The Golden Minute

by John Birmingham

  The Herald pitched up and down on the heaving surface of the bay. Or she assumed they were in the bay she’d spied from the ridge line that first day with Smith. Cady could make out low hills on the horizon to either side of the ship, but only open water and a few small, scattered islands ahead of them. The ship rode over a strengthening swell that piled up between the headlands at the mouth of the inlet where Salem nestled. She had a foolish urge, almost a compunction, to reach for her iPhone and bring up a map.

  All sorts of reasons that’s not gonna happen.

  Word of their escape was probably all over the village by now. Poor Michael would be catching hell for it, although he’d been in charge of the tiny, stand-alone jail, not the tavern where the overflow prisoners from the witch hunt had been held. And the bars she’d sawed through would probably divert attention from him, too.

  Cady tried to convince herself that leaving her stuff behind was also the smart play because it would distract the Apprentices and their masters. They’d be more focused on making sure the Puritan numpties didn’t fire up her Kindle or discover freeze-dried chicken curry before its time than they would be on grabbing her up. At least for now. For her part, she didn’t give a shit about contaminating the past. As best she could tell this timeline was what Chumley had called a ‘complication’, a splintering of history to create an alternate reality. There was something about that idea which did bother her, but it wasn’t some ethical bed-wetting moment over breaching the time traveler’s prime directive. It was… something else.

  Something a lot less pressing than the seasickness she could feel coming on as they plowed into the deep Atlantic. With the deck pitching and rolling ever more dramatically, her stomach started to follow. She must have looked pretty green, because Bowditch saw her, smiled and left the conference of his fellow officers.

  “Hail, Mistress Smith, and well met the day. Might you be in the way of needing breakfast? I could send young Pip down to the galley for broth and bread.”

  Cady’s throat closed up at the suggestion and she had to focus on her breathing to avoid losing the thin soup she’d eaten a few hours ago. She shook her head and said nothing.

  “Very wise. I warrant your travels have carried you through tempest and squall before.”

  Bowditch wasn’t looking at her, but rather staring off into the distance as they swung round a low, bare island and set their heading south. Cady followed the line of his gaze and blanched.

  The storm toward which they sailed looked to be part of one long system, connecting four major squalls. It grew larger with alarming speed, effecting a strange schizoid disturbance in the ocean around them. Seaward, stretching off to the horizon, the water was an eerily flat, metallic grey, as though beaten from a vast sheet of lead. Between the Herald and the coast, however, the water churned into a black cauldron, roiled by foaming white streaks and chaotic, knife-edged waves. Fearfully looking back toward land, Cady saw that the dividing line between these two contrary seas was the green wake of the ship. A couple of dolphins played in the foaming vee.

  “We’re going into that?” she asked, surprised at how flat her voice sounded.

  “We need sea room,” Bowditch replied. “And there will be no slipping around it. But this is all to the good,” he added. “Of late the French pirate Quarrel haunts these waters in his ship Le Sournois and we do not wish an encounter with him, or with the Comte de Frontenac’s Canadian privateers.”

  “No,” Cady said. “That would suck.”

  Bowditch frowned at her use of the odd word and inwardly she smacked herself upside the head. She couldn’t explain everything away as being an exotic side effect of her travels.

  She stared past him, as though she had not just said something completely perverse, and her discomfort at the minor indiscretion was quickly displaced by her galloping fright at the giant wave heading directly toward them. Bowditch saw her expression and was already turning around before Garvey had begun to yell orders to the crew and the wheelmen. Cady understood nothing of what Garvey was shouting, although she’d probably have been just as lost and clueless on a modern sailing boat. She heard a lot of words like “abaft”, “abeam” and “all hands aloft”. His bellowing instructions had an immediate effect, with sailors exploding into action so quickly that she had the distinct impression they were anticipating his orders rather than reacting to them. Sails snapped, ropes snaked up and down, more shouts and orders flew between the men, and the bow of the Herald came around to take the giant green mountain of a wave at an angle. Cady let herself be pushed down into the deck, her knees flexing as though under growing g-forces, as the ship climbed the moving, liquid cliff face. The deck pitched over so far that she could’ve stepped directly onto the face of the wave, and cold, rushing seawater came roaring in through the wooden guardrails on that side of the vessel. Cady flailed about, looking for a handhold, suddenly convinced she would be thrown overboard, when Bowditch, who seemingly had no trouble keeping his balance, snaked his arm around her waist and held her tight against his side.

