Steam City Pirates Read online

  The giant inquisitor laughed! It was a vibrating, mechanical laugh that would haunt Monturiol’s dreams. “Bring out the balloon!”

  From the far-end of the cavern a gigantic, floating craft came toward them. It was high in the air above them, and walking beneath it was a short man with long white mustaches, and he wore a formal suit of no fashion the Spaniard had ever seen. His captain’s cap was snow-white, his coat and trousers were black, and his collar was turned up. He was pulling the aircraft along as a boy would lead his dog, by a long metal leash that led in an arcing loop up to the balloon.

  “This is Count Ferdinand Adolf August Heinrich Graf von Zeppelin. He is also an inventor, and together, you will create the underwater paradise of your dreams!”

  The Count clicked his heels. “I first flew in one of the American Union Army’s balloons operated by John Steiner. I later renewed my interest, and this is the result. I was living in Germany, in 1888, and Miss Haskins here came to visit me from the past. I agreed to come back in time with her to create my craft for the Society! And now you, my friend, will work with us to form a new force for good on this planet. Life is so good, yah?”

  “Force? What are we discussing here? I thought you were scientists. This looks like a craft for war,” said Monturiol.

  The Grand Inquisitor Abraham Manette marched over to where the short inventor stood. He placed his long arm around the inventor’s thin shoulders and tilted his head down. Monturiol looked up and could see the brass coils around the big leader’s neck. When the voice came out of them, the Spaniard almost fell backward from their vibrating blast.

  “Money is the root of all evil, and it is also the root of all invention. Our plan, you see, is to earn our fortunes in order to create your undersea world. Mister Monturiol, the forces above do not appreciate your genius. All they understand is power and, yes, force. We plan to create a torpedo for your steam-powered submersible, and it will be infused with steam so that it will penetrate the hull of any ship those above have in their navies. Once one of these merchant ships has been sunk, the Count’s airship will move in. We shall tell them via telegraph that unless they allow us to plunder the other ships with our balloon armada, they will all be sunk! See how ingenious we are?”

  The mechanical voice was now booming in the little man’s ear, and he pulled away in fear. “You want to kill people and steal their cargo? I can’t have that. I am a man of peace. I belonged to a communist society in Spain, and we only want what’s best for the common people!”

  “How can you believe the common man can save us from all the greed and corruption going on above the earth? Did you not advise me that our hope lies beneath the sea? The only way you can get us beneath the sea in your paradise is to join us in procuring the funds we need to make your inventions real! Won’t you join us? We can begin tomorrow with your designs. Let your mind go free! Become an inquisitor!”

  The woman called Jane the Grabber spoke to him, and he turned toward her. Her eyes flashed, and the clock in her corset began to spin around and around as she told him, “I have been into your future, Señor Monturiol. If you do not change your life now, you will end up dying in poverty, penniless and alone. Don’t you understand how the powers above can corrupt the future? Please, won’t you join us?”

  Monturiol made a decision. Without money, he could not go on. He was possibly entering Dante’s Inferno, but at least he would have the money to see his dreams realized. What more can any mortal ask for? “Yes, I will do it! We will steal from the rich and give to the poor, correct? Like the British Robin Hood?”

  “Of course! Your dreams will be realized and our Society will prosper! Let’s go eat. A banquet is in order, and we shall feast upon the creatures from the sea!”

  Music filled with brass instruments, drums and steam whistles began to vibrate the cavern. They all walked toward one of the other small caves, the one on the eastern side of the grand cavern, and as they passed into its confines, Monturiol could see the band. Seven men and four women played the music, and they all wore pirate attire.

  “These are the Steam City Pirates! They will serenade us whilst we feast!” said Manette.

