In the Company of Thieves

by Kage Baker

  I was living up in the Hollywood Hills then—I’d scored an apartment in a nice building above Highland, near the Bowl. A lot of small-time studio people lived there; the sort of folks who painted, and drove, and stood in for lighting checks, and hauled the wandering stars back on set when they got lost out in the wilds of Beverly Hills.

  That last one was me. I’d heard about the place from a grateful hairdresser when I returned Van Johnson (sullen bastard that he was) to the set of Madame Curie early one morning. The place even had a garage, which would have been really nice if I’d still had a car, but Motor City was only making tanks these days. Luckily, the Red Car trolley line ran through the Cahuenga Pass, a half-block below my apartment building, and it could get me anywhere I needed to go to find whatever errant star I was hunting.

  Easter 1943 was sort of drear and sad, what with the constant shortage of sugar, chocolate and young men. I was on assignment for MGM, keeping an eye on Spencer Tracy; with the war on, all MGM’s stars had to present a super-respectable All-American lifestyle. Tracy’s 1941 affair with Ingrid Bergman (another icy blonde who couldn’t stand me) had segued right into his obsession with Kate Hepburn (another redhead who wanted me dead and buried in cowshit), but now he was spending Easter week with his Catholic wife.

  The Red Car also ran straight out to Encino in the San Fernando Valley, where the Tracy family ranch was. Every morning I made the run out there, made sure Tracy wasn’t hiding Easter eggs where he shouldn’t, and phoned it in to the studio. With our senses, I could locate Tracy by his heartbeat from the Red Car stop, while having a cup of coffee three miles away. Things were quiet on the Company front, too, leaving me with nothing to facilitate. Which was fine with me.

  So I was home at my ease on Tuesday, April 20, when Lewis returned from New York. Lewis is another old-timer operative, a Literature Specialist I’d known for close to 300 years. He was stationed in Hollywood, too. His specialty was twentieth-century fiction. His cover had been as a stunt double for Leslie Howard, until Howard got too old: we operatives don’t age. The last several years Lewis had been rotating through gigs as a press secretary, assistant to assistant directors, continuity editor—scripts flowed through his hands, and the important ones stuck.

  As far as I knew, he’d been chasing some manuscript on the East Coast. But his hysterical transmission was coming in from Hollywood and Franklin, only a half mile away, as clearly as if he was in my living room. Among the many nifty nanomachines that the cyborg process installed in our impermeable skulls was an ansible just a tick below the hydrogen line in the microwave frequencies. We could communicate instantly between any two points on the Earth, though most operatives kept it to an arm’s length conversational distance...but Lewis’s yelling and frenetic honking burst into my day off now pretty much simultaneously.

  Joseph? Joseph, are you home? Lewis was obviously in a panic. And he was really laying it on with the horn, down in the street.

  Yeah, I’m home, I’m right here! Quit the honking, Lewis, you’re scaring the neighbors. I looked out my front window and saw a wonder: a gleaming green 1935 Ford Model B Woodie, parked facing the wrong way on Camrose, with the back seat crammed with luggage and what looked like a desk in the passenger seat.

  Jeez, Lewis, is that you? Is that YOURS? I must have been broadcasting disbelief and envy, because he sounded pretty peeved when he answered.

  Yes, it’s me and yes, it’s mine. I just drove home from the train station, but I can’t stay there! Can I park here? Is there a place off the street? I need a place to stay—oh, it’s just horrible—

  By this time, I was out my front door and hurrying through the inner courtyard, down to the curb. The honking stopped as I came up to the car, but that was because Lewis was sitting there wringing his hands. And yeah—that was a desk in the passenger seat, legs in the air like a dead dog. The back seat had a steamer trunk in it, as well as several suitcases with Super Chief tags. Also a garment bag with a white silk scarf tying a pair of dress shoes to the handle, and a cardboard box full of bottles of colored ink and a quire of expensive note papers.

  “What the hell is the matter with you?” I said, taking it all in. “You look like you’re running away from home.”

  Lewis glared at me, but he was too upset to keep it up. “I’ve been in New York for the last two weeks on—assignment. You know.” He glanced warily up at the windows of the two front apartments in my building. Not that anyone was watching.

