The Mammoth Book Of Steampunk Part 21

Anything that faulted that haven needed to be destroyed.

That was Ixtli's job.

In the sitting room of the cramped, smelly, dank hotel room that professed to be properly heated, Ixtli removed his colorful cape, hung up the gold armband of his profession, and sighed.

Gordon Doyle followed him in and looked around. "Grand, this. One more thing. You never asked if we had identified the body."

"I had a.s.sumed you would tell me when you felt it was important. Is it?"

"Important. Somewhat. The grandson of one of the prominent revolutionaries." Gordon stood there, waiting for some reaction.

"I have no theories, certainly there is no reason I know that my country would need some dissident killed in a way that makes us look culpable." Ixtli shivered. This was like standing up on a mountain. "Isn't our business over, now? You can go find some other brown-skinned people as your suspects."

With a tap of a finger on his awkwardly sized hat Gordon backed out the door. "I'll give you a ride in the morning to the airfield."

"My thanks."

Ixtli sat near the heater for a while, trying to warm up, and then finally gave up the attempt as futile and crawled under the thick and scratchy woolen blankets.

His feet never seemed to stop aching, but after a while he relaxed and fell into a light sleep with the odd shiver or two s.p.a.ced a few minutes apart.

That was until he heard a foot creak on a nearby floorboard.

Ixtli rolled off and under his bed just as a large club smacked into his pillow. Just as quickly Ixtli rolled back out and swept the attacker off his feet with one good kick to the nearest kneecap and a sweeping motion with his other leg.

He was rewarded with a half-hearted jab to his thigh with the club. Stone chips ripped at his skin.

It was a macehuitl, the club.

What on earth was someone doing with a museum piece like that?

But that was just a feint. The attacker grabbed him for a takedown, and they were both on the floor, rolling around, Ixtli realizing that the man's heavy weight lent him a major advantage.

It was a sc.r.a.ping, heaving, b.l.o.o.d.y, bashing fight that was somewhere between a Grecian wrestling match and a c.o.c.k fight, and it ended only when Ixtli wrestled the macehuitl away and clubbed the man in his face.

Ixtli looked something like a stereotype when Gordon responded to his urgent message, delivered to the concierge by the pneumatic speaking tube in his room: he sat on his bed, still holding the squat fighting club with the sharp stone bits embedded on its sides, blood dripping, the vanquished foe by his feet.

"Dear G.o.d!" Gordon said.

"He isn't Mexica," Ixtli said.

"Well, someone is working awfully hard to make sure it looks like that."

Ixtli looked down at the man and bent to rifle his pockets. No papers of any sort. Except for a stiff, beige card with holes poked through it. Ixtli held it up. "But we do have something here."

Gordon looked at it. "A loom card?"

Ixtli nodded. "It's your best clue yet, they didn't count on an amba.s.sador being a skilled warrior. Find out who makes it, or even who purchased it. We don't have much time before they find out their man is dead."

"I'll get right on it. I'll send some men up to get the body. They'll also keep guard in a new room that we'll be getting you into."

"Thank you." But Ixtli didn't think he would be sleeping.

He called down to the concierge to pa.s.s on the message that he would not be taking the next airship home.

Ixtli would see this to its end.

Gordon found him in the restaurant poring over hot coffee before sunbreak, the closest thing Ixtli could get to cacoa. It warmed him.

"I heard you weren't returning to your homeland?" Gordon asked.

"News travels quickly." Ixtli stirred in honey. "I want to know who wants me dead. A professional courtesy, I had hoped you would understand."

"A case could take weeks, or months, to crack. It's not a case of roughing up the bystanders and accusing people of crimes. It's a methodical thing, filled with suppositions and theories that need to be validated or checked. One must be cool and moderate, and uninvolved."

"By then your trail will have gone cold." Ixtli sipped the coffee. Pa.s.sable. Very pa.s.sable. He smiled for the first time in the last two days. "I think, Mr Doyle, that you and I have something in common."

"What's that?"

"We're both children of the enlightenment."

Gordon stiffened. "I wouldn't say that around here. French revolutionaries and colonialist terrorists were the children of the enlightenment."

Ixtli laughed. "Not politically. I am speaking of your reverence for the truth, the interest in where the trail will lead. And now I have the greatest mystery in front of me: someone wants me dead. I admit, I'm very curious."

Gordon didn't look so sure. Ixtli kept a mask of geniality on. It was not quite true, what he'd said. Underneath he simmered to find the true a.s.sa.s.sin behind all this.

"Okay," Gordon said. "But you are unarmed, right? I don't want you causing any trouble."

"I am unarmed." Ixtli spread his arms.

Gordon slapped the loom card on the table. "Then we visit the makers of this. And tonight we'll switch you to a new hotel."

The giant brick building near the docks of New Amsterdam, chimneys looming overhead, was the HOLLERITH MACHINE COMPANY. A Mr Jason Finesson waited for them, resplendent in tails and a tall hat, spectacles clamped down over his nose hard enough to leave a welt.

"Detective." He shook Gordon's hand, and then turned to Ixtli. "And sir."

Ixtli gave a nod of the head and turned to Gordon, who pulled out the offending card. Ixtli wasn't sure why they were at a machining company, but he declined to say anything out loud. If a card could control a loom for weavers, maybe it could control other kinds of machines.

"Ah." Mr Finesson looked at the card. "A punch card. Your message, you do say you found it at a crime scene?"

Gordon nodded. "Yes."

"How curious." Finesson held it up to the gaslight in the corner of the room. A bored-looking secretary with perfectly slicked-back hair in a black suit sat poring over a ledger laid out across his desk by the entrance. "Well, I can tell you the very machine it was made on."

