by Terry Bisson
“No problem.” Caleb slipped his new dime into her mouth.
She opened her arms and Caleb was enveloped in a sweet smelling silvery mist, only for a second. Then it was gone, and he felt clean all over. He looked down at his ragged coat. Even it was clean.
“I love it here!” he said, as the SaniBot bowed and rolled away.
“Of course,” said the infoBot. “Now that there is no poverty or crime, Chicago is a good place for bio-citizens to live.”
“No poverty? No crime?”
“No need,” said the infoBot. “All our energy needs are taken care of by radioactive microwave grid, and all the labor is done by robots like myself. We are here to serve you.”
“No robot rebellion, huh?”
“I beg your pardon, bio-citizen?”
“Nothing,” said Caleb. “I was just thinking that the Future is everything I ever expected—everything the sci-fi writers anticipated, and even better.”
“This is the present,” corrected the infoBot. “It is anticipated that the future will be nice also.”
“I don’t doubt it,’ said Caleb. “Are you sure there’s nothing about me in your whatever-you-call-it?”
“Magnetic memory,” said the Infobot. “All human knowledge is on tape, in here.” He tapped his transparent head. Caleb could see reels turning between the glowing vacuum tubes.
“And there’s nothing about Caleb Freeman?”
“Negative.”
“Hmmm. Maybe I change my name, like a movie star.” Caleb pulled his last dime out of his pocket. “But this is me, right?”
“Certainly,” said the InfoBot. “Who else could it be?”
“Exactly,” said Caleb. He pocketed the dime and looked around at the shining towers, the moving sidewalks, the floating cars and the happy citizens gliding by.
And then he groaned aloud, realizing what he had to do.
“Damn!” he said. “Clearly I did something important, to help bring about this wonderful future. And now I can’t enjoy it!”
“I don’t understand,” said the InfoBot.
“I have to go back to my own time, so I can do whatever it is that I do in order to bring all this about. I can’t take the chance on missing out on my historic destiny.”
“Whatever you say,” said the InfoBot.
“Plus, if I stay here I’m liable to get tangled up in some kind of Time Paradox. Which I’ve read about in—say, what happened to my magazine?’
“I can show you a magazine in the museum,” said the InfoBot. “Would you like to take a guided tour?”
“I wish I could. I love it here. But I can’t take the chance,” said Caleb. “I’ve got a full belly and a shave and a haircut. I should probably be heading back to the present. I mean, the past.”
“If you say so. Not many tourists go there anymore. It is said to be rather unpleasant.”
“You’re telling me!” said Caleb. “But I don’t want to miss out on whatever it is that makes me famous. How do you work this thing?”
He pulled the watch—the temporary chronoslip interface device—out of his pocket.
“It is apparently already set,” said the InfoBot. “All you have to do is press the little radium-powered button. Would you like me to help?”
“I can handle it. This one?” Caleb pressed it.
And the robot was gone.
The city was gone.
The Future was gone.
Brrrrr! Caleb felt the cold wind on the back of his neck.
He was on his knees in the alley, and the man in the long black coat was standing over him.
“That thing you took,” he said. “You must give it back! You don’t understand how …”
“Oh, but I do,” said Caleb. He handed him the watch. “Sorry to have troubled you. You see, I …”
But the man was already disappearing, in a slow flash of light. And Caleb was alone in the alley.
There was his magazine, on the ground where the man had dropped it. Caleb picked it up and looked at the cover: a gleaming futuristic city, with silvery towers and floating cars, but not half as nice as the real thing.
The Future he had seen—if only for a moment.
Caleb suddenly felt very tired. He stuck the magazine in his shirt and headed back for the doorway, where his blanket was stashed. He rolled up in the blanket and lay down in the doorway.
He shivered. It was even colder than before.
“No matter.” Caleb pulled the dime out of his pocket and smiled. There was his face, like Caesar himself. Who knew what pleasures awaited, if he could just get through the winter.
