The Golden Minute

by John Birmingham

  Smith picked up the handpiece.

  He heard a faint, almost tinny-sounding voice within it.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  “Er… howdy,” he said, finding that the handpiece did sit rather naturally upside his head.

  “Who is this, please?” A man’s voice, speaking in accented English.

  “My name is John Titanic Smith, sir, and I…”

  He jerked the earpiece away from his head at the rush of loud Germanic cursing that erupted from it. The watch translated every word, but did nothing to reduce the volume to something less thunderous. When the flood of Teutonic shouting abated and he heard the same voice but at a more reasonable loudness repeating, “Smith, hello? Smith, are you there?” he answered.

  “I am, sir. And you would be?”

  “You called me, Mister Smith. It’s Professor Koffler. You must have received my note, yes? And the letter from our mutual friend, yes, if that is not too familiar of me?”

  “I could not attest to your familiarity or otherwise, sir,” Smith said. He found himself, for no good reason, trying to hide within the frond of the giant fern which sat next to the phone. This was an unusual exchange and he felt unusually exposed by it. The life of the hotel continued on around him. An orchestra played in a nearby parlor, towards which waiters pushed trolleys piled high with sweet bakery treats and pots of coffee and tea. Smith’s stomach growled. He had not eaten in some time. “If you are Professor Koffler, however, I can confirm I have your letter. But before we meet, can you explain to me how?”

  A momentary silence followed. Not a complete stillness, though. The phone crackled and popped in Smith’s ear. Finally the German spoke.

  “I do not understand.”

  “Neither do I, sir,” Smith replied. “I do not understand how you knew to leave correspondence for me at the reception of this hotel. You could not know I would lodge here, for I had no plans in that direction.”

  Smith was surprised by a bark of laughter in reply.

  “Oh, Marshal Smith, you are indeed a fine detective. I could not know you would be at the Esplanade. I have left copies of the same letters at every hotel within three blocks of Potsdamer Platz. Miss Cadence long ago inferred that to be your likely arrival point from the information she had of your previous stay here. I believe you drank a great deal of beer at the Wild West Bar in Haus Vaterland. She wagered that you would not stray far if and when you returned. A risky wager, but one with a large reward, yes? You can, if you wish, confirm that all of the hotels and rooming houses in the district hold identical letters for you. I can wait, but I would ask you to make your inquiries with all dispatch. We must meet and plot your return to Salem, there to rewrite this unfortunate chapter.”

  Smith did not know whether this Professor Koffler was a man to be trusted, but right now he was the only connection to Ms Cady, and he felt himself compelled to abide.

  “I will make inquiry,” he said, almost as if he were threatening Koffler. “But I would also meet you at your earliest convenience.”

  “That would be right now, Mister Smith.”

  “And where?”

  “Let us repair to your previous watering hole, yes? To the Wild West Bar. You will not look out of place there, and it would not do to draw any attention to your staying at the Esplanade. Shall we say one hour? I shall approach you with a red flower in the buttonhole of my lapel.”

  “Done deal,” Smith said.

  Koffler spoke true. There was a letter waiting for Smith at the Excelsior, and another at a much smaller boarding house on the way to Haus Vaterland. In each case he was required to perform the same trick of supplying his full name and his ‘port of embarkation’ for Massachusetts before he could take possession of his mail. It did not establish Koffler’s good faith, but it was something to weigh against the chance of his being an agent of the Watchmakers. Smith resigned himself to playing the hand he was dealt. He would meet this professor, and if he gave the lawman the merest hint that he was going for a gun or a blade, he would bust the villain’s head like a melon dropped from on high.

  The day was lengthening toward its end when Smith left the Esplanade, but it was the disposition of the crowds which gave him to understand the work day was close to being done. The sidewalk cafes and restaurants hosted more drinkers than diners. Lines for tickets began to form in front of theaters and music halls. Here and there a business did stand shuttered, and glancing at the fading handbills and Daguerreotype images pasted to their padlocked doors and white-washed windows he was sure he knew why. They were bawdy houses and pleasure dens for the sort of gal-boys who preferred to lay down with each other instead of womenfolk.

