Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

  The lawyer shook her head. “No. We’ve signed them up to an agency agreement, you know, guys like Elvis and Sinatra. And we’re taking the industry-standard commission off their royalties, but where there’s an extant commercial entity that could claim ownership of say, the words and music to ‘Blue Suede Shoes,’ we’ve actually sought them out, provided the product, and offered the right of first refusal. Nine times out of ten, they jump at it, and we negotiate a much better deal for the client than was the case originally, back in our world. So everyone’s a winner.”

  “Really?” said Dan, who was only following a fraction of what she was saying.

  “Well, no, not really,” she admitted. “The recording companies are getting screwed, because their original contracts were so onerous. But they know a guaranteed income stream when they see it. They don’t want to lose it to a competing company, which they could do, because their legal claim is tenuous at best. Nobody likes arguing jurisdictional issues, and there is no case law in Multiverse Theory. So most of the time they just sign up. And the artists do get a much better deal.

  “For example, we got Sinatra out of Tommy Dorsey’s band and right into his solo career. He’s so grateful that he’s playing four nights a week here, for free.”

  O’Brien spooned up a mouthful of peas, drew a breath, and started talking at a mile a minute again.

  Julia looked fascinated.

  Dan decided to concentrate on his dinner. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t like the sound of this, but it all made him feel decidedly uneasy. It seemed as if this woman was making a fortune out of thin air, but she wasn’t producing anything. She was just making people pay for things that, to his way of thinking, belonged to them anyway.

  “It’s a lot easier when you have a single artist involved,” she continued. “But it gets nightmarish very quickly when you get into things like movies, and you have hundreds of people who lay claim to be being responsible for some part of the production. And of course, you have a lot of the parent companies like MGM or Paramount operating right now. I advise my clients to stay well clear of them. There are hundreds of cases working their way through the lower bowels of the court system, and you can tell that nobody has a fucking clue about where to even begin untangling the mess. Anyway,” she said, scooping up another mouthful of peas, “I always saw the entertainment industry as a sunrise initiative. Most of the opportunity has come and gone there. We’re looking at medium- to long-term strategies now. Like what’s going to happen in the Middle East when the war is done. I don’t imagine we’re going to bend over and invite the Saudis to buttfuck us again, for the next eighty years.”

  “So what, you’re looking at alternative energy sources already, back here in nineteen forty-two?” Julia asked.

  O’Brien shrugged. “I like to think of it as foresight.” Then she leaned forward. “I hear there’s OSS teams in Vietnam already, talking to Ho Chi Minh.”

  “So what are they doing there?” asked Julia in a voice Dan recognized immediately. She was at work again.

  O’Brien smiled. “Well, I don’t know. If they are there, I didn’t send them. But I imagine they’re telling Uncle Ho that he can have the fucking place, and as many surplus Springfield rifles as he wants, as long as he uses them to shoot Japanese soldiers. I mean, what’s Lyndon Johnson doing now? He’s off somewhere in the navy, but I’ll bet he’s spending every minute boning up on his presidency. He’s not going to want to make the same mistakes, and he’s already plugged into Roosevelt. He ran for Congress as a New Deal Democrat in 1937. He won and got himself straight onto the Naval Affairs Committee—as a freshman! FDR put him there. He’s only in the navy now because he lost a race for the Senate last year. I don’t imagine he’s behind the OSS thing, but nor can I imagine him sitting around with his thumb up his ass when he knows what’s coming.”

  Like millions of Americans, Dan Black had read a couple of the “future” histories published within weeks of the Transition. Julia’s colleagues on the Clinton had written many of them, and she’d pointed him in the direction of some of the better ones. So he had a pretty good grasp of what they were talking about.

  “So that’s what you mean by foresight,” he said.

  “Exactly. Things aren’t going to be the way they were in our time, Dan. That’s what makes this business so exciting. If you were betting on a race that had been won already—”

  “Like Slim Jim has,” Julia added, grinning.

  “No comment,” O’Brien replied, her own smile just as wide. “But if you were betting on a done deal, sure, it’s easy money. But where’s the challenge? And of course, once people know the future, they immediately start fucking with it. So that’s where the challenge comes in. That’s why I love it.”

