People would try to kill me for sure now.
Paranoia set in. Each passenger who got up to take a leak, every guy with a balaclava, even the conductor who stared too long, were all part of a plot.
What’s more, I had Bridget to worry about. After ten agonizing minutes, I decided to send a cable. I wouldn’t tell her about her family—that could wait until we saw each other. I settled on a forthright message.
BEING FOLLOWED [STOP] YOU ARE IN DANGER [STOP] EXERCISE EXTREME DILIGENCE
I waited nearby in case she answered. I was still waiting when the train filled with that pre-stop rustle of people digging out bags and putting on coats. I pushed rudely to the door and glared at the conductor when he tried to correct me. He sensed that I had good reason or maybe that I was armed because he let me by. I ran full-tilt to the first steam-hansom I saw.
“Your boiler up?” I asked.
The driver was a lanky fellow in a voluminous coat, a bright red scarf and an equally red nose. He nodded without speaking and secured goggles over his eyes.
I passed him two dollars—more than twice the cost of a regular fare—and told him where I was headed. “Don’t spare the horses.”
He gave a dry laugh and didn’t bother with the taximeter. We rocketed up 42nd like a spring flying loose from its bracket, the whistle screeching people out of our way.
I gave him another quarter when we got to Bridget’s hotel and asked him to wait. There wasn’t a doorman, so I went right up. I suspected she chose it for that reason, as a strange doorman could not be trusted to keep her secrets or even discourage assassins.
Her room was on the corner of the third floor, a choice location. I knocked and waited.
My pulse sounded in my ears as I counted off the minutes. When I looked down, I nearly shouted with rage. The beige slip of a telegram lay under the door. I picked it up slowly. It was my wire from the train.
Checking that I was alone, I drew my truncheon and shouldered the door open with a brutal shove and then froze.
Bridget lay like a satin doll in a green-patterned chair. She was wearing a simple white chemise with nothing else. I felt a brief and embarrassing moment of lust when I saw her, followed by horror.
She lay perfectly still, head cocked slightly, beautiful green eyes glazed with death. The vivacious white curls of her hair fell around her angular face like sea foam, a creamy contrast to the red on her lips. It was an impossible scarlet color any woman would envy. I was fairly certain it was blood.
I knelt beside her and gently opened her fingers like a flower. A .22 derringer lay in her palm. It was cold like her. I put it on the table and delicately pushed her jaw open to examine her mouth. There was congealed blood on her teeth and a hole in her soft palate.
There were no bruises or signs of a struggle. It looked like a suicide.
As if to confirm this, a telegram was crumpled in her left hand. Condor Inc. confirmed that all four Clearys had burned up with the Starling Skyline. I glanced around the small chamber and found the same newspaper I had read that morning.
This was why you didn’t give news like that over the wire.
I re-crumpled the telegram and put it back in her clawlike grip, trying hard not to look at her face. An overpowering urge to find Moira took me.
This isn’t her, I reminded myself.
I rested Bridget’s hands next to her body and stood up, looking around. Nothing was out of place. It was tidy even.
An envelope was propped on a writing desk by the window. It had my name in a flowing hand. Even her writing was graceful. I could practically hear her polished Anglo accent when I saw the delicate cursive letters.
I reached for it but stopped as I passed the window. A woman in black was getting into my hansom. She leaned back into the shadows to hide like a coiled viper.
My pulse started to race. I’d paid him to wait, not take a new fare. My ribs hurt as I thought of the Pinkerton woman and her sadistic heel.
Stepping from the window, I put my back to the wall and opened the letter. It had over a thousand greenbacks and two notes:
Mr. Schist,
Please accept my apologies for the disarray. Enclosed is your compensation, though it would be impossible to pay you what you deserve. I am certain that the coming days will be quite dangerous for you. There is valuable information concerning the recent dirigible crashes in my valise. I trust you will know what to do with it.
May the sun shine always on your face,
And the wind be always at your back.
Bridget Cleary
An Irish blessing and her birth name. I looked at her again, beautiful even in death, and shook my head. The second note was for the authorities. I read it anyway.
To Whom It May Concern:
Having participated in an abhorrent plot to secure vulgar profit with Mr. J. D. Cabot, I unwittingly caused the death of my innocent and loving family. I cannot bear the pain of what I have done. It is fitting that the suffering I have caused has rebounded to me.
Bridget Cleary
alias Beatrice Clermont
P.S. Mr. D. Schist is blameless in my death. I am a suicide and accept all the shame (and likely damnation) that entails, though I believe Mr. J. D. Cabot may also bear some guilt for my demise.
I double-checked my derringer and then took the liberty of loading hers. My .38 carried two shots. Her .22 had a single round. Derringers weren’t exactly the meanest gun to start with, and most people were wearing three layers of clothing right now. I had once seen a .22 bounce off a wool jacket like a Franklin stove. Even so, the more shots, the better. With these two small comforts in hand, I proceeded to her bedroom and opened the valise.
It was filled with all sorts of stationery, forms and glossy black formula cards. The punch cards were tied together with a bright yellow ribbon and, since they weren’t numbered, I didn’t dare touch them. If anything disturbed their sequence, it would be impossible to find out what process they were meant to affect.
