Kaleidoscope (25 page)

“Stay behind me,” Jack told Luna, which seemed to amuse Arno greatly.

Becker adjusted his approach so that he could sight through the grid of the cage’s heavy bars. The revolver’s barrel elevated slightly, then lowering.

“S’long, suckers.”

The trigger-finger pulling—

But then a deep, sustained growl stayed the killer’s hand, Becker turning from the cage to find a hound baring teeth an arms’ length away.

“Fucking mutt.”

Becker turning to his new target. Boomer launching himself furiously, seventy pounds of meat and fangs. The revolver bucked with a heavy explosion. The hound jerked sideways with a slug in his flank. The carney’s bloodhound falling to the sand. But before Becker could fire again—

BOOM!

Becker ducked as lead shot sprayed the clearing.

“FUCK!”

Tommy Speck and The Giant popping from the cover of Tommy’s Ford motorcar to charge across the underbrush. Another blast from The Giant’s shotgun had Becker sprinting for his Packard.

Tommy now firing his carbine on the run. The Giant tearing yet another wad from Becker’s Packard with his double-barrel. Becker jumping into his coupe, jerking the choke but jamming the starter. The engine caught just about the moment Tommy ripped a slug through the windshield and Arno fishtailed from the clearing before the cage. Emptying his revolver at Speck and The Giant through his passenger-side window.

“The tires, Giant!”

The black man dropped to a knee.

BOOM! A wad of buckshot too high into Becker’s door.

Giant fired again, the double-barrel bucked, and you could see a fender well above a black tire chewed with shot.

“What’s happening?!” Luna’s hands latched onto Jack’s arm like a vice.

“They ran him off! Those crazy saps!”

The Giant now running toward the cage.

“The fuck were you crazy bastards thinking?” Jack greeted the pair.

“Didn’t you know they were coming?” Luna leaning on Jack to stand upright.

“When have I ever known anything?”

“Hang on, we’ll get you out,” Tommy said.

“How’d you get a car in here?”

“Pushed it.” The Giant taking the chain in his hands. Pulling it across his chest.

“Be faster to shoot the lock, wouldn’t it?”

The chain shattered so suddenly that the giant man almost lost his balance.

Jack rushed over to kick the door open.

“Thanks, big man. Now, stay with Luna.”

Jack grabbing the shotgun as he turned to Tommy.

“Any chance of catching Becker?”

“If we got a tire.”

Arno Becker made it all the way to the blacktop before he felt the tire.

“Shit.”

Was a rear tire, passenger’s side pulling the wheel. But not bad enough to stop, not just yet. Especially not when you were dodging buckshot with a hundred grand on your bench seat. All he had to do was get down the road a mile or two. There was always some sap on the highway would stop to help with a flat and when he did Becker would have a fresh set of wheels.

Arno wasn’t about to let a tire spoil his getaway. Worst case, even if the freaks caught up to him—? Becker reached for the Tommy gun on the seat. Should have used the squirt gun at the cage, he chided himself gently.

Oh, well.

The steering wheel was jumping in his hand, now, and Becker could hear the tire in the back,
thump, thump, thump
. He glanced over to the side-mirror and saw a black Model T small on the blacktop behind—

“—We’ll never catch him,” Tommy chambered a shell into his Winchester as Jack pulled the flivver’s throttle wide open.

“He’s weaving!” Jack shouted. “I think you got a tire, Tommy!”

But Becker wasn’t finished. They saw the rear window of the Packard shatter with a long burst from Arno’s gun. Becker firing blind at the pursuing Model T.

“Jesus!” Jack swerved with the
ping-ping-ping
of .45 slugs into the Ford’s metal frame.

Just the one burst and then Becker dropped the weapon for the steering wheel. You could see the hairpin curve ahead. Could see the Packard leaning on its chassis.

“STOP THE CAR, JACK.”

The dwarf clutching his leg as he jammed a foot into the dashboard.