  Bat Carry escorted Monturiol to his place at the long banquet table, pulling out the chair. The Spaniard sat down and saw that the table was filled with steaming bowls of clams, oysters, crabs, and lobsters. There were also heaping platters of bread, fresh from the oven, and a vast array of condiments. As he reached for one of the lobsters, the inventor envisioned himself sitting at a similar table beneath his undersea city. He would be named the first mayor of this city, and he would be praised for his generosity and special genius. The Steam City Pirates played on, and Monturiol dug into the flesh of the buttery lobster with a new-found passion. When Jane the Grabber looked over at him from across the table, he smiled at her, and she smiled back!

  The new world beneath the City of New York was opening up to him, and Monturiol was ready to accept it. He hummed to himself as the steam-powered music infused his body with hope.

  Chapter 1: Wherein Our Heroes Experience a New Crime, a New Detective, and a New Office

  We were now facing a new enemy. As a result, I knew it would be best to move into a more protected location for my office. Jane the Grabber Haskins, the evil brothel Madame, had disappeared into thin air. We also had a person who could disappear, and he was walking downtown with me. Seth Mergenthaler, the little mazikeen, was our secret weapon. Not only could he become invisible, the eight-year-old could also foretell the future, change into the shapes of other humans and animals, and fly, as he was half-angel and half-human.

  My departed mother back in Kilkenny was a believer in angels. She always told me I had a guardian angel who was assigned by God to watch over me. I never really believed her until I was in combat during the Civil War. I never told this to General Billy Sherman, the man who nominated me for the Congressional Medal of Honor, but when I jumped between the General and that speeding Rebel bullet, I had not made a conscious decision to be brave. Truth be told, I was pushed by this invisible angel. I felt his big hands on my back, and then I became airborne. Everything that happened to me after that moment can be called “divine providence,” I suppose, although it goes against every fiber of my Irish stubbornness to believe such superstition, I am an angel believer also.

  My new job as a detective in New York City must now include this boy as my assistant. I looked down at Seth’s small form. He was wearing a little gray suit coat and white shirt with tie, and his knee pants were moving like tiny pistons as he kept up with my brisk pace. The paradoxical reality of Seth was that one moment he could be this little boy, as he was now, his eyes sparkling and taking in everything around him. The next moment, he could be the voice of an educated adult who could converse with me about any subject known to modern science.

  “The pirates are coming,” Seth said.

  I looked down at the boy, and he looked up at me. We exchanged frowns.

  “Pirates? You mean, you want to play pirates?” I wanted to know if I were addressing the child Seth or the adult Seth.

  We stopped, and I watched the boy’s face take on a mesmerizing, squinted affectation.

  “No, the real pirates. I can see them boarding ships and stealing things.”

  “Where are they? What do they look like?”

  “I can’t say where they are. However, it is out in the water. My future vision is like looking through a spyglass. I can see only one small circle picture at a time. These pirates are not normal. I can see they are dropping out of the sky! The men on the ship are frightened, and they let the pirates take the money and the crates of supplies. The pirates go back up into the sky inside moving boxes attached to a pulley. The boxes carry the pirates and the stolen cargo up into a big balloon that hovers directly above the ship!” Seth’s eyes were transfixed as he stared off into space.

  I had previously worked with Seth and his magical abilities in the Jane the Grabber case. Just when I was at my wit�
��s end by what was happening at the Sisters’ Row Hotel, Seth showed me how he could take on the physical personification of another child—a ten-year-old girl named Cassie--and my entire sleuthing career had taken a dramatic shift from that moment until this. However, this was the first time I had experienced my small partner’s ability to look into the future, just as I was still waiting to see him use the invisible wings he supposedly had affixed to his narrow shoulders. If I had not seen this lad change from a young girl into his present shape and back again, with my own eyes, I would not have solved the Jane the Grabber case, and the love of my life, Miss Rebecca Charming Jones, would possibly be out of her business as a brothel madame in the Theater District of New York City.

  If this were how my cases begin now, I was going to have to change my method of discovery. What was I going to do to find clues about a crime that had not yet been committed? In the first place, I was an Army man, and I had no experience with naval matters. Secondly, the fact that Seth reported that these pirates would be using an air balloon to abscond with their booty was not only impractical but it was also beyond my comprehension.

