The Golden Minute

by John Birmingham

  7

  Colonel Hausser was one of them fellers could turn it on and off like a tap. As cruel as he’d spoken to poor Mandelstein, and as menacing a specter as he’d conjured for the brownshirt gang, he was the very soul of courtesy and consideration to Smith as soon as the other men had dispersed.

  “Are you recently come to the Fatherland, Herr Schmidt?” he asked.

  “Just arrived, sir,” Smith replied. “And I am needful of cash money. I have gold and silver to trade.”

  The German officer politely but firmly led him away from the street with all of the jewelry shops and dealers in fine metals. He never laid so much as a finger on Smith, not even a gentle touch at the elbow to get him moving. But he indicated with an open hand that Smith should walk with him, and his silent companions fell in behind, cutting him off from that direction. It was all neatly done, but a vexation to Smith because he was still penniless. He needed to trade for currency.

  Hausser was considerate of that too.

  “You need not lower yourself to grubbing about and haggling in such a rough neighborhood, Herr Schmidt,” he said. “You will get a much better price for your silver at a good German bank. There are many right here on Potsdamer Platz who will be pleased to offer you the market rate of the day.”

  Smith could have cursed aloud for not having thought of that himself.

  Any bank back home would happily exchange paper currency for nuggets or gold dust. He had been so fixed on following Miss Cady’s example that it had not occurred to him to simply follow his own nose. They returned to the city square, which seemed even busier than it had when Smith first surveyed it. The traffic was thicker and noisier and the pavements thronged with crowds such as he had not seen since his travels among the celestials. Hausser pointed him towards a massive stone pile of a building, blackened by soot and dust.

  “The Deutsche Bank will see to your needs, Herr Schmidt,” Hausser said. “But perhaps you should clean yourself up a little first, eh? You look as though you have come from the frontier, perhaps from fighting an Indian war there, yes?”

  The German grinned with good humor, but Smith followed his gaze down to the blotches and spots of blood discoloring his jacket and britches.

  “Ah, I do apologize for my rough appearance, sir. I had me some trouble with varmints and the like who…”

  “Tut tut, no, do not apologize, Herr Schmidt. You are our guest in the Fatherland, and I am afraid you find us in a fit of social derangement. Those fellows who waylaid you earlier, brutes and thugs for the pervert Röhm. They run riot everywhere just now, offending the quiet and good order of the whole country. It does not surprise me that you have come afoul of them. Please accept my apologies on behalf of all Germans.”

  Smith had no idea what in tarnation this feller was on about, but if’n he was convinced that Smith had got a little bloody lambasting some local scalawags, then a smart feller would surely not miss the opportunity to shut the hell up about it.

  “No apologies needed, sir,” Smith said. “But I do owe you my thanks for your kindness.”

  The German clicked his heels together and bowed his head.

  It had the air of a music hall performance, but done for real. Smith touched two fingers to the brim of his hat.

  “Oh, and Herr Schmidt, you will find the Wild West Bar over yonder as the cowboys say, yes?”

  Hausser pointed to the building at the far end of the plaza, with the copper dome gleaming in the sun.

  “As indeed we do, sir. Thankin’ you.”

  Smith was about to break off, when he decided to chance his luck with the German officer.

  “I wonder, sir, if I might bother you for a recommendation. I have yet to settle on a hotel for my accommodations…”

  “I did wonder about that,” Hausser said. “There are two large establishments within a few minutes’ walk. I can recommend the Esplanade, but not the Excelsior.”

  Hausser pointed out both, and emphasized that he would not choose to stay in the latter. Smith took him at his word and bid the Prussian farewell. Hausser and his two guardsmen, who had not spoken once during the entire exchange, removed themselves to continue their patrol, or whatever the hell they were up to. Smith had grown accustomed to the feeling that he knew but one tenth of a tiny sliver of very little about the times and places he had thus far fetched up in, and it was his policy not to interfere with something that weren't botherin’ him none. Some deep and abiding animosity obviously lay between Hausser’s gang and those brown-shirted galoots; that was a truth he held to be self-evident. But what it might be was of no concern to him. They might just as well have at each other over who had the spiffier-looking outfit. (Hausser, by a furlong in Smith’s opinion.)

