The Calorium Wars Read online

  Secretary Stanton, for his part, seized Yurevskii’s proffered hands with a cry of delight:

  “Ah, Your Highness! How good of you to receive us on such short notice! And as for ‘fit,’ I can only say that you look as if the effort of ruling half the North American continent were mere child’s play!” Stanton thinking meanwhile that the Russian looked uncommonly like a gorilla he’d seen recently at the Central Park Zoo. What a thug! It was said he’d once competed for purses as a barroom brawler in the Bowery, and it was easy to believe!

  While this display was taking place, Boylan and Pilkington—free to be themselves—eyed each other narrowly after curt nods while thinking wistfully—each according to his own favorite fantasies—of what fun it would be to skip over the diplomacy part and get right down to some serious mayhem.

  “And how is the Mexican expeditionary force faring?” Yurevskii asked Stanton.

  Glad to turn to business, Stanton pulled out his watch and made some quick calculations. “I received a telegram from their commander this morning,” he answered, “and I would estimate their crossing of the border into the Arizona Guberniia within the hour. At that point, as we agreed earlier, they will make camp and await the arrival of your airships and troops—once they join up, the joint command will begin the operation to seize the mines from the Apache brigands who claim to control them.”

  Yurevskii grinned and rubbed his hands in a moment of genuine pleasure. Of course when the time came his people would turn around and put an end to the American forces, but for the time being it was really most opportune to have their help against the savages.

  “Come,” the Prince said with an expansive gesture, “let us make our first joint appearance before the inhabitants of my capital.”

  And—giving his flunkies an imperceptible nod to fling open the doors to the balcony—he beckoned Stanton forward:

  “After you, my dear colleague!” he said, and the two of them moved forward to accept the plaudits of the multitude …

  … Which unfortunately seemed to be a bit on the meager side. Across the vast square in front of the Palace, where Stanton had expected to see thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of cheering Little Russians, there were scattered perhaps a thousand or so people, most of them police and soldiers, with a few knots of sullen-looking civilians scattered among them, hugging themselves against the unaccustomed autumn chill.

  “Hip, hip, hoorah!” cried a solitary voice from among the palace guards at the front of the crowd, and the meaningful way in which the guards fingered their rifles and glared at the others, called forth a few fitful and patently bogus cheers.

  Prince Yurevskii, thoroughly mortified, turned to Boylan and jerked a thumb towards the square. “Get down there at once, find who is supposed to be in charge and have him put in chains. I’ll attend to him later, personally!”

  And, turning back to Stanton, he said: “It’s too cold to stand on the balcony anyway. Let’s go have a hot grog and talk about more pleasant things.” And then, more or less to himself, he added: “These damned people seem not to understand that it’s the government that knows what’s best for them, not their friends or their family or anybody else, and by God I’ll make them see it if I have to flay every inch of skin from their worthless bodies and put every last one of them in chains!”

  Amen to that, thought Stanton as they moved towards the royal chambers, for once I can agree with this wretched creature!

  Bear Flag Republic, El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora de Los Angeles/Edison City, and Santa Monica

  November 1, 1877

  Chapter Eighteen

  Smartly togged-out in his brand new finery, luxuriantly bathed, shaved and bay-rummed, his hat tucked tidily under his arm, Liam McCool strode up to the ornately carved mahogany door and rapped on it with the head of his stick.

  “Hello?” he called in a voice calculated to penetrate the wall, let alone the door. “Anybody home?”

  “Criminy!” a child’s voice yelled back. “Pipe down, willya? Whyn’t ya try the doorknob, like a gentleman?”

  Shrugging, Liam turned the knob and pulled the door open, revealing a handsomely furnished antechamber in the center of which stood an extremely big desk behind which sat an extremely small man—so small in fact that at first Liam thought he might be some sort of tiny automaton. A moment later, he recognized him and grinned sheepishly:

  “General Thumb?” Liam asked, “General Tom Thumb?”

  “None other!” the little man said with a piping chuckle, jumping up and coming around the end of the desk with his hand held out for a shake. Roughly three feet tall, fashionably turned out in a dark suit and waistcoat, smoking a cigar and bustling with cheerful energy, he took Liam’s hand and gave it a brisk shake.

