Fiendish Schemes Page 30

  “What meaning is that supposed to convey to me?”

  “Simple,” she said. “We work for Mrs. Fletcher.”

  PERHAPS I should have expected that latest revelation. But I confess that it caught me unprepared. Without being invited, I sat down on the couch, Scape making room for me beside him, to prevent my legs giving out from beneath me due to the shock.

  “You poor thing.” From her perch on the couch’s arm, Miss McThane ran a caressing hand through my hair. “I don’t think you’re really cut out for all these conspiracies and stuff. You look a little overwhelmed.”

  “If I appear so, it is because I am.” I closed my eyes for a moment as I leaned my head back against the cushions. “Forgive me if I point out that I am more accustomed to thinking of the pair of you as little better than felons, irrevocably opposed to the regular functioning of society. To discover that you are now in alliance with the highest levels of government—”

  “Yeah.” Scape nodded. “Disappointing, isn’t it? Took me a while to get my head around it, I can tell you. Kind of a new thing for us. Like the people in these days would put it, we’re a little more used to running with the hares than the hounds. But, like the people from up in the Future would say: Hard times will make a rat eat a red onion. Gotta hustle to make a buck, in other words.”

  To further revive and strengthen myself, I took a long gurgling swallow from the decanter that Scape had set on the table before us. As though its underpinnings had been loosened by the alcohol fumes, the room swam and tilted about me for a moment, then settled back down. I felt emboldened enough to present a direct enquiry to the pair.

  “What exactly is it,” I said, “that you do for the Prime Minister? Something to do with the walking lights, I imagine, and Phototrope Limited, and all those various gamblers seeking to further enrich themselves. They very likely require having a close watch kept upon them.”

  “That bunch? Don’t make me laugh.” Scape shook his head as he took the decanter from me. “They’re not even players—at least not at the level we’re talking about.”

  “What about Stonebrake, then? He may be deceased, reduced to his component atoms by the explosion at Parliament, but while alive he gave the appearance of being complicit in all manner of conspiracies.”

  “Yeah, he would, the punk.” With the back of his hand, Scape wiped his mouth after imbibing once more. “Guys like that give me a cramp. Always running around, making with the big talk—like the world revolves around their ass.” His nose wrinkled in evident disdain. “Just as well you got rid of him—you were wasting your time with him.”

  “Which is, I am supposed to take it, more productively spent with you?”

  “Hell, yeah. This stuff we’re doing with that Fletcher woman—I mean, if you can still call her that—it’s big. Super big. It’ll change the whole frickin’ world by the time we’re done.”

  “Hasn’t it been changed enough already? Perhaps it has earned something of a rest by now.”

  “Forget that noise, pal. Like a shark—always gotta keep movin’ forward, or else you drown.” The spirits produced a moment of brooding meditation on his part. “You’ll see. This is our chance. Not just for a big score . . . but something else. Something even bigger.”

  “And this is Mrs. Fletcher’s ambition as well? To change the world?”

  “Ee-yep.”

  “In what way?”

  “Get this, Dower.” He leaned close toward me, bringing his face within an inch of mine. “You know all this Steam stuff?”

  “More,” I said, “than I would ever have cared to, had I the choice.”

  “She’s gonna get rid of it.” Scape lowered his voice, as though imparting the deepest confidence possible. “Ka-boom. All gone.” He made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “Yesterday’s news. Who the hell needs it?”

  “Well . . . that sounds pleasant.” I nodded slowly, inhaling the alcohol-laden fumes he breathed in my direction. “Such would indeed be a profound change, devoutly to be wished for. All of Britain would revert to its former pastoral state, a place of hearty yeomen and verdant fields crossed by no more than the hedges and farmers’ stone fences. I can see it now—”

  “Are you kidding?” Scape drew back from me, his brows knitted in disdain. “Why would anybody want that crap? Come on, Dower, get with the program. We’re talking about getting rid of Steam so we can replace it with something else.”

