“The portal.” I smiled. “Okay, now I get it. Top secret stuff going on, and Sanchez figures he’ll just keep his nose clean and out of it.”
“Exactly. It worked out very well.”
“Sounds like it.” Dan glanced Michael’s way. “So we don’t need to get you a lawyer?”
“No,” Michael said. “It’s going to be okay.”
“Good. I’ve got to go, Mike. I promised Mom we’d have dinner out somewhere. But I’ll see you later.” Dan strode to the door, then hesitated and turned back. “Say, Nathan. What about you and me and Mike go to a basketball game tomorrow night? The Warriors are home over in the Coliseum.”
Michael sat up straight and beamed.
“Sounds good,” Ari looked my way. “If you don’t mind?”
“Not at all,” I said. “I’ve got work to do.”
“But can we take Brian, too?” Michael said.
“Definitely Brian, too.” Dan grinned at him. “Good call.”
The boys’ night out turned out to be a great success, or so both Ari and Michael told me later. I only wished Dan could have stayed in town longer, but with Michael found, his first duty lay with his unit back in Iraq. Before Uncle Jim drove him down to the airport, they stopped at my place so I could say good-bye.
“Think about OCS, will you?” I said. “Military intelligence could use an O’Grady.”
Dan blinked in surprise. “That never occurred to me,” he said. “Okay, I’ll think about it.” Then he grinned. “You and your X-ray vision!”
Over the next few days, while we waited for Interpol and Ari’s agency to decide what to do about Johnson’s death, we spent as much time as possible with Michael. In bits and pieces he told me or tried to tell me, at least, what had happened to him. When I explained the concepts of the multiverse and its levels, he grasped the math and physics side of it better than I ever had. The social issues involved, however, baffled him.
“You know, at first I thought I’d ended up in the past,” he told me, “but the dates all matched ours whenever I saw a calendar. They had paper calendars in windows and stuff. Weird.”
“It was pretty low tech, huh?” I said.
“Yeah, because of some kind of war. Back when was that?” He frowned out at the air. “Someone told me. The 1930s, I guess. San Francisco never got bombed, but the radiation killed a whole lot of people.”
“Wait a minute! Nuclear weapons in the 1930s?”
“Yeah, the Germans had them.”
“Thank God we don’t live there!”
“You bet! But the Germans lost anyway, and we bombed the Russians under—” He paused for a moment. “Under President Patton, yeah. That was his name.”
“There must not have been a lot left of Europe after that.”
“I got that impression. The States aren’t much better off. Everyone wants to emigrate to Brazil and Argentina, but there are these long waiting lists to get visas and stuff. Even Mexico’s real fussy about who they let in.”
“So if you’re born in California, you’re going to stay there.”
“Yeah. And so unless you’re rich you join one of the gangs. If you’re a Catholic guy, see, you’re a Giants fan and belong to one of those gangs. And if you’re Protestant, you root for the Dodgers. Things get pretty hairy. That’s who beat me up, one of the Dodgers gangs, because I was wearing my Marichal shirt.”
“I’m glad they didn’t maim you.”
“One of the Giants gangs heard the noise and came and pulled me out of it.” He sighed. “Or they might have killed me. After that the BGs kind of took me in. That’s the Bravos Gigantes, the gang that saved my butt. I told them that I came from a farm out in the valley and didn’t know anything. It was kind of true.”
Sports and religion, I thought, all mixed up into a Chaos cocktail, like the Blues and the Greens in Constantinople. Michael, it turned out, had never heard of Constantinople, so my analogy fell flat, but he understood the concept, all right, in a very reality-oriented way.
“Then later,” Michael went on, “I realized that they knew about parallel worlds and gates, so I told them the truth.”
“They knew?”
“Everyone knows about all kinds of talents there. I think it’s the radiation. It scrambled a lot of genes.”
Michael also confirmed Ari’s theory about the consumer goods in the windmill. Our perps had dealt heroin to obtain American money to buy American luxury goods to take back and sell at home on the black market.
“The BGs told me that the Dodgers gangs were runners for the big dealers,” Michael explained. “They took the orders and stuff like that. And if someone didn’t pay fast enough, they collected the money.”
