Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  Linda said, ‘The bar where he got that matchbook—’

  ‘Your father is hardly likely to go back to it, Linda. Although I bet Mr Lar will put it under surveillance, just in case.’

  ‘It’s down in Alphabet City and features live music every night, the kind of old-time stuff my father likes. There are other places like it. I was thinking of checking them out.’

  ‘Are you asking my permission, or are you asking me to come along?’

  ‘You could help me canvass bar staff. Our friends in the white Dodge, by the way, they’re following us again. One lane over, three cars back.’

  Stone thought for a moment. Now that the locals were all over him, it might not be a bad idea to have someone who could help him evade their attention. And while there was virtually no chance of picking up Tom’s trail, he would be able to see how Linda handled herself, and get an idea of how things worked in this sheaf . . .

  He said, ‘If I go barhopping with you, I don’t want to be looking over my shoulder all the time.’

  ‘So you’ll come along?’

  ‘Isn’t that what I said? But only if you can lose our friends.’

  ‘Let’s wait until we get to Atom City,’ Linda said. ‘They’ll have a hard time blending in there. Actually, so will you, in that suit and tie. The first thing we have to do is find you some appropriate clothes.’

  When the atomic bomb had exploded over the Hudson, two-hundred-and-fifty-mile-an-hour winds and firestorms had levelled every building on the west side of Manhattan below Houston Street. East of Broadway, the upper storeys of surviving buildings were still printed with black scorch marks, and many were derelict, standing stark and windowless in wastelands of rubble. Linda Waverly told Stone that the social geography of Manhattan was reversed here: survivors with money and influence had moved as far as they could from Ground Zero, displacing the poor from Harlem and the Bronx, who had been resettled in high-rise blocks of social housing built on the ruins of Greenwich Village as part of the European-funded reconstruction plan. She pointed out a tall, slender tower outlined in red and green lights, about where the Pan-American Trade Center stood in the Real, and where reed beds grew along the shore at the edge of Susan’s farm.

  ‘The Atlantic Friendship Tower,’ she said. ‘It carries New York’s TV and radio traffic. Before we came through the mirror, it was popular with European tourists. They used to ride to the top to get a good view of Ground Zero.’

  The Lower East Side, renamed Atom City, was mostly intact, although many buildings were propped up by massive wooden braces. Avenues A, B and C had been renamed Alpha, Beta and Cobalt 60. Cars and taxis crawled nose to tail along the potholed streets, reflections of neon signs sliding over their windshields, and pedestrians overflowed the crowded sidewalks. Most were under thirty, dressed in what looked like their grandparents’ clothes, men in hats and suits with wide lapels, women in A-line dresses or beaded sweaters and knee-length skirts. Young toughs in leather jackets or T-shirts and jeans lounged on stoops, sizing up the crowds with insolent eyes. Little knots of soldiers or sailors called to each other. Street vendors sold hot dogs and doughnuts, pretzels and Chinese noodles. A guy in a red jacket was beating the hell out of a stack of cardboard boxes and plastic crates with a pair of drumsticks.

  After Linda found an empty spot and parked the taxi, the white Dodge nosed past. Two men in it, their gazes fixed straight ahead.

  ‘Take off your jacket,’ Linda told Stone. ‘We need to dress you down. It’ll help us lose those guys, and in the places where we need to go you could get in a lot of trouble if you’re wearing that suit.’

  ‘I was told the locals were friendly here.’

  ‘We have good relations with the government, but out on the street there are plenty of people who aren’t so happy with our presence. Street gangs, students, people who hang around student bars and pubs but aren’t actually students, if you know what I mean.’

  They found a used-clothing store, a whitewashed basement crammed with racks of tuxedos and Hawaiian shirts, cotton dresses and sweaters and woollen overcoats. Linda helped Stone choose a red wool shirt with long, pointed lapels, and a loose-fitting navy-blue cord jacket that more or less hid his shoulder holster, then stepped back and studied him, her head tilted to one side. She was almost his height, dressed in a green needlecord shirt and knee-length khaki shorts. She’d caught up her mass of red curls under a shapeless old Homburg. Tom Waverly’s little girl, all grown up.