“You nuts?!”

“STOP THE FUCKING CAR!”

Jack nearly lost control as he slammed on the brakes, the flivver sliding sideways on the blacktop.

Arno Becker was halfway through the hairpin when he saw Tommy’s Model T skidding to a stop behind.

Why? Arno wondered briefly. Why would they give up the chase?

And then a bull elephant burst from the ditch to charge the crippled Packard. Five tons of elephant closing at thirty miles an hours.

“
Sheisse
.”

Ambassador rammed the Packard broadside. The rear tire exploded, the car rolled in a sloppy waltz, once…twice…the Packard skipped off the blacktop like a hockey puck and slammed into the trunk of a yellow-heart pine on the other side of the road. One dip of tusks tossed the car off the tree and into the ditch. Arno Becker hanging upside down. The Packard spinning on its top like a turtle. Becker cursing and furious, scrambling to retrieve his machine gun.

Jack heard the Tommy gun’s chatter. He saw the flash-flash-flash from the muzzle.

“YOU SON OF A BITCH!” Speck slid from his seat to the flivver’s running board.

Ambassador backed off, you could see it, stumbling briefly from the mangled Packard that was now quiet in the ditch. He backed off, the bull did.

But only for a moment.

Becker was scrambling to free himself from his getaway car when he saw Peewee’s elephant return for a steady, deliberate circuit around his mangled Packard. Arno knew he’d hit the fucking thing; he could see a rip of .45 caliber slugs along the bull’s trunk and flank. But it was apparent that the elephant was not mortally wounded and had not been driven away. If was as though the Tommy gun had stung the animal to a more studied attack.

“Want more, do you?”

Becker was fumbling for a fresh magazine when he saw an enormous pair of eyes sighting him over the chromed ornament of the coupe’s hood. Two eyes, huge and intelligent, staring into his own.

“
KOMMEN SIE!!
”

A massive head rising, as if to acknowledge that invitation. A final, furious trumpet and then the head dipped. The ground shook. And five tons of raging beast drove ivory spears through the windshield, through the steering wheel, and through the bastard screaming curses behind. A single jerk of the elephant’s head and Arno Becker was fetched through the windshield impaled on ivory tusks.

By the time Tommy and Jack made it to the ditch, Ambassador was gone, swallowed by a jungle of pine trees and wetland. Jack approached Becker’s car with caution. He could see a flat tire spinning lazily. Could hear the creak of metal, the hiss of a broken radiator.

He found Becker hanging from the windshield, a spool of entrails sizzling with blood on the Packard’s steaming hood.

“Looks like Ambassador did our work for us,” Tommy sat down hard beside his carbine.

“Looks like,” Jack agreed and, peering into the car, located Doc Snyder’s leather bag.

“Go ahead,” Tommy dipped his head as though to grant permission.

Jack crawled over the hood and past Becker’s gored corpse to retrieve Peewee’s money.

“Didn’t get a chance to spend any, did he?” Tommy joked weakly and slumped onto the ground.

“Tommy—?”

A dark stain seeping through the dwarf’s trousers.

“Tommy, goddammit!”

Tear-Down—
dismantling the midway at the end of the engagement
.

T
hree days after Arno Becker suffered an end which was too merciful, Tommy Speck died. Bled to death, Doc Snyder gave that postmosrtem. Knicked in the femoral artery by Becker’s chance round. Eileen Speck went into labor the day after her husband’s funeral. It did not go well. The baby became breached in the mother’s diminutive canal. With the mother’s life in danger along with her child’s, the doc had no easy choices. If he spent too long manipulating the infant, both babe and mother would surely die, but the only certain way to remove the baby was to crush its skull and abort, a procedure Eileen refused to countenance.

The only other option was to go in aggressively and get her baby out.

“I’ll have to break your pelvis,” Doc told the woman in her awful labor.

