Three Days to Never

I have done nothing but in care of thee,

Of thee my dear one, thee my daughter,

who Art ignorant of what thou art, not

knowing Of whence I am…

— WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE TEMPEST

One

"It doesn't look burned."

"No," said her father, squinting and shading his eyes with his hand. They had paused halfway across the weedy backyard.

"Are you sure she said 'shed'?"

"Yes — 'I've burned down the Kaleidoscope Shed,' she told me."

Daphne Marrity sat down on a patch of grass and straightened her skirt, peering at the crooked old gray structure that was visible now under the shadow of the shaggy avocado tree. It would probably burn up pretty fast, if anybody was to try to burn it.

The shingled roof was patchy, sagging in the middle, and the two dusty wood-framed windows on either side of the closed door seemed to be falling out of the clapboard wall; it probably leaked badly in the rain.

Daphne had heard that her father and aunt had sometimes sneaked out here to play in the shed when they were children, though they weren't allowed to. The door was so low that Daphne herself might have to stoop to get through, and she was not a particularly tall twelve-year-old.

It was probably when they were too young to go to school, she thought. Or else it's because I was born in 1975, and kids are taller now than they were back then.

"The tree would have burned up too," she noted.

"You're going to get red ants all over you. She might have dreamed it. I don't think it was a, a joke." Her father glanced around, frowning, clearly irritated. He was sweating, even with his jacket folded over his arm.

"Gold under the bricks," Daphne reminded him.

"And she dreamed that too. I wonder where she is." There had been no answer to his knock on the front door of the house, but when they had walked around the corner and pushed open the backyard gate they had seen that the old green Rambler station wagon was in the carport, in the yellow shade of the corrugated fiberglass roof.

Daphne crossed her legs on the grass and squinted up at him against the sun's glare. "Why did she call it the Kaleidosope Shed?"

"It—" He laughed. "We all called it that. I don't know."

He had stepped on what he'd been about to say. She sighed and looked toward the shed again. "Let's go in it and pull up some bricks. I can watch out for spiders," she added.

Her father shook his head. "I can see from here that it's padlocked. We shouldn't even be hanging around back here when Grammar's not home." Grammar was the family name for the old lady, and it had not made Daphne like her any better.

"We had to, to see if she really did burn it down like she said. Now we should see if" — she thought quickly — "if she passed out in there from gasoline fumes. Maybe she meant, 'I'm about to burn it down.'"

"How could she have padlocked it from the outside?"

"Maybe she's passed out behind the shed. She did call you about the shed, and she doesn't answer the door, and her car is here."

"Oh…" He squinted and began to shake his head, so she went on quickly.

"'Screw your courage to the sticking place,'" she said. "Maybe there really is gold under the bricks. Didn't she have a lot of money?"

He smiled distractedly. "'And we'll not fail.' She did get some money in '55, I've heard."

"How old was she then?" Daphne got to her feet, brushing down the back of her skirt.

"About fifty-five, I guess. She's probably about eighty-seven now. Any money she's got is in the bank."

"Not in the bank — she's a hippie, isn't she?" Even now, at twelve, Daphne was still somewhat afraid of her chain-smoking great-grandmother, with her white hair, her grinding German accent, and her wrinkly old cheeks always wet with the artificial tears she bought in little bottles at Thrifty. Daphne had never been allowed in the old woman's backyard, and this was the first time she'd ever been farther out than the back porch. "Or a witch," she added.

Daphne took her father's hand as a tentative prelude to starting toward the shed.

"She isn't a witch," he said, laughing. "And she isn't a hippie either. She's too old to have been a hippie."

"She went to Woodstock. You never went to Woodstock."

"She probably just went to sell her necklaces."

"As weapons, I bet," Daphne said, recalling the clunky talismans. The old woman had given Daphne one on her seventh birthday, a stone thing on a necklace chain, and before the day was out, Daphne had nearly given herself a concussion with it, swinging it around; when her favorite cat had died six months later, she had buried the object with the cat.

She tried to project the thought to him: let's check out the shed.

"Hippies didn't have weapons. Okay, I'll look around in back of the shed."

He began walking forward, leading the way and holding her hand, stepping carefully through the dry grass and high green weeds. His brown leather Top-Siders ground creosote smells out of the bristly green stalks.

"Watch where you put your feet," he said over his shoulder, "she's got all kinds of old crap out here."

"Old crap," Daphne echoed.

"Car-engine parts, broken air conditioners, suits of medieval armor I wouldn't be surprised. I should carry you, your legs are going to get all scratched."

"Even skinny I'm too heavy now. You'd get apoplexy."

"I could carry two girls your size, one under each arm."

They had stepped in under the shade of the tree limbs, and her father handed her his brown corduroy jacket.

He shook his head as if at the silliness of all this, then waded through the rank greenery to the corner of the shed and disappeared around it. She could hear him brushing against the shed's far wall, and cussing, and knocking boards over.

Daphne had folded his jacket and tucked it under her left arm, and now she walked up to the shed door and reached out with her right hand, took hold of the brown padlock, and pulled. The whole rusted hasp and lock came away from the wood in one stiff piece.

A few moments later her father appeared from around the far corner, red faced and sweating. His white shirt was streaked with dust and cobwebs.

"Well, she's not back there," he said, brushing dead leaves out of his hair. "I don't think she's been out here in months. Years. Let's get out of here."

Daphne held out the rusted hasp and padlock for him to see, then dropped it and brushed her fingers on her pink blouse.

"I didn't tear the wood," she said. "The screws were just sitting in the holes."

"Good lord, Daph," said her father, "nobody's going to mind."

"I know, but I mean the thing was just hung there, in the holes-somebody else pulled it out, and then hung it backup." She wrinkled her nose. "And I smell gasoline."

"You do not."

"Honest, I do." They both knew her sense of smell was better than his.

"You just want to look in there for gold."

But he sighed and tugged on the purple glass doorknob, and the door creaked open, sliding easily over the dead grass.

"Probably she keeps whisky out here," Daphne said, a little nervously. "Sneaks out at night to drink it." Her father said her uncle Bennett kept a bottle of whisky in his garage, and that's why he kept all his business files out there.

"She doesn't drink whisky," her father said absently, crouching to peer inside. "I wish we had a flashlight — somebody's pulled up half the floor." He leaned back and exhaled. "And I smell gasoline too."

Daphne bent down and looked past her father's elbow into the dimness. A roughly four-foot-square cement slab was leaned up against the shelves on the left-side wall, and seemed to be responsible for that wall's outward tilt; and a square patch of bare black dirt at the foot of the slab seemed to indicate where it had been pried up. The rest of the floor was pale bricks.

The floor was clear except for a scattering of cigarette butts and a pair of tire-soled sandals lying on the bricks.

The gasoline reek was strong enough to mask whatever moldy smells the place might ordinarily have; and Daphne could see a red-and-yellow metal gasoline can on a wooden shelf against the back wall.

Her father ducked inside and took hold of the handle on top of the can and lifted it. She could hear swishing inside the can as he stepped past her, and it seemed to be heavy as he carried it outside. She noticed that there was no cap on it. No wonder the place reeks, she thought.

There was a nearly opaque window in the back wall, and Daphne stepped in across the bricks and stood on tiptoe to twist the latch on its frame; the latch snapped off, but when she pushed on the window the entire thing fell outside, frame and all, thumping in the thick weeds. Dry summer air puffed in through the ragged square hole, fluttering her brown bangs. She inhaled it gratefully.

"I've got ventilation," she called over her shoulder. "And some light too."

A television sat on a metal cart to the left of the door, with a VCR on top of it. The VCR was flashing 12:00, though it must be past one by now.

"The time's wrong," she said to her father, pointing at the VCR as he ducked his head to step inside again.

"What?"

"On her VCR. Weird to have electricity out here."

"Oh! It's always had electrical outlets. God knows why. This is the first time I've seen anything plugged in, out here. Lucky there was no spark." He glanced past her and smiled. "I'm glad you got that window open."

Daphne thought he was relieved to learn that her "time's wrong" remark had been about the VCR. But before she could think of a way to ask him about it, he had stepped to the shelf and picked up a green metal box that had been hidden behind the gasoline can.

"What's that?" she asked.

"An ammunition box. I don't think she's ever had a gun, though." He swung the lid up, then tipped it sideways so Daphne could see that it was full of old yellowed papers. He righted it and began flipping through them.

Daphne glanced at the nearly upright cement slab — and then looked at it more closely. It was lumpy with damp mud, but somebody had cleaned four patches of it — two handprints and two shoe prints, clearly pressed into the cement when it had still been wet. And behind the undisturbed clumps of mud she could see looping grooves in the face of the block; somebody had scrawled something in it too.

She put her father's jacket on the shelf beside the ammunition box and then stepped down onto the patch of sunken dirt next to the block. She pressed her open right hand into the right-hand print in the block — and then quickly pulled her hand away. The cement there was as smooth and warm as flesh, and damp.

With the side of her shoe, she scuffed mud off the bottom of the slab, and then stepped back. Jan 12 — 1928, she read. The writing seemed to have been done with a stick.

"Bunch of old letters," her father said behind her. "New Jersey postmarks, 1933, '39, '55 .. ."

"To her?"

Daphne pried off some more mud with her fingers. There was a long, smooth groove next to the shoe prints, as if a rod too had been pressed into the wet cement. She noticed that the shoe prints were awfully long and narrow, and set at a duck-foot angle.

"Lisa Marrity, yup," said her father.

Above the rod indentation was a crude caricature of a man with a bowler hat and a Hitler mustache.

"The letters are all in German," her father said. She could hear him rifling through the stack. "Well, no, some in English. Ugh, they're sticky, the envelopes! Was she licking them?"

Daphne could puzzle out the words at the top of the block, since the grooves of the writing were neatly filled in with black mud. To Sid — Best of Luck. And the last clump of dirt fell off all at once when she tugged at it. Exposed now was the carefully incised name, Charlie Chaplin.

Daphne looked over her shoulder at her father, who was holding the metal box and peering into it. "Hey," she said.

"Hmm?"

"Check this out."

Marrity looked at her, then past her at the cement slab; his face went blank. He put the box down on the shelf. "Is that real? " he said softly.

She tried to think of a funny answer, then just shrugged. "I don't know."

He was staring at the slab. "I mean, isn't the real one at the Chinese Theater?"

"I don't know."

He glanced at her and smiled. "Sony. But this might be real. Maybe they made two. She says she knew Chaplin. She flew to Switzerland after he died."

"Where did he die?"

"In Switzerland, goof. I wonder if these letters—" He paused, for Daphne had got down on her hands and knees and begun prying up the bricks along the edge of the exposed patch of wet dirt. "What?" he said. "Gold?"

"She almost burned up the shed," Daphne said without looking up. "Got the cap off the gas can, at least."

"Well — true." Her father knelt beside her, on the bricks instead of the mud—which Daphne was pleased to see, as she didn't want to wash a fresh pair of pants for him to wear to work tomorrow — and pulled up a couple of bricks himself. His dark hair was falling into his eyes, and he streaked a big smudge of grime onto his forehead when he pushed it back. Great, Daphne thought; he looks — probably we both look — as if we just tunneled out of a jail.

Daphne saw a glint of brightness in the flat mud where one brick had been, and she rubbed at it; it was a piece of wire about as thick as a pencil. It was looped, and she hooked a finger through it to pull it up, but the rest of the loop was stuck fast under the other bricks.

"Is this gold?" she asked her father.

He grunted and rubbed more dirt off the wire. "I can't say it's not," he said. "Right color, at least, and it's pliable."

"She said you should get the gold up from under the bricks, right? So let's—"

From outside, on the street, a car horn honked three times, and then a man's voice called, "Frank?"

"It's your uncle Bennett," said her father, quickly slamming back into place the bricks he had moved. Daphne fit hers back in too, suppressing a giggle at the idea of hiding the treasure from her dumb uncle.

The bricks replaced, her father leaped up and grabbed all the papers in the ammunition box into one fist and shoved them deep into an inside pocket of his jacket on the shelf. He wiped his hand on his shirt, and Daphne remembered that he had said the envelopes were sticky.

"Stand back," he said, and Daphne stepped back beside the television set.

Then he cautiously put one foot on the square of black dirt and gripped the cement slab by the top edges and pulled it toward himself. It swayed forward, and then he hopped backward out of the way as it overbalanced and thudded heavily to the floor, breaking one row of bricks. The whole shed shook, and black dust sifted down onto the two of them from the rotted ceiling.

The block's near edge was visibly canted up, resting on the row of broken bricks.

"Both of us," said Daphne, sitting down on the bricks to set her heels against the raised edge. Her father knelt on the bricks and braced his hands on the slab.

"On three," he said. "One, two, three."

Daphne and her father both pushed, and then pushed harder, and at last the slab shifted, slid to its original position and thumped down flush with the bricks. Its top face was dry and blank.

Daphne heard the click of the backyard gate, and she scrambled up and ran two steps to the VCR and hit the eject button. The machine whirred as her uncle's footsteps thrashed through the weeds, and then the tape had popped out and Daphne snatched it and dropped it into her purse as her father hastily grabbed his jacket from the shelf, slid his arms into the sleeves and shrugged it onto his shoulders.

"Frank!" came Bennett's shout again, this time from just outside the open door. "I saw your car! Where are you?"

"In here, Bennett!" Daphne's father called.

Her uncle's red face peered in under the sagging door lintel, and for once his expression was simply wide-eyed dismay. His mustache was already spiky with sweat, though he would have had the air conditioner on in his car.

"What the fuck's going on?" he yelled shrilly. "Why the — bloody hell does it smell like gasoline in here?" Daphne guessed that he was embarrassed at having said fuck, and so hurried to cover it with his habitual bloody — though he wasn't British. "You've got Daphne with you!"

"Grammar left the top off a gas can," her father said. "We were trying to get some ventilation in here."

"What was that almighty crash?"

Her father jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "The window fell out when I tried to open it."

"Sash weights," put in Daphne.

"Why are you even here?" Bennett demanded. He ducked in under the lintel and stood up inside; the shed was very crowded with three people in it.

"My grandmother called me this morning," said Marrity evenly, "and asked me to come over and look at the shed. She said she was afraid it was going to burn down, and with that uncapped gasoline can in here, it might have."

Daphne noted the details of her father's half lie; and she noted his emphasis on my grandmother — Bennett had only married into the family.

"It's a little academic at this point," snapped Bennett, "and there's nothing valuable out here." He looked more closely at Daphne and her father, presumably only now noticing the dust in their hair and the mud on their hands, and suddenly his eyes widened. "Or is there?"

His hand darted out and pulled the videocassette from Daphne's purse. "What's this?"

Daphne could read the label on it: Pee-wees Big Adventure. It was a movie she'd seen in a theater two years ago. "That's mine," she said. "It's about bad people stealing Pee-wee's bicycle."

"My daughter's not a thief, Bennett," her father said mildly. Daphne reflected that right now she was a thief, actually.

"I know, sorry." Bennett tossed the cassette, and Daphne caught it. "But you shouldn't be here," he said to her father as he bent down to step out of the shed, "now that she's dead." From outside he called, "Not unless Moira and I are here too."

Marrity followed him outside, and Daphne was right behind him.

"Who's dead?" asked her father.

Bennett frowned. "Your grandmother. You don't know this? She died an hour and a half ago, at Mount Shasta. The hospital just called me — Moira and I are to fly up this afternoon and take care of the funeral arrangements." He peered at his brother-in-law. "You really didn't know?"

"Mount Shasta, at like" — Marrity glanced at his watch — "noon? That's not possible. Why would she be at Mount Shasta?"

" She was communing with angels or something — well, that turned out to be right. She was there for the Harmonic Convergence."

Behind the grime and the tangles of dark hair, Frank Marrity's face was pale. "Where's Moira?"

"She's at home, packing. Now if we want to avoid things like restraining orders, I think we should all agree—"

"I'm going to call her." He started toward the house, and Daphne trotted along behind him, clutching her Pee-wee videocassette.

"It'll be locked," Bennett called after him.

Daphne's father didn't answer, but pulled his key ring out of his pants pocket.

"You've got a key? You shouldn't have a key!"

Grammar's house was a white Spanish adobe with a red-tile roof, and the back patio had a trellis shading it, tangled with roses and grapevines. Over the back door was a wooden sign, with hand-carved letters: Everyone Who Dwells Here Is Safe. Daphne had wondered about it ever since she had been able to read, and only last summer she had found the sentence in a Grimm Brothers fairy tale, "The Maiden Without Hands." The sentence had been on a sign in front of the house of a good fairy who had taken in a fugitive queen and her baby son.

The air was cooler under the trellis, and Daphne could smell roses on the breeze. She wondered how her father was taking the news of his grandmother's death. He and his sister had been toddlers when they lost their parents — their father ran away and their mother died in a car crash soon after — and they had been raised here, by Grammar.

Her father stopped on the step up to the back door, and Daphne saw that one of the vertical windows beside the door was broken; and when her father walked to the door and twisted the knob, the door swung inward. None of the locks here are any good, she thought.

"You've erased fingerprints!" panted Bennett, who was right behind Daphne now. "It was probably a burglar that broke the window."

"A burglar would have reached through and turned the knob inside," Daphne told him. "My dad isn't going to touch that one."

"Daph," said her father. "Wait out here with Bennett."

Her father stepped into the kitchen, and her uncle at least waited with her.

"Probably broke it herself," muttered Bennett. "Marritys."

"'Divil a man can say a word agin them,'" said Daphne. She and her father had recently watched Yankee Doodle Dandy, and her head was full of George M. Cohan lyrics.

Bennett glanced away from the door to give her an irritable look. "All that Shakespeare won't help you get a job. Except—" He shook his head and resumed staring at the kitchen door.

"It'll help me get a job as a literature professor," she said blandly, knowing that that was what his except had referred to. Her father was a literature professor at the University of Redlands. "Best job there is." Her uncle Bennett was a location manager for TV commercials, and apparently made way more money than her father did.

Her uncle opened his mouth and then after a second snapped it shut again, clearly not wanting to get into an argument with a girl. "You absolutely reek of gasoline," he said instead.

She heard footsteps on linoleum in the house, and then her father pulled the kitchen door wide open. "If there was a thief, he's gone," he said. "Let's see if she has any beers in her 'frigerator."

"We shouldn't touch anything," said Bennett, but he stepped in ahead of Daphne. The house was cool, and the kitchen smelled faintly of bacon and onions and cigarettes, as usual.

Daphne couldn't see that anything in the room was different from the way it had looked at Easter — the spotless sink and counter, the garlic-and-dried-rosemary centerpiece on the kitchen table; the broom was upside down in the corner, but the old lady always kept it that way — to scare off nightmares, according to her father.

Bennett picked up a business card from the kitchen counter. "See?" he said. "Bell Cabs. She must have taken a taxi to the airport." He set it back down again.

Her father had lifted the receiver from the yellow telephone on the wall and was using the forefinger of the same hand to spin the dial. With his other hand he pointed at the refrigerator. "Daph, could you see if there's a beer in there?"

Daphne pulled open the door of the big green refrigerator — it was older than her father, who had once said that it looked like a 1950 Buick stood on its nose — and found two cans of Budweiser among the jars of nasty black concoctions.

She put one into her father's hand and waved the other at her uncle.

"Not Budweiser, thank you," he said stiffly.

Daphne put the other can on the counter by her father, and looked at the cork bulletin board on the wall. "Her keys are gone," she noted.

"Probably in her purse," her father said. "Moira?" he said into the telephone. "Did Grammar die? What? This is a lousy connection. Bennett told me — we're at her house. What? At her house, I said." He popped open the beer one-handed. "I don't know. Listen, are you sure?" He took a long sip of the beer. "I mean, could it have been a prank call?" For several seconds he just listened, and he put the beer can down on the tile counter to touch Grammar's electric coffee grinder; he flipped the switch on it, and the little upright cylinder chattered as it ground up some beans that must still have been in it. He switched it off again. "When did the hospital call you? Talk slower. Uh-huh. And when you called them back, what was the number?"

He lifted a pencil from a vase full of pens and pencils and wrote the number on the back of the Bell Cabs card.

"What were the last two numbers? Okay, got it." He put the card in his shirt pocket. "Yeah, me too kid. Okay, thanks." He held the receiver out to Bennett. "She wants to talk to you. Bad connection — it keeps getting screechy or silent."

Bennett nodded impatiently and took the phone, and he was saying, "I just wanted to see if — are you there? — if there was anything here we'd need to bring along, birth certificate…" as Frank Marrity led Daphne into the dark living room.

Grammar's violin and bow were hanging in their usual place between two framed parchments with Jewish writing on them, and in spite of having been scared of the old woman, Daphne suddenly felt like crying at the thought that Grammar would never play it anymore. Daphne remembered her bow skating over the strings in the first four notes of one of her favorite Mozart violin concertos.

A moment later her father softly whistled the next six notes.

Daphne blinked. "And!" she whispered, "you're sad about Grammar, and mad at her too — and you're very freaked about her coffee grinder! I… can't see why."

After a pause, he nodded. "That's right." He looked at her with one eyebrow raised. "This is the first time you and I have both had it at the same time."

"Like turn blinkers on a couple of cars," she said quietly. "It was bound to match up eventually." She looked up at him. "What's so weird about her coffee grinder?"

"I'll tell you later." In a normal tone he said, over her shoulder, "I don't think my grandmother ever had a birth certificate."

Daphne turned and saw that Bennett had entered the living room and was frowning at the drawn curtains.

"I suppose they don't give birth certificates in Oz," he said. "We should fix that window."

"I can use her Makita to screw a piece of plywood over it from the inside. You think we should call the police?" Her father waved at the violin on the wall. "If there was a thief, he didn't take her Stradivarius."

Bennett blinked and started forward. "Is that a Stradivarius?"

"I was kidding. No. I don't think anything's been taken."

"Very funny. I don't think we need to call the police. But fix the window now — we should all leave together, and only come here all together." He rubbed his mustache. "I wonder if she left a will."

"Moira and I are on the deed already. I can't imagine there's much besides the house."

"Her car, her books. Some of this… artwork might be valuable to some people."

To some weirdos, you mean, thought Daphne. She was suddenly defensive about the old woman's crystals and copper bells and paintings of unicorns and eyes in pyramids and sleepy-looking bearded guys wearing robes.

"We'll want to inventory it all, get an appraiser," Bennett went on. "She was a collector, and she might have happened to pick up some valuable items, amid all the crap. Even a broken clock is right twice a day."

Daphne could feel that the mention of broken clocks, in this house, jarred her father. There were a lot of things she wanted to remember to ask him about, once they were in their truck again.

Two

Outside the vibrating windowpane, the narrow trunks of palm trees swayed in the hard sun glare over the glittering traffic on La Brea Avenue. This was south of Olympic, south of the dressy stores around Melrose with black or green awnings out front, and way south of Charlie Chaplin's old studio up at Sunset where you could see the individual houses on the green Hollywood hills; down here it was car washes and Chinese fast food and one-hour photo booths and old apartment buildings, like this one, with fenced-in front lawns. The apartment was stuffy, and reeked of coffee and cigarette smoke.

Oren Lepidopt had crushed out his latest cigarette in the coffee cup on the blocky living room table, and he held the telephone receiver tight to his ear. Answer the page, he thought. It's a land line, obviously it's something I don't want broadcast.

The only sound in the apartment aside from the faint music at the window was the soft rattle of keystrokes on an electronic keyboard in the kitchen.

At last Malk's voice came on the line — "Hello?" — and Lepidopt leaned back against the couch cushions.

"Bert," he said. "It's daylight here."

There was a pause, then Malk said, "I thought it was daylight here too."

"Well I think it's… brighter, here. Now. We got another installment from the ether. I think more is going on here than where you were going."

"I probably can't get a refund on the ticket."

"Screw the ticket. You need to hear Sam's new tape."

"Ala bab Allah," sighed Malk.

