King of the Cracksmen

by Dennis O'Flaherty

  Becky grinned at him. “No,” she said teasingly, “you agreed to that, I was just listening.” As he started to protest she shook her head firmly. “You can fuss and fume all you like, but I’m not going to budge. I’ve gotten into and out of scrapes that would make your hair stand on end, just to get a story. I’m certainly not going to sit at home knitting when I could be helping a President I admire and a man I quite like.”

  She smiled just a little and gave him a look so level and unwavering that he felt himself slipping again into the bottomless blue of her eyes. Much as he wanted to just let himself go he wasn’t quite sure how she would feel about that, so he pulled himself back before he went over the edge.

  “Very well,” he said, “but you’ll have to oblige me in one thing, then …” He reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out Maggie’s nickeled Webley. “Keep this with you from now on. Do you know how to shoot?”

  She nodded. “This was Miss O’Shea’s, wasn’t it?”

  Liam nodded.

  “Good,” she said with a smile, “let’s go.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Willie Pilkington was doing his best to look inconspicuous, but since he had never felt like undergoing the rigorous apprenticeship his father expected from aspiring detectives, he attracted a lot more attention being unnoticeable than he would have if he’d just sat on one of the Station’s wooden benches and pretended to read a newspaper.

  It was covert attention, of course—everybody else in the big brick-and-stone Pennsy station on the corner of 6th Street and B Street NW either recognized Willie from pictures in the press, or sensed immediately that he was some kind of Eye, which was enough to make them drift off forthwith to more remote parts of the Station’s waiting room. Willie, meanwhile, with a dark brown bowler pulled down almost to his nose, his dark brown greatcoat swirling around him like a canvas bathing machine, and a deeply sinister pair of brownish smoked glasses, felt sure that he cut a rather dashing, anarchist-flavored figure, while remaining rigorously incognito.

  Still, it was going to be July in another couple of days and the Washington heat and humidity were nearly as bad tonight as they had been in the daytime, so Willie was praying fervently for the New York train to open its doors and disgorge its passengers so he could get back to the DPS steamer and shuck off this damned coat before he melted. Ah, there! Thank God the passengers were starting to pour into the waiting room. He inclined his head and pretended to scratch his nose as he peered surreptitiously at the newcomers. Surely Becky and McCool wouldn’t have dared to travel openly by train, but it wouldn’t do to miss the obvious …

  “Sir?”

  The familiar voice came from Willie’s blind side and startled him so badly that he nearly cried out. Furious at having his disguise pierced, he spun around, teeth bared in a snarl …

  “Just what the Devil do you mean by …”

  … and deflated just as quickly when he saw that it was Agent McPherson, whom he had taken for some sort of smalltime drummer when he’d passed in the crowd a moment ago, and who now stood examining him with an uncertain smile.

  “Sorry, sir,” McPherson said, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “Ah … hmph … yes, of course I knew you were there, McPherson, I just wanted to see if you were on your toes!”

  And, beckoning to McPherson to accompany him, he turned and headed towards the exit.

  “Any sign of McCool here yet?” the detective asked with a barely suppressed eagerness that put Willie in mind of a big, mean cat closing in on a mouse.

  “Not so far,” Willie said, “but if they’ve come to Washington to make mischief it won’t be long till we have them. Secretary Stanton has mobilized every able-bodied man from here to Annapolis, and he’s printed thousands of handbills with Miss Fox’s and McCool’s likenesses.”

  McPherson grinned without a hint of mirth and narrowed his eyes hungrily as he stared at some interior vision; Willie imagined it a bit queasily—whatever the details, it surely involved severe and even gory discomfort for Liam McCool.

  “Just remember,” he said sharply as they exited onto 6th Street, “McCool is yours, as I promised. But no one may lay a hand on Miss Fox and she must be given directly into my charge. The only reason I didn’t have McCool up for murder over those two plug-uglies you hired in Five Points was because they had the temerity to assault her and he acted in her defense.”

  “Ah, Mr. Pilkington, dear,” said McPherson, lapsing into a brogue as he continued to savor his vision of revenge, “nivver you mind yer worriting, I’m that grateful to you for calling me in at the finish, I’ll be certain sure to see you right.”

