Three Days to Never (5 page)

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 cloth
ing; 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-Maaravi, 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 Jesus and then destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. This was the place of the
Shekinah
, the 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
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.

T
he 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 Claremont 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.