Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (13 page)

And then went home and made savage love to his wife.

And that damned unnerving guitar fell to pieces on the E minor sixth, as resolved as it was ever going to be.

The silence persisted for a full minute before anyone so much as thought to look into his drink for any answers that might be skulking around in there. And when we did, we found none there, so we tried looking at each other. And when that failed, we turned as one to regard the stranger who had brought us this vision. His hand was back at his side, now, and the fireplace was back where it .belonged, naively attempting to warm a room that had gone as cold as death . .

.

“That, gentlemen,” he said simply, “is Bobbi Joy.”

No one said a word. I saw Doc Webster groping desperately for a wisecrack to break the spell, and it just wasn’t there. The stranger had been right: now that it was over we could scarcely believe that it had happened, scarcely believe that we were still alive.

“Now that you know her,” the stranger went on, “you’re ready to hear her story, what made her what she is and what I hope to do about it.”

Bobbi Joy (the Meddler continued) was born Isadora Brickhill in the back seat of a gypsy cab somewhere in Harlem, in the year 1952. I can see by your scowls, gentlemen, that I don’t have to explain what that means. She didn’t even have Billie Holiday’s classic two choices-no one was hiring maids in those days. By the training and education she received, she was prepared only for the most basic trade there is: by 1966 little Isadora was an experienced and, if rumor is to be believed, accomplished whore.

Even in that most cliched of professions she was an anomaly. She did not drink, touched no drugs save an occasional social reefer, and never seemed to project that desperate air of defeat and cynical surrender so characteristic of her colleagues. She had a fiery fighting spirit that demanded and elicited respect from all who knew her, and except for physically, no one ever touched her at all. Madams loved her for her utterly dependable honesty in the split, the girls loved her for her unflagging courage and willingness to be of help, and the johns loved her for the completely detached professionalism she brought to her work.

Then came the bust.

Some sort of political mix-up, as the story goes-a payoff missed, an official inadvertently offended, a particularly well-written expose that demanded token action. Whatever the reason, Hannah’s House was raided in April of 1974 in the traditional manner, wagons and all. Bobbi, a she was by now known, was loaded into the wagons with the rest of the girls before she had a chance to grab a wrap. Consequently she attracted the attention of a patrolman named Duffy, who had come to appreciate that in such situations, a policeman hath rank privileges. He attempted to collect what he regarded as only his right, and was refused: Bobbi allowed as how she might be for sale but she was damned if she was for free. Duffy persisted, and bought a knee in the groin, whereupon he lost all discretion and laid open Bobbi’s face with the barrel of his pistol. This so mightily embarrassed Duffy’s sergeant, who was also Duffy’s brother-in-law, that he was forced to ignore the wound, locking Bobbi in with the rest of the girls in the hope that her disfigurement could be passed off as the result of a razor fight in the cells. By the time she got medical attention, it was too late. She was scarred through and through, and forever unsuited for the only job she knew.

Almost a year later, a producer received an unsolicited tape in the mail. Such tapes are never played, but this one had the songs listed on the outside, and the producer’s eye was caught by the first title: “The Suicide Song.” It was a crude, home-taped version of the song you just heard, audio only. The producer played it once, and spent a frantic seventeen hours locating Bobbi Joy.

He didn’t make her a star: he simply recorded her songs and made them available for sale. She became a star, a starlike there had never been before. At least seven of her recordings, tape and holo, were proscribed from public broadcast-because areas in which they were played showed sudden jumps in the suicide rate. The 70’s and 80’s were not good years in which to live, and Bobbi Joy spoke for all too many of us all too well. She was a phenomenon, endlessly analyzed and never defined, and if some of us took a perverse kind of courage from her songs, maybe that was more reflection of us than of her. And maybe not.

In any event, the producer with remarkable ease became unspeakably rich. And it comforted him not. Poor devil, condemned to be the man who gave Bobbi Joy to the world, how could his heart be soothed with money? He gave most of it away to his mad brother, who thought he could build a time-machine, just to be rid of it. He pickled himself in alcohol with the balance, and never, ever played her tapes for himself. Like all her fans, he ached to bring her peace and knew no man ever could; but there was more. He loved her with a ferocious and utterly hopeless desperation, and consequently avoided her company as much as possible. He dreamed futile dreams of fixing her hurt, and lost a great deal of weight, and when his mad brother told him one spring day that the time machine was a success, he knew what he had to do.

