Chapter Two

How dare he give me the fig? Damn his impudence!” Stanton was glued to the window, transfixed with fury as he glared down at Liam through the binoculars, his curly gray beard bristling and jutting with outrage, the deep, disapproving grooves that normally tugged the corners of his mouth downwards growing still deeper and more censorious, the wrathful frown dragging his bushy eyebrows down over the top of his glittering little pince-nez, the heavy gold chain across his black brocade waistcoat rising and falling like a mooring line in a storm as his maddened wheezing jiggled a paunch whose growth had kept pace with the steadily increasing grandeur of his titles.

He spun around and lowered the glasses, turning his rage on Pilkington and McPherson, wagging a porky finger at the two of them as if he wished it was a club:

“I blame this whole business on your incompetence, both of you.”

Fanatically attuned to his master’s needs and fancies, Pilkington had imitated him not only mentally but physically, with the result that a natural plumpness had turned into full-fledged corpulence, his body wreathed and garlanded with fat and his face bloated until his eyes were tiny sparks of feverish anxiety shining out above the suety mounds of his cheeks. Unfortunately the new, fatter Willie Pilkington sweated twice as much as the old one, especially when he was worried, and by now he was absolutely dripping with perspiration.

“But, sir!” cried Pilkington in despair. “My men and I have worked day and night to find these villains!”

McPherson, a big, beefy roughneck with sandy hair and whiskers and the fiery red nose of a man who liked his first whiskey with breakfast, edged away unobtrusively from Pilkington. Partly, of course, to get away from the smell of his boss’ muck sweat, but at least equally to emphasize the absolute gulf that separated his own fine work from Pilkington’s lamentable errors and miscalculations.

“Sure, now, yer honor!” groaned McPherson, slipping into a pained brogue. “My Agency’s operatives have been turning over every stone in the city, and I’m willing to bet it was them breathing hot on his trail that turfed out the informer who gave you McCool.”

“Don’t you flannelmouth me, you cretins, you egregious nincompoops!” Stanton was so infuriated that flecks of saliva flew with every word. “Let’s not even get started on what just happened to poor Pennywhistle and the fact that you two are supposed to be responsible for public order and decency in this mutinous Sodom—which as far as I can see hasn’t developed a thimbleful more order or decency since the Draft Riots. No, let’s just talk about that vile thug down there with the rope around his neck!”

Stanton sneered at his cringing lieutenants with ferocious sarcasm. “One man! Imagine my surprise when I saw they were leading just one man out of the van to be hanged. Surely there must have been at least forty or fifty of him to be flimflamming you two at every turn and setting all your efforts at naught, but no! Just one scrawny little Irish rogue, the very same Liam McCool I sent the pair of you to arrest in Washington not six months ago. And did you arrest him? Did you, hah! He and that damned female scribbler Becky Fox knocked you senseless, stripped you to your long johns, tied you up and bathed you with Chinese rotgut, and then proceeded to free Lincoln and see him safely into hiding! And how did you pay them back, eh? Tell me that!”

Stanton glared daggers at the cringing duo: “You …” he stabbed a finger at McPherson, “… let him and that creature break into this very room, rifle your safe and publish documents exposing the crimes you committed to conceal the bastard he …” the stabbing finger swung around to point at Pilkington “… fathered on one of our spies, and while McCool and his hetaera pulled that off they amused themselves by blowing up your brand-new, million-dollar office building!”

Stanton clenched his fists at his sides, his face almost black with rage, and bellowed at them:

“Was ever any patient, long-suffering statesman burdened with such gormless, contemptible imbeciles for helpers? Who knows how many more heinous crimes that swine might have committed if I hadn’t been lucky enough to receive the anonymous denunciation that led my operatives right to him! And you haven’t even been able to locate the informant so that I might shake his hand and pin a medal on him!”

