by Tim Powers
At the gently curving apex of London Bridge he paused and leaned on the still warm stone rail and gazed west along the river toward the darkening sunset that silhouetted the five arches of Blackfriars Bridge half a mile upriver. I guess I’ll have to make another attempt to talk to Doctor Romany. It’s probably a lost cause, but I’ve got to try to get back to 1983. He sighed, allowing himself a moment of self-pity. If it was just this bronchitis or pneumonia or whatever it is, I might stay and try to beat it and make a living here and now; but when two evidently powerful groups are fighting over you, one wanting to kill you while the other will settle for just torturing you, it’s hard to hold a job.
He pushed away from the rail and began walking down the north slope of the bridge. Of course I could just leave the city, he told himself. Just right now get to the shore, steal a boat and push off—let the current take me to Gravesend or somewhere. Begin life anew.
When he came out of his reverie he was off the bridge and crossing Thames Street. He glanced up and down the lamplit street, remembering the day, two and a half weeks ago, that he’d almost allowed himself to be taken to Horrabin by that fake blind beggar, and then had been rescued by Skate Benjamin.
There were few people out on the streets this Tuesday evening, and the pubs and dining rooms along Gracechurch Street spilled light but little noise out across the cobblestones. Doyle was able to hear the whistling when it was still a good distance away. Yesterday again.
When the first moment of blind panic had passed, Doyle smiled in grim amusement at how Pavlovian his response to that damned Beatles tune had become—he had instantly leaped into a recessed doorway, yanked the ruined gun out of his coat pocket and raised it like a club over his head. Now, as he realized the sound was coming from at least a block away, he lowered the gun and allowed himself to breathe—though the pounding of his heart didn’t slacken. He peered cautiously out of the alcove, not daring to leave it yet for fear of attracting notice. After a few moments the whistler rounded the corner from Eastcheap and began walking down Gracechurch, in Doyle’s direction but on the opposite side of the street.
The man was tall, and seemed to be drunk. His wide-brimmed hat was pulled low over his face and he lurched from side to side as he walked, though once for a moment or two he broke into a clumsy parody of tap dancing, whistling the tune fast to accompany himself. Just when he was about to pass Doyle’s hiding place he noticed, with an exaggerated jerk of his head, a pub at his right, a narrow, ill-lit place called The Vigilant Rowsby. The man stopped whistling, patted a pocket, and, reassured by the jingle of coins, pushed open the bull’s-eye windowed door and disappeared inside.
Doyle started to hurry away south, toward the river and Gravesend, but after a few steps he halted and glanced back at the pub.
Can you walk away from it? he asked himself. This guy certainly seems to be alone, and not particularly dangerous at the moment. Don’t be an idiot, objected the fearful part of his mind, get the hell out of here!
He wavered, then hesitantly, almost on tiptoe, he crossed the street and stepped up to the heavy wooden door of The Vigilant Rowsby. The place’s old name sign squeaked gently back and forth on its chains over his head as he tried to work up the nerve to take hold of the S-shaped iron door handle.
The decision was taken out of his hands when the door was yanked open from the inside and a tall, burly man stepped out onto the pavement, seeming almost propelled by the burst of warm air, redolent of beef and beer and candle tallow, that billowed out around him. “What’s the problem. Jack?” exclaimed the man loudly. “No pence for beer? Here. When Morningstar drinks, everybody drinks.” He dropped a handful of copper into Doyle’s pocket. “In you go.” Morningstar placed a giant hand between Doyle’s shoulder blades and shoved him inside.
Keeping his face averted from most of the tables and booths, Doyle hurried to the long counter at one end of the room and bought a beer from the bored-looking publican. Doyle brushed his hair down across his forehead and then tilted the heavy glass beer mug up to his face and, with only his eyes showing, turned his back to the counter and started a slow scan of the room while he took the first long sip.
Halfway through it he froze, and almost choked on his beer. The man who had been whistling was sitting over a beer in a tall-backed booth against the far wall; his hat was set next to his glass, and the candle on the table lit his slack, blear-eyed face clearly. It was Steerforth Benner.
