The final dying sounds of their dress rehearsal left the California Institute of Technology Players with nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over the footlights of an almost empty auditorium. They hardly dared to breathe as the slim, solemn figure of their director emerged from the naked seats to join them on stage, as he pulled a stepladder raspingly from the wings and climbed halfway up its rungs to turn and tell them, without so much as a preparatory clearing of his throat, that they were a damned talentless group of people and a terrible group of people to work with.
‘We are going to start again,’ he said. ‘From the beginning. And carry on until we get it right.’
No murmurs of dismay followed these words, nor even the briefest eye contact between the Players. Like slaves who had been whipped so many times they had forgotten how to flinch, they just moved numbly back into their places for the first scene. Loeser got down off the stepladder, pulled it back into the wings, and returned to his seat in row F.
‘Ready, Ziesel?’ he shouted.
‘Ready!’ shouted Ziesel from his technician’s box.
‘Auf geht’s.’
Ziesel cut the footlights so that the auditorium was in total darkness. Dr Pelton, CalTech’s best amateur pianist, struck a series of eerie dissonant chords. Then a spotlight lanced across the stage, revealing Adele Hister standing on a dais in the centre. She wore a tight black gown with a sort of asymmetrical cheongsam collar and spiky shoulders.
‘Look, Grandma,’ she howled, raising a lump of magnesium ore high above her head, ‘I caught a snowflake in my hand and it isn’t melting!’
Another spotlight came on, this time revealing Mrs Jones, a secretary from Throop Hall, as she rolled a rusty wheelchair down a long steel ramp.
‘But, precious,’ Mrs Jones howled back, ‘it’s not even snowing outside.’
‘I know, but look!’
‘Well, precious, I hope you know what that means. My own dear old grandma told me when I was just a little girl. If you catch a snowflake when it isn’t snowing, you get one wish. And if the snowflake doesn’t melt, you get three wishes.’
‘Three wishes!’ At this point a row of three more lights came on, these ones shining intensely into the stalls as if there were escaped prisoners among the audience.
‘Yes, precious. What will they be?’
‘Gee, Grandma, first of all, I wish that we get a real white Christmas. Real snow on Christmas Day, like in stories.’ One of the three lights shut off, and Dr Pelton, in the orchestra pit, tolled a deep, funereal bell.
‘And?’
‘Second of all, I wish that Ma and Pa find the money to buy medicine for poor old Nigger.’ A second light shut off, and a second bell tolled. At the same time, a different light came on, revealing the huge aluminium model of a dog’s skull, ferocious jaws agape, that was suspended on chains from the ceiling to represent the family’s ailing pet.
‘And?’
‘And third of all, I wish that mean Mr Parker doesn’t make Pa work in the factory on Christmas Day.’
A third light shut off, and a third bell tolled. At the same time, a hydraulic machine press that had been installed at the front of the stage started up, producing a hammering noise that left much of the dialogue that followed almost inaudible.
‘ “Mean”? That’s no way to talk about your future father-in-law, precious,’ shouted Mrs Jones.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Everyone knows you’re sweet on Chip Parker, precious. Just yesterday, you were necking with him at the soda fountain.’
An obscene pink light began to strobe.
‘I was not! How did you know?’ Adele still held the magnesium over her head and her elbows were starting to quiver.
‘Don’t worry yourself about that. Grandmas always find these things out. Now, here’s your Ma coming back from town.’
The strobe shut off and a long blast of dry ice befogged the stage as Dr Pelton’s wife Martha entered on a conveyer belt. She wore wooden conquistador armour.
‘Ma!’ screeched Adele.
‘Hello, little one.’
‘Isn’t it chilly today, Ma?’
‘It sure is, little one, but nothing more warms me up faster than coming back to this wonderful cosy house.’ Many more lights came on, revealing the rest of the set, which was mostly composed of ladders, pulleys, dustbins, and broken mirrors.
‘Oh, Ma,’ said Adele, flinging out her arms as if crucified as Dr Pelton scraped a steel protractor across the strings of his piano, ‘isn’t Christmas just the loveliest time of year?’
There had been some concern among the faculty that The Snowflake by J.F. McGnawn, Dr Millikan’s choice for this year’s California Institute of Technology Christmas play, might not be quite compatible with Egon Loeser’s particular style of direction. Neo-Expressionism was apparently the term, and if you wanted to be equitable about last year’s inaugural Gorge Auditorium production of The Little Match Girl, you might say that it had provoked a quantity of bracing debate. Nonetheless, the university’s president had his heart set on The Snowflake, and Loeser was still the only real theatre man with any connection to the faculty, so the two of them had reportedly made the bargain that if Millikan could have the play he wanted, then Loeser could direct it, not to mention write the music and design the costumes, without any interference at all.
Bailey, who sat at the very back of the auditorium, had slipped into this morning’s dress rehearsal to see how his young assistant was getting on. When the Players were most of the way through their second run-through of the first scene, he decided he’d watched as much as loyalty to Adele demanded, so he got up and went back out into the December sunshine. The light in Los Angeles was not by any means a hibernant beast but sometimes just for a few days in winter it did get fat and furry and slow.
Bailey was walking towards the Obediah Laboratories when he noticed a small crowd of students gathered near the Dabney Hall of the Humanities. They were staring up at something on the roof. He looked up himself, and what he saw ripped away his breath. There was an old black Model T Ford up there, parked as if it were about to drive suicidally off the edge.
‘Dad,’ he said, ‘how did that get up there?’
‘I don’t know, son,’ his father said.
As was their deferential habit when they came to an unfamiliar place, they had got down off their bicycles to wheel them on foot. The ground here was sticky and there was a sweet smell in the air, like walking under a mulberry tree in late summer, except there were no trees by the side of the road. He must have been twelve or thirteen by then and they had already been through so many small towns on their way to Tiny Lustre that Bailey had gone from treating each one like an exciting new frontier to treating each one like some friend of your uncle’s to whom you might be introduced at a family function — you knew that you were probably never going to see them again and that they were therefore not worth any investment of your finite curiosity. This particular town was called Scarborough, and they only had to walk a short distance further up Main Street before they saw that something ghastly had happened here.
Splintered wood and broken glass and torn awnings; human shapes lying on porches, unmoving, covered by sheets, or in one case not even a sheet but an old patchwork quilt; a horse thrown head first through the window of a saloon, its back legs still weakly kicking like a dog in a dream; an overturned cart with blood and hair stuck to one of its wheels; from all directions, the sound of whimpering or crying; and that insistent sickly odour, getting stronger and stronger as they walked. At the north end of the town was some sort of factory, and up there the disarray was at its worst, with nurses and firemen and policemen running back and forth among gawpers like themselves. Bailey thought at first that a tornado must have scrambled the town, but then his father stopped a man in a butcher’s apron to ask what had happened, and they found out about the accident.
The factory was the Scarborough Ginger Ale Company bottling plant, the town’s biggest employer, and beyond it was a branch of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. About an hour ago, a circus train from the Mockton-Piney Circus, heading east towards Florence, had made an emergency stop to check an overheated axle bearing on one of the flatcars. The driver of an empty Atlantic Coast Line train behind it had missed the signal posted by the brakeman — he must have been drunk or asleep, but no one would ever know now because he was dead — and had sped straight into the back of the circus train. The caboose and the rear four sleeping cars had all been pulverised, and the car that held the circus’s elderly performing elephant had snapped off its couplings and rolled south down the incline into one of the Scarborough Ginger Ale Company’s half-a-million-gallon steel storage tanks. The tank had burst and sent a mighty wave of ginger syrup rushing like an apocalypse down Main Street, high enough to sweep that Model T Ford on to the roof of that bank. So far they’d counted more than thirty dead and more than a hundred injured, too many to fit in the town’s hospital. As the man said this, Bailey caught sight of a headless body being taken out of the bottling plant in a green wheelbarrow, basted in its own gore, the tips of its fingers dragging on the ground. All Bailey could think about was that as they’d gone past Florence he’d been begging his father to let them take a train, just a slow, unpopular rural train, just once.
‘ “When many a great shipwreck has come to pass,” ’ said his father softly after the man in the butcher’s apron had moved on, “ ‘the great sea is wont to cast hither and thither benches, ribs, yards, prow, masts and swimming oars, so that along all the coasts of the lands floating stern-pieces are seen, giving warning to mortals.” Carry on, son, please.’
‘ “Even so,” ’ said Bailey, ‘ “if you suppose that the first-beginnings of a certain kind are limited, then scattered through all time they must needs be tossed hither and thither by the tides of matter, setting towards every side, so that never can they be driven together and come together in union, nor stay fixed in union, nor take increase and grow.” ’ His father had been teaching him Lucretius for two years now, and he knew most of the first two books of the Cyril Bailey translation of De Rerum Natura off by heart. Soon he would be ready for Walt Whitman and William James.
‘Exactly right.’
‘Those poor people,’ said Bailey.
‘Poor people?’ repeated his father, and straight away Bailey knew he’d made a mistake. He still made mistakes so often. ‘There was a much bigger train wreck in Washington just a few months ago. Are the men and women here worse off than the men and women there?’
‘No, Dad.’
‘Is there any reason why we should feel any more pity for the men and women here just because we happened to be near by when it happened?’
‘No.’
‘What fallacy would that be?’
‘Propinquitous Conceit.’
‘Exactly right. And what fallacy did the people of Scarborough commit?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, I expect most of them thought that just because something like this had never happened before, they didn’t need to worry that it would ever happen, and so they didn’t need to take precautions.’
‘Inductive Normalism.’
‘Exactly right.’
