He slapped Bertie on the shoulder, grabbed his bag and melted way into the night.
Chapter Two
Liam McCool trotted briskly along the forest path listening to the monotonous screeching of the katydids, watching the yellow streaks of the thumb-sized lightning bugs that flitted here and there, smelling that cloying flowery smell that always seemed to come out at night here in the sticks and thinking that Central Park was all the Nature anybody really needed. Plenty of leaves, birds, noisy bugs like those pests sawing away in the bushes there—just the thing if you were in the mood for it.
Liam cursed as one of the big lightning bugs zipped past his ear. Back in the city everything was a decent, normal size, or at least it had been when he left. Not like those lightning bugs and the rest of the freakish creatures he’d started seeing around here a while back. He dodged another grotesque bug and shuddered in spite of himself.
People were saying the bizarre fauna had started after Stanton strung up the leaders of the Iroquois uprising, that it was all down to Indian “medicine.” Crazy? A really bad thought, anyway—there were a lot of damned mad Indians around since Stanton picked up where Andrew Jackson’s Indian Expulsion had left off …
Liam jacked up the pace of his jog, desperate to leave Nature behind and get indoors, where he could at least imagine city life. True, he did have a pal or two back home who insisted on dragging him out to the Park to make him play Walden, but when they finally got fed up with the bugs and greenery, he could escape back out to Fifth Avenue, see crowds of people, read a newspaper with today’s news (here in Henderson’s Patch a week old was a new paper), buy himself a beer and a sausage and generally live in 1877 instead of the Middle Ages. Liam had grown up in Five Points, in a Mulberry Bend tenement, and they had all the Nature you could use there only mostly the human kind and enough of that to keep m. de Balzac busy scribbling novels till his hand fell off.
Liam chuckled. He was really sick of Henderson’s Patch and pleased as Punch to be leaving. He might as well have been on the moon during these past months as an unwilling snoop for the Pilkington Agency. The only links to the outside had been the private wire at Boylan’s saloon and the line that Henderson’s Anthracite leased on the Government Wire, so he’d had to go twenty miles to Pottsville if he wanted to send a telegram back to the city. Not that there was much point in it most of the time, since Secretary Stanton’s Eyes read everything on all the wires everywhere and you couldn’t say “boo!” on one of them without expecting a knock on your door later on.
A series of thunderous hoots sounded in the distance—the steam whistle at Henderson Anthracite’s pit-head calling out the volunteer fire department. Liam smiled wryly. There’d be hell to pay over blowing up Henderson’s house, by tomorrow the town would be crawling with Coal & Iron bluecoats like when you kick an anthill. And if the coppers got their hooks into him they’d never believe he’d nearly talked himself blue in the face to keep the Lodge from blowing up Henderson himself along with his house. He’d had to work his jaw like Moody and Sankey preaching hellfire before Boylan agreed to play it smart instead, to warn Henderson that the Mollies had his measure instead of killing him.
And then there was that damned Acme. Liam rolled his eyes just thinking about that miserable hunk of boiler plate. He had seen at a glance it was one of the special calorium-fuelled ones with all the works inside instead of the standard model with the firebox on its back. The new ones could go forever without being refuelled, all you had to do was give them water for steam every eight hours. The trouble was, no matter how desperately everybody else tried to discover it, only the Brits had hit on the secret for refining calorium from pitchblende—which meant that Royce could charge what he liked for his “Imperial” Acmes. So far only the Government in Washington was allowed to buy calorium, which meant he’d just blown up one of the Department of Public Safety’s most expensive toys and they’d be way madder about that than if he’d murdered somebody.
There was a sudden racket of something big thudding through the woods nearby and Liam skidded to a halt like a Steamer with its brakes jammed, dropping to his knees and listening with taut concentration. There’d been a lot of talk lately—hushed talk, looking-over-your-shoulder talk—about strange animals roaming at night, stuff right out of the Delaware Indian legends. Like he’d heard the other day from Paddy Delahanty, a miner whose wife went batty after seeing an owl with a thirty-foot wingspan carrying off a bleating sheep. And truth to tell, the lightning bugs and those pesky katytids were just as bad as the big critters—he’d seen a katydid in the bushes at Maggie’s the other day damn near as big as a nickel stogie, not to mention which, Maggie’s lodger Kreutzer had said they’d taken to stinging now. Who ever heard of stinging grasshoppers?
