Mendoza in Hollywood (Company)

by Kage Baker

  I raised my eyes to the distant island; it loomed out there like a dream, as I had seen it every day and night of my sojourn here. I turned to Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, who was now ten times the enigma he had been before. I opened my mouth to ask him a question.

  But I never did ask him, because at that moment I picked up the signal of the mortal man approaching through the brush ahead of us. My head snapped around, and I focused on him. Mortal male, two meters tall, thirty to thirty-five years of age, sober, approximately 270 pounds, blood pressure slightly elevated, brainwave pattern suggesting he was hunting. Mounted, and urging his horse forward at a brisk trot. Armed. Rifle and two Navy revolvers.

  “Edward,” I said in a low voice, “we’d better get off the trail.” He looked at me sharply but turned his horse’s head at once, and we found our way down a gully and into the partial shade of a scrub oak.

  If only he hadn’t been so tall.

  The mortal must have caught a glimpse of that tall hat, because he sent a bullet whistling through the sagebrush at us. That was no more than conversation in Los Angeles, and it missed by a good ten feet. But here he came, galloping after it, emitting the signal I’d come to know too well: a mortal after blood.

  We slid from our saddles, and I found myself flattened between Edward and an undercut clay bank, where the storms of 186z had hollowed out a space. The clay was just about the same color as those miraculous trousers of his, which were still spotless, by the way. Edward’s gun was already in his hand. Damn, here still came the mortal, and even if he didn’t spot me and Chameleon Man, he’d see the horses.

  He did, too; he saw them first. A long searching stare along the gully, and he saw Edward as well. He grinned in delight, taking in the details of Edward’s appearance, his tailored clothing.

  “Now I just bet you’re that limey bastard,” he said. “Let me hear you say something, friend. Talk for me.” And he raised the barrel of his rifle.

  Bang. Just like in the movies, a red dot appeared in the center of his forehead and a dark red drop ran down. Just like that. He sat there a moment in the saddle, his grin frozen, then fell slowly to one side. His horse didn’t appreciate that at all; it stepped clear of him and kicked impatiently to clear his dead foot from the stirrup.

  Edward rolled away and looked at me in astonishment. “Good shot, my dear,” he said.

  That was when I realized I had just killed a mortal. The gun was there in my hand, a bullet gone from the cylinder.

  We don’t do such things. Einar’s mad, he doesn’t count; Porfirio had immediately saved the life of the only person I ever saw him shoot. We don’t kill. We reason, we run away, we lie to our attackers or confuse them or project illusions to hide ourselves, but we never, ever rob them of their miserable brief lives, because we have so much and they have so little. Unlike us, they have mothers who mourn for them. They have families who starve.

  I was crushed with such a sense of sin as I had never felt in my wretched long life. I was a true Angeleno now, wasn’t I? At last I’d fired a gun at a total stranger, and blown him away too. But no audience cheered for me, as would have happened in the movies.

  Edward took the gun from my nerveless hand, stroked back my hair, looked straight into my eyes. “Dolores, my dear. This was your first time, I think?”

  Nice of him, to help a lady so gently on the occasion of retching after her first kill.

  “My apologies, señor,” I murmured at last.

  He waved a dismissive hand. “It quite shocks the system,” he said, “the first time. But I think you ought not to take this up as steady work, however good your aim. One can accustom oneself to the act of necessary murder, but does one wish to?”

  Yes indeed, something to be seriously considered by the young woman contemplating her entrance into Victorian society.

  We mounted and rode on.

  The sun was dropping into the west now, and we were nearing San Pedro and the probable cordon, so the danger was greater than ever. We arrived at Long Beach before it was quite dark, splashing across the slough. I wondered if D. W. Griffith’s men would plant palm trees here one day, preparing the scene for the desperate chariot race to warn Babylon.

  It seemed preferable to wait until full cover of night before making our way to Souza’s. Accordingly we found a dry stream bed under an oak tree along the outskirts of Señor Tempe’s rancho and reined in there, to dismount for a while.

