by Kim Newman
They were nicely trapped in this triangular wedge. Coll ambled across the lobby, raising his tommy-gun and convulsively chewing. He aimed low, and fired a burst, jerking the barrel up.
The glass smashed as the first bullets struck, and Bertha's foot got loose. Ness pushed, and they were spat out of the hotel, stumbling down the front steps and away from the building. The door, pushed by the gunfire, span like a grinder, and a scatter of glass flew out of it. Taking Bertha's hand, Ness ran across the square.
Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman
Behind, the hotel lifted from its foundations and flew apart. A wave of heat and sound knocked them flat, and burning rocks fell all around.
Ness was in the dirt, his head hammered. Hands pulled at him. Bertha was babbling about a doctor.
"Come on, Eliot," said a voice through the noise. "Get up and dance."
Ness tried standing. It was surprisingly easy. None of his major bones were broken. He ran his fingers over his face, then looked at his hands. Blood smeared on his left palm, and he was aware of the throbbing in one side of his face.
"You'll have a scar," Purvis said. "Like..."
There was another explosion, smaller. Ness turned to where the hotel had been, and saw a clump of masonry falling in. The building didn't exist anymore. Dotted around the rubble were a number of medium-sized bonfires. The square was full of people, gawking.
"Where's the girl?" asked Ness.
"She ran off," said Purvis. "She's okay. Well, as okay as I guess she'll ever be. Autry called a doctor."
Butler waited with two of his men, handing out orders.
"A nice operation, Agent Ness," the Major said. "I salute you, sir."
Ness just nodded. He was tired, and wanted to go back to sleep.
"The job's not over," said Purvis. "We have to clear out Camp Nowhere before news reaches Debs and Capone orders reprisals. Butler's sent word to his men out there to give the squatters some good prods. It's cover-up time for us. In a minute, you and me are going to go running into the street as if we haven't a clue what the hell's happening. We'll organise the fire-fighting and rescue operation and generally pretend we care very deeply about what happened Nitti's nutsoes. We'll take it from there..."
"That Nitti, Mel. He wasn't human, he..."
"You're telling me."
Lieutenant Scott ran up to Butler and threw a salute. "Sir, Captain McCrea reports they're having trouble with the civilians out in Nowhere. They won't move out. Some say it's a trick to lure people into the open and kill them one by one."
It was a dumb idea, but given Nitti's behaviour, it was natural people wouldn't trust the army. Butler looked perplexed and shook his head in frustration. This wasn't in his line of work at all.
Ness wiped blood away from his face-wound. He was lucky not to have lost an eye.
B
Back in the USSA
"Let me try something," said Ness. "You stay here and see what you can do. I'll go over to the camp with Major Butler and try to get those people moving."
"Okay," said Purvis. "I'll see you back here as and when..." "Mel, if Greasy Thumb Guzik is still alive, finish him off for me. He's a material witness."
"What are you going to do later, Major?" he asked as the staff car, driven by Lieutenant Scott, began the climb to Camp Nowhere. "No matter how innocent you can play it, they'll get you."
"I know that, Agent Ness. I've made arrangements to borrow those fast cars Nitti brought here. The day after tomorrow, my officers and I intend to apply for asylum at the British embassy in Mexico City."
"You're giving up everything."
"I give up nothing," said Butler, lighting a cheroot. "Everything has already been taken from me. I'm like these wretches here. My family lands were confiscated. All my tenant farmers, white and nigra, were expelled. Now the profession to which I was born has been stained. So as Charles Marx would have it, you take away everything a man has, you set him free once more."
Scott stopped the car outside the camp. Crowds parted to let the vehicle crawl to a halt. The only people talking were soldiers, mostly farmboys who'd joined up for three squares a day and now saw their own folks in the deluded suckers who'd bought the Tom Joad lie and used up the last of their food and gas to get to this mountain rat-hole. Butler's aide had been right. Nobody was making a move to leave. All the tents and makeshift shelters were all exactly in place. Men, women and children stood around under the climbing sun, still waiting for their deliverer.
