Ghosts of Columbia (30 page)

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Authors: L.E. Modesitt Jr.

Tags: #Science Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Alternate History, #United States, #Literature & Fiction

BOOK: Ghosts of Columbia
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“Drink?” asked the waitress.
“Food?”
She slipped an oblong of cardboard in front of me. From it, I learned that I was in “The Dive.” It didn’t take long to decide on what to eat.
“How are the chops?”
“Steak pie’s better.”
“I’ll take it and a light draft.” I almost asked for Grolsch, but that would have been out of character. The almost-slip bothered me. It wouldn’t have happened ten years earlier.
“Morris all right?”
“Fine.”
The beer came immediately, and I took a sip, but not much more. I hadn’t eaten anything since the morning, one reason I’d probably collapsed. For once I hadn’t even felt that hungry. But not eating was stupid in the current situation, and I intended to eat just about everything that came with the steak pie.
Like all of the men in flannel, and some of those in working suits, I sang the chorus with the singers, careful to slur the edges of the words and swing the heavy glass stein, trying to ignore the incongruity of steins and Old West country songs composed in the last decade or so.
“Favorite rails and dim-lit places,
nine of crowns and spade of aces,
let me drink away the pain,
let me ride that evening train.
“And let those boxcars roll!
Make my point and save my soul …”
The pianist was good, but he certainly wasn’t any Edo deWaart, either.
“Here you go.” The waitress set the steak pie, wide fried potato strips, and boiled brussel sprouts in front of me.
“Thank you.” I began to eat, not caring especially that the singing duo had taken a break. The steak pie was good, the potatoes fair, and the brussels sprouts a decent imitation of sawdust dipped in turpentine. I ate it all and finished the amber beer in the process.
No sooner had I set down the stein than the waitress was there. “You want another Morris?”
“Please.”
She was back in instants with another stein. “The whole thing comes to ten.”
I handed her ten and a silver dollar.
“Thanks, Sarge.”
I nodded and looked at the amber liquid, ignoring the “Sarge.” The second
Morris had to last for a while. So I sipped it slowly, the only way I could now that my stomach was nearly full.
One of the less square-faced women, probably younger than me but looking older despite the dyed black hair, glanced from an adjoining table.
I smiled sadly and shrugged, implying that I was lonely but not exactly flush. The green-rimmed eyes studied my cheap dark suit, and she slipped away from the other woman and eased into the other side of the booth. She carried her own stein, half-full.
“Lonely, mister?”
“Peter. Peter Hloddn at your service. Best damned ledgerman on the East Coast—no … You can see that’s not true.” I set down the glass stein just hard enough to shake the dark-varnished oak top a bit. “I sell enough to make ends meet, not enough to support a wife, and that’s good because I don’t have one, and I couldn’t support her when I did.”
“Thel. Thel Froehle. You come here often?” She set the half-full stein on the damp wood. All the wood was damp, despite the antique hot-air furnace that rumbled from somewhere beneath the bar.
“No. I can’t pay for many overpriced beers. The company doesn’t pay for much beyond the room, and I can’t always sit and look at the videolink.”
“You could go down to the Mall and look at the pictures.”
“I could. Sometimes I do, like today, when I’m here on Saturdays.” I took a sip of warm beer from the stein, and it tasted more like lacquer the warmer it got. I guess I’m not really Dutch, despite the genes, because I’m not fond of warm beer or beer you have to chew. “How many times can you look at pictures?”
“I like pictures.” She shook the thick dark hair that was probably blond beneath the color. Blonds had been out of fashion for almost a decade with the reappearance of the “ghost” look—pale skin set off by dark hair.
“So do I, but I like people better. Pictures don’t talk.”
“Sometimes it’s better when people don’t talk.”
She had me there, and I tried not to shrug, instead taking a gulp from the stein.
“You drink that fast, and that stuff will kill you.”
“Something will. Not going to get out of life alive anyway.”
