Addleton Heights

by George Wright Padgett

  Maybe this interview was salvageable after all.

  I leaned forward. “How do you know him?”

  “He’s one of Mr. Montague’s inner staff. He works in the Babbage group, like an accounting foreman or something. Nice fellow, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “Nothing. I’ve ridden the bassel down from the mansion a few times while he was in it. He’s a nice guy.”

  “What then?” I didn’t conceal my frustration. “How do you know with such certainty that he’d never come in here? Do I need to go ask Reggie what your association with Jim Nelson was?”

  “No, I told you, we’d take the same bassel transport sometimes. That’s all.”

  I stared into his eyes, waiting.

  Finally, he offered, “There was one time I asked him . . . I made a mistake and misread signals . . . at least what I thought were signals.”

  I took the picture back. “You propositioned him?”

  “I thought . . . he seemed to . . . I misinterpreted his kindness for something more. He told me he had no interest and that was that. I promise, that’s all.”

  “Why did Bailey fire you from your position?” I asked.

  “Surely if you’re here, you know why. I got the sack because of my condition. A no mandrake policy on Montague’s premises. Somebody found out about me, and that was it. Mr. Bailey made me promise never to tell of my real job duties up there. He said if I did, he’d have me arrested for my condition.”

  “Why didn’t they just banish you?”

  “Maybe to keep me as an unofficial consultant or something, I don’t know. You tell me, you work with him.”

  “That’s why you thought I was here to kill you?”

  “What would you think if you were me?”

  “I see your point.” I took what was left of the device that Sawyer had slipped me from my pocket. “Do you know what this does?”

  After a few seconds of intense examination, he pushed it back on the table toward the long barrel of the gun. “It looks like a fancy door hinge or drawer pull. What is it?”

  “I don’t know, but the other half of it is blinking at my office,” I said, tucking it back into my vest.

  “Sorry, mister. I know weapons, not tinkware. Chinatown’s got some good inventors. You can take a bassel to Chinatown—”

  I waved off his explanation. “One final thing, Olsen, then I’m gonna let you go. Are you sure you don’t know anything about the crates? Dozens of crates are being packed and sent from Mr. Montague’s place. I’ve seen them in person, and they weigh like they’ve got weapons in them, maybe like what’s hidden under the topiaries. I need to find out what’s inside.”

  “Is this a test or something?”

  “No test. What’s inside? Where are they going?”

  “I swear to you, I don’t know. Are there any crate inscriptions or bills of lading to review?”

  “No, the crates just say ‘Founder’s Day’ and have Montague’s name stamped on them.”

  “Shouldn’t Mr. Bailey know what they are?”

  “Well done, Mr. Olsen,” I said, masking my disappointment that he clearly had no knowledge of Jason, Sawyer’s device, or the contents of the crates. This whole enterprise was a bust. “Yes, Mr. Olsen, it was a test, and you passed.”

  The confusion on his face melted into an expression of relief. “So . . . I can . . . it’s all right for me, you know, to go?”

  “Not just yet. I want you to wait ten minutes or so and then leave by the front door. I’m going out the back. That’s where he is.”

  Olsen nodded up and down so fervently, I thought his head would snap off.

  I tucked Fitzpatrick’s gun back into my belt. “Oh, and Olsen, stay away from your apartment for a few days. It’s not safe there. Go stay at your lover’s place if you can.”

  “Yeah, Trevor can do that,” he explained, still nodding. “I stayed with him last night.”

  I reached over for one final sip of coffee. “Good, and avoid coming here for a few days too.”

  “Thank you, mister. Thank you so much. I don’t even know your name.”

  “Kip. Friends just call me Kip. By the way, when this is all over, tell the owner of this place to invest in some better locks. Oh, and thanks for the coffee.”

  PART TWO

  Sixteen

  The chill of the brisk January air nipped at my cheeks like needles. As Hennemann had said, he’d parked the steam carriage on the back side of the club. I shut the service door with a strong push and headed toward the vehicle.