  It did bother him that he had involved the Jewish barber in some difficulties, and had not paid him at all for his trouble, but Mandelstein was nowhere to be found, and it seemed obvious these Germans were as poorly disposed to the Yiddish race as any Bible-bashing holy show preacher Smith had ever met.

  Likeways, there weren’t nothing to be done about the spoilage on his jacket. T’weren’t the first bloodstains he’d put there, and he did not doubt he would paint it some more afore he was done. Better to see to his business while the blood was fresh and not given to the stink of putrefaction. He would, were it possible, get his outerwear cleaned while in the city, but not at the expense of delaying his return to Ms Cady. He pushed aside the feelings of falling backasswards from a high horse at the thought of her, trapped so long ago in New England. He had a practical task to attend to, cashing up at the bank, and since it would move him that much closer to reuniting with Cady; it were best he put his mind to that rather than to a lot of hopeless moping and maudlin excitements.

  As Hausser had promised, the tellers of the Deutsche Bank were more than happy to relieve him of his silver in return for paper money. He tried to be smart about it, though. Like Ms Cady would be. Rather than trading his entire stash, he asked the sallow-faced counterman in the dark gray suit how much local currency he would need to support himself in modest style for a day and a night in the city.

  “I figure to rent me a room at the Esplanade,” he said.

  By the teller’s calculations, three ingots would more than cover the bill of fare, affording Smith a surprisingly fat wad of banknotes that he secured with the money clip his good lady wife, God rest her soul, had given him on their wedding day. So far as he was from home and hearth, that clip and his wedding band seemed freighted with an even greater weight of significance than he might normally afford them. They were all he had of home.

  As unsettling as it was to ponder the fate of Ms Cadence in Salem, Smith was even quicker to close and bolt the stable door on those earlier memories. He had already been some years mourning the loss of Martha, and that wound to his heart was now more scar tissue than open cut, but recollecting Martha inevitably meant thinking of his daughter, little Elspeth, too. He’d burned with a fever to get back to her since Wu’s damnable timepiece had cast him adrift on the years. But that fever had burned double hot since Ms Cady had shown him that there did exist a path home, and she was of a will to help him walk it.

  Smith emerged from the cool, dim interior of the bank to the bright heat and light of early afternoon in the German summer of 1934, determined that he would return to New England for Cadence and do so with all dispatch. He did not care to weigh up his motivations, to balance the debt he owed to Cady for involving her in his tribulations against the need he had of her learning and competence in comprehending the arcane gears and machinations of the watch.

  Of both watches now, he reminded himself.

  Nor did he care to weigh in the balance the fond feelings he increasingly possessed for the young woman who had no reason to feel the same way about him.

  Certainly not since he had abandoned her to the uncertain mercies of a hard and terrible past.

  With good folding money in his saddlebags, he had options. In the shock of arriving without Cady,
he’d fallen back on the one familiar thing in this world: that peculiar cowboy bar he’d found the last time he was in Berlin. It had seemed a natural sorta move to hole up there again and just wait out the twenty-four hours until he could get back to the village in New England. But now that he had some currency to his name, Smith got to reconsidering all of his possibles and prospects. If he took a hotel room he could stay hidden for a day. Clean up, rest up, and ready himself for what were set to be a downright unpleasant return to the Puritan colonies.

  He was not even entirely sure of how it would all work.

  Ms Cady had taken pains to explain to him the workings of the watch, as best she could figure them. He knew from her tutoring and their experience that to jump back to where and when he’d just come from he had to double-press the winding mechanism on the watch that’d brought him here, and he had to do that in the exact minute before his first twenty-four hours in Berlin were up. He also had to be standing as close to his arrival point here as possible. Within the very outlines of his boots, if he could manage that. That should see him return to…

  What?