  “My apologies for being so forward, Mistress Smith,” he shouted over the uproar of the surging sea. “But Captain Garvey did entrust your safekeeping to myself, and you look not to have recovered your sea legs yet.”

  His arm felt like an iron band around her waist, but she wouldn’t be talking to HR about inappropriate touching any time soon. She was just immensely relieved not to have tumbled into the water and drowned. Bowditch held his grip as they reached the crest of the wave and kept going. Cady’s eyes widened in disbelief that the Herald seemed about to launch itself into space. Fully one third of its hull was exposed to the air before the front of the ship finally tipped forward and crashed down into the black trough on the other side. As she hit and went deeply under, the men working on deck were overwhelmed by tons of exploding seawater.

  Bowditch tightened his grip around Cady’s waist as she gasped and did not let go until they had climbed and cleared the second wave hiding behind the first. The men she had seen drenched and, she thought, almost certainly drowned by that first biblical inundation, were still on deck and working when the great flood drained over the sides of the ship. Bowditch steered her, firmly but still gently, back to the corner where she had been sleeping just a few minutes earlier.

  “I can ask of the captain if he would object to your riding out this squall in his cabin, mistress?” Bowditch shouted.

  The clouds ahead of them turned and stretched and slowly grew into a wall of rain which hid the coast and reached around as if to envelop the tiny sailing ship. Two hundred yards ahead, strange grey circles of violent mist began swirling into coherence. These demented, twisting devils whipped in on them and the storm slapped down hard.

  “That would be nice,” Cady yelled, almost directly into Bowditch’s ear.

  The wind and lashing rain briefly flattened out the sea, smashing down on the waves and slop. The larger cycles soon prevailed, however. Towering whitecaps threw the Herald around like a child’s toy in a washing machine. The ship’s design was rugged and simple, and as she muscled her way into the cannonading waves, Cady was reminded of a boxer closing up his guard and walking through a fusillade of really heavy hits. Technically simple, but hard.

  She held onto a thick oaken railing while Bowditch left her for a second to confer with Garvey. The captain, busy fighting the squall, waved the younger officer away.

  Great crashing walls of spray smashed into the Herald, while a short distance off to the left, Cady saw a deep black canyon yawn open in the water, the sort of thing she had once imagined the parting of the Red Sea to look like. Between the Herald and the canyon’s lip, the water was relatively flat, but then it dropped away down a sheer black abyss, beyond which she could see the far wall on the other side. It had the appearance of a great rift valley, except this one was alive and moving towards them.

  “Come with me,” Bowditch yelled over the freight train roar of the storm.

  Cady could not b
ring herself to let go of the railing.

  He saw what she was looking at and simply nodded as the bow came around toward the yawning chasm. Before it could swallow them whole, however, the waters closed up with a great explosion of green-blue spray.

  Bowditch prised her from the imagined safety of the rail and yelled, “Hold on to me.”

  Cady wound her arm around his waist, clutching at him as though he was the only thing keeping her from being cast down into Hell. Bowditch, for his part, seemed amused.

  “I was tipped into a sea like this from a rowboat, a whaler,” he shouted, as he shuffled forward, drawing her with him. “Five of us went in, my older brother included. I found a bundle of sticks to cling on to and was paddling for land when I saw my brother coming at me, intent on having those sticks for himself.”

  Cady finally let go of the rail and took a faltering step forward. The whole world around them had fallen into tempest and mad chaos. Bowditch was still shouting in her ear.

