Three Days to Never (15 page)

“Does paranormal mean witchy?” asked Daphne.

“Yes,” said Lepidopt. He kept his eyes on Daphne, but she was looking at her father.

C
an you,” said Marrity, “make it stop?”

“If we can reproduce Einstein's work, I believe we can, yes. We can save—we can make this intrusion stop now, before it—goes any further.”

Marrity was sure the man was being euphemistic because Daphne was listening.
We can save your daughter's life,
he had probably been going to say; or at least,
your daughter's sanity.
And
before it's too late.

“I may have to—leave, abruptly,” Jackson was saying now, and he pulled a business card out of his pants pocket. “Take this, and call us if you think of anything later, or—need anything.”

Marrity took it—the only thing printed on it on either side was an 800 telephone number. He tucked it into his shirt pocket. “Do you speak German?” Marrity asked.

“Yes.”

“What was the German thing the cartoon said, at the end?”

The NSA man appeared to consider not answering; then he said, “It meant ‘Cut open her throat.'”

Daphne touched the stitches below her chin. “Again?” she whispered.

“No,” said Jackson, “that was an echo of something it said this afternoon, when you were choking.”

“An old woman said it,” said Marrity, “in the restaurant. Were you there? What is all this? Was the old woman that thing on the TV? Tell me what's going on.”

“I can't, until I know what's
gone
on.
Did
you have some kind of intrusion yesterday afternoon?”

“Yes,” whispered Daphne.

“Yes,” echoed Marrity. He rubbed his eyes. “Did you
have a woman approach me, a couple of hours ago? Primed with…knowledge of my tastes in books and liquor, to question me?”

“No,” said the NSA man. “Where did this happen?”

“Outside St. Bernardine's, the first hospital we were at. She even smoked the same cigarettes I do.”

“What did she look like?”

“Audrey Hepburn.” He realized that he was describing her more to Daphne than to Jackson; they had watched
Breakfast at Tiffany's
not long ago. “Slender, that is, with dark brown hair in a ponytail. Sunglasses. Burgundy shirt, black jeans. About thirty.”

“You have a pen and paper,” said Jackson. “Let's conduct this conversation in writing, shall we?”

“You mean—not out loud,” said Marrity.

“Right. I find it's easier to keep track of topics that way.”

Marrity was surprised to see Jackson hurriedly twist a pair of earplugs into his ears. But probably they're miniature spy speakers, he told himself.

Marrity crossed to Daphne's table and tore off the top sheet of the pad and put it in his pocket.

R
ascasse was snapping the fingers of his free hand as he listened to the scrambler telephone. He stopped in order to put his hand over the mouthpiece and bark at the driver, “
Ralentissez,
we are too late.” The roaring of the bus's engine went down in pitch.

Finally he replaced the receiver in its box. To Golze, he said, “We should have put Charlotte at the second hospital, compromised though she was. Shaved her head and given her a fake mustache. Not wasted her on foolish Bradley.”

“What happened?”

“An NSA man, or some fellow claiming to be of the NSA, talked to Marrity and the daughter at the hospital.”

He sighed and dragged his fingers across his scalp, making his close-cropped white hair even spikier. “The dybbuk appeared on the TV set in her
chambre,
her
room,
” Rascasse went on, “trying to get her to let it into her mind. The NSA fellow and her father stopped her from consenting. An NSA
man, knowing about dybbuks! We'll be getting a fax of the transcription of their talk, but Marrity mentioned Einstein, and the NSA man gave him a bunch of nonsense about wanting Einstein's work in order to talk to dead people. He hinted that Marrity's daughter is in big danger if Marrity doesn't cooperate.”

“Well,” said Golze, “she would be.”

“He'd have dropped the hint in any case, to open Marrity up. And Marrity said he and his daughter experienced some kind of ‘intrusion' yesterday at four-fifteen, which is precisely when we registered the Chaplin device as having been activated.”

Rascasse had been looking at Golze, but now Charlotte saw her own face swing into his view. “
Then
Marrity asked if the NSA had set a
woman
onto him, primed with his tastes in books and liquor!” He paused, no doubt making some sort of face. “And he gave the fellow a good description of you too. And
then
the NSA man said they should conduct the rest of their question-and-answer session in writing! All we got was the sound of a pen scratching on paper! Luckily Marrity made the man leave after about five minutes. We should have had you in the room next to the girl's.”