  Absorbed with coming up with an explanation for what had taken so long, I failed to notice his condition at first. Hennemann’s massive face was pressed against the glass. He looked dead.

  The thought of Jason being onto us and ambushing him accelerated my heartbeat. I withdrew my pistol, crouched, and scanned the area for the assassin . . . until I heard Hennemann snoring.

  Slightly embarrassed at myself, I tapped the glass with the butt of the revolver to wake him, then tapped again. “Hey, you big lug.”

  A slow string of drool leaked from his mouth like spit from the foamy jowls of a rabid bloodhound. He was out cold.

  Placing the pistol on the roof of the cab, I grabbed the handle of the door. I imagined yanking it open and shouting, “Wakey wakey.” I’d laugh as the big man fell into the snow slush . . . but then I caught myself.

  As if obeying a silent mental command from the pistol, I took it from the roof and cocked the hammer back. The barrel clinked against the glass as I leveled it at his temple just beneath the brim of his bowler. I raised my free arm to shield my face from any blowback from the glass.

  I was a statue holding my freedom in my hand. All I had to do was pull the trigger, just move it less than half an inch toward me. All of this would be done. I’d dispose of the gun and claim that he was dead when I came out of the club.

  It would be so easy. But did I have the nerve and will to do it? The parson’s words about “choosing who I am” returned to me. I stared at the sleeping oaf.

  I deflated, realizing that I couldn’t commit murder, not even against a creature as vile as Marcus Hennemann. I lowered the revolver in disgust.

  The gleam of morning sunlight ricocheted off an approaching bassel.

  My legs carried me away from Hennemann’s steam carriage even before my mind registered it. Seeing the couple from before waiting to board the bassel on the platform above my head, I clumsily tucked Fitzpatrick’s gun into my belt as I ran. The last thing I needed was for them to mistake me for a nobbler and create a scene.

  I scurried up the metal corrugated ramp as the transport slowed to a stop and the man and woman entered through the sliding door.

  I rushed past the couple before they could even take their seats. Keeping my head low, I peeked through the window. There was no sign of him. I slumped down in the wooden seat and let out a nervous laugh. “Almost missed it,” I said to the young couple.

  By the way they dressed and carried themselves, I guessed they were from somewhere affluent, maybe South Hummock or even the Whale Point sector along the south edge of the city. They stared at me.

  Still winded, I coughed and dried my watering eyes from the cold.

  The woman hugged her man more tightly. He adjusted his brown bowler. “Mister, are you going to be all right?”

  Though it was very subtle, the woman elbowed him for talking to me.

  I held a hand up while nodding. “I’m fine, just fine.”

  They must have thought me mad, and I couldn’t blame them, considering the entrance I’d made and my disheveled appearance courtesy of the brothers Densmore. As the bassel zipped along the rail, I respected their wish to ride in silence.

  I regretted telling Olsen to wait ten minutes before leaving and wondered if he’d make it out of the club before Hennemann awoke.

  The Chinatown sector was an exotic place brimming with a strange culture and beliefs. The Chinese immigrants, commonly known as “J
ohn-Johns,” were commonplace on the island even before the stilts were raised, back when maps referred to Addleton as Nantucket. After the hurricane of 1845, John-Johns almost singlehandedly rebuilt the town with Montague Steel. In exchange for laying the foundation of the city’s platform, the immigrants were awarded a quarter-mile stretch of the west sector by Fredric Montague.

  It was now a little after ten o’clock, and workers of the laundry industry of Chinatown were already busily moving about. The bassel soared like a condor through white puffs of steam belching up from the ground below. The aroma of laundry cooking in vats had the inescapable tangy smell of a wet dog.

  Through the bassel windows, I gazed at the steel rail that carried us to our destination. In 1882 the US Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, a law that withheld the possibility of naturalization from John-Johns. Fredric’s son, Alton Montague, seized upon the opportunity and welcomed these disenfranchised workers to Addleton Heights, promising to quadruple the size of the Chinatown sector. The tradeoff was they’d agree to complete the bassel rail line for impossibly low wages.

