I dreaded what I might find at the office, but I could hardly avoid the place forever. I was running a business, after all, and as the sole proprietor and employee, that business could not survive my absence. Moira was no morning lark, so I was reasonably sure the place would be safe.
It was shift change in the factory district, so the rail was crowded. It was the same when I switched to the omnibus. The ones going on shift were pretty easy to spot—they were rubbing their eyes and yawning. The ones going home were just as obvious—they leaned into the brass rails, barely able to stand after fourteen hours of monotonous labor.
Two of them caught my eye immediately. They wore the patched, greasy garments of factory men, and by their look, they were Irish. But something about their manner bothered me. They seemed too awake, too alert, to be going off or coming on shift. This made me a little nervous. I had, after all, crossed a lot of people in my time. It’s an unfortunate part of my job.
They didn’t spare a glance my way but the best tails never do. I noted them and surreptitiously checked my derringer, resolving to get off one stop early and see if they got off, too.
As I continued to scan the passengers around me, I caught sight of an attractive creature handsomely dressed in a periwinkle blue skirt and rose-colored frock coat. She was a lady of sorts, though not too uptown to ride the omnibus. Probably a middle-class girl, like a tutor or a governess. Maybe even a clerk. Many respectable businesses hired women these days, especially since a lot of male workers my age had gone South and returned in caskets.
I had a soft spot for the gentler sex, which partially explained why I took cases like Bridget and wholly explained why Moira liked throwing things at my head. This girl was just the sort that would elicit violence from Mrs. Schist. She had a nose that managed to be dainty without being plain, beautiful green eyes and a chin that just begged for a man to hold it between his fingers.
She glanced back at me and quickly averted her eyes.
I suddenly became aware of how rude I was being, to stare at her like that, but was secretly happy when she got off at the same stop I did. A few glances at a pert girl made for a fine distraction.
The gaslights were hissing off when I stepped onto the pavement. The omnibus rattled on, horse-hooves clicking as it went. I tried not to stare for too long at the woman in the blue skirt, glancing around to see if the two strange men had gotten off as well. They had not, so I figured I was wrong about the tail.
She stopped to chat with the fellow at the newspaper stand and I paused a respectful distance to peruse the headlines, which I would have done anyway. I didn’t see the Gray Lady so I picked up the latest bile from the Tammany press instead.
Between mostly innocent glances I took a gander and saw the burned-up airship was still a topic of discussion. Must have been a Magnate’s niece on it or something, because there was talk of hearings.
Icarus Unlimited had given a press conference in Newark. The press really went at their industrial captain, which was rare, since most journalists were plutocratic lapdogs. This meant the poor bastard had crossed somebody big and now had to walk the gauntlet. The robber barons could be pretty cruel to failures. I guess a flaming balloon and twenty cremated passengers rated a failure. Twenty important passengers anyway. If those had been Cornish miners in Virginia, nobody would have batted an eye.
The viciousness of the journalists intrigued me. Their questions were razor-sharp. Time and again the Icarus executive had to tell them that hydrogen was a safe gas for lift-bags, despite its combustibility.
The woman ahead of me coughed and turned to cast an eye over her shoulder at me. I had forgotten her. Part of me felt the urge to approach her and start a conversation, even if it was just about the weather.
She paused in front of an alley as if in thought and I quickened my pace. I was almost next to her when an awful realization struck. Her dainty nose and pert little chin had taken me off guard for a second.
A second is all anyone ever needs to kill you.
I reached for my truncheon but they were too quick. The wakeful factory workers from the omnibus had ridden to the next stop and doubled back while I watched their decoy. They were waiting in the alley for me when I walked up.
“Get in here, you shite!” one spat at me, throwing an uppercut into my stomach.
I gave up on the truncheon and went for my little shooter, but the woman pointed at me. A derringer had magically appeared in her petite gloved hand.
The other factory worker, the one who hadn’t yet punched me, curled his arm around my waist and led me into the alley. I cast a glance through his arm and saw the newspaper vendor quickly look away, pretending to straighten his wares.
If anyone else had noticed, they didn’t do anything about it.
I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice to say I received the second beating in two days. My New Year’s resolution would be to never repeat this week.
“So, think you’re a Pinkerton, eh?” one of them said between kicks.
“Pretending to be a Pinkerton… You’re not a goddamn Eye.”
“You’d make a lousy detective, asshole, falling for that honey trap.”
“Who’d want to be?” I gurgled, though I meant to laugh. “How’s it feel to be a whore for the robber barons? How does it feel to betray your own people, fellahs?”
The blows were heavier after that. The use of the word whore earned the wrath of the pretty woman. She had high-heeled boots that came down like pneumatic hammers.
“You back the fuck off,” one hissed at me when they were done. “Bridget Cleary died. Keep looking, and you will too.”
It was always of interest to me that the wealthy classes never did their own violence. They left the thuggery to the poor. Police, private detectives and thugs-for-hire all had one thing in common: they were as poor as the people they beat up. Similarly, it was rather ironic how micks treated darkies, considering the shit Yankees gave micks. You’d think that micks would understand and even empathize, but no, they hate them. If I were to be philosophical, I’d say it was because poor people hate to be reminded they’re poor, and nothing reminds them how poor they were like seeing other poor people.
