Three Days to Never (4 page)

The next morning he saw six of the French-built Mirage jet fighters take off to the west, the blue Star of David insignia gleaming on the silvery fuselages, and then somehow everyone knew that the war had actually begun. Egypt and Syria were certainly the enemy, and probably Jordan as well, and France and Britain and the United States would not help.

Most of the paratroopers of the 55th were to be dropped into the desert at the southern tip of the Sinai, near the Egyptian air base at Sharm el-Sheikh; but Lepidopt had been in the hastily assembled Fourth Battalion, and they had been briefed separately from the other three battalions.

Standing on the tarmac away from the cargo planes and the buses, Lepidopt and his companions had been told that the Fourth Battalion was to be dropped later, over the town of E-Tur on the east shore of the Gulf of Suez, there to link up with a unit of General Yoffe's tank division, which would by then have come down the shoreline from the north; from there they were to proceed inland to a site near the ancient Saint Catherine's Monastery. They were told that their destination was to be a peculiar stone formation in that dry wasteland of granite and sand—the briefing officer referred
to it as the Rephidim, which Lepidopt had known was the place where Moses had struck a dry rock with his staff to produce a spring for the mutinous Israelites.

Every man in the Fourth Battalion had been given a cellophane-laminated map and a green plastic film badge, which several of the men recognized as being devices to measure the wearer's exposure to radiation; the badges were heavier than they looked, and bore only the initials ORNL. They were apparently from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, in the United States. Lepidopt pinned his onto his khaki shirt, under his camouflage jacket.

But at a little past noon, the orders were changed. No flying would be involved after all—Sharm el-Sheikh had already been taken, and the 55th was to proceed by bus to the Old City of Jerusalem instead, thirty-five miles away to the southeast.

That meant Jordan had entered the war against Israel too, and Lepidopt and his companions would be fighting the elite British-trained Arab Legion. Equipped with new maps and having shed their parachutes, they boarded the buses at 6:00 p.m.

Only after his bus was under way did Lepidopt learn that an officer had collected the film badges from the rest of the men who had been designated as the Fourth Battalion—Lepidopt still had his pinned to his shirt.

Rocking in his bus seat as dusk fell over the ancient Judaean hills, Lepidopt had discovered that fear felt very much like grief—his father had died two years before, and now he found himself once again unable to hold on to or even complete a thought, and he clung to the view of trees moving past outside the window because staying in one place would be intolerable, and he was yawning frequently though he wasn't sleepy at all.

And in the streets of Mount Scopus that night, still a day's march north of Jerusalem's walls, he had found a cold Hieronymus Bosch landscape of domes and towers lit in silhouette by mortar explosions close behind them, and skeletons of jeeps and trucks white as bone in the glare of
the Israeli searchlights—he was stunned by the ceaseless hammering of .50-caliber machine guns and tank-turret guns that concussed the night air; and the crescent moon riding above the veils of smoke seemed to be an omen for Islam.

The ringing night had been enormous, and he had been grateful for the men huddled around him in a courtyard of the abandoned Hebrew University.

But still he wasn't at the front. When the bell in the YMCA tower struck one, the paratroopers began to advance south through the crashing darkness toward the walls of the Old City. The dawn came soon, and at midmorning they regrouped in the wrecked lobby of the Ambassador Hotel. By now they could see Jerusalem's walls, and Herod's Gate, but it wasn't until late in the afternoon that they passed the Rivoli Hotel and saw, past the burned-out shell of a Jordanian bus, the tall stone crenellations over the Lion's Gate. The paratroopers cautiously advanced toward it.

Visible through the gate was a corner of the gold Dome of the Rock, where Mohammed was supposed to have ascended to Heaven—and from just inside the gate a .30-caliber machine gun began firing into the column of paratroopers. Their captain appeared to be blown out of the jeep he'd been riding in, and all around Lepidopt, men were spinning and falling as the bullets tore and punched at them.

Lepidopt had dived into the gutter, and then he had his Uzi up and was firing at the flutter of glare that was the machine-gun muzzle, and seconds later he and a dozen of his fellows were up and running through the gate.