“‘Long as my baby lives,” she grated.

“I can’t guarantee that.”

“Give it as much chance as you can,.”

Doc managed to ratchet Eileen’s canal to the point that the infant was successfully delivered. Tommy Speck’s wife was able to hold her baby and even to nurse the child a short while before she succumbed to shock and died.

Eileen called her daughter a perfect flower, and thus she was given a carney’s name. Flower was small but was not a dwarf. She was, rubes would say, perfectly normal. The spittin’ image of her daddy, Half Track declared, grief tainting the joy which any birth brought to the community of Kaleidoscope.

Flower Speck would not grow up with her mother and father, but it would be untrue, as Jack now knew, to say she would have no family.

Luna found a wet-nurse for Tommy’s daughter and lodged the newborn in her own apartment. Eileen was buried beside Tommy on a knoll of ground overlooking the Alafia River. The Little Alafia, naturally.

With that sad ceremony finished, the community turned with no guilt or remonstrance to pragmatic concerns. Becker was dead, but the carnies could not be certain they were secure from some other psychopath. They were certainly not safe from Oliver Bladehorn. And there was the matter of how best to handle Peewee’s money.

Only a handful of freaks in the community had any idea where the money came from that paid their bills, doctored their children and supported their winter hideaway. Of those residents, only Luna and Doc knew that the money Bladehorn would kill to recover was Peewee’s inheritance. Luna convened a meeting in the café to explain the situation and air opinions on the matter. Brodies and performers packed every stool, booth and chair, everyone listening quietly, without interruption, as Luna reported details of the portfolio from the Tampa bank that had invested Peewee’s cashed-in certificates, explaining that it was Peewee’s choice to use the money to fund her adoptive community and that it was also Peewee’s firm decision to liquidate all assets to cash.

“How much do we have, then?” Cassandra asked.

“Little over a quarter of a million dollars,” Luna replied and the café was suddenly quiet as a church.

“It’s a blessing, of course,” Gregory spoke up. “But if we are not careful, it can also be a curse. Money divides as often as it heals.”

“Agreed,” Luna said. “I’d be happy to show you every dime that’s been spent, but make no mistake, this is Peewee’s money. Do I hear any disagreement on that point? Speak now or hold your wad.”

“I would like to talk to the Princess,” someone spoke up and there was a murmur of assent. “I would like her to hear our opinions.”

“Fair enough,” Luna agreed and told Half Track to serve chow on the house.

All sorts of ideas got tossed over flapjacks and sausage and coffee regarding the disposition of Peewee’s estate, some folks urging immediate distribution of the money, others wanting to see the entire stash reinvested on the stock market.

“Folks are making fortunes on Wall Street,” Penguin opined. “Why can’t we?”

Jack agreed. The market was always a sure thing, wasn’t it, especially with a quarter million to play? But he knew that Peewee had a different opinion.

The carnies were convened before the Princess’s much diminished throne when they received her edict on the matter. Nearly everyone was startled to hear Peewee say that she had cashed in all of her certificates and was not going to put a red cent back in investment.

Peewee frankly admitted that part of her caution derived from instinct. “But I also read,” she said, and went on to outline more reasons for abjuring the market. “Take a look at Tampa. Terry Dobbs was a bigshot, once, and we all know what happened to him.”

Peewee going on to remind the carneys that Tampa’s economy was once considered bulletproof.

“But now the banks are broke, real-estate’s tanked, and, worse, the city does not have a way to recover. You can’t earn enough to rebuild what’s been pissed away and nobody knows how they’re going to cover the debt left behind.”

The Princess finished the justification for her decision by pointing out that the same speculators who doomed Tampa’s economy were prevalent all over the country.

“My father lost my mother’s fortune on Wall Street and there are tens of thousands of men just like Oliver Bladehorn who are buying paper with money they do not have. There are smart men, ruthless men, who are one stroke of pen away from disaster.

