Liahona (3 page)

Coltrane shook his grizzled head.
 
“The mark didn’t see me.
 
Ain’t nobody seen me.
 
Then again, wouldn’t matter if they did, ’cause I ain’t had to do
nothing.”

“You’re charmingly cryptic,” Poe laughed softly.
 
“Would you care to explain your
statement?”

“The limeys did it for me.
 
Beat hell outta the boiler pipes with a wrench and then went
and stole all the tools.
 
No way
the
Jim Smiley
sloughs it and rolls
outta here in the morning, not under her own steam.
 
She’s gaffed.”

“Mmm,” Poe considered.

“Whadda we know about the Brits, boss?” Coltrane asked.
 
He fidgeted with the pommel of the
knife in his belt, one of several knives Poe knew he kept on his person at all
times.
 
“I was damn surprised to
get to the
Smiley
and find ’em there
ahead of me.”

“Captain Richard Francis Burton,” Poe reported, seeing
before his eyes Robert’s handwritten files he had memorized in Richmond.
 
“Soldier, swordsman, linguist,
explorer.
 
A dangerous man and very
nearly a famous one.
 
Author of
several books, decorated inventor of a dueling maneuver, arguably discoverer of
the sources of the Nile and erstwhile ersatz hajji.”

The dwarf shook his head irritably.
 
“Jebus, boss, you buffalo me with the
big words.
 
I could a swore you
jest called that feller an
arsehole horse hat sod gee
, but that don’t make no damn kinda sense.”

“He made the pilgrimage to Mecca in disguise,” Poe
explained, thinking about the scars on Burton’s face, lingering evidence, he
understood, of a spear that had once been thrust entirely through the man’s
head.
 
A man that could survive
that sort of attack, Poe worried, was an antagonist to be feared.

“That so hard?” Coltrane wondered.

“It’s very difficult,” Poe affirmed.
 
“The second man is Absalom
Fearnley-Standish, a junior member of Her Majesty’s Foreign Service.
 
Harrow, and Cambridge.
 
His only posting prior to this
expedition was to a consular position in the Principality of Liechtenstein.”

Coltrane spat on the floor.
 
Ah, thought Poe, this was what it was to live in the
West.
 
Hard liquor and spitting
indoors.
 
The sight of the dwarf
spitting made his own lungs ache, and he clutched reflexively at a handkerchief
in his pocket while he fought down the urge to cough.
 
“Sounds like small fry, don’t he, boss?
 
But don’t he also sound like a feller
you’d expect to play the game straight?”

“Yes,” Poe agreed, “and that worries me.
 
What is such a man doing on this
mission?
 
Are we mistaken about
what the mission might be?
 
Do we
overestimate the importance of this to the Crown?
 
Are Burton and Fearnley-Standish a ruse, distracting us from
the real operatives?
 
Or might
Fearnley-Standish be more than he appears upon first inspection?”

Coltrane grunted.
 
“You think a lot, boss.”

Poe coughed once, then stifled the cough’s siblings.
 
He wondered if he thought
enough
, and felt dissatisfied.
 
Was he a fool to believe war could still be averted?
 
“There are Pinkertons here,” he told
his aide.
 
He nodded almost
imperceptibly to where Bowler Bob and Stovepipe stood on the other side of the
room, waving their calotype in the pasty faces of a clutch of denim overall-
and straw hat-wearing Scandinavians, who answered him with shrugs and
uncomprehending stares.

“After us?”
 
Coltrane dropped a hand to touch the knife in his belt again.

“I don’t know.”
 
Poe wondered.
 
“They claimed
to be after Clemens’s man, the Irishman O’Shaughnessy.
 
Though they knew him as
McNamara
.
 
Clemens didn’t bat an eye, lied bold as daylight, said he’d never seen
the man.”

“Brass balls on that guy.” The dwarf’s voice sounded
admiring.
 
“So we’re safe.
 
