Three Days to Never (11 page)

He looked up desperately, and clearly noticed the old man in the green jacket. Marrity opened his mouth as if to say something to him, then just closed his eyes and jerked his fists up again. Malk heard the girl's teeth snap shut as the thrust rocked her head back.

Four minutes until brain damage, Malk thought. How quickly can the paramedics get here?

He noted that everyone in the restaurant seemed to have
crowded in the doorway to watch. A distraction not to be wasted, he thought. Choose your moment.

M
arrity could only think of how humiliated Daphne must be by this public spectacle. He would not permit himself to imagine that she might die here.

He loosened his cramped hands and reached forward to roll her head back; she was unconscious now, her face white, her lips and half-closed eyelids shadowed with a bluish tint. Of course she was not breathing.

The Heimlich maneuver was not working, would not work; it dawned on him finally that very soon he would be uselessly pummeling a limp corpse. “Dammit, Daphne,” he whispered, “why couldn't you
chew
?”

He looked up at his father. The old man was nodding in evident sympathy.

Marrity lifted Daphne's limp body off his lap and laid her face-up on the black-and-red linoleum.

“A sharp knife,” he said, holding out his right hand. “Quick!”

The older of the two men who had been at the nearest table flicked open a flat stainless-steel pocketknife and slapped the grip into Marrity's hand.

Marrity's father stepped forward. “No, Frank!” he shouted. “You'll kill her! Somebody stop him!”

The man who had given Marrity the knife stood up and threw an arm across the old man's chest, and one of the college boys from the farther booth gripped his upper arm.

“It's all he can do,” the boy said.

“Hold him,” said the man who had provided the knife, and then he pushed his way through the crowd in the doorway.

One of the old women in the north-wall booth shouted something in German, and was shushed by her companions; and peripherally Marrity was aware that his father was struggling very hard with the college boys, who were holding him back; but Marrity's attention was fixed on Daphne.

He pushed her chin up and back, then felt her throat. The
larynx muscles were convulsing weakly under his hand, and he felt for the rings of cartilage in her throat.

The younger man from the nearest table had crouched beside him and was holding something in Marrity's field of vision—it was the clear barrel of a Bic pen, with the ink tube pulled out. Marrity nodded, sweat dripping from his face onto Daphne's blouse.

His heart was pounding so hard that he was twitching with it.

Gripping the knife by the blade like a pencil so that only three-quarters of an inch of steel protruded below his thumb, Marrity pushed the point of it into Daphne's throat below the thyroid cartilage, denting the skin and then, as he despairingly pushed harder, puncturing it.

A bloody spray followed the knife blade when he pulled it out, and he snatched the Bic pen barrel from the outstretched hand and pushed it into the makeshift incision.

Air whistled out through the clear plastic tube that now stood up out of Daphne's throat like a dart, and Marrity held the tube in place with his trembling thumb and forefinger.

“Goddammit, stop him!” roared his father.

“Shut up, man,” said somebody else. “It's working.”

Now air was being sucked into the tube, and a moment later Daphne's legs shifted on the floor and her hands flexed.

The man crouched beside Marrity gave one bark of tense laughter. “You've saved her,” he said.

Daphne's eyes fluttered open.

“Don't move, Daph,” Marrity said, feeling the smile tugging at his face. “You're fine, just lie still.” He sat down more comfortably next to her on the floor.

She managed a slight nod. Her hands floated up toward her throat, but Marrity pushed them back with his free hand. “Don't move, kid, just lie still. Trust me.”

She nodded again, and even managed a flickering, uncertain smile, and relaxed. As Marrity watched, the healthy pink color was returning to her face like sunlight filling in shadow.

Marrity glanced at the man beside him; he looked to be in his late twenties, with a dark brush cut, and he needed a shave; he wore a gray linen sport coat with no tie.

“Th-thank you,” Marrity said. His hands were trembling and his ears were ringing. He leaned back carefully against a table leg.

