Above the door, a thick glass lens on a cast-iron mounting turned and bobbed to look me over head-to-toe, then a dozen locks clicked and the door wheezed open.
No doorman had opened it, rather the thick wood with metal-sheathing had been opened by a series of gears and pulleys. Somewhere inside the shop, Verhalen had seen me, pulled a lever and, voila!, it yawned like Ali Baba’s cave.
Just inside the door, lit by the weak gray daylight, was a wide vulcanized rubber mat that read WELKUM. I wiped my feet and shook my head. Verhalen was a Fonetik, a subspecies of the Technocratic Movement. They wanted, in addition to rebuilding society with the efficiency of an analytical machine, to completely reform the spelling of the English language so that it was consistent and predictable. I pretended to agree with him on this, since he got all queer and fanatical with me when I didn’t, but deep down I suspected most people liked English the way it was. Strange spellings gave it an air of mystery, like a woman.
Verhalla was a tangled maze of poor lighting and jumbled machine parts. Half-finished inventions lay beneath drop cloths like corpses in a morgue. I picked my way down a path only to discover it dead-ended at a partially built steam carriage. I had to retrace my steps and try another.
The lighting was bad because Verhalen only ever lit the area he was using at that moment. Everything else relied on weak natural light from a handful of skylights. Since it was, as always, pitifully overcast, the whole place was dreary with shadow.
I finally found them in the southern corner of the warehouse, working on what appeared to be a fifteen-foot set of medieval jousting armor, though instead of a knight inside, there were gears. I say “them” because Verhalen was not alone. A young coolie girl perched on the shoulder of the knight, doing something with a crescent wrench. She was lean and hungry-looking, with short black hair and a broad flat face like the moon.
The Dutchman was on the ground with a pair of brass goggles hanging round his neck and thick gloves in hand. Despite the cold, he was wearing nothing on his chest but suspenders and a leather apron for sparks.
“Schist,” he grunted without turning.
“Who’s this?” I asked.
The coolie stopped and blew her hair out of her face so she could see me better.
“New apprentice.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I said, tipping my bowler.
Before she could reply, Verhalen interrupted.
“Pleasantries over. Back to work!” he bellowed.
She scowled at his tone and bent over the gears again.
“She speak English?” I asked. His exaggerated yell was a frequent way that we Americans dealt with foreign-types.
“Not a lick.”
“So…does she speak Dutch?”
“Nee.”
I scratched my cheek. “Jesus, Verhalen, how do you communicate?”
He stretched his arms like a Shakespearean actor. “The universal language. Gesture! So what brings you to Verhalla? Is it a case, or just looking for a friendly word?”
“Friendly words would be welcome,” I told him. “And I was wondering if I could borrow your Horizon Goggles.”
“Of course,” he answered cheerfully. The great thing about fanatical inventors is that they absolutely love it when people use their inventions. “I think I left them over on the shelf there, in a case between the auto-sketch and the spare Babbage parts.” His attention must have flitted to the coolie because he suddenly raised his voice and started to roar in Dutch.
The coolie yelled something back down in her own language. I consider myself an educated sort of man, but I’ve never learned the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin. It was anyone’s guess where she hailed from or what she was saying.
Verhalen cocked his head to listen as if she were genuinely telling him something and then shook his head and responded in his own foreign-speak.
“This must be what Babel was like,” I observed.
Their yells serenaded me as I dug through reams of garbage before finding the right valise. I dusted off the top, checked to see that they were there, and returned to the arguing savant. “Why’s she working for you, if you two don’t even speak the same lingo?”
“Well, she has to. I bought her.”
“Hell and damnation, Verhalen! What were you thinking?”
He stopped yelling in Dutch and turned to look at me. I became uncomfortably aware of the fact he was holding a magnesium torch in one hand. Rather carelessly, I might add.
“Some might consider that slavery,” I explained patiently.
