“I was wishing I could ask you why you were doing this, Buck,” I said after a few minutes. “But I think I understand now. The pleasure is worth the expense. This is fun.”
“That it is,” he agreed dreamily, pausing in his work to sip his Blessing. “The best part, I can’t get over how nobody’s paying the slightest bit of attention to us. I like your customers, Jake. But hey—why couldn’t you ask?”
“Because it would’ve been a snoopy question,” I said. “You see that wiry little guy at the piano, Fast Eddie? Anybody asks a snoopy question in here, Eddie has orders to eighty-six ’em—and he ain’t gentle about it.”
“Even you?”
“Even himself. House rule.”
He looked Eddie over, and shrugged. “Man sure plays good. Plays like he’s got three hands.”
“That he does.”
“Well, I’d hate to fight with a three-handed man. Especially one that talented. Why don’t I just take you off the hook and volunteer the information?”
“Up to you,” I said.
“I can put it in three words. Spain and Portugal.”
I frowned. “Spain and—?”
“Didn’t you ever wonder about them? Spain and Portugal used to rule the world, you know. The whole damn planet: the Pope drew a line on a map of it one day, and gave half to Spain and the other half to Portugal.”
“Sure,” I agreed. “That’s why they speak Portuguese in Brazil.”
“And what the hell happened? Third-rate powers at best, today, both of ’em. The two of them together couldn’t take France in a fair fight, and just about anybody can take France. How could they fall so far so fast—did you ever wonder?”
“I dunno; I guess like Rome before them and England after them.”
He shook his head vigorously. “Totally different thing. What destroyed Spain and Portugal was treasure—the shipload after shipload of gold they took from the New World. They really did, you know, and not all of it ended up on the ocean floor. They thought they were in hog heaven; the poor saps must have thought they were importing wealth by the ton.”
I must have looked puzzled. “Weren’t they?”
“No. They were importing money. Gold is not wealth. Potatoes is wealth. Corn is wealth. Potable water is wealth. Gold is just money.”
I began to get it. “Oh, my—”
“Right. All of a sudden there was much too much money around, and very little more real wealth than there’d been the day before. Too much money chasing a fixed amount of goods. Their currency inflated; their prices rose; their balance of trade went all to hell; and finally their economies collapsed, so totally that centuries later they’re still trying to dig out from under the rubble. The only real wealth to be had in the New World was real estate—but what little wasn’t taken away from them, they had to let go at fire-sale prices.”
“Wow.” It was an ironic notion. Death by money.
“That’s why I’m doing this,” he said, launching another bill toward the fire. “Our own economy’s in the toilet for much the same reasons: we’ve got too many dollars chasing too few potatoes.”
“And a vice-president who can’t spell either one,” I couldn’t resist adding. (This was in 1988.) “So you mean you’re—”
“—doing my civic duty as I see it. If you’ll forgive a dreadful pun, the bucks stop here. The damned stupid government is trying to cure the deficit by printing money: I’m opposing them. I’m tightening the money supply, one tiny notch. For the same reason you mentioned why your customers don’t swipe singles out of that box down there: enlightened self-interest. I figure it’s better to be broke in a healthy economy than rich in a dying one.”
“You know,” I said slowly, “that’s so crazy it almost makes sense.”
“I think so,” he agreed. “Oh, I know this is too small an amount to have any significant effect—I started out with well under two million—but it’s all I can do, and I won’t shirk it. Like Johnny Lennon said, ‘We’re all doin’ what we can.’ I’d burn more if I had it.”
“I’ll be damned,” I murmured.
***
So I thought about it. Suppose I suddenly came into possession of a few million bucks. What would I do with it?
The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that being suddenly handed a couple of million dollars would be a fucking disaster.
For a start, I wouldn’t particularly want to change my present lifestyle much: I like my life. If I bought all the toys I really crave, and all the books and CDs I could ever use—just went hog-wild—I’d say I could use up a hundred grand or so, tops. Peanuts. I don’t think I’d care much for the company of other rich folks, either; the few I’d run across in my time had seemed to me distinctly unenviable—and yet it’s hard to hang out comfortably with anybody else but other rich people once you’re worth a few million: the imbalance inevitably puts a strain on both sides of any such relationship. Educating myself to the point where I’d be capable of intelligently and ethically managing or investing that much money would take years of distasteful skullsweat for which I am spectacularly ill-suited: I’m just this side of innumerate, and I gave up trying to do my own taxes when I was twenty years old.
God, think of the tax headaches! Inspire the IRS to shine that big a flashlight on my tax situation and history, and I’d be in perpetual audit for the rest of my life, long past the point where all the money had hemorrhaged away into the federal coffers. If I let the IRS have my millions, then I would be much more personally responsible than ever before for what the government would ultimately do with them, and I didn’t want that on my conscience. But even just learning to protect myself from the IRS was probably beyond my abilities, and who could I trust to do it for me? Who said I had better judgment than, say, the Beatles? The record of history was clear: the only kind of people who could hang on to sums of money on that scale without being bled dry by their agents and friends were the people who had been born to that calling…and none of those people ran a bar or played folk music for a living.