  “It’s okay,” spoke Miss McThane in a soothing manner. “He tends to get a little over-excited when he talks about this stuff.”

  “Can’t get too excited,” said Scape, “far as I’m concerned. How often do you get a chance to blow up everything that the world depends on? And get rich while you’re doing it.”

  In this aspect, he was no different from my former companion Stonebrake. With such rascals, the money is ever uppermost in their thoughts. The other ambitions of which he spoke, the overthrow of Steam and so forth, did strike me as something new, though.

  “Very well.” I endeavoured to speak in as measured a tone as possible, to keep from setting him off again. “Rid the world of Steam, if you wish—I will hardly attempt to stop you. But what is it that you seek to replace it with?”

  Scape jabbed his forefinger into my chest.

  “Coal.”

  I waited for him to say something more. But he remained silent as he leaned back to gaze at me in satisfaction, just as if no profounder statement could have been made.

  “That’s it?”

  “Hell, yeah.” Scape seemed to take offense at the question. “Isn’t that enough?”

  “Ah. I see.” I gave a slow nod of my head. “Very droll. I am glad to see that your sense of humour has not been diminished by the passage of years.”

  “Wait a minute—you think I’m jerking you around? I’m serious, pal. It really is coal that Mrs. Fletcher is all hyped up about. You need to get up to speed on this, if you don’t want to get left behind.”

  “I somehow suspect, given your sudden reappearance in my life, that I will not be given much of a choice as to whether I will be left behind, or swept up in whatever schemes you have been concocting. So tell me, then—what exactly is it about this filthy, nasty stuff known as coal that our terrifying Prime Minister finds so fascinating?”

  “Look, Dower, it’s not that she’s so cranked up about it just on its own. I mean—it burns, okay? So it makes heat—pretty nice heat, actually—”

  “Yeah,” agreed Miss McThane. “I love a coal fire. It’s like . . . cozy. You know?”

  “Whatever.” Scape forged ahead with his elucidation for my benefit. “But here’s the deal. The reason why Mrs. Fletcher is all fired up about the coal thing is—it’s not Steam.”

  “Why would she find that attractive? I had been given to understand that the woman is a great enthusiast of all things steampowered. Indeed, she has had herself transformed into a creature whose very essence—her lifeblood, as it were—is Steam. How could she bear the slightest animus toward it?”

  “Okay, you got a good point there, Dower. I mean, the whole thing about coal as a power source is that you can get a boiler going with it, and then you get things moving around—like factory engines and trains—even prime ministers, as long as they’ve been all remodeled the way she’s been. So Steam per se isn’t the problem for her. The problem is the way that it’s been set up, the whole delivery system and all, with the stuff being piped in from the steam mines up there in the Lake District. That’s what ticks her off. As long as everything depends on those people, then there’s a limit to what she can do. And she’s not the kind of person who likes to have limits— that’s why she had herself made over the way she did.”

  “We made a bundle off her,” said Miss McThane, “over at Fex. Biggest job we ever did. We had our guys working for months on that one. Kind of customer we like.”

  “Yeah, and she was pretty happy with it all. You saw the way she’s been able to shove her way around over there at Parlia
ment. Very intimidating person, if you know what I mean. So everything was fine for her with the whole Steam business until she started to figure out she had made some real enemies in the process—her definition of enemies being anybody who gets in her way.”

  “And who would do that?” His explanation did not yet make sense to me. “As you have indicated, Mrs. Fletcher is somewhat of an overpowering personage.”

  “You know, Dower—you really need to start keeping up on politics. I mean, what’s going on in the world around you.”

  “I have been somewhat preoccupied of late.”

  “That’s how you wind up having stuff sneak up on you. Like this. I bet you probably haven’t even heard of the SMU.”

  “I confess the acronym is unfamiliar to me. What does it represent?”

  “What it stands for, Dower, is the Steam Miners’ Union. It represents those poor bastards who have to go down in that great big hole and send all the steam through the pipes that run everywhere now, making stuff go. Believe me, it’s a crappy job.”