They watched the rescuers work for a few minutes longer. The activity was so disciplined and repetitive by now that it was almost as if this factory had been deliberately adapted for some new and unspeakable purpose — as if all these people would go home at five and come back tomorrow at nine and carry on working here until they retired.
‘Dad?’ Bailey said hesitantly.
‘Yes?’
‘Did They do this? Did They think we might have been on one of those trains?’
‘I don’t think so, son,’ his father said. ‘Remember, They want us alive.’ And as they turned to leave Bailey heard yet again the squeak of the green wheelbarrow…
Moving like a clockwork automaton, Bailey approached the crowd of CalTech students so he could hear what they were saying about the car on the roof of Dabney Hall.
‘They must have lifted it up there with a crane,’ someone suggested.
‘Where would they get a crane that tall?’
‘Maybe they had a teleportation machine.’
Bailey glanced with suspicion at the originator of this last remark, but he saw that the boy had been joking — he didn’t know anything.
‘You’re all dumb-asses,’ someone else said. ‘They took it to pieces, lugged it all up the utility staircase, and put it back together. There’s no other way to do it.’
‘That would have taken all night.’
‘Anything worth doing takes all night. Don’t you remember when they bricked up that door in Page and then painted it over like it was never there?’
‘Where would they even get a car like that? It must be fifty years old.’
So it was just another student prank, thought Bailey. The boys here loved pranks — once, before his death, Marsh had decreed that they must wear jackets and ties for evening meals, and that night they had all arrived for dinner in jackets and ties but no trousers or shoes. He should have known, of course, but for a moment the car on the roof had seemed to him like some sort of malevolent lesion in time. It had been a long while since anything had reminded him of that day. By now some of the students had noticed Bailey standing there, so he nodded at them curtly and walked on towards Throop Hall. On his way past the front desk, Mrs Stiles waved to him. ‘Oh, Professor Bailey, I’ve been calling your lab.’
‘I’m sorry about that, Mrs Stiles, I was at the Gorge Auditorium.’
‘How are the rehearsals coming along?’
‘Very well, I think. Was it anything urgent?’
‘There’s somebody here to see you.’
Bailey couldn’t see anyone waiting. ‘Who?’
‘An old coloured woman. She just went to powder her nose. She says she’s a family friend.’
That wasn’t possible. ‘Did she give her name?’
‘Lucy,’ said Mrs Stiles.
Bailey stared at her.
‘Lucy,’ said his mother again from the doorway. ‘Mrs Phenscot wants to talk to you about tomorrow’s luncheon. She’s in the orchid house.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Lucy.
She put down the knife with which she had been boning a chicken and went to wash her hands. It was only then that Bailey’s mother noticed Bailey’s father sitting on a stool by the kitchen window.
‘Tom,’ she said sharply, coming forward into the kitchen. ‘I didn’t know you were down here.’
‘Oh, sweetheart, Lucy and Franklin and I were just having a little tongue wag — weren’t we, son?’
Bailey didn’t look up from his toy steam engine. He was inside the train as well as above it and the great black oven beside him was its coal furnace. With Lucy gone he would have to stoke it himself. His mother waited until the cook had gone out and then said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t do this.’
‘Do what?’ his father said.
‘All these “discussions” with Lucy.’
‘I treasure our discussions.’
She tutted incredulously. ‘I grew up with her, Tom, I love her as much as anyone, but we both know the only reason you keep coming down here is so you don’t have to talk to my father. I’m sorry you think he’s so unbearable.’
‘I don’t see why—’
‘In fact, no, I’m not sorry you think he’s so unbearable. I don’t care what you think of him. I’m only sorry you take such pleasure in being rude to my family. Do you think I like apologising for you all the time?’
‘Oh, sweetheart, you know I don’t mean to offend your daddy any more than necessary. I come down here to talk to Lucy because I like talking to Lucy. Have you ever discussed God with her?’
‘No, Tom, as it happens I haven’t ever discussed God with the cook.’
‘You know she believes in everything? I mean it. Everything. African deities, Red Indian spirits, Catholic saints — they’re all the same to her.’
‘And that’s fascinating to you?’
‘Yes. Because she doesn’t see any contradiction. The priests on Hispaniola taught her grandparents that there’s one god and all different kinds of angels. It’s a sort of cheerful, omnivorous credulity.’
‘It sounds like a child’s religion.’ His mother took off her glasses and folded them up, which was how she showed she was resigned to seeing a tiresome conversation through to its end. Bailey wondered what it would feel like to run the wheels of his steam engine over the raw flesh of Lucy’s chicken.
‘It does have a child’s honesty. The other religions dissemble. Everything that’s in Lucy’s faith is in your parents’ Catholicism too, sweetheart. The difference is that your parents’ Catholicism has to suppress the parts it doesn’t like. Lucy told me that back on Hispaniola her grandparents used to sacrifice livestock, and every so often, if things got desperate, someone might sacrifice a cripple. Her family didn’t take part, she says, but it happened. Don’t you think that’s in Catholicism? All that bloodshed? But it’s hidden. Not very well hidden, though — you’ve seen that crucifix they have on the wall that frightens Franklin so much. And who knows what goes on in that chapel of theirs?’
‘Nothing “goes on” in there. That’s where I was christened.’
‘Then why won’t they let me inside?’
‘You’re an atheist. It’s the family chapel and no atheist has ever set foot in there before. You know that. You’re lucky they even let you into their house. Especially when you behave like this.’
‘No atheist? What about you?’
‘Tom…’
‘You’re not telling me you’ve changed your mind again? That you believe in their god after all? Next you’ll decide you want to let them put him through that initiation ritual.’
‘Confirmation is not an initiation ritual.’
‘Confirmation is bullying our son into joining their cult when he’s still too young to understand why he might not want to.’
‘Our son is right here and when you talk like that you probably scare him a lot more than that trinket on the wall. I don’t want to have this argument again.’
‘Come along, sweetheart, you promised me. You’re going to help me make sure they don’t put him through that. You’re going to talk to your mother about it. Why don’t you go now? She’s always in a good mood when she’s with her orchids.’
That was three weeks before his mother disappeared and his father took him away in the middle of the night…
‘Are you all right, Professor Bailey?’ said Mrs Stiles.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Stiles, but I don’t have any family friends named Lucy and I won’t have time to see her today.’
Bailey turned and strode away as fast as he could without quite breaking into a jog. He’d come here to pick up some typing from one of the girls but instead he carried on until he was out of Mrs Stiles’s range of vision and positioned himself behind a pillar so that he could observe whoever came out of the women’s bathroom near the reception desk. And then, sure enough, there she was, this shadow out of time. She was old, now, of course, probably almost seventy, walking with a stick, but she didn’t look all that different. Hurrying out of Throop Hall by the doors at the other end, he tried to pretend to himself that he hadn’t seen her, but this was a rupture in his history far harder to deny than that Model T on the roof of Dabney Hall. Some sort of storage tank had been broken open in his head and now he couldn’t seem to stop the memories from gushing through him.
‘Professor Bailey? Might I importune you very briefly?’
Bailey stopped. Why could he not be left alone today? The intervention here was from a blond man with an English accent who seemed to have been waiting there for him beside the steps up to the door of the Obediah Laboratories. ‘Yes?’ he said.
‘My name is Rupert Rackenham. I live over in Venice Beach and I’m an old Berlin friend of Adele, your assistant. I’ve been given a freelance commission to write about you for the Daily Telegraph in London. They’ve heard you’re very eminent in your field. I’d hoped to set up an appointment in advance but the lady at Throop Hall told me she’s been instructed not to pass on any messages of that kind.’
‘She has indeed. I’m afraid I’m much too busy.’ That name, Rupert Rackenham, was familiar to Bailey from somewhere, but even more familiar was that voice: not just the accent but the false, practised, opportunistic charm. And yet he knew he’d never met this man. ‘There is all sorts of interesting work going on at CalTech. Perhaps you could talk to one of my colleagues instead. Dr Carradine, for instance.’
‘What does Dr Carradine do?’ said Rackenham.
‘He is building a machine for making eel congee out of electric eels that is itself powered by electric eels. An elegant design.’
‘I’d much rather talk to you, Professor Bailey. It need only take an hour. The Telegraph will pay for lunch. I’ve cleared it with Dr Millikan. He thinks it will be good publicity for the Institute. We would begin with your family background and then—’
‘No. I’m afraid not. Not this year.’ And he tried to hurry on into the Obediah Laboratories, but the Englishman, undiscouraged, put a hand on his shoulder to slow him.
‘Don’t touch my son, please,’ said Bailey’s father.
‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry,’ said the Englishman with a smile, withdrawing his hand not quite straight away. ‘It’s just that I think your son dropped his toy. Wouldn’t want him to lose it. Handsome little object.’
Bailey felt a cold tickle of embarrassment, knowing that at fifteen he was several years too old now to be carrying around a toy of any sort, and he couldn’t look the Englishman in the eye as he took back his steam engine. Nonetheless, he recognised the Englishman, and the Englishman recognised him, because they had seen each other three times before, in other Wisconsin towns. For their itinerary to intersect more than once with some other traveller’s was not that unusual — there were only a limited number of logical routes, for instance, up the western shore of Lake Michigan. Looking out across the empty planes of this state from his bicycle, Bailey had often thought of Lucretius. ‘Space spreads out without bound or limit, immeasurable towards every quarter everywhere. No rest is allowed to the bodies moving through the deep void, but rather plied with unceasing, diverse motion, some when they have dashed together leap back at great space apart, others too are thrust but a short way away from the blow. Many, moreover, wander on through the great void, which have been cast back from the unions of things, nor have they anywhere else availed to be taken into them and link their movements.’ Bailey and his father had not truly linked their movements with the Englishman, but they had wandered on together for a few days, and at first Bailey assumed it was this featherweight acquaintance that the Englishman had taken as a permit for the immediate camaraderie of his demeanour here in the hotel corridor. Only later would he deduce that the Englishman adopted that same demeanour with everyone he met.
