by Kin S. Law
Then there were her legs. The girl’s artifice legs were carefully sculpted to match the girl’s doe-like countenance, giving her a high-fashion figure. Cid had clearly used the periodicals of the day as a model for the feminine form, resulting in this hyper-Victorian, dress-shop mannequin perfection. A traveling ensemble from Hargreaves’ closet hid the legs from view; an espresso-colored pinafore trimmed in ebony, with a dense circle of petticoats beneath to muffle the small mechanical scrapes of cogs. Combined with raven locks and deathly pale coloring from too much time in the M.A.D. tunnels, it made her look like the sequestered daughter of some new steamwork gentry, or some sprung ballerina from a porcelain music box.
Cezette set the glass bottle of lemonade down, and spectral fingers reached out to pick it up, setting it on a passing bar tray. Jean Hallow retracted his fingers and folded over into himself against the sparse crowd, clearly uncomfortable in a social setting. A severely cut suit and his pale complexion made him seem more a comic lithograph than a man, a flat drawing of someone gaunt and pinstriped with hollow eyes. He looked like something native to a cave.
“What good is having a Pandora’s box of plagues when there is no way to open it? What if we want to use it as a bargaining chip? What if we want to destroy it?” Arturo proposed.
“Does dear Vicky want it destroyed? Answer me truly,” Cid Tanner countered.
“It’s an option, I’d say.”
“When did you switch from detective to errand boy? Worse yet, a budding war criminal,” sniped Tanner.
Arturo sighed. He had expected some resistance, but what he had never counted on was Cid Tanner’s immunity to Arturo’s charm. The girl Cezette had been quick to marvel at Arturo’s impeccable ruby suit, his silk cravat, and the way he handled the pub, firmly, but with a smile as slippery as it was warm. Tanner, on the other hand, was a stone.
“What I want to know,” Cezette interjected, “is what you intend to do with the knowledge. The box is no longer in London, Monsieur Adler.”
“I could wire to our dear inspector,” Arturo dodged. He knew it was a futile move; the cat was out of the bag.
“But you have no clue where she might have headed, have you? No reliable telegraph locations, at any rate. It seems to me there is only one course of action, n’est pas? You intend to find her.”
“Now there is a plan I can nail to a bulkhead,” Cid Tanner agreed with a throaty chuckle. He downed the remains of his whiskey.
“None of you are coming,” Arturo said, putting his foot down. “No offense, but I work alone. I came to you because you seem likely to keep the secret.”
“You’re taking the piss,” Tanner barked.
“If you are afraid of Maman’s reaction, do not be. We will take full responsibility,” said Cezette.
“Maman?” Arturo echoed, but Cezette had seen through his bluster at a glance. Yes, he did not want to admit it, but he respected Hargreaves far more than he let on. If she had avoided involving the M.A.D. crew, who was Arturo to thrust them willy-nilly into danger?
“Look at it this way. Alphonse is a precision machine, top-flight and very finicky. He came in sealed boxes straight from the manufactory in Glasgow. Without us, the inspector could easily falter in the middle of an automata brawl. A loose nut or steam leak. With us, there are reinforcements,” said Tanner. “You do not have to burden yourself with the knowledge of how to open the hermetically sealed box. Do you really want to be standing there when the seal emits a cloud of Mr. Cook’s plague-ridden, vaporized body parts?”
Arturo shuddered with the thought. With the perceptive Cezette’s wide eyes on him, the immovable Mr. Tanner, and Hallow perched there like a vulture, he saw no reason to continue pretending. From a dispatch case at his knee, he extracted a folio of documents.
“Now I’ve been absolved of any responsibility, I’ve already booked you on the next zeppelin out to New York. You remember Ivanov? He says you are old friend. He helped Hargreaves pull some strings to get there. I’ve made arrangements for a very private cabin, and the vessel is a fast one.”
“You’re a right bastard,” said Hallow. Arturo started, but was surprised to see the sepulchral figure smiling.
“Not so far as I know. Dastard might be a better description,” said Arturo.
“You are a fine, loyal friend,” Cezette complimented him. “Maman should be so surprised! On arrive, New York City!”
