As the old fellow stood there smiling reflectively, a newsboy ran onto the Square from 14th Street, brandishing a folded broadsheet and shouting: “Getcher latest Freedom, hot off the press!!” He snatched a copy of the paper off the top of the stack he was holding under his arm and shoved it into the old man’s hands, just in time for the oldster to stuff it into his pocket before a big, sweaty bluecoat ran into the scene and the boy took off again across the Square, running like a scalded cat as the copper glared after him, blowing his whistle shrilly and shouting:
“You stop right there you little bastid, before I …!”
But before he could even finish the sentence, the boy had lost himself in the crowd of workmen and the copper, totally winded, took off his hat and wiped his face on his sleeve.
“Tch!” croaked the old man in a querulous tenor. “Young folks! I tell you, officer, kids just don’t have any respect nowadays, it’s a crying shame!”
“You can say that again, Grandad!” the copper said hoarsely. “He about gave me a heart attack, that lousy little spalpeen—I’ve been chasing him since Second Avenue! You just wait till old Stanton declares his Emergency Regs—the troublemakers will be singing a different tune then, believe you me!”
“Emergency Regs?” quavered the old codger.
“Yeah, it ain’t official yet, but I already seen the handbills back at the Precinct. Those boys in that building across the way …” he gestured towards the DPS HQ, “are going to be some busy little bees, stringing up seditionists.”
“Well, I never!” said the old fellow, tugging nervously at his bushy gray moustache. “Is Mr. Stanton himself going to be here today?”
“You bet, old-timer,” the copper said with a proprietary grin. “You come back later this afternoon and bring a folding chair, get yourself set—by the time the speeches start around seven, they’re expecting fifty thousand people will be right here in this square to hear Secretary Stanton and Director Pilkington.”
“My, my, that does beat all!” the old man said wonderingly, just as the copper clapped his hat back on and shouted furiously:
“That dirty little son of a bitch!”
The workmen across the way had finished up and were dispersing towards home, revealing the newsboy jumping up and down in front of the DPS building, thumbing his nose towards the copper and shouting across the Square: “Flat-foot! Flaaaat-foot!”
“We’ll see about that!,” the bluecoat bellowed, and took off furiously towards the newsboy, who was obviously planning to taunt the law until the last possible second.
“Attaboy!” laughed Liam in his own voice, taking the folded broadsheet out of his pocket. FREEDOM! it announced in huge letters, and then in smaller ones, printed in a lurid red: “Where Is Stanton Hiding President Lincoln?”
“Nice work, Becky,” Liam murmured.
As she had told him last night on the voicewire, Stanton had boarded up all the newspapers and magazines in the country the day after they printed Becky’s Little Russia exposé, and this new broadsheet had stepped into the gap, printed in huge quantities on Shelter Island and distributed by the Underground Railroad. President Lincoln himself had suggested a publicity campaign to gradually expose the secret of Stanton’s betrayal, the mind-boggling story of John Wilkes Booth’s imposture, and Lincoln’s thrilling rescue by the Freedom Party. By the time Becky had written the final installments, the American people would be clamoring to have the real Lincoln back, Acme or no, and Lincoln would have used the pages of Freedom to call for a fresh slate of Presidential and Congressional candidates and fair and free national elections. If that didn’t put Stanton well and truly on the skids, Liam missed his bet. True, that happy culmination was going to be down the road a ways, but it was a good plan and comforting to think about. Meanwhile, there would be plenty to keep Liam and his friends busy …
Liam stepped into the alleyway behind the Pilkington Agency headquarters. It was a good thing he’d been over this ground before, in the week after he’d reported to Mr. P. Having seen McPherson go through the secret door in Pilkington’s bookcase, Liam decided it might be useful to know how to do it himself, and late one night he’d cased the building’s entrances thoroughly. At last he’d picked a likely-looking candidate in the alley that ran behind the building on the 16th Street side, a door almost obscured by trash cans that obligingly swung away from the wall when Liam finally figured out the trick of the thing.
