[What Might Have Been 02] Alternate Heroes Page 13

  Then the stranger put his arm around Vladimir Ilyich’s shoulders. What had they been saying to each other? Had they reached some kind of rapprochement? Perhaps Lenin was in fact a German agent, and these two had been working together all along. Could I have been so wrong? The sight of them sitting side by side like old friends unnerved me.

  The fisherman gripped Lenin’s head with both hands and twisted it. The neck snapped, and in that long moment it seemed to me that he would tear the head from the body. I drew my revolver and rushed forward.

  “Did you think it would be that easy, Rosenblum?” I said as I came up behind him.

  The fisherman turned and looked up at me, not with surprise, but with irritation, and let go of Lenin.

  “Don’t move,” I said as the corpse slumped face down across the stairs.

  The fisherman seemed to relax, but he was watching me carefully. “So you used him as bait,” he said, gesturing at the body. “Why didn’t you just kill him yourself?”

  His question was meant to annoy me.

  He looked out to sea. “Yes, an economical solution to counter-revolution. You liquidate us both while preserving the appearance of innocence. You’re certain that Moscow will fall without me.”

  I did not reply.

  He squinted up at me. “Are you sure it’s me you’ve captured? I may have sent someone else.” He laughed.

  I gestured with my revolver. “The seaplane—only Sidney Reilly would have come here in one. You had to come quickly.”

  He nodded to himself, as if admitting his sins.

  “What did Vladimir Ilyich say to you?” I asked.

  His mood changed, as if I had suddenly given him what he needed.

  “Well?” I demanded.

  “You’re very curious about that,” he said without looking at me. “I may not tell you.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  He considered for a moment. “I will tell you. He feared for Russia’s future, and that moved me, Comrade Stalin. He was afraid because there are too many of the likes of you. I was surprised to hear it from him.”

  “The likes of me?”

  “Yes, the cynics and doubters who won’t be content until they’ve made the world as barren for everyone else as they’ve made it for themselves. His wife’s death brought it all home to him, as nothing else could have. His words touched me.”

  “Did you tell him that you killed her?”

  “I was too late to save her.”

  “And he believed you?”

  “Yes. I told him who I was. His dreams were dead. He wanted to die.”

  My hand was sweaty on the revolver. “Bourgeois sentiments destroyed him. I hope you two enjoyed exchanging idealist bouquets. Did you tell him what you would have done if you had caught us in Moscow?”

  He looked up and smiled at me. “I would have paraded all of you through the street without your pants and underwear, shirt-tails flapping in the breeze!”

  “And then killed us.”

  “No, I wouldn’t have made martyrs. Prison would have served well enough after such ridicule.”

  “But you came here to kill him.”

  “Perhaps not,” he said with a sigh. “I might have taken him back as my prisoner, but he wanted to die. I killed him as I would have an injured dog. In any case, Moscow believes that he died weeks ago.”

  “Well, you’ve botched it all now, haven’t you?”

  “At least I know that Lenin died a true Bolshevik.”

  “So now you claim to understand bolshevism?”

  “I always have. True bolshevism contains enough constructive ideas to make possible a high social justice. It shares that with Christianity and the French Revolution, but it’s the likes of you, Comrade Stalin, who will prevent a proper wedding of ideals and practical government.” He smiled. “Well, perhaps the marriage will take place despite you. The little Soviets may hold fast to their democratic structures and bring you down in time. Who knows, they may one day lead the world to the highest ideal of statesmanship—internationalism.”

  “Fine words,” I said, tightening my grip on the revolver, “but the reality is that you’ve done our Soviet cause a great service—by being a foreign agent, a counter-revolutionary, a Jewish bastard, and Lenin’s assassin, all in one.”

  “I’ve only done you a service,” he said bitterly, and I felt his hatred and frustration.

  “You simply don’t understand the realities of power, Rosenblum!”

  “Do tell,” he said with derision.

  “Only limited things are possible with humanity,” I replied. “The mad dog within the great mass of people must be kept muzzled. Civil order is the best any society can hope to achieve.”