  Stone said, feeling amused and slightly foolish in his disguise, ‘How do I look?’

  ‘Like an undercover cop who got out of bed in a hurry,’ Linda said. ‘But in a dim light and a crowded bar, you’ll just about pass for an ordinary human being.’

  They hopped from bar to bar, buying drinks they didn’t touch, scoping out the customers, showing bartenders and waitresses a photograph of Tom Waverly that Linda had brought along, moving on. No one seemed to be following them. In a club that occupied a converted bus garage, where strings of coloured lights dangled from the steel trusses of the high roof and a three-piece band played a ragged blues, Linda persuaded one of the bartenders to let her and Stone leave through the fire door. They walked away quickly and circled around Tompkins Square and the tent city for the homeless that was laid out under the trees.

  ‘I think we lost our friends,’ Stone said.

  ‘You’re enjoying yourself.’

  ‘I guess it reminds me of the good old days.’

  For a moment, the ghost of a young, exuberant, recklessly brave Tom Waverly touched both of them.

  Linda said, ‘There’s one more place I’d like to check out.’

  It was on the second floor of an old tenement building hidden behind a forest of wooden props. Stone followed Linda up a narrow flight of stairs into a space made out of three or four rooms knocked through, crowded with young people in old-fashioned clothes who were drinking beer and wine from paper cups and making a lot of noise under the pressed-tin ceiling. Most of them were smoking. In the big room at the end, on a small, low stage in front of windows shuttered with corrugated iron painted bright red, a man and a woman perched on bar stools with their acoustic guitars in their laps. Their audience sat on broken-down sofas and kitchen chairs, listening to the woman sing about how her morphine would be the death of her.

  Stone stood with Linda at the back of the audience. The singer played rhythm guitar and wore a calf-length flowered dress and tooled leather cowboy boots, her pale face framed by auburn hair parted down the centre, her dark eyes grave and steady. Her partner, dressed in a grey suit, black hair tangled across his handsome Irish face, bent over his guitar, putting some Spanish into his phrasing. They played a song about John Henry. They played a pretty song about a brave little flower called the acony bell. They played a song about the coo-coo bird, that sings as it flies. Songs that put a shiver in Stone’s blood, reminding him of the Harvest Home dance at the Ellison place two weeks ago, of tunes played at christenings, barn-raisings, and Fourth of July picnics: the singer and her partner were like travellers from distant blue hills, come down into the city with the mythic cargo of a lost, half-forgotten America.

  In a break in the set, while the two musicians retuned their guitars and chatted with friends in the audience, Linda told Stone that this bar was the centre of the revivalist scene.

  ‘When we first came through the mirror, all they had was European pop, European heavy metal, European dance hall. But after we made contact, there was a cultural flowering, a rediscovery of American roots. They have gospel, all kinds of blues, dozens, grunge . . .’

  ‘Grunge?’

  ‘It’s like heavy metal, but played real fast. There’s acid grunge, apocalypse grunge, garage grunge . . . all kinds. It’s what teenage white kids play in their bedrooms to annoy their parents, if they aren’t playing dozens.’

  ‘How about Bob Dylan? If we found him—’

  ‘We’d find my father.’ Linda smiled at Stone from under the brim of her H
omburg. They were leaning close to make themselves heard over the noise of the crowd. He could feel the heat of her body. A faint scent of patchouli oil. She said, ‘I’ve looked hard, but I don’t think Dylan took up the guitar in this sheaf.’

  ‘Maybe he’s out there somewhere, walking the back roads. He just hasn’t made himself known yet. How about Elvis Presley?’

  ‘He’s strictly a movie actor here. He started out as a singer, but after the war he went into the movies. I saw him in one - Judgement Day. He played a corrupt Southern Senator.’

  ‘I’d say it puts this sheaf about thirty per cent on the Elvis scale.’

  ‘I remember how you and my father used to joke about things like that.’

  ‘Back in the good old days.’