  As they stepped onto the sidewalk a horde of black cabbies swarmed around them offering their services, but Pilkington just cursed and shooed them away as a big black steam pantechnicon with the Department of Public Safety’s All-Seeing Eye and its motto “Per Aspera ad Securitas” picked out in gold leaf on its doors pulled up to the curb and its driver jumped out to hold the door open for Willie.

  “Where to, sir?” the driver asked.

  “I want to check out all the DPS observation posts,” Willie said. “And drive slowly, we’re on the lookout for a couple of fugitives.”

  Their helpers in the Underground Railroad had supplied Becky and Liam with a battered old steam caravan that met all their requirements handsomely. First, it had to be too old and decrepit to excite police interest while being large enough to offer a secure hiding place for President Lincoln and his wheelchair. Second, it had to be a vehicle that would offer both Liam and Becky some logical excuse for traveling in it together if explanations were demanded, and finally it had to be one the Underground Railroad wouldn’t miss if for any reason Liam and Becky needed to ditch it.

  Becky hesitated to ask her Alexandria hosts how they had managed to come up with the one they found, but it certainly seemed to her to fit the bill perfectly, being an antediluvian Confederate ambulance that had been skillfully converted into a traveling country store packed with all sorts of goods from nails to bolts of calico to a cheap rye whiskey that Liam guessed might do in a pinch for removing paint.

  As for the fugitives themselves, the challenge to the younger Miss Duchamp (a prominent player in local amateur theatricals) was irresistible. Despite Liam’s misgivings she trimmed his hair still shorter and fitted him with a gray wig that—according to a giggling Becky—made him look positively venerable, and then dusted his moustache with some sort of theatrical powder that matched the wig nicely. With a suitably distressed-looking suit of the sort fashionable in the days of President Jackson and his dark glasses, Liam had to admit he looked decrepit enough to make an undertaker reach for his tape-measure.

  Becky, who had enacted quite a few roles in dead earnest as she traveled to far corners pretending to be anybody but a reporter, entered into the spirit of the thing happily. By the time Miss Duchamp had finished with her, her honey-blonde hair was concealed under a school-marmish wig of gray curls, while wire-rimmed spectacles, a shiny old bombazine dress with yellowed lace cuffs and some discreet India rubber padding created a total effect that made Liam break into helpless laughter and call Becky “Mother Fox” until she threatened to hit him with her cane.

  But later on, after a few miles on the road back to Washington, Becky and Liam had pretty well lost the urge to laugh.

  “This is bad,” Liam muttered, “we haven’t quite hit the outskirts of the city and we’ve already had to go through two checkpoints. I haven’t seen this many troops around here since the end of the War.”

  “What worries me most,” Becky said, “is whether our half-Delta will be able to land and take off again without being seen. It’s been re-set now for four o’clock tomorrow morning, because that’s when you can usually expect most people to be sound asleep. That’s why we picked the Duchamps’ tobacco fields for a landing, because they’re on bottomland below the line of sight of most of the buildings in Alexandria, and we figured that would re
duce the chances of a sighting to near zero. But with all these troops galumphing around …” She fell silent, biting her lip worriedly.

  Unable to think of anything reassuring that wouldn’t sound irritatingly trite, Liam just shook his head in silent agreement and kept on driving and watching mounted and steam-driven soldiers come and go. He still had his Colt and Becky had the Bulldog, and he’d managed to fill his jacket pockets with cartridges for both in the gun room at the Duchamp estate, but anything involving gunplay at this point would probably be suicidal. Still, better to go down fighting than to give Stanton a chance at putting them in cages so he could play with them.

  Becky broke into his thoughts: “Do we need to check with Mike to make sure everything’s in order?”

  Liam smiled and shook his head, recognizing the question as the kind of worrying away at a loose tooth you always tend to do when everything’s been planned to the last dot on the i’s and cross on the t’s. He’d been able to talk to Mike on the Duchamp’s voicewire machine last night and he had it all covered. Mike would collect on an old IOU from the Grogan clan, river pirates who’d been involved in the New York area’s river and ocean crimes since the days of smuggling tea and rum under the British.