There was no time to analyze the forms in detail, but they appeared to be records of bribery, stock transactions and, most disturbingly, a Babbage readout that predicted how many dirigible explosions were required to bankrupt a company.
It wasn’t just about bankrupting them, though. There were also carbon copies of real estate and futures transactions. Standard Oil had discovered vast helium deposits while probing the Great Plains. Standard’s game was oil, so they would have little use for helium. Someone was buying it from them. Someone who knew that the public were about to think hydrogen was unsafe.
That someone was James Danforth Cabot III. If I got to choose my enemy, he would have been dead last. Not because he was moral or even likeable—he was neither—but because he was far more dangerous than the others. He was a callous soul even for a Plutocrat, a warped creature who was known to haunt sick or dying companies like a great black vulture. Evidently he was tired of carrion and had graduated to culling the healthy.
Valise and derringers in hand, I went for the door and paused to look at Bridget again. I was wracked with guilt for the arousal I had felt when I first came through the door. The thought of more men leering at her shapely white calves enraged me.
I put everything down and laid a coverlet from the bed below her waist. They would know someone was here just after her death anyway. She had been nice enough to tell them, after all, that I was innocent. Of course, if the Magnates decided I was guilty of something, it wouldn’t be hard for the note to disappear.
When I went to the door this time, I didn’t look back.
Chapter Ten
The woman in the hansom was waiting out front so I went up instead of down, taking a rickety lift to the roof access and then stepping out into the cold air. It was a different world, just as alive as the streets below. Gray and purple doves bobbed
their heads and cooed while the wind whistled eerily through the tangled jungle of telegraph wires above and between the buildings.
I went to the side of the hotel where it bordered a squat brick department store and took a deep breath. With a running start, I cleared the alleyway and landed hard on the other roof. I kept running, in case I was seen, and made for the fire escape.
Once my feet were on the ground again, I ducked from alley to alley until I was certain no one was behind me. If my tail was slow, I could run home one last time. Hopefully, they wouldn’t realize I’d left the hotel until it was too late. I had better armaments there, and I knew I should pack a bag. Leaving the city would be my best chance of survival once I unloaded this data.
It was a strange thing, but I thought uncomfortably of Moira as I went. She had nothing in common with Bridget, but the corpse made me want her all the same. I badly wanted to hold someone to me, someone soft and warm and loving. Moira was two of those anyway.
There’d been a time when she was loving. I wanted to say it was all her, but it was just as much me. How could I tell her what I’d seen? How could she understand what I’d done?
She couldn’t. And so there was a wall between us. She could yell all she wanted, but I only spoke in whispers.
None of that mattered now, though, not with the chill of Bridget’s corpse still on my hands. I badly wanted to warm up against her. Moira wasn’t one of those women who were perpetually cold—her skin radiated heat like a forge when we lay under the covers together, except for once.
That was why I was disturbed. I had almost lost Moira once, and the memory stuck with me. I knew what she would look like as a corpse. I could close my eyes and see Moira with hollow, sunken eyes and pale, listless skin.
I pushed the thought away and realized I was at my apartment.
Given its contents, the valise was worth millions, but I decided to hide it in the alley when no one was looking so I could go in with both pistols drawn.
The front door was still broken, so there was no way to tell if anyone had entered since I left. If they were up there, they hadn’t left a light on.
The sweet sting of adrenalin hit my veins as I approached the front door. Taking the handle with my left hand, I swung it open and stepped in, both derringers leveled for action.
Instead of a bullet or a razor, I was hit by shock.
There had been an ambush all right. Before I got there.
A dead man lay at the base of the stairs. A pool of blood surrounded him like a halo, congealing rapidly in the winter air. He was wearing a long black greatcoat.
It appeared that he’d fallen and hit every stair down, but that didn’t matter because his throat had been slit from ear to ear with the precision of a butcher.
Seamus, I thought immediately. What have you done?
The dead man’s face was familiar.
The Pinkerton. He’d been dressed as a factory worker last time I saw him, at the beating in the alley. Hard to forget a man’s face when he’s spitting on you.
Had Seamus come to kill me and met this unfortunate fellow? Or maybe the family knew I was in trouble and he thought he was helping. One could never tell with micks… Little Brother might have killed me himself if I kept avoiding Moira, but that wouldn’t stop him from circling the wagons and watching my back if someone else gave it a try, especially a Pinkerton. The old clans had a funny sense of honor.
Somewhere, people were laughing, so I hastily shut the door, plunging us into darkness. It wouldn’t do for anyone to see me standing over a body like that. So far, my enemies had left the bulls out of it—hopefully it would stay that way.
I started to gingerly make my way up the stairs when I received yet another shock. There were moans of agony in my living room.
I vaulted up the steps two at a time, in case it was Seamus. The dumb bastard had probably caught a slug in his face for his trouble, which he royally deserved. Killing a Pinkerton was bad news—if the stupid mick was still alive, I would really give him the what-for. Seamus had nothing to do with this. By butting into my business, he might have signed his death warrant.
