Murder on the Titania and Other Steam-Powered Adventures

by Alex Acks

“Oh yeah, these, right.” He untucked the folded papers from under his arm and offered them over. “Still nice and crisp.” He’d learned not to let anyone else have a look at the papers first. They tended to disorder the pages, and the Captain had strong opinions on that topic.

  Captain Ramos snatched them from his hand and retreated to her desk, worryingly like a coyote that had just made off with a particularly nice haunch. Simms inspected his hand but yes, all of his fingers were still there, though with the addition of a few paper cuts. He brought his attention back to the little orrery, twiddling with another little switch that seemed to do nothing at all, and turned to go.

  “Simms.”

  He knew that tone. He stopped, froze in place actually, and glanced over his shoulder.

  “Tell me, does this man look familiar?” Captain Ramos turned toward him, holding up one of the papers. Half of it was a set of advertisements: a butcher shop headlining its fantastic sausages, three lawyers, a doctor claiming he could cure warts of all sorts, and a rather large and gaudy ad for an astrology society of all things. The other half of the page was far more interesting—MAN FOUND MURDERED NEAR BUTCHER SHOP—some irreverent part of Simms wondered if he’d been going for sausages—and a sketch of a vaguely familiar face.

  An instant later, recognition hit. Right. He’d last seen that face as the little bastard scrabbled at his head, during the train robbery. Only for all the residual humiliation, Simms didn’t particularly like the thought that he’d ended up dead quite that quickly. “It wasn’t anything we did, was it? He took a pretty heavy fall…”

  “Not unless he fell on a bullet.” Captain Ramos glanced at the paper. “Oh, excuse me. Three of them.” She shook her head. “Yet somehow, I find this juxtaposition of events rather…tantalizing. What might our flighty friend, one Levi Smith, have been up to, to get himself so spectacularly killed?”

  Simms suppressed a groan. “Probably wouldn’t give his wallet over to a thief.”

  “You have no imagination, Simms.” She slapped the paper shut. “It might explain some of the odder things in that little notebook I took from his trunk. And who knows where that might lead us?”

  He sighed, though that thought did stir a bit of interest; he wasn’t an entirely incurious man. “Denver or Salt Lake?”

  Captain Ramos held up the paper: The Tribune.

  “That’ll be half a day away—”

  “Best get going now, then. We can take the small rail car.” She waved him off. “Go give your daughter a kiss.”

  Simms gritted his teeth, hand tightening around the little tin orrery until it let out a warning plink. Well, perhaps Dolly would take it better if she got a toy out of the deal.

  There was an unpleasant smell in the Grand Duchy of Salt Lake’s main city: earthy, thick, and faintly fishy. Something to do with the gathering of cold weather and the proximity to the Great Salt Lake, Simms had been told. He only knew it made him wish he could invent an entirely new way of breathing that did not involve either smelling or tasting the air. Despite the brilliant, cloudless blue sky overhead, the world felt quite gray between the smell and the mostly unadorned concrete and stone buildings that lined the street.

  Looking at the apartment building—five narrow stories squeezed between a set of offices and a rather questionable hotel—he also found himself wishing he hadn’t turned his nose up at the church, either. Captain Ramos had given him the choice of looking through church records or hunting around for the dead man’s apartment. He’d felt as if the massive square building of gray stone that housed the main temple of Salt Lake had been looking on him with severe disapproval, and the sensation had only been intensified by the rather stern angel that sat over the large but unadorned doors, holding his trumpet like a machete. This building, however, seemed to be giving him the eye as well, but it was far more calculating and seemed to want to know how much money he had in his wallet, and if he had any gold dental work besides.

  Well, he had a pistol hidden in his buckskin jacket, a machete worn much more openly (he was presumed to be a frontiersman by most curious passersby), and knuckles crossed and recrossed with white scars from fights of all sorts. He shook off the oppressive atmosphere as best he could, hooked his thumbs in his belt, and strolled across the unusually wide street, so unlike those of Denver, to walk boldly up the steps.

