Sweet cheeks?
Amanda wished with all her heart that she did have her white parasol on her right now, or almost any of her other 'working parasols.' She'd suspected who might be the boss of the criminal operation going on in the Federal Building as soon as she'd recognized Joey Rock-fingers. She, like Tem, longed to bring in 'Presidio Pete' Yerba ever since the killer had managed to elude them in San Francisco. But now she was the one at Yerba's non-existent mercy along with her loved ones, and she not only didn't have any of her favorite weapons to hand, she didn't even have her usual strength or energy. She had recovered from her exposure to the spilled chemical on her skirt for the most part consciousness-wise, but still didn't feel up to her usual level of physical ability. She also wasn't finding it easy to control the swirl of emotions threatening her from within. Need to focus, need to focus . . . .
What did she have to bring to this fight? She and Jimmy had the knives they'd taken off of Yerba's unconscious goons. They still had the skirt and its dangerous residue. There were distinct advantages to being underestimated sometimes – it was easy to conceal contraband like the knives during a search using their father's old sleight-of-hand trickery and none of the gang suspected that the skirt contained anything more than her cast-off petticoat. Two knives and the most knockout piece of women's wear in creation weren't enough to take out a well-armed, well-organized gang that had already gotten the drop on all of them though. There had to be something they could do, something they could use.
"Uh, can I . . . can I sit down too please?" Jimmy asked with a frightened quaver in his voice, looking toward the Investigators seated on the floor.
Yerba nodded and his gunsels gestured for Jimmy to join the Investigators. Jimmy scrambled to sit down next to a couple of captives near the back.
"Thanks," Jimmy murmured to the mob. "As my Great, Great Aunt Maude always said-"
"Shaddup, kid," Yerba growled.
Jimmy obediently shut up, but he didn't need to finish the sentence for Tem and Amanda to get a hidden meaning from it. He had figured out something he could do at least, even if they hadn't. Amanda tilted her head forward ever so slightly to acknowledge it – message received. So, she saw out of the corner of her eye, did Tem. The real Great, Great Aunt Maude would have been amused to know she still had a name to conjure with half a century after her death, Amanda thought. Their father had taken to using that name with a purpose. Amanda just hoped her younger brother knew what he was doing, whatever it was. He might be the smartest one of the trio for all his youth, and he'd been resourceful beyond all expectations in Murfreesboro a few months ago. He'd also come darn close to getting himself killed for that ingenuity.
She needed to figure out what she could do herself. It didn't take any particular genius to know that Yerba would focus more on her actions than on Jimmy's, whatever she did. She also needed more information if she could get it. Without bothering to ask permission first, she folded her legs in their masculine pants and sat down cross-legged next to her husband, staring defiance at Yerba all the way. She could spring up from this position much faster than most people, and she needed to confer with Tem if possible. Yerba made a snarling gesture at her but did nothing else, since at that moment he was distracted by the arrival of some of the Wests' own possessions from below. Greedy as ever, the gangster turned his attention to these new acquisitions, trusting that his armed guards could handle the prisoners for him.
"You're looking better," Tem commented quietly.
"A change of outfit can do a girl wonders," she answered back. She dared say nothing more about her condition while they might yet hope to use the skirt and its chemical cargo as a weapon. Jimmy still had possession of it and had set it down carefully beside himself. None of the gang had taken any special notice of it beyond their initial snickers at Jimmy.
In hushed tones and with surprisingly little objection from their captors, Tem and Wickersham filled Amanda in on Yerba's plans for the Franconium hydrate – and for them. It was an ambitious and blood-curdling plot all right – one that must not be allowed to succeed, whatever the cost. And Yerba might not give a damn about Franco-American diplomacy, but Amanda understood more than a little about the importance of foreign relations, just as her father had. Right now with political tensions rising in Europe, especially in France, that might be the most important consideration of them all.
Amanda might have had trouble wrestling her fears and concerns into their accustomed corral today, but the sight of Yerba and his goons manhandling the family's private possessions was enough to put a quiet, determined fury in charge of the herd.
"What's this do?" the San Francisco mob leader asked her, handing her grandmother's china teapot off to one of his gang for inspection. Yerba had experienced the touch of Amanda's electricity-charged white silk parasol once before and had sense – or cowardice – enough not to risk poking into Amanda's other belongings too closely himself.
"It's my grandmother's teapot," Amanda answered laconically. "It's used to make tea."
The gangster handling the tea pot, peering inside it and looking down its spout smirked and with one quick tossing motion smashed the fragile object to pieces on the floor. Amanda wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of hearing her gasp or seeing her flinch in reaction.
