[What Might Have Been 01] Alternate Empires

by Anthology

  Everybody in the bar noticed us when we came in. You could see their faces tighten up.

  The bartender reached over and put the cover on the free-lunch jar. I caught that even though I was watching the people in the booths.

  They knew who we were. You could see the caution come into their eyes. I’m big enough that nobody just glances at me once. You get used to that after a while and then you start to liking it.

  “Beer,” I said when we got to the mahogany bar. The bartender drew it, looking at me. He let some suds slop over and wiped the glass and stood holding it until I put down a quarter.

  “Two,” I said. The bartender put the glass in front of me and I pushed it toward Phillips. He let some of the second beer slop out too because he was busy watching my hands. I took the glass with my right and with my left I lifted the cover off the free-lunch jar.

  “No,” he said.

  I took a sandwich out.

  “I’m gonna make like I didn’t hear that,” I said and bit into the sandwich. It was cheese with some mayonnaise and hadn’t been made today.

  I tossed the sandwich aside. “Got anything better?”

  “Not for you,” the bartender said.

  “You got your license out where I can read it?”

  “You guys is federal. Got no call to want my liquor license.”

  “Lawyer, huh?” Phillips asked slow and steady. He doesn’t say much but people always listen.

  The bartender was in pretty good shape, a middle-sized guy with big arm muscles, but he made a mistake then. His hand slid under the bar, watching us both, and I reached over and grabbed his wrist. I yanked his hand up and there was a pistol in it. The hammer was already cocked. Phillips got his fingers between the revolver’s hammer and the firing pin. We pulled it out of the bartender’s hand easy and I tapped him a light one in the snoot, hardly getting off my stool. He staggered back and Phillips put away the revolver in a coat pocket.

  “Guys like you shouldn’t have guns,” Phillips said. “Get hurt that way.”

  “You just stand there and look pretty,” I said.

  “It’s Garrett, isn’t it?”

  “Now don’t never you mind,” Phillips said.

  The rest of the bar was quiet and I turned and gave them a look. “What you expect?” I said loud enough so they could all hear. “Man pulls a gun on you, you take care of him.”

  A peroxide blond in a back booth called out, “You bastards!”

  “There a back alley here?” I asked the whole room.

  Their faces were tight and they didn’t know whether to tell me the truth or not.

  “Hey, yeah,” Phillips said. “Sure there’s a back door. You ’member, the briefing said so.”

  He’s not too bright. So I used a different way to open them up. “Blondie, you want we ask you some questions? Maybe out in that alley?”

  Peroxide looked steady at me for a moment and then looked away. She knew what we’d do to her out there if she made any more noise. Women know those things without your saying.

  I turned my back to them and said, “My nickel.”

  The bartender had stopped his nose from bleeding but he wasn’t thinking very well. He just blinked at me.

  “Change for the beers,” I said. “You can turn on that TV, too.”

  He fumbled getting the nickel. When the last of The Milton Berle Hour came on the bar filled with enough sound so anybody coming in from the street wouldn’t notice that nobody was talking. They were just watching Phillips and me.

  I sipped my beer. Part of our job is to let folks know we’re not fooling around anymore. Show the flag, kind of.

  The Berle show went off and you could smell the tense sweat in the bar. I acted casual, like I didn’t care. The government news bulletins were coming on and the bartender started to change the channel and I waved him off.

  “Time for Lucy,” he said. He had gotten some backbone into his voice again.

  I smiled at him. “I guess I know what time it is. Let’s inform these citizens a li’l.”

  There was a Schlitz ad with dancing and singing bottles, the king of beers, and then more news. They mentioned the new directives about the state of emergency, but nothing I didn’t already know two days ago. Good. No surprises.

  “Let’s have Lucy!” somebody yelled behind me.

  I turned around but nobody said anything more. “You’d maybe like watchin’ the convention?” I said.

  Nobody spoke. So I grinned and said, “Maybe you patriots could learn somethin’ that way.”

  I laughed a little and gestured to the bartender. He spun the dial and there was the Republican convention, warming up. Cronkite talking over the background noise.

  “Somethin’, huh?” I said to Phillips. “Not like four years ago.”

  “Don’t matter that much,” Phillips said. He watched the door while I kept an eye on the crowd.

