Barlow let it drop. “You’ve got a mighty sharp eye for details, Mr. McCool. Better than most coppers.”
Liam shrugged. “Comes in handy sometimes.”
“I expect,” Barlow said drily. He looked around the room. “Well, young McCool, tell me what else your cracksman’s eye caught, maybe you can help me lay my hands on this villain.
Liam looked slowly around the room, registering the changes.
“I see you found the bullet. I might as well tell you it was me that gave Maggie the gun it was fired out of, a nickel-plated Webley Bulldog in .45 caliber.”
“Was it you notched the bullets?”
“You don’t suppose she knew how, do you? I expect she went for the gun when he tried to go further than she wanted him to. Then he managed to turn it around on her when they wrestled for it. The bastard probably took a shine to that nice nickel finish and just dropped it in his pocket. But I’ll tell you one thing—he had to be plenty strong to beat Maggie wrestling. When she was mad she could coldcock a mule if she took a notion to.”
Barlow nodded. “I was figuring he had some weight on him from the depth of his footprints. Small feet, wearing those pointy-toed opera shoes, but going by the average height to-distance-between-footprints ratio he shouldn’t be any shorter than you. For a man of normal height to make that deep a print he must be carrying some heft around on those little tootsies. You notice anything else?”
Liam hesitated: “You’d find it sooner or later, but you might as well know about it now.”
He walked over to where he’d looked under the carpet the night before, knelt down and turned the rug back again. Then he took up the floorboard and gestured to the empty Mason Jars.
“When the Panic started in ’73 Maggie lost every penny she had in the Fourth National crash—that’s probably why she ended up working for you people. Anyway, this is how she did her banking after that.”
Barlow squatted down next to Liam and examined the cache minutely. “Looks like our friend made a withdrawal before he left. Practical fellow, this murderer—waste not, want not.”
Liam gave him a hard little smile: “I’m just hoping he hung onto something that I’ll recognize when I run into him; I expect he did—somebody that greedy probably still has his first dime.” He stood up, dusted off his knees and looked around the room. “That’s about it as far as I know,” he added. “Except maybe the tickets, I didn’t check that before.”
He went over to Maggie’s desk and pulled open the middle drawer. He searched carefully, examining envelopes and papers tied up with lengths of ribbon, finally running out of patience and turning the contents out onto the desktop so he could rummage freely. At last he came up with a brown paper envelope that had “R. R./Frisco” written across it in bold letters. Its ribbon had been removed and stuffed inside, but otherwise it was empty.
“Damnation,” Liam muttered. “Besides my pistol and our savings that thieving skunk took the tickets Maggie got us for the Trans-Little Russia Railroad to San Francisco. First class, I guess that’ll be a pretty penny when he asks for a refund.”
“Anything else?” Barlow was peering at him expectantly, as if he were waiting for Liam to notice something he’d missed.
“Wait a minute …” Liam pulled out one drawer after another and searched through them feverishly, irritated that he’d forgotten something that important. Finally he gave up and slammed the drawers back into the desk, glaring at Barlow as if all this misery were his fault.
“Her diary,” Liam said. “Maggie wouldn’t even let me touch it, but she’d always say that one day it might be the saving of us. Now what in the name of the Devil himself did that murdering swine want with Maggie’s diary?”
Shaking his head angrily Liam turned and headed for the door.
“Hang on a minute,” Barlow called after him.
“What?” Liam was tired of being careful with the old pest. “I haven’t got time to stand around holding hands, I need to get my life moving again.”
“I just wanted to ask what you know about Miss O’Shea’s boarders. Bound to be more than I do.”
Liam rolled his eyes but turned back. He pointed overhead. “Directly upstairs, that’s Arthur Morrison, the accountant at Henderson Anthracite. He’s a milksop, wouldn’t say boo to a goose, let alone do murder. The front rooms on this floor, that’s the chief engineer at Henderson’s, Hiram Kreutzer. He’s waiting for his wife to bring the kiddies so they can buy a house. In between times he’s practicing for sainthood except for the occasional snort of gin, so I’d count him out. The upstairs front now, that’s Lukas—looks like the Missing Link, talks like a professor and dresses like a fashion plate. But if you want hard facts …” Liam shrugged: “People know about as much about Lukas as they do about the Grand Cham of Tartary. Last thing Maggie said about him was he was off to New York … I think she said he was interviewing somebody for some big book he’s writing. As far as I know, he was supposed to be back next week …” He spread his hands: “That’s all.”
