Liahona (8 page)

“I understand,” he said carefully, as if trying to talk
reason into a mountain lion.
 
“I
shall discuss your position with my colleague, Captain Burton.”

“Fine,” Rockwell spat.
 
“Tell him I’ll knife him just as happily as I’ll knife you, even if he
ain’t family.”

“He will appreciate your fair-mindedness,” Absalom said
reflexively, and then wanted to kick himself.
 

“I’d sooner see you floating dead in the Bear River than
alive and walking the streets of Salt Lake,” Rockwell said.
 
“I hate—” he paused and strained
at the air to listen.
 
Absalom
thought he heard the low conversation of men’s voices somewhere, but he
couldn’t be sure.

“Dammit!” Rockwell cursed in a whisper.
 
Dropping Absalom to the ground, he
turned and sprinted, cat-like and quiet, into the darkness and was gone.

“Great thundering Jove!” Absalom quipped, sinking into a
puddle of his own coat, but the Burtonesque oath lacked Burton’s panache and
gave him neither courage nor comfort.
 
He sat shaking and trying to calm his breath, took off his circumcised
top hat and let the cool night breezes blow through his sweaty hair.

“Looks like you’ve had a scare, brother,” said a warm,
kindly baritone above him.
 
Absalom
lifted his head and found himself in the gaze of a clean-shaven, square-headed
man with protruding jug ears and a broad smile.
 
“That isn’t the happy grin we prefer to see on first-time
visitors to the Kingdom,” the man said.
 
He wore a heavy brown wool coat over a yellow waistcoat of rough wool
and a red bowtie.
 
One of his
waistcoat buttons was tortoiseshell, but two of them had been replaced with
whittled wooden disks.

“A grin that happy’d make me feel bad to see it on the face
of my worst enemy,” added another voice, more nasal and higher-pitched than the
first, and Absalom saw that a second man stood at Square Head’s shoulder.
 
He was lean and bent, with a stubbled
chin and eyes that didn’t look quite the same direction.
 
Each man wore two pistols on his belt
and held a rifle in one hand.
 
“Name’s Bill Hickman,” he introduced himself and extended his free hand
in greeting.

“Absalom Fearnley-Standish,” Absalom presented himself.
 
He rose shakily to his feet and then
took the proffered hands of both men and shook them.
 
“Representative of Her Britannic Majesty Queen Victoria.”

“Oh, you’re one of the Englishmen,” said Square Head.
 
“My name is John Lee.
 
Bill and I are both simple ranchers and
horse traders, but we sometimes run errands for Brother Brigham or the Twelve.”

“You mean Brigham Young?” Absalom clarified.

“President of the Kingdom of Deseret,” Lee nodded proudly.

“And the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles,” Hickman added.

“Yes, the Foreign Office is well aware of the identity of
Brigham Young,” Absalom said, dusting off his hands.
 
“I am to see President Young on my arrival.
 
My colleague and I are to see him, that
is.”

“We can’t none of us wait,” Hickman grinned, and his missing
teeth and stray eyes together gave him the appearance of a madhouse
resident.
 
Absalom shuddered.

“In the meantime, Brother Absalom, maybe you can help us,”
Lee suggested.
 
“We’re aiming to
meet a friend of ours, a man named Porter Rockwell, but we haven’t been able to
find him.”

“It wasn’t him as scared you, was it?” Hickman demanded,
staring at Absalom with one eye while the other wandered about the back wall of
the Saloon.

Absalom looked from one man to the other.
 
They stood respectfully back and smiled
in a friendly fashion, but their friendliness and their interest in Rockwell
made him nervous.
 
“I’m afraid it
wasn’t, gentlemen,” he lied.
 
“Unfortunately, you’ve caught me after an argument with my colleague
that’s left me rather shaken.
 
I
don’t know your friend; have you checked inside, and in the dormitories?”

Hickman squinted suspiciously, but John Lee nodded and
smiled.
 
“Thanks very much,” Lee
said.
 
