Wild Cards

“I kind of see those displaced in time as blips on the temporal landscape,” Croyd said. “Sort of like a radar screen. I can’t tell who they are and it’s hard to say how many are in a given location, especially since we’re dealing with a relatively small number of people.”

“Seems like enough to me,” Nighthawk said. “And the actual place where they landed is, essentially, the same place they left?”

They stopped at the elevator bank and punched the button for the lobby.

“Well, most times anyway. I suppose. Actually, I really haven’t sent too many people back in time. Just that pigeon. Oh, and an alley cat when I first woke up. It seems like a pretty useful power, but, really, how often would the necessity for using it come up?”

Great, Nighthawk thought. Our temporal expert seems to be groping around as much as I am. The elevator arrived and Croyd and Nighthawk got on. The car was empty except for its operator, a tall, young black man in Palmer House livery. Seeing him took Nighthawk back through a hundred and forty–some years of memory to a time when he, too, wore the Palmer House uniform, when he worked at the hotel that stood on this very spot, before the Great Chicago Fire. Memories flooded into his mind and he clamped down on them and sent them away to where he kept them, hidden, but never forgotten.

“Floor, please,” the young man said.

“Lobby,” Croyd said.

“So,” Nighthawk said as the door closed, “whoever we’re after—”

Croyd looked at him and nodded. “Would have ended up—”

Nighthawk shook his head, his eyes shifting to the elevator operator who stood in front of him. “Say,” he said, “any strange things happen in the hotel, lately?”

“Mister,” the operator said without turning around, “strange stuff is always happening around here. You’d be surprised.”

Actually, Nighthawk thought, he wouldn’t. “Like what?” he asked.

“Well—” He thought for a moment. “Couple of weeks ago this crazy white man broke into a room, somehow, naked as a jaybird. He—”

The operator glanced back over his shoulder, catching Croyd’s eye. “Sorry, sir,” he said. “I didn’t mean—”

“No, no,” Croyd said. “This is fascinating. Do you know what he looked like?”

“Well, he was kind of, uh, stocky, I guess you could say.” He paused for a moment. “And he had a funny haircut for a grown man. You know, like that Buster Brown in the comic strip.”

Croyd and Nighthawk looked at each other.

“Charlie Flowers,” they said simultaneously.

A bell dinged as the elevator stopped.

“Your floor, sirs,” the young man said.

The air on the Chicago street was cool and crisp with the tang of early autumn. It was as crowded a street as any Nighthawk had walked down during the twenty-first century and perhaps even noisier. But he’d forgotten the old smell of the city. It all came back to him in a sudden rush when they left the Palmer House lobby.

“What’s that smell?” Croyd asked, wrinkling his nose.

Nighthawk waved at the street. “Horse manure.”

Horse-drawn carts and carriages were still battling the automobile for supremacy on the streets of Chicago. It was a losing fight, but there were enough of the old-fashioned conveyances that the distinctive sweet tang of horseshit still lingered on the air. They stepped into the flow of the foot traffic and let it carry them down the street until they came upon a café that had a few tables set out on the sidewalk as well as inside.

“I could use a bite to eat,” Croyd said.

Nighthawk was hungry as well. Such mundane concerns as food and drink had been forgotten in the excitement of the game and subsequent events, but now they came back to the time travelers. They took a seat at one of the small sidewalk tables and a white-aproned waiter appeared almost instantaneously. They ordered ham sandwiches and beer and were surprised and happy at the size of the slabs of rye bread, the thick cuts of ham, the whole dill pickles on the side, and the mugs of beer. A pot of spicy German mustard accompanied the sandwiches, which both slathered generously on the bread.

As they tore into the thick, juicy sandwiches, a newsboy came by hawking the afternoon edition of the Tribune. He was a runty little kid, maybe ten or twelve, looking like he stepped out of a Norman Rockwell illustration, or, Nighthawk realized, his memories.

“Hey, kid,” Croyd called. “Give me a paper.” He reached into his pocket for the bill that their British benefactor had given them back in the room in the Palmer House.

The kid’s eyes grew big as Croyd held it out. “Jeez, mister, I can’t change a twenty.”

“How much is the newspaper?” Croyd asked.

“Two cents.”

Croyd laughed. “Two cents? Even when I was a kid …” He looked at Nighthawk in surprise. “It was three cents,” he said, wonder in his voice. “Have I forgotten so much?”

“You’d probably be surprised,” Nighthawk said with a gentle smile.

Croyd called the waiter over. “Give the kid a nickel,” he said, “and add it to our bill.”

The waiter complied.

“Keep the change, kid,” Croyd said.

“Thanks, mister!”

From where he sat, Nighthawk could read the banner headlines: IRISH HOME RULE NEAR! The front page was crowded with columns of text. “Don’t keep me in suspense. What’s the date?”

“Oh, October 8, 1919. Say—” Croyd looked up, frowning in concentration. “I got us pretty close. Flowers has been here a month, tops. Not too much time to get up to a lot of mischief. Now all we have to do is find him. He’s around here somewhere. But where, exactly? How many people lived in Chicago in 1919?”

“Two and a half million.”

“Really?” Croyd looked at him.

“I do know Chicago,” Nighthawk said, looking up and down the bustling street. The memories were flooding back upon him like a wave that threatened to drag him under with its powerful pull. “Wait a minute … 1919? October?”

Croyd looked at him. “Yeah. What?”

Nighthawk set his sandwich back down on the plate, chewing thoughtfully. “At least we missed the riots,” he said.

“Riots?”

“Chicago’s worst race riots—ever.” Nighthawk’s voice became pensive, his gaze turned inward. “The summer of 1919 was known as Red Summer because of the racial tension that spread across the entire country. There were riots in many cities. My people were coming up from the South in massive numbers. Here in Chicago the tensions boiled over when a thrown rock killed a young black man at a beach in late July. By the time the National Guard had been called in to quell the violence, almost forty people were dead, a few more blacks than whites, but most of the property damage occurred in the Black Belt on the South Side, at the hands of organized ‘athletic clubs.’” Nighthawk frowned at Croyd. “Mostly Irish, mostly fairly recent immigrants themselves, competing for the jobs with the blacks coming up from the South.”

“What are you, a history buff or something?” Croyd asked.

“Or something,” Nighthawk said quietly. “It was pretty terrible. But, look, what else happened here in Chicago in 1919?”

Croyd, thumbing through the paper, looked up. “What?”

“The Black Sox scandal! The year the White Sox threw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds.”