A Fold in the Tent of the Sky (13 page)

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the doppelgänger tango

It was as if Peter were looking at it all through a mirror. The image of someone with him all the time, dogging his every move. Like the theory his acting coach used to harp on—about the two streams that ran through a stage performance, the life stream of the actor in confluence with the life stream of the character being portrayed—was that it?

“I keep seeing someone—with me. Like that last time in Dallas.”

“That's impossible. You're imagining it.” Mike Blenheim was wearing a suit today, a dark blue double-breasted; he
sat down on the edge of the desk and undid the jacket and then the shirt collar, loosening the tie and ducking out of it with a look on his face that suggested he was backing out of a guillotine.

“Well, whatever—he's there every time. The same guy.”

Peter had just come out of an RV ganzfeld trance that had taken him to a desolate hillside, a bleak, barren place full of wind and driving sleet. Bare rock and scrubby evergreens clinging to craggy cliffs. He was supposed to have found some sort of military installation, something to do with chemical weapons. “He was sitting on a rock about twenty yards away from me. He actually waved at me.”

“Could be like phantom limb pain—you know what I'm talking about? What amputees feel; the missing leg, arm, throbbing, itching—that sort of thing. Your left-behind body's there in front of you, your brain adding it to the landscape—”

“It's not me. I know that much. But it's hard to make out details—more or less a blur.” Peter swung the light away and climbed out of the recliner.

“Just make a note of it on your session report. If it keeps up, we'll get Jane or someone to go along with you next time—see if she picks something up—”

“I get the feeling he wants something.”

“Maybe you want something from
him.
”

“I do. I want him to get the hell out of my sessions.” Peter took a drink from the glass of water that was waiting for him on the small table next to the recliner. His hand was shaking and he put the glass back down before Blenheim noticed.

“The ether's a strange place; you're one of the lucky ones.
Some of the guys doing this stuff back in the early days—some of them never came out of it; ended up psychotic—no safeguards back then. Like test pilots without parachutes.”

“That's supposed to make me feel better?”

“Yeah, yeah, it is.”

“Well, thanks; but it doesn't.”

“Do you play tennis?”

“No. Why? A bit, I guess. You know, bashing the ball around.”

“Get out of here and get some fresh air. Find someone to play with—a real person, to dog your every move. Next session pretend you're doing the same thing, trying to deek the guy out, physically. Make the process a muscular thing, a body reflex, rather than a cerebral one—you get my drift?”

“Tennis.” Peter wondered what it would be like playing tennis with a ghost in the ether—Casper the Unfriendly Ghost with an invisible racket and an attitude.

“Yeah, why not?” Mike Blenheim blinked a few times—those translucent eyelashes of his made his eyes look teary. “Get Pamela out there too, couldn't do her any harm.” His tongue came around to do a sweep of his front teeth; a defensive body move, Peter thought. Everyone taking it for granted he and Pam were an item already.

“I keep thinking I'm off-target when this guy shows up, like today—deflected. You know what I mean?” He wanted to steer the conversation away from Pam for some reason. “It's as if I know this person real well, but I can't quite grab on to who it is—”

“It's
you
; believe me. ‘Phantom limb pain,' remember?” he said, quoting himself. “Okay? Got it?” Putting his hand on
Peter's shoulder now, guiding him toward the door. He still had the necktie in his hand; as he walked by the filing cabinet he placed it next to a potted cactus, gently so the knot wouldn't be disturbed. Peter wondered whether he'd bought it that way—pre-tied.

Beaucoup de cool chicks

The shuttle was taking some of the Calliope staff to L'Espérance Airport today, then heading back down to Marigot—the French side of the island, which suited Simon just fine after all the Shell stations and the
COKE
signs on the Dutch side, the people with time-share come-ons at every street corner, every speed bump. The French side seemed more civilized somehow, the road signs all standardized,
understated
—more “up-market,” as this Brit he used to tend bar with back in Vancouver used to say. About North Vancouver of all places, the suburb on the other side of the Lion's Gate Bridge.
Simon
had thought of it more as the geriatric part of town—all the retired people clogging the mall parking lots with their massive Buicks and Mercs. Anyway, Marigot was more to his liking, with its streets full of jewelry shops and little boutiques with one plain dress in the window, which was a signal for,
This place is fucking expensive.
Shops selling huge bottles of perfume: Chanel number whatever in the two-gallon economy size.

