White Apples (33 page)

Chivas stared straight ahead and kept tight hold of the wheel. "No idea. I know as much about this as you do.

Hopefully not much longer. But it is getting worse. The roads are covered with black ice."

He steered them expertly around the truck/tram wreck and under an elevated train overpass into... spring. On one side of the overpass it had been snowing. On this side it was still cloudy but nothing threatening. The sun kept peeping through the clouds. There was no snow anywhere. Parkas had been shed for jeans jackets and pullovers. A few brave souls even wore shorts and sandals. A man carried a bouquet of exotically colored flowers. But another block farther on it began to rain, then pour. A short time later they were driving through a torrential thunderstorm. It became so dark that they had no idea what time of day it was.

Isabelle reached forward and turned off the heat. The blower quieted but the slam and drum of rain on the car replaced it in intensity. Lightning kept coming, coming, coming, followed instan•taneously by great bone-shaking cracks of thunder. The storm was right above them and the runoff of the rain grew higher and higher in the streets until

it was a speeding small flood.

"I think— " Their car or something very close was hit by light•ning. BANG! Everything around them lit up like a bomb going off. Isabelle shouted in surprise.

Chivas said he was going to pull over for a few minutes and let the storm pass. Without waiting for her answer, he started to turn slowly in toward the curb. The car behind them smashed into the Audi. The sickening crack and thud of metal hitting metal. Then something large fell off and hit the street. "Jesus!" Both of them turned and watched as the driver of a white Suzuki SUV pulled drunkenly around them and sped away.

"Hey, that guy's doing a hit-and-run!"

Unaffected, Chivas opened his window a crack and spit out his chewing gum. "It was a woman. Didn't you see her long blond hair?"

"So what? She's still doing a hit-and-run." "We've got more to worry about than that now." Isabelle stiffened. "Like what?"

"Did you notice the car she was driving?"

Isabelle pointed toward where Ms. Hit-and-Run had sped off. "A Suzuki SUV. Why?"

Chivas stared at her but said nothing. It looked like he was waiting for her to figure out something. The storm kept crashing around them. It was still directly overhead. Maybe it was listening to their conversation and found it so interesting that it didn't want to leave yet. Was she supposed to discover something in Chivas's facial expression, something that would tell her what he was really saying?

To fill the void, she said as an afterthought, "I had a car like that once. The Suzuki, I mean."

He stared at her. Without looking behind her, she was almost sure Hietzl was staring at her too.

"My car was white too. I was a terrible driver then. I had an accident in it and totaled it." She looked at the driver and raised her eyebrows. "You're not being of much help here. Am I supposed to be deciphering something?"

He kept staring at her but then slowly pointed in the direction of the hit-and-run driver. "Help? All right, I'll help you decipher. Think about it, Isabelle. The car that just hit us was a white Suzuki SUV. The driver was a blond woman.

We're a long way from the center of town, which means we're still a few years ago. You just said you owned that kind of car a few years ago—

Isabelle slid all the way over in her seat until her back touched the passenger's door. "That was
me
in that car? That was me who just hit us?"

He nodded.

"How? How can that be?"

"Because you brought her back. You brought her back to stop us now. You don't want us to get downtown to your meeting. Next you'll bring other versions of yourself to keep us from returning to our time. That was just the first attempt."

"I'm
doing it? Why? Why would I stop myself? I want to be with Vincent; now more than ever. That's all I want." Chivas's hand came down off the wheel, cutting the air between them like he was throwing a karate chop. "No you don't! You're afraid of what will happen the next time you're with him. And you just proved it by trying to run us off the

road. You're afraid of what will happen to the baby and what will happen to you.

"You're a terrible coward, Isabelle, and have been your whole life. Luckily your family and their money have kept you safe from harm. But it hasn't made you stronger. Just the opposite—given the choice, you have almost always run away whether physically or psychically." He reached into his shirt pocket and took out a slip of paper. "You once read this passage and it had such an impact that you wrote it down in your diary. Because you knew it was so true about yourself.

