I’d been wondering what defense she’d been planning to use. Insanity, drunkenness, unhappy childhood. We could have used any of those. But someone would have had to talk to me first to extract some facts and no one had bothered.
She fell back on dramatics.
“Tell me,” she said, flinging out one arm. “Can a man really stand trial for murdering himself?”
The prosecutor was out of his seat and hopping up and down before my counsel had drawn breath to begin her next sentence. He needn’t have bothered. The judge announced that yes, a man could.
Mr. Dalkin sat down.
My counsel looked around her, noticed the number of cameras and the size of the crowd, and decided she had to do more than just stand there opening and shutting her mouth. “This man,” she said, pointing at me. “Used to be a gang boss. Until he was sued by his own clone. For reckless endangerment. Sued successfully.”
I was sure the jury got that bit.
Because I was the man standing in the dock wearing a tatty jacket and being defended by her. And they’d buried the other me in a new silk suit and smothered his grave in enough orchids to fill a rainforest.
She made a half-dozen mistakes in my life story but no one bothered to correct her, including me. The basics were there. Gang boss discovers he’s due to be hit and grows clone to take the bullet instead. Clone stops off on his way to the hit, calls the police, the media, and a lawyer he gets from a small ad in the back of that day’s paper. The police and the lawyer could have been handled. The police, the lawyer, and the media was one problem too many. Particularly as it was the out-of-state media my clone called.
The assassin was arrested.
I was sued by my clone. As my defense counsel said, successfully.
He took everything. The house, control of the gang, my bank accounts, my contacts book, and a web of connections I’d spent most of my life building up. A dozen gangs had rolled over in the time I was boss; moving me up the ranks toward being boss of bosses. All the gangs got their autonomy back. Mostly it was the previous boss who simply stepped back into his old shoes. Sometimes his son, where an old boss had died in mysterious circumstances. Once it was the grandson; but that was the Lucianos and they were notoriously unlucky.
The map of the city went back to where it was before I came in. Jack Cogan kept me alive. That is, he let it be known he’d not be bought off or intimidated if anything happened to me and the best way to make sure nothing bad happened was to keep me alive. I don’t doubt I owe him. Equally, I don’t doubt that at some point, he’d intended to collect.
Sighing deeply, my counsel retook her seat.
Whatever she’d been saying, it didn’t look like the jury were convinced. A couple were even shaking their heads, as if they didn’t know why she’d wasted her time trying to defend me in the first place. Only Jack Cogan was looking at me.
He nodded at the screen.
Then he glanced at his watch. When I shrugged, he did it again.
Maybe he had an appointment? A whore and a bottle of whiskey waiting for him in some police apartment somewhere? I hoped so, one of us deserved to enjoy this afternoon and it didn’t look it was going to be me. Although there was probably someone out there sick enough to look forward to a couple of dozen machine-gun slugs to the chest. There are some sick people in this city.
And then, and this was weird, Jack Cogan stood up from his table and limped toward the restroom: Now Jack doesn’t have a limp. I do, courtesy of whatever happened in those lost three days.
His leg was fine when he walked back to his seat.
It was my turn to speak. At least I assumed it was, from the way everyone was staring at me when I looked up from the dock.
“Well,” said the judge. “Do you have anything to say before I pass sentence?”
By this point Jack Cogan was almost purple with... It was hard to tell with what. I’ve only ever seen Jack with three expressions: angry, more angry, and angrier still, and all of these involved scowling. Now he looked almost anxious.
“Well?” the judge demanded.
“Yes,” I said. “Can I see that tape again?”
You could tell from the judge’s expression that he just thought I was digging myself into a deeper hole. The sneer on his face said he had no problems with me doing just that. As for Mr. Dalkin, he was nodding like a toy dog before the judge even turned to him.
“No objections,” he said.
Jack Cogan, he was looking relieved. Which told me what I needed to know. At least, it told me I was meant to know something and that something was on this tape. So I watched the killer walk to the gate, slap his hand on the palm reader, and listened to the gate click open.