Ness doubted the squatters could even be forced to go at bayonet-point. There must be twenty thousand individual souls here but they acted with one mind, one intention. To try and make any impression on them would be like putting your fist into a pool of water and hoping there'd be a hole when you took it out again.
The pain in Ness's face had settled down to a dull throb. He and Purvis could cover themselves, and Butler would make it over the border. That just left twenty thousand squatters to save.
He pulled up the collar of his overcoat and tipped the brim of his hat downwards over his eyes. He stepped out of the car, and looked
Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman
around. The man he had been when the sun went down last night was a stranger to him, and he hoped he could walk into the camp clean and cold.
A thin figure stood up from where she had been lying. It was Bertha Thompson, her face scrubbed, her hair skinned back. She still wore her bloody, torn dress. Inside, she must be steel.
Ness still felt the kick in his hands as he shot under the pillow.
"Sister," he called to her.
She whimpered, but controlled herself. He tipped his hat, and showed her his marked face.
"Tell the people, sister."
She nodded.
"Tell the people Tom Joad is here."
He sat on the back of a flatbed truck, smoking a bent cigarette. When he flicked the butt and looked up, a solid ocean of people stretched before him. People all spoke to one another in low voices. The name "Tom Joad" emerged again and again from the shambling and hissing of the crowd. Kids were clustered around his feet, just looking up at him. If anyone recognised the man who had interviewed them days earlier and stood around while Frank Nitti murdered a family, no one said anything. Until that moment, he had been sure he could never pull this off, but he hadn't reckoned on the people's need for Tom Joad, their need to believe in their hero.
He stood up, and took off his hat, showing the new scar. People gasped."Frank Nitti is dead," he said, projecting his best lecture-circuit voice. "I just dynamited his hotel."
There was a ragged cheer.
"When the Party find out, they'll want to track down every one of you and kill you. That's why you must get out of here right now. The Party will be after all of us. So don't waste any time. Pack up and get out. The road to California is that way. As soon as you're out of here, the safer you're going to be..."
"Tom," shouted a man who tossed his hat in the air. It was Harold Bissonette, Ness was astonished to realise. "Tom, will you be coming with us?"
Ness shrugged, and realised what he said next would decide it. If he sold them on Tom Joad, they would scatter and be saved. If not, this would be a killing field.
Fl
Back in the USSA
"You go on ahead of me, folks," he said, thrilled by the bright eyes all around him. "I've things to do back here."
The words came to him.
"I'll be all around in the dark. I will be everywhere wherever you look. Whenever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, whenever there's a cop beating up on a guy I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad, I'll be in the way kids yell when they're hungry and they know their supper's ready. Wherever people are eating the stuff they raised and living in the houses they built, I'll be there too."
This hobo jungle was much like the last, although—being in Alabama —there were more blacks than whites grouped around the fire. Ness was used to these fringe gatherings now. In theory, Purvi
s and he were still being punished, but this assignment was being drawn out.
One thing about working for Hoover was that he put the Bureau ahead of everything, including Justice, Truth and Party. If anyone in Debs had an idea what had gone down in Nowhere, it had not been mentioned. Ness and Purvis picked up extra citations and were kicked back out into the field. The only casualty of the conspiracy was Sheriff Autry, who had resigned, ostensibly for letting the chicken-thief get away. Autry had quickly returned to state service as Carson City's best-loved singing dog-catcher, with Deputy Gabby as his assistant. Smed Butler was in Mexico, leading some jumped-up White Yank regiment with comic opera uniforms. Bertha Thompson was in California, somewhere. And Frank Nitti had more parks named after him than any other Hero of the Permanent Revolution.
As the sun went down, the hoboes had been telling Tom Joad stories. They were wilder, more extravagant now. One claimed Tom Joad was a ghost in a black cloak, and that he carved his initials on the cheeks of the Party goons he killed. Another, a scrawny Negro who called himself Fetchit, told of how, somewhere over Nevada way, Tom Joad dynamited that murdering sonofabitch Frank Nitti and how Nitti had staggered out, his fancy clothes in tatters, only to be confronted by the avenging Tom Joad, who strangled him with his bare hands. The tale-teller went through all the motions, popping his eyes out and calling on the Lord for forgiveness as he re-created Nitti's well-deserved end.
