King of the Cracksmen

by Dennis O'Flaherty

  “Thank God, you’re here!” Liam gasped, collapsing through the doorway onto the hall carpet as Becky knelt over him, pulling at his bloody jacket sleeve feverishly.

  “You’ve been shot!” she cried.

  “Never mind that,” Liam said, staggering to his feet, “am I in time?”

  She glared at him, speechless with tension and exasperation, then abruptly took his face between her hands and kissed him firmly on the lips. After a moment she let go, her exasperation replaced by a cryptic smile.

  “Come on,” she said, “the Flyer’s about to leave!” And, grabbing Liam’s hand, she dragged the befuddled man along behind her towards the back of the house.

  Washington, D.C. June 28—June 29, 1877

  Chapter Nineteen

  Liam was walking on tiptoe and breathing through his mouth to keep out the stink of old bones, or whatever it was. A dismantled brontosaurus? Something at least that big, the smell was too revolting for anything less. The last time he’d been in this place was back in ’65, fresh out of the Union Army and killing time till the next troop train for New York and a blessed deliverance from the South, from hick towns of all descriptions, and especially from hominy grits—which could surely have defeated the Yanks without any outside help given another year or so of company cooks serving the things when rations were short.

  He’d spent the night before celebrating his discharge drinking white lightning in every pot-house in Blacktown, then the whole morning in Willard’s Hotel drinking coffee and eyeballing the respectable women, and then a couple of hours walking around the Mall trying to keep from gagging on the summer cocktail of Potomac River humidity and ripe stinks from the City Canal, until finally he escaped indoors at a red sandstone building with turrets and battlements that looked like it had escaped from his dog-eared old copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

  The Smithsonian Institution, or the Castle as people called it. There had been a fire there not so long before and it still smelled of old smoke. But it was interesting enough, and Liam had decided that they could blow up the rest of the city, starting with all the politicians, but that they’d probably better keep the Smithsonian. And now, a dozen years later, here he was again—only not upstairs, in the daytime, but downstairs in the basement, at night and definitely not as a tourist.

  He stopped abruptly, frozen by the sound of a distant door closing. Five would get you ten that was the Museum’s one night watchman, roused briefly from his slumbers to have a pee … yup, there it was, the faint whispery rustle of the Castle’s luxurious indoor plumbing, and a moment later … another click as another door closed. Probably the old codger had made himself comfortable in some pharaoh’s sarcophagus and Liam could forget about him for the rest of the job. The guarding was of a piece with the locks and the rest of the security apparatus, which Liam was certain could be jimmied by any self-respecting ten-year-old with a bent pin.

  Some contrast to the security out in the streets! Liam and Becky had had their hearts in their throats all the way from the Duchamp estate in Alexandria to the stretch of B Street, NW (the former City Canal) that ran behind the Smithsonian. Becky had been dressed (with some help from the Duchamp girls, one of whom had lost a husband in the Confederate cavalry) in fashionable widow’s weeds and a heavy black veil that hid her famous face. Liam had had to make do with a slightly operatic bandage (decorated with chicken blood by the younger Miss Duchamp) that hid most of the lower part of his face and went nicely with the smoked spectacles he’d picked up in Pottsville. But even with the disguises their uneasiness had mounted steadily from the moment they hit the outskirts of Washington City.

  “I haven’t seen anything like it since the War,” Becky had said as she peered through the curtains of their elegant steam carriage. “They must have a couple of regiments walking foot patrols, and everywhere they don’t have soldiers they have Acmes or Stanton’s Eyes.”

  “They must have heard we were coming,” Liam said with a grin.

  “I wish that were funny,” Becky answered, “but I expect our faces are on various watch lists by now. Willie Pilkington has had my father and me under surveillance for days, and he warned me quite sternly about consorting with a villain like you. If you’ll remember, your arrival at our front door was a bit on the noisy side.”

