by John Shirley
“Hopscotch!” said Number 1. “We could play hopscotch!”
“Bah!” spat Himmler. “You’re useless.” He looked at the others. “You!” He pointed to Heinrich Number 6. “Kill her.”
“Come on!” said Eleanor, twirling her magic sword as if it were a baton. “I’m ready for you!”
“There’s nothing I’d like more than to kill her, Herr Himmler,” said Number 6. “But my lumbago’s been acting up, and—”
“You’re physically perfect!” screamed Himmler. “You can’t have lumbago!”
“Sure I can,” he said, rubbing his shoulder. “It’s really bothering me!”
“That’s your shoulder, idiot! Lumbago affects your lower back.”
“I was just scratching an itch,” said Number 6 defensively. He moved his hand to his lower back. “That lumbago’s really bothering me.” He turned to Eleanor. “I’m sorry, Big El. There’s nothing I’d like more than to kill you, but you can see that it wouldn’t be a fair fight.”
“I’ll even the odds,” she said.
“How?”
“I’ll fight with one eye closed.”
Number 6 suddenly groaned and clutched at his chest. “I think I’m coming down with pellagra, too!”
“You get pellagra from an inadequate diet,” yelled Himmler. “And super Aryans don’t eat!”
“You can’t make me fight her on an empty stomach!” protested Number 6.
Himmler turned to Einstein. “This just isn’t working out,” he said apologetically. “All right. I want all twelve Heinrichs in the cage with her!”
“Little Al?” said Eleanor. “I could use some help.”
Einstein faced the twelve super Aryans, closed his eyes, reached his arms out, and chanted, “E equals MC squared!"
And suddenly all twelve Aryans were gone, replaced by twelve little mushroom clouds.
“Son of a bitch!” exclaimed Einstein. “I finally got it right!”
“You haven’t heard the last of me!” promised Himmler. He closed his eyes, reached his arms out, and chanted, “I was only following orders!" There was a puff of smoke, and suddenly Eleanor and Einstein were alone in the vast chamber.
“Well, it looks like we scored another victory for Truth, Justice, and the American Way, Big El,” said Einstein.
“Your spell actually worked, Little Al,” she said. “I’m so proud of you!” Suddenly she frowned. “How are we going to get home?”
“Not to worry,” said Einstein. “I’ve got it covered.”
And moments later they were in the White House, having traveled there exactly the way the brighter readers of this story anticipated. As they parted outside the Oval Office, she returned the enchanted sword to him.
“Can I keep the outfit?” she asked. “Just for special occasions?”
“Sure, Big El,” said Einstein. “You’ve earned it.”
Then she went off to her room, and Einstein entered the office.
“We’re back, Mr. President!” he announced triumphantly.
Roosevelt reluctantly looked up from the crystal ball he’d been studying intently.
“Oh,” he said. “Were you gone?”
El and Al vs. Himmler’s Horrendous Horde From Hell
By Mike Resnick
The Ganooch raised a withered hand and aimed a skeletal finger at me. His breathing came in ragged gasps and he could barely manage to hiss out my name.
I pressed my way through his gathered family, went to my knee beside his bed, and said, “I’m here, Frankie.”
His slack mouth tried to frame words, but nothing came out. I huddled closer and put my ear to his lips. As he breathed through his teeth the delicate wisps of his white stringy hair blew across my cheek. His skin was so thin now that it had split along the seams and wrinkles of his face, leaving his crows’-feet crusted with dried blood.
Don Franco Ganucci was forty-seven years old and looked like he was well past ninety. Eight days ago we’d played three games of racquetball together and then gone out to dinner at Ventimiglio’s, where the Ganooch picked up the best-looking girl in the place. He always got the best-looking girl in every place we went because he was handsome, slender, fit, exuded real presence, and nearly as rich as an Arabian prince.
His eyes focused on me. They were so bloodshot I couldn’t even tell what color they were anymore. He sucked air like a dying fish.
