Mayor of the Universe Read online

  “Millie, I’m sure—”

  The woman held up her hand. “I appreciate the effort, but don’t even bother. I do have my sight, Deke. I’ve looked in mirrors. Now let me tell my story.”

  Deke dipped his hand, motioning her to go ahead.

  “All right, so two beds from Gerry was this bloke named Henry—we were supposed to address them by their rank, but I never did; when you’re in hospital you need all the friendliness you can get. Anyway, this Henry is a real bugger, always complaining”—Millie’s cultivated accent was fading into an earthier one—“always yelling at the nurses, throwing his food, a right baby.

  “Wasn’t even hurt much—he’d taken some shrapnel in the chest and shattered an elbow, but bloody hell, at least he was whole!” She took another sip of beer and wiped her mouth with a knuckle. “His sister would come visit him—she was always decked out to the nines and as posh as could be, her nose in the air, treating everyone as if they were her and her brother’s personal servants.

  “So one sunny day, the sister decides that instead of sitting there complaining about how her chauffeur asked for a raise, she’s going to take her brother for a walk, and the stupid cow leaves her coat and bag behind! Right there on the chair next to her brother’s bed!

  “‘Take a look,’ says Gerry. ‘See if she carries around anything valuable.’

  “Now I’m sneaky, remember—I’ve had a lifetime of sneaking around—so I pull up the chair what’s got all the goodies on it and pretend to chat up the soldier who’s on the other side of Henry’s bed. ’Course the fellow—Reggie, I believe his name was—is sleeping; Reggie probably spends about two hours a day awake—but I carry on a conversation as I’m rifling through Sis’s bag and pockets.

  “The old bat had about seventy quid in her purse, but I only took a couple fivers, thinking she might not notice those. And she didn’t. That was my modus operandi at hospital—never take everything, but just enough—”

  “—to make a statement?” asked Deke.

  “Sure,” said Millie with a grin. “I like to put it to the ol’ buggers. But mostly, well, I used it to buy little treats for us.” She leaned toward Deke, looking at the watch he’d put on after she had tried to purloin it.

  “Blimey, I’m late. Must run.”

  “May I come?” asked Deke.

  Millie had been wriggling into her coat but stopped for a moment, one arm held out as if she were signaling a left turn.

  “What—to see Gerry?”

  Deke finished his last smooth sip of beer and nodded.

  Buttoning up her coat, Millie stared at him and then with a shrug, said, “Fine by me.”

  Had Deke Drake ever drawn up a list of influential friends, the Preuve-Baileys would have been at the top. During his months in London, he was a regular visitor to Gerry’s flat, which was attached to his smaller locksmith business.

  “I’ve legitimized my illegitimacy,” said Gerry, showing him around the small shop.

  “Yea,” said Millie. “First I break into their homes, and then they come to Gerry to get new locks made!”

  “I wish that’s how we operated,” said Gerry, who like his sister could speak in all sorts of accents and whose default one was a high-toned dialect that belied his roots. “But yes, occasionally the circumstance arises whereby both our talents come into play.”

  The first invitation to visit had led to a second and a third until Deke fell into a habit of having tea with them, sharing scones and hardboiled eggs and tinned-meat sandwiches. But it was the sustenance of their company that allowed him to thrive, their easy banter and quick wit, their particular worldview. Deke admitted to himself an attraction to this criminal side; he’d known cheaters and swindlers back home, but they never admitted to their cheating and swindling.

  “Our mum always said there was no excuse for stealing,” Millie said one evening, pouring Deke a second cup of tea. “But me and Gerry; we thought a little differently.”

  “Yea,” said Gerry, cranking up the Cockney. “Empty stomachs got a way of excusin’ a lot of iffy behavior. Not that a swell like you’d ever know what that’s like.”

  Millie and Gerry teased him just as they ribbed each other, and rather than taking offense Deke was flattered by their willingness to treat him as an equal.

  “Come on, the two of you could be as rich as the King of England and you’d still plot to break into the U.S. Treasury.”

  “You’re probably right about that,” said Gerry with a laugh.