“Oh yeah?” He pursed his lips. “Guess they would. Listen—it ain’t like that at all. I was talking to an engineer who worked on the Bicoastal Rail and he told me the railway companies brought them over by the boatload. He says they work real hard, too. There was some kind of race to build as much track as possible between them and the micks, but the coolies won.”
“Did they?” I asked in a falsely interested voice.
“Oh yeah, and they had harder terrain to cover as well—”
“Verhalen!” I said, shifting the valise to my other hand. “She’s a human being and you…bought her?”
He cut the flame and put the torch down, scratching behind his ear with one enormous leather-clad finger. “I suppose it might look untoward to some people…”
“You’re damn right it does! You brought an unmarried woman into your shop without a chaperone, after buying her.”
“Now see here! None of that moralistic nonsense. Adults should be trusted more. I’m tired of the starched-collar middle class inflicting their bizarre mores on the rest of us. I do not need a chaperone. I am man enough to control my urges.” He motioned behind me. “You know I sleep in the loft over there, right?”
I nodded.
“Well, I have her sleep out here, under that table.”
I looked at the work bench he’d fashioned into a crude bunk. “So you’re not a lech, you’re a robber baron, making your coolie sleep in the cold shop?”
Clearly, I had struck a nerve. His face mashed up in thought. I didn’t think he meant her ill. It was just that sometimes his head ran more like a clicking Babbage than a human brain.
“I could find a warmer place,” he growled in resignation.
“Send her to one of the Hull Houses,” I said. “They’d teach her English and fine scruples.”
“Now see here…I paid for her!”
“There you go again…”
“No, listen…a lot of coolies can’t afford the passage from Asia so the railways pay it for them. Like indenture in the old days. I paid off her debt to the company, since they didn’t need her anymore, and brought her to Manhattan.”
“What the hell for? And why couldn’t you get a Chinaman instead? Why a girl who everyone in the neighborhood will snicker at?”
Now it was his turn to look angry. “That doesn’t make any sense at all. I didn’t choose a man or a woman. I chose a fine pair of hands with ten slender digits.”
Ah, Verhalen. Never mind that he brought a young maiden into his house. Never mind that people would label him a creature of basest debauchery. It was the poor girl’s fingers that mattered.
“Mine don’t fit in the finer gearwork,” he explained. “The analytical I’m putting into this colossus is going to be years ahead of the rest. I need it to coordinate the limbs in order to move it like a human man, otherwise he’ll be too stiff.” He grinned. “It’s not about impure thoughts, Donovan. It’s about the machine.”
There was no convincing him when his technocratic principles were trotted out. I guess it really didn’t matter since most of the Verhalen clan were dead or moved away, and their high-society friends found the current heir as repulsively base as he found them useless. Simply put, he didn’t belong enough to be ostracized.
>
I left the Dutchman swearing at his new assistant and went out to the wharfs. On a day like today, the hexoid glass that made up the Carnegium’s domes reflected the gray sky like silver.
Ma Cleary would probably never know what a favor I was doing her. It was a nasty day for a stakeout on the river. My overcoat might as well have been a doily for all the good it did against the wind.
My plan was to monitor everyone going to and from the Carnegium. I had no other way to confirm if Bridget was working there. If she didn’t live on premises, she would have to take one of the steam launches out to the ship.
I didn’t see her. Or, rather, I don’t think I saw her. Most of the passengers were bundled up in balaclavas or scarves so that even with the Horizon Goggles, I couldn’t make out their features.
The day started coming to a close, becoming progressively darker and colder. I knew then that I shouldn’t have come out at all. An Irish girl in Carelli’s employ would never work at the Carnegium.
So I boxed up the goggles and headed back to the workshop. As I stepped around the side of the building out of the wind, I heard the staccato beat of a woman’s shoes on pavement. I glanced up and felt my heart stop. A shapely woman was waiting in the alley.
Moira. I was too stunned to flee. Before I could turn and run, she was on me.
Chapter Five
“You cold, mister? I can warm you up.” The woman took my hands in hers.
