Mayor of the Universe

  “If that’s reality—” began Fletcher, but then his material world swirled, and on its speed and colors he rode it into a cobblestone street in the Knightsbridge section of London.

  Deke was running, and from his breathlessness it was clear that he’d been either running for a while or running at a very fast pace. Odd too was the fact that he was wearing a tuxedo and patent leather slip-ons and that Millie, breathing just as hard, was running slightly behind him.

  With a quick nod toward a stone fence, he was able to communicate to her their next plan of action, and veering to the left he gracefully hurdled the fence and then helped Millie, whose long evening gown and fur wrap did not lend itself to graceful, or successful, hurdling.

  “Aw, blimey!” she said, as Deke pulled her off the stone fence onto the narrow strip of ground that separated it from a hedge. “I’ve ruined me dress!”

  “That’s the least of your worries now,” whispered Deke, and before she had time to brush the leaves and dirt off her skirt, he crawled through a break in the hedge.

  “Follow me!” he ordered. “Hurry!”

  She obeyed, dirt and pebbles collecting in the nap of her fur wrap and smearing and tearing at her gown. No sooner was she on the other side of the hedge, panting, than the two heard shouts and the approach of footsteps on the street.

  “I’m sure they went this way!”

  “Maybe they’ve gone into the park!”

  “Bloody hell!”

  The voices trailed off as the footsteps clattered away, but Deke and Millie lay on the ground for a long time, making sure their pursuers weren’t coming back.

  “Sorry,” Deke finally whispered.

  “Well, you get an E for effort,” whispered Millie back. “But an F for execution.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Deke, holding up the purloined wallet he still carried, and his laugh ignited one in Millie. For several long minutes, they lay on the cold ground, their laughter fed by excitement and relief.

  Back in Millie’s flat, they examined the wallet’s contents.

  “Two hundred quid!” said Millie with a low whistle. “These blokes weren’t just drunks—they’re rich drunks!”

  “Look at this,” said Deke, handing Millie an actors’ guild card.

  “Theo Jeffries! I thought he looked familiar! I saw him in Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Old Vic!”

  “Now I feel bad that we robbed actors,” said Deke, taking the wad of cash out of his wallet.

  “You wouldn’t if you’d seen his performance,” said Millie, counting bills. “I’ll bet they were headed to Angela Park’s party, too.”

  Several days before, an item in the paper had alerted Millie to the reception honoring “Britain’s favorite comic actress and her Saudi Arabian fiancé.”

  “We’re going to this,” she told Deke, showing him the news article.

  “And I suppose you have an invitation?”

  “Invitation,” Millie scoffed. “Invitations are for amateurs.”

  They had been on their way to the Knightsbridge mansion, with the goal of relieving the actress of some of her heavy burden of jewelry, but two blocks from their destination, Millie had ordered the cabbie to stop.

  In response to Deke’s question as to what they were doing, she nodded to a trio of men across the street.

  “This is our warm-up act.”

  Two of the men were fighting and both of them had piled their coats on the arm of their friend, either because they didn’t want to dirty them or they wanted to better their slugging range of motion. It was obvious from their wild flailings and the laughter of the coat holder that liquor had been ingested and ingested freely.

  She and Deke crossed the street, and feigning concern Millie asked the coat holder if he needed any help.

  “Naw,” said the man, weaving. “They’re both too drunk to land a punch, and even if they did, they’re too drunk to feel it.”

  “Bloody bastard!” said one, as he missed his target and stumbled forward.

  “See what I mean?” asked the convivial coat holder before he stumbled backwards to avoid collision with the clumsy pugilist.

  Staggering, he dropped one of the coats, which Millie graciously picked up.

  “Here you are,” she said, returning to its holder the coat but not the wallet inside its pocket.

  Seeing this larcenous exchange, Deke became emboldened and decided to explore the pockets of the other coat for a wallet or money clip, but he was not as graceful as Millie.

  “Hey,” said the coat holder. “Just what the hell are you doing?”