London was her usual steamy self. A mile from the city center, an abundance of greenery lessened the signs of Victoria III’s steam-driven revolution. In times long ago, this part of London had been used for cemeteries. Later it housed the myriad workforce needed to maintain and drive Britain’s budding industry: the Arabs, the blackamoor Africans, and the Indians.
Arturo left the pub with a warm agitation in his chest. He had gambled on much: New York, as the likely place Hargreaves would begin her investigation, that M.A.D. would play into his hands like they did, and that Hargreaves would even continue investigating. But he knew her that much, as well as this neighborhood, in fact.
For whatever reason, a great swath of the place had been saved from the ravages of building to become lush, beautiful parkland. Not even leisure dirigibles chose to land on the green, favoring the flatland of Hyde Park to the bridged hills of Mile End. One wing of a decrepit department store stood like a row of gapped teeth, with one portion missing, bombed out in the last war. The park had been allowed to claim the building, filling the vacant space with grass and benches.
Arturo felt as at home walking these streets as he did in his rooms in fashionable North London. He passed a knot of cockney boys smoking cigarettes outside a pub. The closest, a large bearded fellow, took a long glare at Arturo’s shock of bright, spiky hair, until another of them nudged the fellow with an informative jab. Their leader nodded, knowingly. Last year Arturo had posted the leader’s bail on a trumped-up charge. Half of these men had been in his pay, at one time or another. Now they were better than hounds when he needed to find someone underground.
By the chip shop on his left, Arturo had found Withers the cat half a dozen times for elderly Mrs. Howell there in the grove of spiny sloe. In the housing complex to his right, he had once saved a young couple’s marriage by proving beyond a doubt the tart carrying the husband’s child was nothing more than a pretender with a stolen handkerchief. He had people to protect him here, like an armor of whispered tales and rumored deeds. This was his side of the city.
Which made the tail so inexplicable in this part of town. He knew it like the back of his hand. The tail might be hiding his face behind a scarf, but the sharply polished shoes, the immaculate coat, and the way he stepped round the puddles as if they were plague-ridden, all spoke of someone not native to gritty Mile End. Further, as Arturo rounded the corner, the man suddenly picked up his pace.
Arturo gave it some thought. He was surprised it had taken so long for someone to find him. The usual suspects came to mind, of course: British Intelligence? Not Scotland Yard; they were not the cloak and dagger sort. He considered the American thieves, but it was unlikely. Orb Weaver had killed his partners, most likely fled after failing to take the box.
Arturo was so deep in thought that he nearly did not react when the garrote descended past his eyes. But for the glimpse of the first man, he would have been taken off guard. As it was, he was only able to get a finger between the wire and his neck.
“Tell us where the box is,” a voice demanded, clearly unaware of how human vocal cords operated. If Arturo could talk he might have remarked his assailant was really quite daft.
Instead, Arturo gasped. The joint at his first knuckle hurt as the wire dug into his glove. A low whirr accompanied the tightening of the wire—a clockworked device. His attacker yanked him backward, into a hedge and against something, maybe a tree. Arturo felt the bite against his neck, a creeping coldness, and disconcerting warmth where the blood was starting to flow.
Even as air became a rare commodity, his brain began to ana
lyze his attacker in the hair’s breadths between the seconds. The voice was accented—Liverpool or Ireland, perhaps. Height? The wire was cutting upward, which meant tall, much taller than Arturo. Arturo scouted with his other hand, flailing as if out of control. He felt hard muscle under a woolen jacket, a scruffy beard, and then his strength left the arm as the air began to run out of his lungs. He could track the rate his brain was dying by the white fog creeping into his vision, a London pea-souper in his head.
His attacker loosened the wire. It was just enough for Arturo to grasp a tiny mouthful of air, before tightening again.
“Where is the box?” the attacker asked again.
“You brute, how will the man answer when you’ve got his neck?”
The tail had arrived, and plunged into the hedge with them. In the dark, it was hard to see, but the man was shorter, and his accent different. Arturo pinned it; Asiatic, likely Nippon. He’d heard one like it not too long ago, at the picture house, some grotesquerie about a lizard monster as tall as Big Ben. An odd match….
