The Calorium Wars Page 3

  Finally satisfied, Harry pulled away from the scope and looked towards the block of buildings at the 17th Street end of the Square, waiting for his signal and thinking that their collaborators from the Whyos gang seemed to be shaving this one a little bit too close. He had been worried a while ago when the detachment of Johnnies showed up at the 14th Street corner, but fortunately they weren’t as brave facing a huge angry mob as they were when they were shooting one or two terrified “seditionists,” so they had double-timed straight on down 14th Street and out of sight. Now, however, the anointed champions of the Swell Set, the toffs of New York’s own 195th Light Infantry, had shown up at the Broadway corner of the Square, all set to keep the plebeians in line and supported (from behind, where else?) by none other than the detachment of Johnnies. That was too many rifles for civilians to face, and if the Whyo sentinels didn’t send their signal soon …

  Harry looked towards the top of the building on the Broadway corner, but so far the Whyos were keeping out of sight. He could feel the irritation and anxiety seeping into his thoughts like sediment stirring at the edges of a limpid pool, and he forced himself away from them into the clarity of zazen, watching the movements below him without any thought of their meaning or content, his breath steadying and slowing until at last he could … aagh! The serene moment popped like a bubble as a huge black DNS steam van tore into the Square, its gruesome pneumatic siren loud enough to make your ears bleed. “Now what?” muttered Harry. He raised the Malcolm sight to his eye and peered down towards the gallows, where the van had screeched abruptly to a halt, venting billows of steam.

  As the rear doors of the van clanged open, the Rev. Beecher brought his oration to a practiced dramatic pause and turned to watch as two more of the “brainy” Acmes dragged another hapless figure down the van’s steps and up the stairs towards the scaffold. Where McCool had seemed quite fit and cheerful apart from his bruises and abrasions, this prisoner seemed scarcely able to walk, having to be supported by one of the “brainy” Acmes while the other slipped the noose over his head and settled it around his neck.

  It wasn’t the man’s physical condition that disturbed Beecher most, however, it was the ghastly metal helmet whose front half was pierced like a jack-o’-lantern with holes where eyes, nose and mouth should be and whose back half was joined to it and locked shut by a series of tiny padlocks set in holes drilled all the way around its circumference.

  For once completely at a loss, Beecher reached out as if to touch the man, stopping himself with a jerk as he suddenly realized what he was doing. The clergyman cleared his throat instead and raised his voice to be heard above the pandemonium caused by the masked prisoner’s arrival:

  “Ah … are you all right, sir?”

  The answering voice was clear and British-crisp if a bit weak and oddly echoey: “Am I all right? Am I all right? Let’s see, now—I’ve been beaten and kicked regularly for days and jolted with enough electricity to run a trolley and then there’s this tin pot locked onto my head and I’m about to be hanged, but apart from that I suppose everything’s really quite splendid! Are you quite all right, sir? You seem to be suffering from the last stages of terminal idiocy!”

  At that, McCool burst into a peal of uproarious if somewhat muffled laughter and Beecher—stung into momentary speechlessness—just stood there with his jaw hanging open until a faint sound of shots and screams reached them from the direction of 17th Street.

  “Great God,” Beecher muttered in a distraught voice, “I don’t think I can stand much more.” He looked across the Square towards the ominous racket and unthinkingly moved around behind the comforting steel bulk of the “brainy” Acme.

  Up in his rooftop aerie, Harry was tracking the same worrying noises, swinging the Malcolm sight around towards 17th Street and trying to make sense of the hubbub of armed men and terrified spectators milling around the corner of Broadway and 17th. Fortunately, his confusion was ended a moment later by the arrival of the long-delayed signal from the Whyo sentinels on top of the building at the Broadway corner: a triple mirror flash that said “They’re coming!”

  Harry nodded, smiled, checked the row of shiny brass cartridges waiting in a neat row on the lid of his rifle case and set his sights squarely on the “brainy” Acme that was standing in readiness to pull the lever and drop the trapdoor under Liam’s feet.