‘I see we’re in adjacent lodgings,’ said the Englishman. He held out his hand. ‘Bertram Renshaw. Archaeologist.’
But his father ignored the hand and hurried Bailey into their small double room. After the door was closed he said, ‘Don’t talk to that fellow.’
‘Why, Dad?’
‘There’s something not right about him.’
‘Is he working for Them?’
‘He could be. We’d better leave early tomorrow. We’ll double back towards Madison.’
His father’s criteria for identifying a stranger as an agent of either the Phenscots or the Catholic Church were mysterious to Bailey. Sometimes they wouldn’t even have to encounter a person in multiple towns, as they had the Englishman: just one sighting at a distance would be enough. But this time, Bailey couldn’t disagree with his father. There was indeed something not right about Renshaw. Most likely, his father would have preferred them to make their escape straight away, but for nearly two weeks now he had been wriggling on the hook of an abscessed tooth, and Sheboygan Falls had a good, cheap dentist. So at three o’clock, after setting Bailey his algebra problems for the day, he went out. As usual, Bailey was not to leave the hotel room for any reason, unless his father had not returned within six hours, in which case Bailey was to assume his father had been captured and carry on alone to Tiny Lustre.
The sky was overcast that day and through the window of the hotel room Bailey could see crows flying high up in it like punctuation lost on a blank page. He waited fifteen minutes, then went out into the corridor and knocked on the door of the Englishman’s room. When Renshaw opened it he said, ‘I sure am sorry to bother you, sir, but I was wondering if I might borrow a pencil sharpener. I can’t find mine.’
Renshaw looked pleased. ‘Certainly. Come inside and I’ll look for one.’
For the first few years that he had travelled with his father, Bailey had been very afraid of their pursuers. But lately he had thought more and more about what it might actually be like to meet one of these dark entities. And this was the first chance he had ever had. He knew he ought to feel frightened but he didn’t.
‘Why don’t you sit down, my boy?’ said the Englishman. ‘It might take me a moment or two to find.’ He started rummaging around in a suitcase. ‘Where are you and your father from?’
‘Philadelphia.’
‘That’s a long way to come on a bicycle.’
‘He took me out of school for a year so I could see a little of our country.’
‘A magnificent notion. I come from London, but I’ve been all over this continent. Always something new to see. Mostly travel by motor car myself.’
‘You’re an archaeologist, you said, sir?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you go around looking for bones?’
‘Sometimes. But these days I’m more of an educator. Science isn’t any use, you know, if we scientists keep it all to ourselves.’
‘So you give lectures?’
‘Not often. I’ve found that the general mass of the American public is seldom prepared for the latest discoveries. I prefer to arrange meetings with interested individuals with progressive sensibilities. They, in turn, can use their influence to sow the seeds of this new knowledge.’
‘What knowledge is that?’
Renshaw smiled. Somehow he had still not located the pencil sharpener. ‘Oh, I’m not sure a lad of your age would be far enough ahead in your education.’
Bailey gave the invited response. ‘I’ll bet I am far enough ahead, sir.’
‘Are you quite certain?’ said Renshaw almost coquettishly.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘In that case, my boy, have you ever heard of the Troodonians?’
‘No.’
‘I should have been surprised if you had. Come and assist me with this.’ Another of his cases was almost as big as a tenement stove, and Bailey had to help Renshaw lift it on to the bed. Then Renshaw snapped open four heavy brass catches to bisect the case vertically, and Bailey saw that the left side held the top half of a skeleton and the right side held the bottom half, each bone pulled snugly against the thick black velvet lining by leather loops, so that the case could be used as a sort of display cabinet when it was swung all the way open. Most of the skeleton looked unmistakably humanoid — the feet and the ribs and pelvis — but the skull looked more like a bird’s or a lizard’s. Also, it had a tail, and only four long digits on each hand.
‘What is this?’ said Bailey.
‘I expect you’ve been told that the Red Indians were the first civilisation to inhabit North America,’ said Renshaw. ‘Well, they weren’t. The Troodonians were far more advanced. While the Red Indians were still living in caves and eating worms, the Troodonians were herding livestock and trading goods.’
‘What did they look like?’
‘They evolved from dinosaurs, my boy. So they had scaly skin and serrated teeth. They laid eggs, and had no mammary glands, because they fed their young on regurgitated food. They worshipped a benevolent creator and lived according to his wishes. Their language would probably have sounded like birdsong, but they were also strongly telepathic, so they communicated mostly by thought. Unfortunately, although they were a cunning, acquisitive race, they were also a peaceful one. There is no such thing as a Troodonian weapon. So when the Red Indians decided to take over the Troodonians’ lands, they met with very little resistance. In the end, almost the whole race was destroyed, and all we have left now are disjected remains. Some biologists do argue that a few surviving Troodonians might have undergone some sort of evolutionary reversion to a more primitive lizard form — small, quadripedal and robust — but I don’t find that theory very credible.’
‘Did you dig this one up yourself?’
‘One of my colleagues found it in Arizona.’
‘And you carry it around to show to people?’
‘Not just to show, my boy. That would be selfish.’ Renshaw explained that he placed discreet advertisements in small regional newspapers announcing an archaeological breakthrough of epochal magnitude, with an address to which interested parties could write for more information. He then toured the homes of the respondents with a Troodonian skeleton, and once he’d found a good home for that skeleton with a keen gentleman scholar, he telegraphed to his colleague in Arizona to despatch a replacement by rail so that he could continue his trip. And since his purpose was primarily educational, he practically gave away each skeleton, asking only enough in return to help cover some of the costs of the excavations. Never more than a thousand dollars. In fact, he could tell that Bailey and his father were both of a cultured, enquiring temperament. Perhaps they might be interested in a purchase themselves? You couldn’t take a Troodonian skeleton on a bicycle, of course, but they could send it back to Philadelphia to await them on their return. And it was at this point that Bailey finally realised what Renshaw really was.
According to his father, the confidence man wasn’t quite the most contemptible type of human being on the planet. That was the confidence man’s victim. But the confidence man himself was still pretty bad. Ever since they left Boston, Bailey’s father had been working on his manuscript, The Complete Taxonomy of Anthropic Cognitive Unsoundness. The epigraph was from Lucretius: ‘Just as in a building, if the first ruler is awry, and if the square is wrong and out of the straight lines, if the level sags a whit in any place, it must needs be that the whole structure will be made faulty and crooked, so that some parts seem already to long to fall, or do fall, all betrayed by the first wrong measurements; even so then your reasoning of things must be awry and false, which all springs from false senses.’ And the introduction promised that any man who trained himself rigorously using the book would be invulnerable to the predations of confidence men, hotdog vendors, sales clerks, politicians, moralists, aesthetes, beggars, cheap newspapers, sentimental novels, tearful women, and, above all, priests.
‘Where is your father at present?’ said Renshaw. ‘Is he next door?’
‘He’s at the dentist,’ said Bailey. ‘I don’t know when he’ll be back.’
‘I see.’ Renshaw coughed and turned back to the skeleton. ‘You know, my boy, the Troodonians had internal genitalia. Everything would have been tucked up inside a little vent called a cloaca.’
‘Oh.’
‘Whereas mammals like you and me are lucky enough to have been given external genitalia.’ He put a hand on Bailey’s thigh, its fingers quivering as it rested there like the legs of a nervous animal. ‘Everything is … everything is just …’ He didn’t seem to be able to finish his sentence. ‘Perhaps you might like to…’
There was a hammering at the door. ‘Franklin?’ his father shouted. The door was on a latch so Bailey had to get up and run over to open it from the inside. ‘I knew I could hear you,’ his father said, glaring at the Englishman. ‘What are you doing in here?’
‘Your son came to borrow a pencil sharpener.’
‘He’s got a pencil sharpener.’
‘I couldn’t find it, Dad.’
‘Come on, Franklin.’
They went back into their room.
‘I told you not an hour ago that there was something wrong about that fellow. You shouldn’t have gone in there.’
‘But he’s not a detective or anything, Dad.’
‘That may seem so obvious now that you feel as if you knew it at the time you made the decision. But you didn’t. What fallacy is that?’
‘Retrospective Reassurance.’
‘Exactly right.’
Bailey’s father never punished him, because for the last five years it had been his responsibility to train his son to behave rationally in every circumstance, and he believed that the failure of a pupil was by definition just as much the failure of a teacher. However, he didn’t speak to his son for the rest of the evening, except to report that the dentist had been too busy to see him that afternoon so he would have to try again tomorrow. The next morning, Bailey went with him to the dentist and waited in an armchair while his father had his tooth pulled. They left Sheboygan Falls straight afterwards, his father’s mouth still stuffed with bloody cotton, and Bailey never saw the Englishman again…
The ultramigration accumulator was already warming up, so he must have come into his laboratory and turned it on. He couldn’t even remember how he’d disengaged himself from Rackenham. It was possible, he thought calmly, that he was having some sort of dissociative episode, and that he ought to go home before it got any worse. Where did it come from, this compulsion to tumble always back into the past? But the latest phase of his experiments was reaching its conclusion, and something about the sight of the Ford on the roof had made him determined to see it through as soon as he could. He set to work. After about an hour, Adele came in.
‘How was your rehearsal, my dear?’
She grimaced. ‘Don’t ask.’
‘I saw a few scenes and I was very impressed.’