  “I was convinced he would drag me down, so I kicked away for all I was worth.”

  The ship pitched down into a trough and they suddenly raced forward a few steps with the momentum. Bowditch turned to face her, placing his back towards the wooden steps she’d climbed to the wheel deck the previous night.

  “Follow me,” he said, and braced one arm on either side of her to provide at least an impression of safety within his embrace as they climbed down.

  The Herald was rising and falling on the wild waves, and descending these few steps was one of the hardest things Cady McCall had ever done. She did not need to conjure up the prospect of being hit and swept away by another Godzilla wave like that first monster. The Herald was now constantly under the hammer of the sea.

  And still Bowditch kept telling his story.

  “My brother chased me but eventually succumbed to the waters.”

  By some miracle she made it to the main deck without being swept away, and Bowditch wrapped an arm around her shoulders and hustled her through a doorway. Or a hatch. Perhaps they called them hatches?

  Protected from the howl of the wind, it was quieter inside. The storm still roared, but her savior dropped his voice to a mere shout.

  “I never until then had experienced any satisfaction at seeing a man die,” he shouted, “but I remember few incidents in the course of my life more gratifying to me than that of my brother Swede going unto the deep.”

  He steered her through a narrow passageway and into a cabin of some sort. Small panes of glass admitted a dim light from outside, but not much, and the glass was wavy, almost opaque.

  The space was barely furnished.

  A table, apparently fixed to the floor.

  Some cupboards, and a bed.

  Unable to see the horizon, or anything but the inside of this cramped and unlit cabin, Cady’s senses rebelled at the sensation of violent movement. Her head started to spin and her stomach wanted to flip over.

  “I’m sorry about your brother,” she managed.

  “Oh, I didn’t like him at all,” Bowditch answered. “He would have drowned me for those sticks. You will ride out this current saliaunce in comfort here, Mistress Smith. But I must away.”

  He managed, in the violent disorder of the ship’s tossing and plunging, to remove his cap and bow.

  And then he was gone, back out into the storm.

  19

  Koffler hurried them away from the burning car crash via a series of switchback alleys and dogleg streets. They remained within a short walk of Potsdamer Platz but the professor avoided the main thoroughfares and the constant patrols of police, Gestapo and brownshirt militia who infested them.

  “We will not feature on their alerts and bulletins for some time,” he said as they turned a corner in a narrow, poorly lit street.

  “Even with dead men in the wagon?” Smith asked.

  Koffler stopped so quickly Smith almost overran him in the dark.

  “That was unfortunate,” he said. “They were not meant to…” he made a frustrated gesture with his empty hands. “They should not have died. One of the men was shot. Was that you?”

  “No,” Smith said. “Gerhard was holdin’ a gun on me. It went off in the crash and he did for his own feller, just like that. Blew his brains out. The wreck seen off the driver and the other guard. I will admit I gave old Gerhard a tap on the noggin to settle him down some.”

  “Hmmph,” Koffler grunted. “Well, there is nothing to be done for it. We will be long gone by this time tomorrow.”

  But he still seemed troubled. He resumed walking, his face down, one free hand stroking his chin as he pondered their difficulties. The other still held Smith’s bag.

  “I should carry that, Professor,” Smith said. “It ain’t exactly lightweight, and it is mine.”

  Koffler seemed to clutch it closer for a second, weighing its heft, its possibilities, before handing it over.

  “Of course. Thank you. Come, it is not far now.”

  They continued down the quiet laneway. Smith imagined it to be an older part of the city. The buildings here leaned close together in a fashion he recalled from Paris many centuries earlier. They looked like family homes rather than common lodgings or places of business. In the German way they were modest but well maintained. He wondered if Koffler lived nearabouts.

  “You didn’t tell me why we would be safe from pursuit,” Smith said.

