Touchstone

by Laurie R. King

  “Why don’t you have a headache from me? Yet.”

  “Because you’re not hiding things.”

  Hiding things: Well, that was Carstairs, all right. “You sound pretty sure about it. That I’m not hiding things.” Grey shot him a glance, and went back to massaging his temples. “I mean, doesn’t everybody?”

  “The things most people conceal are small and private embarrassments. People like the Major hide themselves; they hide from themselves; and it’s an agony to me.” Grey dropped his hands, studying his visitor with the same disturbing intensity that he’d shown when listening to Stuyvesant earlier—the American felt as if Grey was counting the pores on his face. “You haven’t the faintest idea what I’m talking about, have you?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “The Major brought you here without telling you about me?”

  “Basically, Carstairs told me just enough to get me on the train. He said you’d been injured, left with some, what he called ‘peculiar abilities,’ and came here to get away from things. He seemed to think you might be able to help me with a, er, problem I’m having. Oh—and he said you weren’t a mind-reader.”

  After a moment, Grey’s mouth twitched, and the ghost of a handsome man flitted briefly through the worn features. “Must have cost him something to admit that,” he said. “Tell me, does he still pull out that damnable note-book of his? I know he still smokes those bloody awful cigars, I could smell them from across the yard.”

  “Yeah, he writes notes sometimes in a little book. Why? What’s in it?”

  “God knows. It used to make me shudder, that book. Look, would you like some tea, or there’s coffee?”

  “Coffee’d be great,” Stuyvesant agreed, thinking that it might be good to get some into Grey, as well; if he had a little more than four hours to figure out how the man was to help him, he didn’t want to waste it watching the blond head snoring face-down on the table. Grey pushed back from the table and stood—or tried to, but his balance failed and his leg gave out on him, tipping him back into the chair and nearly upending it. Stuyvesant’s big hand shot out and seized one flailing wrist, snapping Grey back against the table. This time when Grey’s head went into his hands, it was from dizziness, not pain.

  Stuyvesant got up instead and went to hunt through the cupboards for a packet of coffee grounds and a pot. He filled the kettle and stirred up the fire, talking all the while: Keep Grey focused, keep him awake, and, most of all, keep him from going for a refill on the rotgut. And if it took chattering like a cleaning lady, that’s what he’d do.

  “Look. Carstairs told you I know what he’s got in mind, or some of it anyway, but like I said, I really don’t have anything more than an educated guess. Maybe I ought to begin with me—how I got here, what I’m after—and we can go from there. That sound good to you?”

  “Fine.”

  “Okay. Harris John Stuyvesant, at your service. I’m an agent for the U.S. Bureau of Investigation. You don’t see a lot of Bureau agents outside the States, but for the last five or six years, my job’s been agitators. Anarchists, Reds, Unions, the lot. Same as you have here, for the most part, although our strikes tend to be more violent than yours, and a lot of the chief agitators were born outside the country. Then again,” he mused, “most of our workers were born outside the country as well, so maybe it doesn’t signify. Anyway, until recently the Bureau’s main goal, outside of bank jobs, has been to keep the agitators under control. Now, what with Prohibition and all, things are shifting to straight crime, but I’m still mainly—”

  “Anarchists.” Grey seemed to be addressing the oil-cloth. “Did you have anything to do with the arrests of Sacco and Vanzetti?”

  Yeah, Stuyvesant thought: Grey might live at the end of the world, but he kept up with the London papers, and apparently some kind of wireless broadcasts penetrated this remote toe of England. He might know as much about the two Italians as any man on the streets of New York. “I worked on the case for a while, but I got myself reassigned when I flat out told my boss he had the wrong guys. Those two aren’t lily-white innocents by a long shot, but they’re not guilty of that murder.”

  “Will they be executed?”

