Andy Anders and the Rebel Spies

Chapter 1 Part 3 - Power of Money

The captain mulled this over, "Andy, you're positive and not just letting off steam?"

Andy took a deep breath, "Yes sir, I'm sure. As I mentioned earlier, the mayor does not know I do bookkeeping part-time. I make many of the entries in the ledgers for the bookkeeper. He pays me under the table.

"I found out the mayor keeps a second set of books, but I have not found them yet. Nowhere in any of the books do the Irishmen show up. I am sure they were never paid, nor any money disbursed for their travel anywhere. However, I noticed an entry in the books I keep, a large payment to a slave trader for removing some spoiled cargo the night they disappeared."

Oldstone was speechless with rage over their disappearance and this revelation. Andy handled the horse reins skillfully as they made their way by carriage to the newly constructed city hall.

As they continued on their way there, Andy apologized, "Sorry about mispronouncing your name Captain Oldstone, but it was misspelled on the note the mayor gave me to pick you up. We got that all straightened out, right captain?"

Even though he was upset over the missing men, the captain chuckled and nodded in agreement. Half-aloud and half-thinking to himself, "Andy, have you considered volunteering and helping to put down this Rebellion?"

Andy did not even hesitate as his words quickly flowed, "If war breaks out, I just might. I'm eighteen, and the thought has crossed my mind. Sir, I do not know what I would be good for. I have never been in a fistfight or used a sword or bayonet, but I did a bit of wrestling and am a fair shot with a rifle on a good calm day. I play second base on the Mercyville Cherubs baseball team, haven't hit a home run yet. I really don't know what you'd do with me."

Oldstone thoughtfully replied, "Andy, you have more opportunities than you know. I would like to talk to you about them after I meet with the mayor. For now, let's not mention our discussions to anyone?"

Andy quickly nodded in agreement, as he pointed at the new city hall up ahead, "We're almost there, sir."

Moments later Andy pulled up on the reins, stopping the horse-drawn carriage. He climbed off and flipped the end of the reins around a rather ornately designed hitching post. The captain looked at it oddly, as if asking what the dickens was on top of it. Andy noticed his look, and leaned over to him and whispered in confidence, "It's a cherub's face and wings. Ah, before I forget to mention it, the mayor prefers to be addressed as the honorable Mayor Katz, and he loves cherubs as you are about to discover in our new city hall."

"Honorable Mayor Katz and cherubs, huh?" The captain took in a deep breath, "Okay, let's head in. I've got to see this place."

The captain stepped off the carriage, and he could not help admiring the stately imposing building façade still under construction. He noticed the unfinished iron gates and almost completed stained glass windows. "I knew Mercyville was rich and famous from its thread mills and tobacco wrapper plantations, but not this wealthy and ostentatious."

On hearing this, Andy pretended small-town pride, grinning ear to ear, puffed up his chest and replied good and loud so the mayor would hear him, "Yes sir, our Most Honorable Mayor Aloysius T. Katz has been most generous to us since his election."

Andy's words echoed in the marble hall entryway. "Our community has been blessed to have such a wise businessman as our leader, Mayor Aloysius T. Katz. His building plans are par excellence if I dare say so myself."

Watching the young man boast gave Captain Oldstone the feeling that the honorable Mayor Aloysius T. Katz was truly a man of conceit and highly questionable business practices. Good and loud he asked, as if impressed, "So there is a lot of money to be made here by an adventurous businessman, huh Andy?"

Andy was glad the captain caught onto what he was doing, "Oh yes sir, we are truly a booming business community where everyone who is anyone deserves to profit from his efforts. Right this way sir, the Honorable Mayor's office is straight up the atrium stairs."

Andy's words were the exact words the captain wanted to hear about Mercyville, but he was more interested in hearing those exact words coming from the mayor himself. The captain headed up the granite steps of the brand new, but still unfinished, Mercyville City Hall.

Once they were through the gates and past the unfinished stained-glass doors, they stepped into a marbled atrium facing an over-built, wide-flowing marble staircase covered in cherubs. It was right across from the main entranceway they had just stepped through. The captain realized, he was right about Katz building the new city hall to impress others, but he wondered whom? It was by far too large a building for Mercyville. It might be needed in a hundred or more years, but not anytime sooner.

Andy was right too. Everywhere the captain looked were cherubs staring back at him. Some smiled or laughed, or what appeared to be singing. How very odd the captain thought.

Looking up at the top of the staircase, they could see the Mayor standing there. He was impeccably suited for the day and wearing a broad black cummerbund around his potbelly. He reminded Oldstone of a foreign dignitary or a potentate beckoning him up the stairs to his doom.

"Come on up, Captain Oldstone. The air is rarified up here in anticipation of a successful business deal between us. Isn't my Mercyville City Hall magnificent? Don't you just love those winged cherubs on the corners and along the top molding? I paid a fortune for them and what about my portrait over the reception area. Magnificent isn't it?"

"I assure you, your Honor, I have never seen another building such as this building outside of Washington D.C. In fact, it probably outshines most buildings in the District and in the other towns, which I have entered on my long journey to get here. I'll be right up." As Oldstone spoke, he could see that the mayor was truly beside himself in anticipation of his arrival. The mayor's eyes dilate with the excitement of bringing more money to Mercyville or was it just for himself.

Turning to Andy, the captain whispered only loud enough to be heard by Andy, "Thank you for filling me in on what is really going on here and carrying my bag this far for me. I have to take it the rest of the way upstairs, alone. Oh, one more thing just between you and me. After this meeting, I need to talk to you about something of great importance to you. Later he will probably ask you to arrange a tour of the area and a guide for me; I'm going to insist on you."

Andy winked surreptitiously and handed the carpetbag over to him. "Good luck sir."

As the captain began his climb up to the mayor's office, Andy headed over to talk to Angela the red-head receptionist, behind the oak welcome desk.

Andy was sweet on Angela, but with her being Mayor Katz's stepdaughter, they did not get many opportunities to talk. Except when Mayor Katz closed his office door, of course. They would sneak off for lunch in the garden or park, where the mayor never strolled. Otherwise, they always winked or very discretely smooched at each other from a distance. They carried on behind the mayor's back with knowing little loving smiles.

Fortunately for Andy and Angela, the mayor never noticed their love for one another because all he ever cared about was power and money. Katz married Angela's mother for her money; her death was just a matter of monetary convenience to him.

Katz was overly proud and downright arrogant about being a self-made land baron and thread mill industrialist. He would stop at nothing to get a controlling interest in anything local, and he did as he pleased, no matter who got hurt.

According to local gossip, Andy and Angela suspected Katz had his fingers in almost every pie in town. In fact, his reach grabbed something from every business including the Mercyville Post, which was owned by the Falsemouth family and which seemed to be wrapped around his little finger.

He was still irked that he could not get rid of the abolitionist Republican Newspaper.

Katz despised both that newspaper and the inn because they believed in and supported abolition. Katz also despised the Quakers, and all abolitionists, because in the 1840s they cost his family their slaves when Connecticut outlawed slavery.

Andy and Angela often heard Katz intimidate people by telling them how his father taught him to use legal loopholes. They would cringe whenever he said, "All you do is pay off the right judges and have the police chief in your back pocket, and you can get away with murder."