By Gaslight

by Steven Price

  And he would go quiet then, and study the scrapings of his plate, remembering.

  The hotel was located six blocks from the rail yards and the two men father and son made their way out into the rain with their oilskin coats turned up and their heads low. Trudging through the mud of Central Avenue towards the river with a bowlegged gait each one and the grim unfussy approach of men well acquainted with violence. The rain came in at a low slant and the outlines of horses could be seen huddled to one side of the hitching posts. William regarded the thin orange glow from the hurricane lamps on the porch reflecting off their haunches and casting their crooked shadows out into the ruts and black pools of the street and he blinked the water from his eyes and went on. It was a cold ropy rain that chapped the knuckles and rawed the wrists and William regretted his gloves packed in his trunk at the hotel. The Enfield he had rolled in oilskin to keep the powder dry and carried it low at his side.

  His father coughed and turned from the rain and spat then stepped up onto the clattering boardwalk and went into the depot. They wore two pistols apiece and they kept their heads both.

  It was a small room with a low fire burning in a brazier at its centre and a wicket against one wall and beechwood benches set back to back running the length of it. It stood near empty but for the five operatives lounging with papers opened and pipestems bristling from their jaws and their hats wilting beside them or hooked over their knees. They were big men each one the better of William but when they saw his father they got anxiously to their feet.

  All right lads, his father said, looking up at them. It’s not time yet.

  He swung off his hat and beat the rain from it and put it back on.

  The rain was dripping from the hem of William’s oilskin and he stood in a puddle on the floor wiping water from his face and stamping the muck from his boots. Anything might go wrong on the morrow and he knew any one of these men might not come out of it and he wondered again what sort it was elected such work for pay and what trust could mean to those who traded in flesh.

  His father was going among the men. A nod, a clasp on the shoulder. The common touch. Has Mr. Bangs been in yet? he asked.

  He were just here, Mr. Pinkerton, sir, one of the men said. A mouth wide as the base of a bottle, crooked yellow teeth like piano keys. His eyes were grim.

  Where is he now? William asked.

  The men looked at him then and he saw in their faces something thin, and hard, and severe.

  Is he back at the post office? his father asked.

  Yes sir, a second man replied.

  Mr. Pinkerton? What is it we’re here to do, sir? the first man asked.

  The father peered across at the son.

  Willie?

  William met his father’s eye. We’ll tell you when it’s time, he said curtly, and then he regarded the men. It’s unlikely to be tonight. But be ready for it all the same.

  A shuffling of boots. Much muttering and knuckles working in pockets.

  William looked again at his father and set the rifle down on the bench then went back out.

  He walked up Fourth and crossed Elm in the whirling rain then hopped back up out of the mud on the far side and stamped his boots and opened the door of the post office and stepped through. It was warm in there with the fire going and Bangs was seated on a bench under a poster advertising condensed milk and the miracle cures of Mr. Bilmacken’s Goat Cheese and he looked up as William came in.

  Nothing?

  Bangs looped his spectacles back on, glanced at the clerk. Green eyeshade and gartered sleeves, a gnawed pencil tucked up behind one ear. Examining some paper laid out before him with a too-strained intent. Then Bangs stood and gestured William out onto the porch and the bell rang and the door swung shut behind them.

  Everyone still in place? Bangs said.

  William nodded.

  I think today’s a bust, Bangs said. There’s only the one express left and that’s within the hour.

  He was a small man, an ugly man. Walked with his left foot turned in and his left hand contorted into a claw and shoved into his coat pocket from an injury sustained before the war. As a boy William had feared him. He had small teeth not visible when he spoke so that only the tip of a pale tongue could be seen moving in the black and when he laughed his thin lips gaped open like the gills on a trout. Pocked cheeks from some childhood illness, hard green eyes behind crooked eyeglasses. He had been a journalist once and a guard at New York’s Crystal Palace after that and he had balanced the Agency’s books since its founding thirteen years earlier.

  How’s Margaret? he asked now, staring across at the lights of the depot.

  Still beautiful, William said. Still fed up.

  Bangs smiled. A woman like that likes to have her fellow close to home.

  He likes to be there.

  Well. Bangs nodded. This’ll be done with soon enough.

  It’s the waiting I hate. The rain was easing now, the wind turning to the south. William folded both arms over the railing and clasped his frozen hands. The gaslights of the opera house were burning across the street, casting cones of light along the stone facade. He could hear the heavy waters of the Ohio churning far off in the darkness. He said, You think we can trust this Winscott?

  I think so.

  William thought about it and then he said, Tell me about Edward Shade.

  You should ask your father about that.

  I’m asking you.

  The older man despite his ruined appearance was a hard and stubborn man. He seemed to be turning it over in his head and after a moment he shrugged as if he had decided something and then he said, What do you want to know?

  What happened in sixty-six?

