Shadow Soldier (The Gunsmith Book 2)

by C. K. Crigger

  Frank Mueller must have been at least twenty, lean and well-built. I can certainly attest to the well-built part since I had a perfect view. The three cousins were similar in body type, so I knew Willie would soon resemble his brother in every way. August had already achieved this admirable state and it struck me that this was a very handsome trio. All three of the boys, August included, seemed completely unaware they had a witness to their hijinks. And that’s all I was, a witness, for I felt a great distance between those boys and me, a distance multiplied by years.

  While I admired the physique of a man who had probably been dead for years and years, alive only in August von Fassnacht’s memory—and now in mine—Will came swinging over the creek on the old rope.

  Frayed rope, I noticed, seeing the strands breaking and curling apart. Will whooped and jumped, cannonballing deep into the water as the disintegrating rope let go. The other two paused, waiting for him to come up. They waited and waited, their faces growing tense when he failed to reappear.

  August broke first, diving like a sea otter into the pool where Will had vanished.

  “He’s trying to buffalo us, “ Frank shouted, but August hadn’t heard. Within a few seconds, Frank, showing signs of doubting his own pronouncement, dived after the other two.

  Being in position to know Will didn’t die in an accident at the swimming hole, I waited in some amusement to see what the others would do. After a time first one, two, then three heads surfaced. Will had held his breath for so long he’d nearly turned blue, but he was laughing in delight. Frank laughed along with him. August took in great gulps of air, trying, in between breaths, to speak.

  “Dummkopf.” He coughed green river water. “Idiot child! I thought you were drowned.”

  “Hell,” Will said, paddling slowly toward the bank and chugging for breath between every stroke, “I’m as good a swimmer as you are, Gus, now I’m not a kid anymore. Aren’t I, Frank? Whatever you can do, I can do.”

  Then they were gone, swimming hole and all, the scent of humid, verdant foliage fading from my nose to be replaced by the smell of the sea. In my final view of Frank, he was standing on a great wharf jutting into New York Harbor, watching as August, his shoulders slumped in dejection, trudged slowly up a steep ramp and into the belly of a ship.

  The summer was over and my acquaintance with the Mueller brothers ended. I’m finished with Frank, I thought regretfully, but not with Will. I knew I’d be seeing Will again. Shaking my head to clear away the remaining visions, I discovered old August von Fassnacht looked dazed and bemused. His eyes were wet. And yet he was smiling.

  “Ah,” he said. “That was fine. I wish I knew how you did that.”

  I, too, wished I knew how I’d done it, especially without the medium of the gun. Fortunately, August refrained from demanding an explanation and continued to reminisce about his companions.

  “Frank—and Will, too—were the best cousins anyone could’ve had. Good friends, good brothers and sons, plain good men, both of them. I have no doubt they’d have been fine husbands and fathers if they’d lived long enough.”

  “Did Frank die in the war, too?”

  “Oh, yes. He volunteered with the French Escadrille Americaine, you see. Couldn’t wait for America to join the fighting. He was an aviator, flew a Nieuport and was shot down over northern France in 1916. Young Will signed up not long afterward, or I suppose he would’ve been conscripted when he was old enough. Knowing him, my guess is he’d be hell bent on avenging his brother. My uncle sent news of that much, though I never heard from, or of, them again. Until . . .”

  August was apparently unable to finish the thought.

  Had he truly expected his American relatives to accept him into the fold after the war? I couldn’t envision him ever being so naive. He had killed one of those boys himself, then stolen the dead boy’s identity. He hadn’t ever expected to walk right in and own up to his crime, let alone beg forgiveness, had he?

  “What brought your cousins’ family to America in the first place?” I asked, shifting uneasily in my chair. Silence fell as he thought over his reply.

  I’d seen August’s home, sort of. A castle, no less. Millions of people immigrated to the United States in the1890s and early 1900s. Back then, the European nations took the lead in filling the empty spaces of America, although for some reason I’d thought the immigrants were, with few exceptions, much poorer than the Muellers.