Grunting, the tall man released his grip and Arturo fell to the dirt. His hair was likely a horrid mess, he thought. The tall man kicked him onto his back, where he lay unmoving.
“The box is in Whitechapel,” Arturo gasped, hacking and wheezing. His attackers leaned in to hear. “Missy Cerise. Red hair, lovely white skin. It’s just fifty pee for a look.”
Casually, the shorter man took out three inches of steel and sheathed it in Arturo’s belly.
At first, there was no pain, just a sudden cold and a shock of seeing the flat, beige handle sticking out of him. When the pain came, the tall man shoved a glove in Arturo’s mouth, to silence the screams.
“Basically, we can leave it in there, and you can probably reach a cab or a police box in time,” the short man whispered. “Or, I pull it out sideways and let you bleed to death. It won’t be pretty, and you’ll have a hard time keeping things inside.”
The tall man mimed the motion, reeling in the lengths and holding them to his own belly. It was too dark to see their hidden faces, but Arturo felt he must have been laughing quietly.
Arturo was no hero. He told them. He told them everything and more, about his sainted, absent mother, about his arduous youth training in the arts of detecting: acrobatics, chemistry, hours poring over studies of cigar ash in his family library. He told them about the time he got stung in a dozen different places when he bumbled into his father’s beehives, and his resulting immunity to bee venom thereafter. He told them everything but what they needed to hear, hidden in the wasteland of his life.
Soon enough, the cockney boys rushed the hedges, drawn by his initial scream, and Arturo gasped a sigh of relief.
“Oh you cunts, you beautiful whoring cunts, yes!” he cried. In the vernacular, of course.
As they chased off the attackers, Arturo held the short man’s knife still stuck in him with his left hand. He clung to it desperately, every movement triggering a jarring flower of pain. It mustn’t come out, it mustn’t come out, the thought looped and twisted through his white fingers, locking them like a vise.
In his right, he held onto a sheaf of papers, folded into quarters and hidden under his body. The tall man had probably thought them safe, inside his coat pocket, but discerning and pickpocketing valuables had been the first thing Arturo salvaged from the wasteland of his youth.
“These blasted scraps of mulch must hold some secret. I’ve used lemons, I’ve exposed it to arclight, I’ve held on to it and spun in a circle. I’ve even burned a small corner of it. Perhaps it’s a spoken command? Come now, reveal your secrets! Abracadabra! Alakazam! Reducto!”
Aboard the zeppelin Gretchen, bound for America, Arturo C. Adler was going stir-crazy, shut up in his cabin. Arturo had been confined to quarters after a wide-shouldered German ship’s surgeon took one look at his abdomen wound. The M.A.D. members were housed in the same suites, but they had the freedom of the ship.
“Zis is terrible! A velocipede accident, you say?” cried Cezette.
Infuriated, Arturo had devoted his time to two scraps of bloody paper. There were marks on it, in regular lines and dots, but they appeared incomplete, like bits and pieces of Morse telegraph. It was gibberish in Morse, or any of the ciphers Arturo had memorized.
Arturo made all the inductions he could from the paper itself. Repetitive creasing and smoothing had left their marks in nicks and corner folds. There must have been some trick to it, then, some kind of invisible writing. The paper smelled of sweat, and grease from a chip shop, likely from the tall man’s pocket. The marks were India black, judging from the distinct smudge pattern. Arturo had turned the paper under natural light, arclight. and gaslight, looking for a telltale shine from invisible inks. It could not be an ink, because the document would then be permanently legible. One corner was discolored, promisingly, but a sniff revealed it to be a spill of common ale, which would have dissolved, not revealed, most inks.
Even in the face of ineffable boredom, Arturo finally ran out of ideas. He leaned back in his bed, his stomach hurting abominably. Though the stitches were good, and the wound relatively harmless despite the small man’s threats, the cut still stung. Worse, it itched. His customary laudanum dulled the pain somewhat, but Arturo wanted his mind clear for what lay in store.