‘Back in Berlin, people used to say Egon had quite a bit of talent and he might do something important one day, except you couldn’t ever tell him so because his head would get so big. I don’t know what they’d make of The Snowflake.’
‘Speaking of Berlin, I met a fellow just now who said he was an old friend of yours.’
‘Oh, you mean Rupert?’
‘That’s right. Rupert Rackenham. How did you guess?’
‘I ran into him just now on my way here.’
‘He’s still out there loitering?’
‘I’m afraid so. All the same, it’s nice that you met him at last.’
‘Why do you say “at last”? Who is he?’
‘You remember. He wrote that book you liked.’
‘Book about what?’
‘Lavicini,’ said Adele.
‘Who’s Lavicini?’ said Bailey.
Someone shouldered past him on their way to the bar, and he spilled some of his grapefruit juice on the carpet, but he was so dismayed he hardly noticed. Could it be that teleportation had already been achieved in Germany and the news had not made its way to the United States? Could it be that some Italian engineer working for Siemens had beaten him to it? He hadn’t even meant to mention teleportation to this singular girl in the first place, and indeed he wasn’t at all sure what she was doing at an Athenaeum Club cocktail party — you could tell just by looking at her that she wasn’t one of the undergraduates’ girlfriends, and she had a German accent. But then Adele explained about the Teleportation Accident of 1679.
‘How do you know all this?’ he said when she’d finished.
‘A friend of mine published a novel about Lavicini. And I was in it. I was the ballerina who died, except I was really a princess.’
Straight away, with the irrefutable force of a religious revelation, Bailey was certain of two things. The first was that Lavicini’s story was the key that would unlock the final door in his teleportation research, the door on which he’d been knocking for so many years. And the second was that this girl — the ballerina, the princess, the herald — would have to become his assistant. She probably didn’t know anything about physics, but that didn’t matter. She seemed bright. She could learn.
Teleportation as a fantasy had come to Bailey when he was still travelling with his father. They couldn’t take trains or streetcars or steamboats because their faces might be recognised; they couldn’t hire an automobile because their licence plate might be tracked; and they couldn’t even take a direct route from east to west on their bicycles because their next stop might be anticipated. As the years wheeled on, Bailey began to wonder if they would ever get to California. And yet in his dreams he would look out of a window and he was already there. Lucretius made it seem as if anything was possible if you understood the nature of things. Couldn’t there be a machine that could hurl a body across a continent as a telephone could hurl a voice?
But Bailey hadn’t had his first revelation of how teleportation might actually work until he arrived alone in Los Angeles in 1915. Boston and Chicago and New York, the cities he’d seen with his father, were bodies with organs, but this territory, like space itself, was still just a giant bag of cytoplasm. It had almost unlimited capacity and its inhabitants were willing to drive almost unlimited distances. If you were trying to decide where to build a house or a restaurant or an ostrich farm, therefore, you had no substantive grounds on which to do so: here, location was a meaningless and arbitrary property. All spatial coordinates were equivalent. And that was how teleportation would function. A teleportation device would have to convince the object in the chamber that it just wouldn’t matter if it were somewhere else. (Only a few months before this party at the Athenaeum Club, he’d been driving back from Venice Beach when he’d got stuck in the most infernal traffic jam he’d ever encountered. There must have been an accident up ahead, because he didn’t see anyone make an inch of progress for twenty minutes or more. Horns quacked pointlessly. Bailey had been reminded of Lucretius: ‘All things are not held close pressed on every side by the nature of body; for there is void in things. For if there were not void, by no means could things move; for that which is the office of body, to offend and hinder, would at every moment be present to all things; nothing, therefore, could advance, since nothing could give the example of yielding place.’ And then he saw the driver of a dented green Chevrolet up ahead open his door, get out, and simply saunter off down the street, something in his bearing making it obvious that he did not intend to return. He was chased by curses, because if his car sat there driverless then the jam would take even longer to clear, but he never looked back. And all Bailey could think about was that this was teleportation. A particle’s spatial coordinates were the steel chassis in which that particle was trapped. To escape from them, the particle merely had to get out and walk.)
Bailey wasn’t, of course, the only physicist to be interested in teleportation. Over the years he’d met quite a few who’d read The Disintegration Machine by Arthur Conan Doyle when they were boys, or The Man Without a Body by Edward Page Mitchell (the author also of The Clock that Went Backward), and had never forgotten about it. But he knew they would never get anywhere, because they hadn’t thought about it hard enough. They didn’t seem to realise, for instance, that when an object departed the teleportation device, it couldn’t just leave a vacuum behind, and when it arrived at its new destination, it couldn’t just displace the matter that was already there. The laws of physics wouldn’t allow that. Teleportation would have to be an exchange. If you set the device correctly, a human body would be swapped for a volume of air of exactly the same shape. But if you were off by a few feet, the subject might find himself embedded part of the way into a wall, like that horse thrown through the window of the bar in Scarborough, and in the chamber of the teleportation device you would find a sort of bas-relief. Indeed, if you teleported a naked corpse right into a block of marble, you could produce a sculpture accurate to every pimple.
The Monday after he met Adele at the party at the Athenaeum Club, Bailey sent for a copy of The Sorceror of Venice, and when he’d finished it he went to the Los Angeles Public Library to find out everything else he could about Lavicini. Each new detail made him more certain that the secret of teleportation was here. So when that same week a soft-spoken man from the State Department came to tell him that on the orders of Cordell Hull he was now to direct his scientific work according to the recent discoveries of an obscure author from Rhode Island called H.P. Lovecraft, Bailey was not nearly as surprised as the man seemed to expect him to be. When he looked over the State Department summaries of Lovecraft’s stories, what he heard was a chord of recognition. Lovecraft understood everything. Bailey quoted Lucretius to the man: ‘ “For even as children tremble and fear everything in blinding darkness, so we sometimes dread in the light things that are no more to be feared than what children shudder at in the dark and imagine will come to pass. This terror then, this darkness of the mind, must needs be scattered not by the rays and the gleaming shafts of the day, but by the outer view and the inner law of nature.” ’ The man nodded and then told Bailey that there was only one small obstacle remaining: it had been impossible to obtain a proper security clearance for Bailey because for some reason State Department investigators had not been able to find any trace of his existence before 1915, when Bailey had enrolled at what was then called the Throop College of Technology. Presumably, the man said, there was a simple explanation? But Bailey just stared in silence at the man until at last he coughed and got up to leave. The question of a security clearance was never brought up again, although he was told that he was now so valuable to the American government that he could no longer be permitted to travel on aeroplanes.
From then on, the State Department sent Bailey every new story that Lovecraft published, and also typed extracts from his letters, which they often intercepted and steamed open. He soon began to feel that in other circumstances he could have been good friends with Lovecraft. To learn that Lovecraft, too, had read Lucretius in his youth did not surprise him: even Lovecraft’s dread gods were sternly materialist, and it took a Lucretian belief in the illimitable reach of empirical enquiry to write that ‘the sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.’ Bailey thought Lovecraft would have taken some pleasure in The Complete Taxonomy of Anthropic Cognitive Unsoundness.
Then again, Lovecraft did seem to have a malign obsession with Negroes and Jews, which would have been forbidden by Bailey’s father’s book. ‘Either stow ’em out of sight,’ he wrote to one friend, ‘or kill ’em off.’ This was tiresome reading, and yet Lovecraft was hardly alone. A great many of the Americans Bailey most admired were, or had been, preoccupied with the precarious future of the noble white race. Robert Millikan, the founder of CalTech. William Cowper Brann, the martyred editor of the freethinker magazine The Iconocolast. Edward Alsworth Ross, the sociologist who blamed the replacement of private cabs by public streetcars for the high rates of miscegenation in the urban United States. And Henry Ford, famously. Well, perhaps the other races really were inferior and dangerous. Perhaps they weren’t. Bailey didn’t know; it didn’t interest him…
‘Did you have a nice time at the party last night?’ said Adele.
For a moment he thought she must be talking about the Athenaeum Club in ’35. But of course she meant the party last night at the Muttons’ house in Pacific Palisades. Loeser had pestered him for months to go to one, and he still wasn’t sure why. But that first time, he’d been surprised to find quite a few German and Austrian scientists present who didn’t yet have tenured jobs in this country, and some of them knew rumours about the latest incremental advances in particle physics that hadn’t even quite reached CalTech. Also, the hosts seemed delighted by his presence in a way that was unfamiliar to him (once, Dolores Mutton had gone so far as to invite him to join her and a few other guests for a swim in the moonlight, but he’d had to decline because at forty-one he’d still never even learned to tread water). So he’d voluntarily gone back three or four times since. ‘Oh, not too bad,’ he said. It was nearly seven o’clock, and the ultramigration accumulator had finished a cycle. ‘Why don’t you go home, Adele? You must be tired after all those rehearsals.’
‘Not really,’ said his assistant.
‘I insist. You won’t miss anything. I won’t be doing any more experiments today.’
This wasn’t true. There were some experiments that, for various reasons, could not be performed in Adele’s presence. Which was a pity, since Bailey liked to have her with him whenever he could. His instinct about her at that party four years ago had been more correct than he ever could have hoped. He didn’t know why, but whenever it was Adele who operated the Teleportation Device, the prototype seemed to perform a great deal better. Perhaps in a field as mercurial as teleportation, a lack of formal scientific training was an advantage. And she worked so hard. Her only disagreeable quirk was that every so often he would notice her gazing at him for so long that he began to think he must have something in his teeth. Most likely she was just lost in thought. It had not escaped his notice that quite a lot of men on campus were erotically infatuated with the girl. Loeser, for instance, could hardly have been more blatant about it, and neither could Slate. Bailey himself had never taken any interest in sex, even as a young man. Most of what he knew about it came from Lucretius, who did not make it sound at all appealing. ‘When the lovers embrace and taste the flower of their years, they closely press and cause pain to the body, and often fasten their teeth on the lips, and dash mouth against mouth in kissing; yet all for naught, since they cannot tear off aught thence, nor enter in and pass away, merging the whole body in the other’s frame; for at times they seem to strive and struggle to do it. They yearn to find out what in truth they desire to attain, nor can they discover what device may conquer their disease; in such deep doubt they waste beneath their secret wound.’ Why on earth would anyone want to put themselves through that?
