Neither the Civil War nor the Great Chicago Fire could be set straight, but Ransom had been secretly investigating the cause of the murders at Haymarket since the day he’d walked out of Cook County Hospital on wooden crutches. Five friends who’d also been taken to County that day never walked out, victims of the bomb supposedly set off by agitators—union rabble, heads full with communistic ideals and radical notions of fair work practices. Two other cops dead on the street. No one ever learned the truth of it. No one ever claimed responsibility, and no one ever pinned that responsibility on anyone either, despite their hanging one man for each killed police officer. All Ransom knew was the single fact that seven good cops died that day. A devil’s bargain that left him wounded and wondering who to lay it on. Official reports left as many questions as physical injuries. He gave little thought to emotional injury. But he gave a great deal of thought to what’d become a crusade to get the CPD to pay restitution to the families of the slain officers, but in his zeal to do so, he’d raised the ire of the mayor, his lieutenants, city fathers, and Chief Kohler.
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Oddly, the more he poked and prodded, the greater the protests against him, which only led Ransom to dig in his heels to uncover the truth surrounding Haymarket.
As he dug deeper into a past that wouldn’t let go, Alastair began to suspect the unimaginable . . . that the highest authorities in Chicago may have wantonly conspired against the labor movement in an effort to make them all out to be anarchists, and thus hatched the idea for the anarchist bomb in Haymarket Square. Could it have been conceived and implemented by labor bosses and by men in his own department?
A horrid notion when Alastair first came to it; it’d hit him like a stone wall. He refused to believe it, and for a long time it’d sat—while he pursued other leads, talked to other sources, went down other paths . . .
Each only led back to a single persistent and ugly conclusion. As actual eyewitnesses disappeared, moved on, died, became mentally unfit, or had graduated from incarceration to death itself, memories and details and so-called facts had become scarce, drying up.
But he remembered the doctor who’d patched him up and tended his burns, Dr. Christian Fenger. What Fenger knew, however, he had no intention of telling Alastair Ransom. He felt the matter rightly belonged in the grave of time, better left with those dead on both sides of the labor wars. On this score, Dr. Fenger had all these years remained adamant.
The cab stopped abruptly. The end of movement and the sudden silence against the cobblestones raised Ransom from his reverie. He climbed from the cab, tipped the faceless, silent cabbie and walked from the tavern address fronting the street to the back alleyway. Here he climbed stairs to the second floor atop the tavern, and knocked on Polly Pete’s door in the sure belief that Polly no longer lived here, replaced by his beloved Merielle instead.
No answer came at the door.
This surprised him.
He checked his watch.
He’d given her everything she needed to pursue her fasci
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nation and interest in painting oils, and she was an amazing artist, after all. He’d seen the result of his patronage; his benevolence such as it was on a detective’s pay. She simply needed to be discovered by Crocea or Barhid or any of the major galleries now legion here. Along with commerce and industrialization, the interest in opera, theater, ballet, and the arts had blossomed. In fact, Chicago’s new art institute was this year completed in Lake Park, standing alone and set apart on the lakeside of Michigan Avenue facing the buildings of commerce and banking. The arts building at Congress and Michigan Avenue also stood out in his thoughts now as he again knocked at Merielle’s door.
Where might she be?
Then he heard someone on the inside.
He banged louder.
Louder still.
Finally, the door crept open, wide enough he could see her eye in shadow. It was swollen red and cut so badly as to be closed. Opening her injured eye sent a shock of pain through Merielle that she could not mask, contorting her soft features. Someone had beaten her, and he knew exactly the man—if the term could be applied to Elias Jervis.
“Don’t say anything, Alastair,” she said. “Just listen. I’m no good for you. I let you down.”
“Jervis did this to you! The bastard. I’ll kill the sonofa—”
“No, it wasn’t Elias!”
“Who then?” Jervis had been the last man who’d tried to keep her, but he only knew her as Polly Pete. It was rumored he’d once put her up as partial payment on a bad debt. Ransom goaded Elias to toss her in as a prize during a heated poker game when both men were drunk. Ransom had had his eye on her since seeing a photograph that Philo had sold him. But at that poker game, he saw something pained and solitary and quivering and in need when he gazed into her eyes. He cajoled Elias into the bet, upping the ante, saying it must be a permanent arrangement, and Polly’s eyes lit up with the possibility. And so he’d won her fairly, and once 76
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they were alone, he offered her enough money to leave Chicago, to go home. But she continually claimed there was no home—that it no longer existed.
That had been the night they’d first made love, but also the night they’d watched dawn arrive together. The night Alastair learned her real name.
“I slipped back, Alastair,” she now tearfully said. “I don’t know why . . . don’t know what’s wrong with me, but he got ugly, the bastard, but I swear it never came to nothing but a beating. It’s all my own fault. I shouldn’t’ve let him through the door, but . . . but he was going to go forty bloody dollars.
Damn me! Damn my—”
He pulled open the door and took her in his arms. When he’d first met her, his friend Stead had warned him off, characterizing her as a woman “shut up in sin,” one destined to tread the “cinder path of sin,” as he’d called it. But Ransom refused to give her up.
She stood shivering, surprised, expecting him to hit her.
“It was Elias, wasn’t it? I want a piece of the bastard.”
“Forget him, Ransom. My own stupidity and foolishness got me this way.”
“No, Merielle! No man has a right to do this to you!” He shoved the door closed. “No one!”
“You don’t know my final secret, Alastair . . . sweet, dear Alastair.”
“Christ . . . I thought we’d gotten through all your secrets.”
“We got through all of Merielle’s secrets, yes. But not . . .”
“—not Polly’s?”
“ ’Fraid so.”
“Whatever will make you happy?”
“Something’s wrong in my blood . . . in my head even, Alastair. I need someone to tell me why . . .”
“Why?”
“W-why I like to be hurt . . . why I like pain. Why I want to be treated like dirt. Ground beneath your boots, Alastair.”
“Baby, it’s—”
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“Shut up and listen! I’m telling you the truth, finally, so listen!”
“All right . . . go ahead, sweetheart.”
“Can you, old man, tell me why I want to be Polly and not . . . not this princess you want me to be, Alastair, the one I’ve been trying to be! Like your bloody dream of some child I once was?”