Читать книгу Low Chicago - Группа авторов - Страница 10

CHARLES DUTTON SHAKILY GOT to his feet and moved over to the window, shunting the drapes aside. He stared out into the sky, which was still dark with the last legs of the night.

“What’s happening out there?” he asked rhetorically. Neither he nor Nighthawk nor any of the others who drifted toward the window could make any sense of the noises, flashing lights, and dark shapes they saw moving erratically on the street until a sudden burst of sheet lightning illuminated the scene for a moment. Even then, they were distracted by the accompanying rolling rumble of thunder that seemed as if it would never stop.

The escort Jack Braun had brought to the game—the twin who’d sneaked into the bedroom with Bellerose and had escaped the dangers of the fight—screamed aloud, wordlessly, turned, and ran from the room. Nighthawk and Dutton stared at other speechlessly, while Margot Bellerose sank to the floor on her knees and asked in a little voice, “What happened, mon Dieu, someone please tell me what happened.”

Meek cleared his throat and said, diffidently, “Well—”

And then the twin returned to the room, screaming even louder. “It’s changing! It’s all changing!”

Nighthawk moved to intercept her as she ran crazily around the room, her eyes wild. He grabbed her arms, shook her. She blubbered wordlessly, the incoherent sounds she was making drowned out by another roll of thunder like the clap of doom hovering over the Palmer House.

“Breathe deep!” Nighthawk ordered the girl. He held her tightly against his chest, and could feel the tremors running through her entire body. He took a shot in the dark. “Hildy?” Her head, tucked against his chest, nodded. “Calm down. Calm down and tell me what’s happening in the hallway.”

“I was—I was waiting for the elevator,” she got out between hiccups, “and when it came—it was different. It wasn’t a regular elevator. It was a steel cage with a man in a uniform in it and he looked at me so funny, so funny, I just screamed and ran—”

“Look at the buildings,” Dutton said in an awestricken voice.

Nighthawk looked. They all did, except for Bellerose, who was still frozen, struck silent and motionless. Hildy looked for only a moment, gasped, and returned to the sanctuary of Nighthawk’s arms, nuzzling his chest with her face like a kitten trying to bury itself against the warmth of its feline mother.

Outside, making the sounds of giant behemoths moaning in strange pain, the buildings were shifting, growing, shrinking, grinding against each other, changing in multiple ways that lasted only for seconds before they morphed again from skyscrapers to smaller, simple structures of stone or brick or even wood, or swelled into ovoids of glittering metal connected by sweeping ramps and skeletal metallic catwalks. Once they became a set of tepees along a tranquil stream, once burned-out, destroyed hulks from a blast so powerful it must have been nuclear.

The sky itself was also changing, rippling from darkest night to strange purples shot through by rays of silver and golden light. Snowstorms and rain and fog whipped by tremendous winds howling between the buildings, but nothing except spatters of water made it down to the ground below. The rest all dissipated into mist or showers of colored sparks like the grandest fireworks display ever launched into the air.

The Palmer House itself seemed mostly immune to the strange, seemingly endless transformation. The room they were in, at least, stood like a rock in a sea of chaos. But why, Nighthawk wondered, and for how long?

“Time storm,” Donald Meek said in his mild voice. “We’re in the eye of a time storm.”

“What?” Dutton asked, turning his attention back to inside the room.

“My fault,” Meek said meekly. “When Galante’s bodyguard lashed out with her fire power, I was caught in the edge of it.” His singed eyebrows and ruddy, though not deeply burned face and hands, attested to that. “And I returned fire.” He sighed, looked from Dutton to Nighthawk. “Unfortunately, the power can be hard to control.”

“So,” Nighthawk said hesitantly, “they’re out there somewhere—somewhen—doing things that are … are …”

“Ripping the time stream apart,” Meek said resignedly. “Changing history. Continually and at cross-purposes. There’s no unified ‘present’ anymore—only a dozen warring ‘presents’ overlapping, contradicting, competing with, and melting into each other.” He gestured toward the window. “A time storm.”

Hildy moaned softly, and Nighthawk felt her going limp. He half walked, half dragged her to a nearby chair and set her down in it. Bellerose finally wandered closer to the others. She looked out the window listlessly.

“What will happen?” Dutton asked in a low voice.

“Oh,” Meek said. “I suppose that eventually the fabric of the universe will tear and the Earth will be destroyed and maybe eventually everything else with it. Or not.” He shrugged. “This is all new to me too. I haven’t had this power long.”

“Unless—” Nighthawk prompted. “Can you find them?”

Meek frowned in concentration. “They were scattered around the room and absorbed different levels of time shift. Those close to each may have been popped into the same time. They’re all in the same space.” He rubbed his chin. “Somewhen in the Palmer House, if they were sent to a time when the Palmer House exists. They’re all somewhere in Chicago, anyway. If they were sent to a time when Chicago existed … but I can sense them, more or less, like blips on the radar screen of time.”

