City of the Absent (26 page)

“I thought burning the file the right thing, Inspector.”

“Did the reports have the eye on them?”

“The big eye of the Pinkerton Agency, yes, sir. That is, most pages did.”

“Then it's true. Pinkerton's joined forces with Kohler.”

“They didn't have nothing that they could prove, lotta words about suppose this and maybe that and perhaps here and could be's and would be's and such.”

“Surrounding what?”

“Your interrogation of a man who got burned to death, for one.”

“Haymarket days. Old news, and it wasn't me torched the man.”

“I never believed it, as many times as I've heard it told.”

“What else?”

“Something about a shootout, you killing a man.”

“Self-defense pure and simple, and a setup to boot.”

“Bosch told me 'bout that one.”

“What else?”

“Some notion you may've killed some lady named Polly Pete. Said you may've made it look like the work of the Phantom.”

“Fairy tales. Nonsense. What else?”

“Something about dropping a man kicking and screaming to the bottom of the lake.”

“They're reaching.”

“Still, I'd be careful of who you call a friend at the firehouse.”

“Meaning?”

“They had a statement from Mr. Harry Stratemeyer, the fire investigator…”

“Harry, no. What must they have on Harry?”

“Says he helped you dispose of a body out on the lake, the body of the supposed Phantom of the Fair.”

“Sounds like you read well enough, Sam.”

“Is it true?”

“What?”

“Is it true you dropped him alive into the lake?”

“Samuel, you saw what he did to Griffin, to Polly, to others, and the law—Kohler—let him go for lack of evidence.”

“Mostly heard secondhand about it. Met you sometime later…on the Leather Apron case, sir.”

“What else did you see in the file?”

“They had statements against you for what happened to both your partners, Drimmer and another you worked with on Leather Apron…Logan.”

“Bastards blame me for Logan's death, as if I don't blame myself.”

“And another thing they're keen on what wasn't in the file, but Bosch says it's so.”

“What's that, Sam?”

“Getting you for what happened to Father Jurgen.”

“Father indeed, the man doesn't deserve the title, so let's just call 'im the pervert he is. They can't make that stick.”

“They're on the lookout for me,” Sam replied.

“You?”

“Figure to shake me down, pay me off, do whatever's necessary to break me and make me talk ill of you, to stand in witness 'gainst ya.”

“And if it came to that, Sam?”

“I didn't witness nothing, and you never told me nothing, so I won't make a witness for 'im.”

“That's easier said than done. If these men get you in their hands and sweat you, Samuel, they're professionals; they know how to break grown men.”

“They won't break me!” he determinedly said.

“That leaves Philo, then,” muttered Ransom. “Anything in the file on Philo Keane as…as a known associate?”

“Tons, sir…just loads.”

Pinkerton's targeted Philo. This is not good,
Ransom thought. “Look, Sam, I'm going to ask you to leave the city for a while, and here're the funds to do it with.” He held out two fifty dollar bills.

“Leave Chicago?”

“Just for a month or so, till I know which way the wind is blowing.”

“Wind's always blowing off the lake, south-southeast.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I got no place to go.”

“Go to the Dunes in Indiana, the Dells in Wisconsin, to a hunting lodge, I don't care, but get out of the city till this nonsense blows over. Can't imagine why they're defending a sicko-deviant pervert in the first place, from O'Bannion
down, and disappoints me that Bill Pinkerton's been taken in by guile or money or both.”

“Somebody stamped in big letters across most everything in the file the words: ‘Questionable as Evidence.'”

“Take the money and get on a train, Sam.”

Sam took the bills.

“When we get to our destination on Atgeld, Sam, stay back.”

“But I wanna stay with you, sir.” He pushed the money back on Ransom.

Ransom refused to take it. “No, you can't! Please, take the cab a block off. Kohler has spies among the coppers I'm meeting, for sure. And if they've been told to get hold of you, well…I don't want to think of you in one of their interrogation rooms or lockup.”

“I still want to stay with you.”

“Damn it, son. If one of Kohler's men sees you, you'll be run to ground, Sam, like a dog.”

“I know every squirrel hole and burrow in the city, Inspector. There's not a copper who can catch me 'less I want 'im to.”

