City for Ransom

gorgeous, and as she was a mute, so perfectly manageable.

For now, he must concern himself with commerce. Aside CITY FOR RANSOM

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from what Ransom needed, which he did purely for the money, he did shoots for area merchants. Another passion, his camera, was the specially designed 1893 Hetherington magazine camera. Sealed in leather with no projecting points, it had a continuous rotary shutter requiring no attention and could be set on slow, medium, or rapid speed. The lens was a beautiful Darlot #1 hemispherical with a lovely revolving diaphragm working between the lenses. Aside from a focusing dial, the camera was outfitted with a tally that kept a record of the number of exposures made. Finally, it had a rack-and-pinion focusing movement, and a back-and-forth double swing back, as well as a side-to-side swivel. Everything in one camera! And it had set him back sixty dollars—a fortune. Purchased through Montgomery Ward & Company, along with his oversized tripod that’d cost another $9.98, his outlay for equipment had put him in the hole. However, he’d talked Ward & Company into barter for partial payment through a commission to create a photo array accompanying a line of veterinary instruments.

Philo was in the process of fulfilling this agreement on the side, but the angst involved, the frustration, the sheer hatred of the project had grown like a cancer inside. A ruddy little account executive named Trelaine kept turning down his concepts for selling, with some attempt at flourish, such items as stricture cutters for cow teats, French poultry killing knives, Whisson’s improved pig forceps, de-horning saws, Farmer Miles’s castrating ecraseur, and, worst of all, the disgusting Gape Worm Extractor for worm disease in fowl.

This terrible looking instrument, essentially a brass probe with barbed fishing hooks, Trelaine billed as the only sure way to pluck out the offending worm and dead matter from the windpipe to save a chick from a gasping death.

Men like Trelaine infuriated Philo. So did all the prudes at Ward & Co., as they’d turned away his best, most imaginative solution to selling such god-awful products—a lovely bonneted model playing the part of farm maiden, holding a precious chick in one hand, the chicken-torturing device in another, while smiling at the camera. Their alter-66

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native? A boring full-page add made up of words. Words that spilled over the edge of the page; words without let-up, no visual counterpoint, like looking at a page in the Ency-clopaedia Britannica.

Still he had to pay the piper, to defer to his patron, to swallow his artistic integrity. To abolish his perfectly rendered ad for the milksop they proposed—a simple picture of each probe, each extractor, each bailing iron and plier.

But first to CPD business, make some money by developing 8-by-10 cuts of dead people. Another side business, an underground market catering to the bizarre and gruesome, would pay handsomely for a shot of Ransom shoving that severed head into Tewes’s hands—not to mention headless, crispy-fried torso shots.

He slipped a small silver-coated flask from his coat pocket and swallowed its contents. With Denton still not back, he’d had to mix the chemicals and float the cuts himself. By now, he hoped the death shots from the train station—submerged in a brackish solution that told him he needed to clean his tray—ought to be taking form.

In his darkroom, he found it so. The results made his rent, and a sumptuous meal and bottle besides. “Where in hell is Denton?” he wondered aloud. His new apprentice was a glutton for punishment. In fact, Waldo brought it on himself.

“But like God, I never put more on the boy than he can bear.” Helplessly, Philo always took the tone of a British lord engaging his lowliest subject with Denton—lord to peasant; he did so only because Denton invited it, seemed actually to expect it. “It’s as if comforting to the boy,” he’d once told Alastair when Ransom had pointed it out.

Philo stared into the watery solution as the prints below the surface began a hazy, formless chemical dance. The term solution seemed apropos. Unfortunate that his friend Ransom had no easy solution to this bizarre series of garroting murders.

Waldo Denton noisily pushed open the door to Philo’s CITY FOR RANSOM

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residence, his clatter at odds with the stirring sound of Wagner’s valkyries down in the deep interior of the lower level apartment. Over the musical rendering of the twelve hand-maidens of Odin riding their horses over the field of battle to escort the souls of the slain heroes to Valhalla came Denton’s complaints as he placed the monster tripod in its corner. Too large to stand straight up, the tripod—used only in photographing murder and suspected murder victims—reached out to trip even the cat, Kronos, a tom that came and went of his own accord.

Philo slipped from the darkroom, his hands waving, mimicking a maestro. Waldo stared at his mentor’s antics. Philo’s orchestrating left hand continued, while his right swooped rhythmically down, dipping into his pocket, and returning with a bank note dangling before Waldo.

“The equivalent of U.S. currency, my boy!” he assured his apprentice, handing him the note instead of the promised dollar bill. Denton stared at the bank note from the Prussian Bank of Chicago as if it were a hundred dollar bill, his eyes wide with wonder. “I’ve never seen a bank note with this kind of pale pink color, and my . . . the Roman Caesar’s got such a strange scepter, and usually his nose is a whole lot bigger, isn’t it, Mr. Keane? I mean don’t get me wrong. It’s quite lovely in its detail.” “It’s a new bank just opened off Lake Park Avenue . . .

you know, Adams Street. So you know it’s legitimate.”

Philo himself made little in the way of payment from the CPD, but he’d wisely catered to not one but all seven district station houses, and the work was beginning to pick up.

Philo’s darkroom amounted to a section of the apartment he’d covered in black material purchased from a mortuary.

In what little space remained of his apartment, one corner was filled by a bed shoved against the wall, while another wall held up his bookshelf and desk, cluttered with all manner of photographic paraphernalia and books. Philo had studied the new and amazing science of photography since 68

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its inception and even before: the various stages of man’s desire to reproduce reality in his own hands— through his own eyes—from cave art to present . . . the Matthew Brady deluxe camera and tripod now available in any Sears Roebuck store and catalog across the country. Photography had taken off like a brushfire in a tornado, and sadly he knew the only ones getting rich from it were the manufacturer and the merchant. At times, he’d cursed himself for having turned down that job to sell cameras at Fields Department Store, turning his back on a normal life, a regular paycheck, and perhaps some friends he’d have encountered among those who loved the new science. But sales was sales and he was no salesman, and he had always shunned what others called normal.

Perhaps for the same reason the science of photography had captivated Philo as a child. The history of reproducing and depicting the world around mankind, all of it fascinated him. Even as a child, he watched in awe as a Civil War photographer named Clemmens displayed battlefield shots and spoke of his adventures in the war. This man inspired him, giving Philo a wartime print that he’d signed.

Philo now ushered Denton out of his front door, chastising him for being late getting back. “Come round when I send a messenger for you, Waldo, and not before.”

“Right, sir, but are you sure, sir?”

“Out Waldo, now!”

The sound of Waldos closing the door came as a gift just as Wagner ended. “Sometimes silence and aloneness is all that will do,” he said and raised his empty gin flask. “But this will not do.”

Inspector Alastair Ransom had left the Illinois Central train station and waved down a city hansom cab, one of a fleet of horse-drawn carriages that collectively beat a rhythm against the brick and cobblestone streets. Once seated inside, Ransom called out to the cabbie through a small portal CITY FOR RANSOM

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that slid open and closed as needed, shouting, “One forty-one Clark Street.”

Clark Street was the center of a great deal of activity, shops and taverns lined its way along with bawdy houses and gambling dens. In order to remain open and operating, Ransom knew that every pub, inn, tavern, bar, brothel and flophouse paid a tribute to the beat cops patrolling the area.