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surely rushed into the flames—flames in their acme, rabid, licking, unstoppable.

Stratemeyer, a large man himself, had thrown a massive bear-hug onto Ransom, and with the two others, had wrestled his friend Alastair into a sitting position below the cinders that rained down around them all like searing fireflies discovering freedom.

Finally, two large firemen now sat on Ransom where he beat the earth with both fists.

Alastair Ransom had sat all night on the street corner, feeling his life going off into the night sky with the smoke that discolored the moon. Head in hands, eyes arched and watching, Alastair said a prayer for Merielle as the final boards caught flame, only to fall into the center of the gutted two-story. The place had housed the old London Royale Arms Tavern, a pretentious title for a pub, and his Merielle’s rooms above, now no longer above.

Stratemeyer would not let him set foot onto the scene until one hundred percent certain that first the fire was under control, and until he could determine if it were arson or an unfortunate accidental occurrence. Two burly firemen stood guard over Ransom where he sat while Harry kicked through the rubble in a methodical going over.

As it’d been a large, sprawling thing that went far back of the yards, a number of other apartments rented by the owner of the Arms had also burned. But everyone living in the building was accounted for, all but Polly Pete.

Now at daybreak, the fire under control, Ransom stood to shake off the weary firemen guarding him. He began a strange tiptoe amid the squalor and fumes and blackness of the gutted house, working to remain in Harry’s footsteps so as to disturb as little as possible of Stratemeyer’s possible arson investigation, and he thought of the last time he’d spoken to Merielle.

The second floor had caved in on the bar below, and all of 158

ROBERT W. WALKER

Polly Pete’s frilly adornments had gone up in smoke, along with her trunk, her bureau drawer, the mirror blackened with smutty, grimy smoke now atop chairs and tables in one corner—somehow miraculously intact, a still-life painted in fire meant to mock Ransom, to rend his heart. Peering into her eerily intact mirror was a look into a bottomless abyss of smut. Nothing reflected from it save a single eye—his eye, reflecting where a single dewy quarter-sized square remained somehow unblemished. Satan winking at him. Then he saw the bed again— their bed—straddled atop what was left of the bar, the mattress gone save for the seared, hoary black tufts of it. Black spider webs clung to rails, to exposed conduits for the gas burners, pipes, leftover standing boards, leftover standing glasses half melted, to an array of exploded bottles of rye, rum, whiskey, gin, vodka and other spirits. Only the bedsprings remained of their bed, and the coiled springs, like the mirror, painted in satanic abandon.

“Where is she? If not here . . . where?” he asked. A glim-mer, like a fleeting bird from his deepest recesses of—hope for Merielle—rose in him.

A completely ash-covered Stratemeyer looked him in the eye. “Alastair, you should go home . . . go home, now.”

“Where the bloody hell is she?”

Stratemeyer gritted his teeth. “You’re a hard man to stay liking, Alastair. You should take a friend’s advice!”

He pushed past Harry, searching, tearing at boards, cutting hands on debris in his mad hunt for Merielle, but he found nothing when he came around a wall on his right side that’d somehow grotesquely remained standing, as a magician’s trick . . . like the trick of the intact mirror. Still, no body.

“Damn you, Harry! What’s become of her?”

Stratemeyer merely lifted his chin, and Ransom followed his eyes upward. Above, caught on an exposed daggerlike protrusion of steel pipe—part of the upstairs plumbing—her body dangled: a charred disfigured doll, and ghastliest of all, she was headless.

Ransom went to his knees, bellowing like a wounded CITY FOR RANSOM

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beast. All of the hurt, all of the pain she must have felt, he screamed out in her name.

Stratemeyer called for some of his men to escort Alastair out of the devastation.

When Stratemeyer felt confident that Ransom had been put in a cab and sent home, he went around the bar and stooped below the bedsprings to reach in for the other part of the woman he’d only known as Polly Pete, the woman Ransom had made a reputation on with his winnings as a gambler. Harry’d never heard her called anything else. He wondered about the name Merielle. Guessed it Polly’s nick-name, else the one given her at birth by parents, whoever they were . . . wherever they might be . . . if even alive.

One thing he knew was to treat Polly’s body with all the respect of a queen, Alastair Ransom’s queen. He knew not to assume anything, knew to pass this along to the medical chaps who’d ultimately take her in their care, knew not to willy-nilly bury the remains in Potter’s Field, not without consulting Ransom.

An assistant rushed to Stratemeyer’s opened arms with a large paper sack to receive the head. This done, Harry pointed to the dangling corpse overhead. “Somebody get a ladder against that wall! Determine if it’ll hold! And confound it all . . . if God willing, snatch that poor woman down.” “Sir, if I may volunteer for that duty,” replied Rodney McKeon. “Alastair Ransom’s been a good friend, sir.”

Harry concurred, nodding firmly, thinking Ransom had done so much for so many. He dropped his gaze and jerked his head to hide a creeping tear. “That man doesn’t deserve this.”

“Some bastard’s taken her head off,” muttered another fireman.

McKeon added, “Yaaa . . . looks the same bastard as did the others, but this time . . .” He paused to bring home his point. “This time, he’s gone too far.”

Harry said, “And he’s not goin’ to get away with it, not after Ransom finds his wits.”

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ROBERT W. WALKER

Alastair Ransom hadn’t gone home in the cab they put him into; instead, he wound up at Muldoon’s, unsure how he’d arrived here. He pounded on the door, demanding he be served, until Muldoon pulled it wide. Muldoon argued the law that shut taverns down on any given Saturday midnight not to reopen until Monday noon. Ransom pushed past the giant Muldoon, who snatched out a blackjack and slammed it into Alastair’s head, knowing he had the law on his side.

This just as Mike O’Malley’d arrived.

O’Malley arrested Muldoon for assaulting an officer, and Ransom was taken into custody for a drunk and disorderly, orders of Chief Kohler himself, and ignobly thrown into the drunk tank. With no beds left, they laid him out on the floor, unconscious.

Muldoon was booked for battery on a police official and told his court date would come round when it came around, despite his continual plea: “I was trying to uphold the drinking laws put forth by authorities!” It fell on deaf ears. Muldoon’s use of the sap to the back of Ransom’s head had caused a concussion, and saps were as illegal as drinking on Sunday—which actually changed from one week to the next, depending upon the level of graft. In fact, the drinking laws proved as mercurial as the tides.

“He knows the rules but chose to break ’em! I pay good money to run a business, and this is how you treat me?”

complained Muldoon, his gigantean features terrifying even through the bars.

“You daft fool, Muldoon! Have ya no sense? That’s Alastair Ransom you knocked cold, and he has friends all over Chicago.”

“I know who he is, but he pushed into my establishment shouting orders!”

“Have you not heard the news, man?”

“What news?”