“My pleasure,” the young man said. “Keep the pen.”

Marrity nodded, then tried with one hand to wipe the blade of the knife off on his shirt. The man gently took the knife from Marrity's shaking hands.

“Give that back to your friend,” Marrity said.

“Right.”

Marrity looked up at his father, who was still gaping down at Daphne in dismay. “She's
breathing,
” Marrity told him. He nodded toward the tube he was still holding in Daphne's throat. “That's a—a tracheotomy.”

“I know,” the old man said. “I've done one. The results were bad.” He blinked a couple of times. “I told you not to have Italian, didn't I?”

“Yes.” I think he's more upset by this than Daphne is, Marrity thought. “We should have listened to you.”

Three men in white paramedics' uniforms shouldered through the front door and into the dining room now, one of them rolling a folded gurney and the other two carrying aluminum cases and a green oxygen cylinder; they visibly relaxed when they took in the scene, but one of them crouched by Daphne, murmuring reassurances as he shined a penlight into one of her eyes and then the other, while another man was unstringing an IV bag and line from one of the cases. The third man was talking into a radio.

The man who was crouched on the floor gently opened Daphne's mouth and peered down her throat with his light, then shook his head. “They better get it out in ER.” He looked over at Marrity. “You okay?”

“Sure,” Marrity said. He took a deep breath and let it out. “Tired.”

“How long was she unconscious?”

“Not more than a minute,” Marrity said.

“How old is she?”

“Twelve.”

“Is she on any medications, or allergic to any?”

“No, and no.”

“Okay, we'll get an IV going, mainly to get some glucose into her, and we'll run her to St. Bernardine's to get the blockage out and suture her throat. Probably they'll keep her overnight, observation and antibiotics. But this looks good. Who did the tracheotomy?”

“I did,” said Marrity.

“You do good work.”

“That's what they told me too,” muttered Marrity's father.

“I think dinner's off, tomorrow,” Marrity told him.

S
tanding on the shaded sidewalk outside the restaurant, old Derek Marrity watched the paramedics slide the folding stainless-steel gurney with Daphne on it into the back of their white-and-red van, and then Frank Marrity climbed in the back too. A moment later the doors had been slammed shut and the ambulance van had steered out into the sunlight and sped away down Base Line Street to the east, its lights flashing.

The old man was still dizzy, and his ears were still ringing. He had been staring at Frank Marrity's haggard face so intently that now he could still see the afterimage of the straight jaw, the squinting eyes, the compressed mouth.

He looks just like you,
Daphne had said.

“What was that you gave him, when he cut her throat?” said an overweight old woman standing behind him; he turned, but saw that she was speaking to the younger man who had been sitting at the table nearest Marrity's booth. He had been with another man, who had disappeared while Daphne was choking.

“A Bic pen,” the man said, “with the ink cartridge taken out of it.”

“Not very sterile,” said Derek Marrity.

“Least of the worries, at that point,” the man said shortly. “He's her father?”

“Yes.” Yes, Derek Marrity thought,
he's
her father. I'm a stranger in this picture, soon to disappear. An ineffective, useless stranger, as it turns out.

The young man didn't say anything, just kept looking at Derek Marrity; but Marrity wouldn't fall for that old cop trick of prompting a fuller answer by appearing to expect it. This guy's tipped his hand right here, the old man thought with nervous defiance; he and the guy he was with are from one of the secret outfits, the Mossad, the NSA, whoever, whoever. But what could I tell any of them now? I have no idea at all.

They'll probably follow me. They've probably already bugged the Rambler, with some clunky “state-of-the-art” devices.

His smile was brief and twitchy as he imagined big metal boxes with lights on them, and antennae like sections of polished rebar.
Man from U.N.C.L.E.
stuff.