Lepidopt laughed at the ironic use of the Arabic phrase — it meant, more or less, "What will be will be." "So get back here now. Full APAM dry-cleaning while you're driving too — stops and double backs, watch for multiple cars, and if you can even see a helicopter, drive on by and lose the car."

"Okay. Don't start the John Wayne stuff till I get there."

Lepidopt's elbows jerked in against his ribs in a sudden shudder.

The line went dead, and Lepidopt's face was cold as he replaced the receiver in its cradle.

Don't start the John Wayne stuff till I get there. Bert, Bert, he thought, so carelessly and unknowingly you shorten my life! Or show me a new, even closer boundary of it, anyway.

He made himself take a deep breath and then let it out.

The faint clicking of the keyboard had stopped. "You were laughing," said young Ernie Bozzaris from the table in the kitchen, "and then you look as if you saw a demon. What did he say?"

Lepidopt waved his left hand in a dismissive gesture. "I shouldn't have borscht for lunch," he said gruffly. "He's coming back here, not getting on the plane. Should be here in half an hour or less." Suddenly self-conscious, he slid his maimed right hand into his pocket.

Bozzaris stared at him for another moment, then shrugged and returned his attention to his computer monitor. He was in his late twenties, fresh from the Midrasha academy; there was no gray in his black hair yet, and though he shaved several times a day, his lean jaw always seemed to be dark. "It's not the borscht," he said absently, "it's the Tabasco you pour into it."

With his left hand Lepidopt shook out another Camel from the pack, then used the same hand to snap his lighter at it. He inhaled deeply — it seemed even less likely now that he would have time to die of cancer. He had always heard the saying, You're scared until the first shot. And that had proved true twenty years ago, in Jerusalem. For a little while, at least.

He sighed. "Any activity? " he asked as he stood up and carried his coffee cup to the kitchen. His shoes were as silent on the kitchen's linoleum floor as they had been on the carpet in the living room.

Bozzaris had hung his gray linen sport coat over the back of the plastic chair and rolled up his sleeves.

"No unusual activity," he said, not looking away from the dark green monitor screen and the bright green lines of type scrolling upward, "But we don't know who else is out there. The one in New Jersey who tried to get into the mainframe Honeywell in Tel Aviv an hour ago uses the Unix disk-operating system on a Vax machine, and, like everybody else, he doesn't know about the three built-in accounts the machines always come with. I got into his machine by logging on to the 'Field' account, default password 'Service.'"

He paused to knot his long, thin fingers over the monitor and stretch. "Their e-mails," he went on, "show nothing but the usual cover-business stuff, assuming it is a cover business — the real guys might be covertly routed through real businesses, like we are. And there's been no notable increase or decrease in the traffic during this last hour and a half."

Bozzaris had insisted that the Institute pay for a new IBM model 80 computer with a 32-bit processor, and a Hayes Smartmodem 1200 that could operate at either 300 or 1200 baud. Lepidopt was used to the shoe-type modems that a telephone receiver had to be fitted into.

"Are any of the travel messages suspicious?"

"How should I know? It's a travel agency. A number of flights here to L.A., which I've copied, but that seems to be usual for them. And of course any of them could be codes. But there hasn't been any 'Johnny, this is your mother, take the casserole out of the oven.'"

"Any of them could be codes," Lepidopt agreed.

"I doubt they've got anything more than the Harmonic Convergence static; a hundred thousand New Agers standing on mountain-tops, holding hands and blanking their minds all at once to realign the earth's soul."

Static? thought Lepidopt. They're making a blasphemous Tzimt-zum, is what they're doing. In the beginning En-Sof, the unknowable Infinite Light, contracted itself to make space for the creation of the finite worlds, since without that contraction there would have been no room for anything besides Itself.

And now these wretched hippies and mystics have all contracted their minds at the same time! What sort of things will spring into existence in this vacuum?

Bozzaris seemed to answer his thought. "Every sort of critter is likely to be poking its head through from the other side," the younger man said, "with that kind of door open."

"The New Jersey crowd tried to hack Tel Aviv after the noon event."

Bozzaris shrugged. "It's unlikely that they'd have been listening on that, uh, wavelength," he said. "But I suppose the event might have registered with other media. Of course people do try to hack Tel Aviv, for lots of reasons."

"Assume it's not a coincidence," said Lepidopt.

He stepped to the kitchen counter and poured hot coffee into his cup, then stared at the cigarette butt floating in it.

With his left hand he fished the cigarette butt out of the cup and tossed it into the sink, shaking his fingers afterward. Then he sighed and took a sip of the coffee.

Bozzaris typed H-> to hang up the phone line, then immediately typed in DT and a new telephone number. The modem's LED lights flickered.

Lepidopt sipped his coffee and looked nervously toward the front window while Bozzaris clicked his way through now familiar passwords and directories. This telephone line was routed through a number of locations, and if Bozzaris's intrusions were fingered by the National Security Agency, there would probably be a warning soon enough for them to abandon this safe house.

And Bozzaris, for all his youth, was meticulous about security, always checking his computers for unsuspected "back doors" and intrusions. Only Bozzaris touched the machine, but he had told Lepidopt about all sorts of computer perils, such as programs that would mimic the IBM opening screen and ask for the user's password, and when the password had been entered would store it, and then flash "INVALID PASSWORD. TRY AGAIN," so that the user would assume he had typed the password wrong, and enter it again, at which point the real log-in sequence would start, and the user would never know that the intruder had copied his password. Bozzaris watched for intrusive programs and changed his passwords all the time. He even made allowances for the possibility of microphones in the room, and made sure to hit each key of his passwords in a measured pace, not hitting a double letter with two fast clicks; and, just to make any inquisitive listeners think his passwords included more characters than they actually did, he always hit a couple of random keys after pressing carriage-return.

Now Bozzaris sat back. "I see no unusual activity among the 'special Arabic' crowd at the NSA." This was the NSA euphemism for their Hebrew linguists monitoring Israel. Lepidopt was relieved to see him hit H-> again, terminating the phone connection.

A moment later Bozzaris began typing again, and Lepidopt sat down on the pebbled gray-steel safe that sat against the wall next to the stove.

He got up when the daisy-wheel printer on the counter beside him started chattering.

Bozzaris pushed his chair back and stood up, yawning cavernously. He waved at the printer. "The billing addresses the New Jersey guys have booked to or from LAX so far today. Not likely to be anything, and probably not worth checking out now — but we can keep them in the safe and see if they show up in anything that develops."

"Compare them against all Los Angeles lists we've got, of anything. And send a copy to Tel Aviv."

"To who, in Tel Aviv? Who are we working for? Who are we, anymore?"

"To Admoni, as usual."

Lepidopt wished it were still Isser Harel instead of Nahum Admoni, though Harel had resigned as director general of the Mossad in 1963, four years before Lepidopt had been recruited into the Israeli secret service. It had been Harel who had instituted this off-paper "Halomot" division, the agents of which used target-country passports — American, in this case — and didn't work through the Israeli embassies. The Halomot was even more insulated from the rest of the Mossad than the Kidon, the assassin division.

Young Bozzaris had a point, though, when he had asked, Who are we, anymore? Since 1960 the Halomot had been concealed as a succession of anonymous committees in the LAKAM, the Israeli Bureau of Scientific Liaison; but the LAKAM had been shut down amid international scandal a year and a half ago after the FBI arrested Jonathan Pollard, the LAKAM's paid spy in the U. S. Naval Investigations Service. The LAKAM had not been part of the Mossad, but its chief had once been a Mossad agent, and any Mossad activity in the United States was now potential diplomatic catastrophe.

The Halomot was left with no cover identity at all, and Lepidopt was afraid that Nahum Admoni didn't share Isser Harel's conviction that the Halomot function was necessary, or even real.

Lepidopt held up a loop of the continuous sheet that was ratcheting out of the printer, another inch appearing every time the spinning printhead reversed its direction across the paper. The billing addresses were in Glendale, Santa Ana, Palm Springs…

Lepidopt walked back into the living room and crossed to the wide front window. He put his cup down on the sill and stared down at the afternoon traffic on La Brea.

You're scared until the first shot.

Lepidopt had been twenty years old in early 1967, working for a plumbing-supply company in Tel Aviv, and the idea of war had been almost inconceivable. Throughout May he had followed the news — U Thant had capitulated to Nasser's demand that the UN peacekeepers be pulled out of the Sinai desert, which was the buffer zone between Egypt and Israel, and Egyptian forces had taken control of the Gulf of Aqaba — but everybody knew that Egyptian troops were too busy fighting in Yemen to attack Israel.

Buses in Tel Aviv had been running irregularly because many of the drivers had been called into military service; late in May Prime Minister Eshkol had broadcast to the nation his famous "stammering speech," in which he had sounded uncertain and scared; and every Arab radio station from Cairo to Damascus had been joyfully predicting that all the Jews would shortly be driven into the sea; but it wasn't until his own reserve unit was called up that the young Lepidopt had believed there might actually be a war.

He had been making a delivery to a kibbutz outside Tel Aviv, he recalled, unloading lengths of copper pipe from a truck, sweating in the morning sunlight and watching a group of young men under the corrugated steel awning of a grocery store across the street. They were huddled around a little transistor radio with its volume turned all the way up; the station was Kol Ysrael, and the voice from the radio was reading out call signs — "Open Window… Ham and Eggs… Top Hat" — and every few minutes one of the young men would jerk, and then step into the sunlight and hurry away. The voice was echoing from other radios too, and up and down the street Lepidopt saw men and women stepping out of shops, taking off aprons and locking doors; and then he heard his own call sign, and he dropped the last armload of pipe onto the street so that he could drive the truck to the army base at Peta Tiqwa. What he remembered later was how quiet it had all been — no weeping or cheering, just the voice on the radio and the footsteps receding away on the pavement.

Forty years old now, he stared at the Marlboro billboard over the muffler-and-tune-up shop across La Brea, and he pressed the four fingers of his scarred right hand against the sun-warmed glass.

He had been trained in parachuting, and he had found himself abruptly reassigned to the "red berets," the 55th Parachute Brigade under Colonel Mordecai Gur. For three days he lived in one of a row of military tents outside the Lod Airport, halfway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and then on Sunday the third of June the brigade had boarded air-conditioned tourist buses and been driven to the Tel Nov military jet field near Rehovoth.

The next morning he saw six of the French-built Mirage jet fighters take off to the west, the blue Star of David insignia gleaming on the silvery fuselages, and then somehow everyone knew that the war had actually begun. Egypt and Syria were certainly the enemy, and probably Jordan as well, and France and Britain and the United States would not help.

Most of the paratroopers of the 55th were to be dropped into the desert at the southern tip of the Sinai, near the Egyptian air base at Sharm el-Sheikh; but Lepidopt had been in the hastily assembled Fourth Battalion, and they had been briefed separately from the other three battalions.

Standing on the tarmac away from the cargo planes and the buses, Lepidopt and his companions had been told that the Fourth Battalion was to be dropped later, over the town of E-Tur on the east shore of the Gulf of Suez, there to link up with a unit of General Yoffe's tank division, which would by then have come down the shoreline from the north; from there they were to proceed inland to a site near the ancient Saint Catherine's Monastery. They were told that their destination was to be a peculiar stone formation in that dry wasteland of granite and sand — the briefing officer referred to it as the Rephidim, which Lepidopt had known was the place where Moses had struck a dry rock with his staff to produce a spring for the mutinous Israelites.

Every man in the Fourth Battalion had been given a cellophane -laminated map and a green plastic film badge, which several of the men recognized as being devices to measure the wearer's exposure to radiation; the badges were heavier than they looked, and bore only the initials ORNL. They were apparently from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, in the United States. Lepidopt pinned his onto his khaki shirt, under his camouflage jacket.

But at a little past noon, the orders were changed. No flying would be involved after all — Sharm el-Sheikh had already been taken, and the 55th was to proceed by bus to the Old City of Jerusalem instead, thirty-five miles away to the southeast.

That meant Jordan had entered the war against Israel too, and Lepidopt and his companions would be fighting the elite British-trained Arab Legion. Equipped with new maps and having shed their parachutes, they boarded the buses at 6:00 p.m.

Only after his bus was under way did Lepidopt learn that an officer had collected the film badges from the rest of the men who had been designated as the Fourth Battalion — Lepidopt still had his pinned to his shirt.

Rocking in his bus seat as dusk fell over the ancient Judaean hills, Lepidopt had discovered that fear felt very much like grief — his father had died two years before, and now he found himself once again unable to hold on to or even complete a thought, and he clung to the view of trees moving past outside the window because staying in one place would be intolerable, and he was yawning frequently though he wasn't sleepy at all.

And in the streets of Mount Scopus that night, still a day's march north of Jerusalem's walls, he had found a cold Hieronymus Bosch landscape of domes and towers lit in silhouette by mortar explosions close behind them, and skeletons of jeeps and trucks white as bone in the glare of the Israeli searchlights — he was stunned by the ceaseless hammering of .50-caliber machine guns and tank-turret guns that concussed the night air; and the crescent moon riding above the veils of smoke seemed to be an omen for Islam.

The ringing night had been enormous, and he had been grateful for the men huddled around him in a courtyard of the abandoned Hebrew University.

But still he wasn't at the front. When the bell in the YMCA tower struck one, the paratroopers began to advance south through the crashing darkness toward the walls of the Old City. The dawn came soon, and at midmorning they regrouped in the wrecked lobby of the Ambassador Hotel. By now they could see Jerusalem's walls, and Herod's Gate, but it wasn't until late in the afternoon that they passed the Rivoli Hotel and saw, past the burned-out shell of a Jordanian bus, the tall stone crenellations over the Lion's Gate. The paratroopers cautiously advanced toward it.

Visible through the gate was a corner of the gold Dome of the Rock, where Mohammed was supposed to have ascended to Heaven— and from just inside the gate a .30-caliber machine gun began firing into the column of paratroopers. Their captain appeared to be blown out of the jeep he'd been riding in, and all around Lepidopt, men were spinning and falling as the bullets tore and punched at them.

Lepidopt had dived into the gutter, and then he had his Uzi up and was firing at the flutter of glare that was the machine-gun muzzle, and seconds later he and a dozen of his fellows were up and running through the gate.

They soon fell back, to wait for reinforcements and enter the city the following day; but that night, wrapped in a blanket on the lobby floor of the Rivoli Hotel, Lepidopt had realized that it was true — You're scared until the first shot. After that first machine gun had begun firing in the Lion's Gate, he had simply been dealing with each moment as if it were a ball pitched at him, not looking ahead at all. Fear was the future, and all his attention had been fixed on grappling with each new piece of now.

The next day he had learned that the future could chop you down too; and that there was no way of getting around the fear of that.

"The door light's on," said Bozzaris now from the kitchen. "That'll be Malk, or the FBI."

Lepidopt turned away from the window and hurried across the tan carpet to the kitchen, where he pulled up the long accordioned sheet from behind the printer and tore it off; the touch of a cigarette would flash the paper to ash in a second, and he glanced at the pin in the side of the computer, which only had to be yanked out to ignite a thermite charge over the hard drive. As he quickly lit a cigarette, he mentally rehearsed how he would do both actions, if he should have to.

A muffled knock sounded from the door in the living room.

It was today's two-and-two recognition knock, but Lepidopt stepped behind the kitchen wall, reinforced now with white-painted sheet steel, and he glanced at the bowl of dry macaroni on the shelf by his left hand; but when Bozzaris had got the door unbolted, it was Bert Malk who stepped in, his jacket wrapped around his fist, his tie loosened over his unbuttoned collar, and his sandy hair visibly damp.

"Matzáv mesukán?" he asked quietly. It meant Dangerous situation?

"No," Lepidopt said, leaning out from behind the wall. "Just new information."

Malk slid a small automatic pistol out of his bundled jacket and tucked it into a holster behind his hip. "It's worse in here than on the street," he complained. "I'll take a cut in pay if you'll get an air conditioner."

When Bozzaris had closed and rebolted the door, Lepidopt tossed the stack of printout onto the counter and stepped out from behind the kitchen wall. "It's not the cost, it's the constant evaporation."

"Sam's gotta learn to screen out phase changes," Malk said irritably. "Why don't cigarettes bother him?"

Malk already knew the answer — smaller scale, and the fire hides it — and Lepidopt just said, "Come listen to this new tape he made."

He led Malk to the closed door off the kitchen, and knocked.

A scratchy voice from the other side of the door said, "Gimme a minute to get dressed."

"Sorry, Sam," said Lepidopt around his cigarette as he opened the door, "time untied waits for no man." He led Malk into the cluttered room.

Skinny old Sam Glatzer was sitting up on the bed, strands of his gray hair plastered to his gleaming forehead, and in the glare from the unshaded bulb on the ceiling, his face seemed particularly haggard. The window in here was covered with aluminum foil, though Lepidopt could hear the speaker behind it — violins and an orchestra; Lepidopt hadn't been a fan of classical music since 1970, but Sam always brought along Deutsche Grammophon tapes in preference to whatever the radio might provide, though there was a strict rule against bringing any Rimsky-Korsakov. The stale air smelled of gun oil and Mennen aftershave.

Sam was wearing only boxer shorts and an undershirt, and he hooked his glasses onto his nose, scowled at Lepidopt and then levered himself up off the bed and began to pull on his baggy wool trousers. A whirring fan turned slowly back and forth on one of the cluttered desks, fluttering the fringe of one of Lepidopt's toupees that sat on a Styrofoam head on another desk.

"Bert needs to hear the tape," Lepidopt said.

"Right, right," the old man said, turning away to zip up his trousers and fasten his belt. "I haven't got anything since that one burst. I'll wait in the living room, I don't like to hear myself talk." The old man caught the "holograph" medallion that was swinging on a string around his neck — required equipment for every Halomot remote viewer — and tucked it into his shirt before buttoning it up.

When he had left and closed the door, Lepidopt sat on the bed to rewind the little tape recorder. Malk leaned against the nearest desk and cocked his head, attentive now.

The tape stopped rewinding, and Lepidopt pushed the play button.

"—on, right," came Sam's reedy old voice, "turn off the light, I don't want afterimages." There was a pause of perhaps half a minute. Lepidopt tapped ash onto the carpet.

"Okay," came Sam's voice again, "probable AOL gives me the Swiss Family Robinson tree house in Disneyland, I don't think that's right, just AOL, analytical overlay — let me get back to the signal line — voices, a man is speaking — 'And we'll not fail.' Following somebody saying, 'Screw your courage to the sticking place,' that's Shakespeare, Lady Macbeth, this may be off track too — the man says, 'She's probably about eighty-seven now.' The house is on the ground, not up in the tree, little house, it's a shed. Very crapped-out old shed… 'She doesn't drink whisky,' says the man. They're inside the little house now, a man and a little girl, and there's a gasoline smell — I see a window, then it's gone, just empty air there — and a TV set — 'An ammunition box,' says the man, 'I don't think she's ever had a gun, though.'"

Sam's voice broke up in a coughing fit at this point, and Lepidopt's recorded voice said, "Can you see any locating details? Where are they?"

After a few seconds Sam's voice stopped coughing and went on. "No locating details. I see a headstone, a tombstone. Bas-relief stuff and writing on it, but I won't even try to read it. There's mud on it, fresh wet mud. The man says, 'Bunch of old letters, New Jersey postmarks, 1933, '39, '55 — Lisa Marrity, yup.' Uh — and then he says, 'Is that real? … I mean, isn't the real one at the Chinese Theater? But this might be real… She says she knew Chaplin. She flew to Switzerland after he died.' Now there's someone else, 'It's your uncle Bennett…' Uh— 'One, two, three,' and ... a big crash, he pulled the tombstone down… and sunlight again — three people walking toward a house, the back door, with a trellis over it — a broken window — something about fingerprints, and a burglar — 'Marritys,' says the new man, and the little girl says, '"Divil a man can say a word agin them" '—the first man is at the back door, sayi, 'If there was a thief, he's gone.'"

Lepidopt reached out now and switched off the recorder. "Sam loses the link at that point," he said mournfully.

"Wow," said Bert Malk, who had perched himself on the corner of a desk in line with one of the fans. "He said Marity. And Lisa, which is close enough. Did Sam know that name?"

"No."

"We could call the coroner in Shasta, now that we've got a name, see if a Lisa Marity died there today."

"For now we can assume she did. We can get Ernie's detective to call later to confirm it."

"It wasn't a tombstone," Malk went on thoughtfully.

"No, pretty clearly it was Chaplin's footprint square at Grauman's Chinese Theater, and in fact that square isn't in the theater forecourt anymore, it was removed in the 1950s when everybody was saying Chaplin was a communist, and then it got lost. We've already got a couple of sayanim trying to trace where it went."

Malk sighed heavily. "She'd be eighty-five this year, actually. Born in '02." He pulled his sweaty shirt away from his chest to let the fan cool the fabric. "Why wouldn't Sam try to read the writing on the stone?"

"It's like trying to read in dreams, apparently — if you engage the part of the brain that knows how to read, you fall out of the projected state. Ideally we'd have totally illiterate remote viewers, who could just draw the letters and numbers they see, with no inclination to try to read them. But I think it obviously said something like 'To Sid Grauman, from Charlie Chaplin.

"I think this is in L.A., not Shasta," Malk said. "The guy didn't say 'the Chinese Theater in Hollywood,' he just said the Chinese Theater, like you'd mention a restaurant in your area."

" Maybe. "Lepidopt looked at his watch. "This he re tape is only… fifty-five minutes old. Scoot right now to the Chinese Theater and see if there's a man and a little girl there, looking for the Chaplin footprints or asking about them."

"Should I yell 'Marity,' and see who looks?"

Lepidopt paused for a moment with his cigarette lifted halfway to his mouth. "Uh — no. There may be other people around who are aware of the name. And don't be followed yourself! Go! Now!" He stood up and opened the bedroom door.

Malk hurried past him to the apartment's front door and unbolted it; and when he had left, pulling it closed behind him, Lepidopt walked over and twisted the dead-bolt knobs back into the locked positions.

"One minute," he said to Glatzer and Bozzaris, and he strode past them into the spare bedroom and closed the door. The faint music still vibrated in the aluminum foil over the window.

Lepidopt crouched by the bedside table, ejected the new tape and then slotted the cassette they had made at noon — the session that had made him send Malk off on his aborted trip to Mount Shasta — and pushed the play button.

"—goddamn machine," said Glatzer's voice. "I'm seeing an old woman in a long tan skirt, white hair, barefoot, she's just appeared on a Navajo-looking blanket on green grass, beside a tree, lying on her back, eyes closed; it's cold, she's way up high on a mountain. There are people around her — hippies, they're wearing robes, some of them, and face paint — beards, beads — very mystical scene. They're all surprised, asking her questions; she just appeared in the meadow, she didn't walk in. They're asking her if she fell out of the tree. She's — lying on a swastika! — made out of gold wire; it was under the blanket, but they've moved her, and they've seen the swastika. Now one of the hippies is taking a cellular telephone from his backpack — some hippie — and he's making a call, probably 911. Uh — 'unconscious,' he's saying; 'In Squaw Meadow, on Mount Shasta… ambulance' — now she's speaking — two words? 'Voyo, voyo,' she said, without opening her eyes. Ach! Her heart is stopping — she's dead, and I'm out, it's gone."

Lepidopt pushed the stop button, and slowly stood up. Yes, he thought, it was her. We found her at last, just as she died.

He walked back into the living room.

"Can I go too? " asked old Sam Glatzer, getting up from the couch. "I never did get any lunch."

Lepidopt paused and looked over his shoulder at him. Glatzer reminded him of the tired old man in the joke, whose friends arrange for a dazzling prostitute to come to his room on his birthday— I'm here to give you super sex! she exclaims when he opens the door; and he says, querulously, I'll take the soup.