You had to hand it to the old boy—he had clearly paid top dollar for the construction of his secret passage, and the street-door’s mechanism and the interior finish of the passageway itself were as nicely fitted and finished as a Swiss music box. When Liam got to the top, though, he found himself wishing the builder had had a moment or two of sloppiness. He was standing outside what had to be the back side of the sliding bookcase entrance and he wanted to get a look inside before he entered, but unfortunately the surface of the door on this side was as smooth as an egg.
A dim electric bulb burned above the doorway and a very obvious green button in the middle of a brass plate waited at the side of the door for Liam to press it, but he didn’t feel quite ready to accept its invitation. Slowly and with as much care as he would give to the dial of a safe, he ran his fingertips back and forth across the door’s glassy surface, until at last he found an area that responded to his gentle urging by sliding to one side. Once the panel had moved, it revealed a narrow slit that would have been invisible from the other side, but that was quite wide enough on this side to give Liam a view from one end of the office to the other.
Nobody home, excellent! He pressed the green button and noted with satisfaction that the sliding section of bookcase moved on rubber wheels, so smoothly and silently that there was simply nothing to hear. Then, once he was inside, he only needed to go to Pilkington’s desk, check the neat brass labels along one side of the kneehole and press the necessary button for the thing to close just as silently as it had opened.
Liam pulled out his watch: 8:15 a.m. In a way, he wished he had waited to leave until Becky was back from Shelter Island—he would have enjoyed watching her reunion with her father, who had been sprung from house arrest by the boys last night. Liam looked out the window towards the DPS offices across the street, the giant gold letters spelling “Per Aspere ad Securitas” glittering in the early sunlight. Good old underground New York, the network of tunnels reached nicely up Manhattan to the Foxes’ house in Gramercy Park, all you needed was the Butcher Boys’ handy-dandy map to make it easy.
Anyway, he thought as he started a slow walk around the office prospecting for likely wall-safe locations, he had been too keyed up to hang around home waiting. First he had wanted to check the big job he and Mike had put the boys on after they brought Becky’s pa safely downtown, and that had taken a while since it involved some sensitive calculations and a fair amount of friendly chit-chat with the lads as they had all been through a thing or two since Liam had left town with Becky a few days ago.
Then, after he was sure that everything was going smoothly and according to schedule, he gave in to the knowledge that his stomach was trying to digest itself and stopped at a greasy spoon he knew near the Pilkington Agency for a heaping plate of eggs and corned beef hash. After chasing that with a couple of cups of eye-popping Turkish coffee, he was ready for anything, and now …
… Here we go, he thought, and carefully lifted a daguerrotype of Mr. Pilkington standing on a field with President Lincoln down from the wall, revealing the dial of an aged but solid National safe. With a smile of recognition for an old acquaintance, he took out his stethoscope and started letting the dial’s mechanisms speak to him. OK, there … one of the tumblers gave a tiny click, and Liam was just settling himself to search for the next one when he heard a more imperative sound behind him—someone was turning the handle of the door. Not even bothering to put the picture back, Liam leapt across the room to the stretch of wall next to the door’s hinges and pulled out his Colt.
“Wh
at the divvil?” It was McPherson, and he’d frozen with surprise as he saw the safe uncovered, letting the door to the office swing slowly shut behind him. After a moment, he shook his head angrily and started towards the safe.
“Don’t bother,” Liam said, and this time McPherson swung around in a half-crouch, reaching towards the inside of his jacket as Liam cocked the Peacemaker. The unmistakable sound froze the Great Detective in his tracks.
“That’s better,” Liam said, grabbing a straight-backed chair away from a reading table and pushing it across the floor towards McPherson. “Have a seat,” Liam said. McPherson obeyed grudgingly, eyeing Liam with a barely suppressed fury that turned his face red as a beet.