“Sooner or later the chips are going to be called in from San Francisco to New York and what will happen to the markets then? I don’t know; no one knows. But what I
do
know is that now is not the time to think about getting rich. We have what we need. We should be thinking of ways to protect it.”

“But we haf provided protected it, have we not?” Marcel spoke up with his twin nodding assent. “We have protected you, as well. And with all apologies, Princess, for our protection we haf suffered terrible losses. The fire. Tommy and Eileen. Flambé and his family. Not to mention our possessions!”

“Every time you get on the train you risk something,” Luna interrupted sharply. “Every carney knows there are no guarantees and no free rides. We took a risk when Peewee came to us, sure, but we got a fortune in return.”

“But all of us did not know we were at risk,” Cassandra spoke up. “In fact, most of us didn’t.”

“You didn’t turn down the help,” Luna countered. “I have yet to see a single person here coming to me for money who cared where it came from. You, Cassandra—you came from a gilly in Toledo without a pot to piss in nor a window to throw it out of. It was Peewee’s money bankrolled your act, bought you a trailer.

“It was Peewee’s money built the chowhouse that we all share. She bought Ambassador and paid for his feed, and when Pinhead was jailed for manslaughter last fall who do ya think kept his neck out of a noose?

“Everyone here has been helped one way or the other by the Princess, but even if we hadn’t, even if no one here had received the kindness of a single dime of her money, it shouldn’t matter. We’re carnies. The boss makes a fix, we back him up and I’m the boss in this beddie. I gave my word to Peewee that she could use her money any way she wants. It was hers when she came here. It’s hers now. That’s the gig.”

“But is it safe?” Penguin asked. “And are
we
safe?”

“There’s only one way to be sure,” Jack replied. “Only one sure way.”

For a breath or two no one said anything.

“So,” Half Track broke the ice. “Who’s gonna do it?”

Jack sent a pair of telegrams before he left Kaleidoscope for the return trip to Cincinnati. The first wire went care of her tending family to Mamere and Martin. It was a note of contingency, also of confession. “
WILL FOLLOW WITH LETTER
,” the wire promised. The other telegram went to Spuds Staponski; Jack could not be sure how happy the Cincinnati businessman would be to receive a message from a fellah who mostly drank his beer for nothing. But, hey, he’d paid Spuds every penny he owed, hadn’t he? And this was new business.

Jack traveled by coach, this time around. No sleeper, no first-class amenities. He still had a wad of cash left over from Bladehorn’s initial advance, but had developed a sense of frugality in recent weeks. A sleeper was an unnecessary extravagance.

He did not indulge in cards or conversation, but the reason for that circumstance was very difference on this trip than it had been on the way south from Cincinnati. On the train to Tampa, Jack had been invited almost continually to the diner or card table or some woman’s private sleeper. The handsome man with the tony suit and marquee looks found it hard to remain solitary. Not this time. Jack still had plenty of money. He had his suit. But no one was inviting him to gamble or drink or dance. None of the swells or their full-calved honeys.

Jack would catch them looking, his fellow travelers staring at the scar splitting his face. His blistered lips just healing with bright, pink flesh. The gumline pulled up in a kind of rictus from the work of scars and stitches. They were fascinated, these well-heeled sophisticates, and they were horrified. They tried to be discreet; Jack was familiar with that effort. He had made the same pretense only too recently himself.

There were no floozies dragging Jack over to the gramophone, no innuendo, or flirtation. Certainly no offer of sex. There were opportunities to gamble, but not with the real money, not with the gentlemen in the smoker who hid their eyes along with their cards when Jack passed by. All Lon Chaneys report to the caboose, please. If you didn’t mind playing with hoboes. The children, at least, were unabashed in their cruelty. Laughing when they passed Jack in the dining car as though he were a treat provided for their Halloween entertainment.

