The Big Mitt (A Detective Harm Queen Novel Book 1) (39 page)

Silently he descended the stairs, listening to the house’s comforting hum. It vibrated through the walls and in the floors, and he wanted its sensation to flow through his body. Everything about the house was sacred to him. It symbolized rebirth. It was where the Sage had once, as an idealistic young man, thrown his very soul into what everyone believed would be Utopia on Earth, but ultimately became a doomed cause, a catastrophe of epic proportions.

Gottschalk’s family had been sucked into this abyss, and suffered a financial undoing they never recovered from. Stark and lonely years followed, filled with poverty, transiency and painful hunger, but his father always forgave the past. Gottschalk, however, was a boy whose cold, hard resentment ripped through his heart. His father, a faithful Lutheran, sensed his anger. He tried to explain how Christ taught to turn the other cheek, but the bitter young man wanted nothing of it. He wanted the vengeful God of the Old Testament to teach him how to express his fury over the lot life had cast him.

He had left home at fourteen for the true guidance he desired, and quickly learned the dark ways of man. One night, soon after setting forth on his own, he hopped a train and found himself in a boxcar with four hoboes, who told them they wanted to use his body for the vilest of purposes. When persuasion didn’t work, they simply tore off his clothes and followed their filthy urges to take what they wanted from him.

For many boys, such an experience might have sent them back home, weeping and broken. But for Gottschalk, he had learned his first terrible lesson: You can take what you want from this wretched world with force. And so his mortal education began. Begging became lying, lying became stealing, stealing became hard drinking, and hard drinking became assault. Arrests led to prison, which led to chain gangs and splitting rocks, which led to a muscled, hardened body that imposed its will on whatever came across its path. The experience of inflicting unrelenting pain whittled down his conscience, notch by notch, as each day passed.

While the warm blood emptied his body in favor of cold, and the things his father taught him about right and wrong ceased to matter, he was still a boy with an education, and his hatred for the Sage continued to simmer underneath his skin. So he kept studying and preparing with steeled focus, reading about the man in whatever Minnesota newspapers he could get, or books that mentioned the misdeeds of the “little demagogue,” so called by the man’s legions of enemies. The Sage was a fraud, a humbug, and a swindler of cunning skill. Every published attack Gottschalk read reinforced what he already knew. He devoured information about the Sage’s great manipulations and plotted his revenge wherever he could: in boxcars, under sheltering trees in pouring rain, from the dark innards of jails and in abandoned barns amid desolate fields.

In November of 1882 he finally found himself back in Minnesota, at his father’s funeral. He had spit on the man’s dead face, called him a coward, and raised all manner of hell in the church where he lay. Walking away from the funeral, he saw a pasted bill touting a speech by one Mr. Ignatius Donnelly.

The vision of his dead father had lowered his spirits to a dull, despairing ache, so it was in that place that his idea formed. He had dreamt in his head of the most monstrous ways of snuffing the Sage’s light. He’d considered kidnapping him and locking him in an empty boxcar, shunted on an unused sidetrack, to die of starvation as his family almost had. In another moment of inspiration, he’d hatched an idea to tie him to the back of a steam engine in a snowstorm, fantasizing over the image of the Sage’s body wracked by freezing cold as the train rumbled for hundreds of miles over bridges and through mountains until finally, when it came to a stop, he would be nothing more than a frozen mass of beaten flesh, blue and stiff and dead, dead, dead.

Here was an easy opportunity that might never pass again. The Sage was scheduled to give a speech in Minneapolis, and he could walk up to him with a pistol and kill him cold, as Charles Guiteau had murdered President Garfield the year before. While it wouldn’t match his years of imagined torture, his retribution could be here, and now. He took a newspaper from a blithering little newsboy, tearing it open to confirm the news.

MAKE WAY FOR DONNELLY

Donnelly, the “pestiferous little demagogue,” is billed for a speech at Turner Hall tonight to close the Democratic campaign. The TRIBUNE sincerely hopes that he will not fail to come, and that the hall will be packed with mechanics and laboring men.

