The Shadow Men (15 page)

“It’s going to be nearly impossible to get one here. Maybe out on the main road, whatever it is that runs over the Big Dig. Otherwise we can head toward Quincy Market. It’ll be easy enough to find a cab there. That’s probably better, getting some distance, just in case those people called the cops.”

“And if they have?” Trix said. “What would we do? How would we explain who we are?”

“We’d just …,” Jim said, voice disappearing into a shrug.

“In this Boston, we’re both dead,” she said. “Husks in the ground, or dust if our families had us cremated.” She shook her head, trying to absorb the strangeness of that truth.
Every breath I take contains molecules I’ve breathed before in another body
.

“I don’t care,” he said. His face changed little; there was no dawning realization, only acceptance. “I’m only here for one thing.” As he turned from her, she saw him check that the two folded envelopes were still in his back pocket. Each had been marked with a name and an address, and she was keen to check them out right away. But this was all for Jim. For now, she would follow his lead.

Less than ten minutes later they flagged down a cab on North Street. The driver was a big, cheerful Irishman, and he turned down the Celtic-punk CD just enough to be able to shout over it. Something about this comforted Trix, though at first she couldn’t quite place what it was. Jim shouted his apartment address, the driver waved a hand and pulled out into traffic, and the music provided a drum-and-fiddle theme to their journey. It was as the Irishman started shouting about roadwork and how the city still wasn’t spending enough on road maintenance that she was able to sink back into her seat and relax.
He doesn’t see anything different about us
, she thought.
To him we’re normal
. Clasping Jim’s hand, she closed her eyes and rested.

I wonder if Trix is feeling this as well
, Jim thought. The sense of being followed was subtle, an itch on the back of his neck and a tightening across his scalp. He did not turn around to look back; all he’d see would be headlights, vague shapes walking along pavements, shadows in this place where he should never be. The feeling was slight. And besides, whoever followed them would be at home in those shadows.

He looked forward past the big driver at the streets unrolling ahead. Trix’s hand felt solid and real in his, and he gave her a slight squeeze, smiling when she squeezed back. The driver was speaking, but his words were all but lost in the rush of music blasting from the speakers. Amid such cacophony, Jim found it ironically easy to rest and gather his thoughts.

From what he’d seen of the skyline from the upstairs window in the house they had just fled, this Boston looked quite different from the city where he had been born. How strange that a few significant changes could affect the view so fundamentally, even though ninety-five percent of the city was probably nearly identical.

Yet already he felt so much closer to Jenny and Holly. He and Trix had come through into this reality from another, stepping across the threshold with little more than watery eyes and a sense of shock at their accomplishment, and maybe somewhere in this Boston, Jenny and Holly were breathing, living, striving to discover what had happened to them and waiting for him to find them again. Though this was a strange city, the sense of being an invader here was rapidly fading away.

He could feel the folded letters in his back pocket. Soon they would go to the first of those addresses and look for the first name, but before that he had to see for himself just how different this place was. As Trix had said, both of them had died in this reality and left their loved ones grieving, so his apartment would belong to someone else. But it was the first place Jenny would have checked, and perhaps …

“Perhaps she’s still there,” he muttered.

“What’s that?” the driver called.

“Nothing,” Jim said, raising a hand. “Turn the music up.”

“That I can do!” The driver flicked a dial on the dashboard, and the music roared louder, filling the car and allowing Jim to clear his head.

“She might be,” Trix said, leaning into him and resting her head against his shoulder. “But if I know Jenny, she’d have moved on.”

“Holly will be her priority. She’ll be trying to figure out what the fuck has happened, but she’ll be steered by Holly. They’ll have to eat, and have somewhere to sleep. And if they can’t find anyone who knows them, it’ll be a hotel.”

“Providing she came through with money.”

“Yeah,” Jim said. “And providing the currency here is still dollars.” He wondered what would happen when it came time to pay the cabdriver. He reckoned he had fifty bucks in his pocket, but would the driver recognize the president on Jim’s currency? And beyond that … would they have to steal? And if they were arrested, what story could they give? Their names here matched those of long-dead children.

