Complete Short Fiction, page 19
Solomon moved slowly towards the candle, sliding his feet across the uneven, rubble-strewn floor. The dim shapes of statues, piled-up pews, and crosses danced briefly in the light, vanished, then danced again. The air smelled wet and dusty. Bile stung the back of his throat.
He’d stretched himself to the limit to get here. Acquiring extra, illicit doses of Tempedrine from manufactories in sixteenth century Germany and twentieth century California, he had pumped himself into almost a state of toxic psychosis to get over the barriers of interdict Time Center had put up around the Great Forgetting, bent Time Center’s mental conditioning with the aid of a Zen Buddhist monk in thirteenth century Japan, and hired a seventeenth century Dutch engraver to forge his documents. There were some things that even a Full Historian was forbidden to mess with. He only hoped that it would be worth it.
When the seated figure became clear in front of him, he stopped, just outside the circle of light cast by the candle, and took a breath. His skull felt as large and unwieldly as the cathedral itself. “If you are who you claim,” he said carefully, thinking about every word, “you already know the question I have come to ask. If you are not, there is no reason to even ask it.” Logic was a broken reed that would pierce his hand, but he had nothing else on which to lean.
The voice laughed. “I claim nothing, Hugh. Maybe the answer lies inside your own head, and you’ve gone through a lot of trouble for nothing. But come on, come on. There’s nothing for you to be afraid of. Not here. Not now.” A giggle. “Is that what you came for, Hugh? It’s a common enough question, and easily answered. Do you want to know the hour and place of your death?”
Solomon froze for a moment, breathing shallowly. If she was who the stories said she was, she really could tell him exactly that. Like a man gazing over a precipice, thinking idly of what it would be like to jump, he felt drawn in spite of himself. He would know everything, and his fate would be clear.
“No!” The word ripped from his throat. He leaned forward over her, into the light from the candle, his hands like claws. “You try to tell me and—”
“And what, Hugh? Don’t be so silly. If I know when you are to die, I certainly know when I will. Not tonight, Hugh, I’m not going to die tonight. And neither are you, if I’m not giving anything away. So why don’t we talk?”
Moira Moffette was a grossly fat woman, sprawled in what had once been the bishop’s throne. The candlelight shone on the rich, filthy brocade of her dress and the rings sunk deep into the flesh of her fingers. A tiny pair of feet in embroidered slippers emerged from beneath her dress to hang in the air. Her face was round and smooth. Long lustrous lashes hid her blind eyes. She smiled at him, her teeth horrible and misshapen. “Do I match the description, Hugh? I hope you weren’t expecting beauty. History is a festering wound, and those maggots that feed on it are never beautiful. Does that bother you, fellow maggot? Never mind, then. What did you bring me?” she asked, like an eager child.
He unwrapped the package. The foil paper crackled and sparkled. “A Sachertorte,” he said. “From Demel’s Konditorei, Vienna, 1889 CE.” He’d stopped for a coffee, there in the mahogany and crystal interior, then walked out into the sunny spring warmth amid the ladies with their parasols and the gentlemen with their top hats, their faces as clear and open as the sky. He opened the box and the musty air filled with the rich chocolate aroma of Vienna.
“Ooooh!” Moffette squealed. “Hugh, you doll! Give it here, darling, give it here. Oh! Oh! With apricot preserves between the layers! Wonderful.” She grabbed the cake with both hands, smearing frosting all over herself, took a bite and chewed, cheeks puffed out, eyes screwed up with pleasure. Lank, dirty hair hung around her face. Like certain holy men and mystics throughout history, she had the capability of synthesizing a Tempedrine-like chemical in her pineal gland. In order to do that, she needed a chemical precursor—Theobroma, the Food of the Gods: chocolate. Under its influence, the twists and turns of Time were visible to her. Who she was, and how she had come to be here in the twenty-first century ruins of Sacre-Coeur were facts unknown to anyone, though Solomon had tried to track down every lead and rumor. She might have been a Druid, a witch, a priestess of Magna Mater, a Neanderthal fertility goddess, a chocolate binging housewife with a deviant physiology, or simply an illusion of senses deranged by overdoses of Tempedrine.
“So, tell me, Hugh. What’s your question?”