  Bangs adjusted his spectacles with one finger. He said, An express train robbery in New York. The guard had fallen asleep and the thieves cut a hole into the door and clubbed him over the head while the train was moving at speed and then they jumped from the car and ran off. The guard was found unconscious with froth at his lips. There wasn’t much to work from, the rough cuts around the door, some slivers of soap in the floorboards. But we had a feeling something was wrong. At one point the guard named a tunnel in the Bronx the train had just entered, right before the thieves struck. But if he was asleep in a windowless express car how could he have known that? He cracked. Confessed to being a confederate of the thieves and admitted rubbing soap on his lips to create the froth. The thieves were two men we hadn’t known before, Crakes and Stone, and we traced them up to Toronto and arrested them and brought them south. We found a serrated knife in their room that matched the cuts around the express car door and had them sent down to the jail in White Plains, New York. The strange thing was that everyone we talked to insisted there had been a third man with them in Toronto, a man with a dark complexion and a scar on his face, a man named Edward.

  William nodded.

  It wasn’t Edward Shade, Bangs said. There was no reason to think it.

  But my father thought it.

  You must have heard about this.

  William was shaking his head. Did you track the man? This Edward?

  Bangs smiled ruefully. Three weeks after the arrests someone dug a tunnel under the jail and Crakes and Stone escaped and we couldn’t find them anywhere. Then a month later the Boylston Bank in Boston was broken into using the same kind of tunnel, and over a million dollars’ worth of securities was seized. It was Crakes and Stone again, of course. By this time your father was furious and sent two dozen operatives in to find them, but whoever was in charge, maybe it was this Edward figure, he was too clever for that. He approached Boylston’s manager indirectly using a crooked attorney and offered to work back the securities to the bank for a fraction of their value. The bank agreed. I guess they thought it was cheaper than paying for our investigation. We couldn’t do anything. We think there were four of them on that Boylston job—Crakes and Stone who were known to us, an English cracksman, and this mysterious Edward. All four of them sailed for Europe ou
t of Canada and we could only watch them go.

  What about the stolen amounts?

  All of it worked back. Every dime.

  William was puzzled. I don’t understand, he said quietly. So what’s all this about Shade?

  Bangs was shaking his head and fumbling in his pocket for his pipe but when he pulled it out it was wet and he started to shake it dry and then gave up.

  Mr. Bangs?

  Look, kid, Bangs said. He’s your father and I admire him more than any man living. But everyone gets it wrong once in a while. Here’s what happened. A witness identified a third man running from the express train, said he was this tall and looked like so with a scar on his face like so. Dark skin, like a half Mexican. A similar man was seen in White Plains. No question. An informant in New York gives us the name Edward. And when we canvas the bank manager in Boston he claims a wealthy Mexican who was so tall with a scar on his cheek was seen opening a new account two weeks before the heist.

  Okay.

  Bangs gave him a look. Each of the witnesses said they saw the scar. Later every one of them retracted it. Both Crakes and Stone had thick beards, if that’s what you’re thinking. It wasn’t either of them. Sometimes people think they see things and it turns out later to be, well, you know.

  Wrong.

  Yes.

  My father doesn’t want to talk about it.

  He’s embarrassed, I guess.

  Was it very bad?

  Bangs tilted his hat back from his forehead. There were jokes about it in the Police Gazette in New York, he said. At Christmas somebody mailed him a present of sticking plaster. For shaving cuts. It was kept out of the dailies thank god.

  It could have been worse.

  You think so.

  You don’t?

  Bangs pushed himself upright from the railing, his bad arm hunched in the cold. He said, Worse doesn’t come into it, kid. Not for your father. You know why we’re here, don’t you?

  To take John Reno.

  Bangs stared out at the rain. John Reno, he murmured. Sure.

  They waited all through the evening and slept badly in their clothes with their boots and coats beside their beds and then waited all through the morning and afternoon of the following day. William could feel his father’s impatience. The rain had blown past in the night and the city was crowded with clerks coming out of the counting houses and coaches mired in the muck and ladies holding their skirts in disgust.

  He could not still himself and he paced under the big windows of the hotel lobby watching the doors for word and going to the station and coming back and in the afternoon as the daylight was again failing the telegram at last came through.

  It’s a go, he told his father with a rush.

  His father merely grunted.

  Dick Winscott would have John Reno on the Seymour platform awaiting the 4:10 postal express that day. William and his father came at a run into the waiting room of the Cincinnati & Indianapolis to find the big men watching the rail yards and adjusting their hats and the depot clerk regarding them with a disapproving air. Then the door clattered open behind them and Bangs was shuffling in out of the cold with a scarf double-wrapped around his neck and his eyes afire.

  You ready? he said.

  His father glanced at the men standing behind him and William could feel his excitement. Is the car coupled? his father said.

  Bangs nodded. He took William’s hand at the door and wished him luck.

  It’s not us who needs it, William said. He winked. Don’t wait up.

  And tipped his hat and went out.

