Ax & Spade: A Thriller (Raven Trilogy Book 1)

by Kurt B. Dowdle

  TWENTY-FOUR

  KAMP FILLED the next three days with research of the records. He scrutinized each page of every document, thousands of records in all, including a search for any information related to the delivery or use of a steam-powered screw press in Saucon. He found nothing related to it. But he continued to work through the documents until he’d pieced together enough fragments to assemble a clear picture for himself. At night, he rested and let his bones heal. Nyx spent the better part of her time making cartridges the way Angus had instructed her and then putting the Sharps to good use. She went hunting every day for squonk and brought back something even better, a strange bird newly introduced to the region, called a pheasant. Kamp had heard that it made good eating, and they feasted on it.

  On the third night, he removed the splint from his right arm and found that the arm could bend. It felt exceedingly weak at first, and he didn’t attempt to lift anything. But he practiced moving it back and forth until he was exhausted. E. Wyles had done an expert job on the surgery, and he could tell the wounds were healing correctly. Nyx changed the dressing on his left arm at regular intervals. The angry purple bruise that covered his left hip had turned greenish-yellow, a good sign. More important, it felt better, and it felt good to walk. He slept as much as his body and mind would allow, which is to say that his sleep was always troubled. Each night, when Nyx heard shouting, crying and bumping in his bedroom, she lit a candle and investigated. And each night, she found Kamp asleep but thrashing in bed. The shouts and cries were all his.

  On the seventh morning, Kamp awoke hours before dawn. He lay in bed testing his arms and legs. Everything hurt but seemed to be in good working order. He walked into the front room, lit a candle and fixed a cup of coffee. He walked onto the front porch and looked at the stars blazing out in a black sky. The crescent moon, a narrow white shard, hung high. When he turned to go back in the cabin, Nyx met him at the door.

  He said, “Time to go.” She nodded.

  They loaded their few possessions into the wagon and locked the cabin doors. As he prepared to load himself into the wagon as well, Nyx stopped him.

  She said, “There’s one more thing.” She lit a lantern and went around the side of the cabin. Nyx pulled back the corner of a tarred canvas pall to reveal the punt gun. “Joe found it at the hunting camp and stole it. He said you’d probably need it at some point.”

  “Is that what he said?”

  “Yah, and he even threw in a couple pounds of powder and shot. Right there.”

  Together they managed to lift the weapon into the wagon. He lay down on his back, parallel to the barbarous instrument. Nyx covered them both with the tarred pall, leaving only his head exposed. He stared up at the stars and breathed the cold, still air. Almost as soon as the wagon started to roll, he got very drowsy and soon slipped into a lucid dream, where each star became a twinkling, silver coin. Kamp found he could travel to each star and read every one of its grooves and letters, decipher all its fire-born mysteries and see all the way back to its birth.

  NYX REACHED THE PATH that led to the house where Jonas and Rachel Bauer had lived. When she brought the horse to a stop, he awoke. Kamp sat up slowly in the bed of the wagon and scanned the surroundings. Together they pried the boards off the bulkhead doors and unloaded the contents of the wagon into the cellar, save the Sharps.

  Kamp said, “I want you to ride to the Fogels. Go see your sisters and show them you’re all right.”

  “What do I tell everyone about where I was?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  “Okay, but what should I tell them about you?”

  “Nothing. But if they want to know where I am, just tell them I’ll be at the police station this afternoon. Save them the trouble of having to look for me.”

  Nyx held out the Sharps to Kamp, who shook his head and said, “Keep it.”

  “No. It belongs to you.”

  He said, “I won’t be able to shoot it. Not for a while. You’re probably already a better shot than I ever was anyway.”