But he was a good remote viewer, and one of the most reliable of the sayanim, the civilian Jews who would efficiently and discreetly provide their skills to aid Mossad operations, for the sake of Israel. Sam was a retired researcher from the CIA-sponsored think tank at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, up near San Francisco, and he was a widower with no children; and Lepidopt told himself that the old man must enjoy using again the clairvoyant techniques he had pioneered back in '72. And over the last several years, Glatzer and Lepidopt had played many games of chess while sitting in safe houses like this, and Lepidopt believed the old man had found them as welcome a break from tension or boredom as he had.

"I'm sorry, Sam," said Lepidopt, spreading his hands, "but I really think we should monitor the 'holograph' line until it's been twenty-four hours. Till noon tomorrow. I'll send Ernie out for any food you'd like." I'll take the soup, he thought.

"Good idea," said Bozzaris, getting up from his keyboard. "Pizza?" Bozzaris did not observe the dietary laws, and ate all sorts of trefe food.

"Whatever he wants," Lepidopt told Bozzaris. "Get enough for three — Bert might be back pretty quick." Bert Malk didn't bother about kosher food either.

After Bozzaris left, tacos and enchiladas having been decided on, Glatzer went to sleep on the couch, and Lepidopt sat down in a chair against the door-side wall, for the afternoon sun was slanting in through the front window, and he stared almost enviously at Glatzer.

A widower with no children. It occurred to him that Glatzer could expire there on the couch, and — though Lepidopt would lose a friend and chess opponent—nobody's life would be devastated. Two lines from an Ivor Winters poem flitted through his head — By a moment's calm beguiled, / I have got a wife and child.

Lepidopt had a wife and an eleven-year-old son in Tel Aviv. His son, Louis, would be envious if he knew his father was working in Hollywood. And Deborah would worry that he'd be seduced by a starlet.

All katsas, Mossad gathering officers, were married men with wives back in Israel; the theory was that married men would be immune to sex traps abroad. Broad traps a-sex, he thought. To preserve you from the evil woman, from the smooth tongue of the adventuress, as the Psalmist said.

Don't start the John Wayne stuff till I get there, he thought, then shuddered.

In that war twenty years ago, Lepidopt's battalion had stormed the Lion's Gate again at 8:30 the following morning. Israeli artillery and jet fighters had pounded the Jordanian defense forces within the city, but Lepidopt and his fellow soldiers had had to fight for every narrow street, and the morning was an eternity of dust exploding from ancient walls, hot shell casings flying in brassy ribbons from the Uzi in his aching hands, blood spattering on jeep windshields and pooling between paving stones, and the shaky effort of changing magazines while crouched in one or another of the drainage ditches.

I see a headstone, a tombstone.

Lepidopt recalled noticing that the bridges propped over the narrow ditches had been Jewish gravestones, and he had learned later that they had been scavenged from the cemetery on Mount Zion; and now he wondered if, in the subsequent gathering and burial of hundreds of dead Israeli and Jordanian soldiers, anyone had thought to restore the stones to those older graves.

By midmorning the city had fallen to the Israeli forces; sniper fire still echoed among the ancient buildings, but Jordanians were lined up by the gate with their hands in the air while Israeli soldiers scrutinized their identity papers to see if any were soldiers who had changed into civilian clothing; dead bodies were already being carried out on stretchers, with handkerchiefs over the faces so that medics would not mistake them for the many wounded.

Lepidopt had fought his way through the Moghrabi Quarter, and he was one of the first to reach the Kotel ha-Ma-aravi, the Western Wall of the Temple Mount.

At first he didn't realize what it was — just a very high ancient wall along the left side of an alley; clumps of weeds, far too high to be pulled out, patched its rows of weathered stones. It wasn't until he noticed other Israeli soldiers hesitantly touching the uneven old masonry that it dawned on him what it must be.

This wall was all that remained of the Second Temple, built on the site of Solomon's Temple, its construction completed by Herod at around the time of Christ and then destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. This was the place of the Shekinah, the earthly presence of God, to which Jewish pilgrims had come for nearly two thousand years until Jordan's borders had enclosed it and excluded them in 1948.

Soldiers were on their knees, weeping, oblivious to the sniper fire; and Lepidopt shuffled up to the craggy, eroded white masonry, absently unstrapping his helmet and feeling the breeze in his wet hair as he pulled it off. He wiped one shaky hand down the front of his camouflage jacket and then reached out and touched the wall.

He pulled his hand back — and powerfully in his mind had come the conviction that he would never touch the wall again.

He had stepped back in confusion at this sudden, intrusive certainty; and then, defiantly, had reached his hand out toward the wall again — and a blow that seemed to come from nowhere punched his hand away and spun him around to kneel on the street, staring at blood jetting from the ragged edge of his right hand where his little finger and knuckle had been.

Several of the other soldiers were firing short bursts at the source of the shot, and a couple more of them dragged Lepidopt away. His wound was a minor one on that day, but within an hour he had been taken to the Hadassah Hospital, and for him the Six-Day War was over.

Four days later it was over for Israel too — Israel had beaten the hostile nations to the north, east, and south, and had taken the Golan Heights, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the Sinai desert.

And eleven times — twelve times now, thank you, Bert! — in the twenty years since then, Lepidopt had again experienced that certainty about something he had just done: You will never do this again. In 1970, three years after he had touched the Western Wall for the first and last time, he had attended a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade at the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv, and as the last notes of the Allegro Molto echoed away, he had suddenly been positive that he would not ever hear Scheherazade again.

Two years after that he had visited Paris for the last time; not long afterward he had discovered that he would never again swim in the ocean. After having part of his hand shot off in testing the premonition about the Western Wall, he was reluctant to test any of these subsequent ones.

Just during this last year he had, for the last time, changed a tire, eaten a tuna sandwich, petted a cat, and seen a movie in a theater — and now he knew that he would never again hear the name John Wayne spoken. How soon, he wondered bleakly, until I've started a car for the last time, closed a door, brushed my teeth, coughed?

Lepidopt had gone to the Anshe Emet Synagogue on Robertson at dawn today for recitation of the Sh'ma and the Shachrit Tefilah prayer, as usual, but clearly he was not going to be able to get there for the afternoon prayers, nor probably the evening ones either. He might as well say the afternoon Mincha prayer alone, here; he stood up to go into the other bedroom, where he kept the velvet bag that contained his tallit shawl and the little leather tefillin boxes. Every day he shaved the top of his head so that a toupee could be his head covering, and the one he wore to pray was in the bedroom too. He never kept his yarmulke-toupee in the bathroom.

Rabbi Hiyya bar Ashi had written that a man whose mind is conflicted should not pray; Lepidopt hoped God would forgive him for that too.

Three

The truck cab smelled like book paper and tobacco. "When we do go," Daphne said, cheerfully enough, "we can go to Grammar's house again too, and pull up the bricks. A-zoo-sa," she added derisively, seeing the Azusa exit through the windshield. And Clairmont and Montclair were coming up.

She used to think Azusa was an interesting name for a city, but recently she had heard that it meant "A-to-Z USA," and now she classed it with other ridiculous words, like brouhaha and patty melt.

She also disapproved of a city called Claremont being right next to one named Montclair. She thought there should be a third one, Mairn-Clot.

Traffic was heavy on the eastbound 10, and an hour after they had left Pasadena their six-year-old Ford pickup truck was still west of the 15, with San Bernardino and their house still twenty miles ahead. The afternoon sunlight glittered fiercely on the chrome all around them; brake lights glowed like coals. Daphne knew the traffic justified her father's decision not to go look at the Chinese Theater today, and she had stopped sulking about it.

"We'd have to split it with Bennett and Moira," her father said absently, his right foot gunning the accelerator while his left foot let the clutch out every few seconds in little surges. The gearshift lever was on the steering column, and it didn't seem likely that he'd be reaching up to shift out of first gear anytime soon. "If there's really gold under the bricks," he added.

Daphne nodded. "That's right. If you don't want to do what Grammar wanted you to do with it."

"As in, she told me about it, and didn't tell them. Why is everybody going east out of L.A. on a Sunday afternoon?"

Daphne nodded. "She knew they've got plenty of money already, and that's why she told you. Her — last wishes." Last wishes was a good phrase.

"I'll think about it. It might not be gold. Though — wow, look at that," he said, his finger tapping the windshield. An old Lockheed Neptune bomber was flying north over the freeway ahead of them, its piston engines roaring. Its shadow flickered over a patch of cars a mile ahead.

"There must be fires in the mountains," Daphne said.

"It's the season for it. We'll probably—" He paused, and glanced at her. "You're worrying about me," he said. "And it's not to do with money. I — can't quite get the reason, just a sort of image of me, and worry like some kind of steady background music." He peered at her again. "What about?"

Daphne shrugged and looked away, embarrassed that he had caught her thoughts. "Just — everybody leaves you. Your dad ran off and then your mom died in a car crash, and Mom died two years ago, and now Grammar." She looked at him, but he was watching the traffic again. "I'm not going to leave you."

"Thanks, Daph. I won't—" He stopped. "Now you're shocked. What did you see?"

"You think your mother killed herself!"

"Oh." He exhaled, and she sensed that he was finally near tears, so she looked out the side window at a railway bridge over a shallow arroyo. "Well, yes," he said, with evident control, "I — now you mention it — I think she did. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have — I guess she just couldn't handle it, foreclosure on the house, got arrested for being drunk in public — after my father—"

Daphne had to stop him or she'd start crying herself. "Why were you on your guard," she interrupted, "when Uncle Bennett and I mentioned broken clocks?" Her own voice was quavering, but she went on, "I said the time wasn't right on her VCR in the shed, and he said something about a broken clock, and both times you thought for a second that we meant something else."

Her father took a deep breath, and managed a laugh. "It's hard to explain. Ask your aunt Moira sometime, she grew up there too."

Daphne knew he'd say more if she didn't say anything, so she stared out through the windshield, looking past the cars surrounding them. This far east of Los Angeles there weren't housing tracts around the freeway, just two rows of tall eucalyptus trees. A railway line paralleled the freeway to the south, and occasional farmhouse-looking buildings were scattered across the foothills to the north; the mountains beyond the foothills were brown outlines in the summer smog.

"Okay," her father went on at last. "Grammar — what, had no respect for time. You know the way she carried on sometimes, as if she was still a teenager, like going to Woodstock; and she'd plant primroses in midsummer, and they'd thrive; food got cold real quick sometimes even though she just took it out of the pan, and other times it stayed hot for hours; well, a long time. It never surprised her. Maybe she was just pulling tricks on us, but time didn't seem to work right, around her."

A big blue charter bus swerved into their lane ahead of them without signaling, and her father hit the brake and tapped the horn irritably. He didn't mind if people cut him off, even rudely, as long as they used their blinkers. "Dipshit," he said.

"Dipshit," Daphne agreed.

"I know all this sounds weird," her father said. "Maybe us kids imagined it."

"You remember it. Most grown-ups forget all that kind of stuff."

"Anyway," he went on, "the Kaleidoscope Shed — one time Moira and I, when we were about eight and ten, found our initials carved in one of the boards of it, though we hadn't done it; and then a year or so later we noticed that they were gone — the board didn't even show a scratch — and we'd got so used to them being there that we carved 'em in again. And when we stood back and looked at it — I swear — what we had carved was exactly what had been there before. Not copied, see, but the same exact cuts, around the same bumps of wood grain. And then a year or so later they were gone again."

""Were they there today?"

"I honestly forgot to look. I might have, after your 'time's wrong' remark, but then Bennett showed up."

Daphne was watching the back of the blue bus ahead of them; it was speeding up and then slowing down. Under the back window, in a blocky typeface, was lettered HELIX. "Why did you call it the Kaleidoscope Shed?" she asked.

"I should get away from Felix here, he's probably drunk," her father said. "Okay, sometimes the edges of the shed, the boundaries from wherever you were looking — rippled. And the shed made a noise too at those times, like a lot of wooden wind chimes or somebody shaking maracas. And sometimes it just looked less decrepit, for a while."

He pressed the brake and signaled for a lane change to the right, shaking his head. "She couldn't stand it when my dad left — the police said she was drunk when her car went off the highway, and I don't blame her for that, I don't blame her for killing herself — my dad drove her to it, by abandoning her with two little kids and no money."

Daphne had known his thoughts were still on his mother even before he abruptly switched topics. She tried to blank her mind, but her father picked up her reflexive thought anyway.

"True," he said, "she abandoned us too. But she sent a note to Grammar, asking her to take Moira and me in, raise us, if anything ever happened to her. A couple of weeks later was the car crash. See, she entrusted us to her mother-in-law, she at least made some provision for us, not — not like him."

Daphne couldn't help asking — her father so seldom talked about all this. "What became of him?"

"I think he sent Grammar some money, the year he left. 1955. She got some, anyway. So he must have known where we were — but aside from that money, nothing. He'd be nearly sixty now." Her father's voice was hoarse and level. "He — I'd like to meet him someday."

Daphne was dizzy with the vicarious emotion, and she consciously unclenched her jaw. It was anger as bitter as vinegar, but Daphne knew that vinegar was what wine turned into if it was left to lie too long, and she knew, though her father might not, that his anger was baffled and humiliated love, longing for a fair hearing.

"I always—" he began. "Grammar never seemed to wonder what had become of him, so I always figured she knew. He was her son, and — and she did treat me and Moira as her own children, loved us, after my mom dumped us on her." He thumped the clutch down and shifted up to second, though a moment later he had to pull it back down to first again.

"It is hard to understand why people kill themselves," he went on quietly, as if to himself. "You look at the ways they do it — jump off buildings, shoot themselves in the mouth, pipe carbon monoxide into an idling car in the garage — what terrible last moments! I'd just eat a bunch of sleeping pills and drink a bottle of bourbon, myself — which probably shows I'm not a candidate."

"Portia ate hot coals," Daphne said, relieved that the cramp of aching anger had passed. "Caesar's wife. That's pretty dumb — I always wondered why they named a car after such a dumb person."

Her father laughed, and she was pleased that he had known she was joking.

"You're looking at it like killing yourself, though," she said. "The way they do it, real suicides, is like they're just killing a person. Throwing somebody off a building is a rotten way to kill yourself, but it's a fine way to kill a person."

For a few seconds her father didn't answer. Since Daphne's mother had died two years ago, he had talked to Daphne as he would talk to an adult, and often she felt helplessly out of her depth; she hoped her last remark hadn't been stupid, or thoughtless. She had pretty much been talking about his mother, after all.

But, "That's pretty good, Daph," he said finally, and she could tell that he meant it.

"What's so weird about Grammar's coffee grinder?" she asked.

"Don't I get a turn? Who's the boy with the glasses and dark hair? I've been seeing him ever since we left Pasadena."

"I don't—" Daphne could feel her face heating up. "He's just a boy in school. What about the coffee grinder?"

Her father glanced sideways at her, and it was clear that he was considering not telling her. She didn't lower her eyebrows or look away.

"Okay," he said at last, returning his attention to the lane ahead. "Damn, that crazy bus has changed lanes too, look — maybe I could pass him now."

Daphne peered over the dashboard and the rust-specked white hood beyond the windshield. Though there were two cars between their truck and the bus, she thought she could see a face in the bus's tinted high back window — but the face seemed to have silver patches on its forehead, cheeks and chin.

She pushed herself back in the seat.

"Don't pass it, Dad," she said quickly. "Slow down, get off the freeway if you have to."

He might not have seen the face, but he slowed down. "No harm getting off at Haven," he said quietly. The Haven Avenue exit was almost upon them, and he swung the car through the lane on their right and directly onto the exit ramp, making the engine roar in first gear.

"Her coffee grinder," he said when they had got off the freeway and turned left onto Haven. It was empty country around here, and sprawling grapevines made still-orderly lines across the untended fields, leftovers from the days when this had all been wine country.

"Well, somebody's got part of the story confused," he went on. "See, when Grammar called me today — what was it, eleven-thirty?"

"About that, yeah."

"Well, when she called me she was using her coffee grinder. I ran it for a second in her kitchen back there, and the acoustics are unmistakable. She was still in her kitchen at — well, at the earliest! — eleven o'clock this morning."

"And the hospital at Mount Shasta called Aunt Moira when?"

"About twelve-thirty."

"How far away is Mount Shasta?"

"Five hundred miles, easy. Almost up at the Oregon border." He shook his head. "Moira must have misunderstood the time somehow. Or I guess Grammar could have raced to LAX right after she called me, got straight onto a plane, direct flight, no layover, and then died just as she got off the plane…"

Daphne simply understood that there was no way her great-grandmother could have got to Shasta, but that the old lady had done it anyway. And she was sure her father realized this too.

"Did she build the Kaleidoscope Shed?" Daphne asked.

"Hah. Yes. I don't think she even hired anybody to help. But her father drew the plans, she said. I never met him — she called him Prospero, but as a nickname."

"Prospero from The Tempest? What did he do? — like for a job?"

"I got the impression he was a violinist."

"What's the bit, in The Tempest? About the creepy music?"

Her father sighed. " 'Sitting on a bank,'" he recited, "'Weeping again the King my father's wrack, this music crept by me upon the waters.'"

Daphne knew she'd be scared tonight in her bed, but that would be then — right now, among familiar fields and roads, and the hour no later than 3:30, she was just tense, as if she'd had several fast Cokes in a row. "I said she was a witch."

"She was a good mother to us," he said. "But!" he added, holding up his hand to stop her reflexive apology, "it looks like she may have been something like a witch." He turned right onto Foothill, the highway that used to be Route 66, still dotted with 1950s-era motels; travel time was predictable on surface streets, and Daphne knew they should be home by 4:30 at the latest. Her father added, "I think Grammar killed herself too."

Daphne didn't answer; she knew he could tell she thought so too.

Another World War II-era bomber roared overhead. There must be fires in the mountains here as well.

Her father was teaching a summer school class in Twain to Modern at Cal State San Bernardino tomorrow, and he had a stack of papers to correct, so when he opened a beer and shuffled up the hall to his office, Daphne took a Coke from the refrigerator and walked into the living room. Two or three cats ran away in front of her, as usual acting as if they'd never seen her before.

The kitchen and living room were the oldest parts of the house, built in 1929, when San Bernardino had been mostly orange groves. The house was built on a slope, and the newer sections were uphill-two bedrooms and two bathrooms that had been added on in the '50s, and at the top end of the hall was a big second living room and her father's office, built in the '70s. The walls of the downhill end of the house were stone behind the drywall, and this living room by the kitchen was always the coolest part of the house.

She fitted the Pee-wee's Big Adventure cassette into the VCR slot and sat down on the couch across from the TV set. If her father wanted to watch the movie, she'd see it again with him, but usually he fretted till bedtime over his lecture notes.

Remembered circus music spun behind the credits on the TV screen, and then the movie opened with a view of the Eiffel Tower painted on a billboard. This was Pee-wee's dream, she recalled; he was about to be awakened by his alarm clock. In the dream a cluster of bicyclists streaked past the billboard, and Pee-wee was winning the Tour de France on his crazy red bike, yapping like a parrot in his too tight gray suit; then he had ridden past the finish line, breaking the yellow tape, and all the spectators lifted him off his bike and carried him to a bandstand in a green field — and after some woman had put a crown on his head, she and all the other people hurried away, leaving Pee-wee alone on the platform in the middle of the field—

—and then it was a different movie.

This was black and white, and it started abruptly, with no credits. There was jazzy atonal piano music, but shots of the ocean were accompanied by no surf sounds, and Daphne knew even before the first dialogue card appeared that this was a silent movie.

It was about two sisters, Joan and Magdalen, living in a house on the California coast. One of the sisters was engaged to a simple-minded fisherman named Peter, and the other wasn't; but the actresses seemed to switch roles from scene to scene, so that Daphne could only guess that the engaged sister was the one who met a glossy-haired "playboy novelist" and ran off with him to some glamorous big city, maybe San Francisco. Peter seemed upset by it, anyway. Everybody's facial expressions were exaggerated, even for a silent movie — grotesque, almost imbecilic — and they all seemed to walk awkwardly.

Daphne had never heard the sound-track music before, and it didn't have any recognizable melody, but she kept being jarred by the absence of certain notes that the music had seemed to call for, as if she had tried to step up onto a curb that wasn't there. She had no sooner wondered if the implied notes formed a concealed melody than she was sure that they did — she thought she could remember it and hum it, if she wanted to, but she didn't want to.

She was sweating, and she was glad she was sitting down. The couch, the whole living room, seemed to be spinning. Once when her mother and father had had a party, she had sneaked into the kitchen and poured a splash of each kind of liquor into an empty Skippy peanut butter jar — brandy, gin, bourbon, vodka — and taken it back to her room. When she had finished the "cocktail" and lain down on her bed, the bed had seemed to spin like this. Really, though, this was now more like teetering — as if the whole house were balanced on a pole over a pit without walls or a bottom.

She was aware of her father's hands — one hand holding a sheet of paper and the other holding a pencil and scribbling something in the margin; and the writing hand paused, for he was aware of her intrusion. In the bones of her head, over the jagged piano music, she heard him say, What's up, Daph?

She had to keep flexing her right hand to dispel the impression that another hand was holding it — a warm, damp hand, not her father's. Someone standing behind her…

Maybe it hadn't been Peter's fiancйe who'd run away, because now in the movie he was marrying the sister who had stayed. But the wedding was taking place in some sort of elegant Victorian hotel — a white-draped table appeared to be an altar, and a man in black robes was standing behind it with his arms raised; he was wearing a crownless white hat that exposed his bald white scalp, and the brim of the hat had been cut into triangular points, like a child's cutout of a star. He leaned down to press his forehead against the tablecloth, so that his bald head with the ring of triangles seemed to be a symbol of the sun, and then the bride was stepping up to the altar with a knife — there was a quick cut to the other sister, on the seashore, plunging a knife into the center of a starfish—

—and suddenly Daphne realized that it had been only one woman all along, somehow split in two so that one of her could go away while the other stayed home — the woman was in two places at once, and so was Daphne — Daphne was standing up very tall from her father's desk, tossing the paper to the floor and saying in her father's voice, "Daph, who's in the house?"

And then the house lost its balance and began to tip over into the pit — for a moment Daphne couldn't feel the couch under her, she was falling — and in a panic she grabbed with her whole mind.

The house lurched violently back to level solidity again, though the curtains in the front window didn't even sway; and black smoke was jetting out of the vent slots in the VCR.

Daphne was sobbing, and her ears were ringing, but she could hear her father in the hall shout, "Daph, the fire extinguisher, quick!"

She got dizzily to her feet and blundered to the kitchen, and she muscled the heavy red cylinder up from beside the tool chest. Then her father was there, yanking it from her arms with a brief "Thanks!" and turning away — but instead of going straight across into the living room, he ran left, up the hall.

Daphne peered around the corner after him, and saw smoke billowing out across the hall ceiling from the far-right-hand doorway — her bedroom.

Her father could handle that. Daphne hurried back into the living room, coughing and blinking in the fumes of burning plastic, and she tugged the VCR's cord from the wall and then yanked the still smoking thing down off the TV set; she gave it a few more jerks, and when it lay smoking on the rug, free of all connecting cables, she dragged it through the kitchen and out the door, onto the grass. She took a couple of deep breaths of the fresh air before hurrying back inside.

She ran back through the kitchen and up the hall, and she stepped wide around the doorway to her room in case her father might come out fast; smoke made a hazy layer under the hall ceiling and the air smelled of burning cloth.

Her father was shooting her blackened bed with quick bursts of white fog from the extinguisher, but the fire seemed to be out. Her pillow was charred, and the blue wall behind the bed was streaked with soot.

She was wringing her hands. "What burned?"

"Rumbold," her father panted. Rumbold was a teddy bear Daphne's mother had given her years and years ago. "Was there somebody in the house, at the door?"

"Oh, I didn't mean to burn Rumbold! No, that was in Grammar's movie. It wasn't Pee-wee, it was a scary movie. I'm sorry, Daddy!"

"Your mattress might be okay. But we'd better drag your sheets and blankets and pillow outside. And Rumbold, what's left of him."

The teddy bear had melted as much as burned, and Daphne carried him outside on a cushion because he was still very hot.