  Stone didn’t entirely trust Linda. She was inexperienced and naive, and David Welch was almost certainly using her to get close to him, but he was pretty sure that he was going to need some help tomorrow and, at bottom, they both wanted the same thing. They both wanted to find Tom Waverly before the locals did, and bring him in alive.

  He said, ‘When did you last see your father?’

  ‘Three years ago. Just before he went through the mirror for the last time. He disappeared, those insurgents claimed to have captured him, and then he was officially declared dead.’

  ‘How did he seem?’

  ‘A little quieter than usual, a little preoccupied, but maybe that’s only hindsight. You know how he was. It was always hard to know what he was really thinking.’

  ‘Did you happen to see his apartment after he disappeared?’

  ‘It was cleared out by the Company, in case he’d left sensitive information lying around. They sent on a few of boxes of personal stuff, mostly clothes and disks.’

  ‘No computer stuff? Notebooks? Files? Letters?’

  Linda shook her head. ‘We had a couple of phone conversations just before he disappeared. He talked about a motorbike he was thinking of buying, a long road trip he wanted to make. I can’t help thinking that what happened to him, the reason he disappeared, wasn’t something planned. He could have gotten caught up in something against his will. He could have been brainwashed.’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘But you don’t think so.’

  Stone smiled. ‘I plan to ask him about it, first chance I get.’

  The two musicians took to the stage again. The woman told the audience they had but one number left, and in the expectant hush began a long, yearning song about dreaming of a highway that would take her home, take her back to her lost love. A highway like a winding ribbon, a winding ribbon with a band of gold. A highway back to you. For a little while, everything except the music seemed to stop; only the music kept time moving forward.

  Stone was so caught up in its spell that he didn’t at first realise that the trilling noise was coming from the cell phone in the pocket of his pea jacket. He pulled it out, saw that Welch was calling him, pressed the yes button and said, ‘Wait up,’ and walked through the crowd to the restroom in back, disturbing a couple of teenagers in ruffled silk shirts and eyeliner who were sharing a marijuana cigarette. Stone locked himself in a vacant cubicle and told Welch to go ahead.

  Welch’s voice scratched in his ear. ‘What are you doing down in Atom City?’

  ‘Did Linda Waverly tell you where we were going, or do you have goons following me too?’

  ‘The phone tells me where you are.’

  The strong sweet smell of pot coiled through the stink of urine and disinfectant. Stone said, ‘Does it also tell you I’m off duty?’

  ‘I don’t think you are. I think you’re following up a lead from that little clue you found tonight.’

  ‘I guess Mr Lar got around to telling you about it.’

  ‘I thought we had an agreement, Adam. Anything you found, you’d tell me first.’

  ‘The locals were tailing me. They pounced as soon as they realised I’d found something. And maybe I’m just a little pissed off at you, David, because you gave Tom’s daughter the job of driving me around town.’

  ‘I forgot to ask. How’s that working out?’

  Stone heard the amusement in Welch’s voice, pictured his sly smile.

  ‘Tom hasn’t tried to get close to her, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘She’s no more bait than you are, Adam.’

  ‘We need to talk about that. Get it straightened out.’

  ‘Good idea. I’ll meet you for breakfast at the hotel tomorrow, six-thirty. Ed Lar will be stopping by at seven. You can thank me for persuading him to let you stake out the phone.’

  ‘The one in Duffy Square? Of course I’m going to stake it out. Tom expects me to be there tomorrow morning. Me, and no one else. If he sees that I’m being shadowed by the local law, he’ll call the whole thing off.’

  Stone was certain that Tom wouldn’t be anywhere near Duffy Square, but he didn’t want to waste time evading local surveillance after he found out where Tom wanted him to go.

  Welch said, ‘We have to cooperate with the locals, Adam. That’s how it is now.’

  ‘If you can’t call off Lar and his men, things could go bad very quickly.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll be able to find a way around it. We’ll talk tomorrow and see what we can come up with.’

  ‘Maybe you can tell me something now. Why are so many of the old gang involved? There’s Tom, of course, and you and me, Nathan Tate . . . I wonder how many more. I wonder if it has something to do with the Old Man.’

  ‘Knightly is stroked out. Most of his brain is shut down. He couldn’t plot his way out of his diapers.’