Barlow was plunged into thought, eyes narrowed and lips working as if he were chewing on a persimmon. Finally he nodded.
“What would you say if I told you it looks like this Lukas is gone for good?”
“What do you mean, gone?”
“I mean scrammed, cleared out, absquatulated.”
Liam was taken aback. “He took everything with him?”
“I haven’t had time yet to go through it with a finetooth comb, but if he left anything behind the mice must have carried it off.”
“That’s too many for me,” Liam said, “I’m pretty sure Maggie didn’t know anything about him leaving.”
Barlow shrugged. “No telling just when it happened, but it had to be either him or somebody else that got his stuff together, so it must have been when Miss O’Shea wasn’t around.”
“She goes … she went around every morning with the cook, shopping for stuff for dinner and the next day’s breakfast, I guess it could have been then—Morrison and Kreutzer would both be out of the house at work. But why would Lukas have cleared out like that unless …?”
Barlow nodded. “… it was him that killed her. It’s a possibility.”
Liam’s impatience had vanished, replaced by a kind of hungry, predatory focus intense enough to make Barlow glad he wasn’t the prey.
“OK if I have a look?”
“Why not? Come on, I’ll keep you company.”
The door to Lukas’ suite was standing open and Liam could see from the hall that the place had been stripped. Still, you never knew. He and Barlow entered and started turning the place upside-down: mattress picked up, pictures lifted off their hooks, sofa pillows thrown on the floor, rugs rolled up and the floorboards tapped for hiding places, closets opened and scoured, wardrobes pulled away from the wall; Barlow even stuck his arm up the chimney and got nothing more for his pains than a sleeve-full of soot.
Liam stood there looking around the room for a moment, then saw where Barlow had pulled all the drawers out of a big bureau and grinned:
“You’d make a poor sort of thief,” he said, pulling the drawers out the rest of the way, turning them upside down and stacking them on the floor. Then, as he started the right-hand set of drawers, he hit pay-dirt:
“Well, well, well,” he muttered. A big white envelope was held against the bottom of the drawer with sticking-plaster and Liam ripped it free impatiently. The first thing he came up with made him sit down on the bed as if the wind had been knocked out of him. It was a photograph taken at the Centennial Exposition in Philly, a picture of Maggie and Lukas all lovey-dovey and grinning at the camera like a couple of idiots. Liam stared at it with such a stricken expression that Barlow left him alone for a moment or two.
Finally he pulled himself together, handed the picture to Barlow and turned the envelope upside down so that the contents fell out onto the mattress. Some of them seemed to be love letters from Maggie to Lukas, and these Liam pushed away to one side. The
only remaining item was a pamphlet with a pink cover printed in Cyrillic letters: Динамит—Лекарство OT от Капитализма [Dinamit—Lekarstvo ot Kapitalizma]. Underneath the Cyrillic words were English ones: “Tipografia of The People’s Will. Springfield, Illinois Guberniia, 1876.” Barlow peered at it over Liam’s shoulder:
“Looks like Russian,” he said. “Can you read that?”
Liam nodded and started to answer, then caught himself and stared at Barlow with a quirky little smile.
“Whoa, old man, not so fast!”
Barlow frowned: “What’s your game, McCool?”
“No game, just time for a little quid pro quo.”
“Uh huh. And what would that be?”
“You tell me everything Pilkington said when he briefed you on coming down to Henderson’s Patch, and I mean everything. Treat me square and I’ll tell you what the pamphlet’s about. Otherwise you can wait till you get back to Washington and give it to one of the DPS bright boys.”
Barlow pursed his lips and stared at Liam as he chewed on that; after several long moments Liam fancied he could about hear the gears grinding in the old boy’s bean.
Liam finally had to laugh. “I knew a fellow once could hypnotize chickens putting his finger on their beak,” he said. “They looked just about like you do now when he got finished with them.”