  And he walked down the path toward the road. Normally, he hated walking on an empty stomach, but now that the pain had begun to subside, Kamp forgot his hunger and savored the feeling of putting one foot in front of the other. He took the main road to Bethlehem instead of the tracks, because he knew no one would be looking for him. While he walked, he allowed his arms to swing as freely as he could bear. His thoughts soon shifted to what he’d learned during his convalescence with respect to the county records. In particular, he’d come across the name of a certain Otto Vordemgentschenfelde, who, according to records, was a chemical engineer and an employee of Native Iron. It also appeared Otto was a numismatist. Kamp knew this because the man had filed for a business license to deal in coins. The address listed for the business was 127 East Broad Street in Bethlehem. From tax records, Kamp had also learned that Vordemgentschenfelde owned a property in Saucon.

  When he got to Bethlehem, Kamp bought pierogies from a street vendor. He stood on the corner, ate two of them and pocketed the other two for later. He then made his way down East Broad Street, expecting that when he reached the business at 127, he would find the storefront empty. And he was right. Kamp cupped his hands around his eyes and pressed his face to the front window. He saw that the place had recently been occupied, though only a few old chairs and a display case attested to the fact. He went down the alley behind the building and found the back door, which he kicked open. A thin layer of dust had settled on the floor in the back room. He noticed nail holes in the walls where pictures or perhaps a tool rack had hung. But nothing remained. He went to the front room, looked in the abandoned display case and found it had been stripped bare. He turned on his heel and surveyed the room. On the far wall, at eye level, a countenance had been carved rather delicately into the wall. The face was smiling and wore a cap in the Phrygian style.

  Kamp left through the front door and headed down East Broad. He wondered as he walked whether the records related to Vordemgentschenfelde, perhaps the man himself, had been made from whole cloth. He decided they may have been. This possibility called into question the accuracy of all the records he’d studied. If someone had gone to the trouble of fabricating one set of documents, could the entire batch be fake? And if all the county records had been falsified, Kamp worried he’d have nothing in black and white, no facts, upon which to base his assertions. Having ruminated at length, though, on the nature of the forces arrayed against him, he concluded that the official county records, like the records of any county, contained mostly fragments of verifiable facts in addition to outright lies. The remainder of the documents consisted of expeditious half-truths that could never be proved or disproved. For example, he recalled that according to the documents, Roy Kunkle’s brother Anton lived at 283 Goepp Street. Since Anton Kunkle’s known address didn’t include an apartment number, he assumed it was a house.

  283 Goepp Street turned out to be a tenement building, and a monstrous one at that. Kamp went in the front door, through a small lobby and into what appeared much more like an aboveground rabbit warren than an apartment building. People streamed through dark, narrow hallways and up staircases that appeared in unexpected places and at odd angles. Due to the low light, the cramped conditions and the haphazard layout, he found it impossible to discern where one apartment ended and the next one began. He followed the main hallways as best he could, calling the name “Anton Kunkle” in the hope that he would stumble upon the man himself or that the residents would point the way to him. Neither happened.

  He attempted to find a manager or any person in charge or at least in possession of an address book. No such person existed. Eventually, Kamp resorted to traversing each hallway, knocking on each door, and if anyone answered, asking the inhabitant whether he was Anton Kunkle or where the man could be found. Most people answered with a blank stare or a stream of invective delivered in German or Hungarian, sometimes both. A few people responded with a simple “no.” By the time h
e’d knocked on the last door, Kamp had begun to suspect that Anton Kunkle, too, was a fictitious person.

  He left the tenement building at 283 Goepp Street through the back door, and when he did, he noticed a small light in a cellar window. He got on his hands and knees and pressed his face to the glass and saw a burning candle on a table. He circled the building, looking for a way into the cellar. Kamp found the wooden bulkhead doors, secured with a heavy iron chain but no lock. With some difficulty, Kamp eased the chain away and gently swung open the doors. He stared down into the cellar.

  “Hello? Anyone there?” No reply.

  He stepped down slowly into the darkness, working in the direction of where he’d seen the candle. Though he’d left the bulkhead doors open, Kamp soon found himself in pitch black darkness. He shuffled his feet along the floor and ran his hand along the wall. Kamp turned a corner and saw a sliver of yellow light coming from the crack beneath a door. He moved toward the door, and as he reached for the doorknob, he heard a loud click and felt two cold barrels against his left temple.

  Kamp said, “Anton Kunkle?”

