The Graveyard Game (Company) Read online

  “We’re not going to eat here, are we?” murmured Lewis.

  “What are you, nuts?” Joseph’s eyes widened as he opened their beers. “But isn’t this a great place to talk in private? Can you imagine any Company operative coming in here for any reason at all? Get a load of this.” He jabbed with a chopstick between two of the bricks in the bare wall; ancient mortar trickled down like fine sand. “Any quake over 6.2 and, boy—”

  “Don’t.” Lewis closed his eyes.

  “Hey, it’s okay. Next big one isn’t scheduled for—” Joseph looked at his chronometer. “Well, a while, anyway. So, what did you want to talk about?” He lifted his bottle and drank.

  Lewis drew a deep breath. “You know I was posted to the Laurel Canyon HQ back in ’65.”

  “The Mount Olympus place?” Joseph frowned. “That’s the one that monitors the Lookout Mountain Drive anomaly, huh? It’s a full-service HQ now?”

  “Budget reasons,” Lewis said.

  Joseph sighed and shook his head. “Jesus. One of these days that whole place will get sucked into some black hole, you know? So, what happened? Was there a disturbance?”

  “Yes, apparently, though it was over by the time I got there,” said Lewis. He wondered how to tell Joseph what he had to say next. Finally, he just said it. “Joseph, I saw Mendoza.”

  He wasn’t prepared for the reaction. Something flared for a moment in Joseph’s eyes, then burned out as fast as it had appeared. He lifted his beer and took another swallow. “Really?” he said casually. “No kidding? How’s she doing these days?”

  “What do you mean, how’s she doing these days?” gasped Lewis, staring at him.

  Joseph looked for a long moment into Lewis’s white face. “Oh,” he said. He set the beer down carefully. He put his head in his hands.

  “You mean you didn’t know?” Lewis was horrified. “I’d have thought you of all people would have been notified!”

  “Yes and no,” said Joseph in a muffled voice.

  “All these years I thought you knew.” Lewis sagged back in his chair. “My God. I was never officially notified myself, I came across the partial transcript in my case officer’s files.”

  “What happened to her?” Joseph lifted his face. His eyes were cold now. “You tell me. I’d rather hear it from you.”

  “She was arrested,” Lewis said. “And . . . retired from active duty. Joseph, I’m sorry, I never thought—”

  “Arrested? What the hell did she do? When was this?”

  “1863. She was stationed in Los Angeles, and—”

  “L.A.?” Joseph said. “They sent her down there? What did they do that for? She was in the Ventana, she was okay. Nothing grows in Los Angeles! Nothing natural, anyhow.”

  “Well, things used to, before the 1863 drought. There’s that temperate belt, remember? She was stationed in the old Cahuenga Pass HQ.”

  “Bleeding Jesus!”

  “Well, she was doing all right. Apparently. She’d completed her mission and everything, but . . . From what I can tell, the job ended, and she wasn’t reassigned anywhere else.” Lewis swallowed hard. “You know how layovers can be.”

  Joseph nodded. “If trouble’s going to happen, it happens on a layover. Every time. Some goddam idiot of a posting officer . . . Tell me the rest.”

  Lewis wrung his hands. “I’m not clear on the details. As far as I could make out, somehow everybody was away from the HQ one day except for Mendoza and a junior operative. And . . . a mortal came to the station while the boy was in the field. She, er, ran off with the mortal. Deserted.”

  “With a mortal?” Joseph stared. “But she couldn’t stand being around mortals! Not since—” He halted. “Who was this guy? Did anybody find out?”

  “Oh, yes, the boy testified. It was his testimony transcript I saw, actually. The mortal seems to have been one of those Englishmen their foreign office sent out back then to court the Confederacy.” Lewis stopped. Joseph had gone a nasty putty color under his tan.

  “You did say Englishman, right?”

  “I know. Bad luck, wasn’t it? After what happened to her in England all that time before.” Lewis shook his head. “Maybe the coincidence—I don’t know. But it ended rather quickly. And unpleasantly. The Englishman died, I know that much.”

  “You’re sure about that,” said Joseph.

  “Well—yes.”

  “What did they do with her? Where did they send her?” Joseph asked.

  Lewis made a sad gesture, turning his empty palms up on the table.

  “But you said you saw her!”

  Lewis nodded. “I told you there was a disturbance. It was in 1862, before the incident happened. She and a fellow operative went into Laurel Canyon hunting for specimens. I don’t know what could have possessed them to do it, but they rode up to Lookout Mountain Drive. And somehow or other the temporal wave sucked them forward, into 1996.”

  “Forward.” Joseph gaped at him. “No, that’s nuts, you must have misunderstood. We can’t go forward. They must have been pulled from 2062. You heard wrong.”

  “Joseph, I saw them,” said Lewis quietly. “They were wearing nineteenth-century clothes. They’d been riding horses, even the horses had been pulled along with them!”

  “But—” Joseph was too stunned to continue.

  “I got there just as they were being sent back,” Lewis explained. “They were already in the transcendence chamber. And I saw her there, and I just—” He paused. “I tried to warn her about what she was going to do. I had to! And she couldn’t understand me through the glass, she just stood there looking bewildered.” He had to stop.

  Joseph reached out and patted his arm. “It was a good try. There’ll be trouble over that, though, you know.”

  “Oh, it’s not that bad,” Lewis said. “My case officer and I get along. I think I smoothed it over. It’s not as though it did any good.” He laughed bitterly. “History cannot be changed.”

  “Watch out, all the same.” Joseph was still puzzled. He looked sharply at Lewis. “When did all this happen?”

  “Yesterday afternoon.”

  “The place must be swarming with techs trying to find out how it happened. How’d you get away?”

  “Well, I had business up here anyway and I thought—I thought you knew about her, you see, so you might have an idea where she’s being kept. It was one thing to learn about her arrest and feel awful for years, but then to see her! Suddenly I just couldn’t stand it anymore. As for how it happened, well, isn’t it obvious?”

  “No. Would you mind letting me in on the little secret?” said Joseph harshly. “Because in—what, twenty-odd thousand years of going around the block?—this is the first time I’ve ever heard of anybody defying the laws of temporal physics!”

  Lewis looked at him miserably. “It was Mendoza, Joseph. She’d become a Crome generator. She set off the temporal wave. You didn’t know that either?”

  Joseph was silent for about thirty seconds. Then, moving too quickly for mortal sight, he leaped to his feet and hurled, his beer bottle across the room. It smashed against the brick wall. The waiter looked at him reproachfully.

  “Let’s get out of here,” croaked Joseph. “I need to do myself some damage.” He pulled out his wallet and withdrew a fifty-dollar bill, which he thrust at the waiter as he shouldered past him. He ran clattering down the stairs, Lewis following him closely.

  The waiter thrust the money into his pocket and, sighing, got a couple of paper napkins from the cutlery stand. Careful not to step in the broken glass with his bare foot, he crouched to shove it all together in a small pile between the two napkins. He scraped up as much as he could into the napkins. Looking around, he finally dropped them down the dumbwaiter shaft. The rest he pushed up against the baseboard, into a spacious crack there. Wiping his hands on his apron, he put on his sock and shoe again and limped downstairs. His corns hurt.

  There are a lot of strange people in San Francisco, and if you work there, you soon grow
used to occasional peculiarities in your customers; but the girl behind the cash register at Ghirardelli’s decided that this took weirdness to new heights. Two executives in tailored business suits were sitting at one of the little white tables in the soda fountain area, glaring hungrily at the fountain worker who was preparing their eighth round of hot chocolate. They had marched in, put down a hundred-dollar bill, and told her to keep the drinks coming. On the floor between their respective briefcases was a souvenir bag stuffed with boxes of chocolate cable cars, and the table was littered with foil wrappers from the chocolate they had already consumed.

