“That was a very short furlough, even for this department, sir,” Belle Boyd said dryly as she entered the office of General Philo Handiman, although she and Horatio A. Darren—who had met her in the passage—knew the matter that brought them there must be of some urgency.
What was more, the Rebel Spy and the male agent had already unknowingly reached the same conclusion over why they had been summoned to meet the superior in the United States Secret Service.
“Accounts said the taxpayers shouldn’t keep on being burdened by the expense of keeping you in a place as costly as the Grand Republic Hotel, Miss Boyd,” the General replied, instead of getting down to business immediately after the social amenities he only rarely overlooked were observed. He made the comment in such an apparently somber tone, he might have been serious rather than ironic. “And they are just as adamant that you ought to be in less extravagant accommodation than you have at present, Mr. Darren, as they are paying for it.”
“Somebody somewhere must love Accounts,” the male agent sighed in a seemingly heartfelt manner. “But I’m damned if I know who they might be.”
“You’ve seen the account in the newspapers this morning?” Handiman said, more as a statement than a question.
“I did order a most delightfully high-priced breakfast in my suite, which I mean to put down with my other expenses,” Belle confirmed, knowing to which item in the morning’s newspapers her superior was referring.
“Along with the ten dollars you’ve already claimed for the cab ride you took,” the General said in a mock-disapproving tone, as Darren was signifying concurrence with the Rebel Spy.
Although there was no longer any need to do so, the subject of her attentions having taken the advice she had given before they parted at Hoffmeister’s Hauf Brau, Belle had retained the suite taken for her to enable the surveillance of Countess Olga Simonouski to be simplified, reveling in a luxury far greater than she usually was granted when on an assignment. Darren had stayed in the less palatial accommodation he had used. Not that either was allowed to remain in relaxation for long. Each had anticipated the arrival of the note, delivered by a mounted messenger who showed signs of having traveled at some speed, ordering them to report to headquarters as soon as convenient, which both had known meant straightaway whether convenient or not.
“What’s behind the story of the robbery on the train, sir?” Darren asked.
“I’m pleased that the Washington Mail have handled it just as one would have expected of them,” Handiman declared after having told all he knew about the incident. “It simplifies things for us, although I’m sure that was never the editor’s intention when he included it.”
The comment aroused chuckles of appreciation from the two agents, despite each being aware of the situation’s gravity and why the head of their organization was taking such an interest as he implied they were to become involved.
Although not the largest of the newspapers published in Washington, D.C., the Mail was of a distinctly liberal persuasion, which led it to always seek out—even fabricate on occasion—any items detrimental to the government, the military, and the forces of law and order. While its competitors merely reported that two guards were killed while pretending to deliver printing plates for currency to a new mint opening in San Francisco, the Mail—which normally would not have regarded the murder of men following such an occupation as being worth mentioning—demanded to know why they were deliberately sacrificed in such an unnecessary fashion.
“Do you know, sir,” Belle said, “there’s something familiar about the robbery.”
“Such as?” Handiman prompted.
“The way the doors of the private car were locked with the keys left on the inside and one of the windows was open, for starters,” the Rebel Spy obliged. “As it must have happened earlier at night, doing that wouldn’t have been so easy as it would in the Grand Republic.”
“That’s true,” the General admitted. “The waiter who delivered the meal, then discovered the bodies when he had the conductor open up, offered a reasonably close estimation of when it happened. The trouble is finding out how it took place.”
“Like why a pair as smart and well used to such things as Charlie Forbes and Archie Fine let somebody get close enough to shoot them down without either being able to get his gun clear,” Darren suggested, having met the two men in the line of duty and retained their friendship. “There aren’t many they would trust. In fact, I’ll bet they told the waiter to make sure it was him and nobody else who fetched along their order. Which being the case, they wouldn’t have sat still if a stranger came with something pretending to be what they’d asked for.”
“They might have let a woman get close,” Belle offered. “That’s how the Bad Bunch down in Texas got away with it for so long.” x
“Knowing what they were carrying, even if it was only fake plates,” Darren answered, “I don’t believe they would have let a woman come as close as from where they were shot while on the job.”
