Authors: Richard Bowes
For a moment Rollins looked hurt. Then he said, “Sorry to break your heart, Quinlan. It’s nice that you figured if anyone in New York knew how to Slide it would be me. You’ve been in and out of the city over the years without ever trying to get in contact so I wondered what you wanted. Somehow I didn’t think of this. Either you got stupid out in California or you got very desperate.”
In the early morning light, stepping carefully along a tenement fire escape just off Tenth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen, Detective Roark edges forward revolver in hand. Up ahead is Figs Figueroa’s window. In another moment his partner will knock on the door of the apartment and Figueroa will be on the move. Roark curses the stupidity that led him into this. Backup is on its way and they could have waited. But the Lieutenant is not happy with the way they’d bobbled Jimmy Nails’ arrest the other morning or the way they’d then made him too dead to talk. McDevitt thinks the two of them need some redemption.
As Roark inches forward, the window right behind him opens. He drops to a crouch, revolver at the ready, turns and sees the terrified face of an old woman about to hang a basket of wet laundry on her wash line. When Roark turns back, Figueroa stands on the fire escape with an automatic leveled on him.
“Cut.”
On the roof just above Quinlan were the assistant director, the script girl, the camera man, and the director himself. “We need this one more time,” said Graham. “Just do what you’ve done before.” He looked closely at Quinlan and said, “Get this man some coffee.”
It was late in the morning and Quinlan had already gone up this fire escape six times. He guessed this particular building got cast for the part because of this fire escape, which was as black and labyrinthine as the stairways of a Piranesi prison. People fussed with his clothes and his makeup. He’d lain awake all night next to Adie, who slept soundly. Somebody brought him coffee.
This scene was his best moment in
Like ’60
. By coincidence, it and the one they’d shoot immediately afterwards were his last ones in the film. His work in New York was over.
If someone asked him what
Like ’60
was about, Quinlan would have said it was the story of a cop who was an ordinary guy wanting the ordinary things and living in a simpler and not very enlightened time. This man is pulled by circumstance and human weakness into a situation where his life is on the line.
Again he climbs the stairs and inches forward. Again the window opens and, revolver at the ready, he stares into the terrified face and looks up too late to see his killer.
This morning, it seemed as if Rollins was right about the Slide being a delusion. Quinlan felt no distant hum of past times. His stomach was tight, his shoulders tense.
In his dressing room he looked at his messages. Adie had called from her office to say she had a meeting with a client and would have to miss the wrap party. This morning she had asked him—gently, indirectly, not like he was being evicted yet, if everything was okay for him back in L.A. She hadn’t mentioned the Brazilian, but he was an invisible presence.
As Quinlan sat absorbing this, Arroyo, the lawyer, called. “My associate in San Bernardino says the grand jury will hand down indictments in an intimidation/extortion scheme this afternoon at around 6 pm New York time. You’re accused of impersonating a law officer. One alleged victim says you showed him a badge, threatened to run him in on false charges if he didn’t come up with his payment.”
“That’s a lie.” Sean said that automatically but the only memory the accusation evoked was an appearance he’d made as a rogue cop on
NYPD Blue
many years before in which he flashed a shield.
“Sean, they’re not interested in you. They want the ones who hired you.”
“Speaking those names means I’ll be dead or in witness protection,” he said. “I’ll get back to you.”
Quinlan remembered when he turned thirteen and decided that instead of becoming a cop, which was all he’d wanted up until then, he was going to be an actor. His grandfather had said, “Tough luck kid, you drew your father’s face and your mother’s brains.”
He jumped when a woman from props knocked on the door and came in to put him into a bloody shirt.
Pat Roark lies sprawled face up in the alley with the gun still clasped in his lifeless hand, his hat beside his head, his dead eyes staring at the sky.
The scene was shot from above. The camera looked down as a dozen extras, kids carrying school books, women in curlers and house dresses, guys in work clothes, idlers and honest citizens suddenly converged from all directions to see the dead man who had fallen from the sky.
The computer imaging of Roark falling backwards off the fire escape and slamming into the asphalt had been completed before he left Los Angeles.
“What was he doing up there?” a woman with a Spanish accent wanted to know.