His brother, though road, was not so mad as he was by now, and sought to reason with him. He spoke of possible disruption of the time-stream by the changing of the past, and other complicated things, and flatly forbade the producer to use the time-machine.

Right now, years in the future, he’s nursing a sore jaw and wondering whether I’m about to destroy the fabric of time. And so am I.

I’ve been wandering around in your time for two or three days. I gave myself some leeway to make plans, but I’ve been using it to cool off. And now I don’t know what to do. Maybe my brother was right; he knows a lot more than I about it. But I can’t leave her in pain, can I?

Oh yes, one more thing: the bust is tonight. About four hours from now.

What could we say? We had to believe him-the technology inherent in that holographic sphere was certainly well beyond the present state of the art. More important, if that voice truly existed in our time, we would have heard of it long since. It was impossible to disbelieve that voice.

Callahan summed it up for all of us.

“What do you figure to do about it, brother?”

The Meddler didn’t answer, and suddenly I knew somehow, maybe from the set of his mouth, maybe a little from the glance he gave Tommy Janssen.

“I think I understand, Mike,” I said softly. “I saw him talking to Tommy while I was up on the stand, and I saw Tommy cuss him out. Somewhere outside he ran into someone who told him where he could find a kid who used to be a heroin addict, a kid who would certainly know where to get him a gun. He’s going to kill Patrolman Duffy. Aren’t you, friend?”

The Meddler nodded.

“Then you’ve made your decision?” asked Callahan. “One murder’ll fix everything?”

“It’ll prevent that scar,” said the Meddler. “And how can it be murder to kill a scum like that? The hell with a gun, I can get within knife distance easily-no one will be expecting anything, and, I don’t care what they do to me afterwards.” He squared his shoulders, and looked Callahan in the eye. “You figure to stop me?”

“Well now, son,” Callahan drawled, “I’m not certain I’ve got the right to meddle in something like this. Besides, I reckon it’s no accident you’re closer to the door than any of us. But it seems like I ought to point out-“

He broke off and stared at the doorway. So did the rest of us. A man stood there, where there had been no one a moment before. He looked like an older, wearier version of the Meddler, built much the same, but he wasn’t wearing an overcoat so you could see that the pot-belly was actually an enormous belt strapped around his waist. Obviously, it was a time-machine; just as obviously; he was its inventor, come to stop his brother from tampering with history.

But our attention was centered not on the machinery around his waist, but on the much smaller piece of it in his right hand. Made of glass and seemingly quite fragile, it could only have been the handgun of the 1990’s, and the way he held it told us that we ought to respect it. I thought of lasers and backed away, fetching up against my amplifier.

“I can’t let you do it, John,” said the newcomer, ignoring the rest of us.

“You can’t stop me,” said the Meddler.

“I can kill you,” his brother corrected.

“Look, Henry,’.’ the Meddler said desperately, “I’m not going into this blindly. I know what I’m doing.”

“Do you?” His brother laughed. “You damned fool, you haven’t the faintest notion what you could do by killing that fool policeman. Suppose a criminal he would have apprehended goes on to kill some innocent people instead? Suppose the simple removal of him from history suffices to disrupt this time-stream beyond repair? You may be killing every man, woman and child in your time, John!”

“Don’t you think I know that?” cried the man in the overcoat. “And do you suppose that’s all there is to be afraid of? Suppose I’m entirely successful, and only bring about a world without Bobbi Joy. She brought us all a self-conscious awareness of collective guilt which had an enormous effect for good. I don’t know that I have the right to deprive the world of her music.

“Suppose there’s a Law of Conservation of Pain? Suppose pain can’t be destroyed within a continuum? Then all I’ll have done is redirected her pain: I suspect it will all be transferred to me-and I can’t sing worth a damn. Henry, I admit I don’t have any idea what the consequences of my action may be. But I do know what I have to do.”

