Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers

by Kage Baker

  Rich boy down on his luck meets poor girl who works at office, I thought to myself. He needs cash. She figures out a way to abscond with office’s money. What happens next? They grab the loot, go on the run and then, while she’s asleep in a room somewhere, the boyfriend ditches the girl. But not without—

  “He took the money, and you still love him,” I said.

  She sighed. “I can’t help that,” she said.

  “So when you woke up and found him gone, leaving you broke with the law after you, you came here,” I said grimly. She looked at me.

  “I didn’t mean to,” she said. “I walked out to the highway and I hitchhiked. I slept in the woods. I got a ride with a truck driver, but he kept asking me questions and I didn’t know what to tell him. So the next time a farm came in sight I said that was where I lived and he let me out there. I just walked on. I came here and saw the stairs going down. That was when I decided. It seemed like a good idea at the time.” Her voice was listless.

  “It all seems so stupid. I didn’t think I was stupid. I guess I deserve whatever happens now.” I didn’t say anything for a minute. Some mortals deserve to die. The boyfriend deserved to die, wherever he was, but there wasn’t anything I could do about him.

  “What you did, you did for love,” I told the girl. “But you were betrayed. Honey, that’s one of the oldest tricks in the book, what he pulled on you! He used you to get the money and then dropped you like a rock. It’s not your fault.”

  I wasn’t making her feel better. I made an effort to control my temper. She shivered and looked out at the water again. The sun had gone down by this time and the temperature was dropping fast.

  “Is my body still out there, on the bottom of the bay?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “You’re still in your body. You’re only conditionally dead. That’s why you’re still feeling the cold and wet. We have to talk about this some more, but I’m going to make a fire first.”

  “The Angel of Death by Drowning builds campfires?” she said wearily.

  “Yeah,” I told her. I got up and looked around. Up the beach, left high and dry by last winter’s tides, was a chunk of redwood log maybe three feet in diameter. I climbed up to it, lifted it as though it weighed nothing, and brought it back to where the girl sat. She stared up at me, wide-eyed, and any doubts she might have had about my supernatural nature were gone.

  “Here we go,” I said, and setting it down above the tideline I went into hyperfunction and busted the whole thing into a huge mound of punky splintered kindling.

  “See, we’ve still got some things to work out,” I said. “Think of this as a hearing to determine whether or not you’re going to stand trial.” I looked around for a sharp stick and did the twirling thing to make a fire, that almost never works at ordinary mortal speed but works in hyperfunction just fine. A little bright flame jetted up silently, slid along the splintered wood and began to eat into it. She had watched all this in shock, staring. Yes! I had her attention now, all right, that was terror and awe in her black eyes, and it didn’t matter anymore that my union suit sagged or my chin was unshaven. I loomed against a background of dancing flame and held out my arms like Leopold Stokowski giving a command to the string section.

  “Do you truly repent your sin?” I asked her. She nodded mutely.

  “Do you see the man who betrayed you for the cheap liar he is?” I demanded. “Not loving you, not worthy of your love?”

  Her face twisted and she drew a ragged breath and said, “Yes.”

  “What would you do with your life, if it were given back to you?” Was that hope leaping up in her eyes, or just the reflection of the fire? “I—I’d start over. Somehow!

  I’d never be such a fool again. I’d try and earn enough to send the money back to Mr. Jensen.”

  “Are you telling me the truth?”

  “Yes!” she cried. “I don’t know how I’d do it, but I swear that’s what I’d do!”

  “Then come to me, mortal child,” I intoned, holding out my hand, “And I will give you your life back.” She rose and took my hand and I pulled her close, so she could get warm and dry by the fire, but her arms went around me and her mouth fastened desperately on mine.

  Look, I didn’t think that was going to happen. We’re immortals but we’re not all-knowing. I’d have thought it was the last thing that poor kid wanted. She did want it, though, she’d come there in the first place hoping something would ravage her; the least I could do was keep the experience sort of spiritual. So I played Azrael, or some kind of angel anyway, there by the fire on that dark beach between life and death.