'' 'Fear's greatest weapon is its ability to blind us to anything but ourselves. In its presence we forget there are others to consider, things to save besides our own skins, our own feelings.'

"If you join up with Ettrích again now, you know you're going to have to be braver than you've ever been—"

Livid at what he had said, she slammed her hand down on the dashboard. "That's bullshit! I went into
death
to get him! No coward does that."

"You did not do it, Isabelle; a small and very remote part of you did—a part you never knew existed before. Like a tiny island in the middle of an ocean that's never been mapped. If you weren't pregnant, you would never have looked for that island. And without doubt you never would have discovered it in your normal travels. You went to get Vincent because of the baby. Don't deceive yourself about that. You did it for Anjo. You found that extraordinary cour•age within because of the child. No other reason."

She hit the dashboard again. "That's not true! I did it for Vincent. I did it because I love him."

"Wrong. If you loved him, you would
never
have run out on him in London. Don't lie now, Isabelle. You've been lying to your•self your entire life. It's made you deluded and more frightened the older you've gotten. That's why you almost always run away from difficult things. It's part of your nature now. Then you make up a lame excuse to justify your spinelessness. Until Anjo, you had never stood and fought for anything important in your life. That's why you are a coward.

"I'm not telling you something you don't already know in your heart."

She had no chance to digest what he said. While he spoke, Isabelle looked out the window on her side so that she wouldn't have to look at him. When she heard the car start up again and felt it pull out, she was still looking out her window.

"I can see her down the block. She's coming this way."

Isabelle looked quickly through the windshield. In the rain she saw the white car coming toward them from the opposite direction. She tried to keep her voice calm, especially in light of what he had just said about her. "What are you going to do?"

His voice was cool and knowing, "With her? Just scare her. She's not the one I'm worried about." Chivas drove toward the white car as he spoke. Thirty feet away he veered into the oncoming lane and, accelerating, went straight at it. The Suzuki tried to stop. They could hear the skitter of its brakes and skidding tires across the wet distance, through the closed windows of their car. Isabelle had no time to protest or be afraid because what Chivas had done was so unexpected. It all happened within seconds of her seeing the white car moving their way. All she managed was a peep of surprise.

Just before impact, the Suzuki veered to the right and drove off the street straight into a lean-to tram stop. Luckily no one was stand•ing there because the car demolished the flimsy metal structure before coming to an abrupt full stop after hitting a light pole square-on.

Isabelle saw the driver raise her blond head off the steering wheel. She had obviously hit it there on impact with the pole be•cause Isabelle Neukor never wore a seat belt. The older woman stretched her neck as far as it would go to see what had happened to her younger self.

Chivas knew. "She's all right—she only banged her head. Luck•ily the car is totaled so we don't have to think about

her
anymore. Not that she's the one who worries me." "Who does worry you?"

She found out minutes later. They had stopped for a red light a block before the Gürtel, the road that circles the inner city and is the demarcation line between the outer districts of Vienna and downtown. Isabelle was torn between wanting to respond to the cruel things he had said and being hyperalert to their surroundings in case they were attacked again.

Chivas seemed content to simply drive and not continue the discussion. It was difficult enough because, as he had predicted, the weather kept constantly changing around them. Sometimes the change was extreme; others it was hardly noticeable. The trees bloomed again. There were window boxes full of summer flowers.

A few blocks later the boxes had been taken inside because it was too cold. There was more rain and snow but nothing as extreme as what they had passed through. But both of them knew that meant nothing because it could all change in a blink.

In front of them at the traffic light was a black BMW. Isabelle knew little about cars so she could not tell in what year the car had been produced. She was about to ask Chivas when the first stone hit. It landed with a loud metallic thunk on the roof of the BMW. About the size of a large grapefruit, the stone was so heavy that instead of bouncing off and falling to the ground after hitting, it bowed the roof and stayed where it fell.

