“Please,” he implored. “My name’s Harold. I don’t want any trouble. I have something you really might want.”
“Trading hours commence on Monday,” I stated stoically.
“Please,” he intoned. He was wearing a rough-looking pea coat and dress-blue uniform pants that looked too big on his skinny frame. He swung an architect’s blueprint tube off of his shoulder just as I sensed Santi appearing behind me, an Easton aluminum bat no doubt in his left hand. I subtly leaned left to accommodate anything that might ensue. Santi liked fighting lefty, which added an element of surprise towards the dudes who always expected him to draw or punch from the right.
“I know you know how to obtain Admission,” this guy Harold said, his voice somewhat hoarse. Maybe from the nasty February weather, maybe from yelling. Maybe both. Maybe worse. “I know it’s not easy to get. But please, hear me out.”
“Why?” Santi spat, his Argentinian accent adding a veil of vehemence.
“I was with the National Guard’s nuclear cleanup crew,” the guy said. “I’ve just come from New York City.”
***
Chapter Four – Starry Fight
In one of the collections of papers in the basement I have the final copies of the New York Times. Also the Post and Daily News too, but the Times one was my favorite. So stoic. So like the Grey Lady, to calmly explain that a terrorist attack of unknown but strongly speculated origin had taken place.
The kicker is the format. The Grey Lady had been reduced to a blue-inked one-pager that even the crummiest punk-rock ‘zine scenesters would have derided. But to me, that gritty, charred slice of regular office paper shows me all the beauty of total commitment, a captain going down with his ship.
I dunno. I wasn’t old-old when it all went down (I’m still not, though I damn well feel it some days) but I was old enough to remember what it was like before all the technology ran all the things. I knew that final edition of the Times, that smudgy purple-print “Dear John” to humanity, had been typed up on a manual typewriter. Someone at the office must have had one, maybe as a prank gift or an ostentatious “real journalist” piece of desk setting. It didn’t care about the lack of electricity. The hastily-aligned borders and blue residue of the ink could only mean one thing: it was cranked off, by hand, on some old mimeograph machine that must have been dug out of the depths of a basement or storage locker.
But it existed. It told its story. Even if all the news that was fit to print was little more than a few breathless rumors, some hints for hauling out, and the final, friendly headline of “GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK”, it existed.
Kind of funny, that we’d spent time from the dawn of the printing press safeguarding first editions of various books as the height of value. Now, for some items, it was their LAST edition that was the only thing that mattered.
Oh well. It existed. It told its story. Survival in and of itself is a kind of value, never let anyone (or yourself) tell you otherwise.
What Harold was doing appeared to be an issue of survival.
I let him inside and he wasted no time sitting down at the bar and undoing the cap on his blueprint tube. Santi watched him suspiciously, as though the tube was filled with anthrax or explosives or something, and the gingerly way Harold handled it did indeed make it seem like the object inside was of dangerous value.
“I was part of a cleanup crew on the East Side,” Harold explained, rubbing his hands together for warmth as he readied to show us his prize. “Hundreds of mansions, penthouses, all that old money. There was stuff to be saved. I’d heard how important it was to you guys. I wanted to help. God knows no one on that forsaken island cares.”
I studied his pale pallor, his obvious anxiety, his thinning buzzcut. I wondered if the radiation maybe didn’t hit him harder than he thought. I knew the National Guard tried to conscript a lot of help in the A-Day aftermath, but this guy just didn’t fit the bill somehow.
Still, a part of me wanted all the news from New York that he could express, even if they were exaggerated or secondhand. The truth can set you free, but stories can set you safe.
Not that any of us were really safe, anymore, but I did want to hear his tale.
“The Met went into lockdown, there was no breaching the security doors,” he explained, referring to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. No surprise there, that castle of creativity was one of the most heavily-guarded institutions in the world, EMP blast or no.
“But,” he continued, “there’s a lot of glass on the ground floor of the Museum of Modern Art. We got in there pretty easy.”