"The VCR too?" her father asked in the fresh air as he stepped over the charred machine on his way to the trash cans.

Trotting along after him, Daphne called, "Yes, it too. Dad, it was a really scary movie!" Tears blurred her vision — she was crying as much about Rumbold as about all the rest of it. The late afternoon breeze was chilly in her sweaty hair.

Stepping around the truck, her father dumped the still smoking bedding into one of the cans.

"I want to bury Rumbold," Daphne said.

Her father crouched beside her, wiping his hands on his shirt. "Okay. What happened?"

"It was the movie—it wasn't Pee-wee except for the first couple of minutes, then it was a black and white, a silent. And I felt myself falling — the whole house felt like it was falling! — and I grabbed on — I guess I grabbed the VCR and Rumbold, both." She blinked at him through her tears. "I've never been that scared before. But how could I set stuff on fire?"

He put his arms around her. "Maybe you didn't. Anyway, the movie's gone now."

His kindness, when she had expected to be yelled at, set her sobbing again. "She was a witch!" she choked.

"She's dead and gone. Don't—"

She felt her father shiver through his shirt, and when she looked up she saw that he was looking past her, down the driveway.

Daphne turned around and saw Grammar's old green Rambler station wagon rocking to a halt on the dirt driveway, thirty feet away, under the overhanging boughs of the Paraiso tree.

Daphne had begun moaning and thrashing in her father's arms before she heard him saying, "It's not her! Daph! It's some old guy, it's not her! She's dead and gone and her movie's burned up! Look, it's just some guy!"

Daphne clutched her father's shoulders and blinked fearfully at the car.

There was only one person visible in it, a gray-haired man with a pouchy, frowning face; perhaps he had only now noticed the child and the crouching man beside the Ford truck. As she watched, the car quickly reversed out of the driveway back into the street, and then sped away east. She lost sight of it behind the fence and the trunks of the neighbor's eucalyptus trees.

"That was Grammar's car!" Daphne wailed.

"Yes it was," her father said grimly, straightening up. "Probably that guy was the burglar who broke into Grammar's house. Casing our place now, I bet."

"Her keys were gone," said Daphne, shivering and sniffling now. "He must have waited till we were all gone, then took her car." And followed us, she thought.

"I'll call the police. We're dealing with thieves here, Daph, not witches."

And a girl who can set things on fire in rooms she's not even in, Daphne thought unhappily. Even things she doesn't want to burn up. What if I have nightmares about that movie? Could I set fires in my sleep?

A shrill screeching from behind her made her jump and grab her father's leg.

He ruffled her hair. "It's the smoke alarm, goof. It just now noticed that there was a fire."

Four blocks away, the green Rambler had pulled over to the dirt shoulder of Highland Avenue, and a couple of children on bicycles laughed to see the gray-haired old driver open the door and lean out to vomit on the pavement.

Four

When Lepidopt unbolted the door and pulled it open, Malk was startled by how exhausted the man looked — Malk knew Lepidopt was forty, but at this moment, with the lines in his hollow cheeks and the wrinkles around his eyes, and with the stray curls of his prayer-toupee stuck to his forehead, he looked twenty years older. In his hand was a piece of white paper that he had clearly written out as a report, in the strict Mossad format with the addressee and subject line underlined.

Malk knew there was no superior officer for Lepidopt to give it to — it could only be a copy-to-file letter; a bit of kastach, covering one's ass.

"What did I miss?" Malk asked cautiously after he had stepped inside and Lepidopt had closed and rebolted the door. The curtains were drawn, and a lamp by the window had been switched on. "There was no particular man and girl at the Chinese Theater."

Young Bozzaris was standing in the kitchen doorway by the bowl of macaroni this time, silhouetted by the fluorescent ceiling light, and Sam Glatzer was sitting on the couch, asleep. The room smelled of salsa and corn tortillas.

Lepidopt nodded. "No, they went straight home. Glatzer received another transmission."

Malk noticed the tape recorder on the coffee table, among a litter of greasy waxed paper and cardboard cups; apparently the transmission had arrived so suddenly that it had been easier to bring the recorder to Glatzer than to bring Glatzer to the recorder.

"Any locators this time?"

Lepidopt leaned his back against the curtained window and rubbed his eyes. "No, still no locators." He lowered his hands. "Glatzer's gamúr."

Malk looked again at the old man on the couch. Glatzer's chin was on his chest, and he wasn't moving at all. The holograph talisman lay on his belt buckle, its cord curled slackly across his shirt.

"Oh weh," Malk said softly. "Was it… stressful?"

"I'll play it back for you. After dark we can drive him to Pershing Square, sit him at one of those chess tables, and then call the police to report a body there. Perishing Square. Poor Sam. Sit down."

Malk sat down in the chair next to the door, across from the couch.

Lepidopt had apparently rewound the tape to the right place, for when he pushed the play button there was only a moment of silence and then the abrupt beginning of a recording.

Lepidopt's voice began it, a few syllables ending with "—go!" Then Malk heard Glatzer's frail voice: "The girl, in a house, with cats. Now the Eiffel Tower — no, it's just a picture of it — a bicycle race, in France — some crazy giggling guy in a gray suit is riding in it, passing everybody — he's riding a red bicycle, not any kind of racing bike — he won, he broke the tape—"

Bozzaris's recorded voice interjected, "Pee-wee's Big Adventure is what that is."

"—crowd is carrying him to a lawn—"

"What?" said Lepidopt's voice.

"It's a movie," Bozzaris had explained then, "somebody's watching it."

"It's a movie, on a TV set," said Glatzer's voice. "Now it's a different movie, one woman playing two roles — no no, two women playing one role—" For several seconds the old man was as silent on the tape as he was now on the couch. Malk wished he'd asked for a cigarette before the tape started; he couldn't shake the thought that the tape voice was Glatzer talking live from wherever dead people go.

A hoarse cry shook out of the machine, and then Glatzer's voice went on breathlessly, "I can't follow her, she's falling out of here and now. I almost fell out with her— Wait, she's back — everything's on fire, up the hall and the TV set — running through smoke — I'm fine, let me get this! — a man's voice says, 'Was there somebody in the house, at the door?'"

Malk kept looking at Glatzer's dead body in its shirt and tie, half expecting gestures to accompany these terse, fragmentary impressions.

From the recorder Glatzer's voice said, "'I didn't mean to burn Rumbold,' says the little girl."

The tape recorder was quiet again for a while, though Malk could hear recorded panting. He made himself look away from the body.

Glatzer's voice went on finally, "'I want to bury Rumbold,' says the girl. 'It was the movie — it wasn't Pee-wee except for the first couple of minutes, then it was a black and white, a silent' — uh — 'She was a witch!' Now — now a car is pulling into the driveway, an old guy in it, in a, a green station wagon — he's — the girl is holding on to her father — I can see the old guy, he's—"

Then there was the sound of a sharply indrawn breath, and blurred exclamations from Lepidopt and Bozzaris.

Lepidopt now reached down and switched off the recorder. "And then he died."

And we lost our remote viewer, Lepidopt thought. Our psychic eyes are gone. We killed this old man — and what did we get for it? Not even any locators.

Through the curtain he could hear the faint music from the speaker taped to the living room window: Madonna's "Who's That Girl?"

Lepidopt didn't think he had ever been this tired. Malk and Bozzaris had better not need help walking the dead body from the car to one of those cement tables in Pershing Square with a chessboard on it in mosaic tile. They'd have to remember to take the talisman off the body.

He thought of the old man sitting there abandoned in the night, with no player on the other side of the table; and he almost asked, Who played Rooster Cogburn in True Grit?

Instead he pushed away from the window and said to Bozzaris, "What have we got right now?"

"From the noon tape," said Malk, "we've got an old woman who died on Mount Shasta, and she was probably the Marity woman: Sam said she just appeared there, and of course Sam saw her via the holograph talisman, which would indicate her. What was it she said, just before she died?"

"It sounded like 'voyo, voyo,'" said Bozzaris. "Voyou is French for hoodlum, if that's worth anything. And then an hour and a half later," he went on, sitting down in his white plastic chair by the computer, "we have a man and a little girl who quote Shakespeare. And they apparently know the Marity woman fairly well — he said she doesn't drink, or own a gun."

"And the guy knew her age, within two years," put in Malk. "And he says she went to Switzerland after Chaplin died in '77, and she's got the Chaplin footprints from the Chinese Theater in this shed."

Lepidopt was pleased that they were thinking, and let them go on with it.

"I still think they're locals, the man and the girl," Malk went on. "This seems like L.A. to me."

"But the old woman got mail as Lisa Marity," Bozzaris reminded him, "and we've checked L.A., past and present, for any Marity."

Malk nodded. "And there's no indication that this man and girl know anything," he said. "They were surprised by the Chinese Theater slab, and the guy said 'a bunch of old letters' with no evident informed guessing, and they assumed it was a plain thief who broke into the house, not a reconnaissance team. Obviously they don't—"

"Hah!" interrupted Bozzaris, springing lithely from his chair. He grabbed a hefty telephone book from the kitchen shelf and began flipping through it.

"What?" asked Lepidopt.

"The little girl said, 'Divil a man can say a word agin them,'" Bozzaris said excitedly, "it's a Cohan song. It's Harrigan in the song, but with Marity it'd be 'M-A-double R-I,' see? We've been" — he was tossing his way through the white pages — "looking for either the Serbian Maric or the Hungarianized Marity, with one r, but what if the old lady added an extra r to make it look Irish? Nothing in L.A. — Bert, give me Long Beach, and you get busy on Pomona or something."

Lepidopt shambled past Malk and Bozzaris into the stuffy kitchen and took a telephone book from the shelf. He thumbed through the pages to the Marriage-Martinez page, and squinted down the columns.

"Here's a Marrity, L," he said, "with two rs." He flipped to the cover. "Pasadena."

There proved to be no more Marritys at all in the Los Angeles area.

"I bet that's her," Malk said. "I knew this was local."

Lepidopt stared at the telephone book in his hands. "We should have found this… years ago," he said sadly.

"Natural oversight, though," said Bozzaris with a shrug. "If you were looking for M-A-R-I, you'd never see that solitary Marrity way over there. There's a whole nation of Marquezes in between — and Marriots. And you wouldn't expect to find her listed anyway."

"Still," said Lepidopt, "there it was, all this time."

"Hey," Bozzaris said, "nobody's human." It was an old Mossad line, a confusion of "nobody's perfect" and "I'm only human."

Lepidopt nodded tiredly. "Get on the phone," he told Bozzaris, "and tell your sayan to look up Lisa Marrity with two rs. Your San Diego detective. Have him check L.A. and Shasta."

He sat down on the couch facing Sam, and when Malk stepped toward him, he waved him off.

When he had returned to Tel Aviv in mid-June of 1967, unable to work because his hand was still bandaged, he had brooded, and checked out various books on Hebrew mysticism from the library, and finally he had visited a friend who was an amateur photographer.

Lepidopt had wondered if it had been the Shekinah, the presence of God, that had given him the prediction that he would never again touch the Western Wall — the prediction that he had foolishly tested, at the cost of his finger and a good bit of his hand — and he remembered how the Lord had warned Moses to keep everyone back from Mount Sinai, in the book of Exodus: "You shall set bounds for the people round about, saying, 'Beware of going up the mountain or touching the border of it. Whosoever touches the mountain shall be put to death: no hand shall touch him, but he shall be either stoned or shot; beast or man, he shall not live.

To Lepidopt this had sounded like precautions, in terms a primitive people could follow, against exposure to radiation; especially the order that anyone who got too close to the mountain should be killed from a distance. So he gave his photographer friend the film badge he had been issued when the Fourth Battalion's mission had been to find the Rephidim stone in the southern wastes of the Sinai desert. Lepidopt wanted to know if the film showed that he had been exposed to divine radiation.

The photographer broke open the film badge in his darkroom and developed the patch of film it contained, but while it wasn't transparent and unexposed, neither did it show the graduated fogged bands of radiation exposure — instead the negative showed, in white lines against a black background, a Star of David inside two concentric rings, with a lot of Hebrew words in all the spaces and four Hebrew words evenly spaced around the outer circle. The words in the corners proved to be the names of the four rivers of Paradise— Pishon, Gihon, Prath, and Hiddekel — and the script inside the star read, "Your life story be sacrosanct, and all who are in your train." Between the rings had been various names such as Adam and Eve and Lilith, and word fragments in all the diamond-shaped spaces had been rearrangements of the letters of the Hebrew word for "unchanged" or "unedited."

To his own surprise, Lepidopt had not taken this as evidence of divine intervention; his belief, he discovered, was that the diagram had been exposed onto the film and inserted into the ORNL badge before it was issued to him.

Perhaps the photographer had mentioned the odd "photograph" to friends; or perhaps all the men who had so briefly been assigned to the Fourth Battalion were monitored; in any case, Lepidopt received postwar orders to report to the army base in Shalishut, outside Tel Aviv. There, in a garage that was empty except for himself and half a dozen white-coated technicians, he was given a series of peculiar tests — he was asked to describe photographs in sealed cardboard envelopes, to identify playing cards just by looking at the backs of them, and to heat up coffee in a cup inside a glass box. To this day he had no idea if his guesses about the photos and the cards had been accurate, or if the coffee had heated up at all.

For the next several months he was called back for more tests, but these were more mundane — he was given a number of thorough physical examinations, and his reflexes were tested; the medical staff gave him strict dietary instructions, steering him away from preservatives, hard liquor, and most meats.

After three months the program had become more instruction than testing. If he hadn't been amply paid for the time all this took, he might have refused to go on, even though he understood this was part of his army reserve service. Certainly it was pazam in both senses of the word: service time, and a longtime too. Luckily he had still been single in those days.

The instruction was mostly done in a windowless trailer that was driven from place to place throughout the day, perhaps at random; five other students, all males of about his own age, sat with him at a bolted-down trestle table that ran the length of the trailer, and the twenty-one-year-old Lepidopt was soon able to take readable notes with his left hand, even when the truck braked or turned unexpectedly. The students seldom had the same instructor twice, but Lepidopt was surprised that each instructor was a tanned, fit-looking man of obviously military bearing, in spite of the anonymous suits and ties they all wore.

He would have expected bent old scholars, or disheveled fanatics — for the texts the students analyzed were spiral-bound photocopies of old Hebrew mystical books. Some had titles — Sepher Yezirah, Raza Rabba — but others just bore headings like British Museum Ms. 784, or Ashesegnen xvii or Leipzig Ms. 40d.

Often when the texts were in Hebrew they had to be copied out in the student's handwriting before they could be read aloud, and in those cases the students had also had to fast for twenty-four hours before beginning, and make sure to write each letter of the text so that it touched no other letter; and often the lectures were delivered in whispers—though surely there could have been no risk of being overheard.

The texts had largely been antique natural histories with interesting but outlandish theories, such as Zeno's paradoxes that appeared to show that physical motion was impossible; but Lepidopt had been surprised to see that the fourteenth-century Kabbalist Moses Cordovero, in his book Pardes Rimmonim, had defined lasers while describing God and the amplified light that connects Him with His ten emanations; and that the succession of these emanations, or sephirot, seemed to be a stylized but clear presentation of the Big Bang theory; and that these medieval mystics apparently knew that matter was a condensed form of energy.

It had seemed to young Lepidopt that the instructors emphasized these things a bit defensively, in order to lend some frail plausibility to the wilder things in the texts.

Those wilder things began to have a stark, firsthand plausibility on the day when the students were taken in several jeeps out to some ruins in the desert north of Ramie — and that night in his own room, having pulled the curtains closed to block the view of the night sky, Lepidopt had wondered what sort of action the Fourth Battalion would have been faced with in the Sinai desert, at the Rephidim stone, if the orders had not been changed.

The instructor that day had been a deeply tanned, gray-haired old fellow with eyes as pale as spit; he had taken them into the wilderness to show them a thing that he claimed was "one of the Aeons" — specifically the Babylonian air devil Pazuzu.

Far out in the desert, half an hour's steep hike from where they had had to park the jeeps, the students and the instructor had finally stood at noon in a shadeless, yards-wide summit ring of carved, weathered stones under an empty sky, and the old instructor had meditated for a while and then pressed his right hand on to an indentation in one of the stones — and then they were reeling with vertigo in the center of a clanging whirlwind, but it had palpably been a living, sentient whirlwind; and young Lepidopt had known in his spine and his viscera that it was the world that was spinning, and the alien creature, the Aeon Pazuzu, that was holding still. In comparison to it, nothing he had ever encountered had been motionless.

Nothing else in the training had been as dramatic as that, but some things had been more upsetting — as when the students had been trained in astral projection. On the several occasions when Lepidopt's consciousness had hung in the air, looking down at his own slack body on a couch, he had always been afraid that he would be spun away into the whirling honeycomb of the world and never find his way back to his physical body. Every time he had pulled himself back into his body, sliding into it as if he were inching into a tight sleeping bag, it had been with a profound sense of relief and a resolution never to leave it again.

There had always been afternoon prayers in the truck, and evening ones if the lessons went on that long, but the Psalms all seemed to Lepidopt to have been chosen for their apologetic or resentful tone.

Lepidopt realized he'd been staring across the table at Glatzer's collapsed body. He stood up and crossed to the wide front window, and leaned his forehead against the curtained glass, idly listening to the faint music audible from the speaker taped against the windowpane — it was the new U2 song, "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For."

Neither have I, Lepidopt thought. We seem to be very close now, but I wonder if I'll live to find the… the technique, the technology, the breakthrough that Isser Harel has been searching for ever since learning of a nameless little boy who appeared in England in 1935 long enough to leave impossible fingerprints on a water glass.

It had opened up a whole new direction of scientific inquiry. Isser Harel had kept it very secret, but perhaps not everyone else involved had been as discreet.

The Iraqis had been pursuing research in the same direction in the late 1970s; and Lepidopt, working with a Halomot team on a war-surplus destroyer in the Persian Gulf in '79, had detected the Iraqi research station at Al-Tuweitha, a few miles southwest of Baghdad. The world thought it was simply an Iraqi nuclear reactor that Israeli F-16s bombed to rubble in June 1981; only Menachem Begin and a few agents in the Halomot — and Saddam Hussein and his top advisors — had known what sort of device the Iraqis had been trying to build behind the cover of installing the French-built Tammuz reactor.

How odd, he thought, that Moslems could even get close! Had they studied the Hebrew Kabbalah?

The intelligence services of several countries seemed to be aware of the new possibility, just as they had vaguely known of "the uranium bomb" in the early '40s; in 1975 the Soviet premier Brezhnev had asked for an international ban on weapons "more terrible" than any the world had yet seen.

But it had been a Jew who discovered this thing, twenty years before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948; and in the text of the second- century Zohar was the passage, At the present time this door remains unknown because Israel is in exile; and therefore all the other doors are removed from them, so that they cannot know or commune; but when Israel will return from exile, all the supernal grades are destined to rest harmoniously upon this one. Then men will obtain a knowledge of the precious supernal wisdom of which hitherto they knew not.

And Israel wasn't in exile anymore.

It's all been one war for me, Lepidopt thought — and he made a narrow fist with the thumb and three fingers of his misshapen right hand.

Bozzaris had said something to him. Lepidopt looked up.

"What?"

"I said the dead woman on Mount Shasta was definitely the woman known as Lisa Marrity. I got my sayan on the phone, and I had him call police departments in L.A. and Shasta and ask about a Lisa Marrity, with two rs. The guy just called back — a hospital in Shasta pronounced her dead at 12:20 this afternoon. Driver's license says she was born in 1902 and lived at 204 Batsford Street in Pasadena. The Siskiyou County sheriff wants to look into it — it may have been suicide, since she had hardly anything but a note on her with next-of-kin phone numbers — which my man got and passed on to us, yes! — and witnesses say there was a big gold swastika on the grass under her body, made out of gold wire, just like Sam saw at noon. Real gold, they claim, though it was all gone by the time the cops got there."

"Some hippies," said Lepidopt, echoing what poor old Sam had said. He got to his feet. "Airline tickets, gas receipts?"

"None, and no keys at all, and no cash or credit cards at all. And she was barefoot, like Sam said, no shoes anywhere near her. Way up a hiking trail, and no cuts on her feet."

"Huh. So who are these next of kin?"

"A Frank Marrity — two rs — and a Moira Bradley. Frank's in the 909 area code, that's an hour east of Pasadena, and Moira's 818, which is Pasadena."

Bozzaris was in the kitchen with the Pasadena telephone directory. "Bradley," he read, "Bennett and Moira, as in 'Uncle Bennett,' note. 106 Almaraz Street. We haven't got any 909 directories here."

"Yes, that's got to be the 'Uncle Bennett' that Sam caught a reference to," said Lepidopt. "Right before 'pulled the tombstone down.' Get your sayan to look up Frank Marrity. And then you can take Sam to Pershing Square. Don't forget to take off the holograph talisman."

"I won't. But you'd better get Tel Aviv to send us another remote viewer to hang it on."

"Yes. Won't be as good as poor old Sam, I'm sure. I'll send Admoni an e-mail tonight." He wasn't looking forward to sending the report — the Mossad strongly disapproved of letting sayanim get hurt, much less killed; still, Glatzer had been in his seventies, and a heart attack had never been unlikely. "What's our safe-house situation like in the 909 area?"

"The two apartments are still stocked and paid up, in San Bernardino and Riverside," said Malk. "But for this kind of work your best bet is—"

"I know," said Lepidopt. "The tepee place."

"The Wigwam Motel on Route 66, right."

"Book us a room. A tepee. A wigwam."

I'll start with Frank Marrity, Lepidopt thought. He's almost certainly the guy Glatzer was reading this afternoon, the guy with the little girl.

Five

Huck Finn is told by Huck Finn himself, from his point of view."

Suddenly unwilling to read whatever sentence might follow that first one, Frank Marrity let the Blue Book test pamphlet fall into his lap. The stack of similar Blue Books stood on the table beside him, but he had just this moment decided to call in sick tomorrow, so they didn't depress him nearly as much as they had when he had sat down.

He was in the uphill living room, in a chair by the cold fireplace, and Daphne was asleep on the couch in front of the uphill TV set. She had drifted off during Mary Poppins, and he had turned the set off. She seemed to be sleeping peacefully, and he was reluctant to wake her.

He tamped his pipe and puffed a cloud of smoke toward the set of Dickens on the mantel. His hands weren't trembling now, but he still felt sick to his stomach.

Poltergeist? he thought, allowing the morbid, impossible thought to surface again. It must — actually — have been a poltergeist! A girl in her teens — well, close enough — and sudden breakages or fires in the house when she was emotionally stressed. Are there child psychologists who specialize in… poltergeistery? Maybe it was a one-shot thing, maybe it will have worn off by morning. We'll be able to forget about the whole thing.

One of the cats, a tailless black-and-gray male, was clawing the back of the couch, which was already hanging in tatters from the previous attentions of the cats. "No no, Chaz," said Marrity absently, saying what Daphne always told the cats, "we don't do that. We've talked about it, remember?"

What the hell kind of movie did Grammar leave lying around, anyway, driving little kids nuts? But apparently Grammar did mean to burn it. She would never knowingly hurt a child. Would never have.

Marrity didn't want to use the word poltergeist in Daphne's hearing, since she had seen the Steven Spielberg movie with that title. The little girl in that movie had been contacted by some kind of ghosts through a television screen, and he didn't want Daphne to develop a phobia about TV sets.

His Encyclopedia Britannica — admittedly a set published in 1951 — seemed to take poltergeist phenomena seriously. In the article on psychical research he had also read the section on telepathy and clairvoyance, but though the writer of the article seemed credulous of these things too, there was no mention of the sort of psychic link he and Daphne had.

Their link had shown up in the two years since Lucy's death, but until today it had alternated between them — for a week or so he would be able to catch occasional thoughts of Daphne's, and then the ability would fade out, and a month later Daphne would be able to see some of his thoughts for six to ten days. Maybe the no-telepathy periods had been getting longer, the alternating telepathic periods getting closer together, until now they had actually overlapped. Would they stop, now, after having finally occurred together? He hoped so, even though he was glad he and Daphne had been linked this afternoon, when the fires had started.