  To make matters stranger, they had the appearance of junior delegates from opposing sides of a celestial peace conference: the dark one with his little diabolic beard and the fair-haired one with his fragile good looks. As she watched, the devil jumped up the second his order number was called and went swiftly, if unsteadily, to take his tray. He grabbed the cocoa-powder canister on his return. Sitting down across from the angel, he added a generous helping of cocoa to his hot chocolate. Then, apparently seized by an afterthought, he opened the canister and shook out a couple of spoonfuls onto the marble tabletop. Giggling guiltily, he pulled out an American Express card and began scraping the cocoa powder into neat lines.

  “Danny!” She stopped the busboy as he came through the turnstile. “Look at him! Is he really going to—?”

  He was. He did. The angel went into gales of high-pitched laughter and fell off his chair. The devil sighed in bliss and leaned down for a pass with the other nostril.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with them,” said the girl in bewilderment. “I swear to God they were both sober when they came in here, and all they’ve ordered is hot chocolate.”

  “Maybe they just really like hot chocolate?” said the busboy.

  “So, anyway,” Joseph said, brushing cocoa powder off his lapels. “Where was I?”

  “That thing you were going to tell me about,” Lewis replied from the floor, where he was on his hands and knees searching for his chair.

  “Yeah. Well, see, I don’t think Mendoza’s been deactivated. And I’ll tell you why.”

  “I’m glad we’re doing Theobromos,” said Lewis as his head reappeared above the level of the table. “I don’t think I could bear to discuss this if we weren’t, you know? I just think I’d cry and cry.” He drank most of his hot chocolate in a gulp.

  “Me too.” Joseph lifted his mug and quaffed mightily as well. “But this is okay. So. You ever go over to Catalina Island?”

  Lewis blinked, remembering.

  “Once or twice. Second-unit work. Who was I stunt-doubling for? Was it Fredric March or Richard Barthelmess? I know I’ve been over there. Go on.”

  “You remember the big white hotel? It’s not there anymore, they tore it down in the sixties, but back then it was brand-new.” Joseph sighed, remembering. He reached into the souvenir bag and pulled out another bar, unwrapping it absentmindedly.

  “Big white hotel. Right.” Lewis frowned solemnly. “Oh! The Hotel Saint Catherine. I remember now, because one used to be able to get, uh . . .”

  “Yeah, liquor in the bar, because there were bootleggers all over the place.” Joseph looked around on the tabletop, trying to see where his chocolate had gone. “Did I eat that already? Christ.”

  “I hope you’re leaving me some of the ones without almonds.”

  “Uh-huh. So I was over there in 1923. I was trying to corner somebody, Chaplin or Stan Laurel or I forget who, to get him interested in a deal with Paramount.”

  “Was he?” Lewis drank the rest of his hot chocolate and signaled to the counterman for more.

  “Interested? Hell no, complete waste of time. But it was a job. So I’m at the bar, see? And I’m talking up a great line, hoping to make the guy sorry he’s not a player, you know, and I glance over into the dining room and—there she is.” Joseph gulped. Tears started in his eyes. He reached blindly for his hot chocolate and drank the rest of it.

  “Who?”

  “Mendoza. I’m telling you, Lewis. Sitting at a table in the restaurant. Sleeveless dress, peach silk with a bead fringe on the skirt, white sun hat, string of pearls. She had a glass of white wine in front of her. So did he.”

  “Who?”

  “The guy,” said Joseph, and put his head down on the table and began to weep. It’s disconcerting when a baritone weeps. Lewis was at a loss. He looked up as the fountain attendant, who had given up trying to get their attention, approached with their next hot chocolates.

  “Um, I think my friend has had enough,” he enunciated with care. “You can leave both of those, though, I’ll drink them.”

  “Can you drive?” said Joseph foggily.

  “Uh . . . no.”

  “Well, I can’t.”

  “That’s okay,” said Lewis. “We’ll just take a cable car.”

  “I live in Sausalito.”

  “Oh.” Lewis drank half of one of the hot chocolates. “Cable cars don’t go across the Golden Gate, do they?”

  Joseph shook his head, reached for the cocoa powder again.

  “Oh, busboy!” Lewis stood up and nearly fell over. “Would you call us a taxi, please? Thank you. There we go! All settled. So, anyway. The girl in the peach silk dress. She turned out not to be Mendoza, obviously.”