As they left the North End, Jim took more notice of their surroundings, leaving the problems of money and identity until later. The overall impression he’d gleaned from that brief look at this new Boston’s skyline was becoming more refined now, and initially he was surprised by how little had really changed. The JFK Federal Building was still there, which told him plenty, and Boston Common was still a welcome oasis of nature within the city. It was across the Common, roughly in the theater district, that the cathedral they’d seen from the house rose toward the night sky. It was well illuminated by display spotlights, proudly flaunting its magnificence over the lower buildings surrounding it.

“That is massive,” Trix said, and Jim realized she was leaning across the backseat with him to get a better view.

“What’s the cathedral’s name?” Jim shouted, taking a risk. The driver glanced curiously at him in the mirror, then grinned again and switched into a new, even more verbose mode.
Tourists
, he must have thought, and Jim vowed to keep an eye on their route.

“That’s the world-famous Cathedral of Saint Mary in the Park, and that in front of it is Saint Mary’s Park. Green an’ lovely, even at night.” He turned the music down, and Trix glanced at Jim and raised her eyebrows.
What have you started?
But this was good. They needed information, needed to know what this Boston held for them. And who better to ask than a taxi driver?

“Almost thirty years to build, and fourteen souls taken into the cathedral’s bosom,” the driver said. “If you visit it on your stay, make sure you take a look at the shrine in there, built to those brave souls. Beautiful, it is.” He looked in the mirror again, the smile slipping.

“Where are you from?” Trix asked.

“Well, you’re asking me two different things there, young lady,” the driver said, his good humor restored. “As to where I was born, that was Cork back in the home country. But where I’m from?” He waved both hands around him, holding the wheel with his knees. “Lived here since I was three years old, and never been back. So anyone asks where I’m from, I say Boston. Who wouldn’t, eh?”

“Who indeed,” Jim said. A few raindrops speckled the cab’s windows, smearing his image of the cathedral, and he wondered whether Jenny and Holly were getting wet in the same shower.

“You’re here visiting?” the driver asked.

“Looking for someone,” Jim said. Trix tapped his leg, but he moved her hand aside. Why shouldn’t he tell the truth?

“Who’s that, then? Maybe I can help.”

“I doubt it. So … I haven’t been to Boston before, would you believe? The Irish influence is big?”

“You kiddin’ me?” the driver asked. “It’s way beyond just influence. Some of them”—he waved both hands again, a gesture that Jim thought perhaps the man used all the time, but which he was sure would wrap them around a lamppost within the next mile—“… 
New Yorkers
. Y’know? There’s Irish there, for sure, but none of them are
really
Irish.” He looked in the mirror again. “You’re not New Yorkers?”

“Baltimore,” Trix said, and the driver nodded.

“Knew it. Baltimore. Good city. This one, though, yeah, heavy Irish influences. The best pubs in the States are here, and the best of them are run by guys who’ve come over from the home country to escape the Troubles.”

“The Troubles are”—
over
, Jim wanted to say, but the man was staring at him in the rearview mirror yet again—“terrible,” he said.

“Got that right,” the man said, voice more cautious now. “Since they started blowin’ up planes and trains … well, Boston’s like the Ireland that should’ve been. Peaceful. Mainly.” They were heading southwest toward Jim’s apartment, and as the streets flitted by left and right he found himself growing increasingly nervous rather than excited. He fully expected to find no sign of his wife and daughter at that address, and that should move him on in his search. But there was something else niggling at him.

He glanced over his shoulder into the glaring headlamps behind them.

“You, too?” Trix asked softly.

“What?”

“Getting the sense we’re being followed?”

“Yeah. Ever since …”

“We came through.”

“Probably the least of our worries. We’re dealing with this,” Jim said. “Coping. I don’t know how, or why, but we are.”

“The why is because this is for Jenny and Holly. We’ve come through to look for them, and that’s making us strong.”

“So what about them?” Jim asked, and his voice broke.
What about them?
They were dragged through; they didn’t come through of their own accord, with their own aims in mind. They didn’t understand like he and Trix. They had no inkling of what was going on. What could the trauma of this do to them?

