by Kin S. Law
Inside, Rosa met her not far down the corridor. She had changed into a satin number with a sable coat, but her strappy stiletto heels still looked untouchably gorgeous. Hargreaves knew better. There was likely twice her stone in blades and sharps inside the sumptuous coat.
Rosa looked expectantly impatient, standing next to two glasses of Vanessa’s favorite rotgut gin. Rosa’s was already empty.
“Really? I was so easy to read?” the inspector said, glumly downing the shot. Its fires chased the autumn chill from her spry form.
“We raided a rum runner’s stash together in Barcelona. I’m used to how you look when you scope out a joint. Sort of screwing your face together, like you bit into a lemon. Don’t worry; Burgess was more interested in your bust than your eyes,” said Rosa Marija.
“I will monitor my tells more in the future,” Hargreaves said through gritted teeth. “Say, what were you looking for?”
“Burgess doesn’t simply deal in girls and automata,” Rosa mentioned offhandedly. “Half these rooms are filled with clothes and jewels for dressing up his ladies. Likewise, half his cellar is filled with illicit parts, rare art nobody else can fence, and loot he can afford to keep until the pigs forget about it. Custom jobs are sort of his kink.”
“And you’ve been pinching them left and right….” Hargreaves deduced.
“Bingo. Everything too hot to move eventually gets to Burgess. He’s the only one on the eastern seaboard knowledgeable enough to take apart and file down the endless strings of serial numbers without blowing himself up. Guns, of course, but clockwork for gears, too.”
Rosa’s explanation did not sit properly with the inspector. For one thing, it seemed too difficult to steal and resell the items after Burgess put in the laundering. For another, long milking operations didn’t seem like Clemens’ style.
“Come now, what are you really after?” Hargreaves was tempted to say. Instead, she opted to keep quiet. This was American jurisdiction, after all, and besides, the inspector had developed a burlesque dancer’s worth of flexibility in her morals during the last few months. Stealing from a crime kingpin was just dandy in her book.
“Not to sound suspicious, gorgeous, but why are you here? What business does the Queen of England have with Stanley Burgess?” Rosa asked now.
“None of yours,” Hargreaves evaded. “But if you can show me to his records rooms, I can compensate you for the aid.”
“I can compensate. Not ‘the Crown,’” Rosa remarked. “I could call for a guard. They know who I am.”
A moment passed between the two, and Hargreaves’ lips tightened almost imperceptibly. Rosa’s sardonic grin never faded.
“Come on, we’re past all that,” said Rosa. Without another word, she marched off along the corridor. Hargreaves breathed a sigh. It was good to have friends.
Hargreaves could only follow, admiring the complete discretion of the place. Behind the scenes, Burgess’ pleasure palace bore none of the frippery and frosting of the burlesque. Each of the doors they passed looked as if they were storerooms, windowless and whitewashed, without even numbers adorning them. Still, there were hints of fragrances and small moans drifting out from behind the thin tenement doors. Hargreaves blushed, and hid it in her collar.
At the end of the corridor, another door led into a dark chamber. It took a moment for Hargreaves to realize they were high above the boxes of the main amphitheater, lights extinguished after its stars quit the stage. A catwalk led round the perimeter, strung with complex, bulky apparatus. Candles and chalk to produce the magic of burlesque.
Rosa led the way, round the catwalk towards a door set atop three steps. It was an awkward, cramped arrangement. The walls were tumbledown and rotting, leaking insulation here and there. When Rosa opened the door, more steps led down again, this time to a makeshift walkway laid across some bare girders. Chip wrappers, damp boxes, and tobacco ends crammed every nook and cranny so badly it took Hargreaves a moment to realize they were traversing the beautiful avant-garde ceiling of the amphitheater. To think, the bourgeoisie of New York gathered each evening to sit under a metric ton of rubbish.
“Here. It used to be a projection booth, but now it’s used as a storeroom for the arclight engineers. Some of the old picture-house reels are still there, but the rest has been converted into Burgess’ records office. Nobody comes up here but Burgess, and then only rarely,” Rosa all but whispered. She opened a second, thicker door, and stepped inside the booth. “We can talk normally here. The booth is insulated against sounds.”