At dinner Daphne hadn't eaten much of her chili con came. Twice she had choked, as if she was having difficulty swallowing; but he had caught an image from her thoughts — a brief glimpse of somebody spooning out brains from a broken bald head with a splayed crown on it, seen in black and white and therefore obviously from the damned movie she had watched — and he had not asked her to say what was wrong. Maybe he should have.

More strongly than he had in a long time, he wished that Lucy had not died, leaving Daphne and him adrift. Even two parents were hardly enough to raise a child. He remembered a passage from Chesterton: "Although this child is much better than I, yet I must teach it. Although this being has much purer passions than I, yet I must control it."

Daphne's fingernails were always bitten down to the quick; for these last two years, anyway.

I do my best, he thought, trying the phrase on; and then he wondered how often he really did do his best, and for how long at a time.

Since he wouldn't be setting the alarm clock for tomorrow, he poured more Scotch into his glass, though the ice had long since melted. He wouldn't be paid for tomorrow either.

But there's gold under the bricks in Grammar's shed, he thought. Possibly.

Gold, which Grammar could have expected to survive the shed burning down; and some kind of movie, and some letters, which would reliably have been destroyed. Well, the movie was now burned up.

There had been a message on the telephone answering machine from Mercy Medical Center in Shasta when he and Daphne had got home; he had called them back, and they had confirmed that Grammar had died on Mount Shasta at about noon.

He took a sip of the lukewarm whisky, grateful for the full-orchestra burn of it in his throat, and then reached into his inside jacket pocket and carefully drew out the sheaf of letters that he had taken from the ammunition box in Grammar's shed. Some flecks of broken old brown paper fell onto the Blue Book on his lap, and he brushed them and the booklet off onto the rug. The letters smelled of gasoline, and he laid his pipe carefully in the ashtray.

The first envelope he looked into was postmarked June 10, 1933, from Oxford, but the letter inside was handwritten in German, and Marrity was only able to puzzle out the salutation — Meine liebe Tochter, which clearly meant "my dear daughter," and the signature, Peccavit, which he believed was Latin for "I have sinned."

He flipped through the stack, poking his fingers into the envelopes to find one of the English-language letters he recalled seeing in the shed, and pulled free the first one he found.

The postmark was Princeton, New Jersey, August 2, 1939; the printed return address on the envelope was Fuld Hall, Princeton Institute for Advanced Study; and under it, in pencil, someone had scrawled Einstein Rm. 215.

Marrity paused. Had Albert Einstein written Grammar a letter? That would be worth something!

Hoping it might be from Einstein, and hoping that a couple of others in the batch might be too, he carefully unfolded the yellowed letter. It was typed, and addressed to "Miranda," though the addressee on the envelope was Lisa Marrity.

My dear Miranda, Marrity read, I have sent today a Letter to the King of Naples, advising him of the ominous Behavior of Antonio, and advising him to busy himself in acquiring pre-emptively for Naples the Power toward which Antonio is looking.

Marrity recognized these names — Miranda was the daughter of the magician Prospero in Shakespeare's play The Tempest, and Antonio was Prospero's treacherous brother who had usurped the dukedom of Milan and driven Prospero and his daughter into exile.

Grammar had called her father Prospero.

I did not mention the other Power, the letter went on, and did not the Caliban who is now your chaste Incubus. (And whose Fault?) I can assist Naples with the First, but I will work only to conceal and obliterate all Records of the Other. Ill break my Staff, and bury it certain Fathoms in the Earth, and deeper than did ever Plummet sound I'll drown my Book.

Caliban was an inhuman monster in the Shakespeare play, and the break my Staff sentence was a verbatim quote from the Prospero character.

The letter ended with, And you should do the Same also. Forgive yourself about 1933, and then forget even what it was you did. Starve Caliban with Inattention. I should never have given him Shelter — I've learned my lesson, not to interfere with Suicides! Twice the Interfering has made Disasters, and so I must somehow have the Palm Springs Singularity to be destroyed. And you must burn the verdammter Kaleidoscope Shed!

Marrity actually lowered the age-yellowed letter and looked around the dim corners of the room, as if this were a trick being played on him.

Then he looked back at the sheet of old paper. The letter was signed Peccavit, in the same hand as the first letter he'd looked at.

Was this Peccavit Grammar's father? And was he Albert Einstein? Were all these letters from him?

Marrity realized glumly that he couldn't believe it. It was inconceivable that Albert Einstein could know about the shed he and Moira had played in as children. There were any number of plausible reasons why someone might write Einstein on an envelope.

But hadn't Einstein taught at Princeton?

Marrity flipped through the stack again, peeking into the envelopes, and saw another in English. He carefully drew the letter out of the envelope — which was plain, postmarked Princeton, New Jersey, April 15,1955. The letter was handwritten, in the same difficult scrawl as the Peccavit signatures.

My dear Daughter, Marrity managed to puzzle out, Derek was here — did you know?

And Marrity stopped reading again, his face suddenly cold. Derek, he thought. That's my father's name. He ditched us in '55— sometime before May, since my mother killed herself in May. Was he just off visiting his grandfather? If so, why didn't he ever come back? Did he die? If he died, why wouldn't Grammar have told Moira and me?

Quickly he worked his way through the rest of the letter.

I hope you have not told him too much! I said to him to go Home, I am always watched, can tell him Nothing. And Derek not knows his own Origin, that he has no lineal Status. I have spoken to NB when he was here in October, just enough to assure he has no Inkling of the Maschinchen. And he has not. I am in Hospital, with a ruptured Aortic Aneurism, and I know I do not survive. I wish to have seen you one more Time! We are such Stuff as Dreams are made on, and our little Life is rounded with a Sleep.

It was signed simply, Your Father.

That last sentence was of course from The Tempest.

With a shaking hand Marrity laid the letters aside, and stood up and tiptoed into the hall, where the Britannica volumes stood on a shelf above head height. He pulled down the EDWA to EXTRACT volume, blew dust off the top page edges, and flipped to the article on Einstein.

It listed his birth year as 1879, but there was no death date in this 1951 edition. Marrity only skimmed the accounts of Einstein's discoveries, but noted that Einstein had become professor of mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, in 1933.

An image more vivid than a daydream unfocused his view of the page — Daphne was dreaming. In her dream a young man with long hair was tied up and gagged, lying on his back in some kind of recessed space in a metal floor between padded, bolted-down seats, and a hand with a knife hovered over his throat; then it was Daphne lying on her back on a red-and-black linoleum floor, and Marrity was crouched over her with an opened pocketknife in one hand, pushing her chin up with the other—

"Daph!" he called, stepping quickly back into the living room. He was anxious to wake her before the dream could go any further. "Daph, hey, your movie's over! Up up up! You can sleep with me tonight, since your bed's all smoked. Right right?"

She was sitting up, blinking. "Okay," she said, apparently mystified by his liveliness. The dream was clearly forgotten.

"And I don't have time to correct those papers tonight," he went on, "so I'm going to call in sick tomorrow. We can have lunch at Alfredo's."

"Okay. Did you clean up my bedroom?"

"Yes. Come on, up."

"How does it look?"

"Halbfooshin'." It was a family word that meant pretty bad, but not near as bad as a little while ago.

She smiled. "Tomorrow we can flip the mattress and put the bed different?"

"Right. You've been east-west — we'll put you north-south for a while. The cats will still land on you when they come in the window."

She nodded contentedly and followed him down the hall.

Viewed by the other drivers on the westbound 10 freeway this evening, the bus generally looked black — its bright blue showed up only when it sped past under one of the high-arching streetlights — and a driver passing it had to squint to make out the word HELIX along its side.

The windows along the side of the bus were gleamingly dark in the back, but the two or three right behind the driver's seat glowed yellow, and a driver passing the bus in the fast lane was able to glimpse a white-haired man sitting as if at a table.

In the lounge area behind the bus's driver, Denis Rascasse sat back in one of the two captain's chairs and with his open hand rolled his Bic pen across the flat newspaper in front of him.

"Lieserl Marity came out of hiding in order to die," he said formally, as if he were dictating a newspaper photo caption.

"In effect," agreed Paul Golze. He sighed and audibly shifted his bulk in the other captain's chair, probably passing from one ear to the other the telephone that was connected to the modified CCS scrambler. "A Moira Bradley called the hospital at twelve forty-five — she's one of the next of kin. And at six-ten a cop from San Diego called too, a detective, asking about Lisa Marrity. Nobody else, no press."

By the interior lights glowing over the seats and fold-out tables at the front of the bus, Rascasse was working on the Los Angeles Times crossword puzzle. Without looking up, he said, "I think we should get that cop." His French accent made the last word into something like coop or cope.

The Vespers radar dish at Pyramid Peak near the Nevada border covertly monitored all telephone communications that the NSA bounced off the moon, and swastika and Marity were two of the hundred high-specificity words the Vespers computer was programmed to flag. Tonight these two had occurred in the same conversation, and one of the technicians at the compound outside Amboy, all of whom had been on full alert since shortly after noon, had telephoned the New Jersey headquarters as soon as the correlation was noted and transcribed, and the New Jersey people had called Rascasse.

Paul Golze spoke into the telephone; "Read me the entire conversation, slowly." He began scribbling on a yellow legal pad.

Stretched out on a couch by the dark galley in the back of the bus, Charlotte Sinclair paid wary attention to the two men at the tables ten rows forward.

Charlotte had lost both eyes in an accident, but she could see through the eyes of anyone near her.

She was tensely amused whenever one of the two men looked at the other; they were such opposites, physically — Rascasse tall and straight with close-cropped white hair, Golze slouchy and fat and bearded, and always pushing his stringy black hair away from his glasses.

Charlotte wondered if she would be able to sleep.

She had lit a cigarette to kill the spicy smell of the thing they called the Baphomet head, but the smoke irritated her eyelids, and she crushed it out in the armrest ashtray.

Instead she reached under the seat and lifted out of her bag the bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon, still reassuringly heavy, and twisted out the cork cap. A mouthful of the warm liquor dispelled the incense-and-myrrh smell perfectly, so she had another to work on dispelling the memory of the thing as well, and then corked the bottle and tucked it beside her under her coat.

It had been three years now since Rascasse had picked her up in a poker club in Los Angeles and she had begun working for the Vespers, but she still didn't know much about the organization or its history.

The thing they were looking for now was apparently invented in 1928, but the Vespers had supposedly been pursuing it under other forms for centuries. Before the advances in physics during the twentieth century, it had been categorized as magic — but so had hypnotism, and transmutation of elements, and ESP.

Rascasse had told her once that the Vespers were a secret survival of the true Albigenses, the twelfth-century natural philosophers of Languedoc whose discoveries in the areas of time and so-called reincarnation had so alarmed the Catholic Church that Pope Innocent III had ordered the entire group to be wiped out. "The pope knew that we had rediscovered the real Holy Grail," Rascasse had said, nodding toward the chalice-shaped copper handles on the black wood cabinet behind the driver's seat. "We lost it during the Church's Albigensian Crusade, when Arnold of Citeaux destroyed all of our possessions at Carcassonne." When Charlotte had dutifully made some derogatory remark about the Catholic Church, Rascasse had shrugged. "Einstein suppressed it too, after rediscovering it in 1928."

Another time Rascasse had told her that in the 1920s the Vespers — called the Ahnenerbe then — had worked with Adolf Hitler, and had even provided him with the swastika as an emblem; though Rascasse had added that the group's core had never been interested in the screwy Nazi racial philosophies, but had only hoped to use Hitler's government to fund their researches. The association had apparently not worked out, and long before the Ahnenerbe had been incorporated into the SS, the core members had stolen the archives and left Germany and taken on, or possibly reassumed, the name Vespers. Golze said Vespers was a corruption of Wespen, the German word for wasps, though Charlotte liked to think it referred to the French term for evening prayers. Rascasse himself was French, and probably old enough to have been active during the war, but she had never been able to figure out when he had joined the Vespers.

Their researches had to do with the nature of time, and her payment for working with them was going to be derived from that.

But "researches" probably wasn't the right word, except in a historical-detective sense — they weren't hoping to discover how to manipulate time, but to rediscover work that had already been done toward that, work that had subsequently been lost or hidden or suppressed.

In these three years Charlotte had seen them pursue a number of leads — clues that took them to private European libraries, and odd old temples in India and Nepal, and remote ruins in Middle Eastern deserts — all of which had proved to be dead ends. Rumored scrolls or inscriptions were gone or had been misleadingly described, alchemical procedures proved to be too obscure to follow or did nothing, and disembodied Masters turned out to be disembodied imbeciles, if not complete fabrications.

It had been Charlotte herself who had obtained the one solid lead for them: She had got access to a secret archive in New Jersey, and had stolen several files of papers that contained information about a woman who had been living under a false name in Southern California as recently as 1955, a woman who had at one time had possession of some sort of potent artifact. Charlotte hadn't been told all the details, but it had been this discovery that had led Rascasse and his team here to Los Angeles to work with the California branch of the Vespers.

A mouthful of bourbon heated her throat now as she banished the memory of what she had done to get access to that archive.

Charlotte didn't think Rascasse and Golze had truly believed the old woman's device still existed; certainly they had assumed she must have died years ago. But at noon all the Vespers electronic Ouija boards had shaken into activity, with ghosts anxious to know if they still had identities — this and a careful study of the day's seismological charts convinced Rascasse that the device had been activated and used.

He had immediately got the Vespers remote viewers busy trying to triangulate its location; and after an hour they had narrowed it down to somewhere in the Los Angeles area.

Then the old woman's gadget had reportedly moved east, at about 1:30 — the viewers couldn't be precise, since the device had not been activated at the time — and so Rascasse had rounded up Golze and Charlotte and set out in the bus toward Palm Springs.

At one point on that long drive a gong had sounded from the cabinet behind the driver's seat, and the cursor on the electronic Ouija board above the cabinet had been bouncing like the virtual ball on a Pong game, lighting up random letters and numbers. Charlotte had faintly heard the thing in the cabinet moaning.

After a quick, whispered argument with Rascasse, Golze had opened the cabinet doors with evident reluctance.

Charlotte had had to fight down sudden nausea. It seemed to her that the head always smelled worse — like hot rum spiced with "blood and honey and the scrapings of old church bells," as Thurber had once written — when it was agitated. And even though it had no eyes, she always imagined that it was looking at her.

Golze had gingerly lifted the tarry-black head and its wooden base out of the cabinet and shuffled around to the windows with it held out at arm's length, to let the thing, as he said, "scope the traffic," but though the head seemed to quiver with more excitement when he carried it back to the galley and held it up to the back window, none of the vehicles nor anything in the sky had seemed unusual.

Rascasse had curtly told Charlotte to scan the nearby perspectives, but she got nothing more significant than a view of the dashboard of a car or truck, and a rust-flecked white hood. Nothing that looked like opposition.

Charlotte had tried to avoid seeing the awful black head, but at one point while she was using Rascasse's eyes he had looked straight at it.

Polished black skin clung tightly to the eyeless skull, and paisley-shaped panels of silver filigree had been glued or tacked onto the forehead, cheeks, nose and chin, like metal Maori tattoos — probably to cover worm holes, Charlotte thought nervously — and a slack ribbon around its neck swung back and forth underneath the wooden stand. "Charlie Chaplin's hat," Golze and Rascasse called the ribbon. According to Golze it was the liner ribbon from a hat that had once belonged to Chaplin, cut now and fitted with a button and loop.

Charlotte had hastily switched to the driver's point of view.

Golze had eventually put the head back in its cabinet and closed the doors, wiping his hands afterward. Only then had Charlotte taken a deep breath.

At 4:10 P.M., though, the head had begun moaning again behind its closed doors, and again the electronic Ouija board had rapidly indicated meaningless numbers and letters; but, luckily before they could open the cabinet again, Rascasse had got a frantic call from the Amboy compound, reporting that the old woman's gadget had disappeared — dropped right out of the perceptions of all the remote viewers.

Rascasse had immediately made another call to the seismology lab at Cal Tech, but there had been no earthquakes within the last half hour. Apparently the gadget had been briefly activated again— too briefly to hope to triangulate it — but had disappeared without having been used.

They were headed back to the L.A. office now, and Charlotte had long since calmed her nerves with the bourbon. Rascasse would surely get the device soon, whatever it was, and there was nothing she could do to help right now.

She knew that she could look at the highway ahead, and see the lights of windows in the darkness — distant kitchens and bedrooms and living rooms — but she didn't exert herself to look. Right now she didn't want that heimweh, that homesick longing for strangers' lives. She was too distressingly close now to getting a life for herself.

Golze had said he could never sleep on the bus, but usually Charlotte could — the noise and the rocking took Charlotte back to her childhood.

From the age of eight until the age of nineteen, when she had been honorably discharged because of disability, Charlotte Sinclair had been one of several children working for the United States Air Force in a remote string of Minuteman ICBM missile silos in the Mojave Desert south of Panamint Springs. She and the other children had spent most of their days and nights in the underground Launch Control Centers, each of which was a compact three-story house suspended inside a concrete sphere on "shock isolators," four huge compressed-air shock absorbers, and the floor had constantly tilted one way and then the other as the Boeing air compressors tried to compensate for pressure loss in one or another of the shock isolators. Sometimes the floor would stay tilted for hours before the compressor came on, and she and the crew would get used to it — and then it was always disorienting to notice that the stationary blast door appeared to be rotated to one side or the other.

Golze had hung up the telephone in the slot in its carrying case and was reading the notes he had made on the legal pad. "Her next of kin are the Moira Bradley who called the hospital, and one Frank Marrity, spelled with two rs. Pasadena and San Bernardino area codes. We could visit Marrity in San Bernardino tonight. He's east, and the thing moved east."

"We won't call on him," said Rascasse, "especially not at night. Don't want to scare anybody, we don't. We will call Marrity tomorrow, offer to buy it, if he's got it. Fifty thousand dollars should be… effective. And in case there's a hitch, it should be Charlotte that does the visiting."

In the darkness at the back of the bus, Charlotte nodded. Visiting I can do, she thought; and I'm good at looking. I don't mind if you ask me to do those things.

Back in the early '60s, someone in Army Intelligence at Fort Meade had been worried that Soviet psychics might identify American missile silos, and so he had designed this secret cluster of silos to confuse any such remote viewers. The tar-and-gravel runway was concealed behind a row of gaudy carnival tents and booths and rides, and the gray walls of the underground Launch Control Centers were all hung with pictures of Bozo the Clown and Engineer Bill and Gumby, and the Launch Control consoles were painted in such garish stripes and circles that the functional lights and buttons could hardly be distinguished; and the commander's launch key had a little clown's head epoxyed to the top of it. Charlotte and the other children had been required to play with Tinkertoys and Lincoln Logs in the LCCs, and to accompany maintenance men into the tunnels and silos, which had been decorated with enormous Dr. Seuss murals. Any Soviet psychic who managed to view the missile launch site would, it was hoped, assume that he was seeing some sort of amusement park or progressive elementary school instead, and would write off the session as a miss.

Charlotte had been the queen of the Silo Rascals, since she had been able to sense the intrusion when a distant psychic was using her eyes to look out through; and it had happened two or three times every year. At those moments she was trained to begin singing "Bye Bye Blackbird" as loudly as she could, at which signal all the air force personnel would drop their official work and begin dancing or putting on hand puppets or blowing through cheap tin trumpets. There had been times — when a favorite officer was being yelled at, or when she had been assigned to accompany the Corrosion Control crew below Level 7 at dawn in the middle of winter, or even when she had simply been bored — when she had begun singing the song without having sensed any outside monitoring. Even at the time she had been sure that the crew commanders sometimes suspected her of raising a false alarm, but they had apparently been under strict orders not to question her alerts.

Eventually she had become able to fix on a remote viewer who was looking through her eyes, and follow the link back, and get a glimpse of his surroundings — generally just some featureless dark room, though on a couple of occasions she had found herself staring at the dashboard of a moving car.

She had never mentioned this emergent homing ability to her control officers at Fort Meade, though, because even as a child she had known that they would immediately reassign her to a site that was reliably watched by foreign psychics, just so that she could spy on the psychics. She didn't want to leave the secret underground kingdom of the Silo Rascals.

The Launch Control Centers were her home, along with the stairs and corridors between the entrapment doors, and the two-hundred-foot cableway with its infinity of hiding places between the support girders, and the vast silo itself, ten stories deep with the shiny bulk of the Minuteman missile filling the infinite volume.

An exploding battery in the charger bay had blinded her in 1978, when she was nineteen.

In the nightmare months that followed — after the hospitals and the therapy, and after her extensive debriefing and eventual honorable discharge — she had discovered two things that had made her blindness and exile bearable. She learned that she could see through the eyes of anyone who was within about a hundred feet of her — the distance varied a bit, depending on the seasons — and she discovered alcohol.

Golze got up from his table now and descended the tight stairs to the tiny restroom just behind the front door of the bus; idly Charlotte monitored him, and she smiled at the way he was careful to do his business at the urinal by touch alone, staring up at the close plastic ceiling. He wasn't what anyone would call a gentleman, so it must be shyness. Men who knew about her ability always, when they went into a restroom, made a point of either modestly looking up or arrogantly looking down. Rascasse always looked down, but with Rascasse somehow it always seemed to be in surprise.

She shifted her attention to Rascasse, and she saw that he was staring at one of the crossword-puzzle clues: a four-letter word that meant "underground fence."

"Haha," she called toward the front of the rocking bus.

"What's funny back there?" he called.

"An underground fence is called a haha," she told him.

In the newspaper margin he wrote, Y dont U finish the bottle and sleep. Bzy day morrow.

"Haha," she said, and then set about taking his advice.

Six

When Frank Marrity walked down the gravel driveway at eight the next morning to pick up the Los Angeles Times, the green Rambler was parked just outside the chain-link gate.

He had awakened before Daphne, and slid out from under the covers without disturbing her, and in his pajamas and slippers he padded out to the kitchen to call the college and then make breakfast.

After he'd explained to the English Department secretary that he would not be coming in today, he boiled milk on the stove and poured it into two bowls of Quaker instant oatmeal, then stirred into each bowl a tablespoon of Cool Whip and a teaspoon of Southern Comfort liqueur. Daphne appeared just as he was carrying the bowls to the kitchen table.

"I looked in my room just now," she said as she pulled out a chair.

"We'll fix it up today," Marrity told her.

"Crazy day, yesterday," was all she said before digging into the oatmeal.

"The craziest," he agreed.

He was glad that she didn't comment on being served what was usually her "sick girl" breakfast instead of the routine cereal or bacon and eggs; but after the choking she'd experienced last night at dinner, he wanted to put off giving her anything that required chewing.

The telephone rang, and he decided to stay where he was and let the answering machine get it.

'You're reached the Marritys," said his voice from the machine, "and we're not able to come to the phone right now, but leave a message and your number and we'll get back to you." The beep followed, and two seconds of silence, and then the dial tone, which soon shut off.

He glanced at Daphne. She was frowning, but for a moment it seemed to him that it was his voice coming from the other side of the room, and not the hang-up, that had disturbed her.

A black-and-white cat jumped up onto the table, sliding on yesterday's newspaper, and Daphne nudged him off and then absently stared at the headlines. "Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of Elvis's death," she said. "I wonder if ghosts come back on their anniversaries."

"I'll get dressed and go fetch today's paper," Marrity said, pushing his chair back.

The sun in the east was throwing shadows across the gravel driveway from the lemon and peach trees, and the sky to the south was a deep, cold blue. Tiny white flakes of ash glittered as they fell silently through the sunlit air, for the northern sky over the mountains was a white haze of smoke.

