Anarchy has its drawbacks, especially for cops. “Suppose we lift these prints—then we could prove we’d caught the right guy!”
Ed considered. “Provided individual fingerprints really are unique. Can you prove that?”
It was my turn to consider. I’d always taken it for granted: millions of prints on file with the FBI, no two sets alike. But if the feds ever ran across a set of ringers, they’d never tell. They might even rub out the poor slob with the duplicate digits! It’s a sad world. “I never heard of anyone disproving it. Get me some talcum powder and Scotch tape.”
“What’s Scotch tape?”
“Grr! Some sort of transparent sticky ribbon, like for wrapping packages. I hate to start giving lessons, but it looks like you could use this one.”
“There’s probably a thing or two we could teach you, as well,” he said good-naturedly.
“I’m learning every minute. Don’t forget the clean sheets.” He left me wondering how we’d get all the wires back into place. Clarissa was going to be one upset cookie. I glanced at the window. Something definitely odd going on there. Seemed like more glass, now, than Ed’s autopistol had left.
Ed came back, a bundle under one arm and a satisfied look on his face. “I checked around a bit. The bushes under this window are pretty flat. Couldn’t have been a comfortable landing. There’s a faint trail of broken glass halfway to the street—quite invisible, I had to use instruments. No blood, though.”
I laughed. “Don’t feel too bad. I missed him at six inches!” I pointed to the derringer lying on the floor, realizing for the first time that my fingers weren’t broken.
Ed picked up the little gun, looked it over with disbelief, and put it on the bookcase. “Window’s coming along fine,” he said, running a finger over the edges. “I’ve called Professional Protectives. They’re sending a team over. Where do you want this stuff?”
I took the talcum powder. “Hope I haven’t lost my touch since I saw this in Crimestopper’s Textbook. This should stick where his hands left an oily residue. Then we’ll pick the powder up with some tape, and—”
Ed held up a hand. “Sounds kind of messy. Wouldn’t it be simpler to let the Telecom do it?” He picked up the clipboard and pulled loose a little knob that trailed a fine, retracting cable. He passed the knob over the surface of the knife handle. “Now we’ve got a permanent record. Want to see?”
I nodded dumbly. The wall lit up, showing the six-inch handle expanded to six feet, its entire surface visible on the screen.
“Now we’ll try a little contrast enhancement.” The image began to unravel a millimeter at a time, replaced, line by line, in sharper detail. Dust particles, minute scratches began to disappear. Most of the prints were smeared, except for a beauty at the back, near the guard. “More ultraviolet,” Ed said to himself, and the smears began to fade. Along each pristine ridge, individual pore-prints could now be discerned.
“Okay, genius, I’m impressed. What about the overlapping ones?”
More adjustments. The prints moved and separated like an animated movie title, arraying themselves like an FBI reference card. This seemed to satisfy Ed. “Now let’s do the alarm defeater.” He picked it up by its wires and let the Telecom look it over. Images were duly refined and placed below those from the knife, each paired with its identical mate, proving, unnecessarily, that our intruder had handled both objects.
However, at the bottom of the screen was a third row. “Where somebody else handled the defeater. Probably me.” He scanned his fingers and let the camera snap back. The bottom row shifted and danced, identified Ed’s thumb and forefinger marks, leaving four strange prints. Ed looked highly pleased. “You know what, Win? I’ll bet whoever owns these prints hired our knife-wielding friend.”
“Or sold him the defeater, Sherlock. Don’t get ahead of yourself.”
“No comment.” Ed grinned. “You want your bed changed?” He reached for the bedclothes he’d brought with the useless powder and tape.
“Yes—and don’t remind me there’s another use for that talcum! What about all this gadgetry?”
“I think we can hook you back up again. Clarissa left instructions in the ’com. I’d hate to wake her at this hour. Slide into this chair while I straighten things out.”
“Ed, is there anything that Telecom of yours won’t do? Must be a hell of an expensive rig.”
