The Improbable Journeys of Billy Battles

Chapter 21

Chapter 21The next morning, as requested, Katharina walked to

the southeast corner of Union Station’s Great Hall. She wore what

was for her a rather nondescript dark-brown dress. A wide-brimmed

white straw hat was perched on her head. She walked briskly and

decisively, and she carried a brown leather attaché case in her

left hand.

When she got to the place where she was

supposed to wait, she did an about-face and looked back at the

Great Hall. As she stood there waiting, several men and women

milled about, buying newspapers and magazines. Several children ran

between the long highly polished brown benches that covered part of

the hall. A few men were getting shoe shines from the four

shoe-shine boys who plied their trade along the south wall.

Which of these people were going to approach

her? Where was Anna Marie?

Charley and I were about halfway across the

hall watching, a distance of some two hundred feet or so. Earlier,

I checked the train schedules and found that one train was leaving

for Pueblo at about nine twenty and another was going north to

Cheyenne, Wyoming, at nine forty-five. Eichel and his band were no

doubt going to be taking one of those trains after they made the

swap of Anna Marie for the documents Katharina was carrying.

The question that kept running through my

mind was what if Anna Marie was on one of those trains, and it left

with her? I trembled at the thought.

The night before, Bessie had sketched out a

plan of action but left out a lot of details.

“Don’t worry,” she said when I asked for a

more detailed explanation of what would happen the next day.

“Nothing will go wrong… Remember what I said about controlling the

environment and people playing their roles? You play your role and

leave the rest up to us.”

I looked at Bat, and he nodded at me. I

trusted him probably more than any man I had ever met, except maybe

my cousin Charley.

“If Bessie says she has a plan and that it

will work, why, that’s good enough for me,” he said.

As I watched Katharina, I noticed two Denver

policemen stroll side by side through the Great Hall. They wore

long black wool coats with shiny brass buttons down the front, an

eight-point silver star above the left breast, and distinctive

black helmets with a gold crescent above the short brim. They

carried wooden batons, which they swung around and around by the

leather straps at the end of the handles. I recall hoping the two

coppers would not somehow upset Bessie’s plan of action. They

walked right past Katharina and didn’t give her a second look.

I was beginning to wonder if anything was

going to happen when a woman walked up to Katharina and said

something to her. Katharina opened the leather case for the woman,

who briefly inspected the contents. Then she walked away and

entered the ladies restroom nearby. Katharina followed a few

minutes later. I started to walk across the hall when a man bumped

into me, dropped the newspaper he was carrying, and when he bent

down to pick it up, he spoke. “Stay where you are… Everything is

going to plan.”

I looked at him as he stood up. “Bessie

sends her regards,” he added, and then he walked quickly away.

“Who the hell was that?” Charley asked.

“One of Bessie’s people, I guess. We’re to

stay put… We couldn’t go into the ladies facilities anyway, but

I’ll be damned if I like being out of the game.”

Charley and I waited another ten minutes or

so, and I was just about to disregard what the stranger had told me

when Katharina emerged from the ladies room holding Anna Marie’s

hand. I walked quickly toward them flanked by Charley. When Anna

Marie saw me, she broke from Katharina’s grasp and ran toward

me.

“Papa, Papa!” she cried as she ran. When she

reached me, I lifted her up and hugged her, and then the tears

flowed.

“It’s all right now, Anna Marie… It’s all

right now.”

“They pushed Oma from the buggy!” she

shouted, finally catching her breath and dabbing her eyes with the

backs of her hands.

“Oma is fine… Don’t worry.”

At that point, Katharina joined us.

“I guess it all went as planned,” Charley

said, looking at Katharina.

“Mostly, it did,” she said. That’s when we

noticed Katharina was still carrying the brown leather briefcase

that she had arrived with in the station. I put Anna Marie down,

and the four of us sat on one of the long mahogany benches.

“What happened?” I asked, nodding at the

briefcase.

