The Calorium Wars Page 4

  As Mike held the man down Liam inspected the mask carefully, tapping and pulling at it gently here and there. The front half fit into the back half with the seamless precision of a fine pocket watch, but Liam couldn’t see any reason it shouldn’t just lift off now that the locks had been removed. Crossing his fingers mentally, he inserted his fingers into the gap left by the panel that had sprung loose a few minutes ago and pulled upwards gently; there was a momentary resistance, almost as if the join was sealed by a vacuum, then it let go and the remaining portion of the front half came free.

  “Whaddya know,” Mike said in a hushed whisper, “he really is a Chinaman after all. What’s Stanton got against them, anyhow?”

  The man’s face was long and hollow-cheeked, with a prominent patrician nose and a wide, thin-lipped mouth framed by a drooping moustache; even bruised and bloody and distorted by delirious grimaces, it was an aristocratic face, suggesting a strong will and a sharp intellect.

  “I’m guessing Stanton doesn’t care about Chinese people one way or another,” Liam said, examining the man’s face thoughtfully. “Willie’s pet Inquisitors didn’t do me over half as bad as they did this fella—they were just playing with me till it was time to send me to Union Square for the long drop. But five will get you ten our friend here was sitting on some valuable information Stanton would have given his eye teeth for, so you just know they tried everything they could think of before they finally gave up trying to crack him and sent him to keep me company.”

  “They were wasting their time,” Mike said with a note of approval. “Just look at that face. He’s got a jaw like my old man, stubborn as a mule. There’s no way this geezer’s ever breaking, not even if you put him on the rack.”

  Liam smiled as he thought of Old Vysotsky, a bank robber who’d marched the three thousand miles from Moscow to Siberia in chain gangs po etapam three different times without ever giving up so much as his name.

  “Pick him up again,” he said to Mike, “I want to get the rest of this junk off him.”

  As Mike lifted the man’s upper body away from the bunk, Liam freed the back half of the mask and tossed it into the trash barrel. Then he pulled the sheet and blanket up over the man’s naked chest and tucked him in.

  “I reckon that’s it for now,” he said. “We must have poured a pint of Bushmill’s into him. It’ll be a while till he sobers up. Let’s go see what’s going on up topside and find out if we can get him some duds from Cap’n Billy.”

  Once they were out under the sky again Liam and Mike moved as far forward as they could go, finally seizing hold of a couple of stanchions so they wouldn’t fall down every time the bow of the Straight Up slammed into a trough. Standing with his feet spread, the tails of his borrowed slicker flying straight out behind him in the wind and his eyes squinted half-shut against the constant spray of icy salt water, Liam could feel the pent-up bitterness of the past couple of months washing away like layers of dirt.

  “You have to hand it to Stanton’s boys,” Liam said, shouting over the wind, “they know how to run a clink. How many times did you try to spring me, anyway?”

  Mike made a disgusted face: “Five times in three months, and we couldn’t even get close to the part where they were keeping you. Only other place I know that good is the Shlisselberg Fortress in St. Petersburg.”

  “Look at the good side,” Liam said, “I would have hated to miss out on the Spiggoty Twins with their dainty little pimp moustaches and their shiny fingernails.” His eyes narrowed as he slipped back into his memories: “Adalberto and Fulgencio. Very polite boys, a couple of really dedicated artists.”

  Mike looked at his friend sharply, weighing Liam’s tone with a concerned look. “Nu, nu, starik,” Mike said in a soothing tone, “don’t let it get to you, we got some real artists in the Butcher Boys, too.” He grinned. “Maybe not so polite, but hey, whaddya expect, they’re city boys.”

  Liam had just opened his mouth to answer when the front of the boat lifted high over a crest and slammed into the trough of the wave with a crash like a cannon shot, throwing back a washtub-full of cold sea water that knocked him to the deck and left him coughing and spitting up salt water and laughing helplessly:

  “Okay, I needed that,” he sputtered. “Listen, Misha.” He scrambled to his feet and grabbed his pal’s arm with his free hand: “Listen to me. If you see me starting to feel sorry for myself again just pour cold water on me. You get into bad habits in solitary, all you can do is think about your poor dear self and how miserable you feel, but now I’m out that’s over. We got a lot to do and I don’t want to waste time on silly stuff like the Buenos Días Boys and their tricks. They’re just trained animals, bad dogs—if I see them in the street they’ll be sorry they didn’t stay home pulling the wings off flies, but that’s it. Let’s leave revenge to the Count of Monte Cristo, OK? We’ve got bigger fish to fry.”

