The Callahan Touch

by Spider Robinson

“Jesus Christ,” Long-Drink said reverently. “How could he show a profit?”

  “By creating a category in his bookkeeping called ‘Satisfaction,’ Drink. He inherited his pile when he was thirty, and decided he couldn’t think of anything better to spend it on than turning people on to good coffee.”

  “Come to think of it,” the Doc rumbled, “neither can I.”

  “He drove the IRS crazy, but so far it’s still legal to lose money if you have a mind to. He operated like that twelve hours a day, six days a week, for over twenty years. If nobody came in, he’d read a book. Once a year he’d take off a month and travel around the world, visiting all the great coffee kings—he knew ’em all; they’d give him beans out of their personal stashes.”

  “My God,” Bill said, adjusting a bra strap, “he must have done something awful good in his last incarnation.” There were many nods.

  “One day,” I went on, “he realized that his money was running out. So he sank most of what he had left into designing the Fount. He figured to sell it for enough to keep peddling superb coffee at cost until he dropped in his tracks. He started with the concept of microwave roasting. In conventional roasting, by the time the inside of the bean is done, the outside is a little overdone…so you have to go for a compromise. With microwave, the inside and outside reach optimum temperature together.”

  “Brilliant,” Doc Webster said. Even the Duck looked impressed.

  “It grew from there. He said he realized the idea was too big for individual home consumers, so he aimed at the restaurant, bar and big office market. The Fount’s made like a VW used to be. Every single component is stock generic hardware, cheap and easy to replace. The prototype cost him his last dime, but he wasn’t worried. He knew he had a winner. He went looking for venture capital and a patent lawyer.”

  “Which one got him?” Willard asked, with the reflexive interest of a retired professional. “The money man or the lawyer?”

  “Both,” I said sadly. “He was lucky to come out of it with physical possession of the Mark I—which he’s not allowed to sell. There’s a patent but his name doesn’t appear on it, and he’s legally enjoined by a corporation he supposedly worked for against ever inventing anything involving coffee again, and the lawyer has his nephew the engineering student busy crapping up the design to suit the capitalist. In about five years you’ll be able to pay eight hundred bucks for a version that looks like the bridge of the starship Enterprise, and will actually produce a drinkable cup of coffee right up until its thirty-day warrantee runs out, after which you will find that the capitalist is sole source for all the customized parts. It’ll stiff big, because hardly anyplace wants to devote that much money and space to a better cup of coffee and not get it, and that’ll kill the market for at least a decade.

  “Meanwhile, the Slave’s retired, broke. He’s so bummed out, he gave me The Machine pretty much just to know that it was being used, by people who’d appreciate it. I offered him one hundred percent of the profits I made selling coffee, but he isn’t allowed to accept ’em.”

  “Jesus,” Tommy said. “No good deed goes unpunished. Maybe this society is too stupid to deserve the Fount. What’s this Slave’s name?”

  “What else?” I said. “Coffey. Joe Coffey. Like the cop Ed Marinaro played on Hill Street Blues. For all I know he was born with that name, and it triggered his interest. I never asked.”

  “He actually is Mister Coffey…” Long-Drink said wonderingly, and flinched under Doc Webster’s glare.

  “Yeah, it’s hard to say that with a straight face,” I agreed. “I always call him Cough.”

  “You got a spare cigar box, Jake?” Tommy asked.

  The non sequitur took me aback. Or did it sequite? Cough—cigar—cigar box? “Yeah, as a matter of fact. Why?”

  “Whip it out,” he said. When I obliged, he set it at the end of the bar, beside the customary one intended to let people reclaim whatever change they have coming back when they leave. “That there is for donations to the Order of the Sainted Slave,” he announced, and dropped in a couple of singles.

  Doc Webster drifted over. “I hereby dub it The Cough Drop,” he said, and dropped in a five. A line formed behind him.

  The Duck was so surprised he forgot to grimace. “Have I got this right?” he asked me. “The guy gave you this thing…and now they all insist on paying for it? In installments?”

  I blinked. “Yeah. Why—you got a problem with that?”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s just that I’ve been looking for a place like this all my life…and up until now, even my luck hadn’t been that good.”

  I smiled and stuck out my hand. “Welcome to Mary’s Place, Duck.”