When he had convinced himself that he was neither mistaken nor hallucinating, Doyle gulped some more beer. Why hadn’t Benner returned with the rest of the party? Had anyone else missed the boat? Doyle pushed away from the counter and, taking his beer with him, crossed to Benner’s table. He slipped his free hand into his coat pocket and gripped the ruined pistol.
The big, sandy-haired man didn’t look up when Doyle stood over him, so Doyle lifted the pistol inside his coat until the muzzle showed as a ring against the taut fabric, and then shook him by the shoulder.
Benner looked up, his wheat-colored eyebrows raised in irritable inquiry. “Yes?” he said, and then, carefully, “What is it?”
Doyle was impatient. Why did the man have to be drunk? “It’s me, Steerforth. It’s Doyle.” He sat down on the opposite side of Benner’s table, letting the barrel of the concealed gun clank onto the wood. “This is a pistol here,” he said, “and it’s pointed, as you can see, at your heart. Now I want some answers to some questions.”
Benner was staring at him in wide-eyed, slack-jawed horror. He said quickly, the words tumbling out of his mouth, “Christ Brendan don’t torture me are you real, I mean there, good God you’re not a ghost or a DT are you? Say something, god-dammit!”
Doyle shook his head disgustedly. “I should pretend to be a ghost, just to see you really crack. Get hold of yourself. I’m real. Do ghosts drink beer?” Doyle performed this trick, without taking his eyes off Benner. “Obviously you know I was shot at Sunday. Tell me who did it and why—and who else is going around whistling Yesterday.”
“They all are, Brendan,” said Benner earnestly. “All the boys Darrow brought back here with him. The tune’s a recognition signal with them, like that three note thing the Jets whistled to each other in West Side Story.”
“Darrow? He’s back here? I thought the return trip worked.”
“The trip you came along on? Sure it worked. Everybody except you got back fine.” Benner shook his head ponderously. “I’ll never know why you wanted to stay here, Brendan.”
“I didn’t want to. I was kidnapped by a crazy gypsy. But what are you telling me, then? That Darrow came back again? How could he? Did he find new gaps to jump through?”
“No. Why should he need to? Look, the whole Coleridge speech thing was just a lucky way to finance Darrow’s real purpose—which was to move back here to eighteen-goddamn-ten permanently. He was hiring open-minded, history-savvy lads to be his personal retinue—physician bodyguards—that’s the job I got that I wouldn’t tell you about, remember? And then he noticed that old Coleridge was giving a speech in London during the period of the gap. He’d been having problems paying for everything, and this was the solution—get a million a head from ten rich culture freaks to go hear Coleridge. And he decided he needed a Coleridge expert for that, and that’s when he hired you. But all along, the main… objective… was to come back again, just him and his hand-picked staff, to live. So when the Coleridge party got back to 1983, he hustled them all off into cars and then set up for another jump back to the same September first gap, and we jumped again. But this time we arrived in the middle of the gap, an hour or so after all of you—us—had driven off to see Coleridge, and we cleaned up the signs of our arrival and were long gone by the time the two coaches came back, minus one Coleridge expert, and waited for the gap to end.” Benner grinned. “It would have been fun to drive to the Crown and Anchor and look in on ourselves. Two Benners and two Darrows! Darrow even thought about doing it, and seeing that you didn’t go AWOL, but he decid
ed that changing even that small a bit of history would be too risky.”
“So why does Darrow want me killed?” demanded Doyle impatiently. “And if Darrow’s so damn concerned about the inviolability of history, why has he kidnapped William Ashbless?”
“Ashbless? That jerk poet you were writing about? We haven’t messed with him. Why, isn’t he around?”
Benner seemed to be sincere. “No,” Doyle said. “Now quit ducking the question. Why does Darrow want me dead?”
“I think he wants us all dead, eventually,” Benner muttered into his beer. “He’s been promising that his staff will be permitted to return to 1983 through a gap in 1814, but I’m pretty sure he intends to kill us all, one by one, as he stops needing us. He’s holding all our mobile hooks, and he’s already killed Bain and Kaggs—those were the two who were supposed to do you in a week ago. And then this morning I overheard him order me shot on sight. I managed to grab a fair amount of cash and get away, but now I don’t dare go near him.” Benner looked up unhappily. “You see, Brendan, he doesn’t want anyone else here who knows twentieth century things—radio, penicillin, photography, all that kind of stuff. He was worried you’d patent a heavier than air flying machine, or publish ‘Dover Beach’ under your own name, or something like that. He was very relieved when I—”
There was a pause that lengthened uncomfortably while a hard smile deepened the lines in Doyle’s cheeks. “When you reported to him that you’d shot me through the heart.”