  “You kiddin’? Why, that goddamn Eisenhower almost took the nomination away from Taft last time. Hadn’t been for Nixon deliverin’ the California delegation to old man Taft, that pinko general coulda won.”

  “So?” Phillips sipped his beer. A station break came and I could hear tires hissing by outside in the light rain. My jacket smelled damp. I never wear a raincoat on a job like this. They get in your way. The street lights threw stretched shapes against the bar windows. Phillips watched the passing shadows, waiting calm as anything for one of them to turn and come in the door.

  I said, “You think Eisenhower, with that Kraut name, woulda picked our guy for the second spot?”

  “Mighta.”

  “Hell no. Even if he had, Eisenhower didn’t drop dead a year later.”

  “You’re right there,” Phillips said to humor me. He’s not a man for theory.

  “I tell you, Taft winnin’ and then dyin’, it was a godsend. Gave us the man we shoulda had. Never coulda elected him. The Commies, they’d never have let him get in power.”

  Phillips stiffened. I thought it was what I’d said, but then a guy came through the doors in a slick black raincoat. He was pale and I saw it was our man. Cheering at the convention came up then and he didn’t notice anything funny, not until he got a few steps in and saw the faces.

  Garrett’s eyes widened as I came to him. He pulled his hands up like he was reaching for something under his coat, or maybe just to protect himself.

  I didn’t care which. I hit him once in the stomach to take the wind out of him and then gave him two quick overhand punches in the jaw. He went down nice and solid and wasn’t going to get back up in a hurry.

  Phillips searched him. There was no gun after all. The bar was dead quiet.

  A guy in a porkpie hat came up to me all hot and bothered, like he hadn’t been paying attention before, and said, “You can’t just attack a, a member of the Congress! That’s Congressman Garrett there! I don’t care—”

  The big talk went right out of him when I slammed a fist into his gut. Porkpie was another lawyer, no real fight in him.

  I walked back to the bar and drained my beer. The ’56 convention was rolling on, nominations just starting, but you knew that was all bull. Only one man was possible, and when the election came there’d be plenty guys like me to fix it so he won.

  Just then they put on some footage of the president and I stood there a second, just watching him. There was a knot in my throat when I looked at him, a real American. There were damn few of us, even now. We’d gotten in by accident, maybe, but now we were going to make every day count. Clean up the country. And hell, if the work wasn’t done by the time his second term ended in 1961, we might have to diddle the Constitution a little, keep him in power until things worked okay.

  Cronkite came on then, babbling about letting Adlai Stevenson out of house arrest, and I went to help Phillips get Garrett to his feet. I sure didn’t want to have to haul the guy out to our car.

  We got him up with his raincoat all twisted around him. Then the porkpie hat guy was there again, but thi
s time with about a dozen of them behind him. They looked mad and jittery. A bunch like that can be trouble. I wondered if this was such a good idea, taking Garrett in his neighborhood bar. But the chief said we had to show these types we’d go anywhere, anytime.

  Porkpie said, “You got no warrant.”

  “Sure I do.” I showed them the paper. These types always think paper is God.

  “Sit down,” Phillips said, being civil. “You people all sit down.”

  “That’s a congressman you got there. We—”

  “Traitor, is what you mean,” I said.

  Peroxide came up then, screeching. “You think you can just take anybody, you lousy sonsabitches—”

  Porkpie took a poke at me then. I caught it and gave him a right cross, pretty as you please. He staggered back. Still, I saw we could really get in a fix here if they all came at us.

  Peroxide called out, “Come on, we can—”

  She stopped when I pulled out the gun. It’s a big steel automatic, just about the right size for a guy like me. Some guys use silencers with them, but me, I like the noise.

  They all looked at it awhile and their faces changed, closing up, each one of them alone with their thoughts, and then I knew they wouldn’t do anything.

  “Come on,” I said. We carried the traitor out into the night. I was so pumped up he felt light.

  Even a year before, we’d have had big trouble bringing in a Commie network type like Garrett. He was a big deal on the House Internal Security Committee and had been giving us a lot of grief. Now nailing him was easy. And all because of one man at the top with real courage.