“Protect … la … famiglia,” he said, raising his right hand up a few inches.
I took it and said, “I promise, Frankie.”
I hoped to Christ that whatever he had wasn’t contagious.
One set of doctors said it was an ultra-aggressive form of cancer. Another told us it was some kind of radiation poisoning. The young priests called it the will of God. The old nuns suspected demonic attack.
Ganooch gurgled out one final breath and then finally let go.
Grandma Ganucci began to wail and hurl herself across the room, calling down all the saints. The rest of the clan tried to calm her but she went two-forty of stocky muscle and broke free easy. Her rosary whipped around her like a single engine motor. She could snap the neck of a lion with those arms. For fifty years she’d been getting up at dawn to cook for the family, the consigliere, the accountants, the capos, all the legbreakers, the hitters, the torpedoes, stirring pots of sauce and making fresh cannoli and zeppoles every day. She ran through the family and knocked them around, her howls and wails shaking the reinforced glass in the window frames.
Cole Portman, Ganooch’s consigliere, turned to me with his stoic features almost showing a touch of emotion. He whispered, “You think it was a hit?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Who kills a man this way?”
“I don’t know.”
“The Jamaicans? The Haitians? They use poisons.”
I shook my head. “Nothing that does this to a man.”
“The Russian mob? You remember that story about the spy who was murdered slowly with radiation?”
I didn’t answer. I watched the family in their grief. Helen, the Ganooch’s wife, looked like she was hardwired to the third rail. Current seemed to be running through her as she shook and sort of danced in place. Gina, his daughter, was trying to hold herself together while she stared at her dead father’s decrepit corpse. She glanced at me once and our eyes met. She was twenty and dark and beautiful and her sorrow made me want her even more. We’d been lovers for two months and had yet to share so much as a romantic dinner. We met in the deep night when the family was asleep and the estate guards were prowling the grounds. I made the effort to give her all my sympathy in the glance we shared. I didn’t have much to begin with, but what I had I wanted to give to her.
The Ganooch’s nineteen-year-old son, Tommy, made the effort of holding his mother tightly and hugging her to his chest while she sobbed. She flapped her forearms weakly around him and eventually sank to her knees. He went down along with her, his pretty-boy face brimming with confusion. He was head of the family now and the knowledge of it made his eyes practically swirl.
Portman leaned in to me and said, “Some of the capos are showing signs of jumping ship. Pastore will start wooing them. He knows we’re weak now.”
“They won’t leave.”
He nodded. He knew our men were all afraid of me. They’d seen me up close in action. They still feared blades and bullets more than a mysterious week-long terminal disease. The politics of the syndicate was making everybody nervous.
But the Ganooch was just going to be the first. I could feel it. Next in line for the throne was Tommy, if we stuck to tradition. But nobody would. Instead, Chaz Argento, the Ganooch’s senior capo, would take the reins. There might be some grumbles. There might some in-fighting, captains crashing other territories, crews trying to make it on their own. These things had a way of boiling over and then settling down on their own.
The heads of the other families would throw a big customary celebration full of the usual syndicate nonsense, and
Chaz would come out the frontrunner and kiss the capos on their cheeks and immediately buy a new house twice as big as his old one and start living larger than he ever had before.
I wondered if Chaz could’ve gotten his hands on some kind of radiation or poison. I knew Chaz as well as any of us could know each other in this life. He had been a loyal second to Frankie Ganucci. They’d come up together on the same street in Brooklyn and were best friends. It didn’t mean Chaz couldn’t have clipped the don, but I had serious doubts.
“I’m putting you in charge of this,” Portman said. “Find whoever has done this. Protect the family.”
“I’ve already made that promise.”
“I’m calling together a meeting of the captains this afternoon.”
“I thought you might.”
He stared at me hard. He had to be wondering if I had slipped something to Frankie, but you had to trust someone and trusting your torpedo was as good a bet as you could get. “Where are you going to start?” he asked. “With Argento?”