  Harry put another click or two of windage on the telescopic sight. There, perfect! His bull’s-eye would be the little hump that the British mechanician Royce had set at the point where the Acme’s neck joined its head. It had been meant to discourage his competitors from screwing off the thing’s head to find out how the “brainy” part worked and it bore a label stating clearly that any tampering would set off a small charge of dynamite, enough to make the tamperer regret his nosiness.

  For Harry, however, the hump was simply a handy aiming-point. Emptying his mind of distractions, he began applying a gentle pressure to the Sharps’ trigger, slowing his breath until his lungs were barely moving, thinking that however solidly Henry Royce may have crafted his “brainy” Acmes, he couldn’t have planned for the colossal slug mounted on the end of a Sharps .44-90 cartridge—more than an ounce of lead flying at 1300 feet per second. A bullet like that could punch its way through a half-dozen Acmes and still knock bricks out of a wall …

  BLAM! The shot had fired without any conscious control by Harry, and an instant later there was a second and louder explosion on the scaffold as the carefully measured dynamite charge blew the Acme’s head to smithereens. Without a moment’s hesitation, Harry swung the barrel of the Sharps towards the “brainy” Acme standing ready to drop the trapdoor on the second prisoner, simultaneously levering open the breech, inserting a fresh round, and still on his Zen plateau of perfect calm, firing again, then, finally, as the second Acme’s head disappeared in a cloud of smoke and some sort of disgusting bloody goo of brains and wires, repeating the entire operation smoothly and nervelessly as he blew the third Acme’s head into fragments and then the fourth and the fifth as Beecher flattened himself on the floor of the scaffold, screaming hysterically as he tried to wipe the brains off his jacket, and then gave up and covered his head with his hands.

  Pandemonium swept through the crowd, screams and cheers and excited shouts sweeping from one side of Union Square to the other as Liam tugged at his hood. Then, once he had torn it off, he grinned up towards the roof of the building that Harry had fired from, mouthed “Thanks!”, and lowered his manacled hands to his neck, grabbing the noose, wrenching it open and dragging it back up over his head. Liam looked around the Square urgently … there! He breathed a huge sigh of relief as more screams and a crackle of gunfire came from the Broadway corner, the crowd making way hastily as a nightmarish-looking steamer appeared and raced towards the scaffold.

  It was as if someone had taken one of the old Civil War ironclads and put it on wheels—a vehicle as big as the DPS prison van, but with sloping sides made of boiler plate and vertical gun slits on three of its sides, plus a Gatling gun in a revolving turret on top. As one of the gentlemen warriors from the 195th shouted for his men to fire at the strange machine, the turret spun around and fired a rattling volley back at them, making them drop instantly to the pavement and cover their heads in terror.

  Definitely time to hoof it. Liam leapt to the other prisoner’s side, opened the noose and pulled it up over the weird “iron mask” with its border of tiny locks, started to help the man walk towards the steps, then changed his mind, dropped to his knees, jerked his manacled hands as far apart as they would go, pulled the man up across his shoulders for a fireman’s carry and took off towards the stairs at a staggering run.

  “No, damn it! No, no, no!”

  Maddened with fury and frustration, Stanton pounded with both fists on the sealed window of the Pilkington Agency office, totally oblivious to the danger of smashing the glass and cutting his hands.

  “You can’t! You mustn’t.”

  But Liam McC
ool was already lurching down the stairs from the scaffold to the pavement of Union Square, his burden precariously balanced on his back with his manacled hands stretched back over his shoulders and the chain between them pressing into his own throat.

  As Stanton watched, nearly dancing with wrath, the ironclad steamer screeched to a halt in front of Liam and an armored door clanked open, disgorging a cheerful young man with blond hair and the pug nose and wide cheekbones of his Russian muzhik ancestors. The man ran to Liam and relieved him of his burden, passing the prisoner on to an armed man who had followed him out of the steamer and then throwing his arms around McCool.

  “I don’t believe it!” roared Stanton. He shook his fist crazily at Willie: “You miserable wretch! You told me you had captured Mike Vysotsky!”

  “We did,” whined Pilkington, “but somehow he managed to escape again!”

  Liam and Vysotsky—his oldest pal and co-chairman of the Butcher Boys—were embracing happily when a thought seemed to strike Liam. He broke away from Mike, talking urgently, and pointed up towards the window from which Stanton and the others were watching.