“Welcome to the Kingdom of
Deseret.
 
I hope we get to see more
of you around the Great Salt Lake City.”

Then he walked away, tugging Hickman with him by the elbow.

Absalom stood watching them go, nodding affably, and when
they were around the corner, he collapsed like a marionette with cut strings.

*
  
*
  
*

Sam sat on the edge of a bunk in the cheap section of the
dormitories.
 
Two gas lamps lit the
whole room, which looked about a hundred feet long and held maybe fifty beds,
upper and lower bunks, all flat and hard and appealing only to the truly
exhausted.
 
In the corner opposite
the entrance was the all-ages-and-sexes latrine, a squatpot-and-bidet unit
whose modesty could be preserved by a tattered and unfortunately stained
curtain.
 
As usual in these
caravanserais, the Indians, Mexicans and other non-Anglos ended up bunking
around the latrine end of the room, so Sam sat staring into twenty-odd copper
faces and feeling grateful for the jet of steam and hot water that flushed out
the squatpot after each use and kept it smelling, if not nice, then at least
not abominable.

Still, the sight was distracting.
 
“Would you gentlemen mind closing the curtain?” he suggested
mildly.
 
“I find my sensibilities
are more delicate than I had imagined.”

They were mostly young, all male, wild-looking and armed to
the teeth.
 
Just what he needed.

“I’m not looking to start a war,” he informed them.
 
“I just need to delay the
Liahona
a bit.”

One of the older men—maybe as old as fifty, a man who
had been identified to Sam as
Chief Pocatello
—nodded.
 
“The white
men of Deseret are not our enemies,” he said, “but we sometimes have small
disagreements with Brigham and his people.
 
Sometimes those disagreements even go so far as skirmishes.”

“Tell me what sort of thing might cause such a disagreement,
Chief Pocatello,” Sam urged the older man.

“Money talks,” said the older Shoshone.
 
“I hear you speak its language.”

Sam tossed a small bag of gold coins to the floor; the bag
(the strings of which Sam had deliberately loosened) opened and spilled its
dully gleaming contents onto the plascrete floor.
 
The crowd gave an appropriately appreciative collective grin
and one of the younger men collected up the coins and gave them to Pocatello.
 
“How’s that for a parley-vouz?” Sam
asked.

The old Indian shrugged, but his eyes twinkled.
 
“Is that all?”

Sam grinned broadly.
 
The hook was in the fish’s mouth.
 
“No, Chief, it isn’t.
 
I’ve
got an idea how you can turn an even bigger profit out of this deal, provided
you’re willing to do a little trading in commodities.”

*
  
*
  
*

Jed crouched behind the pipes above one of the
squatpots.
 
The two ’pots sat side
by side in the Saloon’s donnicker, in booths separated from each other by a
thin slab of plascrete, and the pipes that ran up behind the ’pots and into the
ceiling shared a crawlspace behind them for occasional maintenance.
 
A full-grown man might have wormed his
way back into the crawlspace with a ladder and some patience; Jed found it a
comfortable waiting place, as well as a tactically shrewd one.

Sooner or later, he thought, everybody shits.
 
When it really came down to it, that’s
all people were anyway, skin bags full of blood and snot that sloshed around
all day processing their next shit.

He had a length of piano wire wrapped loosely around one
hand and a little ebony canister, inscribed with hieroglyphic writing, beside
him in the shadows.
 
He couldn’t
read what the hieroglyphs said and he didn’t care to.
 
Hell, he wasn’t even sure Poe could read them, though that
man could fake his way out of an iron box if an army of angels was guarding it
with flaming swords.
 
If pressed,
Poe would no doubt be able to spout acres of bullshit and claim it was the
interpretation of the funny old pictures.
 
Jed knew what was in the canister and he knew how to use it and that was
all he cared about.

The latrine door opened and the Pinkerton sauntered in.
 
It was the one with the Bowler Hat, and
he seemed to be looking for someone.
 