  Stuyvesant shifted the kettle to a hotter spot, then raised his eyes to the window, tracing the lines of Grey’s Phoenician city. What had those ancient residents done by way of law enforcement? “I hope to Christ not. They’re on appeal now. I’d say they have a good chance of getting off, or at least getting reduced sentences. Hell, they’ve got half-decent alibis and there’s even another man’s confession floating around, they’re sure to get—”

  “Stop!” Grey’s cry broke into the American’s monologue. He was cradling his head again, nursing its pain. “For God’s sake, man, if you don’t believe it, don’t say you do!”

  Stuyvesant stared at the other man in bewilderment, which slowly edged into understanding. He knows things, Carstairs had said Saturday in Hyde Park. He sees into people. Well, Grey had just seen through the threadbare argument that Stuyvesant had held a thousand times over the past months, never quite managing to convince himself of its truth. The blunt fact was, Niccola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were scapegoats who’d been loaded up with the country’s nightmares and driven in the direction of the execution chamber.

  But if Bennett Grey could see through the determined self deception of a perfect stranger like Harris Stuyvesant, how could he possibly carry on everyday relations with his fellows? Was that why he lived ten miles from Nowhere? How could the poor bastard so much as go into town and buy a loaf of bread, if everyday guile hammered a tenpenny nail into his skull? “Sorry,” Stuyvesant said. “Yeah, you’re right. The truth is, I don’t know if those two’ll escape the electric chair. There’s a lot of people hot to make an example of them.” My boss, for one. “You know how it works—if you can’t find the real villains, find a couple of convenient ones and push them in people’s faces. I keep trying to convince myself that they’re going to win their appeal. I…I don’t much like feeling ashamed of my country.”

  Grey relaxed a fraction. “Thank you. Now, you were telling me about your work.”

  “Right.” Stuyvesant tipped back the lid of the kettle, decided the contents were close enough to boiling, poured water over the grounds in the pot, and was transported to another time and place.

  Perhaps it happened because his mind was occupied with the matter of winning over this man, or because he felt momentarily safe from both the overt madness of London and the shadowy menace that seemed to accompany Aldous Carstairs. Or maybe there was something about his companion that evoked the memory, but at the crisp sound of water meeting coffee grounds and the rich uprush of aroma, Stuyvesant was abruptly standing in a place of eternal clamminess and muck, the weight of a helmet pushed back on his head, the awareness of lice in his armpits and groin, the ache of trench-foot on his toes. The rumble of guns was far away, not enough to bury the sound of Kowalsky reading aloud the latest drivel from his girlfriend in Sioux Falls, or the sound of the men up the trench playing poker, or the scraps of conversation Tim was having with Sergeant Jimmy DiCicco (nick-named The Padre because of his clean mouth), who was Stuyvesant’s partner in the business of Keeping Tim Safe.

  Kowalsky was blown to pieces and The Padre took a bullet through the helmet when he poked his head over the parapet, and Tim…

  The memory-moment held him, and his men were there, all of them whole and safe and immortal, while he brewed up coffee, in a calm moment, in the trenches.

  Chapter Eight

  STUYVESANT BLINKED. The sandbagged walls vanished, replaced by a clean, dry, old-fashioned kitchen in the south of England. Boy, he thought, haven’t had a visitation of the past that strong in a long time. He pushed away the inevitable creeping sensation down the back of his neck and glanced at his companion, but Grey hadn’t noticed that his visitor was briefly out of the room. Where had the conversation got to? Oh yeah—work.

  “Like I say, most of my
cases have to do with Unions. This last year, I’ve been trying to run to earth rumors of what you might call outside consultation among the agitators. I mean, radicals are always a pain in the ass, but lately it’s more than that. You get to know your enemy, don’t you? How they think, what they can and can’t do. But recently our home-grown troublemakers have been coming up with things they’ve never thought of before, clever and politically savvy and ruthless—terrorism, planned and targeted, not just their usual outburst, hitting out at authority.”

  “For example?”