  “And you must be the notorious King of the Cracksmen,” he chuckled, at which Liam gave him a little half-bow. “But I’ll call you by your real name if you’ll call me Charlie Stratton, which is mine. Governor Barnum and Mayor Edison will receive you in half a tick if you don’t mind waiting.”

  “As long as you like,” Liam said. “I’m here to ask a favor so I don’t want to get pushy about it. But if you don’t mind my asking, tell me how you came to be here—I thought you had retired.”

  Stratton grinned a bit sheepishly. “Tell you the truth, McCool, I was starting to get a little tired of the whole bourgeois householder thing, and then Phin drops by for a drink and tells me he’s thinking of putting together a new show for the Big Top and taking it out to California just for fun. Well, I mean!” He spread his arms in a gesture of surrender: “How could I say no?” He grinned with delight: “Now Phin’s Governor of the Bear Flag Republic and I’m his Cerberus!”

  “CHARLIE!” a ringmaster’s bellow sounded out from the office behind Stratton and he gestured for Liam to follow him.

  Santa Monica’s Government Building was the only ten-story structure in town, and from the Governor’s office on the top floor Liam could see out across Santa Monica Bay towards the Pacific, which today was a sun-sparkled blue with a dusting of whitecaps, dotted here and there with sailing ships and steamships riding at anchor while their owners did business ashore.

  Standing behind a desk which gave him a panorama of the Bay and the long, curving white beach which embraced it as far as the eye could see, was America’s Greatest Showman himself, Phineas T. Barnum, tall, broad, heavy-faced, with black, curly hair over a high forehead, a big smile and a pugnacious chin. Next to him stood a slightly shorter man in his thirties in a rumpled white suit. He had a shock of brown hair over his forehead and his serious expression belied the smile lines at the corners of his mouth. Barnum strode towards Liam holding out his hand and smiling widely:

  “By Jingo!” he cried. “Here’s someone from back in Civilization, come to visit us vaqueros!”

  Liam grinned back and pumped Barnum’s hand: “Glad to meet you, sir! But if where I just came from is Civilization I’m for Darkest Africa any day.”

  The man in the white suit held out his hand and greeted Liam warmly. “Tom Edison,” he said. “Glad to meet you, but sorry to hear the dear old States have sunk so low.” He smiled slyly: “I mean to say, I’m not surprised to hear that of New York, after all they’ve let that bohunk putz Tesla string up his toy lights on every street corner. But New Jersey? Surely Jersey stands a step or two above the Congo.”

  “Maybe it does now, sir,” Liam said with a smile, “but it won’t stand there long if Secretary Stanton has his way.”

  Barnum and Edison exchanged a cryptic look.

  “Why don’t you have a seat, Mr. McCool?” Barnum gestured to a couch and some chairs arranged around a low table and turned to Stratton:

  “Charlie, would you bring everybody a nice cold Anchor Steam?”

  The little man grinned and crossed to a piece of furniture Liam had taken to be a wardrobe, but which now turned out to be some sort of ice box with an electric light in it. As Stratton took out four bottles of beer and set them on a tray,
Liam peered at the lighted interior curiously,

  “I’m calling it a ‘refrigerator,’” said Edison with a smile. “It’s not quite ready for a patent but it beats hauling blocks of ice up ten floors.”

  Stratton passed the beer around and Barnum held his up for a toast: “Here’s confusion to Eddie Stanton and all his thugs and success to Liam McCool and his boys when they kick the invaders out of the Arizona territory!”

  Liam threw him a startled look: “Say, how do you know …”

  Barnum held up a hand to calm him: “In a place as remote as the Bear Flag Republic, Mr. McCool, information is the most valuable of all commodities. We may seem pretty far from the mainstream, and it’s true that it’ll be a while yet before the telegraph reaches us, but we do get a fast airship every day with all the latest news along with the passengers and cargo and we have a special information bureau downstairs that sorts out everything from vague rumors to the latest editorial in Freedom. So we have a shrewd idea about your plans for freeing Custer as well, and we’re more favorable to them than you might think. But we have to get some rules clear first.”

