The Golden Minute

by John Birmingham

  “Prince Albert Street,” Gerhard barked at the driver.

  The Gestapo hoosegow, Smith assumed as the car leaped forward. Seeing his possibles bag on the empty seat next to Gerhard, he was affixed with the notion that if he let them transport him to this Prinz Albrecht Strasse he would likely never leave the place, not with a breath in his body.

  “I can see what you are thinking,” Gerhard said.

  He pulled a pistol from inside his long leather coat and pointed it at Smith.

  “Do not be so tiresome and foolish. It would be a chore to clean your insides from the floor, but it would not be the first time, and the unpleasant drudgery would not fall to me, I can assure you.”

  Smith did not doubt the man. He didn’t seem the type to clean up after his own mess. He would have underlings for that. The gun he held was of a type Smith had not seen before, and he’d laid eyes on all manner of weapons this last month. Much changed as you moved through human history, but not that. There was always plenty of weapons around and fellers happy to wave them in your face.

  He forced himself to relax.

  When he did make his play, it would not help him to be rigid with apprehension.

  “Perhaps we can make this quick, fellers,” he offered as cheerily as he could. “Y’all will be curious about the items and particulars in my carry-all. That’s understandable. But Professor Koffler had the truth of it. I am a travelin’ salesman and these are just my samples and merchandise.”

  Gerhard snorted.

  “You are no salesman, and these are not brushes or soap powders or bits and pieces of the famous electrical suction cleaners so beloved of America’s lazy hausfrau.”

  There was something in the way Gerhard said that word which caused a slight hiccup in the translation. Smith started to understand he’d meant ‘homemaker’ or even ‘lady homesteader’, but then a deeper, nastier insinuation gave him to hear the word in its original German again.

  That happened sometimes.

  Usually when some foreign brute was calling you an ape or barbarian in their native tongue.

  He was familiar with quite a few curses for such these days.

  “This,” Gerhard went on, backhanding the possibles bag, “is the equipment of a spy or a saboteur. Not a salesman.”

  Smith, who’d been so unsettled by the letters he’d received at the hotel that he had not thought to stow his luggage in a cupboard or hideaway, cursed himself for the oversight. Not that these goons looked like they’d be discouraged by a game of hide and seek. They all looked the sort to tear a man’s private lodgings apart and spit in his eye when he protested the intrusion.

  He was beginning to understand why Ms Cady had such a powerful detestation for these Gestapo and Nazi types, although he weren’t entirely sure how she’d managed to encounter them so often in Seattle, so long after the war that done for them. But she was forever cussin’ out Nazi this and Nazi that and Smith was beginning to get his bearings on why.

  The Gestapo car aggressively muscled into the traffic and appeared to be headed away from the open square at a gallop. Smith no more imagined he could jump from the motor wagon at this speed, and come up grinnin’, than he could leap from a runaway stallion. If’n he was set on escape, he’d need to do it while they were delayed somewhere, most likely at a crossroads. He’d come to recognize these were often chokepoints in a city full of cars. There was no sense in gettin’ Gerhard and his offsiders riled, though. Best they be well disposed toward him and thus unguarded as to his real intent.

  “Fellers,” he said, holding up his empty hands, getting them used to the idea that the grizzly had nothing in those big old paws but harmless honey drops. “Fellers, I can assure y’all that I am as I represent myself, and I would be happy to take you through all my wares, which are of course for sale at the most reasonable of prices.”

  Smith had been pestered by more than one traveling salesman in his time, and he’d locked a few of them up, too. He thought he made a fair tilt at their usual line of hokum and gimcrackery. He made himself comfortable in the Gestapo wagon, plastered the widest, most innocent of smiles on his face, and recalled as best he could the sunny disposition of the Tucson snake oil peddler he’d once locked up for gulling half a county out of their savings.

  “Indeed,” he said, warming to his sales pitch, “were you to make a bulk purchase, I would be even happier to reduce my already narrow margins to veritable razor thinness in anticipation of securin’ the good will and ongoin’ business of the German government… Heil Adolf,” he added, improvising the strange girly wave he’d seen these goobers offer to each other from time to time.