  It would have been a moral outrage to him not so long ago, and a stunning revelation that a civilized society could tolerate such open perversity, but he’d seen that people’s ideas of what were natural and good weren’t graven in stone tablets, but rather drifted on the breeze from one place and time to another. Smith was beginning to suspect that a hard wind was a-comin’ for this city, and it would blow away nearly everything he could see right now: the bright and colorful lights, the laughing people, the music and lightness of the place. He did not doubt that the fellers he’d encountered this afternoon were the riders on that storm, just as he did not think that it was any concern of his. He had but one. Cady.

  The imposing facade of Haus Vaterland loomed. The burnished copper dome blazed as though afire in the late afternoon light, and hundreds of revelers entertained themselves at tiny tables which faced out toward the street traffic. They had been arranged as if to afford the drinkers and diners that singular enjoyment which can only be had while contemplating others hard at work while you lollygag about.

  Smith was early, and that by design. He poorly recalled the details of his last visit here, mostly through a haze of strong German beer, but a grand entry hall beckoned and he allowed the flow of foot traffic to sweep him inside. A magnificent arcade opened up ahead of him, stretching away into the middle distance. An unknowable number of saloons and parlors devoted solely to the pleasure of the city’s masses lined either side of the concourse, which was itself thickly forested with ‘outdoor’ cafes, which were of course indoors and protected from the elements by the soaring vaulted ceiling high overhead. There must already be thousands of merrymakers thronging this vast space, Smith reckoned. And many of them wearing uniforms. Grey jackets and jodhpurs with polished black boots. Cavalrymen perhaps? A smattering of black and white naval dress. Colleagues of Colonel Hausser in their intimidating all black uniformity. And here and there small clutches of the noisy, rough-headed brownshirts, who were easy to find because they were both offensively rowdy and almost always surrounded by clear space as good Germans moved away to avoid them.

  Another thing you got used to seeing everywhere and when. Thugs and bullies.

  Drawing on his imperfect memories, Smith navigated half the length of the concourse, passing a gallery of moving pictures, and a Cafe Vaterland which looked an enormous venue to Smith, with seating for a thousand patrons at the very least. Marble busts of ancient nobles glared down disapprovingly from the floors above, as though offended by the cacophony of competing bands and orchestras. Even the smaller restaurants all seemed to boast their own musical ensembles, which, like the cuisine, hailed from the four corners of the world. It was quite the wonderland, Smith thought. But he ignored the colorful life-sized dioramas inviting him to dine in ‘ancient Italy’ or the ‘Spanish wine room’ and pushed on to the vast stone staircase that carried him up five floors to… well, to a frontier saloon in the Rocky Mountains from which spilled the bright, swinging tunes he’d come to know of as ‘jazz’.

  You didn’t hear a lot of negro music in the Territories, or the Rocky Mountains for that matter. But there was an undeniably American energy to the place, and Koffler was right. Even in his hat and boots, Smith fit right in among the chorus girls, the twirling lassos, the wagon wheels and wooden barrels. He even recognized the accents of his
homeland here and there among the tipsy crowd. The house guests were packed in tight, mostly listening to a negro band which was wailing up a storm on the small stage. Giant steins of ale and lager crisscrossed the floor, carried by a strange working alliance of Indian squaws and German mountain girls in short pants and braces. He smelled bacon and sausage and tobacco smoke, and spied four separate gaming tables, dice and cards in play. He wondered at the stagecoach which sat in a far corner. Had it once plied a route for Wells Fargo as the insignia announced? It sure looked as though it might.

  Smith hadn’t seen it the last time he’d been here, but then he had not been at his best. Full of liquor and despair. He had nursed his misery with libations of bourbon and had even been tempted to find his ease in the embrace of the prostitutes who had been openly working the room. They still were, but this time he ignored them and they him. He could only assume he did not reek of desperate lonesomeness as before. Having recovered from the surprise of Cady’s letter—he could not help but think of it that way, despite his natural caution—he came into this facsimile of a western saloon as leery-minded of ambush and treachery as he would have in the real thing.