  Even so, many Chinese abandoned their construction duties on the Central Pacific Railroad to board an airship to the fabled platform city in the sky. Despite being labeled the most cunning member of the Commonwealth, Alton Montague honored his word.

  When the bassel slowed to a stop in Chinatown Square, I allowed my wary traveling companions to exit before leaving my seat. They made their way down the bassel platform as quickly as possible. I looked at the slip of paper with the address from Sawyer.

  210 QINS HIHUANG TERRACOTTA W.

  Maybe it’d lead me to a John-John tink that could tell me the function of Sawyer’s mysterious object. I scanned the buildings of the area first for any terracotta roofs and then for any that had a red rust hue. There weren’t any of either variety.

  I’d read something recently about a militant group in China called the Yihequan movement and how they’d been stirring up a ruckus throughout the country. Last March, a brutal anti-foreign and anti-Christian policy had formed and killed thousands in various provinces. The Addleton Gazette had mentioned an influx of John-Johns fleeing from that part of the world and coming to this section of the city.

  Now I was seeing it with my own eyes. The courtyard bustled with a makeshift market with patrons and marketers speaking English and various Chinese dialects.

  I descended the platform as the empty express bassel zipped away to its next destination. I matched the pace of an elderly Chinese woman pushing a cart and tapped her on the shoulder. She set the cart down and offered her best toothless smile while extending an origami rose to me from the top of the heap. When I waved it off, she proceeded to display other folded paper ornaments.

  “Good luck for you, mister. Good luck for you to buy, sir.”

  I nodded, unenthused, but if I bought something, maybe I could get her to help me. Refusing a paper giraffe and bird of some sort, I traded a coin for something that resembled a dragonfly. It wasn’t exactly like Montague’s cicada, but it reminded me of it just the same. She gave a small bow of gratitude, which I awkwardly mimicked. I pointed at the address on the slip of paper and enunciated, “I need to go here . . . to this place.”

  Her wrinkled smile melted to confusion.

  Thinking that she might have poor eyesight due to her advanced age, I placed it in her hand for a better look.

  She barely glanced at it before handing it back. “I don’t understand. Joke?”

  “No joke. I need to go to this place to see someone.”

  The confusion shifted to worry. “There is not a place to go.” She shook her head. “You cannot see him. No one can.”

  This lit a fire in my sleep-deprived mind. She knew something. I pressed the issue. “Why can’t I see him? Who can’t I see?”

  She grabbed the handles of her cart with veined hands and began to push.

  I positioned myself in front of her, forcing her to stop.

  “Mister is not funny joke.”

  “Why can’t I see him?” I demanded.

  “He’s dead.”

  “Did someone kill him?”

  She was perturbed. “He die a long, long time ago. Go play joke somewhere else. Please.”

  She maneuvered the cart back and then around me as I tried to take in her meaning.

  Tucking the slip of paper in my pocket, I felt Montague’s pocket watch. I’d forgotten about the Founder’s Day ceremonial gift intended to link me to Nelson’s death. I squeezed it tightly in my palm until it smarted, then tossed it into the icy water of a nearby horse trough.

  A young Chinese girl was staring at me thirty or so feet away. I offered a dumb wave and motioned her closer. When she didn’t budge, I presented the paper dragonfly as enticement. As she approached cautiously, I asked, “Can you read?” loud enough to get a nod of the head from her.

  “Of course, I am eight and a half!” she shouted.

  One thing that the Commonwealth required of its Addleton Heights citizens was the education of the young, both male and female. Chinatown was no exception.

  “Come here,” I said, waving the origami. “Come help me read something, and I’ll give you this paper toy.”

  Playful skips closed the distance between us. She reached for the dragonfly. Crouching to match her height, I handed her the slip of paper instead. “I need to find this address. Is there a map shop or directory around here?”

  She looked curiously at me. “This is not a place,” she explained with better English than the old woman had. “It’s a man. Qin Shi Huang? He is first emperor of China.”

  My mind grappled with this. Why would Sawyer give me a clue about a Chinese emperor? Maybe he was as crazy as Hennemann had said.

