In the Company of Thieves

by Kage Baker

  “Hey, that’s great!” I sat down between a plastic box full of personnel room assignments and, yes, a pile of actual cocktail napkins. For the next forty-five minutes or so I watched as Lewis picked up files, scanned them, notated them and consigned them to various stacks: all at eye-flickering speed.

  Finally Lewis tossed off the last file, dusted his hands, and swung round in his chair to beam at me.

  “And the sorting is done!” he declared.

  “Just like that? Lewis, you’re a wonder! I didn’t know it could be that simple!” I was really impressed, watching him was pretty amazing. “So what do you have for me?”

  He indicated one of the curves that ran between his desk and the wall—a thin one with a doubled curve in it like a big cursive Q.

  “This one’s for you. Start at the wall end and go through every pile, and see what springs out at you,” he ordered.

  “What?”

  “That’s the line of greatest likelihood to tell us where the ikons got shipped.” Lewis grinned evilly. “Did you think you were going to get out of this part, Joseph? Really?”

  Well, yeah. I was a Facilitator. Which I guess he saw in my face, because he wagged a scolding finger at me.

  “Come on, Facilitator. This requires your specialized brain, to see through all the twisty errors and subterfuges of lesser immortals!”

  If this were a movie, I could show the next several days in classic Autumn Leaf calendar style—the daily pages floating off to join the piles of paper on the floor, a sea of time with the islands of pertinent paperwork rising from it. I could show you Lewis’s triage in slo-mo, the pages floating with uncanny skill to land on their appropriate islands. And then I could show them all floating back off into our hands, in a nifty reverse reveal. There would be slow pans of empty coffee cups and eviscerated chocolate wrappers; cartons of Chinese food and bags of tacos. Of course, one of those tattered file sheets would eventually drift down against the green Army blanket on Lewis’s cot, to reveal the location of the missing ikons. Voila!

  It certainly happens that way in the movies, and for all I know it happens that way in real life. I don’t know, I’ve never lived in real life.

  Instead, we sorted paper for most of a week. We chased down names and locations and such-like clues on our credenzas, calling up a lot of operatives who were busy doing something else and were moderately annoyed to be questioned about possibly misfiling a shipment. (Like that never happened. Oh, man, the things that get lost even once they’re in our hands!) I drove to a lot of quiet, unvisited places where crates from Dr. Zeus have a habit of getting stashed.

  They were all washouts, though, and I had to go back to reading old reports and memos on where the stuff from New World One got shipped. None of the interesting stuff, like personnel files or treasure maps: just inventories, rosters, shipping orders; corrections to shipping orders, amendments to shipping orders. One thing we did finally ascertain: all the paperwork at least agreed that the ikons had come to Los Angeles.

  I didn’t even have any excuses to go check on Spencer Tracy; he’d moved back into town, to his usual hotel. It was all so damned boring!

  “Portions of my cognitive software are shutting down,” I complained to Lewis after about a week. “I’m not programmed for this.”

  “Think of it as forensics,” said Lewis. He was working on the St. Exupéry illustrations again. “I always find it very satisfying.”

  “You’re a Literary Preservationist! I’m an—an improvisational artist! I’m a PI, a gumshoe, a knight of the hard streets, man. I’m not designed to sort through all this bureaucratic crap!”

  Lewis looked up at me. “You’re always telling me you were designed to be flexible,” he pointed out. “You can do anything I can do. It doesn’t mean you have to enjoy it.”

  “You actually enjoy this?”

  “Oh, my, yes,” he sighed, and smoothed the edge of a page in a way that made me embarrassed to be looking. “You have no idea—the craving to set the text right, the need to make sure it will last. The satisfaction when you look down at perfection and know you made it happen—it’s a totality of appetite and reward that approaches nirvana.” He blushed. “I’ve always assumed it gets tied into our compulsive urges when we’re training.”

  “Better than sex, huh,” I said sourly.

  “Oh, no!” he exclaimed. “A lot easier, though.”

  “Download your programming to me, then.”

  “It’s specialized, customized, and personalized, Joseph,” he said. “You know that. Your head would explode.”