  Becky and Liam and the President would fly directly from the Duchamp estate to the beach just south of Barnegat Light on Jersey’s Atlantic coast, less than an hour in a half-Delta. There were expensive summer homes not far away, but Liam knew from experience that these people were the kind of nobs who didn’t like to get involved with anything outside their own tight little world and even the DPS wouldn’t take a chance on bothering them without being invited.

  The Grogans would be waiting there with the steam launch they’d used for running the blockade during the War, and in no time at all they would have Lincoln and his wheelchair off the beach and on his way to Freedom Party HQ on Shelter Island, another rich folks’ hideaway at the tip of Long Island and as secure from DPS nosiness as the far side of the moon. Maybe fifty or sixty nautical miles from pickup to dropoff, a piece of cake for the Grogans, and the President himself safe and sound so fast after leaving Washington that even Stanton would be left scratching his head.

  “I wouldn’t go so far as to say there’s honor among thieves,” Liam said with a grin, “but there’s a cast-iron code of correct behavior, and the Grogans will discharge their debt to the Butcher Boys down to the last jot and tittle. I’d rather make a deal with a crook than, say, the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher any day in the week.”

  Becky laughed merrily, glad of a chance for some humor. “I was catching up on some of the old news while we were killing time at the Duchamps’ and I came across an account of Beecher’s sermon at the Plymouth Church on the significance of the railwaymen’s strike. The best part was where he said that ‘while it was true that wages of $1 a day were not enough to support a man and five children if a man would insist on drinking beer and smoking, a prudent family could live on good bread and water in the morning, water and bread at mid-day, and good water and bread at night.’ According to the report at that point there was general applause and laughter among the congregation.”

  “It’s been a while since I read Dante,” Liam said, “but I’m sure he had a circle for the Plymouth Church down there somewhere in The Inferno.”

  No sooner had he gotten off his little quip than a soldier stepped out into the road ahead of them and waved his arms back and forth to signal a stop.

  “Damn!” muttered Liam. Things had been going too well, for sure—they weren’t more than twenty minutes’ drive from the Smithsonian and they’d had clear sailing all the way from the second checkpoint to here. He braked to a stop with a loud and painful screeching from the ancient machinery and turned to Becky: “Time for Mother Fox,” he murmured. He leaned his head out the window and quavered in his best doddering-old-timer voice:

  “What can I do for you, young fella?”

  The soldier was a tow-headed infantryman with a baby face and a friendly grin. “Sorry, Dad, but we’re under orders to have a look in the back of your caravan.”

  “Why sure, youngster, always happy to oblige a Union soldier!” He turned to Becky: “Now then, Mother, you keep a weather eye on the steam gauge, we don’t want Old Betsy to blow us all to smithereens!”

  The young soldier looked uneasy: “Say, Pop, is this contraption safe?”

  “Safe?” chuckled Liam. “Safe? Say, is a basketful of rattlesnakes safe if you keep the lid on?” He cackled gleefully and then felt a little contrite at the hint of panic in the soldier’s expression. “Aw, sonny, don’t you pay me no mind, I’m just an old fool pulling your leg! Old Betsy will be just fine long’s we don’t keep her standing still but a couple of minutes!”

  He walked around the back of the caravan and threw open the door, revealing a treasure trove of useful junk spooled, stacked and hung from the ceiling. The crate of cheap rye whiskey was right by the door and it caught the soldier’s eye as he flashed his lantern around the interior.

  “Say, mister, is that whiskey?”

  “That’s what the label says, young fella! One dollar a bottle and worth every penny.”

  The soldier pulled out a bottle and examined the label by the light of his lamp. “It says ‘Made in China,’” he said dubiously.

  “Why, sure enough,” said Liam with a touch of indignation, “that’s why it’s a dollar, you got to pay a premium for the imported stuff!” Noting that the soldier’s frown was deepening Liam said, “I tell you what I’ll do, you buy one bottle for a dollar and you can have another one for free, and that’s just because I fought with the Union at Chapultepec in the Mexican War.”