“No.” Thel took a small swallow from her stein and licked a touch of foam off her lips with the tip of her tongue. “No reason to bury your face in the suds. You ought to look at what’s happening on the trip.”
“The old life’s-a-journey business. My wife always said we should go first class. She tried, and I went broke, and she left.”
“You’re cheerful.”
“Sorry.” Except I wasn’t, exactly. My problem was that I saw what was happening, and I didn’t like it, no matter how it turned out.
“Cheer up. Things could be worse.” She took another swallow from her stein.
I forced a smile in return. I didn’t feel like it, since it seemed like every time I
started to cheer up, things had gotten worse. “They could be. They have been. Suppose I should be grateful.” I sipped the Morris. “You grow up around here?”
“No. New Ostend. Came here with the B and P when they closed the New
Amsterdam office.”
“Still work for them?”
“Hardly. I work for a legal office down on Fifteenth. It pays the rent.”
“Why’d you leave the railroad?”
She gave me a sad smile. “Ghosts. You know how many people died in that accident last year? Half of them seem to haunt the offices.”
I had to frown. Ghosts usually stayed near where they died.
“See, when the train crashed through the platform, it was a mess, so they carted some of them upstairs into the offices. Maybe three or four died right there.” She shivered. “Don’t seem right. Poor souls can’t even stay near friends or family.”
“Maybe it’d be better if they’d died sudden.”
“I don’t know.” This time her swallow was a healthy one.
“Read something about the government trying to stop ghosts. Think that would have helped? Would you have stayed there if the office wasn’t haunted?”
“Frig the government. Always messing with people. Ought to leave the damned souls alone. Leave us all alone.”
“Yeah.” I sighed.
“They don’t make it easy, do they?” she asked.
I shook my head. They certainly didn’t.
She gave me a smile, and stood, her empty stein in her hand. “See you around, . Sarge.”
Did I really look like an undercover watch officer? Or was that just familiarity? Did it matter, or would it throw off vanBecton’s boys?
Since I didn’t know, I staggered back to my small, cold room. I would have liked to call Llysette, but that would have been one of the dumbest things I could have done, and I wasn’t that stupid or desperate—not yet.
W
aking up with a headache in a crummy small hotel room to the sound of air hammers on the street below is not recommended for health, sanity, or a cheerful outlook on life. Then again, why should my outlook have been particularly cheerful?
Ralston McGuiness and Gillaume vanBecton both wanted me out of the way. Hans Waetjen either had orders to frame me for a pair of murders or was being set up so that it was in his interest to do so. My lover had turned cold toward me, or I thought she had, and the family ghost was quoting Shakespeare and old songs at me, or I thought she was. I really couldn’t drink, but I’d eaten and drunk too much the night before, or I thought I had. And now I needed to roam through Georgetown to set up a rather improbable scenario that I would have instantly rejected if I’d been my own supervisor back in my Spazi days.
Outside, the sky was cheerfully blue, and the light hammered at my closed eyelids when the air hammers didn’t. Construction on Sunday? Why not? After all, this was Columbia, land of free enterprise, and a dollar to whoever provided the best service, Lord’s day or not.
Finally I staggered into the bathroom in an attempt to deal with attacks on all internal systems. After that, I tried not to groan while I stood under the hot shower. That was hard because the water temperature jumped from lukewarm to scalding and back again, sort of like my life in recent weeks.
I wore flannel and worn khakis when I left the room. No ledgerman would waste his good suit on an off Sunday.
The Bread and Chocolate across the street was closed, but I found a hole-inthe-wall a block up and around the corner, Brother George’s. Brother George’s poached eggs were just right, and the toast wasn’t burned. I still almost choked because the cigarette smoke was so thick, and I burned my tongue with the chocolate because I was trying not to cough from the smoke.
After breakfast, all of two dollars, which you couldn’t beat, even for all the smoke that still clung to me, I took the Georgetown trolley out to Thirty-third and M. I should have worn a jacket, but I hadn’t brought anything except the trench coat—a definite oversight on my part, but under stress you don’t always think of everything you need. I hoped I hadn’t left anything really important behind, but I probably had. I just didn’t know what it was.