“Or a priest, like Beguinage used to pretend to be?” the Rebel Spy asked, referring to a hired killer, claimed to be the most deadly and successful in Europe, who had come to Texas to carry out an assignment. xi
“Neither was a Catholic,” the male agent replied. “Or religious enough to let a preacher of any other kind, or even a nun, get near enough to do it without one or the other of them fetching out his gun. They might not be as fast as I’ve heard Dusty Fog and some of those other Texans you know so well are, Belle, but they weren’t exactly slow either.”
“Well, it happened, no matter how it was done,” Handiman asserted. Then there was a knock on his door, and as a booming voice sounded from the passage without the words being discernible, he went on, “Ah, it sounds like the man I’ve asked to come and meet you has arrived.”
There was something theatrical about the appearance of the tall and well-built man who entered the office upon the General’s calling for him to do so. Fairly handsome in a florid fashion, with bushy eyebrows and an equally auburn mustache of sizable dimensions, his features expressed a bonhomie and his deep-set dark eyes twinkled with amusement as he strode as if leading a parade of the more garish kind rather than merely walked forward. He carried a broad-brimmed black hat, and a black cloak lined with red silk hung over the shoulders of his stylishly cut dark suit. A multihued cravat was secured to the frilly bosom of his white shirt by a stickpin with a large ruby. His step was jaunty, and other than that he was well past the first flush of youth, nothing about him gave any suggestion of what his actual age might be.
“Hello, Barnie, you old reprobate,” Handiman greeted, rising and shaking hands with the visitor. “What’s your latest attraction, another Ki-Chu?”
“No more of them, thank you,” the visitor boomed in a voice that was clearly used to making itself heard over considerable distances. “Dash it all, Philo, the last one I had got religion in Boston, Mass., of all places. Right in the middle of my introduction, with his cage surrounded by assorted gilpins and rubes all agog over me expounding how he was a tailless Ki-Chu, the monkey that looks so much like a man that no attorney-at-law dare go near his cage for fear people would think the Ki-Chu had escaped when he pulled off his wig and false whiskers, then told them I, me, Phineas Taylor Barnum, with all undue modesty the Greatest Showman On Earth, was nothing but a fake. Such a display of base ingratitude cut me to the quick, wherever that may be, I may tell you.” xii
“I can see how that could be somewhat embarrassing,” the General declared without any show of sympathy. “Now let me present you to my two young friends. This is Miss Belle Boyd, and, before you ask her, I’m ordering her to tell you of her own free will that she doesn’t want you to lead her to fame and fortune equaling that of Lavinia and Tom Thumb.”
“Egad, that is a pity!” Phineas T. Barnum boomed, eyeing the slender girl with open approval and admiration. “I can visualize it all now. Dressed in a suitable fashion, you could demonstrate how you most justifiably became known as the Rebel Spy, my dear lady. Why, I might even be able to get the almost equally famous Scout of the Cumberland to engage you in a recreation of the great battle of fisticuffs in which you and she engaged at a theater the name of which escapes me for the nonce.”
“There’s only one slight trouble with that,” Belle replied, her demeanor showing amusement. “I never even met Pauline Cushman, much less engaged her in a bout of fisticuffs, as you put it.” xiii
“The latter is of little import, dear lady,” the showman claimed with the grandiloquence of manner that was second nature to him. “The gilpins and rubes believe it took place, and I consider there is something most meritorious about fulfilling their desire to see a belief brought to fruition.”
“I truly admire a man who thinks so much of others,” Handiman said dryly, and introduced Darren.
“And now, Philo,” Barnum said, taking the seat that was offered after having shaken hands with the two agents. “How can I be of assistance to you?”
“What do you know about the Circus Maximus?” the General asked.
“Old Cosmo Cathneiss’s little show?” Barnum intoned as if the mention of the name was close to being anathema where he was concerned. “They’ve just recently been gracing your fair metropolis with their presence, if that is the correct word.”
“It will do until something better comes along,” Handiman declared.
