City of the Saints

by D. J. Butler

  Third—and this was where Sam’s instructions foresaw real possibilities of confusion on the ground, not to mention disaster, mayhem, and even crime—do whatever he could to aid the United States in the coming war. This might mean, he’d been told, stealing Pratt’s airships, or stealing the schematics, or acts of sabotage against the Deseret aerial fleet or against the Kingdom on other fronts. He’d likely have to figure it out for himself in the moment. Sam wasn’t a diplomat and he was even less a spy, but he really wasn’t a thief or a saboteur. He was prepared to do his duty, but he sincerely hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  Or if it did, he wanted to be able to unleash Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy and wash his hands of the consequences. Really, that was what the crazy Irishman was for. Sam didn’t need a bodyguard against these—he twinkled his fingers again at a woman-old man-woman trio of passersby—harmless, eccentric, mechanically-minded Deseret Mormons. They were no threat to him or to the United States, however strange it was that their old men snapped up all their most attractive women.

  He kind of—almost—liked them.

  The Beehive House was built in a style that Sam thought was current, and that those who concerned themselves with fashions in the houses of the wealthy liked to call Greek revival. Tall white columns rose up above a wraparound porch and supported a white-railed wraparound balcony at the second story. Above that a mansard roof climbed to a widow’s walk (or maybe a widows’ walk, Sam thought merrily, wondering exactly how many women would mourn President Young if he ever failed to come back from sea) that in turn surrounded something that looked like a big pedestal, or maybe a pulpit. On top of the pulpit, preaching to all the architectural splendor below, perched a little beehive. In the shadow of the gigantic Tabernacle, it was an acorn lying beside an oak tree.

  It was hard to be sure from the outside, but it looked to Sam like a suite or a wing of some sort actually linked the Beehive House and the Lion House together. One big, happy family, then. Really big, if the stories contained even an ounce of truth.

  And it was a rare story that didn’t contain at least an ounce.

  Sam badly wanted to light a cigar, but in the interest of diplomatic decorum, he refrained. He straightened up his bow tie, paced up the walk, and encountered a double-wide white door with no knocker. An engraved plate beside an elegant brass chain read PULL.

  He pulled: ding-ding-dong.

  The door opened and Sam found himself smiling stupidly into the face of a clean, pressed, pretty young woman.

  “Good afternoon,” she said sweetly.

  “Yes.” He smiled, caught a little off guard. For a moment, he couldn’t remember what he was doing here, so he reached into his jacket and produced a Partagás. He waved it at her in a polite hello.

  She frowned.

  He put the cigar back, abashed.

  “If you’re looking for President Young, my father’s not taking visitors at the moment,” the young woman said.

  “Your father?” Sam was amused, though of course if the man had thirty wives, he probably had a daughter or two out of the bargain. He knew from calotypes that Young was a serious-looking old goat, but then it was a universal rule that half the world’s women, including the pretty ones, had fathers who were less handsome than average. He suppressed an impulse to ask her about her family life and instead cleared his throat officiously and gave his most charming smile. “Your father’s expecting me. My name’s Clemens, and I’m a U.S. government man.”

  The girl grinned back at him. “Be careful, Mr. Clemens. Words like that frighten some folks around here.”

  She led him down a long hall and around a corner and brought him to a door where two big, broad-shouldered men in dark suits, long coats, and hats stood guard. One held a rifle, but they both wore pistols on their hips.

  “Mr. Clemens is here to see my father,” she told them. “He has an appointment.”

  They squinted and bared yellow teeth, fierce as any Mississippi keelboat man or logger from the Great North Woods, but they let him in.

  Brigham Young’s office was bigger than the communications room in which Sam had seen his man George Cannon, earlier in the day. Here, too, there were glass and brass message tubes and a sorting table, but there were only half a dozen of the tubes and the table was a small one, unobtrusively out of the way.

  Cannon’s room had struck Sam as the working center of a great socio-mechanical brain. Young’s looked like the den of a lion. Its walls were painted the confident, masculine red of a hunting lodge, its three large sofas were a brilliant gold, and all the wood, most conspicuous being a deep, broad and tall desk, absolutely clean on top, was stained dark and well-polished. There was a globe in one corner of the room and full bookshelves and that surprised Sam. Hadn’t Young been a cabinetmaker, or some similar sort of tradesman in his Yankee, pre-Mormon career?