“Then we can go after them—” Nighthawk began.

“I could send you after them,” Meek said, “at least one of them. But what good will that do? You can’t bring anyone back. You could stop one from acting, but which one is causing the most damage? Or is it a question of accumulative damage to the time stream brought on by all of them …”

“These ‘rays,’” Dutton said thoughtfully, “the rainbows you shot out … that’s what caused these temporal displacements?”

“Yes,” Meek said.

“Are they reflective?”

“What? The rays?”

“Yes,” Dutton said. “Of course.”

“I … don’t know.”

“The bedrooms have full-length mirrors in them,” Margot Bellerose offered helpfully without looking at them.

“Okayyyy,” Meek said. He and Nighthawk looked at each other.

“We have to do something,” Nighthawk said.

Meek looked reluctant, but nodded. “I suppose we do.”

Nighthawk turned to Dutton. “Lock the door. Don’t let anyone in. Barricade it as best you can. There’s a couple of guns lying around.” He reached down for the .38 he kept snugged in an ankle holster. “Here’s mine.”

Dutton took it, nodding. “Let me accompany you into the bedroom.”

They turned and looked at Bellerose. She was silently contemplating the landscape below them through the hotel windows. Out of the dark sky a great flying lizard swept with leathery wings, soaring toward the window. She ducked, screaming. The lizard banked away at the last moment.

Dutton nodded to the bedroom door. “We had best do this soon,” he said quietly.

Bellerose was right. The room had a full-length mirror placed strategically on the wall before the bed. “In the service of full disclosure,” Dutton said to Nighthawk, “there is something we should tell you.”

“A surprise?” Nighthawk said with an expectant frown.

“Of a sort.” Dutton gestured at Meek grandly. “Meet Croyd Crenson.”

Nighthawk pursed his lips, but remained silent. Of course, he thought. He should have known. “The Sleeper,” he observed. That explained much. He felt more than a little annoyed at himself for not suspecting, and somewhat more annoyed at them for keeping him in the dark. “I see. The Sleeper, at a card game with seven million in the wall safe.”

“Hey,” Croyd said, “it’s not like we were planning on stealing the cash or anything. Dutton was going to win it fair and square.” He laughed, shortly and insincerely. “Heh. Sorry we didn’t let you in on it sooner, but we, uh, thought it best to keep that on a need-to-know basis.”

“Now that the stakes have changed,” Dutton intoned, “it’s best you know the truth.” His expression and his voice grew even more serious, if that were possible. “Of course, sooner or later Croyd will need to sleep again. And when he sleeps, he transforms.”

And loses his powers. Nighthawk eyed Croyd dubiously. “How long have you been awake already?”

“Oh, only a couple of days. Don’t worry, I’m used to it. I can handle it.”

So you say, Nighthawk thought. “We’d better get started,” he said in a neutral voice.

“I guess,” Croyd said, “we’ll be right back. Or maybe not. We’re dealing with time here. Who the hell knows?”

“Good luck,” Dutton said. “Everything’s riding on you!”

“We better get real close,” Croyd said, “like hugging close.”

They stood before the mirror. Side by side, one arm wrapped around the other’s waist.

“Ready?” Croyd asked.

Nighthawk felt a roiling in his gut. This was the strangest, most dangerous thing he’d ever done. But it was better to die trying rather than just stand by and watch the world disintegrate around them. “Yeah. Just do—”

The rainbow arced again from Croyd’s palm and hit the mirror. As the spectrum of colors rebounded and washed over Nighthawk he felt like someone hit him all over his body with the hardest punch he’d ever taken. The air swooshed out of his lungs, his testicles tried to ascend back into his abdomen, and his buttocks clenched so tightly that you couldn’t pull a pin out of his ass with a tractor. He thought he was struck blind and then he realized that he’d just closed his eyes. He was naked, but warm air caressed his skin, as well as Croyd’s arm, which was still around his waist. The soles of his feet were planted on thick, lush carpet.

“—it.”

Nighthawk looked ahead, blinking, and realized that he and Croyd were standing behind two men. One was young, immaculately well dressed in the finest of evening attire, if, Nighthawk recognized, you were going out to do the town about a hundred years ago. He wore an expensively cut black coat and white tie, and the second man was using a whisk broom to brush off some imaginary flecks of dust from his well-clad shoulders.

They were standing before a full-length mirror and the young man was admiring his reflection in it when he caught sight of Nighthawk and Croyd materializing behind him. His eyes suddenly bulged out of his pleasantly featured face and he did a credible imitation of a goldfish removed from water gasping for breath. His lips moved, but it took a moment for words to actually issue from them. When they did, they were in a striking English accent.

