by D. J. Butler
Poe left the hallway and started back the way he had come. The Danish guard didn’t even notice as he passed, too intent on watching what was happening on the stage.
“Brothers and sisters,” Lee finished, “for now, please go back to your homes and your shops. Pack some necessaries to get out of Salt Lake for a day or two, collect your children. Pray for President Young’s soul and for the Twelve and the Seventy, but please don’t be worried. The situation is entirely under our control.”
Burton, Poe decided. Surely the Englishman must be an ally and maybe he would even be a source of information.
***
Chapter Nine
“I gather at least some of you gentlemen know each other,” Sam said dryly.
He would have liked a lit Partagás between his teeth, but his hands were tied behind him, there was a burlap sack over his head, and his body bounced along in the cargo space of a steam-truck that, he thought, could only be generating that many bumps by driving over a mountain-sized pile of armadillos.
First things first.
He felt a wall against the small of his back and he began inching his way up it into sitting position.
“The sons of bitches’re probably listenin’, so be careful, but hell, yeah, I know President Young.” It was Rockwell’s voice, hard and twangy like dried gut, but muffled. Sam guessed he was hearing it not only through the sack over his own head, but probably through a sack covering Rockwell’s head, too. “I thought he knew me, too, but I guess he musta figured old Bill Hickman and John Lee were more trustworthy. Was it the saloon, Brigham? Was that what turned you against me?”
“Peace, Brother Porter.” Remarkably, Sam thought, Young’s voice did sound peaceful, though moments earlier Sam would have been unsurprised to see the man rip off human heads with his bare hands. Peaceful, with a little truck-caused vibrato. “I see that I’ve made a mistake.”
Sam was sitting up now and he turned his attention to his hood. He shook his head vigorously—the sack was loose and he thought it might come off easily, but for his own thick, curly hair, which caught at it and held it in place.
“I ain’t worried about me, Brother Brigham, I’m worried about you. ‘Cut not thy hair,’ Brother Joseph told me, ‘and no bullet or blade can harm thee.’ I ain’t scared of dying.”
“I do not wish to quibble,” Ambassador Armstrong intoned in his deep voice, “but I saw joo take a bullet only a few minutes ago.”
“I’m shot,” Rockwell admitted sullenly. “I ain’t harmed.”
Sam kept shaking his head. His nostrils were full of the smell of apples and started to tickle.
“There’s no reason to fear dying, regardless,” Young said, and now something of the gruff tone returned. “God’s great work will roll on, His mighty machine will continue to pump and churn and perform its great and mysterious marvels. If four little, nondescript cogs such as the four of us are taken from one slot and put into another to perform a different task for a while, it matters not at all in the eternal scheme of things.”
“Achoo!” Sam sneezed on a downward shake of his head and the sacking flew off, hitting the truck floor in a cloud of dust.
“Salud,” the Ambassador offered.
Sam looked around. The back of the steam-truck was just a big empty box, dimly illuminated by slices of daylight cutting around the back door that doubled as a gangplank. The other three men had all also managed to struggle into sitting position, Sam now saw. Their captors might be sitting up front, but wherever they were, Sam couldn’t see them.
“Thank you,” Sam said.
Rockwell’s head snapped up. “I can hear you better now, Clemens. Someone take the sack off your face?”
Sam laughed. “I sneezed it off. Just an everyday marvel performed by one of God’s nondescript little cogs.”
“Can joo see the men? Are they watching us?”
“No,” Sam told them. “We’re alone in some kind of cargo space. I assume you all can smell the stink of apples just as well as I can. Our captor-cogs must be performing their share of the Lord’s marvels by driving the truck.”
“Fools mock, but they shall mourn,” Brigham Young said grimly.
“I don’t recognize the reference,” Sam admitted, “and I thought I was familiar with the Bible.” He looked at Rockwell. The man’s buckskin shirt was soaked in blood, but the floor wasn’t. He seemed to have bled for a while and then stopped. “For a man who’s been shot, Mr. Rockwell, you look like you’re doing alright to me.”
