If Angels Fight

by Richard Bowes

  Roark served a year in Korea. Firemen are navy; cops are army. Quinlan knows this. The next line is his:

  “Ok Nails, freeze.”

  “Cut!”

  The truck with the chickens went into reverse and parked next to a mint condition 1955 Oldsmobile and an old fashioned ambulance the size and shape of a station wagon.

  Before the first take Mitchell Graham had said, “Sean, you’re so perfectly in period that I feel like I should film you in black and white.”

  As McDevitt that day Zach Terry wore his hat at the same great angle as Quinlan. Graham noticed that. After the first take he told Quinlan, “It’s distracting to have both of you with your hats alike. Could you straighten yours?”

  The game was called protecting the star. Sean knew that game. McDevitt’s hat was an important prop today. He shifted his own fedora.

  “Perfect,” said the director.

  A featured player yields gracefully in the hope that a director will remember when casting in the future. Quinlan wondered how many movies Graham would direct after this one. He wondered what his own career would look like if an indictment came down in California.

  Crews were setting up for the next scene, which would be shot in front of an old three story building just across from the piers. For the movie a sign had been erected on the front that read, “Murphy’s Fine Food and Drink. Rooms by the Day or Week.”

  Once this had actually been a waterfront tavern with rooms rented to sailors on the upper floors. For a while after the waterfront shut down it had been a notorious gay bar called The Wrong Box.

  Carter Boyce, the actor playing Jimmy Nails, was in costume and taking a practice walk toward the ferry shed. Carter Boyce was a nice guy who happened to have a mug two feet wide with bad news written all over it.

  In the next scene, Jimmy Nails was supposed to have just come down the wooden exterior stairs that led from the second floor of Murphy’s. He had an overcoat on his arm and carried a satchel.

  The scene of Nails on those stairs had been completed the day before through the miracle of second unit work.

  Detectives McDevitt and Roark stand exactly where they were at the end of the last shot. In the background as they start to move towards Murphy’s, the Oldsmobile and the chicken truck roll off the dock in one direction, a red Studebaker station wagon goes by in the other.

  Twenty feet away from them Jimmy Nails drops his luggage and overcoat and swings a double barrel shotgun their way. McDevitt acting instinctively whips off his fedora and flings it at Nails’ face in one gesture. Jimmy, his eyes rolling like a trapped beast, is a creature of instinct and empties a barrel at the hat. Roark’s gun jumps into his hand and he fires three times. Jimmy Nails goes down firing the second barrel into the ground.

  The hat flying through the air and getting blasted into felt confetti was being shot that same week by a special effects outfit in California.

  “Thanks,” Roark says.

  “That hat cost me seven bucks at Rothman’s,” says his partner, his buddy.

  “Cut. Let’s put Zach and Sean about a foot further apart,” said Graham. “And Sean, slower on the reaction. Let the hat surprise you as much as it does Carter. Sean, are you with us?”

  Quinlan nodded. For a moment he’d felt like the back draft of the antique vehicles was pulling him away from this time and place.

  Over several takes the vintage Studebaker blew a tire and the wind and the sun played hell with Mr. Terry’s hair. Half a dozen people surrounded him, spraying his chestnut locks.

  “Exposure to the elements . . .”

  “It’s not, of course, but the light makes it look thin.”

  “. . . lighting adjustment . . .”

  This Quinlan knew was also about protecting the star as was the scene they kept enacting. McDevitt needed to save Roark’s life to mitigate, for the audience, the fact that his misjudgment was going to cost Roark his life.

  As they prepared for what turned out to be the last take, Quinlan couldn’t stop thinking, each time he looked at Zach Terry, that this was the bastard who was going to get him killed.

  At some point during the last couple of takes, Sean Quinlan became aware of a figure from his disreputable past. Rollins stood across the street dark and sharp in a navy blue suede jacket and soft leather shoes and watched everything that went on.

  When they were finished with Like ’60 for the day, he and Rollins went down the avenue to what had been a nouveau chic diner and now seemed to be slipping into just being a diner with a liquor license.

