Gods of Chicago: Omnibus Edition (17 page)

The footsteps overhead grew rushed and Aiden heard shouting. A low voice gave orders and then Aiden heard the
thump-clank
of an ironwork hound. He jumped through the doorway into the darkness beyond and pulled the door shut behind him.

Chapter 28

In the broadcast booth, Brand picked over the page Crane had given him. He saw where someone had numbered the sentences, apparently ordering the statements so that whoever ended up reading the page would give the report as the editor intended. Thinking about that word, Brand pinned a mental badge on Crane as the author of the
redactions, amendments, and clarifications
in this report.

The lights flashed on and off in the broadcast booth and the ‘On Air’ sign by the door flickered to life.

Ladies and Gentlemen of Chicago City
, Brand read from the page before tossing it down the waste chute behind him
and picking up his broadcast without missing a beat.

Last night, February nineteenth, a young man was murdered in the Old Town neighborhood. This wasn’t any young man, but a former employee of the Chicago Daily Record, now the Ministry for Public Information.

It seems this information, however, is too hot for some ears, so I’ve been advised to inform you of other information regarding the death of one Peter “Digs” Gordon. I’ll let you decide which is bunko and which is the truth. According to a report written by the Minister of Public Information himself, one Jameson Crane, it seems that Mr. Gordon’s mother returned home from a night of debauchery at a local house of ill repute. That’s what you’d all call a whorehouse. Mrs. Gordon was a prostitute who used to work for Al Capone’s Outfit. It seems…

Brand stopped talking as the
On Air
light went dim and the broadcast booth door slashed open. Crane stood in the doorway, full of bluster and clutching a few pages that he mashed in his grip as he stabbed a finger in Brand’s direction.

“The Ministry of Safety and Security has been notified of this breach of the public trust, Brand. You are under arrest. Officers are on their way. And in case you get any ideas about running, I’m about to inform the soldiers outside that you’re a threat to public safety and a fugitive. They’ll have orders to shoot you if necessary.”

Brand gained his feet when the door opened. Now he stepped toward Crane, who hadn’t moved from the doorway. Stepping forward with his left foot, Brand let his right hand hang loose. Images of Digs Gordon blurred in his mind until all he saw was violence against a night sky. He took another step and was in reach of Crane. The G-man stood there fuming. Brand balled up his fist and slammed it into Crane’s gut.

The G-man toppled over and coughed all the air out of his lungs. He followed this by coughing up whatever he’d eaten for breakfast. Brand darted a quick look into the hallway and saw no one. At his feet, Crane slumped on his knees and struggled for breath. Brand’s foot connected with his ribs. Crane fell face forward into the broadcast booth, crumpled and wheezing. Brand slid the door shut. Still thinking of Digs, and Jenkins, too, he went to the desk and grabbed the microphone, ripping its connections loose. Crane struggled to stand as Brand whipped the microphone down and across the G-man’s jawline. Crane went slack and hit the floor in a heap.

Brand grabbed up the pages that Crane had when he came in.

“Important information in here, Minister Crane? The kind the people need to hear?” Brand spun to toss the pages into the waste chute, but his eye caught the first line of text and he paused. Hardly believing what he read on the page, Brand stuffed the clutch of papers into his pocket and pitched the microphone into the waste chute behind him. The sound of whirring gears and clacking blades gave way to a grinding noise and then an alarm sounded, alerting the maintenance room. Brand hot-footed it over Crane’s still limp form and cracked the door open.

The sound engineer stood in the lift and shouted an alarm as the door closed on him. Brand watched the numbers light up, showing the lift climbing. He shot down the hall to the stairwell door and was two flights down before he heard shouts from above. The stairwell let out into the basement. Down a dim corridor, Brand saw a figure turning a corner. He had the gimpy gait of an old man who’d left the better part of a foot in a trench. Mutton, the Record’s trusted wrench and pliers man. Brand let him go and snuck down to the workrooms where the old man holed up every morning.