He paused for a moment, still unsure. “I want to find Andrew Tarkin.”
She gasped and choked. Her blind eyes stared. “Oh, oh. But he’s all over the place. He crosses over and over himself. How could you not have found him? After all, Hugh, you are in so many times and places yourself.” Then she began to laugh, spilling half chewed bits of cake onto her front. “Vengeance!” she said. “It’s a matter of private vengeance. You’ve always been so droll, Hugh.”
“You’ve never met me before,” he grated.
“But you have always been droll, haven’t you, even if I’ve never met you? You don’t think as clearly as you might, Hugh. But why have you come all this way to bother me with a silly personal matter?”
“It’s not personal. The son of a bitch tried to kill me.”
“Nothing more personal than that, is there, Hugh?”
“He’s trying to deform Time itself, and that could kill all of us. Don’t you understand?”
“Never having been born is not the same thing as dying, Hugh.”
“Stop playing games,” Solomon said. “You ate the cake, now answer the question.”
“Little Miss Moffette sat on her Tophet,” she chanted, like a small child. “Hear her words and pray.” She giggled. “Like it? I thought it up myself. I wish I could figure out how to finish it. All right, Hugh. You want to find Andy Tarkin. Or at least you think you want to find Andy Tarkin. Whatever you say.” Her eyes suddenly rolled up into her head and she began to shake. Her breath came sharply through her throat and she made a sound like the barking of a small dog. After a few minutes, her breathing slowed. “Chicago, Hugh. The Levee. You’ve heard of it? June 12, 1902. A little bar, one of a hundred little bars, called The Lone Star Saloon and Palm Garden. Just after one in the morning, a table near the back. He’ll be drinking what they call bourbon, but isn’t.” She leaned back and closed her eyes, obviously tired.
“But,” Solomon said, “but. The Levee. That’s where—”
She opened them again, angry. “I know where it is, Hugh. Think of it as old home week. I know that’s where she is, our darling Louisa. I know that’s where young man Hugh Solomon is also. You were probably a cute boy, Hugh. The Full Historian as a young man. Andy Tarkin is there, Hugh. Not the young one, young Hugh’s friend. Not even the slightly older one who tried to drown you in the Baltic. It’s the one you need to find. A long way to go to find an old friend, Hugh. That’s what you asked me for, and that’s what you got.”
Solomon shook in a sudden chill. It was cold in that damn cathedral. How did she stand it, sitting there, eating nothing but chocolate? But, Jesus, Chicago. Not again.
“Now go away, Hugh. I’ve had enough of you. If you’re smart, you’ll just go back home to Time Center and forget all about this. People try to kill you all the time. You’ve got to learn not to take it so personally. Good night!” She blew out the candle and let Solomon find his way back to the front door in darkness.
June 1902 CE
Though it was after midnight, the streets were crowded. The Levee lay sprawled out around Solomon like a nickel whore who’d made enough to drink herself into a stupor. Probably the widest open vice district in the United States of America, it crammed no fewer than two hundred whorehouses into a few square blocks on the South Side of Chicago, along with taverns, dancing halls, gambling dens, dog-fighting pits, and hock shops. It was a favorite touring stop for visiting evangelists.
Solomon moved quickly through the fitfully gaslit streets, not looking around himself, for fear of seeing himself when young. His furtive air was usual for the Levee, and no one paid him any attention. Drunken laughter came from an open window in a three-story tenement. He slid past a black man with a bowler hat too large for his head who wanted to sell him some “goofer dust.” Solomon resisted the sudden urge to stop and negotiate with him. It was sometimes too easy to adapt to the time in which one found oneself. Tempedrine brought the human mind into an identity with a time which was not its own. Solomon pushed his way through the swinging double doors of the Lone Star Saloon and Palm Garden.
Inside, it was dark, smoky, and raucous. Solomon walked, among wide laughing mouths gleaming with gold teeth and women’s faces painted heavily into clown’s masks of false joy, towards the figure slumped over the table in the back.
He hit Tarkin sharply below the left ear with his elbow to stun the brain centers responsible for time travel and injected him in the buttock with a needle he had strapped to his right knee. It was quick, and no one else in the bar noticed a thing.