And I know my destiny, he thought. I know I get through the winter.
Shivering, but smiling, he fell asleep, into the deepest, and final, sleep of his life.
“Up and at ‘em,” said O’Malley. He rapped on the sidewalk with his nightstick. It made an ugly sound.
“Hey, you! Let’s get moving!” said O’Shea. “Uh oh. Look here.”
The two cops bent down and pulled back the blanket. The body inside was stiff.
“Didn’t we roust this bum out before?” said O’Malley.
“Musta crawled back,” said O’Shea. “Poor guy. Last night was a killer. Literally.”
“One less bum to worry about. Better call the dead wagon.”
“At least he died smiling. I guess dreams are still free.”
“At least he found some clean clothes,” said O’Malley. “That makes it easier. Help me turn him over.”
“This one was a reader,” said O’Shea. “Thrilling Future Tales. I read that one myself sometimes.”
“You can keep it then. Help me pry his hand open. Wouldn’t you know it. A dime.”
“Guess it’s ours,” said O’Shea. “Poor guy’s got no one else to leave to.”
“Brother, can you spare a dime,” said O’Malley, warming the coin in his hand. He looked at it. Then stared at it. “Funny. Hey. Look at this.”
“That’s your face!” said O’Shea. “Let me see.”
He took the dime in his hand and watched as the face slowly changed. “Now it’s my face!”
O’Malley grabbed it back. “Now it’s my face again. Some kind of trick dime.”
“Futuristic, you mean. Radioactive, or something,” said O’Shea. “Bet he bought it through that magazine. There are lots of novelty ads in the back pages. Let me see it again.”
“No way, O’Shea. I’m keeping it.”
“Why? You can’t spend it.”
“I want to show the sergeant. Wait’ll he sees his ugly mug on a dime!”
Charlie’s Angels
Knock knock!
I never was a deep sleeper. I sat up and buttoned my shirt. Folded the blanket and dropped it behind the couch, along with the pillow. You don’t want your clients to find out that you live in your office; that suggests unprofessionalism, and unprofessionalism is the bane of the Private Eye, even (and especially) the…
Knock knock! “Supernatural Private Eye?”
I dropped the Jim Beam into the drawer and opened the door with my cell phone in hand, so it would look like I had been working. “Can I help you?”
“Jack Villon, Supernatural Private Eye?”
She was somewhere on that wide, windswept chronological plain between thirty and fifty that softens men and sharpens women, especially those with taste and class, both of which she appeared to have in abundance.
“It’s Villón, not Villon” I said. “And—”
“Whatever.” Without waiting for an invitation, she brushed past me into my office and looked around with ill-disguised disgust. “Don’t you have a necktie?”
“Of course. I don’t always wear it at eight in the morning.”
“Put it on and let’s go. It’s almost nine.”
“And you are …?”
“A paying client with no time to waste,” she said, unsnapping her patent leather purse and pulling out a pack of Camels. She lit a long one off the short one in her hand.
“Edith Prang, Director, New Orleans Museum of Art and Antiquities. I can pay you what you ask, and a little more, but we have to hurry.”
“You can’t smoke in here, Mrs. Prang.”
“It’s Ms. and there’s no time to waste,” she said, blowing smoke in my face. “The police are already there.”
“Already where?”
“Where we’re going.” She closed her purse and walked out the door without answering, but not before handing me two reasons to follow her. Each was printed with a picture of a President I had never had the good fortune to encounter before.
“Now that I’m on retainer,” I said, folding the bills as I followed her out onto Bourbon Street, “perhaps you can tell me what this is all about.”
“As we go,” she said, unlocking a sleek BMW with a keychain beeper. The 740i. I had seen it in the magazines. Butter leather seats, a walnut dash with an inset GPS map display, and an oversized V-8 that came to life with a snarl. As we roared off, she lit another Camel off the last. “As I mentioned, I am the Director of the New Orleans Museum of Art and Antiquities.”