“You thoroughly scouted the place,” Hargreaves remarked as soon as the door closed behind her. Inside, the booth wasn’t large, maybe twice the length of a woman lying down and very narrow. It was, however, quite tall, featuring a ladder stretching up to a roof access trap. Wedged into a corner sat a small desk, cleaned off and ready for use.
Against the opposite wall crouched a privy with no door, and a large tangle of boxy machinery mostly obstructing their view of it. This was the old picture projector, with its prominent cannon-like lens and intricate film spools. Much of the bulk belonged to a rectangular metal box in the body of the apparatus, which revealed a triple shelf of bound black notebooks when opened.
“There you are,” Rosa indicated in a humored kind of way. “Now can I be party to the workings inside that gold-plated noggin of yours, Hargreaves?”
Something in her voice suggested to the inspector their meeting so fortuitously was not due to chance. Perhaps fate had thrown in Vanessa Hargreaves’ lot together with this pirate crew again—or perhaps, they were the very villains Hargreaves was after. Was Clemens capable of pilfering a weapon of such horrifying implications? No, absolutely not, Hargreaves decided. But if he had no knowledge of the contents of the box… Yes, it was a definite possibility. He might only think it was very valuable. In such a case, the pirates had every reason to waylay or exploit her.
Hargreaves kept her thoughts to herself. She reached for the closest notebook and began to leaf through. Rosa Marija hadn’t steered her wrong; these were in fact Burgess’ gunrunning records, written in neat blocky print and meticulously organized. Debits were marked in red, and everything was written in guarded shorthand, but it was all there. She recognized prominent airship pirates, international gang leaders, and high officials in Ubique. A veritable stock exchange of death.
Rosa Marija looked around with a seemingly bored expression on her face, but Hargreaves knew her better than she let on. The inspector looked for the fingers: still and even like a stalking spider. Rosa was paying rapt attention. Hargreaves was supposed to find something here, was she?
The notebook she held was the most recent. From the date headings, Hargreaves counted back a full month, and selected the appropriate volume. This detailed some sales Burgess had bartered or mediated, mostly dealing with percentages he had a cut in. In a minute, she noticed something odd.
“Rosa, were you casing the place as far back as a month ago?”
“No,” Rosa replied. “We started at the beginning of the month. It was lucky. Burgess hadn’t been hiring any new girls for a long time. When we stepped in, it was like he had a sudden windfall, three girls at once.”
“It makes sense. His illicit revenue stream, according to the abbreviations here, dropped off the map after three months of non-stop gain. See, these months are all red.” She slapped at the entry with the backs of her fingers. Businesses were all the same, black or white. “But a large deal came in at the beginning of the month.”
“You Brits have a golden touch with accounting,” said Rosa. She ignored Hargreaves’ narrowed eyes. “I snuck Alby in here when we started. He saw the same thing, but he couldn’t figure out why.”
“Mordemere’s fall must have rippled through the underworld. This is bad, very bad,” Hargreaves thought aloud.
“How bad, exactly?” asked Rosa, maybe a little too anxiously.
“If we assume these sales are guns and automata parts, there’s only one large, l
egitimate buyer,” Hargreaves continued. “The Ottomans. They’ve been stockpiling since before Mordemere and the Nidhogg. If they’re stopping, it could be a prelude to an intrusion into Europe.”
A chance to mull over the matter never presented itself. Rosa Marija had been correct in assessing the insulating nature of the room—it had been as quiet as the grave, besides their own voices. Only one aperture marred the hermetic seal: a window cut to allow the projector egress, corresponding to a hole overlooking the amphitheater. Hargreaves almost missed the wisp of movement there, visible for a brief moment in the gap. Someone was coming!
“We must go. Is there another exit?” said Hargreaves calmly. Rosa Marija pointed at the ladder reaching from floor to ceiling. Quite a bit of debris stood in the way, old film reels and dusty boxes of equipment likely writ with the history of the old building inside them. They clambered over these shaky footholds one at a time, reaching a spot just out of sight as the door rattled with the sound of an unexpected visitor. Burgess?
