World's Greatest Sleuth! (9 page)

“Driver! Stop!” he cried. “I’m getting out!”

He threw himself from the hansom before it even came to a full halt.

“You alright, Mr. Smythe?” I asked.

“I need air! A walk! To clear my head! Oh, my poor nerves!”

He scurried off toward the electric glow and chattering crowds and strange, gay music of the Midway.

I looked over at my brother. “Should we go after him?”

Gustav was eyeing the lights spinning slowly in the dark night-time sky. The Midway’s famous Ferris wheel was still turning, despite the late hour, and hovering high above us one could see hundreds of faces peering out the windows of its huge, illuminated cars. It would be hard to imagine a mechanized contrivance better designed to turn my brother’s stomach, and he gaped at it with something akin to horror upon his face.

“Smythe’ll be alright,” he said. “Though I don’t see how goin’ anywhere near
that
could soothe a man’s nerves.”

“Oh, I don’t know. It might be real relaxin’, swoopin’ up into the clouds with the birds and the angels. In fact, I ain’t leavin’ Chicago till I’ve given it a whirl myself … and talked you into comin’ with me.”

“Feh,” Old Red said.

I nodded. “Yeah. Feh.”

Soon afterward, we were back at the Columbian Hotel, the ramshackle rattrap where all the contestants were staying. In the neighborhood around it were enough rooming houses to lodge every man, woman, and child on the planet, with beds left over should the population of another decide to take in the fair as well. On our one block alone was the White City Inn, the World’s Fair Hotel, Keene’s Exposition Lodge, and half a dozen others. In Chicago that year, making a mint in the hostelry business seemed as easy as painting a sign and hanging it over your front door.

Which was exactly what the owner of the Columbian seemed to have done. It was no more than a dreary office building hastily made over into an even drearier fleabag. The carpeting was poorly fitted and threadbare, the wallpaper peeling to reveal crack-veined plaster, the lighting so stingy and cave-like I almost expected to see bats hanging from the low ceiling, the “lobby” no more than a random scattering of mangy settees seemingly salvaged from the back of a junkman’s wagon, etc., etc. Strangest of all was the front desk, which was, unlike any other front desk I’ve ever encountered, literally a desk parked in the front of the lobby.

And parked behind it when we came in: a wide-eyed, high-haired, middle-aged woman beaming so much sunshine you could tan your skin by her. This was Mrs. Jasinska, the Columbian’s owner and, she claimed, general manager. I say “claimed” because nothing much seemed to get managed around the place, either generally or specifically.

“Why, if it isn’t Mr. and Mr. Amnee[mutter]!” she cried upon spying us. (Like half the folks who aren’t Amlingmeyers themselves, she could never get the hang of our name.) “Welcome back! Did you bump into your admirer?”

“Our admirer?” I turned to my brother. “See how this is workin’ out? Now we got two!”

“What admirer?” Old Red asked Mrs. Jasinska.

“The bearded gentleman. You couldn’t have missed him. He left not twenty seconds ago.”

We had indeed passed a man on our way into the hotel, but he’d just hustled by us with the collar of his dark coat turned up.

“He wanted to know if you were staying here with the other detectives,” Mrs. Jasinska said. “He was hoping to meet you.”

“Well, he missed his chance. Breezed right by us.”

“Probably didn’t recognize us in these getups,” Gustav growled with a bitter glance down at his tux. “Speakin’ of which, I can’t wait to be free of mine.”

He was already whipping off his white bow tie as he tromped off toward the stairs. I bade Mrs. Jasinska good night in the more traditional fashion—by actually saying it—then followed.

Despite the drab dilapidation of the place, my brother and I had been afforded one unaccustomed luxury: separate rooms. So after a lengthy discourse on recent events (Me: “Well, that was a hell of a day”; Old Red, closing door: “Yup”), we parted ways for the night. I spent the next couple hours stretched out on a mattress as downy-soft as a pile of bricks while I pored over my Exposition guidebook. It was interesting, though hardly surprising, to find that the Columbian Hotel rated but one word in the chapter on local lodgings: “Avoid.”

