Still, we had a nice little stroll anyhows.
As far as 1940 New York Cities go, this was a pretty good one. No giant red Schicklgruber flags deckin’ the halls, no surrendering your wallet at Henry Wallace Economic Justice checkpoints, no zeppelins filled with killer bees. Just shiny new DeSotos and Hudsons honking their way down the street, ragamuffin newsboys standing on the corner hawking their papers, and brawny construction guys wolf-whistling at Maizie as she bounced past ’em in her checkered sundress .
It was a bee-you-tee-ful Brooklyn morning that promised to turn into a warm, sunny day. The Dodgers were playing this afternoon. I was ahead on my caseload, so I got thinking me and Maizie might catch the game right after this collar. Being A-Number One does have certain advantages, and mister, that ain’t hay!
So anyway, when our chump got a half block from his beige brownstone, me and Maizie sped up our pace and passed him just before he trotted up the stoop. We bustled inside, leaving him in our dust.
Now, there are good ways and bad ways to tail somebody wit’out them noticizing you. One of the best is to not be following in the first place, especially if youse know where they’re going. Get there ahead of them.
We knew exactly what apartment he was headed to thanks to the lingering chrono trail he’d left schlepping up and down the stairs the past week. We started up the rickety stairwell, floorboards creaking every step of the way, all the way up to the fifth floor. And him trailing five steps behind us, getting the pepto cause on accounts of us being so slow.
Now we wasn’t suspiciously following him, see? We wuz annoyingly blockin’ his way ahead of him like some Sunday driver and not worth a second thought five minutes later. See the difference?
Just for certainties, I nudged Maizie in the ribs with my elbow and she went into her Distraction routine. Maizie may have a peabrain the size of a dinky .22 slug, but there ain’t no finer Distracter than her when she gets going. A regular idiot savannah or whatevers deys call it.
She started yammering on like we was some newlywed couple checking out the sublet on an apartment like, and her complaining all the way up ‘bout how she liked the other joint better on accounts it was ground floor and how she wasn’t going to climb no five flights of stairs what with her being in the family way and whatnot.
Only she was describing the blessed event in terms that’d make a drunken sailor blush, all the time climbing the stairs with a wiggle in her caboose that’d be right at home on the runway of Minski’s. That’s a Maizie distraction.
Pure genius.
See, a decent guy hearin’ and seein’ that would be going out of his way not to look at or notice us—pretendin’ we don’t exist, even—and an indecent guy, why he’d be too busy admirin’ Maizie’s poop deck swaying on the stormy North Atlantic to wonder if he was being tailed, so to speak.
So we got to the top of the landing, takin’ in all the glories of the permeating smell of boiled cabbage. Maizie then pulls out a piece of paper and starts carrying on about there not being an apartment 17-E and that she’d told me we were at the wrong address and that now she was going have to walk down all them stairs in her condition.
Our chump, he just shook his head like he’s glad he’s not married to her, and he dug out his keys and opened his door.
That’s when I made my move.
I boosted my muscle and reflex augments up twenty percent and zoom! I’m in the doorway before he can close the door, hustling him all the way inside and slamming the door behind me. Maizie, her augments just a-humming, nips in right behind me as the door slams shut.
I swiveled my head around, aural and visual augments turned up, checking if anybody else is in the apartment. Nope. Just us and the pigeon. Good.
The apartment was as beige and plain as the rest of the building. Beige walls, beige sofa, beige oval throw rugs made out of what looked like beige horse blankets.
Our pigeon, he was beige, too. The boys down at the precinct, if they hadda write him up woulda called him ‘non-descript.’ Average height, average weight, average mug that went white as your average sheet when I pulled my Agency gat from under my jacket.
Maizie shoved him one-handedly across the room, sprawling him in an overstuffed chair, beige naturally. I flipped the selector switch on my gat to blue and pull the trigger, plugging our chump dead center in the chest.
He immediately went limp, so tranked up that the only thing he can move is his bugged-out eyeballs. He manage to croak out a horse whisper “Who—?” like he was a big beige owl or sumptin’.
Like I wasn’t gonna tell him why I’m there. What a chump.