  The hair at one corner of his mouth twitched, as though he were trying to grin but the necessary muscles had atrophied. “A pleasure.”

  “Better,” I said. “A joy. You’ll see.”

  He sighed and nodded philosophically. “I probably will. Hey, Doc! You’re buyin’, you said?”

  “My shout,” Doc Webster agreed, and I got busy.

  This toast was to gentle, funny Tom Flannery, who had died a dozen years earlier to the day—and was still fondly remembered by all those who had had the privilege of knowing him. By the time the last glass had smashed, the shrapnel in the hearth had randomized again.

  △ △ △

  “One thing I’ll say for you people,” the Duck said some time later. “You don’t ask the obvious questions.”

  “You don’t ask many yourself,” I said.

  “Just about everybody else I ever met seems to think that if you’re weird you have some obligation to go around explaining yourself.”

  I nodded. “We’ve got a fair number of customs and habits, but only a handful of rules. One of ’em is that anybody who asks a snoopy question in here wakes up in the alley with a sore skullbone.”

  “Who gets to define ‘snoopy’?”

  “The person asked. If you want to know something personal, it’s best to begin with, ‘Do you mind if I ask—?’ and be prepared to accept a ‘Yes’.”

  The answer clearly pleased him. “You people are all right. Mary’s Place, huh?”

  I nodded.

  He glanced around the room. “Uh…you mind if I ask where Mary is?”

  “Not at all—but I can’t answer. You asked the wrong question.”

  He tilted his head and regarded me out of the corner of his eye. “What is the right question?”

  “The right question is, ‘When is Mary?’”

  He didn’t even blink. “Okay. When is Mary?”

  “Not yet,” I said, and moved down the bar to get the McGonnigle an ale.

  I expected that to end it. Enough time had passed that I was no longer suffused with sick helpless yearning at the sound of Mary’s name—nothing worse than a toothache—but I still wasn’t ready to discuss her with a stranger. Even an interesting stranger that I was beginning to take a shine to.

  But while I was away, he paid me a pretty high compliment. The Duck thought about what I’d said, and how I’d said it, and decided to assume not only that I’d meant it literally…but that I wasn’t as crazy as it made me sound.

  “Time traveler, eh?” he said matter-of-factly when I got back to him.

  I nodded, trying to be just as matter-of-fact. “Ever met any?”

  “Just one. Guy named Phee—”

  I whooped with delight. “—and he swindled you out of every penny you had, right? We had him in here too, once! Boy, that’s an amazing co—” Just in time I caught myself.

  “Thank you,” the Duck said quietly. “You have no idea how much I hate those words.”

  “I can see how that would be.”

  “Your Mary isn’t a friend of Phee’s, is she?” he asked.

  “No, no, she’s from further up the line. Much nicer class of people.”

  He nodded. “And she founded this place?”

  “No, that was her dad. Mike Callahan. He estab
lished Callahan’s Place in 1948, about twenty miles from here.”

  “What’d he do there?”

  I shrugged. How do you answer a question like that? “Fixed broken brains. Made sad people happy and happy people merry and merry people joyous. Tutored in kindness and telepathy. Smoked hideous cigars. Forgave people. Accessory before and after the pun.”

  “Where…excuse me, when is he now?”

  “I wish I knew, Duck. I truly do. He left that night, and hasn’t been back.”

  He snorted. “Hell, I would too. All it takes is one nuclear weapon and I’m gone; that’s just the kind of guy I am. Call me touchy.”

  “Oh, that’s not why he left. It was more of a ‘Tonto, our work here is done’ kind of deal.”

  “What—” He caught himself. “You mind if I ask, what was his work here? Besides being a jolly host.”

  “Well, basically he had to save the world.”

  The Duck nodded. “Glad to hear it. Only sensible reason I can think of for using a time machine. I gather he was successful?”

  “Seem so,” I agreed.

  “How’d he do it?”

  “He killed a cockroach.”

  He sighed and looked pained. “Look, Jake, you can tell I’m crazy enough to believe this bullshit—so why are you dragging it out like this? Are you gonna tell me the story or what?” When I hesitated, he looked even more pained. “Okay, I understand. You just met my face.”

  “No, no,” I said. “It’s not that. There’s nothing secret about it. But it’s a real long story, Duck. I mean, I think it’d probably take about three books to tell you all of it.”