  Nothing I’d seen indicated either by their clothes (or lack thereof) or in the health of the Mueller boys led me to think they were in any way underprivileged or needy. Matter of fact, they seemed such an ordinary bunch, I had to wonder how or why any magical residue clung to them. What connection did these boys have with the Colt and with Caleb?

  The Great War was the only plausible link I’d seen so far, but that being the case, where did Eva, August’s two-timing girl friend, come in? All these quaint, little scenes made me feel I was wasting my time, accomplishing nothing toward finding Caleb and bringing him home. My heart lurched when I thought of how he must be feeling—lost, alone, abandoned.

  “You know, girl, you have certainly set me a puzzle,” August finally said, bringing me out of my reverie with a start. I’d already forgotten what we’d been talking about.

  His thin face was furrowed in thought and his shoulders drooped as though incredibly weary. “I guess I never really knew, and never thought to ask why my uncle came to America. I know they always welcomed me into their home, even in that year before war broke out. They must’ve known the governments of the world were gearing up for a fight. But they never said a word in recrimination to me. And yet, thinking back, to this very day I remember how quiet they’d get sometimes if I unexpectedly entered a room. I guess they hurt my feelings a few times that way and made me think they didn’t trust me.

  “You know, not everything has stuck in my mind the way it should. I don’t especially like admitting that, mind you, but it’s true. My memory isn’t what it used to be. Yet I do remember Auntie looking at me and saying to Uncle, ‘Why don’t you ask him? He’s next in line.’ And there’d be a frightened and frightening expression on her face, as if with a little bit of provocation, she could hate me.”

  He stirred the photographs, still strewn over the table, with one nicotine-stained finger. He looked up at me, his blue eyes cold again, and hard.

  “Then my uncle said, ‘He’s not to blame, just as my brother was never to blame. It was the woman, Ersie. You know it was.’ I always wondered what woman they were talking about, but I never did work up the courage to ask. Of course, I eventually figured out they were referring to my mother.”

  His finger hovered over the portrait of his mother then, with a thick, horn-like fingernail, he fished it apart from the others. “Another piece of the puzzle, eh, sis? I wish I could’ve asked Mother⏤Beatrix, that is. She never liked for me to address her as ‘Mother.’”

  “Why didn’t you? Ask her, I mean.”

  His free hand darted out and caught mine. A dizzying rush of sound whispered in my ears as the magic took us through the massive walls of the old family castle, and into a lady’s bedroom suite. Boudoir, actually. I think that is a more correct term for the opulent, possibly decadent rooms in which I found myself. Decadent is not a word much in use in my generation. We’re too used the idea of living well and doing what seems good to us. Well, August’s mother did what seemed good to her also.

  But you can be sure her idea diverged rather radically from most of the world when it came to a definition of good.

  Ah, I answered my own last question. That’s why he never asked. He was afraid of her.

  CHAPTER 13

  Always, from the very first time one of these guns of power drew me into its history, I’d been an actor in events. Sometimes I hadn’t been aware of myself, Boothenay Irons, as a presence until later, when the story ended and I was called back to my own persona. Then I would realize that for a while I had melded with another being and somehow
become both him or her and me.

  Or sometimes I had been observer, on the stage, so to speak, if not the main character. But I’d never had an experience quite like this. Those other times I had been caught up and involved so I shared emotion and memory with the ones who had made a particular gun’s history.

  Always—I repeat—always, I’d identified with those people. Felt sympathy for their plight, suffered their despair, cared for them. So far I hadn’t met anyone in the Colt’s history who really touched me, including the boys at the swimming hole. Oh, they’d been mildly interesting—especially a hunk like Frank Mueller—but distanced somehow, so their story seemed no more than a glimpse of a movie as I was passing through the theater. I hadn’t become involved, yet here I was associating with people, both past and present, whom I’d rather never have met.

