A Matter of Time

by Glen Cook

  “Hank’s kicking up dust about something. I was helping his dad calm him down. Norm, this thing don’t look right. It says there wasn’t anything in his stomach. Except almost indetectable traces of what may have been pureed beef liver, and what may have been applesauce.”

  “No potatoes? No roast beef? No beer?”

  “No.” She sounded puzzled.

  Cash let out a whoop. “We did it! We proved it! The guy ain’t O’Brien.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Babe, I’ll tell you all about it when I get there. Don’t let John get away. He’ll want to hear this too.” He hung up, wrapped Annie in a powerful hug.

  “Norman, will you please calm down long enough to explain?”

  “Honey, I just made a breakthrough. It’ll put Hank on Cloud Nine. The dead guy can’t be Jack O’Brien.”

  “I heard. So how can you prove it?”

  “He ate meat and potatoes before he disappeared. The dead guy ate liver and applesauce.”

  She smiled, sharing his joy. Then, “You’d better sit down. You forgot something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you only proved that he wasn’t run through the time machine right away.”

  “Hunh?”

  “Those meat and potatoes wouldn’t stick to his ribs forever. Fifty years is plenty of time to digest them.”

  “Oh.” He slumped against the back of the couch. “I went off half-cocked, didn’t I?”

  “Looks like.” She took one of his hands in hers. “It’ll be okay. You’ll get to the bottom of it.”

  “Shit.”

  “Norm!”

  “Okay. Look, I got to get back. Hank’s pissed enough now, we spend so much time screwing around with this thing.”

  “Don’t let him keep you too late. Major Tran called. They’ll be here in time for supper.”

  “Damn. I don’t know if I’ll be able to cope. Unless John’s got something to cheer me up. There was another one, honey. I found out today. Besides O’Brien and the four hoods.”

  “What?”

  “Another victim. A kid. Twelve years old. Carstairs never found out about him or the hoods. But he must’ve felt something. That had to be why he was so stubborn about letting go.”

  “Evil. I told you....”

  “I’ll be home as soon as I can.” He kissed her good-bye. They still did that, after all these years.

  “What happened to the high?” Beth asked as he slouched through the office door.

  “My old lady shot it down.” He explained. “Where’s John? What’d he get?”

  “I haven’t seen him. I thought he was with you.”

  “But...” What the hell? John had had plenty of time... Teri? The sonofabitch was making whoopie on company time. He grabbed a phone, then thought better of it. No point stirring things up, or playing Typhoid Mary with his depression. Let John enjoy till he decided it was time to come in.

  A thump startled him.

  Old Man Railsback had dozed off. A book had fallen off his lap.

  Hank’s door was closed, but the sound of his feet as he paced could be heard.

  “Beth, see if you can get Judge Gardner for me. If you can’t, just leave a message saying I dug up another disappearance. With a witness.”

  “At the Groloch place again?”

  “Yeah. I’ll be in here shuffling papers.”

  Quitting time arrived. Still no John. This was going to have to stop. Sooner or later, Cash decided, Harald was going to force him to take official notice.

  Irked, he returned home. He had been counting on John to give the day a bright ending.

  It was just the day that had him down. John had been vanishing without explanation since before Christmas.

  A cool shower did wonders. Norm felt human by the time Tran and his family arrived.

  XX

  On the X Axis;

  1889-1945;

  A Bohemian Physician

  Neulist arrived May 12,1889.

  The crone of a midwife strained cataracted eyes — and screamed. “Another one! Another devil!”

  No one listened. She had been going on this way for twenty-five years, since the flight of her husband and children. Her warnings had been so fervent for so long that even the most compassionate villagers shunned her as a madwoman.

  Those same villagers shunned the growing boy. His approach stirred irrational loathings. Even his parents barely tolerated him.

  He had spent years in isolation, hated by millions. The antipathy of a few hundred superstitious peasants troubled him not at all. What bothered him was being a child.

  Children in this age were little more than slaves.