  “As soon as we get to the office, I shall address your prognostications, Seth. Until then, if you have any more relevant visions, please retain them until we reach our destination,” I said, squeezing the boy’s hand as I began to walk.

  “Yes sir, Mister O’Malley. I just thought you might want to know about it. If you had asked me earlier about the men who kidnapped my father, then you might have avoided a lot of effort,” he pointed out, and there was a hint of rancor in his high-pitched voice.

  He was correct. I had not believed the lad when he told me he was invisible inside the hospital room of Mount Sinai when his father was taken, so I never asked him about what he had seen. I was not going to make that mistake again, as young Seth Mergenthaler was now my only real connection with a person who had the same kind of powers I had to now confront.

  We had searched all over New York City to find a place where we felt comfortable. Our little group was confronting a force that had proven to be both cunning and diabolical. They could travel through time, and their powers at mind control through the use of drugs and other methods had been an especially difficult adversarial problem in my pursuit of Jane the Grabber. We knew we needed a place that would not be suspected easily, and it was Becky who had come up with the idea to move our location to a Gothic structure that Bessie Mergenthaler said would protect us from the evil eye. Temple Emanu-El was located on 5th Avenue and 43rd Street on the Upper East Side in what was known as Kleindeutschland, or “Little Germany.”

  As we made our meandering way through the city’s pedestrian traffic, I kept thinking about how Bessie Mergenthaler had reacted when she first realized that her son Seth was a supernatural being. Before that moment, she had been an educated and liberal Feminist and suffragette. She is the Administrator of Mount Sinai Hospital, and her entire life had encompassed a logical, scientific outlook. When her husband, Arthur, was kidnapped from that same hospital in December of ’67, she did not believe in his eccentric statement that he and his son were mazikeen and that she was a daughter of Lilith.

  I saw Doctor Merganthaler die in Collierville, Tennessee, so I also had no reason to believe his claim of being a half-angel, half-human mazikeen. Now, however, ever since Seth’s transformation inside the Sisters’ Row Hotel room, every person in our little detective group listens to what he says with much more respect, and this includes his mother, Bessie. Although, as his mother, she is still a disciplinarian to him when he is behaving in his “little boy” role. When he changes into his mazikeen or supernaturally adult self, it is I who has been given the supervisory job of watching out for him.

  As we walked up 5th Avenue toward Temple Emanu-El, I remembered Bessie telling me that in the two decades between 1835 and 1855 around 250,000 European Jews immigrated into the United States, many of them settling on the Lower East Side and the tiny congregation that first established this temple on a second floor rented loft in 1845 had certainly exploded into a temple that resembled something out of an Arab’s dream and not a Jewish synagogue.

  Only seven blocks north the grand white marble spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral were being built, and ten blocks to the south the brownstone mansions of William and John Jacob Astor demonstrated that high society was making its presence felt. In Five Points, where I came from, this area might as well have been called “heaven.”

  If this temple meant to rival the soaring Gothic structure of St. Patrick’s, it succeeded. Bessie told me that the architects, Henry Fernbach and Leopold Eidlitz, had worked together in designing the structure. Fernbach was the first Jewish architect in the United States and had been here only 12 years when he received the commission from the congregation to build the temple. The architects and congregation leaders decided upon using a Moorish motif, which reflected the pre-Inquisition period when Jews enjoyed relative freedom in Spain. It also allowed them to compete with the soaring Gothic pinnacles of St. Patrick’s.

  As Seth and I climbed the marble steps leading into the building, the several shades of brick and “Ohio and Newark stone” greeted us on the front and on the two Minaret-type towers that soared 140 feet skyward. There were five arched doorways that were repeated just above in smaller versions. Stained and painted glass sparkled in the sunlight and tiled red roofs at various heights blended to form an Arabian fantasy of these German Reform Jews and were certainly not an understated Jewish orthodox design.