He found that he was limping rapidly east down the sunny Base Line Street sidewalk, past the grand yellow stucco arch of a car-repair garage and then a couple of faded bungalow-style houses looking shackled behind chain-link fencing and black iron window bars, and he couldn't remember how he had left the young spy and the fat old woman. The Rambler was parked on a side street up ahead; he had stashed a fifth of vodka under the seat, and he would need a bit of its vitamin supplement before he considered what to do now, today having gone so badly wrong. Frank and Daphne must think I'm crazy now, he thought.

Soon to disappear,
he thought again.

When he had stepped barefoot out of the Kaleidoscope Shed yesterday, a good hour before Frank and Daphne had arrived, he had seen naked infants lying among the tall weeds, their waving pink limbs stark against the black dirt and the green stalks; the dozen?—half dozen?—tiny wailing forms had flickered out of existence when he had blinked at them in astonishment.

Delirium tremens, he thought; still mild, really. But in fact we're all just sparks arcing across the vacuum left by God when He withdrew, none of us any more substantial than those alcohol-conjured infants. What's one wasted life?

He's her father.
Yes. Not me, damn my soul, not me. I had a daughter once, but she died. She will not come back to life. She will
not,
and I mustn't imagine anymore that she could.

I have…
another
daughter.
She'll
grow up, God help her, and God help me.

Through his mind flickered the quickly dismissed image of a dark-haired little girl frowning in concentration over a book; and then, just as quickly dismissed, another image: of a drunken woman resolutely climbing into the driver's seat of a Ford LTD and slamming the door.

He turned right at the next street, his bad leg aching now, and he could see the green Rambler parked in the shade of a pepper tree at the curb ahead of him—but he saw it blurrily, through tears.

By the rivers of Babylon,
he thought,
I sat down, yea, weeping again the King my father's wrack.

But he knew he was weeping for Daphne.

B
ozzaris watched the old man hobble away, reflecting that he hadn't seemed quite sane. But Lepidopt had
sayanim
to follow him; any of the people on the street now might be one of them.

He turned to the old woman. “You said something in German, inside. Are you German?”

The question seemed to nettle her. “My mother was German,” she said. “That was part of a prayer she used to say.”

Bozzaris was about to ask her what it meant, but her two companions came bustling and chattering out of the restaurant then, and a moment later a boxy white Dial-A-Ride bus pulled up at the curb, and when the doors had hissed open the three of them clambered aboard.

Bozzaris waved cheerfully at the bus's opaque tinted glass, then turned to go back into the restaurant; but Malk stepped out onto the pavement and told him, “Lunch hour's over. To hell with Bailey.”

“Right,” said Bozzaris, falling into step beside the older man as he walked around the west corner to the parking lot. They both squinted in the direct sunlight.

Quietly, Malk told him, “Grab the bag by the Dumpster outside the back door; you'll probably have to jump a fence, but
do
it. I took the beer bottles from the old guy's table, replaced them with a couple of bottles from another table. Fingerprints.”

“Got you.”

P
aul Golze was driving the Dial-A-Ride bus, and Charlotte Sinclair was sitting on the corrugated rubber floor in the back.

“That guy met up with the one he was with before,” she said as the van speeded up, “and they're walking out to the parking lot, talking—and I'm out of range.”

“Okay,” Golze said. “We'll play the tapes soon,” he went on, scowling into the rearview mirror, “but Tina, why did you speak German?”

Tina Iyana-Kurtycz closed her eyes and shook her head. “How should I know? I don't even know German.”

“Schneid mal die Kehle auf,”
repeated the gaunt woman in the seat next to her, staring out the window.

“What you said means ‘Cut open her throat,'” Golze said. “It was involuntary, yes?”

“Yes. I wouldn't
voluntarily
interfere in a, an area of measurement.”

Golze seemed almost pleased. He looked down and clenched one fist in front of his chest, where only Charlotte could see, if she happened to be paying attention to him.

W
hile Daphne was in surgery, Marrity blundered outside for a much needed cigarette. The glow of self-satisfaction at having saved her life was beginning to fade into shadows of worry. What if she does this
again
? he asked himself as he plodded across the glossy brown-tile floor of the hospital lobby to the electric-eye doors.

