Free Automatic Woman by Nathan L. Yocum Page A

fixtures. Gone.
    My stomach rumbled and twisted. No notes, no words, no signs of who was here or what had transpired. I tried to calculate the manpower of an exodus of this magnitude. Had they left last night? Had he been moving since my bail three days ago? I made a mental note to talk to the porter I’d sent here the night before.
    Outside Nouveau’s barn, street merchants and wagoners occupied the dirt roads with their comings and goings. A horseless carriage puttered by. I tried to swallow but my mouth was free of spit and coated in sticky goo. I sat on the curb and let my mind reach out.
    I could lean on a pawn broker or two, see if news of Nouveau’s departure had crossed their network. This seemed a bum lead. Anyone who’s thorough enough to pull the fixtures off the wall would do well enough to cover news of the departure, or set some false story for the looky-loos.
    If Nouveau had wanted the Swan so bad, if his connections were this good, why involve me at all? The unknown loomed over me. I could glean the existence of a bigger picture; I just couldn’t see the details.
    Lord Barnes, my former boss and trainer, suddenly came to mind.
    “Always start at the beginning,” he’d say. “If you lose your way, just go back to the beginning.” Lord Barnes, master thief catcher, master blackmailer, pain in the arse boss.
    I hired a hansom cab and went back to Saxon’s penny theater, back to the beginning of my story, back to the scene of the crime.
    The door to Saxon’s theater was busted off the hinges. No surprise. I drew my Engholm and entered the theater on full alert. Saxon’s place had been worked over like my apartment. Glasses cases were smashed and emptied. Posters were ripped from the walls and left in shredded pieces. In the theater, all the chairs had been broken to sticks and piled into the orchestral pit, like an unlit bonfire. The key on my trigger guard jingled and jangled in the otherwise dead silence. I went backstage. Torn curtains and cut ropes marked the continued mayhem. A little staircase ran to the second story. I followed it, gun low and ready. The stairs lead into Dr. Saxon’s office and living quarters. It was a cramped studio with a smashed bed, gas hotplate, and an oversized workbench bolted to the north wall. I barely had room to turn around. Dr. Saxon’s life was his work in the most literal sense. Here were the living quarters of a man who cared nothing for luxury. His bed had been converted into a pool of feathers like mine. The shelves of his work bench stood open with smashed locks. They probably had held files, though everything had been salvaged from them. Axe scars marred the surface of the table. I ran my hands over the marks, the wounds. I imagined Saxon looming over this table, pressing cogs and gears, tweaking small parts into larger machines, everything for the dancers below, the Doctor’s beautiful dancers.
    I opened my eyes. Between the table and wall a tiny corner of paper peeked out. I tried to pinch it, but my fingers were too thick to get a hold. Whatever the paper was, it was firmly wedged between the bolted table and the wall. I gave the table a good shake. Nothing. I grabbed a corner of the table and gave it a good tug. The bolts held and I accomplished nothing but making my infected hand even more tender. I looked around the room for some sort of tool, something to assist. I lifted a plank from the busted bed, cracked it over my knee, and pulled a splinter the size of pencil loose.
    I was jabbing at the envelope when I heard shuffling down below. I gave the splinter one last shove and the paper slid under the desk. It was an open envelope, empty, addressed to C. Darwin, 12 Upper Gower Street, London.
    There was another noise down below, this time a crash. I pocketed the envelope and crept to the door, gun back in my fist. The doorway to Saxon’s living quarters came out onto a bird’s eye view of his theater. With the curtains gone, that view included the