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260
John Gregory Betancourt
That New Chicago was a pearl buried in a pigsty was Robin’s first impression. The original town, surrounded by a stockade, was exactly as Verne had described it. The streets were wide, the houses laid out along tree-lined avenues radiating from a large central plaza. The huge council building—now Capone’s palace—stood at the exact center of town.
Around the stockade, though, lay a huge slum. Gaunt-faced men and women stared as Robin and Capone’s men strode past. Thousands of hovels, flimsy constructions of logs, clay from the River, and bamboo, had been built between New Chicago and the River with no concern for order or sanitation. The reek of human waste was nauseating.
Robin covered his mouth and nose with a bit of cloth. Is there no degradation to which man will not fall? he wondered.
“Don’t worry,” the man to his right whispered, as though in answer to his unspoken thought. “You can’t smell Pisstown from the city most days.”
“Good,” Robin said.
At the stockade’s gate, guards took Robin’s longbow and quiver of arrows. Robin didn’t protest; he knew it was a small price to pay for the information he would gain.
To his surprise, he was taken almost at once to a small whitewashed building fronting the central plaza. Two guards escorted him to an office. An engraved brass plaque beside the door said A. EICHMANN.
“Come in,” a young man with sandy hair said in a heavy German accent. “Please, sit.”
Robin lowered himself into a straight-backed wooden
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chair. It creaked faintly under his weight. He allowed his gaze to travel leisurely around the room—it was bare except for the desk—then back to Eichmann’s thin, unsmiling face.
Eichmann had a paper in front of him. He dipped a pen into a clay inkwell, then asked, “Name?”
“Robin Huntington,” Robin said, and spelled it. Eichmann’s pen made scritch-scratch sounds.
“Date of death?”
“The year of our Lord eighteen hundred and forty-six.”
Eichmann noted it down, then paused to study him. “Skills?”
“I was a master gunsmith.”
“Excellent, excellent.” Eichmann wrote that down, too, then deposited the form in a small tray on the corner of his desk. Opening a drawer, he removed a card. The paper looked thick and coarse, but words had been printed on it with a printing press of some sort. Eichmann wrote Robin’s name on the card, along with a series of numbers.
“This is your identification card,” he explained. “Carry it with you at all times. You will need it to enter and leave buildings, use the Provider for your meals, and requisition tools and equipment for your work.” He smiled. “You’re lucky you’re a gunsmith—the boss is big on weapons. He wants pistols as quickly as possible, and if you work hard to keep him happy, you’ll find the benefits and privileges are enormous. As it is, you’ll be among the elite of the scientific teams.”
“That sounds good to me,” Robin said.
Eichmann gestured to the guards. “Find him a room in the dormitories,” he said.
262
John Gregory Betancourt
The next morning, in the gunshop, Robin met the three other gunsmiths working for Capone. The head of the gun project, a Dutchman named Emile van Deskol who had died in 1865, gave Robin a tour of their shop. A dozen apprentices, varying in age from about seventeen to twenty or twenty-one, were hand-carving rifle stocks and pistol grips, and chipping flint for flintlocks. A few pistol barrels had been cast in iron, and their bores were being smoothed and polished.
“As you can see,” Emile said, “our progress is slow. The iron is poor, our casting methods worse, and the work is tedious and time-consuming. It will be months if not years before we have a single working pistol.”
Robin frowned. He was no expert, but progress on the weapons seemed far more rapid than that. He made no mention of his suspicions, though.
“This will be your area,” Emile said, indicating an empty table and bench at the back of the shop. “Each of us works on weapons of our own design. Any tools you need will be requisitioned, as well as assistants. Life is cheap; the more people we put to gainful employment, the better, if you understand me.”