Theater of spies, p.8
Theater of Spies, page 8
“Not the most impressive specimens of Anglo-Saxondom, but they’ve certainly got reason to move,” she observed.
The horror-gas only killed every six or seventh person in London. But it killed the city, too. A head shot is a small wound, but the corpse won’t walk; with no Parliament or King or Bank of England or ships or trade, what’s the reason for London? They can’t even go in for the bodies, and the stench of a million unburied dead must be apocalyptic. Nobody who was close to that wants to wait for more of the same from the Gotha bombers, either.
So the convoys that bore warriors and supplies to Britain were coming back over the ocean crammed to the gunwales with people, to be shoved right onto the trains from the insanely overcrowded docks without wasting time on formalities and dispersed over the continent just as fast as was physically possible without severely endangering their lives.
As she watched, a group of Party volunteer activists—you could tell them by their American-flag armbands—started chivvying the crowd out of the way of the refugees and setting up sawhorse-and-rope barricades on the tile floor to give them some space.
The Party was good at organization, and that revealed a set of trestle tables with military-issue tin cups and plates and cutlery, urns of coffee and tea, jugs of chilled water or cold milk or fresh-squeezed lemonade with drops of condensation running down them, more heaps of sugar-dusted donuts and things like cold cuts and cheese and sardines and sliced buttered bread and fruit, the latter mostly boxed oranges, something Southern California wasn’t going to be short of anytime soon.
The refugees hesitated for a moment, broke into excited smiles as they realized it was all for them, and headed for the food and drink with concentrated zeal as the activists kept order. Some of the soldiers in transit and bystanders spontaneously pitched in to help, and soon all the children were clutching glasses of milk in one grubby hand and cookies or other treats in the other, while their parents fell on the sandwich makings and drinks. One or two were actually crying at the taste of the tea as they diluted it with milk and shoveled in sugar, as if all three were things they hadn’t had for a while and missed sorely, the taste of a lost home and time.
“Oh, a cuppa,” one of them said between sobs. “A luverly luverly cuppa!”
A big sign went up behind the tables: AMERICA WELCOMES OUR ENGLISH COUSINS! and A GOLDEN FUTURE IN THE GOLDEN STATE! with crossed flagstaffs holding Old Glory and the Union Jack, or the British flag and the dumpy, grumpy-looking grizzly bear on California’s state banner.
Other tables held stacks of forms in front of seated clerks, and smaller signs reading Housing and Employment and Food and Clothing Ration Books and Collect Your Temporary Stipend—all under a bigger You Must Register Here Now! notice.
A further table had a quick photo booth set up next to the sign reading National Health Insurance Agency, with a white-coated elderly doctor and nurses in those odd-looking folded white caps behind it ready to administer the compulsory course of vaccinations. Heaps of clean diapers and trash cans with tight-sealed lids beside a table with a rubber cloth and buckets of disinfectant-laced water showed that someone had been thinking ahead, and there were some Department of Public Health and Eugenics bureaucrats as well.
Probably itching to get calipers on the Cockneys’ Anglo-Saxon heads. Though I’d delouse them first!
FOUR
Grand Central Station/General Wheeler Airship Haven
American National Railways/American National Airways
Los Angeles, Southern California
NOVEMBER 19TH, 1916(B)
Luz and Ciara walked quickly toward the great exit doors in the wake of their baggage like pilot fish behind a whale, anonymously upper-middle-class in their plain good tailleur shirtwaist outfits, slightly flared calf-length skirts, and moderately broad-brimmed round hats, each with a single pheasant feather in the band above the right ear. They came out into the brightness and mild warmth of the great curved loggia in front of the station, amid a spill of purple and crimson bougainvillea planted in man-tall ceramic vases between the soaring marble height of the Corinthian columns that burst into clusters of gilded acanthus leaves at their summits.
