It finally looked as if the case might pay after all, yet I wasn’t excited about it. Not a bit. I wanted to forget about Bridget and the Clearys, even if I could get reimbursed for my time. The urgency in her voice sent shivers down my spine. The ferry ride back was even colder than the submersible, made more so when I replayed her words in my mind. Her face swam in my vision whenever I closed my eyes, a wan, terrifying specter so different from the frightened girl I had expected.
There were a lot of travelers this time of year, so I had to get tickets fast. I hired a steam-hansom to Grand Central Depot and made sure to keep the receipt, since I had a customer now to cover incidentals. There wasn’t anything direct to Rushford or Alexandria but I could catch the 5:00 a.m. up through the Empire State Corridor and at Buffalo take a spur into what I suspected was serious hick territory. I wondered if they even had coaches or if I’d have to ride a donkey or something.
I had a few hours to kill and, since I had no desire to sleep on the benches at the station, caught another cab back to my loft. Since I hadn’t hired a locksmith, the door was still broken, but by some miracle no one had robbed the place. It was dark and cold. The bakery below had shut off the oven hours earlier.
For the first time since I started living alone, the stillness of the place bothered me. When I checked the bedroom, it looked like the sheets had moved since last time I was here, but otherwise nothing was amiss.
I tried not to think about why the sheets would move. Had she been here again? Why wasn’t there a note?
I walked through the dark rooms and stopped in front of the bookshelf. The books were safe. She hadn’t defaced any more volumes. I checked my usual hiding places. Moira had definitely not been here—the liquor was untouched.
The bedroom seemed desolate so I slept in a comfy chair by my desk. The gaslights shot up through the frosted glass, painting a black cross on the far wall. I stared at that cross and tried to sleep.
Moira.
Her image came to me unbidden, like a ghost flitting down the chimney.
Moira.
My discipline was gone. I lay there in the chair and felt my eyes mist up. Without conscious thought, I went to the bedroom and collapsed face-first into the pillow.
Moira.
It smelled of her. She had been here after all. She had been here and lain on my bed again, waiting for me to come home. This time, though, she’d given up. This time, there was no note, no food and no poison bottle.
The thought brought a painful knot to my throat. Why hadn’t she waited longer? Why hadn’t she drunk? It wasn’t like her not to drink when she was alone. The thing that hurt the most, I think, was that she hadn’t done anything destructive. Why hadn’t there been another murder attempt?
I fell asleep thinking of her and slipped back into that awful white corridor in the Carnegium. I knew it would give me nightmares.
It was deathly still, like a winter’s pond. Out of that stillness, Moira appeared in the white haze. She was nothing but a pair of angry green eyes that looked at me from above a white surgical mask. She shook her head slowly, resolutely, and turned. The white bled into white and she vanished in that queer fog of plaster and marble and linen.
I chased her. Or I chased at her, rather. I must have screamed because the eyes turned back and then she tore her mask and hood off. Her beautiful hair, which was normally both red and black at once, was bleached white. Her creamy skin was hard and cold, like the marble we walked on.
“I’m over you,” she told me in a calm, unaccented voice that was more hurtful than her loudest shriek. “You are beneath me.”
When I came to, the words were ringing in my ears like the dull echo of a heavy bell.
Beneath me.
It took a moment to realize that someone was knocking at the door. Whoever it was, they had to see that the door was broken. Why didn’t they just come up?
I didn’t bother with the derringer. Assassins generally didn’t knock.
When I opened the door, my heart skipped a beat.
“Moira?” I asked the short, womanly figure before me.
Reality crashed down like an icy wave. It was too short to be Moira, and she was wearing the black uniform of a maid under her shawl.
“Top o’ the mornin’, Donovan!” sang a squeaky voice.
“Morning, Maggie,” I said. “Can’t offer much warmth, I’m afraid.”
She went up and stood there, stomping her petite heels on the wood and hugging herself. “Saints above! It’s cold in here.” She fixed me with a look. “Did you sleep in your coat?” Her eyebrow arched in disapproval.
“Got in late last night.”
“It’s like an icebox! You pay the gas bill?”
I nodded. “I’m doing fine, Maggie. I just got in late and didn’t bother with the heat.”
“You are not doing fine,” she corrected with a glare.
When Maggie fixed me with her eyes like that, it was no wonder I mistook her for Moira, though they shared no blood. She was a cousin on my mother’s side, another mick who came over when I was a little kid. We used to play house together. Knowing each other since childhood gave her a certain power over me.
She was going to exploit it. “Ya need a woman, Donovan. Just look at ya!”
“Are you going to take the part?” I asked, looming closer.
“Donovan Schist!” she shouted, slapping me on the chest. “I’ll none o’ that! I meant Moira and you know it.”
I shrugged. “Too bad. You’re quite the kisser, as I remember.”
Her mouselike features contorted with rage. Sure, she had a power over me, but I also had some over her. She was, after all, the first girl I’d ever kissed.