Damn this place, anyhow! At night in the city you might run into a pack of boozed-up Hudson Dusters looking for trouble, or a hold-up man with a twitchy finger, or maybe even a couple of Eyes trolling the saloons for seditious talk—all bad enough, sure, but he’d rather take his chances with them any day than with some ridiculous yokel nightmare of giant birds and bugs. And ye gods, what was that smell? Liam wrinkled his nose and fought down the urge to vomit. Whatever was making all that noise gave off a stink like the cells in the Tombs: puke and slop buckets, plus something worse—like a whiff of the ripe dead bodies lying under the sun at Gettysburg.
He flattened himself out on the ground, peering into the dark shadows until he caught a glimpse of a big indistinct shape pushing its way through the brush. A moment later it emerged into a dappled patch of moonlight and Liam’s breath caught in his throat: a wolf, but like no wolf he’d ever seen—the size of a brewery horse, panting and looking around as if for him, personally, its eyes glowing like coals, its tongue lolling out and enough teeth for a whole pack of ordinary wolves glinting in the moonlight.
“Blessed Mother!” he murmured involuntarily and the thing looked sharply in the direction of his hiding place. Slowly, gingerly, Liam reached for his Colt (thinking simultaneously that he might as well throw acorns at the beast), when suddenly another sound swelled through the night and seized the attention of man and wolf-thing alike:
From somewhere overhead, growing steadily until it made Liam’s very bones thrum in sympathy, came the sound of a titanic, angry bee. Liam closed his eyes and shook his head: this was clearly a night he should have stayed home in bed, reading Count Tolstoy’s new book. Somewhere not far away, and coming fast, was one of the Secret Service’s Black Deltas—huge, rigid, delta-shaped hydrogen balloons powered by six aerial screws, or propellers, each one driven by its own, silenced Corliss aerial steam engine.
Liam had heard that the Secret Service now had special telescopes for seeing at night, and that worried him even more, since he happened to know that each of the Black Deltas had gun ports for six steam-driven Gatling guns, capable of firing 1,100 rounds of .45-70 ammo per minute. Liam had fired one of the old hand-cranked ones back in the War and had been appalled to see it chop through a 300-year-old oak tree like a knife through a hunk of cheese. He squinched his eyes as tight shut as he could and put his hands over his head, praying. The wolf-thing, on the other hand, spooked suddenly and ran off in another direction, crashing through the brush like a herd of cattle.
Suddenly there was a sparking zzzzzt! from somewhere overhead and the forest lit up as bright as day as a monstrous carbon-arc lamp started playing back and forth across the tops of the trees and a stentorian military voice shouted through a megaphone:
“You, there, below! Halt where you are! I say again, HALT OR WE’LL SHOOT!”
Instantly, without waiting for a response, the Black Delta cut loose with a deafening stream of bullets, glowing incendiary rounds that created a sort of hellish umbilical cord between the Delta and the ground below. Liam prayed without pausing, every prayer he could remember from Sunday grace through the Lord’s Prayer to the Rosary and back again. Finally, after what seemed like days, the firing ceased, the illuminated squ
ares of the gun ports closed—making the Delta invisible again—and then with a throbbing hum the airship veered off to the east and disappeared.
They must have called that thing in from the Secret Service station in Pottsville, Liam thought inconsequentially. He raised himself to a sitting position very gingerly, as if he were made of glass and might break if he moved too fast. The moonlight was glinting off a carpet of little golden tubes on the forest floor around him, and Liam leaned forward to pick one up: a .45-70 cartridge case, they must have fired thousands of them. Somehow that little piece of reality brought Liam to his feet.