“Who’s we?” I asked. He named a battalion I made note of to double-check with Officer Rick. Santi repeated it, apparently aware of their existence from elsewhere, and offered the guy a semi-serious salute, which Harold crisply returned. Oddly enough, I was beginning to believe this guy.
But believe him or not, what followed was going to require verification.
From the blueprint tube, possible-guardsman Harold pulled out a rolled canvas. It was smallish, but when he unfurled it, its simple elegance radiated out at us, mesmerizing as a masterpiece.
Sitting on my bar, surrounded by walls covered with random art and imagery from nearly every location humanity had previously inhabited, a little luminous in the sunlight seeping in from the front windows, was Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”
And though there was no possible way Harold could have known this, he’d rescued Uncle Marty’s all-time favorite painting.
Santi and I stood there, staring, scrutinizing, and speculating. Harold wore an impassive look that partially said he’s completed his mission, and partially said he wanted compensation for doing so.
There’s no way he could have known it was Uncle Marty’s favorite. But this? If this was real, it’d mean Admission. Astronaut or no astronaut.
This was the actual definition of priceless.
“Well,” I said. “I need to take this downstairs and examine it under better lighting. Of course, you’re welcome to join me.”
“Lead the way,” Harold replied. I nodded to Santi, who was already in working position behind the bar, and touched the sap at my side to silently show I’d be safe.
We walked back through the room that used to be a kitchen (now a glorified storage space for easily-traded items). I kicked up an unobtrusive floor panel in the back.
A stairway descended into darkness. Harold suddenly looked nonplussed. I hit a generator-fed light switch, one of the few bits of precious electricity we’d been able to reconfigure in the last few years, and led him into the flickering underground.
The basement of the bar is the same size as the main room, an expanse nearly as big as a regulation basketball court. It’s filled with supplies, a major archive of art, treasures for trade or University installment, and a good amount of storage for stuff belonging to sailors who are currently at sea. But that wasn’t the room we were going to. Through another padlocked door, we wound through a deeper section of the underground, now inside the centuries-old shanghai tunnels that pirates used to drag press-ganged captives through en route to the docks.
One more padlocked door, this one steel. Behind it, the stone sub-basement stairs were cold as the grave, the corridor spooky-silent as we approached one of several steel doors similar to the first. I was one of a very few people who knew how to navigate down here, by design. I ushered Harold into a room not much larger than a big closet and shut the door with a thud.
“Wait here.”
I left through a side door and in the sub-basement’s darkened main chamber, I rearranged a few things, rolling a large rack toward the antechamber’s thick observation window. Using a flashlight, I briefly examined Harold’s canvas again. Back in the small antechamber with Harold, I pulled the black curtain from the observation window and hit the lights. Even though the retro-fixed technology wasn’t quite there yet, even to the elite echelon of traders I brought down there, the effect itself was still pretty impressive.
But not as impressive as to what it illuminated.
As the still-evolving lights buzzed and flickered their way to life, I noted Harold’s face reflected in the clear bulletproof plastic of the observation panel. In the space of a few seconds, he registered a spectrum of emotions, from horror to amazement to utter unbelievability.
The horror was that I was holding a gun to his head.
The amazement was that just beyond a few inches of bolted-on bulletproof window, on one of a number of large rolling racks which I’d long ago hired Manny to craft from old industrial piping, there were five exact, gorgeous, very nearly perfect copies of Van Gogh’s formerly one-and-only “Starry Night”, and they had sealed Harold’s death warrant.
***
Also nestled amongst the treasures in the basement is my brig.
Yeah, I have a brig. What? I need it. Precisely for people like Harold, who was now occupying it most morosely.
I’d added his copy of “Starry Night” to my collection. It really was quite a good fake.
“Now Harold,” I said calmly through the thick steel bars of the single cell. “I’m not saying you’re a forger. I’m just saying that this is an extremely interesting painting, and that the pirates’ penalty for trying to pass forgeries is death.”
