Gene Wolfe - There Are Doors

“Stop up there,” North told him, “where it says guns. See the sign?”

“You’re going to get a gun?”

“Stop or I’ll break your God-damned neck.”

North seemed to mean it. He pulled to the curb in front of the gun store and switched off the ignition. North got out, and he sighed with relief as he saw North walk past the show window and go into the haberdashery beside it.

He took out the Tina doll and studied its enigmatic smile for what felt like a long time, then pulled the charm Sheng had given him free of his shirt. It was a root, a dry, hard thing shaped like a tiny wrinkled man no taller than Tina’s forearm.

A passing woman glanced through the window, and he realized how strange he must have looked to her with the doll in one hand and the charm in the other. She probably thought he was crazy, and if she called the police, she would find out she was right.

Except that even United had not thought him crazy, only an alcoholic. He was—supposedly—a drunk, and North was what? A schizophrenic maniac. Something like that.

He put the charm and the doll away and turned his attention to the passersby. At first they looked ordinary enough, though a little old-fashioned in their dress. He had seen pictures set in the thirties and forties, and he felt that these quiet, dark figures hurrying through the cold were costumed for just such a picture, girls and women and a few men, all in heavy coats that reached nearly to their shoe-tops, the men in wide-brimmed felt hats, the women and girls in head-hugging cloches.

Or that he was somewhere in Eastern Europe, where according to the evening news such clothing was still worn. One young man who passed him had a fur hat, and several women were wearing fur coats. Was there a place in Eastern Europe where they spoke English? A training city, perhaps, for Russian spies? Yet such a city should have been far more accurate. American clothes and American cars were not hard to get.

Three middle-aged women passed, each with an attache case or a briefcase. It occurred to him that he had seen very few older men, and he began to count. He had counted twenty-three women and three men who looked middle-aged when North came out of the gun store.

“All set,” North told him. “Let’s roll.”

“I thought you were in the other place.”

“I was. I got this coat. Like it?”

It was single-breasted, of thick, brown tweed. “Sure,” he said.

“I got to feeling a little chilly. Now I’m fixed.” North unbuttoned the coat and the jacket beneath it, and spread them wide. There was a shoulder holster on each shoulder; the butt of an automatic protruded from each holster. “Nine millimeters. I was afraid they wouldn’t have them, but they did. Okay, let’s get rolling. We’ve got places to go and people to see.”

He shook his head. “Not as long as you’ve got those.”

“You’re afraid of me. I guess that’s only natural. Here.” North dropped one of the pistols into his lap. “Now we’re even. I’ll give you the shoulder rig as soon as we get someplace where I can take off the coats. Let’s roll.”

He shook his head.

“What the hell’s the matter with you? I’ve tried—”

He didn’t want to pick up the pistol, but he did. “Here. Take it back. Take them both back to the store. They’ll give you your money.”

North’s right fist crashed into his jaw, driving his head against the window glass. For a moment he saw intense flashes of pale yellow.

“Next time I hit you, it’ll be with the gun, not my hand.”

He tried to open the door, but North caught him by the arm. “You got a gun,” North said. “Go for it.”

He shook his head, trying to clear his vision.

“Go for it! It’s loaded, ready to shoot. Pick it up and try to kill me. I’ll go for mine. One of us wins.”

“You’re crazy,” he said. “You really are crazy.” He felt the checkered grip of the automatic pushed into his hand; North had it by the barrel, trying to make him take it. Instead he held up both hands as he had seen people hold up their hands in movies, as he had seen suspects hold them up on television. He hoped a passing cop would see them.

North said, “You got no guts. No guts at all. I thought you had some, but I was wrong.”

“If it takes guts to shoot an empty gun at a man with a loaded one, you’re right; I don’t have a bit.”

North jerked back the slide; a cartridge flew out, striking the windshield. North caught it, took out the clip, jammed the cartridge into it, and slammed it back into the butt of the gun. “Want to try again?”

He shook his head and turned on the ignition.

“Then get it in gear.”

As they pulled away from the curb, he asked, “Where are we going?”

“A hotel to start with. I need more clothes, documents, newspapers, a base to work from.” North snapped his fingers. “The Grand! Keep moving, I’ve got to get myself located.”

He wondered—very much—what sort of work was to be carried out from that base. He thought it better not to ask.

The street lost its trolley tracks and became a boulevard flanked by imposing buildings of granite and marble, buildings guarded by snow-draped statues and in one case by a live sentry who might have been a United States Marine in dress blues. At last they were drawn into a traffic circle in which cars, small trucks, double-decked buses, and an occasional bike spun dizzily around a bronze general with a sword and a cocked hat. There was a moment of wild disorientation before he realized that the general, his rearing charger, and his pointing sword were all circling too, that the statue was revolving counterclockwise, like the traffic.

A small green car cut in front of them, and North reached for a gun.

“Easy,” he said, and laid his hand on North’s until the green car was gone.

“By God, I would have rammed the bastard,” North whispered through clenched teeth. “Rammed him!”

“And the police would have got us. Where do I turn off?”

North said nothing, staring straight ahead. Cars, mostly black, wove in and out. A policeman and a policewoman passed them in a black-and-white squad car. The woman glanced at them incuriously before her squad car moved off through the traffic.

His jaw still hurt; he rubbed it with one hand as he drove. “Keep circling,” North told him. “It’s one of these.”

There was a balcony whose smooth carpet of snow testified that no one used it in winter. He did, opening the French doors and stepping out in his topcoat to study the winter sea. The waves were of that nearly black green he had been told artists called cannon ; they pounded at the deserted beach like sentient beings, like so many workmen who knew that the job would be finished at last, the final stones, the last grains of sand, washed to the bottom, and that until it was done they would get their pay.

Nearer was a windswept concrete seawall; nearer still, a narrow asphalt road spotted with ice. A paved terrace flanked by evergreens in tubs led from the road to the marble steps of the Grand, which was clearly a resort in summer and in winter nothing much.

Their room—North had insisted that they share a room—was on the uppermost floor. It cost a modest twenty-five dollars a night; yet even so they had been able to get a weekly rate of a hundred and twenty-five. It was spacious, with a high ceiling; and thus far it had been always cold.

A lonely gull circled the freezing sea, and it struck him that North might well have tried to shoot it if North had been there.

And that the seagull might—if only it could—tell him what sea this was and whether his own land lay over it, though he was convinced that it did not.