“Well, well,” McPherson said, his voice dripping sarcasm, “sure if it isn’t young Lochinvar home from the wars, all dressed up for Halloween and his thoughts turning to larceny like any young cracksman’s would. Can I help you find what you’re looking for, Mister McCool?”
“I reckon I can find it myself,” Liam said. His voice had an odd edge of hoarseness to it, and he realized that he was having to fight hard against pulling the trigger, thinking about Maggie lying dead on the floor of her sitting room. “Unless maybe you moved all of Mr. P.’s papers once you’d stabbed him in the back and sold him out to Junior.”
McPherson’s eyes narrowed and he showed a thin line of teeth, as if he were wrestling with the urge to leap out of the chair and tear out Liam’s throat. “Not that I’d ever be needing to explain meself to scum like you,” he grated, “but it took Junior to see the obvious, that I was the man to head the Agency and not his old pa, so Junior took the matter up with Secretary Stanton, and he agreed that an outfit like this needed a go-ahead young fella at the helm if it was to be working hand in glove with the Secret Service.”
“I carried the word to Pilkington meself, and the poor old ninny actually broke down and cried.” McPherson sneered as he savored the memory: “Frankly, Mr. P. had got a bit too long in the tooth to see the obvious, whether it was the need for him to go home and write his memoirs or the fact that we needed to get all our young white men back into uniform and all the black bucks behind the machines in the factories. This is a new America you’re trying to stand in the way of, laddiebhoy, and if you don’t get out of the way it’s going to run right over you and mash you flat.”
Liam shook his head wryly. “I hope you’ll be as ready to run at the mouth when I find Inspector Barlow and tell him the solution to the murder of Maggie O’Shea.” He smiled a little as he saw McPherson start. “That’s right, McPherson, I have all the facts I need now, and as nice as it would be to shoot a hole in you, it will be a lot better fun to get a seat in the audience when they stretch your neck. Now, if you’ll pull that chair around where I can keep an eye on you, I was just about to open that safe and get the stuff Mr. P. was holding over my head. After that, you can go to blazes till Barlow shows up with the coppers!”
His mouth set in a thin angry line, McPherson pushed himself and the chair towards the wall.
“That’s just fine, Seamus,” Liam said. “And back up a little, so I have plenty of room to shoot you in case you decide to jump out of your chair.”
McPherson obeyed sullenly, eyeing Liam with a combination of suppressed anger and spiteful expectation that bothered Liam a little until he decided he hadn’t time to worry about the Great Detective’s state of mind—the clock was running down now, and he wanted to be well away before things got too busy. Keeping half an eye on McPherson and most of his attention on the whisper of machinery behind the safe’s green-painted face, Liam heard one tumbler after another fall into place until at last there was a final, telling click.
“There we are,” he said cheerfully. “Well, then, Agent McPherson, I hope you’ll use your time well until the law comes for you. Start on your memoirs, it’ll be a good six months before they get around to hanging you.”
McPherson’s only answer was a sneer, so Liam shrugged and reached for the chromed handle on the safe door, pulling it down and back to swing open, but no sooner had the door begun its movement towards Liam than he was struck by a jolt of electricity so powerful that he felt like he’d been hit by a piledriver, the galvanic jerk of his muscles flinging him backwards into the room a good six feet and stretching him out flat on the floor. His mouth had a horrible coppery, burned taste in it, and his face and fingers felt numb and dead. To add to his misery, McPherson got up and walked across to him, bending over him and grinning with venomous triumph:
“Surprised you, did we? That’s a little toy Secretary Tesla made up for us, you’ll be paralyzed for a few minutes, just long enough for people to come when the alarm sounds.”
As if to confirm what he said, there was a knock at the office door and a moment later the door opened and Liam heard a secretary speaking:
“Is there any trouble, sir? Would you like me to summon help?”
