Three Days to Never (29 page)

“You!” she said, blinking up at him. “Where's my father?” Then she was looking past him at the quilted silver fabric that lined the ceiling and at the fiberglass bulkhead panels with their inexplicable inset round and oval holes. The cabin swung like a bell, and then extra weight told Marrity that they were ascending. “Are we in an airplane?” asked Daphne.

“Helicopter,” said Golze, staring out the port window at the San Gabriel Mountains. “So don't
do
anything.”

“Oh.” She seemed to let out her breath.

“You're the dipshit,” said Marrity to Golze, belatedly.

“What did you do,” said Rascasse's voice, “to make the damn thing work? How do you stop at one specific time?”

Marrity glanced at the bracket and saw that the flowers were shaking and the red blobs in the lava lamp's tapered cylinder were all clustered at the top.

“How I did it—I was improvising, but it worked—was to tape right against my skin a thing that had undergone a decisive change at the time I wanted to get to. I found one of my grandmother's old cigarette butts between the bricks of the shed floor, and used that. It wasn't precise to the minute, but it landed me in the right day, at least.”

“
Your
grandmother?” said Daphne.

Marrity just kept staring at the flowers. He could feel sweat rolling down his chest under his shirt.

“A cigarette butt?” said the silvery voice. “Nothing more than that?”

“That was it,” said Marrity hoarsely. “It sort of shivered and got hot when I had slid back in time along the gold swastika—which looks like a quadruple helix in that perspective—to the right day. And then you just sort of—stretch, flex, step out of your astral projections. You can feel the rest of your momentum go rushing on without you, into the past.”

After a pause, Daphne asked Golze, “Where's my father?”

“Dead, I suppose,” said Golze, still looking out the window. “Probably wrapped around a tree in the Hollywood
Hills. He took off down the canyon in a car driven by a blind woman.”

For a moment Marrity thought of telling her that
he
was her father, but the banksias were shaking their narrow petals.

“But you can still go back?” said Rascasse. “It's not one way?”

“You can go back,” said Marrity, speaking to the flowers and the lamp. “The return—and both my great-grandfather and my grandmother did it—is apparently prepaid. Plain Newtonian recoil, in a lot more dimensions. If I stand on the gold swastika again, I think I'll shoot straight back to where I was in 2006. Though I'll be arriving,” he added, careful to keep looking at the flowers and not at Daphne, “in a very different life.”

“How much came back here with you,” said Rascasse's voice. “Clothes, the air?”

Marrity was glad of the distraction of the questions. “It's apparently everything within the boundaries of the aura that goes,” he said. “I thought it would be a bigger volume; a lot of stuff I was going to bring along got left behind in 2006—my Palm Pilot, an iPod, a Blackberry.”

“Sounds like a salad,” said Golze.

Glancing down at Daphne peripherally, Marrity noticed that she hadn't reacted to Golze's statement about her father probably being dead—she was still glancing around at the interior of the helicopter. Already she doesn't care about her father, he thought. Just as I remember.

A shrill buzzing sounded from below Golze's seat. “Could you get that?” said Golze. “It's the cell phone.”

“It's my father,” said Daphne.

Marrity's shirt clung to his sweaty skin as he leaned down across Daphne to lift the telephone case. He unsnapped it and pulled out the bulky telephone, then raised his eyebrows at Golze.

“The button at the top,” Golze sighed, “puts it on speaker. Then just set it down on the seat.”

“Modern ones are no bigger than a bar of soap,” said
Marrity defensively. He pushed the button and laid the brick-size thing on the vinyl seat.

“Hello,” called Daphne.

“Hello,” came a woman's voice, loud enough for everyone in the cabin to hear, even over the steady whistle of the turbine engines overhead.

“Hello, Charlotte,” said Golze. “You're lucky this time line is about to be canceled.”

“Put my dad on,” said Daphne from the floor.

“He's not here, Daphne,” said Charlotte's voice from the mobile telephone on the seat, “but he should be back anytime. Now I want to talk to the grown-ups alone, can we—”

“He's standing right beside you,” Daphne interrupted, “I can hear you through him. Oof! And his mouth's full of beer.”

For a moment there was silence from the phone. “Who believes that?” asked Charlotte finally.

“I do,” said Golze.

Marrity nodded sourly.

“I'll know it soon enough,” said Rascasse's voice from the flowers. “Your signal's clear.”

“Okay, dammit, yes, he's right here,” Charlotte said, “and young Daphne brings me to my point. I'm holding a gun on him—”

The flowers in the wall bracket shook. “You're not,” said the metallic voice. “It's in your purse. I don't see him.”

