Three Days to Never (12 page)

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 wastebaskets 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.

B
ennett 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.