Nobody stopped him, and he stepped out the front door and breathed thick air. Orchard Street was jammed with street vendors, horse drawn carts, and people. The air was heavy with the smell of manure and baking bread. Wooden and brick tenement buildings crowded around him, blocking out the light.
“Head north. Stanton Street is one block away,” Charlotte said.
Parker moved up the block, trying to blend in with the tradesman who hawked their wares and filled the crowded sidewalk. The men around him all sported mustaches and hats, most wearing filthy aprons and cracked boots. Small businesses were crowded between and inside the tenements. Hat makers, cobblers, shirt makers . . . everything was bustling and alive. The depth of detail was incredible—the place felt real.
The noise was deafening. Men shouted and cursed, iron wheels clattered on stone, horses whinnied, leather harnesses creaked, and in the distance he heard the jarring rattle of an elevated train. Added to the din was the general scuffle of feet as an incomprehensible number of people bumped and jostled each other along the sidewalk.
A sickly looking mule pulled a vegetable cart slowly down the street. A woman in a filthy ankle-length dress swatted the mule halfheartedly with a long thin stick. The mule kept pulling, bells around his harness jingling morosely. In its day, this was the most crowded section of Manhattan, filled beyond capacity with the newly arrived poor setting foot in the New World to chase their dreams through the mud and violence of America. Even in this version of history, the same idea held. The prisoners without connections lived down here, in the bowels of Manhattan. Unable to buy their way up the food chain, they toiled in the same backbreaking labors as their ancestors had a hundred and fifty years earlier.
The system was built to rehab the convicted. But like any system, there were flaws. This one took on a life of its own, and some prisoners continued to experience the harshest of circumstances.
Parker crossed the street behind the cart and paused on the corner beneath a leaning gas lamp.
“You’re on Stanton now,” Charlotte said. “Look for the brick tenement with the red door, about fifty feet to the east.”
Parker spotted the building next to a white clapboard house that leaned dangerously to the side. An alley of rutted cobblestones could be seen between the two buildings. Laundry hung limply over the alley, wooden barrels stacked up against the wall in a pool of stagnant filthy water. As Parker approached, two toughs stepped out wearing high-crowned derbies and carrying wooden clubs.
Charlotte’s voice sounded in his ear. “I’m showing the building has security.”
“Yeah. I’m looking at them now. Times two.”
The toughs were heavily muscled for the time, both in dirty long coats with checkered vests. They had the casual amble of men used to getting their way and stepped onto the street to block Parker’s path.
One of the men pointed the club at Parker. “What are you doing here, boy?”
Parker stopped short, put up his hands. “Just minding my business.”
“Why don’t you mind your business the other way,” the man said. “Street’s closed.”
The man jabbed Parker painfully in the ribs with his club. Parker took a step back. His fists clenched, and he took a breath against the pain. The body he was in was stronger than most. The pistol still weighed heavily in his pocket, but he wanted to keep it quiet.
“What am I looking at?” Parker spoke aloud for Selberg’s benefit. The Archive Operator had the ability to scan prison records, and for listed prisoners, he could match up the faces of their new bodies with their records. The point of this whole system was rehabilitation, but some convicts were too far gone. They would never leave this place.
“Both prisoners,” Selberg replied. “Lifers for homicide.”
“Am I authorized?”
“You have a green light.”
The two toughs glanced at each other as Parker seemed to speak to himself. They took another step toward him. One of the men had a thin face, a twisted lip marked by an old scar. The street that teemed with 1880s tenement life suddenly went quiet. From his periphery, he sensed the crowd stepping back onto the sidewalk. A prostitute in a wine-red velvet dress draped in folds walked by and quietly whispered at Parker, “Don’t want to mess with those two.”
Parker smiled and nodded at her, then turned back toward the men. He spread his feet out into a boxer’s stance and dug his back foot into the dirt of the street.
“But I like this street,” Parker said to the men.
“That’s your mistake, then.”