"That night," Fetchit said, "Marse Tom led a hundred thousand folks to California, into the promised land. An' he still out there..."
Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman
Which was true enough, in Debs's eyes. Which was why Ness and Purvis, as the Agents who had come closest to catching the phantom, where now headed South to investigate a report that he might be in Mobile, Alabama. They were well-placed to play their dangerous game, but they couldn't go on forever. There was a limit to the number of agitators they could ignore, the number of informants they could expose to their fellows.
Ness liked to think they were making a difference. One day they'd get caught, exposed and purged. Then they might be real heroes.
"That's some story," Purvis told Fetchit. The Negro grinned, and took a pull on the bottle.
"It weren't quite like that," said a skinny white guy with a cap pulled low over one eye. "I was there."
"You saw Tom Joad?" asked Purvis.
The hobo nodded, then qualified himself. "Missed the shootin', 'cause I showed up just as everyone else was fixin' to move out. Saw a feller who said he was Tom Joad. Said he'd killed the Enforcer and all troubles were ended. Might have been him, might not. Sure talked a fine speech, but unlike a lot of them talkers, he could do a deed or two on the side."
Ness shrank back into the shadows. The man looked familiar, but so did everyone they met on the road.
"Why ain't you in California still?" Purvis asked.
The hobo shrugged. He was a quiet, rangy man, and his voice was flat, the clipped tones of some mid-west farm.
"Didn't take to oranges, I guess."
The hobo rubbed his cap, and Ness saw the long-healed scar by his eye. It was like the red badge he had picked up in Carson City.
"That feller," Ness said. "The one who made the speech. What did you reckon? Was he Tom Joad?"
The hobo gave a sad smile. "Well, if he weren't then, he sure is now."
fc
1965-1969
Bob splashed tap-water into his eyes, and tried to blink away the throbbing in his head. He wasn't supposed to be hung over til tomorrow, but everyone and his uncle was buying him drinks. In the Ladies' Lounge, he'd gone easy, knocking back only the sweet sherry his Mam and Thelma drank. He wished now he'd stuck to the Back Bar and brown ale.
Then again, Terry had just put a couple of gallons through his kidneys, on top of a fish and chip buttie tea, and he was in a worse state than Bob. Terry was in one of the stalls, hands jellyfish on the floor, chinning the porcelain rim as he spewed.
Bob went over and hooked his hands into Terry's armpits, lifting him up and aiming his mouth at the toilet bowl. He felt the racking of reverse peristalsis—a term remembered from school—run through Terry's ribs. The last of the chips and Mother's Pride came up as beery sludge.
"She let you tup her last night," Terry said. "Tight-drawers Thelma."
That was true.
"So thought you were going to die in foreign parts, so she dropped 'em for you."
That was arguable.
Yet more came up out of the bottom of Terry's stomach. It must be the last of it.
"She'll never understand, that one."
Bob hauled Terry upright and wiped his face with a rough paper towel, getting off the worst of the sick.
"You smell like a tramp's dustbin."
125
B
Back in the USSA
Terry touched a fist to his chest and lightly thumped Bob over the heart.
"She'll never get in here, Bob. Not bloody Thelma."
"I should hope not. It's the Gents."
"Ahh get on with you, you know what I mean."
Bob did.
"Come on, Bob. Back to the battlefront...King, country and Strongarm Ruby Red Bitter are calling."
Terry lurched out of the toilets. Bob followed, as he had been following his mate since St Godric's primary school.
Thelma had been furious when he volunteered. She'd screamed at him that he didn't have to go in the Army—he could have had a medical exemption from National Service for his flat feet—and that now he'd passed his City & Guilds he should make a career for himself, but oh no, he had to sign up just because his best pal Terry had...
The smell of piss was worse in the corridor outside the Gents. There was a sound, as if someone had left a tap running. Bob ran into Terry's back. By the stairs stood a fat bloke in a dark suit. It took a moment to realise he was piddling against the wall.