  She smiled at the memory and then put her veil down. “We’re almost there, have you got everything you need?” Liam nodded and pulled the brim of his Homburg lower. “All right then,” she said, “the driver will slow as soon as I rap on his window, and he’ll pull over behind the Castle as close as he can to the cellar freight entrance. One of our people has left the padlock unlocked but apparently closed, so you should be able to be out of the car and inside the basement before you can say boo! Remember, you have to be ready and waiting by 3 a.m., the steam pantechnicon will only stop for a moment before it goes on to the next stop on the Underground Railroad.”

  Liam had taken her hand and held it tight until the carriage glided to a stop. “See you at three,” he said, and moments later he was making his way cautiously through the graveyard gloom of the Smithsonian’s basement …

  Which must have been designed by some mad troglodyte, with more twists and turns and blind corridors than the tunnel system he’d been in a few hours ago. Thank God he’d had a set of plans to study at Duchamp’s, because without them he’d probably have ended up as one more Smithsonian skeleton: “Late nineteenth-century cracksman, New York metropolitan area.” As it was it made him promise himself twice over that he would never, but never take on another job where he hadn’t had time for his usual preliminary reconnaissance. Now … the storage area was supposed to be at the end of this hallway, across from the boiler rooms.

  And there it was! Liam did a double take and groaned under his breath: and there also were two absolutely massive Chubb locks, recently installed, as the brilliant, shop-fresh brass of the fixtures attested. Just wonderful. Every other door in this endless pile of stone equipped with a lock he could have opened by shaking his finger at it, but this one with enough lockwork to guard the Mint. With a sigh, he reached inside his jacket and got out his picks.

  The one good thing about the Chubbs was that he’d just had a refresher lesson with the ones at Gotham Savings, so this time he could work pretty much by feel, leaving his mind free to roam. Of course, the only bad thing about that was that every time he let it off its tether his mind seemed to roam right back to Becky Fox.

  It wasn’t the thought of Maggie that bothered him; he had nothing but happy memories of his time with Maggie and he knew that Becky respected that and respected Maggie herself. And he wasn’t worried about bringing Maggie’s killer to account either. Even if it wasn’t Lukas—and he’d felt something oddly genuine about what the man had said back in the tunnel—he had a feeling deep down in his guts that the thing would be sorted before this whole mess with Stanton and Pilkington was finished. No, if there was anything bad about throwing in with Becky Fox it was that the usual tidy clarity of his thinking had gotten more than a little discombobulated.

  For instance: what he should be thinking about right now was what on earth these two Chubbs were doing on this one door out of all the others. As far as he knew, there was nothing in here except a lot of old junk from various Indian tribes, both the ones that Andrew Jackson had tossed out of the eastern states and exiled across the Mississippi in the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and the ones that had already been living over there before the Russians set up housekeeping and tried to turn them into slaves. As Becky had said with a touch of angry scorn, now that all our Indians were gone we found ourselves getting sentimental about them and sending American anthropologists into Little Russia to buy souvenirs of the dear old Noble Savages. Just why Liam was recovering this one particular souvenir was something Becky promised to explain once they had the thing in hand, but meanwhile he was left to scratch his head over the great big locks on the pennyante door.

  Or maybe to just let his mind skip sidew
ays onto that kiss back on Becky’s front stoop … Liam stayed there for a good long chunk of time after that, enjoying where he was and thinking about not much else, until he absent-mindedly started patting the door and fumbling around after a third lock, having opened the first two and willing to stay there happily opening locks until he’d squeezed the last drop of juice from Becky’s kiss. Dimwit! He shook himself like a wet dog, dragged his mind back to business and opened the door.

  On the other side of the door was a cavernous storage hall, barely lit by two or three gas jets high up on the wall and filled as far as the eye could see with row upon row of glass-fronted cabinets stuffed with dusty-looking gimcracks. Fortunately, these science birds were nice and orderly, every row had a number, and Liam had the number and the rest of the information to identify what he wanted, so he set out confidently, found his row right away, and—flicking on his pocket electric torch—moved quickly and unerringly to the exhibit he wanted.

