Chapter Twelve

Just north of the Santa Monica Pier and a few blocks west of the ley line vortex where Crazy Horse had begun his journey (ley lines, after all, being magical and nothing if not unpredictable), the main plunge at the North Beach Bath house was jammed with bathers, children and grownups alike happily taking advantage of the twenty-five cent admission to dunk their bodies in cold water on a day when the mid-afternoon temperatures had soared into the nineties. The sideline gallery was equally packed with fully-dressed Santa Monica and Edison City folk: watchful mothers, timid spectators considering a plunge and die-hard sex fiends who would have paid a lot more than a quarter for the chance of seeing a naked ankle peeping out from under the dark woolen skirts of a lady’s bathing costume.

In fact, by early evening the attendants were already wondering if they ought to tell the Boss to stop selling tickets until some of the bathers went home, especially as the kids had started a splashing game that was soaking the spectators in the gallery and building a level of happy hysteria that might get out of hand any minute if something untoward happened. Like, for instance, an Indian in a monkey suit, a curly-haired Mick and a long, skinny Chinaman suddenly materializing in mid-air ten feet over the most boisterous scrum in the splashing game, hanging there with stunned expressions for what seemed like a half hour but was maybe three long seconds, and then dropping into the water with a cannonball splash accompanied by more screams than anybody had heard since the Chinatown War.

“Help!” yelled Ambrose Chen, thrashing around frantically.

“What the blazes do you mean, ‘help!’” Liam snapped irritably as he tried to fend off a screaming nine-year-old. “Swim down to the end and climb out, we have to get out of here before the coppers come!”

“I CAN’T SWIM, IDIOT!” bellowed Chen, who was flailing his arms like a pelican caught in a net.

“Big fancy-Dan sorcerer,” muttered Liam, grabbing Chen under the arms and dragging him away through the water towards the end of the pool.

Crazy Horse, meanwhile, had been trying to free himself from a hysterical, blimp-shaped bather who had seized hold of his braid with fanatical determination and was tugging on it as if he meant to pull it loose.

“Let go hair, svoloch!” Crazy Horse yelled in broken English, giving up at last as he saw Liam and Chen drawing away and punching his captor sharply in the nose.

“Zhdite menia!” he yelled to Liam and Chen and took off after them like an otter.

The enormous, vaulted ceiling amplified the bedlam in the baths to a point that made talking a waste of time, so as Crazy Horse pulled himself out of the pool, Liam just pointed towards a sign that said “Gentlemen’s Dressing Rooms” and beckoned to the others to follow as he took off at a trot.

“Find something that fits and change fast,” Liam said as they closed the door after them, “any bluecoat that sees us the way we look now is going to collar us first and talk later.”

Keeping an ear cocked for the sound of police whistles, the trio rummaged through every open locker until they had managed to dress themselves more or less presentably—Chen with his wrists and ankles sticking out of a yellow plaid suit, Crazy Horse swathed in a cowboy’s long canvas duster, and Liam spiffy but uneasy in the summer dress uniform of a Navy Commander.

“Well, boys,” Liam said with a grin, “I don’t expect we’d be welcome at the Opera, but I don’t reckon we’ll get arrested on the beach either. Come on, let’s hook it!”

Jumping up onto a bench under the room’s only window, Liam pushed at the wire-mesh screen until the frame came loose and fell out onto the sand. It was twilight, the sky a dark violet overhead and rimmed with orange along the horizon where it met the ocean, and the mob of terrified bathers and spectators was pouring out of the opposite side of the building. Liam beckoned to Chen and Crazy Horse:

“Looks like the coast’s clear over here, let’s go!”

Suiting the action to the words, he pulled himself up and out, dropping to the sand in a crouch and peering around warily as he fingered the handle of his sword stick and his companions dropped to the sand behind him. There were plenty of people walking on the sand and on a beachfront sidewalk that ran north and south as far as Liam could see, but no sign of the police or of anybody else who seemed the least bit interested in their presence. Liam stood up with a sigh of relief, and then wobbled as a wave of vertigo hit him and reached out to steady himself against the bathhouse wall:

“Whoa!” he muttered. “I’m feeling weak as a kitten!”

“You just did a major feat of magic,” Chen said in his most professorial manner. “Whatever religious enthusiasts may claim, magic is part of the natural world, not something apart from it, so your weakness is explained simply and elegantly by Newton’s Third Law: ‘To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.’”

Liam glared at Chen and Crazy Horse, who were watching him with the eager attentiveness of proud parents witnessing baby’s first steps. It was true, dammit! It must have been from hitting the rock with his sword, and that meant that all that folderol of Gran’s was real and he was stuck with this. Whatever “this” was!