I knew death. I’d been doing this for a long time. I made a study of it. I practiced at it. I learned from the street, and I learned from the best. I learned from men who’d done their tours in a land of dust that hadn’t seen peace for ten thousand years. I knew death. And no man aged fifty years in a week. There was no cancer this aggressive. There was no known infection or toxin that could do this. I thought of the young priests calling this the will of God. They were wrong.
“With the nuns,” I said.
Like just about everyone in our business, in Brooklyn anyway, I was a Catholic who still went to mass every Sunday. I knew the names of all the priests, gave generously to my local diocese, and took communion. Even though syndicate members tended to edit out some of our more nefarious deeds in the confessional, we all thought of ourselves as good Catholics. Don Ganucci used to be an altar boy. So had Argento. So had I.
Unlike the others, though, I used to suffer from spells and visions as a kid. My old man, who was a second-string boxer who couldn’t keep off the H, used to slug me and my mother around a lot. I used to wonder, while she nursed me through the horrible headaches, her own nose broken, sometimes bleeding from her ear, if he was doing real damage to us. Until I hit puberty I used to have insane hallucinations of angels clinging to the high corners of my bedroom, staring down with judgment and disappointment, aiming fiery swords at my heart. I used to sleepwalk and sometimes wake to find myself standing over my father’s bed with a kitchen knife in my hand, poised at the thick stubble of his throat.
I walked to the front gate where three family soldiers stood inside a huge security booth of bulletproof glass. I signaled for them to let me out. Instead they opened the booth door and gave me a hard time about hitting the street alone. They were strapped to the teeth. Portman had already put the word out that the Ganooch had been iced. The foot soldiers wanted to chauffeur me in one of the Lincoln stretch limos, but I wanted to stroll the neighborhood and prepare myself. They didn’t argue with me that much. No one ever did.
I wandered the streets where I’d grown up. They were the same as they had been twenty years ago, with the same privately owned shops standing side by side. There were still fruit carts on the corner. There was still a man who would come and sharpen your knives. No draw-down metal shutters were necessary. There was no sign of yuppie influx or any kind of conglomerate takeover of the small stores.
The Ganooch and his father, Don Rafael, had refused to let the corporate sinkholes lay any claim to roughly four square blocks of the neighborhood. In this age that was considered a minor miracle. The locals would line up by the hundreds at Frankie’s funeral, same as they had for the old don. I waved to Mr. Palazzolo, the butcher, and Mr. and Mrs. Iacobuzio, the grocers. And Joey the T, and Frankie Sabia and his brother, Jocko. And Paulie the Lemon Squeeze, and Eddie the Ear. And Mrs. Aspetta, ninety-two and hosing off the sidewalk in front of her furniture shop. They knew who I was and what I did, but they called to me and waved, and it wasn’t out of fear. They knew they were under my protection. There wasn’t any one of them that would’ve denied me anything.
I turned the corner and could see the spire of St. Mark’s church in the distance. To one end of the block was the rectory and the seminary, and to the other was St. Anne’s, the Catholic school I’d graduated from. Across the street was the convent.
I put a little more step in my stride and cut through the alleys and turned the corner of the schoolyard where kids were playing out on the playground. Sister Christina May was out there behind home plate umpiring, her habit flapping in the breeze.
I glanced up at the fourth floor of the convent.
There was one nun who spooked everyone in Brooklyn. The priests, the archdiocese, the Mother Superior, the rest of the sisters. Hell, maybe even the Pope for all I knew. In another time they would’ve put her away in a mental institution, or at least turned a hand toward exorcism, but as things stood we had somehow entered a more devout yet solemn age of reason, so they left her mostly alone on the fourth floor in a suite of small rooms filled with crucifixes and pictures of the blessed heart.
I walked into the building. The convent had its hardened troops too, same as any syndicate family. An elderly sister I recalled being a geometry teacher when I was a kid had taken up station at the front desk. I stepped up and gave her my warmest smile. She returned it, reached for my hand, took it in a powerful grip.