  He found the midwife’s past overwhelmingly intriguing. All that talk about her husband and children, about possession and flight....

  The other villagers were bored with it. Possession? By now they believed she had driven them off with her shrewish ways.

  The mayor once mentioned having received a letter all the way from America, from Fiala, asking after her mother. The boy broke into the man’s home and stole it when he was seven.

  It gave him an address.

  He mulled that letter, and the old woman’s story, for years. And knew were his destiny lay.

  As a child he had no more rights, and little more power, than a bondservant. Till he turned thirteen he hired out to work in the fields. Then he joined his father in the mines at Kladno.

  There was little he could do till he became a man.

  Except study. The village priest overcame his revulsion and helped a haunted but brilliant child find the navigation markers of life in that age.

  Those were the years when he learned patience. He had no choice. A strapping was the inevitable consequence of the slightest rebellion.

  His mother died when he was nine.

  His father loathed him almost as much as did the midwife. His childhood became one long exercise in discipline. He learned, without coming to understand, what it was like to live on the receiving end of dictatorship.

  In time he became perfectly willing to invest decades in his vengeance. And absolutely determined to carry it out. For these years of hell the Zumstegs would pay in agony and blood.

  The summer of 1908, finally, saw him fleeing his hell for Vienna, taking his own, his father’s, and his church’s savings. There, through applied gall and a talent for forgery, he enrolled himself in the Academy of Fine Arts, where his work as a sculptor was just good enough to keep him in. Two years later he reverted to old habits, began studying contemporary medicine with a Dr. Mayer in Leopoldstadt, Vienna’s Jewish district.

  Despite, or perhaps because of, his background in twenty-first century medicine, he was an abysmal failure as a medical understudy. Students weren’t permitted to contradict the common wisdom of their teachers, nor to promulgate crazy medical theories. Mayer endured him for two years. The doctor was a patient, tolerant man, completely oblivious to any aura of the alien. His cause for dismissing his apprentice was, in fact, personal. He learned that his goy pupil had been bedding his daughter — and had gone so far as to abort their love-child.

  Mayer expelled his protege from his practice with that air of great sadness characteristic of the career long-suffering European Jew.

  There had to be, Neulist thought at the time, laws of temporal inertia, or laws of chronological thermodynamics, that refused to permit the introduction of changes or new ideas.

  He could not comprehend the importance to these people of being goyim or Jew, nor the intense revulsion the period’s habitues bore abortion.

  His response to the dismissal was blind despair. Medicine was the only field he knew — since people in this age had little need of a chief of secret police whose duties were to maintain the purity of the party ideal. Not even his obsession with the Zumstegs could break through. When the depression at last lifted he was left with nothing but indifference and a bottomless well of self-pity. His social condition slipped
from bad to worse — he made his few kronen performing abortions — and to worse still, till in January 1913, so destitute that he no longer possessed a winter coat, he pawned his shoes for enough money to spend a week in the Mannerheim. The Mannerheim was a five-hundred-bed dormitory maintained for the not-quite-indigent, a sort of Viennese YMCA.

  Even there, among outcasts, he remained an outsider. It was as if he exuded some alien scent that kept most everyone at a distance. There was just enough human contact to start him on the road back up.

  His one friend, a man as alienated as he, was one he had long admired, in historical retrospect. Even though marooned in this desert isle of time, he had never hoped to meet the fellow. Certainly not among the down-and-outs of Brigittenau district, where Jews were thick as flies.

  At that time, though, the man was just a young, directionless crank and third-rate artist, possessed by no political ideals and certainly not obsessed with the Jewish Question.

  “Things must be different this time,” Neulist mumbled to Hitler one morning, when they were alone in the writing room. “Unless I’m more ignorant of your biography than I thought.”

  The skinny, homely youth glanced up from his watercolors puzzledly. This was the sort of mysterious, never-to-be explained remark that had first drawn him to his companion, this Michael Hodzâ. That and a shared feeling that they were trapped in a foreign world.