  “I hate you, Lewis,” I told him.

  “Whatever gets you through this,” he said, unperturbed. He glanced at the top paper in my stack, which was unmistakably a high-level memo. You could tell by the embossed red foil Kukulcan logo. “Isn’t that a memo to Houbert?”

  “Yeah. Like the other 7,264 I’ve looked at so far.”

  “Why’s it dated three years after New World One closed?” he asked.

  Good question. It was also upside down and hand-written in a scrawl that implied Houbert had been employing augmented chickens with epilepsy. Which was no problem for a Literature Preservationist like Lewis, which was why he was supposed to be doing this in the first place...

  But it was a clue, a bona fide lead. The most I could get out of it, though, was someone sloppy inquiring where he ought to put something illegible. Obviously, it had been filed in the handiest open box when the last ones were shipping out to long-term storage. There was no answer or follow-up.

  I finally tried calling up Houbert, who was running a neutral-ground casino in Monte Carlo, teaching vacationing Nazis and expat Europeans about real decadence. I never did get hold of the jerk, just got a one-word response from one of his latest sycophants.

  Luckily for me, it was a name.

  Slick Mick had been knocking around Los Angeles since the 1800s. His name was Micythos when he got here, but everyone—mortal and operative—had been calling him Slick Mick since about, oh, 1872. He arrived with the first wave of Yankees, when one more uncouth immigrant with no known ties or associates could settle down in the shadows of Los Angeles and start socking away goodies for the Company. Technically, Mick was a cultural anthropologist, and what did him in was Anthropologist’s Disease: he went native.

  It’s impossible for one of us to go off the rails. It says so in the Company by-laws, I think. However, it’s very possible for us to get...peculiar, especially with the OCD motivation built into the Preservers. If it gets bad enough, we get hauled in and reprogrammed; but if it doesn’t interfere with our ability to do The Work, one of us can go on for centuries just getting weirder and weirder. Hence assholes like Houbert, and just plain crazy bums like Slick Mick.

  If Mick had been mortal, he’d have been a drunk. As it was, he got his buzz off constantly eating chocolate, which left him in a permanently altered state. Mostly he was an errand boy and a messenger—like a homing pigeon. He could find his way anywhere he knew there was Theobromos. He behaved like a drunk, he looked and talked and smelled a lot like one, and he lived in the various hobo squats and leftover Hoovervilles downtown and on the edges of Griffith Park. It was easy to locate him, once we had the clue—a broad spectrum scan of the Basin on the operatives’ frequencies only showed one transmission aberrant enough to be Slick Mick.

  Lewis and I piled into the Ford and set out in search of treasure. I had my entire stock of chocolate stuffed in a briefcase, to attract and bribe Mick. Lewis had all our combined coupons for chocolate and sugar—See’s Candies was due to be open today.

  I dropped Lewis off near Ivar and Hollywood, where a crowd was already assembling on the black and white tiles of the shop entrance. I went off to an empty lot on Franklin, below the boarded-up Japanese embassy building at the top of Orange. Mick’s signal was a blurry light show in the front of my mind, leading me right to him.

  He was lounging against a bit of broken wall, looking very content in the misty sunl
ight. Coveralls and a deformed straw hat made him look like one of Auntie Em’s more depraved farm hands.

  “Hey, Joseph,” he greeted me. He had the rusty, dusty voice of an alky, though booze doesn’t affect us much and Mick never actually imbibed. “Still babysitter to the stars?”

  Only when I’m not on the job for the Doctor, I transmitted. I sat down carefully on the wall, briefcase across my knees. And the word from the good Doctor is that you once took delivery of two or three Byzantine ikons from New World One.

  Probably, Mick allowed. There was a lot of weird stuff came up from there when it closed down. Some of it, I just kept circulating through town, you know? Moving it from one place to another to keep it hidden....

  Yeah, sometimes you had to do that. Not every safe stash stays that way for a handy millennium; sometimes you need to move stuff every twenty years or so, just to keep it in the right area to be found on a given date. It was one of the main ways things got lost in the first place.