  “Yeah?” Mike looked interested. “Like what exactly?”

  Liam bent closer and raised his voice, as the wind howled around them:

  “You remember what I said about Stanton back in July, after Becky and I came back from Little Russia?”

  “Sure.” Liam could see the wheels turning as Mike tried to guess where he was going with this. “You said Stanton was on his way to putting together a big-money strong-arm gang like nobody heard of since Genghis Khan, with the Army and the Navy and sixteen different kinds of coppers for muscle, so we had best be keeping our heads down until we figured out how we were going to deal with them.”

  Liam nodded. “That’s what I said all right, and you can forget I ever said it. We don’t need to lay low, we need to organize and get moving. Right away! Us, the Whyos, the Dusters, the Rabbits, the Bowery Boys, everybody who’s in the life.”

  “Whaddyou mean, everybody?” Mike was shaking his head as he tried to absorb the idea. “Even the Chink tongs? Even dodos like the Molasses Gang? You get all these birds together in one room there’ll be blood coming out the chimney.”

  “I said everybody, I mean everybody,” Liam said flatly. “If we don’t move fast, start working together, start hitting Stanton and the rest of those jokers every time they turn around, it’s going to be too late. He means to polish off every last one of us as fast as he can. Us and anybody else that isn’t saying ‘Yessir, yessir, three bags full!’”

  Mike gave an incredulous snort: “Are you serious?”

  “Is getting your neck stretched serious? Are the Hasta la Vista Twins and their blowtorches serious?” He gave Mike a level look and poked him in the chest for emphasis: “For you and me and our boys and the Rabbits and the Whyos and every other all-right guy in this town and in every other town where there’s crooks and coppers—there’s one job and one job only: Dust Stanton! And once he’s gone we croak everybody that was in his pocket and then we bust up whatever’s left of their tea party and chuck the pieces into the East River. Then we can relax and drink a beer and get back to how things used to be.”

  Mike grinned broadly, reached into his sleeve and took out a short, narrow-bladed knife. He made a quick incision on his palm and passed the knife to Liam, who followed suit, then grabbed Mike’s hand and squeezed their palms together in a hard handshake.

  “War to the knives,” Mike said.

  “To the knives,” Liam echoed.

  They held the handclasp for a long moment, then let go and turned back to watching the waves, Liam feeling a touch of discomfort as he reflected that for once he hadn’t been 100% honest with Mike. When it came to the question of revenge it was true they had to make sure all their boys got the message that getting rid of Stanton came first and foremost. But he did have his own private score to settle alongside the big one, a purely personal question that was bound up part and parcel with solving the problem of “Tsar Eddie.”

  As questions went, it was simple enough: Who had betrayed him? Who was it that had hated him enough to give his name to Stanton’s Eyes, knowing that there was only one place it could lead
to: Union Square, with him standing on the gallows wearing a rope around his neck?

  He shuddered as he remembered Union Square and his first sight of the gruesome fist-thick coil of hemp hanging from the crossbeam. The nightmare vision of that rope had almost sucked the air out of him during those endless weeks in solitary. Deep underground, in total silence, without light except for the sporadic visits of Adalberto and Fulgencio, Liam had begun to appreciate how much the thought of the future had fuelled him and how fragile that faith was. That’s how those bastards twisted the knife in you when you were in the hole: how could you live if you stopped believing in the future?

  Liam shook the thought off and let the icy ocean spray clear his mind. Now, thank God, his life was his again and he could see his dreams as clearly as if they were right here in front of him. One of them was a warrior’s dream: he looked forward almost gleefully to battling Stanton and his armies—though he wasn’t about to admit it to Mike or anybody else, he saw himself as Vas’ka Denisov in Count Tolstoy’s War and Peace, leading a relentless guerilla force that would nip at Tsar Eddie’s flanks until every one of his thugs and murderers had been chewed up and spit out, just like Napoleon’s armies in Russia.