"That was genuine Spode," she said coolly with narrowed eyes.
She did get some satisfaction from Yerba's reaction as he wiped the smug, ain't-that-a-shame smirk off the minion's face with a swift blow to the head.
"Idjit!" Yerba yelled at the man. "That could'a been worth something!" Then he turned to the rest of the crew pawing through or bringing up boxes from the Wests' cartload. "Don't nobody destroy nothing else without my say so! You got it?"
They got it.
While Yerba and his gang were distracted with that, Amanda looked around to see whatever she could see, and try to figure out what Jimmy was up to. It didn't take her long, and when she did, she felt almost embarrassed that she hadn't thought of it herself. Tem's hands were fastened behind his back by steel handcuffs, but the Federal Investigators had been tied with ordinary rope. Amanda had been trained by her parents to spot an acting job when she saw it. Three of the Investigators sitting closest to Jimmy were now only pretending to have their hands still tied behind them. A fourth Investigator was trying just a little too hard to act inconspicuous while she noticed the slight but steady movement of the arm muscles under his shirt. The knife Jimmy had kept concealed on his person was making the rounds. A knife blade wouldn't solve Tem's dilemma, but at least some of their law enforcement colleagues were no longer as helpless as the gang thought. Amanda considered sending the knife she'd kept on her to perform the same function, but Yerba's sentries were paying closer attention to her and Tem than to her gawky teenage brother and the other captives.
"Hey, you!" Yerba called over to Amanda again. "What's this do?" He held up an object Amanda couldn't blame him for not recognizing this time, it being one of her father's less successful inventions.
"It's an electric waffle iron," she sighed. "It makes waffles, sometimes." And could make Lily Gordon irritated even more often, she remembered, though her mother was in a far better place than any smoke-filled kitchen these days.
"What'cha having some kind of kitchen sale?" Yerba complained, disappointed by his meagre and mediocre haul.
"We've been packing up our parents' belongings," Amanda said, doing her very best to keep her tone and temper under control. "They died a few months ago."
"Yeah, I heard about ol' West." The mobster started chuckling. "I heard it was a real blast!"
If looks could have killed, the hostile glares Tem, Amanda and Jimmy all gave him in that moment would have cremated Yerba on the spot. But it helped Amanda to summon the calculating, dangerous calm she needed so much right now. Yerba would regret that. Amanda put away all her fear and frustration and became the force of iron determination, with a much sharper focus. She began thinking much more clearly and quicker though outwardly nothing about her appearance changed.
"Hey boss, look at these," one of Yerba's gangsters said as he and a co-thug carried in two boxes labeled T. M. of Steel lamp 1 and T. M. of Steel lamp 2.
Tem flashed Amanda a wary glance at the sight of those boxes, but Amanda didn't return his concern. She was counting up the number of Yerba's men, going over in her head what she already knew about them, and forming a plan. A strange plan, perhaps, but the best one she could think of, and the contents of those boxes were nothing if not strange.
"T. M. of Steel lamp," Yerba muttered, reading aloud and then looking back at Tem and Amanda for answers. "What's 'at supposed to mean?"
Tem appeared flustered and furious as she knew he would. In full actress mode, she adopted an expression of awkward humiliation mixed with indignation, causing her face to blush again as she gave Tem a sharp nudge that was one of their signals to let her take the lead.
"You would have chosen to bring that along!" she scolded her husband. "You and Jimmy! Or I suppose you were going to claim it was all Jimmy's idea!" In the back, Jimmy seemed plenty flustered too, but he knew his sister's acting abilities and had more than a few of his own. Amanda's sudden, quarrelsome reaction told Yerba nothing of what he wanted to know, but made him even more curious about the contents of those boxes, as well as cautious.
"I said, Lady," Yerba growled, "what's in it!"
Amanda pulled her sitting position up straighter and made herself the very picture of offended matronly sensibilities.
"If you must know," she sniffed, "it's one of those old winding peep shows. Something our fathers apparently used at one time."
"Peep shows?" Yerba asked, eyebrows raised. If there was one term that could get him and every one of his men suddenly interested, this was it.
"You know," she frowned, fidgeting and trying to make herself blush even hotter. "One of those old-fashioned naughty stereopticons, with the pictures of dance hall girls dancing around in their . . . ." she hesitated. "Their . . . very little. And then taking that off. A bawdy peep show." She paused again and snuffled with disgust. "It's designed to look like a lamp so men could hide what it was from their wives or girlfriends, but my mother figured it out. I don't know why she ever let my father or Uncle Jim keep the thing! They probably bought it when they were bachelors." Now she had every single one of the San Francisco gang present hanging on her every outraged word. Possibly all of the Federal Investigators too. She took the calculated risk of staring back at her brother to add to her authenticity by scolding him too. "And I know Mom caught you using it once, Jimmy!"