“True,” said Charlotte in a level tone. She was one of the very few remote viewers who could read text while looking out of someone else's eyes—possibly because if she couldn't read that way, she wouldn't be able to read anything at all.

The scrambler phone buzzed, and Rascasse opened the case again and lifted the receiver. After thirty seconds he said, “'Kay.” He replaced the receiver and shut the case.

“The San Diego detective who called the Shasta hospital yesterday is dead,” he told Golze and Charlotte. “Before he died, our people asked him who told him to track down Lisa Marrity. The detective, who was Jewish, said he was doing a favor for a friend—and under duress admitted that he believed his friend was with the Mossad.”

Beside Charlotte, Golze gulped audibly. “Then that wasn't an NSA man in the girl's hospital room—he didn't sound like NSA, what with the dybbuk and all.” Behind the
disordered tangle of his black hair, his glasses winked in the overhead light. “Could the Mossad be on to
us, here,
because of the New Jersey branch's pass at the Tel Aviv mainframe on Saturday?”

“They're here for the same reason we are,” said Rascasse. “They want the thing Lieserl Maric had.”

After a moment of bafflement, Charlotte remembered that Lieserl Maric was Lisa Marrity's real, Serbian name.

“We've got to get the thing, both pieces of it, and close this down,” said Rascasse. “We're on alien turf here, our strength is all in Europe. This is still Einstein's defended exile island. Tomorrow,” he said, staring at Charlotte so that she had a good view of her own face, “early morning, you kill Marrity. Gunshot.”

Charlotte watched her eyebrows and mouth, keeping them in straight lines.

“He's the Mossad's source now,” Rascasse went on, “and we don't want them to get any more out of him than they did tonight. This will isolate the daughter, and we might be able to work on her with help from the dybbuk and our
tête
friend in the cabinet.”

Her face swung out of Rascasse's view as he looked out the window at cars in other lanes. “You've been due to kill someone for a while, you know, Charlotte,” Rascasse went on, not unkindly. “Can't get favors from the Devil unless you do some favors for him.”

“Okay,” she said flatly. She thought about her younger self, the pre-1978 Charlotte who could still see.
I have done nothing but in care of thee,
she thought forlornly.

“Paul,” Rascasse went on to Golze, “tell the field men to bring in that old man who has been driving the green Rambler. He hasn't done anything worth watching yet, but we need to prevent the Mossad from getting hold of him too. And I think we need to take another look at the Einstein cluster on the freeway.”

Charlotte was estimating how many steps it would take her to get to her coat and purse at the back of the bus, and the bottle of Wild Turkey.

“The freeway” was the Vespers term for the five-dimensional state outside of time, the region where the ghosts existed and where a person's whole lifetime could supposedly be seen as something like a long rope curling through a vacuum abyss; though sometimes they described the lifetimes as sparks arcing across a vast gap, or as standing waves ringing some inconceivable nucleus.

From any point on a person's lifeline, such as right now, the person's future was contained in an invisible cone expanding away forward in time. Like everybody, the Vespers could largely control their futures; but Charlotte knew that they hoped to work in the other direction too, so that even their pasts would be expanding cones of changeable possibilities, opening out backward.

Charlotte needed it to be true.

They were hardly the first natural philosophers to hope to do this—the Holy Grail was a picture of their ambition: a chalice made of two opposite-facing cones, one opening upward and the other opening downward.

Already they could project their astral awarenesses “onto the freeway,” out into the bigger space of the fifth dimension, but they could only hang in one place out there and look around. They couldn't do anything that could by analogy be called moving. And they could do even just this much only by summoning the beings that existed in that region, and…
paying
them.

With the device Lieserl Maric had possessed, they believed they would be able to
travel
through the fifth dimension, into the past and the future—and they would probably be able to dispense with the diabolical escorts.

And they would be able to change the past, with surgical precision.

Right now the Vespers were pretty sure they knew how to “short out” a person's lifeline, how to make someone never have existed. Einstein had supposedly left a device in a tower in Palm Springs that could delete a person's lifeline from the universe, but among the Vespers it was generally
believed that the device had never been used since Einstein created it in 1932.

They couldn't be certain, because in the resulting world—the world in which the shorted-out person had never existed—only the person who had performed the “erasure” would have any memory of the erased person or the world that had included him or her. And so far no one had claimed to have done it.