“What else you got, Charlotte?” asked Golze wearily, leaning back and closing his eyes.

Rascasse's voice said, “I look for him, but see this girl instead.” For once the artificial voice seemed to express an emotion—bafflement.

“Dad!” called Daphne from her cocoon on the floor plates. “Don't let them catch you!”

The young Frank Marrity's voice came out of the phone's speaker now: “I won't, Daph, and I'll come get you soon. These people aren't planning to hurt you.” After a moment he added, “It smells like peanut butter there. Don't eat or drink anything they give you, Daph.”

“That's just how this helicopter smells,” said Daphne.

“We bought it from the Comision Federal de Electricidad,” said Golze, “in Mexico City. Maybe they use peanut butter for insulation.”

Marrity's voice from the phone said, “Don't
do
anything in the helicopter, Daph!”

“I already told her,” said Golze.

“Denis,” said Charlotte's voice, “I bet you could sense the Marrity I'm with if you look at the girl there.”

Old Marrity noticed that the blobs in the lava lamp were breaking up into strings.

“It's true,” said Rascasse's violin voice, “I sense him there—but not enough to see him. I can hardly see this girl.”

“Okay,” said Charlotte, “I'm not bluffing now, here's some truth: The young Frank Marrity and that girl have a psychic link—as Denis says, their minds overlap. They'll look like an X from the freeway, not separate lines. You can't negate her, you can't isolate her time line, while he's still alive.”

“This is bullshit,” said old Marrity quickly, rocking on the seat as the helicopter swayed under the rotors. “I never had any, any
psychic link
with her, in
either
of my lifetimes.” He wiped a hand across his mouth. “I'm not telling you another thing until my younger self's safety is…assured.”

F
rank Marrity found that he had leaned back against the brown tile wall of the telephone alcove. A moment ago he had been leaning in over the pay phone with his ear to the receiver Charlotte held, but now he felt as if he were wrapped in some coarse fabric and rocking supine on a hard floor, and he realized that in his shock he had mentally fled his physical situation and retreated to Daphne's.

That's no help, he told himself, and he took a deep breath of the smoky gin-scented air that was actually around him and looked out at the fountain and balconies of the Roosevelt Hotel lobby. The tables on the tile floor around the fountain
were crowded even at this afternoon hour, and he made himself hear the babble of voices and clink of glasses rather than the drone of the helicopter's engines.

“If we do this my way,” said Charlotte into the phone, “his safety will be assured. Denis, if you try to stop his heart, you're just as likely to kill the girl.”

Marrity pushed away from the wall and stepped up beside Charlotte again. On the little wooden counter below the pay phone was the pad on which she had written Eugene Jackson's number, and now Marrity picked up the hotel pen and scribbled,
MY YOUNGER SELF?
and then,
THE YOUNG FRANK M?

Charlotte covered the mouthpiece. “I told you he wasn't your father,” she said impatiently. “The thing that was in your grandmother's shed is a time machine.”

Marrity was still holding a glass of beer, and he drained it in one long swallow now. And he looked again at all the people sitting in the lobby.

He could feel Daphne in his mind—it wasn't a sensation or a thought, just the mental equivalent of holding his hand. He returned the psychic pressure.
You and I will come out of this okay,
he tried to project to her.
The rest of these can go their own ways, whoever they are.

“I'll tell you,” said Charlotte into the phone, “if you'll shut up.”

He looks like me, thought Marrity, an older version of me. Daphne said so, right away. He told us not to go to an Italian restaurant. He claims to have met this crowd when he was thirty-five; I'm thirty-five. On Grammar's back porch this morning he said,
I hate the old man as much as you do,
and when I asked him if he meant his father or mine, he nodded and said,
That one.

He believes it, at least, thought Marrity, and so do these people, apparently—

—and they don't seem to be fools—

—but I can simply acknowledge that they all believe it, and work from there.

“Okay,” said Charlotte. “With Frank's help, I wrote out a
letter and xeroxed it, and got envelopes and stamps here, and we just got done dropping three copies in different mailboxes. The envelopes are addressed to the FBI, and the Mossad care of the Israeli embassy, and to the LAPD—all Los Angeles addresses—and the letter includes an account of your murders of that San Diego detective and that kid last night, the two shootouts today on Batsford Street, your passport numbers, the New Jersey and Amboy locations, and the license-plate number of the bus.” She paused, clearly listening. “You've both used your passports when I've been with you. You know me, I didn't exactly have to lean over your shoulders.”

