“I thought the blossom was awesome,” James quipped as we reached the table.
The doughy guy rolled his eyes at Taylor. “They haven’t done an Awesome Blossom in, like, six years. Taylor doesn’t normally order food is all.”
“Who’s this guy?” I asked Taylor, nodding at the doughy guy, who was dipping a fried thing that looked like an alien egg into a little ramekin of green-flecked pink ranch dressing.
“That’s Deke,” Taylor said. “Deke’s cool.”
“Thanks,” Deke said, his mouth full of Awesome Alien Abortions.
“I wanna get out of this thing with Chico and Peggy.” I reiterated.
Taylor finished his beer, and held the empty aloft. “Can’t help you.” The waitress nodded at him, and he set the bottle on the edge of the table. “Don’t really know them. I’m just a poor boy with the Dept. of Ag.”
James frowned. “I thought you were with the FDA. The building says ‘FDA Annex D.’ ”
For just a second Taylor looked like he’d swallowed a nickel. His partner, Deke, leaned in, addressing James. “FDA’s in the Dept. of Ag, m’man.”
James shook his head. “No, it’s not.” The waitress glided in, swapped Taylor’s empty for a fresh bottle in a single deft movement, and moved on without a pause. “And the Department of Agriculture offices are in Raleigh.”
Taylor sighed. “It’s sort of an inter-agency lend-lease thing.”
“You got lent and leased?” James asked archly.
“The porta—” the chubby guy, Deke, caught himself, “the equipment we, uh, service, it got lent, or leased, or whatever.”
This didn’t satisfy James, either. “So you guys drive four hours from Raleigh—”
“It doesn’t matter who signs his check, James!” I snapped. “It matters that I don’t want to work for him anymore!”
This annoyed Taylor. “You aren’t working for me, Bassmaster. Shit! Not only am I lowest squirrel on the totem pole, you and me aren’t even on the same pole.” He waved at the waitress again, flapping his hands and holding up fingers in an ornate semaphore that bespoke a man who spends an unhealthy amount of time sucking suds in this Chili’s.
“Listen, Paul: I work for Uncle Sam via the Dept. of Ag, at this time directly under the supervision of Mr. Panke of the FDA. You work for South Boston mobsters with Cambridge aspirations via Peggy and the History Department of UNC-Asheville, under the direct supervision of Mr. Chico. Our org charts do not intersect. I’m not your HR rep, your union steward, or your priest. You are on your own here.”
“What am I supposed to do?!” I heard how shrill I sounded and hated it, but not so much as I hated the jam I was in.
The waitress glided by, depositing a pair of Dos Equis for me and James.
He shrugged. “You could shoot them; isn’t that how meth dealers make inconvenient people go away?”
“I’m not a meth dealer!”
“Your amigo Chico is,” Deke suggested.
“That’s racist!” I practically shouted.
Taylor took a pull from his beer, unruffled. “Amigo was poor word choice, I think. Deke isn’t saying Chico’s a meth dealer because Chico’s Hispanic; he’s saying Chico’s a meth dealer because Chico deals meth. People who deal meth are meth dealers. QED. Independent of race or ethnicity. Doesn’t matter if they’re doing it across all space and time,” he looked at me pointedly, “or in a Taco Bell bathroom.”
Taylor locked eyes on me and took another long pull from his beer, and it dawned on me that he hated me. But he didn’t hate me for being me, or even for the thing I was doing to the people of the colonial village: He hated me like a prisoner hates the bars across his window.
“I just wanna fix this without anyone getting hurt. Especially me.”
Taylor and Deke exchanged a look.
“We could send Chico to camp,” Deke hazarded. This, to me, sounded an awful lot like sending the dog to live on a farm.
“I don’t want to get anyone hurt,” I reiterated.
Taylor nodded to Deke, but spoke to me. “It won’t get anyone hurt. He’ll live ’til he dies, he just won’t do it anywhere near here.”
I swallowed, absurdly grateful for this brief glimmer of hope. “And I don’t want it to be violent,” I said with much less certainty than I’d hoped.
Taylor laughed. “Have you seen yourself, Paul? Have you seen Chico? I think we’ll opt for subterfuge over brute force. Play to your strong suit, as a thespian.”