The blow of the club was easy to predict. The first man pulled his arm back, then swung the club in a wide looping motion at Parker’s head. Parker ducked the move easily, the club whistling over his head, then delivered a kick to the gut of the tough. The man doubled over, and Parker caught him across the temple with a right hook.
The second man took a tentative step back as he watched his companion fall unconscious into the dirt. Parker picked up the fallen man’s club from the ground and hefted it expertly in his hand. It was solid oak, with a leather handle.
“You shouldn’t pick fights with strangers,” Parker said, then buried the point of the club deep into the man’s belly. The man crumpled to his knees, and Parker smashed the man’s face with the point of his elbow. The tough shrieked in pain as his nose broke and blood gushed over his mouth.
“Time is ticking,” Charlotte said.
“I know, I know,” Parker replied as he advanced across the rutted street. The front door of the tenement burst open with a single kick. He stepped into a narrow dark hallway littered with broken glass. The roof was layered in dented tin. Peeling, rose-colored wallpaper layered black with soot spread raggedly along the wall. A kerosene ceiling lamp flicked a feeble, blue flame behind its glass enclosure.
“Second floor,” Charlotte said. “Wooden door number three.”
Parker pulled the pistol from his pocket as he took the stairs two at a time. The upstairs hallway was empty. The door to the shared hallway bathroom was left open, a toilet on a wooden platform visible inside. Somewhere a baby cried. Parker pressed his ear to the third door and heard nothing.
“Door three?”
“That is affirmative,” Charlotte replied.
Gripping the pistol in one hand, Parker kicked the door hard, and with a snap of wood, the rickety lock snapped open. Parker advanced quickly into the two-room apartment beyond. The kitchen was empty. A wood fire boiled a kettle of water on a large cast iron stove. The air was stiflingly hot.
The target was in the back bedroom. He jumped up from the bed as Parker moved into the space. He was in his early 30s, with a cunning and unlikable face. He was shirtless with dirty slacks and suspenders that hung around his waist. His eyes went wide and he raised his hands. He stepped back and almost tripped on an oak chest on the floor. A woman sat on the edge of the bed, a baby cradled in her arms. She screamed and moved toward the wall.
From below, a police whistle sounded and Parker heard booted feet on the street below.
“What’s your name?” Parker asked, the pistol leveled at the man’s head.
“What do you want?” The man’s hands began to shake.
“Your name.”
“Edward Rafferty.”
Charlotte’s voice sounded in Parker’s ear. “That’s our guy. Prison snitch. LifeSleep for bank robbery.”
Parker pressed a finger to his lips, then the pistol to Rafferty’s forehead. Outside, the footsteps of the coppers moved by. When the hall was quiet, Parker turned back to Rafferty. “You know why I’m here?”
“No, sir.” He kept his hands in the air. “I work in a tinner’s shop on Essex.”
“Bullshit. You got a twenty-year sleep sentence for a dozen armed bank robberies.”
Rafferty’s eyes flicked slightly to his woman. “I never robbed no banks. Honest. Just work with tin.”
Parker looked around the small, squalid apartment. The place stunk of cabbage and old gr
ease. An ash barrel stood in the corner, overflowing with garbage. The view from the window was blocked by the fire escape. Rafferty’s wife cradled the baby against her chest. She wore a dress the color of dirty snow that hung limply on her pale frame. The baby shrieked, its little face blistering red.
“My wife. Doesn’t know,” Rafferty whispered. “Thinks she was born and raised in here. Perfect synchronization, total memory wipe.”
Parker nodded to the woman. “Take a walk. You see any coppers, you keep your mouth shut. Got it?”
The woman crept silently out like a ghost, the shriek of the baby getting farther and farther away as she descended the stairs.
“Why do you live in this shit hole?” Parker waved the pistol around the room.
“Flats are expensive. Do I look like a Fifth Avenue man? Elevators and steam heat?”
Parker raised an eyebrow and frowned, kicked the edge of the bed with a foot, then lifted up the mattress. Hidden underneath were two Hustler magazines, naked girls rubbing each other on the cover. Typical contraband. For a price, hackers on the outside could insert modern-day items into the system. Every once and a while they would show up. Same thing had been going on for years in the real world. Used to be drugs or cigarettes smuggled in. Now it was all virtual. The idea of something.