  Sometimes Deke would visit Gerry in his shop in the mornings, chatting with him in idle moments and working on self-appointed tasks when the locksmith was busy with customers or Bridget, the nurse who came round twice a week to assess his condition.

  “Oh, rot,” said Gerry. “Except for the fact I’m missing a pair of legs, I’m fit as a fiddle. Why don’t you spend your time attending to people who need you?”

  “Because you fancy me so,” said the nurse as she pumped up Gerry’s blood pressure cuff. “And I know you live to gaze upon my lovely face every Tuesday and Thursday.”

  “That’s exactly what he tells me,” said Deke, who was refining the rather crude backdoor ramp to make it better accessible for Gerry’s wheelchair. “Your lovely face is what makes him carry on.”

  The two men enjoyed each other’s company, having lively conversations about everything from the news of the day (“That Truman’s not as dumb as he looks!” Gerry asserted) to childhood stories to jokes. They had only once talked about the war and only to ask where the other had served.

  “The Argonne.”

  “Italy.”

  They were silent for a long time, Gerry sitting in his wheelchair and Deke leaning against the counter, each thinking thoughts that couldn’t rise up into words, couldn’t get past the many gates and doors each man thought were better kept locked.

  Finally Gerry sighed and whispered, “Bloody hell,” and Deke nodded, and the little bell on the door jingled, signifying a customer.

  One evening, as Deke was leaving after a nice tea and a few games of gin rummy, Millie walked him outside and said, “I’ve got a little job tomorrow night—fancy coming along?”

  “Sure,” said Deke, surprised and excited by the invitation.

  “Good. Meet me outside the Crest Hotel in Mayfair. Seven o’clock. Black tie.”

  “Black tie?”

  Millie nodded. “You have a problem with that?”

  He didn’t, buying a tux the next morning. Time didn’t allow a custom fit, but he had the lean, muscular body that didn’t need much extra tailoring, and when he walked into the lobby of the Crest Hotel, there weren’t many women whose eyes didn’t linger on the fine figure that Deke Drake cut. But more than his pulchritude, his obvious kindness was admired—just look at the way he so carefully escorted the poor blind woman at his side.

  The poor blind woman was Millie, dressed like a grand dame in a gray wig, fur coat, and gown. She wore dark glasses and carried a cane in the hand that wasn’t resting on Deke’s arm.

  “Act like you belong here,” whispered Millie.

  “Well, I do,” said Deke, and as he led her through the champagne-drinking crowd, he nodded and said things like, “Lovely to see you, “How’re things?” and “Good evening.”

  Millie led—for despite the picture they made, it was she who was doing the leading—them to the elevator and when they stepped on with a small group of people, she told the operator, “Six, please.”

  On the sixth floor, Millie found the stairwell and said to Deke, “Now we’ll go down a couple flights” and when they got to the fourth floor, Millie walked briskly to room 406 and extracted a hairpin from her small handbag. After a few slight maneuvers with it inside the keyhole, the lock opened.

  “There we are,” she said, once they were inside. “Now you check for anything they might have left lying about, and I’ll try my hand at the safe.”

  “Whose room are we in?” whispered Deke.

  “Work
now, talk later,” directed Millie as she opened an armoire and set about turning the dial of the safe within it.

  Later, with a zippered pocket in the lining of her fur coat holding a substantial jewelry booty, she and Deke enjoyed a glass of champagne as they moved through the lobby crowd and enjoyed another in the bar at Claridges.

  “To Lord and Lady Westerbrook!” whispered Millie as they toasted to their caper.

  “So what was your motivation for this robbery?” asked Deke. “Was Lord Westerbrook a war profiteer? Did Lady Westerbrook consort with the enemy?”

  “Simple ease is all,” said Millie. “I read in the paper they were hosting a reception at the Crest, and I thought, ‘Exactly what I like—a piece of cake.’”

  “How’d you know what room they’d be in?”

  “First lesson, my dear Yank: keep your eyes and ears open.” She took a sip of champagne, smiling as the liquid fizzed inside her mouth. “See, a couple years ago, I had a friend who was a maid at the Crest, and she’d always go on and on about how mucky-mucks left the dirtiest rooms.”