This word tickled Deke, who chuckled and returned his concentration to his clutch of extra-crispy popcorn alien larva.
James watched all of this coolly. “Before we agree to anything, I want to hear the actual plan.”
Taylor turned on James, fixing him with the withering gaze fed-up schoolmarms reserve for the willfully stupid.
“Or else what?”
James opened his mouth to answer, and then closed it, because the “or else” was pretty up in the air. Or else we go to the cops? And tell them what? That I’d been breaking into a government facility to transport a Schedule II controlled substance across state lines—and time lines? That I’d been knowingly colluding in a criminal enterprise for months?
“Yeah,” Taylor said, reading our subliminal dialogue. “You aren’t agreeing to anything, ’cause we aren’t making a deal here. This isn’t a negotiation. We’re working together,” he emphasized this by pointing at each of us in turn with his index finger, then poking himself in the chest, “to solve Paul’s”—he poked me hard in the chest— “problem under Paul’s conditions without getting anyone fucking shot. I am helping you here.”
“Why?” James asked, honestly perplexed.
Taylor looked to his partner—who was a whole lot less jolly now—and something silently passed between them. Then Taylor’s face hardened.
“It’s a long story.” Taylor dug his iPhone out of his pocket. I assumed this was the prelude to the long story, but instead he dialed a number. He tilted the phone away from his face once it began ringing on the other end, and said to me: “When I get him on the phone, make up some reason that he has to go through the portal with you tonight.”
“You’re what the what!?” I asked, panicked. And then Chico picked up.
“Hey Chico!” Taylor said in a bright, fake customer-service voice. “T. here, from the office. Hope you don’t mind me ringing you direct.”
There was yelling.
Taylor’s customer-service smile never wavered. “Yeah, I know you didn’t know I had this number. Yes, I recognize that you are upset to learn someone has your direct line. Ya-hunh. I hear that, Chico. I share your concerns and regret the inconvenience. But—now, Chico, listen. I only called because it’s super-duper important. Yeah. Paul’s here.” Disturbingly, the yelling clipped off as though the call had been dropped. “Un-hunh. Yeah. Paul. Paul swung by my office during regular business hours. Un-hunh. Because in all the hubbub last night with that excellent haul at the antique show, he neglected to mention some big news.”
Chico asked something.
“I sure do! I have him here, and I’m handing the phone to him now.”
Taylor’s customer-service smile disappeared, and he held the phone out for me. I reared back like the handset was liable to both bite and scald me. He scowled and shook the phone at me once, hard. Finally James leaned out, took the phone, and held it to my ear.
“Chico?” I hazarded, gingerly taking the handset.
“Paaaaul,” he sighed slowly. He sounded pretty disappointed. This was somehow much worse than him yelling. “Paul, I imagine you are going to tell me something completely fascinating now, eh? Something superfantistico?”
“I... yes. Yeah. Last night, um... the... guy who had those tankards, he told me they have a full tea service of a similar, um, provenance. Like, the whole nine yards: Big tray, teapot, coffee pot, creamer, sugar bowl, a whole set of teaspoons. All done in a nautical theme, so it matches. One-of-a-kind.” Chico was disturbingly quiet, and I
worried I wasn’t hooking him. “He says it was made for Samuel Adams.”
“The guy on the six pack?” Chico asked, bemused. “That a real guy?”
“Yeah. He was related to John Adams somehow. He ran the tavern where the Founding Fathers schemed. Anyway, he bailed on Revere and never took delivery, so Revere got all pissy and gave the set to his pastor’s assistant as a parting gift when that guy left to be the pastor in the village.” This was, quite easily, the greatest ad lib of my entire life. I couldn’t help but be a little proud, even through the terror. “But it’s huge, ’cause it was made for, like, showing off in a tavern. There’s no way I can carry it back to the portal—not without risking dinging it all up—and no way I want any of the audience seeing how I make my entrance. On top of that I’ll have the normal haul of spoons and gravy boats—” I felt my explaining verging on over explaining, but couldn’t seem to reel it in. Thankfully Chico was already shushing me.