  “Okay, for example. Two months ago last week we just happened to foil a bomb plot. Absolute blind luck, checking a hotel room that’d already been gone over when the lead guy happened to notice one of the bottles on the drink stand was in a different place from the night before. And very fortunately, he used his eyes before he used his hands, and saw a tiny stub of freshly cut copper wire sticking out from under the edge of that bottle. If he’d picked it up, several ounces of gelignite—you know what that is? Nice, stable, simple-to-use form of nitroglycerine?—anyway, quite a wad of it, packed inside a couple pounds of roofing nails that might’ve gone off at knee level. If he hadn’t spotted it, the bottle would have been picked up about an hour later, when a Senator offered a drink to a couple of bank presidents, three Congressmen, two other Senators, and the Bureau Director.”

  No need to mention that when the bomb squad had gotten there, they’d found the device was a dud, that with the last push of the wires into their housing, one small connection had come awry. The bomb was real, the gelignite active: so what if later it was anticlimactic?

  “They were there to discuss ways to infiltrate Bolshevik groups in factories. The meeting had been written about in the papers, but the hotel they were meeting in was only announced three days before. That’s damned fast work.”

  “Lucky man, to spot the bomb.”

  “Boy, you’re right there.”

  “That was you, wasn’t it?”

  Stuyvesant’s jaw dropped. “How’d you guess that?”

  “Did you find who put it there?”

  “The Bureau is hunting for one of the hotel maids who didn’t show up for work the next day and—” Stuyvesant broke off, realizing that, chatter or not, he had gotten enormously sidetracked here. “You don’t really want to know all this, do you?”

  “Not particularly. Although I think you want to tell me.”

  It was such an odd thing to say, Stuyvesant could only stare at him. But damn it, the man was right. It was dead stupid to dump the whole story on a perfect stranger, but yes, he did want to talk. He’d always found it easier to see the details of a case when he’d hashed it over with someone. But the nearest thing to a partner was on the other side of a lot of ocean, and who was this guy going to blab to, anyway, the pigs? Simpleton Robbie?

  Not that he was here because of anything resembling a case. This trip Carstairs pushed him into was going to be a complete waste of time anyway, he knew it. Hell, the whole English venture was nuts; he’d have been better off setting a match to so many dollar bills and waiting for The Bastard to return to New York, when he could just plant some evidence on him like any sane man would. But instead he’d done it right and he’d played along, and now he was stuck with four hours to kill until Carstairs came back. Why not throw up his hands and talk about it? It might help him think, and it was better than sitting here staring at the walls.

  “Okay. Well, like I said, the maid had vamoosed—packed her bags and left her apartment, and the Bureau has a call out for her across the country.”

  “They think she did it?”

  “No—for one thing, she’d worked there over a year, too long just to set this up. It looked like the girl was only a maid, with nothing about her to suggest she could build a thing like that—the device was a real work of art: well thought out as to the timing, enough gelignite to make sure nobody in that room walked away. But the girl had been seen at one or two Communist meetings, and we figured someone had to open the door for the bomber.

  “One witness said she’d been talking with a man, earlier that day. The description the witness gave was pretty useless—slim, slicked-down hair, smoky glasses, thin moustache—but one of the girl’s neighbors had seen her a day or two earlier with a man who fit the same description, guy with an English accent. We figured she’d let him in to set the bomb, then either ran away with him, or heard what he’d done and got scared and took off on her own. She was foreign—Mexico, maybe Central America.

  “Now, in and of itself, an English accent doesn’t tell us much—half the men in New York have an accent of some kind—but it was a thing I’d heard before, an Englishman in the vicinity of a clever device. So I took the description and I—”

  “What were the other devices?” Grey interrupted to ask.

  Again Stuyvesant hesitated; again he shrugged, and told him about the fire that had started it all.

  “Last summer, a number of us Bureau agents were in Chicago, helping the local force with some agitators, when somebody had the bright idea of holding a raid. And not just a raid, but they thought it would be good to give the Reds warning, to give them time to clear out. Make ’em look like cowards, you know?