Should I start making sure I've always got a knife and a Bic pen on me? Give the sitter instructions on how to do a tracheotomy?

He was only aware of how chilly the hospital air was when the doors swung open and he stepped out into the the dry, sage-scented breeze. I wonder if I can go back to work tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow is Modern Novel, and I should prepare a lecture tonight. My briefcase is in the truck at the Alfredo's parking lot—I'll take a cab there, drive the truck back, and then put the lecture together in the lobby here.

A slim, dark-haired woman in sunglasses was standing by the planter to the left of the door, and as he fumbled a pack
of Dunhill cigarettes out of his coat pocket, she dropped a smoking cigarette butt onto the pavement and stepped on it and then took a pack of Dunhills out of her black leather purse.

“If they're going to kill us, we may as well smoke the best, right?” he said, holding up his pack.

She frowned at him, then tucked her own pack back into her purse and hurried past him into the lobby.

“Good, Frank, good,” he muttered to himself, feeling his face heat up. “Always break the ice with a remark about dying. Especially to somebody standing in front of a hospital.” But maybe she didn't speak English. He noticed half a dozen identical flattened cigarette butts on the pavement where she'd been standing.

He lit a cigarette and took a deep drag on it, then exhaled and leaned back against the pebbled-stone planter. Passing cars glinted in the afternoon sun on Twenty-first Street just beyond the iron fence at the edge of the hospital lawn, and he envied the drivers whatever concerns were theirs.

She's just got to be meticulous about chewing everything very thoroughly, he thought. Every swallow should be a careful, conscious action. Probably after this she won't even need reminding. I'm glad we painted her bedroom today. I wonder what that damned movie was, and why my father seemed to be interested in it.

And why was he at Alfredo's today? He must have followed us. That's unpleasant. I think we'd be better off having no further contact with him; to hell with why he visited Einstein in '55. Maybe the letters will give me a clue, before I sell them.

“I'm sorry,” said a woman's voice behind him; he turned and saw that it was the woman in the sunglasses.

I
was distracted,” said Charlotte Sinclair. “You were talking about the cigarettes. You're right, we may as well kill ourselves with the best.”

So far so good, she thought, and she checked herself out
through Francis Marrity's eyes: black jeans, loose burgundy short-sleeved blouse, and dark brown hair pulled back in a ponytail; she noted a strand of stray hair dangling above one eyebrow and smoothed it back.

They were alone on this breezy strip of shaded sidewalk, and she wished she could see Marrity's face.

“That was my last, in fact,” she added, assessing her rueful smile.

“Would you like one of mine?” he said, and he held his pack out in front of himself.

“Thanks,” she said, watching her own fingers to guide them as she reached out and picked a cigarette from the pack. “I owe you.”

Denis Rascasse's Vespers research gang had reported that Marrity smoked Dunhills, so they had found a liquor store that carried the British cigarettes; on the drive here one of the Vespers men had broken several of the cigarettes and lit them and instantly ground them out, so that Charlotte could scatter the butts around where she'd stand.

Marrity's field of vision shifted from her to the lawn, so she said, “Are you visiting somebody?”

Again she saw herself in his vision. “Yes, my daughter's having her throat stitched up. Uh—tracheotomy.” He paused, and then his left hand was holding out his wallet, tilted toward her. “Daphne,” he said. “She's twelve.”

Apparently he was showing Charlotte a photograph of his daughter. She took off her sunglasses and lowered her eyes until she seemed to be staring at the wallet. “Very pretty girl,” Charlotte said.

“Yes.” Marrity glanced at the picture himself before putting the wallet away.

She looks like I used to,
Charlotte thought, and then thrust the thought away.

After a pause in which he might have smiled, Marrity went on, “You too? I mean, not a daughter with a tracheotomy—”

“A neighbor of mine. They won't let me see her yet, but—‘We also serve who only stand and wait.'”