“We aren’t due to play here for some time,” Barnum said, making the words have the implication that he felt his small audience—and the population of Washington, D.C., in general—would be the losers because of the absence. “But it has gone down considerably of late. The balloon Cosmo goes up in isn’t a bad attraction, especially when he has it turned loose instead of being moored to the ground. The cats in the act are so old they couldn’t chew milksop, much less their trainer, or he wouldn’t be in with them. Although Momma and Poppa Martinelli were good in their day, those sons of theirs aren’t more than passable. Cosmo’s strong man is all right. Nothing spectacular, but not much needing to be faked. That little feller Dinks is a good clown, and he’s more proportionately formed than many of them. One of his games is to get dressed up as a cowboy bandit, with a bandanna over his face, and pretend to hold folks in the crowd up with a toy cap pistol that sends out a flag with ‘Bang’ on it when he pulls the trigger.” Giving no sign of noticing the way all three other occupants of the room stiffened as they heard the last words, he went on, “But he’s no Tom Thumb, and has a temper that makes most of us shy away from hiring him.”
“How about the women I saw mentioned on the bills?” the General queried.
“There’s only one of them,” Barnum stated. “Except for a few over-age flashers who can’t do more than walk around the ring to make it look like there’re more of them working than is the case.”
“Just one woman does all those acts?”
“Just the one, Philo, although she doesn’t do them all every night, regardless of what Cosmo implies. Her name’s Libby Craddock, and she’s better than fair at everything she does. Whatever might be lacking, she covers it up by having quite a physique that she shows off most satisfactorily by the way she’s costumed for the part she’s playing.”
“If she’s that good,” Handiman said, “why haven’t you or one of the other big shows picked her up before now?”
“For the same reason Jinks is still with Cosmo,” Barnum explained. “Only even more so. She’s such a good shot with a pistol that she blew the ba—made the ringmaster of one show so he wouldn’t hope ever to raise any children when he tried to molest her. Which nobody could blame her for, as she wasn’t the first he’d done it to, even though some thought it a trifle extreme. Then, in another show, she laid open the face of a Gypsy girl who ran a mitt camp—fortune-telling concession to you gilp—with a knife quicker than a flash when they both fancied the same man. There have been other incidents of a like nature, and these combined to make owners shy away from taking her on.”
“Do you happen to have a poster for the circus, sir?” Belle inquired, just beating Darren to speaking and equally amused as the men by the way in which the visitor had only just refrained from referring to them as ‘gilpins.’
“I have,” the General confirmed, and came to his feet.
“Does the escapologist act she performs entail picking locks, Mr. Barnum?” the Rebel Spy wanted to know, after her superior had collected the poster from where it was standing in a roll alongside a filing cabinet and spread it open before her.
“That it does,” the showman agreed, nodding as if to indicate he believed a shrewd point was being made. “And very good she is at it, by all accounts. In fact, I’ve heard there were a couple of times money was found missing from locked cash boxes. There was some suspicion on account of her known skill, but her own nature and having Jinks and Padoubny the strong man backing her play, nobody got around to trying to prove it.”
“So the three of them have been together and close friends for some time?” the Rebel Spy said quietly.
“They have indeed,” Barnum substantiated. “I don’t know what she sees in them, but, according to what I’ve heard, they would do anything for her without question.”
“You wouldn’t know whether there have been any unexplained robberies take place where they were appearing, sir?” Darren said, showing he was duplicating Belle’s line of thought.
“I’m afraid not,” the showman replied.
“Damn it!” the male agent exclaimed. “I’ve always said it’s a pity there isn’t a central collecting agency where lawmen could send information like that to be available to others when needed.”
“I’ve tried to have one set up several times,” Handiman claimed. “But I was always turned down by Our Masters, as I think you call them, Rache, because of the expense setting it up would entail and fears that the liber-rad softshells would object on the grounds that doing so would entail a loss of privacy for everybody who was kept on the records.”
“Before you ask,” Barnum said, and for once his voice lost its usual timbre. “Yes, I think Libby and her two friends could have pulled off the robbery at the Grand Republic with the help of the Martinellis. Climbing up and down the wall would be possible even for her, with Padoubny hauling in the rope on the way back.”
