World's Greatest Sleuth! (31 page)

“You’d think he was ridin’ into Jerusalem on an ass,” I grumbled, but I don’t think Old Red even heard me. He was too busy trying to take advantage of the distraction, and indeed as we hustled along in Brady’s wake (with Smythe in ours), we only had to put up with two dozen wisecracks about our finery instead of the two hundred I’d expected. We also saw beards aplenty, of course, but none were attached to anybody who seemed to wish us any harm.

By the time we reached the bandstand, Brady and Frank Tousey were doing us yet another favor—entertaining the reporters camped out by the steps with bold predictions of imminent victory. We managed to slip by almost unseen.

There would’ve been no “almost” about it if Old Red hadn’t leaned out over the railing when we were halfway up the stairs.

“Hey! You!” he called down to the reporters. “The feller in the white suit!”

A man clad in wrinkled seersucker turned to peer up at my brother. I recognized him as the newshound from the
Evening Journal
—the one who’d been shouting about “the ghost of Sherlock Holmes” the day before.

“That spook ever come back?” Gustav asked him.

“No,” the man said sourly, obviously thinking my brother was guying him.

“Well, just keep your eyes open today, friend,” Old Red said, and on he went to the top of the steps.

I’ll say this for Boothby Greene and Blackheath-Murray and Eugene Valmont: They were all polite enough not to smirk or roll their eyes at our getups. (You’ll notice that Lucille Larson and William Pinkerton are conspicuously missing from that sentence. The Crowes are as well, but I couldn’t fault them for the looks on their faces. They’d been forewarned what we’d look like, yet the colonel still winced, while Diana stared despondently at Old Red like he was a kitten favoring a sore paw. Her heart obviously ached for his lost dignity—which had me wondering if she thought I had any to lose.)

A moment later, Brady and Tousey joined us, and it was time. Pinkerton said a few words from the podium, but I didn’t hear a one of them. He could’ve fired off a cannon and I wouldn’t have noticed, so lost in thought was I.

If I don’t talk my way into an early grave, I might get seventy or eighty years to gallivant around this old world of ours. Yet despite all the thousands of hours I could still have ahead of me, this next one, I knew, was the most important, for every single minute to follow would bear its mark. We were being swept toward a fork in the river, my brother and me. To the one side was failure, to the other success, and the current was strong and our paddles small. We were going to have to row for all we were worth to make it downriver the right way, and what’s more—and this scared me most of all—we were going to have to get lucky. And the one and only thing you can count on with luck is that it won’t be there when you really need it.

“Contestants, deduce!” Pinkerton bellowed, and it was only then I realized he’d already handed out all the envelopes, and one of them was in my own hands.

I tore it open and read out the following words.

To find the treasure

Board a ship of the desert

Asail where the spinning wheel looms.

Enter ye there the pharaoh’s tomb.

The prize you’ll find hidden

In that black vault forbidden:

In Death’s grip, yet free from harm,

Safe as the babe in mummy’s arms.

“Hardly even counts as a riddle, it’s so obvious,” I said. “They may as well have just given us a map with a big
X
on it.”

“Maybe that’s the point,” Old Red said. “Ain’t the time to stand around jawin’ about it, though. Lead on.”

It was gratifying to be the first ones on the go, for once, and the assembled multitudes put up a satisfying roar of approval as we clopped down the stairs. We didn’t get all the huzzahs to ourselves, though, for King Brady was right on our heels, and when we reached the bottom of the steps I glanced back and saw Diana and the colonel at the top.

“Clear a path for our sleuths!” Frank Tousey called out to the crowd. “And don’t follow them, please! If you wait just a few minutes, I assure you, you’ll have front-row seats for the thrilling climax of our competition!”

Miraculously, the sea of spectators parted, and we were able to cut east with no shoving needed. Our stiff new clothes slowed us, though, and before we even had the crowd fully behind us, Brady and the Crowes had swept ahead. By the time we rounded the Mines and Mining Building on our way out of the Court of Honor, Greene and Valmont had passed us as well. We were one minute into the final round of the contest, and already we were dead last again.

“God damn these crazy drawers,” Gustav panted. “It’s like tryin’ to run with your legs in splints.”

“You’re the one who wanted us wearin’ ’em.”

