The Calorium Wars Page 16

  “Georgii Valentinich!” she exclaimed in astonishment, but the moment she said it he was holding a finger to his lips and saying: “Shh!!”

  “Arkady Antonich Veresayev, at your service,” he said with quiet but unmistakable emphasis. “And this,” he said, gesturing to the heavily-muffled giant, “is my colleague Grisha Dva.”

  “Grisha Two?” she queried in baffled English, as the giant bowed solemnly.

  “It’s rather a long story,” said her mysterious acquaintance with a smile. “Perhaps we should go someplace where we can get a glass of beer and chat without worrying about being overheard.”

  “Excellent idea,” Becky said. Then, dropping her voice and whispering right into the man’s ear: “As long as you promise to tell me just what Georgii Valentinich Plekhanov, notorious revolutionary and leading light of the Land and Freedom party, is doing skulking around New Petersburg pretending to be someone named Veresayev.”

  Plekhanov grinned broadly: “Perhaps I shall, Becky dear, let’s see.” And with a little bow and a gesture towards the next side street, he set off down the sidewalk accompanied by Becky and the hulking Grisha Two.

  Pivnaia Leinenkugel, Plekhanov’s favorite tavern, turned out to be a cellar dive another three or four side streets away from the bright lights and even farther down the social scale, since it reminded Becky of nothing so much as the dismal hangouts—fogged with tobacco smoke and funky with beer—described in Mr. Dostoevsky’s novels. On the far side of the room from the steps by which the trio entered was a wooden counter twenty feet long, fronted by a series of tall, dilapidated stools and backed by a series of enormous kegs with taps set into the bung-holes, from which the proprietor—a bald man in shirt sleeves, nearly as big as Grisha Dva and twice as thick around the middle, poured endless steins of beer for his shouting customers.

  The place seemed to Becky to be a total Bedlam in which it would be impossible for her to hold a conversation without shouting every word, but at an imperceptible signal from Plekhanov a harried-looking waiter in a dirty apron appeared like a genie and led them to a nook in one of the far corners of the room where they were magically seated at a table, equipped with steins and a huge pitcher of beer, and walled off by a thick curtain of green felt almost before Becky could draw a breath.

  Plekhanov poured beer for Becky and himself and then raised his glass for a toast: “Za vashe zdorov’e,” he said, adding with a grin: “and while we’re at it, to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Becky answered with a smile, adding as she turned to Grisha Two: “Have you taken the pledge, Mr. Dva, or do you just not like beer?”

  Despite the stifling heat of the pivnaia, the giant was still heavily swathed from head to foot, and he answered Becky without unwrapping his face in a peculiarly deep and hollow voice that Becky found familiar without quite being able to say why:

  “Ah, dear lady, that may be an even longer story than why Mr. Plekhanov is pro tempore Mr. Veresayev.”

  Becky turned back to Plekhanov and raised her eyebrows. “All right, Georgii Valentinich, I can only stand so much mystification. What’s going on here? And why don’t you begin your story with how a dyed-in-the-wool devotee of land and liberty for the peasantry is suddenly drinking instead to the industrial proletariat?”

  “As for the peasantry,” Plekhanov answered in a tone of urbane amusement, “I’m sure you remember that my attempts to improve their lot ended with my being thrown in jail. Twice. In truth, the muzhiki are quite hopeless politically. They love the Tsar. If you tell them that he means to rob them forever, until they haven’t two kopeks to rub together, they’ll say you lie—it’s all the fault of their crooked landlords.”

  He shrugged and spread his hands: “After I escaped to England, I fell in with Karl Marx and it was he who convinced me that factory workers are much better revolutionary material—for one thing, they’re simply smarter than peasants. Unfortunately in Russia there aren’t yet many factories, so I decided to move here and see what might turn up.”

  Becky frowned and shook her head, baffled. “I heard that Yurevskii was building more factories to make airships and automatons, but who are the proletarians supposed to be? The Little Russian peasants are just as ignorant as the muzhiki back in the Motherland, and I can’t see Apaches or Cheyennes settling down to operate lathes.”