I put away my gat and told Maizie, “Frisk him, then case the joint.”
She patted his pockets none too delicately, coming up with a wallet and some subway tokens. She tossed me the wallet and disappeared into one of the back rooms.
I glanced through the wallet. The idiot still had his home-time Massachusetts driver license (expiration date 2018) and his ATM card tucked inside the wallet, along with a faculty ID card from M.I.T.
My achin’ neck. A college professor. Thems always the hardest collars on accounts of thems being just too egghead-stupid to be sensible like a workin’ stiff.
“So, Seymour…Herscher,” I said, squinting at the name on the driver license. I snapped the wallet shut and tossed it on a table.
I pulled up a wooden chair in front of him and sat on it backward, resting my arms on the top of the chair back. “Youse and me, Seymour, we need to have a little talk what you’re doing strollin’ around 1940 New York City like you own the joint. See, I work for a little gatherin’ called the Temporal Protection Agency and we make it our business to find out your business and make it our business, see?”
“T-t-t-t-” he stuttered. “T-temporal Protection A-agency? Like one of those secret organizations in sci-fi novels that stop people from changing history—”
“Shaddap!” I roared. “You’re giving me the pepto.” I pulled out a cigar from my vest pocket and struck a lucifer on the side of the chair. I puffed a couple times to get it going. Seymour coughed on the smoke like he ain’t never been in a room where they smoke.
“Look, you dope,” I said. “We ain’t no Buck Rogers make-believe, and we ain’t no good-fer-nuthin’ goody-two-shoes outfit what wants to put the kibosh on whatever youse doing. We don’t care. You wanna bump off Hitler, no skin off our nose. You wanna sink the Titanic, more power to you. We don’t care.”
I took a big puff and blew a smoke ring in his face. “All we wants is our cut.”
“C-cut?” Seymour stammered.
“Cut,” I said. “Piece of the action. Percentage.”
He looked at me like I wasn’t speakin’ good English or something.
Professors!
I tapped cigar ashes on the threadbare throw rug. Maybe the crummy joint’d catch fire, liven things up.
“Look, Seymour. Guys what do whats you do, go back in time and change things up, no matter what scheme youse guys got, no matter how much youse guys try to dress it up with justifications like, youse guys are all just losers trying to change things up so youse winners. And youse can’t go from loser to winner without what there’s some sort of profit involved. Well, we want a cut of that profit, see?”
Seymour just sat there, his mouth working like an air-drowning fish.
“Fifteen percent,” I said. “Firm. Just like what one of dem fancy literary agencies charge. Nobody blinks at payin’ them fer doing nuthin’, do they?”
Maizie came in from the back, dragging an old steamer trunk behind her. “Found this in his bedroom.” The trunk had three heavy-duty Yale padlocks on it and a chrono-trail shinier than Seymour’s sweating beige forehead.
She plopped the trunk on the middle of the floor and busted off the case-steel padlocks with a casual twist of a wrist. She rummaged around. “Lessee, music headphones, electrical adaptor thingie. One of them eye-plop music things.” She held up a glass-screened flat oblong electronic device and dropped it.
She dug around some more. “Oh, here we go. One time travel recall switch.” She set aside an electronic gizmo with flashing LED lights. Boys back at the labs would want that and Seymour wouldn’t be needing anymore, that was for sure.
She looked up and shrugged. “Pfft. And that’s it, Vincent. Nuttin’ else but a useless pile of crummy books.”
“Lemme see ‘em,” I said. I knew from past experience with them professor types, you can usually figger out what they’re up to by lamping what books they lug back in time with ‘em.
They was all a collection of song books from music big shots. Burt Bacharach, Jimmy Webb, Euell Gibbons. The greats. And these was all hit songs in these books and they all was from a lot later date than 1940.
I also found a couple dog-eared spiral bound notebooks of that musical writing paper my old piano teacher, she had. The notebooks was filled with hand scribbled songs with “Words and Music by Seymour Herscher” written proudly at the top of each song. I ain’t no music lover but even I could see that none of Seymour’s notebook songs were gonna be in any hit music book.
