"What'll it be, Jake?" she asked. She has a voice like glass dropped into a porcelain basin.
I ordered steak and eggs with a double helping of french fries, then topped it off with a question: "Anybody been asking around about me, Dory?"
She wrote half the question down on the order pad before she realized that I had stopped ordering. Dory was supposed to have been a fine-looking street girl in her day, but no one ever said she had many smarts.
"Not me," she said. "I'll ask Benny."
Benny was the bartender. He was smarter than Dory. Some days, he was capable of winning a debate with a carrot.
I don't know why I tend to hang around with so many chumps, saps, and blockheads. Maybe it makes me feel superior. A guy who's dumb enough to be trying to make a living as an old-fashioned shamus in the late twentieth century, in the age of computers and space-age eavesdropping equipment and drug thugs who'd kill their grandmothers for a nickel — hell, he needs some reason to feel good about himself.
When Dory came back, she brought a negative from Benny, plus the food. I took it down in large bites, thinking about the stranger who had walked through the wall into my bedroom.
After two more big Scotches, I went home to look the place over again.
Just as I reached my apartment door and thrust the key toward the lock, this dude opened it from the inside and started coming out.
"Hold it right there, creepo," I said, leveling my.38 on his big belly. I pushed him back into the living room, closed the door behind us, and turned on the light.
"What do you want?" he asked.
"What do I want? Look, buster, these are my digs, see? I live here. And the last time I looked, you didn't."
He was dressed like something out of a Bogart film, and I might have laughed except that I was angry enough to chew up a little bunny rabbit and spit out good-luck charms. He had a huge hat pulled down over half his face. The overcoat might have been tailored for Siamese twins. It hung to his knees, and after that there were wide, sloppy trousers and big — I mean BIG — stuffy tennis shoes. The tennis shoes didn't fit Bogart, but the air of mystery was there.
For size, this guy reminded me of that actor from the old movies, Sidney Greenstreet, though with a serious gland condition.
"I don't want to harm you," he said. His voice was about a thousand registers below Dory's, but it had that same harsh sound of something breaking.
"You the same dude who was here earlier?" I asked.
He hunched his head and said, "I never been here before."
"Let's see what you look like."
I reached for his hat. He tried to pull away, discovered I was faster than he was, tried to slug me in the chest. But I got the hat off and managed to take the clip on the shoulder instead of over the heart where he had aimed it.
Then I smiled and looked up at his face and stopped smiling and said, "Good God!"
"That kicks it!" His face contorted, and his big square teeth thrust over his black lip.
I was backed up against the door. And though I was terrified for the first time in years, I wasn't about to let him out. If my threats didn't keep him where he was, a hot kiss from the.38 would manage just fine — I hoped.
"Who… what are you?" I asked.
"You were right the first time. Who."
"Answer it, then."
"Can we sit down? I'm awful tired."
I let him sit, but I stayed on my feet to be able to move fast, and while he walked to the sofa and collapsed as if he were on his last legs, I looked him over good. He was a bear. A bruin. He was a big one too, no little Teddy, six feet four. His shoulders were broad, and under those baggy clothes he probably had a barrel chest and legs like tree trunks. His face was a block of granite that some artist had tried to sculpt with a butter knife, a straight pin, and a blunt screwdriver. All sharp planes, eyes set under a shelf of bone, a jaw better than Schwarzenegger's. Over all that: fur.
If I hadn't been used to watching afternoon TV talk shows when business was slow, all those programs featuring husbands-who-cheat-with-their-wives'-mothers and transvestite-dentists-who-have-been-abducted-by-aliens, then sure as hell the sight of a talking bruin would have crumpled me like an old paper cup. But even being a couch potato in the nineties and facing up to what's creeping around on our city streets is enough to make you tougher than Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe combined.
"Spill it," I said.
"My name is Bruno," he said.
"And?"
"You only asked who I was."
"Don't get cute with me."
"Then you weren't being literal?"
"Say what?"
"By asking who I was, you were actually asking for a general accounting, a broader spectrum of data."
"I could blow your head off for that," I told him.
He seemed surprised and shifted uneasily on the sofa, making the springs sing. "For what?"
"Talking like a damn accountant."
He considered for a moment. "Okay. Why not? What do I have to lose? I'm after Graham Stone, the first man you heard in here a few hours ago. He's wanted for some crimes."
"What crimes?"
"You wouldn't understand them."
"Do I look like I was raised in a nunnery, don't understand sin? Nothing any sleazeball would do could surprise me. So how did this Stone character get in here? And you?"
I waved the.38 at him when he hesitated.
"I guess there's no concealing it," Bruno said. "He and I came through from another probability."
"Huh?" It was hard to make even that sound with my mouth hanging open as if I were a stoned fan at a Grateful Dead concert.
"Another probability. Another time line. Graham Stone is from a counter-Earth, one of the infinity of possible worlds that exist parallel to one another. I come from a different world than Stone's. You've become a focal point for cross-time energies. If this is the first time it's happened to you, then your talent must be a new one. Besides, you're not mapped — no record of you in the guidebook. If it were an old talent—"
I made a number of wordless grunts until he got the idea to shut his yap. I made him go pour me half a glass of Scotch and drank most of it before I said anything. "Explain this… ability I've acquired. I don't scan it."
"It's possible to travel across the probabilities, from one Earth to another. But the only portals are those generated around living beings who somehow absorb cross-time energy and dissipate it without the rudeness of an explosion."
"Rudeness."
"Yes. That can be messy."
"How messy? Very."
"Anyway, you're one of those talented people who don't explode."
"Good for me."
"You broadcast a portal like — well, sort of like a spiritual aura in a twenty-foot radius, in all directions."
"Is that so?" I said numbly.
"Not all possible worlds have such talented creatures on them, and therefore the infinity of possibilities is not really completely open to us.'
I finished the Scotch and wanted to lick the glass. "And there is a… a counter-Earth where intelligent bears have taken over?" I couldn't any longer blame this business on my hot night with Sylvia. Not even the most persuasive shrink in the world would ever convince me that postcoital depression could be like this.
"Not exactly taken over," Bruno said. "But on my probability line, there was a nuclear war of distressing dimensions shortly after the close of World War Two. In the aftermath, science survived, but not a great many people did. In order to survive as a race, they had to learn to stimulate intelligence in lesser species, master genetic engineering to create animals with human intelligence and dexterity. "
He held up his hands, which were graced with stubby fingers rather than paws. He wiggled them at me and showed all his square teeth in a broad, silly grin.