Mutton kept a tidy workspace. Shelves lined with machine parts and tools stood out from every wall of the cramped little cupboard. Chief had offered more space and the old man had turned it down every time. Brand remembered him saying he liked to be able to reach everything he needed from where he sat. Sure enough, a swivel stool stood in the center of the space on casters. But some of the shelves were at eye level, and Mutton was no giant. Then Brand saw the pulleys and ropes strung along the ceiling and the handles that connected to clamps and gripping devices. Sitting on the stool, Mutton could reach any corner in the room and any shelf, no matter the height.

Brand quickly tossed through the tools on the workbench. He grabbed a hand cranked filament torch and went to shove it into his pocket. Remembering the pages he’d scooped up, he took them out and gave them a quick scan. He had to be sure of what he read. The Governor’s seal marked each page as official. The text on the page was something else. Brand had seen orders for military operations before. He understood words like
mission
,
perimeter
, and
enemy
. What he hadn’t seen before was a bulletin about Chicago City that used those words. Crane had his fingers in some kind of pie, and it looked to Brand like the kind you’d pass on eating unless you weren’t given a choice. The date on the bulletin read February 21st, meaning whatever events were being reported on hadn’t happened yet. It also meant that the people of Chicago City would be served a heaping pile of bunko unless Brand could figure out Crane’s scheme. And a way to pull the lid off it.

Brand stuffed all three pages back into a pocket and tucked the crank torch into the other pocket. He slipped out of Mutton’s cupboard. The back stairs were deserted and Brand didn’t wait around for that to change. He launched up the first flight and kept the heat on as he climbed. At the third floor, he fought down the acid burning in his gut. When he heard a door open below and the voices of soldiers, Brand pushed on to the fifth floor. He didn’t give his mind a chance to imagine what the soldiers would do if they caught sight of him. Those rifles they carried were made for getting the last word in.

“He’s up here!” one of the soldiers shouted down below. They must have been on the first floor. Still, Brand pushed himself up the last flight of stairs as though the soldiers were right on his tail. At the door to the fifth floor, he paused and let himself breathe a second. Then the sound of boots clomped behind him, forcing him through the door and into the hall. It was empty, but Brand knew it wouldn’t be for long. He’d hoped they would fall for his diving act and spend more time in the basement. But these were the kind of soldiers you wanted on the battlefield: full of know-how.

“Just my rotten luck it couldn’t be the guys on the front door instead.”

He reached the door to the print rooms, slipped in and held the door closed then pivoted and went to the loading doors. Brand counted three and stepped onto the mooring deck, hoping Crane hadn’t followed through on his promise. The airbikes still hung on the trapezes. Thanking his luck, Brand hopped onto the closest one, fired the motor, and kicked loose the tether arm.

The bike dropped fast until the motor came up to speed. Brand turned the little craft down and in a tight arc so the mooring deck would cover his descent. Then he drove it forward in the chill air, aiming for the houses on the neighboring block. If he could make it to the back of the first house, he’d have a shot at getting away in the alleys. Unless the soldiers figured out where he went and followed him on the other two bikes. Brand cursed himself. He should have cut the other bikes loose before taking off.

Fearing the pain of a bullet in the back, Brand piloted the airbike through the chilly air. When he reached the alley behind the first house, he thanked his stars for a second time and wove a path through the quietest streets he could find, always aiming at the river. Two blocks from the riverside, a metallic scuttling came to his ears. Brand cursed and urged the bike forward. From all around him, crabs poured out of their nooks in the sidewalk and foundations of buildings. Adding trouble to trouble, the rumble of patrol boats came from a few blocks away, drawing curious crowds to a halt on the streets.

A trio of heavy wagons crossed his path up ahead. Behind the bulk of the wagons followed a long school of cyclists. Brand guided the airbike into the mass of bicycles, ignoring the shouts of alarm and cries to
“Watch it, buster!”
An opening came as two lead cyclists split the school into lines on either side of Brand’s path. He opened the throttle and used the bicycles as a screen. When the last bicycle passed him, he turned the airbike down a side street and along an alley that he knew let out at the river’s edge.