  Over the months, the vague remarks included such cryptic admonitions as, “Finish Sea Lion before you start Barbarossa,” and, “Don’t trust Count von Stauffenberg.”

  After each remark Hodzâ became embarrassed, as if he had spoken out of turn.

  Neulist, aka Hodzâ, no longer worried about altering history. His experience with Dr. Mayer had convinced him that he could not. So he did as he pleased, spending his little energy scrounging a living, and for a time completely forgot the Zumstegs.

  His latter days of poverty and impotence were, paradoxically, among his happiest in two lifetimes.

  Yet he remained the Avenging Sword of the State. It was his duty to pursue traitors even here in the backwaters of Time.

  But the State, to all practical purposes, did not exist. How could he presume to act in its behalf?

  In this age, in a whole body, he suffered none of the pain, physical or mental, that had driven him over the borders of rationality in his own time.

  The friendship with Hitler never deepened, though they became traveling companions. On May 24, 1913, they set off together on a railroad adventure which ended at the cradle of the F? hrer-to-be, Munich.

  The piling international crises of the time, the Balkan Wars and the separatist movements in the imperial Hapsburg hinterlands, brought Europe to a simmer. In June 1913 the men separated. Hodzâ returned to Prague. Using forged credentials, he established himself as a physician. He met Hitler again briefly in 1936, when he was physician to the Czech Olympic team. Hitler didn’t recognize him.

  But the F? hrer did remember him later, on July 20,1944, at about 12:35 p.m., when the Count von Stauffenberg entered the conference room in the Lagebaracke at the Wolfsschanz with a fat black briefcase.

  Hitler puzzled the vague memory till it was too late to flee. The bomb went at 12:42....

  But this time it didn’t kill.

  The colonel had effected a major alteration of the past.

  By 1936 he suspected things could be radically changed. There were subtle little differences in this history and they seemed to be accumulating. He continually wished he had studied his history closer so he could identify their nature. The big, shaping changes then still seemed improbable.

  Those Prague years, more than a score of them, hurried past. He made only halfhearted attempts to fulfill his duty toward the Zumstegs: He was content with his life.

  Contentment and happiness expired late in 1938. They perished on a day when Hitler and Chamberlain were meeting at Munich.

  Because he made a delicious, exciting, entirely coincidental discovery. A vagary of Fate fanned his mad anger till it became a raging, possessing demon.

  On that ill-starred September morning he had decided to visit Isador Neumann’s tiny philatelic-numismatic shop. A tall, rugged, hard-looking man jostled him at the door. Their eyes met. Both frowned, paused as if trying to remember the name of an old acquaintance. Hodzâ watched the man walk on while trying to fathom his sudden excitement. Finally, he went inside.

  “Ach, Dr. Hodzâ,” said the gnome of a Jew with the incredibly merry eyes. “Buying or selling today?” And, “What’re the English and Germans doing to us now?”

  “I’m selling, Isador. And so are the English. But they’ll get no joy from their thirty pieces of silver.” He opened the special wallet to reveal the stamps within, then glanced toward the door perplexedly. “Who was that man?”

  “Him? One of my oldest customers. Not a very talkative sort. You really want to sell these? Hold them another year. They’ll go up.”

  Neumann was a good fellow. His advice was well-meant. But in a year the market would be dead. The fate of Czechslovakia, and of Europe, was being sealed this very day. “Yes. Only the forty-eight copies known. But I want to sell. That man?”

  “I have his card here somewhere. He always buys the old Austrian coins. Long ago he gave me the list. Two, three times a year he comes to see what I’ve found. You’re sure you want to sell?”

  “Absolutely.”

  These stamps would explode in value after the war. All these copies, twelve of the forty-eight known, would be destroyed when a misguided Resistance fighter, under the misapprehension that any free Jew must be a Gestapo agent, would, in 1943, throw a bomb into this shop. Hodzâ planned to gather the surviving copies in 1945, once the Russian occupation had destroyed the value of everything but food.

