Mithras. That was a name she rarely heard outside the backwoods—an old Greek cult, occasionally interbred with other faiths. It wasn’t a popular name, in Boston, and the single church in Roxbury that followed its creed was shunned. It had been burned down three times.
She heard another engine pass outside, and prayed they would notice the curtains, check the lighthouse for… anything. But the sound puttered away, and her spirits sank. “You worship this… Mithras?”
“We’re anarchists, sweetheart. We worship nothing.” Buda lit another cigarillo. “Mithras is an idea, core to our philosophy. He is the unseen chaos inside every man. He’s the shining path, a door that lets Humours into our world—and he’ll show everyone the truth about this country. Very soon.”
“Right… sure. Whatever you say.” Not for the first time, she wondered how a bunch of lunatics like these had come to town, without her hearing about it. She’d known about the Queen, and Big Jim’s return had been obvious, if you listened to the right people. But Buda… he was different. He knew how stay outside the limelight. “Okay. You like anarchy, you hate the government. Why the hell am I here?”
Buda leaned forward. “Punishment.”
“For what? I already did my time.”
He snorted. “Your comfy cell, down in Framingham? That was hardly a punishment. No, you are here because you worshipped a golden calf. You were so devoted to capitalism you betrayed your own countrymen. By the thousands.” He grinned. “That demands compensation.”
She shrugged. “So dial up my bank. I’ll pay you handsome, if you let me walk out of here. You know I’m good for it.”
“I have a better idea.” He puffed smoke at the ceiling, lances of evening light shining spectral through the drifting vapor. “You’ve got power, Ponzi. It’s not a Company card, like that meddling detective Vance, or a dead man’s commitment like Big Joe. But you’ve got power all the same. You’re here because people listened to you. And why did they listen?”
She shrugged. “I’m persuasive, and they were suckers.”
“All the capitalists who threw money at your scheme, they believed you. That’s your power. But you wasted your gifts, trying to get rich.”
“I’d have gotten away with it, if my dumb-ass husband hadn’t turned himself in.”
“Maybe. But he’s in jail, and you’re not. Your lies gave you freedom. We can use that.”
The cigarillo smoke was choking, and Ponzi felt herself shrinking in the face of these monsters, dwarfed by their madness. Buda had a way of speaking that pulled you in, totally unmoored from logic. She sensed a kindred spirit here: she brought in the suckers with promises of cash, and he did the same by ranting about the government. They worked in the same business: shoveling bullshit.
She swallowed. “What do you need me to do?”
“In a moment. Our Governor is about to make a speech.” Buda turned up the radio.
“… Never in the history of our Commonwealth… has such an array of foul influences corrupted our streets, paving them with blood. These are trying times, but with the cooperation of the Bureau of Investigation and Mitchell Palmer—”
“That’s him! That’s him, Father!” The Queen danced in place, her long fingers twitching. “Palmer! The chief pig, the head bastard!”
“Quiet, Aleksandra.”
“We can kill him, if he’s here—”
“I said, be quiet.” Buda rose and swung a fist, knocking her to the floor. While she was down, he lashed out with his boots. Amazingly, the Queen didn’t fight back. Carla had watched her kill a man in cold blood, yet she took Buda’s beatings like a child, rolling up and flinching with every kick.
Buda said, bending down and pressing his cigarillo against the girl’s neck. The sizzle of her flesh was audible, despite the babble from the radio.
“Don’t you wanna hear the good Governor speak?” She nodded, her eyes blank. “Great. Don’t interrupt me again.” He spun his chair and sat down, to hear the rest of the broadcast.
“… has dispatched agents to the city to investigate the sightings of raw Humours. These people have crossed a line. We’ll have no Al Capones, here in Boston.” Governor Cox was worked up, Carla could tell. She’d heard him speak before, but now there was a fire in him, some leftover Puritan strain bubbling up in the face of angry voters. “I am taking Mr. Palmer as my advisor, and together, we will destroy the trade of Draughts. No one’s going to touch these ungodly drinks in my state, no one’s going to make them, and if anyone’s caught selling them… Well, there’s an electric chair waiting for you. Politics be damned.”
