Three Days to Never (30 page)

Marrity closed his eyes to concentrate, and he projected an image of himself hugging Daphne; and in return he got a clear impression of…cautious amusement, like a wink through tears.

“It's okay,” he told Charlotte. “She didn't mind. We've
got
to get her back.”

“We will. These people aren't stupid.” She sighed deeply and gulped her martini. “I didn't mind either.”

Marrity could still taste her gin. He was shaky. It had been two years since he had kissed a woman, and a whole lot longer than that since he had kissed a woman he didn't know well. “I didn't either,” he said quickly. Then he took a deep breath and changed the subject: “Mossad, you said—that's Israel's secret service?”

“Shoot at you in the morning, kiss you in the afternoon. What's left?” She sighed and he watched her light a ciga
rette. “Yes, Israel. They've apparently kept close track of all things Einsteinian. Did you know that after the first president of Israel died, in 1952, they asked Einstein if he'd be president? It wasn't just a gesture—the Mossad knew that Einstein had made some unpublished discoveries.”

“Like a time machine.” Marrity shook his head. “I think you said—Jesus—that that's
me,
that old guy, that old drunk guy! Who claimed he was my dad? Like, me from the future?”

“One future, not
the
future. There isn't any
the
future. He used this machine in your grandmother's shed to come back here to 1987 from 2006. His life—”

“2006? Then he's only…if he's me…fifty-four. He looks older.”

Marrity tried to summon skepticism, and found he didn't have any. He believed it, believed that the pouchy-faced old man was in fact himself, and he hated the thought of that querulous old fool walking around and talking to people. Marrity had never been drunk enough to have done and said things he couldn't remember later, but he felt as if it was happening now. What might he be
saying,
Marrity wondered helplessly, what personal secrets of mine might he be blabbing to these people?

Marrity could feel his face getting hot. “Is
Daphne
talking to him?”

“I don't imagine he's eager to talk to her,” said Charlotte quietly. “He's experienced two lifelines already—one broke somehow, and spilled him into the other. In the original happy one, Daphne died yesterday, in that Italian restaurant. He wants to make sure that in
this
time line she doesn't grow up—doesn't go on living.”

Marrity was dizzy, and couldn't make himself look at Charlotte. “He's not me, I could never want that. What could Daphne ever do—”

He was staring down at his clenched fists, and Charlotte took hold of one of them. “There is no
the
future,” she repeated. “When you get free of this, you and Daphne can do anything you choose to do.” She squeezed his hand. “But he
told Golze that in his second lifeline, you—he, that is, he and Daphne were both alcoholics, living in a trailer somewhere, and they hated each other. Daphne tried to take his car at one point, and he tried to block her, and she backed it over him.”

“Those weren't us. Those weren't us.”

“Make them not be.”

She was facing him, so he couldn't see her eyes. “What do you—” he began, then halted uncertainly. When she cocked her head, he went on: “It's none of my business, but what do you want to use the time machine for?”

She took a deep drag on her cigarette and exhaled a long sigh of smoke. “True,” she said, almost absently, “it's none of your business. But none of your life is my business—
I
am
not
Daphne's keeper—but somehow I'm knee deep in it anyway.” She stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray. “You've got an advance warning to go easy on the booze, haven't you?”

“Yes, I guess I have.”

“Did you plan to start going easy today?”

“No, not today.”

She picked up her empty glass and half stood up—then sat back down again. “I want to go back,” she said quietly but quickly, “and prevent my younger self from being blinded in 1978. All I've worked for is to save her. I don't even think of that little girl as
me
anymore, I think of her more as my lost daughter who needs rescuing. If I can save her I can disappear, and she'll be a new person, born out of me like—” She waved her empty glass.

“Like parthenogenesis,” said Marrity.

“Exactly. Identical body, but not
this
person.” She took hold of his empty glass in her free hand and straightened gracefully to her feet. “Same again?”

“Same again.”