  “I expect it would be.”

  “No, I mean a really crappy job.” Scape spoke with exaggerated emphasis. “You’re down there digging away or doing whatever else it is you have to do, you’re in danger of getting scalded to death at any moment—they lose a bunch of miners that way every year—and on top of that, you don’t get paid squat. So it’s no wonder that even with all the thugs the government has sent up there to whack people over the head, the miners have still managed to get themselves organized. You gotta give ’em credit for that much, at least.”

  “They would seem to be very dedicated to their labours.” I gave a slight shrug. “What would be the source of Mrs. Fletcher’s contentious relationship with them?”

  “Well, for one thing, they’d like to get paid a living wage. I mean, yeah, their standards are low, being all working class and stuff—but still, they’d probably like to be able to feed their kids.”

  “A laudable ambition.”

  “Yeah, but it’s more than that,” said Scape. “In general, the miners just don’t like being ground under Mrs. Fletcher’s wheels. Nobody does, actually, but these guys are the only ones with the guts to do anything about it. That makes ’em a problem. As long as everybody else depends on the steam miners providing the power everything runs on, then they can dictate their own terms.”

  “How utterly despicable of them.” I shook my head. “Is there no limit to human perfidy?”

  “Whatever that is—probably not.” Scape took another swallow from the decanter. “There’s a bunch of industrial re-organization schemes—that’s what Mrs. Fletcher calls ’em—that she’d like to get going, but the miners’ union has completely shut her down so far. As a matter of fact—and don’t let on that I told you this—” Decanter in hand, Scape leaned close to me again, the better to impart another confidence. “The miners . . . have gone on strike.” He straightened himself, watching for my reaction. “Believe it.”

  “Actually, it is a little difficult to credit such an assertion.” I gestured about myself and by inference to the greater world beyond the room’s walls. “There appears to have been no great interference with the supply of steam and its attendant power.”

  “Yeah—so far.” Scape attempted to make his words sound as alarming as possible. “That’s because there were already some reserves in the system. But when those run out, everything stops. And that’s when things will get ugly. Real ugly. As in so ugly, it could bring down Mrs. Fletcher’s government. Nothing’s moving, people are freezing in the streets—that’s riot time, pal. Complete anarchy. And there are plenty of anarchists around, I can tell you, who’ll be more than willing to make it all happen. You heard about that Walsall bunch?”

  “Only that I was accused of being one of their number, while I was in the custody of Mrs. Fletcher’s henchmen.”

  “Well, they’re not the only ones she’s got to worry about. Like I said, she’s got a lot of enemies. She could find herself dismantled and the pieces thrown out for scrap, in that boneyard down the river. That’s how bad it is. The miners have already shut down a couple of the major steam pits. Fletcher knows that if they close down the whole operation, she’s in big trouble.”

  “I’m not quite sure I understand.” My brow creased as I attempted to make sense of all that I had just been told. “What does this have to do with coal?”

  “Let me give it a shot,” said Miss McThane. “Now listen to me real carefully. Mrs. Fletcher needs to break the Steam Miners’ Union. She can’t do what she wants with them having a gun pointed at her head. So to speak. But she can’t get rid of them while everything still depends on steam power. Right?”

  “I suppose. . . .”

  “So she needs to get everything, the whole society, off steam. So she’s going to convert everything to running off coal. If people need steam, they won’t get it from some pipe that runs all the way back to the steam pits, up there in the middle of nowhere. They’ll just light up some coal and run a boiler with it, or whatever other kind of engine they’ve got. Simple, huh? No big steam delivery system running all over the country, people using coal instead for what they need—and the steam miners can go screw themselves. They’re done with. They can go back to starving to death, or whatever else it was they were doing before all this steam stuff happened.”

  “You know . . .” Scape spoke in a deeply musing tone. “The weird thing is . . . when I think about the Future—the way I can see it inside my head, the way it’s going to be—it’s like Steam and the way everything is right now—it’s like that’s some kind of dream. Just a little blip. Like this wasn’t supposed to happen at all. Like it’s one of those alternate history things.”