Hargreaves motioned silently for Rosa to stop, about to open the heavy trap above them. Noise would have drawn the visitor’s gaze up, but they were fortunate. The room was narrow enough to push one’s gaze down towards the equipment, to avoid the feeling of being in a well. So long as they stayed quiet, they would be safe.
The ladies’ hardy patience won out. The intruder was not Burgess, but one of Burgess’ men, carrying a dim gas patrol lantern. Hargreaves held her breath when the stocky youth made right for the ladder. The youth rummaged through the pile of debris purposefully, lifting a few specific boxes until he had the right one. Inside, she spied a yellow stack of papers. The tough did not bother to pause, pulling the lone stool in the room close to him.
In the dark, the tough began to masturbate, one hand leafing through the girlie mags at a leisurely pace, the other working business-like in his trousers.
Hanging over the projection booth with one hand, Hargreaves covered her mouth. Inspector Vanessa Hargreaves had seen some of the goriest cases ever to come across Scotland Yard’s Homicide desks. The moniker their black-striped ambulances had in the streets of London said it all: Meat Wagons. She had seen men with their heads caved in, men stabbed so many times their guts spilled into the street, and men flayed by syndicate professionals into steaming, naked piles. She had been in the Core of the Nidhogg. But she had never seen a man in private, flogging the monkey for everything he was worth.
She had gone on the pull, of course, but encounters were fleeting, awkward and brief. Naked passions made her want to bury her eyes in her hands, but she couldn’t tear her eyes from the scene below. Meanwhile, Rosa Marija was having a ball, quietly laughing hard enough to jiggle her rounded buttocks over Hargreaves’ face.
“Keep doing it. They’ll fall off, you see if they don’t,” Hargreaves replied, when the tough was finished and all sign of him had disappeared from the catwalks. Only an abandoned handkerchief remained, sticky and stinking in the booth with its sweaty detritus.
“Oh, God, the look on your face was too good,” Rosa guffawed. “Come on, we don’t want to run into our stallion downstairs. Up, up. Come on!”
“That’s what he said,” said Hargreaves, and they chortled merrily as they made their way out through the roof access.
Interlude II
B.O.E on the Ghost Train
Winnie Lee-Smith watched the men put the small freeman boy into the hopper with the rest of the dead ones. The clacking arms of the client’s collection apparatus (for that was what she chose to call them, as opposed to gigantic spiders made of metal and the stuff of night terrors) always made her nervous as they dropped the cargo inside. But for the whiteness of teeth and the palms of hands, the deep umbers and cocoa browns in the twilight might have been coal or coffee beans half-filling the hopper.
Winnie sighed. Not for pity, or her rising gorge—both stopped a long time ago—but out of a detached sense of professional pride. The client had expected a full delivery of thirty barrels. When the company was unable to deliver last month the client had sent these rattling, chittering collection apparatuses to help speed business along.
With the previous day’s haul the load would add up to twenty-two barrels, stretched to twenty-seven if they put in an extra cycle of processing. The client would not be happy, but the sub-par barrels would be mixed in with the single-press barrels and overall she thought she just might get away with it.
“Winnifred? Looking for a Winnifred here,” cried a delivery man. He rolled a hand truck through the loading dock, clipboard in one hand.
“Here. It’s me. And it’s Winnie,” she said in a piercing voice. That was routine—it was the only way to get these big construction men to notice her.
“You don’t look like a ‘Fred,’” said the delivery man as he rolled to a stop. He held the clipboard just out of reach.
“I get that a lot,” said Winnie, and flashed her badge. The delivery man reluctantly handed over the clipboard and she signed for the items. There was always the off-chance he could be a government inspector in disguise, but judging by his leering at her professionally cut pencil skirt and mini-bustle, he was only a delivery man.
And it was her gosh-danged birthday.