“I say,” he said. Then, apparently unable to think of anything to add, he continued with, “I say, I say, I say.” Struck with further inspiration, he added, “What? What now? What?”

He was rather tall and willowy built. The other man, who also wore formal attire, but more in the line of someone in service, a valet, probably, was even taller and more solidly built. He turned and looked at them. He had a shrewd-looking face with an imperturbable expression and a steady, intelligent gaze.

Croyd made an embarrassed sound in his throat, took his arm away from Nighthawk’s waist, and stepped a foot or two to the side.

“Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “We’re from the future.”

The valet’s left eyebrow lifted a quarter of an inch, as if expressing vast surprise.

They were in a luxuriously appointed hotel room. Nighthawk could recognize the general outlines of the room they’d just left, though the furnishings were completely different. Everything was expensive-looking, if heavy and ponderous. There was a large four-poster bed, an ornate wardrobe, a smaller dresser, side tables on either side of the bed with bric-a-brac all over them, and an overstuffed chair with antimacassars on the arms and back.

“Indeed, sir?” the valet asked. His gaze swept over them briefly and then focused somewhere on a distant spot between them. “And does everyone in the future go about disrobed?”

“Ah, well,” Croyd replied. “That’s just an effect of time travel, itself. You can’t bring anything with you. Not even clothes.”

The young man had turned around and was eyeing them with a puzzled expression that somehow seemed habitual. “Rummy, that,” he said, then added briskly, “Well, we can’t have you sporting about starkers. There must be something you can find—”

“Immediately, sir.”

“Well, fine. Fine, fine, fine.” The young man beamed at the unexpected arrivals. Nighthawk couldn’t help but feel an instinctual liking for him.

“Well, sit down and tell me all about this ‘future’ business. Or”—his expressive face suddenly took on a concerned expression—“wait a mo’ … let’s get some”—he made a helpless gesture with his hands—“you know, some, uh, before you sit, you know.”

Nighthawk understood, and shook his head at Croyd, who was about to plop his butt into the overstuffed chair. Croyd caught himself at the last moment and nodded.

“Oh, sure. Sure. Very generous of you—”

The young man shook his head, briskly. “Not at all. Not at all. I’ve been touring your country—just out of New York, Boston. Fascinating. Everyone’s been most accommodating. Least I can do to help out you chaps. And from the future you say! Extraordinary!”

The valet had been piling up articles of clothing from both a dresser drawer and the wardrobe, and he approached Nighthawk and Croyd with an armload. The young man’s face fell as he handed the items over. “Not the new checked suits!” he said. “I just got those in New York.”

“I know, sir,” the valet said imperturbably. “I feel they will serve these gentlemen more suitably.”

Nighthawk thought he could detect something of a note of relief in his voice as he handed the suits over. Nighthawk understood. They were not exactly his style, either.

“Ah, well,” the young man said, shrugging. “Needs must, I suppose.”

“Yes, sir,” his man said. He watched critically as Nighthawk and Croyd dressed. “I’m afraid, sirs, that the fit is not perfect. The young master is taller—”

“That’s all right,” Nighthawk said. “We’ll make do.”

“Yes, sir.”

There was something in this man, Nighthawk perceived, something that bound him to the younger man who was so generous and, well, naive was probably a kind word, with cords of loyalty and protectiveness that went deep into the soul. He nodded, and the valet nodded back.

“So,” the young Britisher said eagerly as they dressed, “tell me all about the future.”

“Well—” Croyd began. He and Nighthawk exchanged glances. “You wouldn’t believe it,” Croyd finally said.

“We can’t say much,” Nighthawk explained, “on the chance that you can use your knowledge to change history.”

The Englishman looked crestfallen. “That’s a bit of a disappointment.”

“But I’ll tell you one thing,” Croyd said.

“Yes?” the young man said eagerly.

“Don’t trust Hitler. And another thing—whatever you do, don’t visit New York City on September 15, 1946. It’ll be very dangerous on that day.”

“Well, thanks awfully for the warning.”

“You bet,” Croyd said. He and Nighthawk looked at each other. “Well, time to go save the world. Thanks for everything.”

“Certainly. Good luck, chaps.”

Croyd paused. “One last thing.”

“Yes?”

“Could you loan us a twenty?”

The young man shook his head as he reached for his wallet. “I say,” he said, “they’ll never believe this at the Drones Club.”

“So how does this temporal tracking ability of yours actually work?” Nighthawk asked Croyd as they went down the hotel corridor, heading for the elevator.

“I kind of see those displaced in time as blips on the temporal landscape,” Croyd said. “Sort of like a radar screen. I can’t tell who they are and it’s hard to say how many are in a given location, especially since we’re dealing with a relatively small number of people.”

“Seems like enough to me,” Nighthawk said. “And the actual place where they landed is, essentially, the same place they left?”

They stopped at the elevator bank and punched the button for the lobby.