I busted out laughing.
“Seymour,” I said, turning with a smile. “Youse and me, we’re gonna get along just fine on a counts of youse being an even bigger crook than I am.”
***
Professor Seymour Herscher, it turned out—just like I guessed—when he wasn’t professoring math he was busy back home at night being a jealous little song scribbler who couldn’t get his lousy songs published for nuthin’. After stumbling into inventing time travel, does he go for the Nobel Prize? No, he does not.
Seymour gets the bright idea instead of grabbing all the hit music for the past sixty or so years he could carry and lamming back to 1940 so he could publish all that hit music under his own name. (He wasn’t stealing, he indignified to me as he spilled his guts. How could he be stealing when he’d be publishing ’em before they got written?) And then when he was good and famous and filthy rich, he could get all those stinkeroos in them spiral notebooks published just like he always dreamed.
I laughed even harder as he explained all this.
“Relax, Seymour,” I said, “I’m not laughing at you, I’m just laughing ‘cause I rode this particular merry-go-round before.”
I pulled out The Complete Bottles Songbook from amongst his little treasure trove. It was a big thick book, bigger and thicker than all the rest. “You don’t really think them boneheads Lemon and McCarthy wrote all them songs themselves, do ya? I once had their whole band tranked in a chair the same way youse is sitting in yours, and them with a cardboard box full of other peoples’ songs. Beach Bums, the Carpenters & Tennille, what have you.”
His eyes goggled. “You don’t mean that they—”
“—paid us fifteen percent, just like the deal I’m offering youse. Now, one of ’em, their first drummer, he welched on our deal like a rat. You know what happens to rats!” I drew my finger across my throat like a shiv. “Gkkkt!”
“I-I thought it was brain hemorrhage,” he said. “The accounts all say—”
I smiled, “We know better, don’t we, Maizie?” I tapped ashes off my cigar. “So what’s it gonna be, Seymour? Gkkkt? Or are youse going to be sensible like and pay us our fifteen percent?”
“I don’t know. Fifteen percent seems awfully high…”
“You’re lookin’ at it all wrong, Seymour. Sure, we’re taking fifteen percent off the top, but we’re adding so much more than what we’re taking.”
I held up one finger. “One. We lets you keeps breathing, like. That’s always a plus. Or maybe not in your case with a phiz like what youse got.”
A second finger. “Two. Now, you have what? Maybe two hundred hit songs in your stack of books? We can get you hit songs from over two hundred alternate timestreams. Big names you ain’t never hoird of in your timestream an’ they ain’t hoird of in dis one, neither. Way we see it, the more songs you pinch, the bigger our fifteen percent is. So, do we got a deal nor not, Seymour?”
We didn’t. Professors!
I shoulda known better. I shoulda seen it coming.
When Seymour shoulda been talking turkey, he wanted to talk about what I’d just said about ‘timestreams’ instead. These pigeons always get surprised like to find out they didn’t go back in time in their own timestream like they thought they was doing, instead they’d shifted laterally into a parallel timestream. Only they usually don’t pipe up about that until after we’ve sealed the deal and they’d had time to think.
Worse, Seymour didn’t just take my word for it and shut up. He wanted to argue. Him in a chair all tranked up and me with a gat under my jacket.
“Look, you chowderhead,” I finally said to him. “How’s you gonna go back in your own timestream? Youse made up of atoms, ain’cha? Whirling electrons and them molly-whatchmacallits—”
“Molecules,” Maizie supplied.
I gave her the fish eye. “I know that, you dope. That was a rhetorical whatchamacallit.”
I turned back to Seymour. “You go back in time like you’re thinkin’, your atoms are gonna be in two places at the same time. That makes Isaac Newton very very mad, not to mention the universe. So, the universe, it boots you over to some parallel timestream and everyone’s happy ‘cause your atoms ain’t in the same place twice no more. You can go back in time with a time machine, sure; you just can’t go back in your time, see?”
He didn’t—professors!—but eventually I browbeat him into signing on with the Agency and paying his protection money like a good little chump.