Charlotte had heard Golze joke about a person known as Nobodaddy, who was evidently the mythical founder of the Vespers. According to the story, at some point the Vespers had shorted out the founder's lifeline, erasing him from the memories of everyone in the world except the one person who had done the erasure, and leaving the Vespers as an organization that nobody had founded.

“We should call it a tollway, not the freeway,” said Rascasse through closed teeth. “Fred!” he called to the driver. “Pull over when you see somebody walking alone—tell him you need to know how to get to the 210 freeway. Get the person to come aboard the bus to show you on your map. Charlotte can do a scan to make sure nobody's watching, and when she says go, we'll subdue the person.”

Charlotte could see her own face squarely in the center of Golze's vision; probably he was smiling at her. “People who would never get in a stranger's car will get into a bus,” he said. “Everybody trusts bus drivers.”

W
hat intrusion? yesterday

my daughter watched a video, an old b&w—I was in other room—reading d'ter's mind—and the video scared her so bad that she set the VCR & her bedroom on fire. Just with her mind, no matches

wheres the video from? my grandmother's house, labeled
Pee-wees Big Adv'ture,
but only first 5 min were Pee-wee—after, this b&w. Very old movie, a silent—something about a woman eating the brains out of a bald guy's head

by the ocean?

Dunno—ask her?

later—video where now?

burned up

G'mother Lisa Marrity?

yes

what did she know about Einstein?

he was her father. She had letters from him letters where now? stashed. I cn make copies need them now. tomorrow. Bank safe deposit

What d u know about Einstein & yr g'mother? & Chaplin?

Einstein, nada, she ne'r mentioned him. Said she knew Chap in 30s, went t Switzerland in 77 after he died

G'ma ever refer to electric machine she &/or Einstein made?

No

Where was yr g'mother last, in Calif?

? Airport, I guess?

Any certain reason to think so?

She took cab. Card here. Who was the woman who talked t me?—books, liquor, cig'ts?

Not sure. Don't talk to her. Meet tomorrow—here, noon? We'll compensate for time off work.

——ok

 

“Well,” said Malk, slapping the sheet of paper onto the wooden table, “he didn't put those letters in any safe-deposit box. No bank was open yesterday, and we followed him all day today.”

“We followed him yesterday,” said Bozzaris. “It's Tuesday now.” He was crouched on the floor at the shadowed opposite end of the little twelve-sided motel room, dialing the telephone that was mounted on the low vertical section of the white wall; above elbow height the walls slanted inward to a flat ceiling panel.

The ringer coil and clapper had been taken out of the telephone, and the two brass bells themselves had been carefully wrapped in tissue paper and stashed in separate places. Lepidopt wasn't worried about the cellular phone, which Marrity would reach if he called the number on the card Lepidopt had given him—the premonition had palpably
been about telephone bells, not the electronic tone of a Motorola cellular phone.

“The letters must be at his house,” said Malk. “We could go look for them right now.”

“No,” said Lepidopt, who was sitting on the bed. “There's a thousand places in that house to hide letters; and he's being cooperative, considering his crash recruitment. Incidentally, Bert, I want you to go through his trash cans, before dawn, and find that burned-up VCR and videocassette.”

“Okay. Does he believe his daughter's in big danger, and that you can save her?”

“Partly. Mostly.”

“Odd that he wouldn't give you the letters right away. Why does he want to make copies of them?”

“So he can sell the originals, I imagine,” said Lepidopt. If it were my son who was in danger, he thought, I would not be thinking first of making money from selling the Einstein letters.

It's afternoon in Tel Aviv right now, he thought; Louis is probably with Deborah, maybe having lunch. If I were there he would want to go to Burger Ranch for lunch, and get one of those disgusting Spanish burgers, with the watery tomato sauce on it.

Lepidopt remembered riding on the old Vespa scooter with Louis through the quiet evening streets of Tel Aviv, stopping to feed the many stray cats and watch lights come on behind the shutters and awnings and planter boxes that residents had hung all over the balconies of the 1920s Bauhaus apartment buildings, breaking up and humanizing the once stark architectural lines.

He pushed the tormenting thoughts away.

