Callahan's Place 06 - The Callahan Touch (v5.0) Read online

  THE

  CALLAHAN

  TOUCH

  Spider Robinson

  www.spiderrobinson.com

  www.spectrumliteraryagency.com/robinson.htm

  Copyright © 1993 by Spider Robinson

  Cover design by Passageway Pictures, Inc.

  Books by Spider Robinson

  Callahan’s Place books:

  Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon

  Time Travelers Strictly Cash

  Callahan’s Secret

  Off The Wall at Callahan’s

  Lady Sally’s House books:

  Callahan’s Lady

  Lady Slings the Booze

  Mary’s Place books:

  The Callahan Touch

  Callahan’s Legacy

  Callahan’s Key

  Callahan’s Con

  Stardance books:

  Stardance (with Jeanne Robinson)

  Starseed (with Jeanne Robinson)

  Starmind (with Jeanne Robinson)

  Deathkiller books:

  Time Pressure, Mindkiller (published together as Deathkiller)

  Lifehouse

  Very books:

  Very Bad Deaths

  Very Hard Choices

  Other books:

  Variable Star (Robert A. Heinlein and Spider Robinson)

  God Is An Iron and Other Stories (collection)

  The Free Lunch

  By Any Other Name (collection)

  User Friendly (collection)

  Night of Power

  Melancholy Elephants (collection)

  The Best of All Possible Worlds (anthology)

  Antinomy (collection)

  Telempath

  This book is for Solace,

  and for John Varley

  THE

  CALLAHAN

  TOUCH

  Spider Robinson

  -1-

  The Immediate Family

  Opposites make good companions sometimes.

  The reason Irish coffee is the perfect beverage is that the stimulant and the depressant play tug of war with your consciousness, thereby stretching and exercising it. Isometric intoxication, opposed tensions producing calm at the center, in the eye of the metabolic hurricane. You end up an alert drunk. I suppose speedballs—the cocaine-heroin combination that killed John Belushi—must be a similar phenomenon, on a more vivid and lethal level. Fear and lust is another good, heady mixture of opposites…as many have learned in warzones or hostage situations.

  But if you can get hope and pride and serious fear all going at the same time, balanced in roughly equal portions, let me tell you, then you’ve really got something powerful.

  You can turn your head around with a mixture like that, end up spinning like a top and paralyzed, exhausted and insomniac, starving and nauseous, running a fine cold sweat. Like a car in neutral, with the accelerator to the floor. It’s exhilarating, in a queasy kind of way.

  I’m embarrassed to admit I binged on it for days before I realized that was what I was doing, and then another day before I made up my mind to kick. Finally I admitted to myself that I was being selfish, that other peoples’ hopes—and cash—were involved in this too. They’d been waiting a long time already. Besides, in a three-way tug of war, the chances of one side suddenly letting go with a loud snap are doubled.

  Hell, I’d already jumped. It was time to open my eyes and see where I was going to land…

  So one fine day in May of 1988, I picked up the phone and made the call.

  “Hello there, son,” he said when they finally tracked him down. “I was just thinking about you. Been too long. What’s the good word?” His voice was strong and clear despite the lousy connection. As always.

  “I think I'm ready,” I said.

  Short pause. “Say that again. Like you believe it, this time.”

  I cleared my throat. “Well, I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready. But I think it’s ready. I truly do, Sam. As ready as it’s ever gonna be.”

  “Why, that’s fine! Uh…want me to come over and take a look? Before you—”

  “Thanks. But no. I’ll take it all in one dose. Put the word out for me, okay? I open Friday at nine. Just the immediate family.”

  “Friday, huh? Appropriate date. We’ll all be there. I'm looking forward to it. It’s been awful too damn long. Good luck—wups, Code Blue, got to go!” The line was dead.

  Friday was two days away. Time for one last binge of conflicting emotions before the balloon went up…

  The thing is, I had accomplished a miracle—and I knew in my heart it wasn’t good enough.

