Designated Targets

O’Brien spooned up a mouthful of peas, drew a breath, and started talking at a mile a minute again.

Julia looked fascinated.

Dan decided to concentrate on his dinner. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t like the sound of this, but it all made him feel decidedly uneasy. It seemed as if this woman was making a fortune out of thin air, but she wasn’t producing anything. She was just making people pay for things that, to his way of thinking, belonged to them anyway.

“It’s a lot easier when you have a single artist involved,” she continued. “But it gets nightmarish very quickly when you get into things like movies, and you have hundreds of people who lay claim to be being responsible for some part of the production. And of course, you have a lot of the parent companies like MGM or Paramount operating right now. I advise my clients to stay well clear of them. There are hundreds of cases working their way through the lower bowels of the court system, and you can tell that nobody has a fucking clue about where to even begin untangling the mess. Anyway,” she said, scooping up another mouthful of peas, “I always saw the entertainment industry as a sunrise initiative. Most of the opportunity has come and gone there. We’re looking at medium- to long-term strategies now. Like what’s going to happen in the Middle East when the war is done. I don’t imagine we’re going to bend over and invite the Saudis to buttfuck us again, for the next eighty years.”

“So what, you’re looking at alternative energy sources already, back here in nineteen forty-two?” Julia asked.

O’Brien shrugged. “I like to think of it as foresight.” Then she leaned forward. “I hear there’s OSS teams in Vietnam already, talking to Ho Chi Minh.”

“So what are they doing there?” asked Julia in a voice Dan recognized immediately. She was at work again.

O’Brien smiled. “Well, I don’t know. If they are there, I didn’t send them. But I imagine they’re telling Uncle Ho that he can have the fucking place, and as many surplus Springfield rifles as he wants, as long as he uses them to shoot Japanese soldiers. I mean, what’s Lyndon Johnson doing now? He’s off somewhere in the navy, but I’ll bet he’s spending every minute boning up on his presidency. He’s not going to want to make the same mistakes, and he’s already plugged into Roosevelt. He ran for Congress as a New Deal Democrat in 1937. He won and got himself straight onto the Naval Affairs Committee—as a freshman! FDR put him there. He’s only in the navy now because he lost a race for the Senate last year. I don’t imagine he’s behind the OSS thing, but nor can I imagine him sitting around with his thumb up his ass when he knows what’s coming.”

Like millions of Americans, Dan Black had read a couple of the “future” histories published within weeks of the Transition. Julia’s colleagues on the Clinton had written many of them, and she’d pointed him in the direction of some of the better ones. So he had a pretty good grasp of what they were talking about.

“So that’s what you mean by foresight,” he said.

“Exactly. Things aren’t going to be the way they were in our time, Dan. That’s what makes this business so exciting. If you were betting on a race that had been won already—”

“Like Slim Jim has,” Julia added, grinning.

“No comment,” O’Brien replied, her own smile just as wide. “But if you were betting on a done deal, sure, it’s easy money. But where’s the challenge? And of course, once people know the future, they immediately start fucking with it. So that’s where the challenge comes in. That’s why I love it.”

“I thought you loved it for the money,” Dan said, letting his offended sensibilities get the better of him. But neither of the women obliged him by taking offense.

“Sure,” agreed O’Brien. “And there’s the money, too.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the money, Dan,” Julia chimed in. “Money’s what makes the world go round.”

Slim Jim loved this place. Of all the things O’Brien had hooked him into, the Bayswater was the best. He would never have thought he could get so jazzed about a club that not only let in your niggers and your Jews—but actually invited them to come.

He never would’ve thought you could make money on something like this, either, especially not with the top- shelf wages he was paying. But the money rolled in like a flash flood that never ended. And anyone who was anyone in this town was beating on the doors, trying to get in and throw their money around. It was one of the seven fucking wonders, was what it was.

And two or three of the other wonders were right in here with him, too.

That Sinatra kid, up on stage singing “Slow Boat to China” with Joybelle—you had to admit, that kid’s voice was a wonder. And this piece of ass Slim Jim had here on his arm, the fabulous Norma—or Marilyn, as she was calling herself now that Ms. O’Brien had sorted out the business with the movie guys—this fantastic piece of ass was such a natural wonder of the world that he was sure every guy in the room would crawl a mile over cut glass just to jerk off in her shadow.

But the biggest wonder had to be that table of wise guys over there, mooning over Joybelle and Frankie’s duet. Just six months ago, those guys wouldn’t have crossed the road to piss on his heart if it’d caught fire. Crazy fucking mobsters. And now they were ringing him up, asking him if they could come to his club. And the hell of it was, they were really asking.

Oh, sure, they’d rolled in here like kings of the fucking hill that first time. He didn’t know what O’Brien had done or said to them, but after that you couldn’t have asked for a quieter, more well-behaved pack of wops. He’d been terrified, expecting them to muscle in on his action. But no, they came for the show and the food. They couldn’t get enough of the fucking food.

They’d also liked staying behind after the place had closed, to watch The Sopranos and all of his Mafia movies on the big flatscreen. But Ms. O’Brien had put a stop to that pretty quickly. She said it was “inappropriate.”

Well, a lot of people would look around this place, with its mixed races and nightly parties, and they’d swear on the Bible that the Bayswater redefined inappropriate. But Slim Jim Davidson called that “bull talk from a one-eyed fat man.” That was his new favorite phrase, ever since he’d seen John Wayne in True Grit.

“Hey, darlin’!” he shouted to Marilyn over the noise of the band and the bar crowd. “You think John Wayne worries about turning into such an ugly, fat old prick?”

“Well,” she said, sipping at a cocktail he didn’t recognize, “at least he got to grow old.”

Slim Jim rolled his eyes and gave her a squeeze. “Now you know we ain’t lettin’ that happen to you, sweetheart. You ain’t marrying that drunken ball player. You ain’t fucking those Kennedy boys. And you—”

A painful grip on his bicep tore his hand off Marilyn’s ass. “Out in the back. You’re with us, Romeo.”

He recognized the voice, and his heart skipped a beat. It was the two bozos. The feebs who’d rousted him in his crib.

The unfriendly one—at least they’d kept their roles straight—had made some sort of Chinese burn on his elbow. It hurt like hell. Before he knew it, he was up on his tiptoes and being hustled away from Marilyn as fast as they could handle the move without attracting attention. Even so, there were plenty of patrons beginning to point and stare.

The Bureau men shoved him through a set of doors and into the first office on the left.

A push sent him into the desk, and he corked his thigh painfully. “Ow! You didn’t have to—”

“Shut up, shit head. What the fuck are you doing here?”

Rubbing at his leg, his mind racing, Slim Jim played dumb. “I got an interest here. It’s strictly legit. If you guys were as smart as—”

“You know what we mean. You’re supposed to be in California. You’re supposed to be working for us now. You were supposed to have ditched that bitch, and—”

“Why, gentlemen, I do believe my ears are burning.”

The two bruisers spun to find Maria O’Brien standing in the doorway, flanked by Marilyn and some couple Slim Jim didn’t know. They must have been the friends O’Brien said she was meeting for a late supper, he guessed.

“Agents Geraghty and Swinson, I presume.” She smiled, but not in a friendly way. “You’d know them as Good Cop and Bad Cop, in that order, Mr. Davidson. Now, would you care to cease your criminal assault on my