  “We had some rare adventures, you and I,” Rollins remarked when they settled into a back booth, “a pair of theater students out looking for adventure.”

  “And not caring where they found it.”

  “Always on the right side of the law, though.”

  “Not as I remember. There was the time we unloaded the Quaalude those crazy guys from NYU manufactured in their chemistry lab.”

  “We weren’t caught. That’s being on the right side of the law as far as I’m concerned. Glad you got in touch. I’ve been following your career. Sorry about the divorce. Monica Celeste must be loaded.”

  Quinlan shrugged. “I see you’re still the Well Dressed Passer-by,” he said. “That routine keeps working for you?”

  “In any large city there are always the lost, the confused, and the lonely that need an assist from a passing stranger.” Rollins gave a charming smile. “Actually, though, I’ve gone legit. I’m in the tourist business—tours of various old New Yorks. You heard about that?

  “We have people taking daytrips to 1890s New York. Out in Brooklyn in a couple of spots you can walk down a street and almost think it’s a hundred and twenty-five years ago. Any decade you can think of, people want to see the remains.”

  Rollins smiled. “It’s an amazing confluence, you being back in town and making this movie. Like ’60, is on the cusp of the hottest boom in this tired town. Your movie is going to be porno for the ones who go for ’50s New York. That ferryboat sliding up to the dock and that truckload of chickens and you and your pal in those hats and padded shoulder suits will make them cum in their Dacron/rayon pants.”

  Sean gave a grin. “In tough times people want to go elsewhere,” Rollins said. “With every corner of the planet going down the drain, the places they favor are in the past. Some lunatics even want to go back to the Great Depression. Like this one isn’t bad enough for them. But I don’t ask questions, I just set up the tours. Who would have guessed that a master’s degree in History from Columbia would stand me in such good stead?”

  “Especially since you never went there.”

  Rollins shrugged. “What makes it all weird and twisted and thus makes it my kind of enterprise is that some of the clients believe that if they can find a place with enough artifacts that evoke a certain time; they’ll get a jolt and wind up there.

  “Most of them want to go back to the seventies, the sixties, the fifties. They figure things would be comfortable enough. I.D. requirements were still loose back then. Sliders know enough about those times that they could make a nice living betting on the World Series and buying Xerox stock. One said that if he could get back to 1950 he’d have almost sixty years before stuff got really screwy.”

  “You’ve heard them talk all this out? Ever help any of them do it?”

  “None of my clients and no one else I’ve ever known has actually managed the Slide. They’ve all heard about someone going back in time. They know someone who found a message from someone who disappeared saying he’s living like a king in 1946. Psychiatrists say it’s delusional. People can’t deal with bad times.”

  “You believe the shrinks know what they’re talking about?”

  “They diagnosed me as a sociopath back when I was in high school. It sounded good and I went with it. If you’re looking for a guide to the Slide you’re out of luck. If you want a job leading 1950s nostalgia tours I’d be happy to hire you.”

  “Thanks, but I
have other plans.” Quinlan rose and put a ten down on the table. “Nice talking to you Rollo.”

  For a moment Rollins looked hurt. Then he said, “Sorry to break your heart, Quinlan. It’s nice that you figured if anyone in New York knew how to Slide it would be me. You’ve been in and out of the city over the years without ever trying to get in contact so I wondered what you wanted. Somehow I didn’t think of this. Either you got stupid out in California or you got very desperate.”

  In the early morning light, stepping carefully along a tenement fire escape just off Tenth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen, Detective Roark edges forward revolver in hand. Up ahead is Figs Figueroa’s window. In another moment his partner will knock on the door of the apartment and Figueroa will be on the move. Roark curses the stupidity that led him into this. Backup is on its way and they could have waited. But the Lieutenant is not happy with the way they’d bobbled Jimmy Nails’ arrest the other morning or the way they’d then made him too dead to talk. McDevitt thinks the two of them need some redemption.