“He’s a cop,” said a wise-ass kid, “see that police special.”
As the sirens wail and echo off the alley walls, Pete McDevitt runs down the fire escape, yelling, “Pat! Jesus, no!” His voice breaks in a sob.
Quinlan couldn’t tell if he used the dippy smile. The shot of Pat Roark dead in the alley would be used repeatedly in the film as a motive for Zach Terry’s Peter McDevitt in his quest for the killer and the ones behind the killer who, it turned out reached all the way to the Commissioner’s office.
The old stage actor Denny Wallace, whose father was a Polish Jew and whose mother was a French ballet dancer, played Lieutenant O’Grady.
Standing over the corpse, he delivers Roark’s epitaph. “He was worth twenty of you. I’ll have your badge and your gun for this, boyo.”
Quinlan heard applause on the set, which meant this was probably the last take. There was comfort in lying dead in an alleyway killed in the line of duty in a time when that meant something. This was the part of his life that actually made sense.
The applause faded and died. Smell was the first thing he noticed, tobacco smoke and garbage and exhaust. Sirens sounded on the avenue. Quinlan focused his eyes on a kid with bat wing ears, a crewcut and jeans so stiff that could stand up by themselves. A bunch of scruffy street rats stared down at him.
“It’s a cop!”
“How’d he get here?” The city accents were thick enough to cut.
He closed his hand on his prop gun and they all stepped back. “You been shot mister. You need a doctor?” Quinlan remembered the prop blood on his shirt front. No one, he noticed, talked about calling the cops.
“He’s a fuckin’ actor. Look at the make up,” said an old lady with way too much lipstick peering into the alley.
All Sean wondered as he got up was how long it would take Graham and the rest to notice he was gone. He dusted himself off, buttoned his jacket to hide the dye on his shirt front, and wiped his face clean with a pocket handkerchief.
It was a five story city and the sun shone directly from across the Hudson. Everyone got out of his way as he walked down the alley. He stuffed the gun in his pocket.
“Anyone follows me,” he gestured to it. He doubted that anyone in Hell’s Kitchen was going to call the police. But he moved quickly, got on Tenth Avenue and started walking.
Cars and clothes gave only a hint of the year. A corner newsstand had a big display of papers dated May 19, 1957.
His father would be about half his age and still in the army in Germany. His mother would not have moved here from Buffalo. His grandfather and grandmother lived up on Fordham Road in the Bronx. The avenue was lined with pawn shops. The gun was a fake but he figured it would be worth a buck or two.
Black Jack Quinlan and he would be about the same age. If he was here. He had to be here. Once he explained things, once he showed this face, Sean Quinlan couldn’t imagine them denying this fugitive a welcome.
Alternate Worlds floating in the Time Stream have been an interest (obsession?) of mine.
Warchild
, my first novel and the first piece of speculative fiction that I wrote, begins in New York but has all Time as its setting.
Part Two:
ACROSS WORLDS AND TIME
The Time Stream is the back story for my novelette, “
The Ferryman’s Wife
.” The setting is suburban Westchester in the mid-1950s.
A favorite short story author of mine, John Cheever, was known in his lifetime largely as a New Yorker writer and chronicler of the social mores of the mid-20th century American suburb. An article on
Mad Men
, the TV series set in 1960s Madison Avenue, mentioned that the producer has Cheever’s
Collected Stories
on his bookshelf as a reference tool. Recent biographies reveal that Cheever himself was more complicated socially and sexually than was generally known at the time (more like a
Mad Man
character, in fact).
His style, normally naturalistic in
The New Yorker
manner, could unexpectedly shift into magic: a suburban evening might evoke nymphs and gods. Some Cheever stories, “Torch Song,” “The Enormous Radio,” “The Swimmer,” are overtly fantastic. Death is a lady in Manhattan; a radio broadcasts the private lives of the residents of an apartment house, a young man on a whim swims across his suburb by going from one backyard pool to the next. In the course of a day he travels into the neighborhood’s decline and his own old age.
Around 2000, I began writing Alternate World/Time Stream stories. For one of the first I used a Cheever setting. This was my first story to be on a Nebula short list.
THE FERRYMAN’S WIFE
1.