Some time after Adele left, Bailey decided to go for a stroll. Fresh air kept him alert. But on his way out of the Obediah Laboratories he was dismayed to see Rupert Rackenham standing there in just the same place beside a cypress tree. The Englishman had a cigarette in his mouth and he’d flicked butts in every direction as if sowing a field.
‘Professor Bailey—’
‘Have you been here all this time?’
‘Yes. I really am sorry to pester you like this but, between you and me, I’ve already spent the fee for this article so you’d be doing me an incomparable favour if you could spare so much as a minute and a half to discuss your work.’
‘Mr Rackenham, if you weren’t a friend of Adele’s I would telephone the security guard at Throop Hall and report you for trespassing.’
‘Don’t treat the gentleman that way, Franklin. You always were a well-mannered child.’
Bailey turned, and there was Lucy. For a moment he thought she was another one of these alarmingly vivid recollections that had been invading him all day, except that his recollection of Lucy wouldn’t have had a walking stick, and she wouldn’t have had those spotty subsident jowls, and she wouldn’t have been able to respond when Rackenham said, ‘Are you a friend of Professor Bailey, madame?’
‘Since he was born.’
‘I don’t know this woman,’ Bailey said.
‘Franklin!’ said Lucy.
Rackenham raised his eyebrows. ‘I don’t mean to be impertinent, Professor Bailey, but she does seem to know your name.’
‘Anyone could find out my name.’ Last year the State Department had offered to help tighten security on campus to protect the highly classified endeavours of Bailey and Clarendon and their colleagues, but Millikan had refused, saying he didn’t want the Institute to feel like a military base. At the time, Bailey had been relieved, but he realised now how absurd it was that nothing really stood between him and the rest of the world but Mrs Stiles at Throop Hall. Bailey had always done his best to keep his Teleportation Device a secret, but on his long pilgrimage with his father he’d come to realise that secrecy, like kinetic energy, was continuously dissipated — so that a secret kept for ever was not just improbable, like a teleportation device, but inconceivable, like a perpetual motion machine.
‘Have you been here all evening, madame, like I have?’ said Rackenham.
‘Yes,’ said Lucy. ‘They said he won’t see me. But I have to see him. So I waited. I was watching you waiting too.’
‘You must be hungry. I certainly am. Perhaps you’d allow me to buy you a spot of supper somewhere near by? You needn’t worry,’ Rackenham added with a smile, ‘I haven’t any caddish intentions. But we could talk a bit about the disobliging Professor Bailey.’
‘You have no right!’ said Bailey.
‘To do what?’ said Rackenham.
The last thing Bailey wanted to do was invite Lucy into his laboratory, but he didn’t have a choice if he was going to get her away from Rackenham. ‘Lucy, come inside.’
‘I thought you didn’t know her,’ said Rackenham.
‘Come inside,’ Bailey repeated. He took Lucy’s arm and pulled her into the Obediah Laboratories almost faster than she could go with the stick. Then he locked the door behind them. Neither of them spoke until they were back in room 11, when Bailey said, ‘How did you find me?’
‘My granddaughter, she lives in Pasadena,’ said Lucy, panting a little. ‘I came out to live with her last year after I retired. One day I saw you in the street. I knew it was you. Don’t know how I knew — thirty years gone by at least — but I knew it was you. My little Franklin. But I didn’t want to stop you right away. Too nervous. So I got in a taxicab and I followed you. Found out you’re at the Institute. Found out you’re calling yourself Bailey now.’
‘My name is Franklin Bailey and it always has been.’
‘What did your daddy tell you about your mama, Franklin? I always used to wonder what he told you. You remember when she passed on it was right around when she’d had that ruckus with your grandma about your confirmation. Did he tell you your grandma and grandpa did something to her? Did he tell you he had to take you away in case they did something to you too?’
The lock on the door of the chapel. The carvings on the altar like gutters on an operating table. The chalice that was polished almost too clean. ‘You are a senile old woman.’
‘He did, didn’t he? Franklin, don’t you want to know what really happened to your mama?’
‘Nobody knows what happened. She disappeared and she was never found.’
‘She was found, child. She hadn’t been found by the time your daddy took you away. He only waited a day. She was found after that. But you were already gone, so you never knew.’
‘No more of this gibberish, please.’ She was going to tell him that his father had murdered his mother. She was going to tell him that his father had run away because otherwise he knew he’d be caught. She was going to tell him that it was the police that he and his father had been fleeing, not the agents of the Phenscots and the Catholic Church. She was a liar. He knew she was a liar. He knew. He knew. He didn’t know. He’d never known. He thought of Lucretius. ‘These men, exiled from their country and banished far from the sight of men, stained with some foul crime, beset with every kind of care, live on all the same, and, in spite of all, to whatever place they come in their misery, they make sacrifice to the dead, and slaughter black cattle and despatch offerings to the gods of the dead.’
Lucy smiled sadly. ‘Franklin, your mama fell down an elevator shaft.’
‘What?’
‘She was in a hotel and she didn’t have her eyeglasses and the grille opened when it shouldn’t have and she just stepped right into the elevator shaft. Broke her pretty neck. They didn’t notice her down there for a day and a half. Your daddy just jumped to conclusions.’
‘Do you still worship the gods of the dead, Lucy?’ said Bailey.
‘Are you listening to me, child?’
‘Do you still worship the gods of the dead? The gods those priests taught your grandparents about on the island where your people come from?’
‘I’m a good Catholic now, Franklin.’
‘That’s a pity,’ said Bailey. ‘Your grandparents were wrong — there are no gods of the dead — but they still understood more than you could possibly know.’
‘Professor Bailey?’
He looked up. Clarendon stood at the doorway of room 11. When had the Obediah Laboratories turned into Union Station? And then for the first time he wondered whether all this had really happened in just one day — whether, in fact, it wasn’t a week ago that he’d seen the Ford on the roof of Dabney Hall, and two weeks ago that he’d watched Adele in her rehearsal — whether he’d just let the transitions drop from his memory like a cutter down in Studio City. He found it hard to be certain. How was it possible for a person to be in one place, and then in another place, or to be in one time, and then in another time, without ever seeming to traverse the distances between them? ‘Yes, Dr Clarendon?’ he said.
‘I thought we might have that talk now about the trouble I’ve been having with the phasmatometer. But, uh, I see you’re busy,’ said Clarendon, obviously puzzled by the presence of an elderly black woman in Bailey’s laboratory.
‘No, I’m not busy. This lady is just lost. Why don’t you go back to your lab and I’ll come by in a few minutes?’
‘All right.’ Clarendon nodded to Lucy and then left.
‘Who is that man, Franklin?’ said Lucy.
‘A colleague.’
‘There’s something about him puts a frost on my bones.’
‘He’s not very genial, no.’
‘I don’t know if you should be on your own with him, child.’
Bailey wondered if Lucy had heard rumours about the deaths at CalTech. ‘I’ve been on my own with him a hundred times. He’s harmless. Now, it’s time for you to leave. You’d better go out by the back entrance. I don’t want you ever to come back here and I don’t want you to say one word to that Englishman.’
‘Franklin, please…’
‘I don’t know you. You didn’t know my parents. You have probably come here to cheat some money out of me and you are trespassing just as much as Rackenham.’ Then he turned his back on her and started fiddling with the controls of the ultramigration accumulator. He would stay like this for ever if he had to, but after a short while he heard her give a long sigh and then depart, cumbersome as black cattle.
When the ultramigration accumulator was at full power, Bailey put his toy steam engine into his pocket and went upstairs to Clarendon’s laboratory, where the other physicist was in the process of disassembling his phasmatometer. ‘As you can see, I’ve added this extra pair of valve coils,’ he said when Bailey came in, as if they were already in the middle of conversation. ‘I think that might be causing the trouble. What do you think?’
‘Actually, Dr Clarendon, there’s something I’d like to show you in Dabney Hall. I believe it has some bearing on your difficulty.’
‘What is it?’
‘I’ll explain on the way. Then we can have a closer look at your valve coils when we get back.’
‘If you really think so,’ said Clarendon, and reluctantly put down his screwdriver. Together they left the Obediah Laboratories. This time, to Clarendon’s relief, there was no sign of Rackenham, Lucy or any other pursuer.
‘Do you know anything about Adriano Lavicini?’ said Bailey as they walked.
‘A little. I read that novel about him.’
‘The Sorceror of Venice. Yes. Then you remember that Rackenham proposes that the destruction of the Théâtre des Encornets was the result of the sabotage of the Teleportation Device by a stagehand. That hypothesis is implausible, most obviously because it gives no explanation for the unusual phenomena reported by members of the audience. The fall in temperature. The disagreeable smell. The tentacles. I’ve done a lot of research into Lavicini, and I believe I know what caused the Teleportation Accident. The truth is, it wasn’t an accident at all. The destruction of the Théâtre des Encornets was the express purpose of the Extraordinary Mechanism for the Almost Instantaneous Transport of Persons from Place to Place.’ They were at the main entrance of Dabney Hall now, and Clarendon made as if to go inside, but Bailey shook his head and led him around the corner to the utility staircase.