So once he finished pilfering a respectable-looking suit and hat from a store and forced his way into a bathhouse for a hard scrub and a shave, he found his way to Turner Hall, where a group of Democrats had gathered to assess the party’s victories and defeats in the recent fall elections. Public tickets had been sold and seats had been filled in anticipation of Donnelly’s address, but the bastard didn’t show.

Gottschalk’s disappointment far exceeded the crowd’s. He seethed with hatred as he looked for a saloon. His first objective was a drink. His second, to pick out a victim to smash to the ground with his hard-knuckled fists. The first barroom he saw, he went into. And there he saw him.

The Sage, at the head of a table, standing firmly over an enthralled group of men, his deceptively innocent, babyish face fiery with passion, words rolling off his tongue like the sweetest music he had ever heard.

The gun never came out of Gottschalk’s pocket. He sat and listened like a hypnotized snake, charmed by the diminutive man’s lilting musical voice.

The Sage castigated the state’s mill lords and lumber barons, accusing them of sucking the land dry without giving back in return. He denounced them with fire and brimstone and likened them to robbers and cutthroats. Gottschalk sat entranced. He had never heard anything like it in his life. Anti-trust, anti-monopoly, anti-railroad. Every newspaper article he’d ever read about the Sage had relayed these same ideas, but they had been lifeless without the speaker. To hear them in person, to be present with such bewitching power, was a greater thrill than he’d ever experienced. He felt faint with the moment’s enormity. It was as if the scales had fallen from his eyes. It had been his first rebirth.

Normally Gottschalk made no room for shallow reminiscences, which he knew misused his time in the present moment, but he did keep room for such sacred memories as his first awakening. Now, the memory bound him to the momentous occasion about to happen. He moved through the house as though dancing on air, satisfied that everything would soon be coming to its conclusion. The house’s voice now spoke to him, drawing him to the Sage’s Sanctuary, where a great desk stood among shelves and shelves of books, stacked from floor to ceiling.

This was the library where the Sage had created his masterpieces, far-reaching works of scientific, revelatory writing that would outlive the ages. Living here, basking in the Sage’s aura, would help catalyze his own transformation into higher consciousness.

He felt the room pull him closer, this enchanted den where words once flowed like magic from a pen, writing the very script of humanity’s tragic performance. He wanted to sit in the Sage’s chair, hold the great man’s pen, and write the last chapter to
Ragnarok
. In this final chapter, he imagined, humanity would face its sins in the flaming form of a Second Great Comet. The one that would put the world, once more, into chaos.

Slowly he descended into the soft leather chair, and spread his fingers over the desk’s smooth surface. Its energy washed over him, like the blood of Jesus, entering his being with a palpable, unrelenting bliss. The time was drawing very, very near, and he was the only one who had deciphered the message, the only one now alive who could save humankind once more from oblivion. It was he who would make the preparations.

And it started with the sweet darling upstairs, the joyous bundle that would purify Gottschalk. It would finally crown him the Prince of a new world, free from the greedy clutches of the wealthy and corrupt. It was marvelous to imagine, a cleansing of astronomical scale. The new shall rise, and the old shall perish.

Then he flinched, with the pain of a forgotten task. He had to prepare the filthy prushun Ollie for the ceremony, and best to do it now. Sitting atop the great desk was a silver machine that made flame. This was the Sage’s personal gift to him, as it had been left with the understanding that he would come to claim it. It was the weapon that would spark the transformation, and he kissed it lovingly, aware of the power it would soon wield him.

Across the wintry-white yard was a special hiding place, and it was there that he needed to go, to fetch it, bring it forth, and drain its blood. So he went, his long steps making the barest of imprints in the snow. But to his bewilderment, he noticed erratic footprints around the old stone well. Two sets of prints, neither of them his. He followed the tracks with his eyes into the dark grove of trees. He looked down into the icy water, to the far-below bucket where he had tied the body of the prushun Ollie. Moments ago, he had expected it to be barely breathing, clinging to life, stripped to nothing but a shell, safe and secure in the depths.