  “DOWN!” shouted McPherson as the significance of the gesture sank in. He grabbed Stanton and Pilkington and pulled them to the floor, ignoring their indignant cries.

  In the Square below, Mike was leaning into the open hatch of the ironclad, giving orders, and a moment later, the turret on top of the vehicle moved smoothly around and the barrel of the Gatling gun rose slowly to a 45-degree angle. Then, with a deafening roar of .45-70 cartridges exploding in a non-stop stream of fire, the Gatling delivered a couple of hundred slugs through the window where Stanton, Pilkington and McPherson had been standing a moment ago.

  “There!” Liam said with a laugh. “That’ll give them a little something to remember us by … now let’s get rolling!”

  He and Mike jumped into the steamer, and a moment later it spun around as gracefully as a couple of tons of armor could manage and tore rapidly back across the Square. As it disappeared around the Broadway corner, a vast cheer rose up from the shanghaied crowd, and as the men of the 195th, the detachment of Johnnies and a miscellany of NYPD personnel—both humans and automata—rashly raised their weapons and fired into the air to intimidate them, the crowd abruptly threw all caution to the winds and poured over their tormentors like a tidal wave, reminding them—even if only for a few painful moments—of the immemorial truth that it doesn’t do to push New Yorkers too far …

  Chapter Three

  There was a giant hurricane moving towards New York from the Caribbean and the ocean off Long Island’s South Shore was already showing a stiff two-foot chop, but Captain Billy Grogan and his steam launch Straight Up had run the blockades in the Civil War and weather like this just made the old river pirate grin in his bushy white beard.

  “A tempest in a teapot, Liam me lad,” he chuckled as he got Liam and Mike and their mysterious companion settled belowdecks. He held out a bottle of Old Bushmills. “Here, a drop of that’ll set you right as rain. And as for that poor fella,” Captain Billy clucked sympathetically and shook his head as he inspected the Man in the Iron Mask, “youse had best be gettin’ that tin pisspot off his head and the rest of that Bushmills into him, he don’t look too good!”

  Throwing them a salute, the old river pirate headed back up the ladder to the pilot house while Liam and Mike struggled to get the mystery man into a bunk, a frustrating task with his long arms and legs flopping around bonelessly like a giant marionette.

  “Chort!” Mike cursed in Russian. “He don’t weigh much but he must be a good six-six when he’s standing up.”

  With a final heave-ho they managed to get him into the bottom bunk of a rack of three, but not without banging his helmet into the bulkhead with an awful, hollow clonk! The man groaned painfully and started a strident harangue in some language neither Liam nor Mike could make head nor tail of.

  “Red Indian?” Mike asked. “One of those Iroquois rebels maybe?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Liam, “I’ve heard it before but …” He bent closer to the hole in the mask, listening with a frown; then he stood up, smiling a little. “You have, too,” he said, “on Mott Street.”

  “What, he’s Chinese?”

  “Unless wángbādàn means something in some other language. It means ‘bastard’ in Mandarin. You have your picks on you?”

  Mike grinned. “Does Michelangelo have paint?”

  He reached into an inner pocket of his smart glen plaid Norfolk jacket and pulled out a roll of morocco leather the size of a small salami, unsnapped it and rolled it out onto a table bolted to the floor next to the rack of bunks. The morocco wallet had been divided into a row of miniature pockets by stitching, each pocket about big enough to hold a pencil but holding instead several dozen slender tools, some like a dentist’s probes, some like screwdrivers with tiny teeth, some clearly improvised and corresponding to nothing any hardware dealer would recognize. Liam examined them judiciously, picked out two and set to work on the mask’s tiny padlocks as the mystery man maintained a non-stop obbligato of incomprehensible muttered conversation, broken by loud shrieks and curses.

  Mike looked pained: “What’d they do to this poor geezer?”

  “If it was the same pair that worked on me you don’t want to know,” Liam said with a wry smile, “it would ruin your digestion.” He squinted at the lock he was working on with total concentration, his tongue clenched between his teeth as he probed with a long, springy pick. Suddenly there was a barely audible click and the lock popped open.