“Christ,” whispered Benner, closing his eyes, “don’t shoot me, Brendan. I had to, it was self-defense: he’d have had me killed if I didn’t. Anyway, it didn’t kill you.” He opened his eyes. “Where did it hit you? I didn’t miss.”
“No, it was a good shot, square in the center of the chest. But I was carrying something under my jacket, and it stopped your bullet.”
“Oh. Well, I’m glad of that.” Benner smiled broadly and rocked back in his seat. “You say you didn’t choose to go AWOL from the Coleridge trip? Then you and I can help each other tremendously.”
“How?” Doyle asked skeptically.
“Do you want to get back? To 1983 ?”
“Well… yes.”
“Good. So do I. Man, don’t know what you got till it’s gone, eh? You know what I miss most? My stereo. Christ, back home I could play all nine Beethoven symphonies in one day if I wanted to, and Tchaikovsky the next. And Wagner! And Gershwin! Janis Joplin! Hell, it used to be fun to drive up to the Dorothy Chandler and hear things in concert, but it’s lousy if that’s the only way you can hear ‘em.”
“So what’s your plan, Benner?”
“Well—here, Brendan, have a cigar—and,” he waved at a barmaid, “let me get us another round, and I’ll tell you.”
Doyle took the cigar, a long Churchill-sized thing with no band or cellophane wrapper, and bit a notch in the end; then, again without taking his eyes off the other man, he lifted the candle and puffed the cigar alight. It didn’t taste bad.
“Well,” began Benner, lighting one for himself when Doyle put down the candle, “to begin with, the old man’s nuts. Crazy. Smart as you could ask for, of course, a very shrewd guy, but he hasn’t got both oars in the water anymore. You know what he’s had us all doing since we got here? When we could be, I don’t know, booking passage for Sutler’s Mill and the Klondike? He’s bought a damn shop in Leadenhall Street and outfitted it, completely, as a for God’s sake depilatory parlor—you know? Where you go to get unwanted hair removed?—and he’s had two men staffing it at all times, from nine in the morning until nine-thirty at night!”
Doyle frowned thoughtfully. “Did he… say why?”
“He sure did.” The beers arrived and Benner took a hearty swig. “He told us all to keep our eyes peeled for a man who’ll have five o’clock shadow all over himself and ask for an all-body treatment. Darrow told us to shoot him with a tranquilizer gun, tie him up, and carry him upstairs, and not to hurt him at all beyond the tranquilizer bullet, which damn well better not hit him in the face or throat. And get this, Brendan: I asked him, boss, what does this guy look like? I mean, aside from having whiskers all over himself. You know what Darrow told me? He said, I don’t know, and even if I did know, the description would only be good for a week or so. Now—are those the words and actions of a sane man?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” said Doyle slowly, eyebrows raised, reflecting that he now knew far more about Darrow’s plans than Benner did. “How does all this bear on your plan to get us home?”
“Well—say, do you still have your mobile hook? Good—Darrow knows the times and locations of all the gaps. And they’re pretty frequent around now, the 1814 one isn’t the closest. So we’ll bargain with him, get him to tell us the location of the next one, and we’ll go and be standing in its field when it comes to an end, and snap! Back we’ll be in that empty lot in modern London.”
Doyle took a long puff on the—he had to admit—excellent cigar, and chased it with a sip of beer. “And what are we selling?”
“Hm? Oh, didn’t I say? I’ve found his hairy man. Yesterday he came in, just like the old man said he would. Short, chubby red-haired guy with sure enough five o’clock shadow all over him. When I started edging toward the trank gun he got spooked and ran out, but,” Benner smiled proudly, “I followed him to where he lives. So this morning I was listening in on Darrow’s room—trying to find out if he was in a mood to be approached with an offer of you give me my hook and tell me where’s a gap and I’ll tell you where your hairy man lives, and by God, I hear Darrow telling Clitheroe to tell all the boys Benner is to be shot on sight! Seems he doesn’t trust me. So after emptying one of the cash boxes, I split, and went and talked to the hairy man myself. Had lunch with him just a few hours ago.”