They soon fell back, to wait for reinforcements and enter the city the following day; but that night, wrapped in a blanket on the lobby floor of the Rivoli Hotel, Lepidopt had realized that it was true—
You're scared until the first shot.
After that first machine gun had begun firing in the Lion's Gate, he had simply been dealing with each moment as if it were a ball pitched at him, not looking ahead at all. Fear was the future, and all his attention had been fixed on grappling with each new piece of
now.

The next day he had learned that the future could chop you down too; and that there was no way of getting around the fear of that.

“The door light's on,” said Bozzaris now from the kitchen. “That'll be Malk, or the FBI.”

Lepidopt turned away from the window and hurried across the tan carpet to the kitchen, where he pulled up the long accordioned sheet from behind the printer and tore it off; the touch of a cigarette would flash the paper to ash in a second, and he glanced at the pin in the side of the computer, which only had to be yanked out to ignite a thermite charge over the hard drive. As he quickly lit a cigarette, he mentally rehearsed how he would do both actions, if he should have to.

A muffled knock sounded from the door in the living room.

It was today's two-and-two recognition knock, but Lepidopt stepped behind the kitchen wall, reinforced now with white-painted sheet steel, and he glanced at the bowl of dry macaroni on the shelf by his left hand; but when Bozzaris had got the door unbolted, it was Bert Malk who stepped in, his jacket wrapped around his fist, his tie loosened over his unbuttoned collar, and his sandy hair visibly damp.

“Matzáv mesukán?”
he asked quietly. It meant
Dangerous situation?

“No,” Lepidopt said, leaning out from behind the wall. “Just new information.”

Malk slid a small automatic pistol out of his bundled jacket and tucked it into a holster behind his hip. “It's worse in here than on the street,” he complained. “I'll take a cut in pay if you'll get an air conditioner.”

When Bozzaris had closed and rebolted the door, Lepidopt tossed the stack of printout onto the counter and stepped out from behind the kitchen wall. “It's not the cost, it's the constant evaporation.”

“Sam's gotta learn to screen out phase changes,” Malk said irritably. “Why don't cigarettes bother him?”

Malk already knew the answer—
smaller scale, and the
fire hides it
—and Lepidopt just said, “Come listen to this new tape he made.”

He led Malk to the closed door off the kitchen, and knocked.

A scratchy voice from the other side of the door said, “Gimme a minute to get dressed.”

“Sorry, Sam,” said Lepidopt around his cigarette as he opened the door, “time untied waits for no man.” He led Malk into the cluttered room.

Skinny old Sam Glatzer was sitting up on the bed, strands of his gray hair plastered to his gleaming forehead, and in the glare from the unshaded bulb on the ceiling, his face seemed particularly haggard. The window in here was covered with aluminum foil, though Lepidopt could hear the speaker behind it—violins and an orchestra; Lepidopt hadn't been a fan of classical music since 1970, but Sam always brought along Deutsche Grammophon tapes in preference to whatever the radio might provide, though there was a strict rule against bringing any Rimsky-Korsakov. The stale air smelled of gun oil and Mennen aftershave.

Sam was wearing only boxer shorts and an undershirt, and he hooked his glasses onto his nose, scowled at Lepidopt and then levered himself up off the bed and began to pull on his baggy wool trousers. A whirring fan turned slowly back and forth on one of the cluttered desks, fluttering the fringe of one of Lepidopt's toupees that sat on a Styrofoam head on another desk.

“Bert needs to hear the tape,” Lepidopt said.

“Right, right,” the old man said, turning away to zip up his trousers and fasten his belt. “I haven't got anything since that one burst. I'll wait in the living room, I don't like to hear myself talk.” The old man caught the “holograph” medallion that was swinging on a string around his neck—required equipment for every Halomot remote viewer—and tucked it into his shirt before buttoning it up.

When he had left and closed the door, Lepidopt sat on the bed to rewind the little tape recorder. Malk leaned against the nearest desk and cocked his head, attentive now.

The tape stopped rewinding, and Lepidopt pushed the play button.

“—on, right,” came Sam's reedy old voice, “turn off the light, I don't want afterimages.” There was a pause of perhaps half a minute. Lepidopt tapped ash onto the carpet.