  The morning sun was hot on my face. As I reached up to wipe my forehead with my sleeve, Reilly leaped over Lenin’s body and fled down the long stairs.

  I aimed and fired, but my fingers had stiffened during our little dialogue. My bullet got off late and missed. I fired again as he jumped a dozen steps, but the bullet hit well behind him.

  “Stop him!” I shouted to a group of people below him. They had just come out of the church at the foot of the stairs. “He’s killed Comrade Lenin!”

  Reilly saw that he couldn’t get by them. He turned and started back towards me, drawing a knife as he went. He stopped and threw it, but it struck the steps to my right. I laughed, and he came for me with his bare hands. I aimed, knowing that he might reach me if I missed. It impressed me that he would gamble on my aim rather than risk the drop over the great railings.

  I pulled the trigger. The hammer struck a defective cartridge. Reilly grunted as he sensed victory, and kept coming.

  I fired again.

  The bullet pierced his throat. He staggered up and fell bleeding at my feet, one hand clawing at my heavy boots. His desperation was both strange and unexpected. Nothing had ever failed for him in quite this way. Its simplicity affronted his intelligence.

  “I also feel for dogs,” I said, squeezing a round into the back of his head. He lay still, free of life’s metaphysics.

  I holstered my revolver and nudged his body forward. It sprawled next to Lenin, then rolled down to the next landing. The people from the church came up, paused around Vladimir Ilyich, then looked up to me.

  “Vladimir Ilyich’s assassin is dead!” I shouted. “The counterrevolution has failed.” A breeze blew in from the sea and cooled my face. I breathed deeply and looked saddened.

  Reilly was hung by his neck in his hometown, but I was the only one who knew enough to appreciate the irony. Fishermen sailed out and towed his seaplane to shore.

  Lenin’s body was placed in a tent set up in the harbor area, where all Odessans could come to pay their last respects. Trotsky and I stood in line with everyone else. One of our warships fired its guns in a final salute.

  10

  We sent the news to Moscow in two carefully timed salvos.

  First, that Reilly, a British agent, had been killed during an attempt on Lenin’s life; then, that our beloved Vladimir Ilyich had succumbed to wounds received, after a valiant struggle.

  We went north with our troops, carrying Lenin’s coffin, recruiting all the way. Everywhere people met our train with shouts of allegiance. Trotsky appointed officers, gathered arms, and kept records. He also scribbled in his diary like a schoolgirl.

  I knew now that I was Lenin’s true heir, truer than he had been to himself in his last weeks. I would hold fast to that and to Russia, especially when Trotsky began to lecture me again about the urgent need for world revolution.

  In the years that followed, I searched for men like Reilly to direct our espionage and intelligence services. If he had been turned, our KGB would have been built on a firmer foundation of skills and techniques. He would have recruited English agents for us with ease, especially from their universities, where the British played at revolution and ideology, and sentimentalized justice. I could not rid myself of the feeling that in time Rosenblum would have turned ba
ck to his mother country; he had never been, after all, a Czarist. I regretted having had to kill him on that sunny morning in Odessa, because in later years I found myself measuring so many men against him. I wondered if a defective cartridge or a jammed revolver could have changed the outcome. Probably not. I would have been forced to club him to death. Still, he might have disarmed me…

  But on that train in 1918, on the snowy track to Moscow, I could only wonder at Reilly’s naive belief that he could have altered the course of Soviet inevitability, which now so clearly belonged to me.

  ABE LINCOLN IN McDONALD’S

  James Morrow

  He caught the last train out of 1863 and got off at the blustery December of 2009, not far from Christmas, where he walked well past the turn of the decade and, without looking back, settled down in the fifth of July for a good look around. To be a mere tourist in this place would not suffice. No, he must get it under his skin, work it into his bones, enfold it with his soul.

  In his vest pocket, pressed against his heart’s grim cadence, lay the final draft of the dreadful Seward Treaty. He needed but to add his name—Jefferson Davis had already signed it on behalf of the secessionist states—and a cleft nation would become whole. A signature, that was all, a simple “A. Lincoln.”

  Adjusting his string tie, he waded into the chaos grinding and snorting down Pennsylvania Avenue and began his quest for a savings bank.