  Two more tall, stone-faced gunmen stood inside the door. A fifth stood by a tall, yellow-draped window, and as Sam coolly looked him over, he thought he saw, just flickering in the corner of the window, a face. He wasn’t sure, but he thought, again, that it might be the face of the midget Coltrane.

  He fought back a spasm of astonishment.

  Should he say something?

  Best not to, he decided quickly. He didn’t want to take responsibility for anything the midget might do and besides, Young’s security guards would certainly catch him any moment.

  If he was even really out there, after all.

  Two men stood up at the sofas from a tray of tea and Sam crossed the office to shake hands. President Brigham Young wasn’t tall, but he wasn’t short either, and he was powerfully built. With his curly hair, the beard around his jaw and chin but clean-shaven upper lip, and ox-like shoulders, he looked like a man who knew how to use a plane and chisel.

  “Fornication pants!” Young snorted.

  Sam froze, unsure he’d heard the man correctly, thinking maybe he was witnessing some rough Mormon attempt at humor.

  “He is a modern man, Señor Presidente,” the other man said. He was a heavy black gentleman, completely bald and clean-shaven but for a little sharp spike of graying hair beneath his lower lip, and he wore a careful smile on his face.

  “That doesn’t give him liberty to seduce my daughters,” Young barked, “no matter how convenient he, or they, might find the unbuttoning of his pants!”

  “I … I …” Sam found himself stuttering, an affliction from which he hadn’t realized he suffered. He swallowed hard, to get rid of the fragmented sentences, and tried again. “I hadn’t realized that Mr. Levi-Strauss’s trousers were so potent,” he essayed a disarming joke. “Will it put you more at your ease if I remove them?”

  “Mr. Clemens.” It wasn’t a question, and it was growled. They shook hands. “This is Mr. Juan Jermaine Tomás Salvador María Zerubbabel Armstrong, Ambassador Plenipotentiary to the Kingdom of Deseret from the Republica de los Estados Reunidos de México.” He grinned. “Give or take a name or two.”

  “Joo have no missed one yet,” Armstrong said. He radiated gravitas. He and Young both did. If not for the fact that Armstrong also exuded a certain easygoing humor and charm, Sam would have felt daunted by Young’s bear-like assault on Sam and his innocent Levi-Strauss pants. Sam shook Ambassador Armstrong’s hand, too. “Mr. Clemens. Joo are the United States man, aren’t joo?”

  “Yes I am,” Sam admitted. “The way people talk about me around here, I’m starting to imagine that my arrival was expected.”

  Crash!

  The glass of the tall window exploded inward in a fury of tiny splinters, stinging Sam’s cheek and lodging into his curly hair. Sam stumbled back and away from the window as he turned, his eye barely able to follow the blur of action.

  There was a man, short but built like a bull, and he had a sword in his hand. No, not a sword, the long fighting knife they called the Arkansas Toothpick. Long hair and beard and buckskins flapped behind the newcomer as he charged.

  The bodyguard standing by the w
indow moved, but not fast enough. The intruder threw his body at the bigger man. Before anyone could react he had a forearm around the man’s throat and his long, wicked knife pointing directly into his eye.

  The other guards froze.

  “You’re not the midget!” Sam exclaimed in surprise. “You’re Rockwell!”

  “What?!” Young bellowed.

  The Deseret lawman from Fort Bridger stared at Sam with piercing blue eyes in a scarred and weatherbeaten face. “You’s expectin’ a midget?” he asked.

  The Ambassador pivoted to look at Sam with concern. “That is a good question, Señor Clemens. Were joo expecting a midget to come through the window?”

  Sam laughed out loud. Oops. “No, Ambassador, no, Mr. President, I wasn’t. I just … I …”

  “I dunno what they told you, Brother Brigham!” Rockwell howled, “And I don’t know nothin’ about no midgets!” His voice was rough and raw and he smelled like a mountain man from ten feet away. “I don’t know what Lee said, but I’m loyal to you like I always been.”