“A bit of jiggery-pockery.”

“A bit of what?”

“Jiggery-pockery… bambosh… galbanum… at

least that’s what Bessie called it.”

Charley and I looked at each other. Then

Anna Marie spoke up.

“Aunt Bessie tricked ’em, Papa.”

“Aunt Bessie?”

Katharina, seeing that Charley and I were

mystified by what had just happened, explained what occurred just

after the woman approached her and headed to the ladies

facilities.

“She checked the contents of the attaché

case and told me to wait a minute and then follow her in,”

Katharina said. “I did as I was told, but just as I got to the

entrance, I met a woman dressed exactly the same as me and carrying

the same leather attaché case. She directed me to another door. It

was a small office with a desk and a few chairs. When I went in,

there was Bessie sitting behind the desk.

“‘Make yourself comfortable, dear,’ she

said, nodding toward a chair… ‘Things are about to get

interesting.’

“Who was that woman?” Katharina asked.

“Which one? The first one or the

second?”

“Well, both then.”

“‘The first one was a German lady your

friend Eichel hired to check the documents you are carrying. The

second one was one of the finest actresses in Denver. We made her

up to look as much like you as possible.”

“You did an exceptional job… I thought I was

looking into a mirror at first.”

“Now you know why I provided the dress, hat,

and attaché case last night. It’s one of the costumes from Gilbert

& Sullivan’s Ruddigore playing at the Variety Theater.

We needed two exactly alike, and of course, the Opera Company

always has duplicate costumes.”

When the Katharina pretender entered the

ladies room, she found herself in the midst of four or five other

women. Another woman dressed in a maid’s uniform was on a ladder

repairing one of the electric light fixtures that hung from the

ceiling. That was no accident. She had effectively disabled the

fixture, making the room much darker than usual.

The actress looked around the room until she

spotted the woman who had spoken to Katharina in the Great Hall.

Then she walked over to her. In the dim light, the woman never

noticed that this was not the Katharina she had approached in the

Great Hall.

She demanded the case. The actress refused,

saying she wanted first to see Anna Marie. At that, the woman

pulled a silver Derringer from her purse. No sooner had she done

so, then all of the other women in the room pounced on her and

wrestled her to the ground. They were all Bessie’s girls. And as

Bessie had explained, they were “controlling the environment.”

After threatening the woman with a variety

of weapons, including a straight razor that one woman dragged

lightly across her face without drawing blood, the woman eagerly

divulged what she was supposed to do next. They then stripped her

down to her undergarments, gagged her, pushed her into one of the

stalls, and hog-tied her.

Moments later, one of the other women had

put on the woman’s dress and hat and walked to a small door at the

back of the room that opened to the outside. She opened it, stepped

into the doorway, and held up the leather case. Moments later,

another woman approached, holding Anna Marie’s hand. As the woman

got close to the door, Bessie’s girl turned her back slightly and

pretended to sneeze several times into a hanky.

“Sorry,” she said softly, keeping her head

turned and holding the leather case out for Eichel’s woman to

take.

“Get in there, you little imp,” the woman

said, shoving Anna Marie through the door and snatching the case

from the hand of Bessie’s operative.

With that, the door was closed, and Bessie’s

girls surrounded a confused Anna Marie. Moments later, they were in

the office where Katharina and Bessie had been waiting. Anna

Marie’s eyes lit up when she saw Katharina’s familiar face. She ran

over to her and put her arms around her.

Bessie stood up and walked over to Anna

Marie. “So you are what all of the fuss is about?”

Anna Marie looked up at Bessie, who smiled

and knelt down so she was level with Anna Marie.

“You can call me Aunt Bessie,” she said.

“Did any of those people hurt you?”

Anna Marie shook her head no.

Katharina cleared her throat. “Let’s get you

back to your father,” she said. “He’s waiting for you outside.”

But the jiggery-pockery wasn’t finished, Bat

later explained.