‘Why would Lavicini want all those people to die?’ said Clarendon. ‘And what has this got to do with the valve coils?’
‘You remember, of course, that the basis of my teleportation research is to delete a particle’s physical coordinates and replace them with new ones. Well, I once said to Adele, my assistant, “What’s the one thing in the world that can uproot almost anything?” She’s a very good assistant but she can be sentimental, and I could tell from the vapid expression on her face that the answer she had in mind was love, or something of that sort. That’s what it would be in the motion pictures. But it’s not love. Love does nothing. Love is only a type of anthropic cognitive unsoundness. What uproots things is violence. You must already understand that, Dr Clarendon. After all, a ghost could only be possible if a violent death caused some localised distortion to the physical laws of the universe. And it does. Unfortunately, not in the way you think. There is no such thing as a ghost. No one will ever build a working phasmatometer. All your research has been futile. If you were a better physicist perhaps you might not have wasted so many years.’
Clarendon looked taken aback. ‘But, Professor Bailey, I always had the impression…’
‘It was not the right time to break it to you. If you gave up your research, the State Department would have had no one at CalTech to bother but me, and that might have been inconvenient. Now, Lavicini knew no more of physics than Lucretius. But, like Lovecraft, he came to the truth by other means. This was Paris in the age of the Court of Miracles. And Lavicini’s temperament was an empiricist’s, not an artist’s. He’d worked as an inventor at the Venetian Arsenal. Theatre was just a diversion. He wanted to build a real teleportation device, just as much as I do. And he succeeded. Did you know that in 1684, five years after Lavicini was supposed to have been killed in the Teleportation Accident, he was reported to have been seen back in Venice?’ By now they were at the top of the utility staircase. Clarendon followed Bailey out on to the roof, where the Model T Ford was still parked at the edge. Beyond that, you could see the whole distribution of CalTech’s buildings, like the parts of the phasmatometer laid carefully out across Clarendon’s table.
‘What are we doing up here?’ said Clarendon.
Bailey opened the driver’s side door of the car. ‘Get inside,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘Get inside. You’ll see why.’
Clarendon did as he was told. Bailey shut the door after him, then went around to the other side of the car and got into the passenger’s seat.
‘Hurry up and shut the door,’ his father said.
The noise of the rain on the roof of the car was so loud that Bailey had to raise his voice to speak to his father. ‘I didn’t know they had storms like this in California.’
‘They have tornadoes here sometimes, son. Hail. Mudslides. It’s not all sunshine.’
The rain had started all at once, as if some part of the sky’s masonry had suddenly collapsed, and they’d been caught outside with no shelter near by except a few inadequate trees. Then his father had spotted the Model T Ford parked a short way up the slope, and they’d dropped their bicycles and sprinted over, gambling that they would find its doors unlocked.
‘What if the man who owns the car comes back?’ said Bailey. There was a folded roadmap of southern California at his feet and he saw guiltily that the water dripping off him had already soaked it through. He could smell that a big dog sometimes travelled in this car.
‘He won’t come back. You can’t drive in this rain.’
‘Do you remember that Model T we saw on the roof in that town in South Carolina that time? What was it called?’
‘Scarborough. I remember.’
He heard thunder, not far off. ‘What are we going to do now, Dad?’
That morning, beneath one of those glassy March skies with a few grey stormclouds like the smears of soot on the inside of a blown light bulb, they had finally arrived at Tiny Lustre. Five years it had taken them to bicycle from Boston to California; five years of doubling back and turning aside and looping around and hiding out; five years as a mad doodle on a map of the continent, a housefly exploring a sunlit ballroom, a western vector so faint it might as well have been a statistical accident; five years avoiding the agents of the Phenscots and the Catholic Church, and the bustles in which those agents might lurk; five years of hotels and flat tyres and De Rerum Natura; five years to get to this freethinkers’ colony not far from Temecula where they could hide in safety until the despotism of religion had been overthrown. Every few months his father had sent coded letters to Tiny Lustre to update its leaders on the progress of their clinamen, but of course he couldn’t ever reveal their current location in case the letters were intercepted and the code was broken, so he had received no news in return.
The colony was approached by a dirt road winding up through the pines. As they came near they had got down off their bicycles as they always did, and Bailey had realised almost with disbelief that this might be the last time they would perform this little ritual. Tiny Lustre was intended to be self-sufficient, so among the log cabins there were goat pens and chicken coops and vegetable patches. But all that seemed to be in a state of some neglect, and they couldn’t see a single human being. At the far end of the colony there was a big meeting hall with cracked clerestory windows, and they wondered if everyone might be assembled in there, but when they pushed open the door they saw only two tiny white rodents skittering away like backgammon dice between the benches. If he were a Pentecostal Christian, Bailey thought, he would probably assume that the Rapture had come. Except that the men and women of Tiny Lustre were all atheists. Could atheists have a sort of Rapture, too? Could the sheer heat of your scepticism be so great that you were converted instantaneously into gamma rays?
‘Perhaps they’re all swimming in the lake,’ his father said. ‘Hello?’ he shouted after that. ‘Is anyone here?’
They heard a noise behind them and they turned. An old man in dungarees stood there with a carrot in his hand as thin as a chisel. ‘You looking for Yoakum and the others?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘They’re gone.’ He bit the end off the carrot. ‘Hope you haven’t come far.’
‘What happened?’
‘No gossip behind other people’s backs,’ said the old man. ‘That’s a rule here.’ He looked around. ‘But I guess the rules don’t mean much any more. Well, the long and the short of it is, Yoakum was having relations with other men’s wives. Three of them at least. All came to light at once. No violence here, that’s another rule, so we just sent him away with his things. Week later, police came up here from Temecula and said they’d had a report we’d been keeping women and girls chained to trees and suchlike. Must have been Yoakum. They didn’t find anything — nothing to find — but they started clearing us all off. Said we didn’t have a right to farm this land. They never liked us down in town.’
‘We were coming to live here,’ Bailey’s father said.
‘You the ones been writing to Yoakum? In the special code?’
‘Yes.’
‘He talked about you. He couldn’t make head nor tail of that code most of the time, but he knew you were coming. Well, you can hang around here as long as you like. Can have your pick of the cabins. But the police ought to be back before long. They know I’m still here and they want me gone.’
‘In that case, we won’t stay. There’s another community like this in Ohio. Not as big as this one, but we can go there. Thank you for your help.’
So Bailey and his father had got back on their bicycles and gone back down to the road at the foot of the wooded slope. Then the rain had started and they’d found shelter in the Ford. ‘What are we going to do now?’ Bailey asked again.
‘We’ll go to the colony in Ohio, as I told the man. We’ll find our sanctuary there instead.’
‘How long will it take us to get there?’
‘I don’t know. We’ll have to take all the same precautions, of course. Remember that man we saw in San Jacinto: there’s no reason to think They’ve relaxed Their vigilance. What fallacy would that be?’
For Bailey not to answer his father’s question with the correct subheading from The Complete Taxonomy of Anthropic Cognitive Unsoundness was physically uncomfortable. But instead he said, ‘That’ll take years.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘I don’t want to do that, Dad. I want a life. I want to go to college.’
‘That’s not possible just now.’
‘I’m not going to Ohio with you.’
‘What else do you suggest we do? Take the train back to Boston? I haven’t protected you all this time so that They can do to you what They did to your mother.’
Thunder so loud that Bailey could almost see ripples in the air. ‘What did They do to her?’
‘You know it’s best not to dwell on that, son.’
‘You think she was a human sacrifice. You think They drained her blood in that chapel because she was going to leave Their religion.’
‘It’s best not to dwell on that.’
‘You’ve never said it right out, but that’s what you’ve always wanted me to think. But it might have been anything. It might have been an accident. Or she might have taken her own life.’
‘There’s no evidence for that,’ said his father.
‘Or you might have murdered her yourself.’
‘I know you’re disappointed about Tiny Lustre, son — I am too — but it isn’t rational to let your anger get the better of you.’
‘Is it rational to care more about your mother than about some woman in Mongolia? Is it rational to mourn your own mother’s death when so many others just like her die every hour of the day?’
‘As you know, I address this question at length in the third chapter of the Taxonomy, and it is my conclusion that—’
‘What about your father?’ said Bailey. ‘Is it rational to mourn your own father’s death? Or doesn’t it mean anything at all if he’s found dead in a car by the side of the road?’
‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about, Professor Bailey,’ said Clarendon. ‘My father is still alive. I thought we were talking about the Teleportation Accident.’
‘Yes. As I was saying. The Teleportation Accident was an act of human sacrifice. Just like the Aztecs used to practise. And Lucy’s grandparents on Hispaniola. And the Court of Miracles in Paris. And the Esoteric Order of Dagon in Innsmouth. Except that Lavicini made it work. He understood what violence can do. And if he’d been born in this century, he would have understood, as Wittgenstein did in the Tractatus, that “gravitational force” and “electric charge” and “Planck’s constant” and even “causation” are just the same as Dagon and Tezcatlipoca and Yahweh and Ryujin — patterns that men think they’ve seen, when the real pattern is far, far too complex for them to see, like a child with a crayon finding funny shapes in a logarithmic table. He was a brilliant man. And at the moment all those people died, he gained the power to appear and disappear anywhere he liked, as the devil himself can, according to the Bible. He was able to shift his own spatial coordinates so that he wasn’t crushed under the Théâtre des Encornets. My Teleportation Device will do the same with any object. You are giving far more help to the State Department now, Clarendon, and more to your country, than you ever could have with your phasmatometer. I had thought of using Lucy tonight but then you saw me with her and you might have caused difficulties when she was found.’