The guide was far more effusive—too much so, actually—on the myriad marvels of the White City. I was trying to pick out the highlights of the fair, anything that stood out for its distinctiveness or scale, like the Yerkes telescope. The problem: There were so many such things, a highlight anywhere else would barely rate as a lowlight here. Within a two-mile radius, you could find the Liberty Bell, the crown jewels of Germany, a solid silver sculpture of Justice, the world’s largest dynamo, the world’s largest searchlight, the world’s largest lump of coal, the world’s largest conveyor belt, the world’s largest screw power testing machine (for those interested in screw power testing machines), and the world’s largest “gray canary” diamond, whatever that meant.

Dizzying as it all was, I kept on studying, fancying it’d prepare me for whatever puzzles the next day might bring.

Ha!

The next morning, when it came time to costume myself for round two of the contest, I found that the only one of Mr. Cohn’s creations I could bring myself to wear—and that just barely—was the oversized red Stetson. It looked mighty strange on a man in a black suit and brogans, I grant you, but I felt I had to make some concession to Mr. Smythe, if only to head off more weeping. Gustav topped himself with his new hat as well, and even went so far as to dress himself in the closest he had to “Sunday best,” though I suspected this had less to do with Urias Smythe than with Diana Crowe.

When we returned to the Court of Honor just before noon, we found a much smaller audience than we’d drawn the day before. Riddle-cracking was most definitely a bust as a spectator sport. Yet that only compounded our humiliation, for the catcalls could surely be heard by one and all. “What happened to your red-and-white outfit, Tex? Saint Nick need it back?” was probably the
least
insulting—which is why it stands now as the only one I care to recall.

Up on the bandstand, we found the whole gang from Rector’s, with one exception: Armstrong B. Curtis was nowhere in sight. I expected Pinkerton to wait for his Puzzlemaster to appear, but just a few minutes after our arrival—minutes we passed, alas, getting both guff from Smythe for not wearing our costumes and the cold shoulder from the Crowes—he trudged up to the podium alone. After a perfunctory welcome to the crowd and some halfhearted blather about the contest, he gave the sleuths their starting clues with all the enthusiasm of a fellow handing bullets to his own firing squad.

“Detectives … deduce,” he said glumly when he was done.

We tore open our envelopes and pulled out the cards inside.

“Sweet Jesus,” I sighed after scanning the first few lines.

“That bad?” Old Red asked.

I answered him by reading our “clue” out loud.

O, Nephilim; O, Atlas;

Be not haughty in thy pride.

O, Gog, Magog, and Behemoth;

We can cut you down to size!

The tiny stone

By shepherd thrown

Now weighs a ton

And flies for miles.

“Is that even English?” my brother asked.

“Well, it ain’t French.”

Eugene Valmont was already headed for the steps, a smile on his face and Lucille Larson on his arm. King Brady won a round of applause just for following after them, and Boothby Greene was soon on his way as well. A moment later, the Crowes swept past us, too. Once more, we’d be last out of the gate.

“Read it again,” Gustav said to me. “Slow.”

I obliged him.

“What the hell is a ‘nephew-phlegm’?” he asked when I was through.

“I got no earthly idea. Same with them gogs. A behemoth, though—that’s a huge, monster kind of a thing. And Atlas is a giant feller outta old legends. Supposedly carried the world on his shoulders.”

“I know the feeling,” Old Red muttered. “At least there’s one part even I can figure out: the bit with the shepherd throwin’ things. That’s gotta be David goin’ after Goliath. Which gives us another giant. So the stone that flies for miles…” He grimaced like a man about to burp up a meal he didn’t like the taste of in the first place. “They got the world’s biggest slingshot ’round here?”

“Not that I … hot damn! The Krupp Gun!”

“The
what
gun?”

“The world’s biggest cannon, Brother! I read about it last night. Built by the Germans. Shoots a shell as big as a shed, and it
flies … for … miles
.”

“Well, where is the thing?”

I pulled out my guidebook, consulted the map, then stepped out toward the front of the gazebo.

“That way!” I proclaimed, pointing to the northeast.

A few folks cheered.

William Pinkerton rolled his eyes.

“If you would remain here till all our contestants have left,” he said to the audience as I marched down the steps, Old Red on my heels. The brass band from the day before was once again lined up nearby, and Pinkerton swept an outstretched arm their way. “Major Bacon and His Hoosier One Hundred will treat us to a selection of favorite marches while we await today’s champion.”