“No bullet or blade,” Rockwell repeated, nodding his sack-shrouded head.
“It’s from the Book of Ether,” Young sniffed, as if he were repeating something that every idiot knew.
“Ether.” Sam didn’t recognize the name. “Is that the stuff in outer space or the stuff that puts you to sleep?”
“Both!” Rockwell guffawed.
“Porter!”
Rockwell hung his head. “Sorry, Brother Brigham.”
“It is good that joo mock, a little,” Ambassador Armstrong offered. Sam almost laughed. The combination of the Ambassador’s accent and the sight of three men with sacks over their heads made him feel like he was in some sort of comic medicine show. “Mockery is the health of a democracy. But joo must not mock too much and joo must not mock to hurt. Joo mock to tell the truth.”
“I don’t intend to hurt, Mr. Ambassador,” Sam deferred to the other man. “I just don’t understand. I don’t see how it is that Mr. Young can know that he’s a cog in God’s great machine and that if he dies, God will just move him somewhere else and give him another job. I can’t even imagine what that would be. Personally, if this little jaunt ends in my death, I hope the good Lord reassigns me to the haunting of Mr. Hickman. But how does Mr. Young know, one way or the other? It’s the certainty that I feel I have to mock. I poke fun at it in order to deflate it.”
“The question you want to ask me isn’t how does Mr. Young know,” Young asserted. He had an almost-angry edge to his voice and a disturbing amount of dignity, for a man with an apple sack over his head.
“No?” Sam asked. He hadn’t really thought that he was asking any question at all.
“The question you want to ask me is how can Mr. Clemens know.”
Sam had no answer to that and they bounced along a while in silence.
Burton nodded to the gypsy Egyptianeer, Archibald, on the way down. The purveyor of circus-ring Egyptology raised a finger like he wanted to get Burton’s attention, but Burton had no time for the man and kept walking. If he waited, he’d lose his opportunity.
A big man stood at the bottom of the stairs like a sentinel, but he was distracted, staring up at the pulpit over his head with tears in his blue eyes. Burton pushed past him and aimed for the small knot of military men crossing the plascrete well of the Tabernacle, heading for a discreet exit.
“Captain Everett Morgan!” he called out, straightening his own back and shoulders to a self-consciously military bearing. “Sir!”
Morgan turned.
Close up, his facial hair made him look bellicose and dangerous. Burton smiled at the man, grateful that his own scars gave him a certain ugly masculine charisma as a counterpoise.
“Yes, suh,” Morgan said. His voice was heavy with a sort of sardonic skepticism.
“I am Captain Richard Burton,” Burton identified himself, extending a hand, “Special Envoy of Her Britannic Majesty, Queen Victoria.”
“You hear that, boys?” Morgan drawled over his shoulder. “Even the Queen is taking an interest.” He didn’t take Burton’s hand.
“Yes,” Burton snapped sternly. “Yes, by Indra’s thundering chariots, she is! What kind of military officer are you, that so cavalierly dismisses the envoy of a valued and valuable ally, and that on the brink of war!”
“Brink?” Morgan asked, slyly. “I’m afraid I must correct you, suh. The brink, exciting as it was, was yesterday. Today is rather more humdrum and ordinary. Today is merely another day of war.”
“All the more reason!” Burton snarled through grinding teeth.
“As for alliances, suh, do you imagine that a mere officer in the field makes decisions as to what nations are and are not his allies?”
“No sir, I do not!” Burton raged. “I also do not imagine that such a man, if he wishes to remain in the field and an officer, may with impunity ignore the decisions of his government as to who his allies are!”
One of the cavalrymen surged forward as if he wanted to punch Burton. Burton welcomed the attack, longed for a chance to prove himself to these men, but Captain Morgan held his soldier back with a half-raised fist. He met Burton’s fierce gaze with a sly look and seemed to think for a moment.
