A matter of time

1975

She paid the cabbie, tipping generously, then added twenty dollars and asked him to recover her baggage from the railway station. She watched him pull away, then marched up the winding, rose-flanked walk to the door.

He responded almost as if he had been waiting.

"Fiala! What are you doing here?" He spoke German. His English remained as broken as hers. "Come on in."

The house was old, rich, dark. It had changed little with the years.

Fial had. He had aged.

But sixty years separated this meeting from their last.

A woman of sixty, confused and embarrassed, rushed from the rear of the house. "I'm sorry, Herr Koppel. I was in the bathroom." She, too, spoke German, but with a northern accent.

"That's all right, Greta. You and Hans take the car into town, will you? Catch up on your shopping."

The woman withdrew with a slight, stiff, Teutonic bow. She seemed accustomed to disappearing when strangers arrived.

"My God, that woman is ugly."

"But the perfect housekeeper. Absolutely close-mouthed. She and her husband have been with me since forty-nine. They're refugees. I think they were involved with the SS. Whatever, they don't attract any attention."

"Koppel?"

"I changed names during the Depression. My business connections were beginning to wonder about my longevity. It seemed like a good time to disappear. Financial empires were crumbling right and left. But you haven't told me why you're here."

"I had to run. I had to, Fial. After I saw him, and the policeman… I couldn't stay there anymore. It was all closing in…"

The old man guided her to an overstuffed chair. "Sit. I'll make some tea. You settle down. Get your thoughts organized."

One familiar with Fiala would have guessed Fial to be as fussy and old-fashioned as his sister. The interiors of their homes were almost interchangeable, though Fial's place was larger and more carefully maintained. He didn't fear carpenters, electricians, or plumbers.

Fial had two cats and a dog. The beagle, a bitch, was seventeen and so feeble she could barely move. She had lost so many teeth that Greta had to spoon-feed her baby food. Yet Fial refused to have her put to sleep.

Fial returned in ten minutes. "Now tell me about it. From the beginning. I really didn't understand your letters."

"First I'd better tell you. I saw Neulist."

"What?" Fial sprang from his chair, began pacing. "How do you know?"

"I can't tell how. I just knew who he was when I saw him. Maybe because I was unconsciously expecting him."

"We're supposed to have orderly minds," Fial reminded her. "Minds forged and honed by the State. Let's apply them. Go back to the beginning."

He was worried; this lack of pleasantries, this minimization of the amenities, indicated a fear that something critical was in the wind, that they might have to act swiftly.

"It started with the body in the alley."

"I don't understand why the police were so excited. In this country the alleys are carpeted with corpses."

"Because the dead man was the double of Jack O'Brien. Because two detectives found that out and turned the investigation into a crusade. They just wouldn't stop digging."

"But…"

"I know. But it was O'Brien. To perfection. Even to the clothing. I know there had to be differences, but after fifty years I couldn't put my finger on a thing. I was too upset the one time I saw the body, though I remember saying it looked smaller.

"I finally figured it out on the way here. Because I saw Neulist at the funeral. He planted the body. How, I don't know."

Fial paced. "What about why?"

"To stir up the police? That would be his style, wouldn't it?"

Fial stopped abruptly, peered at her. He dropped into his chair. For two minutes he steepled his fingers before his face and stared into nothing.

"Yes it would. Exactly." He paused again.

"There's something I haven't told you, Fiala. Fian's dead." He described the circumstances.

"I went over there personally. In forty-six and again in forty-eight. The Russians weren't much help.

"I always thought there was something fishy about it. But Neulist? No. I didn't suspect that. The informer, Josef Gabiek… in the history I learned, he was a patriot. He was killed in a police raid on a Resistance hideout. But this one wasn't. He disappeared instead.

"I've spent a million dollars trying to find out where he went. I think I know now."

"You should've told me, Fial. I don't need protection from the truth." She had suspected Fian's death for a long time. He would have gotten in touch after the war had he been alive.