He loved it, wondered when his first month's pay would come through so he could actually use his MasterCard again. Real money was what he really needed, though. Folding money. Old money. Pre-plastic money: or gold. Gold would do just fine.

That morning they'd had him in a remote viewing session targeting a piece of paper, of all things. A list of some German art dealer's assets—a piece of paper in a file folder locked away in a safety-deposit box in the basement of a bank in Zurich. Something to do with Holocaust victims, provenances. All those works of art stolen by the Nazis.

Since his first session with the tin box in the attic he had led them to believe he was making progress. He'd fed them a sufficient number of successes to keep him on the payroll and get the luscious Jane Franklin to actually touch his hand after the last session. She was that grateful, pleased really, genuinely pleased, which for a second made him feel a little bit guilty; but hell, he knew he was on the right track—paying out the line an inch or two at a time. If they thought he was falling behind, they'd give him more training, teach him more tricks. He'd learned this dynamic when he was a kid trying to get to the Olympics; the squeaky wheel getting the oil. That old
French expression his coach used all the time:
Reculer pour mieux sauter.
He'd say this so much, Simon actually knew the words off by heart. The only French he did know. It meant “Pull yourself back so you can jump ahead of the pack”—something like that. His coach had been talking about diving, of course, but it applied here just as well.

He'd found the old Nazi's file folder and the document they were looking for with no effort at all. It had taken him less than a minute, but he'd dithered around for a bit making it look to Jane and her linebacker assistant, Blenheim, as if he were having a bit of trouble. Checking out the rest of the deposit boxes in the room: stashes of jewelry, bearer bonds, one box stuffed with thousand-dollar bills. The other half; how they lived. Switzerland. The Alps: the world's mattress.
Stuff it under here; we won't tell a soul.

Gold. Lots of gold jewelry. That was one of the things that impressed him about St. Martin too—how much gold there was around. Duty-free, supposedly. St. Martin being a free port since the days of the privateers. Gold doubloons; pieces of eight. Casino chips.

If he was going to go freelance, moonlight, so to speak (this is what he'd decided; he couldn't see himself working for these people the rest of his life, playing psychic messenger boy; in the back of his mind too, was the notion that one day he might figure a way to put them out of business—corner the market, maybe—play “Biggest-Fish-in-the-Pond” like Bill Gates), one way of avoiding suspicion would be to focus on lost wealth, rather than lost information. For information you needed a buyer, and what the information was worth to someone had to be negotiated, which added an extra complication
he had no time for. He wanted to go after something with a fixed exchange rate. Something like what he'd seen in the basement of that Swiss bank.

He was sitting at a table outside a café looking out over the harbor—the marina full of boats worth more per square foot than Fifth Avenue real estate—sipping an overpriced rum punch, watching the Citroëns and BMWs circle the square stalking parking spaces.

Watching, through his mirrored Paul Marco glasses, all the glorious women, multihued, sleek as Thoroughbreds. Beautiful women hanging off these fat old guys wearing Sansabelt polyester slacks. Really together-looking women, women in their thirties, forties maybe—on top of things. Savvy. Which after Betty was becoming a real turn-on to Simon. Jane had given him a look this morning coming out of her office—something she did with her eyes you could bet the farm on, if you let yourself. He'd even put up with all the voices—the noise in her complicated head. The next time she made the mistake of touching him, he would dig a little deeper—find something he could use to make her take more notice of him.