  Koffler produced a large key-ring from his jacket and stopped outside a small, two-storey cottage. This building looked even older than the others, as though Berlin had grown up around it. Smith could imagine it having stood here since the days of forgotten kings. He assumed Germany had plenty of them. Most places did, ’ceptin’ for America. Koffler looked up and down the street.

  “We will be safe inside,” he said, opening a heavy wooden door with the old-fashioned iron key. “Come along.”

  Smith followed him into the darkened cottage, his nerves singing with unheard whispers of danger and unseen intimations of threat.

  But he settled some when Koffler turned on a lamp to reveal an unremarkable entry hall to an ordinary, private home. He dropped his keys on a small table just inside the door, which he indicated Smith should close behind him. The marshal did, feeling better with the solid planks of oak between himself and any likely pursuit. It was a false comfort, he knew. They were trapped in here now if the Gestapo decided to surround the place.

  Koffler breathed out, a great deep sigh of relief.

  “Professor?”

  He came back to himself and to Smith’s question.

  “Yes, yes. Of course. My apologies. I think we will be safe here. Thanks to your friends in the brownshirts, Smith.”

  That set him back on his spurs.

  “I don’t cotton to why that might be.”

  Koffler turned and bustled away past a flight of stairs, moving toward a kitchen. Smith saw an old-fashioned hob that would not have been out of place in Thurgood Thompson’s General Store. Koffler pulled on a string hanging from the ceiling and another light came on, showing more of the kitchen space. Cupboards, a wooden dining table, a deep sink and what might have been an icebox. He took down two glasses and a bottle from a shelf and poured himself a slug of liquor. He offered Smith one.

  “Schnapps.”

  “Much obliged.”

  They sat at the table together, sipping at the fiery spirit. Koffler seemed to be composing himself and Smith gave him the time for it. He did not imagine history professors were often called upon to effect breakouts from a prison wagon. They probably didn’t get to see fellers with their brains splashed out every day, either. Koffler’s hands stopped shaking after the second drink.

  “Tonight is the Night of the Long Knives, Marshal Smith. Do you know what that is?”

  Smith could imagine the words in big important newspaper letters, all properly capitalized, but he didn’t know why.

  “Not a clue, sir. Some festival of the old world, I would guess.”

 
“You are not even close, Marshal. Tonight the Führer secures his hold on power in Nazi Germany by murdering dozens of his own supporters within the Storm Detachment. The SA, from the German word Sturmabteilung. Your brownshirt friends.”

  “The uniformed thugs I done tangled with twice today? We ain’t friends.”

  Koffler laughed once, without humor.

  “This is a whole country of uniformed thugs, Marshal Smith. But yes. Them.”

  Koffler took another drink. Smith sipped at his and waved away the offer of more.

  “I will not bother you with a long history lesson,” Professor Koffler said. “We will be gone tomorrow and it will be pointless then. But be assured that tonight there is a great deal more violence and chaos in Germany than we have just borne witness to. Thousands of SA fighters and their erstwhile comrades in the SS battle each other across the country. In the confusion it might even be assumed that brownshirts killed Gerhard. The Society has a few dozen members here. Few of them are aware of our true purpose, but they can still be useful. If you will excuse me in a few minutes, I will see to it that they hear rumors of the brownshirt attack on Director Gerhard.”

  There had been a time, not so long ago, that Smith, as a lawman in his bones as much as his workaday calling, might have objected to the subterfuge. But not now.

  “You gonna make a few calls?” he asked, demonstrating his growing knowledge of how things worked in the future.

  Koffler shook his head. “I am afraid such conveniences are not so common as you might imagine in 1934. I will have to step out for a few hours. You will be safe here. But please, do not leave the house.”

  “Is your family home?” Smith asked.

  “Not here, no. This is a safe place maintained by the Society. Miss Cadence was a woman of considerable foresight. She purchased this property in 1708.”

  Smith could not stop his eyes boggling.

  “This was Cady’s place?”

  Koffler snorted in amusement, but genuine amusement this time.