  The soldier grinned: “Now that’s more like it!” He fished a silver dollar out of his uniform pocket and Liam handed over two bottles with a silent prayer that Chinese hooch wouldn’t do the kids any harm.

  “Anything else?” Liam asked.

  “That’s all, Dad, you can go ahead and let Old Betsy rip!” He waved and took off to join his pals as Liam trotted back to Becky and climbed in. He handed her the soldier’s coin:

  “Hang on to that, Mother,” he said in his normal voice, “that’s our first dollar!” As Becky collapsed laughing, he let off the brakes with another tortured scream, engaged the engine and chugged briskly away towards the Smithsonian.

  Blessedly, as they chugged down B Street NW towards their goal they could see that the service area behind the Smithsonian was still dimly lit, despite the sudden proliferation of carbon arc spotlights around the Mall and the Capitol Building. Less welcome was the fact that they’d had to stop two more times, and although Liam managed to oil their way through both checkpoints with liberal applications of Chinese firewater, the process had taken so much time that by this point they had eaten up all their margin for delay and then some.

  Now, as if to rub it in, they saw a wink of light as the door by which Liam had entered the night before opened briefly to allow the exit of two burly DPS agents in the standardized black gabardine suits and curly-brimmed bowlers that said “Eye!” to everyone but the blind.

  “Oh, oh,” said Becky. “Should we run them down?”

  “Certainly not,” said Liam with a grin, “first of all it’s illegal, and second of all when you run down an Eye you have to wash your whole steamer with tomato juice to get rid of the smell. I’ve got a better idea …” He reached forward and played with the steam valve until the engine started gasping and banging alarmingly. “Dear me, Mother,” he said in his codger voice, “we seem to have engine trouble. I expect those clever men over there can help us fix it!”

  “Ah!” Becky said. She smiled and adjusted her wire-framed spectacles as Liam pulled off the road and onto the paved area behind the Smithsonian. Immediately the two DPS men hulked towards them warningly.

  “Say,” said the first one in a surprisingly high, reedy voice. “This here area is off limits to the public, Grandpa, you better sling your hook before we have to haul you in!”


  Liam gave the Eyes a pleading look: “Land sakes, young fella, can’t you hear my poor old Betsy a-gaspin’ and a-coughin’? I was hoping one of you smart youngsters was savvy enough to figure out how to help her.” As the DPS man’s lips tightened with impatience Liam added hastily: “I’ve got some mighty fine imported whiskey in the back, you can have all of it you can carry away if you’ll help me out!”

  The Eyes exchanged an avid look. “Show us the booze, old-timer,” the First Eye said sharply, “and make it snappy.”

  Liam got out and did his creaky-old-bones turn as he hobbled around to the back, where he threw open the doors and gestured grandly at the remaining bottles of whiskey: “There you go, boys,” he said coaxingly, “if that ain’t the finest drop of whiskey you ever put down your throat I’m a monkey’s uncle!”

  The DPS agent pulled out a bottle and examined the label suspiciously. “China? Chinese rye?”

  Liam gave him a hurt look. “Say, if you think I’m just funnin’, you go ahead try a slug of that on me!”

  The agent gave a why-not shrug, worked out the cork and tipped his head back for a healthy swallow. An instant later his eyebrows shot up nearly to his hairline and he broke off his drink, laughing and coughing:

  “Whooo-ee! Them Celestials can brew up a mean batch of red-eye! This stuffd take the enamel clean off a stove!”

  The other agent stuck out a big paw impatiently: “All right, then, Murph, don’t go hoggin’ it!”

  The first agent handed the bottle over and the second one tipped his head back and finished the bottle in one long, gurgling pull, determined to manage it without coughing. As the last swallow went down he straightened up, tossed the bottle to Liam and grinned happily:

  “By Jingo, old man, that’s some good stuff,” he said when he finished. “How many of those you willing to part with if we can get your heap running right?”

  Liam gestured at the case: “You fix old Betsy for me and you can have the rest of them!”