Tarkin turned, his eyes already glazing. He managed an expression of hatred, though he could barely control the muscles of his face. “You again. You’ll never learn, will you.”
Solomon stared at him in horror, for this man was older than he was himself, not at all the young man who had trapped him on the Dagmar of Lubeck. Tarkin’s once-red hair was white, and stood out in all directions. Solomon grabbed his hand roughly. Despite his sedation, Tarkin winced. “Where did you get this, Andy?” The gold ring on Tarkin’s finger was a convenient focus for his rage.
Tarkin grinned weakly, but with triumph. “You don’t really want to know. Believe me, you don’t.”
“I’m tired of people telling me what I don’t want to know,” Solomon said, injecting Tempedrine into Tarkin’s carotid artery along with a synaptic impeder, to lower temporal inertia. It was hard to haul someone else through Time, impossible if they were not properly conditioned. The human mind, the only device capable of traveling through Time, tends to want to stay in its own time.
They left together, as if they were old friends, Solomon laughing and singing, Tarkin limp, stumbling. “Too much to drink, Billy,” Solomon said, for the benefit of the others in the bar, who paid no attention. “I told you, but you just wouldn’t listen . . . time to go home.”
“Time,” Tarkin muttered. “Time.”
The back alley was a good place to leave from. A few prostrate bodies were scattered here and there, drunk or drugged, of no more account than the lampposts or the complaining cats. Solomon lowered Tarkin to the ground.
“Ssso how’s th-the sailor?” Tarkin said, slurring. “I gave up trying to kill you after the Dagmar, you know. I figured you’d come to me, in the end. I was right.” He dropped his head suddenly to the bricks of the alley with a hollow crack. Solomon checked his skull. He hadn’t fractured it, but there would be a big bump tomorrow. What was Russian for “bump” ? The language came hard now, but soon it would be almost impossible to speak or think anything else. Ah, yes. Shishka. That would do as well as anything.
“Now let’s find a few things out,” Solomon said. He whispered the words of release, and the alley was empty.
February 1930 CE
Colonel Fedosyev leaned forward in his chair, resting his chin on his hands, and stared at prisoner Shishkin with loathing. It was only the fourth day of the interrogation, but he was already bone tired. Must be getting old. He’d once been able to run a seven day conveyor almost single-handed, and now look at him. His eyes were gritty, and each breath took a conscious effort. Damn, he wasn’t the one sitting in the middle of the room on a hard wooden stool.
The cut crystal decanter, carefully polished, filled the room with sparkles when he poured himself a glass of water. He didn’t want a drink, but the prisoner, fed on salty food and deprived of water, certainly did. Was he even watching? Fedosyev forced himself to swallow the tepid, flat liquid with every sign of satisfaction, smacking his lips. He felt bloated. He wanted to lie down and sleep a thousand years.
Water dribbled from the glass and made another dark spot on the tattered green baize of the desk, the color picked because it showed off gold. The Soviet State needed gold. “Let’s give it another try, shall we?” Fedosyev said heavily. “The name of the jeweler, and his current whereabouts. Then you can have a drink of water and some sleep.” Sleep! “Just don’t give me any more Arabian Nights stuff. I’m not an idiot.”
Shishkin didn’t look as if he had heard. The parasite! He just sat there, babbling nonsense. Fedosyev had heard whispers that they were raising desperately needed foreign exchange by selling Rembrandts from the Hermitage to the millionaires of the West. And bastards, greedy bastards everywhere, were hoarding gold. The word had come down through the OGPU, the secret police: get it! Get the gold. Sweat them! Squeeze them! The nation needs it! So Shishkin, his white hair sticking out in every direction, sat slumped in the interrogation room like some pale insect and tired Fedosyev by telling him everything but what he wanted to know.
He pushed his chair back and walked around the desk. His boot heels clicked on the elaborate parquetry, now deeply scratched. The room had once been part of the Office of Textiles. Darker blue squares on the patterned wallpaper still showed where framed swatches had hung. Plaster cherubs, chipped and dusty, blew trumpets at the corners of the high ceiling.