  She slept like a baby, curled up in the firelight. Her face was so peaceful. I sat a few paces away with my head in my hands, feeling like thirty cents.

  After a while of gloomy meditation on stuff that would only depress you if I described it, I got up and found her purse. Sitting down, I went through its contents.

  There were some keys on a ring. A coin purse containing three pennies and a dime. A pencil. A dime-store fountain pen. A comb. A compact and a tube of lipstick. A bottle of nail polish and an emery board. A leather case containing a Social Security card issued to Cora Luciano. Two letters and a photograph.

  I read the letters. They were from the guy. He was so smooth, so polished, he might have copied every word out of a romance novel. How could she have believed him for a minute? But she didn’t understand professional deceivers. I do, being in that line of work myself. I looked at the photograph too. It had been taken at an amusement park, I guess, not long ago. They were standing against a rail in front of a carousel. His arm was around her. He was tall, handsome, had a well-dressed Ivy League WASP kind of look to him. Bastard. Beside him she looked small and shabby and dark, poor little office clerk. Radiantly happy, of course.

  Bastard.

  Old, old story, nothing new to me. I still wanted to find the guy and kill him. I knew, in the back of my mind, why this was making me so sore. It had to do with this green place and another girl who’d come here once, whose life had been wrecked by a smooth-talking mortal man. That girl hadn’t died here. She can’t die, much as she’d like to.

  I couldn’t help her. I never can.

  After a while I got up and looked at Cora, studying her critically. I took the letters, the photograph and the Social Security card and fed them to the fire.

  I walked away down the beach to where I’d buried my cachebox and dug it up. Retrieving some of the stuff inside, I went back to the fire and sat down to work.

  The Company had a neat little document alteration device back then, issued to most field personnel. It looked like a fountain pen. Actually when you unscrewed the cap the business end was a fountain pen,’

  and if you were a cyborg or even just a really good forger, you could imitate typed letters with it that nobody could tell hadn’t been formed on a machine. When you reversed the device, though, when you took off the smaller cap on the other end, there was an itty-bitty laser that was delicate enough to remove the ink on paper fibers without removing the fibers underneath.

  I did the birth certificate first. All I had to change on that was the gender and year of birth; 1913

  became 1918.1 deleted my signature on the Social Security card. She’d have to sign it herself, when she became Miss Leslie Joseph. I thanked God we were still in the paper age; doing something like this in, say, 1998 would be a nightmare.

  I’d have to make myself up a new birth certificate and Social Security card, of course, and I’d have to change the name on my new driver’s license—I thought of calling myself Angelo Morte, but the Company frowns on obvious stuff like that. They prefer names that don’t draw attention. I settled on William Joseph. Boring, but with luck I’d only have to use it for a few decades. Bill Joseph. Yeah. I could be a Bill Joseph.

  I had everything stashed away again by the time I woke her. The sky was just beginning to get light.

  “Cora.”

  “Hm?” She opened he
r eyes and then sat up abruptly, staring at me. “Oh, my God. I thought you—”

  “You thought I was a dream? Almost. Listen to me, Cora, I’m going back now and I don’t have a lot of time.” I hunkered down beside her. “You’ve been given a new life. Cora Luciano died out there in the water, and so did all her mistakes. You’re Leslie Joseph now, understand?”

  “Leslie Joseph,” she repeated, and she didn’t understand but she was trying to.

  “That’s right,” I said, and held up her birth certificate. “See? Here’s your proof. You’re twenty years old and you’ll be twenty-one next March. Here’s your Social Security card. Sign your name, Leslie.” I held it out to her with the pen from her purse. Wonderingly, she signed Leslie Joseph.

  “Great,” I said, and taking the card I slipped it into the leather case that had held her old one. Next I held up a thick wad of cash. “Thousand dollars, mostly in tens and twenties. You know better than to flash it, though, right, Leslie? You’re a smart girl. Stick it down in the bottom of your purse, peel off a ten and keep it at the top.” I put the money in her hands.

