A Place so Foreign, Cory Doctorow [famous ebook reader .TXT] 📗

ticket to the matinee or get lost."

On reflection, telling my Mama was probably a mistake. It meant that I was locked in my room for two consecutive Wednesdays so that I couldn't catch the train. On the third Wednesday, I climbed out onto the roof and then went down the rope-ladder I'd hidden behind a chimney. The Wells Fargo notes I'd started with were almost gone, mostly spent on the expensive food on the train — I hadn't dared try to sneak any food away from home, my Mama was no fool.

I thought about buying a ticket to the matinee. I still had almost five dollars, but a quick look at the menus in the restaurants had taught me that if I thought the food on the train was expensive, I had another think coming. I shouldered my rucksack and wandered away, taking care to avoid the filth from dogs and people that littered the sidewalks. I told myself that I wasn't homesick — just tired.

#

"October 29, 1929, huh?" Reddekop was a small German with a greying spade beard and a heavily oiled part in his long hair. His fingers were long and nimble, but nearly everything else about him was short and crude. He made me nervous.

"Yes, sir. Mr Nussbaum thought you'd know what it meant."

Reddekop struck a match off the side of the organist's pit, lighted a pipe, then tossed the match carelessly into the theatre seats. I winced and he chuckled. "Not to worry, kid. The place won't burn down for a few years yet. I have it on the very best authority.

"Now, Nussbaum says October 29, 1929. What else does he say?"

"He said that you'd take care of me."

He gripped the pipe in his yellow teeth and hissed a laugh around the stem. "He did, did he? Well, I suppose I should. Of course, I won't know for sure for more than 25 years — I don't suppose you want to wait that long?"

"No, sir!" I said. I didn't like this little man — he reminded me of some kind of musical rat.

"I thought not. Do you know what a trust is, James?"

We'd covered that in common law — I could rattle off about thirty different kinds without blinking. "I have a general idea," I said.

"Good, good. What I'm thinking is, the best thing is for me to set up a trust through a lawyer I know on Market Street. He'll make sure that you're always flush, but never so filthy that someone will take a notice in you. How does that strike you?"

I thought it over. "How do I know that the trust fund won't disappear in a few years?"

"You're nobody's fool, huh? Well, how about this — you find your own advocate: a lawyer, a bondsman, someone you trust, and he can look over all the books and papers, make sure it's all square-john. How does that strike you?"

Reddekop knew I was a stranger in town, and maybe he was counting on my not being able to find anyone qualified to audit the trust, but I had an ace up my sleeve. I wasn't anybody's fool.

"That sounds fair," I said.

#

Back at my Mama's I'd had long hard days, doing chores: chopping wood, stacking hay, weeding the garden, carrying water. I'd go to bed bone-tired, limp as a rag and as exhausted as I thought I could be.

Boy, was I wrong! By the time I found Mr Adelson's rooming house, I could barely stand, my mouth was dry as a salt-flat, and it was hard to keep my eyes open. They've got hills in San Francisco that must've been some kind of joke God played. His landlady, a worn-out grey woman whose sour expression seemed directed at everything and anything, let me in and pointed me up three rickety flights of stairs to Mr Adelson's room.

I dragged my luggage up with me, bumping it on the stairs, and rapped on the door. Mr Adelson answered in the same shirtsleeves and suspenders I'd seen him in that Christmas, an age ago, when my Mama dragged me to his cottage. "James!" he said.

"Mr Adelson," I said. "Sorry to drop in like this."

He took my bag from me and ushered me into his room, pulling up a chair. "What on earth are you doing here?" he said. "Do your parents know where you are? Are you all right? Have you eaten? Are you hungry?"

"I'm pretty hungry — I haven't eaten since supper last night on the train," I tried to make it sound jaunty, but I'm afraid it came out pretty tired-sounding."

"I'll fix us sandwiches," he said, and started fishing around his sea-chest. I watched his shoulders move for a moment, and then my eyes closed.

#

"Well, good morning," Mr Adelson said, as I sat bolt upright, disoriented in a strange bed with a strange blanket. "Coffee?"

He was leaning over a little Sterno stove, heating up a small tin pot. Morning sun streamed in through the grimy window.

"I wrapped your sandwich up from last night. It's there, on the dresser."

I stood up and saw that except for my shoes, I was still dressed. The sandwich
was salt beef and cheese, and the sourdough was stale, and it was the best thing
I'd ever eaten. Mr Adelson handed me a tin cup full of strong coffee, and though
I don't much like coffee, I found myself drinking it as fast as I could.

"Thank you, Mr Adelson," I said.

"Robert," he said, and sat down on the room's only chair. I perched on the bed's end. "Well, you seem to have had quite a day! Let's hear about it."