“Tell me then, suh,” Morgan finally said. “Your Queen. Whose ally is she? Is she the ally of the United States? Or is she the ally of some other party?”
Burton had no patience for this fiddle-faddle and for a moment he almost wished Fearnley-Standish were here. Just for a moment, though. He bit back the bitter thought and organized some careful words, words such as he thought a true diplomat might conjure with. “Her Majesty is a friend of the American people,” he said, “and their various governments, and a friend of peace. I am her Special Envoy with a mission to the Kingdom of Deseret—”
“Yes, suh!” Morgan clapped as if applauding some point he himself had won. “And I am a humble officer of the Third Virginia Cavalry. If you wish to discuss the affairs of the Kingdom of Deseret—” he pointed up at the stage, at John Lee “—you should talk to that man.”
“I have a mission,” Burton ground out each word slowly and distinctly, “and I had hoped to be able to discuss it with my ally. Perhaps I have mistaken you.”
“Perhaps you have,” the Captain agreed lightly. “Perhaps, if you find yourself at such a loss, it means that your mission, as you refer to it, is finished. I certainly have no instructions for you, no instructions regarding you, and no interest in further conversation. I have my own orders, my own men to take care of, enemies to pursue, and reinforcements for whose arrival I must prepare. Good day, suh.”
Captain Morgan tipped his hat sarcastically and disappeared into the exit.
Burton was so mad he almost spit on the floor.
“Hell and begorra!”
Tam’s head hurt for want of a drink. It had been hours and Mother O’Shaughnessy had never let him go that long without at least a nip, even as a boy.
The midget disappeared, out through the gates of the train station and into the Great Salt Lake City. He still carried the machine-gun case like he was a dance hall fiddler and the pack full of ammunition and loaded extra drums slung over one shoulder. Even heavily laden as he was, he was hard to track in the crowd.
It hadn’t been easy following him with the little kid in tow. Tam had switched his hat and coat for a big, dirty duster and a broad-brimmed cattleman’s hat he’d found in Browning’s shop and he’d made the boy wear his own porkpie. He’d put on a kerchief and tucked his long scarf in his pocket and wished he had a pair of dark glasses.
“Keep your eyes down and your mouth shut, boy,” he’d warned the kid, “or I’ll by-Brigit shoot you and leave you for the buzzards.”
“I ain’t afraid of you,” the boy John Moses had said at once, but then he’d shut up and done as he’d been told. Tam had kept a hand on the grip of one of his Hushers the entire time, but he hadn’t had to draw the gun.
The midget was a suspicious little bastard, though, always looking around him and sometimes doubling back on his own tracks. Tam wondered what he was afraid of (though in this fallen world, wasn’t it the honest and prudent man who was always afraid of everything, and always looking out for his own interests?) and stayed on his toes so the little man never got a good look at his face.
Was it the Pinkertons he feared? It might be. There’d been two at the Great Salt Lake City train station, on the very platform, when Tam had disembarked, poking around with their calotypes and asking questions. Tam had tightened his grip on the boy’s hand, but the Pinkertons hadn’t approached him and there hadn’t been any trouble. Lucky for him, the Mormons didn’t seem all that interested in being forthcoming with the Pinkertons. The cold shoulder he saw them giving the lawmen was almost enough to endear the Kingdom of Deseret to him forever. Coltrane had gone one way, right in front of one of the detectives, so cool butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, and Tam had dragged the boy with him in the other direction. They’d crossed over the tracks below on parallel catwalks, Tam careful not to overtake the smaller man with his longer steps.
He almost lost the dwarf at the exit, and he almost lost him again outside the train station. The little man crossed one of Deseret’s exaggeratedly wide boulevards there and immediately on his heels the street filled with American military steam-trucks, barreling past at full steam. It was the Massachusetts squaddies again, the same ones he and Sam Clemens had seen earlier. Before, they had had the practical, slightly underslept, getting-about-one’s-business look that soldiers everywhere always seemed to have when not in action or suffering through some drill or actually asleep.