  “I got time,” he said.

  So I made a start. It seemed appropriate to be telling someone the story of Mike Callahan, on Opening Night at Mary’s Place. But I hadn’t gotten very far—barely as far as the night Mickey Finn walked in and told us all that he was gonna destroy the Earth shortly, and felt just terrible about it—when the door opened, and a white-haired old stranger came in, and I shut up.

  3

  With Good Intentions

  Why? you may ask. Why stop in the midst of a perfectly good yarn just because someone walks in who probably wouldn’t understand a word of it, or believe it if he did? It wasn’t simply because he was a stranger: so was the Duck. To be sure, the Duck had already sort of established himself as Our Kind of Guy—but I had no reason to conceal Mike’s story from anybody. What harm could it do? If Mike had wanted us to keep our mouths shut about him, he’d have told us before he left. Tom Hauptman was closer to the door than I was, and not busy; I could have kept on talking.

  But several things about the old-timer were striking.

  First of all, of course, the simple fact of his advent. This was Opening Night, for what was intended to be something like a semi-private club. I didn’t plan to bar new trade—but I hadn’t expected any this soon. There was no neon outside; no sign of any kind, on the building or out on 25A. I had done no advertising, posted no fliers. The place did not look particularly like a bar from the outside, more like a warehouse of some kind. What had led the old gent to wander inside? There was no storm without…

  And he was clearly in great need of a drink, that was the next striking thing about him. What he looked like, really, was somebody wandering around in shock after a major accident. Only technically present. Eyes like Mickey Finn had the night he walked in: what grunts call the Thousand-Yard Stare. Novocaine features, skin wrinkled and sagging. Vaguely stork-like walk. Neglected clothes, buttons in the wrong holes.

  That, I found myself thinking, must be what I looked like right after Barbara and Jessica died.

  (You think that’s a depressing thought? I was improving. A couple of years earlier I’d have thought, that must be what I looked like right after I killed Barbara and Jessica.)

  (No. A couple of years earlier, I would not have had that thought at all. Not if I could possibly have helped it.)

  He looked, in other words, like a man carrying a load larger than his design limit…and so bone-deep exhausted from shouldering it that he has ceased to even mind the pain.

  In fact, however, the only load he appeared to be carrying at the moment would probably have assayed out at not much over five pounds. Possibly less…depending on how many bullets were in the clip. The muzzle diameter seemed noticeably smaller than the Holland Tunnel. And I was looking at it head-on. It oscillated at about the same rate that I was trembling.

  △ △ △

  If Dejah Thoris married a guy named Parley Voo, she’d be—

  It was by no means the first déjà vu of that night for me—but it was certainly the most powerful so far. I took comfort from the fact that the last guy who’d walked into Callahan’s Place with a .45 automatic in his hand, a decade and a half ago, was presently standing ten feet away from me, serving drinks. And I took considerably more comfort from the intellectual knowledge that thanks to our cyborg friend Mickey Finn, neither I nor any of Callahan’s regulars could be harmed in the least by gunfire at close range. But the Duck was not one of us. And he had this funny luck, sometimes bad…

  Besides, old habits of thought die hard. Somebody points a loaded gun at you, your blood chemistry changes.

  Conversations died away as people saw the stranger and the gun. Fast Eddie kept on playing piano; soon that and the crackling fire were the only sounds in the room.

  I wanted to handle this situation in as Callahan-like a manner as possible. I knew this was an important surprise test of my fitness to assume his mantle—and that I had already lost points for stopping in the middle of a sentence when I’d seen the gun. Mike would have finished his sentence, excused himself to his listener, and then dealt with the gunman. So I wanted very much to hit the ground running. The problem was, first I had to deal with a blockage in my airway…which turned out to be my heart. It’s damned odd: the fight-or-flight adrenal rush is supposed to be the evolutionary heritage of millions of years of success in surviving crisis…and just about every time it’s ever happened to me, it ruined my judgment or my coordination or both. Especially on those occasions—like this one—when the judges split evenly on the question of fight or flight. The net result was quivering quadriplegia without the comfort of numbness.

  And so it was that self-same above-mentioned former gunslinger, ex-minister and utility bartender, Tom Hauptman, who had to deal with the situation.

