City for Ransom

“Yes . . . I mean, no, but—”

“Someone should.”

“She is seeing a fellow who intends just that,” Jane lied.

“Ahhh . . . that’s good.”

“I will take my leave of you now, sir,” said a more composed Dr. Tewes.

Ransom watched the funny little doctor saunter from the tavern as if a sudden fear had overtaken him.

CHAPTER 18

His father’s name was Campaneua, his mother Jarno, and together they straddled the earth, wreaking havoc in both Europe and America as anarchists. Mother had kept a scrapbook, clippings on train derailments, bombings, bank robberies, and even assassinations they’d carried out. They’d been lovers in a war against established government, communists of a sort, and they had a son born of their union, but wedlock in their estimation amounted to just another social contract meant to make sheep of people, right alongside religion and centralized government. Just another fabrication, a contract with myth—another tool of the enemy. They purposefully abstained from marriage as just another form of mind-slavery, a ritualized cultural iconoclastic opiate. As such, marriage looked, felt, tasted, sounded, and smelled like just another part of the cultural bag of tricks undermining true opinion and intellect. A conspiracy to keep the common man in place, from the Bible to the U.S. Constitution—all designed to keep a harmonious peace among the sheep.

His anarchist parents had named him Roberre Jarno-Campaneua the Second, and his mother had brought him up to believe in himself entirely and in the causes of anarchy.

But anarchy appeared on the wane, and he could find no compatriots this side of the ocean—someone not brain

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washed in the mores and values of capitalism, someone who might appreciate him—men willing to die for the cause, as his father had seven years ago at the hands of one small-minded, now crippled police detective here in Chicago. Another killer like himself—one he hated with all the venom inside him—Alastair Ransom.

Sleepeck Stumpf—a secret name given him by the ghost of his father—had met few men today to rival his father. He’d like to set a bomb in a busy thoroughfare or train station himself. Do the old man proud. But it’d have to wait until after his vendetta against Ransom was settled for good and all.

Times had gone sour for anarchy in America. While the movement of the anarchists thrived in Europe, dotting the continent, here in America, it’d quelled to a murmur—thanks in large measure to the enactment of labor laws resulting from Chicago’s Haymarket Riot. The enemy had won that day.

Ransom had almost been killed by a bomb that his father may well have set, the same bomb that killed seven coppers at Haymarket. He’d no way to substantiate this. Nonetheless, no one among the anarchist communities had ever claimed responsibility for the Haymarket bomb, and as his father’d been murdered before the bomb went off, it could well have been his work. Several prominent labor leaders and a handful of anarchists had been arrested, given blanket injustice, tried quickly, and hung—seven all told. There ought to’ve been a world outcry at the injustice of it all, the quick prairie justice as some called it, but none came. Blood was required. One imprisoned anarchist managed to kill himself in his cell, cheating the citizenry of Chicago of their justice.

One anarchist, a woman, had slipped away; she’d gone all these years undetected, living a quiet retirement after learning of her common law husband’s death. Roberre’s mother.

He had memories of his father holding him, playing with him, caring for him, but it’d been too long and his features had faded. All he had was a worn, aged daguerreotype, what little Mother’d told him, the news clippings of his father’s 194

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doings, and a rough police sketch done as a wanted poster by some long-ago police artist created from faulty accounts.

According to his mother, they had his nose too large, too flat, his ears exaggerated, along with his lips, and they displayed his eyes as wide and maniacal, along with an overhanging brow—all wrong. In fact, his father had mild features and could pass for a bank teller or accountant. “Put ’em in a suit and tie, and the man could step through any door,” Mother would say, a twinkle in her eye.

“You should’ve known your father, such passion,” she’d drummed into him. “Such a blazing fire in his soul. So inspiring, and all he wanted was a better life, not for himself alone, not even for just you and me, his family, but for the masses.” Roberre heard this every day of his young life, from his mother, whose maiden name had been Stumpf.

And so he’d come to Chicago, where he’d dug up his mother from Potter’s Field and buried her anew on the farm-stead outside Chicago she’d called home until the bank had taken it from her. But he’d also come to avenge his father, and he meant to do it his way, and not by bomb—as it left too much to chance. He meant to serve up this vengeance against the man who’d executed his father by fire in the manner of cold vengeance, a vengeance that would bring that giant of a man to his knees before killing him outright.

He’d do it quietly, carefully. He’d made himself invisible to go about Ransom’s damnable city freely, and he would strike viperlike with the garrote he’d made with his own hands when just a boy, when Roberre Jarno- Campaneua the Second, a.k.a. Stumpf began contemplating killing the man who’d turned his father into a human torch.

Across the city at Ransom’s home and in his nightmare It felt as if it were happening all over again; even the sounds in his ears on the day they’d cornered that Frenchy CITY FOR RANSOM

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bastard, who planned to set off a bomb. Ransom had tracked down the son-of-a-sow, and during a Chicago storm, deep inside a large warehouse, several coppers had worked the man over. He sat beaten and strapped to a chair. They tried to pry from him where he’d planted the bomb and the names of accomplices.

“I tell you nothing! I am French citizen. Have rights. You can’t detain me like this,” he kept saying. “You are law in Chy-cago! So must obey rules. Is not so?”

Angry at his smugness, Ransom kicked out the chair, sending him toppling. Another uniformed cop named Nathan Kohler then doused him in the kerosene that Ransom had threatened to use, the fumes so powerful they made both Campaneua and Ransom choke.

Now Campaneua and Ransom stared wide-eyed from each side of the huge wooden match. Unlit for the moment.

Neither man saw anything else—not the other men in the room, not one another, not their surroundings. Neither man saw the vegetable crates or the huge warehouse door that stood so near. Neither saw one another any longer as Ransom contemplated striking the match, the storm outside replaced by hollow silence in his ears.

Ransom didn’t see Kohler, just back of him, strike a match either, and when Nathan tossed his lit cigar onto the man lying tied in the sawdust, all he heard was a whoosh.

The flaming, flailing sight backed him off as the dying man cried out his name: “Roberre Jarno-Campaneua!” The last words he uttered as his body burned before the amazed eyes of the four Chicago policemen who’d been ordered to get information from him at any cost.

And Ransom sat bolt upright, awake, a feeling of Campaneua’s ghost in the room, alongside all the garrote victims, including the unborn child and Cliffton and Merielle.

They’d stalked him to his bed, each whispering some unin-telligible gibberish understood only by the dead as Ransom broke into a blistering sweat.

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The following day at the home of Dr. Tewes The phone rang several times before Gabby picked up.

She still felt tentative using the new invention, but the moment she heard it was Inspector Ransom, she