  “So our Lord and Lady really are filthy rich?”

  “Ha ha. ‘All except for Lord and Lady Westerbrook,’ she’d say. ‘They hardly need me, they keep their room so clean, which is surprising, considering they always stay in room 406, which is puny compared to the other suites.’ So my subconscious, deviant mind, never knowing when it might need something, stored that useful bit of information—room 406.” Millie shrugged. “They must stay there for sentimental reasons. It’s probably where he popped her cherry, back in the dark ages.”

  “Your sense of romance is a beautiful thing,” said Deke.

  “Thank you. Now, anything else you want to know?”

  It turned out Deke wanted to know a lot, and under Millie and Gerry’s aegis, he learned it. He struggled with the technical side of thievery, sitting for hours and hours in Gerry’s shop, practicing lock picking.

  “It’s about listening and feeling,” schooled Gerry, but Deke was clumsy at sensing tumblers and pins engaging.

  “You might never have Gerry’s instinct or his light touch,” said Millie, watching him one afternoon as he struggled to pick a padlock. “But you’ve got what most thieves would kill for.”

  “What’s that?” said Deke, banging the stubborn lock on the table.

  “Charm and accessibility.”

  “That’s right,” said Gerry, who’d been doing a crossword puzzle at his perch behind the cash register. “What’s a four letter word for ‘needle case’ again?”

  “Etui,” said Millie.

  “Right” said Gerry, filling in the answer. “Quite right.”

  “See, Deke,” said Millie. “Your station in life and your good looks will always allow you easy access into the world of the wealthy. No party crashing or dressing up in costume for you.”

  “And the charm part?” teased Deke.

  “Well, that’s really the key—no pun intended,” said Gerry. “Because what is charm but the art of engaging someone? Of making a person feel special. And that someone, fully engaged and feeling special, is often willing to reveal information the charmer seeks.”

  “People like to talk,” said Millie, “especially to someone who listens—and a charmer likes to listen. Listen and learn.”

  “Care to elaborate just a bit?” asked Deke.

  “Well, take combination locks, for example,” said Gerry. “Often people will assign numbers to them that are meaningful. So your job might be to, oh, find out their birthday—”

  “—or their children’s,” said Millie.

  “Or if they’re newly married, their wedding anniversary. A good thief is really like a good doctor, always listening for clues that might help his case.”

  Deke’s bear still visited, in his blood-drenched, scream-filled dreams, and in his waking life, grabbing him suddenly when he’d been doing nothing more than buying cigarettes in a tobacco shop or sitting and watching curtains of pigeons descend from the sky at Trafalgar Square. The panic would squeeze him while images played and replayed in his head: of Slater doing his impersonation of Al Jolson and the next moment spraying blood; of Mellom valiantly trying to push his own guts back into his body, a wry smile on his face; of Selby’s smooth eighteen-year-old face and the sadness in his eyes as he looked at Deke, fighting for breaths that he knew would soon be ending.

  “Mama?” said the teenaged soldier. “Mama?”

  And the bear, nearly suffocating him with memories, would remind him of the two tears that had slid down Selby’s face and how the poor boy had whispered, “Sorry.” That skewed apology—it was Selby who was owed one, who shouldn’t give one—taunted Deke, who felt the seismic weight of it and how it would shudder across continents and into the home and heart of the family Selby talked about: his parents, his brothers and sisters, his pregnant girlfriend.

  “You mind if I ask you something?” Deke asked Gerry one afternoon, when rain had sliced through the air all day, cutting it up into cold, wet pieces.

  Gerry looked up from behind the counter, his face wary.

  “I might.”

  Deke nodded, knowing that he was about to cross a line both he and Gerry had drawn a long time ago.

  “Do you have terrible dreams?” he asked, looking at his hands. “And do your bad dreams ever seep into your real life?”

  “Yes,” said Gerry simply, “and yes.”

  Deke raised his head, waiting for Gerry to go on, but now it was the other man’s turn to stare at his hands.

