Deseret (8 page)

First, persuade Brigham Young to visibly ally with the
United States in deploring the secession of any individual State or association
of States.
 
Get him to put
pressure, with the threat of his famous air-ship fleet, on the so-called
Confederate leadership, head off the secession, get them back to the table to
keep talking about tariffs and railroads and all the other nonsense that was
threatening to split the United States apart.
 
He was on his way to pursue that objective this very
instant.

Second, and right under Brigham Young’s nose, secretly
deliver rubies (a negotiated
quid pro quo
)
to an agent of the famous Orson “Madman” Pratt (and in the event, it had been
Pratt himself, and not an agent, to take delivery), in exchange for
comprehensive schematics of Pratt’s (and Deseret’s) airship technology,
including designs of its individual airships.
 
Sam had delivered the
quid
, the rubies.
 
Pratt had given him an appointment to deliver the
quo
, which would be a pile of papers in some shape, but
the spurious, off-hand manner of the appointment’s making led Sam to consider
the possibility that Pratt had no intention of following through.
 
Sam would be at the appointed place in
the appointed time anyway, of course, but if Pratt didn’t show, Sam would have
to think seriously about the remainder of his objectives.

Third—and this was where Sam’s instructions foresaw
real possibilities of confusion on the ground, not to mention disaster, mayhem
and even crime—do whatever he could to aid the United States in the
coming war.
 
This might mean, he’d
been told, stealing Pratt’s airships, or stealing the schematics, or acts of
sabotage against the Deseret aerial fleet or against the Kingdom on other
fronts.
 
He’d likely have to figure
it out for himself in the moment.
 
Sam wasn’t a diplomat, and he was even less a spy, but he
really
wasn’t a thief or a saboteur.
 
He was prepared to do his duty, but he
sincerely hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

Or if it did, he wanted to be able to unleash Tamerlane
O’Shaughnessy and wash his hands of the consequences.
 
Really, that was what the crazy Irishman was for.
 
Sam didn’t need a bodyguard against
these—he twinkled his fingers again at a woman-old man-woman trio of
passersby—harmless, eccentric, mechanically-minded Deseret Mormons.
 
They were no threat to him or to the
United States, however strange it was that their old men snapped up all their
most attractive women.
 

He kind of—almost—liked them.

The Beehive House was built in a style that Sam thought was
current, and that those who concerned themselves with fashions in the houses of
the wealthy liked to call
Greek revival
.
 
Tall white columns rose up above a
wraparound porch and supported a white-railed wraparound balcony at the second
story.
 
Above that, a mansard roof
climbed to a widow’s walk (or maybe a
widows’
walk
,
Sam thought merrily, wondering exactly how many women would mourn President
Young if he ever failed to come back from sea) that in turn surrounded
something that looked like a big pedestal, or maybe a pulpit.
 
On top of the pulpit, preaching to all
the architectural splendor below, perched a little beehive.
 
In the shadow of the gigantic
Tabernacle, it was an acorn lying beside an oak tree.

It was hard to be sure from the outside, but it looked to
Sam like a suite or a wing of some sort actually linked the Beehive House and
the Lion House together.
 
One big,
happy family, then.
 
Really big, if
the stories contained even an ounce of truth.

And it was a rare story that didn’t contain at least an
ounce.

Sam badly wanted to light a cigar, but in the interest of
diplomatic decorum, he refrained.
 
He straightened up his bow tie, paced up the walk and encountered a
double-wide white door with no knocker.
 
An engraved plate beside an elegant brass chain read
PULL
.
 

He pulled:
ding-ding-dong
.

The door opened, and Sam found himself smiling stupidly into
the face of a clean, pressed, pretty young woman.

“Good afternoon,” she said sweetly.

“Yes.”
 
He
smiled, caught a little off guard.
 
For a moment, he couldn’t remember what he was doing here, so he reached
into his jacket and produced a Cohiba.
 