  He finished the sentence he was speaking to Noah Gonzalez, and walked down the bar toward me. My peripheral vision was unnaturally vast, and I could see Tom clearly. He walked slowly and casually, and with every step he got larger and broader and calmer and more Callahan-like; as he reached me I could have sworn I caught a sharp whiff of cheap cigar. He and the stranger reached opposite sides of the bar at the same time and locked eyes. The old guy held out his gun. Tom held out a salt shaker. The gunman opened his mouth…then his eyes focused on the salt shaker, and he closed his mouth.

  “Might as well salt that thing, mister,” Tom said gently. “You’re about to eat it.”

  △ △ △

  All of us remembered those words. Callahan had spoken them to Tom himself, the night that Tom had tried to stick up the joint.

  But I had been watching Mike when he said it that night, and I recalled that his hands had been under the bar, resting on his sawed-off, at the time. I had an alley-sweeper under the bar myself, and other items slightly less lethal. But I was in the stranger’s visual field, and did not dare upstage Tom in this psychologically crucial moment. Also I was not certain my body would obey orders, and it is usually better to not pull a gun than to screw it up. I had one small comfort. In that stopped-time moment of hyperacute sensitivity, I became aware of a subliminal change in the music Fast Eddie was playing, and realized that his left hand was now doing the playing for both, so well that probably no one else noticed.

  But the old gent lowered his gun, and Tom lowered the salt shaker, and Eddie lowered the blackjack, and I lowered my CO2 level, by inha
ling for the first time in what seemed to have been a very long while.

  Eddie went back to playing two-handed, but his left was playing Professor Longhair style, and his right sounded like Monk.

  “But you’ll be wanting a drink first,” Tom went on pleasantly. “How about God’s Blessing?”

  I hadn’t thought Tom was going to get a word out of this guy…but he managed to puzzle him into speech. “What’s that?” His voice was rusty.

  “Irish coffee,” Tom said, and went to the Fount, turning his back on the man with the gun without hesitation. “You take sugar?” Tom asked without turning.

  The old man frowned down at the gat, and put it in his pants pocket. “Please.”

  I could spend an hour making a list of Words I’d Most Like A Stranger Who’s Just Walked Into My Bar With A Gun To Say, and that’d still be in the top three at least. (Think about it. Suppose it was Marilyn Chambers, and she said, “Get these clothes off me!”?) It was the word more than the simple pocketing of the gat that made me stop calculating the distance between my hand and my scattergun. I swallowed as unobtrusively as I could, and said, “Howdy, friend. Welcome to Mary’s Place. I’m the proprietor; my name’s Jake.” My voice came out steady, friendly.

  He focused his eyes on me. He saw a tall skinny forty-something galoot with glasses, a greying beard and a ponytail, wearing an apron. I saw a paunchy man of average height in his middle or late seventies with Mark Twain hair, dressed like an absent-minded professor whose wife has recently discovered LSD. He was wildly out of character as a burglar, and I saw him beginning to realize it. “Ah…hello. I’m…ah…Jonathan.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Jonathan,” I said. “Let me know if there’s anything you need.” And I went back to telling the Duck about Mickey Finn. He looked at me a little oddly, but soon he was nodding and mm-hmming.

  Conversations restarted all around the room. Not the rooba-rooba you get after a crisis, just normal bar chatter.

  Tom gave Jonathan his Blessing, introduced himself briefly, made change, and left him alone. The old guy blinked at Tom’s retreating back—I averted my eyes as he glanced at me—and then he spent a few seconds blinking at the steaming mug, and then he turned bright red for just a moment, and finally he took what was meant to be a big gulp of coffee. For the first second he was disappointed that it wasn’t hot enough to burn his mouth, and then the flavor hit him and he converted the gulp into a long deep swallow that emptied half the mug and gave him a horn-player’s beard the same color as his hair. I glanced at the Fount, saw that Tom had dialed two full ounces of whiskey and the extra strong Kayserlingck’s Kastle coffee from Daintree, Australia. Good man. When Jonathan finished the mug, Tom waited to be asked for another, and dialed the Bush back to an ounce and a half this time. He fetched a dish of shortbreads with it. When Jonathan made no conversational overtures, Tom nodded pleasantly and moved away.