There was a pause as the station resumed regular news coverage, the announcer’s voice fraught with worry. Carla tried to digest all of it.
Mitchell Palmer was an ex-attorney general, a Quaker whose obsession over “Reds” had led to vicious arrests and many deaths. The raids he’d conducted and the camps where he’d kept people were legendary; it had taken years for judges to conclude he’d abused the Consitution and illegally detained people. Bringing Palmer to Boston was a declaration of war.
“Well, folks, you heard him yourselves… The Governor has scheduled a gala, to benefit the children of the police gunned down so tragically last night. The Mayor and Mr. Palmer will be attending, and will detail their plans to bring back law and order to our city…”
Buda turned off the radio. “So, it’s Palmer they’re using for this. Not Hoover.” He blew smoke at the ceiling. “Rotten bastard slipped my line again.”
The Angel stepped forward. “If I may?”
“Speak.”
“Palmer would make an excellent Host. He’s devout—buries his emotions. Drowns them in work. The song of his heart will be ugly and powerful.”
“Not a bad idea.” The anarchist snapped his fingers. “Ponzi. You asked what we wanted from you. This is it—you’ll bring us Mitchell Palmer.”
She held up a hand. “Now hold on, we ought to talk figures…”
Buda held out a hand, and the Angel produced a knife, smooth as blinking. Buda levelled the blade at her, wagging its silver length back and forth.
“Your payment is your life. Ask for anything else, and I’ll make sure that tongue of yours stops wagging. Forever.”
“Okay! Okay.” She found herself trembling… but with rage instead of fear. Nobody threatened her like this—nobody. Sooner or later, she was gonna get even with this pig. But for now, she needed to play along. “I’m in. What’s the job?”
Buda stuck the knife in the table. “Aleksandra, get Carla some clothes. Something high-profile, with nice shoes. But stay away from Downtown Crossing—there’s a police checkpoint being set up. Baxter…” The Angel bowed. “I want to know where this ‘gala’ is happening. Get me names, a guest-list. Make sure we all have invitations… and if you have to kill a capitalist to get them, even better.”
“As you wish.” Buda’s assassin whisked out the door. Carla blinked in the sudden glow of sunset outside, as the Queen raised her to her feet, dusting her off. Her face was devoid of all emotion, the burn on her neck raw and puffy.
“A new sister, joining our ranks,” she said. Her eyes still had that curious blankness. “Together, we will destroy this rotting husk of a nation. Praise Mithras.”
“Sure,” said Carla, shivering as Buda unrolled a map of Boston. “Yeah. Praise Mithras.”
PART TWO: LITTLE FISH
“We’re the tops for miles around,
We’ve got doctors and scrappers, preachers and flappers,
Men from old County Down.
Say, they’ll take you and break you
But they’ll never forsake you,
Down in Southie, my old hometown.”
--Early South Boston drinking song
CHAPTER ONE
GUS HENDERSON was no coward. But he wasn’t stupid, either. After the botched job at the docks, he’d spent a day riding the subway, hiding out in blind-pigs and distilleries. In between hiding, he delivered the bad news to t
he wives of his men. Mostly they wept, but one nearly chopped his nose off with a kitchen knife. He didn’t blame her. The massacre had been his fault: hell-bent on getting cash, he’d driven his boys to a horrible end. Now their families were on a fast-track to poverty, their children fatherless. Without husbands, their widows would have to find jobs in textile mills—or simply work as whores. He didn’t envy the choices ahead of them. Their husbands had known the risks, but it didn’t make what had happened any less horrible.
Out of frustration and pity, he stopped by the bank. If he could get some money to these families, he could silence the annoying prattle of his conscience. But when he tried a withdrawal, the waspish teller shook his head.
“Your account’s been frozen, sir.”
“Frozen? By who?”
“A… Mister Gustin. He, ah, said you needed to speak to him, first. Urgently.” The clerk swallowed, his Adam’s apple bouncing. “He was… extremely clear about it, sir.”
Gus simmered, flames licking the back of his teeth. It didn’t take a genius to figure out the pseudonym. Wallace and his boys operated out of Gustin Street, and had for years—it was their home turf. Clearly Wallace or one of the gang had come here and put the screws on his bank.