“Hello, I’m Sister Maeve. How may I help you?”
“I’d like to see Sister Abigail,” I said.
Her face closed up like a fist, with a not-so-subtle spark of fear flashing in her eyes, just the way I knew it would happen. “Sister Abigail doesn’t receive visitors.”
“She’ll receive me.”
“No, I’m afraid you don’t understand. You see, she—”
“I understand perfectly.”
“Who shall I say is calling?”
“Her son.”
“Oh.” She turned away from me and I wondered if she might cross herself. She didn’t. “It’s you. I remember you now.”
“Yes.”
She picked up the phone but I knew my mother didn’t have a phone in her room. Sister Maeve was calling the Mother Superior, who had once taught physics classes. She was a realist. Anyone running a convent in Brooklyn would have to be. She’d made her deals with the devil before.
“Please take a seat. Someone will be with you directly.”
“Thank you.”
I sat and stared at the Catholic iconography all around, the tortured faces, the twisted bodies, the loving eyes. They were the same as the ones in my mother’s room. Martyrs glared at me from every corner. They looked no less angry than my father.
My old man had been a punch-drunk boxer with a weakness for heroin, whiskey, loud women, and a tendency toward self-pity. At the time my mother was an infrequent recreational drug user who began to get more and more stoned whenever my father went on a binge. She suffered from high fevers that sometimes drove her from the house in the middle of the night. Sometimes she’d be gone for days. My old man would eventually send me out to look for her in the alleys, crack dens, shooting galleries, whorehouses, and under the boardwalk at Coney Island. Wherever I found her she’d be babbling about the same angels I occasionally saw in my spells. We were two of a kind.
They used to fight like hell. Physically brawling. My mother had learned a lot from him over the years. How to duck, bob and weave, dodge wild swings, work his glass jaw. Neither one of them would be feeling any pain. The fights could last for a half hour or better. My mother would be seized by the power of speaking in tongues and start raving at him in an unknown language. He’d eventually get tuckered out and go sleep at one of his girlfriends’ apartments.
Then my father took his final dive and lost most of the sight in his right eye. He was out of the ring but it didn’t stop him from farming himself out as a Ganucci legbreaker. When I was fifteen I heard he tried to strongarm a couple of Ja
maicans into sharing some of their turf and the cops found him the next morning with a butcher knife in his back, about a block away from our house.
While my mother was dressing for his funeral, the worst fever to ever afflict her struck. I watched her eyes roll back in her head and listened to her speak in tongues and thrash across the floor. Every time I tried to go for the phone an ancient voice full of desert dust told me to stay where I was. I stayed. She twisted and contorted and howled like a dog. Her eyes and ears bled. When it was over, I called an ambulance and she was in the hospital for a week of tests that never showed a damn thing and couldn’t be paid for anyway.
The day she was released she became a nun, devoted herself to God, and became someone else’s problem. I was sixteen and went to work for Don Rafael that afternoon. By the time I was twenty I was his number-one torpedo.
A door slammed somewhere deep in the building and the echo snapped off the corridor walls and thrummed in my chest. Severe-sounding footsteps followed. I knew the rhythm of that gait anywhere.
It took a full minute before Mother Superior turned a corner and, without expression, approached me. Sister Maeve ducked her head and pretended to be busy with paperwork.
Mother Superior didn’t offer her hand and I didn’t offer mine. We had a long and complex relationship. She used to beat the hell out of me with a yardstick. She used to keep me after school explaining I was smart enough to go to college and get far away from Brooklyn. She would come to me when the church ran into its various travails with the media. I had gotten reporters to retract stories. I had gotten witnesses in cases against priests to alter their testimonies. About five years ago a Chinese street gang was trying to establish a foothold in our area and set up distribution near St. Anne’s, getting the kids hooked and starting them off as runners and movers for them. When Mother Superior found out she put in a call to me and I got in charge with the triads, who cleared up the problem without anyone else having to get directly involved.
Mother Superior would never admit it, but she needed me, on occasion.