  We don’t bother with the formalities anymore. Phillips opened the trunk of the Pontiac and I dumped Garrett in. Easier and faster than cramming him into the front, and I wanted to get out of there.

  Garrett was barely conscious and just blinked at me as I slammed down the trunk. They’d wake him up plenty later.

  As I came around to get in the driver’s side I looked through the window of the bar. Cronkite was interviewing the president now. Joe looked like he was in good shape, real statesmanlike, but tough, you could see that.

  Cronkite was probably asking him why he’d chosen Nixon for the VP spot, like there was no other choice. Like I’d tried to tell Phillips, Nixon’s delivering California on the delegate issue in ’52 had paved the way for the Taft ticket. And old Bob Taft, rest his soul, knew what the country needed when the vice presidency nomination came up.

  Just like now. Joe, he doesn’t forget a debt. So Dick Nixon was a shoo-on. McCarthy and Nixon—good ticket, regional balance, solid anti-Commie values. We could do worse. A lot worse.

  I got in and gunned the motor a little, feeling good. The rain had stopped. The meat in the trunk was as good as dead, but we’d deliver it fresh anyway. We took off with a roar into the darkness.

  TO THE PROMISED LAND

  Robert Silverberg

  They came for me at high noon, the hour of Apollo, when only a crazy man would want to go out into the desert. I was hard at work and in no mood to be kidnapped. But to get them to listen to reason was like trying to get the Nile to flow south. They weren’t reasonable men. Their eyes had a wild metallic sheen and they held their jaws and mouths clamped in that special constipated way that fanatics like to affect. As they swaggered about in my little cluttered study, poking at the tottering stacks of books and pawing through the manuscript of my nearly finished history of the collapse of the Empire, they were like two immense irresistible forces, as remote and terrifying as gods of old Aiguptos come to life. I felt helpless before them.

  The older and taller one called himself Eleazar. To me he was Horus, because of his great hawk nose. He looked like an Aiguptian and he was wearing the white linen robe of an Aiguptian. The other, squat and heavily muscled, with a baboon face worthy of Thoth, told me he was Leonardo di Filippo, which is of course a Roman name, and he had an oily Roman look about him. But I knew he was no more Roman than I am. Nor the other, Aiguptian. Both of them spoke in Hebrew, and with an ease that no outsider could ever attain. These were two Israelites, men of my own obscure tribe. Perhaps di Filippo had been born to a father not of the faith, or perhaps he simply liked to pretend that he was one of the world’s masters and not one of God’s forgotten people. I will never know.

  Eleazar stared at me, at the photograph of me on the jacket of my account of the Wars of the Reunification, and at me again, as though trying to satisfy himself that I really was Nathan ben-Simeon. The picture was fifteen years old. My beard had been black then. He tapped the book and pointed questioningly to me and I nodded.

  “Good,” he said. He told me to pack a suitcase, fast, as though I were going down to Alexandria for a weekend holiday. “Moshe sent us to get you,” he said. “Moshe wants you. Moshe needs you. He has important work for you.”

  “Moshe?”

  “The Leader,” Eleazar said, in tones that you would ordinarily reserve for Pharaoh, or perhaps the First Consul. “You don’t know anything about him yet, but you will. All of Aiguptos will know him soon. The whole world.”

  “What does your Moshe want with me?”

  “You’re going to write an account of the Exodus for him,” said di Filippo.

  “Ancient history isn’t my field,” I told him.

  “We’re not talking about ancient history.”

  “The Exodus was three thousand years ago, and what can you say about it at this late date except that it’s a damned shame that it didn’t work out?”

  Di Filippo looked blank for a moment. Then he said, “We’re not talking about that one. The Exodus is now. It’s about to happen, the new one, the real one. That other one long ago was a mistake, a false try.”

  “And this new Moshe of yours wants to do it all over again? Why? Can’t he be satisfied with the first fiasco? Do we need another? Where could we possibly go that would be any better than Aiguptos?”

  “You’ll see. What Moshe is doing will be the biggest news since the burning bush.”

  “Enough,” Eleazar said. “We ought to be hitting the road. Get your things together, Dr. Ben-Simeon.”