Barlow snorted irritably. “Sure I’ll tell you. It’s no big secret—he said your job’s done here now. Thanks to you we’re ready to put the collar on the lads that mean to blow up the prison yard Monday. Your orders are to check in with McPherson in Pottsville and then report back to Pilkington HQ on Union Square. And that’s supposed to happen toot sweet, no dilly-dallying.”
“That’s it? That’s everything?” Liam’s look was as black as a thundercloud. “I’m supposed to ‘report to headquarters’?”
Barlow seemed a bit taken aback. “What’s the problem with that? That’s what he said.”
“I’ll tell you what the problem is! Old Pilkington told me at the beginning that when this job was done, we were quits. He’d tell the New York cops to tear up their papers on me and I was free as a bird.”
Barlow spread his hands. “I don’t know anything about that. All I know is what he told me: you check in with McPherson, then you report back to HQ.”
“And what about my Gran? Pilkington sicced the coppers on her for running a policy bank, then he said they’d hold up the arrest warrant till I had done this one little job for him. If I did it right, he said, he’d make sure the court voided it. What about that then, are they still hanging a sword over my grandma’s head?”
Barlow shook his head helplessly. “Like I said, all I know is what he told me.”
“Damn that old twister anyway! We had a deal.”
Liam turned away abruptly and headed for the door.
“Hold on!” Barlow said sharply. “We had a deal too, and I did my part.”
Liam made a face, picked up the pamphlet and read aloud: “‘Dynamite—The Cure for Capitalism’”
Barlow was riveted. “You don’t say?”
Liam flipped the booklet open at random and translated out loud: “Death to the bourgeois! Always, wherever he may be, he will be overtaken by an anarchist’s bomb or bullet.” He snorted and threw the pamphlet aside, on top of the love letters. “What a pack of morons! Sounds like Stanton’s sermonizing about national security turned inside out, you people and these evil crackpots deserve each other.”
He threw the pamphlet back on the bed, spun on his heel and headed out the door.
“Hey!” yelled Barlow. “Where do you think you’re going?”
His only answer was the sound of Liam’s heels clattering down the stairs.
Chapter Six
As he stepped outside and closed Maggie’s front door behind him Liam stopped short, struck by the finality of the moment. For weeks he had been tying himself into knots trying to figure out how to get free of the mess he was tangled in thanks to Pilkington holding his Gran hostage—the whole “big-city-cracksman-on-the-run” charade he’d been performing to keep the Molly Magees sweet; the dynamitings; the constant, sickening danger of being forced to commit murder in spite of himself; the stewing misery of his companions, angry men stuffed down a mine like sardines in a can; the endlessly interlocking consequences of each lie he was forced to tell, with each bit of violence spreading its ripples into infinity until he felt himself drowning in it all, a maelstrom greedy enough to swallow Manhattan.
And now life had simply turned the page.
He stood for a moment soaking up the late afternoon sunshine, closing his eyes and spreading his arms as if to pull the warmth deep into his bones. Then, whistling absent-mindedly, he set out along the dusty road back to the main street of Henderson’s Patch, running through the information he had gathered on his own and with Barlow’s help. He smiled wryly at the thought of the grizzled copper with his big beak and his little-old-man specs—not so much Pickwick, after all, maybe the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. If that was how Barlow figured in Liam’s story, some kind of Herald, then Providence hadn’t lost its irritating sense of humor.
He turned the corner onto the main drag and picked up his step a little, eager now to get to Maloney’s and settle things with Boylan. It was good he’d had his moment of meditation back there, because once he sat down across the table from the Grand Chieftan of the Shamrocks’ local lodge and looked into his cruel little pig eyes, he would have to work hard to keep his wits about him.
“Ahoy, McCool!”
The shout broke into Liam’s reverie and he stopped short: it was Fergus Dineen, his companion from last night’s adventure, coming towards him at a brisk trot, his thin, sharp-featured face crinkled with anxiety.
“Ah, Liam, I’m that glad to see you!”
Liam grinned ironically. “Well now, will wonders never cease? I would have sworn you’d legged it to Outer Mongolia by now.” And then, relenting at Fergus’ crestfallen look: “What’s up then, is it trouble?”