It was a good one, no windup, no warning at all. The prisoner’s face jerked sideways and he gasped. The smack of the backhanded slap filled the room for an instant and was gone. Captain Solomonov, silent at his secretary’s desk with his pen, inkwell, and notebook, looked up from his writing, his lean, high-cheekboned face carefully expressionless. There was a little blood at the corner of the prisoner’s mouth. Just a bead.
Fedosyev squatted, a huge bear of a man, took the prisoner’s hand, and stared him in the face. Shishkin looked back intently, like a stranger watching an unfamiliar game, failing to puzzle out the rules that governed its play. “Gold is not a solitary beast like an eagle.” Shishkin’s face tightened as Fedosyev twisted his hand. “No. It is a herd animal. Like cows. Like sheep. So.” He twisted farther. “Where are this one’s brothers? And where is the shepherd?” The ring on the prisoner’s finger glinted up at him.
In spite of himself, Fedosyev admired it for an instant. It was a snake biting its own tail, the shimmering intricacy of the pattern of scales definitely oriental. Its eyes were green jewels. No wonder the prisoner made up such fanciful stories. But it was gold, rich and heavy, and it was not more than a dozen years old, though it looked slightly melted, as if it had been through a hot fire.
Shishkin’s body began to shake, and he sobbed. “I’ve told you,” he whispered in his poor Russian. “It was made for me, to give to someone I loved. Long ago in . . . in—”
“In wondrous Araby?” Fedosyev roared. “Scum! I’m tired of your fairy stories.” He turned and stared out of the window, running his hand over his shaven scalp. The Kremlin towers loomed to the left against the darkening sky. Decent red stars were only now replacing the Imperial two-headed eagles that had continued to top them for the dozen years since the Revolution. What the hell was wrong? The man had obviously broken completely. He eagerly babbled details, complete descriptions of the jeweler, his habits, his place of work. If his mother had made the ring, Shishkin would have turned her in. Why then was everything he said obvious nonsense? The ring was real. So, therefore, by logical operations Fedosyev had forgotten since school but was sure still applied, was the jeweler. Only he sold earrings to the wives of Party officials, and lived in some sober city in Soviet Central Asia, not Baghdad, or Aleppo, or whatever it was he claimed. Fedosyev didn’t like interrogating lunatics.
He squinted over at Solomonov, who sat attentively, pen ready on paper. Solomonov had brought the prisoner in himself, and seemed to cherish a particular interest in him, writing every detail of his impossible ravings down in his notebook. A personal concern, Fedosyev thought, from the village in which they had both grown up, or from the Gymnasium. An officer in the OGPU was well placed to pay off old scores.
With sudden irritation Fedosyev reached over, twisted the prisoner’s arm behind him, and removed the ring. It slipped off with surprising ease. When he released him, Shishkin slumped back onto his stool and stared off at nothing.
“The caravans leave Aleppo in the winter,” Shishkin said. “I saw it . . . the mosque of Jami Zakariyah gleamed blue. The man from Bukhara made her a ring of finest gold . . . I loved her, I thought he had burned her, he who had been my friend . . . I’ve guarded her for all these years.”
Shishkin had reached a state in which the term “interrogation” was meaningless and Fedosyev suddenly lost all interest in continuing. It was only 1930, after all. Fedosyev and his kind were still moving inch by inch into savagery, like a man lowering himself into a hot bathtub. Ten years later such considerations would have seemed foolish, and Fedosyev would have known that every interrogation was a torture session from start to finish, with information being an irrelevant by-product, but ten years later Fedosyev would be lying in the gold fields of the Kolyma, frozen to death, having been arrested and interrogated in his turn.
He patted Shishkin on the back. “Had an old biddy in here the other day,” he said, confidingly. “Country girl, thought herself smart. Held on a day and a half, then gave it up. Smart girl. Hid it inside the privy. Down inside. A real mess. That’s capitalism for you. Two hundred counterfeit rubles, brass covered with gold. You should have heard her spit. ‘The lice! The lice! You were right to shoot them!’ ” He chuckled at the memory, stopped short.
He sat down at his desk, pulled out a sheet of paper, and signed it. Without a word he pushed it towards Shishkin who, after a moment’s incomprehension, also signed it. It was thus that prisoner Shishkin found himself sentenced to ten years in the corrective labor camps, under Section 10: Anti-Soviet Agitation.