“You’re incorrigible!” She gave me another slap. This time it hit one of my bruised ribs.
I winced and leaned forward, breathing heavy. Pain didn’t stop her, though. Irish women are like that. Once they got you down, they go in for the kill.
“Moira pines for you. It’s even affected her health…poor dear is sick all the time.” She paused dramatically before playing her trump. “She’s stopped drinking.”
I clutched my rib and gritted my teeth. “Then it isn’t love making her sick. It’s delirium tremens.”
Maggie shook her head in disgust. “It wasn’t just the drink that made her hit you.”
“Fair and true,” I grunted, turning my back to her. “I have to go, Maggie. I’ve a train to catch.”
Her hands were on my shoulder, pulling me around to face her. “You’re not leaving, are you?”
“Just business,” I told her. “Though it’s nice to see Moira tripping over herself to get me back. Is anyone else in the neighborhood gonna come bother me? The baker, maybe?”
“You feckless…man.” Her little jaw quivered with rage. “She was here…twice already, though we told her not to come.” Her accent thickened with her anger, causing some of her words to curdle entirely into Gaelic. “Why should she bow to ye? Are ye the Ard Righ o’ Erin now, Donovan Schist?” She bared her teeth like an angry minx. “It’s you who should be begging her, not t’other way!”
My soul became an awful mirror. The heat of her indignation caused my wrath to bubble up like steam from a boiler. My eyes rested on the defaced copy of Hegel. It wasn’t the book that made me angry, it was that Moira wasn’t here. It was that she’d given up so easily last night and left me alone in a cold loft.
“I’ve got to
shave.”
“You will die cold and alone,” she told my back. There was a finality to it, a haunting tone that made me shiver. It was whispered that the Second Sight ran in our family, and scientific though I am, Maggie’s prophecy hung like a dour cloud in my mind.
She left without another word. I knew she’d be brief—she was dressed for work. She was a maid for an important man I won’t name. He had probably never even seen her, mind you, but just working for such a man had its benefits, no matter how lowly your position.
As I’d told her, I had a train to catch. And catch it I did, just after getting a telegraph from Bridget. It was an address for a midtown hotel. Not as nice as she could afford, but probably a comfortable place to lie low.
As it happened, I didn’t even need to leave the train to find out about the Clearys. Just after clearing the station, I started into the morning’s Gray Lady.
There had been another dirigible accident.
The Starling Skyline had caught fire an hour and twenty minutes out of the Newark Aerodrome. All hands were lost. The papers noted that Condor Incorporated, the company which ran Starling, had declared bankruptcy. The stock was dropping faster than their airships.
My weary face reflected back at me from the dark glass of the rumbling car.
I looked like hell.
The Western Union operator didn’t comment on my appearance. He drowsily sent the signal while I waited. I spent a moment watching the white ghosts of the landscape slide by from the narrow corridor. The operator poked his head out and I had my answer: all four Clearys were dead.
Chapter Nine
Any dislike I felt for Bridget melted away. I suppose I could have wired her the information, but it didn’t seem right. A message like this had to be given in person. There was no other way. I knew this because I had done it before and will do it again. When you chase missing people, you often find corpses.
I put sympathy aside for a minute. This put both Icarus and Condor on the chopping block, though Icarus wasn’t official yet. Their industrial captain had insisted to reporters they were “regrouping.”
I wished Verhalen was with me so I could ask him about hydrogen.
All I could do was wait for the next whistle-stop. Every minute meant another mile and a half farther from the city. It was a brutal half hour till I got off.
Dawn came and I was sitting on a frigid open-air platform in a town I’d never heard of. Another northbound came hurtling up, a beard of steam puffing out her sides.
She didn’t idle long before the conductor whistled and her engine began smoking and pumping hard to make up lost time.
Ten cars back, I saw O’Shea. He was leaning into the window, working his jaw absently behind a high upturned collar as the station rolled in his window.
For a long moment, I stared up at him, wondering what course of events had caused him to leave the city. He was almost past when his eyes lit on me. The change was instant—his sour look changed to bitter hatred. He left his compartment to find a way off the train. Before he could make an exit, though, the cars had cleared the station and begun their ballistic journey north.
I didn’t move, pretending to be just another cold traveler. Beneath my coat, I clenched the .38, wondering if two shots would be enough to put O’Shea down.
His hateful glare said it all. He was following me, but not to deliver flowers. It was odd—things were beyond Carelli’s level by now.
An awful thought hit me. What if the next southbound had O’Shea waiting on it like a hellish jack-in-the-box with a giant bronze fist?
I went to the ticket clerk in his tiny booth and asked if a passenger on the last train could switch and head south before I was gone. He didn’t even bat an eye. He leaned back, studied the numbers on his dull green flipboard and shook his head. The southbound had already cleared the next station.
Oddly, the question didn’t seem to surprise him. I wondered if this sort of thing happened a lot. Maybe city-folk chased each other like cats and dogs all the time out here, to the amusement of the suburban clerks. It wasn’t like there was much else to entertain them.