Slippery bastards. Without warning, the Greed surged in him—inhuman, furious and powerful. That was his money, and these two-bit Irish hoods had no right to keep it from him. But he kept a lid on his frustration. There would be time for revenge later; right now, he needed to deal with this mess, and figure out where the hell Rose had gotten to. He left the bank, pulling up his lapels against a chill wind from the North End. Autumn was always a breath away in New England, no matter how high the sun climbed.
His phone calls to Rose’s apartment had gotten him nothing. Same thing a personal visit. He’d hammered on the door until the landlord, a tubby baker with a mustache, had come out to chase him away with a rolling pin.
So Rose was a dead end—maybe literally. But he’d heard other clues. There were rumors on the wind, in Roxbury: after the Humour explosion, a new Myth had been sighted. Some kind of angel, who glowed like a gaslight and had a soft-spot for the poor. People said she’d visited a hospital, infused people there with pure emotion. Things like Hope, Love, and Patience—no Draughts required. She was, some though, a visitation from Heaven. Gus thought it was all bullshit.
But from their descriptions, the ‘angel’ looked a lot like Rose Sweetwater.
He climbed aboard the MTA, and soon he was riding on the overhead rail towards Charlestown, the open train-car swaying as it clanged and rumbled. As the track rose above the Charles he could almost see the dock-front where the fight had gone down.
Damn it, Rose. The hell did you get into, last night?
He didn’t regret taking her gun; if anything, he should have gone a step further and kept her out of the whole job. Bloody work was best left to bloody hands, and Rose was no killer. She’d been out of her mind, to dive in there with him.
But he didn’t think she would’ve stayed behind, not even if he ordered her. Rose was an enigma, to Gus. She was driven to the point of obsession by ‘debts’ she refused to discuss. She was a smart, kind woman, and yet he’d seen her hold bottles of Joy in her teeth while sprinting away from machine-guns. A living contradiction.
Through it all, he’d never pushed her about getting out of the mood-legging trade, and now he wondered if he should have. Because now she was gone, and he had an ugly choice to make.
It wouldn’t take long, for the cops to draw a line from the dead Scots to his doorstep. The wise option would be to skip town—grab a schooner north, or hitch his way down to Jersey. He needed to be away from Boston. Lawmen patrolled every sidewalk today, several of them carrying rifles. The bloodbath at the waterfront had made headlines, and the Mayor was pushing the BPD to crack down. Who, or what they cracked down on, didn’t seem to worry him.
Sooner or later, one of them would match the description of a big Myth with scaly sideburns to sketchy witness statements from the waterfront. When that happened, his goose was cooked.
But he couldn’t just cut and run. Rose was still out there, somewhere: assuming the thing that had escaped the wreckage last night was really Rose, and not some kind of mindless Myth. He owed her a lot, too much to simply run away. On top of that, he didn’t want to run. He’d grown up here, spinning hoops in Lawrence and boxing in Andover cellars. He didn’t want to leave his hometown, tail between his legs.
That left option two: making a stand. And that path wouldn’t be easy. Between pissing off the cops and the Gustin Street crew, he’d painted a target on his head so large it could probably be seen from the moon. He and Mick Vance had put themselves in the hot-seat—but now, Mick was out of the game. He was in the hospital, resting easy. It was his own skin he had to worry about.
Right now, he was trusting that skin to the transit system, riding the overhead raid towards Charlestown. As he stood watching the sunset from the crowded train car, a heavy figure leaned on the rails beside him.
“Nice evening.”
He didn’t need to look at the guy; Gus knew the voice. It was Seamus, one of the Gustin Gang’s enforcers. “Yeah,” he said. “Real nice.”
“It’d be a shame if it got… less nice.” Seamus opened a cigarette case. “Got a light, Gus?’
Gus passed him a book of matches. If Seamus was here to kill him, he might as well let the guy have a smoke first. Common courtesy.
“Thanks.” Acrid smoke drifted over the rail. “What say we get off at the next stop, pal?”
“No thanks, Seamus.”