  Liam smiled, relieved at having it all go so smoothly, and shone his light on #40312, a buckskin pouch like a small saddle bag, with long fringes of buckskin around the edges and a handsome painted and beaded pattern of zig-zag stripes. The bag was bulging with mysterious lumpy objects and the printed label said: “Medicine Bundle of Crazy Horse, Oglala Sioux chieftan, lost at the Battle of Bol’shoi Rog (U.S.: Little Bighorn). June 17, 1876.”

  Interesting. Liam had read a lot about Crazy Horse, a thinker and a warrior who seemed to be more than the equal of most of the white men he’d been up against. Taken from his village as a youngster by the head of the Tsar’s Okhrana, a Machiavellian Grand Duke who planned to turn him against his own people, Crazy Horse had been sent to the Imperial University in St. Petersburg, where he excelled in languages and modern history. Graduating with the highest honors, Crazy Horse published a book of Byronic poetry in Russian, impregnated the Grand Duke’s wife, fought a duel with the Grand Duke himself (contemptuously firing into the dirt when the Grand Duke missed his shot), and then vanished abruptly, only to turn up again in Little Russia, leading the Sioux against the Russians.

  And the Americans, thought Liam as he worked on the cabinet’s lock. It had raised an almighty stink the year before when Crazy Horse not only beat the cream of the Imperial Russian cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, but also a handpicked detachment of U.S. Cavalry who had been riding with the Russians under the auspices of the U.S. Military Attaché in New Petersburg. Most of them had been killed, but Crazy Horse himself had taken General Custer prisoner, and Custer’s current whereabouts remained a mystery despite repeated search expeditions …

  There! The door of the cabinet swung open and Liam lifted out the bag, turning it over in his hands and examining it curiously. So Crazy Horse lost his bag, so what? Why were Becky and her colleagues in the Freedom Party willing to go to this much trouble to return it to him?

  “Young man!”

  The voice—loud, deep, weirdly resonant yet somehow familiar—almost made Liam jump out of his skin. He spun around on one foot, dropping into a fighting crouch, and then slowly stood upright again, more deeply mystified than ever by the sight in front of him. From somewhere behind him in the shadows, a … creature in a wheelchair had rolled forward into the light. It looked like an Acme of some kind, but heavily modified, the covering plates on its legs and part of its chest removed to expose its works, and the usual unconvincing porcelain doll face skipped altogether in favor of a steel egg with holes for its glowing eyes and an unusual mouth and chin which seemed to be hinged and capable of movement. And speech. The weird, not-quite-natural voice continued its bass-viol thrum:

  “I do hope you’re not planning to steal that, son, I expect Chief Crazy Horse would reckon it insult upon injury to be robbed twice of the same treasure.”

  A little uncertainly, Liam cleared his throat. “I can assure you that’s not my intention! In fact, I’ve been sent here on a mission to recover it for its owner, so you may lay your anxieties to rest, Mr….”

  The automaton fixed its glowing eyes on him and then inclined its head slightly, so that Liam could almost have sworn it was overwhelmed with sadness.

  “You might as well call me Mr. Nobody,” the automaton said in a low rumble that seemed to throb with misery, “—indeed, my so-called friends have done their level best for some years now to make that come true.”

  Something had started bubbling in the back of Liam’s mind as the automaton spoke and with the last few words it suddenly boiled over:

  “Gettysburg!” Liam cried. “I heard you speak at Gettysburg! November, 1863, I had leave because my Gran was sick and I stopped there on the way home to see the new cemetery.”

  The automaton lifted its hands to its face with a clank of metal against metal and groaned hollowly, an eerie sound like an organ’s pedal tone.

  Liam spoke earnestly: “I’ll never forget it, sir. Mr. Everett droned on and on till I thought he’d turned me to stone, like the Medusa. Then you got up and spoke for just a few minutes, and for the first time since I ran down the hill with the 20th Maine and stuck my bayonet in some poor hayseed’s eye it seemed like there might have been some good in all that evil. Thank you, sir, I’ve always wanted to thank you for your speech!”

  Liam stepped forward, the tears filling his eyes in spite of himself, and gently pulled the automaton’s hands away from its face.

  “What have they done to you, Mr. Lincoln? How could this happen?”