“No thank you, Miss Willoughby,” McPherson said with an unmistakably gloating tone, “I have this situation absolutely under control. You can turn the alarm off and notify the guards there’s nothing to worry about. In fact, you can make sure I’m not disturbed for the rest of the morning, is that clear?”
“Yes sir,” the secretary said, “I’ll take care of it.”
Liam heard the door close as McPherson walked back into his field of vision and grinned down at him. “Sure, Liam dear, I’m that fond of you I wouldn’t want a soul to be interfering with our little get-together. I expect I should have told you about the shock gadget, but then we both know I’m just a naughty boy, am I right? All you have to do is reach over here on the right of the safe, you see, push up this little panel next to it and snap down that switch, and it’s just as harmless as Little Miss Muffet.”
Liam followed McPherson with his eyes as he swung the safe door all the way open and came out with two packets.
“I expect these are what you’d have been wanting to look at, Liam me lad. This first one has all your papers, just like Mr. P. told you. And a note he put on there saying ‘Return to McCool after completion of Little Russia mission.’ Truly now, could you be wanting better proof that poor old Mr. P. was ready to be put out to pasture? You don’t give up a hold like that when you’ve got it on a useful operator. As for this other little beauty …”
McPherson waved the second packet at Liam and laughed out loud. “This one you’d have given your eyeteeth for, and so would Junior Pilkington if he only knew I had it, for it’s none other than our darling Maggie’s diary.”
Liam writhed against the force of the paralysis and groaned with pure anger and frustration, but even though he could feel a tingle of sensation returning here and there, he still couldn’t do more than twitch. McPherson laughed again, delighted at Liam’s misery.
“Here’s the thing, Liam dear. There’s a long steamy story in here of Maggie’s romance with Junior himself. Yes, Junior, complete with letters from himself and all sorts of other touching mementoes including the birth certificate of baby Mary Agnes, who was none other than Junior’s love child with our Maggie. He begged her, oh how he begged, to take her ‘difficulty’ to a doctor he knew and trusted, who would have made it go away for good.
But you remember our stubborn Maggie, she’d have none of it. First thing you know, there was the little tyke in
Bellevue with Mama, and her ready to take her daughter home, when ohmydeargoodness! The little darling disappeared! Can you believe that? You should, for Junior wasn’t inclined to become a papa and he had ample means to make his problem go away. Which it did, I discovered a while back, with the help of an agent of the DPS named Kelso who drowned the tyke in the Hudson in a burlap bag, just like a bothersome kitten. You can see why I look on that little packet as my insurance policy against all sorts of hard times, can’t you?”
Laughing a thoroughly self-satisfied laugh, McPherson laid the two packets on the floor and took a pistol out of a holster in the small of his back.
“Now I think we’
ll have to take you across the Square to the DPS building, Liam me lad,” he said with mock sigh, “much as it pains me to part with you. You’ll be happy to know they’ve just finished renovating the holding and interrogation rooms in the cellars,” he said with a chuckle, “and the very best part is that Junior got Secretary Stanton to request some special personnel from the Central Prison in Madrid. He’d read an article, you see—always reading, is our Junior—and it seems these fellas are carrying on a grand family tradition from their ancestors back in the bad old times. You know, those folks who winkled out the secret sinners and toasted them on the bonfires. This is supposed to be their first day on the job with us, and that should be a treat! In fact I think I’ll have to come along and see how they do their questioning, it’s said to be quite noisy and colorful. Does that meet with your approval, Mister McCool?”
He knelt down next to Liam and prodded him with the pistol, and this time Liam actually managed to get one arm up off the floor and growled so furiously that McPherson nearly collapsed with laughter.
“Ah, Liam, you’re rare sport you are! Still, I guess we’d better get started, I’d say by the looks of it we’ll have you moving around by the time the elevator gets you to the lobby. Now then, any last words?”
“Yes,” came Becky’s voice from behind him, cold as ice, “drop the gun now!”
King of the Cracksmen Page 29