Weapons of choice

"Not much caffe to be had in Los Angeles, I'm afraid, Admiral. Not that you'd want to drink what they do have, anyway. But, yes, a stroll would be nice. And I'm a little hungry, too. Just let me get my pants on. With pants comes dignity, yes?"

The old man shuffled back into the room, which Kolhammer could see was fogged up with smoke from his pipe. He and Agent Flint stared at the walls while Einstein wrestled himself into a pair of brown corduroy trousers and pulled on a pair of slippers before joining them in the hallway. "I have been using your superb electric book, Admiral. Amazing. Simply amazing."

"We thought you'd like it. Did you see yourself in the movie we saved on there, Insignificance?"

Einstein roared with laughter. "I did! I did! Who would have imagined, me with Joe DiMaggio's wife? An actress, yes, this Marilyn?"

"She will be, I suppose."

Einstein's mood sobered as they reached the elevators.

"But with such a long face, that's not what you wanted to talk about, was it?"

"No, sir. It's not. You saw the other movies?"

"From the concentration camps," said Einstein as all happiness washed out of him.

"We call them death camps," said Kolhammer.

The scientist sighed heavily. A chime sounded, and the elevator door opened. Agent Flint's eyes, which never stopped moving, swept over the man seated at the controls. Otherwise the lift was empty. He ushered in his two charges.

"Yes, I saw them," said Einstein, as they stepped in. "That's why I was playing when you knocked. I play to relax, to forget about the world."

Flint told the operator to take them to the ground floor.

"Sometimes," said Kolhammer, "it's best not to forget."

They walked in silence for a while, each man lost in his own thoughts, until the dead neon signs out on Wilshire Boulevard gave Kolhammer a split second of dizzying dislocation. In his day, the city had funded the restoration of nearly 150 neon signs along this strip in mid-Wilshire. The very same hoardings, unplugged now because of the wartime blackout, greeted him under a hot blue sky as they stepped out through the Ambassador's grand, gated entrance. Jarring the moment of deja vu, however, a yellow streetcar went rattling by, full of Angelenos on their way downtown. Gone were the Koreans and Taiwanese. Replacing them was a homogenous population of middle-class whites. Gone, too, he noticed, was the brown sky and the close, sticky feel of heavily polluted air on his face.

"Are you okay, sir?" asked Agent Flint, taking Kolhammer lightly by the elbow.

"I'm sorry," he apologized. "It's just a shock, that's all."

The three men came to a halt on the side of the road. Einstein managed to appear simultaneously amused and moved by Kolhammer's obvious plight.

"You know, Admiral, your world is still here," said the scientist. He rubbed the tips of his fingers together. "It is this close, right here and now. You came here. You can get back. You have family, yes?"

Another streetcar clattered past. Old car horns blared. Wilshire looked like the venue for a vintage auto festival.

"My wife lives over in Santa Monica. Or she… well, you know."

"Are you going to be okay, sir?" asked Flint. "Would you like to go back to the lobby and sit down?"

Kolhammer drew in a long, deep breath. He could smell gasoline and exhaust fumes, but they stood out against a clear background. To his twenty-first-century sinuses, the air was mountain fresh. He gathered himself together and nodded across the street to the bizarre dome of the Brown Derby Restaurant.

"Is that the original Brown Derby?" he asked.

Neither Flint nor Einstein knew.

"Is it supposed to be a hat?" asked Einstein.

"Well, the sign says EAT IN THE HAT. If you're hungry, Professor, we could get a light lunch over there. They might've invented the Cobb salad by now. They're the guys who came up with it in the first place."

As they crossed the street, Kolhammer could have sworn he caught sight of a young Ronald Reagan taking a seat in the restaurant's tree-shaded courtyard fronting on the street. He suddenly worried that this was going to be a Hollywood place, where they stood no chance of gaining entry. Einstein might even suffer from some egregious episode of discrimination-being Jewish, and wearing slippers as he was.

He needn't have bothered himself over it. Agent Flint pushed through a small group of young women hanging around the front steps, clutching autograph books and occasionally standing on tiptoe as they tried to peer in through the swinging doors. The girls ignored Kolhammer, but a couple of them gave Einstein a quizzical look as he followed the admiral inside.