Winnie’s parents were Southeast Asians from the Canton region, and they didn’t understand the difference between a man’s name and a woman’s name in the West. They also did not understand which names were first and which were last. Her brother was named Lincoln Lee, which was convenient in the northern states. He went by Link in the South, where he ran telegraph shipping junctions for Ubique. But Winnie, with her sublimely archaic given name, was constantly mired in a swamp of androgyny, so much that she had cut her hair to a knife-sharp bob in an attempt to own her looks.
Winnie adjusted her spectacles, making sure the horn rims sat perfectly placed so she wouldn’t have to see anyone’s faces. She double-checked her figures against her own much more impressive clipboard, making notations in the appropriate notches so the marks weren’t just in pencil, but depressed into the hard cardstock. The Ubique marquee graced the top of the clipboard’s brazen housing. It was the latest model, absolutely quiet, fresh from the Clockworks Department. Tiny gears whirred in a corner beneath clear glass, surrounded by bezels buffed and brushed to a high shine. When she flicked a tab at the top, the spring-loaded spreadsheet widget automatically did the calculations with a slider that traveled the width of the paper.
In a moment the armature finished rolling over her marks with its rounded pins, and a tiny nib scratched out a figure at the bottom of the spreadsheet. The result: twenty-eight barrels, better than Winnie guessed. But that also made it more likely the client would be unhappy with the sub-par barrels. She would just have to take the gamble. Brooklyn was not yielding any more to fill the hopper, and it wasn’t anything Winnie could help, no matter how she fudged the numbers.
They’d had to cut a few subcontractors from the payroll. Her superiors couldn’t understand why the numbers were so shoddy even with the client’s equipment. The truth was the winter hadn’t been as hard in the last few years, and her normal contractor had expended far too many assets subduing—no, harvesting—the material. Had to keep the terminology right in her head, or there was no coming back from that slippery slope. Her bosses would probably ask her what she had done that quarter to increase vagrancy and keep up their bottom line. She shuddered to think what would happen if they missed the target again, even as an innocuous freight car rattled in the nearby rail yard.
The Ghost Train was coming very soon.
Winnie headed back up from the loading dock to her office, situated in the second story of the building. The Ubique facility sat hunched over a strip of rail that joined the main line a little ways away, but the building itself was in a fashionable neighborhood. Coffee houses and fashion houses sat in the high industrial ceilings of the old ateliers, while nightclubs received their employees at anonymous ground level doors
Winnie stopped at th
e one in her building, fussing with the barista. She had a special rapport here. As a diminutive Oriental woman high in the company, she had a certain power and mystique that went all the way to the coffee house. Her usual barista, Joshua, never failed to make just what she wanted or put on her favorite B.O.E album. Sometimes he brought the order up to her office. It helped that the one time Joshua made a mistake Winnie had let him make it up after hours in a back room. Winnie was not above downplaying her age either. These Westerners seemed to have no idea how to judge hers. Her string of coffee boys had left knee dents in the filing cabinets over the years.
As for the coffee itself, Winnie was a recent vegan, a practice that was common in the Lands Beyond. News of healthy foods, exercises, and the latest fashions flowed down the grapevine to Winnie’s ears, each bit of information extracted at the source from trader ships that came through the veil. Like most other executives, Winnie followed the trends of the Beyond religiously. As of last March, Joshua knew she took almond or frontier flax milk only. Being able to follow airship follies at a moment’s notice helped denote one’s social rank and ability to expend frivolously, which meant better access to the upper management. Winnie looked forward to sipping soy lattes as far from the steaming grinders as she could get. Shipster Crap was what entertained the owners, after all. As Link sometimes said, shit rolled downhill.
Back in her office, Winnie filed the document from the clipboard. She first fed it through a copy press, which took a similar slider read of the page and produced thin newsprint copies. One she kept in her desk, and two she sent off to Accounting for filing and matching toward subcontractor payouts. That was official terminology. “Payouts.” Not “Wages,” which would implicate Ubique as the employer, not as the client to the contractor. Not “Fee,” because that would cut out the contractor’s piece of the pie. Never “Bounty,” oh God.