Willow Locke - Anarchist Detective

The Amilech

Willow and James crept through the alleyway to the service door on the east side of the Asch building. James scanned up and down the alley, but the only sign of movement was the scurrying rats. Willow pulled the leather tool wallet from her sleeve and unrolled it. She selected a curved pick and tension wrench and went to work picking the lock. She had it open in a few moments and they slipped inside, easing the door closed behind them.
They were in a narrow service corridor with a door at the other end.
"Wait for a few minutes, Whitcomb," Willow whispered "Let your eyes adjust to the dark. Listen for footsteps."
They sat silently in the dark. He held her hand, the leather glove felt rough on her skin. She couldn't see him, couldn't feel the texture of his hand. What had she drawn him into? He was a brilliant scholar. Willow suspected his fluid intelligence could master any field. He would become an engineer, or a doctor, or an author. His future wasn't fixed. He had the resources to become anything he wished. She should have left him to his studies, but he refused to leave her side.
Now she was being drawn into some dark trap; deeper into the suffocating fear every tenement resident felt every day. Her family was being hunted, and not for the first time. Immigrants were used to being despised. She knew what they thought-New York would be a more hygienic place if they were all dead. It was no different from Prague, after everything.
But James wasn't part of her sordid existence. He was a wealthy young scholar with a bright future.
"I'm going to ruin you," she whispered, her eyes had almost adjusted, she could dimly see the topography of his face, a glint of light on his horn-rim glasses, the jagged silhouette of his disheveled blonde hair. "You should go home, Whitcomb."
"It's too late for that, Locke." he pushed up his glasses on his nose. "I'm with you."
She reached for him, felt the collar of his wool coat beneath the rough leather of her glove. She kissed him.
"Too late for both of us."
She lead him along the wall of the corridor and picked the lock of the entry door. They were in the main stairwell at the first landing. There was a pile of rubbish in the corner, rags and old clothes to be taken to the alleyway in the morning.
"It moved," said James, staring into the darkness. A rat emerged from the rags and scurried across the landing, to vanish under the stairs. Willow had crouched, ready to spring, her fists clenched. She stood up slowly.
"The eighth floor," she said; they began to climb. On the seventh floor landing she peered into the darkness toward the wall.
"What is it?" asked James
"The strut is broken." She switched the camera on and heard the accelerating whine of the current. She flipped up the viewer and adjusted the knobs and the oil lenses suspended in water morphed from convex to concave, their symmetry and motion made them look like something living; like phosphorescent jellyfish trapped in the glass cylinders. She shaped the oil lenses into concave disks and the image in the viewfinder grew brighter.
"It gathers light," she focused the image. "The brass strut is broken. Something hit the rail. Something heavy. There is a stain on the wall." She adjusted the focus to examine the dark color on the brick.
"Whitcomb, take this." she let the camera dangle on the strap around her neck and handed him the miniature tool wallet from her sleeve. "There's a small blade. Get a sample of that stain."
Whitcomb unfolded the wallet and found the blade. He opened his bag and took out his school notebook. He tore out a page and folded it into a makeshift envelope. He scraped the wall and caught the flakes in the paper.
"Blood?" asked Whitcomb.
"I believe so." Willow snapped the viewfinder shut and switched off the camera.
They walked to the eighth floor, the steel door to the factory was locked. Willow shifted the camera behind her and went to work with her picks.
She worked on the lock for a few minutes then grunted in frustration.
"It's a complex lock. The tumblers aren't sequential. One group is triggered when the key is inserted vertically, another when the key is turned to the horizontal. The key must have two flanges. If only I could- see." She trailed off, then quickly powered the camera on again and opened the viewfinder. She rapidly adjusted the voltage knobs. The oil shapes flashed like mercury as they inverted into a new form. Now they were long and thin with a reversed bell. Willow peered into the viewfinder.
"It's an impossible view, inverted and radially exploded," she said "But I can see the tumblers." she stepped aside so James could look into the viewer.
"The vertical ones are that row on the bottom, the horizontal ones are on the left. Count them for me."
Willow handed the camera to James and inserted her picks into the lock.
"There's 13 tumblers total," said James "vertical tumblers are numbers 1,2,3,5,7,11, and 13. Horizontal tumblers are 4,6,8,9,10,12."
Willow closed her eyes as she worked. She inserted a second pick. She bit her lip in concentration. Finally she inserted the wrench, turned it and eased the steel door open. The heat and stench of the factory wafted through the door.
They entered the factory and crept past the mountain of scraps at the cutting table. The factory was brighter than the windowless stairwell; the moonlight filtered in through the dirty, cracked glass panels. A rat emerged from the pile of fabric and streaked down the stairs.