“But you’re not a pirate,” he countered.
“No, I’m not. But you are. There’s not an army in the world that salutes left-handed.”
I’d watched upstairs when Santi had cleanly caught him. It was a simple test, Santi throwing his lefty salute at suspicious soldiers or sailors, and only real ones knew to call him out on it.
“Now, we have two problems. Number one, I’ve studied the REAL one enough to know that that painting is a forgery, and that’s a punishable offense. But that’s not the interesting problem.”
Harold stared stonily.
“The interesting problem is who the forger could actually be. It could be you, but I don’t think it is. I think you got that by hook or by crook from someone else, and I’m interested to learn who that someone might be. Because, I must say, they are very talented. Now, I know there are Chinese artists who can spin these things out, made to order. Down to the brushstroke. Could you be working with them?”
Harold didn’t reply, though it seemed like he wanted to.
“Because I’ve heard the Chinese are ramping up to hit some major places around here. Could you be working for them? Flooding the market? Infiltrating to learn our operational secrets here? If that’s true, I’m sorry to say, you’ve seen nothing of the extent of our empire.”
This was true. Apart from the numerous, rather esoteric treasures I kept on the bar’s walls, and my decent but diverse archive here downstairs, all the major collections were at The University.
“Now, I don’t like hurting people’s feelings, let alone killing them,” I continued. “Especially not over art. But I can’t let you stay here.” I let that sentence hang, as Harold hanged his head. “I work with all the dockmasters,” I continued. “If you were to give me some strong intelligence, perhaps I could set you up on a decent ship’s crew…”
“Please no. There’s beasts in the sea.”
The way he said it took me aback, first mentally and then physically as I stopped short and leaned my head back to scrutinize his face. His eyes, suddenly steely and hard, betrayed no fear, but rather staunch, almost fear-inducing certainty.
“You can’t be a sailor?” I asked.
“Please. Please no.”
Images of Moby Dick, Cthulhu, all the great and grievous thalassophobia-inducing creatures swam and slunk through the brine of my mind. Fukushima had emptied into the ocean, Indian River too. That other one on the beach in New Hampshire. Probably loads more too, by now. It wasn’t at all out of the scope of speculation to think that maybe a bad reaction had occurred with organic life somewhere in the murky deep, and what prowled the depths was not happy about it.
Maybe resigning Harold to such a fate with such a creature was justice in itself for all this. I took a moment to seriously ponder my reply, when I heard a distinct sound.
Footsteps bounding down the stone stairs.
Bracelets clanking as hands unlocked a padlock.
“Reli!” Joy admonished, her eyes wide at Harold in the brig.
“Not now. Go back upstairs.”
“Reliiii,” Joy whined. “For real. Come up!”
“Stop it. I’m serious.”
“Me too,” Joy exhorted. “Rudy’s here.”
***
Chapter Five – The Chancellor’s List
He was wearing a ridiculous tri-cornered hat that he had looted out of some historical collection or theatre somewhere, because of course he was. He even wore a cravat and one of those brass-button tailcoats like you’d see in an oil painting of some noble seafarer, although most of those old paintings wouldn’t include a guy rocking Rudy’s bushy beard, thick silver earrings, and murals of tattoos. But Jesus, he even had the knee socks. Playing privateer for all he could.
It irked me how adorable it all was.
He was sitting at the bar sipping a snifter of our best weed-mead, dealing out poker hands with Joy and Santi, using my drachmas as chips. When he saw me he stood and, ridiculous as it was, doffed his tricorner hat and bowed to me.
Who the hell pulls that sort of shit? Some former New York hipster playing privateer, that’s who.
My chest felt a little expansive as he again stood upright and came in for a hug.
“How’s it going, darlin’? How was the meeting?”
“Important.” I hustled behind the bar, grabbing my jacket, gloves and Mohawk-knit ski hat. “We need to get to The University.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me how the ocean was?”