  Gerhard snorted again, but this time with less open contempt. He seemed amused if anything, and although he still held that odd-looking pistol, it was no longer gripped as tightly and aimed as steadily at all of the sausage meat and fried potato sitting so heavily in Smith’s gut.

  “Perhaps it is as you say, Mister Smith, and if so, I can assure you the Reich Minister of Economics himself would insist on meeting with you personally to secure access to these products…”

  The amusement died in his eyes.

  “But I do not think that is how this evening will unfold. Do you?”

  Gerhard was sitting in shifting darkness. Light and shadow continually swept across his face as they passed through the illuminated fairyland of the great city at night. It gave him a sinister aspect, which Smith did not doubt he both cultivated and enjoyed. And it was ruined utterly by the sudden flare of bright, white light which flooded the passenger cabin of the motor wagon with such piercing brilliance that it blinded the Gestapo man. He squeezed shut his eyes and Smith leaped forward, easily freeing himself from the clutches of his guards, who were just as stunned as their boss man by the sudden effulgence. He knocked the muzzle of the gun to one side with his leading hand, and it fired.

  The crack of the single pistol shot was lost in the sudden crash and earthquake jolt which threw the car sideways, shattering windows and rocking it so far over on its axles that Smith feared it might tip completely. He was flung across the tiny space, now filled with thousands of jagged, twinkling gems of glass. He slammed into Gerhard, hearing the man’s cries of alarm and surprise turn to shock and pain at the impact. Smith clamped onto the German, partly to secure himself from flying out of the carriage and on to the roadway, and partly to secure the pistol, which was the unvarying object of his intent, even as the whole world came apart around him.

  It happened quickly, just a second or two of violent action and disorder, but in his comprehension everything was slowed down to the near frozen, infinitesimal crawl of glaciers over a mountain range. He was able to consider and appreciate the sudden peephole which appeared in the forehead of the heavy who’d pushed him into the car. He watched the feller’s grey matter vent from a much larger rupture at the back of his skull, as the bullet from Gerhard’s pistol exited his noggin, dragging along a hot spray of head cabbage behind it. Smith felt his hands close around Gerhard’s grip on the shootin’ iron, and distinctly felt and heard the snap of the man’s wrist as he strengthened his own grasp and levered his whole mass against the limb. All of this occurred in the unnaturally suspended moment of time immediately after the crash.

  Some part of Smith understood they had crashed the wagon or something had crashed into them.

  And then the spell broke and Smith crunched back into the everyday, where time passed in hours and minutes of conventional duration, not the strange taffy-like stretching of seconds into forever. He wrenched the gun from Gerhard, clubbing the Gestapo man across the temple with it, knocking him out, or possibly killing him. Smith was not much bothered to inquire into which. Turning awkwardly, unsure what was up and which was down, and whether he remained all of one piece, Smith was ready to put a few lead plums into the third of his captors, but that was unnecessary. He could see from the grotesque angle of the man’s head upon his neck that his spine had been broken. The driver was no better disposed. H
is bloodied carcass was draped over the front of the wagon. Smith stuffed the pistol into the waistband at the small of his back and searched for a way out. He could smell something burning and had no wish to die trapped in a blazing carriage. It was becoming more apparent to him why he may not have returned to Ms Cady with all the speediness of the Pony Express. Berlin was a helluva place.

  He tried the door through which he’d entered the vehicle, but it had buckled and was stuck fast. He wrenched and pushed at the handle, which broke off with a loud metallic crack. His head banged painfully into the roof as he tried to stand up. He could feel the animal panic trying to undo his reason.

  “This way, Smith. Behind you.”

  He turned towards the voice.

  Koffler.

  The little German historian was standing at the other door, holding Smith’s possibles bag.

  “Hurry,” he said. “We must be away with all dispatch.”