  “You’re holding a knife to my bodyguard’s face, Port!” Young roared. He looked like he was about to paw the floor and charge.

  The mountain man backed his knife away half an inch. “But you know I’m loyal, don’t you? You’ll treat me right? You won’t listen to whisperin’ voices and throw me to the wolves without me gettin’ a fair hearin’?”

  “Have I ever been unfair to you, Porter?” Veins stood out in Young’s neck. “Have I ever been unfair to anyone?”

  “There’s things I gotta tell you, Brother Brigham, there’s men as are disloyal, as are plottin’.” The blue eyes danced wildly from each of Young’s bodyguards to the next. “You ain’t listened to Eliza, you gotta listen to me!”

  “Put down the knife!”

  Rockwell nodded and dropped the weapon to the carpet.

  Sam breathed a sigh of relief as Young’s bodyguards swarmed him, pulling multiple pistols and blades away from his body and out of his reach. His shoulders slumped like a defeated man, but he had a childlike expression on his face. An expression of hope, Sam thought, and trust, which seemed incredible in light of the affronted, raging irritation clouding the face of Brigham Young.

  The door opened and five armed men barged in. At their head stumped a lean, bent man, with a stubbled face and aimlessly drifting eyes. Sam recognized him from Chief Pocatello’s corral. Now he openly held a pistol in his hand.

  “Hickman!” the mountain man snarled. He tensed and strained like he wanted to jump to the attack, but two of the big bodyguards held him firm.

  “Orrin Porter Rockwell,” Hickman acknowledged in a nasal drawl. “More fool me, wasting all that time looking for you in Injun territory, and I coulda just sat right here and waited.”

  He raised his pistol, pointed it at Rockwell’s chest and fired.

  ***

  Chapter Eight

  “Sweet Hildegard, that’s a lot of guns,” Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy whispered to himself.

  Another man might have been tempted by the store of weapons. They were shiny and new and some of them looked downright powerful. Tam, though, was already carrying two Maxim Hushers (What better weapon could there be for a man with a need for discretion and privacy than a gun that killed with a whisper? And to have two of them? An embarrassment of riches, me boy.) as well as the box of little brass murder beetles. Tam was not a man who collected toys; he was a man who picked up a tool when he needed it to get the job done. Mostly the job was killing someone that bloody deserved it and Tam at the moment found himself well stocked with tools.

  He watched the dwarf leave, heading back down the hill to the train station. He might have killed the man then, only the little bastard was carrying that thing the boy called a machine-gun. Besides, once lead started to fly, other armed men on the scene inevitably felt it was their business to get involved, so Tam didn’t want to start a gunfight right next to a gun shop with a gunsmith in it.

  He was looking for an attack situation with a little less risk. He scanned the area around the gun shop and its neighboring farms, noticing the gigantastic looming mountains above, each one the bloody-damn-hell size of Ireland herself, it seemed, and empty as a whore’s heart. That’s where he needed to get the dwarf, out of town and into the wilderness, or else back into the city and in a blind alley.

  He was about to turn to follow the wee circus monkey back down the hill when the gunsmith left his shop and went back into his brick cottage. That left the little boy, sitting all alone in the workshop.

  “Curious fellow,” Tam muttered, and he stopped to watch. The little boy in the slouch hat pushed a stool over to a workbench and climbed up onto it. There was a vise at the corner of the bench with a long brass gun barrel in it and a magnifying lens poised over it on a mechanical clamping arm. The boy stood on the stool so that he could get a good view down through the lens and crouched there, examining the barrel.

  “Weird little freak,” Tam muttered. “Thinks he’s a fookin’ gunsmith, he does.” He didn’t know why the midget was so in love with the kid.

  But he was. And that thought gave Tam an idea.

  Some shite about Mohammed and mountains, but he couldn’t remember what, exactly.

  He pulled one of the Hushers from its holster and checked the bungalow to be sure no one was looking out the windows.

  Bang!

  A red flower of blood spouted from the mountain man’s shoulder and he rocked back in the grip of the big bodyguards.

  “Hickman!” President Young shouted, his voice taut with command and anger. “Porter was restrained.”

