02. The Shadow Dancers (20 page)

I had to come in down in Tennessee; they forced the weak point open just long enough to get me in and close it down again. The other side controlled the only regular substation -and it was theirs, not ours-and that was in Pennsylvania near State College, which wasn't called that or nothin' else, there bein' no Penn State there. There was only a few sleepy little farm towns around there-and .the country estate of one George Thomas Wycliffe, a real nice name for a country gentlemen who happened to be the boss of organized crime from New York to the Virginia border. It also happened to completely contain not just the weak point there but also just about all views of the weak point.

I stepped out into the late afternoon of what in my world would be the Tennessee countryside but was now just the Boone District of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the Labyrinth closed behind me. Aldrath worked it so it opened when it did by forcing a spontaneous opening of the thing so one of his agents could go to a world nearby on that track on some pretend mission. Fact was, only three people really knew I was here-Aldrath Prang, Bill Markham-and Aldrath's resident agent in the world who was meetin' me. She was supposed to be born here, and knew her way around. Even she was told as little as she could, only that I was on some mission for Aldrath. To her, too, I was Beth Parker. No sense in takin' a chance that this Carlos or Addison might know who Brandy Parker Horowitz really was.

She was there, all right; a thin, slightly built young woman maybe five two or three, with shoulder-length black hair. Her face was long and she had a real sharp nose and thin lips. She was wearin' a fur jacket, knee-length skirt, and high-heeled boots. Me, I had on a blue wool sweater, jeans, and sneakers, and I had one of my satchel handbags packed with toiletries and stuff and a small suitcase with just things I thought I might need and might not be able to pick up here.

"Hello," she called to me. "Over here." She had one of those middle voices and middle accents that seemed just about average for American women. I half expected some kind of British accent or something, but I guess we was already polluted in our talk by the time of the Revolution. Of course, the Canadians of my world had been with the British and they didn't sound like no Brits, now that I thought of it. As I went over to her, though, I could see on her face that I wasn't exactly what she was expectin'.

"I'm Beth Parker," I told her, bein' friendly as I could.

"Lindy Crockett," she responded, but she didn't offer a hand. "I-I've seen that thing work a couple of times, but it always gives me the chills. Sorry."

"That's okay. Somethin' else is botherin' you, though. Better clear the air right now; I'm gonna hav'ta depend on you a lot from here on in."

"Uh-nothing, really. I just wasn't expecting you to be a Negro."

My old defenses went up automatically, but I was under control. This wasn't my world and I wasn't invited, I invited myself. I might not like the place much, but it was better to have a comment like that than to be what that meant in, say, Vogel's old world.

"You got problems with that? If so, we better try to set up some alternate people right now, before this goes much further."

"Uh, no, no. It may even work to our advantage once we
begin, but it does complicate things a little. We're going to have a very long drive, and this commonwealth has some pretty rigid segregation laws. Until we get out of Virginia, there might be some problems just finding restaurants we could eat in or motor inns if we need to sleep. I planned on driving to Richmond and taking the train from there, giving you a feel for the place and briefing you as best I can, but we wouldn't even be in the same cars."

Just like home, huh, Aldrath? Of course, they
was
still blockin' off a whole neighborhood of the good old northern City of Brotherly Love back home 'cause a black woman moved into a neighborhood, and my daddy grew up in a place and society like this.

"Then how 'bout we drive north instead of the train?" I suggested. "Or would a black woman and a white woman in a car prove embarrassin'?"

"Not so long as we were both women, no. The roads aren't too great, but we could go up to Huntington and get the train east from Cincinnati to Philadelphia. If I got a compartment we wouldn't have problems."

"Let's do it, then. Anything else?"

"Well, women in pants are pretty rare in this country, and those shoes aren't seen much off the squash courts. Did you bring anything else to wear?"

"Well, I got one skirt in there and some high boots, but I didn't expect to risk my lone pair of pantyhose so early."

She stared at me. "What are pantyhose?"