In Georgetown, I had to scout out Ralston McGuiness’s place, and then I had to begin my engineering—heavy engineering.
When I got off the trolley, I shivered for the first two blocks uphill, but walking quickly seemed to help, and by the third I was doing all right, and I had no trouble finding Ralston’s place. His name had been in the wireset book, unlike vanBecton’s, which had taken some creativity to obtain.
His home was a modest town house off P Street, if a three-story brick town house in rococo dress with a screened half-porch off to the side could be classed as modest. That section hadn’t really been fully gentrified, and Ralston took the trolley to and from the Presidential Palace and walked the four blocks each way virtually every day. He’d mentioned that walk in one of his attempts to prove he was just a normal person.
People like Ralston didn’t have to worry about security, mostly because no one knew why they would possibly need it. After all, why would a president’s special assistant for fiscal review need security protection? And Ralston certainly wouldn’t want to advertise that what he was doing was so vital to the presidency that he needed such protection.
The small yard was landscaped carefully, including an ornate boxwood hedge that paralleled the front walk and a dwarf apple tree only fifteen feet from the low front stoop.
I walked past on the other side of the street and went up far enough to see the edge of Dumbarton Oaks before I turned around. It’s a private park now, with an art gallery, and the proceeds go to The University—Mister Jefferson’s University.
My feet were beginning to hurt, probably because walking on brick and stone sidewalks is harder than running country lanes. I sat down on a trolley bench—serving the upper Georgetown branch that doesn’t connect directly with downtown but swings across to New Bruges Avenue and descends to Dupont Circle where you have to transfer. Was what I planned right? Probably not, but what vanBecton and Ralston planned wasn’t either, and while two wrongs don’t make a right, they might equal survival.
I snorted, feeling cold again, and stood. I began to walk downhill once more with the determined stride of the serious walker, taking in everything I could as I marched by his house. I nodded to the well-dressed couple entering a Rolls-Royce sedan, clearly headed for church, probably the National Cathedral. They actually nodded back, and the white-haired lady offered me a smile.
That wasn’t the end of it. I scouted the alleys a bit, just to make sure, before I walked back to the trolley and headed back toward home away from home—the fabulous Albert Pick House.
After I left the trolley on Pennsylvania and Fifteenth, I got a bratwurst from a street cart outside the Presidential Palace, and ate it as I walked down nearly deserted Pennsylvania Avenue. The bratwurst would lead to more indigestion, probably, but I didn’t want to collapse the way I had Saturday.
I paused at vanBuren Place, north of the Presidential Palace, when I saw a flicker of white in the shadows. A man in a formal coat ran through the east gate, literally through the wooden bars—it was a good thing they weren’t iron—and stopped on the grass. He turned and lifted his hands, as if to surrender, before exploding into fragments of white.
I frowned. The scene recalled something, but what, I couldn’t remember. A man surrendering and being gunned down. Now his ghost seemed doomed to relive it, time after time. But who had it been? I shook my head and turned toward the hotel. I had a few more pressing problems than recalling modern or ancient history.
The doorman at the Albert Pick definitely sniffed as I went through, but who was he kidding?
I had the elevator to myself. Once back in my room, I put on the coveralls and the beard. Then I had to wait for the maids to work their way around the corner before I took the service stairs down to the car park. Since there wasn’t any attendant on duty on Sundays, I didn’t have to worry about how I looked taking the Stanley out—just so long as I didn’t look like me.
This time I drove up New Bruges and took California, winding around and crossing the area several times. I wanted to be more familiar with the street patterns before Monday night. I didn’t go near vanBecton’s place, but straight to the false Dutch colonial that was the power substation. Out came the toolbox with a few items, like plastique from the equipment bag, carefully eased inside. They say you can do anything with plastique except play with sparks, but I still treat things that can blow you apart with respect. It can’t hurt.
The locks, both of them, were straightforward, and I was inside in not too much longer than a key would have taken.
