Two Hours to MidnightPart 1,
Part 2The Big FreezeThe year is 1937 and in every smoke-filled shadowy cafe, jazz music fills the air as everyone waits for the next Big One to tear the world apart.
The Great War ended in 1922 after Paris was taken briefly by the Germans, but the Allies were able to push the Germans back and agree to an armistice in the Peace of Verdun. America never got involved: there was no Lusitania incident, and the ostensibly isolationist President Wilson did not directly involve America in the war. The treaty was signed somewhat in Germany's favor, as the Germans kept their Brest-Litovsk possessions, some French colonial territories in central Africa, and Belgian Congo (as Germany was already in full control of Belgium itself, and forced the Belgians to sign away the Congo for peace in 1922). The German colonies in the Pacific were retained by Japan, against whom the Germans were in no position to possibly retake them. Both Britain and Germany are in pretty poor shape. Millions are dead, they both have depleted workforces and are economically devastated, hence the "noir" atmosphere. This is why the Armistice was signed in 1922: both sides needed to break off hostilities or face total internal collapse. The "war to end all wars" didn't even result in defeating anyone (bloodshed two or three times what the actual Great War accomplished; just another four years in the trenches) and the only result is a status quo peace (except for some changes in the east) meant by all sides as nothing more than a breather until conflict is renewed. In this timeline, Imperial Germany did not suffer the total collapse of its Home Front, so a long Cold War developed between Germany and Russia on one side and France and Britain on the other side. Simultaneously, while Imperial Germany and Bolshevik Russia have been forced into an alliance/mutual cooperation (whether it's truly an alliance is up to the perspective of each player), the Russians still hate the Germans for what they took from them in the Great War, and use political unrest in China, North America, and elsewhere as proxy fronts in a budding Cold War between both of them.
Slightly past 10 PM on Tuesday, when the city’s workers started shuffling back, every night, to their families or the bars, the bright white sign for Mulley’s Diner, proudly announcing
BEST POUTINE, was still flashing every ten seconds, as it would be until Bill Mulley closed down at 3 AM, just as he did every night. Montreal was one of the few big cities out east where curfew didn’t apply because industry had to be fed. Every night, a predictable trickle of stevedores, machinists, and laborers would stop by around nine, and by midnight the ones who didn’t go straight to the dingy, smoke-filled bars downtown came to places like Mulley’s. People still in the diner past three were promptly shown the door. Sometimes Mulley tossed them out himself.
A growing puddle of rainwater, reflecting the diner’s sign, was interrupted by the footfalls of the Sullivan brothers, who walked almost aimlessly towards the large doors of the diner. Broken shards of deep brown and emerald green glass sparkled on the muddy, gravel-strewn ground outside the diner. Both of them kept their eyes down and didn’t stop moving. From outside the place, a slow, steady stream of hypnotic, sultry jazz settled in the air.
Harold sat on a stool, hunched over at his section of the counter at the diner that cold, rainy Montreal night. He stared into his coffee, empty to nearly the bottom of the mug, with a little pool of the dark grounds, turned into sludge, sitting at the bottom. Under the light, a swirl of purple, red, and blue circled in his coffee like an oil spill. It smelled burned, not just old coffee, but the kind of coffee started in the morning, heated all day, and finally drunk. Forgotten coffee. The kind that smells like burned motor oil, tastes something fierce, and almost looks like molasses the way it quickly stains and sticks to porcelain. The countertops in the diner were made from old, polished pine wood, mottled and stained and marked by years of patronage. As he idly pushed his mug of nearly-empty coffee along some of the patterns in the wood, he looked up from his reverie as two figures, dressed in black-stained tired blue overalls, came through the door and headed straight to a booth on the other side of the diner.
“I used to live in Constantinople.”
Harold looked up from his coffee again towards the person who said that. A little man, dressed in a well-tailored, dark suit, sat just a few stools away from him. He stared at Harold for a moment, then pointed at Harold’s mug of coffee.
“The mud in your coffee. A lot of them over there like to drink it that way. Turkish coffee. Coffee mud at the bottom.”
Harold blinked at the man.
“But, it’s best sweetened with sugar. ‘Black as death and sweet as love,’ they like to say.” The little man winked at him, then turned back to his whiskey.
Lucy, the waitress, smiled at Harold as she refilled his coffee unbidden, and eyed the Sullivan boys curiously. They usually showed up around this time, but they almost always looked her way and gave her a “Hello,” especially Michael. Although his brother Peter was already married, Michael Sullivan seemed to Lucy too quiet and shy to put down any roots of his own. She thought about what she would say if Michael finally worked up the courage to really talk with her, but she often found herself unsure what she would do. He seemed like a nice guy, but how well did she even know him? Her family used to live near the Sullivans when they were younger, but it was mostly Peter who gave her any attention, while Michael tried to play innocent whenever he watched her, never able to say what she already knew he wanted to say.
She looked away from Michael to the coffee she was pouring, stopping herself from nearly spilling coffee all over the counter just as the mug was filled to the top. Harold beamed graciously at her as she smiled with embarrassment. She grabbed a cloth, carefully lifted the mug, and set it down on top. “Will it just be coffee for you tonight, or do you want something else?”
He tilted his head to the side, cracked his neck, and shifted back on his seat. “Maybe in a little bit, hun. Coffee for now will do just fine.” Although it was hot, he blew on it for a moment and took a quick gulp.
She pulled out a little flask from her waist pocket, unscrewed the top, and gave his coffee a splash of whiskey. She winked at him. “You just let me know when you’re ready.”