I told him as much as I could, fudging around some of the details — my Mama surely did know where I was, even if she wasn't very happy about it; and of course, I couldn't tell him that I'd met Nussbaum in 1975, so I just moved the locale to France, and caged around what message he'd asked me to deliver to Reddekop. It still made for a pretty exciting telling.

"So you want me to go to this lawyer's office with you? To look over the papers?
James, I'm just a sailor, I'm not qualified."

I'd prepared for this argument, on the long slog to the rooming house. "But I know something about this; they won't believe it, though, and will slip all kinds of dirty tricks in if they think that the only fellow who'll be looking at it is just a kid."

"Explain to me again why you don't want to wire Mr Johnstone to come and look it over? It sounds like an awful lot of money for him not to be involved."

"He's not my Pa, Robert. I don't even like him, and chances are, he'll hide away all that money until I'm eighteen or twenty-one, and try to send me off to school."

"And what's wrong with that? You have other plans?"

"Sure," I said, too loudly — I hadn't really worked that part out. I just knew that the next time I set foot in New Jerusalem, I'd be my own man, a man of the world, and not dependent on anyone. I'd take Mama and Mr Johnstone out for a big supper, and stay in the fanciest room at the Stableman's hotel, and hire Tommy Benson to carry my bags to my room. "Besides, I'm not asking you to do this for free. I'll pay you a — an administrative fee. Five percent, for life!"

He looked serious. "James, if I do this — mind I said if — I won't take a red cent. There are things here that you're not telling me. Now, that's your business, but I want to make sure that if anyone ever scrutinises the affair, that it's clear that I didn't receive any benefit from it."

I smiled. I knew I had him — if he'd thought it that far through, he wasn't going to say no. Besides, I hadn't even played my trump card yet: that if he didn't help me, I'd be out on the streets on my own, and I could tell that he didn't like that idea.

#

Mr Adelson wore his teacher clothes for the affair and I wore the good breeches and shirt I'd packed. We stopped at a barber's before, Mr Adelson treated me to a haircut from the number-two man while he took a shave and a trim. We boarded the cablecar to Market like a couple of proper gentlemen, and if I thought flying in a jetpack was exciting, it was nothing compared to the terror of hanging on the running-board of a cablecar as it laboured up and then — quickly! — down a monster hill.

The lawyer was a foreigner, a Frenchie or a Belgian, and his offices were grubby and filled with stinking cigar smoke and the din of the trolleys. He asked no embarrassing questions of me. He just sized up Mr Adelson, then put away the papers on his desk and presented a set from his briefcase, laying out the terms of the trust, and retreated from the office. I read over Mr Adelson's shoulder, the terms scribbled in a hasty hand, but every word of it legal and binding, near as I could tell.

The amounts in question were staggering. Two hundred dollars, every month! Indexed for inflation, for seventy years or the duration of my natural life, whichever was lesser. The records of the trust to be deposited with the Wells Fargo, subject to scrutiny on demand. Mr Adelson looked long and hard at me. "James, I can't begin to imagine what sort of information you've traded for this, but son, you're rich as Croesus!"

"Yes, sir," I said.

"Do these papers look legal to you?"

"Yes, sir."

"They seem legal to me, too."

A bubble of excitement filled my chest and I had to restrain myself from bouncing on my heels. "I'm going to sign it," I said. "Will you witness it?"

"I've got a better idea. Let's get that lawyer and take this down to the Wells
Fargo and have the President of the Bank witness it himself."

And that's just what we did.

#

Mr Adelson had spent the previous night on the floor, while I slept in his bed. My first month's payment was tucked carefully in my pocket, and over his protests, I pried loose a few bills and took my own room in the rooming house, and then the two of us ate out at a restaurant whose prices had seemed impossibly out-of-reach the day before. We had oysters and steaks and I had a slab of apple pie for desert with fresh ice cream and peach syrup, and when I was done, I felt like new man. Mr Adelson had a bottle of beer with dinner, and a whiskey afterwards, and I insisted on paying.

"Well, then," he said, sipping his whiskey. "You're a very well-set-up young man. What will you do now?"

All throughout my scheming since my second return from 75, the prospect of what to do with all the money had niggled away at the back of my mind. All I knew for sure was that I didn't want to grow up in New Jerusalem. I wanted adventure, exotic places and people, danger and excitement. Over dinner, though, a plan had been forming in my head.

"Does the Slippery Trick need a cabin-boy?"

He shook his head and smiled at me. "I was afraid it was something like that. Son, you could pay for a stateroom on a proper liner with all the money you have. Why would you want to be in charge of chamber-pots on a leaky old tub?"

"Why do you want to sail off on a leaky old tub instead of teaching in Utah, or working on the trolleys here?"

It took me most of the night to convince him, but there was no doubt in my mind that I would, and when the ship sailed, that I'd be on it, with a big, leather-bound log, writing stories.

—

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