  ‘The last time I talked to him, in the middle of that mess over SWIFT SWORD, he told me that he was in need of a few good men. He never got around to explaining what he wanted them for, but I can’t help wondering now if some of his cowboy angels might still be working for him. And I also can’t help wondering if this might have something to do with the Company’s current internal problem.’

  ‘We can ask Tom about it, when we bring him in,’ Welch said, and cut the connection.

  Linda was waiting outside the restroom. Stone said, ‘I’m sorry I missed the rest of that song.’

  He was, too.

  ‘You attracted some attention,’ Linda said. ‘Only Men in Black carry cell phones.’

  ‘Men in Black?’

  ‘It’s what unfriendly locals call us. Like the guy who got in my face just now, asking why I was hanging out with the enemy. It’s okay, he was just some drunk, easy enough to deal with. But I think we should get out of here before someone decides to start some real trouble.’

  They’d gone less than a block when a battered four-door sedan with fat chrome bumpers and rocket-ship fins sharked up onto the sidewalk. Three young men climbed out. With their shaven heads, chests bare under army-surplus camo jackets, and black jeans tucked into heavy combat boots, they looked like brothers from an ill-favoured family. The tallest had a tattoo of the Confederate flag on the side of his neck and flicked open a butterfly knife as he walked toward Stone; the other two circled wide, beating the ends of their aluminium baseball bats on the sidewalk while the kid with the knife told Stone that he was going to find out what colour his guts were.

  ‘If you’re going to do it, son, do it,’ Stone said.

  He stepped inside the knife’s wild swing, caught the kid’s wrist and spun him around, bearing down on his arm and twisting it until the shoulder joint gave with a sharp click. The kid squealed and dropped his knife; Stone shoved him away and pulled out his Colt .45.

  Linda had drawn her pistol, too. The two boys with the baseball bats were backing away from her. Stone watched the kid with the dislocated arm stumble after them, watched as they fell into their car and squealed away with a defiant blare of their horn.

  ‘You did all right,’ Stone told Linda.

  She had a little trouble sliding her pistol, a sleek little Beretta, into the holster under the hem of her green shirt, and her smile
was shaky. ‘At least we know we really did blow off Mr Lar’s people. They would have been all over those idiots.’

  ‘Why don’t you take me somewhere where we can have a quiet drink? We need to talk about what we have to do tomorrow.’

  5

  ‘It sounds like you had a run-in with representatives of the local version of the Minutemen,’ David Welch said, after Stone had finished telling him about the brief tussle with the three thugs. ‘They used to be a gang of white supremacists. Now they’re a self-styled patriotic movement that’s taken to targeting anyone from the Real - they claimed responsibility for nail-bombing a Red Cross walk-in clinic in Newark a couple of days ago. Frankly, no one would have made any fuss if you’d terminated them right there on the sidewalk.’

  They were in the hotel’s dining room. The lights in the crystal chandeliers seemed too bright at this early hour. Waiters were laying silverware on tables spread with white linen. Welch was working his way through a stack of pancakes with a side order of Canadian bacon, pausing every now and then to take a drag from the cigarette burning in the crystal ashtray by his elbow.

  ‘You’ll regret that heavy breakfast if we have to go chasing after Tom,’ Stone said. He’d eaten half a grapefruit and was sipping black coffee laced with sugar.

  ‘I don’t plan to go chasing after anyone,’ Welch said, ‘and I don’t expect you to go chasing after anyone either. All that’s going to happen, Tom is going to phone you, and you’re going to talk to him and work out a way of bringing him in alive.’

  ‘Tom wants to talk to me, that much we can agree on. But how do you know he wants to talk about surrendering himself?’

  Welch dabbed a forkful of pancake in the pool of maple syrup on the side of his plate and pushed it into his mouth. ‘Tom was a good field officer in his day, one of the best, but he’s no Superman. He knows he can’t get out of this sheaf and he knows the net is closing around him. That’s why he left that message at the scene of the crime. He wants to talk to someone he knows and trusts because he wants to work out a way of coming in safely.’