  The field where he and Cady had set down in Massachusetts?

  Or the place a few hundred yards away where he had left?

  Consarn it!

  It were all such a damn confuzzlement.

  Shaking off his doubts and indecisions, he determined to get himself gone from the public thoroughfares as soon as practicable. He had not done much to draw the attention of the Apprentices to his presence here. But it would still be for the best if’n he were to simply drop from plain sight here in Berlin. The Esplanade was a few minutes’ walk, and he set off towards the hotel. It was as big a construction as Smith had ever laid eyes upon, far grander than the usual run of flophouse that he was acquainted with. He worried that he might not have enough money, but he had to trust to the advice of that bank Johnny that his readies would suffice.

  The Berliners were out in their multitudes, it seemed, and all them intent on hurrying to some place or other within a stone’s throw of Smith. Potsdamer Platz heaved with humanity and roared with the traffic of a whole continent debouching into the vast open square from five great arteries. It was a mystery to the frontiersman how it didn’t all just pile up in a crashing mountain of people and carriages. He’d been in some cities of late where that exact circumstance seemed a permanent condition. But here the Germans seemed to have an unnatural gift for flowing into and around the plaza like some great flock of birds, all twisting and swooping and moving with one mind.

  He kept his eye open for more gangs of ne’er-do-wells in those brown uniforms, and also for any wandering chums of Hausser’s, in the black. Lord only knew what it was between them fellers, and how a civilized country could tolerate the presence of rival militias contending on its streets. T’weren’t for him to puzzle out. He did catch occasional glimpses of men in uniform, some of them obviously members of the brown- and black-shirted posses, and he altered his course once or twice to forestall such encounters. But really, the streets of Berlin teemed so thick with fellers in uniform that it was all but impossible to evade them. Smith was glad to finally hurry up the steps of the hotel and out the main flow of foot traffic.

  The Esplanade boasted a handsome facade, golden sandstone bathing in the mellow glow of the afternoon sun. It looked a fitting resort for Austrian princes and Russian noblemen, and Smith worried anew that he would have to return to the bank for more funds, possibly even trading in some of the precious gold ingots Cady had procured for them. The grand entry hall, with its high vaulted ceilings and crystal chandeliers, seemed designed not just to frighten away actual riffraff, but to make regular fellers such as himself doubt their bona fides. He marveled at the sumptuary on display. Silk brocades. Deep leather armchairs. Rich Persian rugs. A veritable indoor forest of fernery and potted shrubs. And not one but two grand pianos tinkling in time. The first rank of the city’s elect all seemed to have gathered for tea and tiny cakes. Gentlemen in dark suits intrigued over fancy sandwiches, while ladies twittered and fanned themselves in closely held factions, the politics of which he would never comprehend. Even in here, he noted, there were a lot of fellers dressed up as soldiers. These Germans did love their dress-ups. A few heads turned in his direction when he pushed through the double-height doors, and a doorman in a top hat seemed to be debating whether to drop the portcullis and some burning oil on this barbarian invader. But Smith had learned from a very young officer in the army of the Union that the secret to moving among the great and the good was to proceed as though you had a perfect right to improve their company with your esteemed presence. (He had once snuck half a bottle of sipping whiskey from the personal reserve of General Grant himself by way of that very subterfuge.)

  Proceeding to the front desk, a long counter of polished marble that may have been looted from Caesar’s own mausoleum, he affected the air of a high-born nob who could buy and sell this dump with his pocket change.

  “I am flew in from New York,” he said, because it sounded very impressive, “and I need me a big room with an ever bigger bath and hot water to fill it. My name is John Titanic Smith and I am an American. I will pay cash money.”

  He had come to implicitly trust the watch to do his translating, but the sudden change in the demeanor of the clerk gave him to wonder, with not a little salting of panic, what in tarnation this feller had just heard from him.

  His eyes went wide and all but popped out of their sockets.