  Up another set of steps. And another. Once in the building, the wallpaper of the narrow wooden stairway was peeling and nearly as gray as the day outside. The smell also wasn’t all that different from the heavy atmosphere outside, tobacco smoke and cabbage and something unpleasantly fishy all mixed together. Had it been possible to hold his breath for four flights of stairs, Simms would have. At each landing he checked the slip of paper from his pocket, but no, still not the proper flat.

  The correct door, when finally reached, was not altogether promising. It was sagging, cracked, and the color of oatmeal, but far more worrying was all the noise emanating from behind it. The sound of shouting was quite clear through the paper-thin walls, only the words blurred out. Something smashed against a wall.

  Simms, his hand raised to knock, winced and seriously considered leaving the way he’d come. Unfortunately the Captain would expect answers from this little foray. He waited for a lull in the shouting and quickly knocked.

  Silence fell. A moment later the door was yanked open by a short, plump woman with straggly gray hair, dressed in a rather shapeless calico smock. Over her shoulder, Simms saw two young women in equally unflattering dresses, both brunette, one nursing a black eye and the other rubbing at her nose with the back of her hand.

  He carefully pasted a polite smile on his face. “Good day, are you the mistress of this house?”

  She inspected him through narrowed eyes and scraped a tangle of hair from her face with rough fingers. “I already paid my tithe this month. Tell Elder Jonas I ain’t puttin’ up with his double dippin’ no more.” She made to shut the door.

  Simms hastily used one hand to keep the door open. “I’m not from the church.” While the Grand Duchy of Salt Lake was sovereign territory like all the duchies, this one was a bit of a theocracy, the Grand Duke only enthroned by the good will of the Temple and its Bishops. That was all Simms knew of the matter, and all he wanted to know.

  Another squinting look. “Then what d’ya want?”

  “I’m looking for a friend of mine, actually, a gentleman—”

  She yanked the door back open. “Oy, you’re one of his friends? You tell that bastard he better get back here with a ring for Arabella or I’ll hunt him down m’self, you see if I won’t!” She jerked a thumb of her shoulder at the sniffling girl who, Simms realized, was a bit rounder in the belly than she probably should have been.

  “I’m here because I don’t know where he is!” Simms protested.

  She grabbed him by the sleeve and yanked him forward. There was perhaps something to be said for the occasional quips Captain Ramos said about low centers of gravity, he thought grimly. “All you men are liars an’ thieves. Or what, he owes you money?”

  “I—”

  “He owes us money!” the girl who wasn’t Arabella shouted. “Stole all my washin’ money when he left on Sunday, the bastard!”

  “Liar!” Arabella shouted back. “You spent it yourself on them shoes!”

  At which point the room once again erupted in loud quarreling. Simms grabbed the doorframe to keep the older woman—the mother, if heredity had anything to do with lung size—from dragging him fully into the apartment. Broken crockery crunched under his boot with the one step he was forced to take inside.

  “Ladies!” he shouted as Arabella grabbed up a plate from the table, the woman whom Simms could only assume was her sister advancing on her threateningly. “Ladies! If you please!” The roar of a different voice caused them to pause, at least. “Sunday, you said?”

  “Yeah, Sunday. He ran off when we were at church. Blasphemous, too,” the older woman said.

  Sunday made abs
olutely no sense as a time frame; Levi Smith had been on the train, getting robbed on Sunday evening—the train returning to the Grand Duchy of Salt Lake. Simms dug through his pocket, producing the sketch from the newspaper of the unfortunate Levi and holding it up. “This is the man I’m looking for.”

  The three women peered at it. “Oy,” Arabella said, one hand smoothing over her belly. “Ain’t that the man, got murdered over the other side of the valley?”

  “He ain’t never been here,” the other girl said. “Even if Joseph deserves to get shot too.”

  Arabella’s eyes narrowed, the expression so like that of the woman still holding Simms’s sleeve that he took a step back, dragging her along. “You got that, you must know he’s dead. What’s this really about?”