  The automaton drew a shuddering breath and shook its head. “The day you saw me at Gettysburg, my boy, I was actually ill with the small pox. I recovered after a while, but the disease left me weak, and when Booth tried to kill me at Ford’s Theatre the shock very nearly did me in.”

  The automaton cocked its head as if it were remembering, and its red eyes glowed in the dim light of the gas jets.

  “I was barely sitting up in bed again when Stanton started haranguing me about declaring a national state of emergency. He swore up and down that the Confederate armies would be marching down Pennsylvania Avenue before the month was out if we didn’t move to suppress all the plotters. I swore right back and argued till I was blue in the face to make him see how important it was to keep our hands clean and observe the law, but Stanton is as stubborn as an ox and I finally ended up in the grip of a brain fever that didn’t leave me for weeks.”

  The Lincoln automaton shook its head despairingly, unnerving Liam with the rhythmic squeaking of its neck joint.

  “When I woke up this time,” Lincoln continued, “Stanton had gone ahead on his own and declared the state of emergency and he and his cronies had everything sewed up pretty much the way they liked it. I don’t know if it was the aftereffects of the brain fever or just my natural melancholy, but as Stanton and his cohort waxed stronger I seemed to get weaker and weaker. Then one day a White House servant I trusted whispered a terrible bit of news into my ear: I had been seen taking the air on the Mall, in an open carriage … all while I was lying flat on my back in my bedroom, swilling iron tonic and praying for the strength to get up and fight.”

  Liam was baffled: “Sir? I do remember when the papers all said you’d been seen out and about again, and I remember how relieved everybody was …”

  “That was the idea, the cheering effect on the public,” Lincoln said in his gloomy basso. “But when I tell you how they did it I expect you’ll think it just as crazy as I did. After Booth’s attempt, Stanton had put it about that Booth had been found and killed by one of the soldiers who had pursued him. The truth was, he’d been captured, and Stanton had sealed him up in an oubliette in the old Navy building, where Stanton’s new Department of Public Safety grilled him night and day for clues to the other plotters. But Booth was a little loony to begin with, and soon he went over the edge …”

  The Lincoln automaton laughed sardonically, a sound so macabre from its artificial voice box that it sent chills up Liam’s spine.

  “It seems Booth had become convinced he was me, and—great
actor that he was—his impersonation became (or so I’ve been told) letter-perfect. And if Mr. Edward Stanton knows anything at all, it’s how to seize the main chance.”

  Liam’s jaw dropped. “No! You can’t mean …”

  “But I do, son. The Lincoln you and the rest of the public have seen since late in 1867 has been none other than my failed assassin John Wilkes Booth. He is apparently so deluded and by now has read so deeply among my books and papers that he could play the part of Abraham Lincoln to any audience in the world and never be suspected as an impostor. Meanwhile he is guarded day and night and made much of by Stanton and his security officers, and kept from the public sedulously except when he must be trotted out for the occasional bit of official color.”

  Liam shook his head helplessly. “But how …” he gestured towards the automaton and his wheelchair, at a loss for words.

  “It was a foreign brain doctor,” the automaton said, “Stanton promised that the man was a wonder-worker, that he knew a way to restore my old health and make me capable of prodigies of new strength.”

  A terrible suspicion was forming in Liam’s mind. “A foreign doctor, you say? Would he have been from …”

  “He was a Russian,” the Lincoln automaton said, “a Professor Lukas …”

  Liam was too stunned for speech, but before he could pull his thoughts together enough to reply, the Lincoln automaton abruptly wheeled his chair forward and grasped Liam by the wrist.

  “What’s your name, young man?” the automaton asked.

  “Liam, sir, Liam McCool.” The feel of those steel fingers gripping his wrist made him shiver involuntarily, but the automaton just pressed on, his tone heart-rendingly earnest:

  “This has been my life ever since, Liam, what you see here. I am no longer human, my voice is not even my own but some strange confection of electric currents and vibrating rubber strings. My legs have been disabled, I assume to keep me from escaping. I am nothing at all but but a few bits of tin and the miserably tired old brain of Abraham Lincoln kept alive in some sort of China tea-pot and sustained by a handful of calorium.”