  His outrage was enough to make the drunken fighters release their grips, and they turned to look at Deke, who stood holding a wallet he had just plucked out of the pocket of the coat the man still held. Under the glare of accusation, he stood frozen and no doubt would have been the new target of the amateur boxers’ blows had it not been for Millie’s directive to run.

  Deke followed Millie, who was following her own advice.

  It was a wild chase, and at one point Millie was only an arm’s length away from the coat holder, but in lunging for her he stumbled and fell, his mobility affected by his earlier visit to the pub.

  Still, adrenaline burned off enough alcohol to make the three drunks viable pursuers. But with no liquor to burn off and with the additional fear of getting pummeled, Deke and Millie held the advantage, and by the second block they had a good lead. When they turned down a back street, Deke thought they might have lost them altogether. Still, it seemed prudent to jump the fence and hide in the hedges.

  “This probably worked out for the best,” said Millie, putting on the teakettle. “Even if we had gotten in—and I’m sure we would have—I’ll bet the sultan had pretty tight security.” She rummaged through a cupboard above the stove. “I know I have some biscuits somewhere in here.”

  “Four hundred and thirty quid altogether,” said Deke, putting the bills in a pile. “Maybe I should go into acting.”

  “All good thieves are actors,” said Millie. “Only at the end of our performances, we get to spend our applause.”

  Despite Gerry’s tutelage, Deke never became adept at lock picking (“I’d be better off hitting my intended victim over the head with this,” he said once in exasperation, waving the torque wrench with which he’d been unsuccessfully practicing), but he became quite good at picking pockets, which was, according to Millie, “the bread and butter of our profession—well, that and simple burglary.” He realized if he were to be successful in the fine art of jewel theft, he’d have to hone the skills Gerry and Millie were convinced he had in spades—his charm and his ability to listen.

  He began to look up those high-placed friends of his Aunt Edna’s. Introductions led to invitations, and soon Deke was in and out of his work uniform—his tuxedo—and on the party circuit, mingling with British and American elite. He was invited into nearly as many beds as parties, and before he returned to America, he had successfully wrested away several necklaces, bracelets, and rings from an international group of victims.

  “I want you to have this,” he said, on his last visit with the two he considered his only real friends.

  He poured a long pearl necklace into Millie’s hand.

  “And Gerry, this is for you.” He gave his friend an onyx men’s ring and matching cufflinks. “Courtesy of Sir Rutherford.”

  “Sir Terrance Rutherford?” asked Gerry, and at Deke’s nod he chuckled. “Well done! I heard that prick on the radio once, going on about how he wished he could go to war but for his ‘debilitating case of flat feet.’”

  They had a final tea and a final game of gin rummy—Gerry beat them both—and when Deke held Millie to himself in a long good-bye hug, he was surprised to find himself teary-eyed.

  Millie was not.

  “Good heavens, Deke,” she said, pulling away from him. “You Yanks are such bloody pushovers.”

  Live Field Report

  To: Charmat

  From:
Tandala

  Have a little motion sickness from all this time travel. The pastel colors and bright sunshine of 1960s Florida have been a real tonic compared to London and its gloom, which is not helped at all by the shroud of war that still covers it. Any insight as to why I am not able to penetrate the terrible layers of Fletcher’s fantasies and be there with him physically? I want to fight off that bear that haunts him; it has mauled me, too! Honestly, Charmat, I don’t know how against all this darkness light still shines. That’s a lesson I can hardly believe: humans still find reason to laugh when they’ve earned every single right to never smile again.

  After leaving London, Deke moved in with his Aunt Edna, who was thrilled to have him back home, even as the weeks passed into months. She realized that he needed time to assimilate back into civilian life, and when he turned down offers of employment from her friends, she tried to keep her disappointment and nagging to a minimum. When he finally told her of his plans to begin a financial consulting service, she felt her prayers for her nephew had been answered and again offered her friends, this time as clients.