  Still fuzzy-headed, but no longer feeling even the least bit drunk, Smith crabbed around and out of the door on the other side, crawling over the bodies of the dead Germans.

  Koffler frowned deeply at the corpses.

  “This was a pity,” he said. “But unavoidable.”

  Smith took the hand Koffler held out to him and allowed himself to be pulled forward and out of the wreck. A small crowd of onlookers had gathered around the site of the crash, but only Koffler had come forward to help. Hungry flames licked at two motor wagons. The one Smith had just escaped, and the one Koffler had crashed into it.

  “It could not be helped,” he said, and it almost sounded like he was apologizing. “They could not be allowed to take you or the bag. Come. We must be gone before the authorities arrive.”

  “Thanks,” Smith grunted. It was all he could manage at that moment.

  “A hospital. I must get this man to a hospital,” Koffler declared to the crowd, and hurried Smith away into the night.

  18

  A boy, who couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve, piped them aboard. But it didn’t seem to be a formal ceremony. He was just playing his pipe, a crude, hand-carved tube of wood with holes up and down its length. Garvey ignored him, and having led Cady up the gangplank—like, an actual fucking gangplank just like the old Peter Pan cartoons on Disney—he pointed to a raised area at the rear of the vessel.

  “You will keep dry up there, mistress. We have no cabins for fancy, and you’ll not want to rub up against the brimgeist below. Serpigo runs hot down there. Well-a-near it be but a hop to Boston, where I am to see you to lodgings for my promise.”

  Damn.

  She really needed that universal translator.

  As tempting as it was to fall back on her mad dialogue skills honed over many International-Talk-Like-A-Pirate Days, Cady resisted the urge to go, “Yaaaarr, cap’n,” and instead followed Garvey to the… What? The quarter poop? The mizzen thingy?

  Who knew? And even if she did know, Cady wasn’t sure she could make herself understood anyway. She could see the crew had rigged up a canvas sheet to keep the rain off most of the tiny, raised deck area around the big wooden steering wheel. Or did these guys say ‘steerage’? Whatever. She wasn’t stoked at the idea of getting any wetter, and she followed close on Garvey’s heels as he strode to the rear of the vessel.

  The sailors on deck did not snap to with salutes or barked acknowledgments. They nodded and got out of the skipper’s way, busy about their chores and duties and Garvey seemed content to let them keep at their work. He climbed a short set of stairs and exchanged a few words with another man, younger, thinner, but dressed in a similar fashion, who shuffled charts and papers on a big wooden box under the cover of the canvas. Cady picked out a few words here and there.

  “Turning of the tide.”

  “The anchor detail.”

  “Canister and ball.”

  But they spoke so quickly in their strongly accented and obscure vernacular that it mostly meant nothing to her. She climbed the steps behind the captain, but tried to keep out of his way. Cady remembered with a small start that she still wore her wristwatch, her father’s old Timex. She’d forgotten it in the trauma of losing Smith, and she reflexively checked it now.

  8.36.

  That can’t be.

  And then she recalled that she hadn’t had a chance to reset it to the local time zone. So it was pretty much useless. Just like her.

  “Mistress Smith.”

  Garvey had caught her again, with her mind a thousand miles and many hundreds of years away.

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “Mister Bowditch here is my first officer, and a gentry-cove of some breeding and repute. He will attend you as needed, but have a care he is not bestraught by your demands, aye?”

  “Sure,” Cady said carefully. “No bestraughting Mister Bowditch. Thank you, Captain Garvey,” she said, before nodding to Bowditch and saying even more carefully, “I am pleased to meet you, sir.”

  The young man smiled and bowed, sweeping off his three-cornered cap, which was much smaller, more practical and generally less utterly fucking ridiculous in every way than his captain’s hairy monster helmet.

  “Lieutenant Willem Bowditch at your service, Mistress Smith,” he said, with no trace of the thick, garbled mess of gibberish in which he’d spoken to Garvey. He sounded like an actor in an old English movie clip on YouTube. A black and white pirate movie, say, where everyone wore puffy shirts and fought each other with swords while swinging from the chandeliers.