  Quite frankly, it would have been easy to be angry with Caleb for disappearing. Especially when I took one look at Beatrix von Fassnacht’s cold, disdainful face, and realized I had to stay here a while, unable to bypass this part of history. She was exactly the kind of woman I will go to all lengths to avoid, in my own life or any other. I was caught in a trap set by the Colt.45 Automatic and August von Fassnacht’s guilt. Oh, yes, I was angry with Caleb, indeed, for setting off this particular magic; an upset made worse by the realization the magic hadn’t wanted me.

  “I thought you’d gone,” Beatrix said, laying aside the glossy fashion magazine she had been studying to look up at August. He’d entered the room through the French doors, open this fine day to the terrace and beyond that, the wood. “To catch a train or something.”

  “I came back. Walked up through the woods. I got to thinking, and decided there are a few questions I wanted to ask you. About Eva.”

  Young August’s posture was stiff in the extreme, no matter that he tried to appear at ease. His once-sharp uniform hung loosely on his thin frame. He stood in front of his mother with his hands clenched into fists and thrust like battering rams to the bottoms of his pockets. In my role of observer, I could see the outline of his knuckles, bulging against the fabric like a pocketful of knobby walnuts. He didn’t fidget or stutter, and only his ears gave him away as red blood coursed hotter and hotter through his veins. Curiously enough, at the same time his ears were getting red, his face grew whiter, as if his blood flowed differently than in an ordinary circulatory system and was draining sideways from his face and out to his ears.

  Beatrix yawned, not bothering to cover her mouth. She wore a gossamer garment, a peignoir I seemed to remember hearing it called, although according to the shadows outside it was already early afternoon. Maybe she had just gotten up. I don’t know. She was lounging gracefully on a peach-colored satin chaise and sipping real coffee, scarce in these days of wartime deprivation, from a Dresden china cup.

  “Oh, don’t get maudlin, August,” she said. “Eva is nothing! Forget her.”

  “I don’t want to forget her. She is . . . was . . . my fiancée. We planned to marry.”

  That August felt abandoned and desperate was very plain. He’d recently been wounded, left to molder for several days in a hospital, then come home to find his girl married to another man. A second wounding—of the heart and spirit this time.

  “The girl is a complete nonentity,” Beatrix scoffed. “Fit only to walk the dogs or to carry my purse or umbrella. She hasn’t an iota of real intelligence that I can see. Although she is ever so grateful for my friendship and patronage. It’s really quite disgusting. I have yet to hear her utter one word of protest.”

  “Of course not, Mother⏤Beatrix. Eva is in awe of you, yet at the same time, you actually quite terrify her. I can vouch for that.”

  “What a ninny.” Her eyes sparkled, and I could see she enjoyed having even someone she considered an inferior in awe of her.

  August opened his mouth, but she interrupted before he had a chance to speak. “Anyone with a single modicum of intelligence would have questioned that telegram. Heavens, the War Department is forever sending out one inaccurate notification after another. The scandal of it is in all the newspapers, but does Eva bother to ask? Of course not. I doubt she can concentrate long enough to read a whole article.”

  “You knew I was recovering, Mother. I can’t imagine why you would let her think otherwise.”

  Beatrix shrugged one perfectly plump, creamy-skinned shoulder. “Can’t you, my son? Then I fear you are as feeble-minded as your paramour. Perhaps I should have let you be saddled with her, except I should detest my friends knowing of your truly common taste in women.”

  “What friends, Mother?” August shot back at her. “You have no friends. Only snide, back-biting sycophants and paid gigolos determined to live off my father’s money and my inheritance.”

  “Why you ungrateful little whelp!” Beatrix’s feet hit the floor and she stood up, nearly touching her son. Tall and youthfully slender, though of course she couldn’t have been past forty at the most, it was easy to see where August had gotten his height. Other than that, they didn’t much resemble each other, she being a dark German, and he the more stereotypical Aryan type. I did, however, notice her ears where they peeked through the veil of her unbound hair. They throbbed with the red heat of her irritation.

  “I’ve done you a favor. You should be grateful. At least you won’t have to use your inheritance to pay her keep forever. As you would, if you’d married her. You couldn’t possibly have tolerated her for more than a few months.” In contrast to the glowing warmth of her ears, she sounded cool, as if the voice of reason spoke through her.

