by Sean Wallace
Pale faces looked up at Ixtli, colonials dressed in little more than rags, tying off the airship’s ropes as they fell down towards the trampled grass. They shouted in guttural languages: English, Dutch, French. Ixtli knew many of them from his days along the Mexica coast, fighting them all during the invasions of ’89.
The airship’s gondola finally kissed the earth, and ramps were pulled out.
Ixtli walked off, porters following with his suitcases. The cold hit him and he shivered in his purple and red robes, the feather in his carefully tied hair twisted in the biting wind.
A bulbous-nosed man in a thick wool cape and earmuffs strode confidently forward, his hand extended. “Gordon Doyle, sir, at your service!”
Ixtli looked down and did not take the man’s hand in his own, but gave him a slight nod of his head. “I am Ixtli.”
“Splendid, what’s your last name?”
“I am just Ixtli.” He stared at Gordon, who rubbed his hand on his cape and fumbled around with a pipe.
“Well, Ixtli, I just arrived from London the day before it happened. Scotland Yard needed me over here to find the Albany Rapist. Bad series of events, that. Poor urchins, bad way to end it, very sensational, all over the papers.”
Gordon was a jittery man. “Did you solve it?” Ixtli asked.
“Um, no, not yet. But come, I have a hansom waiting.”
The murder site was in the Colonial Museum, a massive neo-Dutch structure embedded in the east side of New Amsterdam’s Central Park. The driver whipped the massive beast of a horse up to speed and took them down the Manhattan thoroughfares.
“It’s such a vibrant city, this,” Gordon said, the acrid smell of his pipe wafting across over the smell of horse shit and garbage. The city, as packed and heavy with people as it was, placed its garbage on the streets to be picked up.
At least the city had sewers.
Ixtli leaned back, looking up at the buildings. This island was denser than Tenochtitlan. Large buildings, some over ten stories high and made of brick, lined the road on his left. Greenery and park, with cook fires and shantytowns that dotted it, lined his right.
Gordon noticed Ixtli looking. “Revolutionaries. This year’s batch anyway. The Crown recently seized the land of the ‘Americans’. Think they would have learned their lesson from the last time. Damn terrorists.”
“You let them camp on your public lands?”
“Well, the homeless are always a problem in the big cities. They skulk around here hoping one day to rise up again.”
The cab lurched to a stop and the horse farted. Ixtli leapt down into the mud and walked up to the giant, imposing steps of the Colonial Museum. He was chilled to the core and wanted out of the wind. “Have you investigated any of the revolutionaries in the park?”
Gordon cleared his throat loudly. “Dear God, man, what do you take me for, a simpleton? Of course.”
Ixtli ignored the reaction and stepped through the brass doorframes and into the museum past waiting policemen. Come see the original colonial declaration of secession, the poster proclaimed, next to an encased poster that showed a snake cut into thirteen pieces.
“Let’s see this.”
The young man in question had been left for two days at the request of the Mexica via telegraph. There was the telltale sign of faint bloating. Both Gordon and Ixtli held handkerchiefs to their noses as they approached the body.
Ixtli peered in at the corpse, then looked around. “The room has not been touched, or the floor cleaned? Was there blood on the floor apart from what the body pooled out?”
“None of that nature,” Gordon confirmed.
“The manner in which the chest has been split, while similar, is done in a much more calculated manner than any normal ceremonial practice. And then there is one other thing.”
“Entrails are still in his body.” Gordon stabbed the air with his pipe. “Usually both are burnt, are they not?”
“There is also no blood on this floor, from ripping them out. This was done in a surgical manner, with the heart being removed and taken out in a waterproof container. No doubt to sensationalize and excite people in New Amsterdam,” Ixtli said. “This is not the work of a warrior priest.”
And that was a relief.
Gordon did not look as relieved, however. He made a face. “Well, I guess that rather leaves it all up in the air.”
“Do you have any other leads?”
“Nothing of any particular sorts,” Gordon said. “You were our best, as it would have allowed us to start questioning around certain areas.”