  “Yeah, right.”

  “And it all went perfectly, and I came home, and my train was even early; and then I got my car and drove home, and...” His eyes went perfectly round, the white showing all around his irises like a china doll’s. “Oh, God! I had to leave, Joseph, I can’t stay there—my apartment is infested with rats!”

  I gotta say, I just stared. Rats were certainly not something the fastidious Angelino wanted in his apartment, but hey—it happened. Even to neurotically tidy guys like Lewis, who lived in elegant apartments down near Picfair. In Los Angeles in war time, the rats lived in the damned palm trees. They did pretty much as they pleased, since loose cats had a tendency to end up downtown in the Central Market, labeled as “Rabbit.” But it couldn’t have been the first time he’d encountered domestic vermin; like me, Lewis has walked forward through time on his own two feet for the last 2,000 years.

  “You’re scared of rats? What can I do, find you a cat?” I asked, leaning on his car roof.

  “No, I’m not afraid of rats!” he said indignantly. “But I brought back several very valuable manuscripts, and they all need work, and I need a safe place to work on them while the landlord gets the rats out—and you should have seen the mess those damned things made of my parchment, and endpapers, and—and my camel hair brushes—!”

  He pounded on the steering wheel, and for a minute I thought he was going to burst into tears. Not a sight I wanted my neighbors to see, especially if I was going to be putting him up while the rats got exterminated. And what else could I do, really? I was the Facilitator Field Rep for Los Angeles, and Lewis was not only an old comrade, he was a Literature Preservation Specialist—and obviously in the midst of a restoration project.

  Also, (I couldn’t help but consider) he had a 1935 Ford Model B, while I was on shank’s mare for the duration of the present conflict. And Lewis always took excellent care of his cars...

  “Of course, you can stay with me, Lewis!” I clapped him on the shoulder. “Listen, let’s unload this stuff here in the front, it’ll be easier to get it into my place. And you can park around back where my garage space is. Is this all you’ve got? Is there anything in the trunk?”

  “Just the box of the manuscripts. I had to leave in such a hurry, I was afraid to put it down in the apartment...” He set the handbrake and climbed out. “I knew it would be safe if I locked it in the trunk, and I had to get my things out to bring here...it took three trips...!”

  I went round to the passenger side and opened the door. “You brought your own desk, I see,” I said diplomatically, and began to maneuver the thing out the opened door. It wasn’t that heavy, especially for one us—we’re a lot stronger than a mortal—but I couldn’t quite see how Lewis had gotten it in there in the first place. It was resting upside down in the seat, with its delicate little clawed feet pressed up against the cloth of the ceiling. But I finally managed to get it slid out and put it on the sidewalk by Lewis’s luggage. Didn’t even scratch the paint.

  The matching chair was in the back seat under the luggage. Of course.

  Ultimately, he’d brought four suitcases, a garment bag, the trunk, the desk and chair, the box full of inks and paper, and another wooden box with a sound lid and a padlock. And three pillows. None of it was especially heavy, but my front door was narrow and behind two palm trees; getting that damned spindly desk around the trees and through the door was a pain. Lewis sat on my couch with his arms around the wooden crate of (presumably) valuable manuscripts, staring at me mournfully as I got t
he desk and the steamer trunk inside.

  My place wasn’t big, but it did have two bedrooms. Lewis’s gear made a kind of sad pile in the middle of the smaller one—I’d never gotten around to really furnishing the room, and all it had was a rug and a secondhand Hoover in the corner. Lewis followed me in and looked around. The Hoover seemed to cheer him up.

  “We’ll get you a cot,” I assured him. “And you can set up your desk under the window and have all the room you need.”

  Lewis finally put the crate down, and finally smiled, too.

  “Thank you, Joseph,” he said. “I—I really quite lost it back there. You have no idea what I’ve brought back with me, and the idea that it would all get rat-nibbled...well, it was just too much.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “Now let’s get your car in the garage—or, wait a second!” I snapped my fingers. I’d been waiting for this moment. “Listen, I’ve gotta go run out and do a bed check on Spencer Tracy, make sure he’s home with the missus and the kids. Can I take your car? I can stop somewhere and bring back a cot and groceries, too. You can settle in and calm down.”