Lotteries, horse races—you had to be there physically to collect the winnings, even to buy the ticket. Having to deal with expiry dates and the consequences of changing the destiny of the ex-winner—all in all, a risky business. Ask Ron Koch. Going back and coercing a J. P. Morgan or a Henry Ford into writing you into their will—or making you the beneficiary of an insurance policy—neither scenario was
hassle
-free. Or he could figure out a way to get back to 1950, say, and stay corporeal long enough to buy IBM stock or General Electric dirt cheap. But it would involve a lot of legwork
and paperwork—a pain in the ass, really; and none of it very interesting.

And apart from the life line interference problem (if he had been born rich he wouldn't have to be here would he? Making sure he was born rich), there were all kinds of complications, legal and otherwise, that could mess it up. Paradoxes, ironies—the dragon eating its own tail. All that stuff.

Buried treasure was the answer. Gold. (The little kid in him was jumping up and down at the thought of it.) Treasure trove; he'd done his homework, looked into the legalities of it. “Finders keepers” seemed to be what it all boiled down to: if you find anything keep your mouth shut, and if it's on private property, make sure you don't get caught.

He had checked out sunken treasure first; tons of it out there supposedly—over two thousand ships full of ripped-off Inca gold from Peru, gems from Colombia, all lost at sea between fifteen something and eighteen hundred alone. Only a handful of these Spanish wrecks had ever been found. Twenty of them going down off the Florida Keys. But that involved diving for the stuff. Or paying someone to go after it.

He would stick to buried treasure, like that hoard of Roman coins, silverware, and jewelry a British farmer had dug up in his field a couple of years ago. And Simon didn't really have to go looking for it, it was all judiciously documented—newspaper accounts, books, TV shows. He would just have to go back in time, witness the discovery, then screw with the original finders' heads maybe, and make sure they never got it out of the ground. (Sounded like he would need a Calliope Ph.D.) Make sure it would all be there for Simon Hayward when he got around to going after it—the old-fashioned way, with a real shovel.

Knowing where the stuff was buried wasn't enough; he would have to muck with the past in some way, interfere with it. Go beyond a remote walkabout and try for what good old Eli called a “corporeal manifestation.” To protect himself he would have to narrow his search down to treasure discoveries before 1970—the year he came into the world—or rather, the year his father came into his mother.

Another way to do it would be to use his remote viewing skills and just do some searching in the present. But he needed a specific target—that's one thing he'd learned already at Calliope High. Unless he had a specific location to aim for, he was lost. X and Y coordinates: longitude and latitude. Crosshairs.

Where to start was another big question. He could get hold of one of Gordon's dowsing rods, maybe; get him to show him how to use it with a map. That could narrow things down pretty quickly, but it sounded like a lot of dreary work to Simon. He wanted to get his hands dirty, so to speak. As soon as possible. But first he needed to do a little experimentation, see if he could actually go back in time like Ron did and change things. Play it safe, though; fine-tune something not connected with his own life line—but it would have to be something interesting, something relatively high-profile.

Look but don't touch.
Screw that; he wanted to see if it really worked: “corporeal manifestation in the past.”

He took the narrow road out of the square up past a small Italian-looking church to the hill and the ruins of the old fort that overlooked the bay. He felt the dampening effect of the rum punch on his balance and the hot afternoon sun on the back of his neck. He was breathing hard when he got to the top, thinking maybe he should do more than the few
sit-ups and push-ups in the morning—maybe a few sets of tennis with Jane.

Simon looked out over the bay and the thatch of masts in the marina, at the huge boats anchored offshore and the sails near the horizon shaped like all the best parts of all the most beautiful women he had ever seen, or imagined; then across to the china-white cliff-hanging palaces of the officially wealthy. He saw no reason in the world why he couldn't be padding barefoot through one of those in no time at all.

It was in the cards; he could feel it. And for a second he believed he could jump from the craggy parapet (with its petrified cannon and tourist lectern spelling out a chronological itinerary of official bloodshed) and dive right up into the sky, float up to one of those houses and make himself right at home. Right now, in the flesh—he deserved it.

He pressed his medal into his sternum as if he were hitting the enter key on a computer; setting the software in motion. Sanctifying his vision.