  “Smith, did you say? John Titanic Smith?”

  Suddenly afeared that something was very wrong, Smith’s gun hand twitched, to no effect of course. He had lost his shooting irons back in Massachusetts.

  “That’s me,” he said, expecting a gang of Apprentices to suddenly ride down on him.

  “We have a letter for you, sir. We have been holding it for some time.”

  Smith was suddenly at sixes and sevens. The Watchmaker’s Apprentices were not much for correspondence. They preferred to open communications with a bullet or a knife.

  “A letter you say. For me? Are you sure?”

  The clerk nodded, but excused himself, asking Smith to wait while he bustled up the counter to speak to a manager. The two men returned, the manager giving Smith an up and down look-see such as a riverboat croupier might give a three-dollar note.

  “Your name, sir?”

  Smith said each word carefully. No idea of where this was headed. “John. Titanic. Smith.”

  The manager regarded him suspiciously, “Late of Massachusetts?”

  “I might have been.”

  “And before that?”

  Smith bristled. “I don’t see what business of yours that would be, sir.”

  “It is my business because the hotel has been entrusted with a communication for a Mister Smith, but warned that he would arrive without identification documents. A most irregular situation, I can assure you. If you can confirm the embarkation point for your journey to Massachusetts, I am instructed that the correct answer and your full name will be sufficient proof of identity to release the letter to you.”

  “Er…”

  For a moment Smith wasn’t sure what the officious little German meant.

  “You mean the, er, the port we, er, I left from for Massachusetts?” he asked.

  “Exactly.”

  His heart was beating harder, and he felt a little dizzy.

  “Seattle,” he said. “I left Seattle bound for Boston, Massachusetts.”

  Both Germans nodded in unison, like wind-up toys synchronized to the second. The manager whispered something to his clerk, who disappeared beneath the counter for a few seconds.

  “Manfred will see to your accommodations, Herr Smith,” he said. “The Hotel Esplanade is pleased to be of assistance to you and the Historical Society.”

  “The… historical…?” Smith started, only to taper off as the clerk popped up again with a cream-colored envelope.

  “Your letter, Mister Smith,” he sai
d. “From Miss Cadence McCall, via the offices of Herr Professor Koffler.”

  8

  The magistrate kept his distance, and Cady kept her hands out of the pocket where the can of mace waited. Each regarded the other with open hostility. The magistrate said nothing for a few moments. He stalked back and forth on the other side of the bars, his eyes sliding up and down her body, fixing on her Doc Martens and narrowing as he considered the long, mud-splattered legs of her jeans. The sheepskin jacket appeared to give him no cause for concern, and Cady gave herself a gold star for that. It did look like something a Mongolian goatherd might wear any time in the last two thousand years, even more so now that she’d rolled around in the mud and leaves.

  “Like what you see, Harvey Weinstein?” Cady said, low enough that only he could make out the individual words.

  He frowned.

  “By what dark magicks did your husband, the demon, disappear himself in the light of common day?”

  Cady’s skin turned cold and clammy as all of the blood rushed away from it. This was always going to be impossible to explain away.

  Smith had literally vanished in front of the baying mob.

  She was supposed to vanish with him, if it hadn’t been for that goddamned Indian.

  Sorry. Native American.

  There was nothing Cady could say to explain away the impossible, not to this guy if he was an honest-to-goddamned witch finder, which she still doubted. But she didn’t need to win him over. She needed a cover story to keep Mary on her team, just long enough to formulate an escape. She had no idea how many people lived out here on the Blair Witch Projects. No idea of the best way to blow town if she could escape this cell. She did have a plan for that. A couple of them, in fact. But once she set foot outside, she was lost. She needed a guide, and so far the old woman cowering in the corner was her best bet.

  “By what magic?” Cady said quietly, taking a single step towards the bars. “You tell me, Harvey. You’re the magistrate. You’re the one who’s supposed to serve and protect. And yet this place is swarming with more witches and wizards than Hogwarts’ Open Day.”