  What it was really about was, Simms decided, leaving as quickly as possible. He tried to yank his sleeve from the older woman’s hand, and then pried her fingers away when that didn’t work. “You ladies have been very helpful, now carry on.”

  “Oy, what’s all this about?” the older woman shouted.

  Simms ran. A plate crashed into the wall over his head as he clattered down the stairs, firmly holding onto his hat with one hand.

  He met up with Captain Ramos outside the train station. In slightly less fraught territory than normal—and there to perform far less illegal acts than normal—the Captain had elected to get their railcar a berth in the city. The station was a grand but ugly building, half red brick and half concrete blocks probably reused from older buildings, with a large clock face hanging over the door of black unadorned iron. The only decoration was another angel standing over the doorway, trumpet in hand, though Simms found this one far less disapproving than the one guarding the Temple. The best color on the street was provided by passersby, the working class in bright calicoes, the finer sorts in various shades running from burgundy to hunter green. Red hunter jackets seemed to be in fashion for both men and ladies, judging by the numbers.

  “Run into a bit of trouble, Simms?” the Captain asked.

  “What—”

  She reached up and plucked a chip of porcelain from off his hat. “Well that, and you’ve some interesting fresh scuffs on your boots and coat.”

  He snorted. “I checked the man’s shipping address. It was home to a quarrelsome family, and definitely not one that knew him.”

  “Also one with bad aim, it would seem.”

  Simms frowned. “You don’t sound at all surprised.”

  “I’m afraid not, Simms. You put yourself in harm’s way for no reason at all, it seems. I talked my way into Temple records, and our man doesn’t exist.”

  “Doesn’t exist.”

  “Never was born, never died, had no parents or cousins,” she said firmly. “Yet if memory serves, from the accent he had when he was shouting at you, he was either born here or has lived here since he learned to talk.”

  Simms let out a low whistle. “So we’re chasing after a ghost that got himself murdered in front of a butcher shop. Something a bit twisted about that.” Had they been anywhere else, that would mean very little; records, particularly for the working class, were normally quite sparse if they even existed at all. But the Grand Duchy of Salt Lake had a peculiar obsession with genealogy that Simms didn’t quite understand, though he knew it had something to do with the theocratic side of the government. Which was precisely why he also did not want to know.

  “And this is a duchy whose only ghosts are intentional,” Captain Ramos said.

  Which could mean only a few things, first of which was an agent of the Grand Duke or the Temple. Funny, the man hadn’t felt so weighty when he’d been hanging on Simms’s shoulders and screeching invective. Torn between excitement and resignation, he turned to head down the street.

  “Where are you going, Mr. Simms?” the Captain inquired.

  Simms looked over his shoulder at her. “You’ll be wanting to go to the Grand Duchy of Denver next. Well and good, but I’m buying some sweets for Dolly first since I’ll be missing another day with her.” And the saltwater taffy was, in his opinion, no replacement for a father, but a worthy apology nonetheless.

  The Grand Duchy of Denver proved more fruitful in providing a useful address for their ghost. The crate he’d shipped on the train had to come from somewhere, and had to be picked up by someone, since it seemed unlikely he’d just conjured it out of thin air. Simms bluffed their way into the offices of several shipping companies before they found the right one, pretending at different times to be an inspector, a hapless man trying to find where his vengeful wife had shipped his clothes to, and an angry merchant who wanted to know where his bloody merchandise was bloody well now thank you very much. All the while Captain Ramos remained demurely silent as his titular assistant, wearing a hunter green dress that had an unflatteringly high collar and a cut specifically chosen because it was two seasons old.

  Then it was simply a matter of finding a record of a green crate, picked up on a particular day and delivered to the station. Simple being a relative term, in Simms’s opinion, when it came with so many paper cuts.

  That slip of paper led them to another rather shabby apartment building on the outer edge of one of the more industrialized areas of the city. Everything was coated with a fine layer of coal dust, the small puddles of water in the gutters covered with oily scum. Vendors selling tamales and pasties competed for the attention of the factory workers, the lucky ones allowed to shuffle out into the street for their short lunch breaks.