  “I thought you loved it for the money,” Dan said, letting his offended sensibilities get the better of him. But neither of the women obliged him by taking offense.

  “Sure,” agreed O’Brien. “And there’s the money, too.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the money, Dan,” Julia chimed in. “Money’s what makes the world go round.”

  Slim Jim loved this place. Of all the things O’Brien had hooked him into, the Bayswater was the best. He would never have thought he could get so jazzed about a club that not only let in your niggers and your Jews—but actually invited them to come.

  He never would’ve thought you could make money on something like this, either, especially not with the top-shelf wages he was paying. But the money rolled in like a flash flood that never ended. And anyone who was anyone in this town was beating on the doors, trying to get in and throw their money around. It was one of the seven fucking wonders, was what it was.

  And two or three of the other wonders were right in here with him, too.

  That Sinatra kid, up on stage singing “Slow Boat to China” with Joybelle—you had to admit, that kid’s voice was a wonder. And this piece of ass Slim Jim had here on his arm, the fabulous Norma—or Marilyn, as she was calling herself now that Ms. O’Brien had sorted out the business with the movie guys—this fantastic piece of ass was such a natural wonder of the world that he was sure every guy in the room would crawl a mile over cut glass just to jerk off in her shadow.

  But the biggest wonder had to be that table of wise guys over there, mooning over Joybelle and Frankie’s duet. Just six months ago, those guys wouldn’t have crossed the road to piss on his heart if it’d caught fire. Crazy fucking mobsters. And now they were ringing him up, asking him if they could come to his club. And the hell of it was, they were really asking.

  Oh, sure, they’d rolled in here like kings of the fucking hill that first time. He didn’t know what O’Brien had done or said to them, but after that you couldn’t have asked for a quieter, more well-behaved pack of wops. He’d been terrified, expecting them to muscle in on his action. But no, they came for the show and the food. They couldn’t get enough of the fucking food.

  They’d also liked staying behind after the place had closed, to watch The Sopranos and all of his Mafia movies on the big flatscreen. But Ms. O’Brien had put a stop to that pretty quickly. She said it was “inappropriate.”

  Well, a lot of people would look around this place, with its mixed races and nightly parties, and they’d swear on the Bible that the Bayswater redefined inappropriate. But Slim Jim Davidson called that “bull talk from a one-eyed fat man.” That was his new favorite phrase, ever since he’d seen John Wayne in True Grit.

  “Hey, darlin’!” he shouted to Marilyn over the noise of the band and the bar crowd. “You think John Wayne worries about turning into such an ugly, fat old prick?”

  “Well,” she said, sipping at a cocktail he didn’t recognize, “at least he got to grow old.”

  Slim Jim rolled his eyes and gave her a squeeze. “Now you know we ain’t lettin’ that happen to you, sweetheart. You ain’t marrying that drunken ball player. You ain’t fucking those Kennedy boys. And you—”

  A painful grip on his bicep tore h
is hand off Marilyn’s ass. “Out in the back. You’re with us, Romeo.”

  He recognized the voice, and his heart skipped a beat. It was the two bozos. The feebs who’d rousted him in his crib.

  The unfriendly one—at least they’d kept their roles straight—had made some sort of Chinese burn on his elbow. It hurt like hell. Before he knew it, he was up on his tiptoes and being hustled away from Marilyn as fast as they could handle the move without attracting attention. Even so, there were plenty of patrons beginning to point and stare.

  The Bureau men shoved him through a set of doors and into the first office on the left.

  A push sent him into the desk, and he corked his thigh painfully. “Ow! You didn’t have to—”

  “Shut up, shit head. What the fuck are you doing here?”

  Rubbing at his leg, his mind racing, Slim Jim played dumb. “I got an interest here. It’s strictly legit. If you guys were as smart as—”

  “You know what we mean. You’re supposed to be in California. You’re supposed to be working for us now. You were supposed to have ditched that bitch, and—”

  “Why, gentlemen, I do believe my ears are burning.”