Fergus grinned uneasily, shifting back and forth like a banty rooster on a hot rock. “Sure, I’m sorry Liam, but it’s them fookin’ Acmes as turns me blood to water. I’ve fought the Limey landlords’ bullyboys with naught but a spade and a shillelagh and held me own. But them metal things ain’t natural and I’m thinking it’s the Devil himself as put them here to spite us!” He shuddered at the memory and then forced himself back to the moment. “As for trouble, there’ll be plenty if we don’t get down to Maloney’s sharpish—himself’s raising hell wondering where you’ve got to.”
“That’s a laugh,” Liam said with an answering grin, “seeing as how I’d bet it was Himself sicced the C & I Inspector on me. Come on, then, I wouldn’t want Boylan to piss himself fretting.”
He started walking again, briskly, Fergus half trotting to keep up.
“I wouldn’t be tweaking his nose if I was you,” Fergus said, “the hangings are only five days away now, and he’s wound tight as a fiddle string. I know he’ll be wanting a report on how the work in Pottsville is going.”
“Then he shall have it,” Liam said with a bland smile.
“And another thing,” Fergus said, his voice plunging to a conspiratorial whisper despite the fact that the nearest listeners were a couple of kids rolling a hoop with a stick a block away, “he’s heard a rumor that McPherson’s in Pottsville!”
Liam threw him a sharp look. “What? The Pilkington detective?”
Fergus spat angrily into the road: “Pilkington stool pigeon, more like. I knew that shite-pot when he was the Boss’ fair-haired boy.”
Nobody in Henderson’s Patch had spoken openly about the Great Detective throughout the time he’d been here, and Liam was having to struggle to keep from showing his interest:
“You don’t say, now? You knew him right up to the end?”
“Right to the bitter end, trials and all.” He dropped his voice again, looking around to make sure nobody could he
ar: “And who was it then, was saying to the Boss from the very first that Mr. Music-Hall Irish was all blather and blarney and blindfolding the Devil?”
Liam gave that a small grin. “I don’t imagine Mr. Boylan welcomed your advice.”
“He did, like hell.” Fergus snorted disgustedly: “McPherson sucked up to him from the word go, and it must be said our Grand Chieftain likes to hear a flattering word. So there’s the Great Sleuth McPherson leading us out on raids and punishments with the Boss’ blessings, making the Mollie Magees the terror of the coalfields, and all the time narking to the owners.” He shook his head bitterly. “There’s no villain so low as an informer, and no informer so vile as one that narks on fellow Irishmen to Mr. Franklin B. Gowen—that whey-faced son of a bitch isn’t just a bloodsucking slave-driver, he’s a damned Ulsterman born and bred!”
Liam just shook his head and looked pained, for once at a loss for words. Words other than “informer,” anyhow, that one twisting in his guts like a poisoned dagger. Fergus, happy to have the stage, continued with furious sarcasm:
“You wasn’t here then, but that narking piece of shite actually climbed up on the stand and testified against us at the trials, stood there smirking like a good little boy while they sentenced one after the other of us to death. I tell you this: when they go to hang the first ten next Thursday, every single snapped neck and weeping mother will be down to Pilkington’s hoor, Mr. Seamus McStoolie.”
The story seemed to be getting to Liam. He cleared his throat hard and said: “That’s a heavy burden …”
But Fergus was off again: “And the hell of it is, McPherson wasn’t even worth two cents as a mate. I’ve read all them eejit tales in the papers as how he was always standing the rounds in Maloneys, singing songs and dancing a jig at the drop of a hat, but the truth is that son of a bitch was a skinflint and a tightwad that could squeeze a penny till it shit ha’penny stamps! And God forbid you might be wanting a kind word and a pat on the shoulder and come asking that swine to be a comrade. Most like he’d spit on your shoes—that young fella’s eye was always on the main chance, and his greatest and tenderest care was for one thing and one thing only: onwards and upwards for darling Seamus McPherson. And would you believe it?” He bent closer to Liam, whispering again: “Word’s come to the Boss from the Chapter in Pottsville: somebody’s actually seen the dirty squealer there, not ten miles from where we’re standing!”
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