  Grisha Dva chuckled resonantly, a sound at once sardonic and melancholy. “Who are Yurevskii’s factory workers? I can answer that one easily …”

  Taking off his fur hat, the giant slowly unwound the scarf that had been covering his face …

  “Dear Heaven!” murmured Becky. Grisha Dva didn’t even have to finish the unwinding process before she realized that the reason he had sounded familiar was that he was speaking with vocal machinery designed by the same man who had supplied President Lincoln’s metal body with a voice box: Grisha Dva was one of Yurevskii’s (or Dr. Lukas’, as she couldn’t help thinking) automatons!

  Deeply moved, she reached across the table and took one of Grisha’s giant, gloved hands between hers.

  “You poor man,” she said. “Who were you before Yurevskii got you on the operating table?”

  Grisha turned his head to look questioningly at Plekhanov, who gave him an affirmative nod. The automaton turned back to Becky:

  “Do you remember the explosion in the New Petersburg Regent’s Palace this past spring?”

  “Indelibly,” Becky said with a wry smile. “I was in the process of escaping from New Petersburg on that very day.”

  The automaton chuckled: an unnervingly dry, rasping sound.

  “As it happens, that was my work.” He bowed slightly from the waist: “Lev Alexandrich Tikhomirov, at your service.”

  Becky was genuinely taken aback: “Tikhomirov, the terrorist mastermind of Land and Liberty and the People’s Will? The … ah, the …”

  “Don’t be embarrassed,” he said, “yes, the assassin of Alexander III, the Regent and Tsarevich. Believe me, I have paid dearly for that dubious distinction.”

  “Can you bear to tell me about it?” Becky asked.

  “Why not? My squeamishness has gone the way of my old body. I was the one who set the dynamite charge and the explosion was premature—I hadn’t quite escaped from the palace and the blast blew me through a window. When I awoke, I was deep in the bowels of the local Okhrana HQ, and a couple of weeks later Yurevskii showed up to take over as Regent for his deceased half brother. His idea of a fitting punishment was to remove my brain and put it in one of his automatons.”

  Becky shook her head, speechless. Plekhanov gave her an ironic smile: “It scarcely seems fair, does it? Here my friend Lev Alexandrich had just blown up the only obstacle between Yurevskii and his eventual coronation as Tsar of All the Russias, and the ingrate rewarded his benefactor by sawing open his head and installing his brain in an airship-factory automaton.”

  Tikhomirov leaned forward again and fixed his glowing red eyes on Becky: “But the key thing to note here, Miss Fox, is the fact that Yurevskii’s process for supplanting my earlier, human will with his will, as broadcast by the Wireless Automaton Control Center, failed in my case. And, as I discovered later, the process has failed far more often than Yurevskii realizes. Our beloved Regent suffers from the delusion that he has exclusive control of a single, common automaton brain that makes every individual automaton revere and obey him as the “Father” of them all. In reality …” again Tikhomirov produced that awful rasping chuckle.

  “In reality,” Plekhanov continued, “this mechanized ‘proletariat’ has produced a substantial revolutionary underground, and if you’d care to keep us company for another few days you will be privileged to witness Lev Alexandrovich’s finest moment: the destruction by dynamite of Prince Yurevskii’s Wireless Automaton Control Center …”

  Here Tikhomirov chimed in, his voice trembling with emotion: “… and the launching of the Little Russian Revolution, which will crush Prince Yurevski
i and every trace of Tsarism’s ugly works!”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Riots?” shouted Stanton. “Bread riots in Madison Square Park? Where are the Johnnies? Where’s the militia?”

  Secretary Stanton and Willie Pilkington, both of them looking overstuffed and uncomfortable in the elaborate morning dress required for diplomatic occasions, were taking a break from Prince Yurevskii’s court and talking to New York via the TeslaVox receiver/transmitter on the U.S. Aerial Navy battle cruiser that had flown them to Little Russia.

  Both Stanton and Pilkington had individual handsets connected to the TeslaVox, but Stanton was doing all the talking, while Willie watched him with the anxious wariness of a much-beaten dog.