  “The news isn’t good,” came Norman Grant’s terrible announcement, stabbing from the phone like a poisoned dagger. “Jimmy’s test was positive.”

  Walter Sherman’s flabby, pumpkinlike face whitened with dread. “Are you sure?” Positive, what a paradoxical term, so ironic in its clinical denotations: nullity, disease, doom.

  “We ran two separate blood checks, followed by a fluorescent antibody analysis. Sorry. Poor Jim’s got Blue Nile Fever.”

  Walter groaned. Thank God his daughter was over at the Sheridans’. Jimmy had been Tanya’s main Christmas present of three years ago—he came with a special note from Santa—and her affection for the old slave ran deep. Second father, she called him. Walter never could figure out why Tanya had asked for a sexagenarian and not a whelp like most kids wanted, but who could know the mind of a preschooler?

  If only one of their others had caught the lousy virus. Jimmy wasn’t the usual chore-boy. Indeed, when it came to cultivating a garden, washing a rug, or painting a house, he didn’t know his nose from the nine of spades. Ah, but his bond with Tanya! Jimmy was her guardian, playmate, confidant, and, yes, her teacher. Walter never ceased marveling at the great discovery of the last century: if you chained a whelp to a computer at the right age (no younger than two, no older than six), he’d soak up vast tracts of knowledge and subsequently pass them on to your children. Through Jimmy and Jimmy alone, Tanya had learned a formidable amount of plane geometry, music theory, American history, and Greek before ever setting foot in kindergarten.

  “Prognosis?”

  The doctor sighed. “Blue Nile Fever follows a predictable course. In a year or so, Jimmy’s T-cell defenses will collapse, leaving him prey to a hundred opportunistic infections. What worries me, of course, is Marge’s pregnancy.”

  A dull dread crept through Walter’s white flesh. “You mean—it could hurt the baby?”

  “Well, there’s this policy—the Centers for Disease Control urge permanent removal of Nile-positive chattel from all households containing pregnant women.”

  “Removed?” Walter echoed indignantly. “I thought it didn’t cross the pigmentation barrier.”

  “That’s probably true.” Grant’s voice descended several registers. “But fetuses, Walter, know what I’m saying? Fetuses, with their undeveloped immune systems. We don’t want to ask for trouble, not with a retrovirus.”

  “God, this is depressing. You really think there’s a risk?”

  “I’ll put it this way. If my wife were pregnant—”

  “I know, I know.”

  “Bring Jimmy down here next week, and we’ll take care of it. Quick. Painless. Is Tuesday at two-thirty good?”

  Of course it was good. Walter had gone into orthodontics for the flexible hours, the dearth of authentic emergencies. That, and never having to pay for his own kids’ braces. “See you then,” he replied, laying a hand on his shattered heart.

  The President strode out of Northeast Federal Savings and Loan and continued toward the derby-hatted Capitol. Such an exquisite building—at least some of the city remained intact; all was not glass-faced offices and dull boxy banks. “If we were still on the gold standard, this would be a more normal transaction,” the assistant manager, a fool named Meade, had whined when Abe presented his coins for conversion. Not on the gold standard! A Democrat’s doing, no doubt.

  Luckily, Aaron Green, Abe’s Chief Soothsayer and Time-Travel Advisor, had prepared him for the wondrous monstrosities and wrenching innovations that now assailed his senses. The self-propelled railway coaches roaring along causeways of black stone. The sky-high mechanical condors whisking travelers across the nation at hundreds of miles per hour. The dense medley of honks, bleeps, and technological growls.

  So Washington was indeed living in its proper century—but what of the nation at large?

  Stripped to the waist, two slave teams were busily transforming Pennsylvania Avenue, the first chopping into the asphalt with pick axes, the second filling the gorge with huge cylindrical pipes. Their sweat-speckled backs were free of gashes and scars—hardly a surprise, as the overseers carried no whips, merely queer one-chamber pistols and portable Gatling guns.