“Bad ’cess to ye, Mr. Stanton, and to all your dirty thugs,” Liam muttered, looking skywards. Then he took off loping again towards Maggie’s house. It wasn’t far now, and—winded and mind-blasted as he was—he couldn’t help smiling as he thought of her. If his Ma had still been alive he didn’t know if he could have taken Maggie home to meet her, but then his Ma—who’d been governess to a milord’s kiddies—wouldn’t have been too happy with what he’d made of himself either. Liam McCool, King of the Silk-Stocking Cracksmen? No, he didn’t think so, even though in his day he’d been the best of the best, and he was still a lot prouder of that than of what they’d turned him into by forcing him onto the right side of the law.
Almost to Maggie’s now. Liam slowed to a walk, reaching into his pocket for a comb that he ran through the bushy moustache he’d been affecting since he started this job, that and the long hair he wore tied into a pigtail with a strip of rawhide. Maggie had never seen him any other way and he couldn’t wait till they got to Philly and a barber shop where he could lose the lip-shrubbery and shorten his hair enough so his pals wouldn’t give him the horselaugh when they saw him.
Elbowing his way through the thick underbrush that screened Maggie’s backyard from prying eyes, he suddenly came to a halt. Something was very wrong. By this point he should have been seeing light through the bushes; on this night of all nights Maggie should have had every light in her private quarters lit to welcome him. A sense of foreboding knotted his stomach as he stepped forward into the yard: there was plenty of moonlight, but the house itself was as dark and silent as a tomb.
Liam pushed out into the yard and ran across it and up the back stairs, hoping against hope that Maggie was just asleep, worn out by all the preparations for their trip. He knocked, hoping to hear her joyous welcome from somewhere inside, but instead the door swung inwards. Liam shook his head slowly, trying to deny the evidence of his eyes—Maggie always kept her doors locked tight, ever since a break-in months ago.
He forced himself to push the door the rest of the way open and entered, his steps dragging. The hallway outside Maggie’s quarters was as dark as the inside of a coal scuttle, and he had to fumble back and forth on the wall before he could find the gas jet and strike a match to see where he was going.
There. At the end of the hall the door between Maggie’s quarters and her boarders’ part of the house was locked tight as always and doubly secured by a heavy bolt. But it was the door on his left, the one that led into Maggie’s parlor, that made Liam’s heart drop into his shoes: on the jamb and on the doorknob next to it were smears of blood, and on the hall floor there was half a bloody footprint, its sole in the hallway and the heel-print concealed behind the closed door.
Chapter Three
Grudgingly, almost against his will, Liam turned to see what the gaslight had revealed in the hall behind him: the bloody footprint coming out of Maggie’s parlor was joined by a string of others, less and less clearly marked, heading towards the outdoors.
Automatically he began his “photography” routine, a retentive brain and a safe-cracker’s eye for useful details recording everything he saw. The prints had been made by a man with small feet, hurrying in pointy-toed dress shoes and moving fast enough to leave scuff marks. Maggie’s house was well off the beaten path and on a Saturday night her lodgers would be in town, so what was he running from? Only one way to find out: Liam gritted his teeth and opened the door, recoiling as the hall filled with the reek of burnt gunpowder and death.
The room was dark and Liam hesitated to turn on the light. You’ll not be bringing her back to life by standing here sucking your thumb, he told himself. Fumbling for another Lucifer, he scratched it on the doorjamb and held it out to the gas jet …
It was as if that little pop! of igniting gas had turned on the sun, making everything in the room unnaturally stark and brilliant as it revealed Maggie lying on her back with her dead eyes staring up at the ceiling, her negligée (the blue one she’d loved so much, the one he’d bought her at the Expo in Philly) pulled down to her waist exposing her breasts, and up to her stomach, exposing her white thighs and the dark patch between them. In the middle of her chest, just under her breasts, was a small, bloody hole in a black halo of burnt powder, a great pool of darkening blood spreading from beneath her across her favorite Turkey carpet.
Liam collapsed to his knees next to her and grabbed her stiffening corpse, holding her tight and rocking back and forth as he ground his teeth and growled deep in his throat with pain. Tears poured down his face, the first he’d shed in a lot of years, since the winter of 1863 before the Draft Riots when he’d seen his mother’s body on a trolley in Bellevue.
“I swear, Maggie,” he grated out, “I swear to you I’ll make whoever did this pay.”
He held her for another moment, willing the tears to stop, then laid her back down gently, tugging at her negligée until it covered her the way she would have wanted it. Then he got to his feet, moving stiffly as though he’d aged a lifetime.