"I didn't want you to worry. You always overreacted in emotional situations. Anyway, this one didn't seem that suspicious then. There were fifteen hundred other people in the village, and the raid was identical to the one in our own history-except that Fian was there. There wasn't a shred of evidence against the colonel. I wanted to find Gabiek to satisfy my own curiosity as to his motives, as a check against history as we know it. I certainly couldn't go ask Hitler why the bomb didn't kill him in his bunker and stop the war eight months earlier than it ended. I thought I might uncover some pattern to the changes we've seen. That I might find a way to abort them, or neutralize them, or soften their long-range impact.

"Well, if Gabiek was Neulist, he shouldn't be able to trace us. I don't see how he found you. Unless he got it from Fian somehow. And that's impossible. It had to be dumb luck. I mean, the Czechs let me do some digging where he died. I found his journal, that he kept right up to the minute when the security police started shooting. He never mentioned Gabiek, nor did he have a word to say about Neulist, except a warning about what happened in the programming theater…

"Oh! He didn't follow you, did he?"

"No. Nobody could have. Not without being ten people. We're safe. I don't think anyone even knows you exist. And I took time to make sure they didn't find out. I cleaned the house top to bottom."

"But… Neulist. You should have let me know. I could have come in and surprised him. I could have… I've got contacts. Hans knows people who would have loaned us an assassin. As a favor."

"I didn't know till it was too late. I didn't run from him anyway. I could have handled him. He's vulnerable. But the police aren't."

"But we took care of the O'Brien thing back when." A wrinkle of distaste marred Fial's expression.

"Back when isn't the problem."

"Fiala? Don't tell me. Not again? Not another one?"

"A policeman this time. And I had no choice, Fial. It wasn't like before, just madness and meanness.

"I went to the funeral for the O'Brien doppelganger. And Neulist showed up, like I said. That left me in a state, not thinking very good. Otherwise, I might have handled it differently.

"While I was out, one of the detectives got into the house. He must've lost track of time. He was still there when I got home. He left the door open a crack. Because I was upset, I was ready to be suspicious of anything. I snuck in. He was in the little west parlor going through my journals. I did a lot of them in English, to practice. He was so preoccupied that it was child's play to slip up with a hypodermic… It just didn't occur to me that I didn't have to kill him, not if I was going to run anyway. What I should've done was sedate him while I scoured the house and got out. Nobody would have believed him. But at the time I just didn't see that there was any choice."

"Okay. I understand. I don't like it, but I understand. What about the body?"

"I shipped it in a trunk again."

"I'm running out of room in the basement." He smiled weakly. "You're sure you can't be traced? The police are more sophisticated now."

"I made it as complicated as I could. I bought a railway ticket to Indianapolis. The police sergeant looked the type to think me too old-fashioned to travel any other way. Then I went to the airport. I spent the last five days hopping from Memphis to Chicago to Detroit, to Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit again, Buffalo, then here. Sometimes I used the bus, the railroad, or went by plane. The luggage I sent by bus and several other shippers, skipping every other city. I used three different names and paid for everything in cash. I changed my clothes every time, and I wore wigs." She was unable to put into words the fright, the feeling of anachronism that had accompanied her every step of the way. She had kept going on sheer willpower.

"Okay. You used your head. If they can untangle that at all, it'll take a month. We'll get the jump on them in the meantime. It's time we went back to Europe anyway. The international situation is going to get nasty soon. The Chinese are going to start in. I've been getting ready for ten years, aiming for seventy-eight, just before it hit. But now is just as good.

"The route will be as complicated as yours was. We'll use four different identities. They've existed for years, and they've been leaving the necessary paper residue in the files of several governments. They'll keep on, because these people really exist. We'll eventually end up tenants on a little farm near Tirschenreuth, at the edge of the Bohemian Forest, just on the Bavarian side of the Czech border, in West Germany. We can cross over whenever we want. Hans handled the arrangments. He knows some ex-Nazis who can manage things like that. I've done them a few favors over here.

"When Hans gets back I'll have him contact his people. I'll contact my brokers in New York and tell them to start moving our money. To Beirut, not Zurich. They always look in Switzerland first these days. After that, we can leave as soon as your body is buried. For my part, I'll apparently die and be buried here. I made the arrangements a long time ago. Seemed the best way to disappear. Hans will get this place. He'll cover our backtrail."

Fial chuckled. "Now we've even got a body to put in my coffin."

"Father couldn't have done better, Fial."

"He couldn't have done as good. That's why he always left me the staff work."