After another pause, she went on, “So listen, listen! The plan is the same as before, except that it's
me
you short out,
my
lifeline that you erase from the universe. No, dammit, think about it—without me in the picture, Frank Marrity wouldn't have got spooked so you decided we had to kill him, and without me he wouldn't have fled the hospital this morning and told the Mossad about the thing in his grandmother's shed. You only missed getting the machine today by a couple of minutes—do it this way and you'll be at least a day ahead of the Mossad. And without me, this letter wouldn't exist, wouldn't be in the mail right now.”

Charlotte was leaning in close over the phone. Marrity remembered seeing tears in her eyes during the wild drive down the canyon. She had said,
Probably they wouldn't have given me a new life anyway. I guess I knew that.

And he remembered the name she had originally given him: Libra Nosamalo.
Libera nos a malo.
Deliver us from evil.

“Denis,” she said now, “it'll take you forever to track Frank Marrity, the young one, with his—with your horrible head, if Marrity knows to get away from me and keep running and changing direction. With those letters in the mail, you don't have the time. I'll call you back and arrange a trade—me for the girl.”

She hung up the telephone. Without looking around, she reached one hand back toward Marrity. “Got another quarter?” she asked.

“Uh, yes,” he said, digging into his pocket with his free hand. “Thank you for saving my daughter. Do you have to—can they really short out—”

“They really can,” she said, taking the quarter, “and I'll do it if that's all that's left. I can't let all the things I've done
stay
done much longer. But let's see what your NSA man has to say—he's got the time machine now.”

C
ould I bum one of those?”

Lepidopt raised his eyebrows, then held out the pack of Camels toward Bennett. “Sure. You decided you need a new vice?”

The two of them stepped across the sidewalk away from the glass doors of the Hollywood West Hospital emergency room. There were spots of blood on Bennett's wilted white shirt and on his jacket, and he looked as if he hadn't slept in days; his fingers were shaking as he pinched a cigarette out of the pack.

Moira had been diagnosed as having a concussion, and at best it would be several hours before she would be released.

“I used to smoke,” Bennett said, “but it's a stupid—well, today.”

Lepidopt put the briefcase down on the grass while he lit his own cigarette, then he handed the lighter to Bennett. Out here in the warm breeze he couldn't light one without using
two hands, one to cup around the flame, and he didn't want to invite remarks about his missing finger.

“That's,” Bennett began, then sucked hard on the cigarette. “That's Frank's briefcase,” he said, exhaling smoke.

“I picked it up when we got you and Moira out of that empty house. Didn't seem right to leave it there.”

“Those people—with the helicopter—they grabbed Frank and Daphne.”

Lepidopt sighed. “Evidently,” he agreed.

“I should have the briefcase. That is, Moira should have it.”

Lepidopt stepped back, then crouched and reached out to pick up the briefcase. “I'm likely to see Frank sooner than you are,” he said with a smile as he straightened up. “I'll give it to him.”

Bennett scowled, then shrugged.

They walked out of the building's shadow into the late afternoon sunlight, and Bennett slapped his jacket pocket and then just squinted. “Is anybody going to come looking for
me,
is what I want to know,” he said. He waved his cigarette back toward the emergency room. “Or my wife.”

Lepidopt could see the white Honda, with Malk behind the wheel, parked idling a dozen yards away. “These people wanted Marrity and his daughter,” he told Bennett without looking at him, “and now they've got them. I don't imagine they'll bother with you anymore.”

“I should—I should call the police.”

“Go ahead.”

A man had walked up beside the driver's side of the Honda—a white-haired old fellow, in a dark suit—and Malk was talking to him now. “You should go back inside,” Lepidopt said. “Your wife seemed upset.”

Bennett's shoulders slumped. “Her father's with that gang,” he muttered. “She thinks he had amnesia, all these years. She'll want to try to get in touch with him.”

Lepidopt saw the Honda's headlights flash twice, fast, then once.
No problem here,
that meant. “She won't be able to. Get back inside.”

Bennett followed Lepidopt's gaze, then nodded and hurried back to the glass doors and disappeared inside the hospital. They'd yell at him for smoking in the building.

As Lepidopt strode toward the car, he didn't have to pat his waistband over his right hip pocket; he could feel the angular jab of the .22 automatic concealed by his jacket. He had sewn two steel washers into the jacket hem so that it would flip aside quickly.