“Well, most times anyway. I suppose. Actually, I really haven’t sent too many people back in time. Just that pigeon. Oh, and an alley cat when I first woke up. It seems like a pretty useful power, but, really, how often would the necessity for using it come up?”

Great, Nighthawk thought. Our temporal expert seems to be groping around as much as I am. The elevator arrived and Croyd and Nighthawk got on. The car was empty except for its operator, a tall, young black man in Palmer House livery. Seeing him took Nighthawk back through a hundred and forty–some years of memory to a time when he, too, wore the Palmer House uniform, when he worked at the hotel that stood on this very spot, before the Great Chicago Fire. Memories flooded into his mind and he clamped down on them and sent them away to where he kept them, hidden, but never forgotten.

“Floor, please,” the young man said.

“Lobby,” Croyd said.

“So,” Nighthawk said as the door closed, “whoever we’re after—”

Croyd looked at him and nodded. “Would have ended up—”

Nighthawk shook his head, his eyes shifting to the elevator operator who stood in front of him. “Say,” he said, “any strange things happen in the hotel, lately?”

“Mister,” the operator said without turning around, “strange stuff is always happening around here. You’d be surprised.”

Actually, Nighthawk thought, he wouldn’t. “Like what?” he asked.

“Well—” He thought for a moment. “Couple of weeks ago this crazy white man broke into a room, somehow, naked as a jaybird. He—”

The operator glanced back over his shoulder, catching Croyd’s eye. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “I didn’t mean—”

“No, no,” Croyd said. “This is fascinating. Do you know what he looked like?”

“Well, he was kind of, uh, stocky, I guess you could say.” He paused for a moment. “And he had a funny haircut for a grown man. You know, like that Buster Brown in the comic strip.”

Croyd and Nighthawk looked at each other.

“Charlie Flowers,” they said simultaneously.

A bell dinged as the elevator stopped.

“Your floor, sirs,” the young man said.

The air on the Chicago street was cool and crisp with the tang of early autumn. It was as crowded a street as any Nighthawk had walked down during the twenty-first century and perhaps even noisier. But he’d forgotten the old smell of the city. It all came back to him in a sudden rush when they left the Palmer House lobby.

“What’s that smell?” Croyd asked, wrinkling his nose.

Nighthawk waved at the street. “Horse manure.”

Horse-drawn carts and carriages were still battling the automobile for supremacy on the streets of Chicago. It was a losing fight, but there were enough of the old-fashioned conveyances that the distinctive sweet tang of horseshit still lingered on the air. They stepped into the flow of the foot traffic and let it carry them down the street until they came upon a café that had a few tables set out on the sidewalk as well as inside.

“I could use a bite to eat,” Croyd said.

Nighthawk was hungry as well. Such mundane concerns as food and drink had been forgotten in the excitement of the game and subsequent events, but now they came back to the time travelers. They took a seat at one of the small sidewalk tables and a white-aproned waiter appeared almost instantaneously. They ordered ham sandwiches and beer and were surprised and happy at the size of the slabs of rye bread, the thick cuts of ham, the whole dill pickles on the side, and the mugs of beer. A pot of spicy German mustard accompanied the sandwiches, which both slathered generously on the bread.

As they tore into the thick, juicy sandwiches, a newsboy came by hawking the afternoon edition of the Tribune. He was a runty little kid, maybe ten or twelve, looking like he stepped out of a Norman Rockwell illustration, or, Nighthawk realized, his memories.

“Hey, kid,” Croyd called. “Give me a paper.” He reached into his pocket for the bill that their British benefactor had given them back in the room in the Palmer House.

The kid’s eyes grew big as Croyd held it out. “Jeez, mister, I can’t change a twenty.”

“How much is the newspaper?” Croyd asked.

“Two cents.”

Croyd laughed. “Two cents? Even when I was a kid …” He looked at Nighthawk in surprise. “It was three cents,” he said, wonder in his voice. “Have I forgotten so much?”

“You’d probably be surprised,” Nighthawk said with a gentle smile.

Croyd called the waiter over. “Give the kid a nickel,” he said, “and add it to our bill.”

The waiter complied.

“Keep the change, kid,” Croyd said.

“Thanks, mister!”

From where he sat, Nighthawk could read the banner headlines: IRISH HOME RULE NEAR! The front page was crowded with columns of text. “Don’t keep me in suspense. What’s the date?”

“Oh, October 8, 1919. Say—” Croyd looked up, frowning in concentration. “I got us pretty close. Flowers has been here a month, tops. Not too much time to get up to a lot of mischief. Now all we have to do is find him. He’s around here somewhere. But where, exactly? How many people lived in Chicago in 1919?”

“Two and a half million.”

“Really?” Croyd looked at him.