  “You’re going to put on your shoes and go up the stairs over there and walk north along the highway. Hitchhike, only if you can find another woman to give you a ride. When you get to Monterey, buy yourself all new clothes. New shoes. New handbag. New makeup, too, in different shades. Ditch all of Cora’s things. Buy a bus ticket to San Francisco and once you get there, buy a train ticket to New York. Get on that train and never look back.”

  I got to my feet and backed away from her, into the waves.

  “You’ll be fine in New York, Leslie. It’s a big place, lots of opportunities, and nobody knows anybody back there. You’ll find an apartment. You’ll find an office job. Maybe you’ll even find a nice guy. But nobody, and I mean nobody, is ever again going to talk you into doing something you know is bad for you. Okay? You got all that, Leslie?”

  She nodded as if mesmerized, watching me as I retreated. The water was up to my chest now, the swell was breaking over my shoulders.

  “You’re one lucky mortal, Leslie,” I called to her. “You just got handed the break of your life. It’s up to you what happens now.”

  I sank into the dark water and swam away under the surface. I didn’t come up again until I was far enough out that she couldn’t see me.

  I could see her, though. She had put on her shoes and was climbing the stairs in a determined kind of way. I watched as she got up to the road, took a firm grip on her purse and marched away into the morning.

  She didn’t look back.

  The cachebox was already breaking up—they’re not meant to be reused after the seal is broken—so my Bill Joseph clothes were full of sand, but at least they were dry, and I was able to warm myself up some over the smoking embers of the fire. I stuffed my new wallet in my pocket, slung on my knapsack, climbed the stairs and walked south as far as Gorda, where I ate enough breakfast for three guys. Then I talked a mortal into giving me a ride as far as San Luis Obispo. He was a nice mortal. I told him all about Bill Joseph, how I was a twenty-five-year-old guy from Santa Rosa, how I lived on Nineteenth Avenue in San Francisco, how I was hiking down here on vacation from my job, which was in a car dealership at Market and Van Ness, how I thought Hitler was a bum and there was probably going to be a war soon and how my favorite song was Harbor Lights, how my mother was dead and my father’d raised me… on and on, and I got the mortal to believe it all. By the time I got on the train at San Luis, I almost believed it myself.

  Bill Joseph enlisted when the war broke out, got himself a nice post as a general’s aide, and was right there when the Supreme Allied Command broke into places like Berchtesgaden and Merkers, where the Nazis had stored all kinds of treasure they’d looted from museums and private collections. Bill Joseph knew what happened to a lot of stuff that was never accounted for. He died under mysterious circumstances, though, before anybody could ask him about it. Drowned in the Danube, poor guy. No body was ever found.

  Leslie Joseph didn’t drown. She went to New York just like I told her to, like the good kid she really was. I found her after the war, though I didn’t let her spot me following her around. We’re not supposed to do stuff like that, but, well, we do, and anyway I was so happy when 1 saw she’d gotten over that bastard who’d screwed her up.

  She met an ordinary guy. He ran a store. She married him. They ran the store together then and had three kids. They were as blissful as mortals who have three kids can be. They were celebrating their fortieth wedding anniversary around the time I went to work for Mr. Spielberg at Universal. Great happy ending, huh?

  I wish to God it was that easy for us.

  Why pirates?

  In the 1950s, an Australian television studio did a weekly series titled The Adventures of Long John Silver starring the late Robert Newton. I never missed it. Practically put my little nose through the screen longing after those vistas of clouds over the South Seas, those towering white sails and pitching decks, those cozy dark taverns, those parrots, those big interesting bad guys who were really good guys at heart. Growing up, I can’t have been the first Wendy to discover that real life with Peter Pan is miserable; but a girl can really go places with a decent pirate. So here’s to growing up, and here’s to boys who aren’t afraid to become men, and here’s to tropic seas and tall ships too.

  The Likely Lad

  * * *

  “Alec’s growing up into such a nice boy,” said Mrs. Lewin fondly, pouring out a cup of herbal tea. “So thoughtful. Do you know, he’s doing all his own laundry now? I never have to’ remind him at all.” Lewin grunted acknowledgement, absorbed in his cricket match. It was only a holo of a game played a century earlier—competitive sports had been illegal for decades now—but it was one he had never seen.