“They’ll be fine,” Trix said.

“You can’t know that.”

“No, and I can’t say anything else. Just believe it.” She glanced behind them, then back at him.

“Unsettled, that’s all,” he said softly. “With all that’s happened, all the weirdness. No one’s following us. They
can’t
be.”

“Right,” Trix said, meaning it to sound emphatic. But to Jim she just sounded scared.

They settled close together in the backseat, not quite touching but drawing strength from proximity. And ten minutes later they pulled up outside what should have been Jim’s home, and he knew already that things here were very different. Through the rain-speckled windows he could see that Tallulah’s still took up the first floor, but above that the floors were dark, several windows boarded up, and it felt nowhere like home.

For a moment Jim wondered whether Miranda was still the restaurant hostess, and what her reaction would be were she to see him. But there would
be
no reaction. Back in the Boston he knew, she had been his friend and, after Jenny’s disappearance, apparently his erstwhile lover. But in this Boston he would be unknown. He had never been here before, and to attempt to imprint his memories on this place would be futile. And maybe even dangerous.

“It would have been too strange,” Trix said, leaning into Jim to see from his side window.

“Yeah. But this would have been the first place she’d come.”

“They’ve been gone for half a day.”

“And I doubt she’d have hung around.”

“So where to if you’re not getting out here, pal?” the driver asked. There was an edge to his voice now, nervousness or tension, as if he could suddenly sense that things were not quite right.

“Just … drive on,” Jim said. And he thought,
Where to indeed? Where would Jenny go once she had been here, and seen the differences?
Trying to put himself in her head was just too traumatic, because the confusion and terror she must be feeling were shattering. Instead, he started to analyze her probable approach objectively.

“After here, she’d go to your place,” Jim said.

Trix’s eyebrows rose in surprise, but then she nodded. “Yeah. But … I’m not sure I want to go there myself.”

“Right. After that, probably her parents’ place. Then following on from that—”

“Oh, shit,” Trix said. “Her parents.”

“What?”

“She’s not Unique, Jim. Somewhere in Boston there’s another Jenny.”

“Another Jenny,” he echoed. It set his head spinning, and he felt suddenly sick.

“Maybe her parents don’t live in the same place here,” Trix said. “Didn’t you help them with their mortgage, back in … well, our Boston? So here, maybe they’re still living somewhere else. Maybe outside the city. And maybe Jenny will have gone to the cops, realized things were amiss, and maybe—”

“Too many maybes,” Jim said. He lifted himself from the seat and took the folded envelopes from his back pocket. He checked them both, and then held up the one he now knew applied to where they were right now. “We go here. Yes?”

“Yes,” Trix said, and she sounded relieved.
She wanted to go there right away
, Jim thought, and perhaps that would have been the safest thing to do. He looked across at the building one more time, at the dark windows that he had stood behind a thousand times in another world, another life. He wondered what was behind those windows here … but just as quickly realized he did not
want
to know.

“You know O’Brien’s Bar?” Jim asked. “It’s down on … East Broadway.”

“Know it?” the driver said. “Sure I know it.”

“That’s where we need to go,” Jim said. Trix sighed and seemed to settle lower in the seat beside him, and he felt a slight sense of relief at having made a more definite plan. They’d go to find the Oracle of this Irish Boston, give him the letter Veronica had sent through with them, and then tell him their problem. They couldn’t do this on their own.

“Sure,” the driver said softly. “From the second you got in, I knew you needed help.” He turned up his music again, even louder than before, and Jim watched the rain-washed streets flit by.

O’Brien’s Bar was an innocuous pub nestled among a terrace of houses a couple of blocks from Telegraph Hill. Over the tops of the buildings, they could see the white steeple top of the Dorchester Heights Monument, just a block away. In the other direction was a view of downtown Boston. This part of the city, in Jim’s city, had always been Irish, but now the Irish presence was greater than ever. South Boston was truly an old-world Boston neighborhood, mostly residential, with local bars and markets. But in this Boston, where the Irish were the pinnacle of Boston society, Southie was a hell of a lot nicer.