“I do know Chicago,” Nighthawk said, looking up and down the bustling street. The memories were flooding back upon him like a wave that threatened to drag him under with its powerful pull. “Wait a minute … 1919? October?”

Croyd looked at him. “Yeah. What?”

Nighthawk set his sandwich back down on the plate, chewing thoughtfully. “At least we missed the riots,” he said.

“Riots?”

“Chicago’s worst race riots—ever.” Nighthawk’s voice became pensive, his gaze turned inward. “The summer of 1919 was known as Red Summer because of the racial tension that spread across the entire country. There were riots in many cities. My people were coming up from the South in massive numbers. Here in Chicago the tensions boiled over when a thrown rock killed a young black man at a beach in late July. By the time the National Guard had been called in to quell the violence, almost forty people were dead, a few more blacks than whites, but most of the property damage occurred in the Black Belt on the South Side, at the hands of organized ‘athletic clubs.’” Nighthawk frowned at Croyd. “Mostly Irish, mostly fairly recent immigrants themselves, competing for the jobs with the blacks coming up from the South.”

“What are you, a history buff or something?” Croyd asked.

“Or something,” Nighthawk said quietly. “It was pretty terrible. But, look, what else happened here in Chicago in 1919?”

Croyd, thumbing through the paper, looked up. “What?”

“The Black Sox scandal! The year the White Sox threw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds.”

Croyd’s eyes widened. “Flowers would be drawn to that like a fly to shit. But is the Series still going on? Wait a minute.” He flipped the pages more quickly. “Here it is.” He looked up at Nighthawk. “Game seven is at Comiskey Park this afternoon.”

Nighthawk frowned in concentration. “Give me a minute … Yes, that’s right. The White Sox win today, four to one.”

“Wait,” Croyd said, “the White Sox won game seven? I thought they threw the Series—”

“This was one of the years when the World Series was a best of nine.” Nighthawk signaled to their waiter. “Pay him,” he told Croyd, when the boy came over.

“Wait,” Croyd said again. “They played a nine-game World Series? You knew that?”

Nighthawk smiled. “I’m a baseball fan.”

“Where are we going?”

“I know a man—”

“You know a man?”

“I’ll explain later,” Nighthawk said as the waiter came back with their change. They had a little less than nineteen dollars left.

“You’d better. Just where are we headed?”

“You know that Black Belt I mentioned?” Croyd nodded. “We’re going to a part of it called Bronzeville.”

The geography of Chicago hadn’t changed all that much in a century, and the details of it came back to Nighthawk quickly. The Palmer House was located fairly near the northern edge of the Black Belt, which ran about thirty blocks, from Thirty-first to Fifty-fifth Street along State Street, but, as indicated by its name, was only a few blocks wide. The heart of Bronzeville, Chicago’s Black Metropolis, was around Forty-seventh Street.

They took the el, and got off at a pleasant neighborhood that consisted of rambling single-family homes interspersed with business centers lived in and run by blacks. It looked fairly prosperous, except for some spots of destruction they passed where buildings once stood but had obviously recently been burned to the ground. Rubble still remained in many of these spots like broken teeth in an otherwise healthy smile.

“Results of the riots?” Croyd asked.

Nighthawk nodded grimly. “Yes. Like I said, Irish ‘athletic clubs’ paid the hood a visit. And since most of the cops were Irish themselves, they weren’t too interested in restraining their friends. It took five thousand National Guardsmen to enforce the peace.”

“Doesn’t sound pleasant,” Croyd said.

“It wasn’t,” Nighthawk muttered. Before Croyd could question him further, he said, “Here we are,” and turned up the steps of a pawnshop that was in a row of businesses—grocer, barbershop, drugstore, and other small stores.

Inside it was well lit, airy, and spick-and-span clean, with shelves stocked with every kind of item you might be looking for, from clothes to tools to furniture. Near the front, behind a glass counter that was divided by display cases containing guns—small arms, mainly—and jewelry, stood an immense black man. He was fashionably and expensively dressed, with diamond rings on both pinkies and a diamond stickpin in his tie that was the size of a walnut.

“Hello, Ice,” Nighthawk said.

The man looked at him, frowning.

“You know my father,” Nighthawk said.

“John Nighthawk,” the man said, his face lighting in a broad smile. “You favor him, most precisely.”

Croyd opened his mouth and Nighthawk stepped on his foot.

“I’m happy to say that I do,” Nighthawk said. “He’s a good-looking man.”

“Yes, indeed,” the Iceman said.

“This is my friend, Mr. Crenson,” Nighthawk said, indicating Croyd, who smiled and nodded.

“Any friend of John Nighthawk’s son is a friend of mine,” Ice said. “Welcome to Bronzeville.”

“Thanks,” Croyd said. “It looks like a swell place.”

Ice nodded. “What can I do for you—” He paused.

“John. After my father.”

“—John?”