There was a jumble of broken furniture near the wall. Locke and Whitcomb crept to the overseer's office.
"What happened to the door?" Whitcomb whispered. There was no door, it was entirely missing. Broken brass hinges hung from the cracked frame. Part of the deadbolt still stuck in the wall. Willow pulled the steel bolt from the wall and examined it in her gloved hand.
"The door was knocked down. The force was strong enough to break the deadbolt. A thick oak door can be stronger than steel. There must have been something -a battering ram."
She strode back to the pile of rubble and shifted through it. She held up the black Singer sewing machine and turned it in the blue moonlight. The heavy steel was misshapen in one place, the enamel had broken away.
"This was used to break the door." she said.
They walked into the office. There was a pair of gold cufflinks resting on the desktop, jeweled capital B's. Willow spun one on the leather blotter like a top, then brushed them aside. She rapidly picked the locks on Max Blanck's desk drawers. She opened the first drawer and found his accounting ledger.
"Look for unusual expenses, repeated transfers, things that don't make sense." She passed the book to James, who began poring over it using a magnifying glass and a ruler he found in the drawer.
"Payments to a clinic," James flipped the pages. "The Seraphim Health Clinic for the Working Poor. Regular payments, every month- for the provision of employee health care."
"None of his employees ever visited a clinic." Willow photographed the entries.
She opened a large drawer.
"Personnel files- these names, Kohein, Zilkus, Lostch, it's the list." She pulled the vellum page Eitan had given her from her pocket and quickly checked the names. "They're all here. Nothing on the Pinkertons- officially they don't exist."
She pulled the Lostch files and spread them on the desk- pictures of Eitan, pictures of Rachel, their daily routine, their jobs, their conversations.
"Why? What is the purpose?" She flipped open her own file, Talia Lostch. There were years of grainy telephoto pictures of her. There she was in 1907, playing cards with Ayala around the dining room table. A photograph of her at Reuven's workbench was accompanied by text which described her as an engineering child prodigy.
"Do they know?" asked James, "About Willow?"
"There's no record," she flipped through the folder "We're still one step ahead."
Willow spread out the pages over the desk and flipped open the viewfinder of the titanium camera. She shaped the lenses until the entire desktop appeared in the frame and the image was sharp. She took the picture and James carefully reassembled the files. They spread out more files for the next photograph. They worked until they had photographed everything.
"There is no indication of the influence of another entity- no tangible evidence of a network. Blanck will claim these are internal employee records, even though it is odd that they are so detailed." Willow sighed and closed the camera.
"What about the ledger?" James opened it again, scrutinizing it with the magnifying glass. "The Seraphim Clinic must be a front."
"That's what I suspect. We'll need to investigate." She peered at the ledger. "But I don't think it would be hard for Blanck to pay off a few employees in exchange for the sworn testimony that they had regular health care. There must be something else, something we're - missing." She was running her gloved fingers over the ledger entries, and stopped suddenly.
"Seafood," she whispered "Barrels of fish- shipped by train to Homestead, Pennsylvania,"
"Blanck has a subsidiary business as a-" Whitcomb hesitated, "as a fishmonger?"
"Look at the payment." said Willow "500 dollars received for 3 barrels?"
"I'd love to see the fish market in Homestead," said James "must be solid gold herring."
"It's double blind. The network is here." Willow flipped through the ledger taking photographs. "Blanck makes payments to the clinic, and receives payments through selling fish."
Willow reached for a smaller side drawer and pulled it open. Inside was a box of cuban cigars and a cigar cutter. She frowned and pushed the drawer back and forth.
"The drawer is too heavy, look at the depth of the desk-it's too short," she knelt down examined the drawer. "There's something-" she took off her glove and felt underneath the drawer. "A miniature lock."
She laid on her back and worked with the pick and the tension wrench. A spring released and the drawer slid out further, revealing a hidden compartment. She stood up and rummaged through it. She found a torn lace collar attached to a scrap of fabric with a forget-me-not pattern. She smoothed it out on the desktop. She found her sister's leather pocketbook and opened it, her fingers trembling. There was a book inside, one she had seen Ayala reading at night at home in the tenement: "Walden" by Henry David Thoreau. She flipped through it to read an inscription written on the inside cover in blue ink:
Dear Ayala,
This book has been a beacon for me, giving me hope when my life seemed hopeless. When I despaired, this book comforted me. Its message is that all life is sacred. Though the path of my life seemed controlled by others, I realize now the freedom I have to create my own destiny. Now I want to pass it on to you—I hope you know how much our friendship means to me.
Your Loving Friend,
Hannah