  As I opened the door and we stepped through into the main vestibule, the giant oak door whooshed back in place, and we both stood there for a moment and took in the view. Above us, the soaring space rose at least five stories up, with supporting pillars that looked to be over 60 feet tall. Moorish arches were carved and stenciled, and every inch of ceiling and walls was decorated with a variety of mathematical shapes. Both Muslims and Jews were not allowed to depict the human form, as they believed our bodies to be holy and made by God. Instead, the interior showed a dense pattern of stars, crescents, crosses, hexagons and octagons. Of course, both German Jews and the Moors loved mathematics, and the inside of the Emanu-El reflected this love with a great passion.

  The woodwork was of black walnut and white oak, and the seats were upholstered in the best manner, the aisles richly carpeted in reds and blues, and floors of the portico and vestibule were tessellated in mosaic tiles. Seth, holding my hand, looked up at me and pointed with his other hand at a seat near the wall. “That’s where I sit,” he said. “The organ has 4,500 pipes!” he said, pointing above us at the giant polychromed and gilded cylinders that stretched the entire length of the choir gallery.

  Since it was a Sunday, there were no worshippers present, just a few visitors who, like us, were admiring the magnificent architecture. I led Seth down the stairs into the basement. This was where there was a lecture room and the Sabbath school rooms that could accommodate 400 to 500 children. Seth knew these rooms well, as he attended with his mother every weekday after school. Seth was learning Hebrew, although as this was a Reform temple, he was not going to have a bar mitzvah. We were to meet Rabbi Doctor Samuel Adler, the head of the temple and one of the great philosophical and theological leaders of the Reform Movement in Germany.

  We met a Missus Schwartz, who greeted us from her desk in front of Doctor Adler’s office. She introduced herself and immediately got up and went to a small table in the corner and picked up a bowl filled with some kind of treats. She brought them over to Seth, and the boy covered his eyes with his left hand and dipped into the bowl with his right.

  “We play this game whenever Seth visits. I told him if he can pick out the piece of chocolate without looking, then I’ll let him take two more. Most of the pieces are horehound, and the children don’t like them,” she said.

  As luck would have it, Seth selected the chocolate. True to her word, Missus Schwartz let the lad choose two more. Soon, Seth resembled a chipmunk with both of his cheeks bulgin
g.

  “Doctor Adler is expecting you, Mister O’Malley. You may go right in,” she said, and she walked to the door and opened it for us.

  Doctor Adler was standing before a chart on an easel next to his desk. On this chart was the image of a hand, and in the palm of this hand was an eye. Bessie had explained to me that this was what the Jews and other supernatural believers believed to be a symbol of a hamsa, which is used to protect you from a curse that can be placed upon you so you will have bad luck.

  In fact, Bessie told me that she had given Seth a silver hamsa medallion to wear around his neck. She believed he had been cursed because he had joined me as my assistant, and this was a way to keep him safe. There were also other writings on the chart, but they were in German and Hebrew, so I did not understand what they said. I must admit, I did not expect to see this in the office of such a scientific and unsuperstitious gentleman as Doctor Adler.

  “This is the symbol of the Ayin-horeh or evil eye. Many members of my congregation, including the educated such as Missus Mergenthaler, believe this is real. The Talmud mentions it many times, but it also stipulates that it is only effective if one believes in it. This, indeed, is at the root of all differences between science and religion, is it not?”

  I nodded my head in agreement. I was not about to engage the rabbi in any argument at this point. We needed to rent his room, and he was in charge.

  Doctor Adler was clean-shaven and handsome, wearing a black frock coat, white shirtsleeves and cravat. His eyesight must have been keen, as he wore no spectacles, and his grip was firm as I shook his hand. “Welcome, Mister O’Malley! Missus Mergenthaler was correct. You are a big man. And this little man I know well. Shalom, Seth.”

  “Shalom, Doctor,” Seth said, working the final pieces of chocolate between his jaws and sitting down on a wooden chair that had a cushion on it. It must have been for the children who came to visit the Rabbi when they were naughty, because Seth glanced around the room as he sat there as if he expected an adult to begin lecturing him.