  Lewis just nodded and handed over his keys without a second thought. I knew then the book had to be something special. He was in that OCD trance that Preservers go into when they get their hands on some focus of their special obsessions—nothing mattered to him now but getting his habitat set up to house his prize. And Lewis was a guy who usually bargained for a lien on at least one of my limbs before he let me borrow his car!

  This was going to work out just fine. He didn’t even notice when I left him there with his desk and his books and his inks.

  The ride out Ventura Boulevard to Encino was a pleasure jaunt in Lewis’s Ford. I drove right past the front gate of the Tracy ranch, which was a lot easier than trying to triangulate on him from the train stop. I got close enough to see the palm trees and bougainvillea by the Spanish-style arcade of the front porch, and it was easy to locate Tracy and his family. I pinpointed him in the stables, with one mature female and one adolescent female: wife Louise and daughter Suzie. They were admiring a recently born foal from one of Tracy’s polo ponies.

  Well, that was certainly wholesome, familial and domestic-like. The ride back into Hollywood was relaxing too, with all the orange groves in the Valley apparently in bloom at once.... Nobody knew it yet (well, except me and my kind) but the first ever Smog Alert was due to settle down on Los Angeles this coming July. It would last for sweltering days. Ventura Boulevard would never smell this good again.

  Since I had the car, I stopped at a secondhand store in Studio City and scored a wooden cot and some blankets. Then I went by the Ranch Market on Vine and picked up some staples for Lewis and me.

  The Ranch Market was one of the first twenty-four-hour markets in Los Angeles. During the war, that meant it might be open at any hour, day or night. I got a bundle of their barbecued ribs, too, because you just never knew, these days, when they’d be available. They were worth waiting for, and there were always lines when the sweet smoke from the grills went drifting out the Market’s open arched facade. It was nearly impossible to get roasts or chops or steaks with the war on. But, like every war I’ve lived through, there was always plenty of offal and bones. Liver and lights—and ribs—were easy to find.

  And those ribs were the best I’d tasted since the barbacoa racks first went up in Tortuga and Port Royal—they brined ’em in seawater back then, and slathered them in rum and raw brown sugar. I think the Ranch Market did, too.

  Anyway, I was caught up on duty and supplies when I got back to Camrose. I parked the Ford around the back, feeling very pleased with myself, and hauled all my booty up the long walk to my apartment.

  “Hey, Lewis, I picked up dinner and some beer,” I announced as I shouldered the front door open. “And a bed, too!”

  Lewis wandered in, a book in his hands.

  “There’s a message for you on the credenza, Joseph,” he said by way of greeting. His hair was sticking up every which way and his eyes had a manic glitter. Ah, the joys of work to a Preserver.... “And I reported in about my temporary change of address while I had someone’s ear. And I used your phone and left your number and a very tart message for my landlord, too!”

  “You probably didn’t need to report you were here, as long as you’re going ahead with your project. You brought your own link in your desk, didn’t you?” I put the newspaper-wrapped bundle of ribs in the warmer on the stove top, and began unloading groceries.

  “Yes, but I never get a live person on mine. And when I reported I was staying with you, Hermann Senex—remember him? I had no idea he was assigned to the West Coast now—anyway, he said it was just as well, because they had a new assignment for you and I would be helpful with it.” He cocked his head and looked at me inquiringly.

  “No idea, yet.” I shook my head, putting a rye loaf in the bread box. “I’ll call Hermann as soon as I’m done here and find out. Maybe someone suddenly wants comic books.”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” said Lewis. “I’m up to date on the full run of Superman through last month.”

  Wow. I’d have to ask him if I could take a look at those.

  Lewis dithered about where to put the book while I set the kitchen table, and finally decided it would be safe on my coffee table.

  “You’re like a four-year-old with a new toy,” I said.

  “More than you know,” he said. He fairly bounced in his chair with enthusiasm. “Do you know what I’ve got there?”

  “Nope.”

