Nathan Yocum - Automatic Woman

“He took her and left. I kept your rubbings for myself, though.”

“Rubbings?”

“Last night, in your delirium you demanded I make charcoal rubbings of two of the cogs.”

She reached into her bodice and withdrew a thick folded paper. One side was covered in black reproductions of the cog symbols, the strange foreign letters.

“I love you,” I said.

Mary smiled at that. “Don’t be a fool, Jolly. For at least once in your life, don’t be a fool.”

I took hold of both her shoulders, hollow bird-boned shoulders. I could have lifted her off the ground and cradled her in my arms.

“What’s your day rate, love?”

“You know what I charge, Jolly. Hasn’t changed.”

“No. For the whole day I mean. What does your day cost?”

“Five pound gets you to the morning after.”

I pulled a five pound note from my pocket.

“Wait for me in my room. Please.”

“Hurry back.” She gave me another peck on the cheek, then went tip-toe and kissed my closed eyelid. Mercy.

I left the Piece Work on wobbly feet. Whatever the doc had loaded into my system was drawing every bit of moisture from my mouth and eyes and throwing it forth in layer after layer of cold sweat. I soaked my clown shirt on the walk from the Piece Work to the tube station. By the time I got off near Nouveau’s gallery, my jacket collar was soaked and my sleeves were heavy.

Nouveau’s place stood as rustic and pretentious as ever, a country barn standing in a poshy high-rise neighborhood. Why not?

The barn door swung open at my knock. The main gallery was empty. The paintings were gone. Sculptures, pedestals, the fancy green velvet ropes separating men from art, gone. I walked to Nouveau’s banquet room, the place we’d had our first chat. Empty, of course. The barn door table, the automatic servers, even the chandelier and light fixtures. Gone.

My stomach rumbled and twisted. No notes, no words, no signs of who was here or what had transpired. I tried to calculate the manpower of an exodus of this magnitude. Had they left last night? Had he been moving since my bail three days ago? I made a mental note to talk to the porter I’d sent here the night before.

Outside Nouveau’s barn, street merchants and wagoners occupied the dirt roads with their comings and goings. A horseless carriage puttered by. I tried to swallow but my mouth was free of spit and coated in sticky goo. I sat on the curb and let my mind reach out.

I could lean on a pawn broker or two, see if news of Nouveau’s departure had crossed their network. This seemed a bum lead. Anyone who’s thorough enough to pull the fixtures off the wall would do well enough to cover news of the departure, or set some false story for the looky-loos.

If Nouveau had wanted the Swan so bad, if his connections were this good, why involve me at all? The unknown loomed over me. I could glean the existence of a bigger picture; I just couldn’t see the details.

Lord Barnes, my former boss and trainer, suddenly came to mind.

“Always start at the beginning,” he’d say. “If you lose your way, just go back to the beginning.” Lord Barnes, master thief catcher, master blackmailer, pain in the arse boss.

I hired a hansom cab and went back to Saxon’s penny theater, back to the beginning of my story, back to the scene of the crime.

The door to Saxon’s theater was busted off the hinges. No surprise. I drew my Engholm and entered the theater on full alert. Saxon’s place had been worked over like my apartment. Glasses cases were smashed and emptied. Posters were ripped from the walls and left in shredded pieces. In the theater, all the chairs had been broken to sticks and piled into the orchestral pit, like an unlit bonfire. The key on my trigger guard jingled and jangled in the otherwise dead silence. I went backstage. Torn curtains and cut ropes marked the continued mayhem. A little staircase ran to the second story. I followed it, gun low and ready. The stairs lead into Dr. Saxon’s office and living quarters. It was a cramped studio with a smashed bed, gas hotplate, and an oversized workbench bolted to the north wall. I barely had room to turn around. Dr. Saxon’s life was his work in the most literal sense. Here were the living quarters of a man who cared nothing for luxury. His bed had been converted into a pool of feathers like mine. The shelves of his work bench stood open with smashed locks. They probably had held files, though everything had been salvaged from them. Axe scars marred the surface of the table. I ran my hands over the marks, the wounds. I imagined Saxon looming over this table, pressing cogs and gears, tweaking small parts into larger machines, everything for the dancers below, the Doctor’s beautiful dancers.

I opened my eyes. Between the table and wall a tiny corner of paper peeked out. I tried to pinch it, but my fingers were too thick to get a hold. Whatever the paper was, it was firmly wedged between the bolted table and the wall. I gave the table a good shake. Nothing. I grabbed a corner of the table and gave it a good tug. The bolts held and I accomplished nothing but making my infected hand even more tender. I looked around the room for some sort of tool, something to assist. I lifted a plank from the busted bed, cracked it over my knee, and pulled a splinter the size of pencil loose.

I was jabbing at the envelope when I heard shuffling down below. I gave the splinter one last shove and the paper slid under the desk. It was an open envelope, empty, addressed to C. Darwin, 12 Upper Gower Street, London.

There was another noise down below, this time a crash. I pocketed the envelope and crept to the door, gun back in my fist. The doorway to Saxon’s living quarters came out onto a bird’s eye view of his theater. With the curtains gone, that view included the orchestral pit and seating. My new friend, Mr. Safari, stood center in audience rows, black suit, elephant mask, pistol clutched in hands crossed low over his hips, still as a corpse. Left to right Safari had friends. Mr. Lion, Mr. Ape, Mr. Goat, Mr. Tiger, all masked and suited and hefting nickel-plated long pistols.

“Come down, Mr. Fellows. We have a proposition for you,” Safari called up to me. He punctuated his sentence by cocking the hammer of his pistol. I backed into the workshop and shut the door. For a second I thought I’d imagined the whole thing. That somewhere in my sick, drug addled mind I’d hallucinated the maskers. Then a bullet punched through the door and ripped the skin off the edge of my ear. That brought me back real quick. Boots stomped, men ran. My time slowed. I tried to swallow again, was met with sticky filth again. I was dizzy, sweating. I reached into my pocket for the Engholm, but instead found Dr. Doyle’s syringe. Why not? I popped the cap with my teeth and jabbed the needle in my leg. I pressed the plunger to the end before remembering the doctor’s warning about double dosing. Too late. Bollocks.

Another bullet tore through the door. There was no lock, but the door was a single, small entrance. One man at a time was coming through and I liked the odds of myself against any one man.

Blood rushed into my face, my sweat turned from cold to hot. I was hyperventilating, like my body couldn’t get enough air. I gritted my teeth and ground them in a low crackling sound, masked wholly by the blood pounding in my ears. Cheers to Dr. Doyle.

The door opened. I roared and charged. Goat mask leveled his gun. I like to think he looked surprised under the mask. That maybe he was expecting a cowering man, or a rational man. What he got was the holy living shite kicked out of him. Literally, one kick square in the chest with every bit of weight I could shift into it. Goat mask fell back, hit the guardrail, flipped over it and went crashing to the stage below.