  After two years of careful planning and hard work, I had produced something I excellent. I believed that, and I guess I should have been proud. Oh hell, I guess I was proud. But I was trying to match something long-gone that, in its own backassward way, had been perfect. And it seemed to me, in those last couple of days, that the distance on the scale between lousy and excellent is nothing compared to the distance between excellent and perfect.

  There was nothing I could do about it. Perfection exceeded my grasp. I didn’t have the tools. Nonetheless, I spent those last days like a frustrated cat, trying to bite myself on the small of the back.

  My staff was the first to arrive that Friday night, pulling in at about eight, but he didn’t count. He’d had already seen the place, under oath of secrecy, because I’d needed his help in finishing it. (If you can’t trust a guy with his background to keep a vow, who can you trust?) But I was glad to see him, and gladder when he was dressed for work.

  It was the sheer familiarity of the sight of him in that getup, I think. So much about this place was different from the old one, and he was a thread of continuity that I appreciated. Some of those differences had been driving me crazy.

  Getting ready to open took us a combined total of maybe five minutes. I’d been there all afternoon—and we’d been essentially ready for a week. Then he had the grace to not only suggest a game of darts, but fail to notice how badly I was playing. It took him some doing; at one point I actually threw one shank-first. It bounced halfway back to me. Terrific omen, for those who believe in such.

  At ten minutes to nine, I left him in command and went out into the big foyer, letting the swinging door close behind me. Its breeze started all the empty coat hangers whispering. I felt the need to wait out there, to talk to the whole crew, at least for a few minutes, before I brought them inside and showed them the place.

  At nine precisely, the outer door burst open and Doc Webster, Long-Drink McGonnigle, Fast Eddie Costigan, Noah Gonzalez, Tommy Janssen, Margie Shorter, Marty Matthias and his new wife Dave, all three Masers, Ralph von Wau Wau, Willard and Maureen Hooker, Isham Latimer and his new wife Tanya, Bill Gerrity, Jordin and Mary Kay Kare, and both of the Cheerful Charlies all came crowding into the foyer at once. Don’t tell me that’s physically impossible; I'm telling you what I saw.

  My head pulsed like a giant heart, and my heart spun like a little head. A couple of fairly bad years began to melt away…

  * * *

  They advanced on me like a lynch mob, baying and whooping, arms outstretched, and then we all hugged each other. Don’t tell me that’s physically impossible; I'm telling you what we did. The coat hangers became Zen bells. The more physically demonstrative of us pummeled the rest of us and each other, hard enough to raise bruises, and all of us grinned until the tears flowed. Somewhere in there it occurred to me that the foyer now held every single soul who had been present on the first night I ever had a drink in Callahan’s Place—with the sole exceptions of Callahan himself, and of course Tom Flannery (it was the twelfth anniversary of Tom’s death that n
ight). We stopped hugging when our arms stopped working.

  There was a moment of warm silence. Then the combined pressure of them tried to back me into the bar, and I stood my ground.

  “Hold it a second, folks,” I said, smiling ruefully. “There’s something I want to get straight before we go in, okay?”

  “It’s your place, Jake,” Doc Webster said.

  “That’s the first thing to get straight,” I said. “It’s not. It’s our place. I know I hogged all the fun of putting it together, but that’s because a design committee is a contradiction in terms, and I had some strong opinions. And…well, I wanted to surprise you all. But if there’s anything you really don’t like, we can change it.”

  “You’re saying you want us to complain?” Long-Drink asked.

  “I tink we c’u’d handle dat,” Fast Eddie said helpfully.

  “I hate the Jacuzzi,” the Doc said promptly, and Ralph bit him on the ankle just as promptly. In fact, the dog may have started to bite before the Doc had started to wisecrack. They know each other.

  “Come on, let’s see de jernt,” Eddie said.