He gave her a half-smile and nodded. “Thank you kindly.” He watched her for a brief moment as she went, coffee pot in hand, over to the two men dressed in overalls who seemed to be keeping their heads down. He looked around the place and noticed that everyone seemed to be keeping to themselves. Not far from the two men who just came into the diner, he watched an elderly couple quietly talk and eat. They made no noise as they ate and drank their coffee. A group of young men sat in a circle around a large table in one of the corners, looking tiredly into their glasses of whiskey. One of them looked up at Harold and met his gaze, but went back to holding his whiskey and staring into the glass, past exhaustion and weariness. Another was staring at the wall across from their table: there were three holes in the wall the size of a fist, the wood still splintered around the edges, and a sign, hastily scribbled, promising it would be fixed "
soon." Three stools to Harold’s right at the counter, a man in an expensive suit downed most of his whiskey. The suit was a shade between black and sleet gray: dark and welcoming, pinstriped in a shade of red that was both so faint it was hardly noticeable, yet shimmering and shifting in color between red, fuchsia, and violet. Harold stared at the color and the pattern of the suit, wondering how much the whole thing cost, and who in this town could possibly afford to---
“Tell the waitress this is for the gin.” Harold looked up at the man in the exquisite suit who spoke, noticing for the first time his thick, black eyebrows. The man pressed a one pound coin on the counter, put on his hat, and quickly flashed Harold a silver-toothed smile as he pushed past the diner’s large wooden doors and walked out into the night.
Finally, he thought. He had been told to wait for the signal, when he would be given a pound to pay for another man’s gin. It sounded foolish at the time, but he supposed if it worked like this, he wouldn’t question it. He made eye contact with the waitress and lifted the coin into view.
Lucy walked over to him and leaned over the counter. “Did you change your mind after all? What can I get you?”
Harold nodded over to where the immaculately-dressed man was sitting, drinking his whiskey. “This is for his gin.” She took the money from his hand, the warm expression on her face unchanged. “I’m actually looking for a job. I hear you’re hiring?”
She turned to the large slot in the wall in front of the counter where Mulley and the others in the kitchen on nights busier than Tuesday would have kept pushing plates of food forward, taking back the empty ones, and rang the bell for him. Mulley, a large, tall, red-haired man came forward, crouched low enough to see through the wide slot, and looked at her like he couldn’t be bothered. “This gentleman is interested in a job,” she said, pushing the money over to Mulley. He took the money quickly, but not too quickly, and motioned for Harold to come into the kitchen through the back. The door to the kitchen opened wide, and inside everything was a tired shade of white, gray in some spots, black and covered with soot above the place’s stoves and fryers. Pipes ran everywhere on the ceiling, and a few buckets caught the drip, drip, drip of water on a rusted, leaky pipe near the back of the kitchen. Mulley was nearly alone, save the three kitchen workers rushing around frantically, checking on a dozen things at once. Harold was led deeper into the back of the diner, past the kitchen, down a grimy hallway littered with abandoned bales of newspaper and old, empty boxes labelled
POTATOES. Mulley stopped halfway down the hall, opened a door, and waited for Harold to enter.
Inside was dark. It would have been completely black without the swaying lamp above the center of the room. It was small, almost too small to fit someone with as big a frame as Mulley’s and another person. Two wooden crates sat alone on the floor, and a floor drain, stained dark, lay between both crates. There was no window, and no other exit except the door Mulley was holding open. He walked in after Harold, shutting the door hard.
“Take a seat, boyo.”
Harold hadn’t noticed just how tall Mulley was until he sat down, with Mulley still standing up, looming down at him. There was something cold and vaguely unsettling about the man that reminded him of certain petty criminals, and even the professional ones, back in Seattle he used to round up and sometimes interrogate. These were men who wouldn’t think twice about lunging at you across a table on the off chance they could grab you by the throat and choke you to death in the hope of somehow getting out. In Montreal, Bill Mulley owned and ran a little diner on South Street. But Harold knew what kind of man owned that diner.
Mulley pulled out a pack of smokes, sliding one out and lighting it without offering one. He took a long moment to savor the first drag, then sat down on the crate opposite of Harold. “The money,” he finally said. Harold pulled out an envelope from under his tucked-in shirt and handed it over. Mulley looked inside, nodding with apparent satisfaction. “Your real papers.”
This was something Harold was loath to do, but he didn’t hesitate. He needed fake papers if he wanted to survive, but he didn’t relish the idea of giving up his last link to his past life in the Northwest. Even though being caught with his American papers would mean imprisonment, deportation, or even worse if someone, looking for an easy mark to earn a promotion for vigilance, decided to he was a Red spy, his papers were all he had the moment he crossed the border. His attempt to live as Harold Montgomery, from Vancouver, blew up in his face in a logging camp on the way to Montreal.
Mulley didn’t treat them with the same respect and care. He roughly flipped through them, bending the pages and nearly tearing one in half when he turned it over too fast. “Says you’re Seattle police.”
Harold cleared his throat. “Not anymore.”
Mulley folded the papers into his back pocket and looked at his watch in the room's dim, narrow light. “You’ll meet someone in two hours, at midnight, to pick up your new papers. You’re now Harry Trent, from Toronto. You’ll go into the alley behind Club Flamingo and wait for someone. They’ll trip and drop a few things. You will say, ‘Can I assist you?’ Just like that." He tapped the growing bit of ash from his cigarette onto the floor. "Say it for me.”
“Can I assist you?” Harold, now Harry, repeated back.
Mulley took another long drag of his cigarette, exhaling slowly in short puffs. “Speaking of jobs, I think I have something for you.” He dropped it, half-smoked and red-tipped on the concrete floor, and put it out with his shoe.