  Since this squared with my own impression of little Eva, I have to say I felt some sympathy. A sympathy quickly stifled when she said, “And don’t forget you have inherited nothing as yet, my son. I control the money. Correct me if I’m wrong, but at latest count, there is a whole year before you reach your majority. A lot can happen in a year, including an accurate telegram from the War Department.”

  August’s lips made a thin, tight slash across his face. I thought I could hear as his heartbeat slowed and almost stopped before pounding on. His blood pressure must have been registering around 240/120.

  “It’s so nice to hear you finally tell me how you feel,” he said with chill sarcasm. “I always knew you wished I’d never been born, except you’d have had nothing if you hadn’t produced an heir. Uncle Mueller would have inherited from Papa, wouldn’t he? And then it would be you begging for a crust.”

  She laughed, a jarring sound. “You are more astute than I gave you credit for, August, my dear. You don’t think I would’ve taken a chance on ruining my figure for anything less, do you? But as you can see, I dropped you before irreparable damage was done.”

  Beatrix preened, running her hands over her high breasts, flat stomach and curvaceous thighs, shaping the thin fabric of the peignoir to her curves. If she hadn’t already said such awful things to August, I would have suspected her of playing temptress to her own son.

  He watched in horrified fascination as her hands moved caressingly upon her own body, his expression like that of an ophidiophobic mesmerized by a undulating serpent.

  “I’ve heard no complaints,” she added with a complacent tilt of her lips.

  “Whore!” August’s voice rasped in his throat.

  “Oh, no, no, no,” she said, brushing by August and selecting a ready-made cigarette from a scented cedar box. She fitted the thin brown tube into a long-stemmed jade holder that impressed me as having been a gift from one of her admirers. “Whores are stupid little fools who spend everything they gain, squander all their charms within a few years, and end up without a pot to pee in—if I may be so crude. I have never engaged in a liaison where I made no profit. I don’t come cheap.”

  “Cheap or expensive, a whore is still a whore, no matter how you try to dress it up. Used, probably diseased. Syphilis is running rampant through the army right now from the highest rank to the lowest. Have you been with a great many soldiers, Mother?” His forced laugh was harsh.
“You should try one or two officers. They die off at such an alarming rate, you’d be filthy rich in no time. Perhaps rich enough to satisfy someone like you.”

  With my insider’s view of August’s emotions, I knew he took pleasure in this thrust. Beatrix had a dread of any disease and especially feared syphilis. She just didn’t fear enough.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” She struck a match, pausing long enough to drag smoke into her lungs and then expel it. Though outwardly she appeared quite composed, I saw something like a red mantle of fury in an aura surrounding her.

  “I don’t have liaisons with common soldiers,” she said, drawing again on the cigarette. “I told you. And I’m always very discreet.”

  A corner of August’s mouth curled into a sneer. “Discreet! There isn’t one of my father’s friends and relatives who doesn’t know exactly what you are, Mother. Everyone knows, and has for years. The truth has been whispered into my ears since I was eleven years old.

  “I remember once coming home from boarding school for a day before sailing for America. The butler caught me before I walked in on you—you were ‘having a private discussion with Count von Schlesinger,’ Faust said, and he sent me into the drawing room to wait. So there I was, trapped, with two of Schlesinger’s cronies who were out on the terrace, smoking, laughing and recounting tales of their own experiences with you. Laughing at you!”

  “No one laughs at me. How dare you say such a thing, you jealous, lying spawn of Satan?” Like a vicious, striking snake Beatrix’s hand shot out, clouting August hard in the hollow of one cheek. One of her gaudy rings, studded with a large yellow diamond surrounded by lesser gems, gashed wickedly through his skin.

  His eyes turned colder and harder, narrowing to a thin blue line, but he neither retreated from her attack nor raised a defensive hand to his face. A swiftly rising welt rose under his cheekbone. A thin trickle of blood seeped from the cut. I felt an instant surge in the power so that, much against my will, I was drawn closer into his psyche.