  The two bruisers spun to find Maria O’Brien standing in the doorway, flanked by Marilyn and some couple Slim Jim didn’t know. They must have been the friends O’Brien said she was meeting for a late supper, he guessed.

  “Agents Geraghty and Swinson, I presume.” She smiled, but not in a friendly way. “You’d know them as Good Cop and Bad Cop, in that order, Mr. Davidson. Now, would you care to cease your criminal assault on my client?”

  “We never touched him!” Swinson protested. “Did we?” he asked, turning a baleful eye on Slim Jim.

  “The hell you didn’t, you fucking assholes. You frog-marched me in here and then you threw me into the desk, and I’ll bet I got a big bruise out of it. I could prove it, too.” He started to undo his belt.

  “That won’t be necessary, Mr. Davidson,” said his lawyer. “I’m sure we can find a doctor who’ll testify in the civil suit.”

  “There won’t be any suit,” Swinson blustered. “A two-bit hustler like Davidson. Done time for chiseling somebody’s grandmother. Good luck, sister.”

  Slim Jim winced uncomfortably. That goddamned rubber check was always bouncing back in his face.

  It didn’t seem to bother Ms. O’Brien, though. She still had that nasty smile on her face: the one that reminded him of feeding time at the zoo. “Well now, Agent Swinson, I don’t believe Mr. Davidson has ever made a secret of his former life. In fact, it’s very much public knowledge. Just as his efforts to reform himself, and to make amends for his past misdeeds, are also public knowledge. You may not be aware of it, but Mr. Davidson has made an ex gratia payment of five thousand dollars to Mrs. Durnford, the grandmother to whom you refer. A significant return on the twenty-four-dollar check he wrote to her grocery store, when he was unfortunately unaware of a shortfall of funds within his account.

  “You may also be aware of—”

  Swinson cut in over the top of her. “Hey, we know all about your client, Miss O’Brien. You might have earned a pretty penny turning him into the new fucking Santa Claus, but water still finds its own level, lady. And he’s a crook. Always has been. Always will be.”

  “I guess we’ll see about that,” said O’Brien. “In the meantime, I’ll be pursuing an order against you gentlemen, and any other agents of the Bureau who are sent to harass my client concerning anything other than legitimate government business.”

  “We’re just doing our job,” Swinson growled. “Some people still work for their country, O’Brien.”

  Slim Jim wondered how she’d take that. Ms. O’Brien was inordinately proud of her time in the Marine Corps—much more than he was of his hitch in the navy. If they meant to get under her skin, though, they failed. She simply raised an eyebrow and produced a large leather folder. It contained a data slate. She powered up, opened a file, and there was Slim Jim’s apartment on screen.

  There he was in his bathrobe.

  And there were the two feebs, muscling him.

  It was the surveillance footage from the microcams hidden all over his home. Geraghty was administering a savage, unprovoked blow to the back of his head.

  “Hmm, not such a good cop after all, are we, Agent Geraghty?” Ms. O’Brien teased with a smile quirking the corner of her mouth. At that moment, Slim Jim thought he might just be in love with his scary lawyer.

  The others had crowded into the small room and were also watching, which only added to the agents’ awkwardness. The video made them look and sound like a couple of stupid thugs. Marilyn gasped when Swinson threatened to tell her ex-husband where he could find her.

  “You bastards,” she said. “That was just a marriage of convenience. If I hadn’t hooked up with him, I would have been sent back to the orphanage. My guardian used to pay him to go out on dates with me!”

  Slim Jim wasn’t the only one who found himself caught out by that. Every man in the room, and even the other two women reacted with obvious surprise. Norma turned a cold, level stare on the feds. When she spoke, it didn’t sound like her at all. There was nothing soft in her voice. It sounded like she was grinding up rocks with her teeth.

  “Don’t you imagine for a second that you can involve me in any of your grubby schemes,” she went on. “You have no idea of the life I’ve just escaped. Or what I will do to avoid going back there. You can expect to hear from my lawyers.”

  Slim Jim began to wonder whether it was such a good idea dating someone like Norma. She apparently had hidden depths.

  Hidden depths were not good. Not in his experience. He began to wonder if she’d been using him all the way along.