  Her instant relief at having somebody she could understand was undercut by the immediate suspicion that he was another Chumley; a Watchmaker’s Apprentice planted onboard to wait for just the right moment to run his dagger through her. A headache, which had been nagging at her for hours, began to really hammer at the inside of her skull.

  “Are you long in Captain Garvey’s service?” she asked as innocently as she could.

  “Nine years since I came on as a servant boy,” he said.

  “Gah, modesty becomes you poorly, Bowditch,” Garvey growled, but with good humor. “You were Sir Ferdinando’s ward, not some lowly dockyard cur.”

  The same Ferdinando that Mary had mentioned? Dude sounded like a bit of an operator.

  “Nine years then, Mister Bowditch?” Cady replied. “That’s a long time.”

  “And three more away at reading his books he was, mistress,” Garvey added, “with the seminary at Harvard, thanks to Sir Ferdinando.”

  Bowditch said nothing more about himself, but it was obvious he was pleased that she knew. Cady was just pleased that he was most likely not another Apprentice. Twelve years building up a cover identity was excessive even for those guys.

  “And yourself, mistress?” he asked. “You are in trade, I hear…”

  “The Mistress Smith can avaunt of connection to Captain and Mistress Bradbury’s interests,” Garvey said. “That is enough for us to ensure her besteaded in her plight, lad.”

  “But of course, Captain.”

  Cady had less than no idea what the hell they meant, but it sounded as though they were going to get her out of Dodge, if only to stay onside with the Bradburys and the fantastic Ferdinando.

  “You will best be disposed under cover and out of sight, Mistress Smith,” Bowditch said, shucking out of his long blue coat and passing it to her. “Clad yourself in mine. Your hides look warm, but wet, and I can but otherwise offer a quiet corner while we make ready to sail.”

  The coat was huge and warm and Bowditch indicated that she could curl up out of the way on a pile of burlap sacks, protected from the rain, if she so wished. Cady was a mess of conflicting anxieties. A desperate desire to get as far away as possible from the Puritan nuthouse of Salem; apprehension at the prospect of putting to sea with a ship full of men she didn’t know; and the larger dread that Smith would never find her and she’d be stuck here forever.

  Oh man. I cannot do fifty years in this place.

  But she had not slept in nearly two days. She was clo
se to starving. And Bowditch’s coat was warm and surprisingly soft. When the little boy who’d played the flute, or whatever, appeared at her elbow to offer a mug of hot broth, Cady’s appetite and exhaustion got the better of her. She quickly drank the thin, salty soup, curled up in a quiet corner of the wheel deck and, promising herself that she would rest just a few minutes, she fell deeply asleep.

  The motion of the ship woke her hours later. The sun had risen. It was not yet far above the horizon, and thick, scudding clouds diminished the power of the morning light. She could see from her wristwatch, however, that nearly three hours had passed. Her head was thick with sleep, but no longer pounding with a headache. She blinked and rubbed the salt and grit from her eyes, and tentatively tried to climb to her feet. The pitch and roll of the deck, and the numbness of her legs from sleeping awkwardly on bare wooden boards, made any movement difficult. She also needed to pee and felt acutely self-conscious about where she might do that.

  They might expect her to hang her ass over the side. She was pretty sure they wouldn’t have invented a decent toilet yet.

  The canvas sheet which had protected her from last night’s rain was gone. She presumed it would screw up the working of the actual sails, which bellied out, rumbled and snapped on the masts overhead. Dozens of men and boys appeared to swarm through the rigging up there, with more scurrying about on the wooden decks below. Garvey and Bowditch conferred with three other officers. They all wore the same sort of jackets and knee-length pants, so she figured they were probably in charge. This would be the ship’s command group. Only Garvey had a stupidly big hat, though. Two other men hauled at the giant wooden steering wheel, but they were dressed in patched and sun-faded canvas that looked as though it might have been cut from old sails.