Ixtli shook his head. “Round up the brown-skinned?”
Gordon at least had the decency to look somewhat embarrassed. “One of the guards saw someone.”
“Dark-skinned.”
“Red, is actually what he said.” Gordon hailed a hansom. Ixtli looked over at the curb, where a small group of dirty urchins had melted out of the bush to stare at them. Cold hard stares, devoid of curiosity.
One of them held a small, stiff piece of paper in his left hand, fingering it reverently.
“Red like me?” They melted back into the bushes of Central Park under Ixtli’s stare.
The hansom shook as Gordon stepped in. “We didn’t pull out an artist’s palette and paints. When your embassy found the headline and details, and said they were sending you over, we had hoped they might know something. The method of death is … unique.” Gordon tapped the driver perched on the rear of the cab and gave him directions to the hotel Ixtli would be staying at.
“Ah, you talk about the past, Mr Doyle, and nothing but the past. You should know better.”
And on this note, Gordon smiled. “And yet you are here, sir. So speedily. So sanctioned by your country. It suggests that there may have been something.”
The man, Ixtli thought, didn’t miss much. “Do you know what I am, Mr Doyle?”
“I have my suspicions.”
“I am no spy. I am an inquisitor. It is my job to find heretics. It is my job to find them and stop their heresy.” They clip-clopped their way down into the maze of New Amsterdam’s chaotic business. “When your people invaded …”
“The Spanish, sir, the Spanish, not us.”
Ixtli shrugged. To him one European was just as another. “… they had several advantages against us. Guns, steel, disease, but most importantly, the numbers and fighters of Tlaxcala who hated our taxes and loss of life to the blade of the priest. When Cortez took our leader hostage and Moctezuma stood before our city and told us to bow to the Spanish, we stoned him to death and elected a new leader, and drove the white men from our city. We fought back and forth, dying of disease, but fighting for our existence.
“We’d already killed our emperor. We were bound by tradition, and religion, but it kept hindering us. The living city leaders decided only radical new ways of thinking could save us, and the first was to renounce our taxes on tributary cities, and claim that we would no longer sacrifice the unwilling to our gods. And we made good with actions. It was bloody and long, Gordon, but an idea, an idea is something amazing. Particularly when it spreads.
“So what I do, is help that idea. That blood sacrifice isn’t required, that people are equal under the Mexica, and that we are an alternative to the way of the invaders. And those who want the old religions, the old ways, I hunt them down, Mr Doyle, I hunt them down and exact a terrible price from them.”
“And you are here to make sure your image as past savages isn’t continued?”
“Something like that.” The Mexica made a point of stealing the brightest heretics from Europe over the last 300 years. You wouldn’t get burned in Tenochtitlan, you could print your seditions against European thought there, and anything useful, anything invented, all benefited the Mexica.
Anything that faulted that haven needed to be destroyed.
That was Ixtli’s job.
In the sitting room of the cramped, smelly, dank hotel room that professed to be properly heated, Ixtli removed his colorful cape, h
ung up the gold armband of his profession, and sighed.
Gordon Doyle followed him in and looked around. “Grand, this. One more thing. You never asked if we had identified the body.”
“I had assumed you would tell me when you felt it was important. Is it?”
“Important. Somewhat. The grandson of one of the prominent revolutionaries.” Gordon stood there, waiting for some reaction.
“I have no theories, certainly there is no reason I know that my country would need some dissident killed in a way that makes us look culpable.” Ixtli shivered. This was like standing up on a mountain. “Isn’t our business over, now? You can go find some other brown-skinned people as your suspects.”
With a tap of a finger on his awkwardly sized hat Gordon backed out the door. “I’ll give you a ride in the morning to the airfield.”
“My thanks.”
Ixtli sat near the heater for a while, trying to warm up, and then finally gave up the attempt as futile and crawled under the thick and scratchy woolen blankets.
His feet never seemed to stop aching, but after a while he relaxed and fell into a light sleep with the odd shiver or two spaced a few minutes apart.
