Betina Krahn (4 page)

Over the seven years of their marriage, she acquired quite an education in both business and men. She came to understand their motives, their thinking, and even—she winced to admit—many of their attitudes toward women. She had also come to understand that unless the women of the suffrage movement were content to wait another fifty or seventy-five years for access to the ballot box, they were going to have to change their tactics.

What the movement needed were a few politicians in its pocket: men who could be persuaded by a satisfying “exchange of interest” to support women’s suffrage. And what the executive committee needed was a demonstration of the practical acquisition of influence and power.

She burrowed back into the seat as a light appeared in her eyes.

They needed a politician in their pocket.

Well, why didn’t she just buy them one?

BEATRICE WAS SO
absorbed in her thoughts that it took her a few moments to realize that the carriage had come to a halt. Looking at the window, she saw nothing but darkness outside. That in itself was not unusual. Many of the main thoroughfares were undergoing electrification, and there were frequent interruptions of lighting during the changeover.

There was a thud outside and the coach swayed heavily, as if Rukart, her German-born driver, had just
climbed down from his seat. After a moment, she heard voices outside and tried to make out what was being said. Nothing in the short bursts of verbiage seemed to resonate with Rukart’s rich Teutonic bass. She pressed her forehead against the glass of the window to see what was happening.

Two dark shapes hovered near the horses, but she couldn’t hear what was being said. She sat back for a moment, frowning. What was happening?

Accustomed to taking situations in hand, she seized the brass handle and pushed open the door. Two startled male faces drew back to avoid the swinging door. Their gasp of surprise equaled hers.

“What’s going on?” She looked the men over in a glance, finding them to be thickset and roughly clad … nothing remarkable or worrisome.

“Nothin,’ ma’am.” When the one who spoke received an elbow in the ribs, he muttered, “Well—he ain’t here yet.”

“Where is my driver?”

“Ummm …”

“Well … he’s … he’s …”

The pair glanced anxiously at each another.

When she grabbed the edge of the door and ducked out onto the step, she spotted Rukart sprawled against a nearby wall with his chin on his chest.

“What on earth?” She looked back at the pair with a dawning awareness of peril. She called to Rukart over their heads, but he didn’t respond. “What have you done to him?”

“He ain’t hurt bad,” one said, pulling his chin back and glowering at her.

“Hand over yer val-u-ables, ma’am,” the other
demanded, extending his hand and lowering his voice mid-threat. “An’ you won’t get hurt neither.”

“Get away from me,” she ordered, her anxiety rising as she tried to step down from the coach and found the way blocked. She froze. Her coach had been waylaid, her driver rendered senseless … and she was being
held up
!

“We said, ‘give us yer val-u-ables’ an’ … an’ …”

“We mean it,” the other one finished for him, glancing nervously at the end of the alley, where increased light from the main street warned of increased traffic and the threat of discovery. “You best hand ’em over, ma’am.”

“Never!” Someone else seemed to be in control of her as she clasped her purse to her breast with both hands … bringing it straight into their view.

“Don’t make us get ugly,” one warned, bringing a club from behind him.

“I think someone’s already beaten me to that,” she blurted out, dismayed by her own defiance.

One of them grabbed for her purse, growling “Gimme that.” She jerked it back, lost her footing on the narrow step and fell … straight into the hands of the other one.

“No! Let me go—” She twisted and shoved, trying to steady and then free herself. But, between the two robbers, she was soon overwhelmed. She panicked at the feel of their hands on her and did something she had never done in her entire life … gasped for air and screamed for all she was worth.

The earsplitting sound galvanized the pair of thieves. One cinched both arms around her, pinning her arms to her sides while the other clamped a hand tight across her mouth, and both began to shush her like a pair of steam boilers that had sprung leaks.

“Shhhhh! Don’t scream—”

“Shhhh—hush lady—we ain’t gonna hurt ye none—honest!”

Above the scuffling and muffled screams, there came the clear, piercing sound of a whistle in the distance. Her attackers froze and looked at each other in horror. The whistle sounded again. Louder.

“Coppers!”

They panicked, dragging her first one way and then another.

“This way—over here!” one rasped out, pointing behind the coach.

“No—no—they’ll see us over there—this way!”

The one with his arms around her dragged her farther down the alley, while the one covering her mouth scrambled to keep up. They spotted a small footpath between two buildings and headed for it, glancing over their shoulders. When her resistance slowed them down, one took out a handkerchief and stuffed it in her mouth … not, however, before she got out a “He-elp—help me!”

The pair hesitated, listening. Heavy footsteps echoed down the brick-lined alley toward the carriage and then halted, followed by several shrill blasts from a police whistle.

“Dipper, they found th’ coach an’ driver.”

Beatrice stilled for a moment, trying to hear above the sound of their panting and of her blood rushing in her ears. She focused desperately on the end of the narrow passage between buildings, praying for a glimpse of a dome-shaped policeman’s hat.

“Aghhh!” gasped the one holding her, as the sound of footsteps and voices grew louder. “They’re comin’ this way!”

She was suddenly frantic to make noise—anything that would draw notice. She began to stomp her feet on the pavement and to try to call out through the cloth in her mouth.

“Hush, woman”—one slapped his hand over her mouth again and whispered frantically—“we won’t hurt you!” In the next instant, she was being hauled by shoulders and feet, like an uncooperative hammock, back through the foot alley and into a niche in the brickwork.

The sounds coming from behind them suggested the police were hot on their trail, and the pair began to panic. Between puffs and stifled groans, they hauled her back out into the alley, retreating from one darkened doorway to another, pausing only to listen and then lurch, wide-eyed, into desperate flight again. It was during one of those stops that the one carrying the majority of her weight ordered the other to take off his belt and bind her hands. She fought as best she could, but breathless, frantic, and disoriented, she soon found her hands bound in front of her. A moment later she was slung, bottom up, over a brawny shoulder.