Maybe we oughtta find the Irishman and
hand him over to those boys. That’d burn the lot, wouldn’t it?
 
Slow Clemens up another few days.”

Poe squinted at the Pinkertons and considered.
 
“Unless the Pinkertons are in league
with Clemens, and their confrontation was a ruse to try to flush us out.
 
We rush to the Pinkertons to turn in
the dangerous wanted Irishman, and they clap us in irons and send us back to
Washington.”

“Damn, you think?” Coltrane asked.
 
“You’re making my head spin.”

Finally losing his struggle with his lungs, Edgar Allan Poe
coughed, hard, several times, into his handkerchief.
 
He balled the white square of cotton up quickly, hiding the
blood spots from Coltrane.
 
“Best
to be careful, Jed,” Poe said to the dwarf as he rolled with a show of laziness
and bad posture to his feet.
 
“We’re in the jungle here, and surrounded by man-eaters.”
 
But then, he reflected, he was a
man-eater himself.

That was why Robert had sent him.

*
  
*
  
*

Tamerlane O’Shaughnessy huddled his birdlike head deep into
the nest of his scarf as he kicked the backdoor of the Saloon open and slipped
into the sizzling blue half-light of the stockade yard, leaving behind all the
idjits lowing into their shot glasses like cattle bound for slaughter.
 
It was a crisp, cold night and his neck
was thin, but the real reason to burrow into the scarf was the bloody-damn-hell
Pinkertons.
 
Stupid rotten cheating
bastards.
 
He’d known when he’d
crossed them that they’d send men after him, but who would have guessed they’d
follow him out to the Wyoming Territory?
 
You should have got a pardon, Tamerlane, me boy.
 
Or if not a pardon, at least the
Pinkertons could have the decency to look the other way, since he was a paid
agent of the Union Government and they were more or less supposed to be on the
same side.

The
Union
.
 
Tam Sneered at the word in his own
inner monologue.
 
You don’t have a
side
, you stupid Irish lunkhead.
 
Besides, it’s the
United
States
, you idjit, and it’s best it stays
that way.
 
Pray Brigit and Anthony
that this bloody war don’t ever come, war ain’t good for no one except them
that sells guns.

Crime, now, crime paid.
 
Crime had paid Tam when he was on the Pinkertons’ payroll,
digging coal mine shafts in Pennsylvania and listening to the grumbling small
talk of would-be dynamite tossers, and it had paid even better when he’d thrown
his lot in with the Molly Maguires and been on two payrolls at the same time
and robbing from the rich mine owners to boot.
 
It had paid great right up until that snoopy little Welsh
bastard Pinkerton Bevan had told Tam that he knew the score, and he would keep
quiet so long as Tam sent a little money the Welshman’s way every month.
 
Tam had no objection to greasing palms,
of course, but he couldn’t trust the little Taffy to keep his mouth shut, so
he’d had to slit his throat, burn the body and go west.

Another man in Tam’s boots would have crunched the gravel of
the stockade yard loudly, but Tam had a long-practiced step that was silent
without being stealthy, effortlessly inconspicuous and unnoticeable without
looking sneaky.
 
He floated like a
ghost around the side of the Saloon, figuring he’d hide in the
Jim Smiley
for the night.
 

He knew Clemens would never give him up, not that stubborn
son of Missouri, good old Sam Clemens.
 
He’d spit in the devil’s eye, tell him a joke and swear he’d never seen
no Irishman in all his born days before he’d knuckle under to another man.
 
Sam Clemens had taken Tam under his
wing, recruited him into Intelligence (ha! Tam thought, as if) when the
Pinkertons were on his trail and scuttled him out of the country right under
their noses.
 
Clemens was the first
person since Mother O’Shaughnessy herself who had ever taken an interest in
whether Tam lived or died.
 
Also,
Sam had cash.

“Egad, what if we’re caught?”

Tam stopped.
 