“Mr. Crenson and I just got into town and we’d like to attend the game this afternoon—”

Ice smiled broadly. “So you came to see Ice?”

“We know it’s a hard ticket. We’re willing to pay—”

Ice made a dismissive gesture. “I got what you need, boy, but the money of John Nighthawk’s son is no good here.” He reached into his waistcoat pocket and came out with a sheaf of tickets. “Good thing you got here now, though. I was just going to send my boys out to see what we could get for them. All prime seats. Here, take two.”

Nighthawk knew better than to argue. “Thanks, Ice.”

As he handed over the tickets, the pawnbroker said, “Since you’re just back in town—a warning. I hope you don’t have any business going on the game.”

“Business?” Nighthawk asked. “You mean a bet? No. Is it rigged?”

“Sure as hell is. It’s not well-known, but Ice knows all. He hears everything. You can’t fart in my town without me knowing. That eastern trash comes to our town with their dirty money and bribes our boys to throw it!” There was real anger in Ice’s voice and eyes. “Thank God our boys aren’t part of that filthy deal.”

“Our boys?” Nighthawk asked.

“You know—Smokey Joe and the Thunderbolt. They wouldn’t take dirty money. They wouldn’t let Chicago down.”

“No,” Nighthawk said thoughtfully.

“Anyway …” Ice brightened some. “Smokey Joe Williams is pitching today, and he’ll show them. Tomorrow, though …” He shook his head. “The white boy is going, the other Williams, Lefty. Bet on Cincinnati if you want to, but I wouldn’t dirty my money.”

“Nor would I,” Nighthawk said.

“Damn right. Well …” Ice smiled as they turned to go. “You remember me to your daddy. And tell him to come by sometime soon. He always brings the best when he comes to visit.”

“I will,” Nighthawk said as they left the shop.

Croyd looked at him. “What the hell?”

Nighthawk sighed. “I suppose I should explain.” He paused. The street was quiet, with a few people passing them as they went about their daily business. “I’m … older than I look.”

“Hey, man, I don’t judge,” Croyd said. “After all, I’m like, Jesus, seventy-seven myself. Or about that.”

“Yeah, well, I’m older than that.” There was a faraway look in his eyes.

Croyd looked impressed. “No shit?”

“No shit. I’ve been around a long time. And though I’ve done some traveling, worked for a while in lots of places, Chicago has been my home ever since I came here after the war.”

“What war was that?” Croyd asked.

Nighthawk looked at him. “The Civil War.”

Croyd’s jaw dropped. “Hey, I’m not trying to pry or anything. We all have our little secrets, our little foibles. It’s not like you’re a vampire or something and drink blood to stay alive for so long.” He paused a moment before adding, “Right? Because, if you were, that would be disgusting.”

“No,” Nighthawk said. “I don’t drink blood.”

“Great. That’s cool.” They started down the street again, heading for the el. “You know, I was a kid when the virus hit, back in ’46. I never finished school.” He shook his head. “Always regretted that I never learned algebra, but then it hasn’t really come up much in my life. I always loved history, though.”

“I’ve lived through a lot of it,” Nighthawk said.

“You ever meet General Ulysses Grant?”

Nighthawk shook his head. “No. But I knew Teddy Roosevelt pretty well.”

“Tell me about it,” Croyd said.

“Well, there was this time when we were ordered to take this hill … you think Cuba is something now, you should have been there in the 1890s …”

Comiskey Park, known as the Baseball Palace of the World, was jammed to the rafters, and then some. Even though it was one of the largest baseball stadiums of its time, every seat was taken and even the aisles were crammed with standing-room-only patrons. Ice’s word was good—the tickets he’d given to Nighthawk and Croyd were excellent, box seats located on the field level, just behind the White Sox dugout. Nighthawk was impressed. He’d been to many games at Comiskey Park, before it fell to the wrecking ball in 1991 … not only White Sox games, but also those of the Negro National League before, and even after, Jackie Robinson broke the major league color barrier. But he’d never seen it so crowded.

While unusual but not unique for this time, Comiskey Park wasn’t racially segregated, so no one even batted an eye when Nighthawk and Croyd took their seats, right on the aisle about six rows above the dugout. Nighthawk didn’t notice any other black fans in his immediate neighborhood, though that was more of an economic rather than a social commentary on the times. These were expensive seats, $5.50 each, as printed on the tickets. Though the stands were already crowded, the field itself was empty. The players had yet to appear for infield practice or even warm-up games of catch.

A vendor passed by hawking scorecards, and Nighthawk called him over. He gave the kid a nickel for the pamphlet. Nighthawk looked at the cover musingly as the kid moved on with his wares. Croyd glanced at him. “Who’s that on the cover?” he asked.

“Oh, the owner, of course, Charles Comiskey. A notorious skinflint whose miserly ways in large part caused the …” He paused, looked around, and lowered his voice. “You know, the thing that Ice told us about.”