  Edward jumped down first and put up his hands to catch me as I slid from my saddle. I fell into his arms. The brief hold became an embrace, and without quite meaning to we were kissing hungrily. It was going to happen again; nothing we could do about it, other than unlock for a moment as Edward staggered over to loop the horses’ reins around an oak branch. He came back, breathing hard. I knelt in the sand; he swept off his hat and knelt beside me.

  And really it was like prayer, señors, desperate prayer for forgiveness, an appeal for mercy, an act of life in that deadly place. I gave him pleasure to atone for the death I’d given the stranger. He gave me absolution for what I’d done, and found his own blessing of acquittal in my arms. Violent prayer, struggle and assault, shuddering ecstatic confirmation that we were still alive, though without our bower walls were dogs and enchanters, whoremongers and murderers.

  We lay there afterward, looking up awhile at the red evening sky through the black leaves.

  “What are you?” Edward whispered.

  “Your mate,” I said. “As meaningless as that is, for us both. We’ll never marry. We’ll never settle in a cottage by the sea. We’ll never raise children. Death and time stalk us like a pair of hounds. But we were formed in the mind of God from the same piece of steel, for what purpose I cannot imagine.”

  He was silent for a while. His hand traveled up and closed on my breast. “Death and time,” he said at last. “What would our life be like, if we could live?”

  “Oh, we’d make the world the place it should have been,” I answered with a grand wave. “We’d blaze across the sky like meteors, and our masters would look upon us and tremble. We’d bring down the palace of Death as though it were so many cards. You’d take the flaming sword and smash the lock on the gates to Eden, and let our children into the garden. I’d teach them how to grow corn, and you’d give them laws. Everything would begin again, except sorrow.”

  He laughed, softly. “So it would,” he said. “And then, perhaps, the world could look after its own affairs for a while. Imagine not having to justify one’s existence, ever, to anybody.”

  “Imagine having the freedom to travel where one wished.”

  “Imagine having the time,” he sighed, and I sighed with him. Somewhere out in the evening a sea bird cried, a high thin far-off piping, a lonely sound.

  Perhaps it made the moment too surreal, brought home to him just how strange our conversation was. I felt his mood changing, his wariness returning.

  “Dolores Alice Elizabeth Mendoza,” he said musingly. “You’re far too young to understand this business as well as you do, and to kill with such precision. But for your age, I could imagine you were one of Juarez’s agents, or even that buffoon Napoleon’s, though I can’t see how or why. You were certainly a virgin, and yet I’ve known Eastern whores with less expertise in the arts of love. Less enthusiasm, too. What am I to make of you, my dear?”

  I lay very still. “You might accept the truth as I told it to you,” I said. Of all the mortals in that English hall, long ago, Nicholas had been the only one to suspect what I was. It had been a game between us, a delightful game of question and evasion, until he discovered the truth. Then he tried to kill me.

  “Well, my love, but it doesn’t quite convince,” said Edward. “I add together all the figures you’ve given me, and they simply don’t produce the sum of you.” He stretched luxuriously, in that motion bringing at least two of his concealed weapons into place for immediate deployment. “A sensible man in my line of work would have disposed of you—by some means or other—h
ours ago. I am, however, reluctant to lose such a charming companion. And it is a fact that your objective and mine would seem to coincide.” He smiled, narrow-eyed, waiting to see what I would say.

  I gave the faintest of shrugs, a tilt of the head, and spoke in the most reasonable of voices. “Señor. If my intent were to betray you, I might easily have led you to the Yankees by now. If my intent were to secure the contents of the valise—I had all the time in the world to do that when it sat at the inn, before ever you came looking for it. If you find my knowledge or my skill with a pistol remarkable, all I can tell you is that there’s not much for a well-born girl to do in San Luis Obispo, save read and practice shooting at targets or the occasional bandit. I believe it’s customary for a gentleman to accept a lady’s word without question, is it not?”

