Mendoza in Hollywood (43 page)

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Authors: Kage Baker

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BOOK: Mendoza in Hollywood
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Here were the records for the twenty-first century, and the UFO sightings that would begin on Catalina Island—over the Silver Canyon area, by the way. We all know, of course, that UFO sightings will be a gigantic hoax, costumed nonsense to conceal Company experiments in some cases and mass hysteria in all others. We know that, because the Company told us so. Although nobody ever bothered to explain to me about those little pale men I ran into back in 1860, or why all the material I collected on that job was confiscated. But doubt the Company’s word? Inconceivable.

In any case, the Company was surely responsible for those sightings on the island, because here was name after corporate name becoming entangled in the conservancy’s affairs, and nearly every one of them was some pseudonym of Dr. Zeus. And it was undoubtedly Dr. Zeus who would provide the islanders with the armament enabling them to close their harbor to mainland vessels after the Second Civil War broke out in mid century, Dr. Zeus who would patrol their waters for them, Dr. Zeus who would develop the advanced agrarian technology that would make them self-sufficient when foodstuffs could no longer be imported from the poisoned mainland.

And it would be Dr. Zeus who established the secret libraries and archives there. When Los Angeles is the toxic, riot-ridden hell it will become, Catalina Island, like sixth-century Ireland, will be a peaceful and remote sanctuary beyond the sea, where knowledge is preserved and research conducted.

Look at the names: Olympian Technologies, Kronos Diversified,
Jupiter Cyberceuticals, Lightning-A Company, Jovian Integrated Systems. Every one of them the Company. Will the Company be behind the bizarre incidents that occur on Catalina Island in the twenty-second century? The rash of Kaspar Hausers who come wandering down onto the golf course in Avalon over a three-month period in 2136, babbling in no known language? The weeping man, found floating off Long Point in a fishing boat of antique design, who says his name is Emilio Machado and swears it is the year 1901? The persistent rumors that a Scots actor, famous for his adventure films of the twentieth century, is somehow still alive and well and can be glimpsed occasionally dining at the Avalon Country Club? What is Dr. Zeus up to?

Señors, if I wasn’t meant to know these things, I should never have been given the access codes. Or was it simply that nobody ever thought that one of us would reference this particular subject matter, connect this particular chain of events? I’m fairly sure I wasn’t supposed to find out that the CEOs of Olympian Technologies, Jupiter Cyberceuticals, and the rest are, to a man and woman, loyal subjects of Henry X of England. But that must be a coincidence. We were always taught that Dr. Zeus was a multinational entity, drawing the best brains in science and finance from every nation on Earth. There are undoubtedly plenty of Czechs and Kenyans, too, on the board of directors. Anyway . . .

I raised my eyes to the distant island; it loomed out there like a dream, as I had seen it every day and night of my sojourn here. I turned to Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax, who was now ten times the enigma he had been before. I opened my mouth to ask him a question.

But I never did ask him, because at that moment I picked up the signal of the mortal man approaching through the brush ahead of us. My head snapped around, and I focused on him. Mortal male, two meters tall, thirty to thirty-five years of age, sober, approximately 270 pounds, blood pressure slightly elevated, brainwave pattern suggesting he was hunting. Mounted, and urging his horse forward at a brisk trot. Armed. Rifle and two Navy revolvers.

“Edward,” I said in a low voice, “we’d better get off the trail.” He
looked at me sharply but turned his horse’s head at once, and we found our way down a gully and into the partial shade of a scrub oak.

If only he hadn’t been so tall.

The mortal must have caught a glimpse of that tall hat, because he sent a bullet whistling through the sagebrush at us. That was no more than conversation in Los Angeles, and it missed by a good ten feet. But here he came, galloping after it, emitting the signal I’d come to know too well: a mortal after blood.

We slid from our saddles, and I found myself flattened between Edward and an undercut clay bank, where the storms of 186z had hollowed out a space. The clay was just about the same color as those miraculous trousers of his, which were still spotless, by the way. Edward’s gun was already in his hand. Damn, here still came the mortal, and even if he didn’t spot me and Chameleon Man, he’d see the horses.