“There’ll be plenty of jobs for the Cockneys; right now, there’s work for anyone breathing,” Luz went on. “And we’re not short on food or clothes either, ¡gracias a Dios! Though with the way Los Angeles has been growing they may have to put them in prefab barracks or even Army tents for a while. No hardship in this climate, but I hope they’ve got better quarters ready for the ones they’re sending to Chicago or Minneapolis.”
“The unfortunate Sassenach can get work building houses to live in, then, the way our folk did in Boston, Luz,” Ciara said a little tartly.
She’d been utterly horrified by the Annihilation Gas attacks and risked everything to stop Germany’s Projekt Loki . . . but that didn’t mean Ciara liked the British Empire any better than she had. Ancestral grievance still spoke:
“There wasn’t anything like this on hand when our folk came off the coffin ships back in the famine years. Crawled off or were dragged off by the feet, often enough. And the signs they saw were likely to read No Irish Need Apply.”
It speaks loudest when she’s not looking at actual toddlers rather than theoretical enemies, Luz thought fondly. The niños turn her from Avenging Goddess of the Gael into a smiling puddle of goo making funny faces. ¡Dios mío! but she’s better than I deserve!
“I take the point and that’s gospel true, mi amor,” Luz said aloud. “But this is a better way to treat immigrants, and progress is what being a Progressive is about, isn’t it? They’ll be Americans soon enough, more sausage in the stewpot like all the rest of us. Besides—”
Luz nodded to a poster. This one showed Uncle Teddy, scowling through his pince-nez with his left forefinger stabbing forward and his right hand clenched into a fist—it was a print taken from a famous photograph of one of his speeches, and one that had always made her imagine he was about to jump on a miscreant and beat him senseless the way he had that drunken gunman in Nolan’s Saloon when he was ranching in the Dakota badlands.
Underneath was a familiar Party slogan: 100% Americanism! Vote Progressive Republican!
That was a little redundant given the results of Tuesday before last. The papers were still trying to come up with superlatives strong enough, since landslide and avalanche were plainly inadequate. The Party—and Uncle Teddy—believed in driving arguments home with jackhammer repetition; subtle boiled no potatoes. They knew you had to make people feel as well as think, feel like a tribe on the warpath or a pack howling in unison behind Wolf . . . or Bull Moose . . . Number One.
Half an hour of suffering through Woodrow Wilson droning abstractions and subclauses through his Princetonian nose is enough to illustrate the difference.
She went on: “Their children . . . like that little girl you had giggling . . . will be one hundred percent and then some. You won’t be able to tell that their ancestors didn’t help row Miles Standish ashore from the Mayflower at Plymouth Rock, or that they aren’t descended from Pocahontas like all those First Families of Virginia people.”
“Well, yes,” the younger woman said. “Still . . . oh, you’re right, darling, and half of the Cockneys probably have an Irishman in the woodpile, come to that. Plenty went east in the hunger time, to build railroads in England, and mine coal and load ships and work the looms.”
Other posters showed Uncle Teddy in his Rough Riders uniform, unmistakable though considerably younger and slimmer, with:
Leading the charge of Progress then and now! above, and two lines of print below:
The New Nationalism—Prosperity!—Unity!—Strength!
They maneuvered around a Four Minute Man standing on a box and holding forth to a small crowd, using another poster behind him as backdrop for a quick rundown on why the German Empire was, indeed, a very bad thing.
This one showed a snarling gorilla in a German uniform and obsolete spiked helmet dancing across a wrecked house amid the dead bodies of women and children with a blazing torch in one hand and a blood-dripping knife in the other.
You couldn’t even say it’s all that inaccurate, which must be a first for wartime propaganda. Germans just have no sense of public relations at all; no wonder they ended up fighting the whole world!
Uncounted American Schmidts and Bauers and Meiers were making quick visits to registry offices and emerging as Smiths and Farmers and Stewards, while the clatter of German-language newspapers and schools shutting their doors resounded all the way from Texas to Wisconsin.
Though of course . . .