”‘ When I consider how my light is spent,'” Marrity said,
quoting the beginning of the poem, “'ere half my days in this dark world and wide—”

This one she hadn't been prompted with on the drive over here; it was Milton's sonnet “On His Blindness,” and years ago she had got someone to read it onto a tape and had memorized it. “‘And that one Talent which is death to hide, lodged with me useless,'” she said, keeping the usual bitterness out of her voice. “You don't meet a lot of Milton fans in San Bernardino.”

“My excuse is that I teach literature at Redlands.”

“Ah. I was a career English major. I quote poetry the way Christians quote the Bible.” Time for one of the Housman bits she'd been primed with: “‘And starry darkness paces the land from sea to sea, and blots the foolish faces of my poor friends and me.'” That was adequately placed, she thought, and Rascasse said it was underlined in Marrity's copy.

“Housman!” she heard him exclaim. “My favorite! My name's Frank Marrity. And you are…?”

“Libra Nosamalo Morrison.” She held out her right hand. “My parents were Catholic, with an odd sense of humor.”

“
Libera nos a malo,
deliver us from evil.” She watched him reach out and take her hand. “Well, it's unforgettable.”

She smiled, admiring her white teeth.

“I've got to say I'll be ready for a drink,” she said, “not too long after the sun goes down.” She leaned back against the planter and closed her eyelids to check the eyeshadow through Marrity's gaze. It looked fine, and she raised her eyelids and swiveled the plastic eyes until Marrity saw the carbon pupils seeming to look straight at him. “A scotch on the rocks—Laphroaig, ideally.”

He let go of her hand, and his voice was cautious when he said, “Yes, that's good scotch. I'd love to join you, but I can't.”

Charlotte wished someone would walk by so that she could see Marrity's face—were his eyebrows up in surprise? lowered in a suspicious frown?—for she was suddenly sure that she had pushed it too far. You were doing fine without the Laphroaig, she told herself furiously; just because Rascasse's crew found several bottles of it in Marrity's cupboard
didn't mean you had to go and mention it right away. What must Rascasse be thinking, listening to the transmission of this conversation?

She found that she was reflexively thinking of the song “Bye Bye Blackbird”—
no one here can love or understand me
—and she recalled that it had been her old eavesdropper-warning signal in the missile-silo days of her childhood. But of course Marrity doesn't even know that the song was a code, she thought; and why should I want to
warn
Marrity, anyway?

She put her sunglasses back on.

“Another time?” she asked, watching her face to be sure she kept the expression cheerful. “I'd trust my phone number to anybody who knows Milton and Housman.”

“Yes, thanks. I just can't really think about anything but my daughter right now.”

“Of course.” By touch she found a card in her purse, and held it out to him. She read it through his eyes:
Libra Nosamalo Morrison, Veterinary Medicine, (909) JKL-HYDE.

“A Stevenson fan too,” she heard him say.

The hastily printed card seemed idiotically clumsy now. “Well,” she stammered, “like Heckle and Jeckle—those crows, in the cartoons—and hide—”

“And I bet you specialize in cats.” The card disappeared from his view, and she hoped he had put it in his pocket and not just dropped it. “I'd better go back and see if she's out of surgery yet,” he said. “It's been nice meeting you, uh, Libra!”

“You too, Frank! Give me a call!”

His view was of the opening doors now, and the reception desk and gift-shop counter in the lobby; she turned away, so that when he looked back at her he wouldn't hesitate to stare; but he looked only straight ahead, at the corridor leading to the elevators.

When he had rounded the corner and pushed one of the elevator buttons, she raised her right hand, wide open, and heard a car accelerating toward the curb where she stood.

“I'm a viewer, not a spy,” she muttered into the microphone at her throat.

The driver of the car that had now stopped in front of her
craned his neck to peer into the rearview mirror, and she saw it was Rascasse himself.

She groped till she felt the door, then found the handle and opened it.