“Ahhh
…the Artful Dodger! Still, my young friend, take the hundred and leave this city, and if you never come back, Sam, it may well be in your stars to find happiness elsewhere.”

“Then tell me the truth before I go.”

“What truth is that, Sam?”

“Did you really not do it to the priest?”

“I swear on my mother's grave, Samuel, that I've never lied to you in the past, and I am telling the truth now. Did you lie to me when you said you accepted my plea of innocence in the Jurgen affair?”

“Guess I did, but I believe you now, Inspector.”

“Means a great deal that you do, Samuel.”

Alastair had immediately climbed from the cab
with his cane in hand and quickly closed the door to conceal Samuel, and then he tipped the driver to move on. The commandeered hansom cab hurried away, giving Ransom breathing room but not much. In fact, he'd alighted from his cab to find the paddy wagon he'd called careening around the final corner.

Then Ransom realized that a second paddy wagon followed on the wheels of the first. But who were these men? Who'd called out a second wagon?

The bells and whistles of two paddy wagons were a common enough occurrence all across Chicago these days, but Alastair feared the Rolsky brothers had been alerted, despite the fact that brothels, taverns, gambling dens, and opium dens peppered this part of the city. Locals had come to expect periodic raids in the area.

All the same, Ransom knew that Rolsky could be at any window and could be drawing a bead—either his eye or his gun—on him at this moment where he stood in the street, attempting to choreograph this raid. Alastair made a large target, waving down the noisy others, gesticulating for them to cut the bells and whistles while at it. But no one aboard
either wagon read his hand signals properly, as instead they ratcheted up the noise.

A crowd began immediately to gather about the commotion even before the cops had a chance to climb down from the two wagons. The sudden appearance of this forty-eight man swarm of uniformed cops had surely alerted Philander. Ransom imagined one thing on the criminal's mind—escape; it could also cause him to panic and kill Jane and Gabby, if they were indeed in his clutches yet alive. At this point anything might be true. Anything could happen. Or not. The possibilities, Ransom realized, all walked a high wire strung by Rolsky, but he, too, had hold of one end of that wire, as did the mystery person who'd bailed Philander out—possibly the surgeon who most benefited from the grim work of the Rolsky brothers.

In the back of his mind, along with his fear for Jane and Gabby, Alastair dreaded the mystery surgeon, a man who ordered up death as others might an omelet. He feared this nameless, faceless monster might well escape any form of justice should the brothers be shot and killed in an altercation with police. Clever, cunning bastard. Perhaps the mystery doctor counted on this scenario playing out. That he knew that police would descend on Vander and Philander like locusts out for blood.

And again, who called for the second paddy wagon?

He considered how orchestrated the whole unsteady untenable affair appeared—and how much Chief Nathan Kohler knew and when he knew it. Kohler was known for being cold and calculating. Furthermore, the men climbing from the second wagon had come prepared with high-powered scoped rifles; snipers.

“Need I even ask who called in police sharpshooters?” Alastair questioned himself.

To get him at all cost, Ransom knew that Nathan would sell his soul. And could William Pinkerton have unwittingly provided ammunition for Kohler? Could Nathan Kohler have worked a deal with the deadly doctor or doctors behind the ghouls? Had they ties to Senator Chapman?
Are all the
principal players in a bloody conspiracy or am I reaching?
Alastair wondered. If it were so—and he could put nothing past Chapman and Kohler—this was larger and more insidious than any secrets the two harbored about the Haymarket bomb or the Leather Apron case.

It all had come to a head here and now outside the building where two Rolskys lived. All culminating in this standoff today instead of a courtroom into which Alastair might have been led in chains had Nathan gotten his way.

If fate is the hunter
, Ransom now thought,
it had hunted him in his tracks
,
and fate now threatened Jane and Gabby as well.

As the first police wagon came to a halt before Ransom and the suspect building, and officers in blue leapt off the horse-drawn, covered wagon, some shouted, “Where's the fire?”

Others shouted, “Are we too late?”

“Lads! I need you one and all!” replied Ransom in his most commanding voice, but those in wagon number two fanned out and located positions from which they might fire their deadly and accurate weapons. “There may be two ladies of Chicago being held against their will inside here! Hold your fire!”

“Ladies?”

“Womenfolk?”

“To be saved?”