T
he Roosevelt Hotel was right across the street from the banners and green copper roofs of the Chinese Theater forecourt, and Lepidopt shifted to stare at the ornate old
structure as Malk turned off Hollywood Boulevard at Orange and found a parking place at the curb, avoiding the Roosevelt's valet parking.

Do they wonder what's become of their Charlie Chaplin slab? Lepidopt thought, rocking in the abruptly stopped car. Who'd imagine it's in the Wigwam Motel in San Bernardino now?

“APAM, gentlemen,” said Mishal as they got out of the car and blinked in the heat and late afternoon sun glare of the summer Hollywood sidewalk.

Lepidopt had had enough. APAM, short for
Avtahat Paylut Modienit,
meant securing operational activity, and it was the first thing a Mossad
katsa
was required to learn.

“We're
katsas
,” he said shortly.

“Of course you are,” said Mishal with a smile.

Mishal had paused in the shadow of a shaggy magnolia that draped its branches over the wall of the Roosevelt Hotel parking lot, and Malk and Lepidopt scuffed to a halt beside him.

“Remember that all we want is information about this opposing group, and any information either of these people might have about Einstein's machine. We will appear to care about this man's daughter, and whatever terms this woman may want, but in fact we will not care about them. Everyone is either target or enemy.”

“We're
katsas
,” Lepidopt repeated. “We know this.”

“Oh?” Mishal squinted at him. “Wouldn't that dybbuk, articulate in the girl's body, have been more useful than the girl inviolate?” He held up one thin hand. “Well no, since you let the opposing group capture the girl. Point withdrawn.”

Malk glanced at Lepidopt and rolled his eyes for a moment before sauntering ahead to do a route of the hotel lobby, identify Marrity and the woman and make sure no one else was watching them.

At a more leisurely pace, Lepidopt and Mishal tapped up the hotel's back steps.

“No offense,” said Mishal.

“Of course not,” said Lepidopt. In fact he was wondering if the elder
katsa's
criticism had been valid. Did I, he wondered, jump in to recruit Marrity too quickly, just because the little girl was in danger of being inhabited by that thing?

And he remembered again being in her bedroom, and wondering if she would like his son Louis.

I'm too old for this, he realized; but one way or another I'll be out of it soon.

Malk was on the second-floor balcony on the far side of the lobby when Lepidopt and Mishal walked in; he was holding a newspaper in his right hand, which meant there was no sign that Marrity and the woman were being watched, and then he leaned against the railing and opened the paper, pointing the fold of it downward and slightly to his right. Lepidopt followed the implied line and saw Frank Marrity sitting on a couch with an attractive dark-haired woman on the Hollywood Boulevard side of the lobby.

In any meeting, he recalled, the agent must be there and sitting down before you enter; you never wait for him at a meeting place.

Lepidopt stepped forward across the tile floor while Mishal hung back, and he walked the long way around the fountain to approach Marrity from in front.

Marrity saw him and stood up. “Mr. Jackson,” he said. “This is Charlotte, uh…”

“Charlotte S. Webb,” said Charlotte, smiling quizzically and not getting up.

Lepidopt grinned, and noticed that Marrity did too. Anybody with a book-loving child, he thought, would recognize that title. He wished he could remember the name of the pig in
Charlotte's Web,
to be able to make a clever reply.

“Do you have any children?” he asked her.

“With luck a little girl,” she said. “Parthenogenesis.”

Lepidopt stared at her for a moment, then pulled a metal chair across the tile to the opposite side of their table and sat down, slightly in profile to Charlotte and with the tail of his jacket hanging away from his belt.

“I'm Eugene Jackson,” he said. “Shortly we'll be joined by another man, possibly two. We want to get the pair of you away from here to a safe place.”

“I want some terms agreed on before I go anywhere with you,” said Charlotte. “I've proposed a deal to my former employers, and I'm going to go through with it unless I can make a different deal with you people.”

Mishal stepped up to the table, carrying a chair in one hand. He put it down facing away from the table and sat down straddling it, one forearm lying along the chair back. With his other hand he pulled two folded sheets of ragged-edged paper from his inside jacket pocket and laid them on the table.

