The Calorium Wars Read online

  “Shoot the little bastards!” he shouted, clenching his firsts and willing his subordinate to obey.

  It was almost as if Pennywhistle had heard his master’s command. A moment earlier he had snatched a copy of the broadsheet from a spectator’s hand and skimmed the lead story, his face darkening with anger as he read the poisonous thing. Where had this filth come from? ‘Freedom’ indeed! As if freedom were meant for anyone except those who could afford it, who had learned to temper the exercise of freedom with the responsibilities of property!! His eyes narrowing, his teeth grinding cholerically, he looked around with such ominous intensity that the crowd melted before his glare as if they’d been made of wax, leaving Billy and Finn—their retreat slowed by the awkward bulk of the peanut wagon—exposed near the 14th Street corner.

  “HALT!” screamed Pennywhistle.

  Billy froze in place, too terrified to breathe. Finn, made of tougher stuff, took off like a miler, shouting back at Billy as he went:

  “Run, shite-wit, RUN!”

  That snapped Billy out of his trance and he turned and started after Finn, just not quite fast enough. Before he had even reached the corner, Pennywhistle was already pulling a pocket pistol out of his waistband and aiming carefully as he thumbed back the hammer. A moment later the thing went off with an earsplitting BANG! and Billy leapt into the air as if he were reaching for an invisible brass ring only to fall to the ground on his face, dead as mutton.

  Pennywhistle stared at the inert bundle on the pavement with a frown, as if he were surprised by the result of his shot. A moment later a growl of rage ran through the crowd as they registered the killing and started moving towards the DNS agent with the obvious intention of ripping him limb from limb.

  “Get back!” screamed Pennywhistle with a touch of hysteria. “Get back before I shoot!”

  But the mob that had flowed towards the peanut-sellers and their forbidden papers had no more individual reasoning power than a school of piranhas swarming a wounded tapir; without even a hitch of hesitation they poured over and around Pennywhistle, who could be heard screaming insanely for a moment or two before he went silent.

  Not soon enough to escape the notice of the “brainy” Acmes though, as they raised their left hands—the “Gatling arm” for them as for the earlier-model “curfew” Acmes—and fired a rattling warning salvo into the air. Immediately the crowd fell back all around the Square until they were standing on each other’s feet, pressed as tightly against each other as if they were sardine-tinned into one of Beach’s Pneumatic Transit subway cars. For a long moment of total, breathless silence, spectators and Acmes alike seemed to freeze in place, contemplating the tangled lump of bloody clothing that had been Hiram Pennywhistle, until one of the Acmes—apparently satisfied that the threat of disorder had passed—clomped down the scaffold stairs and clanked its way across the pavement to the back of the prison van.

  As it waited outside the van’s open doors, another Acme appeared in the opening with a human prisoner in tow, a clean-shaven, muscular-looking young man of average height, his curly auburn hair cut short and the sprinkling of freckles across his nose standing out clearly against his jail pallor before they lost themselves in an ugly purple-and-yellow bruise that spread from his cheekbone to his jaw. His hands were manacled and he walked haltingly, his steps hobbled by a short chain joining the leg irons locked around his ankles; but despite all the dungeon trappings he had a spring in his step and an ironic twinkle in his eye. He looked around at the jam-packed mob with a grin:

  “Look at that, will you? My public’s come to see me off!”

  “LIAM!” shouted a man’s voice. “LIAM MCCOOL!” shouted another, echoed by one voice after another as he slowly mounted the scaffold towards the gallows: “MCCOOL! MCCOOL! MCCOOOOOOOOOL!”

  Liam raised his manacled hands overhead like a boxer saluting his fans and shouted back, his voice echoing from one side of the Square to the other:

  “BAD ’CESS TO EDDIE STANTON AND TO ALL HIS DIRTY VILLAINS!”

  At that an inarticulate howl went up from every corner of the Square, the sound as vast and terrifying as the roar of a cyclone:

  “MCCOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL!”