“It’s not a suggestion.” The barrel of a gun prodded his coat, hidden by Seamus’ long coat. Gus grimaced; Myth or not, he couldn’t shrug off a bullet to the gut at close range. Not to mention, he didn’t want to ruin anyone’s train ride. There were kids on this train, slurping ice-cream and cheering whenever the bell rang. There were also cops below, all of whom had line-of-fire to the train.
If he was going to die, he didn’t want to take dozens people with him, and leave more grieving widows. Besides, what he planned to do to Seamus wasn’t fit for public viewing.
“Alright, then.”
Seamus nodded. “You’re smarter than you look, freak. Keep those eyes up, and don’t move.”
Their train passed over the Charles, its glittering brown surface awash with murk. Neither of them spoke further; they didn’t have to. The gun disappeared, but Seamus stayed close—too close to miss, if he had to draw again. Gus could feel the guy’s breath tickling the scales on his neck. Seamus smelled like cheap beer and pastrami.
They got off at Cambridge Square, amongst paperboys hawking the evening post and grifters working the crowd. Gus considered making a break for it, but chose not to. There was no getting away from the Wallaces; they’d stepped in shit the minute they started dealing with that crew, and there was a feeling in him that this was inevitable. Big fish ate little fish… or were eaten themselves. It was the way things worked, and it would never change.
“You got a wife, Seamus?” asked Gus, as they turned a corner and began moving towards a quiet line of trees.
“Nah. Dames tie me down. Why?”
“Was wondering where to send your corpse.”
Seamus laughed, but it was a little forced. “You serious? You've got balls, Henderson, I’ll give you that much.”
“So they tell me. What happens now?”
“Now? You get in the car.” A luxury coupe pulled up, its windows small and dark. One backseat door swung open.
It was a town-car, fit for a prince, and even fancier on the inside. Plush velvet upholstery and clean, polished wood siding gave it the atmosphere of a mansion… or perhaps a coffin.
“Get in,” said Seamus.
“What if I don’t?”
“I’ll plug you right here.”
“Hmm.” Seamus was a big man, but not a brave one—he might be bluffing. But when presented with possible death now, or certain
death later, Gus thought he’d prefer later. It would give him more time to plan.
He got into the car.
Inside, he found Steve Wallace sitting there—one of the brothers in charge of the Gustin Gang. With him was an enforcer, a big guy with dustpan-hands and a thick wedge of chin. The driver’s seat was cut off from the back by a sliding pane of glass.
Seamus climbed in after Gus, and the car began to move.
“Henderson.”
Steve Wallace sat across from Gus, a Luger on his lap. He was unattractive, with a face that looked like God had gotten drunk while putting him together. The suit and tie he wore didn’t change that impression. He seemed a man half-formed, ill-at-ease with the world around him. But he was a Wallace, and together with his brothers, he owned half the low-level smuggling rings in Boston—and by extension, Gus and Rose. The little fish.
“Steve,” Gus said. “Good to see you.” He was cursing himself, for stashing his guns in a speakeasy—he’d wanted to avoid suspicion, but now he was defenseless. Except for his claws and teeth.
“You and Rose made quite a stir, last night.”
“Just trying to do our jobs.”
“Yeah, well, you made my job a pain in the ass.” Steve leaned over a golden spittoon on the floor, and hocked a lump of tobacco into it. “You know how hard it is to move Draughts, with cops up my ass? Do you have any idea how badly you fucked me here?”
Gus looked him in the eye. Being subservient wasn’t going to save him here, and he’d always been a smart-aleck. “Maybe you ought to change careers, Steve.”
Steve snorted, nudging Dustbin Hands. “Look at this guy. Screwed me out of two shipments, and he thinks he can crack wise. Seamus, educate the man for us.”
Before Gus even processed the sentence, Seamus’ fist rammed his jaw. He reeled against the window; he was good in a fight, but these pricks had him cornered, and fighting back might bring guns into the equation. So he held up his arms, and let Seamus work him over. The scab-like shining scales on his arms dulled the pain, but the Greed mutations were brittle—it’d been too long since he’d had a fix. Scales crunched and snapped, oozing yellow fluid.
Spirits of the Charles (The Mithras Cycle Book 1) Page 11