  He felt the absence of a gun at his hip as a sort of negative weight there. The Watchmaker’s Apprentices had once or twice come at him in a crowd, but in his experience, they much preferred to work in shadows and quiet. He could only presume that filling the air in a crowded room with hot lead and the local morgue with a lot of customers before their allotted time would lead to… complications. Was that what Chumley had called them?

  Smith explored the room through gunslit eyes, looking for sign of anyone, man or woman, who might have an interest in him. He discerned no professorial gents with flowers in their buttonholes, and finally beginning to relax, he decided to spend some of his German money on a broiled bratwurst and one small beer.

  He fronted the bar and waited on the attention of the keep.

  They came for him while he was thus invested in the imminent prospect of hot pork and cold froths.

  12

  Blinking as they emerged from the darkness of the cellar, their chains dragged and clanked on a flight of uneven wooden steps. Cady could see straight away she’d made the right call in not trying to escape when the deputy opened the cell door. Hundreds of people were waiting to see them. To see her.

  The taunts and jeering cat-calls started as soon she stepped into the muddy street. She expected rotten vegetables to follow, but they didn’t. Instead, clods of mud, earth and sticks and even one small dead animal flew at her. Food was probably too precious to waste.

  “Desist!” Corwin shouted. “Surcease!”

  But he was less concerned for his prisoners’ wellbeing than for his own. The villagers weren’t going to catch the eye of any Major League scouts with their aim. The sheriff was struck by heavy, sodden lumps of clay more than once. The fusillade trailed off when he stepped into the crowd and clouted somebody with his staff.

  Mary stumbled and Cady grabbed her arm to stop her falling into the mud. The faces of the mob seemed even more deformed by rage and loathing than they had been yesterday.

  She heard Smith’s voice in her head.

  Had some time to stew on it, I reckon.

  The whole world contracted to the savage caterwauling crush of two or three hundred medieval peasants who wanted nothing so much as to tear every limb from her body. She knew they weren’t actually peasants, and this wasn’t the Middle Ages. Not technically. But she’d be fucked if this didn’t feel like Cersei’s walk of shame on Game of Thrones. Some of them were even yelling at her to ‘repent’. But most were screaming ‘WITCH’.

  She was more frightened than she had ever been in Rome or London, where homicidal maniacs had come at her with blades. At least she’d had Smith and even Georgia to…

  Hide behind.

  … Yes. Okay. To hide behind. But she’d had friends. Allies.

  All she had here was a half-starved granny who seemed to have fainted away from the shock of so much hostility. It had struck them like a solid wave the moment they’d emerged. Corwin and his deputies did a fair job of beating back the crowd; not such a great one of protecting their prisoners from the missiles which still flew at them, if only sporadically. A rock the size of a baseball hit Cady in the shoulder and she cried out in pain. Her arm went numb for a second before an unpleasant tingling, something akin to an electric shock, ran all the way down to her fingers.

  She locked her hands around the old woman’s arm and tried to take in as much of the arena as possible. It helped when she reduced all the bugshit hypercrazia to familiar gaming concepts. The mob were just so many NPCs. The looming showdown with the magistrate was a boss battle that she was gonna own. The village was a mini-map, and she was filling in more detail with every step she took through it, even ducking and weaving to avoid the worst of the shit the asshole NPCs were throwing at them.

  They appeared to be in a town center, but not the waterfront village of Salem that Mary had told her about. Cady could see that settlement in the distance, lying below them between long, snaking fingers of grey-brown estuarine water. The town proper, a thin scatter of mud-stained cottages and meeting halls, of unpainted barns and stone-built taverns was a good way upslope from the waterfront, where she could see two- and three-masted sailing ships tied up to the docks. She wasn’t good at guessing distances. The last few years spent in virtual realities had not well prepared her to quantify space in the real world. But she estimated that she could cover the distance down to the waterfront in maybe a quarter of an hour at a jog. Faster if she sprinted along the dirt road that ran west from the port alongside the largest estuary. However, quite a few small cabins and one or two larger meeting houses were strung out along the length of the road, and Cady imagined herself getting crash-tackled by the occupants and amateur witch-hunters as she tried to flee.