Think of the horrid publicity alone! Okay, my name isn’t Buck Rogers—but the name Jake Stonebender is, let’s face it, just weird enough to catch the eye of the fine folks at Hard Copy and the National Enquirer in the same way. I’d end up spending every dime the government left me just to try and get some peace.
I remembered a guy back in the Sixties who inherited a bundle, and went on TV talk shows soliciting worthy causes to donate it to. I seemed to recall he had ended up in a rubber room. Ethically disposing of several million bucks sounded like a job as complex and demanding as that of, say, a Mayor or a Governor, but without the glamour or the perks.
I found myself concluding that if someone ever gave me a guitar-case full of hundred dollar bills, the smartest thing I could do would be to find me a reasonably crowded bar—so there’d be lots of witnesses if the IRS ever asked—and pitch the whole kit and kaboodle into the fireplace.
***
“You know, Buck,” I said, as we folded and threw his money together, “this may be one of the smartest ideas you ever had.”
“I think so,” he said, nodding. “I was this close to hearing Geraldo Rivera’s talent coordinator on my answering machine.”
“Among many others,” I agreed. “Well, anyway, I just want to say it’s a privilege to be a part of this. Thanks.”
That made him smile. “No problem.” Then he glanced into the guitar-case, and frowned slightly. “Except that this isn’t going near as fast as I expected it would. We’ll be at this all night.”
“Would you be willing to accept more help?”
He looked around the bar. “Let me guess. You personally vouch for the honesty of everybody here.”
“Better,” I said. “I personally vouch for the self-respect of everybody here.”
“They wouldn’t palm any of it…and they wouldn’t go blabbing to Oprah Winfrey, either.”
“That’s right.”
He gave a little sh
ake of his head. “The funny thing is, I believe you absolutely. I don’t know why, but I do. I really hit the jackpot tonight, Jake. You’re right: I’ve been looking all my life for this joint.”
“How did you happen to find the place? I asked. “We kind of keep a low profile here, and we don’t get much walk-in trade.”
“That was the damndest thing,” he said. “I was driving along 25A, and all of a sudden this freak tornado sprang up and a goddam roof went sailing across the road ahead of me.”
I glanced across the room at the Lucky Duck, and made a mental note to give him free drinks for the rest of the night.
“I was so startled I swerved into the first curb-cut I came to, and skidded to a stop, and it turned out to be your place. Once I stopped shaking, I shut the engine and just sort of sat there awhile…and it came to me that I could use a drink.”
“How’d you know this was a bar?” I asked, curious. “There’s no sign outside or anything.”
“I guess it was the way the cars are parked in the parking lot, pointing in all different directions, like a herd of cats.”
“Yeah, that would be a clue, to a thoughtful man,” I admitted.
“How come you haven’t asked me where I got the money?” he asked.
“It would have been—” I began, and we finished together: “—a snoopy question.”
“Damn, that’s manners,” he said. “I appreciate that. But I don’t mind telling you about it. Remember that uncle I told you about, Uncle Buckingham? Well, the reason my parents named me after him was, Uncle Bucky was richer than store-bought sin; they hoped he’d leave me a pile when he went. And by God, it worked. Took fifty years, of course. He bought the farm last month, ninety-six years old, and I’m his only living relative, and here I am setting fire to every dollar he was able to acquire in a lifetime of diligent anal retention. I like to think that with every bill I burn, his soul gets a little lighter.”
“I bet it does, at that,” I said.
“Oh my God,” he breathed. “A ghastly pun has occurred to me.”
I nodded. “Happens all the time in here. I think it’s some chemical we all give off. Let’s hear it.”
“Well, I’m having a little trouble making it jell, but…” He held up one of his hundred dollar bills, “What’s the slang term for one of these?”
“A C-note,” I said obligingly, always happy to midwife an especially ugly pun.
“And a ‘cenote’ is a geologist’s and engineer’s term for a hole in the ground. And unlike my anal Uncle Buck, I know the difference between my ass and one of these…”
I awarded it a strangled groan. “Not bad. Okay, let’s get this show on the road.” I raised my voice. “May I have your attention, ladies and gents?”
I don’t suppose I’ve ever had less trouble getting the undivided attention of everyone in the room. I imagine most if not all of them had been dying to be invited into the conversation. In something under a second, all other social intercourse had been suspended, including the darts game, and the only sound in Mary’s Place was the crackling of the flames.
“My friend Buck here,” I said, “would like some help burning this money.”
The response was immediate and enthusiastic. There was a short, rousing cheer, and then my friends swarmed round and got down to business. With a minimum of conversation, folks figured out how many tables needed to be pushed together to allow everyone access, and selected a spot near the chalk line from which toasts are made, and moved the guitar-case there and began stacking piles of bills around it. And a massive kamikaze airstrike on my fireplace began.
I had to leave off tossing myself, shortly, in order to help Tom Hauptman take orders for fresh drinks. Soon we were both so overworked that Buck—who had already thrown enough bills to be developing a cramp—left off himself and came around behind the bar to give us a hand. There was a definite party atmosphere in the room, and it was shaping up as one of the most enjoyable parties I’d ever been to. I even went in back and woke up Zoey—who can nap through a riot—because I knew she wouldn’t want to miss this occasion; it would be good for the baby.