  “Doesn’t look much more promising than the last,” Simms remarked, skeptically eying the gaps in the shingles that faced the building. “I would have thought being a ghost would pay a bit better.”

  “I’m sure it does,” Captain Ramos said, lip curling. “But if you think the work’s any more glamorous than what we do, you’ve been reading far too many trashy novels. They’ll rot your brain, Simms.” She glanced behind them. “Coffee?”

  It was warmer here than it had been in the Grand Duchy of Salt Lake, but a warm drink would be welcome, as would—according to his stomach—something to eat. “Not taking care of this first?”

  She shook her head, glancing down the street toward a sausage vendor with a merry little cart painted red. “I don’t like the smell of that at all.”

  “Wrong bit of the city if you want sausages anyway,” he muttered, her point taken. The vendor didn’t look at all untoward to Simms, but he’d long since learned to trust the Captain’s powers of observation. It meant less mess in the long run.

  They went into the small cafe, which had wobbly tables and cracked plates, but the coffee didn’t actively seem to be taking the enamel from his teeth, and their sandwich cake was just gooey enough to please Simms and utterly disgust the Captain. He ate his way cheerfully through two pieces, paging through the day’s paper as the Captain stared at the window at the passersby. Red riding coats seemed to be quite the rage here, as well.

  As he paged past a spectacularly yellow piece of journalism about the new ambassador from the Grand Duchy of New York, a large advertisement caught his eye—another black bordered monstrosity from the astrology society, very like the one he’d seen in the Tribune. “Is astrology making a comeback?” he asked.

  The Captain snorted. “I don’t think we’ve ever been fortunate enough for it to have gone away.”

  “Apparently Saturn is on the rise,” he observed, and turned to the next page to read about a banking scandal of some sort. Not much of a scandal, in his opinion, if no one had ended up caught in an office in only their knickers.

  “Utter nonsense,” the Captain opined, though it felt more like form than anything. She continued to stare out the window, cup of coffee untouched at her elbow and, to Simms’s eye, developing a disturbing skin of greasy scum.

  Three pages from the end of the paper, the Captain demanded his attention by the simple expedient of yanking the newspaper from his hands and folding it up. Simms sighed but didn’t protest otherwise. It could have been
far worse. “Satisfied?”

  “Very. The sausage vendor is definitely on the take. As is that gentleman pretending to sell pencils in front of the building. He’s the most pathetic excuse for a blind man I’ve ever witnessed.”

  “Oh?”

  “He does keep turning his head to watch the ladies go by.” She stood.

  “Right.” Simms rose to his feet as well. “That’s it, then?” He very well knew it wasn’t.

  “We’ll go in from the side, I think.”

  Could be worse, he reflected quietly. The Captain had an affinity for sewers that he found utterly distressing.

  They walked down a block together, Simms with his collar turned up against the cold, sticking with the steady flow of scarlet riding coats that headed toward the local train station. Just past a shop selling parasols and paper fans, they cut into an alleyway heavy with the cloying scent of urine and piles of refuse. Rather than continue on to the next true street, they turned up another alley that ran parallel, skirting a man with a large shaggy dog and an elderly person with a hunched back and no discernible gender pushing a wide cart filled with junk.

  Nearly at the back of their target building, Simms stubbed his toe on what turned out to be someone’s leg covered with newspapers.

  “Oy!”

  “Sorry,” he apologized hastily, and dug out a handful of coins that he dropped in the vicinity of the man’s lap. It proved a good enough distraction that he didn’t protest further.

  The Captain tried the rear door of the building, a heavy wooden affair covered with peeling gray paint. She rattled the knob, and subsequently wiped a dusting of rust off on her skirts. “Could try to pick it, I suppose, but I don’t think the mechanism’s been turned in the last decade.”

  Simms looked it over dubiously. “Breaking it down would make a good deal of noise.”

  “And some of the cracking might come from your shoulder. No, Simms, I think the fire escape is in order.”

  He looked up at the thin construction of rusted struts and grimaced. “Depends on what you mean by ‘in order.’”