The problem is that so far they’re beating the whole world, too, one enemy at a time.
Luz stopped at a newspaper kiosk and passed the disabled veteran who ran it one of the handsome new Walking Liberty half-dollars for copies of the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Atlantic Monthly. Plus the All-Story Weekly for Edgar Rice Burroughs’s latest pulp adventure, “Wings of Death,” which involved evil Prussians with a flying U-boat in Lake Superior that shot invisible death rays capable of wiping out cities. And a kidnapped heiress surnamed Lehmann in revolt against her questionably patriotic parents; she sabotaged the devilish German plots while maintaining her virtue with the aid of a spy from a carefully unnamed agency undoubtedly meant to be the Black Chamber who’d infiltrated the crew.
The death rays were a lot more credible than they would have been a few months ago.
Plus the November issue of Croly’s rag, the New Republic, to brush up on what the Party leadership was thinking or at least wanted people to think they were thinking . . . that set of wheels within wheels got more wheels within it with every passing month, not even counting factions.
Ciara suddenly remembered she didn’t need to skimp anymore by buying her magazines a month late and used, and contributed a coin for Scientific American, Modern Electrics and Mechanics, and the Technology Review.
“No change, sir,” Luz said to the man, who took the money awkwardly with a stiff left hand.
Then, stepping back and dropping back into Spanish, speaking softly because the man had probably acquired some south of the border: “All right, a lesson. How would we detect a tail here?”
Ciara nodded tautly; she always took work seriously.
“Look in that mirror above the booth?” she said.
“Yes; but be careful not to be too obvious about it. Windows are good for that too, especially shop windows; or you can stop and turn to look at your watch as cover. But always just a glance; staring alerts people faster than anything else. Keep your eyes moving, tracking across things.”
She tucked the newspapers and magazines under her arm, then turned and pointed at an aeroplane flying by, a much more frequent sight than it had been a year or two earlier but still rare enough to attract attention. Unless you were a New Yorker, but they probably wouldn’t let themselves show anything but jaded boredom even if giant apes climbed the Woolworth Building to be shot down by fighting scouts or if fire-breathing dinosaurs crawled out of the sea onto the Brooklyn Bridge.
“Or anything else it’s natural to look at. Scan the crowd quickly as your eyes drop from the sky. It’s hard to act completely natural when you’re tailing someone; you focus, and that’s detectable—it changes the way you walk and hold yourself. Most give themselves away without realizing it. They stiffen when you look at them, for example. You need to train your intuition to spot them, to see what’s giving you that hunted feeling.”
Ciara nodded as she gave the crowd behind them a quick glance, and they walked on. Luz continued:
“Now, when you check behind yourself again, you look for something familiar—hats and clothes are easier to spot than faces at any distance, but faces too.”
“I’m not very good at faces,” Ciara admitted.
“It’s just a matter of paying attention.”
Ciara pouted slightly: “But I don’t pay attention to people that much unless they have something interesting about them! Well, except you. I mean, you’re always interesting.”
“Flatterer. Don’t try to memorize the whole face, as if you were getting to know someone socially. Look for something out of the ordinary and mark that down.”
“And if I think I’ve spotted someone who’s following me? How do I make sure?”
“There are giveaways; we call them tells in the trade. That’s a gambler’s term originally.”
It’s interesting how much of the Chamber’s vocabulary comes from . . . irregular . . . sources, Luz thought. Clandestine work and crime have a lot in common. She went on:
“If someone stops every time you do, that’s an obvious tell, so you stop and start unpredictably; but a tail is most effective if it’s done by a team, the bigger the better so they can hand off. Even with only two, one walks by when the subject stops so it’s not always the same person behind you halting in unison. I don’t think anyone’s trying now, but you never know. When we get into the cab, notice if anyone else hurries to flag another one right after us; if they do, keep an eye in the rearview mirror for that cab. It’s easy since they have to have the license number on the front and rear bumper plates these days.”