He waved it at her in a polite hello.

She frowned.

He put the cigar back, abashed.

“If you’re looking for President Young, my father’s not
taking visitors at the moment,” the young woman said.

“Your father?”
 
Sam was amused, though of course if the man had thirty wives, he
probably had a daughter or two out of the bargain.
 
He knew from calotypes that Young was a serious-looking old goat,
but then it was a universal rule that half the world’s women, including the
pretty ones, had fathers who were less handsome than average.
 
He suppressed an impulse to ask her
about her family life, and instead cleared his throat officiously and gave his
most charming smile.
 
“Your
father’s expecting me.
 
My name’s
Clemens, and I’m a U.S. government man.”

The girl grinned back at him.
 
“Be careful, Mr. Clemens.
 
Words like that frighten some folks around here.”

She led him down a long hall and around a corner and brought
him to a door where two big, broad-shouldered men in dark suits, long coats and
hats stood guard.
 
One held a
rifle, but they both wore pistols on their hips.
 
“Mr. Clemens is here to see my father,” she told them.
 
“He has an appointment.”

They squinted and bared yellow teeth, fierce as any
Mississippi keelboat man or logger from the Great North Woods, but they let him
in.

Brigham Young’s office was bigger than the communications
room in which Sam had seen his man George Cannon, earlier in the day.
 
Here, too, there were glass and brass
message tubes and a sorting table, but there were only half a dozen of the
tubes and the table was a small one, inobtrusively out of the way.

Cannon’s room had struck Sam as the working center of a
great socio-mechanical brain.
 
Young’s looked like the den of a lion.
 
Its walls were painted the confident, masculine red of a
hunting lodge, its three large sofas were a brilliant gold and all the wood,
most conspicuous being a deep, broad and tall desk, absolutely clean on top,
was stained dark and well-polished.
 
There was a globe in one corner of the room, and full bookshelves (and
that surprised Sam—hadn’t Young been a cabinetmaker, or some similar sort
of tradesman in his Yankee, pre-Mormon career?).
 

Two more tall, stone-faced gunmen stood inside the
door.
 
A fifth stood by a tall,
yellow-draped window, and as Sam coolly looked him over, he thought he saw,
just flickering in the corner of the window, a face.
 
He wasn’t sure, but he thought, again, that it might be the
face of the midget Coltrane.

He fought back a spasm of astonishment.

Should he say something?
 
Best not to, he decided quickly.
 
He didn’t want to take responsibility for anything the
midget might do, and besides, Young’s security guards would certainly catch him
any moment.
 

If he was even really out there, after all.

Two men stood up at the sofas from a tray of tea and Sam
crossed the office to shake hands.
 
President Brigham Young wasn’t tall, but he wasn’t short either, and he
was powerfully built.
 
With his
curly hair, the beard around his jaw and chin but clean-shaven upper lip, and
ox-like shoulders, he looked like a man who knew how to use a plane and chisel.

“Fornication pants!” Young snorted.

Sam froze, unsure he’d heard the man correctly, thinking
maybe he was witnessing some rough Mormon attempt at humor.

“He is a modern man, Señor Presidente,” the other man
said.
 
He was a heavy black
gentleman, completely bald and clean-shaven but for a little sharp spike of
graying hair beneath his lower lip, and he wore a careful smile on his face.

“That doesn’t give him liberty to seduce my daughters,”
Young barked, “no matter how convenient he, or they, might find the unbuttoning
of his pants!”

“I… I…” Sam found himself stuttering, an affliction from
which he hadn’t realized he suffered.
 
He swallowed hard, to get rid of the fragmented sentences, and tried
again.
 
“I hadn’t realized that Mr.
Levi-Strauss’s trousers were so potent,” he essayed a disarming joke.
 
“Will it put you more at your ease if I
remove them?”

“Mr. Clemens.”
 
It wasn’t a question, and it was growled.
 