“Claro, claro,” he hushed. “You need to bring your manservant to help cart off the tithes. I get it, Blanquito.” He was obviously running some mental math of his own. For the first time I thought about his end of this business. He wasn’t doing all this just to sell a sixteenth of an ounce of meth every couple weeks—even at the favorable temporal exchange rate. Chico wanted to impress those potential Cambridge connections with what a versatile and resilient business partner he could be.
Cambridge. The College Town to End All College Towns. How much meth could be moved there if you had exclusive distribution rights? Lotsa all-nighters in Greater Boston, lots of college kids with more cash than hours in the day.
And how happy would that tea set make Chico’s Cambridge prospects?
It was a lure too shiny for any big fish to pass up.
“Yeah,” he said absently. “Howsabout we meet tonight, do this little thing? You bring me a proper costume.”
And he hung up on me. I sat for a moment with the warm, quiet phone pressed to the side of my head, the metal edge creasing my palm and ear.
James and Deke watched me raptly, waiting for an update. Taylor drank from his beer and stared out the windows, toward the mall parking lot.
“He said we’d meet tonight.”
“That’s good,” Deke said, flecks of batter pattering down on the tabletop.
“Not really,” James replied. “Because there isn’t really a tea service, is there?”
I shook my head.
“That’s bad,” Deke opined earnestly.
“That’s fine,” Taylor declared, draining his beer and holding the empty aloft. More disturbing than his rate of consumption was the fact that he didn’t even seem buzzed. “That’s perfect. We just need him to show up. Me and Deke will sort out the details. Toodly-oo!” He dismissed us with a backhanded flutter of his fingers. We let him pay for our beers, neither of which had been touched. I don’t imagine he let them go to waste.
James and I were raiding the UNC costume shop for something Chico-appropriate when it dawned on me.
“James,” I said, my belly full of ice, “I have no idea what the plan is.”
He didn’t pause in his shuffling through hanger upon hanger of frock coats. “There’s only one plan that makes sense, Paul: You’re going to ditch Chico in the past.”
“How the hell am I going to do that?!”
James looked up, one eyebrow crooked curiously. “Jeez, Paul; by acting. That is, after all, what they are paying you to do. But right now, what’s important is finding this Chico something to wear that’s his size, period-appropriate, and won’t accommodate a gun.” James glanced at his phone. “And for both of us to make our shifts on time.”
I turned my attention to a rack of particolored knickers. “I think we should call in.”
“I think that if this Chico was ever watching us, he certainly is tonight. We’ve gotta keep everything normal. Besides, your floor manager is gunning for you. You’re going to need that table-waiting gig more than ever come sun-up.”
I finally found a pair of black knickers I thought would fit Chico, and James simultaneously held up a simple cassock, like Jeremy Irons wore in The Mission. The only place to hide a gun would be in the waistband of the knickers, and there’d be no way to quickdraw with the long cassock buttoned up.
“Disco!” he cried in his finest RuPaul.
“Quite slimming!” I agreed, plucking a big shady straw hat from the bin of big shady hats tucked under the knicker rack.
I took the cassock from James and held it up, then frowned. “Drat. The lines will be totally spoiled by cramming a Glock in the waistband.” I sighed theatrically at this fashion tragedy, James broke character and started laughing. Somehow, that made it all better.
We packed it in, went home, cleaned up, and went to work. James was right about not calling in. It wasn’t just that I needed the job: I needed the distraction. If I’d called in, I would have spent all night pacing my apartment and chewing my paws, thinking about the instant chemical confidence boost still inside the snuffbox I’d withheld from Chico. After my shift I picked James up at Fond and we went back to my place so I could get into costume before heading to the FDA Annex.
James caught my cuff as I was on the way out the door and pulled me back. He kissed me lingeringly—a black-&-white railroad-platform-in-the-rain sort of kiss— then stood back and looked me squarely in the eye.
“Clean slate, new leaf, first day of the rest of your life, and all that. I’ll stay up, make you breakfast.” He fixed me with a somber gaze. “There will be hollandaise sauce,” he declaimed, like a Pentecostal preacher admonishing that There will be blood throughout the land of Egypt.
And then I was off.