“You knew his birth date too,” said Rascasse. “Why did you not tell him you had the same birthday? You could have shouted it after him, as he was leaving.” His French accent was more pronounced when he was angry, and higher in pitch. Charlotte could imagine it was a woman speaking.

“So what do we do now,” she asked dully as she pulled the door closed.

“If this…debacle just now was enough to let him know somebody's trying to approach him covertly, probably we will have to kill him, and then get somebody less clumsy to approach Moira and Bennett Bradley, and the daughter.”

She looks like I used to,
thought Charlotte again.

She settled back in the seat and fastened the shoulder strap. It was good meeting you, Frank, she thought as Rascasse steered the car out of the hospital driveway and clicked the turn-signal lever for a right turn onto Waterman. You seem like a good man, a widower doing his best with a young daughter—you even saved her life today!—and you're the first guy I've met who's known what the Milton line was from. But I'm afraid I've killed you by mentioning your favorite scotch.

And I won't try to stop it.
I'm
not a good person, you see. I used to be, and soon—if Rascasse succeeds in this and keeps his promises—I'll get another chance to be one, starting over again.

I'll get a better life then; or she will, anyway—the girl I used to be, my “little daughter,” who looks so much like your Daphne.
I have done nothing but in care of thee.
And she won't know about any of this terrible stuff I do to get it for her. And she won't be blind. She won't be blind.

O
ren Lepidopt stood on the carpet in Frank Marrity's now dark living room, looking around at the shapes that were the table and the television and the rows of shelved
books whose titles he couldn't read now. He had studied them when there had still been light, though—lots of Stevenson and the Brontës and Trollope in this room, while poetry and drama and encyclopedias lined the shelves that hung above head height up the hall, and history and philosophy and modern novels filled the shelves in the uphill living room. Poetry, history, and philosophy were in chronological order, novels alphabetical.

The girl's room had been painted today—the bed had been moved to the center of the linoleum floor, and a little desk and a couple of bookcases had been shoved up against it, with a rolled-up rug and a couple of wicker baskets stacked right on the bed, everything covered by a brown paper drop cloth. When he had peered under it, Lepidopt had seen
The Wind in the Willows
and
Watership Down
among the books in one of the bookcases; the baskets contained recent rock tapes and albums, with a lot of Queen. A black shellac jewelry box with blue-velvet-covered dividers and slits for rings held two gold bracelets, some earrings, and a wedding ring—presumably her mother's.

Lepidopt thought of his son's disorderly room, in their apartment on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv. Louis was only a year younger than Daphne, and he liked Queen too. Lepidopt's wife, Deborah, had been uneasy about the fact that the group's lead singer appeared to be a homosexual, but young Louis already liked girls. Lepidopt wondered if the two children would be friends, if they could impossibly meet; surely they would be; surely Daphne would like the curly-haired Jewish boy with his father's intense brown eyes.

S
tanding in the dark living room now, Lepidopt wondered if the house was at all psychically flexed by his presence, his inappropriateness. Certainly he was aware of it, standing here with latex gloves on his hands, a Polaroid camera around his neck and a Beretta automatic tucked into the back of his pants.

Twice before in his career he had broken into people's
houses when they were absent, and again he felt the sense that the house was poised, like a tennis player who has just sent the ball flying back over the net and is catching his balance to see how it will return; Lepidopt imagined he could hear echoes of the last conversations that had taken place here, and could nearly hear the tones of the next to come.

Being alone in a stranger's house didn't so much convey an acquaintance with the absent owner as give a wide-angle snapshot. Marrity smoked Balkan Sobranie number 759 pipe tobacco, which wasn't the usual sweet-smelling stuff, but Lepidopt didn't know if he was one of those pipe smokers who always had the thing in his mouth and talked around the stem, or one of the ones who was always fiddling with it in his hands, tamping it and relighting it and shoving a pipe cleaner down it; they were different sorts of men. Marrity apparently drank single-malt scotch and Southern Comfort, but Lepidopt couldn't guess, within a very wide range, what sort of drinker he was.