“Right. Got ya.”

Nighthawk glanced up. The players were just starting to take the field in ones and twos, strolling about and stretching desultorily. He looked back down at the program, thumbing through it. “You know how much this nickel program would be worth back in—back home?”

“How much?” Croyd asked, interested.

“I’m not really sure, but probably thous—” He stopped. “Oh my God!”

“What?” Croyd asked.

Nighthawk stood up, staring out onto the field with a shocked expression on his face. He was silent for several moments, despite Croyd’s repeated, “What?” and he finally sank back into his seat.

“What is it?” Croyd asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“On the field,” he croaked. “Black men.”

“Yeah, so … oh. Right.”

“Jackie didn’t break the twentieth-century color barrier until 1946,” Nighthawk said in a choked whisper, “in the minors. Forty-seven in the majors.”

He thumbed through the program until he came to a team photo. It was grainy black and white, but he pointed out the three men who were quite obviously black. The names under the photo read Joe Williams, Oscar Charleston, and Spottswood Poles.

He wasn’t familiar with Poles, but knew the other two quite well. He’d seen them play, followed their exploits in the black newspapers of the day. And Ice had named them, though what he’d said was so foreign to Nighthawk that he hadn’t really processed it. Smokey Joe Williams, six feet four, a towering figure on the mound who’d come out of the dusty diamonds of west Texas, half black and half Indian. He’d pitched well into his forties, and was said to throw harder than the Big Train, Walter Johnson. Said so even by Johnson himself, whom he’d faced frequently in exhibition games when black players faced major leaguers back in their day. And Oscar Charleston, a compact but strongly built outfielder, who was called the Hoosier Thunderbolt because of his combination of power and speed.

He looked out over the field. There he was. Charleston was playing catch with Shoeless Joe Jackson himself and chatting with a smaller, more slimly built black man who had to be Spottswood Poles, tossing the ball with a player whom Nighthawk didn’t recognize.

As he watched a tall black man came strolling up the sidelines accompanied by another player in catching gear. He started to warm up. It was Smokey Joe Williams himself.

“Are you all right?” Croyd asked in a low voice.

Nighthawk suddenly realized that tears were running down his cheeks.

“I’m fine,” Nighthawk said. “I’m just fine.” He turned to Croyd and smiled. “I’m really going to enjoy this game.”

And he did.

It was the fourth inning and the White Sox were leading the Cincinnati Reds 2–0. Spot Poles, who turned out to be a speedy outfielder and lead-off man, had walked in the first inning and then scored when Charleston, who was hitting fourth, right after Joe Jackson, tripled to deepest center. Charleston then homered in his second at bat. No other Sox player had done much at the plate, but no one else had to. Williams was on his game, and was throwing heat. He had a perfect game going through four innings and had struck out seven of the twelve Reds who’d come to the plate, including their own black players, the veteran shortstop John Henry Lloyd and Cuban-born outfielder Cristóbal Torriente. No one was touching Williams and maybe no one on the White Sox dared to boot a play purposely.

Not only was the game itself entertaining, but in the bottom of the first, a couple of latecomers went down the aisle, right past Croyd and Nighthawk, to the front row of boxes. A man and woman, both expensively, even extravagantly, dressed in the fashions of the day. Croyd noticed them first as they passed by. He poked Nighthawk in the ribs, and started to rise, but Nighthawk laid a cautionary hand on his arm as he watched Charlie Flowers and Dagmar take their seats.

“Keep an eye on them,” he whispered. “And let’s enjoy the game.”

It was a crisply played match, over in little more than two hours. In the eighth inning Shoeless Joe Jackson made an incredible running catch, preserving Williams’s perfect game. Williams waited on the mound to shake his hand as they headed for the dugout.

Croyd shook his head. “Is Jackson really trying to throw the game?” he asked in a low voice.

“Some say that he was in on the fix, but didn’t play like it, double-crossing the gamblers.” Nighthawk shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe he couldn’t help himself from catching the ball. Maybe he couldn’t let his teammates down in a game like this.”

It was the only bit of help Williams needed to retain his perfect game. He struck out the side in the ninth inning, and the 2–0 score held up. As Williams was mobbed by his teammates for pitching the greatest game in World Series history, Charlie Flowers stormed up the aisle, a scowl plastered on his face, dragging Dagmar by the hand behind him.

Nighthawk and Croyd looked away, watching out of the corners of their eyes until they passed.

“Let’s go,” Nighthawk said. They followed at a discreet distance up the concrete stairs.