Surprisingly, Jean Hallow had been the one most concerned with Arturo’s well-being. Cid had seen to it Arturo was alive, inquired of the perpetrators, scowled, and left him to his own devices. Arturo would never subject the girl Cezette to such horrors as his bloodied tum, but she still took time away from the wonders of a passenger airship to read to him in the evenings.
Jean Hallow, in contrast, had immediately asked Arturo to show him the bandaged area. His cadaverous form reminded Arturo of a stiff undertaker, but his fingers were skilled at healing. He’d unwrapped the bandages, checked the stitching done by the London hospital, and applied some top-notch first aid. Then he had arranged for the Gretchen’s crew to deliver Arturo’s meals to his quarters, all with a businesslike economy of words. His ministrations were efficient, and his bedside manner pitiless, which Arturo appreciated. The only annoyance was Hallow’s habit of reading a King James Bible in Arturo’s room while Arturo took his supper, but even this was done silently, and was no offense. Occasionally Hallow would chuckle, which sparked Arturo’s curiosity.
“Hmm? I’m laughing at the irony. If hubris is a cardinal sin, this God character is the biggest sinner.”
“Is it fair to say God is so much like us?” Arturo mused.
“Why do you think it hates the worship of idols? It’s trying to eliminate its competition.” Well, how could Arturo not enjoy that?
On the third day, Jean arrived with a tray of supper and a blessedly rotund bottle of ruby port.
“Oh, you creepy bugger, that is a Godsend,” said Arturo. He pounced on the bottle, swilling the stuff like water.
“You’re out of laudanum,” Hallow said, gesturing to the empty flask at the bedside. He didn’t seem to mind being called creepy.
“Why are you being so attentive? This can’t be out of loyalty to Inspector Hargreaves,” Arturo said between smaller sips. He passed the bottle to Hallow, who took to it easily enough.
“My father was an army doctor,” Hallow said. “We used to care for our neighbors when they got hurt. Hampshire, few doctors and long roads. I’m used to fixing people.”
They passed the bottle back and forth. Supper turned out to be a thick bratwurst, mustard, sauerkraut, and new potatoes, enough for one. They picked at it together. It seemed they were birds of a feather, deriving nutrition from a bottle more often than a fork.
“Hargreaves used to favor the aesthetic,” Arturo said. He made an odd gesture, indicating Hallow’s frayed suit and sunken eye sockets. “Old Gothic, I mean.”
“I did not know that. No, I am not a revitalist,” Hallow replied.
“It’s like pulling teeth with you,” Arturo whinged. “Mate, I’m stuck in this
room while my belly knits together. The surgeon is afraid I’ll spill my guts overboard at the slightest tilt. It would help if you could engage in some conversation.”
“If you wished it, I am sure you could sneak out. Inspector Hargreaves often spoke of your resourcefulness.”
“You speak with her much?” Arturo felt a sudden pang of jealousy, well buried beneath layers of dense snark. He often wished he could have an honest conversation with the woman behind the detective, but their relationship was built on sniping at each other. It kept them sharp. Still, just once he wished it were otherwise.
“We talk of relevant things,” Hallow said. He took out a thick, bound notebook, and began to leaf through, making a mark here and there with a draftsman’s pencil. They seemed to be schematics for one of their many automata, though of course they had been unable to bring the other members of M.A.D. along. If Hargreaves was hanged for a traitor, M.A.D. would dissolve.
By and by, Cezette Louissaint and Cid Tanner returned to the room, separately. Cezette had had a grand time in the ship’s well-stocked library, a Neo-Victorian affair built to accommodate an onboard horticultural greenhouse. She delighted in sharing it with Arturo. One could select a volume from the secured aeronautical shelves and descend a whirling wrought iron stair to recline beneath the lemon and orange trees. There was even a tea service provided, in a pleasing simulacrum of an English countryside manor. The shelves were taller than the girl, occupying the walls of two decks in the massive, glittering space. Natural light fed herb gardens and flower gardens, as well as some small berry bushes. Cezette, naturally, had chosen to read The Secret Garden; I, Automaton; and Frankenstein.
