Cowboy Angels

by Paul McAuley

  Now, Stone said, ‘If he pushes you about anything that upsets you, tell him to drop dead. He won’t mind - he likes it when women stand up to him.’

  The dining room had stained-glass windows from the Metropolitan Museum’s mediaeval collection, and a huge stone fireplace flanked by a pair of stone gryphons. The long oak table, with seats for thirty guests, was set at one end with Meissen porcelain and a big gold cruet by Cellini. Stone and Linda sat with Walter Lipscombe and his wife, a cool slender brunette half her husband’s age, the daughter of a congressman from Tennessee who had adroitly changed sides at the beginning of the revolution, after the army had refused to move in when student riots had set fire to campuses across the country.

  ‘You were going to tell me the story of how you scuffed up your jeans,’ Lipscombe said to Linda, over the first course of salmon mousse and white truffle shavings.

  Stone cut in, gave a précis of how he and Linda had escaped from the train. When he’d finished, Lipscombe said, ‘This woman who caused you such grief, she was working for who, exactly?’

  ‘That’s what we’re trying to find out,’ Stone said.

  ‘I hear it’s internal. Something to do with a conspiracy inside the Company.’

  ‘Your sources are still good, Walter.’

  ‘I try to keep up. I also heard it was something to do with your old boss, something he set up before he had his stroke.’

  ‘Like I said, we’re trying to find out what exactly is going on.’

  ‘Well, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. I understand how it is. I’m happy to help out, no strings, no one owes anyone anything. So, how’s retirement working out for you, Adam? I hear you’re living in one of those wild sheaves. What are you now, a farmer? Cattle rancher? Gambler on a riverboat?’

  Although Stone knew that Lipscombe couldn’t possibly know about Susan, he felt a sudden chill across his skin, an ache at the back of his throat. He said, ‘It isn’t exactly like the Wild West. Most of the time I don’t do much of anything, which is the point of retirement. I fish, I hunt—’

  ‘Ever hunt those big animals they have in those wild sheaves, the ones that are extinct here?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘You and me, when this is all over, maybe we could arrange a hunting trip together. What’s so funny?’

  ‘I’m trying to imagine you out in the forest, Walter.’

  Lipscombe grinned. ‘It’d be an experience, right? It’s good to see you back in the saddle, Adam. Really. What happened to you, what happened to all you old-time cowboy angels, the hearings, the resignations, people falling on their swords for the good of the Company ... It was a fucking shame. You were betrayed, you want my opinion. You shoulda risen up and got rid of that lily-livered clown calls himself President.’

  ‘Walter,’ his wife said. She laid a hand on his arm and said, ‘Let’s not talk politics at the dinner table. It gets you too excited.’

  ‘He gave us full independence,’ Lipscombe said, ‘but what good is that if the Commies get together and try to take us down? I met the son of a bitch once. He was on his so-called peace mission. I told him people here thanked God and the Real every night for getting rid of the Dear Leader, they would never forget that the Real had once had the guts to go to war on our behalf. He gave me the fish-eye and a clammy handshake and moved on down the line.’

  ‘Walter,’ his wife said again.

  ‘I’m a passionate man,’ Lipscombe told Linda. ‘Aside from my good wife here, and my two boys, know what I’m most passionate about?’

  Linda guessed that it might be fine art. ‘I noticed the painting in the drawing room. The one on the easel? It looks like Botticelli’s Annunciation.’

  ‘That’s because it is. Are you an art lover?’

  ‘I remember seeing it in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the Real.’

  Walter Lipscombe’s grin made him look like a frog who’d just swallowed an especially juicy fly. ‘That’s where I got it from. My version of the Met, that is, not yours. And it’s my Annunciation too, the one that belongs right here, not the one you saw back in the Real. But if you swapped one with the other, no one would be able to tell, including the guy I’m about to sell it to, a private collector in the Real. It’s an everyday miracle of quantum physics, like the multiplication of the True Cross.’

  Linda said, trying to work it out, ‘You’re a trustee on the museum board?’

  ‘Honey, I own the place. When the Dear Leader turned tail and ran, God rot his black soul, I stood on the steps of the Met with a couple of dozen soldiers and saved the place from the looters. Later on, I bought it from the city.’