The newspaper was lying on the gravel just inside the gate, but Marrity had seen the green Rambler now and he slowly walked past the newspaper and unhooked the padlock from the chain, not taking his eyes off the car. Behind the wheel, staring back at him, was the same gray-haired man who had driven the car into their driveway yesterday afternoon, and had then reversed out and driven away.

Marrity pulled the gate back enough to step through, and then walked out into the street to approach the driver's-side window. It was rolled down.

Before Marrity could speak, the man in the car said, "She called me yesterday, early. She said I could have her car."

Marrity stared at the lined, slack face under the combed gray hair, wondering where he'd seen it before. "So you broke her kitchen window to get the keys," he said. "Who are you? Why are you here?"

"I'm here because—" The old man appeared to try the door handle, and then give up on getting out. He leaned back in the seat. "There's no easy way to say this." His voice was rough, as if from decades of cigarettes and liquor. "I'm Derek Marrity."

Marrity was dizzy, and his stomach was suddenly cold. He took a step back to catch his balance, but he made his voice steady when he said, "You're my father?"

"That's right. Your grandmother — my mother — listen, youngster — she said I should — she said it would be best for everybody if I just went away. Back in '55. Now that she's dead she can't blackmail me anymore. I could have killed her, and stayed — maybe I should have-but how can you kill your own mother?"

"You killed my mother."

The man exhaled through clenched teeth. "Goddammit, boy, I didn't know that. I sent money to your grandmother, to give to Veronica. And letters too. I guess your grandmother just kept the money and trashed the letters. Typical."

"You left your children with her."

"Would you rather have been in a foster home? Was Grammar a bad parent to you? Remember, she didn't know Veronica would kill herself."

Marrity wanted to tell the old man about Veronica's drunken, hopeless last days, before the car-crash suicide — and he wanted to hear, very much wanted to hear the old man's replies— but he didn't want to do it out here on the street.

"Who was Grammar's father?" he asked instead. "What was Prospero's actual name?"

The gray-haired man shook his head. "No concern of yours, boy. Prosper 0. will do fine."

"Albert Einstein," said Daphne from the shadows behind the half-opened gate.

"Daph—" snapped Marrity in alarm, stepping toward her, "you shouldn't be out here. This man is—"

"Your father," Daphne finished for him. She was still in her pajamas, and barefoot on the gravel. "That was Albert Einstein you were picturing, wasn't it, Dad? The crazy-haired old scientist?" She stepped through the gate into the chilly, slanting sunlight and walked up to Marrity and took hold of his hand. "Why was Grammar blackmailing you?" she asked the man in the car.

"Daph," said Marrity desperately, "we don't know who this man is. Go wait for me inside."

"Okay. But he must be your father — he looks just like you." Daphne let go of his hand and scampered back through the gate and up the driveway.

Marrity couldn't help glancing at the man in the car, though the glance must clearly have shown that he had found Daphne's statement unflattering.

But his father's eyes were tightly shut, and he was frowning, as if with sudden indigestion.

"Are you okay?" asked Marrity.

The old man opened his eyes and blotted them on the sleeve of his nylon jacket. He took a deep breath and let it out. "I hope to be, I hope to be. What did she say?"

"She said you look like me."

"The Marrity jaw," said his father, smiling now, a little sourly. "And I think there's something about the eyes and the bridge of the nose. Look at some photos of Einstein, back when he was in his thirties."

"I thought — we were Irish."

"My father might have been, whoever was Ferdinand to my mother's Miranda. His name wasn't Marrity, though — that was your grandmother's maiden name, with an extra R added to make it look Irish. It's Serbian, originally, by way of Hungary. I guess fathers tend to be delinquent, in our family. Though I had — I really believe I had — no choice." He opened his mouth and closed it, then said, "But I'm sorry — sorrier than I can say."

Marrity gave him a brittle smile. "Maybe you are. No help at this point, of course."

After a pause, his father shook his head. "I suppose it isn't. Can I come in?"

Marrity blinked at him. "Of course not! We can meet sometime — give me your phone number — in fact, when you leave here, you, you'd better walk — I've got the license number of that car now, and I'm going to report it as stolen."

"Can I come in?" the man repeated. "My mother — your grandmother — died yesterday."

Marrity frowned. He wouldn't be able to ask his father about unpleasant things around Daphne; but maybe they shouldn't start with the unpleasant things anyway. And if he sent the old man away right now, he might never reappear, and that would be intolerable, again.

Marrity sighed heavily. "Of course you can come in. But — you have to promise to leave with no scene as soon as I say it's time for you to go."

"Fair enough."

Bert Malk was leaning in under the open hood of a rented Ford LTD on the opposite side of the street half a block away, and he didn't dare straighten up to peer after Marrity and the old man who had been sitting in the station wagon, though he noticed that the old man limped; but it was a fair guess that they were going into Marrity's house. Malk had seen the little girl come out in pajamas and say something to them before going back in.

Malk had laid an open toolbox on the radiator and was pretending to assemble or disassemble the clamp on the positive battery terminal. He had been standing here for ten minutes now, alternately bending over the engine and sitting behind the wheel as if trying to start the car, and he would have to leave soon.

This neighborhood was in an unincorporated area outside the San Bernardino city limits, and there were no streetlights or sidewalks; Malk was standing on a patch of grass flattened and rutted by tires. The house he was parked in front of had plywood bolted over the windows and doors, and a brown steel Dumpster nearly as big as the house sat in the driveway.

At the east end of the street a blue BMW appeared, and drove slowly toward him. He bent over the battery, as if looking very closely for any corrosion on the terminal.

The BMW passed him, and the brake lights flashed briefly as it passed the Marrity house, and then it had gone on past, its rear window a featureless block of sun glare. It paused at the stop sign at the west end of the block, then made a right turn.

Malk's face was cold, and he began tossing the tools back into the box. Get out now, he thought.

The woman sitting beside the driver had also been in the passenger seat of a Honda Prelude that had passed him here four minutes ago, also driving slowly east to west. He made mental notes: shoulder-length dark hair, slim, thirtyish, with sunglasses; blue short-sleeve blouse. A real pzaza, he thought, a dark-haired beauty. In both passes she had appeared to be looking straight ahead, not toward the Marrity house, and she might just be a local resident; but she had passed the house twice in different cars, and the cars had had different drivers.

He snapped the toolbox closed and unhooked the support rod from the hood. It was time to get out of here.

"I remember the fires," Marrity's father said, looking over the top of the house at the white northern sky.

"Tenderly the haughty day fills his blue urn with fire,'" said Marrity, randomly quoting Emerson as he strode up the driveway. He was impatient to get inside now, and it irked him to wait for his limping father to catch up.

As Marrity pushed open the kitchen door, his father nodded toward the blistered VCR that still lay on the grass.

"That's an unfamiliar sight," he said.

"The machine burned up," said Marrity shortly. "Bad wiring, I guess." He pulled the door closed behind him when the old man had limped unsteadily inside. "Daph! We've — got company."

When Daphne appeared in the kitchen doorway she had changed out of her pajamas and was wearing green corduroy overalls over a white T-shirt; clearly she had expected her father to ask the old man in. "I was just explaining," Marrity went on, "that a short circuit in the VCR burned it up yesterday. Did you shut your bedroom door to keep the cats out?"

She nodded, and then told her grandfather, "Burnt up the movie in it too."

"Really?" said Marrity's father. "What movie?" He unzipped his olive green Members Only jacket, and Marrity noticed that it was still stiffly pressed, and the long-sleeved red-and-white-striped shirt under it was stiff too, and creased where it had been folded. Marrity wondered if Grammar had had any cash lying around at her house.

"Pee-wee's Big Adventure," Daphne said.

Marrity's father seemed to have some trouble draping his jacket over the back of a chair. "I—" he began hoarsely; then he cleared his throat and went on, "I hope it wasn't a rental."

"No, one of ours," Marrity told him. "Can I get you some coffee?"

"Coffee," echoed his father absently. "Coffee." He blinked at his son. "No, I've been up for so long it's near lunchtime for me. A glass of that Southern Comfort on the rocks would be bracing."

It occurred to Marrity that the man's odd smell was a mix of Juicy Fruit gum, cigarette smoke, and vodka. Vodka before eight, he thought, and Southern Comfort as a chaser? If a cop pulls him over and gives him a 502, when he drives away from here, am I liable, for having served him the alcohol? Marrity discovered that he didn't care, and poured a generous slug of the amber liquor into a water glass.

"Ice in the freezer," he said as he handed it to him. "Help yourself."

"Can I have a bracing drink?" asked Daphne.

"No!" said the old man.

Marrity smiled at her. "No. Sit down and be seen and not heard."

"Aye aye."

Daphne had sat down at the table, so Marrity did too; and as soon as his father had fumbled a couple of ice cubes into his glass, he settled into the chair with his new jacket on it.

The old man was leaning back and looking around the kitchen, and Marrity found himself resenting his father looking at the things he and Lucy and Daphne had assembled over the years — the Kliban coffee cups and dish towels, the cat calendar on the pantry door, the collection of cartoony salt-and-pepper shakers on the high shelves. But maybe the old man was envious of a settled home — certainly he seemed rootless.

Finally the old man looked at Marrity. "It's a very bad idea to give children alcohol," he said earnestly.

"How did you hurt your leg?" Daphne asked him.

"A car ran over me," the old man said. He seemed angry at Daphne for asking.

"Grammar called you yesterday?" Marrity said. "How did you know she's dead?"

The old man shifted his gaze to Marrity. "I got worried and called the police in Shasta," he said. "When she called me from there, she was talking as if she thought she would die soon, giving me the car and all. Even calling me."

Marrity realized that he didn't believe him. Maybe, he thought, he did kill her! Well no, he couldn't have got back from Shasta in time to break Grammar's window and take her keys.

"You asked," the old man said, apparently to Daphne, though he was staring into his drink, "why she was blackmailing me. A man died, and some money was absconded with, and she knew of evidence that would implicate me in it. She might even have believed I was the guilty party. But she didn't blackmail me for money, she only wanted me to go away and not contact any of you again. I'd have gone to prison, almost certainly — it was a very good circumstantial case. I even wondered if she—" He stopped, and groped clumsily for his glass; after closing his hand on empty air a few inches short of it, he managed to get hold of it and take a deep sip of the liquor.

Marrity could see that Daphne was anxious to ask a question, so he asked it for her. "Why did she want you to go away, to disappear?"

"It's not — really a subject for a little girl to hear," said Marrity's father haltingly. "Uh— I married your mother, to some extent, just a little bit, to prove to myself that I — could love a woman. In the 1950s there was no other option, really. It — wasn't entirely a success." The old man's face was red, and he gulped some more of the liquor and exhaled through his teeth in a near whistle.

"So was your grandfather Albert Einstein?" asked Marrity quickly. "My great-grandfather?"

"You seem to know it already," old Marrity said cautiously.

"Why is it such a secret? I never got a hint of it till yesterday. The Britannica doesn't mention Grammar, and she never said a word about it."

"Grammar was born in 1902, before Einstein and her mother were married. Uh — too much of a scandal. He wanted to be a professor, and this was really still nineteenth-century Switzerland. After a while the lie, and the little girl's new identity, were too established to change."

"Huh. Why did you visit him in '55, right after leaving my mother? "

His father stared at him with no expression. "I don't think you have the story entirely correct," he said. "We can go over all the old history later."

"Were you going to blackmail Einstein?" asked Marrity. "About his daughter?"

"Can I smoke?" his father asked, reaching behind him to fumble in the pocket of his jacket.

"Sure. Daph, would you get an ashtray?" Daphne nodded and pushed her chair back.

"You don't know me at all," the old man went on, "so I can't take any offense at that remark. But no, I didn't try to blackmail him. My mother may have."

"To get what?" asked Marrity.

Daphne laid a glass ashtray on the table at the man's elbow, but he didn't look at her as he tugged out of his pocket an opened pack of Marlboros and shook one out. "The same thing she extorted from me, maybe. Absence. He never came back to California after '33." He looked at Daphne at last. "I bet your movie wasn't wrecked. Did you pull it out?"

"It sure smoked," she said cautiously. "And it's been outside all night. Snails probably ate it."

The old man tore off two matches and lost hold of both of them, then with evident care tore off another and managed to strike it alight and hold it to the end of his cigarette. "I've got," he said as he puffed on the cigarette and blew out the match, "a friend who restores all kinds of electromagnetic hardware — computer disks, cassette tapes. You give it to me and I'll show it to him."

"No," said Marrity. "I'm going to — fix it myself."

"Right," said Daphne.

His father stared at Marrity. "You know about that stuff, do you?"

"For all you know, that's what I do for a living," Marrity said.

The old man frowned in evident puzzlement. "I suppose that's true. I've got some errands to run, but I'd like to take the two of you to lunch." He dropped the burnt match into the ashtray. "On me!" he added.

"We've got a lunch date already," Marrity said.

His father nodded, as if he'd expected the answer. "Uh— tomorrow?"

"I'll be working," said Marrity. Reluctantly he added, "Maybe dinner tomorrow? "

"Dinner's good. Seven?"

"'Kay. Have you got a phone number?"

"Not, not right at the moment. You're listed — I'll call you at six, to make sure we're still on. Let's make it Italian — so don't have Italian today, okay?"

"Okay."

"Promise?" The old man seemed anxious.

"Yes, I promise." Marrity stood up. "Well, it's been — distressing." He didn't hold out his hand.

"Bound to be, just at first," the old man said, pushing back his chair. "Probably we'll get more friendly. I truly hope so. Daphne, a — pleasure to meet you. I wish you well."

"Thanks," said Daphne, staring down at the table.

"No Italian today, remember," said Marrity's father as he got laboriously to his feet. "Tomorrow night we'll do it all — lasagna, pizza — antipasto—"

As Marrity and his father walked out the kitchen door, Marrity stood between the old man and the wrecked VCR, and when his father had hobbled away down the driveway, he bent down to pick it up.

"Daph," he called into the kitchen, "would you get the gas can for the lawn mower? I'm going to just plain incinerate this thing."

And, he thought, I believe I'll keep those letters of Grammar's with me, in my briefcase.

"The old guy's walking out," said Golze as he drove by the Marrity house for the fourth time, in a white Toyota now; "limping, to be more precise. The guy who was fixing his car on the other side of the street is gone."

"Our man didn't answer his phone," said Rascasse's voice from the radio clipped to the dashboard. "He let the machine take it. Charlotte, did you get anything? You never give me your money," he added.

Golze reached out and clicked the radio's channel selector to the next frequency in their agreed-on sequence — they were using titles from the Beatles' Abbey Road album as cues.

"That house is set awful far back from the road," Charlotte said. "I was able to see through a child, a bit — must have been the little girl. Two men at a kitchen table, one clearly her father: thirty-five, dark haired, six foot, thin; the other was this old guy who just got into the — oh! darling." After Golze had switched channels again, she went on, "just got into the green Rambler. They're clearly related, the two men, strong resemblance. Old guy was smoking a cigarette, and drinking whiskey or brandy, brown stuff. That's all."

Golze made a slow right turn, eyeing his mirrors. The yards around here all seemed to be scattered with wrecked trucks or live goats.

"No help with the floor plan?" asked Rascasse's voice from the radio.

"Not much. The kitchen is about ten by twenty, narrow ends at north and south; doorway at the north end of the east wall, a step up to a landing, I don't know what's past it."

"Okay. You didn't see — mean Mr. Mustard." Again Golze reached out and clicked the channel selector, "—see a videocassette, or some round, flat film cans—"

"No, but aside from the kitchen, all I saw was the bottom half of the driveway." So, thought Charlotte, the dead old woman's magical device was a movie?

She suppressed a nervous smile — she'd been imagining something more like a candelabra made from a mummified hand, at least.

"Charlotte," said the voice from the speaker, "I may want you to approach the girl's father, Maxwell's silver hammer." Click, "—assuming we get a chance to get into his house and work up a profile. Preliminary, just establish a relationship, no questions yet. Come together." Click. "Very accidental meeting, you know, the sort of thing that even in retrospect he won't think could have been planned. Be charming. Right?"

"Right," she said.

Since first hearing of him last night, the Vespers had found out that Francis Thomas Marrity was a widower with one twelve-year-old daughter, Daphne; his wife, Lucy, had died in '85 of pancreatic cancer, when the child was ten. Marrity was a college literature professor, with a thirty-thousand-dollar mortgage, life insurance through the Automobile Club, and no criminal record at all.

She wasn't going to mention it to Rascasse or Golze, but while she'd briefly been looking through the little girl's eyes, she had momentarily got a flicker image of the little girl herself, though there hadn't been a mirror nearby — it was as if the girl had for an instant been sharing the perspective of one of the men on the other side of the table. She was a pretty little thing, apparently, with big eyes and brown bangs.

Charlotte had decided way back in her missile-silo days that there was no gain in mentioning details that might complicate settled arrangements. Do what's best for little Charlotte, she thought.

Through Golze's eyes now Charlotte saw a woman pause from hanging T-shirts and jeans in a fenced-in yard to glance at the white Toyota, and for a moment Charlotte shifted her viewpoint to the woman; and she eyed her own silhouette critically as the car drove past. Still cheerleader pretty, as always, she thought. And ideally I won't need it much longer.

"Opus is always looking for his mother," said Daphne, sitting at the kitchen table. She was belatedly reading the comics, and clearly had got to the Bloom County strip. "I suppose she's a penguin too."

"I suppose," agreed Marrity, standing at the sink.

Daphne pushed the newspaper away. "It must be weird," she said, "to suddenly have a real father, sitting in your kitchen smoking a cigarette."

"It is," said Marrity. He was washing his hands with dishwashing detergent. "He's got a good explanation, hasn't he?" He dried his hands on a paper towel and smelled them — the gasoline reek was hardly detectable. My life stinks of gasoline lately, he thought.

"Did he mean he's gay?" asked Daphne.

"Um, yes."

"He's not gay," she said.

Marrity walked back to the table and sat down. "How do you know?" he asked her.

"Paul and Webster, at your college, they're gay. And some of Uncle Bennett's friends. They're — it's not like they're always joking, or always sad, but — they're not like your father."

"Well, that's a small sample, and this father guy wasn't anything like relaxed."

She shrugged, clearly not conceding the point. "We can't go to Alfredo's?"

"Sure we can."

"You promised not to."

"Actually I'd—" Marrity paused, then laughed uncertainly. "I think I'd like a chance to break a promise to him. He deserves a lot of broken promises." He shrugged. "We can tell him we had Mexican."

"Okay. And can we fix up my room this morning? Can I paint the walls?"

"Sure, if you don't mind that Swiss Coffee color we used in the hall. In fact, I should paint over the smoke marks on the hall ceiling." Marrity picked up the glass his father had used and swirled the diminished ice cubes in it. "What do you think of him? Short acquaintance, I admit."

"He wants something. From us."

"That video?"

"I think so! But even with it gone, something." She pushed her cold bowl of oatmeal away. "What do you think of him?"

"I'm embarrassed by him. I feel sorry for him. I think he's an alcoholic. And just telling me why he abandoned Moira and me and our mother doesn't change the math." He shook his head. "I don't think he'll… ever be more than a stranger to me."

Tears stood in Daphne's eyes. "This is worse than before, isn't it?"

Marrity took a breath to answer, paused, and then let it out. "I guess it is," he said finally. "No more hundreds of possibilities, just this one old drunk cranking around in Grammar's car."

Seven

As Marrity held open the tinted glass door of Alfredo's for her, Daphne asked him, "What are you going to have besides beer?"

The air was cooler inside the dark restaurant, and smelled of fennel and garlic.

"Two for lunch, please, smoking or nonsmoking doesn't matter," Marrity said to the hostess behind the cash-register counter. They had missed the lunch crowd because of having painted Daphne's room and the hall ceiling, and he could see several empty booths with fresh silverware and red-and-white paper place mats on the tables.

"It's a hot day," he told Daphne as they followed a waitress to a booth against the west wall. "I'm thinking about a beer because that's what I want first. I don't know why sausage and bell peppers looks so good to you on a day like this."

"I haven't absolutely made up my mind."

"It's all I see in there," he said as he sat down across from her. "The young lady will have a—" Marrity said to the waitress, "—don't tell me — a lemon in it, that's an iced tea. And could I have a Coors, please."

"You were picturing two," Daphne said after the waitress had walked away.

"And I'm going to have two," Marrity told her, "but not both at once."

"You should get the chicken and broccoli. You don't eat enough vegetables."

"Onions and potatoes are vegetables."

"They're not green. You don't eat right. Your guts are probably all creepy looking."

"You've got paint in your hair."

She looked dismayed, and glanced back toward the cashier's counter as she patted her bangs. "A lot?"

"No. Here." He reached across the table, pinched a strand of her brown hair and drew the fleck of paint down to the ends, where it slid off. "Only somebody sitting right across from you under this light could have seen it."

"Thank God for that."

Charlotte Sinclair strolled from the back of the parking lot toward the entrance to Alfredo's, trailing the fingers of her right hand along the brick wall for balance. She had changed into black jeans and a burgundy short-sleeved blouse, and her dark brown hair was now pulled back in a ponytail, though her sunglasses were the same. She carried a purse in her left hand, letting the strap swing free. She lingered at one section of the wall for a full thirty seconds, then moved on, rounding the building's northwest corner and shuffling carefully right past the entry door. By the coolness of the air, she knew she was in shadow now. At the northeast corner she turned right again and made her way along the restaurant's eastern wall, again trailing her fingers along the brick surface.

She turned around and walked back to the curb, and when she heard a car squeak to a stop in front of her, she looked out of the driver's eyes and saw herself standing in the sunlight beyond the open passenger-side window; with that view to guide her, she was able to put her hand on the door handle and lean down to speak to the driver.

"Mirror," she said.

"I always forget." The man bent sideways to look at himself in the rearview mirror, and Charlotte recognized the lean, white-mustached face of Roger Canino, the Vespers security chief at the Amboy compound. Charlotte opened the door and got into the passenger seat.

"How's my favorite girl?"

"Fine, Roger."

As the car began moving, she groped in her purse — no sense in asking old Canino to look in there for her — and by touch found the radio and switched it on. In a moment she heard Rascasse's voice say, "Prime here." He pronounced it preem.

Leaning down over the purse and pressing the send button, she said, "Seconde here. The old guy from the green Rambler, octopus's garden" — she switched the frequency up one notch — "is sitting way in the back on the east side, by the restrooms; it's the smoking section, there are ashtrays on the tables. He's got a couple of empty beer bottles and the remains of spaghetti in a white sauce in front of him, but he's done eating and it looks cold to me, polythene Pam." Again she clicked the dial. "Our man and his daughter are in a booth against the west wall, toward the front, north, on the other side of the kitchen. They're just ordering now."

"Got it, thanks," came Rascasse's voice.

"Can I be one of the parties?" she said. "I'm hungry." Actually she wanted to monitor Marrity and his daughter from a closer vantage point, without the restaurant wall between her and them; for a moment there, as she had been looking at Daphne through Marrity's eyes, she had found herself seeing Marrity's face, and she remembered the same skipping-across phenomenon happening this morning when she had been monitoring Daphne from the car.

I've never slipped from one viewpoint to another accidentally before today, she thought. Am I losing my grip? Will I start seeing everybody's viewpoint at once?

"No, Charlotte," came the voice from the speaker, "because."

The radio was silent. "That was a cue, sweetie," said Canino without looking away from the traffic.

"What," said Charlotte, " 'Because'? Shit." She switched the frequency dial again.

"—bumper-beeper on his Ford—" Rascasse was saying.

"Again, from the bridge," said Charlotte.

"Oh," came Rascasse's voice. "Okay, You can't go in because you're going to cute-meet him later, remember? If we don't find the artifact in his house or truck. We're doing research in the house right now, to prep you for it. And we've got a bumper-beeper on his Ford pickup — if we need you, we should be able to make an opportunity before sundown."

"Right."

"Any clues about who the old fellow is? She came in through the bathroom window."

"That one I get," Charlotte muttered, switching the frequency again. "No," she said. "Strong family resemblance with our man, as you've seen. His father, maybe."

