“Are you the guys the Cat told me about? You must be.” He looked at me. “I mean, you’re green.” The big lug was just as nervous as a Chihuahua. I thought he might shiver himself right out of his shirt. He was a big blond guy. Mid-thirties. If you put a beard on the lantern jaw he could play Thor. There was still something boyish about him. Maybe it was the jitters he was having.
“You called. We came,” I said.

The place was a dive in Hollywood – as so many of the places in Hollywood were. The picture business had never lived up to its monetary potential. We sat in a booth in the back. We were the only ones in the joint. It was dim, which was good. You couldn’t see the roaches so well that way. Or the bugs. The drinks were cold and that mattered because it was a miserably hot afternoon outside in sun-bleached Hyopolis. I kept the pitcher of ice water near me.

“What is this about the Cat? And who’re you?” Parker asked. Parker is my partner, except when he’s my doppelganger.

“I woke up in the hotel across the street. The guy with funny ears said to tell you the Cat sent me. He gave me your number. None of the phones in that building work. I came over here. Maybe you can tell me what the hell’s going on – or am I crazy?”

“Slow down. We’re all crazy,” Parker said. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Lucky Parnell.”

“Lucky? Your mom named you ‘Lucky’?”

“Yeah. She was a hippy, I think.”
I broke in. “Why did he send you to us? What’s his message?”

“Message?” Lucky rubbed his arms like he was cold. “Um, oh yeah. He said I could help you find Janie Gilchrist. He said I knew her aunt. That ain’t even true. I mean, I did live in the upstairs of her house. She had it converted to an apartment. But this was twenty years ago. And I don’t know anything about any Gilchrist. Maybe they’re related. But the woman was Vicky. Vicky Goddard. But this Cat told me that the woman I rented from was some Janie girl’s aunt. He wrote it down on this paper with your number.”
Lucky handed me the paper. It gave the number of my Hollywood office and said,
Tell Nake about your landlady when you were in university. She is Janie Gilchrist’s aunt.

 

That was the message in its entirety. The handwriting was tall, sloped and elegant. It would’ve made a nice signature under the Declaration of Independence.

 

“OK, so where was this?”

Lucky gave me a very blank look.

“Where was this apartment?”

“Oh, right! Boston. I was going to Boston College. Roxbury, technically.”

 

“When was this?” Parker asked the big guy.

“When was what?”

“When were you in Boston? When was she your landlady?”
“That would’ve been ’98. Ninety-eight was when I started grad school.”

“In what?” I asked but really only to be friendly. My head was still swimming from the Kaliphornia sunshine. Call me after I’d had a gallon of ice water.

“Social work.”
“How long did you live there?” Parker asked. He had the note in his fat fingers, giving it a lot of scrutiny.

“Boston? Three years.”
“It took you three years to get your master’s? In social work?” Parker demanded. He was in a demanding mood.

“No. Well, yes. Three years. But I didn’t always live in her upstairs. The last year I roomed closer to campus. In house with four other guys.”
But for ’98 and ’99. Then ’99 and two thousand you were still in this place?”
“Yeah. That sounds right.”

Parker had a pen out and he was writing on a napkin.

“And her name was?”

“Vicky Goddard. I told you that.”

“Right. But I hadn’t made a note of it yet. OK, your name is Lucky. Lucky what?”

“Parnell. I told you that too.”
“Right. And now I made a note of it.”
“Are you guys gonna answer some of my questions? I got questions too, ya know. Just where the hell am I? And who is this Cat person? Is he CIA, NSA? KGB? – or whatever the KGB are called anymore.”
“They’re the FSB, right?” I said to Parker, just to be helpful.

“There ain’t none of that here, buddy. You’ve stepped through the looking glass.”

“What’s that mean?”
Parker poured beer down his throat and then shrugged into an answer. “It means whatever you want it to mean. The fact is yesterday you were living in the only world you knew about. Now you’re with us on a different Earth. It’s a variation on a theme. We don’t get it either. Everything here will strike you as a little off. Kaliphornia is spelled with a K. Nake here has green skin.”
“Do a lot of the people?” Lucky seemed nauseated by the prospect.

“Nake’s the greenest I know of. But he’s from our Earth too. He just got here before most of us. And to hear him talk, before the Cat showed up.”
Lucky was sweating more than my glass.
“This is crazy!” he said.