"Excellent." Gordon looked elated. The thrill of the hunt.

"But that won't help you much," Finesson continued. "Our customers use these in bulk for all sorts of things. I couldn't tell you which customer this comes from."

Ixtli had been staring at the man. He looked a.s.sured, confident, and as if he were telling the truth. "You are the manager here?"

"Yes."

"What exactly do your customers use these things for?"

"Ah, let me show you."

Finesson escorted them back through the dim hallways of the building into a large room several stories high that looked like it was the lovechild of a swiss watchmaker and a train engineer. Ma.s.sive gears and wheels strained, clicking away on bearings the size of a man. All throughout pulleys and shafts spun, and a ma.s.sive steam boiler, fit to power a transatlantic ship, squatted in the center of the room, steam hissing lazily out the pipes connected to it.

"Last summer we were commissioned to count the census of the colonies, sirs. Since then we've processed merchant accounts, calculated the mysteries of the universe for leading scientists, and been available for engineers."

"That's a mechanical adding machine," Ixtli said. "I've heard of these."

Finesson pranced around the entryway like a circus grandmaster. "Oh, but it's so much more. Complex maths, instructions, this is a computing machine, gentleman. One of only four or five like it in the world! I'll wager you, sirs, that if you could take the mathematics of policing, and reduce it to calculations and variables and insert it into this machine, we could run your police force."

"Another child of the enlightenment, I presume," Gordon said out of the side of his mouth to Ixtli, who was still gaping at the machine.

"Even better," said Finesson. "I've talked to your counterparts, the Dutch constabulary here in New Amsterdam. Yes, the British do an excellent job of co-ruling this tiny island, but why be so reactive? You know the study of physiognomy, wherein you can determine a person's character merely by studying their unique facial characteristics?"

Both Ixtli and Gordon nodded.

"Indeed, well I suggested to his Excellency Mr Van Ostrand that we take sketches of all the criminals encountered by his forces, load them into our device to find points of similarity, and then begin sketching in all manner of our population to load into our machine to find criminals before they commit their crimes. It would revolutionize your jobs, men."

Gordon and Ixtli glanced at each other. Ixtli spoke first. "And what if you were fingered by the device?"

"What? I'm no criminal," Finesson said. "How dare you! I have nothing to fear."

"I take it the Dutch have not invested in this idea?" Gordon changed the subject quickly.

"No," Finesson looked down at his shoe. "More's the pity."

"Indeed." Ixtli picked up a stray punch card and looked at it. It made no apparent sense to him, hundreds and hundreds of tiny pockmarks.

A man at the table held out his hand. "The order in which we feed them into the machine is important, it tells them what to do."

"Well, Mr Finesson, we would like your customers' records."

"And do you have a writ?"

Ixtli glanced at Gordon, who shook his head. "Not yet, sir."

"If my customers found out I turned over my books so easily, I could lose a great deal of business. There are forms and numbers and calculations being done by businesses here that would not want their information spread about the city."

"I understand."

And with that, a frustrated Gordon and Ixtli were outside again, headed back to the hotel.

"That was a waste," Gordon said, stuffing a new pipe and looking annoyed. "Physiognomy ..."

"Maybe that isn't so." Ixtli held a mirror in his hand, as if checking the makeup on his face. Behind them dashed an urchin, doing his best to keep up. In these crowded streets it was feasible. He rapped the roof to get the driver's attention and handed him paper money. "Stop here. I need you to wander off to one of these stores and purchase something. Take your time."

"Yessir." The driver's large sideburns rippled in the wind as he leapt out and strode past them.

"What on earth is this about?" Gordon asked.

"Observation, Mr Doyle. There is an urchin following us, and that same creature was outside the Colonial Museum when we last left it. Is it coincidence that the very same urchin following us now, and during the previous time I saw him, seemed to have one of these punch cards on his person?"

"I would think not," muttered Gordon.

"Me neither."

Gordon looked around. "This is not a part of New Amsterdam for strangers to tarry in. Particularly ones in colorful capes such as yourself."

"Exactly the reason I chose it," Ixtli said, scanning the crowds pushing against street vendors, people dodging carriages. A tram thundered by, ringing its bell furiously. He pointed a young man out to Gordon. "Call that one over. The one selling those rotten-looking apples."

"Boy!"

The boy in question jogged over with the box of apples in front of his stomach, suspicion embedded in his glare. "What you want?"

Gordon showed his badge and grabbed the boy before he could turn and run.

Ixtli handed the boy a thick wad of paper money. "We have a job for you. That's half what you'll get if you succeed."

"It'd beat selling dodgy apples, you'll make a couple weeks' worth from us," Gordon said, catching on. "And you don't want me asking where you gone and got them from, now do you?"

The struggling ceased. "What you wanting then?"

"There's a mangy sort following this vehicle no, don't look and we want you to follow him in turn. No doubt he'll spring off to inform someone of where we are when we reach our hotel. Follow him, but don't let him see you. Find us back at the Waldorf Hotel. Ask for Doyle."

The boy tugged on his cap. "Yessir."

"And here is our driver," Ixtli said. "Take the apples so the urchin suspects nothing."

Gordon did, and the driver, taking it all in his stride, just asked, "Shall I restart the cab, sirs?"

"Yes, let's move on."

The driver disappeared behind them. The cab shook as he climbed into his perch looking over the cab, and then the hansom jerked into motion. Ixtli settled back in.

"Clever," said Gordon.

"If it works." Ixtli looked down at the rotted apples. He was going to gibe Gordon about the hungry on the streets of New Amsterdam, and then decided to leave the man alone.

"So now we retire to the hotel and wait."

"You told me this was a pursuit for the moderate and patient."

Gordon sighed.