“Hail, the conquering hero!” Ken Behan was one of two inspectors working on the rash of killings now making headlines.
“Welcome home, Rance!” Jedidiah Logan, Behan’s partner, slapped Alastair on the back.
“What’s it all for, boys?” Ransom did a clumsy pirouette, hands extended.
“You’re a hero, Alastair.”
“For what in the name of God?”
“Indeed.”
Laughter erupted. “Does everyone in the city know?” he whispered to Behan.
“Know what? I know nothing. Logan, whataya know?”
“Nothing.”
“We’re as good as the old Know-Nothing party, aren’t we boys?” shouted Behan and a roar went up, ending in laughter and a chorus of “naught nothings.”
“See?” asked Behan amid the uproar over the mention of the anti-immigrant movement and party.
Suddenly Chief Nathan Kohler, standing on the second-floor landing, shouted over all, silencing the room with, “What goes on here?”
“Knock it off, all of you!” shouted Ransom. “Some hero. I’ve lost both my badge and my partner.” He pointed to Drimmer’s empty desk facing his own and a feeling of enormous, sick emptiness filled Alastair.
“He were a good man!” declared Sergeant Dolan, shaking his head.
“We raised more’n a pint to Griff’s memory.” Ken Behan lowered his head.
“And raised three hundred dollars for his family,” added Logan.
Alastair continued cleaning out his desk. “He was a fine assistant inspector although he had some training yet, getting himself knicked like that.”
“Remember the time we set his report on fire, Behan?” asked Jedidiah Logan.
“And that day someone stole his lunch from the icebox, and he couldn’t detect who was behind it?”
They all broke out in good-natured laughter.
The laughs ended abruptly when Chief Nathan Kohler, again shouted, “Ransom! My office, now!”
“Shitty man,” complained Logan under his breath.
“Go get ’im, Alastair,” added Behan. “Now you no longer have to eat his shit.”
“And remember,” said Sergeant Dolan, a skeletal man who stood a head taller than Ransom, “we none of us know a thing, and it’s an oath we’ve taken to your health, Inspector.”
“Ahhh…well thanks, Dolan. I didn’t know I had so many friends among ye.”
“Aye, you do now.”
Alastair imagined the story must have circulated throughout the force about his having quietly “taken out the garbage,” but he wondered with whom the leak had begun and precisely when and maybe where and perhaps who was on hand. Harry or one of his men perhaps, during a drinking bout? He pondered the notion while making the stairs taking him up to Kohler’s closed office.
He hesitated a moment at the turning of the knob, not wishing to get into turmoil with Nathan so soon back, but as he could hardly stand Kohler in the same room, he imagined there was no dodging it. He opened the door and pushed through.
Inside the semi-darkened office, he found Kohler was not alone. In one corner stood Dr. Christian Fenger, a man to whom Alastair owed deference, as Christian had saved his life now twice-once after Haymarket exploded and more recently when Gabby’s gun had exploded.
Alastair did not recognize the seated figure who appeared doubled over, so far into himself did he lean. The stranger was white haired and white bearded, a Santa Claus figure, dumpy, doughy, and looking as if he’d slept in his suit. A gold watch fob and a diamond ring marked him as a wealthy man. When he looked up to see Ransom enter, Alastair saw that it was Senator Harold J. Chapman, the grandfather of the deceased girl. Chapman looked a shadow of himself, on the verge of death’s endgame. The terrible tragedy had left him a tattered soul.
“Senator Chapman,” began Kohler, “here is our best man for such an assignment. Along with Logan and Behan-introduced to you yesterday-Inspector Ransom here will hunt down this madman who’s brought this horror on your family. I assure you that-”
“Shut up, Kohler!” ordered the old man, getting to his feet. He lifted his cane and placed it in Alastair’s face. “You find this monster, Ransom, and you turn him over to me.”
“What’s this?” Alastair asked Kohler, confused.
“Talk to me,” the senator said sternly. “Understand, this is what I want. You do this thing and the three of you, gentlemen, you will have my fortune. The paperwork is already complete at my lawyer’s, all quite in order. All you need is to bring him to me out at my farm in Evanston alive for me to flay. I’ll strip him of every inch of his bloody skin while he’s yet alive. I want to hear him beg and scream and cry the entire-”
Unfortunately and all too often, Ransom had seen this kind of unrestrained, unconditional hatred born of unmitigated hurt, pain, and a sense of entitlement to justice and order in an unjust and disordered world. For men like Chapman, it amounted to an extreme insult. A shock to the comfortable existence of an otherwise honorable soul now twisted and confused and filled with a sense of outrage that reached back to an ancestral past: the old eye-for-eye vengeance legitimized by the man’s bible. Still, Ransom felt sorry for the man’s terrifying loss; he empathized, and being in his position earlier, he, too, had resorted to the same ancient code. But something felt different here, somehow. Most men of Chapman’s stature would never know a simple truth: no execution, no amount of punishment, no amount of justice could end the pain or quail the loss of an innocent life.
“Have you agreed to this, Dr. Fenger?” asked Alastair, amazed, lifting his own cane now.
“I have.”
“How so. You, a man of high moral ethics? A surgeon?”
“I know you, of all people,” interrupted the senator, “can and will put a capper on this maniac, and so why not make a bargain of it?” asked the senator, his gold tooth and gold ring and gold watch all lighting him up like a Christmas tree.
“I see my reputation precedes me.”
“Alastair,” said Dr. Fenger, “it means a new wing at Cook County. You’ve no idea how much it’s needed.”
“And you, Chief Kohler?” asked Ransom. “The defender of law in Chicago?”
“No one need know outside this room, Alastair.”
“I see…given it much thought have you?”
“Look, man, we-you and I-civil servants…what becomes of us, Alastair?” Kohler asked. “When retirement comes round? And hell, face it, we don’t know from year to year if we even have jobs! Do you stand on principle? We are talking a fortune here.” Nathan Kohler extended Ransom’s badge to him.
But Alastair turned from Kohler to Senator Chapman. “I…I have to tell you, sir, that even without your bribe and your hatred, I would do all in my power to bring this fiend to justice.”
Chapman leapt even closer at him. “Justice? I want nothing of justice I haven’t a hand in. Do you understand?”
“That much is clear, yes.”
The old senator snatched the badge out of Kohler’s hand and pushed it on Alastair. “Get it done. See to this, Kohler, or it will be your job!” The senator pushed past Alastair and was out the door, his cane beating a sad rhythm in his wake down the stairs and out the door.
“The old man believes the rumors, Alastair.” Kohler actually grimaced.
“The rumors?”
“That you single-handedly caught and dispatched the Phantom,” added Christian Fenger, who then turned to Kohler and said, “How ’bout we have a drink, the three of us, Nathan. Snatch out that bottle you keep in your desk.”
Kohler did so, placing three small tumblers of whiskey between the others and himself. Fenger lifted and toasted, “To the end of the Phantom, and to a quick end to this new fiend making children vanish.”
Kohler lifted his glass, about to accept the toast, when both men saw that Ransom had not taken hold of his drink. “Come now, Alastair,” began Fenger. “You of all men, reservations? It wasn’t so long ago you and I were plotting violence against Dr. Tewes.”
“I’d like to sleep on it…give it some thought. A thing like this…well, it could ruin the three of us sooner than make us rich.”