"I don't much like flock wallpaper either," said Terry, "but this is taking it a bit far."
The man turned and zipped the fly on immense trousers.
"It's me own fookin' club, y'daft get," he snorted in broad Mancunian. "I can take a burst where I fookin' like."
Bob recognised the fat man. The Comedian was chairman and secretary of the club. He was in with Jack Carter, and in this part of town, Jack Carter ran everything.
The Comedian looked at them. "I know you lads. It's your party tonight, in't it? Do or die, king and country?"
Somehow, Bob didn't want to admit it. But Terry took an unsteady bow.
"Daft bastards," the Comedian said, not without admiration. He pulled out a wad of notes. With pee-smelling fingers, he peeled off four blue fivers and shoved them into Bob's hankie pocket.
"Buy yourselves some slant-eyed scrubber in Saigon, lads."
Terry tried to thank him but spasmed again, bending double to drool thin bile on the already-stained carpet. Bob held him up.
"That's a fookin' pretty picture."
El
Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman
The Comedian's enormous mouth opened in a bark of laughter that shook all his mounds of fat. Terry coughed again, hawking stomach lining.
"Fare thee well, lads," said the Comedian. "And when you get to the Bloody 'Chine, kill some fookin' treens for the Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club. Bring us back a necklace of ears we can hang on the darts trophy."
He put his hand round the full glass and left it there. He told Bet Lynch to have one herself.
"Don't mind if I do, Bob," said the barmaid, looking him up and down. He'd lost a lot of weight. "A vodka-tonic. That'll be four and ninepence please."
1965 seemed a long time ago. Prices had doubled in two years. Everything in Indo or the NAAFI was dirt cheap. It was as well he had a wedge of back-pay from the months when he couldn't spend it.
Bet gave him change, peering at him from under vast false eyelashes like hideous jungle insects. He could hear her thinking "poor love, the things you've been through..."
&nbs
p; At quarter to two on a wet Sunday in February, the Club was almost empty. The few customers were old lads, men with no missus at home to do them Sunday dinner. They looked up from the News of the World and eyed him. Word of his adventures had obviously come home ahead of him.
He'd sent a telegram saying he'd be back Monday, but had made it a day earlier. The taxi had dropped him off at the house an hour ago, but there was no-one in and he didn't have a key. Mam and Dad must have gone to Auntie Glad's in Hartlepool. He went over to Thelma's and found she'd gone on the bus to visit a schoolfriend in Thornley. Walking by Terry's parents' house, he noticed a boarded-over window. There was a red paint splash like blood on the front door.
He looked at the beer. Foam ran down the sides of the glass. He strained to hear the fizz. Hundreds of tiny bubbles burst. A pint of Whitbread Trophy Bitter! The pint that thinks it's a quart! He'd liked the IPA in the NAAFI and Tiger Beer in Saigon, but Trophy was the taste of home, the taste of before.
Maybe because he was a sort of hero or someone further up the chain of contempt thought he was cute, or maybe it was just procedure, but they'd decided to Blighty him fast. After a few days' checkup at a base hospital at Cam Ranh Bay, he was on the gozome bird.
Back in the USSA
The RAF had a few ancient, hideously noisy, Sunderland flying boats to shuttle quacks and Blighty Ones from Cam Ranh Bay to whatever troopship was nearest home. In a few days T for Tommy flew him from Indo to Rangoon, Calcutta, Karachi and Aden. He was dropped him off at Port Said to join the SS Uganda. Nobody from his unit was on board, but some of the blokes had heard about him. Before they passed Malta he'd been awarded honourary extra stripes and invited to join the Sergeants' messdeck.
The door opened with a blast of damp air, chilling him to the bone. An old man with a toothbrush moustache, flat cap and stained overcoat ambled in, shouting to Bet that he'd have "just the usual 'alf." Further down, a man and a woman had an animated argument about whether someone's car was blue or green.
On the boat, a Welsh Sergeant-Major called Williams took a sort of shine to him. Old as the hills, he'd even been out in Burma during the Real War. Now, he was coming home from his third tour in Indo.