Lepidopt and Malk and Bozzaris were in one of the tepee rooms of the Wigwam Motel in San Bernardino, on what had been Route 66 until two years ago but was only Foothill Boulevard now. The neighborhood, right across the highway from the train yards and the towering Santa Fe smokestack, had already begun to deteriorate. Luckily the Wigwam Motel was still in business—nineteen conical cement tepees
arranged irregularly across three weedy acres, each tepee twenty feet tall and painted white with a pastel zigzag line around the middle. To see their cars, Lepidopt would have to get down on his hands and knees and peer out through one of the two diamond-shaped windows.

The safe-house apartments were more conveniently located, and had garages and closets, and were certainly much
bigger,
but these concrete tepees, with steel-pipe “lodge poles” crossed at the narrow top, had the virtue of being largely free of right angles—a hostile remote viewer would find it difficult to get preliminary reference bearings.

And Lepidopt was in no danger from telephones in nearby rooms!

“My
sayan
is dead,” said Bozzaris harshly, hanging up the telephone. “The detective in San Diego. The police down there found his body an hour ago. Apparently he was tortured.”

Lepidopt's face was cold. Another
sayan
dead, he thought. “How could our, our
adversaries
have found out about him?” he asked.

“He called the LAPD about Lisa Marrity yesterday,” said Bozzaris. “And then he called the hospital in Shasta. Probably the adversaries were monitoring calls to the hospital. Fuck.” He was still crouched beside the telephone, his head lowered and a lock of his black hair hanging across his face.

Malk shifted in his chair at the little table. “You figure the ‘adversaries' is the crowd with the dark-haired sunglasses girl?”

“For now I figure that.” Lepidopt stood up from the bed and leaned against the slanted wall beside the front door. He dug a pack of Camels out of his pocket and shook one loose. “And clearly they're not just Einstein scholars, or Charlie Chaplin fans. We should have roped in the old guy in the Rambler when we had the chance. They're likely to get him next, whoever he is.” He struck a match and puffed rapidly on the cigarette.

Two
sayanim
dead, he thought. Sam Glatzer was a heart
attack, but this one sounds like plain execution. Tel Aviv would not be pleased—
sayanim
were sacrosanct. There would have to be retribution for this.

“Bert,” said Bozzaris, straightening up and stepping away from the wall to stretch, “at the Italian restaurant, you
did
pick up those two beer bottles from the old man's table, right? The Rambler guy?”

“Yes,” said Malk.

“Then Frank Marrity must have approached him in the restaurant, shortly after he and his daughter arrived. The fingerprints on the bottles are all Frank Marrity's.”

Lepidopt could feel the skin tighten on his face. He exhaled a stream of smoke, and then said, “For sure?”

Lepidopt's voice had been strained, and Bozzaris stared at him curiously. “Yes.”

“Bert,” said Lepidopt, feeling again the tension he had felt in the wrecked lobby of the Ambassador Hotel in Jerusalem, on the night before they had besieged the Lion's Gate in June 1967, twenty years ago now. “You've got your half of the orders?”

Malk looked startled. “Yes.”

“Haul it out.” He dug a set of car keys from his pocket and tossed them to Bozzaris. “Ernie, get the can of Play-Doh out of my car.”

Bozzaris also looked disconcerted, but only said, “Right, Oren.”

“Tel Aviv told us not to do anything,” said Malk as Bozzaris unbolted the door and stepped outside, letting in a lot of chilly night air that smelled faintly of sagebrush and diesel exhaust. Lepidopt could briefly see a diamond-shaped lozenge of yellow light from a tepee in the middle distance. “That would include reading those orders now.”

“This supersedes what Tel Aviv said.” And I'm glad it does, Lepidopt thought; I want to see what we're supposed to do, before the arrival of the Prague
katsa,
who outranks me.

“What, all our
sayanim
dying?”

“That too.”

“Does Tel Aviv know about your ‘never again' premonitions?”

Malk and Bozzaris hadn't known, until the necessity of insulating himself from all telephone bells had made Lepidopt explain it to them.

And I must not hear the name of the actor who starred in
True Grit.
Don't say it!

For members of the Halomot branch of the Mossad, they had seemed very skeptical.

“Yes,” Lepidopt answered. Tel Aviv took it seriously, he thought. Now Admoni probably intends this new
katsa
to replace me, if he didn't intend that already.

Lepidopt heard a car trunk slam shut, and then Bozzaris hurried back inside and closed and bolted the door. In his hand was a yellow can of Play-Doh with a blue plastic lid.

