“More of the Book of Exodus kind,” said Doyle, “vengeful and wrath-like.”
It all started with an apple. Tom Lyman—or Caleb Kopf, as he was known then—had been in the warehouse when the men, careless with the block and tackle, swung a load too wide and tipped over a barrel. A dozen apples rolled nearly to Caleb’s shoe tips. One of the stevedores righted the barrel and collected the loose contents but not before dropping one in each pocket of his coat; and then, conscious of Caleb’s watching, tossed an apple underhanded to him. Caleb caught it without even thinking. Suddenly a flush of heat came over him as if he stood in the Tower of London with a ruby from Victoria’s crown in his palm, and quickly he shoved it inside his coat. The stevedore winked at Caleb and returned to his lading.
Things went missing from the warehouse every day, Caleb knew, and not just apples. Commerce was measured in barrels and sacks and crates, never in individual units—what did it matter if a container held a hundred apples or only ninety-nine? Nobody ever counted the innards.
Nor for that matter did Mr. Tallmadge, Caleb’s employer. That’s what he paid his clerks for, to tally and sum and tell him, in a neatly written figure at the bottom of the right-most column, how many dollars and how many cents he owned. But in the days and weeks following the warehouse incident, Caleb came to reason that money was like apples: if too much was mislaid the absence would be noticed; but should just a few paper notes, here and there, vanish into a coat pocket, the omission was neglected.
Until it wasn’t. One evening Tallmadge asked Caleb to stay late and then, once everyone else was gone, informed him that occasionally he audited his clerks’ registers. There was a modicum of truth in what Tom Lyman had told Minerva: he’d courted a woman and sought to impress her with the misappropriations. Yet by that terrible sundown, the poor math in Caleb’s book was too substantial to hide. Hot words were said, threats of arrest and lawsuits, and in a moment of panic Caleb grabbed the cast-iron door stop. He only swung it to shut up Tallmadge for a minute so Caleb could think, so he could straighten and make sense of his own story. It worked, in part—Tallmadge never uttered another syllable.
Myerson rose from the chair. He knocked the ash from his pipe into the fire, placed the pipe in a coat pocket. “She wants you to face justice, Caleb, though she has no druthers on whether it’sa lawman or judge or anyone else who dispenses it. To that end, Mrs. Tallmadge has engaged Mr. Doyle and I to be the instruments of her will.” He stood over him. “But first.”
He grabbed Lyman under the jaw and hoisted him to his feet. Lyman hammered at the man’s arm but Myerson ignored it, like a father discrediting the strikes of a bawling child.
“Where’s the money, Caleb? We’ve searched the house—twice. Once while you were picnicking with your whore girlfriend, and another just now.”
Myerson’s fist smashed into Lyman’s diaphragm.
“Where?”
He punched again.
“I’m afraid if you don’t share it with us, we’re going to have to hurt you.”
The grip released and as Lyman fell, Myerson hooked a haymaker into his eye socket. Lyman spun to the floor.
Had they not laid another finger on him after that initial hello inside the door, Lyman would have gladly told them the location of the bag. He cared for beatings even less than he cared for rolling off roofs and whacking his thumbs with hammers; and he calculated the quicker he told them, the sooner the ordeal would end. But as it was, dazed and blurry-eyed and his brain sore and jostled in its case, at that moment he no longer had any recollection of the site. Where had he put the money?
Myerson picked him off the floor again, jabbed him in the chin. Lyman’s head bounced off the wall behind him. “Where, Caleb?”
He was sure he would recall, if only it would stop and he could think a minute.
One-two in the ribs as he keeled downward. A third to the ear. “Where?”
Wait—what was this about anyway? Lyman forgot more and more.
Myerson knelt beside him and for variety’s sake socked him with his left fist. “Where?”
He didn’t know what they wanted. Only what he wanted. He wanted for it to stop. He wanted to see Minerva, one last time. To explain it to her.
Myerson loomed over him, his breath stinking and hot. “Where, Caleb?”
“The basement.”
Myerson looked up at Doyle. “What did he say?”
Doyle’s eyebrows knitted together. He’d heard the whispered words distinctly, though Lyman’s lips, split and drooling, had barely trembled. “It sounded like he said it’s in the basement.”
Myerson let go of Lyman’s collar. They had already searched down there, found nothing. “He must’ve buried it.”
The bounty man stood. “Bring him,” Myerson said to Doyle. Whatever partnership and compatriotism had been in his earlier tone vanished; he spoke as an employer dictates to a wage worker. “I’ll grab the lamps.”
Doyle pulled Lyman’s arm across his back, and by measures dragged, wrestled, and grappled him down the stairs into the dirt-floored basement. Myerson held a lamp in either hand, wicks high.
“Where?” He snarled at Lyman. “Goddamn it, I weary of this. Show me where you put it.”
Lyman’s head rolled on his shoulders.
“Hey,” said Doyle, gesturing. “Look at that over there.”
Myerson raised a lamp. He walked over and ducked his head beneath the stairs.
“Did you notice this before?”
“No,” said Doyle. “Isn’t that the damnedest?” The closer they approached, the more obvious it seemed: there was a corridor under the stairs that led somewhere else. “Like when the curtains rise at the theater, only with shadows instead.”
“It’s a passage,” said Myerson. He stepped within.
Doyle wrenched Lyman to his feet and in moments the three arrived in the dome chamber. Doyle, tired of lugging Lyman’s weight, dropped