"Probably in town for the funeral," said Rascasse. "Obviously he is supposed to meet them in the restaurant."

Charlotte didn't correct him, but it seemed to her that neither Marrity nor the old man expected the other to be there.

"Who are these guys?" whispered Bert Malk to himself as he drove past Alfredo's in the opposite direction. He had just seen the dark-haired girl in the sunglasses climb into a car that then sped away with her; she had probably been a lookout — probably another one had stepped up. And she was pretty definitely the same girl he had seen this morning cruising twice past Marrity's house.

Bozzaris would probably already be in the restaurant. Malk had stopped at a 7-Eleven parking lot pay phone to call the relay sayan, and had got a message from Lepidopt: Crew of three entered M's house as soon as father and daughter drove away. You two prevent any kidnap. Daylight.

"Daylight" meant "highest state of alert."

This was a full-scale operation by somebody.

Malk was aware of the angular shape of the Beretta Model 70S against his hip. It held nine .22 long-rifle rounds — a small caliber, but it was the Mossad standard, and the theory was that it didn't need a silencer since the report of a .22 round, though loud, didn't exactly sound like a gunshot. It was more a loud snap than the deafening pop of bigger calibers. And the long-rifle .22s were plenty deadly if they were put in the right places.

He steered left onto E Street to check for alternate exits from the parking lot and any back doors of the restaurant.

When Malk had finally parked and walked into the restaurant, Bozzaris was already inside, waiting on a vinyl couch by the west-side nonsmoking dining room, and he stood up and jerked his head in that direction.

"Yo, Steve," he said. "Table's waiting."

Any name that began with "S" meant I haven't had time to do a route, to be sure I'm not being followed.

Swell, thought Malk as he followed the younger man to a table only a couple of yards away from a booth occupied by a preteen girl and a dark-haired man of about his own age, mid-thirties. That's our quarry, he thought, not letting himself look directly at Frank and Daphne Marrity. He noticed that Frank had lasagna, and Daphne was eating some kind of pasta with sausage and bell peppers on it.

Malk and Bozzaris sat at adjoining sides of the square table, more or less between the Marritys and everyone else. Malk was mentally rehearsing the old training on how to throw himself backward in his chair and shoot under the table.

When he had sat down, he pulled his Chap Stick out of his pocket and nervously twisted off the cap; then, reflecting that it was probably bad manners to use it in a restaurant, he snapped the cap back on. He looked more closely at it.

"Shit," he said absently to Bozzaris, "this isn't Chap Stick — it's… 'Nose Soother'! There's a picture of a red nose on it. I've been putting it on my mouth!"

"Oh boy," said Bozzaris. "They test those things in the factory, you know. Guys that test 'em, they can't get any other jobs."

"Shut up," said Malk, shoving the tube back into his pocket.

"Some big old retard had that up his nose." Bozzaris looked at his watch and then toward the door, as if they were expecting a third person, and then he looked around at the tables and booths. "Bailey did say one o'clock, didn't he?"

"That's what the message on my machine said," Malk agreed, looking around himself. Waiting impatiently for an imaginary third person was a good excuse to check out the surrounding people; he memorized the other diners — a man and a woman in the booth south of the Marritys, three older women toward the north end, and three college-looking boys in T-shirts against the inner wall, under a shelf full of pasta boxes and Italian cookie cans. At least one party, he told himself, must be operatives of the other force, whatever it is, and they'll be speculatively noting Bozzaris and me. At least we're talking spontaneously, what with the Nose Soother and all.

"What are you going to have?" Malk asked.

"I don't know. A beer, a sandwich."

Because he was listening for it, Malk could hear Bozzaris suppressing his Israeli accent, pronouncing the r at the front of his mouth and flattening the emphases; somehow the cadence of American English wasn't as sociable as the Israeli cadence.

"Me too, I guess," said Malk.

"I'm gonna hit the head first," said Bozzaris, pushing his chair back. "A Budweiser, if the lady comes by."

Malk nodded, and when Bozzaris strode away he took a ball point pen from his pocket and began doodling on the paper place mat so that he could keep his eyes in an unfocused stare that took in the periphery — absently he drew a dog wearing a bowler hat and a snail with a mustache and pince-nez glasses.

"No," Marrity was saying six feet away, "I imagine the funeral will be down here. I guess Bennett and Moira will arrange to have the body flown down from Shasta. I should have called them this morning."

Malk noted that Marrity was apparently not aware of any need for secrecy. As he'd told Bozzaris last night, Marrity didn't seem to know anything about his grandmother's history.

From the corner of his eye, he saw the girl nod.

Bozzaris came back and sat down. "You should go to the head too," he said, very quietly. "Check out an old party sitting in the last booth by the east wall."

Malk nodded, guessing that he meant the old man who had visited the Marritys five hours ago. What the hell did that mean? "Bailey can do it or not," he said in a normal tone, "doesn't matter to us." He pushed back his chair.

"Daph?" said Marrity urgently, and Malk looked over at them.

The girl was holding her throat with one hand, and her face was blank.

"Daph, can you talk?"

She shook her head, her eyes showing alarm now; and Marrity slid out of the booth and stood up, pulling her to her feet. He grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her around, then he crouched and linked his fists over her abdomen from behind.

"Relax, Daph," he said. "Heimlich."

He jerked his fists back and up, ramming the inner one into her stomach just below the ribs; her hands gripped her thighs, but apparently no food was dislodged.

"Hang on," Marrity said hoarsely, "one more time, harder." Again he drove his fist upward into her abdomen, but again there was no result.

Malk had tensed, and his hands were tingling, but he was sure he couldn't do any better than the girl's father was.

"Somebody call 911," Marrity shouted, and then yanked his fist powerfully into Daphne one more time. His shirt was already dark with sweat.

A gray-haired man in a green Members Only jacket had shuffled in from the other dining room, and now stood by Malk's table, looking on in evident horror; and he was indeed the man who had driven the green Rambler and spoken to Marrity this morning.

Malk looked back at the girl and her father, and gripped the edge of his table. He realized that he was praying.

The couple in the booth behind Marrity had got to their feet, but were only staring at the man holding the girl, and the three old women had all put down their forks and were blinking in evident confusion. Malk's training overrode his horrified fascination, and it occurred to him that this conspicuous emergency would probably wreck any kidnap plans.

Daphne opened her mouth and Malk could see her abdomen tighten as she tried uselessly to expel the blockage.

One of the college boys had a cellular phone out, and the cashier was anxiously looking their way and speaking into a telephone at the counter.

"And another, Daph," said Marrity in a voice that was nearly a sob. This time her knees folded after the forceful upward thrust, and Marrity sat down hard on the linoleum, holding her in his lap now.

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.

Marrity 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 faceup 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.

Standing 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.

Bozzaris 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."

Paul 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.

Eight

While 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 Heckyll and Jeckyll — 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.

Oren 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 Brontes 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.

Standing 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.

Who are you, Frank Marrity? he thought. Who are you, Daphne Marrity?

The snapshot impression was of a happy father and daughter, comfortable with each other. Books everywhere, a disorder of clothes on the washing machine, cats scuffling in the hall. Marrity kept the house at about 20 degrees Celsius or 70 degrees Fahrenheit; twice Lepidopt had heard the rooftop air conditioner whisper into activity. He probed his mind for the familiar envy of normal lives, and found that it was there as usual.

He was glad the cat or cats were shy of him, for a year ago he had petted one, and a moment later had experienced the certainty that he would never again touch a cat.

Lepidopt had taken Polaroid photographs of the Marrity waste-baskets and then picked through their contents — without much optimism, since the previous intruders had certainly done it too— afterward consulting the photographs to replace the trash exactly as it had been. He had found Marrity's box of paid bills and photographed the telephone bills, again sure that he was the second person in six hours to do it.

If the movie and the machine had been findable, the other crowd had found them. But maybe they had not been findable. Assume the ball is still in play, thought Lepidopt.

Lepidopt had been careful to move quietly throughout the house, assuming that the preceding crew, whoever they were, had left microphones; and he had left some too.

He had stayed away from the telephones — one in Marrity's bedroom, one in the downhill living room and one in Marrity's uphill office — because of the likelihood that the other crowd would already have attached infinity transmitters or keep-alive circuits to the wiring, effectively making microphones out of the telephone receivers even when they were resting in the cradles, apparently hung up.

Lepidopt had left three electret microphones disguised as empty Bic cigarette lighters — one on a high kitchen shelf, one in a gap between two books in the living room, and one inside a dusty spiderweb on the office windowsill. They were tuned from 100 to 120 megahertz, which spanned the high end of the commercial FM band and the low end of the aircraft voice-communication band, but the range of their transmission was no more than five hundred yards, and Lepidopt had rented a house at the west end of the block and set up receivers and tape recorders. The alkali AA batteries in the transmitters should be good for a week or two, at least.

He had also left, in the back of a kitchen drawer full of dusty chopsticks and parts to an old coffee percolator, two little teraphim statues made of fired tan clay, each with the names of the four rivers of Paradise carefully inscribed into their bases; and on top of the refrigerator he had tucked a postage-stamp-size scrap of leather with a Star of David inked on one side, and on the other a Hebrew inscription that said "and it dwindled" — the phrase was from Numbers 11:2, when a fire had broken out among the tents of the Israelites, and had then subsided when Moses prayed.

And now, before leaving, he was trying to guess what the other gang might have missed.

Here in the dark living room there was a faint reek of burnt plastic under the smells of tobacco and book paper and cat box; up the hall the air was just heavy with the cake -frosting smell of fresh paint.

Yesterday's newspapers are still on the kitchen table, he thought. Somebody had oatmeal and Southern Comfort for breakfast. There must be at least one cat, but I don't see him right now, thank God. There are two TV sets, one in the north living room and one in here, and neither one seems to have burned. But, everything's on fire, Sam Glatzer had said, moments before he died, up the hall and the TV set…

The girl's bedroom was up the hall, and Marrity had painted it today.

Lepidopt stepped toward the TV set, though it meant approaching the unshaded window, and he took the penlight from his pocket. He clicked it on, and then crouched to play its narrow beam over the top surface of the television set. It showed no particle of dust, though earlier he had noted that the table and all the bookshelves were faintly frosted with it. He clicked the light off again and tucked it back into his pocket.

He pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket and wrapped it around his latex-gloved forefinger and drew it across the top of the television set — he would look at it later in a bright light, but he sniffed it now, and smelled burnt plastic.

He backed away from the window. If my amulets had been in place yesterday, he thought, the little teraphim statues and the fire-extinguishing Star of David, I bet there would be a working VCR sitting on top of this television set now. And they might very well provide protection in the future.

But he knew the thought was sophistry. It was wrong to use magic, wrong to try to compel God's will.

Next month would be Selichot, beginning on the first Saturday night before Rosh Hashanah, and Lepidopt — if he were still alive— would pray for God's forgiveness through the following two weeks and would finally be restored to holiness on October third, Yom Kippur. As, often in the past, the duties of his job would be prominent among the things he would ask forgiveness for.

It was time to leave. Marrity might come home at any time. Admoni's brief radio message had said that a senior katsa from Prague was being dispatched and would arrive at LAX tomorrow afternoon to take over the operation; Lepidopt was to leave the Marritys and the Bradleys alone until then, and never mind the rival team, whoever they might be.

But Lepidopt paused, and for the second time he laid three pennies at the edges of the paperback book that lay open and facedown on the living room table, and then he carefully lifted the book. When he had picked it up an hour and a half ago there had still been enough light in the living room to read by, but now he took it to the lighted hall.

The paperback was Shakespeare's The Tempest, and when he'd first looked at it he had noted that it was a mess of inked underlining and margin notations, as would be expected from a literature professor. Lepidopt had photographed the two facing pages that the book was opened to, but he hadn't bothered to photograph every marked-up page. He doubted that the other crowd had either.

Now, up the landing and standing under the hall light, he flipped through the pages. It had been opened to the last page of the play, and one sentence from the Caliban character had been deeply underlined: What a thrice-double ass / Was I to take this drunkard for a god / And worship this dull fool! Now Lepidopt turned back through the text, looking at every page.

Marrity's inked notes were all clearly written: obviously not just hasty thoughts of a moment, but points that he would want to be reminded of every time he taught the play in a class.

And so Lepidopt paused when he came to a couple of nearly illegible words scribbled vertically in the margin of page 110, next to a doubly underlined speech in which the Prospero character said, I'll break my staff / Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, and deeper than did ever plummet sound / I'll drown my book.

The inked phrase in the margin was scrawled in such evident haste that the pen had not at any point lifted from the paper, but when Lepidopt squinted at it he saw that it was probably, and then certainly, Peccavit to LM.

Peccavit. Lepidopt's heart had begun thumping in his chest.

Break my staff, drown my book — Peccavit — Marrity must know who his great-grandfather was, and must know something of the man's work too. Not the public work, relativity and the photoelectric effect and the 1939 letter to Roosevelt about the atomic bomb, but the secret work, the weapon Einstein had not told Roosevelt about.

The LM must be Lisa Marrity, or Lieserl Marity. Frank Marrity must know something about it all.

Quickly Lepidopt flipped through the rest of the pages, but found only one more hasty scrawl of Peccavit to LM, on page 104, next to another twice-underlined sentence: We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.

Lepidopt was sweating as he hurried back to the living room to put the book back exactly the way it had been and retrieve his pennies. He didn't have enough film or time to photograph every page of the book now, and he prayed that Marrity wouldn't move it too far before somebody could come back and photograph the entire text.

And — in spite of Admoni's order — Lepidopt clearly had to keep the rival group away from Marrity.

He was padding back up the hall toward the laundry-room door, which fortunately faced trees and an empty yard next door, when the telephone rang in Marrity's bedroom, loud in the silent house. He paused; the phone rang three times and then stopped, not enough rings to trigger the answering machine.

And a moment later Lepidopt had to force his legs to go on supporting him, and not let him collapse against the wall; for in the instant that the phone had stopped ringing, he had been forcibly convinced that he would never again hear a telephone bell ring.

And surely I will never see Deborah again, he thought; and surely I will never see Louis again.

He clenched his narrow, maimed right hand and thumped the misshapen fist once, very softly, against the wall.

Bennett Bradley pulled open his desk drawer and lifted out the bottle of Christian Brothers brandy, and he was glaring at the white plastic telephone-answering machine.

His office was in what had been the garage, but he had put in a hardwood floor and pale paneling, and fluorescent tubes glowed behind frosted sheets of plastic set into the ceiling. Gray metal filing cabinets full of contracts and photographs stood against the west wall, and a long blond-wood table ran down the middle of the room. Right now there were dozens of four-by-six-inch color photographs laid out on the table, taped together into long strips, but he would have to be putting them away now, with no recompense.

Now they were just on-spec samples, to be folded into a file and labeled "Hollywood Hills, Panoramic View w. Hollywood Sign & Easy Access," and tucked away with all the others: "Laguna Cliff & Sea, w. Easy Parking," and "Eaglerock Typical Middle-class 1960s House," and "15,000 sf French Chateau in Brentwood, Shooting-Friendly." And a thousand others, and probably a quarter of them were obsolete by now: torn down or renovated, or owned by uncooperative people, or with inappropriate freeways visible behind them.

Bennett unscrewed the bottle's cap and took a drink right from the neck of it, grimacing at the sting of the lukewarm brandy; and then he set it on the desk and stood up to put away the photographs.

The Subaru agent had originally said they wanted the thirty-second commercial to have an "old Hollywood" feel.

Bennett had driven up to his proposed site half a dozen times last week, starting north on Beachwood from Franklin, just a block up from modern Hollywood Boulevard but fifty years backward in architecture and atmosphere, with neoclassical apartment buildings shaded by shaggy carob trees along cracked and canted sidewalks; farther up the hill he had stopped to take pictures of the Beachwood Gates, two towering stonework pillars on either side of the street, and he had taken a picture of the brass plaque on the eastern pillar, with its raised letters that spelled HOLLYWOODLAND 1923.

He had followed Beachwood up to the left, and the street wound up Beachwood Canyon between old Spanish houses with red-tile roofs and brown-painted wooden balconies and old double-doored garages that were crowded right up to the street. There was no level ground — the roof of one house blocked the view of the foundations of another, and stairs and arched windows could be seen anywhere among the trees.

Beachwood Drive was too narrow for trucks to pass easily, and at the top of the hill the road curled sharply to the right into Hollyridge Drive, which was so narrow that one car would have to pull to the curb for an oncoming car to get by — but right at the top, a pair of iron gates opened to the left onto a wide dirt lot.

That was Griffith Park land, with an unobstructed view down the north slopes to Forest Lawn Memorial Park and the Ventura Freeway, with Burbank and Glendale beyond, and the Mulholland Highway could provide access for any sort of trucks from that direction. He had drawn a map of the unpaved hilltop lot, showing where the trucks could be parked and lunch tables set up.

And on Hollyridge Drive he had found a vacant house with a wide balcony overlooking Beachwood Canyon and — at the same height as the balcony and so close that the cross girders were clearly visible — the nine huge white letters of the Hollywood sign standing on the hill right across the canyon. Quickly he had contacted the Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks and the owner of the vacant house, and he had already begun the work of arranging all the permissions and insurance coverage.

He tipped the stack of pictures vertical now, and rapped them on the polished tabletop to get the edges straight.

And with his new Nikon RF he had taken these photographs of the site. From the house's balcony he had taken two panoramic series of shots, of the skyline and of the road below, and he had stood at the top of Beachwood Drive and slowly turned on his heel and taken fourteen level shots — a full 180 degrees — to show the Subaru people that there would be no billboards or other inappropriate structures behind the camera to be reflected in the polished bodywork of the car as it drove past; there was a big mirror mounted on the canyon wall where Beachwood looped into Hollyridge, but they could hang a camouflage cloth over it. He had even got down on his hands and knees and photographed the street surface, to indicate what sort of dolly moves would be possible for the cameraman.

And then sometime this afternoon, while Bennett had been on the plane back from Shasta, the Subaru agent had called and left a message — they had decided to film the car on the Antelope Valley Highway east of Agua Dulce, way out north in the desert, and to hell with the "old Hollywood" idea. They'd pay Bennett for the days he had put into the project, but he would have no further part in it.

All the on-site emergencies, the unforseen shadow patches or glare spots, the traffic and parking screwups, the crises with the available voltage and amperage, would be dealt with by another location manager. And that guy would get all the on-location pay too.

Several thousand dollars that Bennett had been counting on-gone. Before the end of the month, he thought, we'll be hurtin' for certain.

The telephone rang, and he hurried to the desk to answer it, thinking the Subaru people might have reconsidered.

"Bradley Locations," he said.

A man's voice said, "I'd like to speak to Bennett or Moira Bradley, please." It wasn't the Subaru agent.

"This is Bennett Bradley."

"Mr. Bradley, I represent a company that's always actively trying to expand its database, and we're now in negotiation with a Francis Marrity for some items that belonged to his grandmother, a Ms. Lisa Marrity. There will probably be a substantial amount of money involved, and our research department has just established that Mr. Marrity is not the sole heir of Ms. Marrity."

"That's true, my wife is coheir." Son of a bitch! thought Bennett. "What items? Uh, in particular?"

"I'm not involved in acquisitions, I'm afraid. But it's probably papers, floppy disks, or films; even electrical machinery or precious metals, possibly."

Bennett had seized a pen and begun scrawling meaningless spirals on a legal pad. "What is your company?"

"The remuneration would be greater if I didn't say. Anonymity is our policy."

"How did — Mr. Marrity — approach you? — and when?"

"We've been in negotiation with Lisa Marrity for some time. Yesterday we learned that she had died, and the only contact she had provided us with was Francis Marrity. We called him, and he expressed interest in consummating the sale we had arranged with Lisa Marrity."

"Well you definitely need to talk to my wife too. She's coheir. As I said. As you know." Bennett was breathing hard. "Now."

"Are you aware of the nature of the items to be sold?"

"Of course I am," Bennett said. What on earth could they be? he wondered — what papers, what precious metals? What electrical machinery? "My wife and I were in Shasta yesterday afternoon and today, making funeral arrangements — for, uh, Ms. Marrity — and we just got back from the airport half an hour ago. I'm sure Frank meant to get in touch with my wife before concluding any deal," he said. "With my wife and I. Because no sale could be finalized without our cooperation."

"Who currently has physical possession of the items in question?"

"Well, they're — divvied up. Some here, some there. I'd need to see a list of which particular — items—are being discussed. The—" Bennett considered, and then dismissed, the idea of sneaking another drink from the bottle. "The old lady had a lot of valuable things. What's your phone number?"

"We'll get in touch with you, probably tomorrow. Good night."

Bennett heard a click, and then the dial tone.

He hung up the telephone, had another mouthful of the brandy, and then banged out through the door that led to the kitchen of his house, yelling, "Moira! Your bloody damned brother—!"

Nine

"He doesn't know what I was talking about," said Rascasse, pushing his chair back from the telephone on the folding desk and standing up, gripping an overhead rail to steady himself as the bus rocked around a sharp housing-tract corner in the evening darkness. To the young man driving the bus he said, "But pull up in front of his house anyway, so Charlotte can take a look."

"He was just up in Shasta," said Golze hopefully.

Through Rascasse's eyes Charlotte Sinclair looked down at herself and the chubby figure of Golze sitting on the first bus seat aft of the cleared rubber-tiled floor, both of them leaning forward to hear the radio speaker. She lifted her chin and pushed a wing of dark hair back from her face.

From the speaker they could now dimly hear Bennett Bradley shouting at his wife.

"Lousy signal," said Rascasse.

"I think they're in the hall," said Golze. "I didn't put a mike in the hall."

"Yes," said Charlotte, leaning back in her seat with her eyes closed, "they're in a hall."

The bus was close enough to the Bradley house now for her to be able to see through the eyes of the people inside — and she saw a tanned blond woman in jeans, standing in a lighted hallway, with suitcases visible beside a door behind her; Charlotte switched to the woman's view, and found herself looking at a man shouting; he had styled reddish hair, and a bristling mustache, and he was wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled back on his forearms.

Charlotte felt the bus jolt to a stop, presumably at the curb in front of the Bradley house, but she kept her attention on Moira Bradley's field of vision.

The man was walking backward into a brightly lit kitchen, and the woman's viewpoint followed, and all at once the sound from the speaker in the bus became clearer, and Charlotte had words to go with the man's moving lips.

"—that he doesn't like you, it's that he doesn't like me," Bennett Bradley was saying. "He's always been jealous of me."

"Jealous? He likes teaching," said the woman Charlotte was monitoring; Charlotte's field of vision bobbed slightly at the syllables.

"Out in the middle of nowhere?" said Bennett. Charlotte saw him wave a hand in the air. "With a dead wife and a bratty kid? And a million cats? He knows he's rotting out there — he'd move west to L.A. or south to Orange County in a second, if he could, but that house of his is probably worth about a hundred dollars. Look at that joke truck he drives! And I drive a Mercedes and I'm on a first-name basis with Richard Dreyfuss!"

"Frank wouldn't try to gyp us out of any money," said Moira. "I'm sure he—"

"There were no messages on the machine from him, just from that damned Subaru agent. You think your brother wouldn't try to keep this for himself? 'Substantial amount of money,' this guy said—"

Charlotte's view rocked as Moira's voice from the speaker said, "For — what was it? Machinery? That doesn't make any—"

"Or papers, or gold. She knew Charlie Chaplin! Your grandmother—" Bennett backed into some decorative glass candleholders on the counter by the sink, and clattering sounded from the speaker. "What is all this trash?" He shoved the jars that hadn't fallen into the sink back against the wall, breaking at least one more.

Bennett shifted out of Charlotte's line of sight as Moira looked into the sink instead of at her husband; but his voice on the speaker said, "Your grandmother might have letters, manuscripts, even lost Chaplin films."

"Well, they're trash now," said Moira's voice as Charlotte saw Bennett swing into view again. "The candles, I mean. So now you believe she knew Chaplin."

