The Plague of Thieves Affair Read Online Free PDF

accident.”
    â€œWork, yes,” Quincannon said, “though not in the brewer’s art.”
    He left Drew looking puzzled and followed a sinuous maze of piping to the fermenting room, a cavernous space filled with gas-fired cookers and cedar-wood fermenting tanks some nine feet in height and circumference. Two of the cookers contained bubbling wort, an oatmeal-like mixture of water, mashed barley, and soluble starch turned into fermentable sugar during the mashing process. After the wort was hopped and brewed, it would be filtered and fermented to produce “steam beer”—a term that had nothing to do with the use of actual steam. The lager was made with bottom-fermenting yeast at sixty to seventy degrees Fahrenheit, rather than the much lower temperatures necessary for true lager fermentation, because the city’s winters were never cold enough to reach the freezing point. Additional keg fermentation resulted in a blast of foam and the loud hiss of escaping carbon dioxide when the kegs were tapped, a sound not unlike the release of a steam boiler’s valve.
    The heady aroma was strongest here. Once again Quincannon’s nostrils began to quiver, his mouth and throat to feel like the inside of a corroded drainpipe. He had the fanciful, and rueful, wish that a man could be fitted with a relief valve as easily as a boiler, to ease pressure buildup inside his head.
    On the catwalk above the cookers, Caleb Lansing stood supervising the adding of dried hops to the cooking wort. Workmen with long-handled wooden paddles stirred the mixture, while others skimmed off the dark, lumpy scum called krausen, a blend of hop, resin, yeast, and impurities that rose to the surface. The slab floor, supported by heavy steel girders, was slick with globs of foam that a hose man sluiced at intervals into the drains.
    Lansing was a rumpled, obsequious individual in his middle years, given to smoking odiferous short-sixes; cigar ash littered his loose-hanging vest and shirtfront. He had just finished consulting a turnip watch when he spied Quincannon. He’d been on his guard every time they’d met previously, even though he had little to fear from a man he believed to be no more than a city inspector. Now, nervous tension once again pulled his vulpine features out of shape—the look of a guilty man. Quincannon had seen that look often enough to know it well.
    Lansing swung away from the low railing, came forward as he approached, and sought to push past him. Quincannon blocked his way. “I’ll have a word with you in private, Lansing.”
    â€œNot now you won’t. Can’t you see I’m busy?”
    â€œMy business with you won’t wait.”
    â€œWhat business?”
    â€œOtto Ackermann. Xavier Jones. Cyrus Drinkwater and West Star Brewing.”
    Fright shone in the assistant brewmaster’s narrow face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    â€œThe game’s up, Lansing. I know the whole lay.”
    â€œYou know … You’re not an inspector. Who the devil are you?”
    â€œI’ll give you one guess.”
    Lansing muttered, “Dirty flycop!” under his breath and succeeded this time in shoving past him. He would have run then, but Quincannon grabbed the trailing flap of his vest and yanked him around.
    â€œCome along and don’t give me any trouble—”
    The blasted rascal was quick as a cat, not with his hands but with his feet. The toe of his heavy work shoe thudded painfully into Quincannon’s shin, broke his hold on the vest, and sent him reeling backward against the railing. Lansing spun and fled to the stairs before Quincannon, growling an oath, could regain his balance and stumble in pursuit.
    Drawing his Navy Colt was out of the question; he couldn’t very well fire it in these crowded confines, even in warning, and brandishing it would likely cause panic among the workers below. Instead he