I sighed in relief. She was just another dockside whore stalking the alleys for a john. Up close, I could see her resemblance to Moira stopped at the collar. Her face was narrow and flinty, with sores around the lips.
“Sorry, I thought you were someone else,” I told her, taking back my hands.
“So did I,” she said to my back, “I thought you was someone with a prick.”
I ignored her and found the Dutchman beneath his amplified gaslight, using a rubber mallet on a dented bit of iron plating that his coolie held. The coolie got irritated with his instructions and seemed to say so, though she might have been commenting on the price of tea for all I know.
Verhalen found her tone insubordinate.
Next thing I knew, the two were yowling at each other in their respective tongues. It was a deep existential moment for me, watching a man and woman shout at each other when neither knew what the other was saying. There was something profound there, I thought.
“You sure you didn’t marry her?” I asked him.
He ignored me.
My heart was still pounding after the incident with the prostitute. “Hey, Verhalen, you mind if I bivvy here tonight?” I needed a safe place to hide for the evening. I figured she would probably come ’round late that night, trash some of my stuff and leave. I could head home early in the morning to clean up the mess and check for customers.
“Sure, whatever,” Verhalen spat before storming into his office.
The Chinese woman yelled at his back, motioning to the panel indignantly. When he was gone, she picked up the rubber mallet and started slamming it on her own. I felt sure Verhalen would come out at that, but he didn’t. Like all men who lived alone most their lives, he knew how to pout. It was the kind of expert-sulking I could only dream of.
I found a relatively clear area below the office to stretch out in. There were better spots in the workshop, but I thought I’d take my own advice and give the Chinagirl as much room as possible. That last remaining bit of gentleman in me would have it no other way.
The floor was hard but the idea that another visitor might be waiting at my apartment made it comfortable enough. The cold was what got me. The ground sucks the warmth from you like a tap takes syrup from a tree. Maybe it was the chilly floor, or maybe that sick giddiness I got when I thought about Moira, or maybe it was the beating I’d had, but when I closed my eyes I was back. Back in the thick of it.
The air was laden with the tang of hot metal and blood.
I could hear the ritcha-titch-titch of the Gatlings, their rounds cutting the air above the trench like fiendish sparrows. Like all infantryman, I hated Dr. Gatling. Only a devil would contrive a device that could kill so many men in so little time. Years later, I used to wonder about doctors. Never much liked ’em, myself. Whatever oath they swore, their inventions were pretty vile. Gatling “improved” the gun, and Dr. Guillotine “improved” executions.
I wasn’t thinking that in the trench, of course.
Your mind was usually unimpeded by whimsies like that. Instead, your senses turned on and told you a thousand goddamn details that did nothing but confounded you more. Every boot-stomp could be a friend moving into position or an enemy about to pop you.
We shuttered at the vibrations coming through the ground, vile pulses that told us the great machines of death were getting close. The British had spared no expense for their Confederate allies. Her Majesty’s myriad technica rolled out to flatten the Yankee aggressors. Maybe it was revenge for 1776. Or maybe it was a message to the czar eying Oregon. Whatever it was, it was bad. Really bad.
There was a whir-click-stomp that made our blood run cold. Gatlings were bad enough behind sandbags. Fixed positions were only dangerous if you charged ’em. When you put that same spinning muzzle on a pair of spring-powered legs, though, you had a mobile Gatling. We listened, terrified, to the whir-click-stomp, whir-click-stomp as clockwork arcipedes threaded their way through No Man’s Land. They were great black cast-iron storks with long muzzle-beaks that flashed for lethal seconds and then lapsed into satisfied silence, smoking eerily like a cigar.
The arcipedes were just the beginning. They were meant to pin us down while the heavy hitters maneuvered.
“We’ve got to counterattack,” someone said. “We have to hit them before they can get their breakers in position.”