“It came with the house, like the plumbing and the auto-valet. But it won’t change this bed, worse luck.” He opened a wall panel and chucked the damp bedding inside. I sat in the chair, wiping the toad-sticker with a pillowcase. The blood was dry and flaked off easily.
“At least,” Ed said, tucking in the last corner, “you’ve won yourself a handsome Rezin.” He levered me back into bed and began attaching wires.
“Resin? What are you talking about?”
“The blade. It’s a Rezin.”
“Looks like steel, but if it’s some fancy Confederate epoxy—”
“Are we speaking the same language?” Ed looked exasperated. “R-E-Z-I-N. Named after the inventor, Rezin Bowie of Tennessee.” He sorted cables, looping them back over their supports.
“Any relation to Jim Bowie?” I asked, examining the wicked “false” edge along the back of the knife.
He thought for a moment. “His brother, I believe—one of the Alamo victors, and later President of the Republic of Texas?”
I laughed. “The way I heard it, Bowie’s side lost at the Alamo. Although the delay cost Santa Anna the war.”
“It cost Santa Anna his life. And any big knife sharpened half way up the back is called a Rezin. Quite a promoter, that Bowie fellow.”
“So I’ve got myself a genuine Rezin. Spoils of war, and all that?”
“You think its former owner will come back and claim it? Besides, it’s the custom.”
I looked at the heavy brass guards projecting from the handle. “Guess I’ll have somebody cut these off, though.”
“For plague’s sake, why?”
“Considering all I know about knife fighting, it’ll make it easier to remove when somebody takes it away and shoves it up my ass.”
TOMORROW WE’D TACKLE our mysteries one by one. With two attacks catching me flat-footed (pardon the expression) in twenty-four hours, how I got here would have to wait until we found out who was putting the hit on me, and why. Maybe it was just a case of mistaken machine gun, and they were really after Ed. Somehow I doubted that. On the other hand, if it was me they were after, they might know how I’d gotten here, and by implication, how to get back. On the third hand (third hand?) I had a lot to learn about detecting in the North American Confederacy.
“Okay,” I said, enmeshed again in therapeutic wiring. “Fingerprints are out.” Ed was having coffee and pie. I was sucking vitamin-sludge through a flex-straw, and not liking it. “What about the Frontenac? Anyone in the neighborhood—Lucy maybe—remember the license plates?”
“What’s a license plate?” He finished up his pie as I watched jealously.
“Well, scratch that line of investigation. It’s a large metal tag you screw to your bumper—skirt—which the state issues for a sizable fee. Funny thing—if you’re caught without one, you just might end up manufacturing them!”
“How’s that?” Ed lit up an enormous stogie, leaned back, and inhaled.
“They’re made by convicts on big stamping machines. How about giving a pal one of those hawsers you’re smoking?”
Ed looked puzzled. “Slaves make license plates, and if you don’t … purchase? … one, you become a slave yourself? A convenient circularity for someone.” He looked at his cigar. “And Clarissa said no smoking until your nitriloside reserves are built up.”
I tried to explain how convict employment—along with conscription and jury duty—isn’t considered slavery, but he just snorted. How could I explain that licenses are necessary to public safely, especially when his culture apparently found no use for such a concept? “Look here, Ed, h
ow many people get killed on your roads every year?”
He puffed his cigar again, and I began to look at homicide from an entirely new angle. “No idea at all.” He reached for the Telecom pad. “Last year, around five or six hundred if you discount probable suicides.”
“What? Out of what population—and how many of them drive?”
More button-pushing. “Half a billion in North America, and maybe three vehicles for every person on the continent.”
“Shuddup and give me a goddamned cigar!”
“Your funeral, Lieutenant.”
I lit up ecstatically. Needles and dials began doing funny things, but I ignored them. Anyway, the final problem—how to get back to the good old U.S.A. if it still existed—was unresolvable at the moment. Which brought me back to the same old issue: how come history was different? Not an urgent matter, perhaps, but something I could pursue lying in bed, using the same Telecom my host brandished so unfairly.