“What are the deals?” he asked cheerfully. “Would each of you take one of these papers? Don't get them wet. Oren, do you have matches?” Charlotte pointed at her lighter, but he said, “No, we need matches.”

“I've got some,” said Marrity. He shifted on the couch and pulled a matchbook out of his pocket and tossed it beside the ashtray, then picked up one of the sheets of paper and unfolded it impatiently. It was blank, and felt oddly coarse.

“Handmade,” said Mishal.

“If I lead you to my former employers,” said Charlotte, “and tell you everything I know about them, you rescue Daphne and I get to use the time machine.” She smiled. “And since it's a time machine, I get to use it before I lead you to them.”

Mishal laughed and pulled another folded sheet of paper out of his pocket. This one seemed to be plain typing paper, and it had markings on it in black ink. “No, not before. Oren, you remember this exercise, help them get some matches burned. I want each of you to copy onto your sheet of paper the symbols drawn on this.” He unfolded the third sheet and laid it out flat on the table.

Lepidopt recognized the curves and circles—they were
kolmosin,
also known as “angel pens,” or “eye-writing” because the arrangements of the figures often made them seem
to be childish drawings of eyes. He picked up Marrity's book of matches, tore one out and struck it. The head flared bright purple and yellow.

Marrity was staring at the six lines of complex figures. “Couldn't we just xerox that sheet onto these blank sheets?”

“No,” said Mishal, “it's got to be in your own hand, and you've got to use burnt matches to draw it. And note that on this original, none of the lines touch each other! They can't in your copies either.”

Lepidopt shook out the match and lit another. “Break the heads off,” he said to Marrity. “It's easier to draw with just the cardboard stick.” His nose itched with the smell of sulfur.

“What is this,” Marrity asked, pushing the burnt match with his finger, “a test of coordination or something?”

“It's an amulet,” said Mishal. “Don't sneer, your great-grandfather invented this one. In 1944—for the war effort!—he made a handwritten copy of his 1905 paper on relativity, and auctioned it off. Among all the pages of arcane symbols for reference frames and constant acceleration, nobody noticed this sheet of
kolmosin,
though the FBI was watching him closely. And by the time the manuscript got to the Library of Congress we had lifted the sheet anyway. As he meant us to do.” He glanced at Lepidopt. “You didn't lose your remote-viewer's holograph talisman, did you?”

Lepidopt could feel the disk against his chest, with the fragment of Einstein's manuscript sealed inside it. “No,” he said. But I'm not the remote viewer Sam Glatzer was, he thought.

He struck another match.

W
hat,” said Marrity, “will be different after we've done this than is the case now?”

“Nicely put!” said Mishal.

“He's an English lit professor,” said Charlotte smugly, linking her arm through Marrity's.

“Ah.” Mishal squinted at Marrity. “These, when you have folded them correctly and put them against your skin, will
make you un-trackable by the people who have your daughter. We'll be able to sneak up on them. Right now you're both occulted by proximity to me”—he pushed back the jacket and shirtsleeve above his right wrist, and Marrity saw the black lines of part of a tattoo on his forearm—“but you might not always be with me.”

“Okay.” Marrity freed his arm from Charlotte's and picked up one of the matches Eugene Jackson had laid out for him. Peripherally he saw that Charlotte had picked one up too, but she paused, humming some old half-familiar tune.

Of course, he thought, she can't do it unless someone
watches
her do it!

“This is some kind of magical stuff,” he said, dropping his match. “I'll watch her do it first. See what happens.”

He stared at the sheet with the printing on it, and then at Charlotte's blank sheet. She picked up a match and, as he continued to shift his gaze from one sheet to the other and back, she began copying the curves and circles.

“He wants to see if I turn into a toad,” she said.

“Well,” said Marrity in a tone he tried to make sound defensive, “it's like tasting food. If it's poisoned, better if just one person tries it.”