“Who did this?” he muttered as he looked around for clues, making sure that he’d forget nothing he saw when he remembered it later. He’d been a brilliant safe-cracker in his day, and only partly because of little tricks like using the doctor’s stethoscope he’d pinched from Bellevue to listen to the tick of the box’s heart as he moved the dial. The main reason he’d never been caught, until that disastrous favor he’d done for Mike’s Uncle Tolya, was the way he could photograph a room in his mind, visiting the target on some pretext ahead of time and committing it to memory so it would become as familiar as his own bedroom.
“It had to be somebody you knew, didn’t it Mags?” he murmured, looking around for any sign of who her caller had been.
Not Maggie’s boarders, surely. Mousy Arthur Morrison, the head accountant at Henderson Anthracite, would have been swilling whiskey at Maloney’s, getting up the courage to sweet-talk one of Boylan’s waitresses. And Hiram Kreutzer, Henderson’s holy Joe chief engineer, would still be at Mrs. Clark’s restaurant reading one of the Reverend Beecher’s sermons as he ate his pot roast and nipped at the bottle of blue ruin she kept in the cupboard for him.
And Lukas? He was a mystery man sure enough, known only by that one name. But earlier in the day Maggie had said something about him leaving for New York to do research on his book about the coalfields. If it hadn’t been for that, Liam would have been on his scent like a bloodhound. His very appearance made him seem a bit suspicious, like some eccentric out of a play: built like a bull gorilla and ugly as a prizefighter but always dressed in the height of fashion whether he was bending his elbow at Maloney’s or going down the mines “to see the lads at work first hand.”
But even if you had judged the book by its cover and picked Lukas for a Five Points plug-ugly disguised as one of his betters, you knew different the minute he opened his mouth: he had the mellifluous voice of some famous professor, someone used to being listened to attentively.
And Lukas wasn’t just some rough diamond polished smooth, either. Liam had been pals with “Little Adam” Worth, a celebrity among thieves and con men who could pass as a gentleman at the Harvard Club. But to someone with Liam’s uncanny ear for languages, even the Prince of Thieves had an echo of his hard-luck origins behind the Harvard cadences. Not Lukas, though. Liam could tell the man was a swell born and bred. The mystery was where? Liam could catch the for
eign ring to some of his vowels but even he couldn’t be sure of Lukas’ native tongue.
Liam shook his head: it didn’t matter—none of the boarders made sense to him as a murderer. Not without enough hard facts to build a story, anyhow. First, the bullet. It must have gone all the way through Maggie, blowing out a spray of blood as it went—Liam could see the traces on the floor and the furniture behind her and it looked like she had fallen backwards right on the spot. He knelt down again and pulled her up by her left shoulder, far enough to see the size of the hole in her back. Big enough to put his fist in.
He shook his head again and stood up, looking towards Maggie’s bookshelves to see if that was where the slug had ended up. There. Maggie had loved the spunky suffragist writing in Victoria Woodhull’s “Weekly,” and one of her treasured bound volumes had a ragged hole in the spine right in line with where she’d been standing.
Liam crossed to the shelf, pulled out the volume and flipped it open: at the end of a channel with accordioned paper bunched up ahead of it was a big lump of lead. Liam turned it over, seeing from the way it had mushroomed that the head of the bullet had been notched, and from the base—which was still intact—that it had to be a .44 or .45. He put the slug back in the book for whatever bluecoat would show up to investigate; then, with a sick feeling of foreknowledge, he walked over to Maggie’s desk and pulled out the drawer. Sure enough, the pistol was gone, just a few spots of gun oil where it had lain on some papers.
Months ago, when some drunk from Maloney’s had tried to climb into her window, Liam had bought her a pistol to ease her mind. It was short-barreled and easy to handle, nickel-plated to make it look more lady-like but with enough punch to knock down a buffalo—a Webley British Bulldog in .45 caliber which he’d made even more lethal by cutting crosses into the slugs. Liam didn’t even have to check his mental photograph to know it wasn’t lying around anywhere, the killer must have pocketed it.
King of the Cracksmen Page 2