Neither of them connected this new shock with what had hap•pened already. Then another stone as big as the first hit the middle of their windshield and rolled down onto the hood. If it had not been shatterproof, both people would have had faces full of flying glass. As it was, they could not see ahead because the windshield was spiderwebbed into a million crystalline cracks.

"Shit, shit, shit." Chivas reached into the pocket on the driver's door and brought up a ball-peen hammer. "Watch your face!" He did not wait for her to cover up. He smashed the windshield with the round end of the hammer head.

Behind upraised arms, she turned her face to the side and felt fear thick as wood in her throat choking her.

Squinting and holding her arms up, she cautiously looked toward the now-blind wind•shield. With his hammer Chivas was knocking a hole through it on his side. She thought of ice fishing. She thought he's hammering through ice.

When the hole was about ten inches wide, he stuck his head forward over the steering wheel. He looked both ways through the hole to see what was going on outside. Another stone hit the very front of their car. Chivas put the Audi in reverse. Immediately they hit a van pulled up close behind them. He swung the steering wheel to the left, then forward-and-backed their car in its place until he could get around the BMW and pull away. Another stone hit the ground nearby. Stones rained down all around them. The sounds were amazing, frightening. But this was good too because it had stopped all of the traffic around them, allowing Chivas to pull out and keep on going.

There were glass shards and dirt on his hands from the hammering. He wiped them across his coat. "Those were cobblestones. Those stones are hundreds of years old and heavy! She must have dug them up from the street. Then climbed all the way to the roof of that building with them to drop on us."

"It was me up there, wasn't it; another scared version of me trying to keep me away from Vincent?" "Yes, it was you."

"Turn around and go back." Her voice was strong and deter•mined. Chivas looked at her. "Wha•d you say?"

"I want you to turn the car around and go back there."

"No, I can't do that." He took a hand off the steering wheel and pointed it forward, as if giving instructions to something straight ahead. "I'm not permitted to go backward. Only forward."

"You're joking?"

"No, Isabelle, I really can't go backward. It's against my instruc•tions."

"Then drop me off here. I'll get to the café as soon as I can by myself." They were two blocks across the Gürtel toward town. He pulled over to the curb again. It had begun to drizzle.

"What are you going to do?"

She looked at the sky and gave a sheepish chuckle. "You said I'm a coward. So now it's time for a change."

He nodded but did not ask what she intended to do. They were both silent a while, swimming around in their own

thoughts. Finally he said, "I'll wait for you here."

She had her hand on the door release. "That's nice of you, but I don't know when I'll be back. I don't know if I'll be back. I don't really know anything except that I have to go back there."

"Then take Hietzl with you." "What can he do?"

"Hietzl? All sorts of things. He's also good company."

"No, I have to do this myself. Without any help or magic or ... I just have to do it myself."

"I understand, Isabelle. We'll wait for you here." She nodded and opened the door. Getting out she felt the driz•zle on her head and hands. She wanted to say something more to him but could think of nothing so she started to walk away. Then a thought came and she doubled back. When he saw her standing by the passenger's door again, Chivas lowered the window there. She bent down and said to him, "Thank you for bringing me this far. And thanks for telling the truth."

Ten minutes later she stood at the intersection where they had been pelted. Someone had moved the stones off the street and up onto the sidewalk in a row. The black BMW was also parked on the sidewalk. Its driver was talking to two attentive policemen.

The BMW driver was pointing to the roof of a building across the street. Isabelle assumed that was where the stones had come from. She stayed away from the men because she didn't want to get involved in any conversation. Standing on the corner, she looked up at the roof of the building. People walked by her in both direc•tions while cars stopped for the traffic light and then moved on.

The two men finished talking. The BMW with the dented roof pulled back onto the street and drove off. One policeman put his pen and clipboard under his arm and the two cops walked over and entered the building.