“Don't open it yet,” Lepidopt told him, “it starts to dry out pretty quick.” He reached into his shirt and pulled up the inch-wide steel cylinder that he always wore on a cord around his neck, while Malk was doing the same. Each of the cylinders was lathed to resemble a stack of disks, with the gaps between each precisely as wide as the disks, and the edges of the disks were visibly engraved with tiny figures.

Lepidopt held out his hand for Malk's, and Malk lifted the chain off over his head and stood up to pass it across to him.

“This is premature,” said Malk.

Lepidopt shook his head decisively. “Should have done it Sunday.”

He held the two cylinders up next to each other, with their top and bottom faces exactly parallel—the disk edges of one precisely matched the grooves of the other, and it looked as if he could have pushed them together to some extent, like meshing two combs.

“The engineering branch seems capable of precision machining, anyway,” Lepidopt said. “Let's hope they remembered to do the text in mirror image.” He pulled the cord off
over his head, untied the knot in it, and slid it out through the ring in the top of the cylinder.

Malk had sat down again and was lighting a cigarette of his own, with shaky fingers. “Even if they didn't,” he said impatiently, “there's a mirror in the bathroom.”

“True, true. Okay, Ernie,” Lepidopt told Bozzaris as he unsnapped the chain on Malk's cylinder and drew it free of the ring, “open the can and roll me out a flat sheet of the stuff.”

As Bozzaris was prying open the can's lid, Malk asked, “What's the movie, that the girl watched? That made her burn up the VCR?”

“Almost certainly it's a thing called
A Woman of the Sea,”
said Lepidopt, “filmed in 1926 by Josef von Sternberg. There were a couple of versions, and this would be the one edited by Charlie Chaplin, with scenes Chaplin shot. The brain-eating bit is supposed to have been only implied, subliminally. This Daphne is obviously a sensitive girl; and tough—
I
wouldn't want to watch it.” He looked at Malk and shrugged. “And I guess I won't. It was never shown in theaters, and Chaplin burned all the prints and negatives in '33, on June 21, the first day of summer. Three years ago there were still two people living who had seen the film, but Paul Ivano died in '84, and Georgia Hale died in '85.”

“Obviously Chaplin didn't burn every copy,” said Malk.

“True. This was certainly his own copy, secretly kept in spite of Einstein's advice.”

Bozzaris blinked at him. “Einstein said burn 'em all?”

“Right,” said Lepidopt. “This one was buried with Chaplin, but Lieserl got it anyhow. You remember Marrity said she went to Switzerland after Chaplin died. I'm sure it's gone for good now, though—Chaplin would have destroyed the original film reels when he'd got it transferred onto VHS tape.”

“Dangerous thing to leave lying around, apparently,” said Malk.

“Very.”

Malk spread his hands. “So what's it…
good
for? What
was
it good for?”

Lepidopt stared from fortyish Malk to late-twenties Bozzaris. Twentieth-century men, he thought; Jews, at least, so they know about more centuries and perspectives and philosophies than just the local ones they were born into, but still men who grew up swimming in the complacent default assumptions of the twentieth century.

“You're Halomot,” he reminded them. “Call to mind your training, call to mind some of the things you've seen.”

Bozzaris grinned. “We expect it to be weird.”

Lepidopt nodded, frowning. “Chaplin meant it to be a device that would let a person travel in space-time. It's not, quite, just by itself, but it apparently turns out to be—to have been—a useful
component
of such a device. Like a catapult to help get jets up to speed coming off an aircraft carrier. The movie by itself would get you up to speed but wouldn't provide an airplane. It—”

“Is that like a time machine?” interrupted Bozzaris.

“The complete device that Lieserl had would be more than that. But yes, it would be a time machine too.”

There was no expression on Bozzaris's face. “You mean like so a person could go into the future or the past.”

“Yes,” said Lepidopt levelly, “and change things. In 1928 Einstein built the prototype, which could only travel up and down, to points in the operator's future and past, not sideways to points outside of his future and past. And it was primitive—apparently Einstein almost killed himself when he used it in 1928—but over the years Lieserl added expansions and improvements, some of which were apparently provided by the movie. The Chinese Theater slab was probably a supplemental component of it too.”

Malk nodded and waved his hand for Lepidopt to continue.