  A bit bemused, Liam spread his hands: “Fire away!”

  “I have to admit we weren’t that serious about staying on here when we first got to California. Charlie and I are pure showmen, and Tom’s got a powerful showman side to go along with all those brains, and for a while we were just having fun packing the rubes into the big tent. But after a while we began to realize there was something special about this place—you could dream as big as you liked and still make your dreams come true. But we’re very vulnerable—this little corner of the world is devoted to building things while the rest of the world seems to be devoted to destruction.”

  Liam nodded, remembering a bit wistfully the dreams he’d shared with his sweetheart Maggie when he was an involuntary undercover in the Pennsylvania coal fields—they were going to go to San Francisco and Maggie would start a great restaurant while he would start a bookstore to rival Brentano’s in New York …

  “I don’t suppose you have a really good bookstore here, do you?”

  Barnum—who had the showman’s intuition for other people’s dreams—smiled and pointed to a large oil painting showing the troupe of one of his side-shows including Charlie Stratton in a circus getup—full Highland regalia including kilt and sporran:

  “Let me tell you a story about big dreams. Those folks in that picture were our most popular side-show ever, and the Fat Lady—see her?” Liam nodded and Barnum continued: “That was Billy Mae Sweetwater, the finest Fat Lady that ever worked with a circus.”

  Stratton piped up: “She was something special, like an auntie to everybody under the Big Top.”

  “That she was,” smiled Barnum reminiscently, “and I’d sooner have lost my eye teeth than Billie Mae. But after we’d all been out here in the Republic doing our show for a few months, she came to me one day looking upset and told me she hoped I wouldn’t think she was crazy, but she had always dreamed of being a veterinarian. The long and short of it was we enrolled Billy Mae in the Los Angeles Normal School’s Veterinary College, and she’s going to become Doctor Billy Mae Sweetwater next spring.”

  He grinned at Liam while he let the story sink in and then held out his hand:

  “So here’s a promise: you help us end the threat of Yurevskii and Stanton and I’ll help you build that bookstore myself, brick by brick!”

  Liam smiled slowly and then shook Barnum’s hand: “All right, Governor, it’s a deal.”

  “You can count on me, McCool. But there’s a proviso: we can’t come out in the open to help you, there are too damned many spies in this city, and we can’t afford to bring those evil thugs in Washington and New Petersburg down on our heads lusting for revenge. But we won’t oppose you either, and we’ll make it as easy for you as possible, starting with springing Custer.”

  Liam looked a little dubious. “I appreciate that, Governor Barnum, but if that’s the case I hope you can tell me something about Serra Castle first.”

  Barnum shrugged and spread his hands, giving Liam an uneasy flash of memory: a thimblerigger insisting he had no idea which shell the pea was under. “Tell you the truth,” Barnum said unconvincingly, “it sounds a lot worse than it is. Back when the Spanish were in charge they say it got pretty bad, especially when the Indians started resisting the padres and the Missions. But Custer’s the first actual prisoner they’ve had in years, and the fact is they’ve just been holding him till Stanton sends someone to take him back East.”

  “How about the guards. Are they Army? Police?”

  Barnum hesitated and looked uneasy. “Well now … that’s the one place there might be bit of a problem. Before the war there was only a skeleton staff at Serra, but from ’65 on, there got to be more and more hard-case types hanging their hats there. People say they’re mostly Confederate fugitives, men with prices on their heads.”

  Liam shook his head incredulously: “You’re telling me there are Confederate fugitives guarding the man they knew in the War as Union General George Armstrong Custer?”

  For the first time Barnum’s showmanly veneer showed a crack or two. “I admit it may sound a bit iffy,” he said with an abashed little grin, “but from everything I’ve heard about the King of the Cracksmen, if there’s anybody that can get him out, it’s you. And to be completely candid …” He stopped and gave Liam an appraising look, which the Irishman returned with an ironic lift of the eyebrow …

  “Crackerjack idea, Governor.”