Parker held up the magazine. “Get this in your tin shop?”
Rafferty shrugged. “Never seen that before in my life.”
Parker rolled up the magazine into a tight club then struck Rafferty across the head with it. “I’m going to toss every inch of this place. Every anachronism contraband I find, I’m taking it all.”
“No, no, wait a minute, wait a minute. We can talk about this, friend. You know how hard it is to get that contraband in here. The drops are harder and harder to find.”
“So talk.”
“Don’t make me a rat.”
Parker struck Rafferty again across the face with the magazine. “Hey, Tinman, I don’t care about your misplaced prison code of ethics.”
Rafferty ducked his head like a cowered dog. “All right, Jesus, what do you want to know?”
“I’m looking for someone.”
“Prisoner or guard?”
“Prisoner. Name on the outside was Donald Lancaster. Investment banker, doing ten years for fraud.”
Rafferty rubbed his chin thoughtfully. Then, like a mask pulling away from his face, he smiled and his eyes grew sharp. He touched the cut beneath his eye, then licked the blood from his fingertip. “Yeah, sure, I think I know him.”
“And?”
“And that’s it? I just tell you? I got twenty years in here, you think I’m going do that time reading Charles Dickens and going to the burlesque? I’ll lose my mind.”
“At least you’re walking around—plenty of guys in solitary.”
Rafferty held up his hands. “Hey, listen, I’m not complaining. But why the 1880s? Put me down in the 1990s at least. Whores, drugs. Television. God, what I wouldn’t give just to turn on a television. Here I work in a fucking tin shop and step in horse shit every time I walk out the front door of my hovel.”
“What do you want?”
“Money. Mobility. I can do 1880 on Park Avenue, but not in these tenements. Put me in someone else, not some off-the-boat mick laborer with a second grade education and no prospects. Give me someone uptown. Not a Jew though, I want to be able to eat pork.”
Parker shook his head. “I can’t transfer you. And I can’t get anything out-of-period. Nothing after 1880. Nothing anomalous. Prison security would detect it.”
Rafferty exhaled, then mumbled. “So what can you do for me?”
There was a buzz in Parker’s ear, then Charlotte’s voice sounded. “On the outside, Rafferty had a thousand-dollar-a-day cocaine habit. We could try that.”
“Try it.”
“I’m sending something now,” Selberg said. “Try the dresser in the bedroom.”
Parker turned and saw a cheap oak dresser in the corner. He opened the top drawer to find colorful paper boxes decorated with images of a little boy and girl playing in the street. Across the top of each box in Victorian script was written Hadley’s Cocaine Toothache Drops. Parker showed them to Rafferty.
Rafferty raised an eyebrow. “How much is in there?”
“Even for a party boy like you, it’s enough of a bump.”
“This is real?”
“Available in any drugstore of the period. Nobody will pick up on it.”
Rafferty looked at the box thoughtfully, then smiled. “Who are you looking for again?”
“Lancaster, Donald.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know him. He’s connected in here. Paid his way up the ladder.”
Parker flipped one of the boxes to the snitch. Rafferty ripped open the box of cocaine toothache drops. Inside was a small glass bottle filled with clear liquid.
“Where can I find him?”
Rafferty took a sip of the liquid and swished it around his mouth. His eyes widened as the coke reached his gums. “Oh wow. You weren’t kidding. There is a fucking bump in here.”
Parker snapped his fingers. “Stay focused.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Let’s see. Lancaster, banking guy right? He’s a Fifth Avenue man. Heard it’s a beautiful flat. Elevators. Servants and carriages. Real plumbing, don’t have to shit in a hole in the ground.”
“Where on Fifth?
“Nice place. Funny name.” Rafferty tapped his forehead, trying to remember. “The Hyacinth. It’s Fifth Avenue and Sixty-Fifth Street. Fucking prison. Got me down here in the slums, he’s up there eating caviar and getting rubdowns by showgirls.”