“Good, good,” I said, taking the pen out of Seymour’s half-tranked hand. I folded the signed contract and stuck it inside my jacket. “There’s just one more thing to take care of before I un-trank you and leave.”
My hand lingered inside my jacket.
“What’s that?” he asked, not liking at all that my hand was lingering inside my jacket.
“The ‘Or Else’ codicil,” I said.
I pulled out my gat and shot him point blank in the heart.
Seymour fainted, the big baby.
It was just a harmless shot of nanos that’d give him a cerebral hemorrhage if he tried to jump timestreams or if he didn’t pay his fifteen percent like a good boy.
“C’mon, Maizie,” I said. “We still got time to catch the Dodgers if you hurry your caboose.”
***
Me, I blame it on one too many ballpark franks or maybe it was that last Coney Island dog giving me the pepto, my lettin’ my guard down the way I did when I got back to the Agency. It certainly wasn’t from that watered-down beer they serve at Dodgers Stadium. That stuff couldn’t even get a Boy Scout drunk, let alone get me drunk.
Not like I hadn’t tried after seeing in the first inning how things were going down, those magnificent bums. That new kid pitchin’ for the Cardinals, that Paul Dunn, he pitched a perfect no-hitter. I actually resorted to using my augments—scanning everything from chrono to bio to X-Ray—to check out if he had any augments, him pitching like that, but nope. Just dumb luck, clean living, and his magic Mormon underwears. Kid that healthy oughta be off fightin’ Hirohito.
So I was out-of-sorts and had the pepto and wasn’t paying any attention like I shoulda when I walked into the Chief’s office to report on our new client.
I’d dropped off Maizie down at the lab to turn in Seymour’s recall gizmo. Me being in a bad temper, we’d gotten in an argument on the way back.
She had got to waxing philosophical again. “Say, Vincent,” she asked. “You ever collar yourself in one of these other timestreams? One of your other selves, I mean?”
And that set me off. See, all the crumbs I ever meet in this racket are losers like Seymour, and I ain’t no loser. I ain’t never gonna be meeting some other me, on accounts them other mes are gonna be winners, too. They’re me, ain’t they? Sure, they might not be A-Number One Temporal Agent like I am, but whatever theyse racket is in their own timestream, they’re number one at that.
So we got to yelling and arguing, and as a result she was sulking down in the lab and it was just me walking past Guido and Lenny flankin’ the Chief’s outer door.
Those twose an’ me, we had it in for each other. Theyse was always schemin’ of some way to bogart my number one spot with the Chief out from under me. Them guys is two of the reasons I got all them augments I ain’t told nobody nuthin’ about.
So I walked past them, them giving me the fish eye the whole way down the hall towards ’em and the door. Smirkin’ like they knew something I didn’t, but I was too out of it to pay much notice.
I step into the security vestibule between the outer door and the soundproof inner door. I give my special knock and step inside the office. That’s when it happened. I get dropped like a rock from a trank gun shot by the guy sittin’ in the Chief’s chair who ain’t the Chief.
As I ragdoll onto the floor, I see that the guy who ain’t the Chief…is me!
***
Next thing I know, I’m trussed up in a chair like a turkey. The Chief, he’s trussed up in the chair next to me, only I could plainly see from the bruises and blood on his face, he’s been given the workover, and I didn’t like the way his head was slumping like that none.
So I turned my attention to the other me sitting in the Chief’s chair instead.
He’s looking at me the way I’d look at a Seymour, clucking his tongue, and trimming the end of one of the Chief’s primo cigars.
“Disappointed in you, Vincent,” he said as he lit the cigar. “Never figgered one of you other mes would be such a sad sack. Just lookin’ at you gives me the pepto.”
It must have been the trank talking, cause I blurted out “Who—?” just like a Seymour.
“I’m you,” he said, puffing away on the cigar. “I’m doing the same thing youse do, only you’re retail, I’m wholesale. See, I don’t handle that nickel and dime stuff you do. I don’t go around putting the business on music writers and Hitler killers. Naw, I leave that up to chumps like you. What I do is put the business on agencies like you. Fifteen percent of your fifteen percent. And ‘Or Else’ nanos to make you behave like a good boy.”
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