  “Well, then. If something were to happen that rendered Serra Castle totally uninhabitable and drove that congeries of lowlifes out for good, I would be eternally grateful.”

  “Hmm,” said Liam with a speculative glint in his eye. “Anything is possible.”

  Barnum grinned widely. “Delighted to hear it. And in case you need official bona fides …”

  He took a sealed letter out of his jacket pocket and handed it over to Liam.

  “… that’s a laissez-passer for you and Mr. Chen and Chief Crazy Horse to visit Custer at Serra Castle—the rest will have to be up to you.”

  Liam weighed the envelope in his hand, smiling thoughtfully. “Forgive me for saying so, Governor Barnum, but I’m surprised you’ve included my friends. The atmosphere here didn’t seem that welcoming for people of color.”

  Barnum shook his head and groaned: “The old-guard ‘Los Anga-leece’ whites, I might have known. Sorry for that, my boy, I think that deep down they all feel guilty about helping the good padres in the Missions destroy California’s Indians. But if you want to know where P. T. Barnum stands, a human soul that God has created and Christ died for is not to be trifled with. It may tenant the body of a Chinaman, a Turk, an Arab or a Hottentot, but it is still an immortal spirit!”

  Liam smiled and got to his feet: “That’s good enough for me!”

  Before he could head for the door, Mayor Edison laid a hand on his arm: “Promise me you’ll do everything you can to keep Yurevskii and Stanton out of the calorium mines. I’ve experimented with the stuff just enough to know it’s incredibly dangerous, which both of those animals probably think is a wonderful thing. And I just heard something from a colleague on the latest airship that makes my blood run cold: the whisper in scientific circles back East is that Stanton has a Chinese metallurgist named Lee working day and night on a process to convert molten lead into calorium. I hate to sound like the Book of Revelations, but I feel in my bones that Lee’s foolishness could be the end of us all unless he’s stopped.”

  Liam nodded somberly. “We’ll stop him, that’s a promise.”

  The Los Angeles business district’s Calle de Los Negros was only a dozen or so miles from Santa Monica, but it might as well have been in Calcutta. Or maybe, Liam thought, back in Five Points, the boisterous New York slum district where he’d grown up. There were plenty of side streets there as rough as this one, though maybe without so many exotic languages and so much action crammed into su
ch a small space.

  The Calle de Los Negros was only about forty feet wide and a block long, but he’d never seen so many people rushing along and crowding into so many saloons, gambling joints, dance halls and cribs. And every single one of these dives seemed to have some kind of band tootling and sawing and plucking away at every kind of music you could imagine, creating a bedlam that made the sober listener long for deafness. Maybe, Liam thought, the plan was they’d shut up if you paid them enough.

  Liam strolled along trying to look relaxed while expecting to need his sword stick at any moment and wondering where Chen and Crazy Horse could have strayed off to. None of these hangouts seemed to have a sign, so looking for Chinese writing was a waste of time. And every one of them had to be looked over carefully, because the crowds were so motley that a tall Chinese and a stocky Sioux Indian would blend right in. In fact, Liam was about ready to give up and stand on a box shouting “Ambrose Chen!” over and over again when he spotted a Chinese grocery store about four feet wide crammed in between a dance hall and a shooting gallery full of drunken British sailors.

  Liam veered off the street and approached the store crossing his fingers, finally letting go a huge sigh of relief when he spotted Ambrose in the back of the store holding forth and gesticulating at another Chinese—probably the grocer—while Crazy Horse stood closer to the door with his arms folded on his chest, staring up at the ceiling. Liam came right up to the window and waved madly, shouting:

  “Ei! Zhenia!”

  Crazy Horse turned and caught sight of Liam, heaving his own heartfelt sigh of relief as he extricated himself from the tiny store. Once outside he threw his arms around Liam, giving him the whole enthusiastic Russian embrace including a kiss on both cheeks.

  “Bozhe moi!” he groaned. “I thought listening to a band of Arapaho fur trappers argue about muskrat pelts was the most exquisitely boring thing I’ve ever had to endure, but this!” He gestured towards Chen and the grocer, at a loss for words. “This is the absolute nadir …”