“One way or the other, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“I guess the Dodgers must have been in Los Angeles in that world, just like they are in ours.”
“No, in Sacramento. They called it Sackamenna, but it’s still the state capital. LA got bombed in a war with the Japanese. That was after America got nukes. No one would have bothered bombing Sacramento, though. It wasn’t worth the trouble.” He considered for a moment. “The BGs weren’t a lot better than the Dodger gangs, just poorer, but they took me in, and I can’t get too down on them. They dealt dope, just local weed, mostly.” He looked away. “And then there were the girls.”
“Ah. Hookers, and the guys were their pimps?”
He nodded and blushed. I got the distinct impression that my little brother was no longer a virgin. Aside from that crucial detail, I kept the Agency informed of everything Michael told me. Not only did I file constant reports, I had several trance sessions with Y.
“I’ve been consulting with the big boss,” he told me in one of these. “We definitely have an interest in your brother, Nola. The Agency’s prepared to offer him a college scholarship when he’s ready to go, along the lines of the old ROTC programs. We pay most of the cost in return for a certain number of years of service.”
“That would really help my family out,” I said. “But you realize that you’re going to have to negotiate with my mother.”
Y’s image went wide-eyed with fear—brown-eyed, too, and his hair darkened. The image of a small dragon materialized between our chairs and hissed.
“Unless our aunt manages to become Mike’s legal guardian,” I went on. “She’s trying. Mother’s considering it. She thinks Mike is an out-of-control juvenile.”
Y’s image relaxed with a small sigh of relief. The dragon disappeared. His eyes returned to blue.
“You know,” I said, “your image changes when you get emotional. Do you really look like it?”
“No, I don’t. I got in the habit of using this one, is all, back when you were new and working on a trial basis. I hide my real self with new recruits, in case they don’t work out.”
“Well, it would be cool to know what you’re really like.”
“I’ll think about it. Keep those reports coming, will you? These glimpses of a deviant level are fascinating. The multiverse is like a chord played on a bevy of harps, but here and there, a discordant note is heard, adding piquancy.”
“Which reminds me, what’s the Agency going to do about that gate in my aunt’s house? My uncle’s nailed the door shut and put a padlock on it, but it worries them.”
“I suppose it would. I’ll talk to the big boss.” The image winked at me. “Other changes are in the wind. Maybe some good ones.”
“I hope that means I get a raise.”
“It could, it could. But, Nola, these are dark and troubled times. We haven’t forgotten your reports on the coven and the Peacock Angel. I fear that the masters of Chaos have looked our way.”
“Have you been watching too much TV lately?”
“Perhaps I have.” Y sighed again and disappeared.
That same day Ari finally heard from Interpol. They wanted him to come back to Israel to appear before some sort of commission before clearing his file of Johnson’s death. They had a plane ticket waiting for him at SFO on a flight leaving that evening. I figured that some of the enemies he’d made at his agency saw their chance to rake him over the coals.
I helped him pack, then went with him down to the airport. With my cross-agency government ID I was allowed to skip all the usual security measures and go with him into the passenger waiting area even though I had no ticket. Two security guards escorted us, because Ari wore his beloved Beretta in its shoulder holster. I got the impression that he would be acting as something of an air marshal on the flight, in fact. He mentioned it briefly when we could be sure no one could overhear us. Just in case, he said.
“I hate to leave you,” he said more publicly. “I was hoping we’d have another couple of days at least. But once I take care of this problem, I’ll be back. I’m due some leave. We can discuss where we’re going to live then.”
For a moment I couldn’t speak. The thought that I was seeing him for the last time hurt.
“Will you miss me?” Ari said.
“Yeah.” I saw no reason to lie. “I will.”
“I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
I smiled.
Ari gave me one last kiss, then ran for the gate just as the flight finished boarding. I wandered over to a window and leaned on the rail to watch as the El Al plane pulled slowly away from the boarding tunnel. I was wondering how he would send the final farewell, phone call or e-mail? I couldn’t see him writing an actual letter on paper, the way that Josh Mitchell had. He had class, Josh, even if his desire for a normal life had gotten in the way of our relationship. But however Ari sent the good-bye, I knew I could trust him to be honest and straight out with it, no weaseling around about extra workload or sudden obligations, no postponing the inevitable.
