2 cobra 21

 

Chapter 21 New York by Suborbital Express

 

 

Apparently it was my time to have to deal with abused children.

I got a call on my phone,  from a number which I did not recognise.

“Hello?” I said, guardedly.

Willow doesn’t even do that; she opens the receiver, and if anyone talks, she answers. Half the time for her it’s advertising from a call centre and it just bleeps out after 4 seconds. I’m exdirectory so anyone who has my number ought, in theory, to have a right to it.

“Mr. Tiber?” said a female voice. It was vaguely familiar.

I had taught as Horatio Tiber, and I saw no need to change that.

“Who is this?” I asked.

“It’s me – Carnation Pulk,” she said.

“Miss Pulk! Of course!” I said. “You won’t be in my class this year; you’ve moved on to senior high, haven’t you?”

“I.... Mr. Tiber, I need to talk to a sensible grown-up who listens,” said Pulk. “Can we meet? As soon as possible?”

“I guess so,” I said, warily.  I think Pulk and I parted on good terms; I didn’t think she’d want to set me up. “Where are you at the moment?”

“New York,” she said. “But if you live anywhere near the school, I can come to wherever you are.”

“Go to the Moonbuck’s on Whitehall Street, South Ferry,” I said. “I’ll be about an hour... maybe an hour and a half.”

Willow was listening.

“Pulk was having trouble with her father,” she said. “He works in the treasury department and he beat her for not understanding fractions, but wouldn’t explain.”

I nodded; I remembered how Carnation Pulk had broken down on me when I guessed that she was being stubborn about learning to pay her father back.

“He’s a bully and stupid, too,” I said. “I’ll be back for tea, possibly with Pulk.”

“I’ll prepare her a room just in case,” said Willow.

I made two calls.

One was to Sodger to get him to make sure the arena was cleared.

The other was to a contact of mine, named Jim.

Jim was fitted up for embezzlement when he was in the British Navy, by some high-ranker who needed a scapegoat. They couldn’t indict him, so he was asked to leave. Feeling that he might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, he left in a vehicle he had put his life on the line to acquire for the Royal Space Navy.  A prototype Muscovite space plane.

He’d relabelled all the controls, of course, as his Russian was, shall we say, rudimentary ... more rude than elementary, as you might say. I mean, he knew words like ‘blyat,’ ‘suka’, ‘idi nakhuy’ and the like, but would have been stumped if he had to walk into a shop to buy a bottle of milk.

He’d been working on the prototype with the boffins to improve it, too; and it was ‘off the books’ so to speak, being stolen, so the authorities could not actually accuse him of taking something they did not officially own. I’d hooked him up with someone able to design him a transponder which could lie about what this vehicle was. Jim would fly anyone anywhere... for a fee. And being able to go suborbital meant that he was only ever about an hour away from anywhere.

 

I drove to the rubble and left my car with Sodjer, just as the graceful silver bird came straight down out of the sky. Yes, it was VTOL; and it had a fusion engine, so the net product of its exhaust was water. I got on board quickly, tossing a cred stick to Jim. He caught it adroitly, and we were off.

I do not like going into space but it was not for long.

He landed on the bowling green, to the outrage of the bowlers.  I got out and managed to shift and merge with crowds before anyone thought to pursue me whilst he was lifting off again. I had a rucksack of goodies for if I had to get Pulk out of there; it would mean a bit of jiggery pokery if she had not lost the minders she undoubtedly had. And of course I was wearing a forgettable face – a second skin^tm over a dialled throwaway. I’d brought a second skin face for her, too. We had to get somewhere Jim could land to pick us up.

I was wearing a carnation so I hoped she would twig.

She was sitting there, and had not drunk enough of her coffee to be getting irritable.

“May I sit here?” I asked.

“I’m waiting for someone,” she said, brusquely.

“I’d say someone turned up,” I said, facetiously. She looked up, angrily, and I said, “Decimals are fractions, too. Hundredths.”

Her eyes widened.

“You’re from Mr. Tiber? You are Mr. Tiber? But how?”

