Hard-Boiled Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles) (4 page)

“Y
ou’re with my buddy Al,” I said.  “What makes you think I’d go behind him like this?  That’d be rotten.”

She had the bottle on the bar next to her.  To get a swig of my own I had to step in front of her first—all right I didn’t have to, I could have gone behind the bar instead—and when I stood there her legs opened.

“Al’s a sweetie, but I need more,” she said.

“Do you.”

“A lot more.”

“How do you think he’d feel if he knew you were here?”

She put her hand on my cheek.  “Aww, he’s a big boy.  Besides, who’s gonna tell him?  I know how to keep secrets, don’t you?”

I leaned in to kiss her, and stopped just shy of completing the act. 

“You know how to
get
secrets,” I said.  “I don’t think you know much about keeping them.” 

Then I
did kiss her.  It was a deep kiss, the kind where you grab the back of the girl’s head to make sure you don’t push yourself all the way through. 

Lucy’s
lips parted for me, and her tongue slid around mine like a cobra.  Then her thighs were spread open and her knees had found their way up around my hips.  In a second she’d be undoing my belt. 

I don’t really know how I managed to pull away right then. 
It could be sixty thousand years had taught me sex is not a good trade for death, even if it’s really good sex and you haven’t had it in a while, and even if it was with a redhead that reminded you of another redhead, just a little.  It could also be my curiosity was actually stronger than my ardor.

I couldn’t tell you for sure, but I
did it.  I pulled away, took a couple of steps back and left her hanging.

“What secrets did you get from Al already?” I asked.  “
’Cuz I don’t have any he didn’t give you.”

She hissed a frustrated
exhale through clenched teeth, closed her legs and pulled the coat down to hide her indecency.

“Why don’t you have a last name
, Rocky?” she asked.

Again with the last name.
  “Who says I don’t?”

She extinguished her cigarette on the edge of the bar, which would have been a bigger deal if not for everybody doing it all the time.  It was better than throwing it in the sawdust on the floor.  “You said so yourself.”

“Maybe I don’t want you to have it.  You want to tell me Smith is your real last name?  Long line of smiths, right?”

I
grabbed the bottle and started to walk away.  When my head was turned she shouted, “
Hey, catch!
”  I spun around just in time to intercept the shot glass before it hit my head.  It wasn’t until I put it down on the bar that I realized her shout hadn’t been in English.

And then there was a gun in her hand.

“Do I want to know where you pulled that pistol from?” I asked.

“My sleeve, wise-guy. 
How’s my German?”

“Is that what that was?”

“Don’t play dumb.  You may be a lotta things, Rocky, but you ain’t dumb.”

“
Your German’s not bad,
” I said, in German.  “But mine’s a little rusty.  You want to shoot me because I know another language?”

“I don’t
wanna shoot you at all, but since you’re not responding to the usual persuasions, I’ve gotta consider other options.”

“Hmm.”  I took a swi
g of the whiskey.  “How about I tell you everything I know and you tell me everything you know, and then I take off that coat of yours and we have some fun?”

“Might be you lost your chance at that already.  I don’t sleep with spies.”

“Me neither,” I said, although strictly speaking I was pretty positive we were both lying.  “So let’s make sure neither one of us is first.”

“Right.  Pour me a drink.”

“Is that an order?”

“I still have the gun, don’t I?  And stay on this side.  I know you
ain’t got a piece on you, unless that was one I felt in your pants a minute ago, but maybe you got one behind the bar.”

There wasn’t
one behind the bar, and I was glad for it.  Back then I didn’t much trust guns, which is what happens sometimes when you see a technology from birth.  Guns used to be tremendously inaccurate noisemakers that were just as likely to blow up in your hand as anything, and that made me want to steer clear.  It took me a long time to accept them as a better option than, say, a sword.  I had the same basic problem with cars and domesticated cats.

I poured a shot into the glass she’d chucked at my head and stepped close enough to her to both grab the gun and put the drink down
next to her.  I only did the latter.

“So I’m
gonna tell you some things I think you might already know,” she said, as soon as I was far enough away to pose no threat as either an attacker or lover.  “You stop me when I’m wrong.”

“How about if I
say I don’t know anything and we forget about it?”

“You already know German, and that’s a thing, Rock
.  There’s a war on and all.”

“
A lot of people know German.  It’s a whole country, and it’s been around for a while.  You speak it, and so do probably ten other guys in the bar tonight.  And before you throw anything else at my head, I also speak Italian.  My Japanese isn’t so hot.”

“
Right, fine.  You also know my Al is kinda important.”

“I wouldn’t say that. 
He works on some things that are more complicated than I’ll ever understand, and those things sound like they’re important.” 

It wasn’t that I couldn’t see where she was going, but I was
going to do all I could to derail her before she got there, short of getting the gun out of her hands.  Romantically, that’s not usually a big turn-on.  (Okay, maybe it is sometimes.)  That I was still thinking in terms of salvaging the possibility of sexual intercourse after she’d pulled a gun on me should give you an idea of exactly how compelling she was.

“That’s funny, Al
says you’re the only one who
does
understand.  Tells me all the time about how sharp you are and how great it is talking to you.  How you ask the right questions.”

“Lots of guys come in here and talk about things, Lucy.  Most of them don’t have much more to
say other than how heavy the last thing they had to lift was, why their wives are disappointed, or what the cost of bread is.  A couple of times of month someone with a kid overseas has to tell us all about him so we can feel bad when he doesn’t come home.  Al’s the only guy I know with something to say that I haven’t ever heard before, and that doesn’t make me depressed about the state of the world.  Of course I ask.  Sometimes what’s on his mind is the only hopeful thing I hear.”