“Does he know?”
Rafferty looked up. “Does he know he’s really in prison and all this is just a product of a Sleep machine? I don’t think so. Not many people do.”
“So how do you know?”
“They never got full synchrony when they put me in the machine. They’re supposed to put you through the memory wringer first, remove all your memories, put them in storage. Then when you get out, they give them back to you. But it didn’t work for me.”
“How do you mean?”
“Don’t know. I still have all my memories of before. Of my regular life before this. That’s how I know this world is just an illusion. That I’m really in a Sleep machine. They say these places are supposed to be for rehabilitation, but this is no paradise down here. How can you rehabilitate yourself when you’re worried about just putting food on the table all the time? There’s a few of us pretending to be regular citizens. Then of course you have the guards. And you have some of the prison snitches. Get certain benefits to keep an eye on the rest of us. They know the deal, but stay away from them, they’re all certified psychos.”
Parker thought of the little girl and the laundry woman. “Yeah. I met some of them already. Got attacked by a few of them the instant I touched down in this world.”
“Yeah, the machine don’t work on the real crazies sometimes. They’re always on the lookout for intruders. Those are the real bad ones. They know the truth, and they love it down here. They can be as violent as they want.
“Most of us, like me, don’t cause problems. Just serve out our sentences. Better than being on the outside. At least in here we get some kind of life. How is it on the outside?”
“Bad. Whole world is falling apart.”
“Like I said, sometimes it’s better to be in here.”
Parker took a last look around the cramped tenement. Then he turned to leave. He reached the door when Rafferty called out to him. “This guy you’re looking for, Lancaster. You’re trying to break him out?”
“Family has money. They want him in the real world, not lying in a coma in a machine somewhere.”
“Well, be careful,” Rafferty said. “The guys that don’t know the deal, that don’t know this whole world is an illusion, they don’t want you to break them out. No matter how much you explain it, they just think you’re crazy. Wealthy guy like Lanc
aster is going to have security down here. Just watch yourself.”
“Appreciate your concern.”
“Self-concern. When you do get caught, do me a favor: forget my name. Living in the slums is still better than in a cell somewhere.”
Parker nodded. “Thanks for the tip.”
An omnibus, pulled by a team of horses and brightly hung with advertisements for hair cream, clattered over the rough cobblestones on its route up First Avenue. Nearby, a boot maker’s window was lit by electricity, casting a bright, cheerful square of light onto the sidewalk. The boot maker himself was visible inside, bent over strips of leather, holding a half-dozen nails between his lips as he worked his craft.
Parker paused beneath a streetlamp to watch the man work. He wondered who he was. A prisoner. A guard. A drone. There, sitting in his shop, hard at work under the electric light, he looked so real, so animated, though he was just a skin inhabited by the consciousness of a criminal.
The omnibus came to a stop and Parker boarded, dropping a nickel into a tin box and climbing into the back. Inside, two benches ran the length of the bus beneath the windows. The benches were already crowded, and he found a seat between two well-dressed men in hats. As he squeezed down, Parker felt the hard metal of a pistol strapped to one man’s hip, hidden beneath his suit jacket. A misty rain, thin and cold, blew in from the street as the horses strained forward in their harness, and the omnibus jerked north.
“They found the bodies of those two toughs you took out,” Charlotte said. “They’re sending in more guards to the island now.”
“What’s their appearance?”
“Coppers.”
They turned west, then north. The Third Avenue elevated train roared by in the distance with a belch of smoke and the loud clank of metal. The omnibus crossed Fourteenth Street, passing by Brentano’s bookstore and the wide muddy field of Union Square.
“They’re sending out your description now,” Charlotte said.
On the sidewalk, a newsboy ran from a dark alley, a stack of papers in hand. He stopped at a light post and tacked one of the papers to the pole before scampering off up the street. As the omnibus pulled closer, Parker saw an uncannily accurate stencil drawing of his current appearance, the word WANTED in bold gothic print written below. More newsboys appeared on the corners, holding out the wanted flyers and handing them off to the crowds.
The Memory Agent Page 12