Jimmy clamped his mouth shut with very authentic-looking resentment and managed a pretty impressive blush on his cheeks too. Amanda hadn't thought he knew that trick yet, but maybe it came naturally to teenage boys.
"A peep show, eh?" Yerba was fascinated. He and the minions who'd brought in the two boxes opened them with great care and lifted out exactly what Amanda knew they would find. There once again was the old lamp base with its reservoir, wick, chimney and lamp stand, and in Yerba's hands the ornate, gaudy, stained-glass shade with its non-fastening finial. Amanda continued to frown with disapproval and Tem and Jimmy gave no sign of the menace the lamp represented as Yerba and his men set down the lamp base with something akin to reverence on a desk near the center of the room and remounted the old stained-glass shade. They examined it all over with great curiosity hoping to find where the photograph reel of naked saloon girls was kept, but saw only an ordinary lamp – of exactly the right kind for a man's wife to find in his den. Once more Yerba turned to Amanda for information. "How's it work?"
Amanda had to look to Jimmy for some help with this, since she hadn't really seen it hypnotize Tem, though she could guess what the first part of the procedure was.
"First you have to light it, I believe . . . ." she said. "And then you have to . . . spin the shade around very, very fast?"
Jimmy nodded confirmation.
"And then you look directly into the light and you can start to see the images of the dancing girls . . . well, you know . . . ." she added.
Yerba listened attentively, but not without at least a little skepticism.
"An' why's it labeled T. M. of Steel?" he asked, sounding suspicious.
Amanda thought up the most vulgar explanation she could give and gave it, lowering her eyes and sounding even more mortified.
"I believe our mother said it stood for To Men of Steel," she whispered, "because I suppose the idea is to make men . . . ." She gestured down to the front area of the men's pants she was wearing but fell silent and refused to say more.
Tem cleared his throat loudly as if to spare his wife further embarrassment. Yerba's gang looked around at one another and began to snicker at what she appeared to be referring to. Yes, they were buying the whole story. Eager to test it out for themselves, they scurried as Yerba ordered them to scrounge up some lamp oil and matches to make the antique 'naughty stereopticon' work once more. And oh, how Amanda wanted to make that lamp work . . . .
"You, uh, should probably have a bucket of water on hand too," Jimmy piped up nervously. "In case it sparks a bit when it's spinning. Kind of old and dusty . . . ." The lamp was that as well. Yerba considered it and ordered the prudent fire bucket also.
Clever, Amanda thought, given what she and her brother had both predicted about the clump of old sleep gas chemical congealed on her skirt should they need to fully activate it by immersing it in water. If it worked, that one-shot deal would be just the pièce de résistance they needed with this crew.
In no time at all, Yerba's crew had found lamp oil, gotten out matches and had the water-bearing fire bucket. Under their boss' close supervision, they filled the old lamp's reservoir, lit it, made sure the stained-glass shade was fitted in place properly and ready to spin. Amanda had assured them – disapprovingly of course – that the images of the women would be seen readily enough once the lamp was lit and they looked into it as the shade spun. Since there appeared to be no clear 'front' or 'back' to the lamp, they all figured the images could be viewed from any angle and were eager to crowd around the lamp and see for themselves.
But Yerba still remembered the Wests from their San Francisco encounter better than she would have liked just then in spite of her convincing act. His men might be gullible enough and anxious to see an 1870s obscene 'magic lantern' stereopticon show, but Yerba held them back and eyed Amanda – and also the lamp – suspiciously again.
"Uh-uh, doll face," he shook his head. "Not so fast. This ain't gonna be us fallin' for one of your sneaky tricks. We'll see what the truth is. I think I know a real good test subject to try out this little gadget on first." Yerba bared his rows of dirty yellow teeth and then grinned, pointing at Tem. "Before we go lookin' into it, I'm thinkin' we ought to try it out on you, West."
At Yerba's command, a glowering Tem was hauled up between two of Yerba's more muscular goons, forced to stand directly in front of the old lamp and ordered, with a gun to his head, to stare into the light peeking through the stained-glass shade. Leaving nothing to chance, Yerba held another gun aimed at Amanda and ordered her to be the one to spin the shade in case it was booby-trapped. Amanda hadn't counted on this. With solemn expression, she stared across the lamp at her handsome, tough husband.
You wanted to take a second crack at this, my love. I hope you were right, because you're about to get your chance . . . .