As the woman now carrying the leather case

made her way toward one of the trains, several sets of eyes

followed her. She entered a first-class car and then stepped into a

private compartment with the window shades pulled down.

Moments later, a man’s voice could be heard

shouting. “Du blöde Siege, du schwachsinnige Kuh!”

With that, the door opened, and the woman

who had just brought the leather case was shoved out of the

compartment. The force of her ejection slammed her against a window

along the passageway. When she caught her balance, she was

face-to-face with the two uniformed policemen whom I had earlier

watched walk through the Great Hall past Katharina.

“What’s going on here?” they demanded as

they entered the compartment. Before them sat Eichel and two other

men, both of whom stood up.

“Sit back down!” one of the coppers shouted,

brandishing his black cudgel. “Or we’ll lay you out.”

“What do you want, Officers?” Eichel asked.

“We just had a little domestic spat. Nothing for you here.”

“We’ll be the judge of that,” the other

copper said. “Get up, turn around, and face the window with your

hands on your heads.”

“This is an outrage!” Eichel shouted. “You

can’t do this!”

“Watch us, you square-headed whoreson.” With

that, he pulled Eichel up by his necktie and shoved him between the

other two men. Seconds later, several other men arrived. They all

identified themselves as detectives.

“Good work, men,” they said to the two

uniformed officers. “This woman and these men are the ones who

stole an attaché case and kidnapped a little girl.” They shoved the

woman back into the compartment.

“We stole nothing,” Eichel said.

“Okay, how about kidnapping a little girl

then?”

“I have no idea what you are talking

about.”

“We’ll see about that,” one of the

plainclothes detective said as he placed handcuffs on the three men

and the woman.

By now there were six plainclothes

detectives milling around inside and outside the compartment,

including Bat Masterson, who was wearing his Arapahoe County deputy

sheriff’s badge. Other passengers were beginning to gather to see

what all the commotion was about.

“Well, looky here,” one of the detectives

said, removing a silver .38-caliber revolver from Eichel’s coat

pocket. After patting down the two other men, the detectives

produced two more revolvers. Another detective pulled a .32-caliber

Derringer from the woman’s purse.

“Looks like we have multiple violations of

the ordinance against the carrying of firearms within city limits,”

the lead detective said. He was a large man with big beefy hands

and a black handlebar moustache. A black derby hat sat at a rakish

angle on his head.

“Okay, boys, let’s get this mob off the

train,” he said.

“Make way! Make way!” the two uniformed

policemen shouted as they cleared a path for the plainclothesmen

and their suspects. Once off the train, Bat and the detectives led

Eichel and his followers to an empty passenger car sitting by

itself on a siding. They were pushed inside, and each was

handcuffed to a separate seat. I joined them a few minutes

later.

“Now, by god, we will get to the bottom of

this, or you will remain here until you rot,” one of the detectives

said.

“I demand to see your superior,” Eichel

said. “I am a Pinkerton detective on a case.”

“Yes, and I am President McKinley,” I said.

“Shut your piehole.”

Bat opened the leather case Eichel had been

carrying and found several pages of paper written in German. Only

the top few pages were filled with writing. The rest of the paper

was blank.

“What is this?” Bat asked.

“That is official German business,” Eichel

said, his voice trailing off.

“Really? Looks like a lot of blank paper to

me… unless they use invisible ink in Germany.”

Eichel looked down at the floor. He had been

outsmarted, and he knew it.

Seeing this, Bat spoke up. “You and your mob

have a choice,” he said. You remain in this car until the train

stops, and you never come back to Arapahoe County again, or

we take you down to the county jail for a nice long vacation behind

some very high walls. So what’s it to be?”

Eichel looked at Bat uncertainly.

Bat smiled. “You may be wondering why the

Arapahoe County sheriff’s office and the Denver Police Department

are giving you such a choice, right?”

Eichel nodded. “It had crossed my mind.”