The plane taxied out of sight to head for the run-way. I left the window and walked away before I cried. I passed back through security on the strength of my cross-agency ID, then caught BART into town.
Ari sent me an e-mail the next morning, but only to say that he’d gotten back safely and that he missed me. I figured the spell hadn’t worn off yet.
That afternoon Michael drove over to my place in Uncle Jim’s old truck. He brought a big bag of fast food with him, hamburgers, fries, milkshakes—Aunt Eileen had given him the money, he told me, to make sure I ate. Although I suspected she’d had some healthier kind of food in mind, I kept my mouth shut about it. The Chaos critter trotted into the apartment with him and followed us into the kitchen. I put the food on plates and handed Michael one.
“Nola, there’s something I’ve got to do,” he said. “I bet you won’t like it, though.”
“Yeah?” I said. “Run it by me and see.”
“I’ve got to get some stuff to José and the Bravos Gigantes. I mean, they saved my butt, and they took me in, and now I’m here where everything’s okay, and they’re not.”
I had to admit that the sentiment gave him credit. “Stuff?” I said. “Define stuff.”
“Nothing illegal.”
“Okay, that’s the first hurdle jumped.”
Michael grinned at me. “I was thinking,” he said, “stuff they could eat, like chocolate. Or maybe sell, like batteries. The problem is, I don’t have much money, just about twenty bucks. That won’t buy a lot.”
He wanted, in short, the same kind of goods that Johnson and Doyle had collected for their gang’s master. The Chaos critter rubbed up against him with a whine. They were both looking at me with big sad eyes.
“I suppose I could chip in a few bucks,” I said, though I felt like a sucker. “But I don’t want you wandering off away from the gate.”
“This little guy can take José a note.” Michael reached down and gave the critter a French fry. “José can see him. Or her. Or whatever.”
“Oh, yeah?” I cut my hamburger in quarters and handed a portion to the critter, who grabbed it with greedy claws. “Tell me more about José.”
Michael was watching the critter cramming the chunk of burger into its pointy mouth. He shrugged and looked up. “José’s cool,” he said. “I bet he’s got talents like an O’Grady, but he doesn’t want to talk about them. It’s bad enough he got dumped by his mother. He doesn’t want to get shot by the cops, too.”
“Wait a minute. Back up here. Dumped by his mother?”
“Yeah, that’s what happens to babies when they’re born with defects. Their moms dump them in empty lots, and the gang girls take them in when they can find them in time. Before they die or the dogs get them.”
“Dogs? You mean, like packs of feral dogs?”
“Yeah. The cops keep shooting them, but there’s always more. A lot of them are deformed, too.”
“Dogs or cops?”
“Just dogs. Deformed guys can’t be cops.”
“Okay. Well, I can chip in more than a few bucks. I’ll see what I can squeeze out of the Agency accountant.” I picked up another chunk of the hamburger and gave it to the Chaos critter.
“Nola, you’re supposed to eat that, not give it away.” Michael fixed me with an apprentice-level gimlet eye. “Inspector Nathan asked me to watch out for your eating disorder till he gets back.”
“The miserable bastard!”
Yet Michael’s innocent faith that Ari would be back touched me enough that I said nothing more. He’d have to learn the hard way, like I had, what happened to O’Gradys who got emotionally involved with normal people.
When we were done eating, Michael drove me down to a big warehouse store in San Bruno, where I spent a hundred bucks of Agency money and a bit more of my own on luxuries for the BGs. As well as chocolate, coffee, and a lot of over-the-counter medicines. Michael picked out shampoo and fancy soaps for the girls who belonged to the gang. Since Aunt Eileen had gone to her bridge club, and Brian was at basketball practice, we drove straight back to the Houlihan house.
Uncle Jim had nailed a board across the door into Nanny’s old lair. Michael had already pried the nails out, very carefully, without bending them, he told me, and set them loosely back into the original holes. Sure enough, he could slip them out with his fingernails. He stowed them in his pockets, then leaned the board against the wall. While I watched, he deftly opened the padlock with a thin piece of wire.