“Let’s just assume I am not all I appear, and that’s probably to your advantage right now,” I said. “Now, tell me what this is all about.”

“Well, you know I started senior high in September,” said Pulk. “And Pop had been pleased that I did well in my end of term exams.  Only I don’t get on well with the math teacher, she’s so brusque and she makes me feel stupid. And I got a bad end of term report, and Pop gave me until half term to shape up. And... well, I couldn’t. So there I was, bending over his desk for the caning of my life, and... and he gave me a couple of blows, and then he swore, and... oh what’s the use! You won’t believe me; he said it would be our little secret that he had another way to punish me.”

“He pulled down your panties and fucked you,” I said.

Her eyes widened.

“You... you can know that?” she said.

“Kid, it’s the most terrible thing in the world for you, but you aren’t the first it’s happened to, and you won’t be the last, I’m afraid,” I said. “It’s the worst betrayal of trust any adult can do to a child in their care, but it happens. You don’t have a mom?”

“She died of an overdose about two years ago,” said Pulk, flatly. “I found her. There was a note which said that Pop’s expectations were unreasonable. She kept having miscarriages trying for a boy, and her figure just went and Pop kept her on this strict diet and made her exercise; got a trainer for her.”

“He was killing his own children,” I said, flatly. “What a fucking bastard your father is.”

Her eyes went round again.

“I didn’t know teachers could swear,” she said.

“Oh, hell yes; and you’ve been forced into being an adult, so the least I can do is to treat you with the respect you deserve, and let you know that I am human too, and that I can swear like a trooper when people like that anger me.”

“I wish he was dead,” said Pulk.

“Do you? Genuinely? Or are you just sounding off?” I asked. “Because I can make it happen, and nothing would delight me more.”

She gave me a very straight look, and in her eyes I could see the little girl find a young woman.

“I don’t think people who do that ought to be allowed to live,” she said. “I can’t help being bad at Math. I have been trying; you told me that I could be anything I wanted to be. I... I was dreading twenty strokes with the cane, I could barely walk from the six he gave me last time, and I had to sleep on my front without bedclothes for two weeks. And he made me come to meals and sit on hard wooden chairs, and the welts would open up again. But... It hurt in a different way and it was... it was dirty. And he told me when he’d done that I’d made him do it, and he gave me another couple of whacks with the cane, and said that if I was going to misbehave like a wanton, I’d have to learn to do it properly and come to his bed at night. I.... I put together some clothes and grabbed my pocket box, and I climbed down the drainpipe outside my window, and ran away. I went to the library, and I managed to get into the school’s records to find your number because I didn’t know what else to do.”

“How long will it be before your father misses you?”

“I... dinner time, I should think. At six. We dine at six.”

It was almost four.

“Unless he went to your room to look in on you – and I don’t think he will, because he’s coming to terms with what he’s done – you have until then before your description goes out to all the cops in New York,” I said. “And when it does, every camera on every street corner will have face recognition software. We are being filmed in here. He will know you met this person which is why I have a throwaway face.”

She looked horrified.

“So, you mean I can’t get away?”

“I never said that,” I said. “What I mean is, that you will have to take orders from me, even if I don’t have time to explain.  You’re going to take a visit to the National Museum of the American Indian, and so am I, separately. We’ll meet inside.”

She nodded obediently, got up and went out. I gave her a couple of minutes, and followed.

No museum can cover every corner. Basically they want to make sure nobody is vandalising the exhibits or nicking anything; but they have electronics on the show cases for that.  They survey people coming in to see if they have anything that looks like it might be dangerous, and on the way out to check you have nothing bulky that you should not have. It was towards the end of the day; it shuts at five o’clock, all school parties were gone, if any, parents with kids on half term breaks were heading thankfully home, and we had the place almost to ourselves. I found Pulk regarding an exhibit about a famous movie star Native American, called Jay Silverheels.

“Yes, I took the name from him,” I said.

She gasped.

“You mean, my teacher is also Jay Silverheels, winner of ‘Extreme’?” she said, awestruck.