“Okay,” came Sam's voice again, “probable AOL gives me the Swiss Family Robinson tree house in Disneyland, I don't think that's right, just AOL, analytical overlay—let me get back to the signal line—voices, a man is speaking—‘And we'll not fail.' Following somebody saying, ‘Screw your courage to the sticking place,' that's Shakespeare, Lady Macbeth, this may be off track too—the man says, ‘She's probably about eighty-seven now.' The house is on the ground, not up in the tree, little house, it's a shed. Very crapped-out old shed…‘She doesn't drink whisky,' says the man. They're inside the little house now, a man and a little girl, and there's a gasoline smell—I see a window, then it's gone, just empty air there—and a TV set—‘An ammunition box,' says the man, ‘I don't think she's ever had a gun, though.'”

Sam's voice broke up in a coughing fit at this point, and Lepidopt's recorded voice said, “Can you see any locating details? Where
are
they?”

After a few seconds Sam's voice stopped coughing and went on. “No locating details. I see a headstone, a tombstone. Bas-relief stuff and writing on it, but I won't even try to read it. There's mud on it, fresh wet mud. The man says, ‘Bunch of old letters, New Jersey postmarks, 1933, '39, '55—Lisa Marrity, yup.' Uh—and then he says, ‘Is that real?…I mean, isn't the real one at the Chinese Theater? But this might be real…She says she knew Chaplin. She flew to Switzerland after he died.' Now there's someone else, ‘It's your uncle Bennett…' Uh—‘One, two, three,' and…a big crash, he pulled the tombstone down…and sunlight again—three people walking toward a house, the back door, with a trellis over it—a broken window—something about fingerprints, and a burglar—‘Marritys,' says the new man, and the little girl says, ‘ “Divil a man can say a word agin them”'—the first man is at the back door, saying, ‘If there was a thief, he's gone.'”

Lepidopt reached out now and switched off the recorder. “Sam loses the link at that point,” he said mournfully.

“Wow,” said Bert Malk, who had perched himself on the corner of a desk in line with one of the fans. “He said Marity. And Lisa, which is close enough. Did Sam know that name?”

“No.”

“We could call the coroner in Shasta, now that we've got a name, see if a Lisa Marity died there today.”

“For now we can assume she did. We can get Ernie's detective to call later to confirm it.”

“It wasn't a tombstone,” Malk went on thoughtfully.

“No, pretty clearly it was Chaplin's footprint square at Grauman's Chinese Theater, and in fact that square
isn't
in the theater forecourt anymore, it was removed in the 1950s when everybody was saying Chaplin was a communist, and then it got lost. We've already got a couple of
sayanim
trying to trace where it went.”

Malk sighed heavily. “She'd be eighty-
five
this year, actually. Born in '02.” He pulled his sweaty shirt away from his chest to let the fan cool the fabric. “Why wouldn't Sam try to read the writing on the stone?”

“It's like trying to read in dreams, apparently—if you engage the part of the brain that knows how to read, you fall out of the projected state. Ideally we'd have totally illiterate remote viewers, who could just
draw
the letters and numbers they see, with no inclination to try to read them. But I think it obviously said something like
‘To Sid Grauman, from Charlie Chaplin.'”

“I think
this
is in L.A., not Shasta,” Malk said. “The guy didn't say ‘the Chinese Theater in Hollywood,' he just said the Chinese Theater, like you'd mention a restaurant in your area.”

“Maybe.” Lepidopt looked at his watch. “This here tape is only…fifty-five minutes old. Scoot right now to the Chinese Theater and see if there's a man and a little girl there, looking for the Chaplin footprints or asking about them.”

“Should I yell ‘Marity,' and see who looks?”

Lepidopt paused for a moment with his cigarette lifted
halfway to his mouth. “Uh—no. There may be other people around who are aware of the name. And don't be followed yourself! Go! Now!” He stood up and opened the bedroom door.

Malk hurried past him to the apartment's front door and unbolted it; and when he had left, pulling it closed behind him, Lepidopt walked over and twisted the dead-bolt knobs back into the locked positions.

“One minute,” he said to Glatzer and Bozzaris, and he strode past them into the spare bedroom and closed the door. The faint music still vibrated in the aluminum foil over the window.