They stayed behind the couple, sheltered by the crowd rushing out onto the streets to celebrate the victory. Nighthawk’s face was grim. He’d just witnessed one of the most incredibly historic sights of his life, and now they had to wipe it all away to mend the time line and preserve their present. It wasn’t a small thing, this breaking of the baseball color line decades before Jackie Robinson. It had tremendous implications, social, political, and economic, for his people, not to mention that it righted a great wrong that had kept deserving men from performing at the highest levels of their chosen profession. Nighthawk had no idea what possibly could have triggered the historic change and, even though it was positive, he and Croyd had to wipe it away. To erase it. To bring back an injustice that would harm the social fabric of the entire nation. He had to blink back tears, this time tears of frustration and rage. But he would remember. He would remember the two hours or so of perfection, just a second or less in eternity, but something of beauty and grace that was an accomplishment for the ages.

They followed Flowers and Dagmar to the line of horse-drawn carriages waiting outside the park. The two time travelers climbed into the seat of an enclosed coach, Flowers shouting an address to the driver. Before he could pull away from the curb, Nighthawk and Croyd leaped into the coach themselves, taking the seat opposite.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Croyd said, smiling.

Flowers stared at them blankly for a moment, until recognition appeared in his eyes. “You’re—” he began, stopped, began again. “You’re those guys from the poker game. What the hell?”

“We’ve come after you,” Nighthawk said, “to return you to our time.”

Flowers stared at him. “What?” He shook his head. “Fuck. No. I like it here. I know important people. I am important people!”

“You help fix the World Series, Charlie?” Nighthawk asked coldly.

“What if I—I mean, what the hell you talking about?”

“Come on, Charlie, it’s in all the history books.” Nighthawk paused. “Although I don’t recall reading your name in any of them.”

“Well, you will.” Flowers flushed. “It was half-assed until I signed on—”

Croyd shook his head. “You’ve got to go back, Charlie. You both have to go back. Our present is being torn apart. History is getting all messed up …”

“Who cares?” Flowers snarled. His face was dark with rage and suddenly he was holding a pistol in his hand. He still had an athlete’s reflexes. “I don’t give a goddamn. I was never very good at history. Let those lousy bastards take care of themselves. They fucked me over when they had their chance, well, fuck them, twice as hard—”

Dagmar, sitting next to him on the seat, had quietly taken a cosh out of her bag. She smacked Charlie hard, on the side of the head. His eyeballs rolled up and he sagged limply on the seat as Nighthawk and Croyd looked on.

She turned to them. “Oh, take me home. Take me home, please!” She started to cry. “I hate it here. It’s so hot and dirty. There’s no television, the movies have no sound! And the food is terrible. Nothing is gluten-free, they don’t even have sushi. Oh, please, please—”

Croyd gestured briefly. Nighthawk could see the rainbow ripples pass between him and his targets, and then Dagmar and Flowers were gone, leaving piles of clothes and a pistol behind them.

“Jesus,” Nighthawk said, “that’s it? They back in our present?”

Croyd nodded in satisfaction. “Yep. That’s it. Standing on Michigan Avenue in 2017 naked as jaybirds. Or jailbirds, in Charlie’s case. Let the son-of-a-bitch explain that.”

“All right then,” Nighthawk said. “Let’s go find a mirror.”

“No place like the Palmer House,” Croyd said.

The desk clerk at the Palmer House didn’t bat an eyelash when Nighthawk and Croyd booked a room for the night, sans suitcases. Nighthawk, acting a part as Croyd’s valet, informed him that their luggage would be delivered later that evening.

It made sense for them to return to the Palmer House. A hotel room provided the requisite privacy to make the jump, not to mention the necessary mirror. It also served as a ready source of clothing and other necessities for the newly arrived travelers. And both Nighthawk and Croyd were hungry. The hot dogs they’d had at the stadium had been a decent snack, but what they really needed was a good meal, which was just a phone call to room service away.

They ordered steaks, several sides, a couple of desserts each—most of them for Croyd—and a large pot of coffee. Black. Croyd was used to remaining awake for extended periods of time. That wasn’t Nighthawk’s normal lifestyle, but for now at least he was willing to match Croyd’s string of sleeplessness. It might turn into a problem as their quest continued, Nighthawk realized, but for now he could deal with it. He was feeling tired, though, and at some point in the near future knew that he would have to energize himself with a jolt of life essence. Again, that was something to worry about perhaps during the course of their next jump.

After their repast, Croyd sat at the table, staring into the bottom of his coffee cup.

“Well, no time like the present,” Nighthawk said.

“Yeah,” Croyd said. “Very funny.”

They went up to the room and stood together in front of the full-length mirror on the wall next to the bed. “Wait a minute.” Nighthawk reached into his pants pocket and pulled out all the money he had. “Give me your cash. We might as well leave it on the nightstand to pay our bill. It can’t do us any more good.”

Croyd’s meek-featured face crinkled in disappointment. “Much as I hate to part with money, you’re right.” He pulled out his cash and sighed. “Now look into the mirror.”