  Among the clutter at the Constitution Avenue intersection—signs, trash receptacles, small landlocked lighthouses regulating the coaches’ flow—a pair of green arrows commanded Abe’s notice. CAPITOL BUILDING, announced the eastward-pointing arrow. LINCOLN MEMORIAL, said its opposite. His own memorial! So this particular tomorrow, the one fated by the awful Seward Treaty, would be kind to him.

  The President hailed a cab. Removing his stovepipe hat, he wedged his six-foot-four frame into the passenger compartment—don’t ride up front, Aaron Green had briefed him—and offered a cheery “Good morning.”

  The driver, a blowsy woman, slid back a section of the soft rubbery glass. “Lincoln, right?” she called through the opening like Pyramus talking to Thisbe. “You’re supposed to be Abe Lincoln. Costume party?”

  “Republican.”

  “Where to?”

  “Boston.” If any city had let itself get mired in the past, Abe figured, that city would be Boston.

  “Boston, Massachusetts?”

  “Correct.”

  “Hey, that’s crazy, Mac. You’re talking six hours at least, and that’s if we push the speed limit all the way. I’d have to charge you my return trip.”

  The President lifted a sack of money from his greatcoat. Even if backed only by good intentions, twentieth century currency was aesthetically satisfying, that noble profile on the pennies, that handsome three-quarter view on the fives. As far as he could tell, he and Washington were the only ones to score twice. “How much altogether?”

  “You serious? Probably four hundred dollars.”

  Abe peeled the driver’s price from his wad and passed the bills through the window. “Take me to Boston.”

  “They’re so adorable!” Tanya exclaimed as she and Walter strolled past Sonny’s Super Slaver, a Chestnut Hill Mall emporium second in size only to the sporting goods store. “Ah, look at that one—those big ears!” Recently weaned babies jammed the glass cages, tumbling over themselves, clutching stuffed jackhammers and toy garden hoses. “Could we get one, Pappy?”

  As Walter fixed on his daughter’s face, its glow nearly made him squint. “Tanya, I’ve got some bad news. Jimmy’s real sick.”

  “Sick? He looks fine.”

  “It’s Blue Nile, honey. He could die.”

  “Die?” Tanya’s angelic face crinkled with the effort of fighting tears. What a brave little tomato she was
. “Soon?”

  “Soon.” Walter’s throat swelled like a broken ankle. “Tell you what. Let’s go pick out a whelp right now. We’ll have them put it aside until…”

  “Until Jimmy”—a wrenching gulp—“goes away?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Poor Jimmy.”

  The sweet, bracing fragrance of newborn chattel wafted into Walter’s nostrils as they approached the counter, behind which a wiry Asian man, tongue pinned against his upper lip, methodically arranged a display of Tarbaby Treats. “Now here’s a girl who needs a friend,” he sang out, flashing Tanya a fake smile.

  “Our best slave has Blue Nile,” Walter explained, “and we wanted to—”

  “Say no more.” The clerk lifted his palms as if stopping traffic. “We can hold one for you clear till August.”

  “I’m afraid it won’t be that long.”

  The clerk led them to a cage containing a solitary whelp chewing on a small plastic lawn mower. MALE, the sign said. TEN MONTHS. $399.95. “This guy arrived only yesterday. You’ll have him litter trained in two weeks—this we guarantee.”

  “Had his shots?”

  “You bet. The polio booster’s due next month.”

  “Oh, Daddy, I love him,” Tanya gushed, jumping up and down. “I completely love him. Let’s bring him home tonight!”

  “No, tomato. Jimmy’d get jealous.” Walter gave the clerk a wink and, simultaneously, a twenty. “See that he gets a couple of really good meals this weekend, right?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Pappy?”

  “Yes, tomato?”

  “When Jimmy dies, will he go to slave heaven? Will he get to see his old friends?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Like Buzzy?”

  “He’ll definitely see Buzzy.”

  A smile of intense pride leaped spontaneously to Walter’s face.

  Buzzy had died when Tanya was only four, yet she remembered, she actually remembered!

  So hard-edged, the future, Abe thought, levering himself out of the taxi and unflexing his long cramped limbs. Boston had become a thing of brick and rock, tar and glass, iron and steel. “Wait here,” he told the driver.