made a mistake was proven most grievously wrong. In public.”
“Oh, come now, Bettina!” Finkel rolled his eyes. “You and I both know that he isn’t good enough for you. You’re smarter than a hundred Arjunas, and right now you should be ascending into the higher circles, not mucking about in the slums. What on earth do you see in that oaf?”
“Arjuna makes me happy.” Bettina turned to look the pale man in the eyes. “I’m fairly certain that is all the reason I should need to be married to him.”
“But you deserve to be with someone who is your intellectual equal!”
“I can decide for myself whom I deserve to be with, thank you very much,” Bettina said. “Not that I have an intellectual equal, but if I did, I sincerely doubt she and I would be able to tolerate each other for more than five minutes’ time.”
“But…!”
“I’m smarter than you are, Peter, by far, so there’s no need for you to make any more noise on this subject. Arjuna is stronger than you, and more charming as well, and much better looking, besides. He’s the finest marksman with any weapon and has studied with sages on two continents. He’s also a talented artist, speaks four languages fluently, has a photographic memory, and performs like a raging stallion in the bedroom. I can’t imagine that a snide cretin in a cheap blue suit with the body of a prepubescent orangutan could really entice me to leave him,” she said. “So from where I’m standing, my choice was quite a coldly logical one. But I’m sorry, I seem to have wandered from our original topic of conversation, which was what again, exactly?”
Finkel made a sour face and hurried away, leaving Bettina with just the faintest hint of a smile on her lips.
When Arjuna stepped out again a moment later he was almost a new man. His face was clean, his hair was slicked back, and his clothing looked slightly neater and better-fitting. Instead of a wrinkled mess, he looked quite sharp and rakish. She took his arm again. “Much better.”
They strode on down the hall as quickly as Bettina’s foot and cane would allow and she knocked on the Minister’s door at a quarter to ten. A young man answered the door and gestured them into the office, and then he slipped out and closed the doors behind them.
Bettina and Arjuna stood beside the two chairs facing the desk, waiting for the woman before them to finish her writing and acknowledge her visitors.
“Sit down,” the Minister said without looking up.
They sat. Bettina crossed her ankles and leaned her can against her hip, and placed both gloved hands on her knee. Arjuna sat back into his seat with his legs crossed a bit more casually than his wife would have liked.
Minister of Justice Gisele Kaiser finished her writing, set her papers aside, and looked up at the young couple. She had the matronly bearing of a woman beyond middle age who had suffered far more disappointments and disillusionments than most. There was a grayness all about her, from her silvery hair to her colorless cheeks and lips. There was nothing in her flat gray eyes except the barest spark of life to keep he
r shuffling papers and barking orders.
With a tired look, she took off her glasses and said, “Thank you both for coming tonight. As you no doubt suspect, the matter is both urgent and delicate. I requested the two of you specifically for this case, and I expect nothing but your finest work in handling it.”
“What’s happened?” Arjuna asked.
“This evening, shortly after six o’clock, there was an escape from Torghast Prison.”
“Who?” Bettina asked. “How many?”
The Minister hesitated. “One inmate. Ranulf Kaiser.”
“Your brother?” Bettina nodded slowly. “I remember the trial. Very complicated. The lawyers loved it. The press hated it.”
Arjuna frowned. “Why did the press hate it?”
“Because they barely understood it,” the Minister said. “Ranulf orchestrated the most complicated insurance fraud in our fair city’s history, and all through obscure legal loopholes that no one understood. The trial lasted nine months. Thankfully, the conviction came much more quickly.”
Arjuna shrugged. “Well, none of that will be a problem now. He broke out of prison. That’s fairly straightforward.”
“It would be, except for one detail,” the Minister said. “Ranulf’s sentence was due to end next month. He would have been a free man if he had only waited another twenty-three days.”
“What?” Arjuna smiled incredulously. “Why would he go to all the trouble of escaping from prison three weeks before his release?”
“That is the question, Mister Rana,” Kaiser said dryly. “And I will also remind you that my appointment as Minister of Justice will be under review in less than two weeks’ time. The Chancellor himself will be considering whether to continue my appointment, or to cave in to the blue bloods and replace me with their little pet, Wilhelm Brandt.”
“But Brandt’s a politician,” Bettina said. “He doesn’t have any background in criminal investigation, or even in law. If I recall correctly, he only joined the Ministry as a political appointee, and he didn’t even want the position at the time.”