  He used her connections and provided them with perfectly constructive, often judicious, and always legal financial consultation, and it was through these contacts that he was able to expand on his alternative—and much more satisfying—vocation. From associations with clients, he learned any number of things about them and their associates and was able to use information about vacations, birthdays, safe locations, special occasions, and so on—to his highly profitable benefit. His base grew to an international one and his jewel thievery grew exponentially. His “profits” were fenced by the same Scotsman Millie employed, and for several years he lived and loved a self-described life of “larceny, luxury, and sex.” It was a life he was perfectly happy with, but one night in Rome, after attending a party of a friend of a friend and liberating the contents of a luggage company heiress’s jewelry box, he fell asleep in his own hotel room only to be visited by his long-absent bear.

  He was yanked out of the peace that he had forged for himself after his long-ago talk with Gerry by a nightmare of bloody brutality, one that didn’t come from the dark and twisted imaginings of a subconscious mind but worse—was an exact recounting of his first day of battle. Awakened with a jolt, with his mind and body filled with one loud and agonizing shout of “No!” he sat up in bed with such force that the headboard thumped against the wall.

  His breathing ragged, he stared out wildly and felt nausea creep under his panic, for there in the corner, next to the hotel divan, crouched his bear.

  “What do you want?” he said, his voice a hoarse rasp.

  “More,” said the bear simply.

  Like a child trying to convince himself that the monster would go away if he couldn’t see it, Deke closed his eyes as tightly as he could and sat frozen against the headboard. Gradually, the muscles around his eyes relaxed, but he still did not open his eyes for several minutes more. When he finally did, he nearly groaned with relief, for he was alone.

  From Rome he flew to Paris to visit a client and almost did not take advantage of a party invitation, still too rattled by the bear’s reappearance to concentrate on a potential mark, but when his client mentioned a particularly comely Folies Bergère dancer who was to be in attendance, Deke rallied himself and in fact not only managed a rendezvous with the French dancer in the wine cellar but appropriated the money clip of a drunken Swiss industrialist as well.

  The first part of his walk back to the hotel had been cheerful—it was a balmy summer’s night and the French dancer had been wonderfully acrobatic—but by and by he realized he was being followed. He knew it was neither the dancer begging for an encore nor the industrialist demanding the return of his money—but his bear.

  He sped up his pace, thinking he might out-walk the beast before it jumped on him and had nearly broken into a trot when a figure suddenly appeared from the recessed doorway of a shuttered shop. Deke put on his brakes, but still he collided with the man, knocking him down.

  “Sorry,” said Deke, helping him up and hearing the man mutter in French, he added, “Désolé.”

  With great dignity, the man brushed his right sleeve with his left hand and Deke noted, with a gasp, that the sleeve was swinging, empty, and before he could censor himself, he asked in his rudimentary French, “Étiez-vous dans le guerre?”

  The one-armed man nodded, answering that yes, yes, of course he was in the war, and as the bear lurked near enough for Deke to smell his breath, the American veteran reached into his pocket and stripped off a bill from the wad of Swiss francs encased in the money clip.

  “Pour votre service,” said Deke, and realizing he sounded as if he were giving the man a tip, and a cheap one at that, he thrust the entire wad of money into the man’s hand.

  The Frenchman’s mustache stretched toward his ears as he smiled.

  “Merci, monsieur, merci,” he said and turned abruptly, before his benefactor could change his mind. But Deke didn’t change his mind, and as he crossed the street, he plunged his hands into his much-emptier pockets and began to whistle, and the bear lumbered away into the shadows of the Parisian night.

  Thus began his tithing, only it wasn’t ten percent of his day-job income that he handed over to his church, but thirty, fifty, and sometimes one hundred percent of his night-job income, after his agent’s (he preferred the word to fence’s) commission.