But he hadn’t expected him to be gone.

Queen’s flask was empty, and Milwaukee Jim in high spirits, as they bounced on the train towards Hastings. The detective was fully aware that what he was doing was outrageously irresponsible, hauling this hapless fellow across the Twin Cities, but he needed someone with intimate knowledge of the place they were headed. His plan was to have Jim lead him to the old town, point out where he thought Gottschalk might be holed up, and get the hobo the hell away from there. Then, he would play a lone hand. It wasn’t a very good plan, he knew, but bringing lots of Minneapolis officers out far past their area of authority might draw attention, and he didn’t want Mayor Ames to face more negative press. Better that it was just him, dressed in plain clothes and with a traveling companion, although Milwaukee Jim’s tattered clothes and stench were attracting unwanted attention that he hadn’t considered in his haste.

“When was the last time you bathed?” Queen asked him.

The hobo scratched his ear, deep in thought. “God’s honest truth, I’ve got no idea. Water has never been my boon companion. I don’t like it. Don’t like to bathe in it, don’t like to cross it when I’m being chased, and I certainly don’t like to drink it. Speaking of which, you aren’t carrying a second flask on your figure, perchance?”

“No.”

They let the train rumble beneath them for a few moments, before Jim spoke again.

“He’s a bad, bad man, this Gottschalk.”

“I’ve figured as much.”

“No, he’s worse than you’ve figured. I am only a model of cheeriness because of the whiskey you gave me. Otherwise I’d be shattin’ my pants.”

“No offense, Jim, but either way you would still smell like shit.”

Jim bit his lip and tried to look hurt, but Queen was having none of that. His concern was about a violent German lurking in the darkness. Anyone willing to murder children was a vile soul, and he had no doubt that he’d done just that to McCartan. The kid had been killed, after all, not long after he and Ollie had departed his company. This Gottschalk was crazy enough to push a hole through somebody’s neck, and that was something to goddamn think about.

“You’re the treasurer of a company when you own a prushun,” the hobo suddenly said.

“What?”

“When you have a little boy under your hand, it’s like being treasurer of a company.”

“How is that?”

“Begging’s a sight easier when you can send a sweet-faced little boy up to the door askin’ for food.” As soon as Jim mentioned food, his eyes danced happily. “It’s a guaranteed bundle of goodies. Every hobo wants a prushun.”

“They do?” Queen’s eyes narrowed at Jim. “Do you?”

“Well, certainly!” The tramp’s grin showed a half dozen of his teeth were missing, and the others were a queer brownish-yellow color. “You live like a king with a prushun.”

“And you would expect to have unnatural acts with him?”

“Lord, no!” Jim exclaimed, a look of horror on his face. “I would never do anything like that, and neither would the men I call my friends. But one’d be awful handy to make meal-time easier. A few like Gottschalk do use ‘em in despicable ways. They know where to get them and how to snare them.”

“How does that work? Enslaving boys?”

“A revolting business,” Jim said, taking out a rotten-looking twist of tobacco and tearing off a piece. He held it out for Queen, but the detective swatted it down.

“There aren’t any spittoons in this car, Jim, so if you’re going to chew you can’t spit on the floor.”

He nodded and put it in his mouth anyway. “This is how it works,” he said, moving the wad around in his cheek. “Imagine, if you will, a man, recently fresh from his travels, wandering through the city, looking for trouble. He walks up to a rickety ol’ tenement building, where a handful of boys sit, nothing to do, and he greets ‘em with a wave and a smile. ‘You fellas look like you could use a story to liven you up!’ he might say. The boys gather ‘round him, eager to hear of his travels, and he proceeds to excite their senses with tales of the road. ‘Ghost stories,’ we call ‘em. Great adventures, makin’ most of it up, I might add. Now after a while, the boys are all peetrified, we call it, or hypnotized. As he goes on tellin’ the tale, he’ll find one boy that he likes especially, and he’ll give him a wink, or a little smile, more than his share, and make him feel like he’s extra special. That’s the beginnin’ of how a jocker snares a prushun.”