  As Roark inches forward, the window right behind him opens. He drops to a crouch, revolver at the ready, turns and sees the terrified face of an old woman about to hang a basket of wet laundry on her wash line. When Roark turns back, Figueroa stands on the fire escape with an automatic leveled on him.

  “Cut.”

  On the roof just above Quinlan were the assistant director, the script girl, the camera man, and the director himself. “We need this one more time,” said Graham. “Just do what you’ve done before.” He looked closely at Quinlan and said, “Get this man some coffee.”

  It was late in the morning and Quinlan had already gone up this fire escape six times. He guessed this particular building got cast for the part because of this fire escape, which was as black and labyrinthine as the stairways of a Piranesi prison. People fussed with his clothes and his makeup. He’d lain awake all night next to Adie, who slept soundly. Somebody brought him coffee.

  This scene was his best moment in Like ’60. By coincidence, it and the one they’d shoot immediately afterwards were his last ones in the film. His work in New York was over.

  If someone asked him what Like ’60 was about, Quinlan would have said it was the story of a cop who was an ordinary guy wanting the ordinary things and living in a simpler and not very enlightened time. This man is pulled by circumstance and human weakness into a situation where his life is on the line.

  Again he climbs the stairs and inches forward. Again the window opens and, revolver at the ready, he stares into the terrified face and looks up too late to see his killer.

  This morning, it seemed as if Rollins was right about the Slide being a delusion. Quinlan felt no distant hum of past times. His stomach was tight, his shoulders tense.

  In his dressing room he looked at his messages. Adie had called from her office to say she had a meeting with a client and would have to miss the wrap party. This morning she had asked him—gently, indirectly, not like he was being evicted yet, if everything was okay for him back in L.A. She hadn’t mentioned the Brazilian, but he was an invisible presence.

  As Quinlan sat absorbing this, Arroyo, the lawyer, called. “My associate in San Bernardino says the grand jury will hand down indictments in an intimidation/extortion scheme this afternoon at around 6 pm New York time. You’re accused of impersonating a law officer. One alleged victim says you showed him a badge, threatened to run him in on false charges if he didn’t come up with his payment.”

  “That’s a lie.” Sean said that automatically but the only memory the accusation evoked was an appearance he’d made as a rogue cop on NYPD Blue many years before in which he flashed a shield.

  “Sean, they’re not interested in you. They want the ones who hired you.”

  “Speaking those names means I’ll be dead or in witness protection,” he said. “I’ll get back to you.”

  Quinlan remembered when he turned thirteen and decided that instead of becoming a cop, which was all he’d wanted up until then, he was going to be an actor. His grandfather had said, “Tough luck kid, you drew your father’s face and your mother’s brains.”

  He jumped when a woman from props knocked on the door and came in to put him into a bloody shirt.

  Pat Roark lies sprawled face up in the alley with the gun still clasped in his lifeless hand, his hat beside his head, his dead eyes staring at the sky.

  The scene was shot from above. The camera looked down as a dozen extras, kids carrying school books, women in curlers and house dresses, guys in work clothes, idlers and honest citizens suddenly converged from all directions to see the dead man who had fallen from the sky.

  The computer imaging of Roark falling backwards off the fire escape and slamming into the asphalt had been completed before he left Los Angeles.

  “What was he doing up there?” a woman with a Spanish accent wanted to know.

  “He’s a cop,” said a wise-ass kid, “see that police special.”

  As the sirens wail and echo off the alley walls, Pete McDevitt runs down the fire escape, yelling, “Pat! Jesus, no!” His voice breaks in a sob.

  Quinlan couldn’t tell if he used the dippy smile. The shot of Pat Roark dead in the alley would be used repeatedly in the film as a motive for Zach Terry’s Peter McDevitt in his quest for the killer and the ones behind the killer who, it turned out reached all the way to the Commissioner’s office.

  The old stage actor Denny Wallace, whose father was a Polish Jew and whose mother was a French ballet dancer, played Lieutenant O’Grady.

  Standing over the corpse, he delivers Roark’s epitaph. “He was worth twenty of you. I’ll have your badge and your gun for this, boyo.”