But then…
Remember back when I said some things happened that night that I classified as weird, by the standards of Mary’s Place? Well, it was just then, as I got back with Zoey, that the first of them happened.
3
MR. ALARM
It happened so fast that it might not all have registered—if I hadn’t long since become a close student of the kind of strange events that happen around the Lucky Duck. That calls for a sharp, fast eye, sometimes. Here’s the way I reconstruct the sequence:
The Duck, flushed with his triumph at the dartboard, had joined in the money-burning, and had just thrown an elegantly folded airplane with particular vigor and an odd little twist of the wrist—
—The shifting, writhing mass of burning money in the fireplace shifted and avalanched just then, releasing a sudden blast of heat—
—The Duck’s arriving missile ran into it, banked sharply over the fire, burst into flame, completed a U-turn and headed back out into the room, trailing fire—
—For the second time that night, a stranger walked into my bar, a short ugly man with long flowing brown hair—
—The flaming missile kissed that hair lightly as it passed him, and set it alight—
—He ignored this utterly, and kept on walking toward the bar—
—Tommy Janssen either tried to douse the stranger’s burning hair with his drink, or started so violently as to fling said drink from him, with the same net result—
—Tommy’s drink—a full cup of scalding hot coffee!—splooshed out the flames, and began running down the stranger’s neck, under his collar—
—Which did cause the stranger to pause for a moment, long enough to catch a whiff of formerly burning hair in his immediate vicinity, and to shake his head back and forth with sudden violence—
—Which caused droplets to be flung from his hair, and land on Tommy’s outstretched hand—
—Which caused Tommy to say, “Ouch. Shit,” with considerable volume, and begin shaking his scalded hand—
—At which point everything returned to what passes for normal around my bar. Total elapsed time, perhaps eight seconds.
***
The newcomer deduced the general shape of what had just occurred, satisfied himself that his hair had ceased burning, and addressed Tommy, amid a gathering silence. “Thanks, friend. I really appreciate that. What’s the matter with your hand?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned to the rest of us and raised his voice slightly. “You folks might want to reconsider the wisdom of playing with paper and fire when you’ve been drinking.” He was clearly angry, but had it under good control.
Buck discreetly tipped the lid of his guitar-case shut.
The new stranger was young, no more than twenty-five, well beyond skinny and into significantly underweight. His features made me think both Eastern European and Semitic; he reminded me of an Ashkenazy Jew I knew. His complexion was what I believe is called swarthy (though I can’t say for sure as I’ve never seen a swarth), and there were blotchy skin rashes at either side of his face, and another visible on his left hand. There had been something just a little off about his walk, like the slightly teetering stride of someone who has just gotten off a small ferry on a stormy day. Now that I studied him closely, I noticed that even parts of his head that the splashing coffee could not have reached were beaded with moisture: he was sweating profusely, despite the cold he had just come in out of. He needed a shave, but there was a round bald patch on his right chin, an old burn scar. (So it was possible to burn him.)
“You’ve got a point, mister,” I agreed. “I’m sorry for your trouble. Are you okay?”
He looked alarmed and glanced quickly down at himself. “Why? Am I on fire somewhere else?”
“No, no,” Tommy Janssen said hastily. “But that was real hot coffee I tossed on you: Jake serves it just
short of hot enough to burn.”
“And the back of a neck is a lot easier to burn than a tongue,” Doc Webster said in that gentle bellow of his. “You’ve got some hard bark on you, mister.”
The newcomer shook his head ruefully. “I wish I did. I’ve got so many scars and colloid patches I look like Frankenstein’s first attempt. See?” He held out his right hand, and sure enough it was crisscrossed with scars, old and new.
The Doc came through the crowd like a whale passing through a school of fish, and examined the appendage. “That one there must have hurt,” he remarked, pointing to a large ugly one.
The newcomer laughed. It was a shocking sound. “If only it had,” he said, and laughed some more. People began to murmur.
The Doc was staring at him. “Wait a minute now. Are you saying…? I believe I read something about this—”
Across the room, Solace somehow managed to cut through the murmuring without overloading her speakers. “Riley-Day Syndrome,” she said.
The newcomer stopped laughing. He located the source of the voice, and blinked. The visual display was the one Solace usually used unless she felt need for complex facial expressions: a greatly enlarged version of the classic Smiling Mac startup icon. Except at the moment it wasn’t smiling as broadly as usual.
“Is that somebody on the Internet?” he asked me.
“Yes,” I answered briefly. Well, I wasn’t exactly lying: Solace was somebody, in my book, and she lived on the Internet—was, in fact, despite all rumors to the contrary, the only being who actually did literally live on the Internet. And we had been skittish about revealing Solace’s true nature to our rare newcomers, always letting her make the first move. Some people, you tell them about a sentient computer network, and the first thing they think of is Demon Seed or “ƒ Press Enter,” or at best, War Games. “Anything I don’t understand must be malevolent.”
Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) Page 4