I wanted to call after my assailants and tell them how helpful they’d been, but that probably would have gotten me killed. They had orders not to kill me, I’m sure, but that might change.
The pummeling had provided more edification than a year of stakeouts.
Carelli would never hire Pinkertons. He had his own boys for this kind of work. That meant someone further up the food chain had taken an interest in my queries. Some high-up really didn’t want me to find Bridget.
Every breath felt like a broken bottle in my side. My skull insisted there was a vise around it. The pain helped me think, though. The ambush had precluded any physical response from me, so now the adrenalin in my veins caused my brain to crank all the faster, like a tightly wound clock. That burning energy focused blue-hot on Bridget.
It was beginning to look as though the coffee men might have been telling the truth. Miss Cleary had a job with a Magnate. The question became: what was that job? What was she doing on the Carnegium that they wanted to keep quiet?
I had never heard of any ribald events in that glass-and-bronze Camelot. But then, no one really knew what went on there. It contained offices and some of the fastest Babbages on the Eastern Seaboard, plus hotels, restaurants, and the largest solarium in the world. But what else? It could have had carnal palaces that put the penny-brothels to shame with their decadence, for all I knew. I couldn’t even begin to imagine the sort of wretched things that bored millionaires would make girls do, safe on their manmade island where even the police needed an invitation.
I mulled these thoughts without bother because people had seen what the detectives had done and responded accordingly. They treated
me like a leper. There were no offers of help or even a shocked glance in my direction. People simply pretended I did not exist.
There were really only two reasons why three people beat the snot out of a man in an alley. They hadn’t taken my wallet or my watch, so one reason was eliminated. That left the second reason—to send a message. To bystanders, it meant I’d crossed someone big. Could be I was a radical, such as a unionizer or socialist, or maybe I’d just been seen at the wrong back door, if you take my drift. Either way, no one was going to be seen helping me now.
So I had to stumble the rest of the way, gripping my broken ribs, thinking about what an amateur Seamus was. Those three were well-schooled in violence. The woman especially had put him to shame.
Her presence didn’t surprise me, but it made me uneasy. At first, I thought they knew who I was and deliberately chose the oft-used honey trap. I was more susceptible than others to it, after all. But their taunts had been bland, perfunctory. It was the vanilla jibing all thugs use when they kick in your ribs. “Back off,” “This’ll learn you…” It was as though they were reading off a card or something. If they had known I was an ex-employee, their taunting would have been more colorful.
The Pinkertons had one of the best analytical machines in the city. That monstrous engine could run all sorts of formulas and had a vast memory. Problem was, Babbages weren’t like people. In order to find out what they know, you had to ask them in the right way. I’m guessing when they ran the cards into the machine, they probably just asked for an address, criminal record and maybe a current employment status. It didn’t occur to those bastards to check their own employee files. And the Babbage wasn’t smart enough to tell them they should.
The input/output would be one name/one address, never knowing there were other answers in there, answers which they hadn’t thought to ask for.
So one bullet dodged. For now.
After I realized I was safe, my anger welled up. That was good soldiering. You couldn’t get even if you were dead. It was important to keep one’s head down and regroup before you thought about vengeance.
Two thrashings in as many days. I would destroy someone for this.
Problem was, who to annihilate? The Pinkertons were just doing their job. You killed one and you weren’t really striking the person who hurt you. Of course you killed ’em when they were after you, just like you cut off a hand that was trying to strangle you. But killing a henchman was never an end to itself.
The best way to get revenge was to finish the case. I’d find Bridget and expose whatever nasty business these people wanted to cover up. I’d do it for free now, because the best pay was satisfaction. Nothing gives satisfaction like raining devastation onto someone who thought they were above you. If that meant taking down some blue-blooded Brahmin, so be it.
I wasn’t a radical, mind you. They had the life expectancy of a house fly. But when I quit the Pinkertons, I vowed I would never just lie down like that again. I wasn’t rooted to the City, after all. If I took someone down and their rich friends came after me, there were greener pastures. With my Moira troubles, it wouldn’t bother me to jump the Bicoastal to California and try my luck on the golden shores of the Last Republic.
But before it came to that, the first order of business was to hop into my loft, patch my wounds, change clothes and maybe pack a bag in case my place got hot.
When I walked up to the door, a nova of icicles exploded in my gut. It had been jimmied by a crowbar. There was no finesse at all, which, combined with the recent pummeling, said it wasn’t the Pinkertons. More likely it was Carelli’s scrags or an angry kinsman of Moira’s.
The difference was important. If a Carelli tough caught my bullets, it was business. If I killed a mick, though, his family would swear a blood feud and I’d be dodging shillelaghs the rest of my life.
I drew the derringer but kept the barrel pointed down. Hopefully, it would act as a deterrent if it were someone I preferred not to kill. I eased the door open with one hand, cringing at the noise, and started up the stairs.