“Yep.”

“I went to sleep in Boston and woke up in, what? L.A.?”

“Hyopolis. This Kaliphornia has a thing about getting rid of Spanish place names,” I told him.

“The story I heard is there was a war of lawyers between a couple of robber baron types.” Parker said.
“Herbert Yates and Henry E. Huntington. Huntington was big in railroads. Yates was radio and then Republic Pictures, before they went bust. I don’t know what he did with his money after the Crash. Anyway, they’re the H. and the y. in Hyopolis. Supposedly. Maybe just a local legend,” I said.

“You can’t trust none of that stuff,” Parker said.

“No Los Angeles?”

“Nope.”

“That explains why no one will take my money. That Cat guy gave me some coins. That’s all I have. These clothes, the coins he gave me. That note and my lucky Walther.”

“Walther?” I asked.

“Yeah. My gun. It’s usually in my nightstand next to my bed. Well, not usually. Always. It’s always in my nightstand. I haven’t laid eyes on it in months. But when I woke up it was tucked into my pants. Empty. The clip was in my pocket. Did they drug me? They musta drugged me.”

“Slow down, man,” Parker said. “Let’s back up. I need to know more about this landlady of yours. You knew her back in ’98 or so. How well did you know her? She was just your landlady, right?”

“Oh. Yeah. I didn’t really know her that well. She had me down to dinner a couple of times just to be neighborly, right? And then I saw her once at a political thing.”

“A rally?” I asked.

“No. It was a meeting with Paul Tsongas. He was interested in starting a third party. So he would hold these small group bull sessions, they called them. We were supposed to brainstorm ideas. She went to one of those. I’m pretty sure.”
“And you are sure about your dates? This was more than fifteen years ago, after all,” Parker asked.
“Yeah. I’m sure.”
“Sure you’re sure?” Parker looked at the big guy hard.

“Yeah. Yes!”

“OK,” Parker said. “Show and tell time.” He took out his gun. “This hunk of Israeli iron throws down a fifty caliber cannonball. If you hit a guy’s spine you can break him in half.”
“I think he’s overcompensating, myself.”

“I like to be prepared.”

“Semper paratus but that’s a Sherman tank at the end of your arm. That thing will make you go deaf,” I said.
“Now show me your gun, Mr. Parnell,” Parker said. “But stand up first.”

Parnell had his hands up like we were cops. He stood up to his full height. I judged him to be a few cents over two meters (my meters, not yours). He had a pretty solid build. I’d put him at around 240 pounds – I’ve never been able to make the conversion to metric weight. Height is easier because your standard doorframe is just over two French meters. But here in the ARC a meter is really a metric yard, which is made up of metric inches or cents. He put up his hands like we were cops. A metric yard is three metric feet, which is the same length as an English foot. The only differences is that it’s divided into ten inches and not twelve. Then there are metric miles, which are thousand metric yards long. They call these k-miles or kyles, since kilometer isn’t good English anywhere.

“My gun’s under my shirt.”

“Hoist it,” Parker said.

“Don’t worry – the clips not in it,” Parnell said, pulling up his shirt. “It’s unloaded. I got the clip in my pocket.”

“Good,” Parker collected the gun. “You can gimme the clip now.”

“You guys sure act like you don’t trust me.” He handed over the clip.

“We don’t trust anybody,” Parker said.

“W-well w-why don’t you tell me some more about this place. Is this still America? Why’s everybody dressed like Bogie?”
“America. Yeah, this is America. The ARC. American Republic of Colonies. The Republic, usually. And the sartorial fashions? I like to think of this place as permanently stuck in 1937. But maybe I’m being too generous.”

“Sit down, Olaf,” Parker told him. “I need to make a few points here. First let me say that, crazy as it may sound, you have found yourself in the middle of a little war. This Cat is some kind of wizard or something. Maybe he’s just from a more advanced society. We don’t know. We don’t entirely understand his game. He seems to be playing a long con of one kind or another. Me and Nake are more or less on the sidelines here. Like you, we just want to get back home.”
“You’re saying this is some kind of parallel reality?”

“Call it whatever you want. It’s here, it’s weird, and we’re stuck in it. We believe that the Cat could send us home, if he wanted to.”

“But he doesn’t.”