Bugger, I didn’t have to tell her that.

“How come you were watching that at school?”

“Oh, we all watched on our pocketboxes under the covers,” she said.

“You also need to know that Miss Peacock is a good few years older than she was pretending, and she’s my wife,” I said. I didn’t want hero worship to tip over into anything else.

“Oh!” she said. “That explains a lot about her. I wish I was as tough as her.”

“If I kidnap you, you will be,” I said. “Right, we’re going into the disabled loo, because it’s large enough to change clothes in, and become two different people. I’m also going to put some salves on your backside to ease the welts; I brought plenty. And you can put some more, er, privily. I’ve patched up friends who were girls before, I’ll be perfectly clinical.”

She flushed quite darkly.

“I... I guess it’s like being with a doctor,” she said.

“Exactly; or living in your skivvies doing ‘Extreme’ crapping into  a piece of bark because it’s too cold and dark to go outside to do it,” I said. “They didn’t film things like that.”

She giggled, slightly hysterically.

 

I didn’t take more than a few seconds to break into the disabled toilet; I wasn’t about to ask for a key.

“Kneel on the toilet seat,” I ordered. She went white, and swayed. “I promise you I will not touch you inappropriately,” I said.

She obeyed, and I slathered salve onto some of the most vicious cane blows I have ever seen. I gave her the salve.

“I... rub it in?”

“It’s safe to go inside,” I said. I turned away from her, and took back the salve when she touched my arm to hand it back.

“Strip to your skivvies and put these on,” I said. ‘These’ were plain bluejeans,  a shirt, and very sloppy sweater. “I’m going to cut your hair, and give you a new face.”

She was a shapely enough girl, but coltish enough to be androgynous in a big enough sweater. She took a scarf out of her own bag.

“If you tied it tight at the back, it would squish things,” she said.

I did so. It did help. Her hair went in a bag; if flushed, some would be bound to float. Then I fitted the second skin^TM which I’d dialled to look much like the one I was wearing under my second skin, which I put back in the bag. They don’t have many times they can be used over before the nanotractors wear the skin and it starts cracking, but no reason to be profligate. We now looked like brothers as my follicolour^TM did its business. Her eyes were big again.

We walked out of the toilet.

“Here! You didn’t ought to be in there together,” said a security guard.

“Oh, please, embarrass the kid even more, do,” I said, sarcastically. “He’s had a bad time of it, and just because he doesn’t look disabled, doesn’t mean he isn’t. He needs help, and I’m his carer.”

The man looked at us both, and decided that we did look enough alike to be brothers.

“One of the visitors said he saw a man and a girl come in here,” he said.

“Are you making cracks because he admires Jay Silverheels and wanted to wear his hair like him?” I asked. “That’s damned impudent of you. I shall be making a complaint to your superior.”

“I’m sorry sir,” he said. “But if there was any hanky-panky in our toilets....”

“Well, there isn’t,” I said.

“How would you like it if you had to be manually evacuated?” said Pulk, managing to look defiant, embarrassed, and angry all at once. She probably felt all of them from our sojourn in the toilet and her feelings about her father.

We walked out. Despite the salves, Pulk was limping a bit, which actually loaned credence to our story.

I asked,

“So, how do you know about manual evacuation?”

She shrugged.

“All the late miscarriages messed up Mummy,” she said. “Pop wouldn’t, and he wouldn’t get her a nurse, so I had to.”

Poor little kid.

We took a street bus via grid to the Waldorf Astoria and booked into two rooms. Pulk did not blink at the price; she was used to the best places. We allowed ourselves to be tenderly ensconced in our rooms, after I had bamboozled the clerk, who had not wanted to let two young men in jeans in, by being terribly upper class British at him. You might almost have sworn that I had an unnaturally high palate, and overbite of a prize quarterhorse to go with it.

Once in the hotel, having paid upfront for the day, I took Pulk to the restaurant for high tea; the poor child was all in.  A cup of tea and some indigestible comestibles did wonders; and that was when I led her to the basement.