Pilkington set his jaw and did his best to look intrepid and determined, looking in spite of himself more like a schoolboy who has just been soundly thrashed by the principal.

“I promise you, sir,” he said earnestly, “every Secret Service operative in the country is on the track of the informant. Clearly, the man is hesitant to claim the credit his public-spirited act deserves for fear of a cruel revenge at the hands of the seditionists, but the instant we discover his identity I promise we will seize him and force him—uh, encourage him—to tell us everything he knows about the Freedom Party!”

“Indeed, sorr,” McPherson asserted, his brogue fighting his best efforts to suppress it, “and every Pilkington detective who could be pulled off other jobs is out beating the bushes under orders to stay on the job day and night till they discover where these damned Freedomists make their lair—when we know that we’ll root them out with fire and the sword, I swear to yez on me mither!”

“Hmph!” snorted Stanton, slightly mollified. “Just see that you do, and don’t be dithering on about it forever—I want to see every last one of those vermin dangling from the end of a rope by Thanksgiving!”

As if in response, a vast, muffled groan rose up from Union Square: “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!” Stanton turned back to the window, raised the glasses and saw—with absolutely delicious clarity—one of the “brainy” Acmes fitting a black hood over Liam’s head and then sliding the noose down over the hood and pushing Liam roughly towards the cracks in the planking that outlined the waiting trapdoor.

“Ahhh!” breathed Stanton with a rapturous smile. “Words cannot begin to express the beauty of that picture—Liam McCool wearing a hangman’s knot for a cravat!”

“Indeed, sir,” said Pilkington eagerly. “And if ever there was a well-merited …”

“Be quiet, you fool,” snapped Stanton, “I’m the one who finally managed to trap him and I’ve earned the right to enjoy this in peace!” Still peering through the glasses he chuckled spitefully, hugging the hard-won triumph to himself and gloating over the shackled figure on the scaffold: “You thought you could make a fool of me, you foul little shanty-Irish pustule? Make a mockery of Edwin M. Stanton, the architect of the new America?” He bared his teeth in a feral grin. “You contemptible little mongrel! In a few moments it’s you who’ll be twitching at the end of a rope and soiling your pants!

He lowered the glasses and turned back to the others, the very thought of McCool’s execution filling him with such a blissful sense of expectation that he couldn’t help giving Willie and McPherson a jovial Santa Claus chuckle. Stanton’s helpers returned his smile warily, so taken aback by his sudden festive mood that their expressions made him think of a little dog he had beaten with a hairbrush when he was a boy. Stanton shook his head ruefully. The poor simpletons looked terrified; clearly, the moment called for a touch of magnanimity.

“Let’s drink a toast, boys!” He gave the Great Detective a hearty clap on the back. “Come now, McPherson, you must still have a drop of that special rye!”

Relieved beyond measure, McPherson bustled over to an ornate mahogany sideboard, grabbed a bottle and some glasses and poured out three healthy shots.

“Right, then!” cried Stanton, raising his glass. “Here’s to the destruction of the Freedom Party, may they be ground to atoms and scattered to the four …”

Before he could finish, a swelling uproar from the crowd of spectators turned into a bedlam of shouts, catcalls, boos and scattered applause. Stanton frowned, tossed off his drink and hurried back to the window, raising his binoculars to see what was happening.

In the Square below, a private steam phaeton with brilliant midnight-blue lacquer-work and brass fittings polished to a golden luster had pulled up next to the DNS van. A pudgy, pleasant-looking middle-aged man wearing clerical garb, his wavy gray hair hanging to his shoulders and his substantial Roman nose probing the air questioningly, like a gopher checking for foxes, was standing next to the car peering around as the chauffeur held the door open for him.

Stanton clapped his hand to his forehead with a groan: “Damnation! Rev. Beecher’s already here and we’re still missing one of the prisoners!”