  Liam grinned cheerfully and turned towards the Pilkington Agency, as certain as could be that Stanton and the rest of his gang were up there in the Old Man’s office, watching. His grin broadening, he raised his manacled hands towards the office, jamming the thumb of his right hand between his first and second fingers, a hand signal his supporters responded to with a thunderous breaker of laughter and a renewed bellow:

  “MCCOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL!!!”

  Chapter Two

  How dare he give me the fig? Damn his impudence!” Stanton was glued to the window, transfixed with fury as he glared down at Liam through the binoculars, his curly gray beard bristling and jutting with outrage, the deep, disapproving grooves that normally tugged the corners of his mouth downwards growing still deeper and more censorious, the wrathful frown dragging his bushy eyebrows down over the top of his glittering little pince-nez, the heavy gold chain across his black brocade waistcoat rising and falling like a mooring line in a storm as his maddened wheezing jiggled a paunch whose growth had kept pace with the steadily increasing grandeur of his titles.

  He spun around and lowered the glasses, turning his rage on Pilkington and McPherson, wagging a porky finger at the two of them as if he wished it was a club:

  “I blame this whole business on your incompetence, both of you.”

  Fanatically attuned to his master’s needs and fancies, Pilkington had imitated him not only mentally but physically, with the result that a natural plumpness had turned into full-fledged corpulence, his body wreathed and garlanded with fat and his face bloated until his eyes were tiny sparks of feverish anxiety shining out above the suety mounds of his cheeks. Unfortunately the new, fatter Willie Pilkington sweated twice as much as the old one, especially when he was worried, and by now he was absolutely dripping with perspiration.

  “But, sir!” cried Pilkington in despair. “My men and I have worked day and night to find these villains!”

  McPherson, a big, beefy roughneck with sandy hair and whiskers and the fiery red nose of a man who liked his first whiskey with breakfast, edged away unobtrusively from Pilkington. Partly, of course, to get away from the smell of his boss’ muck sweat, but at least equally to emphasize the absolute gulf that separated his own fine work from Pilkington’s lamentable errors and miscalculations.

  “Sure, now, yer honor!” groaned McPherson, slipping into a pained brogue. “My Agency’s operatives have been turning over every stone in the city, and I’m willing to bet it was them breathing hot on his trail that turfed out the informer who gave you McCool.”

  “Don’t you flannelmouth me, you cretins, you egregious nincompoops!” Stanton was so infuriated that flecks of saliva flew with every word. “Let’s not even get started on what just happened to poor Pennywhistle and the fact that you two are supposed to be responsible for public order and decency in this mutinous Sodom—which as far as I can see hasn’t developed a thimbleful more order or decency since the Draft Riots. No, let’s just talk about that vile thug down there with the rope around his neck!”

  Stanton sneered at his cringing lieutenants with ferocious sarcasm. “One man! Imagine my surprise when I saw they were leading just one man out of the van to be hanged. Surely there must have been at least forty or fifty of him to be flimflamming you two at every turn and setting all your efforts at naught, but no! Just one scrawny little Irish rogue, the very same Liam McCool I sent the pair of you to arrest in Washington not six months ago. And did you arrest him? Did you, hah! He and that damned female scribbler Becky Fox knocked you senseless, stripped you to your long johns, tied you up and bathed you with Chinese rotgut, and then proceeded to free Lincoln and see him safely into hiding! And how did you pay them back, eh? Tell me that!”

  Stanton glared daggers at the cringing duo: �
�You …” he stabbed a finger at McPherson, “… let him and that creature break into this very room, rifle your safe and publish documents exposing the crimes you committed to conceal the bastard he …” the stabbing finger swung around to point at Pilkington “… fathered on one of our spies, and while McCool and his hetaera pulled that off they amused themselves by blowing up your brand-new, million-dollar office building!”

  Stanton clenched his fists at his sides, his face almost black with rage, and bellowed at them:

  “Was ever any patient, long-suffering statesman burdened with such gormless, contemptible imbeciles for helpers? Who knows how many more heinous crimes that swine might have committed if I hadn’t been lucky enough to receive the anonymous denunciation that led my operatives right to him! And you haven’t even been able to locate the informant so that I might shake his hand and pin a medal on him!”