  Railroad men called it a ghost special. It crouched on the rails in the cold snorting a great cloud of steam like some terror out of an older age, a heavy eight-coupled tender locomotive accustomed to hauling freight, its boiler the size of a barn. There were pigeons scattering up near the smoke box and landing and picking at some spill of feed in the loading bays despite the dark and the cold and William blew out his cheeks and felt the first of his misgivings. Some of the men were already aboard and others were hauling coils of rope from the sheds beside the tracks. That engine had been built for power by the Grant Locomotive Works and sold to the B&O in 1867 and William’s father had borrowed it for its speed. It gleamed black in the gloom with its gold and red trim startling to William’s eye and a great clattering of pistons as the firebox was stoked and the boiler cranked up to capacity. His father did not want John Reno to know what was coming down the track and so the tender had been coupled only to a single passenger car and the fireman now leaned out of the cab and gave them a grim nod and the men clambered aboard.

  And then like that the brakes unclamped with a jolt and the wheels loosed and the twin pistons punched and spun. William took one last look at the station then trotted alongside and swung up and in.

  It was an old velvet-lined carriage smelling of smoke and sweat with seats arranged along each wall in the manner of an omnibus and brass rails for their boots and webbing slung overhead for baggage and a weak gas lamp burning at each corner of the car. William stood with his father at the front while the men got seated and he was the last to sit and no man gave him more than a glance. His father did not sit but stood in the aisle with one hand out on either side of him gripping the posts for balance and regarding the men.

  If you know me you know I’m not one for speechifying, his father was saying.

  The big locomotive rattled up out of the hollow, the grey Ohio sliding past on one side.

  Tonight we mean to go into Seymour Indiana and take John Reno out by force, his father said. This should go simple and without complications. You’ll follow me when we come into the platform and stay close. Don’t engage until we’re in place and then don’t hesitate. You know his reputation.

  William felt the car shunt and shift on the tracks and they were moving now at speed through the extinguishing afternoon.

  There’ll be a man with him, a saloon keeper name of Winscott, his father said. We don’t want him. He’s not a killer by all reports but if he gets in the way.

  He left the words hanging and the men nodded amongst themselves.

  Reno’s not too particular about killing so you’ll want to be fast. He ran a hand across his mouth as if thinking about something and then he added, I’ve told the driver to go in hard and to get out at speed and he’s given us three minutes on the outside before the postal express comes up on him. You know what that means, lads.

  Two of the men were checking their revolvers. William watched their deft hands at play. Click swivel turn click and the glint of metal winking there.

  Is any of that not clear? his father was saying. Mr. Wyatt?

  The man with the yellow teeth and wide mouth turned his face from the window and nodded. Sir.

  I want you to keep an especial eye on his guns. He’ll have two and a knife in his boot if our information is correct. Mr. Mueller?

  A man bearded and broad-trunked and heavy-browed as a lumberjack with a great mane of reddish hair shuffled his boots and grunted. He sat with his hands on his knees and his big thighs splayed out over two seats and his gut sagging over his belt.

  Mr. Mueller I want you to shackle the fellow. William will take his arms from the back and when he does so you get his wrists into the irons.

  The big Hessian nodded.

  His father reached into his waistcoat. Here is a photograph of John Reno taken last spring in Seymour.

  The nearest man took it wordlessly and unfolded it then passed it on.

  There’s nothing about this man you should like or take kindly to, his father added. He’s killed and stolen and done in just about every kind of honest citizen you can name and he’s never thought twice about it. If you have a sister or a wife or a mother, this is the man she goes to sleep at night scared of.

  William did not look at the photograph but handed it across to the man behind him.

  His father took out his pocket watch, cradled it in his palm. You have thirty-four minutes lads, he said. Do wha
t you need to do.

  Twenty-nine minutes later his father picked up his hat by its peak from the seat beside him and set it low on his eyes and adjusted his revolvers then got swaying to his feet.

  He ducked his head to watch the picketed fields roll past, the stands of oak in the middle distance grey and spindled and bare in the cold. William followed his father’s gaze. The sun was low in the sky and had backlit the streaked clouds into a red inflamed welt of light.

  Welcome to Seymour, his father shouted.

  William could feel an electricity go through the carriage then and when his eyes shifted to the face reflected in the window he saw neither dread nor joy nor excitement but something else which he did not recognize and only many years later would understand was the look terror took on in the eyes of a twenty-two-year-old boy. He thought of his wife at home and of his new daughter in her crib and he realized there was no part of him that wanted to leave this earth. The riders at the depot in Seymour were killers and would shoot without hesitation and like his father he did not believe John Reno would be without associates on that platform. What troubled him was the not knowing. He would not know a member of Reno’s gang to see him and could run right past a hand in a waistcoat or a knife in a fist none the wiser.

  When he raised his eyes his father was looking at him.

  Three minutes, his father hollered over the sound of the locomotive. Remember we get in and grab him and get out. If there’s no need to make a fuss we don’t make one.

  William could feel himself nodding despite himself and he blinked hard and peered again at his fists. There was a loose thread on the cuff of his coat and he tugged at it and tried to think of nothing at all.