“You made it back. I assume the ocean was equitable.”
“Indeed. I brought back a plethora of pleasantries. Don’t we have a moment to…”
“No. Joy, suit up.” I threw her her own winter gear from behind the bar.
Rudy swirled the liquor languorously in his snifter, watching amusedly as we completed our braving-the-outdoors ministrations. Winter, nuclear or otherwise, was goddamn cold around here. I yanked my ski hat down over my ears.
“Santi, I’ll be back with the band in a few hours. Hold down the fort?”
“Si, hermana.”
Rudy quaffed his weed-mead. “Always a pleasure, Senor Santiago. See you a little later.” Rudy reached under the bar’s edge and removed a hilariously huge greatcoat made of several large, furry animals, including what appeared to be most of a bear.
“Trading with the Canadians, I see?” I asked as we headed for the door.
“Among others. They do like our beer though, which is great, because for some Frenchy reason they still have exceptional chocolate in Montreal up for trade. Those snow-Frogs keep it real.”
Rudy had a carriage parked outside, a black hansom fit for six passengers. Four well-kept horses pawed the lightly snowy ground, their harnesses jingling softly.
Reading my sugar-rimmed thoughts, Rudy continued, “Don’t worry, of course I brought you some. Down here you’d be lucky to catch a stale Hershey bar.” He opened the carriage door for Joy to clamber in.
“What’s a Hershey bar?” she asked innocently.
Rudy looked at me with mock consternation. “Reli, what the hell are you teaching this child?”
He shut the door. We climbed onto the driver’s bench, me riding shotgun.
“Oh, you know, just math, accounting, business, science, history, English, Spanish, and probably now sex ed, if you can’t keep your damn cabin boy away from her.”
“Robbo’s cabin boy. You know I only keep fur-children on my boat.”
That was an understatement. Rudy sidelined in rescuing all manner of abandoned (or wild) animals, from the mundane to the inappropriately exotic. The local zoo still had a giraffe he’d drunkenly hijacked from some theme park in pre-flooded Florida and hauled up the coast. That had been one hilar
ious docking day at the port.
He lightly jogged the reins, made smooching sounds at the horses, and without a moment’s pause they carted us up the street.
“If you guys are hanging out today, keep her away from the actual pirates, please,” I requested. “Last thing I need is for The Admiral’s daughter to stowaway and end up getting pitched overboard halfway across the Goddamn Atlantic.”
“They wouldn’t throw her overboard,” Rudy reasoned. “She’s good collateral.”
“Don’t you think of shanghai’ing her, either, no matter how much she begs you.”
“I’m a privateer, not a pirate. I don’t shanghai. I impress.”
I wish you’d impress me. The thought leapt to my mind nigh-unbidden. Sexually or seafaringly. Hell, both. I don’t want to run a crummy pirate-prone trading post of a bar forever. I’d be one hell of a first mate…
I reined my thoughts in, wary that they’d somehow leap out into obviousness across my face.
Values. I needed to remember them. We had too much here, and too much at stake, for something as transient and distracting as my dumb feelings to get in the way.
“Speaking of impressing, I have someone in the brig that could use a dose of salty air,” I told him.
“Oh really?”
As we trotted through town, the shiny black carriage turning the townsfolk’s heads, I summarized the events of the morning. Rudy’s solution, as I’d suspected, was a brutally efficient one.
“I’ll talk to Robbo tonight. Better yet, I’ll get one of the Rockeros to talk to him, he trusts them more with shit like that. He’ll wonder why I didn’t want the guy.”
“You’re seriously saying I should just foist this guy Harold on a pirate? Legit, sell him into slavery?”
“Robbo might take him off your hands for cheap. He lost a bunch of guys in a firefight somewhere off Cuba. Ask him for a Picasso or something, you know he’d rather offload all that Spanish stuff safely anyway. If it can’t be fired, fucked, or food, he probably doesn’t want it.”
“I’ll think about it. Let’s see what The Admiral says.”
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