  “I don’t know what those are, either.”

  “Yeah, right—you wouldn’t. Those are something else from the Future. Like a game people cook up, thinking about ways everything could’ve been, different from the way they really happened. Only the weird thing is that maybe this is one of those alternate histories.” Scape gestured about himself. “And by getting rid of Steam, the way it is right now, Mrs. Fletcher’s actually changing everything back to the way it was supposed to be. So we can get back to the Future I remember. Crazy, huh?”

  I made no reply, but I did in fact agree with him about the insanity of what he had just spoken. As before, when he had first claimed to be able to foresee the Future, just as if he had somehow come from that distant time, I considered any discussion of being somehow able to recall that which supposedly had yet to happen—and might never happen, God willing—as an indicator of serious derangement on his part.

  “So this is what Mrs. Fletcher wishes to accomplish.” That much, I provisionally accepted as being true. “In what manner do the two of you become part of her schemes?”

  “Oh,” said Miss McThane, “that’s even better. Fletcher’s a smart cookie. She knows that it’s easy to screw people over, when you can make ’em think that it’s all their idea. If she just tries to shove it down everybody’s throats, they might actually go over to the side of the steam miners. So she needs to create a popular movement in favor of coal over steam. That way, when everybody wants it, she just has to give it to them—and then she’s done. Doesn’t matter whether it’s actually good for people or not.”

  “See, that’s where we come in.” Scape leaned back against the sofa’s cushions, a smirk of self- satisfaction on his face. “We’re basically marketing types. Making people want stuff is what we do. That’s what Fex is all about. I mean, the stuff we do there—if we tried to force people into having that done to themselves, we’d get killed. And we sure as hell wouldn’t make any money. But if you can convince people that’s what they want, then you can do anything. And get paid for it.”

  To myself, I supposed it was ever thus, for those imbued with both a criminal nature and a contemptuous disdain for their fellow man.

  “So we’ve been using the Fex business as a front, for what we’re really doing.” M
iss McThane warmed to the subject. “That’s where all those rich people come in, the ones that we’ve been servicing with all our fexual modifications. It’s not as private as we’ve led them to believe it is. That’s why we’ve got that observation platform in the back room—it’s not just for those rich morons’ amusement, you know.”

  “It helps us get the word out,” said Scape. “To the coalpunks.”

  “To whom?” I wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly.

  “The coalpunks.” He gave the word a pronounced emphasis. “They’re the latest thing. Or they will be.”

  “Just a moment.” A previously unconnected thread secured an anchor in my thoughts. “Did you ever have conversations with a certain Viscount Carnomere?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Scape nodded. “Buncha times. He’s a very forwardlooking guy, if you know what I mean. Other than running around in those caveman furs, that is.”

  Thus one small, inconsequential puzzlement was dispelled. These strange, awkward formulations had been introduced into our formerly graceful language from that ghastly Future with which Scape claimed to somehow be in contact. It seemed but one more offense to be charged against him.

  “You see, Dower”—Miss McThane picked up the interrupted exposition—“what we’ve done is associate steam power with all the wealthy and snobbish pricks in the world. The ones with all the money, the people you love to hate. I mean, you do if you’re an ordinary person. Lord Fusible and his crowd—they’re the target, right? Then you’ve got the poor people and the working people—and there’s a lot more of them, believe me—and you tap into their natural rebellious attitude, especially the young ones. Bam, just like that, you got the coalpunk movement.”

  “They’re a lot of fun.” Scape smiled. “We’ve already had a bunch of riots, all over London. There’s nothing like throwing a brick through a shop window to get the blood pumping. No wonder it’s getting so popular. Who doesn’t like to set stuff on fire? ’Long as it’s somebody’s else stuff, that is. And it’s spreading—that’s the cool part. It’s spreading all across the country.”