Chapter Six
There didn’t seem to be anyone in the front room. A page from a book hung on the cord for the drapes. Not just any book. It was Hegel.
“Moira!” I snarled, jumping into the room.
No one else would have such disrespect for my books. It had to be her. What’s more, she couldn’t have mutilated Rousseau or Marx. She had to mutilate Phenomenology.
That bitch.
I were here, she wrote in her childish script, as if I hadn’t figured that out already. But you weren’t—more news that wasn’t news. Waited for you all night in bed. Naked. Left you something in the kitchen. And the washroom. Miss you, Moira.
My pulse quickened. The words were a little hard to read, since they were scrawled on top of some pretty heavy stuff about historical development. But one word was clear.
Naked.
It fairly blinked at me, as if written by fireflies. The image from my dream came back, unbidden. She was calling me a eunuch again. But her breasts were glorious.
I put the paper down and went into the washroom. There was vomit in the basin and all over the floor, as if she hadn’t quite made it.
“You drunken trollop,” I whispered, shaking my head. Of course she was drunk. She usually was when she wanted me. The impressive part was how she navigated twenty or so blocks in her condition and used a crowbar without hurting herself.
I wondered if her brother had helped. No, it would have been a little too much for poor Seamus to see his sister like that. Maybe Father Dempsey. After our last conversation, I would put nothing past the wily cleric.
Once my washroom and bruises were clean, I stumbled into the kitchen and discovered a cold plate of corned beef and cabbage on my table. The gray meat and pale, wilted leaves looked strange here, as I hadn’t eaten the dish since I left her. My ma used to make the stuff. I wanted to cry like a babe and shovel it by the fork-load into my mouth.
I sat down and was about to do just that when I saw a bottle sitting next to the tap. The label said it was rat poison.
It was empty.
“Hell and damnation.”
I never bought rat poison. My home was like a little sanctuary for them, a veritable holiday island where they would never find traps or poison or cats. Of course, it was easy to be philosophical about rodents when your neighbors already have a pest control plan.
So she’d brought the bottle with her. And emptied it somewhere. Maybe the tap. Maybe the food.
It would be just like her to murder me for making her beg. In her drunkenness, she’d forgotten to hide the bottle. Or perhaps she changed her mind and dumped it in the tap, realizing that if she killed me, she couldn’t throw things at my head anymore.
But the thoughts didn’t stop there.
What if she’d brought it, deliberately drained the poison into the tap, and then left it bold as brass so I would see it just as I started to tuck in?
The possibilities were dizzying.
The bottle went into the waste bin, followed by the corned beef.
She might have poisoned my other victuals, but a sealed tin of beans was beyond her ability. I ate them cold, staring at the discarded food.
When my stomach was more or less topped off, my aching wounds drove me into my tiny bedroom to collapse. The bed was unmade, which wasn’t like me. Then I remembered why.
I could smell her on the sheets. She had lain there, with her soft white skin beneath the cream-colored covers, rubbing her thighs together like a cricket and wondering where I was.
I had spent the night on a hard cold floor while she had panted here for me.
The blood in my veins burned so hot the aches were gone. I had to have her, that second, on this bed. I was pretty sure I could find her. I was a detective and all.
; I changed into something a little more dashing—black vest and silver fob, red suspenders and a pair of shoes that hadn’t spent the last few weeks splashing through ice and mud. Maybe, I reflected, we wouldn’t even make it back here. Maybe I would take her wherever she was, even if it was her mother’s. The place was crawling with children and grandchildren. There’d be so much screaming downstairs that no one would notice a little more upstairs.
Cravat in place and hair combed, I turned to leave when I saw a bit of sunlight hit a single strand of hair on my pillow. The half in darkness was black as night, while the sunlit portion was copper-red. It was a tangible reminder, even more than her smell, that she had been here.
I picked it up and as my eyes unfocused, I saw past it to my discarded waistcoat. Bridget’s picture had slid out the front pocket so I could see the top of her head. She peeked out at me with reproving eyes.
The look of another human being—even from a picture—was enough to calm me. The empty bottle of rat poison came to mind and my faculties returned completely. My mind took a lurid streak—perhaps I could find a prostitute that looked like her—but that thought vanished quickly.
Bridget Cleary was in trouble. I was sure of it. The least I could do for her poor mother was bring her home in one piece.
I’d expected to dig her out of a brothel somewhere or maybe haul her out of the cool black Hudson to ship her home in a pine box. Both of those were frequent endings in a case like this.
Gate-crashing the Carnegium was not. It was dangerous work but more importantly, it would keep my mind off Moira. And if I did find her…well, Uncle Jack would probably change his tune and drop some coin my way.
So I would do what no other lowlife dared—visit the shining aquatic palace Carnegie had built for his friends. The original intention of the device, if the papers were believed, was to be a floating wharf for when they ran out of space on the shore. Problem was, the building costs made it prohibitive to consider this on a massive scale, so the island was fitted with gleaming domes and winking gaslights, becoming a sleek modern Versailles to demonstrate the technical might of the Magnocracy.
Cruel Numbers Page 6