We all knew what he meant. The barbed wire and earthworks were solid walls to a man on foot. They even impeded the clockwork Gatling-birds. But they were nothing to those kings of the battlefield, the dry ironclads.
The corporal—all our sergeants and lieutenants were dead—was right. Every man could hear the rattle and hiss of steam-driven ironclads idling across the field. Once they got their steam up, they would plow into our lines like a locomotive through a haystack. Then the siege would end and Robert E. Lee would have Pennsylvania.
“We’ve got to hit ’em now,” the corporal was saying. “Even if it kills us.”
Men on foot could tear a dry ironclad apart, given enough time. They were built with huge guns and heavy rams, designed to dislodge forts and trenches, not fight a suicidal mob of lunatics. But the arcipedes were antipersonnel. How many would those Gatling-birds pick off before we gremlined the ironclads? Plus there was barbed wire and mantraps between us.
Nobody moved.
I was close to the corporal. He held a six-shooter. Funny thing about six-shooters—they weren’t much good at shooting across No Man’s Land. Pistols were good for close-in fighting. They were good for shooting men in the back. When they ran away. A six-shooter was not for the enemy. A six-shooter was for your own soldiers.
Men and engines screamed around us. The dull booms of shells made our eardrums throb while the shrill cry of the wounded cut knife-like through the din. I could smell the ether and hear the moans and, miraculously, the whispers of triage: “We can’t save the leg.” It was awful to hear. Even amid all that death and destruction, I mourned for that man’s leg.
Corporal Courage was loading his revolver. His fingers were shaking as he gingerly put each bullet into the weapon. I watched him, dumbfounded. I didn’t have to look over the top to know what was waiting for us. I could hear it all. Ritcha-titch-titch…whir-click-stomp…rattle-rattle-hiss…ritcha-titch-titch…whir-click-stomp…rattle-rattle-hissssssssss…
I reached forward and, like an impudent child, slapped the gun from his hand. The bullets fell
in the mud like daisy pedals.
He stared down, mouth agape. He was nineteen, I think. My senior, since I was seventeen at the time. Things were desperate then. No one was too young to die when Johnny Reb had DC and the allied forces were marching to Philadelphia.
Then, all of a sudden, I wasn’t looking at a scared kid anymore but at Moira. Moira in her blue corset, the one which drove me crazy, the one that pushed and crushed her white breasts into a delightful valley below her neck. It was all she was wearing, except for a brass parade helm, somehow polished and gleaming, despite the ash and blood and dirt everywhere.
“You’re a coward, Donovan Schist!” she told me. The revolver was in her hand. I didn’t dare swat it again. “You’re yellow! Where are your balls, Donovan? Leave ’em at home with your mommy?”
I couldn’t breathe or swallow or talk. My eyes were no longer on her breasts. They were on her eyes. They gleamed with madness.
“Over the top, Donovan. Over the top or I shoot your prick off!”
The scene vanished, replaced by the looming face of Verhalen’s Oriental. She shook me awake with slender fingers. Instead of madness, I looked into eyes full of concern.
“Okay, okay!” I gently pushed her off.
She leaned back and sat on her hams, examining me with interest. I became painfully aware of my erection, a result of Moira’s unexpected appearance in the trenches.
“Bad dream,” I explained, hoping she wouldn’t notice. Even with the layers of winter clothes and poor lighting, a bulge was visible.
The Chinawoman said something to me in the incomprehensible language of faraway Cathay and got to her feet. Her black locks had been sheared haphazardly, as if Verhalen had done it himself. I was not surprised at this casual barbarity—long hair could foul an engine.
One more reason she yelled at him, I suppose.
Verhalen wasn’t one to get up early, even if his friend screams at the top of his lungs, so his assistant and I had a breakfast of dry bread and canned apples, occasionally commenting in our respective languages. Verhalen was the private sort. He had many acquaintances around town, but the ones he let in his workshop were few indeed. I wondered if the girl was lonely and any new face—even mine—was a welcome sight.
Cruel Numbers Page 5