Ciara smiled. “I will. Though I’ve never actually taken a taxicab before. Or any auto before I left Boston!”
“See how our friendship is bringing you all sorts of new experiences?”
“Oh, you!” Ciara said happily, and gave her an elbow nudge.
“Taxicabs are a wonderful institution from a spy’s point of view,” Luz went on. “We can wait here for a second and see if anyone stops without a good reason.”
Most of the disembarking passengers were walking three lanes out along brick paths through the asphalt of the roads and standing on the island there to take one of the ranks of big yellow-painted Greater Los Angeles Transportation Authority trolley cars; these days the GLATA could zip you all over the basin for a nickel or two, though Luz intended to use a cab. The trolleys pulled up, climbing from the underground section, filled up, and pulled away in endless succession with a rumble and an occasional ozone-smelling spark from the overhead lines.
“Now, if you’re using the trolley, you can get on, wait for a tail to get on too, then step off at the very last moment just as the doors close. That’s also good for identifying them—they tend to try to follow you and get caught in the doors, or glare through the windows. Give them a sweet smile and a wave and they’re more likely to do that.”
“And you can go through stores or restaurants and come out the back, you said?” Ciara said.
“Yes, but you have to be careful about that—if it’s a team, some of them may have whipped around to the alley at the back when you went in the front. Alleys are a good spot to do a snatch without being noticed, and you can just bundle the subject into an auto with a threat from a gun under the coat over your arm, and drive off, provided they don’t have the nerve to run for it, which is very irritating of them because then you do have to shoot them. Or you can sap them with a cosh and pretend they’re drunk or in a fainting spell, though that’s always very risky.”
“Chloroform?” Ciara asked, and rubbed the side of her head where Horst von Dückler had pistol-whipped her in that warehouse in Boston. “Hitting a head . . . it’s like hitting a teapot full of jelly.”
“A mixture of chloroform and ether works—but that takes a long time, several minutes, despite what the adventure stories would have you believe. The subject has time to . . . object forcefully. A cosh is quick at least, but if you hit hard enough to be sure . . . you’re absolutely right about that, it’s risking death or idiocy. Practice helps, but people’s heads just have a lot of variation. Now, knockout drops in a drink actually can work, but there’s rarely any privacy, so it’s better to make them woozy rather than try for a lights-out dose and have some kindhearted imbécil call for a doctor.”
She looked around at the crowds. “Thank God they got the station and the trolley lines finished before the declaration of war. It would be an even more complete zoo otherwise with this much traffic.”
Ciara took a glance too. “They’d have finished it anyway as a war priority if they had any sense,” she said. “You’d lose more resources on increased transport costs than you spent. Assuming the war lasts more than a few months, but then, has anyone expected the Great War to be over by Christmas since December twenty-fifth of 1914?”
Luz thought for a moment; it was an excellent point . . . though believing the war was going to last forever meant falling off the other side of the same horse, even if it was emotionally easier now.
“True, if they’re rational about it. But a lot of other projects are going to be slowed down or put in mothballs. Desvestir a un santo para vestir a otro.”
“Taking the clothes off one saint to clothe another . . . Oh, I see!” Ciara said, and shifted back to English for a phrase: “Robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
“Yes, robbing Peter to pay Paul. They’ll be keeping on with the things like dams and roads that have a definite payoff, and leaving the pretty buildings for later,” Luz said, and sighed. “It’s a real pity, we had so much planned.”
The porter had spotted them and waved; Luz nodded to him and raised a hand toward the rank of waiting cabs. A plain Model T Ford type with open sides slid forward. That was common here since this climate rarely needed more, even in winter.
She gave the delighted redcap an additional dime, and was taken a little aback when she saw that the driver, while in the blue porterlike uniform of the local Metro Cabdriver’s Cooperative, a sub-branch of the GLATA, was a tired-looking woman of about thirty with mousy brown hair pushed up under her billed cap.