  On the New York end, Seamus McPherson was striving madly to defend himself while Stanton glared and fumed, his rage checked by the merest hair trigger:

  “Sure, yer Honor,” cried McPherson’s tinny voice, “we’re stretched that thin, what with all the homeless folk that was bombed out by the Little Roosians sleeping in the parks and on the streets, and them with nothing to eat and the weather turning cold! There’s Johnnies and bluecoats and soldiers scattered all over the city now, trying to protect the big stores and the markets and just this morning some anarchist set off a dynamite bomb at City Hall!”

  “What?” Stanton screeched. “Do you mean to say some swine blew up City Hall?”

  Barely suppressing a groan, Willie Pilkington covered his eyes with his free hand, peeking out surreptitiously between his fingers in case his master decided to throw something.

  “Begorrah, sorr,” McPherson whined out of the handset like an imprisoned leprechaun, “would I not have called you meself if there had been a real disaster? It was them dirty Whyos as done it, though some says it was the Butcher Boys, but all they done was bring down a few of them big marble pillars on the front of the building, Cicatelli over to Public Works swears it’ll be fixed in a jiffy!”

  Stanton tugged at his starched cravat as if he felt it strangling him, his face growing redder and redder until Willie found himself wondering uneasily if it were really possible for a man’s head to blow up.

  “Tell me at least, McPherson,” Stanton said in a voice choked with anger, “that you finally have Liam McCool and that arch-bitch Becky Fox under lock and key!”

  “Ah, well now, sorr,” McPherson began in his most wheedling tone, “while ‘tis true that we’d almost laid that spalpeen by the heels, we had a bit of a setback and he …”

  “AND THAT VILE TRAITOR ABRAHAM LINCOLN?” Stanton bellowed. “AND HIS FILTHY FREEDOM PARTY?”

  “Ah, there now, yer Honor,” McPherson said brightly, “we’ve finally had some definite good news, as ’tis said by them that’s in the know that the entire kit and caboodle of dirty villains from Lincoln on down to the cooks and bottle washers has thrown in the towel and hauled themselves off to Canada …”

  Stanton took the handset away from his ear and sat staring at it for several long moments as Willie tensed, waiting for the explosion.

  “CANADA!” Stanton shrieked. Grasping the handset by one end he smashed it repeatedly against the table in front of him until finally it broke in half. That seemed to ease the Secretary’s feelings a bit, and he pulled himself effortfully to his feet, breathing in heavy, rasping gasps.

  “Are you quite well, sir?” asked Willie timidly.

  “Shut up,” Stanton said in a flat tone as he struggled to get himself under control. Finally he let out a deep breath and pulled himself up straight, his eyes glittering with angry purpose:

  “I’m afraid it’s time to go suck up to Yurevskii and sign the treaty.” He grinned without mirth, like a wolf baring its fangs. “But that’s all right, Willie my boy, I have a long memory—it won’t be anytime soon I’ll be forgetting it was Yurevskii who ordered the sneak attack that’s forced us to pretend America’s knuckling under. And believe you me: as soon as Professor Lee’s experiment is completed back home and we have a bottomless supply of calorium to fuel our Acmes and our airships it’ll be Edwin M. Stanton that blows Yurevskii’s brains all over the wall.”

  Standing before an ornately filigreed pier glass running a tiny silver comb through his beard, brushing non-existent specks from the lapels of his morning coat and making microscopic adjustments to his starched cravat, Grand Prince Nikolai Aleksandrovich Yurevskii, Regent of Little Russia and Heir Apparent to the throne of the Russian Empire, otherwise known as “Prof. Lukas,” brilliantly gifted neurosurgeon, inventor, bare-knuckle boxer, and criminal mastermind, regarded his immaculate person in the mirror and glowed with deep and well-earned self-satisfaction.

  “Though I tempt fate by saying it out loud, my dear Boylan, it seems that my gambles have succeeded beyond all our expectations!”

  “Aye, ’tis the Gospel truth, Boss! And once we’ve seized the Arizona calorium mines and the ones up in Saskatchewan there’ll be nothing to stop us taking whatever we like wherever we want to!”

  Daniel Xavier Boylan, or “Boyo” if you dared call him that to his face, onetime Bowery leg-breaker and terror of the Pennsylvania coal fields, grinned like a baby with a new rattle, his big shiny red face with its glittering black plastered-down hair and glossy black handlebar moustache almost shimmering with pleasure as he basked in his role as aide-de-camp to Prince Yurevskii, a villain twice as bad and immeasurably more powerful than any he’d met in a life rich with villains.