  She lost sight of the waterfront as Corwin and the escort party gathered in close again. She felt strong hands gripping her upper arms and shoving her through the press of the crowd. She lost her grip on Mary’s arm as a large wooden hall towered over them. Or at least it felt large, at two stories. It was surprising how quickly the mind adjusted. Two stories was a skyscraper here. A fast horse was a rocket sled. And hauling ass, sprinting away down the hill, would be every bit as glorious as bailing on a bad Tinder date in a passing yellow cab. The howling rabble grew dense around the front of the hall. Some tried to reach through her guards to pinch her. What the actual fuck was that about? Others slapped and smacked and hammered at her and Mary with closed fists. She had seen Smith destroy men with one punch, and none of these featherweight blows came close to doing any real physical damage, but the cumulative psychic injury of such malice being focused directly on her was considerable. Cady felt beaten down.

  She stumbled and tripped on a wooden step she didn’t see in the heaving crush, and this time it was Mary Bradbury whose grip closed around her arm to save her from going under. Cady had a strong sense that if she fell at the feet of these lunatics—

  “Repent, witch! Repent!”

  —they would trample her to death.

  She was shaking by the time Corwin muscled them inside. The sheriff did not close and bolt the doors behind them, but in moving from the street to the inside of the hall, the mad, febrile energy of the crowd fell away. They didn’t fall silent or stop heaving and shoving to get at the prisoners, but she felt a definite sense of deflation, as though Corwin’s delivering them here had punctured a bladder full of poisoned animus.

  The ground floor of the building seemed to be given over to a classroom with small wooden desks. Perhaps it was the village school. She had no time to take in the scene, however, for they were bustled up a switchback staircase and into another room, as large as the first but unmistakably laid out for a court hearing. She heard the gasp of those waiting in the public gallery when she stepped into the room, and saw three men dressed as judges in long black smocks at a raised bench in front.


  She searched for her defense attorney.

  There was none.

  But the evidence against her was laid out on a table in front of the judges.

  Smith’s Winchester rifle and six-shooter.

  Her backpack and all of its contents was displayed beside them, a little like the way she had laid everything out on the floor of their hotel room back in Seattle.

  Corwin released them from their shackles and lowered Mary onto a plain wooden chair near the center of the room. Cady took the one next to it. The three judges glowered down from the high bench in front of them. Fifty or more townspeople crowded in the stall seating behind. More perched in the recessed windows, blocking out so much of the morning light that a clerk scribbling notes into a ledger worked by candlelight. Cady could not keep her eyes from darting to all the uptime swag. Firstly to Smith’s weapons, but they were unloaded now. He’d been fighting with that big-ass Bowie knife of his at the end.

  Oh God, Smith! Where ARE you?

  There was no payoff to be had going for the guns—Smith had the ammo, she didn’t know how to work them anyway, and they probably had safety locks or something—but her eyes roamed hungrily over the rest of the gear. Her Kindle. Her iPod. Her precious phone! There had to be an app for this. Uber, but for time-traveling rescues from whackjobs with a kink for witchcraft.

  Her stomach growled at the promise of the freeze-dried apocalypse chow. She swallowed a mouthful of spit while staring at all the chocolate. And she really, really wanted that Altoids tin with the hand-operated saw-chain.

  Corwin left them under the guard of his deputies while he spoke to the judges. Cady glared at Magistrate Granville, all but convinced he was another Chumley. Probably got his time-traveling ass to Boston last night, but two years ago, just to be here for this. He’d make sure she hanged before disappearing all her twenty-first century goodies as profane artifacts or Satan’s doodads or some shit, getting them out of the time stream or ‘the complication’ or whatever he called it when the yokels weren’t listening. If Smith’s guns were loaded she would’ve risked grabbing one and popping a few caps into the motherfucker. He was way more dangerous than these colonial rubes.