  And the other beacon he’d held onto through the endless darkness of solitary was a lover’s dream. Liam smiled wryly and shook his head. There it was, right out in the open and no ducking it: he had to go to Shelter Island and see Becky before he went to war on Stanton and find out whether his future was going to include her or not.

  He’d seen some strange visions after he’d been in the cooler for a while—monsters and demons and things it was going to take him a long time to forget. After a while he even had a hard time remembering what familiar things really looked like. But the one thing that kept him more or less sane was the unchanging vision of Becky as he’d first seen her in Mrs. Clark’s little restaurant in Henderson’s Patch, the Pennsylvania coal town where Pilkington’s Detective Agency had forced him to spy on his fellow Irishmen in a secret miners’ defense group, the Molly Magees.

  As famous as she was for her sensational news reporting, she’d come all that way out in the sticks just to interview Liam’s sweetheart, Maggie, for a story on the impending mass hanging of ten Molly Magee “terrorists.” Maggie, however, had been murdered the night before, so Becky had come looking for Liam to see if he could tell her anything about Maggie’s death. And the truth was, if Becky had asked him his own name that first moment he saw her he would have been at a loss, since all he could think of was her face …

  … A high and serene forehead, just fringed by a bang of auburn hair; eyebrows and lashes thick and all her own, free of any kind of war paint; eyes a blue as deep as a mountain lake, steady, fearless, ready for anything; a straight, strong nose, no cute little upturn; a wide, humorous mouth, half-smiling even in repose, the lips full and without a hint of rouge; chin—firm, forthright and determined … a picture as perfect and indelible as any Liam had ever seen, and she made him feel like some ragamuffin from the slums of Five Points with his nose pressed against the outside of Delmonico’s restaurant window looking in at the swells eating ice cream.

  He’d caught himself a moment later and tried to talk to her without falling over his own tongue, but the damage was done—if he’d never seen her again he would never have forgotten her. And as it was they’d ended up having more adventures together in a few days than he’d had in years … and more passion than he could think about peacefully. But always he found himself wondering just how long an extraordinary woman like Becky could stay interested in a shanty-Irish cracksman—even one good enough for his peers to call him the King of the Cracksmen—whose old man had died drunk leading a mob in New York’s Draft Riots and whose greatest intellectual achievement to date had been reading Pushkin’s poetry and Count Tolstoy’s novels in Russian …

  A dozen yards or so ahead of the Straight Up a seagull was beating its wings doggedly in a vain effort to fly into the gale-force winds, advancing a foot or two and then being pushed back, over and over again until finally it wised up, dropped down to wave-top height and sped away. Liam watched the little drama intently, a grin spreading across his face until he burst into laughter: he was no Roman augur, but even he could read those auspices—come Hell or high water, he was going to fight for Becky until he found a way to make her his own for good and all.

  And as for who it was that had squealed on him to Stanton and his merry men, he’d just hold that one close to his vest and keep his eyes peeled. Somebody out here on Shelter Island had it in for Liam McCool bad enough that they’d tried to turn off his future like a gas tap, and when he figured out who it had been there would be a reckoning.

  Chapter Four

  The chilly southeasterly wind buffeting the lee shore of Shelter Island might as well have been blowing on another planet as far as the average New Yorker was concerned that sultry Halloween afternoon. Tomorrow, perhaps, when the hurricane finally came ashore, the city would cool off. Right now, though, surrounded by two rivers and an ocean and simmered gently at ninety degrees or so on a granite and asphalt frying pan, the heavily-dressed and densely-packed city dwellers were cooking as surely and as unwillingly as any mossbacked old pincher in Shanley’s lobster palace.

  But however miserable and stupefied they might be, none of them was too addled to ignore the hissing and clanking monstrosity that was rumbling its way north along Tenth Avenue. Built for Stanton by the Pullman Palace Car Company, eighty-five feet long and tall as a double-deck omnibus, it was lacquered a glossy, iridescent black with no apparent windows, its ominous midnight look broken only by an even more ominous symbol: a flaming sword clenched upright in a mailed fist above a crescent of gold letters: NYMCG, for New York Metropolitan Corps of Gendarmes.