“How about the way the train was robbed?” Belle asked.
“I’d say they could have pulled that from the roof of the private car,” the showman assessed. “But not so the guards missed seeing them coming in.”
“Unless the killing was done before the others got in through the window that had been opened for them,” Handiman pointed out, despite having nodded as if approving of the theory being propounded by the Rebel Spy.
“That could have been done by Jinks wearing his masked-bandit outfit,” Darren asserted. “You said Charlie and Archie were shot by heavy-caliber bullets that stopped either from cutting loose in return after they were hit, sir. Knowing how experienced they were, I don’t see them mistaking any kind of gun that was large enough to take one—even a Remington Double Derringer, which would be about the biggest he could handle if he’s so small—for a harmless cap pistol.”
“He wouldn’t need to use the Remington, because of his size,” Barnum warned. “He’s as strong as many men a whole lot bigger, and I heard he once shot a drunken horse-wrangler from out west who tried to pick on him with his own Colt Peacemaker.”
“Only, even a Civilian Model Peacemaker would be too big to be passed off as a cap pistol,” Darren objected.
“A Storekeeper Model might get by, especially as it would be expected when they thought they were just watching a child playing a game of outlaws, which is how Jinks must have looked to them,” Belle pointed out, knowing that the major difference between the two types of Colts lay in the one she mentioned having a two-and-a-half-inch barrel against the other’s being four and a three-quarters in length. “And there are others on the market of a large enough caliber that are just as compact.”
“That’s true,” Handiman agreed. “The circus left by train going west this morning, so—!”
“Libby and her bunch weren’t with it,” the showman interrupted. “I had one of my men at the depot to see them off and learn where they’d be playing so our routes wouldn’t clash and, I’ll admit, trying to find out whether Cosmo had come up with any new attractions I might be able to persuade him to let join up with me. He asked about her specifically, as they’d been on good terms once and he’s still got a shine on her, and was told they’d gone ahead on the train that got robbed, only that wasn’t mentioned outright.”
“Would they all be in cahoots?” Belle inquired.
“I’d say not,” Barnum estimated. “It was before the newspapers came out, so they wouldn’t have heard about the robbery.”
“Then they could have done both of them,” Darren stated.
“They could,” the General admitted. “The only problem will be proving what we suspect.” Seeing that the showman was exhibiting signs of wishing to leave, he asked, “Is there anything more you can tell us, Barnie?”
“Only that you don’t want to take chances with any of them if what you’re thinking proves correct,” Barnum replied soberly. “Because even the two wops—Giovanni especially—could prove real dangerous given the opportunity to resist, and there’s no could about the rest.”
“What’s next, sir?” Darren inquired when the showman had taken his departure after having told Belle that he wished he could persuade her to go against her orders and take up his offer of appearing with his organization. “Was it really a just a decoy scheme thought up by the Treasury Department that went wrong and got Charlie and Archie killed, like the Mail says?”
“It wasn’t,” the General replied, speaking in what was a most definite manner to anybody who knew him as well as did his two agents. “But we’re going to do everything we can to make the gang and whoever’s behind them think it was. Because I’m sure they had to have somebody with more facilities than they’re likely to have let them know where to look and when to do it. What we have to do is convince them the real plates are going to be sent to San Francisco by a roundabout route and a courier nobody would be likely to suspect the Treasury of using and, because of interdepartmental rivalry, we aren’t going to be allowed to become involved.”
“It’s a pity we dealt with that bureaucrat of the Countess’s the way we did, Belle,” Darren remarked. “Fed the right news, I bet he’d soon find where to peddle it to the best advantage even if he didn’t already know.”
“And it’s lucky he isn’t the only bureaucrat willing to do things like that,” the General remarked in a casual-seeming fashion. “We’ve got one on tap who we’ve let sell items we wanted various people to know about without knowing he’s been set up to do it.”
“Then we’ll have to hope he can convince them that it will be me taking the supposed real plates while somebody else is doing it, sir,” Belle guessed.
“If there’s one thing I’ve never been able to stand, it’s a smart woman,” Handiman declared. “I married one and know just how smart they can be.”