  “Though the water rate’s a bit high,” Mrs. Lewin added, setting the pot back in place and covering it with a tea cozy. “Not that his lordship can’t afford it, goodness knows, but the Borough Council gets so nasty if they suspect you’re wasting anything! I said perhaps Alec ought to save it all up for once a week, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Changes his sheets every day. Won’t let me do it for him at all. Well, I can understand that, I said, fresh bed linens are a treat, and aren’t you the dear to save me coming all the way upstairs and rummaging in that old hamper for your socks… “

  Lewin dragged his attention away from the lost green paradise of Lord’s and played back what she had been saying.

  “Changes his sheets every day?” he repeated.

  “Yes. Isn’t that responsible of our Alec? It seems like only yesterday he was toddling about and screaming every time I tried to take the face flannel to him, and now… “

  “Now he’s fourteen,” said Lewin. “Hmm.”

  “How time flies,” observed Mrs. Lewin.

  “Hmm.” Lewin paused the holo and stood. “Yeah. Think I’ll go have a word with the boy about the water rate, all the same.”

  He plodded up the kitchen stairs.

  Mr. and Mrs. Lewin were Alec’s butler and cook. He lived with them in a mansion in London. Alec’s father, the sixth earl of Finsbury, lived on a yacht somewhere in the Caribbean, and his mother, the Right Honourable Cecilia Ashcroft, was somewhere else, and Alec hadn’t seen either of them in ten years. As a result, Lewin had been obliged to shepherd Alec through most of his childhood. Lewin was not the only one providing Alec with fatherly advice, though he was unaware of this. If he had been aware, he might have spared himself the long climb up to the fourth floor of the house, which was Alec’s domain. Wheezing slightly, Lewin paused on the third-floor landing. He could hear the hideous dissonance of Darwin’s Shoes vibrating above, loud enough to rattle the pictures of Alec’s parents in their frames. Lewin didn’t mind that Alec was listening to crap music much too loud—he was always secretly relieved when Alec did something normal for a boy his age, for reasons that will shortly become apparent—but if the music was loud enough the neighbors would call t
he Public Health Monitors, and that was to be avoided at all costs, in this city of London in this dismal future time.

  So Lewin gritted his teeth and took the last flight at his best speed. Having arrived on the fourth floor without coronary arrest, he hammered on Alec’s door, which was spektered all over with little moving shots of Darwin’s Shoes, Folded Space and other bands Alec happened to think were cool that week. Lewin felt a certain satisfaction at knocking right through the irritating young faces. Almost immediately, the door opened a bit and one eye peered out at him, a very pale blue eye a long way up. Alec, at fourteen, was already six feet tall.

  “Would you mind granting me an interview?” shouted Lewin, glaring up at the eye.

  “Sorry!” Alec opened the door wide with one hand, hastily stuffing something into his pocket with the other. He waved and, mercifully, the decibel level dropped.

  Lewin stepped over the threshold and looked around. Nothing suspicious in sight, at least on the order of bottles or smoking apparatus, and no telltale fume in the air. Light paintings of ships drifted across the walls, and phantom clouds moved across the ceiling. It was an effect that invariably gave Lewin vertigo, so he focused his attention on the boy in front of him.

  “Didn’t I explain what would happen if you played that stuff loud enough to annoy the neighbors?” Lewin demanded.

  “Oh, they can’t hear it,” Alec assured him. “I’ve got a baffle fieldprojected off the walls of the house. Sound waves just fall into it, see? I could set off a bomb in here and nobody’d know.”

  “Please don’t,” said Lewin, sighing. He had no idea what a baffle field was, but not the slightest doubt that Alec could create one. He shifted from foot to foot and Alec, eyeing him nervously, pulled out a chair.

  “Would you like to sit down?”

  “Yeah, thanks.” Lewin sagged into the chair. Alec stood before him a moment, trying not to put his hands in his pockets, and finally retreated to his bed and sat down on its edge, which would nearly put him at Lewin’s eye level standing.