“Sir,” I said. “Can I see that again...?”
The judge sighed, but he let the clerk of the court rerun the sequence. As the killer tapped his hand to the plate, I tapped mine to the bulletproof glass in front of me, trying to mimic his movements.
He limped across the gravel, and he’d almost reached the front door before I realized the obvious. A glance round the court told me no one else had noticed it. So I kept silent as the front door opened itself and the killer made his way upstairs and along the corridor. I watched him drop his clip from the gun, check his watch, and decide against using a silencer.
We heard the shot and watched the man make his way back to the front door, shut it behind him, and let himself through the gates, vanishing into the darkness beyond.
“And the tape stops after that?”
The prosecution lawyer looked up sharply, and the judge looked at the chief of police, who nodded reluctantly. My defense looked blank. No one had bothered to tell her. Why would they? And for the amount she was being paid, she hadn’t bothered to ask.
“How long for?”
“Mr. O’Brian?” The judge was staring at the police chief.
“An hour, your honor.”
“And when the tape comes back on?”
Judges are not meant to ask questions like that. They’re meant to leave it to the lawyers. But this was Judge Mallory’s court and he’d obviously decided he was going to do what he wanted.
“Nothing, sir. It’s all silent.”
“How did you know?” Judge Mallory demanded. He was talking to me this time. “And what relevance does it have?”
“That’s not me on film,” I told him. “That’s the clone.”
Uproar filled the court. It was a big room and its ceiling was high and its walls were paneled in oak that muffled speech so effectively the main players were miked for sound. All the same, the noise of the crowd echoed off those oak walls and I watched at least a dozen sound men wince before turning down their dials.
“He’s wearing his watch on the wrong wrist.”
“You could have done that,” shouted the prosecution lawyer. “You did do it. A cheap attempt to establish an alibi.”
“And his hair’s parted on the wrong side.”
“Once again...”
The judge waved the prosecution into silence. “Anything else?” he demanded, smiling sourly.
“He’s limping on the wrong side.”
“Run the bloody tape again,” the judge told his clerk.
So the clerk did, and then the judge made me limp across the courtroom while everyone watched. He checked that my hair did indeed part on the other side, that I habitually wore my watch on a different wrist. He asked who could confirm this and Jack Cogan put up his hand.
“And the limp?”
“Recent,” said the captain. “We had it examined. A cracked kneecap. It looks like a fall downstairs.”
“In your opinion,” the judge said. “How do you read what we’ve got here?”
Jack glanced toward the chief of police.
“I’m over here,” the judge told Jack.
“Sorry, sir.”
The judge grunted. “So,” he said. “Talk me through what you think we’ve got, That is if your chief has no objections.”
Chief O’Bri
an scowled.
“The killer used a photograph of the defendant to perfect his disguise. Only he dressed himself in the mirror and forgot to allow for things like the watch being on the opposite side. So when he came to faking the limp...”
“He dragged the wrong foot.”
Jack Cogan nodded. “Yes, sir. That’s my reading.”
“But he got through the gate and the front door and none of the weapons targeted him. That means...”
“He shared DNA with the man in the dock.”
“I know what it means,” the judge said sharply. “You need to find out if there’s a second clone.”
There wasn’t, and no one could come up with a reason why the first clone might want to commit suicide, or decide to take me with him when he did.
The next time I saw Jack Cogan he had gold braid on his uniform and arrived at the restaurant in a bulletproof sedan with police stenciled discreetly on the side. A driver so young he was barely out of diapers rushed to open the door.
“Chief,” I said.
“Mr. Capone...”
We shook hands while his driver took up position beside the restaurant’s front door and my bodyguards went round to protect the back. I owned the place and had chosen its staff myself. That was a while ago. All of them had since assured me, hand on heart, that they were delighted to see me back.
“The usual?” I asked Chief Cogan.