“And I can’t let you,” his brother repeated.

He lifted the strange glass pistol and aimed it at the Meddler’s heart, and I saw Callahan’s big hands go under the bar for the sawed-off shotgun, and I saw LongDrink and the Doc and Tommy Janssen start to close in on the gunman, and I knew that none of them would be in time, and without thinking I spun on my heel, twisted the volume knob savagely on my amp, clutched my Estring as high as I could and snapped the pick across it. A shrieking high-note lanced through the air, and I rammed the guitar in front of the monitor-speaker for maximum feedback.

A red-hot knife went through every ear in the room, freezing the action like a stop-motion camera. The guitar fed back and fed back, building from a noise like a gutshot pig to something that was felt rather than heard. Glasses began to shatter along the bar, then bottles on the long shelves behind it …

And all at once, so did that deadly little glass gun.

Quickly I muted the guitar, and our ears rang for a lingering minute. Blood ran from a couple of cuts on Callahan’s face, and the gunman’s hand was a mess. Doc Webster was at his side somehow, producing bandages and antiseptic from his everpresent black bag and steering the wounded man into a seat.

The Meddler sat down beside him. “How did you do it, Henry? I thought I had the only-“

“You do,” Henry snapped. “You came back with it, you bloody maniac, and as soon as you reappeared I knew from the look on your face that you had succeeded. I didn’t wait around to find out what change you’d made in the world I knew; I hit you with a chair and took the belt, determined to make one last desperate try to save my time. You laughed as you went down, and now I guess I know why. Meddler!”

The Meddler stood up, faced Callahan. “You’ve got a gun under that bar,” he stated. “I want it.”

Callahan stood his ground. “Not a chance,” he said.

“Then I’ll knife him, or bash in his skull with a rock, or drop a match in his gas-tank.” He headed for the door, and no one got in his way.

“Hold on a minute,” I called out, and he stopped.

“Look,” he told me, “I’m grateful for what you did, but-“

“Listen,” I interrupted, “maybe we can’t give you a gun … but we can sure pass the hat for you.”

His jaw dropped as I whipped off the eleven-gallon hat and offered it to Noah Gonzalez. Noah dropped in a five-dollar bill without hesitating, and passed the hat to Slippery Joe. People began digging into their pockets, emptying their wallets, and dropping the swag in the hat as it came their way. It filled rapidly, and by the time it reached Fast Eddie I guess it had maybe a hundred dollars or better in it.

Eddie took it from Callahan and looked at the Meddler. “I ain’t got no dough,” he announced, “but I got a ‘65 Chevy outside dat’ll do a hunnert’n’ten easy.” He fished out a set of keys and dropped them into the hat. “Don’t waste no time parkin’ the bastard, you’ll never find a parkin’ space in Harlem dis time o’ night. Double park it; I’ll pick it up from de cops tomorra.”

There were tears running down the Meddler’s face; he seemed unable to speak.

“Okay,” said Callahan briskly, “you’ve got three or four hours. That should be plenty of time. You drive to

Hannah’s as fast as you can, wave around that dough and tell Hannah you want to take one of the girls home for the night. She sees all that cabbage, she’ll go for it. That’ll get Bobbi clear of the bust, and what happens after that is up to you. Good luck.”

He took the hat from Eddie and handed it to the Meddler, who took it with a trembling hand.

“Th-thank you,” the Meddler said. “I … I hope I’m doing the right thing.”

“You’re doing what you have to do,” said Callahan, “and you don’t have to kill anyone. Now get out of here.”

The Meddler got.

We sent his brother home eventually, and Eddie and I packed up our equipment for the night. We felt sort of inadequate after having heard Bobbi Joy, and anyway everyone in the joint was broke now. By closing time, we were all ready to leave.

The next night we were all there by seven, and although it was Punday Night nobody felt much like making jokes. A few of us had tried to get news of the previous night’s raid from the police, but they weren’t talking, and we were as filled with suspense as the fireplace was with glass.

Along about eight the sporadic conversation was silenced by the sudden appearance of the time-traveling belt on the bar, a soft green sphere and a single piece of paper encircled in it. The piece of paper proved to be a note, which read: