The Devil's Opera(114)
Byron nodded. “Yep.”
“Shall we go talk to him?”
“Might’s well. We don’t seem to be finding anyone else to talk to today.”
They sped up their pace until they were only a couple of steps behind the group of boys. One of them looked around. Gotthilf recognized him; Martin, one of the trio he had encountered the last time he had seen Ursula Metzgerinin. That thought brought a frown to his face. He pointed a finger at the boy, and Martin’s face paled at the sight. The big apprentice grabbed his friends by the arms and veered off in a different direction. Gotthilf snorted. Whatever the boy had been up to, he appeared to have had a sudden change of plans.
The two detectives dropped into step with Simon, one on each side of him.
“Hello, Simon,” Gotthilf said.
The boy glanced at him. “Hello, Sergeant Hoch.”
“Nice day, isn’t it?”
Simon looked back over his shoulder, and relaxed a bit when he saw the other boys were gone.
“It is now.”
“Not friends of yours?” Byron asked.
“No,” Simon said in a low tone. “Not friends of mine. None of them wants to be friends with a cripple.”
“Ah,” Gotthilf said. “Bullying you, were they?”
“Nah,” Simon shook his head. “Not yet. They just said some things, is all. But…”
“But they might have done something if we hadn’t come along.”
Simon shrugged.
They walked a few more steps in silence, then Simon looked up at Gotthilf again.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Ask,” Gotthilf replied.
“Why are you and Lieutenant Chi…Chieske bullying Hans?”
Gotthilf’s eyes widened, and he heard Byron snort. Of all the questions that the boy could have asked, that had to rank as one of the most unexpected. He gathered his wits quickly.
“We are not bullying Herr Metzger,” he said.
“Looks like it to me,” Simon insisted. “You keep showing up where he is, or following him or me, and you keep asking questions and pushing.”
Byron looked at Gotthilf over the boy’s head with a sardonic expression and a shrug, as if admitting the boy had nailed them. Which, of course, he had.
“Well, yes, we do keep coming around,” Gotthilf said. “But that’s because we’re pretty certain Herr Metzger knows some things about how some people got hurt.” He carefully avoided the word killed. “Those are things that we really need to know so that we can bring the people responsible before a judge.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you care who did it? They were all just poor folks like me, weren’t they? Who cares about us?”
Several more steps passed in silence. “All I can tell you,” Gotthilf finally said, “is why I do. A wise man I respect very much once told me something like this: ‘They are victims, and no victim is ever going to be dismissed as just anything. Not on my watch.”
Gotthilf laid a hand on Simon’s shoulder, stopped, and turned the boy so he could look directly down into his eyes. “We may not be able to find out who has been doing these things, but we have to try. And we don’t forget—not on my watch.”
Simon stared up at him unblinking—not that he had to look up that far, Gotthilf conceded in a corner of his mind, given the not so great disparity in their height—for a long moment. At length, he nodded.
“All right. But why Hans?”
“Because we think he knows something that will help us,” Gotthilf said. “And if he does not tell us, someone else might get hurt.”
“Or killed,” Simon said.
“Yah,” Gotthilf agreed. “Or killed.”
“I found one of the deaders in the river, you know,” Simon looked away. “The last one.”
“That’s not in our reports,” Byron spoke up.
“Yah, well, old Johann the fisher came along right after that and took over. But I saw him first.”
The boy swallowed, hard.
“Wasn’t pretty, was it?” The up-timer’s voice was gentle. Byron could surprise Gotthilf, even after working with him now for almost a year.
“No.”
“We want to stop that kind of thing. That’s why we need to know what Metzger knows.”
Simon looked up at Gotthilf one more time.
“Do you think that Hans did it?”
“No,” Gotthilf replied. “But if he knows something, doesn’t tell us, and someone else gets hurt, then it’s just like he did it himself.”
Simon looked down and muttered something low that Gotthilf couldn’t hear.
Gotthilf waited. After a moment, the boy spoke louder. “I don’t know anything, but Hans is real uneasy.” He shrugged. “Can I go now? I have to deliver this package for the candler.” He patted the front of his jacket.