He nodded, unfolding his napkin and tucking one corner into his collar. In the three weeks since the court case his chest had lost its epic battle with his girth and resigned itself to losing. We ate squid, the little ones dropped into batter and dusted with paprika. Then we ate linguine and clams and washed it down with a bottle from my own vineyard in California. And then we ate whatever those little cakes are that are doused in rum and rolled in sugar.
“You had me scared,” he said, when coffee finally arrived.
I waited for him to explain.
“Al...” he said. “You had me scared. I thought you’d forgotten the plan and the man was about to send you down.” He sat back and huffed like a horse. “Guess that’s why I’m me and you’re you. I don’t have that kind of nerve.”
He ate the sweet biscuit I passed him and reached into his pocket for a folded piece of paper. I let him reach. The chief had been searched long before he came into my presence.
“Thought you’d like to see this,” he said.
It was a note from the city coroner. Three mob bosses had died, fallen to their deaths from three different windows. The two goons who beat me up on arrest had saved everyone the trouble and shot themselves the afternoon the trial ended. The old chief of police was still alive, but he’d decided to leave town.
“You know where he’s gone?” I asked.
Chief Cogan nodded.
“Good, then let it be known it wouldn’t be good for his health to come back. Anything else?”
“Usual stuff,” he said. “Clubs wanting licenses, drive-bys in the ghetto, an unlicensed pimp trying to take over three blocks in the east city.” He dumped his notes in front of me and listened intently as I told him what I wanted done in each case.
“You clear on that?”
“Sure thing,” he said. “Completely clear.”
So I glanced at my famous watch to show it was okay if he wanted to take his stomach somewhere else now. In fact, it would be good, because I had stuff to oversee. And Jack Cogan took the hint and pushed back his chair, dipping forward at the last minute to grab a chunk of bread that had been hiding in a basket under a napkin. After stopping to butter it, he nodded apologetically and headed for the exit.
At the door, he turned back. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” I said. “Who knows? I might even answer.”
“That night you came by my house and told me to smash your right knee. I thought you’d lost it.” Chief Cogan shook his head at the memory. “But you had it planned, didn’t you? Right from the start. All that getting drunk and being thrown out of bars. All those memory wipes. You were setting it up, so no one could say you’d had your memory wiped only the one time it mattered. After... after...”
“The other Mr. Capone shot himself?”
“Yeah,” said the chief, wiping sweat from his forehead. “After that.”
“Maybe,” I said.
Jack Cogan grinned. He knew that was all he was going to get. The chief let himself out and left me wondering. Maybe I had set it all up that carefully. Left myself little notes on the earlier occasions.
Worked it all out down to the last memory wipe, wrong parting, misworn watch, and shuffle of the wrong foot. And maybe I hadn’t. I couldn’t remember.
The Sultan’s Emissary:--Theodore Judson
Theodore Judson is the author of Tom Wedderburn’s Life, Fitzpatrick’s War, and The Martian General’s Daughter, the latter of which it was my distinct privilege to edit. Speaking of The Martian General’s Daughter, a future history detailing the fall of a society with certain parallels to the last days of our own Roman Antonine Caesars, Judson says, “I re-write history like this not because I believe history repeats itself, but that humans inevitably repeat the triumphs and mistakes of those who have gone before them.”
The lord chamberlain dared not wake the king at that late hour. As much as he hated yoking himself to a fanatic of Lord Cromwell’s ilk in any undertaking, Lord Thomas Fairfax decided he had to go at once to the general’s residence near St. James’s Palace, for Fairfax knew there was no more loyal defender of the Holy Catholic Church and the Stewart monarchy than the ferocious commoner from East Anglia. Besides, most of the other mighty men in the realm had gone home for the spring planting. Fairfax gathered a score of his servants, and saw that each had a torch and a sidearm before he set out through the darkened streets of 1650 London. A light rain was falling that April morning, as it had fallen early every morning that month. While not quite as pious as most prominent men in Britain were, Fairfax saw the hand of Providence in the foul weather, as if God were lowering a protecting hand upon the island, the last sanctuary for his faith in all the wide world.