Liam shook himself like a wet dog, and then gave his companions a smile of bland innocence:

“Well, I don’t know about you fellows,” he said, “but I could do with a feed and a night’s rest in a decent hotel.”

And, without waiting for comment, he turned and set off across the sand. Crazy Horse and Chen gave each other a look and then hurried after Liam.

“You’d better think twice about the hotel,” Crazy Horse said in Russian as he caught up. “People in Edison City and Santa Monica aren’t too friendly towards anybody that isn’t white.”

“Neither are most Americans,” Chen said, “but I had heard that the Bear Flag Republic was supposed to be the sort of wide-open place where they welcomed thieves and smugglers and every other species of lowlife with open arms—surely they have a place for the likes of us.”

“The Bear Flag Republic is a sovereign state,” said Crazy Horse, “but only because Little Russia tolerates its independence the way Spain and France tolerate Andorra—for the simple reason that you can buy anything from anywhere here if you have the right price, which can be quite useful. However, real behind-the-scenes local power remains in the hands of the old white families who booted the Spaniards out when this was still called California.” He spread his hands with a wry smile: “And the good hotels still seem to prefer white low-lifes to colored low-lifes.”

Chen grunted. “In any event, I’d just as soon stop at a department store first. No doubt large yellow checks are fashionable suiting in Edison City, but I’d rather find something a bit more …” he raised an eyebrow.

“Right,” Liam teased, “what would they say back at New College?”

Crazy Horse looked intrigued. “You were at Oxford?”

“I read Greats at New College,” Chen said with a touch of well-bred smugness.

“I was at the Imperial University in Petersburg,” Crazy Horse said, “I used to come over to Oxford every May for Eights Week!”

“Well, I was at Columbia University once,” laughed Liam. “Matter of fact, I cracked the Provost’s crib while he was up in Saratoga playing the nags and pinched his diamond stickpin and a first edition of Great Expectations.” He winked at the others: “Let’s get a move on, boys. We can talk about school days at dinner.”

Towering over the beach as far as the eye could see in either direction were palisades at least 100 feet high, and now that night was falling an aurora borealis of multicolored light was streaming into the sky from the city beyond. Liam shook his head wonderingly as they walked, thinking that the light was brighter than anything he’d ever seen in New York, even in the parts that Tesla had wired for electricity. He turned to Crazy Horse and pointed up towards the cliffs:

“You were here before, Zhenya, is it always lit up like a Christmas tree?”

Crazy Horse nodded: “P. T. Barnum came out to Los Angeles a few years ago with his traveling circus and he had Thomas Edison appearing as ‘The Wizard of Menlo Park,’ showing off his talking machine and light bulbs and all his other tricks. People out here had never seen anything like ‘The Greatest Show on Earth,’ and Barnum was already dreaming of sugar plums when a pistolero named Tiburcio Vasquez showed up and told him he couldn’t set up his tent unless he paid $10,000 in gold for a ‘license.’”

Liam grinned appreciatively: “I bet Phineas T. was thrilled to hear that one after sailing around Cape Horn with a bunch of seasick elephants.”

“Actually, the way I heard the story, it was a for-real Mexican standoff till Edison finally managed to electrocute Vasquez in his bath. Maybe true, maybe not, but one thing’s for sure: Edison City barely had gas-lights when it was still what the old-timers called ‘Los Anga-leece,’ but nowadays Barnum is Governor of the Bear Flag Republic, Edison was elected Mayor of L.A., and everything in the city runs on electricity. They don’t even bother with steam power, except for the generators that make the electricity.”

Liam looked intrigued. “You mean to tell me they don’t have Acmes out here?”

“Not a one,” Crazy Horse answered with a laugh. “The old families that ran Los Angeles and Santa Monica turned their noses up at everything modern from Back East: too dirty and noisy. But when Edison started boosting electricity over coal all the ordinary folks went for it in a big way because it was clean and quiet, and they ended up voting to re-name the town Edison City. Still—the handful of old white families that call the town Los Anga-leece are the people who really call the tune out here, and that’s probably why Barnum put the government headquarters right here in Santa Monica. Even though Edison City runs right up to the Santa Monica city limits on every side but the ocean, Santa Monica always had its own government and its own police force, and that gives Barnum a little bit of an edge on the ‘Old Los Anga-leece’ boys.”