  Pilkington set his jaw and did his best to look intrepid and determined, looking in spite of himself more like a schoolboy who has just been soundly thrashed by the principal.

  “I promise you, sir,” he said earnestly, “every Secret Service operative in the country is on the track of the informant. Clearly, the man is hesitant to claim the credit his public-spirited act deserves for fear of a cruel revenge at the hands of the seditionists, but the instant we discover his identity I promise we will seize him and force him—uh, encourage him—to tell us everything he knows about the Freedom Party!”

  “Indeed, sorr,” McPherson asserted, his brogue fighting his best efforts to suppress it, “and every Pilkington detective who could be pulled off other jobs is out beating the bushes under orders to stay on the job day and night till they discover where these damned Freedomists make their lair—when we know that we’ll root them out with fire and the sword, I swear to yez on me mither!”

  “Hmph!” snorted Stanton, slightly mollified. “Just see that you do, and don’t be dithering on about it forever—I want to see every last one of those vermin dangling from the end of a rope by Thanksgiving!”

  As if in response, a vast, muffled groan rose up from Union Square: “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” Stanton turned back to the window, raised the glasses and saw—with absolutely delicious clarity—one of the “brainy” Acmes fitting a black hood over Liam’s head and then sliding the noose down over the hood and pushing Liam roughly towards the cracks in the planking that outlined the waiting trapdoor.

  “Ahhh!” breathed Stanton with a rapturous smile. “Words cannot begin to express the beauty of that picture—Liam McCool wearing a hangman’s knot for a cravat!”

  “Indeed, sir,” said Pilkington eagerly. “And if ever there was a well-merited …”

  “Be quiet, you fool,” snapped Stanton, “I’m the one who finally managed to trap him and I’ve earned the right to enjoy this in peace!” Still peering through the glasses he chuckled spitefully, hugging the hard-won triumph to himself and gloating over the shackled figure on the scaffold: “You thought you could make a fool of me, you foul little shanty-Irish pustule? Make a mockery of Edwin M. Stanton, the architect of the new America?” He bared his teeth in a feral grin. “You contemptible little mongrel! In a few moments it’s you who’ll be twitching at the end of a rope and soiling your pants!

  He lowered the glasses and turned back to the others, the very thought of McCool’s execution filling him with such a blissful sense of expectation that he couldn’t help giving Willie and McPherson a jovial Santa Claus chuckle. Stanton’s helpers returned his smile warily, so taken aback by his sudden festive mood that their expressions made him think of a little dog he had beaten with a hairbrush when he was a boy. Stanton shook his head ruefully. The poor simpletons looked terrified; clearly, the moment called for a touch of magnanimity.

  “Let’s drink a toast, boys!” He gave the Great Detective a hearty clap on the back. “Come now, McPherson, you must still have a drop of that special rye!”

  Relieved beyond measure, McPherson bustled over to an ornate mahogany sideboard, grabbed a bottle and some glasses and poured out three healthy shots.

  “Right, then!” cried Stanton, raising his glass. “Here’s to the destruction of the Freedom Party, may they be ground to atoms and scattered to the four …”

  Before he could finish, a swelling uproar from the crowd of spectators turned into a bedlam of shouts, catcalls, boos and scattered applause. Stanton frowned, tossed off his drink and hurried back to the window, raising his binoculars to see what was happening.

  In the Square below, a private steam phaeton with brilliant midnight-blue lacquer-work and brass fittings polished to a golden luster had pulled up next to the DNS van. A pudgy, pleasant-looking middle-aged man wearing clerical garb, his wavy gray hair hanging to his shoulders and his substantial Roman nose probing the air questioningly, like a gopher checking for foxes, was standing next to the car peering around as the chauffeur held the door open for him.

  Stanton clapped his hand to his forehead with a groan: “Damnation! Rev. Beecher’s already here and we’re still missing one of the prisoners!”