  He sent anonymous checks to VFWs around the country, to veteran’s hospitals, and sometimes, after reading a story in the paper, to a veteran himself. Then he began sending anonymous checks to the Quaker Friends and other pacifist organizations. It didn’t assuage his guilt over stealing—he had no guilt over stealing—rather, it lightened his heart to imagine the war-ravaged sergeant puzzling over an envelope’s return address (Deke always wrote simply, “Pax”) before opening it and finding a cashier’s check for five thousand dollars inside. It tickled him to imagine the congregants after a Friends meeting, abuzz about a ten thousand dollar check tucked inside a piece of paper that said, “End war!” It outright made him laugh to think of the administrative secretary working in a VA hospital who opened her boss’s letter containing a check for twenty thousand dollars and the message, “Buy each patient a steak on me!”

  Fed now, too, the bear stayed away.

  After an afternoon game of bridge, Deke was strolling through the reception area of Oceanside Manor.

  “Mr. Drake,” said Tina who sat at the front desk. “Miss Griggs would like to see you in admissions.”

  “Uh-oh,” said the man for whom Tina would have left her husband of thirty-two years (at least for a weekend). “Am I being kicked out?”

  “Hardly,” said Tina, thinking, How could any woman anywhere kick you out of any place?

  In Miss Griggs’s office, Deke thought his knees might buckle, and it wasn’t in reaction to the admissions officer’s decorating taste, which celebrated cows, in figurines carved of wood, forged of metal, blown in glass, or molded of clay.

  “Millie!”

  “I was going to surprise you at your house,” said the small woman, rising from her chair to embrace Deke. “But your butler said you were visiting your aunt, so I had the driver take me here.”

  “Millie!” said Deke again, holding her tight.

  “Miss Preuve-Bailey tells me you were friends years ago in London,” said Miss Griggs, in whose round brown eyes and wide mouth one could understand her affinity toward things bovine.

  “Yes, ” said Deke, holding her in front of him. “Dear, dear friends.”

  “We were, weren’t we?” said Millie and something in her use of the past tense worried Deke.

  “Gerry,” said Deke, “Gerry is . . . ?”

  “Yes, dead,” said Millie simply. “Last year, actually, but he outlived all his prognoses by years, and in the end he was ready to go.”

  “Millie, I’m so sorry.”

  And he was. After he had left England, he had kept up with Millie and G
erry, flying over for biannual visits, but the past few years had been so busy, what with settling Edna into the home, and he’d let things—important things, like friendship—lapse.

  “And how . . . ,” he began.

  “How did I find myself here?” asked Millie. “Well, with Gerry gone, I’m a little freer to come and go as I please, and in the middle of a cold, damp winter, I thought, why not visit my old Yankee pal?”

  “Maybe you can talk her into putting her name on our waiting list,” said Miss Griggs. “In the event she’d like to spend her senior years in our establishment.”

  “Which I just might,” said Millie. “I think it would be peaceful spending time around so many cows.”

  Miss Griggs beamed. “They’re calming figures, aren’t they?”

  “Quite.”

  Out of Miss Griggs’s office Deke took Millie’s hard, thin arm and led her outside before they let loose their laughter.

  “Oh, Deke,” said Millie, “did you see that huge porcelain Guernsey next to her chair? It was as big as a cat! And those little teeny glass ones that look like they’re grazing on her desktop? Good God—there must by more than a hundred cows in there!”

  “Two hundred and eighteen: I counted,” said Deke. “The very first time my aunt and I were in there, she looks around and says, ‘Don’t you ever get cowstraphobic?’ and honestly, I thought Miss Griggs was going to refuse her admission. You do not joke about those cows.” He took Millie’s hand in his. “I’m thrilled to see you, Millie. Thrilled, but surprised.”

  “I’m glad. I meant to thrill and surprise you.”

  “Now where are you staying?”

  “I checked into the Breakers Hotel.”

  “Well, let’s check you out then. You’re staying with me.”

  Live Field Report/Sense-O-Gram

  To: Charmat

  From: Tandala

  This is a kiss. And we thought meteor showers were a big deal.