  So they really meant to take me away. I felt fear and disbelief. Was this actually happening? Could I resist them? I would not let it happen. Time for some show of firmness, I thought. The scholar standing on his authority. Surely they wouldn’t attempt force. Whatever else they might be, they were Hebrews. They would respect a scholar. Brusque, crisp, fatherly, the melamed, the man of learning. I shook my head. “I’m afraid not. It’s simply not possible.”

  Eleazar made a small gesture with one hand. Di Filippo moved ominously close to me and his stocky body seemed to expand in a frightening way. “Come on,” he said quietly. “We’ve got a car waiting right outside. It’s a four-hour drive, and Moshe said to get you there before sundown.”

  My sense of helplessness came sweeping back. “Please. I have work to do, and—”

  “Screw your work, professor. Start packing, or we’ll take you just as you are.”

  The street was silent and empty, with that forlorn midday look that makes Menfe seem like an abandoned city when the sun is at its height. I walked between them, a prisoner, trying to remain calm. When I glanced back at the battered old gray facades of the Hebrew Quarter where I had lived all my life, I wondered if I would ever see them again, what would happen to my books, who would preserve my papers. It was like a dream.

  A sharp dusty wind was blowing out of the west, reddening the sky so that it seemed that the whole Delta must be aflame, and the noontime heat was enough to kosher a pig. The air smelled of cooking oil, of orange blossoms, of camel dung, of smoke. They had parked on the far side of Amenhotep Plaza just behind the vast ruined statue of Pharaoh, probably in hope of catching the shadows, but at this hour there were no shadows and the car was like an oven. Di Filippo drove, Eleazar sat in back with me. I kept myself completely still, hardly even breathing, as though I could construct a sphere of invulnerability around
me by remaining motionless. But when Eleazar offered me a cigarette I snatched it from him with such sudden ferocity that he looked at me in amazement.

  We circled the Hippodrome and the Great Basilica where the judges of the Republic hold court, and joined the sparse flow of traffic that was entering the Sacred Way. So our route lay eastward out of the city, across the river and into the desert. I asked no questions. I was frightened, numbed, angry, and—I suppose—to some degree curious. It was a paralyzing combination of emotions. So I sat quietly, praying only that these men and their Leader would be done with me in short order and return me to my home and my studies.

  “This filthy city,” Eleazar muttered. “How I despise it!”

  In fact it had always seemed grand and beautiful to me: a measure of my assimilation, some might say, though inwardly I feel very much the Israelite, not in the least Aiguptian. Even a Hebrew must concede that Menfe is one of the world’s great cities. Or Memphis, rather, as the Greeks began calling it long ago, and which practically everyone calls it now except antiquarians like me. The Greeks liked to hang their own slippery names on everything and the dull Romans, when it was their turn to own the globe, generally kept them, which is why this land where I live is known as Aiguptos—or Egypt, as it’s sometimes spelled these days—despite the fact that its own people call it Misr when they speak among themselves. And Menfe is Memphis. I prefer Menfe. Though to be consistent I should call it Men-ofer, as it was known in the time when Pharaohs really were Pharaohs, or, better yet, Moph, which is its Hebrew name. By whatever name, it is the most majestic city this side of Roma, so everyone says, and so I am willing to believe, though I have never been beyond the borders of the province of Aiguptos in my life.

  The splendid old temples of the Sacred Way went by on both sides, the Temple of Isis and the Temple of Sarapis and the Temple of Jupiter Ammon and all the rest, fifty or a hundred of them on that great boulevard whose pavements are lined with sphinxes and bulls: Dagon’s temple, Mithra’s and Cybele’s, Baal’s, Marduk’s, Zarathustra’s, a temple for every god and goddess anyone had ever imagined, except, of course, the One True God, whom we few Hebrews prefer to worship in our private way behind the walls of our own quarter. The gods of all the Earth have washed up here in Menfe like so much Nile mud. Of course hardly anyone takes them very seriously these days, even the supposed faithful. It would be folly to pretend that this is a religious age. Mithra’s shrine still gets some worshippers, and of course that of Jupiter Ammon. People go to those to do business, to see their friends, maybe to ask favors on high. The rest of the temples might as well be museums. No one goes into them except Roman and Japanese tourists. Yet here they still stand, many of them thousands of years old. Nothing is ever thrown away in the land of Misr.