  “’Twill be a treat beyond compare to watch you wiping your feet on that pumped-up mouse turd Stanton, let alone his bum-boy Willie Pilkington!”

  Stealing a glance at the pier glass over his master’s shoulder, Boylan nodded approvingly at the way the court tailor’s endless fittings had camouflaged his six-foot-seven-inch, 300-plus pounds of muscle and hard fat with morning dress every bit as fashionable and flattering at the Prince’s. Yurevskii chuckled:

  “You look very smart, my boy, you must give me the name of your tailor.”

  “Sure now, your Highness,” Boylan said with a grin, “me dear departed mither would have gave her eye teeth to see her little Danny dressed up like the headwaiter at Delmonico’s.”

  Prince Yurevskii tugged at a Petrine silver ruble he used as a watch fob and drew a luxuriantly enameled Fabergé watch out of his waistcoat pocket, grinning sardonically as he noted the time.

  “What do you think?” he asked. “Have we let Stanton simmer long enough?”

  “Sure, your Highness,” Boylan said, echoing the grin, “I’d reckon he must be about parboiled by now.”

  “Well, then,” Yurevskii said, “let’s go stick a fork in him and see.”

  In the royal audience chamber, Secretary Stanton was pacing back and forth with grim determination, the increasing redness of his face sending up a flag that was starting to worry Willie Pilkington more by the second. The one hope anytime soon for an improvement in his master’s mood was for the Chinaman—Stanton’s tame metallurgist Professor Lee—to wire them that the experimental process for producing calorium from molten lead had finally succeeded, an event he had been promising every day for the past week. But Willie knew better than to say anything to his irascible boss, so instead he did his best to escape from his worries by losing himself in the mystifying scene depicted on the ceiling …

  At least 100 feet long and fifty feet wide, the mural was framed in richly gilded plaster grapes and vine leaves and showed the reclining figure of a colossal, muscular young man wearing little but a crown of laurel leaves and a strategically-draped bit of upholstery while a dozen or so plump young women wearing nothing at all plied him with plates of food and goblets of wine and a centaur stood nearby strumming a lyre and looking cynical.

  Hungry as ever, Willie found himself wondering what the redhead at the end of the line had on her plate. It looked like éclairs, or maybe some kind of grilled sausages; whatever it was it looked like it was killing her to have to stand in line behind the woman with the suckling pig, fretting at the delay till she could stuff whatev
er it was down that conceited pansy’s gullet. Really, it was galling to think of all the food being lavished on the idle wastrels of the world while he, Willie Pilkington, head of the U.S. Department of National Security’s Secret Police, and heir to the world’s most successful detective agency, was forced to sit here thinking of the absolute aeons it had been since breakfast and all the while his stomach grumbling and gurgling at the thought of a dinner still light years away. Where was the good in being the all-powerful secret policeman Willie Pilkington when his honors and his baubles couldn’t bring him even one little éclair, or a couple of paltry sausages, or even …

  “HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS GRAND PRINCE NIKOLAI ALEKSANDROVICH YUREVSKII!” bellowed a voice at the opposite end of the chamber, so loudly and suddenly that Willie jumped and almost tipped over the chair. As he leapt to his feet a gaggle of flunkies pulled open the enormous, bas-relief-decorated bronze portals that led into the Regent’s private chambers and bowed obsequiously as Yurevskii and Boylan entered.

  The Prince strode up to Stanton and held out both hands in an almost-convincing gesture of spontaneous welcome as both he and Stanton wreathed themselves in grins of pure delight at the unexpected pleasure of meeting each other here, of all places, in the royal audience chamber of the Regent of Little Russia.

  “My dear Secretary Stanton,” enthused Prince Yurevskii, “how good of you it is to come all this way for our chat! I must say you’re looking wonderfully fit and unruffled after your journey!” Thinking even as he uttered the obligatory flattery that Stanton had become a veritable tub of lard since they’d last met. Not to mention the broken veins in his nose and the flush on his cheeks—if the man wasn’t careful he’d die of a heart attack and cheat Yurevskii of the pleasure of killing him at a genuinely useful moment.