He peered under both the stall doors, Jed crouching extra low in the
shadow of the crawlspace just in case Bowler Hat decided his quarry might be a
spider or a monkey, and called out, “Diamond!”

Was that all he wanted, to find his friend Diamond? Jed
wondered.
 
Would he have to spend
more time up here waiting, ignoring the vile noises and breathing in the rotten
stink of his fellow human beings?
 
As he thought of it, the image struck him as a pretty good description
of life generally.

But no, Bowler Hat had the urge.
 
He selected the stall with the cleanest ’pot, shut himself
in, hung his duster over the stall door, and dropped his trousers.
 

Why is it, Jed wondered, that naked men looked so damn
silly?
 
At least the Pinkerton kept
his shirt on.

Jed wasn’t certain that the Pinkerton had to die.
 
But he had chewed the matter over after
his conversation with Poe, watching the two men work the room and flash their
calotype, and had come to the conclusion that it was best if the two detectives
disappeared.
 
He couldn’t be sure
whether they were his enemies or enemies of his enemies, and the uncertainty
would complicate all his decisions.
 
He hadn’t discussed his resolution with Poe, had decided to take it into
his own hands to cut the Gorgon knot, as Poe himself was fond of saying, and
just wipe the problem out.
 
The
world was uncertain, unclear, dirty and dangerous, and a man still had to act.

Bowler Hat grunted, tensed the muscles of his shoulders,
emitted an unpleasant odor, and relaxed.
 
Now he was vulnerable.
 
Jed
stretched the piano wire from one hand to the other, waited until he heard his
target exhale, and then jumped.

Long years of playing the acrobat or the geek or the animal
wrestler in one-horse southern towns made his attack possible.
 
Jed dropped easily onto Bowler Hat’s
shoulders and simultaneously threw a loop of the wire around his neck.
 

The hat hit the filthy floor as the big Pinkerton jumped
back, smashing Jed against the plascrete wall of the stall—

thud!—

Jed grunted, but held tight—

the Pinkerton pulled, kicked, strained—

Jed squeezed tighter, just like holding shut the jaws of an
alligator—

the Pinkerton clawed, scratching Jed’s arms, and smashed Jed
against the walls several more times—

oomph!

but by the time the big man realized that his only chance
was his pistol and grabbed for it, he was passing out.

Jed landed hard, wedged into the corner of the stall as
Bowler Hat fell back onto the squatpot.
 
He continued the garroting until he was sure the Pinkerton was dead,
then climbed down, feeling more irritated than sickened by his surroundings.
 
He quickly stripped the man of interesting
personal effects—a Maxim Husher (he raised his eyebrows and whistled), a
wallet, a badge—before climbing the cold water pipe back up into the
crawlspace where he’d left the canister.

The attack and the theft had together taken two minutes or
less.
 
Now Jed popped open the lid
of the canister and shook its contents down onto Bowler Hat’s prone body.
 
Several dozen brass beetles,
scarabs
Poe would call them, fell onto the bare lower half
and into the clothing folds of the dead Pinkerton.
 

Inside the hinged lid of the canister there were two
buttons.
 
Jed pressed one of them,
and the scarabs set to work.
 
With
fine brass mandibles, relentless brass claws and tiny jets of powerful acids,
they made short work of the corpse, squirting acid onto the man’s body and then
plucking away the dissolving and scorching bits and consuming them, like a
woman plucking the flesh off a boiled chicken.
 
Like a snowball tossed into a campfire, the man’s body just
melted.

Jed watched, fascinated and a little bit disgusted, though
he kept one nervous eye on the door.
 
Not that he was surprised at what the inside of another man looked like,
but it wasn’t the sort of thing he looked at every day, not by choice, not if
he could help it.
 
In thirty
seconds, bones showed through the flesh all over; in a minute, only bones were
left; in two minutes, the bones were gone, too, and the brass swarm
clicked
and
clattered
uncertainly around the ’pot and rustled the empty clothing.