There was a prone body in the doorway to my kitchen. He was clutching his guts and whimpering piteously. I glanced around the loft quickly. We were alone.
Dropping the derringers onto the table, I knelt over the dying man.
“Now this,” I said, “is mighty strange stuff.”
It was not Seamus at all, but the second Pinkerton from the alley. I cradled his head and turned him over. A piano-wire garrote lay beside him, forgotten. His hands had more important work now—they were holding a blood-soaked bundle of cloth against his belly.
“Confound it!” I recognized the bundle as my favorite yellow afghan. “My mother knitted that for me.”
“Sorry,” the Pinkerton said, grimacing as he spoke. “It was handy.”
“Wait…that was in my bedroom,” I whispered, frowning. “On the chair…how did you get it?”
He winced when he tried to speak.
I looked over the kitchen. A cutting board and partially chopped cabbage lay on my table beside a brown paper package. Even over the blood, I could smell the corned beef.
Despite the dying man in my arms, I had a brief flash of Seamus in my kitchen, wearing an apron, chopping up the vegetables, humming “Cockles and Mussels.”
“The afghan fell off her shoulders, didn’t it?”
He nodded, unable to speak. His cheeks were ashen.
“A woman did this…with red hair so dark it’s almost black?”
He nodded weakly.
I lowered his head and leaned back on my hams. “Now here comes the odd question…did she think you were me?”
The Pinkerton didn’t answer. He just offered a stare which was both bleak and perplexed.
I shook my head at him. “Don’t die with that look on your face, friend. It’s not becoming at all.” I tore the afghan from his belly, eliciting a scream. I looked with disgust at the bloodstain and threw it out of his reach. “You’re just prolonging the inevitable,” I explained. “Just lie there quietly and let it come.”
He weakly gripped my ankle but I kicked free. I was not normally given to cruelty, but these men were trying to kill me. One could also argue that I was doing him a favor. I’d seen plenty of minie ball shots to the gut, plus a few bayonet strikes. It never ended well.
I went into the bedroom and discovered that my hands were shaking when I touched the door.
Moira.
The room was empty. For some reason, I thought I’d find her there, covered in blood, weeping like a child. Or maybe I wanted to find her there. Maybe I wanted to save her.
She wasn’t there, though. There was, however, a colossal mess. She’d taken the time to clean herself in my washroom before she left.
The detective part of me began to piece together the scene.
Moira enters the apartment, calls my name. I’m not here so she goes upstairs. She puts the groceries down on the table and takes off her coat but then notices how cold it is. I’ve been gone all day so the heat is off. She goes into the room and hesitates beside the bed. She drapes the afghan like a shawl and returns to cut the vegetables. She pauses to sharpen the knives, like she always does.
She’d often stood in our kitchen, legs akimbo, long gray whetstone scraping gracefully up the blade. She would get this look on her face when she sharpened knives—a queer sort of intensity. I’d never started an argument when she looked like that.
She’s halfway through the first cabbage when she hears the door open. She gets up and waits beside the doorway to the kitchen. Maybe to surprise me with a hug, maybe to stab me in the belly.
She was a transplanted farm girl. She had butchered chickens and hogs. The girl knew her way around a knife.
The f
irst Pinkerton comes up the stairs with his garrote in hand, quiet as a cat. The second Pinkerton waits at the base of the stairs to watch the door. When the first Pinkerton reaches the kitchen, Moira pounces on him, delivering several vicious upward blows to his gut—part of my mind strangely adds leaving bits of cabbage in the wound. The brutality of the attack could be because she saw the wire and knew he was here to kill her husband. An alternative is that the violence of her attack was because she thought her victim was Donovan Schist and she would soon be rid of him. A third possibility is that the fury was because she knew this was not her husband and was enraged she wouldn’t get to kill him today because of this interloper.
The Pinkerton cries out and falls to the ground. The second Pinkerton rushes up the stairs. Moira hears him and, without hesitation—for even a second would have given the man opportunity to get into the open where he could defend himself—she leaps over the prostrate form and is at the top of the stairs to meet him. She lashes out in a single precise cut to his throat, opening the jugular and throwing him off balance so that he falls back into darkness. He is likely dead before he hits the ground.
Moira hesitates at the top, making sure that neither body is moving, then retreats to the bedroom. She hastily cleans the knife and herself, dons her coat and flees the scene, dropping the knife into a convenient sewer grate on her way home.
The scene played itself out several times. Each possibility was as unsettling as the next. The best possible scenario was that all of this was done in a panic, a sort of rapid survival response. I’d seen it in war sometimes, how some people could become deadly when they were scared, deadlier than the calmest, most professional soldier.
An alternative was that she killed two men without hesitation, indulging in the activity with predatory glee. The fellow with the gut-wound in the kitchen was scary enough, but the manner in which she greeted his accomplice was downright chilling. She had responded with either lightning-quick thinking or base animal instinct. Since both possibilities meant Moira could commit murder with only a second’s decision, I found neither idea appealing.
Cruel Numbers Page 11
