“Just try and stop me,” Dalla told him. “Any interviews you have with that little item, I want to sit in on.”
The Proletarian girl, still guarded by a detective, had already been placed in the interview room. The detective nodded to Vall, tried to suppress a grin when he saw Dalla behind him, and went out. Vall saw his wife and the prisoner seated, and produced his cigarette case, handing it around.
“You’re Zinganna; you’re of the household of Councilman Salgath Trod, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Housekeeper and hostess,” the girl replied. “I am also his mistress.”
Vall nodded, smiling. “Which confirms my long-standing respect for Councilman Salgath’s exquisite taste.”
“Why, thank you,” she said. “But I doubt if I was brought here to receive compliments. Or was I?”
“No, I’m afraid not. Have you heard the newscasts of the past few hours concerning Councilman Salgath?”
She straightened in her seat, looking at him seriously.
“No. I and Nindrandigro and Calilla spent the evening on ServSec One-Six-Five. Councilman Salgath told me that he had some business and wanted them out of the apartment, and wanted me to keep an eye on them. We didn’t hear any news at all.” She hesitated. “Has anything … serious … happened?”
Vall studied her for a moment, then glanced at Dalla. There existed between himself and his wife a sort of vague, semitelepathic, rapport; they had never been able to transmit definite and exact thoughts, but they could clearly prehend one another’s feelings and emotions. He was conscious, now, of Dalla’s sympathy for the Proletarian girl.
“Zinganna, I’m going to tell you something that is being kept from the public,” he said. “By doing so, I will make it necessary for us to detain you, at least for a few days. I hope you will forgive me, but I think you would forgive me less if I didn’t tell you.”
“Something’s happened to him,” she said, her eyes widening and her body tensing.
“Yes, Zinganna. At about 2010, this evening,” he said, “Councilman Salgath was murdered.”
“Oh!” She leaned back in the chair, closing her eyes. “He’s dead?” Then, again, statement instead of question: “He’s dead!”
For a long moment, she lay back in the chair, as though trying to reorient her mind to the fact of Salgath Trod’s death, while Vall and Dalla sat watching her. Then she stirred, opened her eyes, looked at the cigarette in her fingers as though she had never seen it before, and leaned forward to stuff it into an ash receiver.
“Who did it?” she asked, the Stone Age savage who had been her ancestor not ten generations ago peeping out of her eyes.
“The men who actually used the needlers are dead,” Vall told her. “I killed a couple of them myself. We still have to find the men who planned it. I’d hoped you’d want to help us do that, Zinganna.”
He side-glanced to Dalla again; she nodded. The relationship between Zinganna and Salgath Trod hadn’t been purely business with her; there had been some real affection. He told her what had happened, and when he reached the point at which Salgath Trod had called Tortha Karf to confess complicity in the slave trade, her lips tightened and she nodded.
“I was afraid it was something like that,” she said. “For the last few days, well, ever since the news about the slave trade got out, he’s been worried about something. I’ve always thought somebody had some kind of a hold over him. Different times in the past, he’s done things so far against his own political best interests that I’ve had to believe he was being forced into them. Well, this time they tried to force him too far. What then?”
Vall continued the story. “So we’re keeping this hushed up, for a while. The way we’re letting it out, Salgath Trod is still alive, on Police Terminal, talking under narco-hypnosis.”
She smiled savagely. “And they’ll get frightened, and frightened men do foolish things,” she finished. She hadn’t been a politician’s mistress for nothing. “What can I do to help?”
“Tell us everything you can,” he said. “Maybe we can be able to take such actions as we would have taken if Salgath Trod had lived to talk to us.”
“Yes, of course.” She got another cigarette from the case Vall had laid on the table. “I think, though, that you’d better give me a narco-hypnosis. You want to be able to depend on what I’m going to tell you, and I want to be able to remember things exactly.”
Vall nodded approvingly and turned to Dalla.
“Can you handle this, yourself?” he asked. “There’s an audiovisual recorder on now; here’s everything you need.” He opened the drawers in the table to show her the narco-hypnotic equipment. “And the phone has a whisper mouthpiece; you can call out without worrying about your message getting into Zinganna’s subconscious. Well, I’ll see you when you’re through; you bring Zinganna to Police Terminal; I’ll probably be there.”
He went out, closing the door behind him, and went down the hall, meeting the officer who had taken charge of the butler and housemaid.
“We’re having trouble with them, sir,” he said. “Hostile. Yelling about their rights, and demanding to see a representative of Proletarian Protective League.”
Vall mentioned the Proletarian Protective League with unflattering vulgarity.
“If they don’t cooperate, drag them out and inject them and question them anyhow,” he said.
The detective-lieutenant looked worried. “We’ve been taking a pretty high hand with them as it is,” he protested. “It’s safer to kill a Citizen than bloody a Prole’s nose; they have all sorts of laws to protect them.”
“There are all sorts of laws to protect the Paratime Secret,” Vall replied. “And I think there are one or two laws against murdering members of the Executive Council. In case P.P.L. makes any trouble, they