Not far ahead of them, the Santa Monica Pier jutted out into the Bay, its brilliantly lit deck fitted out like a circus midway with rides and sideshow attractions and swarming with merrymakers. Liam stopped walking for a moment to enjoy the sight and listen to the cheerful piping of a merry-go-round’s calliope before he nudged Chen with his elbow:

“Look at that, will you? That beats Coney Island all hollow, and it’s all thanks to Edison’s electricity. Now that’s magic for you!”

Chen gave Liam a long-suffering look. “Mr. Edison is a brilliant engineer,” he said, “with a genius for taking bits of mechanical rubbish and turning them into machines that let everyone do things that seem magical, like lighting a room or recording their voices. But like it or not, a talent for magic is something quite different—an inborn power that works on the natural world in a way quite unlike Edison’s. No one without that natural gift can do magic no matter how many spells they recite. But if you do have it, the only real question is: how much power do you have? And what are its limits?”

Liam growled something under his breath, thinking that all that talk about power was a laugh. Instead of making him feel powerful, magic made him feel vulnerable, like he was a little kid again and had to keep asking the grownups what the rules were. He wasn’t some dumb greenhorn, he was the King of the Cracksmen, a veteran of the Battle of Gettysburg and the New York Tombs, and by God there were no flies on him!

With an eloquent snort, Liam turned and started up the long flight of wooden stairs that climbed to the pier from the beach, stomping on the boards with unnecessary vehemence.

Crazy Horse and Chen followed, Crazy Horse chuckling as he watched his friend’s petulant display. “Don’t be so silly, Lyovushka,” he said to Liam’s back. “You’re just upset because your sword strike opened the gate to the ley lines and you don’t understand it. It’s really very simple, your family has a heritage of magic and your grandmother’s fairy circle sparked it to life. It’s in your blood. You might as well get cross about your hair being curly!”

Liam stopped as they reached a platform half-way to the top, spreading his hands with a look of total exasperation: “Dammit, Zhenya, I’m the King of the Silk-Stocking Cracksmen—the best burglar since Little Adam, and he said so himself. On top of that, I’m co-chairman of the most successful gang in New York City and a crack shot and the best jiu-jitsu fighter in New York after Harry the Jap. I don’t need to be a sorcerer, any more than I need to have an udder like a cow!”

Crazy Horse laughed. “And I’m a Sioux war chief and Ambrose is an Oxford classics scholar, but none of us can change our basic natures any more than we can change the color of our skin. Relax! Learn to enjoy it!”

Chen took up the thread, speaking more gently than he had before. “Magic is nothing more nor less than the energy of the universe, McCool. You may call it God instead, if you like, or the Great Spirit, or gravity or electricity—it really doesn’t matter. Humans connect with that energy in different ways, and you won’t have any idea of the nature or the limits of your abilities for a long time.”

“How am I supposed to know what I can do with them?” muttered Liam with genuine anguish.

“You’ll know it when you do it,” laughed Crazy Horse. “Come on, let’s go buy new clothes and get some dinner!”

Liam answered with a noncommittal grunt and resumed his climb, speeding up as he neared the top and the lights and the music and the sound of people having fun (not to mention his curiosity) grew more intense with every step. But nothing he heard could have prepared him for the wonderland at the top of the stairs …

The first shock was the sheer explosion of light, from batteries of enormous carbon-arc searchlights sweeping back and forth across the night sky to what seemed like a Milky Way of tiny, brilliant light bulbs strung in ropes and garlands on stanchions above the pier and around the front of every establishment and dangling from every possible framework that could hold a few more lights.

And a moment later, the impact of the sounds: music blaring from every side; polka bands, strolling accordion players, a Mexican trumpet and guitar band in mirror-decked costumes, a cigar-chomping black man banging away at ragtime tunes on a baby grand with rubber wheels pulled by a team of donkeys in top hats and dark glasses, an impossibly-contorted India-rubber man playing hymns on a kazoo clutched between his toes …

… and the languages—Liam had an ear for them and had learned Russian and French and German on the streets of New York, but he was hearing sounds now that were so unfamiliar they might as well have been from some other planet. Human languages nonetheless, being spoken energetically by a crowd more varied than any he had ever seen in one place before: impossibly tall Africans swathed in brilliantly colored wraps, bearded Asians in what looked like white nightshirts with hats made of swirls of white bed sheet, their womenfolk walking behind them in black draperies that covered everything but a slit for their eyes, a troop of surly-looking black pygmies in American children’s clothes, gnawing hungrily at deliciously brown whole roasted chickens …

… and oh, yes, the smells of food: more kinds of food than Liam had ever seen at any street fair in Five Points: Italian sausages and onions sizzling on a grill, barbecued beef and lamb, hot knishes and cold ice cream, roasted peanuts, an unrecognizable animal being turned on a spit, wreaths of bread, mysterious Chinese concoctions being stirred furiously over a fire in concave steel pans …

… which were finally the straw that broke Ambrose’s resolve, pulling him irresistibly towards the booth as Liam and Crazy Horse followed hungrily. The proprietor grinned and flipped his pan’s contents into the air, catching them on the fly as Ambrose patted his suit absentmindedly for money.