“Bad weather has long been our homeland’s most stalwart defender, Hugh,” he commented to one of his men, a man who had been shivering under his cloak as the group progressed through the cobblestone streets. “We should not curse it.”
“A cold-hearted defender it is, my lord,” said Hugh. “It beats on us as true as it will on them what’s against us.”
“Sanctuaries are found in difficult climes, Tom,” said Fairfax, who could always console himself with the knowledge he had seen worse and would one day see worse once more. “We should love our land’s wind and rain; they caress us like kisses when set against the blows of the Saracens.”
As an educated man, Fairfax appreciated that Britain had been Europe’s sanctuary for the faithful since the ancient days of the Fifth Century, when Attila’s Huns had defeated the combined Roman and Visigoth army at Chalons in Gaul; hundreds of thousands had then fled the Christian Roman Empire along with the great Pope Leo for the sanctuary of island Britain as the Huns proceeded to conquer Italy and then to destroy the armies of Theodosius the Second and the entire eastern empire. The patchwork of barbarian tribes the Huns had left in their wake had offered only feeble resistance to the Muslim tide that washed over the European mainland in the eighth and Ninth Centuries, and only the British Isles, the pagan Vikings of Scandinavia, and the even fiercer pagans of Lithuania remained outside the Caliphate, a development that had brought yet more refugees to the home of Fairfax’s ancestors. After the Norse converted to Islam in the Twelfth Century and had become the sultan’s military vanguard, Britain and her sometime allies in Lithuania had managed to survive by artfully playing the Shiites against the Sunnis and the Arabs against the Turks, by paying discrete bribes first to the Seljuks and later to members of the Ottoman court, and by giving refuge to any learned Christian or Jew who might help them perfect the technologies of naval warfare. Because ou
t of necessity she had developed better ships than the land-loving Arabs and Turks, Britain had been first to cross the Atlantic and to discover both North and South Cabotland, and had planted a string of colonies on the eastern coastline of the former continent. But because the far more numerous Ottomans had also in time crossed the Atlantic and had conquered the Aztec and Inca empires, they now ruled everything in South Cabotland and claimed everything in North Cabotland west of the Appalachian Mountains. Then two years ago in 1648, the greatest disaster of all befallen what was left of Christendom: the Turks had won the Thirty Years War and had utterly conquered Lithuania and the once invincible White Knights of Vilnius. The small expeditionary force Britain had sent to Eastern Europe under the command of the foppish Prince Rupert had availed nothing. Now in 1650 only economic bad times brought on by a cooler climate and the reappearance of the Black Death on the mainland along with the 400 ships Britain could still put upon the sea were all that kept the Turks at bay. Spies had been sending word to London for years that Mehmed the Fourth, the Ottoman sultan who from his throne in Rum ruled everything from the Gates of Hercules to the Ural Mountains and all from Lapland to the Sahara, was contemplating an invasion. The terrible news Fairfax was carrying that evening could only give the sultan another excuse for launching his attack.
Lord Cromwell’s servants answered the door. One of their number went to wake the master while others made China tea which they brought to Fairfax’s men in the front room. Cromwell himself charged downstairs in his dressing gown, his long hair uncombed, a blazing candelabra in his hand, and his state of mind in its usual grim condition.
“Sir Thomas,” he barked at Fairfax, “either the king is dead or a Mussulman army has landed at Dover, or else you have imposed upon me sorely.”
“I bring report almost as dire, my lord,” said Fairfax. “Selim al Ibrahim, the sultan’s emissary, has been found dead fourteen houses hence. A marksman has clearly shot him through the window of an upstairs bedroom. I am having a surgeon remove the bullet from the dead man’s side, but the wound is from a rifle, I warrant it. You know I beheld many such wounds when you and I were on campaign together in the Low Countries.”
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