‘You don’t look very well, Professor Bailey. I think we should go back downstairs.’
‘There is void in things,’ Bailey said. He heard the squeak of a green wheelbarrow. ‘Have you seen it? I’ve seen it. There is void in things. Lucretius says so and I’ve seen it.’ He reached out.
‘What the devil are you doing, son?’
‘There is void in things!’ he began to shout. ‘There is void in things! There is void in things!’ To do it sitting side by side like this was awkward, and the Ford’s suspension wasn’t built for any kind of tumult inside the vehicle, and his father was trying to peel his fingers away from his throat, and Clarendon was batting impotently at his face like a moth trapped between the sashes of a window, but Bailey kept up a steady asphyxiant pressure, feeling the hyoid bone break obediently under his left thumb — and after that it was only seven or eight more seconds until the other man went limp and the struggle was over. Bailey sat back and rested for a while, watching a last bead of sweat run most of the way down his father’s ruddy forehead before it paused at the hummock of a swollen vein. Then he took his toy steam engine out of his pocket and drove it again and again into Clarendon’s torso until at last it broke through the physicist’s ribcage. He reached into the tunnel he had made, used a sort of brisk corkscrew motion to wrench Clarendon’s heart out of its cavity, and bit deeply into it, leaning forward over the warm corpse so that blood didn’t drip on to his trousers. To distract himself from the taste, he thought of Lucretius. ‘For it is clear that nothing could be crushed in without void, or broken or cleft in twain by cutting, nor admit moisture nor likewise spreading cold or piercing flame, whereby all things are brought to their end. And the more each thing keeps void within it, the more it is assailed to the heart by these thing and begins to totter.’
When he had finished, he spat out a last oyster of gristle on to the dashboard and wiped his mouth and glasses with Clarendon’s handkerchief. Then he got out of the car, descended the utility staircase, and went back to his laboratory to take some readings from the ultramigration accumulator. Tomorrow, he would ask Adele to run some more tests on the Teleportation Device. He already knew they would be successful. He’d seen it in his father’s eyes.
When the US military attacked Loeser’s house with poison gas, it was a short while after dawn and he was still in bed. He awoke to find his nostrils being savaged by an odour about a billion times worse than anything he had ever smelled in his life — a cacodemoniac swirl of rubber and garlic and dysentery and murder, perhaps not unlike what the audience at the Théâtre des Encornets began to detect just before the Teleportation Accident of 1679. Remembering something he’d read once about British soldiers and chlorine shells early in the last war, he lunged for a discarded cotton undershirt, folded it over twice, pulled his penis out of his pyjama bottoms, and pissed until the undershirt was saturated with urine. Then he held it tightly over his mouth as he ran through the sitting room and out of the house, still in his bare feet. He looked around, but he couldn’t see any bombers in the sky, and indeed on Palmetto Drive there was an old woman walking her cabbage-faced black pug as if nothing had happened. Cautiously he took the undershirt away from his face. The air out here was as glib as ever. So Loeser really had been the lone target. It was clear that President Roosevelt, as lazy as any other modern American, had decided to begin his vengeance on Germany with the citizen of that nation who happened to be most conveniently at hand.
When Woodkin answered the front door of Gorge’s mansion, he looked like he’d already been up and dressed for so many hours that just meeting his eye was enough to give Loeser a mild feeling of circadian vertigo. ‘Good morning, Mr Loeser.’
‘Have you gone into the war?’
‘The United States, you mean? Not yet, sir, although the Colonel believes it’s only a matter of time. Would you like to come in? Perhaps I could take that for you?’
Loeser realised he was still clutching the urinous wad of undershirt, as if he’d wanted to bring Gorge a nice gift and had opted for a bold alternative to the usual bottle of wine or bunch of flowers. On the way here he’d been intending to ask if he could hide in Gorge’s cellar, but instead he said, ‘Can you come over to my house? Something’s happened.’
‘Certainly, Mr Loeser.’
Even just outside the threshold, they couldn’t smell anything. Only once they were through the door did the horror make its presence known. ‘I think it’s poison gas,’ said Loeser, no longer quite convinced. ‘Methyl heptin carbonate or something.’
Woodkin wrinkled his nose. ‘You’ve had some very bad luck, sir. It’s a skunk.’
‘A skunk? Don’t be ridiculous. Skunks squirt about a teaspoon at a time. A skunk would have to be the size of an Indian elephant to make a stink like this.’
‘Not in every case. When a skunk dies and begins to decompose, its glands will sometimes swell up with microbial gas and then explode. I’ve only encountered it once before, but one doesn’t readily forget the smell.’
‘I may be untidy but I think I would have noticed if a skunk had died in my wardrobe.’
‘A house like this has more voids than you realise. It might have gotten under the floor. Or into the walls.’
Loeser thought of his ghost. ‘Or into the roof?’ he said.
‘Yes, sir. I did once have a raccoon that established a pied-à-terre in my roof space.’
‘What can I do about it?’
‘I’ll have someone sent over. We’ll have to hope the body of the skunk is accessible. In many cases, there isn’t any way to get to the animal without demolishing part of the house. Until then, I suggest you put out bowls of tomato juice and baking soda to absorb the smell. I’m afraid you may find that it has already worked its way into your belongings.’
Loeser had rather hoped that a prelate as senior as Woodkin in the religion of cleanliness might have the power to drive out odour by verbal incantation alone. ‘So all my clothes are going to smell permanently of putrid skunk venom?’
‘It could be worse, Mr Loeser. There exists a rare genetic disease called—’
‘But I don’t have time to deal with this now! The first performance is tonight!’
Conspicuous not far from where they now stood was the contusion on the wall from the day in September when Loeser had hurled a German–English dictionary across the room upon discovering from the Los Angeles Herald that Eric Goatloft, director of Scars of Desire, was planning to film an adaptation of Rupert Rackenham’s The Sorceror of Venice, with Ruth Hussey as Princess Anne Elisabeth, Tyrone Power as Adriano Lavicini, Charles Coburn as Auguste de Gorge and Gene Lockhart as Louis XIV. At the time he left Berlin, Loeser had been determined that he would put on The Teleportation Accident as soon as he got back; even seven years later, and even after all the success of Rackenham’s worthless novel, he still felt that Lavicini’s story belonged to him, and there was no way he would allow himself to be pipped to its first dramatic rendering by Mr Don’t Slip into the Dark. So he telephoned Millikan and demanded that the 1940 Christmas play at the Gorge Auditorium should not be The Christmas Carol as planned but instead the world première of his own magnum opus. Millikan told him that the students and faculty of the Institute would prefer to see something appropriate to the season. Loeser made an ultimatum, which they both knew was at best a penultimatum or an antepenultimatum. Negotiations bumped along, and at last it was agreed. This year, the California Institute of Technology Players would present a heart-warming historical fable by writer-director Egon Loeser entitled The Christmas Teleportation Accident.
Loeser was annoyed by that compromise, but he was hardly surprised. After all, in Pasadena, motorised sleighs were rolling along the streets like tanks, men in Santa Claus costumes were standing guard on corners like infantry, and carols were blaring from loudspeakers like patriotic anthems. As far as he could tell, Christmas here was equivalent to a sort of martial law. Perhaps he was lucky not to have any elves billeted in his home.
With the first performance of The Christmas Teleportation Accident, Loeser was — yes — painting the devil on the wall. In October, on the way to a party at the Muttons’, he’d mentioned the play to Bailey, and it had turned out that Bailey was already acquainted with Lavicini’s story from The Sorceror of Venice. In fact, the physicist had gone so far as to ask if he could help with the production — the Obediah Laboratories, he said, were full of devices that could very easily be adapted as novel theatrical effects. And although Loeser had decided not to attempt to replicate the mechanical Teleportation Device that had sexually upgraded Klugweil back in Berlin, it was true that in all the years he’d worked on Lavicini he had never had a clear idea of how he could convey the climactic destruction of the Théâtre des Encornets. So he had told Bailey he was welcome to help. And Bailey had now spent over a week up on ladders and gantries in the Gorge Auditorium, installing his experimental stagecraft prototype, but he still hadn’t quite finished, and Loeser still didn’t know what it actually did. Meanwhile, his cast this year were on the brink of mutiny.
So he shouldn’t have had anything on his mind except how to make sure tonight’s première wasn’t a total catastrophe. After Woodkin left, though, all Loeser could think about was his ghost. If those noises over his head at night had been no more than a mustelid squatter, then half the reason to believe in her was gone. Perhaps the late Dr Clarendon had been right after all. But then Loeser had no explanation left for the girlish objets trouvés that had continued to appear in his house. That antique wooden chest was like a forensic evidence box maintained by some aberrant police detective to investigate a sex crime that might never take place. Where did all its contents come from? How could so much just materialise? It was almost as if…
He telephoned Adele.
‘Egon, I haven’t even had breakfast yet. If you’re about to tell me you’ve rewritten the last scene again, then you will have to find an understudy.’ He heard her light a cigarette. In The Christmas Teleportation Accident, Adele had the part of the doomed ballerina (who was not, on this account, Princess Anne Elisabeth in disguise).
‘You want to fuck me.’
‘What?’