Pilkington almost squeaked with panic: “You mean the Man in the Iron Mask? But sir! I ordered the jailers …”

Stanton interrupted in an ominously low voice: “Then you had better get on the voicewire at once and find out what’s happened to their van … before I send you down there to take his place!”

Turning abruptly back to the window, he waved energetically at the Rev. Beecher until he succeeded in catching the attention of the chauffeur, who tugged on his employer’s sleeve and pointed up at Stanton.

“Ah, Edwin! There you are!” exclaimed the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, his perennial smile of mild amiability widening as he followed his chauffeur’s gesture and caught sight of the gesticulating figure in the window. The uproar in the Square had grown so strident that the clergyman was getting uneasy about drawing out the delay much longer. True, he still had plenty of supporters—especially in New York—but that plaguey adultery trial had stirred up a great deal of totally unfair censure, especially among the Irish and the other hordes of immigrant Papists, and he would just as soon be back in his peaceful Brooklyn parish as quickly as possible.

Resorting to pantomime, Beecher pulled his watch out of his waistcoat pocket, held it up for Stanton to see, then put it away and turned towards the gallows, gesturing at the empty spot on McCool’s left. Spreading his hands and raising his eyebrows, he sent Secretary Stanton a message as plain as any billboard: “What should I do now?”

Stanton hesitated for a moment, then shrugged and made a rolling motion with both hands, saying with equal plainness: “Get on with it!”

Relieved—if a little uneasy about how to include the missing prisoner in his homily—Beecher turned and climbed the stairs to the scaffold, followed by his chauffeur and one of the giant “brainy” Acmes who flanked him protectively as he moved to the railing to address the crowd, his smile a beacon of gentle affection.

“My dear brothers and sisters!” he intoned, spreading his hands in welcome. At once the volume of the catcalls, whistles and applause jumped to an alarming level and a visible wave of unrest ran through the throngs that lined every side of the Square. Beecher blenched a little but kept the loving smile firmly in place and raised his speaking voice to open-air Chautauqua volume:

“Now some of you may feel that you wouldn’t have me as a brother, not for all the tea in China …”

A roar of laughter, some derisive and some amused, echoed across the Square, and canny orator Beecher seized the moment to turn the crowd’s emotions and bring them under his sway:

“But no matter what faith you profess or what politics you espouse, we are all brothers and sisters in the face of this poor young man’s suffering …”

At that, Beecher turned and gestured dramatically towards the hooded figure standing on the trapdoor next to him:

“… and we all must ask ourselves how a promising and vigorous youth became the contemptible wretch we see before us.”

This time the catcalls and whistles were fewer and farther between as Beecher turned back to the suddenly solemn crowd and spoke out with the fire that had made him one of the most popular speakers in America:

“The answer is all too simple, my friends—it is the age-old tale of the foolish youth setting up his own pennyworth of cleverness against the vast, accumulated wisdom of his elders and betters, who know that God himself has ordained and sanctioned the gulf between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer …”

On the roof of the building next to the Pilkington Agency’s HQ, Harold Nakamura, alias Harry the Jap, a wispily-bearded young man who was the Butcher Boys’ chief artificer and the bosom pal and jiu-jitsu partner of Liam McCool, listened with a bemused smile to Beecher’s oration and the bedlam of shouted comments that interrupted it.

These gaijin were great talkers, Harry mused, but they were short on efficiency. He pushed the background noise out of his mind and went back to his task, peering through the Malcolm Telescopic sight atop his rifle and making a minute adjustment to the windage. Harry’s weapon was a Sharps Creedmoor Model 1874 lever-action falling block target rifle, and Harry had tweaked and tuned it till it could punch the middle out of a silver dollar at 1000 yards. The distance from Harry’s shooting platform to the scaffold was scarcely a hundred yards, but there was no such thing as paying too much attention to accuracy, and he studied the flapping of the flags and banners on the buildings around him as minutely as if he were on the 1200 yard firing point at Wimbledon.

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 McCool 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 …