  “It is,” he said. “Though I expect you’ll appreciate the difficulty I’m in just now, my love, as regards the luxury of trusting anyone.”

  “I do.” I looked up into his eyes. The pupils were dilated, enormous. He really did not want to kill me. “I point out that you have little choice in the matter, señor.”

  His dark smile deepened, melting me, even with the point of his hidden knife inches from my heart. “So the question remains: What are you? I find myself with a price on my head in a foreign land. My associates have bungled and miscalculated to such a degree that I may well be unlikely to escape with my life. I’m in a very narrow little corner indeed, and my only ally is a remarkable young lady who seems, by some unlikely trick of metempsychosis, to be a fused reincarnation of Boadicea and Cleopatra. A very bad business. And I can’t for the life of me think why you’re not having a fit of hysterics now, or angry tears.”

  “Metempsychosis,” I said thoughtfully. “Now, that was Pythagoras’s theory of the transmigration of souls, was it not? Rebirth, after death, in a new body. Possibly I trust you because we were lovers once, in some previous life. Possibly you trust me for the same reason. It makes as much sense as anything else, señor.”

  He drew a deep breath and struck the earth beside my head with the flat of his hand. “Now, how in hell do you know what metempsychosis means? Whoever you are,” he said, “whoever you’ve been, if we get out of this with our lives, I will marry you. See if you can keep the truth from me then!”

  The stars came out, and the chill of evening set in, but we didn’t notice. What stamina he had. And what good fortune for us that no bounty hunters chanced to come near that particular oak tree, on that night of the sixteenth of March, 1863.

  Much later we arose and rode out again, and I led us through the marshy tidelands and the shallow sea of reeds by scanning for solid ground along Rattlesnake Island. If we made noise, the frogs and the night creatures made more; and so we came in safety to the huts of the fishermen, and I was so grateful to ride up onto the causeway and behold Souza’s night lamp burning.

  “I will talk for us,” I told Edward as I rapped softly on the door. He nodded, and when Souza opened and peered out, I said in Portuguese, “The doctor has a request to make of you, Souza. This gentleman and I need to go across to the big island out there, in silence and secret. When can you take us?”

  He yawned and rubbed his eyes. “With the tide, lady. Six hours more.”

  “Have you a secure place we can rest until then?” I asked.

  Of course he had; it was a Company safe house, after all. He bowed us through his low door and showed us to the little closet of a room kept for Dr. Zeus agents who were passing through. Not spacious, but the low, wide bed was clean and dry. There was a chair, on which Edward deposited his saddlebag; there were a washstand and a table with a candlestick on it. Souza lit the candle for us and went to see to our horses. We undressed by candlelight—it flickered, from a little draft coming through the plank walls off the sea—and we sat up by its light long enough to make a late supper out of the last of Juan Bautista’s picnic lunch. We barely spoke for exhaustion.

  Edward got up once, to make certain the door was secured to his standards, and I lay in bed and watched him. Not one mark, not one scar on his body, same as Nicholas. Really rather remarkable for a man in his profession. But, then, he seemed to be as perceptive of danger as an immortal. Anybody who ever contemplated sending a bullet or knife his way must have been fatally beaten to the draw.

  And what was he? I was a woman of mystery to him, but his existence posed a far greater question. Setting aside for a moment that we were somehow in bed together again after three centuries had passed—how was he connected to the technocrats who would one day found my own Company?

  I opened my mouth to ask him, but somehow the only question that popped out was “How did you break your nose?”

  He turned, peering at me curiously. Naked there by candlelight, no Victorian trappings, and he was Nicholas in every line.

  “I’ve never broken my nose,” he replied, coming back to get into bed beside me. He believed what he was saying, too. I lifted my hand to his face and ran my thumb along the irregularity in the bridge that had always so fascinated me.