  “Of course, Reds are more likely to want martyrdom than to save their skin, and what the warning gave them was time to summon a mob. However, the cops had said they were going to do a raid, so they did the raid, broke down the door and started hauling people away. And it would have been okay, since there were plenty of cops on hand to keep the mob under control, but before they got the house cleared, a fire broke out in the kitchen, on the middle floor. And unfortuantely, one young woman had gone back upstairs to get her coat, and when the whole center floor went up in flames, she had no place to go but up, and finally off the roof. Margery Anne Wallingford was her name. She died. The mob watched it happen, blamed the cops, a riot started up, half the city began to beat on each other’s heads.”

  Stuyvesant kept his voice even, but it took some effort. He took a steadying breath, and went on.

  “When the riot was over and the coals were cool, we went sifting through them for evidence that they’d been assembling bombs and set one off, on purpose or by accident, but we didn’t find any other equipment. Which may have meant they’d just had the one that they’d intended to set elsewhere, but when I talked to the Reds they’d arrested, one of them happened to mention a box of groceries that had been delivered earlier that day. He’d just carried it up and left it on the kitchen table, because who had time for groceries when a raid was coming?

  “Tell you the truth, the whole thing was damn confusing. I might’ve thought there was some rival group, except that this bunch had so many internal disputes they were beginning to break into factions, anyway. I spent a long time digging around to see if this particular crew had stepped on the toes of some Comrades, but I couldn’t find anything. But if not rivals, why would the Reds burn down their own house? It couldn’t have been an accident—if the bomb was intended for elsewhere, they had all the time in the world to get rid of the thing before the raid. And if they’d meant it as a trap to kill cops, the timing and the location were both rotten.”

  “You don’t entertain the thought that the girl chose deliberately to go into the fire?”

  “Martyrdom to rally the cause? If there’d been more noise around it, I’d have wondered, but there wasn’t, not even a letter.

  “My nasty suspicious mind even began to wonder if it had started as a fake, designed to play on public sympathy—you know, evil cops setting fire to honest Communists’ headquarters. In that case, only the leaders would have been in on it, and once they were in the paddy wagon there was no one to stop the girl from going up for her coat.

  “The one thing I did find was the kid who’d delivered the box of groceries. He’d been stopped on the street and given a quarter to take it to an address, that was all he knew. By an Englishman with a moustache.

  “Okay, that was last
July. Then in November, a hard-guy judge in Cranston was about to present a key ruling on a Union dispute, and he got in his car to drive to work one morning—driving himself that day, as his driver had called in sick—and half a mile down the road, the car burst into flames. He was quicker than you’d guess, looking at him, and scrambled out with nothing worse than blisters all up his back, but it was a close thing. We figured that one was in a china doll sitting on the back seat—he had a granddaughter, no doubt thought it was hers until whoosh, up it went.

  “We had no reason to think it had anything to do with the July bomb, you understand, except they were two incendiary devices, which may have been placed inside everyday objects.

  “And in January, my bottle bomb, as nice a piece of death-dealing as you could ask for. Three booms, three innocuous settings, two Englishmen, nothing to tie them together but one agent’s suspicious mind.”

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Stuyvesant glanced over his shoulder. “Sorry?”

  “Mr. Stuyvesant, your voice drips with the memory of blood. Why is that?”

  “Bombs are bloody things.”

  “There is a personal element in your intonation.”

  Stuyvesant went to the cupboard for two cups, came back to the sink, and set them beside the coffee. “I don’t talk about my personal life.”

  “If you want my help, you had better change that policy.”

  “It’s nothing to do with the investigation.” Not really.

  “Nonetheless.”

  Son of a bitch. Damn Carstairs, anyway. Stuyvesant leaned both hands on the tiled surface and spoke to the window.

  “That riot, last July? My kid brother got caught up in it. Tim’s fourteen years younger than me and our dad died when he was five, so I’ve always been more like a father than a brother. He’s followed on my heels since he could crawl, enlisted when he was still just sixteen—lied about his age—and showed up on the Front six months after I did. I didn’t even try to get him sent home, just tucked him under my wing and kept him from doing anything too stupid. After the War, I made him go to college. And when he graduated and wanted to follow me into the Bureau, I kept an eye on him there, too. Just…not close enough.