  I clicked open the briefcase, and watched with interest as Mick’s pupils expanded across his irises at the scent from within.

  Whatcha got there, Joseph? God, even his transmission sounded hoarse!

  Two and a quarter kilos of prime Theobromos, I said. Most of it Guatemalan and Hershey’s, mostly milk. A few almond bars. Six chocolate eggs. And about twelve ounces of malted milk balls.

  I thought Slick Mick would pass out just smelling it.

  And it’s all yours, Mick, briefcase and all, if you can remember where you put those three Greek ikons from New World One.

  I swear, Mick’s brain made gear-grinding noises as he sorted frantically through the chemical wreck of his memories. I was seriously considering advancing him just one Hershey bar, so his system wouldn’t shut down from sheer frustration.

  But Mick’s brain wasn’t a total mess yet. After about a quarter hour, while we both sat there in apparent silence, he suddenly straightened up.

  I got it! I had to move them a few years ago, find a new place. They’re in the Egyptian!

  What, the Egyptian Theater? Are you sure you left them there, Mick? It’s a pretty public space.

  I’m positive! He was shaking with glee; that and the proximity of all that Theobromos. Not in the lobby, in the back corridor where the toilets and the emergency exits are. I whitewashed ’em, and painted signs on ’em, and sneaked ’em in one afternoon—the little girl in the ticket booth thought I was just a maintenance man. Hey, you know what?

  What, Mick?

  They still wear the kalasiri, them little girls at the theatre. Isn’t that weird?

  Mortals are like that, man, I said. So—the ikons, they’re hanging in that back corridor?

  Yes! Mick started to giggle. They were really strange, too; gave me the willies somethin’ awful. But now—one says LADIES and one says GENTLEMEN and one says EXIT I wanted to put EGRESS on it, ’cause the Egyptian is a fancy place, but it wouldn’t fit.

  Mick’s ruined mind shone in clear, transparent colors, as innocent of guile as a pile of broken bottles. He certainly believed the ikons were there; and by his peculiar logic, it made sense.

  Mick, my man, you win the big prize. I closed the briefcase and handed it solemnly to him, and he clutched it to his chest like a warm blanket from the Sally Anns. He didn’t really see me anymore after that. He was just sitting there inhaling the fragrance of the chocolate in his arms. Sometimes going crazy makes it easier to be happy.

  ...Joseph? Joseph? Can you come pick me up? I’ve got the goods! Lewis’s transmission sounded breathless and triumphant.

  On my way, Lewis. And I’ve got the goods, too! I was feeling pretty good myself. Because sometimes, just getting the job done is the best satisfaction of all.

  Some people, though, even though they’re powerfully augmented immortals, are doomed to live in china shops constantly invaded by bulls. I’ve often thought Lewis was one of those, and he sure as hell looked it when I picked him up round the corner from the See’s shop a little later.

  For one thing, he was clutching his market bag (promisingly lumpy, I saw) to his chest with a look altogether too much like Slick Mick’s. His hair was falling in his eyes, one shoulder of his suit coat was torn open and he had a blooming black eye. Being one of us, it had to have been pretty recent to show at all. However, he was also grinning like the Cheshire Cat and practically levitated into the Ford when I pulled to the curb.

  “What the hell happened to you?” I asked.

  “There was a riot in the See’s shop. I had to fight to keep my chocolate!” he said proudly. “But I did it!”

  “Great. Hey, were they grandma types you defeated, Galahad?”

  “Oh, ha ha—but, yes, there were some very combative older ladies there....”

  “Well, here they come and they’ve got their umbrellas out, man!” I pointed at the furious posse hurrying down Ivar toward us, threw the Ford into reverse, and backed around the corner by the Burlesque Theater until I could gun it up Cahuenga and take off.

  Lewis waved his hat (which looked like someone had stomped it) in farewell as we escaped.

  “All right, you know where the ikons are!” he exulted, jamming the battered hat down on his head. “So what do we do next?”

  “We’re going to the movies, Lewis,” I glanced at him. “With a stop to put away the goodies and get you a new coat. The secret of successful burglary is not to be noticed.”

