Deseret (2 page)

Crack!

Still nothing.
 
His head hurt a bit, but not so much that he wouldn’t try it again.

“There’s
you
,” John
Moses objected.

“I ain’t a kid.
 
I’m a midget.
 
That’s a
grown man, only shorter and more ornery.”

Crack!

The third time, the door popped open.

John Moses’s eyes were saucers.

“Stay here a minute,” Jed told him, and it only took a
little more than the promised minute before he managed to knock over a dark
wooden correspondence desk, wrangle a letter opener from its drawer and saw
himself free.
 
He liberated the
boy, then threw aside the letter opener.
 
The Irishman had the guns and all Jed’s knives and his piano wire and
the scarabs, so a letter opener was worse than pointless; it would only tempt
Jed into rash action, as if he had a real weapon in his hands.
 

He’d settle for his knives back, but what he really wanted
was a gun.
 
Something big, that
would punch holes in a man.
 
Jed
had a specific man in mind for the punching.

“You’re still brave,” John Moses said defiantly.
 
His slouch cap lay in the corner of the
suite’s front room and John Moses retrieved it with dignity unnatural in such a
small boy, pulling it down onto his head.
 
“I wish I was brave.”

Jed knew he was going to have to leave the boy here.
 
He’d leave the boy, go get himself
armed, somehow, and go after the Irishman.
 
He needed the scarabs back, and then he needed to find out
what had happened to Poe, and if there was still a mission.
 
He didn’t want the boy screaming for
help as soon as Jed left, of course.
 
He decided he’d better try to inspire the kid.
 
“Sure, you’re brave,” he agreed.

“I cry a lot,” the boy said.

Jed shrugged.
 
“So do I,” he lied.
 
Hell,
he couldn’t remember if he’d ever cried, not even as a boy.
 
Crying would just get you a whipping
from Pa, especially if you were the runt and no good around the farm except to
wrestle with the hens for their eggs and milk the little nanny three times a
week.
 
Jed had left that dump
behind as soon as he possibly could.
 
He’d never looked back, and he sure as hell had never cried about
leaving.
 
“That ain’t either here
nor there.
 
Being brave is not
running away when people need you.”

“Oh yeah?” the boy asked.

“Yeah,” Jed repeated, “and that means I ain’t so brave.
 
I’ve been running all my life, from one
damn thing or another.”
 
He rubbed
his wrists, enjoyed the tingle of feeling that returned to them with the
renewed blood flow.
 
It was a line
of bullshit he was selling the boy and he knew it, but at least it was a line
of bullshit that he wished was true.
 
“You got a Pa, don’t you?
 
And he sticks around, does right by you and your Ma?”

John Moses nodded solemnly.

“See now, that there is a brave man.”
 
Jed was just about ready to leave the
little boy.
 
He considered taking
him down to the street and leaving him there, but he didn’t want to be seen
abandoning the kid.
 
No, he’d get the
boy to use the toilet, and sneak off while the door was shut.
 
He still had to figure out how to get
himself armed.
 
At least the
Irishman hadn’t taken his money, but Jed had precious little cash.
 
Maybe enough to buy one puny knife, and
that hardly gave him any comfort.
 
He wondered where Poe was.
 
He had to deal with the Irishman first—he couldn’t risk the
mission getting knocked into the dust, much less getting hanged, because one
vicious red-head nursed a grudge—and then he needed to get back with his
boss and get the mission on track.
 
“And he’s got a job too, don’t he?
 
What’s your Pa do for a living, John Moses?”

John Moses smiled with pride and stuck out his little
chest.
 
“He makes guns.
 
He owns his own shop.”

Jed Coltrane almost laughed out loud.
 
“Does he now?” he asked.
 
“That sounds like a fine and noble
occupation.
 
And is your Pa’s shop
somewhere in the Great Salt Lake City, by any chance?”

“No,” John Moses shook his head.
 
“But it’s real close, and the train will take you there.”

Jed had visions of riding the blinds under some Deseret
train.
 
He could do it, he’d done
it often as a carny, but he didn’t like the idea of doing it with such a small
kid as a companion.
 
He knew his
luck couldn’t have been that good.
 
“I’m afraid I ain’t got the money for a ticket, kid,” he said with a
wistful grimace, patting down his nearly empty pockets.
 
“You got any cash?”

“You don’t need money, silly,” John Moses answered.
 
“This is the Great Salt Lake City.
 
Only I don’t know where the train
station is from here.”

Jed felt like he was beginning to see light at the end of
his personal tunnel and he grinned.
 
“That’s what the guy behind the front desk is
for
.”

*
  
*
  
*

The Great Salt Lake City made Sam Clemens feel
alive
, despite the bow tie he’d wrapped around his
neck.
 

The whole thing—the whole swarming, ticking, crazy
thing—was one big device, everything tightly knitted together and pumping
in sync.
 
There were footpaths,
clean plascrete strips for walking that were open to the early evening air on
the ground level, cutting in and among the columns and towers, and bordered all
along with orange trees and rosebushes.
 
There were footpaths overhead, too, undergirded with steel and encased
in glass, and running from building to building over carriages, horses,
steam-trucks and other pedestrians.
 
The vehicular traffic flowed along shockingly wide streets.
 
There were various other tubes whose
use he couldn’t surmise, radiating out from each building like irregular wheel
spokes.
 
Some were large enough
that a man might crawl through, and had grates on the side.
 
A few vented steam.
 
Some were tighter in radius, and made
entirely of glass, and Sam thought he saw small, blurred objects shooting
through them from one building to the next.
 
They looked like high-speed aerial trains for pixies, he
mused.
 