  ‘It was his single stroke of genius,’ Stone said.

  ‘I’ve made plenty of good deals since then, but I have to admit, the time I moved in on the Met was a defining moment in my life. I know what you’re going to say,’ Lipscombe told Linda. ‘You’re going to say that I’m no better than the looters. That I’m pillaging a public institution for my own gain. Honey, I heard it all. If I sell off the odd painting, it’s to keep the poor old place going. And besides, the museum was built in the first place by Boss Tweed, using part of the fortune he made by stealing the city blind, and more than half the stuff in it is plunder from other countries bought by tycoons who weren’t much better than gangsters and pirates. Anyway, we were talking about passion. Maybe you’re passionate about art, Linda, but for me, it’s a business. I learned to love it, but learning how to love something is different from being in love, am I right? No, what I really love is history. You learn everything from history, or else—’

  He grinned at Stone, who dutifully supplied the old punchline. ‘You learn nothing.’

  ‘He still remembers,’ Walter Lipscombe said. ‘I know a bit about your history, I know you never had what you’d call a real Second World War, that you took sides when the Russians had a revolution in 1947, and you ended up atom-bombing Stalingrad. Here, just a little earlier, the Russians and the Brits were fighting against Hitler and his National Socialism. The American Bund declared that it was staying out of the war, but of course it didn’t - it supplied arms and raw materials to the Germans. That made the Brits pretty sore, I can tell you. After they invaded Europe, and the American Bund’s merchant fleet lost the protection of the German U-boats, the Brits sank most of our ships and bombarded New York and Washington to drive home the point that they could do what they liked. And after they won the war, the Brits and the Russians imposed monster reparations on us. We had two decades of depression and high taxes, and if you guys hadn’t come along, our Dear Leader would probably have lost a war against the United Community of Europe, we’d’ve had world peace, world government, everyone ground down under the same boot-heel forever . . . Adam and me, we were part of the fight against that, once upon a time.’

  Stone said that the revolution had been about to happen anyway; he’d simply helped to give the local resistance a little boost.

  ‘Stone and his pals trained people and brought in guns,’ Lipscombe told Linda. The three glasses of ashen-yellow Pinot Gris he’d drunk with the first course had lit him up. ‘I should know, because I was the guy helping move them. Those were good times. You lived every day, every hour, right there in the moment, because any second the FBI could arrest you and cart you off to the dungeons at Buzzard’s Point, torture you to extract every bit of useful information, then shoot you, bing bang boom. They were killing a thousand a day toward the end, dumping them in the river in such numbers the politicians on Capitol Hill were complaining about the stink. Adam and your father and me, Linda, we were fighting against that.’

  His wife deftly turned the topic of conversation to her husband’s funding of arts projects in the city, the season at the Opera House he’d sponsored, the charities she worked for. Stone saw how Walter Lipscombe waxed proud in the reflected glow of her elegance; the tough, cynical fixer was definitely in love. While the main course of rare beef and watercress sauce was being
served, Linda told Lipscombe that she couldn’t help noticing that he had the little finger missing on his left hand, and asked if he had lost it while fighting in the revolution.

  ‘No, it was way before that,’ Lipscombe said. ‘As a matter of fact, it was my first real lesson in the way the world works. Adam knows all about it, and Anna has heard me tell it about a hundred times, but it’s a good story. I’m sure they won’t mind hearing it again.’

  He held up his hand and with the fondness of a retired soldier examining a campaign medal studied the silvery scar that sealed the stump of the missing finger. ‘Back in the bad old days, I was a raw kid driving a truck for one of the State-owned haulage companies and taking kickbacks from my immediate boss, who was connected, to run an extra trip or two at night. I’d drive across the border along the fire roads, load up, come back. I’d been doing this for a couple of months when I was jumped coming back with a full load. The usual set-up - a tree across the road, half a dozen guys in black balaclavas stepping out with machine guns and telling me to climb down. They were very efficient, knew exactly what they were doing. Hauled me out of the cab and put a gun in my ear and told me what was what, told me I’d come out of it okay if I did as I was told. So I sat nice and quiet on the tree they’d used to block the road, and didn’t say a word while they took the goods.