“Let’s just say you boys got real lucky

because if I had to lock you up, there’s a good chance you wouldn’t

survive a week in the clink before you had some kind of fatal

mishap. We don’t take kindly to crunchers who come here and

manhandle women and kidnap little girls.”

Eichel was silent.

“By the way,” Bat continued. “Which of you

shoved Mrs. Battles from the carriage?”

Nobody spoke up, but one of the men fidgeted

at the question. “I am assuming it was you.”

The man who stood seven or eight inches

taller and weighed forty or fifty pounds more than Bat spoke up.

“It was an accident… She wouldn’t sit still.”

“Not to worry. She’s just fine… a tough old

bird if ever I saw one. She asked me to give you this.” Bat reached

into his pocket and produced a police cudgel. Then as everyone

looked on, he smashed it against the man’s rib cage. The force of

the blow doubled him up and caused him to gasp for air. Then Bat

brought the cudgel crashing down on the back of the man’s head.

“That’s so you’ll know how Mrs. Battles felt

after you chucked her onto the road. Now if we ever catch any of

you back in Denver, I can guarantee you will be buried here.”

As Bat finished, an old locomotive with a

coal car backed up and hooked onto the passenger car.

“Looks like your journey is about to begin,”

Bat said.

“But we have tickets to Pueblo and beyond,”

Eichel said.

“Sorry, but those tickets are no good on

this train,” Bat said.

“Where are you taking us?” the woman

asked.

“You, my fair lady, are coming with us. But

these other ginks are going on a nice trip to the mal país,

otherwise known as the badlands.”

Bat and the detectives turned to leave. “You

can’t leave us handcuffed to these seats!” Eichel shouted.

“Somebody will be along in a few hours to

unhook you… In the meantime, sit back and enjoy the ride courtesy

of the Denver and Arapahoe County Police Departments.”

Bat took the woman by the elbow and guided

her out of the car followed by the other detectives.

I watched them walk across two platforms and

stop at the train from which Eichel and his men had been removed.

Then I turned to Eichel.

“You know, that was a dumb play you made

with my daughter.”

“We were never going to do her any

harm.”

“I don’t care… It is an experience she will

not soon forget nor will I. So the next time I see you anywhere

near me or my family or the baroness Schreiber, I will make sure

you are out of print once and for all.”

Eichel looked confused. Then one of the men

with him spoke up. “He means he is going to kill you.”

Eichel looked up at me, sneered, and mumbled

a German epithet. “Verpiss dich.”

With that, I couldn’t help myself. I did

what I had seen Wyatt Earp do in Dodge City. I drew my colt and

slammed the barrel down on his head. He was wearing a derby, so the

blow was cushioned somewhat, but Eichel moaned and fell unconscious

just the same.

The other men looked at me horrified,

perhaps wondering if I was going to do the same to them.

“When this son of a b***h wakes up, you can

tell him I did just what he asked.”

“What’s that?” one of the men asked.

“Tell him I pissed off.”

With that, I walked out of the car.

As I arrived at the platform where Bat was,

he handed the woman he had escorted across the tracks a ticket.

“Here’s your ticket to Pueblo… or wherever

you were going.”

She looked suspiciously at Bat and then took

the ticket and turned away. Then she turned back. “What about

Martha?”

“You mean the strumpet who pulled a gun in

the ladies room? She’s already aboard. And if you both know what’s

good for you, you’ll never come back to Denver again.”

“Don’t worry. We have no intention of comin’

back.”

“I have one further piece of advice,” Bat

said.

“What’s that?”

“You and Martha should do a better job of

pickin’ your friends.”

“They ain’t our friends… We just worked for

’em. They said they was from Pinkertons.”

“You can’t always believe what people tell

you… and sometimes, you can’t even believe what you see,” Bat said.

“Right, boys?”

With that, he put his hand on the shoulder

of one of the uniformed coppers, laughed, and the two of them

walked into the station followed by Denver’s finest. Soapy Smith

would have been proud.