  The man and woman who’d come in with her remained silent. But he could tell they were fascinated. The chick, in particular. Davidson didn’t doubt she was twenty-first. Her clothes told him that much. But he began to wonder what angle she had. She didn’t strike him as the soldierly type. Ms. O’Brien spoke up while he was wondering.

  “According to the contemporary law specialists at my firm, there’s evidence of seven separate indictable offenses on this stick alone. But of course, that’s only if I file here. On the other hand, if I file in-zone, by my count there are sixty-two civil and criminal actions available to Mr. Davidson, should he wish to seek a remedy for the Bureau’s actions.”

  Geraghty came out from behind his bland persona. A large vein was throbbing in his neck, and his knuckles were white with the effort of controlling himself. “You won’t be filing anything anywhere, you bitch. You’ll be lucky to come out of this without doing jail time yourself.”

  The agents hadn’t noticed—they weren’t as familiar with the technology—but Slim Jim distinctly saw the dark-haired woman press a hot key on the flexipad riding at her hip. She had to be recording this.

  “Once again,” O’Brien said, “I’ll guess we’ll see about that. But you gentlemen should inform your superiors at the earliest opportunity that I will be dragging you ass-backwards and buck-naked through the briar patch. You should also inform your superiors that I intend to call Director Hoover as a witness, and if he tries to blow me off the way he does with every inconvenient inquiry that comes his way, I’ll ask the bench to issue a warrant for his arrest. And I will have him dragged kicking and screaming to the stand. So he might want to go out and buy himself a nice new dress for his big day in court.”

  O’Brien’s voice didn’t get louder or faster as she spoke. Quite the opposite, in fact. When she was finished, she leaned forward, almost close enough to kiss Agents Geraghty and Swinson on the tips of their noses, and Slim Jim had to strain himself to hear. The faces of the two men, however, told him that they’d understood everything.

  They were—what was that thing Ms. O’Brien liked to say?—oh yeah. They were toast.

  The agents sent a threatening glare in his direction as they slunk out of the room, but as a confidence man himself, Slim Jim kn
ew they’d been rolled.

  “You owe Ms. Monroe a steak dinner, Mr. Davidson,” O’Brien told him once they’d left. “She came and got me as soon as they grabbed you.”

  “Thanks, sweetie,” he said to Marilyn.

  “What a pair of assholes,” spat the soon-to-be starlet. “I can’t believe the FBI would employ such people.”

  Both O’Brien and the other chick, the one with the flexipad, snorted in amusement.

  “This is Ms. Julia Duffy, Mr. Davidson, and her escort, Commander Dan Black,” O’Brien said. “Ms. Duffy works for the New York Times, and she had asked me if she could interview you about the harassment you’ve suffered at the hands of Mr. Hoover. As your attorney, I would advise you to agree to the request. Although I should mention that I act for Ms. Duffy in another capacity, and if—”

  Slim Jim held up his hand. “That’s enough. I’ll talk to her. You wrote that fucking amazing bit about that guy called Snider, didn’t you, Ms. Duffy. On the Brisbane Line. Walter Winchell reckons he’s gonna get a Medal of Honor for that.”

  Julia Duffy shook his hand. She had a grip as firm and dry as O’Brien’s, but he noticed with surprise that her hands were heavily callused, like a workman’s.

  “If he gets it, it won’t be because I wrote a story. It’ll be because he deserves a medal,” she said. “He saved our lives, and at great risk to his own.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Slim Jim. “Be a feather in your cap, too, though, wouldn’t it?”

  “Mr. Davidson,” O’Brien cautioned him.

  “It’s okay.” Duffy smiled. “Your client is a lot smarter than most people would give him credit for. Not by book learning, but with rat bastard cunning, if I’m not mistaken. Wouldn’t that be right, Slim Jim?”

  His eyes crinkled and a wide grin split his face. “Something like that,” he said. “When would you like to do your interview, Ms. Duffy?”

  19

  BUNDABERG,

  350 KM NORTH OF THE BRISBANE LINE,

  SOUTHWEST PACIFIC AREA