  Inside, ensconced in plush armchairs on loan from the Harvard Club and watched over by stolid “brainy” Acmes and an honor guard of dress-uniformed Johnnies holding their chromed shotguns at port arms, were “Tsar Eddie” himself, Secret Service chief Willard (Fat Willie) Pilkington and Great Detective Seamus McPherson, all earnestly puffing cigars and nipping at a bottle of fine old Kentucky Bourbon as they tried to erase the shameful memory of how they had shrieked and writhed on the floor of the Pilkington Agency office while a firestorm of Gatling Gun slugs tore the paneled walls of the room into kindling.

  “We’re running out of time, gentlemen,” grumbled a thoroughly jaundiced Stanton. “On New Year’s Day—and that’s a scant two months from now—we will be declaring war on Little Russia and our preparations are woefully incomplete!”

  “But sir,” Pilkington said with an anxious grimace, “surely there can be no great hurry about it—Little Russia has been dozing peacefully on the other side of the Mississippi since Jackson sold our western territories to the Tsar in 1835. Even with Dr. Lukas or Prince Yurevskii or whatever his name is taking over in New Petersburg and getting the Japs to help him build airships our agents say nothing’s changed. Why not let the declaration of war wait till spring, when we’ll have all our preparations in place and the weather’s more favorable?”

  “Willie, Willie, Willie,” Stanton chided reproachfully, “right now the forces of the Russian Empire are fighting tooth and nail against the Turks in Bulgaria. Every spare soldier, every serviceable airship, every possible resource is being bent to the task of crushing the Ottoman Empire. You know perfectly well that swine Lukas turned out to be Prince Nikolai Aleksandrovich, the Tsar’s son by his morganatic marriage to Princess Yurevskaia. You think Daddy’s just going to sit in St. Petersburg playing tiddlywinks if we attack his offspring? If we don’t conquer Little Russia before the Turks surrender to Tsar Aleksandr, the next thing we know the Balkan War will be over and his airships and soldiers will be free to come pouring across the Atlantic to defend his subjects in Little Russia. If that happens we can say goodbye to the idea of taking back our lost territories. Indeed, the Tsar might use it as an excuse to invade the United States!”

  M
cPherson squared his shoulders and put on a bellicose scowl: “Just tell me what you need me to do, sorr! Sure I’ll lay down me life, bedad!”

  “I need you to stop being such a feckless moron,” Stanton snarled. “And start doing your job! And you too, Willie, you insufferable pudding! It would be bad enough just trying to put the country on a war footing without having to contend with the so-called Freedom Party. But thanks to the two of you we must also deal with Lincoln hiding out somewhere issuing slanderous manifestoes when what I had wanted to see was him standing trial for treason, a big, gala trial with daily newspaper reports full of shocking details completely discrediting him and the Freedom Party. And if Lincoln weren’t enough, now that incendiary scum McCool is on the loose again plotting God alone knows what subversive mischief!”

  Pilkington and McPherson nodded uneasily, puffing their cigars hard and praying that the smoke screen would obscure them enough to make Stanton think of someone else to blame for his troubles.

  Stanton, who knew these two better than their own mothers did, greeted their pusillanimous game with a disgusted grunt and turned to stare out at the passing scenery. Though no one could see into the “Black Coffin” as it steamed along on its enormous hard-rubber tires, Stanton could see out easily through the two-way glass windows and for some unaccountable reason it irked him to the point of fury to see frightened passersby scurrying away like mice at the sight of the Department’s armored bus.

  “By the Lord Harry,” muttered Stanton, “there’ll be no skittering down your rat holes once we introduce the Table of Ranks! We’ll know precisely where to find you!”

  Both Pilkington and McPherson, courtiers more attentive than any bird dog, went instantly on point at the sound of a new idea from their master:

  “Sir?” queried Pilkington, his dewlaps quivering with eagerness to please. “Table of Ranks?”