  “Yeah. No, it was her. I’m telling you, Lewis, I saw her!”

  “Who was the fellow she was with?”

  “That was what I couldn’t dope out.” Joseph rose up on one elbow, staring at him. He mopped tears and cocoa powder from his face with a paper napkin. “He shouldn’t have been there. Couldn’t have been, the big arrogant bastard! But they both, looked up and saw me. Recognized me, I’d swear. I pushed away from the bar and went through the crowd to get to them, but that was a hell of a crowded watering hole, and by the time I got into the restaurant, they were gone.”

  “You’re sure they were really there in the first place?”

  “No,” Joseph admitted. “Except . . . their wine was still there, on the table. And the terrace door was open.”

  “Where are you going?” shouted the busboy from the phone, putting his hand over the mouthpiece.

  Where indeed? wondered Lewis.

  “Sausalito,” shouted Joseph.

  They sat looking at each other.

  “We must find her,” Joseph said.

  “I was hoping you’d say that.” Lewis began to smile.

  “It’s impossible she managed to escape from wherever they stashed her, but what if she did? She might need help. And I have to know whether or not she was really there.”

  “We couldn’t get into trouble, could we, just making a few discreet inquiries?”

  “It might take us years to find out anything.”

  “So much the better.” Lewis held out his hands. “We’ll be less obvious that way.”

  “What was it the man said about the free French garrison, Louie?” Joseph began to giggle again, reaching for Lewis’s half-finished drink.

  At that moment another immortal entered the room. He was a security tech. He was dressed as a sport cyclist, in the bright tight-fitting cycling ensemble of that era, and carried his helmet and sunglasses under his arm. He swept the room once with a cold gray stare and acquired the two businessmen sitting at the little table under the time clock. He closed on them at once.

  “Operatives? You stopped transmitting three hours ago. Are you in need of assistance?” he inquired in a low voice. They stared up at him, momentarily sobered. Someone must have been monitoring their data transmissions.

  “Oh, gee, I’m sorry!” Joseph said. “You know what it was? We were in this arcade, and one of the damn electronic games fritzed. We were standing too close to it. Happens every now and then. We’re okay, really.”

  “Honest,” Lewis said.

  The security tech scanned them and recoiled slightly at the level of Theobromos in their systems. He surveyed the litter of foil wrappers and empty cups, regarded the
cocoa powder in Joseph’s beard, and sighed. Two old professionals on a sloppy bender. And it was true that there were occasional inexplicable flares and shortings-out in San Francisco, which was as weird in its way as Laurel Canyon, not because of any geologic anomaly but because the place seemed to attract Crome-generating mortals in droves. It made his job more complicated than that of most security personnel.

  “All right,” he said. “I don’t really need to report this, if you two senile delinquents will promise me you won’t try to drive in your condition.”

  “We’ve already sent for a taxi,” Lewis assured him.

  “Gonna go home and order a pizza and sleep it off. Trust me, kid.” Joseph reached up and patted the security tech’s white helmet. He left cocoa-powdered fingerprints.

  Lewis sat up abruptly and stared around, wishing he hadn’t. He had a terrible headache, and his skin was crawling. He was ravenously hungry, too. At least he remembered where he was: a houseboat in Sausalito. Rank wind off the tidal flats and the cry of sea birds confirmed his memory.

  He remained on the couch for a moment, surveying the litter of the dimly recalled previous evening. Five pizza boxes and two empty five-liter bottles of Coca-Cola. Lewis lifted the lid on the nearest box, hoping there was some crust left. There wasn’t. How sad. He needed carbohydrates terribly just now.

  Resting his head in his hands, he tried to remember his dream, but it was fading so quickly: Mendoza laughing with him at one of the base administrator’s parties, over some ridiculous costume Houbert had worn. They hadn’t been able to stop giggling. He’d master himself, fix all his features in a look of prim attention, and she’d take one look at him and go into fresh gales of laughter, which would set him off again. They’d had to stagger outside at last, leaning on each other.