  “Everyone calls me Duny.”

  KAMP SAT with his back against the wall in the cellar room Anton “Duny” Kunkle had fashioned into his living quarters. A straw mattress and a wool blanket lay in the far corner on the dirt floor. The candle burned atop a produce crate in the center of the room. There was a long, clay pipe on the crate next to the candle. Duny sat on the other side of the room cross-legged, a Pepperbox pistol at his side. It was a boot pistol, a double-barreled breech loader. Kamp knew it held four cartridges. And he also noticed that Duny Kunkle was short, not even five feet tall, and wiry. He had hollow cheeks, deep-set eyes and long, stringy brown hair matted to the sides of his head.

  In a flat tone Duny said, “You know you’s a stupid shit. You know that.”

  “We need to talk.”

  “That so?”

  “And since I figured you wouldn’t come looking for me, I thought I’d look for you.”

  Duny said, “No, I don’t mean you’re an idiot for this, not for coming here, though you gotta be a stone fool to come to this shithole without a piece. Either that or bat fuck insane.” Duny watched him for a long moment. “I heard about you.”

  Kamp said, “Who from?”

  “Don’t matter.”

  “What did you hear?”

  Another long pause. Duny cocked his head and kept staring at him as if he were a magnificent curiosity. He tilted his head back and scratched the wisps of hair on his chin.

  Duny said, “What kind of a man puts hisself between a killing mob and a criminal?” Duny shook his head. “Shit, ain’t nobody that goddamned dumb.”

  “I came to talk about your brother.”

  Duny cocked his head to the other side, parted his lips and let out a sharp breath. “He ain’t here no more.”

  “I know. Part of what I’m trying to understand is why he was killed and who’s responsible.”

  “I heard you went to college,” Duny said.

  “I did.”

  “That must be what made you stupid. I’m guessin’ before you went up there you had common sense.”

  Kamp said, “I don’t think it was an accident, Duny. I think someone murdered your brother, and I want to know who it was. I think you can help me.”

  Duny considered the comment and said, “More like not.”

  “Daniel Knecht knew who was responsible for killing Jonas and Rachel Bauer. They wanted it to look like Knecht did it so that the mob would go after him.”

  Duny Kunkle looked at him with a flat expression and said, “Ho-lee shit.”

  “What?

  “They got you turned six ways from Sunday, boy. I mean, they got you upside down and backwards with this.”

  “Who does?”

  Duny Kunkle leaned forward slowly and picked up the pipe. He laid it in his lap and pulled a tobacco pouch. He packed the bowl, struck a match against a stone in the wall and lit the pipe. The flame bounced up and down as he pulled in a few breaths. He held the last one and then exhaled a great cloud. Kamp smelled tobacco mixed with another ingredient with a pungent smell that he recognized as marijuana.

  Duny handed the pipe to Kamp. “This stuff will cure anything. I mean anything. I got it off an Indian.” Kamp took a long pull and let the smoke spread in his lungs before exhaling and handing back the pipe.

  Duny said, “Okay, here it is. First off, the reason my brother died is that his head got blowed clean off. City asshole showed it to me at the morgue when I hadda go down there and tell ’em it was him. God damn, how did they know to tell me to come down there if they din’t already know it was him!” He looked up, resting his back against the wall and letting out a deep sigh. “So that’s the first thing. There’s explosions in a mine, and men get killed. Boys, too. As far as for why it happened, what kinda one thing led to another, hell if I care.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Well, it wasn’t your brother died in that mine, neither.”

  “No, all my brothers were killed in the war.”

  Duny said, “Yah, I also heard that, heard you was in the war. That’s another thing seems goddamned foolish to me, how a man can go off to war and shoot another man, a man he don’t even know, kill him at some other asshole’s behest.” He shook his head angrily. “But that’s what you did, right? You went and killed some other poor bastard’s brothers, folks you didn’t even have no quarrel with, not really.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Sometimes. Christ, you probably did it every goddamned day, killed someone every chance you got. Hero.” He struck another match and lit up the bowl again. “And now you’re here. You come down here, because you want to know who killed my brother. You want to help me out. Talk about bullshit!”