A
t 7:40 on the first warm day of April, on a Tuesday, that least remarkable of days, the platform at Grove Hill train station was all but deserted. Cars soon arrived, a Country Squire first, a Desoto V8 next, then a flood of fins and chrome. Commuters disembarked.
As 7:49 approached, Oldsmobiles jockeyed with Pontiacs; sunlight gleamed on waxed finishes. A few women got out of autos and waited on the platform. But mostly it was husbands who gave goodbye kisses to wives with hair still in curlers and babies with zwieback-stuffed mouths.
For in that year, 1956, the great nation of the West was reinventing itself, changing from a land, part urban and part rural, into something not seen in the world before.
Linda Martin sat behind the wheel of the blue and white Chevy Bel Air and savored her favorite moment of the day. She rolled down her window as Roy slid of out the passenger seat beside her, passed before the car making goo-goo eyes at six-year-old Sally in the back seat.
He doffed his narrow brimmed hat, ducked his head to the open window. His mouth tasted of Pepsodent, coffee, eggs and bacon, and a single on-the-way-to-the-train Chesterfield. “Keep Lady Olivia amused,” he murmured.
“She’d be happier if you did that,” Linda whispered in his ear.
“Nah, no aristocrats for me. I’m a damn commissar. Comes the Revolution they all get shot.
Linda giggled but glanced in the rearview mirror. She could just hear their daughter’s voice, loud and clear, asking in public, “Mommy, why is daddy a commissar?” But Sally was watching intently for the appearance of the commuter train.
With the ghost of a wink, Roy stuck his hat on at the perfect angle and joined the marching husbands. Linda admired his easy way among the topcoated men. They were joined by old Mrs. Egan who liked to visit her specialists in the city and by Minnie Delahunt who, for reasons much speculated about, had kept her job in the fashion business even after getting married.
The train was out of sight as Linda turned on the radio for news. Driving out of the parking lot, she still felt Roy’s parting touch and, holding that memory, was with him as he walked through a rocking car, greeting a man in horn rims whom they both knew through the PTA.
Roy found a seat, opened his briefcase. Unlike the rest of the passengers, Roy could see in the dark and differentiate one set of footsteps from the dozens behind him on a crowded city street. And unlike almost anyone else in that time and place, he was aware of his wife’s contact. And he could deflect it, which he did with a little smile.
Linda smiled too as she steered into traffic. An announcer on the car radio said, “A perfect blend.” Maybe he was pitching coffee or a new miracle fabric. But to Linda it described the life Roy and she had made in this time and place. Because a road crew was repairing the usual route, she detoured down Main Street.
“Mommy?” asked a voice with a keen edge. In the air was that precarious moment when a thought becomes an idea.
And Linda, her attention focused on the back seat, saw in the mirror the slight quiver of a six-year-old’s pigtails, the growing light in the eyes which were Roy’s eyes. “Yes, hon?”
“How long is Auntie Olives going to stay?” The idea took form.
“A little while. Why?”
“Because last week Timothy brought his rabbit to school and nobody else has one and everyone got to touch her.”
“And you wondered?” Linda felt the idea become a plan.
“No one else has an aunt from England. And she could sing.”
The plan was broached.
Much of Linda’s concentration was focused on Sally. Most of the rest was devoted to negotiating traffic on the two blocks of shops that constituted downtown Grove Hill. So she only glanced at a delivery truck making a left turn beside Stillwell’s Grocery.
Just a black, closed truck driving down a shadowed alley, but it caught her attention. The driver’s face, seen for a moment in profile was so ordinary as to escape the memory. The phrase “hard to pick out of a police line up” occurred to her.
Driver and vehicle evoked dark deeds when the whole point of a village like Grove Hill was never to suggest anything even remotely like that.
The voice from the back seat said, “Can she, Mommy? Huh?”
And Linda heard herself say, “You have to ask Auntie Olives, honey.” She realized that she too was calling their guest that.
Driver and vehicle were out of sight and contact. Alone, she would have cut back immediately. As it was, she drove to the Pathfinder Elementary School. Half distracted, she agreed that Sally could ask their house guest to be that week’s Show and Tell.