  “Yeah, I reckon so,” Hickman agreed. “And so are you.” He gestured with his pistol at Young, Armstrong, and Clemens and instructed the other thugs: “Tie ’em all up and get ’em on the truck.”

  “What are joo doing?” demanded the Ambassador. He drew himself up to his full impressive height, like a cat arching its back to hiss or a cobra flaring its hood. Sam thought he would have been intimidated in Hickman’s place and envied the Ambassador his charisma.

  But Hickman was unimpressed. “I’m takin’ you prisoner, fat man,” he drawled. “Don’t bother threatenin’ me with the wounded sentiments of President Tubman. She’s far away and the only troops you got local are a couple of them shitbucket Striders, and they ain’t even in town.”

  Clemens didn’t resist as a big man roped his hands tightly together behind his back.

  “I have forces in town.” Young’s voice was a rattling lid of calm over a well of fury, but the veins on his neck and temple were thick as ropes and his skin had gone the color of a beet.

  Hickman grinned. “Only they ain’t your forces no more, Brigham.”

  “You’re yellow, Hick,” Orrin Porter Rockwell coughed. He looked surprisingly vital for a man who had just been shot, but he wasn’t struggling against the two men who held him. “You’re lily-livered. You’re chicken. You shoot me when I can’t fight back and then you walk around tall like you done something impressive.”

  “Helldammit, yes,” Hickman agreed with a yellow-toothed leer. “I’d shoot you again right now, blow out your dirty damn brains, only I ain’t sure I want you dead quite just yet. I might need you alive for trading. Or for a threat. Or maybe I’ll just shoot off your fingers one at a time when I’m bored.”

  “Traitor!” Young shouted.

  “Shut your mouth,” Hickman tittered.

  Sam heard the rumble of an engine outside and then twin jets of coal exhaust and steam plumed into the room through the shattered window, announcing the arrival of the back end of a smallish steam-truck. It was a boxy cargo vehicle and its tin back gate clattered into the Beehive House’s flower beds, unloading two more large, grim-looking men.

  “Hoods on the prisoners,” Hickman ordered, and one of his captors jammed a bag down over Sam’s head. It smelled like apples and burlap, but he could breathe through it well enough. The same man started pushing him—in the direction of the steam-
truck, he guessed.

  “I guess Lee gave you the dirty work, didn’t he?” Rockwell taunted Hickman. “Watch out, Hick. He might have to kill you when it’s over, make sure you can’t cause him trouble later.”

  “Shut up, Port,” Hickman retorted.

  “Porter,” Young rumbled.

  Sam tripped up some sort of ramp and was thrown to the ground. More apple smell.

  “Or what?” Rockwell pressed, ignoring both his captor and his President. “You gonna kill me? You think I care? I suppose it was Lee that had the balls to try to pull this off. I just can’t figure out where the two of you got the brains. Pooled together, you might just have enough smarts to play noughts and crosses against a mule. Play, mind you. I ain’t sure you could win.”

  “Porter!”

  Sam heard footsteps and scuffling on the gangplank behind him.

  “No, I don’t reckon you care if you live or die, Port,” Hickman admitted. “That’s always been your charm. But you’ll care if I shoot Brigham. Hell, that was my instructions when I come here and I got half a mind to do it anyway.”

  Rockwell said nothing. Sam heard thuds and grunts around him as other men were tossed into the steam-truck with him and then the clank of the truck’s gate being shut again.

  Absalom Fearnley-Standish sat on a bench on the deck of the Liahona, sipping a lemonade alone.

  He wasn’t moping, no, he was made of stronger stuff than that, he tried to tell himself, but he was in a reflective mood. He’d felt reflective since Annie had rejected him.

  He knew her name was Annie because he’d asked her. He’d been a little out of sorts since he’d met the Mexican Striderman … Striderwoman … Master Sergeant Jackson, and he’d thought he could use some pleasant diversion. He’d found her below decks, standing outside a cabin door and listening at it. That didn’t seem like very ladylike behavior, he told himself in retrospect, but it was cardinal that a gentleman didn’t dwell on the unladylike or ungentlemanly behaviors of others, and frankly, at the time he hadn’t even noticed it. At the time he’d just been happy to see her.