The
words almost sounded like part of his own stream of thoughts, but the voice was
the frightened whine of some bloody effete aristo Englishman, some useless
Etonian fop.
 
It came from the
corner of the stockade yard, ahead of him and to the left, where the blue light
of the electricks splashed ineffectually against the bulk of steam-trucks
resting from their east- or west-bound labors.
 
The voice was followed by a loud, rattling
clank!
of metal on metal.

“Great thundering Ganesha!” barked another English voice,
this one stronger and harsher.
 
“
You
insisted on coming along, now the least you can
do—and I
do
mean the very
least
—is not get in my way!”
 
A grunt, then more rattling.
 
Tam thought he could tell where the
sound was coming from, and a great hulking beast it was, a track-borne iron
behemoth, many times larger than the
Jim Smiley
, hunched in the shadows.
 
Two dark figures lurched across its deck, one straining its
shoulders against a heavy load.
 
“Besides, they’ve only a few hours to catch us, and they can’t possibly
even know what we’ve done yet.”
 
The figures sank into the deck of the big steam-truck, presumably
climbing down some hatch or stair into its belly.

Suddenly, Tam had a bad feeling about the whole thing.
 
First the Pinkertons showed up on his
trail, and now suddenly here were two English bastards up to no good.
 
If there were only the one of them, Tam
would kill him without a second thought, just to be on the safe side, but two
men always made an attack a little more of a throw of the dice.
 

“Hell and begorra.”

Tam gave the strolling Englishmen a few seconds to get well
inside their truck, then crossed the yard to the
Jim Smiley
.
 
He had
to skirt out of reach of the electricks’ blue light, which made his scuttling
circuitous and piled additional time into his state of anxiety, but a couple of
minutes later, heart beating a little faster than he would have liked, Tam
stood next to the
Jim Smiley
and
surveyed her for visible damage.

She looked fine from the outside.
 
All six of her enormous, heavy India-rubber tyres bulked
full and unscathed.
 
The immense
inflated India-rubber skirt that wrapped all around her hull was also
fine.
 
The big elephantastic wheel
in back sat on its axle, unimpeached and unassailed, as far as Tam could
see.
 
Black smoke puffed, wispy and
hard to spot in the blue-black gloom, from her raised exhaust pipe.
 
Tam almost relaxed.

Almost.

He sent himself up the ladder quickly, conscious that he was
visible here from the doorway to any vulture that knew where to look, and then
slipped into the wheelhouse for a moment to scan the shadowed deck through its
large windows.

Nothing.
 
Bloody-damn-hell nothing.

You’re jumping at shadows, me boy.

Tam crossed the deck again and started down the stairs into
the boiler room.
 
He flicked the
light switch in the iron stairwell and nothing happened.
 
He flicked it again, and nothing.
 
That wasn’t good.
 
He wasn’t a mechanick like Clemens, but
he knew that unless the emergency battery was engaged, the lights were powered
by the electricks, which were powered by the boiler.
 
No lights meant the boiler wasn’t on.

Tam drew his pistol, a shiny Webley Lonsgpur (not his,
originally, but Bevan’s, but the weaselly little Taffy didn’t need it now, did
he, and him all singing away,
Bread of Heaven
in the celestial men’s choir?).
 
Saints Brigit, Patrick and Anthony on fire.
 
Could be he let the coal run too low in the furnace and the
fire had gone out.
 
Sure, that was
it.

No, you idjit.
 
There’s smoke out the exhaust, means the fire is going.

Could be a burned out bulb.
 
Didn’t they burn out?
 
They burned out, he was sure of it.

Sure, it could, and it could be bloody leprechauns opened a
valve and let out all the steam.
 
Put your balls back on, O’Shaughnessy, and stop fooling yourself.
 
He shook his head to clear his
thoughts, then cocked the hammer of the Webley.

Gun first, he sprang noiselessly into the boiler room.