When Linda returned to Main Street ten minutes later, there was no sign of the delivery truck either behind Stillwell’s nor anywhere else. In the gray stone and white clapboard stores of Grove Hill’s Main Street, she made quick purchases of a quart of milk, light bulbs, a pack of cigarettes. In each place she made casual mention of a truck that she said had cut her off. Her discreet probe produced the information that there had been no deliveries that morning.
Roy, long gone down the tracks to New York City, would not be accessible until evening. She reached for Sally. Right hand on left side. Not like Perry Gibson next to her who had it wrong.
Saying the magic words, “. . . one nation invisible . . .”
Linda considered the slippery path from proper precaution through solipsism to paranoia as she got back in the Chevy. Still, instead of heading directly home, she drove onto the Parkway and off again. East Radley was the town next to Grove Hill. It lacked a commuter station and was considered a bit dusty and decayed.
A place on the corner where she turned was owned by an old Italian couple who had a small vineyard out back, a statue of the Virgin Mary in the front yard. The neighborhood was mostly large, older houses. As she had been taught since she was eleven, Linda did not reach out.
Abruptly, she felt the touch. Like a sudden ripple on the water, swirling leaves, a shooting star seen at the corner of an eye. Dearest? Mrs. Wood was home.
She tried to keep her memories of the truck, the driver, the people she questioned, as clear as they had been when she first saw them. Mrs. Wood accepted her offering.
Linda Martin pulled up in front of a tall shingled, Queen Anne house. It had an old-fashioned conservatory attached. No car sat in the driveway and the blinds were drawn. A slide and some see-saws could be seen out back. The voices of children were heard. But the back yard was big and overgrown and the voices sounded far away.
Aware of neighbors and casual curiosity, Linda scribbled a note, an actual one about needing a sitter for that Thursday. She walked up to the front porch as if that was why she had come.
Bending to slip the paper under the door, she caught the images of the truck, the driver, the store keepers on Main Street. All had been rearranged and examined. Clumsiness too is a strategy. Just that and no more. She had turned to go when Mrs. Wood touched her again. Your guest. Linda caught the image of a woman, wild haired, naked. It took Linda a moment to realize what the woman was doing. Her passage is in your hands.
Linda remained bending. “Sally is safe?”
She saw another face then, black and white. Beautiful. Mrs. Wood smiled as if that hardly needed asking.
It was well after nine by the time Linda parked the car in her driveway. That’s when she heard the voice. A soprano clean as a child’s trilled up the years from a place where being a ruined woman was an identity and a full time occupation.
I leaned my back up against some oak,
Thinking that he was a trusty tree.
But first he bended, then he broke,
And so did my false love to me.
Think of the song as compensation, Linda told herself as she opened the door and saw a petticoat—her petticoat from Bendel’s!—draped over the hall table. Slips had been taken out of drawers and dropped on the floor without even being tried on. Linda followed the trail of undergarments down to the rec room. This world did not hold enough chemise and lingerie to satisfy the guest. Linda had come to regard it as like being around a magic animal, one which sang wondrously but shed everywhere.
Olivia Wexford sat in a green silk, floor-length robe, her skin like fine porcelain. She brushed her auburn hair with long strokes. It was something she had, with great reluctance, just learned to do for herself. Still, the repeated gesture was elegant each time. She looked up as Linda entered, with an unguarded expression of cold speculation.
She wonders, Linda thought to herself, where I’ve been for the last hour when I should have been here entertaining her. In her slacks, blouse, and French-bobbed brunet haircut, Linda was cute and knew it. But here she felt dowdy, almost sexless. The TV was on with the sound off. Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Greenjeans skipped around a table. Mr. Greenjeans, a proper second banana, was poker-faced, but the Captain mugged each time he passed the camera.
The guest gave a surpassingly raucous laugh. “Amusing rustics,” she said. Her eyes sparkled, her face was animated. If one could ignore the background of pine paneling, the local florist’s calendar on the wall, she could have stepped out of a painting by Gainsborough or Romney, “Lady Olivia Wexford at her toilette.”
Hated and feared back home, unable to boil water, resentful of having to dress herself, disturbed and aroused that men could see her bare ankles, wherever Olivia was it would always be 1759.