“Didn’t you just run a red light?”
“Two years ago, we began a dig on the Gulf Coast of Mexico,” she continued, accelerating through an intersection, “opening a pre-Columbian tomb.”
“Wasn’t that a stop sign?”
“We made a remarkable find—a large statue innearly perfect condition, which the natives knew of by legend as the Vera Cruz Enormé, or Giant. We contacted the Louvre.”
“The Louvre?” We were approaching another intersection. I closed my eyes.
“Our sister institution was called in because the statue had rather remarkable features for an artifact from the East Coast of Mexico. As you can see.”
She was handing me a photograph. I opened my eyes just wide enough to see a picture of a statue, half again as tall as the man standing next to it. Its bulging eyes, hunched shoulders, and feral, sneering face looked familiar.
“A gargoyle?”
“Indeed,” said Prang. “Very similar in fact to the gargoyles on the cathedral of Notre Dame.”
I was beginning to get it—I thought. “So you assumed there was a supernatural connection?”
“Certainly not!” Prang spat. “Our first assumption was that this was perhaps created by the French during the brief rule of Emperor Maximilian in the nineteenth century. A forgotten folly, or hoax.”
“You’re supposed to slow down for the school zones,” I said, closing my eyes again.
“But even then, it would be of great value, historically. The Enormé was placed in a warehouse, under guard, since Mexico is rife with thieves who know perfectly well the value of antiquities, even bogus ones.”
I could hear sirens. Though I am no friend of the cops, I rather hoped they were after us. Though I wondered how they would catch us.
“That was almost a month ago, the night of the full moon. The next morning, both guards were found with their heads missing. The Enormé was back in its tomb.”
“I see,” I said. “So you realized you were dealing with an ancient curse…”
“Certainly not!” Prang said, over the wail of tortured tires. “I figured somebody was trying to spook the peasants so they could blackmail us. I spread around enough cash to keep the authorities quiet, and crated the Enormé for shipment to New Orleans.”
“You covered up a murder?”
“Two,” she said matter-of-factly. “Not hard to do in modern Mexico.”
The BMW skidded smoothly to a stop. I opened my eyes and saw that we were in the parking lot of the museum. I never thought I would be so glad to get out of a 740i, after only one ride.
Prang paused on the steps to light a new Camel off the old. “The Louvre is sending a specialist to look at the Enormé, which arrived here yesterday.”
I followed her through the museum’s wide front door. We raced through the halls and down a short flight of stairs.
“And then, last night…”
“What happened last night?”
“You’re the Private Eye,” she said, pushing through a door that said AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. “You tell me.”
We came out in a large, ground floor lab with one wall of windows. The windows were smashed. The room wascrawling with cops. There was a sickening, slightly sweet smell in the air.
Two uniformed cops wearing rubber gloves were standing over a crumpled wad of clothing and flesh by the door. Two forensics in white coats were taking pictures and making notes on handheld computers.
I joined them, curiosity and nausea fighting within me. As a private eye you see a lot of things, but rarely a man with his head pinched off.
Nausea won.
“Our former Security Exec,” said Prang, nodding toward the headless body on the floor as I returned from throwing up in the men’s room. “He was keeping watch over the Enormé after it was uncrated last night. I rushed you here so you could learn what you can before the police totally muddy the crime scene. I didn’t tell them what happened in Mexico. I don’t want then confiscating the Enormé before we learn what it is.”
“I see,” I said.
“What the hell is he doing here?” Ike Ward, the city’s shoot-first-and-ask-no-questions Chief of Police walked over, scowling at me. “I don’t need a ghost-buster underfoot. This is a crime scene.”
“Mr. Villon is our new Security Exec,” said Prang. “He’ll be representing the museum in the investigation.”
“Just keep him out of my way!” Ward said, turning his broad back.
“You didn’t tell me you knew Chief Ward,” Prang said after he had stalked off.