For ten minutes they said little, just sipped tea and contemplated the dramatic tricks fate had played with their lives.

"Eighty-one years to go," Fial muttered. "It'll be one colossal drudge."

"And no way of knowing what we'll face when we get there. Things are so different."

"Not so much. It's our perspective and revisionist educations, more than anything. The real difference peaked around nineteen fifty. Since then history has been undergoing a normalization. It's as if the fabric had been stretched, but now it's going back to its normal shape. But, still, I sometimes wonder why we bother."

"What are we doing here, Fial? A surgeon and a physicist playing secret agents in somebody else's time."

"It's no game. Not with a crazy colonel out there somewhere, willing to shuffle history all over again. Not with Fian killed…"

"Don't forget an angry St. Louis police sergeant named Norman Cash. He'll get me if he can, Fial. He's another Neulist. You'd think the young policeman, the dead one, was his son, the way he acted toward him."

"Cash? Norman Cash? A homicide detective? From St. Louis? In Missouri?"

"United States of America, planet Earth. Yes. So?"

"Fiala, think! Christ, how bizarre is this thing going to get? Girl, there has to be a God. Not even a dynamic of historical restoration can explain this. Don't you see? He has to be Michael Cash's father. Just has to be. There couldn't be two policemen with the same job in the same city with the same name."

"You think so? Really? I never thought of it. But you might be right. His wife said they lost a son in Vietnam. Her name was Ann, and I think she said her son's name was Michael. Or Matthew…? I just never made the connection. You see how stupid I am sometimes?"

"No. You've never been that interested in history or geneology."

"Grandmother told me all those stories when I was little… About the old days, before the State… It is a coincidence as big as the Great Pyramid. But does it matter? Michael Cash would still be in China. He won't come over for years yet, will he? By then we'll be gone."

"I was thinking about his visits to Prague. But I guess you're right. It doesn't matter. Still, it gives me the queasies, having to live through the same times as these people…

"Things have changed, but history is sliding back into its old groove. It looks like the State will be born right on time. The way we learned it, with Grandma and Grandpa colluding to make it happen. What scares me is that we might still change it. One slip. Anything that would keep Cash out of Prague, or from coming here to take over at the right time…

This United States would survive. Cash wouldn't dump his Chinese allies during their Russian adventure, because he hated that man Huang for what he did to his friend. He wouldn't fix it up with the Czech leadership while the Russians and Chinese are smashing each other. Prague would remain just another capital of an occupied satellite, not the European hub of the new order…"

How critically important this one man would be, Fiala reflected. He would shape the future as surely as Adolf Hitler had shaped the past.

Yet what she had heard about him, so long ago in her own future-past, made him seem a pretty ordinary man. Not at all a megalomaniac. Her grandmother had talked about him ceaselessly.

Michael Cash's driving forces had been a neurotic love and a devouring hatred, each targeted on one woman, one man. He would become powerful only to satisfy the two emotions.

And having done so, he would abdicate…

When had a dictator ever yielded his power voluntarily? Or forbid his family to have anything to do with politics afterward?

Even his wife. And she, chairing the European Party, had been as powerful as he.

That tangled skein fled her mind.

"The doorbell," Fial observed nervously.

"Must be the man with the luggage." Fiala squirmed in her chair, unaccountably nervous herself.

She would like to meet Michael Cash sometime, while the opportunity existed. The memories of a grandmother who had passed away nearly twenty years before their translation into the past, and a father who had seen little of the man, satisfied few of the questions she had today, when she could finally recognize and understand the issues of Cash's day.

Fial had known him too, though only as a child. Maybe he would want a look from an adult perspective. Maybe he would let her tag along.

Fial peered through a curtain. "It's a woman."

"A woman?"

"Yes. Late twenties, I'd say. Dark hair, long and straight. Dark skin. Attractive. Know anyone like that?"

"No. Maybe she's selling something."

The bell rang for the fourth time.

"She's sure determined."

"Well, get rid of her before the man with the luggage shows up."

Fial opened the door. "Of help to you I may be?"

The woman yanked the screen door.

And from a crouch against the outside wall a man lunged inside.

He had a gun.

Fiala swore murderously in German.

"Danke schцn." His grin was broad and evil.

XXIX. On the Y Axis;