They shook hands.
 
“This is Mr. Juan Jermaine Tomás Salvador María Zerubbabel Armstrong,
Ambassador Plenipotentiary to the Kingdom of Deseret from the Republica de los
Estados Reunidos de México.”
 
He
grinned.
 
“Give or take a name or
two.”

“Joo have no missed one yet,” Armstrong said.
 
He radiated gravitas.
 
He and Young both did.
 
If not for the fact that Armstrong also
exuded a certain easygoing humor and charm, Sam would have felt daunted by
Young’s bear-like assault on Sam and his innocent Levi-Strauss pants.
 
Sam shook Ambassador Armstrong’s hand,
too.
 
“Mr. Clemens.
 
Joo are the United States man, aren’t
joo?”

“Yes I am,” Sam admitted.
 
“The way people talk about me around here, I’m starting to
imagine that my arrival was expected.”

Crash!

The glass of the tall window exploded inward in a fury of
tiny splinters, stinging Sam’s cheek and lodging into his curly hair.
 
Sam stumbled back and away from the
window as he turned, his eye barely able to follow the blur of action.
 

There was a man, short but built like a bull, and he has a
sword in his hand.
 
No, not a
sword, the long fighting knife they called the Arkansas Toothpick.
 
Long hair and beard and buckskins
flapped behind the newcomer as he charged.

The bodyguard standing by the window moved, but not fast
enough.
 
The intruder threw his
body at the bigger man.
 
Before
anyone could react he had a forearm around the man’s throat and his long,
wicked knife pointing directly into his eye.

The other guards froze.
 

“You’re not the midget!” Sam exclaimed in surprise.
 
“You’re Rockwell!”

“What?!” Young bellowed.

The Deseret lawman from Fort Bridger stared at Sam with
piercing blue eyes in a scarred and weatherbeaten face.
 
“You’s expectin’ a midget?” he asked.

The Ambassador pivoted to look at Sam with concern.
 
“That is a good question, señor
Clemens.
 
Were joo expecting a
midget to come through the window?”

Sam laughed out loud.
 
Oops.
 
“No, Ambassador, no,
Mr. President, I wasn’t.
 
I just…
I…”
 

“I dunno what they told you, Brother Brigham!” Rockwell
howled, “and I don’t know nothin’ about no midgets!”
 
His voice was rough and raw and he smelled like a mountain
man from ten feet away.
 
“I don’t
know what Lee said, but I’m loyal to you like I always been.”

“You’re holding a knife to my bodyguard’s face, Port!” Young
roared.
 
He looked like he was
about to paw the floor and charge.

The mountain man backed his knife away half an inch.
 
“But you know I’m loyal, don’t
you?
 
You’ll treat me right?
 
You won’t listen to whisperin’ voices
and throw me to the wolves without me gettin’ a fair hearin’?”

“Have I ever been unfair to you, Porter?”
 
Veins stood out in Young’s neck.
 
“Have I ever been unfair to
anyone?
”

“There’s things I gotta tell you, Brother Brigham, there’s
men as are disloyal, as are plottin’.”
 
The blue eyes danced wildly from each of Young’s bodyguards to the
next.
 
“You ain’t listened to
Eliza, you gotta listen to me!”

“Put down the knife!”

Rockwell nodded and dropped the weapon to the carpet.
 
Sam breathed a sigh of relief as
Young’s bodyguards swarmed him, pulling multiple pistols and blades away from
his body and out of his reach.
 
His
shoulders slumped like a defeated man, but he had a childlike expression on his
face.
 
An expression of hope, Sam
thought, and trust, which seemed incredible in light of the affronted, raging
irritation clouding the face of Brigham Young.

The door opened and five armed men barged in.
 
At their head stumped a lean, bent man,
with a stubbled face and aimlessly drifting eyes.
 
Sam recognized him from Chief Pocatello’s corral.
 
Now he openly held a pistol in his
hand.