Now I knew I was livin' in a primitive place.

I changed in the woods and got pronounced all right to travel, although I got the idea that my stuff was a little out of style here. We hiked over the fields and through the woods to a country road where a small car was parked to one side. It was a real tiny, boxy car and it bounced a lot, but the only real problem I had with it was that I was sittin' where I felt I should be drivin' and she was sittin' in the passenger side with a steerin' wheel and we drove opposite of all I was used to. It took some gettin' used to, I'll tell you. Crockett also was the kind of driver who liked to go sixty on roads you wouldn't dare do thirty on and brake at the last minute.

She was a cigarette smoker, though, and relieved that I was, too. She smoked these long, thin, unfiltered things,
though, and I began to realize that I better hoard my two cartons 'cause I was universes away from any more Virginia Slims menthol.

Lindy-her real name was Linda but nobody called her that-was originally from Buffalo but she went east like so many did in my world to make her fame and fortune in New York. Most women here were housewives and you could still live here on one income, but the professional types tended to wind up as secretaries and clerks. Lindy was from the well-off middle class, and she'd gotten a law degree from one of the two colleges in the whole east that let women study law. She never could get into no law firm, though, and couldn't get much business on her own, so she wound up a full lawyer workin' as a legal secretary for a big law firm. She met a guy there who did their PI work, they got married, and she moved over to be
his
secretary. About a year and a half later the husband died from pneumonia he caught on a long stakeout and she inherited the business. She was twenty-six then.

The thing wasn't no Spade & Marlowe, though. It was a nice, comfortable operation with five full-time male investigators all of whom were willin' to let her be the boss so long as they kept doin' all the real work. It was only after a while that she discovered that one of her most regular clients who had 'em goin' all over and doin' all sorts of seemingly crazy things was really the Company. Because there really wasn't no Company here, only a few of Aldrath's agents tryin' to run down what they could, security employed a bunch of private eye companies to help it get information. Since some of her agents had contacts inside "Big Georgie" Wycliffe's organization, she was the one they finally picked as resident agent.

"In a sense, it saved my agency," she told me. "A number of the men didn't like working for a woman and were looking around to jump to other agencies, and business was drying up. Not any more. Plenty of cash, plenty of work, as you probably know."

Yeah, I knew what the Company could do, even if it wasn't in a world where it was set up and fully operating.

"The Gurneys-sorry, the National Police-have been
trying to nail him for years, but he always slips away," she said about Big Georgie. "He came up as a dock union leader and made the big time by being smarter and tougher than anyone else. He got where he is by a combination of big favors, mostly assassinations, for the higher-ups and while still a union leader he seized control of the illegal narcotics trade and made millions. Opium, heroin, cocaine -you name it, he controls it, north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Officially, if you can believe it, he is a brewer in northern New Jersey and also a tea importer. He's highly visible, at charitable events, sporting events, and the like, but very well protected and insulated by a top organizational staff."

"And you think he knows about the Labyrinth and the rest?"

"He knows, because what is being done is being done by his subordinates in his territory. It couldn't be otherwise. The main man for this horrible new drug, though, is a lieutenant named Arnie Siegel who controls the narcotics underworld in the south New Jersey and Philadelphia areas. He works this part of the operation out of Atlantic City, New Jersey, rather than Philadelphia because the mob owns and controls Atlantic City, while Philadelphia is the headquarters of the National Police. They run the Philadelphia vice, too, and own some of the best politicians money can buy, but there's no use in tweaking them
too
far."

I nodded. "But so far this operation is only the fifty prostitutes? No more?"

"That we know of, although things do appear to be changing. The work done up on the farm-the estate up-country-on the gate there seems to be very extensive, and they wouldn't do that if they weren't planning some real expansion. We also believe that they are importing a lot more of the drug than before, and one dose a day is not only the minimum but the maximum you need. Any more has no real effect on an addict. Then there's this Addison woman. She tends to show up now and again, much more in the last few months than ever before, but she never uses the Pennsylvania gate. She has also been seen in the large compound they're building in Guiana."