  Hodzâ had been riding the highs and lows of the stamp market since the close of the Great War, often obtaining future rarities at issue. He had developed a vast but portable fortune in tiny bits of paper, and in Switzerland, in a vault in Zurich, was material with a potential worth in the hundreds of millions.

  “Here we are. I’m going to have to get this place organized someday.”

  The colonel-doctor laughed. The crowded little shop hadn’t changed in decades. “You said the same thing the first time I came in. That was fifteen years ago.”

  “And I meant it. I just haven’t found the time.”

  Hodzâ took the card, it said in two lines:

  FIAN GROLOCH

  LIDICE

  He nearly collapsed.

  “Is something wrong, Doctor?”

  “Right here under my nose all the time,” he murmured. Off and on, he had had a dozen private detectives tearing up America for as many years, and no amount of money had been able to unearth more than one Groloch, the Fiala whose address he had obtained from a letter written fifty years ago, to the then mayor of Lidice.

  He surged toward the door.

  “Doctor! Without your hat?”

  Neumann’s question reestablished his link with reality.

  German troops were already over the border at Eger. They had been for days. In hours the full might of the Wehrmacht would roll. It was too late. There was no time to do a proper job. Right now.

  He resumed his business with Neumann, a plan already shaping in the depths of his mind. Its success would hinge on two eventualities: his own ability to escape Czechoslovakia before the iron grip of the Third Reich tightened, and Fian Groloch’s known unfamiliarity with his nation’s early history.

  Had Fial been there in Lidice, Neulist’s trap could never have been sprung.

  His escape route led through Poland, and along the way a Czech patriot named Josef Gabiek lost his papers, identity, and life.

  • • •

  The night was pitch. The air moaning through the hatch was chilly. Kubis shivered so much his teeth rattled. But that had nothing to do with cold. He had been doing it since takeoff.

  For the first few hours he had worried aloud, constan
tly, about the Luftwaffe, but the endless silence and absolute confidence of his companion, the man who called himself Josef Gabiek, had compelled him to retreat into a fear-filled shell.

  How could Gabiek be so certain? So sure that he had been able to sell the British and the government-in-exile?

  Gabiek was not certain. This time around he had moved the operation up five days in hopes of taking Fian Groloch by surprise. Also, there was the fact that the real Josef Gabiek, in the operation of his own past, hadn’t survived.

  The light came on. The RAF men shoved the equipment bundle to the hatchway.

  “Time to go,” said Kubis, more to himself than to his companion.

  Gabiek rose slowly, tightened his chute harness. “It’s changing, Jan,” he muttered. “I can feel the difference now.”

  A minute later the soil of their homeland was rushing toward them from the darkness. Gabiek tracked the equipment chute. Kubis searched the upsurging forest for a sign of the SS men he knew would be waiting....

  Gabiek was right, just as he had been all along. It went perfectly.

  Morning. May 29, 1942. The open-topped green Mercedes sports car and escort were right on time.

  Couldn’t Gabiek miss?

  The older man jumped out and began firing. Without effect.

  Kubis threw the bomb.

  The Mercedes disintegrated.

  But Heydrich clambered out and came toward them, blazing away with his pistol.

  Reinhard “Hangman” Heydrich, “protector” of Bohemia and Moravia, had been whipped about like a rat in a terrier’s mouth. Pieces of seat-back spring protruded from his back. His spine had been shattered.

  Yet he stood there and fought back.

  It wasn’t his appointed time to die.

  As they fled through their smokescreen, with Heydrich’s slugs hunting them, Gabiek said over and over, “I can’t change it. But it’s different.”

  To effect their escape they were supposed to place themselves in the hands of a priest at Karl Borromaeus Church in Prague. There, among scores of Resistance fighters hiding from the insanity of the security police, Gabiek encountered another time traveler.

  The nun was so aged and feeble that she had to perform her limited duties from a wheelchair.