  “It’s the original manuscript of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry! In French, with the original illustrations, the ones he did himself—he was in New York last month for the American edition’s publication, and I got it!” Lewis practically slavered over the memory. “It took me months to produce the replacement. All those naif watercolors! I nabbed the original drawings, too, what he still had of them; the man is incredibly careless with his work! I’ve got most of the portfolio with me now. It’ll all have to be stabilized before it can go into storage. Do you know, I found one of them crumpled up in the pocket of his coat, in a closet?”

  The Little Prince was one of the great moral bedtime stories that baby Preservers got told, tucked into their little white beds in the nursery wards. St. Exupéry was one of the Good Mortals, see, and every fledgling Preserver loved that story. They all saw themselves, especially a sensitive guy like Lewis, as the valiant child taming foxes, defeating evil baobabs, and saving celestial roses.

  “Sounds like a peach of an assignment, Lewis.” I set a plate down in front of him, along with half of my small store of napkins and a hand towel. “Here, use extras—you’re gonna want to keep your hands as clean as possible, right?”

  “Are you joking? I’m going to bathe before I get to work on this!” he said indignantly.

  However, at that point, the perfume of the ribs distracted both of us. For a while, there, my nifty little 1940s kitchenette sounded just like the ancestral cave in the Pyrenees where I’d had my first slice of smoked pottok brisket.

  On our third round of ribs, though, the credenza in the living room started beeping. Lewis rolled his eyes over the bone he was delicately gnawing.

  Your link, your call, he broadcast indistinctly.

  Mortals can’t hear our equipment’s ultrasonic beeping, or see the higher-than-UV alarm lights flashing. For one of us, though, it’s as bad as a migraine. I hurried over and slapped the thing quiet.

  Facilitator Joseph here, I acknowledged.

  Joseph, it’s Hermann Senex at Beachwood Base. Got a moment?

  It didn’t matter if I did or not, of course, but Hermann was an informal sort of guy. He liked to keep it all on a friendly basis with us field operatives, and I appreciated that. He wasn’t getting out much these days, because he was recruited 35,000 years ago in Germany from a mixed-race couple. The Homo sap neighbors had objected to his green eyes. Cro-Magnon and Neandertal parents endowed H
ermann with a decidedly inhuman profile, a nose like Durante, and a complexion—between his swarthy Cro-Mag dad and his red-haired Neandertal mom—that screamed miscegenation to a twentieth-century American. When we could persuade him out for a beer now and then, we told people he was Rondo Hatton’s stunt double.

  Got an old case cropping up again for you, he sent. You want the transmission first, or do you want to dredge it up yourself from your tertiary?

  Oh, give me the file reference, I replied resignedly. There’s always notes or some damned thing.

  So it came over in a tightly condensed transmission and I recognized the case at once. Oh, did I ever...I’d like to claim the memories surfaced with the scent of lotus and the taste of honey beer. No such luck; I got the records of my own reports, and the sensory recall of relentless heat, hot mud and an itchy wig. Honey beer had never tasted all that good, either. Still, I remembered:

  Third Dynasty Egypt, and the Pharaoh Djoser was having a lot of trouble with his Pharaonic statuary and his pyramid tomb. The sculpture was awful and the pyramids kept falling down, slumping into lopsided mounds. Dr. Zeus was worried that the Egyptians might never get it right—and what might that do to recorded history? All history remembered was that it was all the idea of Djoser’s architect, Imhotep.

  The Company took a look at the representative art up at its own end of Time, and figured out what the secret was. The phenomenon of pareidolia had been at the root of it all, that tendency of the human brain to see faces in random patterns. The reaction in the fusiform and parahippocampal gyri could be deliberately evoked with the right curves and angles. The statues and wall paintings walked and talked to the Egyptian faithful: once they were painted the right way.

  In its corporate paranoia, the Company decided it was their responsibility to make sure everything turned out right. They decided to impart the mathematical formulae as Truth from the Gods, and force the great Egyptian leap into greatness themselves. They’d given all the information to Imhotep, and launched the revolution in art and architecture that would shape Egypt for 3,000 years.