Determining the best way to blow a substation isn’t as easy as it sounds, since the walls are thick and I’d have to run an antenna that couldn’t be seen to where it could pick up the LF signal from the street. Most probably no one would be by to check the station—detailed inspections don’t occur every day—but I couldn’t take that chance.
In the end I opted for what you might call hidden overkill, with far more plastique than I needed, because I had to hide it. Then I relocked the door and walked briskly to the Stanley and drove away.
Down on Newfoundland, not too far out, I found a chicken place, Harlan’s, which featured a sign caricaturing a southern colonel and food caricaturing fried chicken. I sat at a small plastic-topped table, balancing on a hard stool, and munched through the chicken. What I got was filling, although I wondered how I’d feel later.
I should have taken my time, because I needed to wait until it was dark for the next step, and because I began to feel like combining bratwurst and chicken hadn’t been the smartest of gastronomical moves. Instead, I drove out to the zoo, used the public facilities, and looked at penguins. Most people like them, but I feel sorry for them, trapped in their formal wear with nowhere to go and no understanding of what life is all about once they’ve been removed from their habitat—like a lot of people in the Federal District.
Then I took the Stanley out toward where we had lived, but the firs were taller, and the Gejdensons had added a room and put up a big stone wall around the backyard. I drove by only once, and I didn’t slow down. Instead, I turned on the radio to the all-news station.
“… Mayor Jefferson has requested an increase in federal payments earmarked for crime prevention. The mayor claimed the increases were necessary to combat the growing use of weapons in street crime and in Federal District schools. Speaker Hartpence’s office has indicated the Speaker will give the mayor’s request full consideration in the next budget.”
I shook my head.
“… at the half, the Redskins are down to Baltimore by two goals. The amazing John Elway scored twice, once from barely past midfield. George stopped more than a dozen shots, but couldn’t deny Elway …”
Who knew, maybe Elway would replace the legend of Chiri. As the twilight deepened, I turned around and headed toward the Arlington Bridge back into Columbia City.
“Ambassador Schikelgruber will meet with Foreign Minister Gore tomorrow to discuss the issue of placing the second fleet in Portsmouth, England, a step regarded as, quote, ‘uniquely hostile,’ by the Emperor Ferdinand …”
I eased the steamer up California Street and toward vanBecton’s house. What I needed to do was simple: just set the plastique in the joint of a tree limb so that it would drop the limb across the power line to the vanBectons’. What I needed was a brace and bit, plastique, a detonator, and no spectators.
The first three were in the trunk. The obstacle to the fourth was a couple parked in an old blue steamer with a huge artificial grille—probably a mideighties DeSoto. Since they were parked practically next to the tree I was targeting, all I could do was drive two blocks away and park … and park.
After a while I drove up and down Newfoundland for a time, listening to the all-news radio.
“Elway scored three goals and made the key passes leading to two more as the Redskins lost their fourth straight … national korfball team faces the Austro-Hungarian team Monday night in New Amsterdam … weather tomorrow, clear and unseasonably cold.”
I drove back past the end of the street, but the damned blue DeSoto still sat there. I took another spin out New Bruges Avenue, this time checking out Summer Valley and the new storefronts out that way, still half listening to the radio as I drove.
“To find the additional funds, Mayor Jefferson proposed a reduction in the snow removal budget …”
Why not, I reflected. No one in Columbia City could drive on snow anyway.
Then I turned over the back bridge to Georgetown and drove around Ralston’s area. I decided to see how I did in the dark. I did fine, and by the time I got back to vanBecton’s street, the damned DeSoto was finally gone, and half the upstairs lights in the nearby houses were already off.
After all the driving, setting the plastique was almost anticlimactic. All I did was climb the tree, use the brace and bit, fill the hole and set the detonator, and pat it smooth—and hope that no child found it before the next night.
I was exhausted by the time I climbed the hotel’s service stairs and sneaked back into my room. I was also so sweaty that I took a shower. Of course, there were no messages. There seldom were, even at home.

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