And perhaps there was a bit of urgency to the matter, at least for the sake of an old policeman’s mental health. Ed hadn’t stopped with the fingerprints on the knife handle, on the alarm defeater, nor with those on the tips of his own fingers. After the security team had arrived, he’d insisted on showing my poor bruised hand to his marvelous machine. After all, we still had four extra prints to account for.
So maybe it was important to figure out where our histories diverged, maybe the most important thing of all.
Ed and I have the same fingerprints.
IX: The Constitution Conspiracy
That enterprise immodestly represented as “history” resolves, upon inspection, into mere catering. Should you aspire to anything greater, discover what is not considered interesting or relevant by historians: root out an obscure philosopher, a not-quite-forgotten idealist, a leader without apparent following; you may encounter a much despised and greatly feared commodity called “truth.”
—Henry L. Mencken
Presidential Days
FRIDAY, JULY 10, 1987
By morning, the bedroom window had healed up nicely. My troubles were a different matter. Who can explain their own times and the past that created them? I don’t remember enough from high school and a junior college curriculum in police science. What little I can parrot is just a hodgepodge of other people’s opinions.
Hell, they revise it every year. I never did figure out what caused World War I, and with each decade World War II seems more FDR’s doing than Japan’s. If I didn’t understand my own world, how could I understand this one?
Ed and Clarissa didn’t have quite the same problem. For them, there’d never been a World War II; no Roosevelt I could discover had ever scored higher than dogcatcher. Not that they were much more help than I might have been. I enjoyed Clarissa’s frequent, only partially professional visits and I don’t know where I’d have been without Ed, but history was less important to them, and viewed from a radically different perspective. To most Americans it’s a succession of battles, wars, presidents, and kings. To Confederates, history’s Thomas Edisons mean a lot more than its Lyndon Johnsons. Inventions, ideas, philosophies are central; invasions and elections are temporary aberrations.
Take the Westward Movement: France at war with England and the world; Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase; Lewis and Clark; the Homestead Act; cattle barons and squatters; gold in California; the U.S. Cavalry, and war with the Indians. But to Ed it meant Sam Colt, whose repeating sidearm allowed individuals, rather than mobs, to make a place for themselves, self-sufficient and free. And it meant renting or buying land from Indians cannily eager to take gold, silver, or attractive stock options.
It was more productive to talk to Lucy. She was older, a lot more widely traveled, and tended to view the past as something that had happened to her personally. She had axes of her own to grind, but at least that gave me a context and detail I couldn’t get elsewhere.
“Elsewhere” meant mostly maps, fiction, reference books, the encyclopedia. But I never lifted a volume or turned a page, just pushed buttons. Even before I began tottering around the house in a borrowed bathrobe, I discovered the Telecom—an inseparable part of Confederate living, as integral to a home as heating and wiring, as common as self-repairing windows: television, telephone, secretary, library, newspaper, baby sitter, housekeeper, kitchen maid, bartender, catalog, and, as I had reason to appreciate, nurse.
The cast on my arm was the devil’s own nuisance, although lighter than a plaster one, and ingeniously rigged for washing and scratching—in essence, merely a rigid plastic mesh. Clarissa maintained that, along with electronics and vitamins, it was helping me knit a hundred times faster than I had any right to expect. I don’t know all the therapeutic details, but I’m sure the FDA would have outlawed it.
Even one-handed, I soon got the hang of the Telecom’s tubeless picture screen and keyboard. The portable units could be found in any room of the house. I enjoyed that, recalling the cat-fit Evelyn had thrown when I’d insisted on a bookshelf in the bathroom. Most rooms offered at least one wall-size screen, usually tuned in on travelog stuff, up to and including views hot off the beam from the Moon or Mars—sunsets and sunrises at interesting hours.