I crossed the road to a Western Union and wired a friend on Park Row. I paid for the return transmission, too, since police don’t get paid much. The robber barons want ’em nice and poor so they’re easier to bribe.
This bull didn’t take bribes, though. He was a former Pinkerton who’d left with a bad taste in his mouth, just like I did. I’d like to say we were two good guys in a bad city, but in the end we were just trying to survive like everyone else.
The return message was concise, which I appreciated.
CARELLI FOUND IN RIVER YESTERDAY [STOP] FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED
It went without saying that it was foul play. No one goes swimming in that river.
“Shit,” I groaned, scratching under my hat.
The Western Union guy gave me a disapproving shake of his head.
I ignored him and went back to the platform. No wonder O’Shea was angry. I got his boss iced. At best, O’Shea was out of a job. At worse, he was next on the list.
The next train was a while in coming, so I had plenty of time to imagine what O’Shea would do to me. O’Shea wasn’t what you’d call the forgiving sort. He was also not one to give up easily. That was something we had in common, like the war.
The first time I saw him after the war, it was in an alley off 34th Street. It was a cold goddamn night, the sort of night that would inevitably add to Potter’s Field come morning. Back then, I was cashing checks from the Pinkertons, a violent shill for the wealthy. I can’t remember what the assignment was, but I needed to be subtle. Most of the work I did required I keep my head down and my eyes open.
I saw a trio of toughs in an alley, kicking and punching the life outta someone. They weren’t the guys I was after, so I just kept walking. It never pays to be a hero in Hell’s Kitchen.
But then I saw something. One of the assailants got knocked backward and an opening appeared. Amongst the flail of brown coats and knuckledusters, I could make out the faded blue of a Yankee soldier.
O’Shea didn’t have much back then, but he did have a patched-up old overcoat from his days as a soldier. Since it was the self-same one he’d been wearing when he lost his arm, it was missing a sleeve, but that hardly mattered to the men who wanted it. Maybe one of them was cold, or maybe they were hoping to swap that coat for a warm swill of gin. Whatever their reasons, they came at the old vet, three against one, with O’Shea minus an arm, so I suppose it was more like six to one.
That didn’t bother O’Shea, though. He was used to losing, I suppose, so, not wishing to further disgrace his Union blues, he fought on gloriously, with nary a sign of victory in sight. He broke one man’s nose and hit another so hard in the throat that I thought the man would die.
But, as I’ve said, it was three to one.
Their fists eventually beat him flat and their kicks kept him down. If he’d only offered token resistance, they might have let him off with a light beating. But O’Shea had bloodied them on their own turf, so they had their reputations to consider.
My superiors would not have wanted me to involve myself in a street brawl, but I could hardly walk away from another vet. My truncheon was out before I knew what I was doing. They were deep in their mischief, oblivious to their surroundings, so they didn’t see me till I was on ’em.
The first I dispatched with a vicious whack to his right kidney and a follow-up blow to his hand, so he couldn’t use his brass knuckles.
Though prostrate, O’Shea saw his opponents distracted. When one of them turned his head to me, the wounded vet grabbed him by his ankle and tore his foot out from under him. The gangster fell on his ass just in time for O’Shea to crawl onto him l
ike an angry python. Before he could muster a defense, the crazy mick pinned his arms to his torso and started delivering head butt after head butt to his face, cracking teeth and drawing torrents of blood from his nose and mouth.
I had to drag the one-armed soldier off the guy before he killed him.
I knew better than to buy him a meal, though he was clearly starving. He was too proud to accept it. But no Irishman could refuse a drink, especially to toast a victory. We found a quiet bar, far from Hell’s Kitchen, and drank our whiskey while the blood of our enemies dried on our clothes. It was a singularly barbaric moment, a throwback to our shared island heritage, as if we were both savages in a wooden hill-fort, laughing at the dismembered heads of our foe-men.
We sang songs in Irish and talked about the war. From the way we carried on, you would never have guessed that we lost.
“You’re one helluva fighter,” I said between drinks. “You gave them rebs all manner of trouble.”
“I wouldn’t have needed no damn rescue with two arms,” he announced with a grin.
“I coulda just sat there and watched.”
“It would’ve been a nice show. Coulda charged admission.”
I looked at his empty sleeve. “Maybe you could get a replacement.” So I told him about Verhalen.
That was the sort of man hunting me, the sort who would start a one-armed fight against three stout thugs.
Now he had two arms. And one was brass.
I’ve never boarded a train so fast in my life. Even though it was physically impossible for O’Shea to get on this one, I was cautious, stepping into the car with my derringer cocked under my sleeve. Luckily, I didn’t trip and shoot my toe off or something.
The ride south managed to be longer than the ride up. Even at ninety miles an hour, a train couldn’t outpace a man’s thoughts. Someone had cashed Carelli’s chips, which meant they were cleaning house. If they killed their own associate, what would they do to the guy who asked questions in the first place?
Cruel Numbers Page 10