“I was just givin’ us an excuse to strap on our irons. If I’d known it was gonna be like this, I’d have … say.”

Old Red was eyeing a gaggle of young men lollygagging nearby in their wheeled chairs.
FEAST YOUR EYES, SPARE YOUR FEET,
the sign hanging over them read.
SEVENTY-FIVE CENTS AN HOUR.

“I’m way ahead of you, Brother,” I said. “I didn’t leave my money in my other suit this time, neither.”

I wrestled a wad of crumpled greenbacks from my pocket.

“Cash on the barrelhead, boys!” I said as we hobbled up. “Ten bucks to whoever gets us where we’re goin’ fast!”

I would have added “Basil and Al need not apply,” but our sharp-tongued young guides from the first day of the contest weren’t there. Half a minute later, I knew why. As we went careening up the path between the Mines and Transportation buildings, I could see the two of them up ahead, jogging along behind their chairs—in which were sitting Greene and Valmont. Farther up, another pair of chair-pushers was steering the Crowes northward. In fact, the only contestant who didn’t hire himself some wheels and extra legs was Brady: I spotted him dashing across the footbridge to the Wooded Island as we carried on north after the others.

Soon after, all our chariots were clumped up together beside the same gates. The wheelchairs weren’t allowed out of the White City, it turned out, and our destinations lay just beyond, in the Midway Plaisance.

Valmont peeled off into Hagenbeck’s Animal Show. Diana and the colonel darted into the Japanese Bazaar. Greene disappeared into the Moorish Palace. For us, it was back down the Street in Cairo, past the theater home of Urias Smythe’s “soothing” dancers, past the shops and mosques and cafés and camels, to an imposing stone edifice bracketed by towering, rune-riddled obelisks.

This my guidebook had called “the Temple of Luxor,” and inside we would supposedly find “the mummy of Ramses II, oppressor of the Israelites.” We would also, hopefully, find our final clue in the contest—and our last chance to catch Curtis’s killer, if Old Red’s hunch was right. Before heading inside, however, we both paused to glance back up the narrow street we were leaving. We saw bearded men, but no one we recognized as a Bearded Man.

A mustachioed Mohammedan with pince-nez and red fez stood behind the ticket window, and when he saw us come up he smiled and waved us on.

“Mr. Pinkerton made all the arrangements this morning,” he said. “I wish you luck.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I wish it, too.”

From there, a narrow, gloomy passageway wound down to a series of low-ceilinged chambers packed with display cases and educational placards. The floor was sandy, the air musty and dusty, and nearly every inch of wall was covered with colorful “hieroglyphs,” which seemed to translate to something along the lines of “bird man eye squiggle woman cat sun squiggle snake dagger duck.” Propped up in some of the corners were sarcophagi adorned with human faces and crossed hands, and a feeling of profound eeriness hung over everything—and that was before we even saw the bodies.

We found them in what was by far the biggest chamber in the place: a cavern-like space just beyond a pair of heavy wooden doors upon which hung a sign reading
CLOSED FOR REPAIRS.
(This last, we figured, was merely one of the “arrangements” Pinkerton had been seeing to.) In the middle of the room were half a dozen gilded coffins. Open.

Now, there’s one thing about a corpse a man can usually rely on: It’s dead and it’s going to stay that way. Which might sound as obvious as obvious gets until you’ve laid eyes on one that seems to have half a mind to hop up and offer you a how-do, heartbeat be damned. As is the case, I quickly discovered, with those rag-wrapped bundles of bleached bone and beef jerky popularly known as “mummies.” The first one I found myself face to shrivel-twisted face with looked to have all the heft left of your average piñata, sans candy. Yet staring into the black pits of its dead eyes, I could swear I saw a little flutter, a flicker, a glimmer of unholy life.

Of course, it was just a trick of the crypt’s dim, shimmery light. Yet even I, devout scoffer at hexes and hoodoo and spook-talk of all kinds, couldn’t help but go goose-bumpy.

I glanced back at my brother, who was busy giving the once-over to a mummy of his own.

“Nothing tucked in here but one fay-row and a whole lotta old linens,” I said, “but I’m tellin’ ya, this is the place. Ain’t nowhere else that clue could point to.”

Old Red just said, “Nothing here, either,” and moved on to the next carcass.