“I thought you said you weren’t eating till you got out of those yellow checks,” Liam jibed.

Chen growled inarticulately and Crazy Horse chimed in: “Careful, Lyovushka, if you push him too hard he may strip off right here.”

“Insufferable yahoos!” Chen snapped, turning on his heel and striding away through the teeming crowd towards the shore end of the pier as Liam and Crazy Horse followed, laughing.

Ahead of them, beyond an ornamental-iron arch festooned with still more lights, rose an assortment of tidy brick buildings, themselves illuminated by arched street lamps and signs bordered by colored lights wired to create the illusion of an endless rainbow stream. Ambrose and Liam slowed down as they took in this implausibly neat, clean and glowing urban panorama, gawking like a couple of rubes as they took it all in. Crazy Horse, who had seen it before, took off northwards on a street which a signpost declared to be Ocean Avenue, gesturing to the others to follow.

“Come on, fellows,” he called, “let’s get out of our borrowed finery and into something presentable.”

Here on the primly clean and quiet streets of Santa Monica, the character of the crowd changed sharply from the hurly-burly of the merrymakers on the pier. Now, the pedestrians seemed to be almost exclusively white, with a sprinkling of light-brown Latins, all of them respectably attired in suits or dresses, all of them speaking quietly, their rare gestures well within the bounds of Anglo-Saxon seemliness, their laughter polite and hushed enough to be acceptable in church.

Liam looked around uneasily and turned to Crazy Horse: “Did somebody die?”

Crazy Horse laughed: “Santa Monica is the stronghold of the old California aristocracy and that’s them out for their evening promenade, showing the foreign scum how to behave like white men.”

“What do you know?” muttered Liam as they turned the corner onto Santa Monica Boulevard, which stretched straight and glittering into the remote distance. On a corner a couple of streets away stood a four-story brick building topped by a sign whose colored light bulb lettering proclaimed it to be “Henshey’s.”

“There it is,” Crazy Horse said with a chuckle, “the best department store in town, and they have readymade suits almost good enough to let us pass for civilized folk.”

But before the others could comment, a loud, commanding voice thundered behind them:

“YOU THREE! HALT!”

Liam and his companions froze where they stood, their hearts sinking.

“HANDS UP! DON’T MOVE!”

“What the hell?” Liam murmured in Russian.

“Don’t say anything,” Crazy Horse murmured back, “just let them do the talking.”

An odd, high-pitched whine approached from behind them and a moment later a small, electric-powered vehicle, lacquered in white and blue and bearing the shield of the Santa Monica Police Department, circled around them and came to a stop as two officers in sparkling white uniforms stepped out and approached them cautiously. One of them was holding a long scroll of paper, looking back and forth from it to the three strangers with their hands up.

“By God, Horace,” said the one with the paper excitedly, “it’s them, the ones in the bulletin.”

“Sure enough, Jimmy,” said the other policeman, approaching Liam with a sardonic grin. “We really ought to thank you boys, you’ve made our fortunes—the Commissioner’s office just got a telegram from Stanton’s HQ in New York telling us to be on the lookout for two fugitives from justice, a tall, skinny Chinaman and a curly-haired Mick with a beat-up mug. Looks like you birds fill the bill to a T.” He turned to Crazy Horse with mock politeness: “And if you don’t mind, I think we might as well arrest you too, I expect we’ll get a bulletin on you before long.”

Chen was grinding his teeth with pent-up frustration. “Now see here, my man,” he began, but before he could go any further, the one named Horace pulled a Colt Peacemaker out of his holster and shoved the muzzle against the side of Chen’s head with a jarring thunk!

“Uh, uh, Chink, you see here! We just plain don’t like your kind in Los Anga-leece, and I haven’t shot me a Chinaman since the riots. So unless you want to spring a couple of leaks before we haul you in, you’d better shut your yap now. Savvy?”

He turned to the other officer: “Jimmy, why don’t you use the voicewire in Henshey’s and tell the Chief we’ve got guests. And if Secretary Stanton don’t want ’em back, why, maybe we can have a necktie party for them right here in Palisades Park!”

In the Air
October 31, 1877