The Telecom helped me stay out of Ed’s way while he worked on some commission he’d turned down the day I spoiled his vacation. I tried to feel guilty but just couldn’t make it: vacations are always a chore for me—I’d find myself hanging around the department long before the second week was over, everybody tripping over me and some stranger using my desk. Lucy came over almost every evening to play cards and straighten out all the “idiotic conclusions” my day’s reading had led me to.
A short security platoon had been stationed around the house since the knife attack and wouldn’t be gone until the Frontenac mystery was resolved one way or another. I looked forward to talking a little shop with them, once I felt more like hiking around.
Mostly I hunched over the Telecom, a stranger in a strange land, trying to figure out how we both got so strange. What real differences were there between the Encyclopedia of North America and the smattering of history I could recall? Something vaguely bothered me about that July 2 Independence Day—but from then on, things seemed jake, right up until the Whiskey Rebellion’s surprise ending.
What really differed was interpretations.
In 1789, the unlucky year 13 A.L., the Revolution was betrayed. Since 1776, people had been free of kings, free of governments, free to live their own lives. It sounded like a Propertarian’s paradise. Now things were going to be different again: America was headed back—so Lucy and the encyclopedia said—toward slavery.
The fiend responsible for this counter-revolutionary nastiness was Alexander Hamilton, a name Confederates hold in about the same esteem as the word “spittoon.” He and his Federalists had shoved down the country’s throat their “Constitution,” a charter for a centralist superstate replacing the thirteen minigovernments that had been operating under the inefficient but tolerable Articles of Confederation. Adopted during an illegal and unrepresentative meeting in Philadelphia, originally authorized only to revise the Articles, this new document amounted to a bloodless coup d’etat.
Funny—as near as I remembered, these were the same events that had happened in my own world. But in the eyes of my new friends, historic figures like John Jay and James Madison became villainous authoritarians. Of seventy-four delegates chosen to attend the Constitutional Convention, nineteen declined, and sixteen of those present refused to sign. Of the thirty-nine remaining, many of whom signed only reluctantly, just six had put their names to the original Declaration of Independence. By contrast, that agreement had been unanimous, and most of its fifty-six signers actively opposed the Federalist Constitution.
All this seemed vaguely familiar—Patrick Henry smelling a rat at Alexander’s steamroller derby—but how did it square with what I’d always known? Were there really two distinct sets of Founding Fathers, philosophically at war with one another?
> Right off the bat, the newly chartered Congress okayed a number of taxes, one of them on whiskey. This upset certain western Pennsylvania farmers who were accustomed to converting their bulky and perishable crop into White Lightning. They began to wonder what the Revolution had been all about. In 1792, they got together in Pittsburgh to bitch about taxes, Hamilton and his crew, and old General Washington, a once popular hero, now Federalist president and chief enforcer of the hated tax. The farmers feared they’d traded one Tyrant George for another.
The next year saw them tarring and feathering tax collectors, a fate formerly reserved for the king’s minions, and seriously considering hanging a few as examples. Lucy thought highly of this practice; I remembered IRS agents I’d had to work with and grinned. The old general issued a warning proclamation, and when that didn’t quiet the whiskey farmers, followed it with fifteen thousand troopers under command of “Light-Horse Harry” Lee. He quickly became known as “Dead-Horse Harry” when the crack-shot sodbusters blasted mount after mount from under him—it became the Whiskey Rebellion’s running gag.
I’d always thought Kentucky rifles had made the difference against the British and so on, but rifled weapons were rare during the Revolution and for a long time afterward. Federal troops carried French smoothbores. The “ultramodern” rifled guns were the private property of volunteer guerillas despised by Washington, but the only kind of army Thomas Paine approved of. The encyclopedia waxed downright eloquent about civilians being traditionally better-armed than the authorities, a principal element, it claimed, in the preservation and expansion of liberty.
It made me think about my uniformed years packing a bureaucratically mandated .38 against shotguns, magnums, and autopistols. I’ve sometimes wished the population stripped of weapons, but I never fooled myself that it was right or even possible. Later I simply broke the regulations and carried the biggest cannon I could handle.