“Hopeful, huh?”

“Energy’s a good thing, right?  He can’t stop talking about the possibilities.”

She laughed, a gorgeous deep sound from her stomach that was somehow erotic.  “That sounds like him, yeah.”

This time I didn’t know what direction she was heading.  “Why don’t you tell me where I’m wrong?”

“Yeah, okay.”  She put the gun down on the bar and took her shot, and slid the glass down the bar for me to refill.  “So he told you about the pile
under the stands.”

“Bad name for it, but yeah.”

“Sounds crazy, don’t it?   But it’s true, it’s real.  They did it.”

I
refilled us both.  When I put hers down close enough to reach she put her hand on the gun, almost as an afterthought, to make sure I didn’t grab it. 

In hindsight it probably would have been wiser to disarm her early—I’d passed on at least three opportunities—and go with my earlier instinct to run the hell out the back door be
fore this got any worse.

“The first controlled nuclear chain reaction,” she said, to her drink, which she then downed.  “And he thinks it’
s keen.”

“It’s not keen?”

“It’s the scariest goddamn thing in the world, Rocky no-last-name.”

I
am actually old enough to remember when we discovered fire.  That’s not half as impressive as it sounds because it wasn’t like we didn’t know what fire was already—I remember a lightning strike that caused a forest fire being the first time I saw it—we just didn’t think of it as something we could do ourselves.  The discovery came when we realized fire could be created, controlled, and extinguished when it was no longer needed, without having to wait for an electrical storm on a dry night.

Of course, once we got over the idea of using it for warmth and to make our food taste better, we started using it in less life-affirming ways.
 

“You’re talking about a weapon,” I said.

“On the nose.  Except we both know you were already there, don’t we?”

“
No, I really never thought about it before now.”

“Then you
ain’t as smart as he says.”

“Al didn’t
think about it either, did he?”

“No, he
don’t get it.  But he’s not dumb, he’s just not the right kind of smart.  The French have a word for it. 
Naïve
.  See what he’s working on is important, because he and those other fellas proved you could make a chain reaction in a lab, and control it.  Maybe one day we can build things to use that energy like Al wants, but first we gotta survive what comes next.  Because now these boys know their numbers are right the next thing they wanna do is figure out what happens when they release a
lot
of energy, all at once.  Maybe enough to set the sky on fire and blow up the world, who knows?  But that’s another project, one he’s never going to be involved in.”

“Why’s that?”

“He talks too much.  Like when he talks to you, and you give up the stuff he’s been saying to the enemy.  Because I tell you, the only thing scarier than our boys having something like this is the Nazis having it.”

There it was.  I figured I’d hear something like that eventually, but I expected it to come from guys in suits, not a girl in heels and not much else. 
“Seems to me, of the two of us you look like a better suspect, Lucy Smith.  He told me we can’t talk any more, but I bet you can get anything you want.”

“
I already got everything from him I needed to, baby, don’t you worry.  He gave me you.”

“Maybe I still don’t understand what you’re here for.”

She reached into her pocket.  “You may be right, Rocky.  Maybe I
am
the kind of girl who’d Mata Hari poor Al, but I’m the one here with government credentials, so that takes me out of the running.”

She held up a document and a badge. 
They both said FBI.  And if you can believe it, her name really was down as Lucy Smith.  I still didn’t think it was her birth name, because you have to switch up names now and then when you don’t die on schedule like everybody else.

“I understand now,” I said, as regards the badge.

“Do you?  Because here’s what happened from where I’m sitting.  Al and his friends down at the university had an idea for how to build their little reactor, and they worked out all kinds of complicated math to explain it.  And then about a month ago a bar napkin with things only about two or three guys in the world understand turned up in the pocket of a German spy.  That napkin was traced back to Al, and from him to this bar.”

I was starting to get an inkling of how much trouble I was
really in, and it was the kind of trouble
succubus with a gun
didn’t completely cover.  The notion of men in suits with papers to sign was sort of a vaguely threatening notion, but now I was facing an actual representative of the US government, and as far as she was concerned I was a spy.  That was a huge problem, because I didn’t exactly look like Joe American, not once you dug into my past a little bit.  About all I had in my defense was that I
had
no past, and a real spy wouldn’t have forgotten to make up something more concrete.  I made a mental note then and there that if I was going to survive this, I would have to find a good forger.

“I’m surprised Al didn’t get locked up,” I said.  “Isn’t that what happens with this sort of thing?”

“Yeah sometimes, but scientists are hard to replace, and they don’t think like the government does.  These science guys, they figure something out and then they run and tell other scientists.  It doesn’t even matter most times whether that other scientist is American, British, German or Russian or what.  He told the boys who came by before me that he knew better than to share the information with his ‘colleagues’ overseas.  But he
didn’t
know better’n to share it with the guys in the bar down the road.”

“That’s where you come in.”

“That’s right.  My bosses decided it made more sense to send me to find out how that napkin ended up in the Kraut’s pocket, rather than break the arm of a guy they needed to keep on thinking clearly.  So I insert myself into Al’s life and what do I find?  A bartender with no last name, way too smart for what he does, asking my guy all kinds’a complicated questions.  That same bartender has no legal record that I can find, works for pocket change and a roof over his head, doesn’t pay any taxes, nothing.  Nobody knows who he really is, how long he’s been in town or what.  And what do you know, he speaks German.  And it gets worse from there.”