“Champion
s
!” I hollered back. “These two geese are about to lay themselves a golden egg!”

“You are enjoyin’ this entirely too much,” my brother grumbled.

Without my red leather armor to slow us down this time, we were able to clear out of the Court of Honor at a good gallop. Along the Grand Basin with its fountains and gondolas and sun-dappled lagoon, around the Agriculture Building, across a bridge over a narrow canal, and there we were: the Krupp Gun Works Pavilion, a big girder-and-glass block plopped at the edge of Lake Michigan. Once we were inside, it was easy enough to find the Krupp Gun. There were dozens of cannons on display, but only one had a barrel half the length of a Chicago block. Waiting in its shadow was a stout gentleman with a walrus mustache and what could have been a walrus’s gut and jowls.

“Allow me to velcome you to ze Krupp Gun Vorks Pavilion,” he slowly intoned in a German accent as thick as
Hasenpfeffer
. “On behalf of Herr Krupp and all ze di-rrrec-tors of ze Krupp Gun—”

“Yeah, yeah.” Old Red jerked a thumb my way. “Just give him the clue, would you?”

“
Vas?
Your pardon me, please.
Mein
English iz …
nicht so gut
.”

“The next clue! Hand it over!” Gustav barked, and he launched into our dear old
Vater
’s favorite phrase when snapping the reins on a stubborn mule:
“Befördern dein fette Arsch!”

Us kids never knew exactly what it meant, but it always seemed to work on the mules. It worked on that German gent, too. Though his bushy eyebrows flew up high in surprise, he reached into his coat pocket and produced a small envelope.

“Here,” he said as he handed it to me. “Now you vill get
your
fat asses out of my pawilion!”

I could have pointed out that my brother’s ass is really rather bony, but I didn’t get the feeling Herr Mustache would care to be corrected.

“Jawohl,”
I said instead, and we got our keisters—fat and otherwise—out of there. By the time we were scooting outside, I’d read our new clue through once and was starting in on it again.

They set themselves a mighty hurdle—

Enough to make one’s courage curdle.

A task too vast for weaker ilk,

To them it was as mother’s milk.

Success was theirs; they were not bowed …

Although, of course, they were quite cowed!

“Another damned riddle!” Old Red raged. “We was supposed to do us some
real
sleuthin’ today!”

“Don’t complain, cuz I already got this riddle licked. All we gotta do is run across that there bridge and duck into the Agriculture Building. I know exactly where that egg’s gonna be.”

You’d have thought Gustav would look pleased, but just the opposite. He scowled and growled out a “Feh.”

“What’s there to ‘feh’ about?”

“Oh, I may as well hole up in the hotel and leave all the detectin’ to you. I ain’t been no use in this thing yet.”

“Now, now. Don’t go and get … oh. Excuse me.”

A tall, thin, heavily bearded man in a black derby and a long, loose overcoat had appeared in our path as we approached the footbridge. We tried to scoot around him to the right, but he stepped to the side to block us. When we moved to the left, he scooched over to check us again. There was something strangely familiar about him, and he glowered at us hatefully as he slid this way and that to stay in our way.

“Do we know you?” I asked.

“No, but you should! Everyone should!” he spat back, his words inflected with an accent I couldn’t place. Then he reached out and snatched Gustav’s cheaters right off his face.

A second later, the spectacles were on the ground, the dark lenses pulverized beneath the stranger’s heel.

“Ha!”

The man stared at Old Red expectantly.

“Now why would you go and do a thing like that?” my brother said, meeting his gaze without a blink. It was a cloudless, sunny day, yet Gustav didn’t so much as squint.

The bearded man looked profoundly disappointed.

I assume
I
looked profoundly surprised.

“You alright?” I asked Old Red.

“Yup.”

“You ain’t blinded by the light?”

“Nope.”

“Well, how about that? Looks like you cured him, mister. Guess we owe you our thanks.” I lunged forward and grabbed the stranger by the collar of his oversized coat. “And you’ll have ’em soon as you explain what the hell you’re up to.”

“If you insist…”

The man suddenly spun away, flailing, and to my dismay I found myself holding nothing but coat.

“Ha
ha
! Try that on for size, you big hick!” He continued skipping backward, toward the Krupp pavilion. “Come on! Come and get me, clodhopper! You’re not going to let me get away that easy, are you?”