Chico was visibly relieved when I stepped into the conference room at FDA Annex D. “¡Madre de Dios!, Pablo; this my fucking costume?” He held out his arms for the bundle of clothes, and I handed them over. “Imma be your Mexican slave or some shit, right?” he scoffed, trying to puzzle out the garments.
“No!” I said, “You’ll be a Jesuit missionary, like Jeremy Irons in The Mission.”
He looked half amused and half annoyed. “I don’t look shit like Jeremy Irons.”
“You’ve got a noble brow,” I reassured him. “It works. Besides, I doubt they’ve seen the movie.”
“I dunno,” Taylor yawned, scratching his head. “It was on cable an awful lot for a while.”
“I’ve never seen it,” Peggy said, and I just about jumped out of my skin. I spun around, and there she was, dressed like a very historically rigorous milkmaid.
Chico had set his knickers, shirt, and hat aside, and was holding up his cassock, nodding approvingly. “This is pretty tight,” he told no one in particular, “Got a look like Neo in The Matrix, ¿verdad?”
“You’re coming along, too, Peggy?” I hazarded.
“Um, yeah,” she blushed, like an English teacher caught waiting in line to see Twilight. “Taylor called me, said you needed extra hands to bring in the Samuel Adams tea service.”
“I... I’m sure Chico and I can handle it.”
“It’s a million dollar haul, Paul, and the story, the details, drive the price up. Besides,” she looked away and smiled to herself. “I... I want to see. Part’s just curiosity—I’ve spent eight years working on a dissertation about Colonial material culture and its impact on the daily lives of women and children. There are things that just aren’t in the literature or the unpublished monographs or the special collections or even the private collections. I’ve got questions that just twenty minutes through Taylor’s magic portal will answer.” It was obvious that this was her excuse for going through, not her reason. I would have pointed that out, but she beat me to the punch: “But mostly, I just want to see for myself. See what the fuss is about.”
Chico had stripped down to his jockey shorts, and it was hard not to gawk: He was as lean as an underwear model, his shoulders, back, and abs perfectly sculpted. An ornate tattoo of an eagle stretched from shoulder to shoulder. It was
done to look as though it was carved out of marble, outstretched wings replaced with vibrant American flags. A banner draped across his shoulders read FORGING DESTINY, and below that 61st Cavalry Scouts.
“You were in the army?” I asked.
“Yup,” he said, not looking up as he stepped into the knickers, “I’m a fucking Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
He pulled the shirt over his head, and I eyeballed his pile of street clothes. “You don’t have a gun?” The words had come out of my mouth uninflected and unbidden.
Chico snorted, an eyebrow raised, and shook his head as he continued dressing. “Why the hell would I have a gun?”
“Okay,” Taylor said, stepping to the portal controls, “Time to get this show on the road.”
I took a second to step back and eyeball Peggy. She wore neither shoes nor stockings, which saved me having to make up a reason for her to leave them behind.
“No shoes,” I said approvingly, and she smiled.
“Chico explained your reasoning, about wear patterns and build quality; very sharp. You should have gone into academia.”
“There’s more money in voice acting and waiting tables.” I was being honest, but she laughed as though it were a wry one-liner. In this whole thing, that was almost the saddest bit: That a highly trained adjunct professor reduced to dealing meth and stealing spoons for spoiled mobsters seriously thought she was better off than a waiter with modest theatrical aspirations.
I turned to see Chico in full regalia. Tall and lean, he cut a graceful figure in the long black cassock, the wide-brimmed straw hat tipped over his eyes, like an imported assassin in a spaghetti western.
“You. Look. Stunning!” And I meant it.
Chico smiled, then scowled. “Yeah, well, it’s the part I was born to play.” He turned back to his pile of clothes and dug the snuffbox from his jacket, tossing it to me. I dropped it into my satchel, so it wouldn’t clink against the other snuffbox, which was resting in my pocket.
And then the dark, cavernous portal bloomed up on the conference room wall behind us. I wasn’t facing it, but I could feel its warm shimmer. It was like that giddy little contact high I used to get from buying meth—long before the music started, long before we crammed four to a bathroom stall and crushed up the crystal. A totally clean expectation high, the high of knowing that the real high is imminent.
Asimov's Science Fiction Page 6