  The girl seemed slightly embarrassed to be telling a grown man something that was so obvious. “You’d have to go all the way China to visit his tomb and these warriors.”

  “Wait, what warriors?”

  She eyed me and then used a stubby finger to underline the last word. “Right here, ‘Terracotta W.’ That’s for ‘Terracotta warriors,’ right?”

  I took the slip back from her and studied it.

  “They’re the clay statues he was buried with. They say there’s thousands of them.”

  “This Qin Shi Huang, he was buried with a bunch of statues?”

  She shook her head. “No, the Terracotta warriors are magical statues to protect the emperor in his afterlife.”

  “Protect him from what?”

  “I dunno. Can I have the dragonfly now?”

  Though the conversation had become awkward for both of us, I looked at Sawyer’s note and pressed her once more. “What’s the 210 for? You said he had thousands of statues made.”

  “He did. I don’t know 210 . . . maybe a date or something. Maybe 210 B.C.? That’s around when he lived.”

  Satisfied that she’d honored her end of the bargain, I handed over the origami. She curtsied and promptly ran off.

  Though Sawyer’s note hadn’t been of any help, much less a clue as to what Hennemann and Montague were up to, I took solace in the idea that I could still find a Chinaman tink to look at the device.

  If nothing else, maybe I could find a forger in the market to make papers for me to airship off Addleton Heights before it was too late.

  I wandered through the noisy cluster of street vendors haggling with customers. A few businessmen eagerly passed me to enter a dilapidated structure—an opium den, a dank Oriental brothel, or both. At the back of the massive square were stone stairs leading to the joss house temple.

  It struck me how the marketplace served as a microcosm of Addleton Heights. One could find anything they wanted within an eight-block radius: farmed goods, woodwork, Chinese healers offering herbal and holistic treatments, furniture, any carnal debauchery the depraved mind could conjure up, and religion all within a short walking distance.

  But what I needed was a tink, and that lot didn’t typically hang a shingle outside a
shop or push a cart displaying their wares. Their trade was known on the breath of word-of-mouth.

  I made my way to a red two-story building with an “Eat Noodle” sign dangling from a chain. Being the only patron this early, I had my run of the place and requested a booth on the top level facing the street. There was the possibility that Hennemann would remember Sawyer’s note. It was better to be on guard, keeping all my buttons on.

  One thing I was reasonably certain of was that he stood to lose a lot if he reported my escape to Montague. No, he’d try to find me himself, not file a police post for me. But corrupt men tend to be collectors of other corrupt assets. If he had an in with any of my old colleagues on the police force, it wasn’t too hard to imagine one of them turning for a bit of a backsheesh.

  The mechanized noodle server moved evenly down the track in the floor in my direction. When it reached its destination on the other side of the counter from me, a bell dinged. I’ve always found automaton “greetings” like this to be amusing, since it was impossible for anyone to ignore a five-and-a-half-foot-tall metal cabinet moving around the restaurant on its own.

  To their credit, the owners of the establishment had attempted to dress the unit up. The metal box had been painted with a pictogram of a steamy bowl of noodles beneath a smiling face.

  I slid a few coins into the slot designated for dumplings and then more into the one for noodles. After a minute or so, vapor came out of the cooker’s tiny smoke stack. Briefly after that, there were two more dings of the little bell alerting me that my order was complete—not that I needed it. The smell of bubbling broth already filled the room.

  The front panel folded down, making a small ramp to the counter before me. Though I’d seen what was about to happen hundreds of times from similar units around the city, it still fascinated me to watch as small arms nudged the bowl of food from inside the unit down the slope. As per usual, a shade rolled down with “Thank You for Your Business” printed on it.

  The mechanized server and I had more in common than I cared to admit. As it rolled away, I wondered how many laps it had taken around the track of the restaurant since its installation. Was I any different? Sure, the cases had different names, but each assignment was remarkably similar to the one before. Just like the noodle server, I was confined to a track that limited where I could go, what I could do, and what I could become.