"Well obviously she had something. Maybe her violin is a Stradivarius."

"Frank will tell us. He'll tell me, anyway. Unless this was a crank phone call. 'Anonymity policy'! It's certainly made trouble."

"Call him. Ask him. Or I will."

Charlotte's field of vision swung away from Bennett to a calendar above a telephone on the wall, and then back. "We'll see him Thursday."

Bennett shook his head. "This money guy wants to meet me tomorrow. And Frank won't want to talk at his grandmother's funeral, with Daffy underfoot. Call him."

"Okay."

Charlotte watched the telephone bob closer, and then she saw one of Moira's hands lift the receiver while the other spun the dial. Charlotte read the number out loud as she watched Moira dial it — while from the speaker she heard the clicking of the dial being turned, and the hiss of it spinning back — and she felt Golze shift beside her on the bus seat. "That's Marrity's number, all right," Golze said.

Charlotte could smell tobacco smoke; evidently Golze had lit a cigarette.

Charlotte watched the telephone receiver swing closer and then disappear beyond her right-side peripheral vision; of course she couldn't hear anything from the phone. Then after about twenty seconds it appeared again, receding, and Moira's hand hung it back in the cradle with a loud clatter from the speaker. The microphone must be very near the phone, Charlotte thought.

"'You've reached the Marritys,'" quoted Moira's voice, "'and we're not able to come to the phone right now.'"

"You should have left a message," grumbled Bennett. "'We're onto your filthy tricks.'"

Bennett's frowning face swung back into Charlotte's sight, and Moira laughed. "Or, 'You're not fooling anyone.'"

Bennett laughed too, though he was still frowning. "Do it in a disguised voice," he said. Then, growling in a Bronx accent, "'I know what you been doin', an' you better stop it.'"

"He'd lock the gate," said Moira, "and never answer the phone again."

"Right, and then we'd find out this was a joke call, and your crazy grandmother didn't own anything but old Creedence records. But— he'd never dare go to another X-rated movie."

"Frank doesn't go to X-rated movies. You go to X-rated movies."

"I have to, sometimes, it's business. Anyway, that's why he's jealous of me."

"Drive on," said Rascasse to the young man in the driver's seat. "No use having the bus get noticed for this."

Moira was saying something back, but Golze said, "He mentioned lost Charlie Chaplin films."

The bus surged forward with no more noise than a car would have made; the Vespers had replaced its diesel engine with a Chevrolet 454 V-8, and put disk brakes on instead of noisy air brakes.

"He was just choosing random examples," said Rascasse. "It was an obvious thing to say, after I mentioned films in my call to him. He doesn't know anything about it. Neither does she, probably."

Bennett Bradley's voice was coming out of the speaker now, talking about the Subaru deal that Rascasse had managed to get taken away from him, but already the bus was too far away from the house for Charlotte to see any more. She shifted her attention to Rascasse, who was still standing and looking down at her and Golze. Charlotte took the opportunity to check her lipstick, but it was still fine.

"The artifact moved east, yesterday," Rascasse went on, "and Francis Marrity and his daughter are in a, a crisis. It's got to be Marrity who took it. We should have been at that hospital, not wasting our time here."

But I've soured the approach to Francis Marrity, Charlotte thought, bracing herself for reminders of it; but then the soft gong sounded from the cabinet behind the driver's seat, and in sudden fright Charlotte's vision bounced several times between the driver and Golze and Rascasse, so that in rapid succession she was seeing the empty curbside cars and pools of streetlight ahead of them and two views of her own face — lips pinched and brown eyes wide — one in profile and one head-on.

"See — what it wants," said Rascasse to Golze.

Charlotte thought she could already hear the filigreed-silver jaw hinges snapping inside the cabinet.

"Right," said Golze.

He stood up from beside Charlotte and swayed forward toward the cabinet, and Rascasse stared after him, so Charlotte fixed her attention on the driver, a humorless physics student from UC Berkeley, and watched the cars ahead of the bus through his eyes. They had left the housing tract and were on East Orange Grove Boulevard, passing a Pizza Hut and a Shell station.

She heard the cabinet lock snap, and then she really could hear the Baphomet's jaws clicking; and though she was staring at the dashboard and the taillights beyond the windshield, she could smell the head now, the spicy shellac reek.

She heard several voices whispering — and she had never heard the thing form words before. Reluctantly she let herself share Rascasse's perspective.

The cabinet doors were swung open and the shiny head inside was gleaming in the yellow overhead light; its black jaw, with the chin capped in silver like the toe of a cowboy boot, was wagging up and down rapidly, but it was not synchronized with the whispering.

Golze had switched on the Ouija-board monitor over the cabinet: The cursor on the screen was motionless, but there were several breathy voices huffing out between the Baphomet head's crooked ivory teeth.

"Call me flies in summer," hissed one.

"Eighty cents," whispered another. "Can I bum one of your smokes, at least?"

Charlotte swallowed. "What — who the hell are they?" she managed to ask in a level voice.

"Ghosts," said Rascasse in disgust. "The Harmonic Convergence has brought them out like… flies in summer, and the head attracts them when it's not properly occupied. I think it's worse when we're moving — the head is a psychic charge moving through the Harmonic Convergence field. If we weren't smoking cigarettes right now, we'd draw hundreds of them — probably condensed enough for us to see them."

Charlotte shuddered and reached into her purse for the pack of Dunhills.

The feathery-frail ghost voices were coming faster now, overlapping one another:

"Why will you do it? "

"One, nineteen, twenty-four, twenty-seven, thirty-eight, nineteen."

"Will you show me your tits if I can guess how much money you've got in your pocket?"

"Two whole days."

"Why don't you try a real man? "

"Hello, pretty lady! I can tell you what lottery numbers are gonna win!"

Charlotte cleared her throat. "Should I say hello back? It seems rude to snub a ghost." She was still holding her unlit cigarette — neither Golze nor Rascasse had looked at her, and she didn't want to light it just by touch with her shaking fingers.

Golze answered, "You already snubbed him. They run backward in time. But you could say, 'Hello, ghost!' and then his remark would be a reply to that, not an unprompted salutation."

"Hello, ghost!" she said.

Golze glanced at her, and Charlotte saw her nervous smile through his eyes. Quickly she used his perspective to snap her lighter below the tip of her cigarette. "Is he going to tell us the winning lottery numbers?" she said, exhaling smoke.

"He did already," said Golze. "And he guessed you've got eighty cents in your pocket. No use showing him your tits now, it would be before he asked. I don't think they can actually see anyway."

"Nineteen… twenty-four," said Charlotte quickly. "You should have written down the numbers!"

"They're lying," Golze said. "They don't know which lottery numbers are going to win."

"If they're moving backward in time," said Charlotte, "how come they talk forward? They don't sound like records played backward."

"Very good!" said Golze. "They're mostly on the freeway, just dabbling their toes in here for a few seconds at a time. While they're down here with us, they're carried along with the stream in the same direction we are. So each sentence is beginning-first, end-last, but the next remark for us is the previous remark to them."

"Lock it up," Rascasse said to Golze. "But leave the monitor on."

"Two days," whispered one last ghost, "I sat beside my body, staring at the holes in my chest."

Charlotte kept her attention on Golze, and watched his pudgy hands close the cabinet. The copper handles were miniature reproductions of the Vespers emblem: the Grail cup — two plain, smooth cones joined at the tips, one cone opening upward, the other downward, like a double-jigger measure in a Bauhaus bar.

Charlotte used Golze's brief glance to focus hungrily on the little copper chalices. Then he had straightened up and was looking at her.

"How does the Harmonic Converence bring out ghosts?" she asked, and Golze helpfully looked toward Rascasse.

"It's like Gargamelle," said Rascasse.

"What, Gargantua's mother? — in Rabelais?"

"No — or maybe they named it after that, what you said — Gigantor's mother — no, it's the name of a big bubble chamber at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland. Ten tons of liquid is kept very near its boiling temperature, but under high pressure; then they suddenly release the pressure, and any invisible particles shooting through the liquid form lines of bubbles. They become actual, manifest, rather than unseen potential."

Rascasse waved out at the night. "All these mystics on the mountaintops, emptying their minds all at once, have suddenly dropped the pressure in the common psychic water-table, and things are becoming actual that should only be low-probability potentials."

Charlotte dug coins out of the pocket of her jeans and held them out on her palm. Golze looked, and so she was able to see that it was three quarters and a nickel.

"I do have eighty cents," she said.

"If it was five coins they'd have been stumped," Golze said. "They're like some primitive culture, with five numbers: one, two, three, four, and countless."

Rascasse was leaning on the folded-down desk to look outside through one of the starboard bus windows. Charlotte shifted to his perspective, and was able to see the dots of orange light on the mountains.

"Fires all the way up from here to Humboldt and Trinity and Siskiyou," Rascasse said softly. "All started from lightning strikes at about noon yesterday."

"Well," said Golze, "A .50-caliber bullet will rip up dust under it as it goes by. And Lieserl Marity was moving a whole hell of a lot faster."

"A lot of rest you'll be getting in here," said Marrity.

He had pushed the heavy door nearly closed, but the voices and squeaking wheeled carts outside the room were still just as audible. The hospital hallways had a scent like the chlorophyll wood shavings at the bottom of a hamster's cage, but this room still smelled of lemon custard and beef gravy, even though a nurse had taken away Daphne's tray of pureed brown and white and yellow stuff half an hour ago. On the wall behind Daphne's bed was taped a page of typescript headed "Swallowing Instructions." There seemed to be a dozen crucial points. Daphne couldn't see it from where she lay.

A gauze pad was taped across her throat. Two of her ribs had been cracked during the useless Heimlich maneuver, but they hadn't required any tape or bandage.

Daphne picked up the pencil on the wheeled table beside her bed and wrote sleep pill probly on the top page of the pocket notebook he had fetched from the truck. Ask fr you too. The clear plastic bag on the IV pole swayed when she wrote; fortunately the tube was taped to her arm above her wrist where the needle was inserted, so it wasn't likely to be pulled out.

Marrity glanced at the blue canvas cot the nurse had brought in for him to sleep on after he had turned down the offer of a "cardiac chair," which had seemed to be a half-size hospital bed, complete with an electric motor bolted to the underside of it.

"I'll be fine," he told Daphne. He was sitting in one of the two plain wooden chairs in this half of the room; the other chair had a cotton square like a diaper laid across its seat, and he hadn't wanted to ask why.

St. Bernardine's Hospital had transferred Daphne here to the Arrowhead Pediatric Hospital after her emergency throat surgery, and Marrity was pleased that his frantic knife cut of this afternoon had only required four stitches in the skin of her throat. The surgeon had done "undermining," put in a row of sutures under the skin, to leave a negligible scar while still keeping the wound securely closed.

Marrity had called Cal State San Bernardino to cancel his Modern Novels class for tomorrow, and he was planning to sleep in his own bed as soon as Daphne was released in the morning. Sleep all day.

There was another bed in this room, farther from the door, but it was empty at the moment and Marrity hoped it would stay that way. The emergency room at St. Bernardine's had seemed to be full of hoboes who just wanted painkillers, and he didn't want another stranger imposed on his daughter when she was so helpless — she looked very frail in this up-tilted hospital bed, with the thin sheets and threadbare blankets tumbled around her. He would have fetched Rumbold for her, if Rumbold had not been burned up and buried.

She was idly drawing spirals on the pad, and his spirits fell further at the familiar sight of her bitten-down fingernails — then he saw that she had written more words.

Yr father was at Alfredo's?

"Yes," Marrity said. He didn't want to make her write more, so he added, "I guess he probably followed us."

She drew two dots with a V between them: frowning eyes.

"I agree." Marrity shifted in his chair. "He did seem to be very upset by… it all."

Daphne wrote some more: You saved my life. She didn't look up from the paper.

"Um — yes. I was glad to be able to."

must have been hard to do — cut me

He nodded, though her head was still lowered and her face was hidden behind her brown bangs.

"Yes," he said. "Yes, it was very hard to do."

A spot appeared on the paper; and then another. I love you

"I love you too, Daph," he said. He wanted to get up out of the chair and try to hug her, but he knew it would embarrass her; they never talked this way ordinarily. Marrity had always assumed that their avoidance of sentiment was an Irish thing, but today he had learned that they were not Irish. A Serbian thing, then.

"I'm — proud of you," she whispered, still looking down. "I hope it leaves a scar — excuse to brag about you."

"Don't stretch your voice box. They say it won't leave much of a scar at all. But — thanks."

She nodded and sat back against the sloping mattress and smiled at him, and when she closed her eyes she didn't open them again; and after a few moments Marrity took from his coat pocket a beat-up paperback copy of Tristram Shandy that he always kept in the truck. His briefcase was in the truck too, but he wasn't in the mood to read student papers and he didn't want to look at Grammar's old Peccavit letters in here.

He stood up to switch off the fluorescent tube over her bed, noting the spotty horizontal line of chips in the wall plaster at the height of the bed frame — what did they do, play bumper cars with the things? — and then he pulled the bed curtain closed on the hall side and resumed his seat, reading by the light from the hallway.

The book's chapters were short, and when he came to the black page at the end of Chapter Seven he found himself staring into the blackness, and exhaustion gave the page a faint green border. Vaguely he wondered if there might be words hidden in the black field.

He only realized that he had gone to sleep in the chair when he began to drift back into wakefulness. He could hear voices from a television — he knew it was television because he recognized the show that was playing. It was… some cartoon that used to come on very late at night when he and Moira had been in early grade school; irritatingly 1950s-style animation, blocky characters with huge square heads and barrel bodies and tiny pointed feet. Both eyes on the same side of their nose, like in dumb old Picasso pictures.

One character was named Matt, and was always coming home drunk, with his hair spiky and his shirt untucked, and he'd bang on his own locked front door and yell, "Can I come in? Say I can come in!"

Grammar had caught them watching it one night, long after bedtime, and told them that they couldn't watch it anymore. Marrity had assumed it was the late hour, rather than the show itself, that had prompted the ban.

Matt was saying it now: "Can I come in? Say I can come in, Daphne!"

That made Marrity open his eyes. Had Matt's wife been named Daphne?

Daphne was awake in her hospital bed; Marrity could see the gleam of her eyes staring at the far end of the dark room, where the glowing television was mounted high on the wall. Marrity blinked at it himself — it was showing the same program he remembered, the sketchy black-and-white figures who moved only in precisely repetitive gestures. Probably to save animation work.

Marrity noticed that the curtain around Daphne's bed had been pulled all the way open, though he hadn't heard the rollers move in the track on the ceiling.

Then, "Daphne, don't say it!" came a man's voice from behind him, and Marrity came fully awake with a start.

A man was silhouetted against the now open door, with one hand gripping the door frame and the other hand pulling something out of his ear.

Marrity scrambled to his feet, and the paperback book smacked on the linoleum floor.

"Why not?" said Daphne in a hoarse voice, and Marrity realized that she was only half awake. He couldn't see her expression in the dim light from the TV.

"Say I can come in, Daphne!" repeated the cartoon voice from the television. "The mountains are burning!"

"Why shouldn't she let him in?" Daphne asked the figure in the doorway. She turned back to the television, and by the gleam of her teeth Marrity knew that she had opened her mouth.

"No, Daph," said Marrity loudly. He was suddenly sure that it had not been the late hour that had made Grammar forbid them to watch this show; and, irrationally, he suspected now that it had not appeared on any TV set except for Grammar's. "Don't say anything. Don't — strain your voice box."

Daphne stared at her father, and didn't speak.

"Daphne!" called the voice from the television. "Just nod, if I can come in! When the fires are out it will be too late."

"Daph, don't move," said Marrity, stepping toward the television set. He wasn't at all sure he believed that this animated cartoon was actually talking to his daughter, but he could feel the hairs standing up on his forearms.

"You can't turn it off," said the man in the doorway, speaking quickly, "it's not turned on. Tell Matt to go away."

Marrity swayed with sudden vertigo, but he clung to the urgency in the stranger's disorienting words.

"Go away — Matt," he said hoarsely to the blunt outlines of the face on the screen.

For a moment the eyes that were just black circles on the featureless white face seemed to stare at him from the screen, and Marrity felt sweat chilling his forehead as he helplessly stared back. Then the pen slash of a mouth began opening and closing, and the unsynchronized voice said, "When thou cam'st first, thou strok'st me and made much of me."

It was a line from The Tempest — The Tempest again! — and Marrity automatically responded with Prospero's reply to Caliban: " 'Hence, hagseed!'" The jagged outlines of the figure shifted, so Marrity went on dizzily, "'Shrugg'st thou, malice? So, slave; hence!'"

"Schneid mal die Kehle auf," the thing said, and then its already minimal face sprang apart into random lines.

The screen went dark — and Marrity backed away from it fast. He suspected that if he could stand on something and feel the top of the television set, it would be cold.

Or maybe very hot.

"Exit Caliban," he said in a whispery exhalation. Then he turned to face the man in the doorway. "What was that?" His voice shook. "And who are you?" He crossed to Daphne's bed and switched on the fluorescent light over her.

The man stepped into the room. He was wearing a dark suit and tie, and gray leather gloves, and he appeared to be in his forties. "My name is Eugene Jackson," he said. "I'm with the National Security Agency." He was shifting his weight from one foot to the other, apparently impatient.

Marrity squinted at him. "And what was that cartoon? It was — it was talking to my daughter! What did it mean about the fires? How could it talk to her?" He forced himself to gather his routed thoughts. "National… Do you have some identification?"

Daphne was clearly wide awake now, clutching the bleach-paled blankets around her shoulders and blinking unhappily at the stranger.

"Yes, it was talking to your daughter." Lepidopt reached into his inner jacket pocket and pulled out a badge wallet and showed Marrity his plastic NSA card; it was the current configuration — not that Marrity would know — with the blue band at the top edge that indicated a field agent, and the pattern of computer punch holes along the left side that would provide a scanner with the name "Eugene Jackson," and a null identification number.

He was far, far beyond the bounds of ordinary caution here. This was not how or where he would have preferred to approach Marrity— but when he'd seen the figure on the television screen, he'd had to pull out his earplugs and jump in. He gripped the little rubber plugs in his narrow right fist, aching to screw them back into his ear canals, but he was paying very close attention to the man and the girl.

Clearly Marrity had not expected the dybbuk on the television, nor anything like it. That was good and bad — it meant Marrity wasn't committed, but it also meant he didn't know very much about what he was playing with.

"What… was it?" asked Marrity.

Lepidopt pushed the heavy door almost closed, and stood next to it so as not to be seen from the hall. He wished he could close it all the way, and make it impossible for the sounds of the nearest nursing station to reach him. What would happen, in the moment before a ringing telephone would be audible here? Would he simply drop dead of a massive stroke?

"We're hoping," he said, "that you'll be able to help us figure out what that was. We know it has to do with Peccavit."

"Einstein," said Marrity blankly.

"Yes, Einstein. And your grandmother, and Charlie Chaplin."

Marrity took a deep breath and let it out. "How is it — you're a government agency, right? Like the FBI? How is this something you'd be involved with?"

Get what you can here and now, thought Lepidopt. And quick. Marrity won't leave the girl alone to talk somewhere else, and fortunately he's only half awake now.

"Einstein," Lepidopt said, forcing himself not to speak too quickly, "was involved in paranormal research, contacting the dead. This sounds incredible, I know — but remember that cartoon thing you just saw on the television. He, Einstein, was very secretive about it, but we want to know what he discovered." Lepidopt waved his free hand. "There are dead people we'd like to interview. And pioneers are careless — Humphrey Davy poisoned himself with fluorine, and Madame Curie killed herself by handling radium. Only later on did people discover precautions that those pioneers should have taken. Einstein exposed himself and his children to" — he glanced at Daphne, who was listening avidly — "to dangers. Your grandmother took a lot of precautions, but it may be that some of the consequences of her father's work caught up with her yesterday. And we can detect paranormal events; we believe, in fact, that one occurred yesterday afternoon at four-fifteen, in San Bernardino, within a small area that includes your house. Did you experience any kind of" — he waved his gloved fist toward the dark television set in the corner — "intrusion at that time?"

"Does paranormal mean witchy?" asked Daphne.

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

"Can 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.

Ten

Rascasse 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 Nobo-daddy, 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."

Eleven

What 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.

"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

"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 supercedes 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.

"Chaplin," Lepidopt went on, "apparently meant the movie to be a working time machine all by itself, just like he did with his later movie, City Lights. He had noticed that movies could evoke tangible energies out of the psyches of their audiences, and in these two movies he tried to direct those energies. He met Einstein in January of '31, and attended some seances with him, and when Chaplin went to London later in '31 he stood up the prime minister — a dinner to be given in Chaplin's honor at the House of Commons — to run to Berlin and confer with Einstein again. It seems that Einstein didn't so much say it couldn't be done as that it would be a very bad idea."

"Why did Chaplin want a time machine?" asked Bozzaris.

Lepidopt pursed his lips. "His first son died three days after being born, in 1919. Two weeks later Chaplin started shooting the movie The Kid, in which his Tramp character has adopted an orphan boy who the authorities are trying to take away from him. But apparently that… vicarious cinematic resurrection wasn't enough. Chaplin wanted to go back and — somehow — save his actual son."

Bozzaris had used a water glass to roll a chunk of the blue Play-Doh into a sheet on the tabletop. "Ready for you here." He looked up and frowned. 'Wasn't Chaplin's body dug up again, and held for ransom?"

"Yes," said Lepidopt, stepping away from the wall. "By two idiots who wanted money to open a garage. They were caught, and Chaplin's coffin was restored to the Vevey Cemetery, but the police never caught the woman who had coerced the two men into it, and of course she got away with the videocassette that had been in the coffin."

Malk frowned at the sheet of Play-Doh. "If the movie and the footprint slab are improvements Lieserl added," he said, "what's the basic engine?"

Bozzaris got up from the table, and Lepidopt sat down in his chair, across from Malk.

"It's a machine," Lepidopt said absently, hefting the cylinders, "small enough to fit into a suitcase, apparently. Einstein referred to it as his maschinchen, little machine, and from his papers we gather that part of its function — God knows why — is to measure very tiny voltages. Whatever it is, I think it's in Newport Beach, or was, on Sunday. Tomorrow at dawn Ernie and I will go look for it."

"The cab," said Malk. "The card."

Lepidopt smiled and nodded. "Right. I called the cab company and pretended to be LAPD, aiming to find out which airport Lieserl went to, which airline. But the cabdriver reported taking an old woman with one suitcase to Newport Beach, not to any airport. Balboa and Twenty-first, right by the Newport Pier. It may still be there, some pieces of it anyway, these thirty-six hours later."

"That's this morning," said Bozzaris.

"Young people don't need much sleep," said Lepidopt absently.

Now, carefully, he pressed one of the cylinders into the soft blue surface of the Play-Doh, and then he rolled it slowly away from him, maintaining the pressure. After he had rolled it across four inches, he lifted it away — imprinted on the blue surface now were five sunken bands, with fragments of raised letters visible in them. Then he lined up the other cylinder and just as carefully rolled it across the same area, and its disk edges imprinted the raised lines that had been left untouched by the first cylinder.

When he lifted the second cylinder away, the Play-Doh showed a one-by-four-inch impression with tiny raised characters on it; the top rows of figures were repeated at the bottom, for he had rolled out more than one full turn of the cylinders, to make sure he got everything. The figures were Hebrew letters.

"Do you need a magnifying glass?" asked Bozzaris.

"Yes," said Lepidopt, though already, squinting, he had managed to make out the Hebrew characters that spelled "1967" and "Rephidim stone" and "change the past."

The Rephidim stone again, he thought. Where Moses struck the rock to get water for the Israelites, in the Sinai desert — the original destination of the 55th Parachute Brigade, during the Six-Day War in 1967, for which we were issued the radiation-film badges that were actually amulets.

He sighed and flexed his maimed hand. "So get me a magnifying glass, would you, Ernie?" he said.