  “One more thing,” I said. “Before I show you all what Mary’s Place is, I want to talk for a second about what it is not.” I could see that they all knew more or less where I was going, but I said it anyway. “This is not Callahan’s Place. This is Mary’s Place. It will never be Callahan’s Place. No place will ever be that place again, and certainly no place we build. Even if Mike should ever come back from the future and open another bar, it wouldn’t be Callahan’s Place, and he wouldn’t call it that if he did. We can all have some fun here—but if we try and make this be Callahan’s Place, it will all go sour on us.”

  “Hell, we know that,” Long-Drink said indignantly.

  “Relax, Jake,” Tommy Janssen said. “Nobody expected you to work miracles.”

  “We’re not fools,” Susie Maser said. Then she glanced at her husband Slippery Joe and co-wife Suzy. “Wait a minute, maybe I take your point. We are fools.”

  “Look,” I pressed on, “I don’t mean that the layout is different or the setup is different. I don’t even mean just that Mike is gone. He’ll be less gone in this building than he will anywhere else, I think, because he’ll be in our collective memories, and maybe if we’re lucky a little bit of Callahan magic will linger on.

  “But a lot of it won’t. Some of the specific ‘magic,’ if that’s what you want to call it, that made Callahan’s Place work is simply not available to us any more.”

  Rooba rooba rooba. The Doc’s foghorn baritone rose over the rest. “What are you saying, Jake?”

  “For one thing, I'm talking about whatever kind of magic it was that watched over that Place like a door-checker. The Invisible Protective Shield—a selectively permeable shield. You all know damn well what I mean. Did anybody ever wander into Callahan’s that didn’t belong there? And did anybody who needed to go there bad enough ever fail to find it?”

  That stopped them. “I don’t know about that last part,” the Doc said. “There were suicides on Long Island during those years. And I can remember one or two jokers that came in who didn’t belong there. But as Susie said a minute ago, I take your point. Those few jokers didn’t stay. In all those years, ’46 to ’86, we never seemed to get normal bar traffic. No bikers, or predators, or jerks looking to get stupid, or goons looking for someone drunk enough to screw even them—

  “Hell, no drunks,” Long-Drink said, looking thunderstruck. “Not one.”

  “No grabasses,” Margie said.

  “No brawlers,” Tommy supplied. “No jackrollers.”

  Fast Eddie summed it up. “No pains in de ass.”

  “Was that magic?” the Doc asked. “Or some kind of advanced technology we don’t savvy yet? Like Mickey Finn’s ‘magic’ raincoat?”

  “What’s the difference?” I told him. “We haven’t got it—and so this is going to be a different kind of joint. It doesn’t matter what it was. For all I know, it was just a sustained run of incredibly good l—”

  SCREECH!

  I had been peripherally aware of rapidly growing automotive sounds from the world outside, but before I could finish my sentence we all heard the nerve-jangling shriek of brake shoes doing their very best (a sound I happen to find even more disturbing than most people do), much too close to the door. We all froze, expecting a vehicle to come crashing in and kill us all. Just as the noise reached its crescendo and died away, there was a violent, expensive-sounding clang! crump!, and then a single knock at the door.

  Silence…

  There was a harsh emphatic crack! sound. Behind me, in the bar. And then a heavy, dull thop! from the same place, followed by a gasp, and a faint, hard-to-identify sound that made me think of a gerbil, curling.

  Fast Eddie happened to be closest to the outside door. He opened it experimentally, and it was a good thing it opened inward. The front grille of a Studebaker filled the doorway, faint tendrils of steam curling out of it. The rest of a Studebaker was attached in the usual manner. The only unusual thing about it was the pair of rumpled frayed blue jeans on the hood.

  “Hi, guys,” Shorty Steinitz’s voice came hollowly from the passenger compartment. “Sorry I'm late. Did I kill him?”

  One mystery solved. Shorty is the worst driver alive. But how had he managed to punch someone through that door and through all of us and into the bar, without any of us noticing it happen?