I was still giving my second stiff an uneasy eyeballing when Gustav let loose with a “Hel-lo!” I turned to find him pushing his face so close to one of the mummies it looked like he meant to whisper sweet nothings in its ear—which would’ve been hard, seeing as said ear had apparently fallen off some centuries before.

Slowly, gingerly, he snaked a hand into the casket. When he eased it out again, it was holding a small envelope of the sort we’d come to know so well. I hustled to Old Red’s side as he tore it open. Inside, as always, was a small card. My brother handed it to me without even glancing at its contents.

The message was short and not especially sweet.

“ ‘Ha ha,’ ” I said.

“I don’t need no commentary,” Gustav growled. “Just tell me what it says.”

I flicked the hard-edged black type. “That
is
what it says. ‘Ha ha.’ ”

Old Red squinted at the card, for all the good that’d do. I suppose he knows what an
H
and an
A
are, but put them together and they could spell “sauerkraut” for all he’d know.

“ ‘Ha ha’?” he said. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

He got an answer right quick.

There was the crackling smash of shattering glass behind us, the whoosh of quick-fanning flame, and we whirled around to find a wide strip of the crypt—the section between us and the heavy chamber doors—ablaze.

Oh, and those doors? The only way out of the burial chamber?

They were thudding shut.

Ha ha, indeed.

Only my brother and I weren’t laughing.

32

THE CONTEST (FINAL ROUND, PART TWO)

Or, The Last Riddle Is for the Birds, Yet the Feather Goes in Someone Else’s Cap

The fire wasn’t huge
 … yet. A good leap might still get us across to the doors. The flames burned with an unnatural ferocity, though, putting off billows of black smoke and a heat so intense I felt like a pig on the spit from a dozen feet away. Whoever was out to get us, they hadn’t just tossed in a lit match. This was turpentine or wood alcohol or gasoline at work.

I moved closer and tried kicking sand over the nearest finger of flame, but there wasn’t much to kick. The sand on the floor turned out to be but an inch thick. Beneath it were plain, old-fashioned,
flammable
wood planks. We were better off leaving the sand where it was.

I reached up for my lapels, thinking to shrug off my suit coat and use it to beat at the blaze. Unfortunately, my fingers found not heavy, flame-smothering wool but the stiff, useless leather of my red vest. For not the first time (though perhaps the last), I cursed Urias Smythe and his idea of proper Wild West attire. I briefly considered snatching up one of the mummies and using it on the fire instead—they were so withered I couldn’t imagine one would weigh any more than my coat. All that cloth wrapped around them would probably light up like a rag dipped in pitch, however, and I’d just end up holding the world’s oldest torch.

I was out of ideas.

I turned to Gustav and found him with his back to the fire, examining first the high, steepled ceiling filling with smoke above us, then the far walls.

“See another way out?” I asked.

“Nope.”

“A way to put out the fire?”

“Nope.”

“Well, sweet Jesus, what do we do, then?”

“Only one thing left we can do.” Old Red faced the doors again and put his hands around his mouth. “Help! Fire! Heeeeeeeeelllllllllllllllllp!”

It lacked the stamp of genius, perhaps, but just then wasn’t the time to point it out. I simply joined in. And I must say, there are times genius is overrated anyway, for we could’ve lost many a precious second cooking up a brilliant scheme for escape when those cries for help might—and, in fact,
did
—produce a banging on the other side of the doors within seconds.

Why our would-be rescuers couldn’t simply throw the doors open was clear a moment later. The doors finally started to part, but through the smoke I could see two dark lines cutting across the space between them at about waist height. Our would-be
barbecuer
had tied or chained the doors together.

At last, whatever was trussing them up gave way, and the doors flew open—and the two men who’d been putting their shoulders to them nearly stumbled forward into the flames. Fortunately for all concerned, they stopped just short of charbroiling themselves, and a moment later one was smacking at the blaze with his coat while the other dashed off to fetch buckets of sand. They were eventually joined by the fez-topped fellow from the ticket booth (who exclaimed what I can only assume was the Arabian version of “Holy shit!” upon discovering his temple turned into a hickory smokehouse). Between the three of them and a dozen buckets of sand and a few final stomps from me and my brother, the second Great Chicago Fire was snuffed out before it could really begin.