“I know,” she said.
“I never did. Not at all.”
“I’m sure of it. Very sure. What sort of machine was it?” she asked.
“They didn’t say. I didn’t ask.”
“Is there anything you could tell me about it?”
“I’ll tell you what I knew then. They said it would be two crates. Only two. Big. Same dimensions. Same weight. Same items, really, from the sound of it. I asked them where they’d be coming in from. They said they had contacts in the East who’d rob a train heading through Russia. They’d pick the things up there, hop it to Novo-Mariinsk, and they’d have a ship coming in across the Baltic. I said that sounded elaborate as hell, so why would they want me handling it when they probably had someone already? And they said that it wasn’t just smuggling it in that was hard. It would be storing it. They’d want it in someplace safe. Someplace no one’d ever look at. So they needed an old hand for the trick, which was why they came to me. So I said I’d take it. Because, well, why not? You understand, don’t you, Miss Fairbanks? Sometimes a man needs to stretch his legs.”
“I do.”
He nodded and sipped his tea, though it was getting cold now. “So. So Spinsie starts planning. Starts thinking about how he’s going to do this. I already have some ideas, of course. Already know how to get the prizes on land and safe. And they’ve decided the ship’s arrival already. Going to be intercepted by a smaller vessel, which would come east and make a night landing, not too far west along the Strait from the city. And they had a few men ready. But from there they had no other idea. Well. I had a few. I used the old mortician switch. Remember that, Hayseed?”
“Oh, yes,” said Hayes. “If I recall, you always had a lot of reservations about killing the cat.”
“We didn’t always kill the cat,” Spinsie said angrily. “If we could find one that was already dead then that would be fine, too.”
“Or a dog,” said Hayes. “Or a bunch of rats. Or a chicken.”
“What?” said Samantha, puzzled.
“Right,” said Spinsie to her, with some professional relish. “See, the real problem with bringing in anything is, how do you make it something everyone treats with careful respect, and also wouldn’t ever want to open? The answer is, well, you put it in something sacred. A coffin works best in a pinch.”
“Oh, Lord,” Samantha said. She covered her mouth.
Spinsie chuckled. “Yeah. So what I planned on having us do was transfer the cargo to a different boat with the coffins and all, and then put the cargo in a big crate with ‘Quarantine’ on the side and a few dead things tossed in for the odor. People will leave that alone, you believe me.”
“What happens if they search the other coffins?” asked Samantha.
Spinsie hesitated. “Well… well, they’re not empty.”
“You use real coffins? With people?”
“I know a mortician chap who’s putting his kids through school, he lends them out to me,” Spinsie said, now flustered.
“What do their families say?”
“Not much, they don’t often know about it. It’s not like we use the same corpses every time.”
“I should hope not!”
Hayes cleared his throat. “I think we’re getting off topic.”
“Right, right,” Spinsie said hurriedly. “Anyways, so I get the funeral barge all ready and we go out there at the dead of night and wait for these bastards. They’ve got a fair group of people waiting there to help me out. Strong crew. I didn’t get all their names, I usually don’t want them. Maybe a few of those men you listed, maybe they were in there. But one of them.” Spinsie tapped the drawing. “He was there. Quiet fella. Didn’t say much, maybe didn’t say anything. At first, at least. Just waited. The others were rowdy, ’specially these two snotty little pricks. Fancied themselves great criminals. Simple thugs is what they were. Christ, I wanted to throttle them.”
Hayes smiled at that, almost in recognition, but said nothing.
“How many were there?” Samantha asked. “In all?”
“Eleven, maybe. Maybe twelve. All working men, it seemed.”
“I see,” Samantha said.
“I expected a delay, I always do, but this one came puttering along, right on time,” Spinsie said. “We all got up and got ready to load the cargo into the coffin ship, but it was funny. The ship that came… I mean, they said they were intercepting a big frigate from Anadyr, right? Out in the Bering? But the vessel that came was just a little thing. No way that boat could fare in the ocean proper. It’d founder in a minute.”
“How far would you put that ship’s range, Spinsie?” Hayes asked.
“Don’t know. Not much more than fifty miles. Maybe seventy. I wasn’t the only one who noticed it. The quiet fella. What was his name?”
“John,” said Samantha. “John Skiller.”
“Yeah. He noticed it, too. Asked me what sort of boat that was. It was a shore boat, really. Like a ferry. Not that I told him that, he didn’t need to know. But I think he figured it out anyways. He might’ve been the only one with a brain there. ’Cept for me, that is.
“So we pull the little ferry alongside the shore and haul the funeral boat up alongside, too, and we hop aboard to unload the crates. What they were, hell, I couldn’t expect. A weather machine. Or maybe the parts for a fancy new type of car. But as soon as I looked at the boxes, I know. You just get a sense. You carry things like that enough, you just know these things.”
“What was it?” Samantha asked.
He shook his head. “The other men didn’t know. They picked them up and hauled them onto the coffin ship. I shouted at them to watch it but they still dropped the damn thing. It broke open, just a little. But they still saw.”
“What was it, Spinsie?” Hayes asked softly. “What was in the boxes?”
“Guns,” Spinsie said. “But guns like I’d never seen before, and I’ve seen a few in my day. Guns of a type that I don’t think exist anywhere yet. When Heaven invades Hell I hope God gives the angels a few of those guns. I didn’t know much about them but I knew I didn’t want to be around when they started going off. And Skiller. He saw. Started asking, ‘What are those? What are those?’ The others, they didn’t care. But Skiller wouldn’t have any part of it. Went all quiet once he realized what they were doing. Oh, he still loaded it, after a while. But I could tell he didn’t like it.
“We took the coffin ship back to the docks. Plan was to have the cargo shipped to a tobacconist pal of mine and have it repackaged as cigars. Then they’d wait a while and move it. Out to that, that big place, what’s it called?”
“Construct, probably,” Samantha said quietly.
“Yeah. You can stash anything there. The plan was to secure it real good, make sure no one could jimmy it. But once we got to the docks and unloaded them and started putting the corpses through the dockmaster we noticed Skiller was gone.”
“Gone?” Hayes asked.
“Yeah. Just gone. No one had any idea where he went or anything.”
“No one hurt him? No one attacked him?”
“No, not at all. He just slipped away.”
“Where do you think he went?” Samantha asked.
Spinsie shrugged. “Well, he wasn’t stupid. He knew something was up. He knew those guns hadn’t come from any Baltic freighter. Wherever they came from, it could only have been a few miles away. So I think he doubled back to the night landing, and just started walking. Started walking west to look for some pier. Some small dock. Something. To see where those guns had come from.”
Samantha and Hayes did not speak for some time. Spinsie rocked back and forth, glancing between them nervously, still desperate to please.
“Where are the guns now?” Hayes asked.
“I don’t know,” Spinsie said.
“You don’t?”
“No. After the tobacconist it was all up to them. They handled the Construct part. I wasn’t going in there.”
“And they didn’t know what they were going to do with the guns. Just that they were bringing stolen McNaughton cargo ashore.”