That was until he heard a foot creak on a nearby floorboard.
Ixtli rolled off and under his bed just as a large club smacked into his pillow. Just as quickly Ixtli rolled back out and swept the attacker off his feet with one good kick to the nearest kneecap and a sweeping motion with his other leg.
He was rewarded with a half-hearted jab to his thigh with the club. Stone chips ripped at his skin.
It was a macehuitl, the club.
What on earth was someone doing with a museum piece like that?
But that was just a feint. The attacker grabbed him for a takedown, and they were both on the floor, rolling around, Ixtli realizing that the man’s heavy weight lent him a major advantage.
It was a scraping, heaving, bloody, bashing fight that was somewhere between a Grecian wrestling match and a cock fight, and it ended only when Ixtli wrestled the macehuitl away and clubbed the man in his face.
Ixtli looked something like a stereotype when Gordon responded to his urgent message, delivered to the concierge by the pneumatic speaking tube in his room: he sat on his bed, still holding the squat fighting club with the sharp stone bits embedded on its sides, blood dripping, the vanquished foe by his feet.
“Dear God!” Gordon said.
“He isn’t Mexica,” Ixtli said.
“Well, someone is working awfully hard to make sure it looks like that.”
Ixtli looked down at the man and bent to rifle his pockets. No papers of any sort. Except for a stiff, beige card with holes poked through it. Ixtli held it up. “But we do have something here.”
Gordon looked at it. “A loom card?”
Ixtli nodded. “It’s your best clue yet, they didn’t count on an ambassador being a skilled warrior. Find out who makes it, or even who purchased it. We don’t have much time before they find out their man is dead.”
“I’ll get right on it. I’ll send some men up to get the body. They’ll also keep guard in a new room that we’ll be getting you into.”
“Thank you.” But Ixtli didn’t think he would be sleeping.
He called down to the concierge to pass on the message that he would not be taking the next airship home.
Ixtli would see this to its end.
Gordon found him in the restaurant poring over hot coffee before sunbreak, the closest thing Ixtli could get to cacoa. It warmed him.
“I heard you weren’t returning to your homeland?” Gordon asked.
“News travels quickly.” Ixtli stirred in honey. “I want to know who wants me dead. A professional courtesy, I had hoped you would understand.”
“A case could take weeks, or months, to crack. It’s not a case of roughing up the bystanders and accusing people of crimes. It’s a methodical thing, filled with suppositions and theories that need to be validated or checked. One must be cool and moderate, and uninvolved.”
“By then your trail will have gone cold.” Ixtli sipped the coffee. Passable. Very passable. He smiled for the first time in the last two days. “I think, Mr Doyle, that you and I have something in common.”
“What’s that?”
“We’re both children of the enlightenment.”
Gordon stiffened. “I wouldn’t say that around here. French revolutionaries and colonialist terrorists were the children of the enlightenment.”
Ixtli laughed. “Not politically. I am speaking of your reverence for the truth, the interest in where the trail will lead. And now I have the greatest mystery in front of me: someone wants me dead. I admit, I’m very curious.”
Gordon didn’t look so sure. Ixtli kept a mask of geniality on. It was not quite true, what he’d said. Underneath he simmered to find the true assassin behind all this.
“Okay,” Gordon said. “But you are unarmed, right? I don’t want you causing any trouble.”
“I am unarmed.” Ixtli spread his arms.
Gordon slapped the loom card on the table. “Then we visit the makers of this. And tonight we’ll switch you to a new hotel.”
The giant brick building near the docks of New Amsterdam, chimneys looming overhead, was the HOLLERITH MACHINE COMPANY. A Mr Jason Finesson waited for them, resplendent in tails and a tall hat, spectacles clamped down over his nose hard enough to leave a welt.
“Detective.” He shook Gordon’s hand, and then turned to Ixtli. “And sir.”
Ixtli gave a nod of the head and turned to Gordon, who pulled out the offending card. Ixtli wasn’t sure why they were at a machining company, but he declined to say anything out loud. If a card could control a loom for weavers, maybe it could control other kinds of machines.