  ‘But the thing was, I recognised one of them. This tall skinny guy with a stutter who was one of the workgang that had loaded up the stuff in the first place. What they were doing was ripping off the outfit they worked for, the one that had sold the whiskey, as well as ripping off the outfit that had bought the whiskey, the outfit my boss at the haulage company was connected to. When they were finished they beat me up a little, and one of them slipped a twenty-dollar bill into my pocket and told me to say I had been held up by crooked Customs officers. That kind of thing did happen, but usually the customs officers shot up the truck and killed the driver, took half the load for themselves, then turned in the rest and made themselves out to be heroes. There was a telephone number on the bill that I was supposed to call the next time I made a run. They promised me a couple of hundred if I did that.

  ‘Anyway,’ Walter Lipscombe said, ‘I knew that my boss might be taken in by the lame-o story about Customs officers, but I also knew that his bosses would think it was a crock. So, I told him about the guy with the stutter. Next night, I’m pulled out of bed by two big guys in expensive black overcoats, put in a car and driven across the border to the place where I usually loaded up. There are maybe twenty guys there, standing in a circle around six bare-ass-naked bozos all beat-up and bleeding. I’m told to identify the one I’d recognised, and although I’m sick at heart, what can I do but finger him? I mean, they’d already beaten a confession out of those guys, they just wanted confirmation from me, and if I didn’t give it they’d kill them anyway. But by laying the finger on one of them, I became part of it, you see? Which was what happened. I was given a new job at a government warehouse and told to recruit drivers, and that’s how I started on my long climb to where I am today, with my beautiful wife and my beautiful children and my beautiful house. All of which I owe to some poor dumb cluck with a stutter, who didn’t know to keep his mouth shut.’

  Linda said, ‘But what about the little finger?’

  ‘I didn’t tell you?’ Walter Lipscombe widened his eyes and struck his forehead with the heel of his hand in a pantomime of amazement. His wife was smiling at this bit of business, even though she must have seen it a hundred times. ‘What happened was, I kept that twenty-dollar bill that had been tucked into my pocket, and my bosses found out about it when they turned those guys over. So I was promoted for breaking open the scam, and I lost my little finger to remind me to be fully truthful at all times. And I’ve never forgotten that lesson - don’t try to play both ends against each other, or you’ll wind up in the middle, neck-deep in shit.’

  After dessert and coffee, Walter Lipscombe and Stone retired to the library while Walter’s wife took Linda on a tour of the rest of the apartment. The library was panelled with fifteenth-century oak from a manor house in Kent, England, and contained more than ten thousand volumes, including one of the most comprehensive collections of pornography in the world. One wall was dominated by Jan van Eyck’s Last Judgement. Display cases showed off drawings by Tintoretto, Pisanello, and Dürer, an illuminated page from Jean Fouquet’s Book of Hours, rare pre-Revolutionary comics. Suits of ornate fourteenth-century German armour stood in shadowy alcoves.

  Lipscombe poured two fingers of hundred-year-old brandy (‘Liberated from the cellars of the Dear Leader’s palace in Washington, DC’) into two balloon glasses, and after Stone had refused the offer of a cigar and they had settled into leather armchairs on either side of a stone fireplace burning real logs, the ex-gangster made a toast to old times.

  ‘That’s why I’m here,’ Stone said.

  ‘I was wondering when you’d get around to it.’

  In the soft red light of the fire, wreathed in the smoke of the Romeo y Julietta that was stuck in the middle of his grin, Walter Lipscombe looked like a minor devil. A nearby lamp put a shine on the pink scalp under his thinning hair.

  ‘Thanks for holding off over dinner,’ Stone said.

  ‘I know you have a low opinion of me, Adam, but even I can see that while that little girl is putting up a good front, a breath of wind could blow her clean away. Now we’re alone, maybe you could tell me exactly what happened to Tom.’