He did, too; he saw them first. A long searching stare along the gully, and he saw Edward as well. He grinned in delight, taking in the details of Edward’s appearance, his tailored clothing.

“Now I just bet you’re that limey bastard,” he said. “Let me hear you say something, friend. Talk for me.” And he raised the barrel of his rifle.

Bang. Just like in the movies, a red dot appeared in the center of his forehead and a dark red drop ran down. Just like that. He sat there a moment in the saddle, his grin frozen, then fell slowly to one side. His horse didn’t appreciate that at all; it stepped clear of him and kicked impatiently to clear his dead foot from the stirrup.

Edward rolled away and looked at me in astonishment. “Good shot, my dear,” he said.

That was when I realized I had just killed a mortal. The gun was there in my hand, a bullet gone from the cylinder.

We don’t do such things. Einar’s mad, he doesn’t count; Porfirio had immediately saved the life of the only person I ever saw him shoot. We don’t kill. We reason, we run away, we lie to our attackers or confuse them or project illusions to hide ourselves, but we never, ever rob them of their miserable brief lives, because we have so much
and they have so little. Unlike us, they have mothers who mourn for them. They have families who starve.

I was crushed with such a sense of sin as I had never felt in my wretched long life. I was a true Angeleno now, wasn’t I? At last I’d fired a gun at a total stranger, and blown him away too. But no audience cheered for me, as would have happened in the movies.

Edward took the gun from my nerveless hand, stroked back my hair, looked straight into my eyes. “Dolores, my dear. This was your first time, I think?”

Nice of him, to help a lady so gently on the occasion of retching after her first kill.

“My apologies, señor,” I murmured at last.

He waved a dismissive hand. “It quite shocks the system,” he said, “the first time. But I think you ought not to take this up as steady work, however good your aim. One can accustom oneself to the act of necessary murder, but does one wish to?”

Yes indeed, something to be seriously considered by the young woman contemplating her entrance into Victorian society.

We mounted and rode on.

The sun was dropping into the west now, and we were nearing San Pedro and the probable cordon, so the danger was greater than ever. We arrived at Long Beach before it was quite dark, splashing across the slough. I wondered if D. W. Griffith’s men would plant palm trees here one day, preparing the scene for the desperate chariot race to warn Babylon.

It seemed preferable to wait until full cover of night before making our way to Souza’s. Accordingly we found a dry stream bed under an oak tree along the outskirts of Señor Tempe’s rancho and reined in there, to dismount for a while.

Edward jumped down first and put up his hands to catch me as I slid from my saddle. I fell into his arms. The brief hold became an embrace, and without quite meaning to we were kissing hungrily. It was going to happen again; nothing we could do about it, other than unlock for a moment as Edward staggered over to loop the horses’
reins around an oak branch. He came back, breathing hard. I knelt in the sand; he swept off his hat and knelt beside me.

And really it was like prayer, señors, desperate prayer for forgiveness, an appeal for mercy, an act of life in that deadly place. I gave him pleasure to atone for the death I’d given the stranger. He gave me absolution for what I’d done, and found his own blessing of acquittal in my arms. Violent prayer, struggle and assault, shuddering ecstatic confirmation that we were still alive, though without our bower walls were dogs and enchanters, whoremongers and murderers.

We lay there afterward, looking up awhile at the red evening sky through the black leaves.

“What are you?” Edward whispered.

“Your mate,” I said. “As meaningless as that is, for us both. We’ll never marry. We’ll never settle in a cottage by the sea. We’ll never raise children. Death and time stalk us like a pair of hounds. But we were formed in the mind of God from the same piece of steel, for what purpose I cannot imagine.”

He was silent for a while. His hand traveled up and closed on my breast. “Death and time,” he said at last. “What would our life be like, if we could live?”

“Oh, we’d make the world the place it should have been,” I answered with a grand wave. “We’d blaze across the sky like meteors, and our masters would look upon us and tremble. We’d bring down the palace of Death as though it were so many cards. You’d take the flaming sword and smash the lock on the gates to Eden, and let our children into the garden. I’d teach them how to grow corn, and you’d give them laws. Everything would begin again, except sorrow.”

He laughed, softly. “So it would,” he said. “And then, perhaps, the world could look after its own affairs for a while. Imagine not having to justify one’s existence, ever, to anybody.”