  It was ridiculously easy after that, so easy that I was beginning to worry what would go wrong. Most of our work is relatively easy, actually—disasters are rare, and knowing the future in advance really makes the present simpler to get through. Still, there are mistakes (look at the snipe hunt we’d just been on) and things that required the brilliant improvisational skills of Facilitators like me.

  But tonight was simple. Poor old Mick was years out of date—the usherettes no longer wore their Egyptian robes, but they’d never really looked like classic kalasiris anyway—more like Esmeralda the Dancing Gypsy. But the Egyptian was playing a great film, although no one in the audience but Lewis and I knew that Casablanca would be a deathless classic. And we’d both seen it dozens of times—but it is a classic, and we enjoyed it anyway. Between the newsreel—already pretty depressing in 1943—and the cartoon (Der Fuehrer’s Face, an all-time favorite of mine), I went off to the men’s room and had a few quiet moments to myself in the back corridors of the theatre. It might have been a little confusing for patrons coming after me with full bladders, because when I went back to my seat, the signs differentiating LADIES and GENTLEMEN were gone. They might have been found in the alley outside the exit door, if the door had still said EXIT. But it didn’t.

  As we strolled down the long court of the Egyptian, between the palms and sphinxes, I intoned, “Lewis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

  “You say that every time we watch this film,” sighed Lewis.

  “Yeah, well, it’s a good line.”

  When we walked back to where the car was parked on Las Palmas after the show, I ducked down the alley and got the three signs. And still nothing went wrong.

  Lewis earned his keep as soon as we got them home, concocting something that smelled like a mentholated milk shake to clean the white wash off the edge of each sign. They were the right ones, the old colors shining like neon through the flat dull paint Slick Mick had used to hide them. You wouldn’t think mere whitewash would do the trick, but...the Spanish once hid an entire golden altar from Captain Henry Morgan with a coat of white paint, and that bastard was hard to fool.

  Lewis began a thorough cleaning as soon as we were sure, while I called in on the credenza to report that we had the ikons.

  Great news, Joseph. Hermann congratulated me when he came on. I figured all that was needed was a pair of old hands like you and Lewis. Stand by for delivery coordinates....

  There’s always a weird wavering tone when some data dump comes over the credenza. I’m told it’s not a real sound�
��ears and otic ganglia aren’t involved, it’s just an artifact of our neurons in response to the carrier wave that shoves the information into our cerebrums. All I know is, there’s a hum like a distant howling, and then data coalesces out of it like a new memory.

  This time it was two photographs—one of a house front, the other of a man’s face—a telephone number and a name. The howl felt like it was running around my skull, morphing into nasty laughter.

  I know this guy, Hermann. Not by this name, but—

  There was an unhappy pause. I know, Joseph. Everyone in town knows him, one way or another. But he’s the agent for the party waiting for the ikons.

  Hermann—he’s an agent for the Nazi Party!

  I know, Joseph. Hermann sounded at least 60,000 years old now, and like he’d had a toothache the whole time. He went all formal on me then. Facilitator Joseph, do you understand this assignment?

  Hermann Senex, I do. Joseph out.

  And of course, I did understand it. I had just never imagined doing anything like this. We were supposed to be the good guys! But Dr. Zeus, in his infinite and omniscient wisdom, didn’t choose sides. He played all sides against the future, for goals and reasons not obvious to we who slogged through the mud of Time. This time, there was apparently a great good reason for me to deliver mind-altering religious objects to the Nazis.

  Like a student of American cinema didn’t know where that was headed....

  I knew this job was too easy.

  When I told Lewis about it, he never even stopped in his careful cleaning of what I recognized as a martyr bishop. That ikon had frightened men to death, as I recalled.

  “No.” He shook his head. “No, I won’t help you do that.”

  “I don’t need your help,” I said miserably. “I can wash off paint and deliver the things all by myself.”

  “No, you can’t. You’ll ruin them. And it’s wrong.” Lewis looked up at me. His face was calm, but his pulse was racing in fury. “This is against all our training, against everything we stand for.”