“You didn’t ask. Nor did you tell me I was an executive.”
“It’s an interim appointment,” she said. “But it gives you a certain standing with the police.”
I took advantage of that standing, following at a seemingly respectful and hopefully non-antagonistic distance behind Ward’s homicide squad as they examined and secured the crime scene, in their fashion.
The broken windows faced east. Through what was left of them, I could see a spray of glass on the parking lot, telling me that the window had been smashed from the inside. Someone had apparently gained access, then knocked out the window so they could get the Enormé out, into a waiting vehicle. Probably a truck.
I went outside. There was a smear of blood on the asphalt, then tracks that faded as they crossed the parking lot toward the street.
They weren’t the tire tracks I was looking for. They were footprints. Prints that chilled my blood, or would have, had I really believed in the supernatural that was supposedly my specialty.
Huge, three-toed footprints.
Back inside, I watched Ward’s forensics scoop my predecessor up into two bags, one large, one small; then I located Prang, who was busy opening her second pack of Camels.
“We need to talk,” I said.
“Upstairs.”
Her office overlooked the parking lot. I took her to the window and showed her the footprints.
“So it’s true,” she whispered. “It’s alive!”
I have never figured out why people want to believe in the supernatural. It’s as if they find the existence of the irrational somehow reassuring. “Let’s not jump to conclusions, Ms. Prang,” I said. “Tell me, what exactly was the Aztec legend of the Enormé?”
“Olmec,” she corrected. “The usual stuff. Full moon, headless victims, human sacrifice, etc. We did find a pile of bones in the tomb, mostly of young girls. According to the legend, the Enormé had to be fed once a month. A virgin, of course.” She smiled and lit yet another Camel. “So I felt safe. I thought it was all a tale to scare the simple-minded. Until now.”
“And now?”
“You tell me, you’re the private eye. Aren’t you supposed to have a hunch or something?”
“I’m hunchless so far,” I said. “Though I’m certain this is some kind of hoax. An elaborate and deadly one, to be su
re.”
“Whatever it is,” said Prang, “I want the Enormé back. Hoax or not, it’s the find of the century, and it belongs to my museum. That’s why you’re here. Unless we find it before the police, I’ll never get it back.”
“They see it as stolen property,” I said. “And we can count on Ward to keep the press away from those footprints, at least until he comes up with an explanation. He doesn’t like to look stupid.”
“Neither do I,” Prang pointed out. “So where do we begin? What do we do?”
“We begin,” I said, starting for the door, “by figuringout where we would hide a statue if we wanted people to think it was a legendary monster come to life. Then we go and get it.”
“Wait!” said Prang. “I’m coming with you.”
New Orleans’s cemeteries are called the “Cities of the Dead,” because they are all tombs, in long rows like little stone houses. No one is buried in the ground because the water table is so high.
The nearest was La Gare des Morts, only a quarter of a mile from the museum. “Paydirt,” I said, when I saw that the ancient rusted gate had been forced open.
“Why are you so certain that this is all a hoax?” Prang asked, as we slipped between the twisted bars.
“Ninety-seven percent of all supernatural events are crude hoaxes,” I said.
“What about the other three percent?”
“Clever hoaxes,” I said.
From the gate, narrow “streets” between the tombs led off in three directions. I was trying to decide where to begin the search when my cell phone rang.
“Jack Villon. Supernatural Private Eye.”
“Kill me…” It was a man’s voice, a hoarse, sleepy whisper.
“Who is this?”
“Tree …”
Click. Dial tone.
“Who was that?” Prang asked.
“My hunch,” I said, folding my phone.
There was only one tree in the cemetery, a large live oak festooned with Spanish moss. Underneath it, a tomb had been opened—violently. The iron door was twisted off its hinges. Two headless bodies lay outside, clothed in rotted rags, flung in a ghoulish twisted pile. They were so old and desiccated that they no longer smelled. The heads lay nearby, both turned up, eyeless, toward the sky.