  Quinlan heard applause on the set, which meant this was probably the last take. There was comfort in lying dead in an alleyway killed in the line of duty in a time when that meant something. This was the part of his life that actually made sense.

  The applause faded and died. Smell was the first thing he noticed, tobacco smoke and garbage and exhaust. Sirens sounded on the avenue. Quinlan focused his eyes on a kid with bat wing ears, a crewcut and jeans so stiff that could stand up by themselves. A bunch of scruffy street rats stared down at him.

  “It’s a cop!”

  “How’d he get here?” The city accents were thick enough to cut.

  He closed his hand on his prop gun and they all stepped back. “You been shot mister. You need a doctor?” Quinlan remembered the prop blood on his shirt front. No one, he noticed, talked about calling the cops.

  “He’s a fuckin’ actor. Look at the make up,” said an old lady with way too much lipstick peering into the alley.

  All Sean wondered as he got up was how long it would take Graham and the rest to notice he was gone. He dusted himself off, buttoned his jacket to hide the dye on his shirt front, and wiped his face clean with a pocket handkerchief.

  It was a five story city and the sun shone directly from across the Hudson. Everyone got out of his way as he walked down the alley. He stuffed the gun in his pocket.

  “Anyone follows me,” he gestured to it. He doubted that anyone in Hell’s Kitchen was going to call the police. But he moved quickly, got on Tenth Avenue and started walking.

  Cars and clothes gave only a hint of the year. A corner newsstand had a big display of papers dated May 19, 1957.

  His father would be about half his age and still in the army in Germany. His mother would not have moved here from Buffalo. His grandfather and grandmother lived up on Fordham Road in the Bronx. The avenue was lined with pawn shops. The gun was a fake but he figured it would be worth a buck or two.

  Black Jack Quinlan and he would be about the same age. If he was here. He had to be here. Once he explained things, once he showed this face, Sean Quinlan couldn’t imagine them denying this fugitive a welcome.

  Alternate Worlds floating in the Time Stream have been an interest (obsession?) of mine. Warchild, my first novel and the first piece of speculative fiction that I wrote, begins
in New York but has all Time as its setting.

  Part Two:

  ACROSS WORLDS AND TIME

  The Time Stream is the back story for my novelette, “

  The Ferryman’s Wife .” The setting is suburban Westchester in the mid-1950s.

  A favorite short story author of mine, John Cheever, was known in his lifetime largely as a New Yorker writer and chronicler of the social mores of the mid-20th century American suburb. An article on Mad Men, the TV series set in 1960s Madison Avenue, mentioned that the producer has Cheever’s Collected Stories on his bookshelf as a reference tool. Recent biographies reveal that Cheever himself was more complicated socially and sexually than was generally known at the time (more like a Mad Man character, in fact).

  His style, normally naturalistic in The New Yorker manner, could unexpectedly shift into magic: a suburban evening might evoke nymphs and gods. Some Cheever stories, “Torch Song,” “The Enormous Radio,” “The Swimmer,” are overtly fantastic. Death is a lady in Manhattan; a radio broadcasts the private lives of the residents of an apartment house, a young man on a whim swims across his suburb by going from one backyard pool to the next. In the course of a day he travels into the neighborhood’s decline and his own old age.

  Around 2000, I began writing Alternate World/Time Stream stories. For one of the first I used a Cheever setting. This was my first story to be on a Nebula short list.

  THE FERRYMAN’S WIFE

  1.

  At 7:40 on the first warm day of April, on a Tuesday, that least remarkable of days, the platform at Grove Hill train station was all but deserted. Cars soon arrived, a Country Squire first, a Desoto V8 next, then a flood of fins and chrome. Commuters disembarked.

  As 7:49 approached, Oldsmobiles jockeyed with Pontiacs; sunlight gleamed on waxed finishes. A few women got out of autos and waited on the platform. But mostly it was husbands who gave goodbye kisses to wives with hair still in curlers and babies with zwieback-stuffed mouths.