  I turned and pushed open the swinging door, just as tentatively as Eddie had opened the outside door.

  A stranger was sitting at my bar, in one of the tall armchairs I use instead of barstools. Kindling lay in the sawdust at his feet, and there appeared to be either more sawdust or heavy dandruff on his hairy head. He was just finishing a big gulp of beer. Tom Hauptman, my assistant bartender, was gaping at him. This seemed understandable, for the stranger had no pants on.

  He caught my eye, looked me up and down briefly, and pursed his lips as if preparing to sneer. “Evening, stringbean,” he said. He gestured toward the fireplace. “Mind if I warm myself at your fire?”

  “Na dean fochmoid fàinn,” I heard myself say, and wondered what the hell that meant. It sounded a little like Gaelic—and I don’t speak Gaelic.

  “What choice have I got?” he replied.

  He was short and hairy. His eyes and nose and lips and the upper slopes of his cheeks were the only parts of his head that were not covered with tight curls of brown hair. As far as I could see, they did not share that distinction with any other part of his body except his fingernails. He made me think of hobbits. Surly hobbits. He wore a brown leather jacket, a long scarf, a black turtleneck, basketball shoes, and white jockey shorts. There were a motorcycle helmet and a pair of leather gloves on the bar beside him.

  “How did you get in there?” I asked, as calmly as I could, aware of people gawping over my shoulder.

  He looked at me as if I had asked a very stupid question, and pointed silently upward.

  Like Callahan’s Place before it, Mary’s Place had an access hatch to the roof. Or rather, it had had. I hadn’t rigged up a ladder to it yet, because it was awkwardly placed, almost directly over the bar. Now there was no longer a hatch there—just a yawning hole where the hatch had been. The hatch cover was the kindling around the stranger’s feet.

  “You broke in from the roof?” I said.

  He grimaced. “Not voluntarily,” he assured me. “I could have done without the last eight feet or so of that little journey. But I didn’t get a vote. This is good beer.” He made the last part sound like a grudging admission.

  “Rickard’s Red,” I said, seeing the color. “From Canada.”

  “No,” he said, frowning as though I’d called an automatic a revolver, or spelled “adrenalin” with an e on the end. “From Ontario. Americans always make that mistake.”

  Shorty came bustling up behind me. “Is he alive?” he asked.

  “Are you alive?” I asked the stranger.

/>   “No, I'm on tape,” he said disgustedly, and gulped more beer.

  “Honest to God, Mister,” Shorty said, trying to push past me, “I never saw you. Be honest, I wasn’t looking—it just never occurred to me anybody could be on my tail at that speed—”

  “I was in your slipstream, Andretti, saving gas; are you familiar with the concept or shall I do a lecture on elementary aerodynamics? Even a rocket scientist like you will concede that there’s not much point in doing that unless the guy is going at a hell of a clip, now is there?”

  “Well, I never seen ya,” Shorty said uncertainly.

  “That’s because you weren’t looking,” the stranger explained.

  “One of you want to tell me what happened?” I asked. To my pleased surprise I heard my voice come out the way Mike Callahan would have said it in my place. A quiet, polite request for information, with the explicitly mortal threat all in the undertones.

  The stranger looked up at the ceiling again. No, at the sky. Apparently God signalled him to get it over with. He sighed. “I was following that maniac at a—”

  “‘Idiot,’” Long-Drink interrupted. “If they’re in front of you, they’re idiots.”

  The stranger glared at him, and decided to ignore him. "—hundred and twenty when he made an unsignaled left into your parking lot without slowing. On a Suzuki at that speed, you don’t want to bust out of the slipstream at an angle, so I swallowed my heart and cornered with him—better, of course—and there we both were, bearing down on a brick building at a hundred and twenty together, and I would like to state for the record that I would not, repeat not have hit him if his God damned brake lights had been working!”

  “Are they out again?” Shorty asked mournfully.

  The stranger looked at him. “Or if his brakes hadn’t been so God damned good.”