He rose stiffly from his second-class seat to find breakfast in the diner. Morning meals were most democratic, working stiffs and newlyweds sipping orange juice in the atmosphere of cigars and sophistication. Jack found a seat near the back and was on his second cup of coffee when a porter passed by with a basket of newspapers. Jack recognized the black man from his first passage, but was completely unrecognized in return.

“Paper, suh?”

“Not now, thanks.”

Jack’s hands never left the well-oiled bag in his lap. It was not a Gladstone or portmanteau but a smaller satchel, freshly scrubbed with saddlesoap. Peewee had provided it for a purpose.

“Paper for you, suh?”

The porter now engaging some dapper seated with a gaggle of cronies just beyond Jack’s table.

“Paper?” the porter solicited again.

“Yes, I will.”

A banker, Jack had gleaned that much from overheard snippets of conversation. He was a corpulent, self-satisfied tub of guts, vested, coifed and clipped. A pleasant sheen of oil in the hair. A wax of mustache. A man prone to giving orders and used to having them obeyed. He was seated with a wife half his age in a matched set of similarly attired professionals and their wives, men and women making a studied effort to exude what they took to be an air of sophistication. A breakfast of millionaires.

Jack noticed that the banker did not thank the black man who placed the newspaper at his disposal. You could hear the snap of the rag as it opened.

“That’s Malcolm,” the wife twittered to a younger woman. “Can’t eat his breakfast without seeing to business.”

Her confidant nodded, a plump young thing kneading a wreath of pearls.

“Seem silly, doesn’t it? I mean, what’s the point of making gobs if you don’t take time to—”

“Malcolm?”

A deeper voice interrupting the women’s chatter.

Jack looked up from his table to see the banker rigid in his seat. His eyes bulging from their sockets, arms and legs rigid as posts.

“MALCOLM?!!”

The well-heeled gentleman fell face first into his grits and as his guests scrambled in horror Jack noticed the paper on the dining car floor. A bold headline bannered the latest:

The elaborately grilled gate allowing entry onto Oliver Bladehorn’s grounds was unguarded. Jack tested the barrier; it opened complaining on rusty hinges and he limped onto the grounds. There was no sign of security patrolling the arc deco mansion. No crinolines or croquet on the lawn. The long hedges of juniper and holly and azalea had not been trimmed, he could see. The flowerbeds were filled with autumn leaves, buried in leaves actually. The pleasant aroma of maple in decomposition.

Jack followed the track of asphalt around the house proper, through the trees. The roofline of the lepidopterary was easy to see now that the elms had lost their leaves. There was not a servant or valet to be seen anywhere, but Jack could hear a gramophone inside the hothouse. The piano tugged at Jack’s memory. Where had he heard that record before?

It was in France. Of, course, in the infirmary. He could see Gilette, now, gently padding the dust off a shining disk, carefully bringing the needle to a groove. Was it Mozart—? Mozart, yes. Or someone similar. Jack shifted the bag in his grip, turned the brass handle on the flimsy door and went inside.

Turned out it was not a gramophone inside but a radio. Oliver Bladehorn swaying to Mozart in a million swirling motes of color. Butterflies lining his arms like scales. A beautiful insect parting wings on the crown of his bald head as the gangster pinned its cousin to a board.

Something rotting inside. A fetid decay filling Jack’s nostrils.

“They’re getting edgy,” Bladehorn brushed a monarch off his arm as casually as if he’d been expecting Jack all morning. “Time to migrate, I expect.”

“Time to open the windows,” Jack agreed.

Bladehorn’s head swiveling like a turret on his shoulders. Like a barnyard owl. Something like a smile threatening to break over the drool seeping from his mouth. The insect preening unnoticed on top.

“Good heavens, Jack. Whatever happened to you?”

“Played with fire.”

“Knives, too, apparently. I hope you didn’t go to all that trouble for nothing.”

“I found the property,” Jack assured him. “Most of it, anyway. It’s all in cash.”