  “But it has been broken, just here,” I insisted. I could feel the scar in the cartilage, an old injury, healed long ago. “You must have noticed.”

  “I’ve noticed the ugly fellow in my shaving mirror, yes, but he’s looked that way as long as I remember,” Edward said wryly. “It’s a family feature, I assume. I’m not sufficiently acquainted with my relations to know. But I assure you, my dear, I’ve never taken a blow to the face. One of the few advantages of being exceptionally tall; it’s difficult for one’s assailants to reach so far.”

  “Ah,” I said. I’d never asked how Nicholas broke his nose. He’d had quite a reputation as a university brawler, and I assumed he did it in a fight. “Perhaps you broke it in infancy, then, and don’t remember?”

  “Perhaps,” he said, yawning. He leaned up on his elbow and blew out the candle, and drew me into his arms. We snuggled into safety, there in that room where the wind sighed in the corners, bearing on it the smell and the sound of the sea. Sleep came at once.

  We were almost there, señors.

  MARCH 17, 1863.1 had no nightmares, I seemed to have had no sleep at all before there came the discreet knock and Souza’s apologetic murmur advising us that the tide had turned. There was a lingering impression that I’d been having an earnest conversation with someone about Catalina Island and its absurd history, going over and over the cryptic records. The person, who must have been Edward, was patiently explaining that everything was all right because we were really on the same side after all, that the office that employed him would hand on its discovery to the first cabal that would become Dr. Zeus, and that the contents of document D . . . the what?

  I opened my eyes groggily, shivering, reaching for the shreds of memories, and of course they disintegrated into meaninglessness. I saw no blue light in the room, though. Edward’s arm came out of the darkness, bracing around my shoulders. How hot his skin was.

  “Wake up, my love,” he said. “We’ve a crossing to make.”

  We washed and dressed, and he didn’t take the trouble to shave, this time. Every concealed weapon had miraculously found its way into place again, though, and his gloves and hat were firmly on as we stepped out into the morning darkness.

  Wide black sky, wide black horizon, and the glint of water between the waving reeds. Freshening wind and the promise of morning, much more of a smack of the sea and less of tidal mud. Souza was crouched in his boat, clearing away nets for seating space. He rose up and offered me his hand into the boat.

  “We need to leave now,” he said. I nodded and made room for Edward, who stepped in easily and silently and placed his saddlebag among the nets. Souza cast off and bent to his oars. We moved out, bearing well to the east of Dead Man’s Island. Slowly we worked our way out of the shallows, past that island of bad reputation, and at length we felt the pull of the tide taking us into deep water. The wind rose. Edward helped Souza run up our little sail, Point Fermin b
egan to recede behind us, and the black threat of the mainland dwindled away.

  We had done it, we had got clear. The sky began to pale with morning, and we could see the island now, fair across open water, twenty miles out. I was making for a destiny of which I’d never dreamed, with the missing half of my soul beside me, and it didn’t matter what we came to in the end. The morning shone with more promise than any I’d known in my long life.

  Edward was leaning back on his saddlebag, watching the mainland shrink. He turned a speculative eye on Souza; then sat up and addressed me in his awkward Latin.

  “The fisherman,” he asked. “Does he speak my tongue?”

  “No, he does not,” I replied.

  “Good.” He continued in English, but kept his voice low all the same. “I estimate we’ll make landfall shortly before noon, if this breeze continues steady. Friends will be waiting for us there.”

  “Englishmen conducting their scientific studies, yes, you told me,” I said, smiling at him. And they must have made one hell of a scientific discovery, to judge from the tug-of-war that the British and Americans would be playing soon. Whatever it was, Edward and I would have flown to some further safety by then.

  “Ye-es,” Edward said. “And some others. Assuming he managed to find a competent pilot on his own, Mr. Rubery and a party of friends should also be arriving, at very nearly the same moment we do. You may be rather surprised at the company he keeps.”