  Pilkington almost squeaked with panic: “You mean the Man in the Iron Mask? But sir! I ordered the jailers …”

  Stanton interrupted in an ominously low voice: “Then you had better get on the voicewire at once and find out what’s happened to their van … before I send you down there to take his place!”

  Turning abruptly back to the window, he waved energetically at the Rev. Beecher until he succeeded in catching the attention of the chauffeur, who tugged on his employer’s sleeve and pointed up at Stanton.

  “Ah, Edwin! There you are!” exclaimed the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, his perennial smile of mild amiability widening as he followed his chauffeur’s gesture and caught sight of the gesticulating figure in the window. The uproar in the Square had grown so strident that the clergyman was getting uneasy about drawing out the delay much longer. True, he still had plenty of supporters—especially in New York—but that plaguey adultery trial had stirred up a great deal of totally unfair censure, especially among the Irish and the other hordes of immigrant Papists, and he would just as soon be back in his peaceful Brooklyn parish as quickly as possible.

  Resorting to pantomime, Beecher pulled his watch out of his waistcoat pocket, held it up for Stanton to see, then put it away and turned towards the gallows, gesturing at the empty spot on McCool’s left. Spreading his hands and raising his eyebrows, he sent Secretary Stanton a message as plain as any billboard: “What should I do now?”

  Stanton hesitated for a moment, then shrugged and made a rolling motion with both hands, saying with equal plainness: “Get on with it!”

  Relieved—if a little uneasy about how to include the missing prisoner in his homily—Beecher turned and climbed the stairs to the scaffold, followed by his chauffeur and one of the giant “brainy” Acmes who flanked him protectively as he moved to the railing to address the crowd, his smile a beacon of gentle affection.

  “My dear brothers and sisters!” he intoned, spreading his hands in welcome. At once the volume of the catcalls, whistles and applause jumped to an alarming level and a visible wave of unrest ran through the throngs that lined every side of the Square. Beecher blenched a little but kept the loving smile firmly in place and raised his speaking voice to open-air Chautauqua volume:

  “Now some of you may feel that you wouldn’t have me as a brother, not for all the tea in China …”

  A roar of laughter, some derisive and some amused, echoed across the Square, and canny orator Beecher seized the moment to turn the crowd’s emotions and bring them under his sway:

  “But no matter what faith you profess or what politics you espouse, we are all brothers and sisters in the face of this poor young man’s suffering …”

  At that, Beecher turned and gestured dramatically towards the hooded figure standing on the trapdoor next to him:

  “… and we all must ask ourselves how a promising and vigorous youth became the contemptible wretch we see before us.”<
br />
  This time the catcalls and whistles were fewer and farther between as Beecher turned back to the suddenly solemn crowd and spoke out with the fire that had made him one of the most popular speakers in America:

  “The answer is all too simple, my friends—it is the age-old tale of the foolish youth setting up his own pennyworth of cleverness against the vast, accumulated wisdom of his elders and betters, who know that God himself has ordained and sanctioned the gulf between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer …”

  On the roof of the building next to the Pilkington Agency’s HQ, Harold Nakamura, alias Harry the Jap, a wispily-bearded young man who was the Butcher Boys’ chief artificer and the bosom pal and jiu-jitsu partner of Liam McCool, listened with a bemused smile to Beecher’s oration and the bedlam of shouted comments that interrupted it.

  These gaijin were great talkers, Harry mused, but they were short on efficiency. He pushed the background noise out of his mind and went back to his task, peering through the Malcolm Telescopic sight atop his rifle and making a minute adjustment to the windage. Harry’s weapon was a Sharps Creedmoor Model 1874 lever-action falling block target rifle, and Harry had tweaked and tuned it till it could punch the middle out of a silver dollar at 1000 yards. The distance from Harry’s shooting platform to the scaffold was scarcely a hundred yards, but there was no such thing as paying too much attention to accuracy, and he studied the flapping of the flags and banners on the buildings around him as minutely as if he were on the 1200 yard firing point at Wimbledon.