  Stone told the story he’d put together in the bath: how he’d been recruited to try to bring in Tom Waverly, and what had gone down in Pottersville. He explained that Tom had been involved in some kind of conspiracy buried deep inside the Company, the one that Lipscombe had heard about, but didn’t mention that Tom had taken something that both the conspiracy and the Company wanted to find. He knew that if Lipscombe got wind of that, and found out that he and Linda were looking for it, the ex-gangster would make Stone an offer he couldn’t refuse.

  When Stone was finished, Lipscombe took a sip of his brandy and said, ‘Stein told me Tom killed himself, but I didn’t know you were there. And you think Tom was dying of something.’

  ‘Terminal cancer, according to the Company pathologist. I don’t know whether to believe that or not, but I do know that when we met up he’d reached the end of the line.’

  ‘The poor bastard. But we had some good times, didn’t we?’ Lipscombe said, and raised his glass.

  They toasted Tom Waverly’s memory.

  Lipscombe said, ‘You tried your best to save Tom, and the stupid son of a bitch took another way out. But what brings you here? Why aren’t you back on your farm, enjoying your retirement?’

  ‘I’m trying to help Linda clear her father’s name,’ Stone said. He wasn’t about to tell Walter Lipscombe about Susan’s murder. It was too raw and too personal, and he didn’t want the man’s pity.

  ‘And you’re following up a few leads, huh? Well, Tom was a good friend of mine,’ Lipscombe said. ‘Anything I can do to help, name it.’

  ‘When we’ve finished here, Linda and I need to get back to the Real. But we can’t use a regular gate.’

  ‘Because you’d be grabbed.’

  ‘I was wondering if you still make use of the old gate at Grand Central Station.’

  ‘Funny you should mention that. The painting your girlfriend admired? I’m sending it through the mirror tomorrow afternoon, two o’clock. Or is that too early for you?’

  ‘Not if things work out. I’d like to get out of here as soon as possible. No offence.’

  ‘None taken. Let me talk to the guys who look after this side of the gate. I’m sure I can persuade them to let you go through at the same time,’ Lipscombe said, rubbing his finger and thumb together.

  ‘As long as it doesn’t get you into trouble with the COILE.’

  ‘Forget about it.’

  ‘We’ll need new ID, too. Something from one of the Real’s agencies. Something that will get us th
rough an interchange.’

  ‘If you go through the old gate with my name under the contract, it’s strictly no questions asked. You won’t need any ID.’

  ‘We might need to use other gates later on.’

  ‘You really are into some serious shit, aren’t you?’

  ‘I won’t forget your help, Walter. How about that ID?’

  ‘No problem. Army, DEA, ATF, FBI, or Carter’s peacenik Reconstruction and Reconciliation Corps?’

  ‘Army will be fine.’

  ‘You and Ms Waverly will have to give up your present ID - the guy who does this kind of work will need to copy your photographs and fingerprints.’

  ‘How quickly can he do this?’

  ‘Hand your stuff to my butler. He’ll get things organised overnight. So, is that it? If you want some company, a nice girl who can help you forget your troubles, my butler can organise that, too.’

  ‘Maybe you can help clear up a little mystery,’ Stone said. ‘Tom was in this sheaf recently, and he left in a hurry.’

  Walter nodded. ‘Right after he killed that woman. A mathematician, I believe, by the name of Eileen Barrie. She worked for the government, in the laboratories at Livermore. I heard all about it from that prick Saul Stein when he was trying to rattle my cage. He told me that Tom blew her up in her car, and they knew it was Tom because the crime scene guys had found his thumbprint on a piece of circuitry. The bomb was packed behind the plastic cover of the steering wheel column, a very nice shaped charge that decapitated her but left the bodyguard sitting next to her with no more than burst eardrums and second-degree burns to his hands. Very definitely Tom’s style, don’t you think? What Stein didn’t tell me, what I’ve been trying to figure out, is why Tom wanted to kill her in the first place. You know anything about that?’

  ‘I was brought in on a need-to-know basis, and told more or less what you were told,’ Stone said. Lipscombe didn’t need to know that Tom Waverly had been killing off Eileen Barrie’s doppels. ‘I do know that he managed to get out of this sheaf after he killed her. I was wondering if he might have used the old gate under Grand Central Station.’