The pause had cost her abductors dearly. Fatigue and the sounds of pursuit both closed in on them. “We gotta run for it!” the one in charge ordered. They hadn’t gone a dozen jarring strides when the one carrying her stopped abruptly.

“My pants!” he gasped out and she managed, through the red flooding her gaze to realized that his trousers had slid enough to bare a decrepit expanse of underwear.

“Damnation!” The other one rushed back to jerk up his partner’s pants and then drag him around a bit of wooden fence. As they panted for breath and peered
around the fence, checking their pursuers’ progress, the leader declared, “We got to get rid o’ her.”

The one carrying her made to shift her from his shoulders, but was stopped. “No, ye ninny—we got to stash ’er somewheres—till we can get ’er rescued. We’ll never get paid if she ain’t ‘rescued.’”

“Where, Dipper?” Shorty O’Shea whispered, straining under her weight.

Dipper Muldoon, the brains of the pair, rubbed the wheat-colored stubble that covered his chin. If only their fancy employer had put in his “heroic” appearance like he was supposed to … He stuck his head around the corner, pulled it back, then stuck it out again to stare at something he glimpsed at the end of the alley. His face lit with inspiration.

“I know where we’ll stash ’er. Come on.” He dragged his partner by the arm toward the end of the alley and a well-paved street in the more fashionable part of Manhattan. They paused in the shadows, staring at the glow coming from a grand-looking house across the way and at the well-dressed men coming and going from it.

“That’s the only place in th’ city where another woman screamin’ won’t matter!”

SOON DIPPER AND
Shorty were in the Barrel & Shamrock, a tavern on the Lower East Side, bracing themselves with shots of whiskey chased with pints of dark ale as they tried to figure out what their next move should be.

They didn’t have the name or address of their employer, had no idea who they had just abducted, and were only now realizing that at this rate, they might
never get paid for the job. Things took another drastic turn for the worse when Shorty looked up and saw a face that made the blood freeze in his veins. He elbowed Dipper and pointed. Dipper’s throat closed mid-swallow.

Across the smoky, gas-lit tavern stood Black Terrence Hoolihan … so called for the black armband he habitually wore, a reminder of the wives he’d sent into mourning during his career as a cardsharp, bet maker, and high-risk financier. Gaunt, narrow-eyed Terrence and his pair of beefy escorts stood blocking the door, surveying the evening’s crowd for delinquent debtors. And chief on his list of blokes due for a bit of anatomical rearrangement were Dipper Muldoon and Shorty O’Shea.

Fortunately, they had spotted him first and were already headed for the alley door when one of his henchmen noticed them.

“Hey you—Muldoon! It’s Muldoon and O’Shea!”

Dipper and Shorty lunged for the door and burst out the back of the Barrel & Shamrock just seconds ahead of Black Terrence’s men. As they ran pell-mell down the alley, Shorty was frantically invoking every Irish saint on the books and one of them must have responded. A beer wagon came rumbling into the alley between them and their pursuers. While Hoolihan’s men cursed and resorted to climbing over the wagon, Dipper and Shorty made it to the end of the alley and took off across a narrow square teeming with sailors on leave and women and barkers touting fleshly wares.

“We gotta lay low!” Dipper yelled as he ran.

“But wot about ’
er
?” Shorty panted, trying desperately to keep up. “An’ wot about our money?”

Dipper cast a frantic look over his shoulder and
spotted Hoolihan’s bone breakers emerging from the alley and searching through the crowd behind them. Now was no time to worry about the pesky details of a make-believe robbery gone wrong!

“She’ll just ’ave to fend fer herself!”

JEFFREY GRANTON ARRIVED
half an hour late and one alley off target for his date with heroism. Alarmed by the empty pavement, he charged back out to the street and caught the sound of voices coming from the next alley. He sucked a deep breath and rushed to the rescue. But instead of a quivering woman being menaced by two burly “thieves,” he found an empty coach and groggy driver who was being questioned earnestly by a pair of uniformed policemen.

Police!

“Dear God,” he breathed, jerking back around the corner and shutting his eyes as if hoping to erase the sight. But when he turned to look again, the coach was still empty and one of the policemen spotted him peering down the alley.

“Hey—you!”

In the moment it took for Jeffrey to decide whether or not to flee, the policeman had covered much of the distance between them and running would have done him no good. He managed to exhibit a bit of composure and
demanded to know what was happening. A woman had been abducted, he was informed. A Mrs. Von Furstenberg. His shock was so obvious that the officer glowered and asked him what was wrong.

“I—I know Mrs. Von Furstenberg,” he responded, with genuine horror.

The minute they dismissed him, he headed straight for Fifth Avenue and the kitchen door of the Von Furstenberg mansion.

With the help of a kitchen maid who had assisted their clandestine meetings before, he sent word to Priscilla to meet him in the butler’s pantry. She arrived flushed with excitement.

“Your aunt”—he grabbed her by the shoulders—“she’s gone!”

“You mean she’s late coming home from her meeting. You should know, silly. You—”

“No, I mean she’s
gone!
” His fingers dug into her upper arms.

“What do you mean ‘gone’? What happened? Wasn’t she there?” Even in the dimness of the pantry she could see that he was pale and his eyes had a feverish quality.

“It all went wrong—everything. I was a little late getting there and when I arrived—”

“You were late?”

“I couldn’t help it.” He released her and turned aside, stewing in humiliation and guilt. “My mother caught me on the way out the door and made me sit down and … have a sherry with … her dinner guests.”

“Your mother?” She shook her head in disbelief. “You mean you just sat there with your mother’s guests while you were supposed to be … while my poor aunt was being …”