  “A couple of days ago,” said Deke after it was clear his friend was not going to elaborate. “I was at Temple Church, just doing a little sightseeing, but then, there in the rotunda is a young American couple, laughing about what it would be like to have a wedding in a place like this instead of city hall, and the man—a kid, really—looked just like a guy in my unit who died in my arms. Just like him! For a moment I was so happy, thinking, he didn’t die! and I called out, ‘Selby!’ as I approached them, but I must have looked crazy, because they took off as if I were a madman. And I stand there and see that the guy was probably a foot taller than Selby and had a different color hair, and I’m getting so dizzy I can barely stand, and I’m thinking, ‘I’m not even safe in Temple Church.’ If I can’t even be safe in a fucking church, where can I be?”

  Gerry didn’t answer his question, his head bowed.

  “And then yesterday—some guy whistles for his dog and the sound reminds me of that whining whistle of bullets. After that first terrible day, after that crazy zing of bullets had passed and my sergeant said it was okay, I could get up now, you know what occurred to me, Gerry? I’m in a fucking slaughterhouse!—only it wasn’t cows or pigs that were being butchered but men!”

  Deke felt his stomach clench at the horror of the memory, the awful realization that although this abattoir wasn’t a series of pens and chutes he was trapped nonetheless, trapped in a winter-white forest, where in sane times a guy might take his girl for a sleigh ride and kiss her warm lips in the frosty air, a place where a group of friends might cross-country ski and drink beer in a cabin as they played cards and fed the fireplace with logs they’d chopped themselves. But in this forest, the snow was trampled and bloodied, and among the sprawled and crumpled bodies a soldier lay on his back, arms and legs spread the way a child’s are when making a snow angel, but the bullets had stopped all movement that would have allowed the making of the angels’ skirts, of its wings.

  “Are you driven crazy with these kinds of thoughts, Gerry? Or is it just me who’s going crazy?”

  “It’s not just you,” said Gerry finally, his voice rusty with emotion. “But I can’t speak about any of it with you. I can’t speak about any of it with anyone. It took me a long time to grow the scab, and if I pick at it . . . well, you know. I can’t risk bleeding to death.”

  His clear blue eyes met Deke’s and in their stare the two men saw the other’s pain, as well as their own, reflected. In that small narrow
room with its cubby holes filled with all manner of locks and picks, it occurred to Deke that maybe Gerry knew more than he did, maybe there were things better left unopened. So on that cold afternoon with its weeping skies, he decided that he would have to strangle his nightmares by neglect, and that his bear would be wrestled in silence.

  Intergalactic Memo

  To: Tandala

  From: Charmat

  I appreciate your trying to send the English toffee and scones, but they were crushed under the weight of war. Even contained in a simple Sense-O-Gram, those sights and smells of that abomination were enough to cause an eclipse. And you’re right; both sides die the same. I can’t shake those lullabies—sung in English and German by their moms and their muttis—that lulled those dying boys into their final sleep. Please, for the sake of your Lodge brothers and sisters, refrain from sending us any more war.

  13

  “Oh, my God.” In his cupped hands, Fletcher caught the words as they came out of his mouth, and to him it was almost as if he had vomited, so bitter and acrid was the taste in his mouth.

  “Oh, Fletcher,” said Tandala, and when her hand pressed against his back, Fletcher felt himself sag.

  “Tandy,” he whispered, “why did you make me go through all of that?”

  The alien, in her housemaid dress, tsked. “I am so sorry, Fletcher, but you assume I have more power than I do. I just give you the ticket to your story—I don’t tell the story.”

  “But my Deke Drake was a simple jewel thief! He was debonair, charming, rich—not a veteran nearly done in by war!”

  She sat next to Fletcher at the wrought-iron table near the pool.

  “I think,” she began, “that Deke Drake is all that you say, including a veteran nearly done in by war.”

  “I thought this was going to be like make-believe! I wanted jewel heists—not battle scenes! Tandy, this was so horrible . . . horrible. I thought you guys were about fun!”

  “Fletcher, if I had my way, you would only know the life of a circus clown, an acrobat, a regular comic on The Ed Sullivan Show! I don’t know why you just went through that—I can only think that we can’t control the fantasy when it meets reality.”