“You did?” Doyle thought he’d rather have lunch with Jack the Ripper than Dog-Face Joe.
“Yeah. Not a bad guy, really—wild-eyed, and talks about immortality and Egyptian gods all the time, but damned well educated. I told him Darrow did have the power to cure his hyperpilosity, but had some questions for him. I hinted that the old man intended to torture him—which, for all I know, he may—and that he’d need a middleman, a mouthpiece, to deal with Darrow through. I said I’d been one of Darrow’s boys, but had quit when I heard about the atrocities he planned to commit upon this poor son of a bitch. See? But I still had the problem of the shoot Benner on sight order Darrow had given his men.” Benner grinned. “So you become my partner. You talk to Darrow, negotiate the deal, and then you share the payoff—a trip home. I figure you’ll say something like this.” Benner sat back and cocked an eyebrow at Doyle. “We’ll tell old King Kong not to come see you, Darrow, until he gets a letter from us. And we’ll give that letter to a friend—I know just the girl for it—with instructions to mail it only if she sees us disappear through one of the gaps. So you give us a hook and the location of a gap, and if our girl sees our empty clothes fall—and you see, she might be a hundred yards away in a treetop or window, so you can’t hope to find her—then your hairy man will get the go see Darrow message.”
Doyle had been trying to interrupt. “But Benner,” he said now, “you forget that Darrow’s issued a kill Doyle order too. I can’t approach him.”
“Nobody’s after you, Brendan,” said Benner patiently. “For one thing, everybody thinks I killed you, and for another, they remember you as the chubby, healthy-looking guy who gave the speech on Coleridge. Have you looked in a mirror lately? You’re emaciated, and pale as a guy in a Fritz Eichenberg engraving, and there’s about a hundred new lines in your face—shall I go on? Okay—and now you’re definitely bald, and to top it all off, your goddamn ear seems to be gone. How’d you do that? And I noticed the other day you walk funny. Frankly you look twenty years older. Nobody’s going to look at you and think, Aha, Brendan Doyle. So don’t worry. You just go into that depilatory parlor and say something like, ‘Hi there, a friend of mine grows fur all over his body, let me talk to your bos
s.’ And then when you see Darrow you set up the deal. At that point you can admit you’re Doyle—he won’t dare hurt his only link with Mighty Joe Young.”
Doyle nodded thoughtfully. “It’s not bad, Benner. Complicated, but not bad.” Doyle was pretty sure he knew what Darrow was trying to do… and, incidentally, why the old man had a copy of Lord Robb’s Journal. It’s his cancer, he told himself. He can’t cure it, but as soon as he acquired time travel he also acquired access to a guy that can switch bodies. So he gets a copy of Lord Robb because it contains the only mention of the time, place and circumstances of Dog-Face Joe’s vigilante-style execution in 1811. Not a bad bit of knowledge to bargain with!
“Damn it, are you listening to me, Brendan?”
“Sorry. What?”
“Listen to me, this is important. Now today is Tuesday. How about if Saturday I meet you at—do you know Jonathen’s, in Exchange Alley up by the bank? Well, let’s meet there at about noon. By then I can have set up this letter business with my girl and the hairy man, and you can go see Darrow. Okay?”
“How am I supposed to survive until Saturday? You made me lose my job when you shot me.”
“Oh, sorry. Here.” Benner dug into his pocket and tossed five crumpled five-pound notes onto the table. “That hold you?”
“It ought to.” Doyle stuffed them into his own pocket, and then got to his feet. Benner held out his hand, but Doyle only smiled. “No, Benner. I’ll cooperate with you, but I won’t shake hands with a guy who’d try to kill an old friend just to get his own ass out of a sling.”
Benner closed his hand with a soft clap, and smiled. “Say that again after you’ve been in the same spot and acted differently, old buddy. Then maybe I’ll be ashamed. See you Saturday.”
“Right.” Doyle started to leave, then turned back to Benner. “This is a good cigar. Where’d you get it? I’ve been wondering what the cigars are like in 1810, and now I can afford them.”