The old man in the suit saw him coming and smiled, placing both his hands flat on the roof of the car. “Oren,” he said, in a voice that carried just far enough across the pavement for Lepidopt to hear it. “I think you've strayed from the established plan.” His accent was perfect American newscaster.

It must be the
katsa
from Prague, Lepidopt thought. But how on earth did he track us here? The finger. They put something in the finger.

And when he had walked up to within a few paces of the car, he realized that he wouldn't need to ask for identification, for he recognized the old man—this was the instructor who had taken the young Halomot students into the desert north of Ramle in 1967, and summoned the Babylonian air devil Pazuzu, which had whirled ferociously around them but had at the same time been profoundly motionless.

Lepidopt wasn't reassured by the man's smile. “Every plan is a basis for change,” he said gruffly. That was an old Mossad saying, reflecting the fluid nature of field operations. “New developments indicated—”

“And you can't rely on
sevirut,
” the old man interrupted.
Sevirut
meant “probability,” and after Israel's general staff had used the term to dismiss the likelihood of a surprise attack from Egypt and Syria in 1973—a surprise attack that had occurred twenty-four hours later—Golda Meir had said she shuddered every time she heard the word.

Lepidopt thought of old Sam Glatzer, and Ernie Bozzaris, and Bozzaris's
sayan
detective in San Diego. There had been no evident probability that any of them would die. “True,” he said, exhaling.

“You through here?” the old man asked, and when Lepidopt nodded, he said, “Let's look at the situation.”

Lepidopt got into the backseat, and the
katsa
walked around to open the passenger-side door. “I understand you've got Einstein's machine,” the
katsa
said as he folded himself into the seat and pulled the door closed, “but you don't know how to work it. I'm Aryeh Mishal, in case you don't remember the name from that day in the desert.”

“Get us out of here, Bert,” said Lepidopt, “the Bradleys can find their own way home.”

He stretched his legs to the side and leaned his head back on the seat, heedless of disarranging his yarmulke-toupee. “And head for the Pico Kosher Deli, I'm starving.” To the white-haired head in the front seat, he said, “That's right. The only living person who has worked the machine is now with the other team, whoever they are, and they've captured a source of mine. Two of our
sayanim
and one of our agents are dead. Altogether it has not been a—a textbook operation.” He hefted Marrity's briefcase and set it down on the seat beside him. “We do have some letters Einstein wrote to his daughter. They might be helpful.”

“I'll salvage what can be salvaged,” said Mishal in a contented tone. “First I want you to—”

He was interrupted by the electronic buzz of the cellular phone. Only one person had the number to that phone, and Lepidopt straightened up and reached between the front seats to lift it out of its case.

He took a deep breath and then switched the telephone on. “Yes.”

“You guys were too slow,” came Frank Marrity's voice from the earpiece. “They've got my daughter now.”

“Where are
you
now?”

“At the Roosevelt Hotel, in the lobby. They—”

“How did they find the two of you?” Lepidopt asked.

“I'm not sure—apparently my father—who isn't the—”

Lepidopt tensed when he heard fumbling at the other end of the line, but relaxed a little when a woman's voice came on.

“They've got his father's mummified head in a box,” the woman said. “It's not quite dead, and it can point to Frank here via an electric Ouija board. We shouldn't stay here.”

Marrity's voice came from farther away: “What the
hell
are you
talking
about?”

“Put him back on,” said Lepidopt. A moment later he could hear heavy breathing. “Frank, who is she, the woman with you?”

“Her name's Charlotte something. She's the woman who tried to shoot me this morning, sunglasses, apparently she's changed sides. Listen, it's crazy to say my father's head is—‘not quite dead'!—in a box, tracking me.”

A defector from the other side! thought Lepidopt. He covered the mouthpiece with his palm and whispered to Malk, “The Roosevelt Hotel,
now
.” Lifting his hand away, he said, “Listen, Frank, we can save your daughter. We need to meet. We're only—”

“But that's crazy, isn't it? Daphne's kidnapped and I'm standing here with a crazy woman.”

Lepidopt spoke carefully. “Have you experienced supernatural or paranormal events, in the last three days?”

“You know I have. You were there when that thing showed up on the TV last night.”

“And you know something about Einstein, and your grandmother's shed. Has this Charlotte woman been involved in this stuff longer than you have?”

“Yes, obviously.”

“Then just
maybe
she's not crazy. Reserve judgment. Will Charlotte talk with us?”

“She wants to, yes.”

“Good. We're only ten minutes away—stay there in the lobby. It's public. Okay? Your daughter's life is at stake.”

“Okay.”