Now, they looked frightened. The steam-trucks bellowed and groaned and squealed like enormous bellyaching hippopotami as they rushed past and the soldiers on their decks clutched their carbines and looked about them like they feared being shot at from every window they passed, or even by the birds of the air.
What Brigit-blessed nonsense had happened in the short hours while he’d been gone? Tam stepped up his pace, easily gaining ground on the little man with his longer strides, and dragging the boy along, as often as not lifting him off the ground by the wrist. Not too much, Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy me boy, he warned himself. Don’t want to completely overtake the little goblin.
The dwarf crossed the half mile or so of the city center to the Deseret Hotel. Tam and his hostage watched from around corners as Coltrane took the lift up (presumably up to the suite that Tam shared with Sam Clemens, but what in Brigit’s name could he be doing up there, up to no good, but at least it was Tam who had the beetles of doom), returned promptly, had a brief word with the desk clerk (it was still that helpful fellow Sorenson, Tam saw), and then idled on the street outside.
After half an hour of idling, at some prompt Tam didn’t detect, the dwarf started moving again, back toward the giant beehive in the center of the city. He stayed in public, visible places and Tam was beginning to feel like a whore in church from all the eyes on him. If the dwarf wasn’t going to go into any dark alleys of his own free will and choice, Tam might just have to show him the boy and force his hand.
Then things took a turn that was surprisingly … sneaky.
Tam and the boy sat on a brass and plascrete bench across the wide street from the big egg the Mormons called their Tabernacle. The bench was sculpted on its sides with the image of an angel blowing a long straight trump, with the two trumps extending along the sides of the brass-slatted seat, and honeybees flying out the ends of the horn. There was an open space around and before the bench, a green and planted square, and the dwarf moved around on the far side of it, so Tam could watch him comfortably from where he sat. He tried to ignore the spiderweb of glass piping over his head and the whizzing of objects being shot through it, the pumping up and down of glass and brass bellows off in the corner of his eye, and all the glittering surfaces of plascrete and metal and glass, and pay attention to where the action was.
The dwarf didn’t go to into the egg. He went to one of the buildings across the square from it. It was a house, a big fancy house, a lords and ladies house, and it looked really strange here in the Great Salt Lake City, surrounded by plascrete and brass pipes and weird fey things scooting around inside glass tubes. The other building was the Lion House that he had already gone into with Clemens, and the two looked like they might even be joined at one corner, but this building looked totally different. It had tall columns and a beehive on the top of it like a cake decoration and under the second-story balcony held up
by the long white columns, some of its windows were very tall. The dwarf knocked. A young woman came to the door and listened to him politely but didn’t let him in.
The dwarf Coltrane made as if to leave, but once the door was shut he sneaked around in the shrubbery, peering in windows.
“Dirty little bugger,” Tam muttered.
He was good, quick, and quiet, and little, of course, and Tam already knew that he was as agile as any squirrel. Tam had sharp eyes, but if he hadn’t been following the little man in the first place, he never would have been able to spot him creeping about the house with the beehive top.
Then Coltrane ducked, like he was hiding from someone Tam couldn’t see.
Other men came to the front door of the house and were admitted. Tam didn’t pay them much attention, except to notice that there were four or five of them and they were armed. But then everyone in this bloody-damn-hell place carried a gun.
Then a man, a full-sized man, detached himself from the bushes not far from the dwarf and hurled himself in through one of the windows. He was a crazy-looking bastard, with a long beard, a knife in one hand, and dressed head to toe in leather, like some character out of a penny dreadful.
Crash!
Tam was no fool, to grab his gun and go rushing into a fight that was clearly none of his business. Still, he kept his hand on the weapon, just in case.
Bang!
The little boy sat bolt upright like a bullet had hit him. Tam tightened his grip on the Husher, but stayed put.
“Did Jed get shot?” John Moses asked, eyes big and round.