Ransom realized it was every man's fantasy to rescue a damsel in distress, be kissed by the saved angel, fall in love, marry, and live happily ever after. He intentionally turned loose the fuel that stoked this fire of adolescent dream.

The captain in charge of the wagon Ransom had called for, a barrel-chested man named Benjamin Shorendorf, wore a crestfallen face that looked the part of an angry bulldog that'd lost a fight over a bone. Shorendorf shouted back, “Who precisely are we arresting? Who's been murdered?”

Ransom gathered the uniformed men to him. “We're looking for a pair of brothers,” he began, “one a giant of a man and slow-witted to be sure, and the other his keeper! The
names are Vander and Philander Rolsky, which may be an alias.”

“It's that Italian ferret-faced guy we had in lockup over at Des Plaines, isn't it?” asked Shorendorf. “Why was he let go in the first damn place?”

“Not sure he's Italian, more likely Polish, but yes, same man.”

“Why'd you let him go?”

“Bailed out! But I've secured a warrant for his rearrest,” Ransom lied, though O'Malley was at the courthouse at that moment seeking the arrest warrant.

“Why'd you ever let him outta your sight then, Inspector?” Captain Shorendorf sounded angry at Alastair. “Now you say he's holding two women inside?”

“Rolsky was released on bond put up by someone I have as yet to identify, Ben. No one consulted me!”

“But he is Italian, right?”

“If it helps you to take him down, yes, he's Italian. But we need these two brothers alive to sweat information outta them, understood? And look, I fear Rolsky may have hostages.”

“Hostages?”

“Miss Jane Francis and our Gabby Tewes.”

“You don't say! Those kind ladies! The bastards! Hear that boys?” Shorendorf asked his men. “These Rolsky fiends who killed Nell Hartigan 'ave snatched two more of our women!”

“For the carvers?” asked an astonished young copper.

“The surgeons, yes,” replied Ransom.

“I don't care if you break down every door!” shouted Captain Shorendorf. “Get into position and shoot to kill.”

“Whoa, hold on!” shouted Ransom.

“What is it?”

“I want these monsters apprehended, Ben! For questioning! And I don't want the women harmed.”

“I have me orders, Alastair.”

“Whatya mean? You're called out by me, you take orders from me!”

“My orders come from a higher power! Now shove off or help, either one, Inspector, but let go'a my arm!”

“Who gave you a shoot order?”

“Chief Kohler!”

“How'd he hear of it?”

“Dunno, but he called just after you and give me the order, shoot to kill any armed and dangerous, and that means these ghouls!”

“But I want to learn who's behind it all! I want to interrogate these men! Learn who is paying for bodies! Who bailed Rolsky out. All of it!” If so, Ransom reasoned, he might even implicate Kohler in a conspiracy here. Was Nathan covering up for others in high society?

Or was Kohler himself being used in this unholy affair? Fate, in a sense, was being doled out to all of them from some unknown source. How much did Pinkerton know? How much did Nathan Kohler know? But at the moment, Ransom's fear was for Jane and Gabby. Yet fate had a human hand and face in this city, and possibly in this instance. If Kohler could side with O'Bannion and Jurgen on the matter of sexual deviance against children, then siding with ghouls and their degreed patrons was child's play for the manipulative chief.

Ben Shorendorf began deploying his men. Ransom hustled to stay with him. He shouted in his ear, “Tell me the truth! It's Kohler, isn't it?”

“I told you the order to shoot came from him, yes!”

“No, it's more than just a shoot to kill order.”

Ben turned on him. “What're you talking about?”

“Kohler…Kohler is somehow behind the whole bleak, bloody business,” he replied as he and Ben picked their way through a causeway in search of any local residents or rats who might speak English. The neighborhood was largely a mix of Polish and Italian immigrants, most of whom only knew the rudiments of English and got by largely through Pidgin English and hand gestures. Most such immigrants avoided uniformed men of any kind, and today was no ex
ception, but Shorendorf spoke German and enough Polish to get by.

“According to neighbors, the brothers are inside. No one knows anything about women inside.”

Each moment of the process drove a deeper stake into Ransom's heart as he contemplated life without Jane and Gabby. He hated his mind for even suggesting his fear:
They might well already be dead and on dissecting tables in some remote medical facility.

He struggled mightily against the horrid idea.