Idly, out of habit, Linda brushed her guest’s mind. And was stopped abruptly by an image of a silk fan in pink and pearl. On the fan, half dressed and agape, Bacchus and Ariadne encountered each other for the first time. With a slight nod, Linda backed off. Lady Wexford had a powerful protector.
Aware of what had just happened, suddenly reflective, Olivia sipped chocolate out of a doll-size china cup. “HE knew my life up and down, how I had lived it and what I’d do next,” she said. “HE promised me all of Time but little did I guess that I would see it as a fugitive in flight.”
She had fallen hard not for an ordinary lord, goodness help them all, some ass in a powdered wig and silk stockings. No, her particular daemon lover was a power of a kind that made Linda wary. It was not well to know more than a god wanted you to.
“In the last place where the Rangers had me, shock was a favorite word,” said Olivia. “It referred to glassy eyed ex-soldiers, hysterical young women with skirts above their knees. And to me.”
Fresh from the ruins of her own world, Lady Olivia had stayed in a private nursing home just outside London in a certain 1920. This particular sanitarium was secretly controlled by the organization known, where they were known, as the Time Rangers.
“Scarcely could I concentrate my mind enough to wonder why I was there much less what was to be done to me. Here, I have begun to unravel various mysteries.”
Linda saw the image of the fan snap shut, replaced by what looked like a Watteau painting. Light shone through trees, moss grew like velvet, a white body reclined, privacy protected by long auburn hair and chains. They were graceful chains but secure all the same. Lady Olivia Wexford was staked out in the woods. “Bait,” she said, “is what I will be, a playing piece in the games of the Rangers and the Gods.”
Linda thought to herself, ‘After what you and your lover boy did you’re lucky not to have been burned at the stake.’ Aloud she said, “Let’s finish getting you dressed. Make up first.”
Olivia’s nose wrinkled. “In that last London where I stayed, girls who had not been kissed, much less deflowered, wore whores’ paint.”
“Nonetheless. We must honor local custom.”
“Let us,” Olivia said as she rose, and Linda noted how she barely overcame the instinct to issue orders. “Let us, go into the city.”
“Not today. I didn’t arrange for a babysitter.” Linda thought of the black truck. Instinctively, she reached out.
Through Sally’s eyes, a mile away, she saw a blackboard and on it the letter H written as big as a six-year-old.
“We’re going to the supermarket,” she said. Lids rolled over the guest’s wide blue eyes. Life with Sally had prepared Linda for these moments, so she added, “And on the way, we can have a driving lesson.”
Lady Wexford’s eyes opened at this and she allowed herself to be guided upstairs. A bit longer afterwards than Linda would have thought possible, Olivia had helped to dress herself in a velvet jacket and a pair of Linda’s toreador pants under a flared skirt. She had put on flat pumps and was standing at the front door.
“Lord Riot, was what HE was called and after a summer of HIS rule the city lay in smoldering ruins. All burned, the palaces and churches, the docks and the slums. And the populace, gentry and commoners were gone to whatever place HE had led them. But in that other London where I just stayed, it was 1920 and while all else was changed, the palaces and churches still stood and nobody had ever heard of the summer of Lord Riot.”
‘Damn right,’ Linda thought. ‘The Rangers spent a lot of effort making sure your particular London never got heard of again.’
She opened the front door and Olivia stepped out. Linda noticed the other woman’s slight shudder as she entered an alien world.
In the driveway, Lady Wexford touched the hood and roof of the Chevy as if she were acquainting herself with a new horse. While they drove, she listened intently to Linda’s explanation of the ignition, the steering wheel, the clutch, the gas pedal.
At the supermarket she was at once coy and haughty, dizzy in what seemed to her to be public nudity. Linda was aware of the assistant manager at the meat counter, an Italian kid, appraising them. Olivia noticed also. Linda couldn’t see the glance that was thrown, but the young man took a step back, face flushed, eyes wide open.
‘Amusing rustics,’ Linda thought. ‘That’s what we are for her.’
“Duz, Palmolive, Ivory,” Olivia said. “A cornucopia, a soap for every purpose. But every place looks like every other. Your house is the mirror duplicate of one at the corner of your street. The house across the road from yours looks exactly like one three doors down. You tell me this isn’t the same store we were in on Friday last?”