Lepidopt turned off the phone and leaned forward to put it back in its case. “That was the agent I thought had been captured. He's in the lobby at the Roosevelt with a woman who was on the opposing team. Apparently she's switched sides and wants to talk to us.”

“All
right
,” said Malk, hunched over the wheel.

“The opposing team,” Lepidopt went on, “has—according to the woman—has my man's father's head in a box, and it can lead them to him.”

“I can hide him from that,” said Mishal, facing forward again. “You're going to have to buy a couple of bottles of whisky, Oren.”

Lepidopt pressed his lips together. He remembered how whisky had been used in some of the demonstrations in his training.

“This agent,” Mishal went on, “how did you recruit him?”

“I false-flagged him, told him I'm with the NSA. It was a hasty recruitment, but his daughter was about to invite a dybbuk into herself.”

“A dybbuk.” Lepidopt saw the white head nodding. “How would you guess you'll rate this agent in your eventual
Tsiach
report? Hardly blue and white, I imagine,” the old man added with a chuckle.

Blue and white, the colors of Israel's flag, indicated an agent who was totally committed to the Israeli cause.

“I think he'll work out as a B,” Lepidopt said. “Maybe a B minus. He initially lied to us about where he had stashed the Einstein letters, but all agents lie about something.”

“And ideally they never find out they were agents,” said Mishal. “But at least he imagines he's working for the NSA, albeit an NSA that foils dybbuks. Right?”

“That's right.”

In the rearview mirror, Malk gave Lepidopt a sympathetic glance.

“I hope you remember,” said Mishal mildly, “that you're—we're—operating outside normal channels here. We have no diplomatic immunity; if we're caught, we go to prison as spies.”

“I'd like to know who they'd say we're spying
on
,” said Lepidopt.

Mishal laughed. “I imagine impersonating an NSA officer would suffice to get you arrested. And then they'd look at your American passport. You've played very fast and
loose here so far. I'm here to rein you in and save your mutinous hide.”

Lepidopt nodded tiredly, though the old man couldn't see it, and he wondered what he might find suitable to eat in the Roosevelt bar. There wouldn't be any
glat kosher
sandwiches, for sure. Maybe celery and carrot sticks. A lot of them.

H
e's actually Mossad,” said Charlotte quietly, “not NSA.” She held out her hand, and Marrity glanced at the glass-topped table so that she could see where her martini glass was. “Thanks,” she said, reaching down and curling her fingers around the stem of it.

The Roosevelt Hotel lobby was enormous, with a second-floor balcony on all four sides and an ornate ceiling high overhead, and it echoed with talk and laughter and the rumble of wheeled luggage. Marrity and Charlotte were seated next to each other on a small tan couch that faced away from the Hollywood Boulevard entrance, not far from where a black stone statue of Charlie Chaplin sat on a bench for tourists to have their pictures taken with. Charlotte had said that with all these eyes moving around, she didn't need to put Marrity in a good vantage point.

“He said you're not crazy,” Marrity ventured.

“Good to hear.” A brass ashtray lay on the table next to her purse, and she leaned forward and pulled a pack of Marlboros and a lighter out of her purse.

“My father's…mummified head?” Marrity cleared his throat. “They've got?”

“They say they killed him in 1955. I don't know why.”

“That's when he disappeared. That's why he never came back to us. That
would
be why, if it's true.” He sat back on the couch, not believing it but considering it. “I've hated him all these years.”

How can I let go of that? he thought in bewilderment. Hating him has been the basis of my resolve to be the opposite sort of father to Daphne.

After a moment Charlotte asked, “You on the wagon?”

“Hmm? Oh, no, sorry.” Marrity picked up his third beer and took a deep sip. When he put it down again he said, “‘Drink, for you know not whence you came nor why—drink, for you know not why you go nor where.'”

Charlotte laughed and lifted her free arm and draped it over his shoulders. “‘A flask of wine, a book of verse, and thou,'” she said. He looked into her face—he could see himself mirrored in the sunglasses—and she quickly leaned forward and kissed him on the lips.

He reached up and touched her cheek, and suddenly he was kissing her in earnest, and she had opened her mouth and her hand was gripping his shoulder. He tasted gin on her tongue. There were hoots from nearbly tables, but he didn't care.

A flash of sudden astonishment made him close his lips and lean back.

Her face was still very close. She raised one eyebrow.

“It's Daphne,” he said hoarsely.

Charlotte actually blushed as she pulled her arm back and folded her hands in her lap. “Oops! She doesn't need this.”