  “Hah!” cried Liam triumphantly. “Gotcha!” He held it up for Mike’s inspection. “See that, the little letters next to the keyhole? ‘Toledo.’ That’s Toledo, Spain, Misha, not Ohio—this mask thing is one of the toys Willie Pilkington’s Spaniards brought over in their luggage. I bet Stanton is mad as a hornet that we snatched this bird before he could string him up.” He set to work on the next lock, humming a little now that he’d plumbed its secrets.

  “Spaniards?” Mike said.

  “Mm hm,” Liam said in an abstracted tone. “They were a present from Stanton to his blue-eyed boy Fat Willie, all the way from the Old Country. First-class professional persuaders—their ancestors cut their teeth on heretics back in the Inquisition.”

  “Heretics,” Mike muttered dubiously.

  “Yeah,” Liam said with a little grin, “you know, witches, foreigners, birds that carry lock picks in their jacket pockets.”

  The second lock popped open and as Liam pulled it loose a panel sprang free in the lower half of the mask and revealed the prisoner’s mouth, which was badly bruised and cut. Whether it was a change in temperature or light or something else, the man suddenly went crazy, screaming wildly, tearing at the mask and at his prison tunic, thrashing in the bunk and howling as Liam and Mike tried to hold him down, then suddenly bellowing in English:

  “NO! NO! NONONONONOOOO! NO CALORIUM! NOOO CALOOORIUM!”

  “Whiskey!” barked Liam, and instantly Mike grabbed the Old Bushmills and uncorked it. “I’ll pry his jaw open, you pour!” Liam said.

  A moment later they were filling the man like a tea kettle, pouring whiskey until he finally started sputtering and shaking his head.

  “Okay.” Liam said. “That ought to do it.” And in fact, the man’s thrashing slowed down and his gibbering and shouting weakened until they finally gave way to exhausted, ragged breathing. Mike wiped his forehead with the back of his hand and tipped up the bottle, finishing it off.

  “Holy jeez,” Mike said in a strained voice, “willya look at him?”

  The man had torn the prison tunic to shreds in his frenzy, exposing a kind of nightmare relief map: a continent of purple, green, and yellow bruises intersected by a black-and-crimson topography of old wounds—scabbed-over lash-marks, poker and electric-shock burns and meandering gouges dug by unidentifiable instruments. Liam examined him for a long moment, his expression going totally opaque, then shook his head briskly
and jerked a thumb towards the small galley:

  “Check out the cupboards and get us some more whiskey, will you?”

  While Mike rummaged through the ship’s stores Liam went back to work on the locks, moving fast now that he knew their secrets, his expression distracted as his hands worked instinctively and his thoughts wandered. After a few moments, Mike returned with another bottle of whiskey:

  “Now what?”

  “Hang on,” Liam said. Another second or two of gentle tweaking and the final lock clicked open and fell into Liam’s hand. “There,” he said. He scooped up a dozen or so of the little locks and dumped them into his trousers pocket. Mike raised a curious eyebrow:

  “Nu, chto, Lyovushka,” he said, “I never seen you keep souvenirs before.”

  “I never ran into anybody like the Spaniards before,” Liam said with a cryptic smile. “One of these days I’m going to see them again and then we’ll figure out some other things you can do with little locks.”

  He raised the mystery man’s torso off the bed a few inches: “Give me a hand with this, will you? We have to get these rags off him and clean him up.”

  Undressing the man was pitifully easy: his whole wardrobe amounted to the ragged tunic and a pair of threadbare denim pants. Liam threw them into a trash barrel, then soaked a corner of the blanket with whiskey and used it to swab the man’s wounds. As the alcohol stung the open sores the man groaned and muttered drunkenly.

  “Lucky we got some of this booze into him first,” Liam said, “he’d be howling like a banshee.”

  Mike wiped the sweat off his forehead with the sleeve of his jacket. “I seen a lot,” he said hoarsely, “but never nothing like this. You gotta promise me, when you find the Spaniards I get a piece of it.”

  Liam nodded. “Sure.” He grinned: “If there’s any left when I’m done. Now … get a good grip on his upper arms, I want to take the upper half of his mask off but he may go crazy again.”