Crossing the river would be a trick, and he didn’t know where he’d go after that anyway. Brand had chosen the last alley because it was midway between two bridges, and so far his plan held up. The soldiers manning the roadblocks hadn’t spotted him yet. Dropping in and then out of a wagon’s shadow, Brand took the airbike down to the riverbank. He coasted to a tree by the water’s edge and checked he still had the crank torch in his pocket. He did, but the focusing lens was busted. Figures he’d pick up the one tool on Mutton’s workbench that was down there for repairs. It’d light his way though. He hoped. Brand’s destination didn’t have much going for it by way of illumination, at least not if he could figure out how to get in.

Looking back at the bridges, he saw the soldiers on alert. They stood stiffly around their jeeps like watch dogs on a lead. Across the river, the opposite bank provided less cover, and it was an open stretch across the water, too.

Down the bank, Brand spotted a crew of tramps sitting around a fire. One of them looked in his direction and lifted a cup in greeting. Brand’s eyes glazed for a moment and he shook his head. Was that—? The tramp eyed him up and down and lifted a stiff armed salute. That’s when Brand spied the rusty bicycles lying around the edges of the encampment. Two of the tramps got up after some discussion with Chief. The two stood slowly and lifted their bicycles. By the time they’d vanished, Brand had thanked his luck a hundred more times.

Chief’s ghost winked out like the others. Brand blinked when his old boss appeared beside him under the empty wintered branches of the tree. “How’s things, Mitch? See you got yourself in a jam you can’t get out of. Again.”

“Yeah, and thanks for the pep talk.”

“Least I could do.”

“You hear about your pals last night? Three of ‘em, supposedly froze to death. I’m betting it wasn’t like that. Am I right?”

Chief’s face fell into his shoes. If a tramp could look lower than he already did, Chief was giving it a try. “Yeah. We all heard about them. They didn’t freeze to death, Mitch. They—”

“They got ripped apart by a monster. I know. Hell, I was in the room with it when Nitti got his. I’m betting it’s responsible for Jenkins and now Digs Gordon can be added to the list. Conroy’s next unless I can stop it.”

“How are you going to do that, Mitch? Do you have any idea what that thing is?”

“All I know is what I’ve seen, pal,” Brand said and pulled the pages from his pocket. “That power play you told me about the other night. I think this is connected. Something about a military operation over in Old Town and the Village.”

Chief took the pages and gave them a quick glance before shoving them back at Brand.

“That’s something else, Mitch. Has to be. Not even the gods would go that far. They’d—”

The curfew bell cut into their conversation. Brand couldn’t believe his ears at first. Then a bullhorn crackled to life from a nearby patrol boat. Chief slapped a hand on Brand’s shoulder and drew aside the city like a curtain. He let it drop and the world changed. Brand again saw every layer of Chicago City’s life spreading out in all direction. Skies rippled and roiled with clouds, thunder and lightning, blazing sunlight, and misty rainfall. The river ran around them, swollen in flood, and it sat still, frozen under a bed of ice. Buildings wavered and shimmered, like a thousand giant candle flames.

“Where the hell are we?”

“Behind the city.”

Brand stared at his friend letting his confusion ask the question.

“It’s memories, Mitch. Memories of all the people who’ve ever lived here. That’s what makes a city what it is. Without people and their memories, you’ve just got concrete, steel, bricks, and asphalt.”

“You learn all this in your first day on the job?”

“Comes with the territory, yeah. I don’t have to wonder about anything back here. Ask me a question. If it’s about this place or my job, I’ll tell you true.”

“What about the night you saved my hide? You said the other fella was showing you the ropes.”

“He was, but that just means putting on a show for the people out there to watch. You know how it is. You see a couple of bums dancing down the street together, you don’t pay them any mind. But one guy? You might see him in the morning over by the station and then you’re across town and there he is again with nothing but a bicycle with two flat tires to get him there. Maybe you start to wonder about him a little.”

Brand stared into Chief’s eyes like he’d never seen the man before. “Am I cracking up?”

“No. Now where am I taking you?”

“Village,” Brand said, shaking himself out of the stupor he’d let fall over him. He held in the shiver that crawled up his legs when he thought about his destination. “The curio shop.”

Chief balked. “You sure, Mitch? I can take you someplace else.”

“I can’t think of any place safer,” Brand said. “Up here the lead makes a hole that stays made. Down there it’s just ghosts.”