  “Duny, I can understand if—”

  “Understand? Mister, the shit you understand wouldn’t fill a thimble. Daniel Knecht? Danny Knecht? I knew him. He’s exactly the kinda sonuvabitch you’d expect to see swinging from a branch, but he wouldn’t know nothing about no murderous intrigues, believe me.”

  “Maybe he had different sides to him.”

  “Different sides? That idiot?”

  “Yah.”

  “More like one side. For shit.”

  Kamp reached for the pipe, and Duny handed it to him. He took a pull and gave it back.

  “Did you know me and Roy was twins? You didn’t know that either, didja?”

  “No.”

  “That’s all right. You wouldn’t know it to look at us, me and him. Big Roy. Big and strong. What, six-five? Two-fifty. An’ look at me. Five-one, buck-o-seven. Little runty bastard. We was twins, though. That’s a fact. Born five minutes apart. Me first. Fraternal. An’ five minutes after that, our mother died.”

  Kamp felt himself starting to drift out of his body, and he steadied his gaze on the candle flame so that he could stay put.

  Duny said, “He was big, and I’m small. He’s dead, and I’m still alive. We killed our mother just by being born. How’s that for a story? That’s real.”

  “Well, it is and it isn’t.”

  Duny stood up and tucked the revolver in his waistband. He straightened one leg and shook it, then the other.

  Kamp said, “Where’re you going?”

  “Let’s get this over with.”

  Kamp moved from his sitting position and very stiffly and slowly balanced on his left knee and put his right foot on the floor. He winced and let out a groan as he moved.

  Duny said, “Jesus, boy, howdja hurt yourself?”

  “Say, Duny, I need to show you something. I’m going to reach in my pocket once.”

  “Go right ahead.”

  He pulled out the silver coin and held it up. Duny squinted to look at it. He leaned closer to the candle, and Duny leaned in as well.

  Duny said, “Oh, yah, I’ll be taking that—”

  Kamp lunged for the pistol and got his hand on it a split second
before Duny, who wrapped his hands around Kamp’s. They tussled briefly in the middle of the room with Duny trying to wrest the pistol from him.

  Through gritted teeth Kamp said, “Listen, Duny, I’m pretty sure the barrel of this gun is touching your balls. And I’m certain my finger is on the trigger. So, if you keep fighting with me, I know the gun isn’t loaded. Otherwise, there’s going to be one helluva mess. Duny eased his grip and took a step back from Kamp, who trained the pistol on Duny’s chest.

  Duny said, “We was just having a conversation. Whaddya wanna go and do that for?”

  “You and your brother are twins. I did know that. And your mother is Irene Kunkle. But she didn’t die giving birth. Matter of fact, she lives down the street.”

  Duny nodded.

  Kamp went on, “You know everything I said before is true. That’s why you lied about your mother. You don’t want me to go looking for her to ask her questions. You’re afraid they’ll go after her, too. It’s also why you’re living down here in the dark. You’re afraid they’ll come after you.”

  “They already did. Already sent someone. I took care of that. But there’ll be more. That’s sure.”

  “Not if they’re stopped.”

  Duny let his arms hang at his sides and shook his head. “You can’t get to ’em.”

  “Why did they go after your brother?”

  Duny heaved a long sigh. “See, it was like me and him was born into different worlds. Roy always seen things as right. Me, I always seen things as wrong, right from the first. But if Roy thought something wasn’t right, he said, well, it should be. Like how he didn’t like the way they run things in the mines. He thought men should be protected more and get paid better, shit like that. He wanted ’em to be fair.”

  “And he wasn’t afraid to say it.”

  “That’s right. That’s why churchgoers like that Jonas Bauer looked up to him. They didn’t like that he was a rabble-rouser, but they liked what he said, ’specially if it might make things better for them. Guys like Bauer figured it was okay for someone like Roy to speak up and take the grief for it, you know. Roy didn’t have no wife or children. But Jacob and Mrs. Bauer caught it anyway, didn’t they? Caught it something terrible.”