"Then why don't you have pictures of her? At least I'd think you would have them places staked out as best you could."

"We do, and we've had half a dozen chances, brief ones, to photograph her and a couple of opportunities to photograph Dr. Carlos, but no matter what the photos turn out too blurry to be used. They must have some sort of device that makes it impossible. That's all we can figure."

Well, to folks who could build and run the Labyrinth, a gadget like that would be no trouble at all, I thought. Still, it brought up a real point. "If they don't want their pictures taken that bad, then there must be somebody somewheres who might recognize them," I pointed out. "That means they ain't no flunkies and messengers. Have you tried composite sketches?"

"Oh, yes. We sent some fairly detailed ones to security, but they were unable to get anything from them. It's another of those mysteries."

"Other than this Addison, has there been any contact between this Carlos and Siegel? Anything?"

"We think there must be, but we haven't been able to document anything as yet. Consider that the National Police at least know of the drug and are scared by it, too. They think it's locally made and they're scared stiff that it might be mass-produced for general use. They, and we, have staked out, bugged, and tapped both operations as much as humanly possible and come up with nothing at all. The odds are very good that Wycliffe and Siegel have anti-bugging technology far in advance of ours. For them, this is a strictly business proposition. They are getting new technology for their operations that make a joke out of the police efforts, and in exchange they are doing this on the side. None of it, however, makes sense. I mean, why hook fifty young girls on it, all under nineteen when hooked, when you can use far more conventional drugs the same way? And why no men?"

"Any link between the fifty? Families? Anything?"

"The first thing we looked for. Most are runaways or the sort that decided to go on the street on their own. None come from powerful or influential families, although a few are from the middle class, God help us. They are all well
built and attractive, but none are much more than that. The bulk are white, but there are some Negro girls in there and also some Chinese girls. At the start, when there were only a dozen or so, they were kept together, but now they're in small groups working in various cities along the eastern seaboard, no more than six to eight. Siegel keeps three around his personal home at the Jersey shore as virtually his slaves, although even they occasionally work the streets."

Well, we managed to make it to Huntington. After bein' Vogel's Beth I didn't mind eatin' mostly carry-out food and mostly sleepin' in the car. The train ride was real nice-we don't have trains like this back home, I'll tell you-and most everybody just assumed I was Lindy's personal maid or something like that. Their assumptions pissed me off a little, but I played along with it because it was handy and the laugh was on them. Most of the train crew was black, though-the porters, cooks, waiters, that sort of thing- and every damned black man on there seemed to think he was God's gift to women and were the most arrogant bunch I ever was around.

Philadelphia was very much different and still pretty much the same. There was no Schuykull Expressway or I-95 or like that-no expressways to speak of at all, and no U.S. 1 as such, either-but it was still a big city, it was still laid out based on Market and Chestnut, and it had elevated railways, streetcars down every street, and trolley buses, too. The downtown buildings, even the new ones, tended to look old-fashioned and not all box and glass, but it was familiar enough, and out on all sides was the row houses and tiny streets lookin' much the same. They had a couple of northern bridges across the Delaware, but the big ones I was used to, like the Franklin, Whitman, and Ross, just didn't exist. Most folks took ferries across the Delaware to Camden, which was more wide open than in my world.

Blacks lived in their own sections and only there, comin' out only to work or shop, but things wasn't so bad otherwise. Philadelphia stores took the same money no matter what the color, although some of the big department stores had separate dressin' rooms for colored and white. On the other hand, you rode anywhere on the trolley or train you
wanted and all but the fancy restaurants didn't care if you ate there so long as you had the money. The most real trouble I had was that I kept lookin' the wrong way before steppin' into a street and almost got run over, and when a streetcar-they called 'em trams-or somethin' stopped, I half the time would have to keep from walkin' to the wrong side, without the door. Same with taxis, which were all real old-fashioned types and black.