“Imagine having the freedom to travel where one wished.”

“Imagine having the time,” he sighed, and I sighed with him. Somewhere out in the evening a sea bird cried, a high thin far-off piping, a lonely sound.

Perhaps it made the moment too surreal, brought home to him just how strange our conversation was. I felt his mood changing, his wariness returning.

“Dolores Alice Elizabeth Mendoza,” he said musingly. “You’re far too young to understand this business as well as you do, and to kill with such precision. But for your age, I could imagine you were one of Juarez’s agents, or even that buffoon Napoleon’s, though I can’t see how or why. You were certainly a virgin, and yet I’ve known Eastern whores with less expertise in the arts of love. Less enthusiasm, too. What am I to make of you, my dear?”

I lay very still. “You might accept the truth as I told it to you,” I said. Of all the mortals in that English hall, long ago, Nicholas had been the only one to suspect what I was. It had been a game between us, a delightful game of question and evasion, until he discovered the truth. Then he tried to kill me.

“Well, my love, but it doesn’t quite convince,” said Edward. “I add together all the figures you’ve given me, and they simply don’t produce the sum of you.” He stretched luxuriously, in that motion bringing at least two of his concealed weapons into place for immediate deployment. “A sensible man in my line of work would have disposed of you—by some means or other—hours ago. I am, however, reluctant to lose such a charming companion. And it is a fact that your objective and mine would seem to coincide.” He smiled, narrow-eyed, waiting to see what I would say.

I gave the faintest of shrugs, a tilt of the head, and spoke in the most reasonable of voices. “Señor. If my intent were to betray you, I might easily have led you to the Yankees by now. If my intent were to secure the contents of the valise—I had all the time in the world to do that when it sat at the inn, before ever you came looking for it. If you find my knowledge or my skill with a pistol remarkable, all I can tell you is that there’s not much for a well-born girl to do in San Luis Obispo, save read and practice shooting at targets or the occasional bandit. I believe it’s customary for a gentleman to accept a lady’s word without question, is it not?”

“It is,” he said. “Though I expect you’ll appreciate the difficulty I’m in just now, my love, as regards the luxury of trusting anyone.”

“I do.” I looked up into his eyes. The pupils were dilated, enormous. He really did not want to kill me. “I point out that you have little choice in the matter, señor.”

His dark smile deepened, melting me, even with the point of his hidden knife inches from my heart. “So the question remains: What are you? I find myself with a price on my head in a foreign land. My associates have bungled and miscalculated to such a degree that I may well be unlikely to escape with my life. I’m in a very narrow little corner indeed, and my only ally is a remarkable young lady who seems, by some unlikely trick of metempsychosis, to be a fused reincarnation of Boadicea and Cleopatra. A very bad business. And I can’t for the life of me think why you’re not having a fit of hysterics now, or angry tears.”

“Metempsychosis,” I said thoughtfully. “Now, that was Pythagoras’s theory of the transmigration of souls, was it not? Rebirth, after death, in a new body. Possibly I trust you because we were lovers once, in some previous life. Possibly you trust me for the same reason. It makes as much sense as anything else, señor.”

He drew a deep breath and struck the earth beside my head with the flat of his hand. “Now, how in hell do you know what metempsychosis means? Whoever you are,” he said, “whoever you’ve been, if we get out of this with our lives, I
will
marry you. See if you can keep the truth from me then!”

The stars came out, and the chill of evening set in, but we didn’t notice. What stamina he had. And what good fortune for us that no bounty hunters chanced to come near that particular oak tree, on that night of the sixteenth of March, 1863.

 

Much later we arose and rode out again, and I led us through the marshy tidelands and the shallow sea of reeds by scanning for solid ground along Rattlesnake Island. If we made noise, the frogs and the night creatures made more; and so we came in safety to the huts of the
fishermen, and I was so grateful to ride up onto the causeway and behold Souza’s night lamp burning.

“I will talk for us,” I told Edward as I rapped softly on the door. He nodded, and when Souza opened and peered out, I said in Portuguese, “The doctor has a request to make of you, Souza. This gentleman and I need to go across to the big island out there, in silence and secret. When can you take us?”

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