Iron lampposts dotted the
footpaths, topped with glass bulbs that at night, Sam presumed, would cast some
sort of light on their surroundings.
 
Franklin Poles, and a prodigiously large number of them.
 
In the daylight they were swallowed up
and invisible against the grandiosity all around them.

Even the open air lot where he had left the
Jim Smiley
had been fenced in by plascrete walls and lit with
Franklin Poles and criss-crossed with walkways and had felt more like a room
than a field.

In the center of it all was a huge dome, sitting nestled
among streets named South Tabernacle, North Tabernacle, East Tabernacle and
West Tabernacle—Sam admired the mechanick’s sensibility embodied in the
names of the streets.
 
Radiating
out beyond the Tabernacle streets, the other streets weren’t even named, but
just numbered.
 
The sheer
effronterous modernity of it cheered Sam’s heart.

Only it wasn’t a dome, Sam decided, not really.
 
It was an egg.
 
A big, rounded, bulbous tower of
plascrete, steel and glass, textured with windows and balconies and staircases
and shorter, octagonal towers jutting even higher out of its sloping
sides.
 
Plants grew all over it,
bright and dark green and rose-red and orange and blue, an explosion of color
that was unnatural against the dusty green-brown backdrop of the Wasatch
Mountains behind it.
 
That was the
Tabernacle, Sam knew, the spiritual and administrative heart of the City and
the Kingdom, and right next to it sat the Lion House, where President Young
lived and had his office.
 

The Lion House was where Sam was headed.

Salt Lake City’s great advantage over American cities was
its newness, Sam thought.
 
It had
been built from scratch in the last ten years, and its builders could
incorporate every advance they wanted from the works of men like Brunel,
Whitney, Maxim, and Hunley, and in doing so they didn’t have to work around
what had been built before.
 
There
were no old streets to dig up in order to lay down pipes for plumbing, steam or
electricks.
 
There were no old
property lines to contend with, no ancient by-laws, no rights of way,
nothing.
 
The bees had come to an
empty desert and been able to build exactly the hive they had wanted.

The Tabernacle looked like a beehive, too, and reinforced
Sam’s impression that he was himself shrunk and among the honey makers.
 
It’s a Hive of Men, he corrected
himself, a hive built and run by men of industry and surely, necessarily,
designed and led by men of vision.
 
Men like the President of the Kingdom of Deseret, Brigham Young, whom
Sam was on his way to meet now, strolling among the towers on an open path.

Sam lit a Cohiba to celebrate.

If only he didn’t have to have the Irishman with him.
 
The red-headed sourpuss slunk in his
wake like a bad smell.
 
Specifically, like the smell of cheap liquor.

He didn’t need O’Shaughnessy for the mission, of course, not
this part, not for a short stroll through a more or less civilized city and a
first diplomatic contact, but Sam was afraid that if he left Tamerlane
O’Shaughnessy in the hotel with two prisoners, he’d come back and find the
Irishman with two corpses and a story.

It’d probably be a good story, though.

Just not worth the death of the little boy.

Sam didn’t have a hat and he regretted it.
 
The women he passed en route to the
Lion House nodded, and the men all raised their hats to him.
 
Some of the men had the rough, unshaven
look of Hannibal or St. Louis or Kansas City about them, but many of them and,
Sam thought, nearly all of the ladies, had some polish.
 
Maybe not the polish of a Richmond or a
New Orleans or a Boston, but they looked at least as sophisticated and elegant
as, say, the burghers of Chicago.
 
The men were also all armed; Sam had never seen so many pistols.
 
He wondered if the ladies might be carrying
guns too, in their handbags.
 

He noticed that they all carried pocket watches, and seemed
to look at them frequently.
 
He’d
never seen a crowd that looked more intent on being punctual.

He also noticed, idly and without thinking too much of it,
that the distribution of ladies was uneven.
 
Some men, especially older men, had two or even three women
on their arms, and he saw a lot of younger, less-bearded gents alone or in each
other’s strictly manly company.
 
There were more women than were usual in a frontier society, he thought,
but they seemed to travel in clusters.

Lacking an apparatus of salutation equivalent to the
bouncing hats, he took to plucking his cigar out of his mouth and swishing it
in friendly circles at the passersby.
 
O’Shaughnessy just grunted suspiciously and kept his porkpie screwed on
tight.

A steam-truck passed, blue, armor-plated and slow-moving,
with Old Glory crisply flapping from a pole to the right of its wheelhouse and
the flag bearing the blue and gold arms of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
offsetting it to the left.
 
Behind
it came a second, and then a third.
 
Soldiers, Sam thought.
 
A
northern regiment.
 
They sat on the
decks of the trucks and others might have been inside, a couple of dozen on
each vehicle, with carbines and pistols and the well-worn boots and uniforms of
men who knew their job.
 
Sam waved
his cigar at the soldiers too, doing his best to look like he wasn’t trying to
appear nonchalant.
 
I might not
really be cut out for this secret agent stuff, he thought.

None of the soldiers waved back.

“Poor bastards,” Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy muttered bitterly.
 
“Tomorrow could be war and them all
blown to bloody bits.”

“Indeed,” Sam agreed, biting his cigar again.
 
“Them or the other fellas.”

“Jesus and Brigit love ’em all.”

The Lion House was a large grey-painted building with white
trim and dark green shutters on the windows to match the tall dark green
junipers standing guard around it.
 
Sam ran fingers through his thick hair and examined it from the footpath
for a minute.
 
The building might
have been a dormitory or a barracks or a boarding school, and in itself wasn’t
remarkable.
 
Its name came, Sam
presumed, from a brass lion that crouched over a crenellated entrance hall on
the south side of the building, where Sam now stood.
 
It looked conspicuously like an official entrance.