“Nope. He obviously thinks we could be of some use to him. That’s why I’m here. What he wants with me – well, your guess is as good as mine. Now, there are a couple of points I would like to clarify.”

“OK.”
“Your story has some … difficulties.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Paul Tsongas is dead.”

“What? No way! You’re messing with me, right? I mean, I haven’t been following politics as much as I used to.”

“Your landlady couldn’t have gone to a bull session. Tsongas died in January of 98. After being ill for weeks.”

Parnell looked very confused. He wiped the sweat from his upper eyelids. I’ll admit that the ceiling fan was doing nothing. Somebody needed to get on the stick and invent A/C.

“Maybe. Maybe I just mixed up where I saw her. I know we were together at something. I must be confusing events. I went to a Tsongas meet and greet. I was pretty big into politics in college. I even did some canvassing for the DNC. False memories are real, you know!”

“Sure. It’s no big deal. I just thought I should point that out. Also. This gun is not a Wall-ther. It’s pronounced Vall-tuh. That’s because it’s German. Your lucky gun, Lucky, is a Nazi gun.”

“Hey, I don’t know why I called it my lucky gun. I-I barely know what I’m saying. I’ve been abducted and whatever and people are telling me crazy stuff.”

Parker pressed on like he hadn’t heard, “See these rounds? 7.65mm. This is Hitler’s gun. He had one on him in his bunker. And he had a round in his brain. Eva Braun also carried this exact make. Though when they found her dead body, her Walther hadn’t been fired. The room was full of the scent of gunpowder and bitter almonds. Hilter was dead and a Walther was on the floor beside him. It may have been fired by a third party by prearrangement.”
“What does Joachim Fest say?” I asked.

“That at this point it’s impossible to reconstruct events definitively, Hitler and Eva’s bodies having been cremated and all.”
“I always thought it was James Bond’s gun,” Lucky said weakly.

“It’s a Nazi gun. Ian Fleming originally gave Bond a 9mm. But one of his costume designers — for which of the movies, I can’t remember — thought that the 7.65 was a more elegant weapon. Just like Hollywood loves Nazi couture, they love a cute little Nazi gun.”
“Maximilian Schell did look good in A Bridge Too Far,” I said.

“You sound awfully anti-German,” Lucky said.
“Anti-Nazi,” Parker frowned.

“So the sins of the father are passed down to the children, and grandchildren?” Lucky said.

“You’re damn right, they are.”

“For how long?”

“A thousand years.” Parker answered without hesitating at all.

“Wow. That’s stiff,” I said.

“Hey, don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.”

Parker stuck the bullet he had taken out back into the clip, slammed the clip into the gun and pulled slide back, chambering a round.

“Safety on. Safety off. Safety on.”

Bam!

          The little gun went off. Parnell slumped onto the table.

Parker said something like “Damn!”
“What the hell! You shot him!”

“It was an accident! I had the safety on. Look!”

The safety was in fact on.

“You pulled the trigger?” I yelled. “You don’t pull the trigger even if the safety’s on!”

“I didn’t pull the trigger, Nake. I didn’t touch the trigger. I didn’t mean to shoot him!”
I was stretching across the table, trying to feel for a pulse. My own heart was pounding so hard that I couldn’t be sure of anything.

“Is he dead?” Parker asked.

He got up from beside me and went to the other side of the booth and hoisted the big man up. There was just a small bloody splotch at the corner of his brow.

“No pulse. No exit wound either,” Parker said. He stuck a napkin on the wound and then his hat on Parnell’s head. The hat was too small, so he set it at a rackish angle that hid the bullet hole.

“You got a fat head. Is your hat any bigger than mine?”

“He’s not bleeding all over my hat,” I said.

“The dead don’t bleed, Nake. And I don’t care what Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell say to the contrary. No pumping heart — no arterial spray.”

The manager of the restaurant came running to us then. He was an Asian and scrawny. I’d put him west of sixty. The thin hair he had was all gray. In faltering English he demanded to know what the bang had been. At that very moment a big truck sped by in a low gear.

“What sound?” For me the easiest lies are about all I’m capable of in a pinch.

“A car musta backfired,” Parker said. I liked his lie a lot better.

The manager left, but he did so giving us a very suspicious glare.

“I think you’re gonna hafta get on your Dick Tracy phone and call up Spooty.”
I sighed, hating it when he was right.

“For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction,” I mumbled.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, nothing.”