“Ah.” Mr Finesson looked at the card. “A punch card. Your message, you do say you found it at a crime scene?”
Gordon nodded. “Yes.”
“How curious.” Finesson held it up to the gaslight in the corner of the room. A bored-looking secretary with perfectly slicked-back hair in a black suit sat poring over a ledger laid out across his desk by the entrance. “Well, I can tell you the very machine it was made on.”
“Excellent.” Gordon looked elated. The thrill of the hunt.
“But that won’t help you much,” Finesson continued. “Our customers use these in bulk for all sorts of things. I couldn’t tell you which customer this comes from.”
Ixtli had been staring at the man. He looked assured, confident, and as if he were telling the truth. “You are the manager here?”
“Yes.”
“What exactly do your customers use these things for?”
“Ah, let me show you.”
Finesson escorted them back through the dim hallways of the building into a large room several stories high that looked like it was the lovechild of a swiss watchmaker and a train engineer. Massive gears and wheels strained, clicking away on bearings the size of a man. All throughout pulleys and shafts spun, and a massive steam boiler, fit to power a transatlantic ship, squatted in the center of the room, steam hissing lazily out the pipes connected to it.
“Last summer we were commissioned to count the census of the colonies, sirs. Since then we’ve processed merchant accounts, calculated the mysteries of the universe for leading scientists, and been available for engineers.”
“That’s a mechanical adding machine,” Ixtli said. “I’ve heard of these.”
Finesson pranced around the entryway like a circus grandmaster. “Oh, but it’s so much more. Complex maths, instructions, this is a computing machine, gentleman. One of only four or five like it in the world! I’ll wager you, sirs, that if you could take the mathematics of policing, and reduce it to calculations and variables and insert it into this machine, we could run your police force.”
“Another child of the enlightenment, I presume,” Gordon said out of the side of his mouth to Ixtli, who was still gaping at the machine.
“Even
better,” said Finesson. “I’ve talked to your counterparts, the Dutch constabulary here in New Amsterdam. Yes, the British do an excellent job of co-ruling this tiny island, but why be so reactive? You know the study of physiognomy, wherein you can determine a person’s character merely by studying their unique facial characteristics?”
Both Ixtli and Gordon nodded.
“Indeed, well I suggested to his Excellency Mr Van Ostrand that we take sketches of all the criminals encountered by his forces, load them into our device to find points of similarity, and then begin sketching in all manner of our population to load into our machine to find criminals before they commit their crimes. It would revolutionize your jobs, men.”
Gordon and Ixtli glanced at each other. Ixtli spoke first. “And what if you were fingered by the device?”
“What? I’m no criminal,” Finesson said. “How dare you! I have nothing to fear.”
“I take it the Dutch have not invested in this idea?” Gordon changed the subject quickly.
“No,” Finesson looked down at his shoe. “More’s the pity.”
“Indeed.” Ixtli picked up a stray punch card and looked at it. It made no apparent sense to him, hundreds and hundreds of tiny pockmarks.
A man at the table held out his hand. “The order in which we feed them into the machine is important, it tells them what to do.”
“Well, Mr Finesson, we would like your customers’ records.”
“And do you have a writ?”
Ixtli glanced at Gordon, who shook his head. “Not yet, sir.”
“If my customers found out I turned over my books so easily, I could lose a great deal of business. There are forms and numbers and calculations being done by businesses here that would not want their information spread about the city.”
“I understand.”
And with that, a frustrated Gordon and Ixtli were outside again, headed back to the hotel.
“That was a waste,” Gordon said, stuffing a new pipe and looking annoyed. “Physiognomy …”
“Maybe that isn’t so.” Ixtli held a mirror in his hand, as if checking the makeup on his face. Behind them dashed an urchin, doing his best to keep up. In these crowded streets it was feasible. He rapped the roof to get the driver’s attention and handed him paper money. “Stop here. I need you to wander off to one of these stores and purchase something. Take your time.”