‘You want to fuck me,’ Loeser repeated. ‘You don’t want to admit it to yourself, but I can prove it. You’re still running your own experiments on the Teleportation Device, aren’t you? Nocturnal experiments that Bailey doesn’t know about? Well, I know what you’ve been putting in the chamber. Your little romantic tributes. Stockings and brassieres and lipsticks and handkerchiefs and so on.’ Adele choked on smoke and Loeser knew he was right. ‘You told me you can’t control where the objects go, because you can’t control your heart, and the teleportation device runs on love. But it doesn’t run on love. It runs on desire. And, unconsciously, you want to fuck me, so you’ve been sending everything straight here. You might think you’re in love with Bailey — chaste and unrequited — but that’s classic Freudian displacement. My parents were psychiatrists, remember? I know about this stuff. “Love is the foolish overestimation of the minimal difference between one sexual object and another.” You told me that once. There’s more than a minimal difference between Bailey and me, but we’re the same in some ways. Each of us is an isolated genius who wants to build a teleportation device. You’ve just got confused between us. He’s your metonym for me. At first I wasn’t even sure I believed that Bailey’s Teleportation Device worked. But now I know I was right to follow you all the way to America!’
‘That is irredeemable nonsense,’ said Adele.
‘Then how do you explain all these intimacies of yours I still have in my house? How else could I possibly know what you put in the chamber?’
‘You’ve just made a good guess. Perhaps you’ve been taking some sort of evening class in feminine psychology.’
She was more correct than she knew, thought Loeser, but Dames! And how to Lay them had not been any help in this particular case. From a long way off he thought he heard laughter, but out on Palmetto Drive nothing stirred. Ziesel had once told him about the heat death of the universe, in trillions of years’ time, when all thermodynamic free energy would have dissipated and so there would never again be motion or life: quite often west Pasadena felt like that. Millikan, apparently, had argued that cosmic rays were the ‘birth cries’ of new atoms being created all the time by God to delay this heat death, but Loeser found it hard to believe that God was forever slapping the face of the universe like a policeman trying to stop a drunk from falling asleep. ‘Let’s have dinner after the performance tonight,’ he said.
‘And I suppose if I don’t sleep with you, you’ll tell the Professor I’ve been defiling his Teleportation Device. You’re as bad as Drabsfarben.’
Loeser frowned. ‘What do you mean? What has any of this got to do with Jascha?’
‘You understand perfectly well what I mean. I should have guessed you’d copy his methods before too long.’
‘Drabsfarben is trying to seduce you?’
‘Don’t play ignorant. You know all about Drabsfarben and the Professor. What about those parties in the Palisades?’
‘I just take Bailey to the Muttons’ house sometimes because Dolores Mutton told me to,’ said Loeser. ‘On my parents’ graves, if there’s some intrigue afoot there, I’m not part of it. Come on, give me the rest. Is this why you’ve been so bad tempered in all the rehearsals this year?’
‘You really don’t already know?’
‘Adele, I smoked cigarettes for five years before I learned to inhale properly. I am not always’ — he reached for the American phrase — ‘ “quick in the uptake”.’
‘Drabsfarben’s blackmailing the Professor,’ said Adele.
‘What?’
‘He claims to know some secret about the Professor’s past. He says if he tells everyone, the Professor will be ruined. But he’s bluffing. The Professor’s never lied about his past. Why would he? Honestly, Egon, I can’t bear the thought that I tried to get Drabsfarben to go to bed with me once. Berlin seems like somebody else’s life now.’
To Loeser it didn’t feel as if any time had passed at all. ‘Adele, as it happens, I’m getting blackmailed by Drabsfarben myself. That’s what I meant about Dolores Mutton. He’s obviously a very prolific extortionist; a Balzac of the form. Can I please emphasise that I’m not about to use the same tactics to get you into bed?’
‘Let’s see what happens later when you’re drunk.’
‘Why doesn’t Bailey just go to the police about Drabsfarben?’
‘I keep telling him to. But he refuses to involve them.’
‘And what does Drabsfarben want from Bailey?’
‘I don’t know. The Professor won’t tell me.’
‘You don’t have any idea?’
Adele hesitated. ‘He did once mention something about Russia.’
‘Russia?’
‘Look, Egon, you specifically forbade me from going into the lab today because you said I had to be relaxed for the first night. This conversation has not been very relaxing. I’ll see you backstage. I hope you forget about all this by then.’ She hung up, and Loeser felt the last five years of his life begin to disrobe at last.
‘Couldn’t this have waited?’ said Dolores Mutton a few hours later as she sat down opposite Loeser on a red velvet banquette in the bar of the Chateau Marmont. He’d telephoned to demand a meeting in private, and since her husband was at home she’d reluctantly agreed to drive out as far as Hollywood. ‘Stent and I are coming to your play later. And what’s that smell?’
‘Death,’ said Loeser. He took a sip of his beer. ‘Is Drabsfarben a spy?’
Like a flock of blackbirds just before it knew which way to fly, the decision not yet made but already scribbled in its wings, Dolores Mutton’s face, in the three or four seconds that followed, seemed to disclose the whole polyphasic transit of her deliberations; but Loeser knew that it was only when you were in love with a woman, or at least had once been in love with her, that you could look up and follow the transit, read the wings, join the flight. And although Loeser would have mortgaged his bone marrow to see Dolores Mutton naked just once, he wasn’t in love with her, so he didn’t anticipate that she was about to call over a waiter, ask for a double vodka, wait patiently for it to arrive, and drink most of it down before replying: ‘Whenever I used to practise what I’d say when someone finally came out and asked me that, I used to assume it would be Stent. Or someone from the FBI. Or someone who mattered. I never guessed it would be somebody like you. I didn’t rehearse for this. And I’m trying to remind myself now why I’m supposed to say what I’m supposed to say. But this morning I feel closely comparable to somebody who doesn’t give a damn.’ She grimaced as if she’d only just noticed the taste of the alcohol. ‘You know, it’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when I really believed in it all. Years ago, back in New York, when they first got their hooks into me. I read Capital to the end — I don’t even think Bill Foster read Capital to the end! And I was happy to help, although I was never their favourite because I wasn’t one of those girls who’d put on lipstick and screw some diplomat for the good of the Party. Then I met Stent and we got married and we moved out here. I forgot all about it. Until one day in thirty-four Drabsfarben came to see me and said he’d been told I was a loyal friend of the Communist International.’
Loeser had always thought that was a song. He nodded.
‘At first, he just wanted Stent to put his name on some petitions. Then there were the letters to the newspapers. Then we had to go on that trip to Moscow and Stent had to write those articles. And meanwhile the novels all had to be anti-capitalist, anti-bourgeois, anti-government. I didn’t really mind any of that. It still felt like doing good, sometimes. But then Drabsfarben wanted us to help out more directly. He had people coming to California. Gugelhupf was the first. Do you think I ever wanted to live in that ridiculous glass box? Maybe in Berlin it’s a political gesture to build a house like that. Here, it’s no different from building a Gothic chateau or a Tiki hut or whatever the hell else. Except the house builders here don’t know what to do with the sort of blueprint you get from Gugelhupf, so not a damn thing fits together and there are nails sticking out of everything. And half the time it’s too hot to think! But Drabsfarben said we had to have Gugelhupf build us a house because it was the easiest way to get him set up in California. They needed him here. I still don’t know why. And how did that asshole thank us? He rehashed an old design. Then Drabsfarben made me set up the Cultural Solidarity Committee as a cover. We started having the parties. I hate those parties. I always hated parties. I never threw a party in my life before Drabsfarben told me to. Do you know what I like doing at night? I like cooking dinner with my husband and then making love on the beach. But Drabsfarben makes me fill our house with strangers twice a week so he can catch them in his lobster trap. Every year, it gets worse. Every year, Drabsfarben wants more.’
Loeser remembered that conversation he’d misunderstood five years ago at the Muttons’ party. One is always wrong, he thought now, always, always wrong about every single thing; if some young cousin was ever stupid enough to ask him for advice about life, that was all he would be able to tell them. The truth ran back and forth over your head at night but you never saw so much as the colour of its fur. ‘And what does your husband think about all this?’ he said.
‘Stent? He’s never had any idea! He just likes how I take an interest in his work. He likes how I always have suggestions and corrections. He says I’m the best editor a writer ever had.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t care what happens to me any more. I don’t care if I get locked up for spying. I don’t even care if Drabsfarben shoots me and dumps my body in the ocean. But Stent can’t know. I love that man more than anything in the world. I love that man so much it makes me grind my teeth at night. If he found out I’d been fooling him for our entire marriage … That’s why I can’t stop. If I stop doing what Drabsfarben says, he’ll make sure Stent finds out about everything I already did. You know, I met Sinclair Lewis’s wife once. She was in the same hole as me. But in the end she went to the FBI. I guess I’m not that brave.’
‘What does Jascha want with Bailey?’
‘When the NKVD found out Bailey was working on teleportation, they told Drabsfarben they wanted Bailey to defect. That was supposed to be his top priority from then on. But Drabsfarben only really knew artists and writers and musicians and architects. Back then, he didn’t have a connection to CalTech. He didn’t even have a connection to a connection. Then we saw you going to dinner at Gorge’s house. Gorge bought himself a lot of juice at CalTech with that million dollars for the theatre. Drabsfarben thought you might be useful one day.’
Ever since he noticed Dolores Mutton, the barman across the room had been polishing the same side of the same glass in ever smaller and more rapid circles. ‘So that was why you called me afterwards and took back all your threats and offered me that job,’ said Loeser.
‘Yes. And in the long run, it worked out nicely. Drabsfarben’s plans almost always do. We put on a little pressure and you brought Bailey right to us. The NKVD were thrilled. But after about another year, Drabsfarben decided Bailey wasn’t going to defect voluntarily. So he tried blackmail.’
‘Adele told me that. What’s this secret about Bailey’s past?’
‘Maybe he’s a bootlegger from North Dakota? I don’t know. Drabsfarben hasn’t told me. But that’s not all Drabsfarben knows. He has something else on Bailey. Something much bigger. Something so big he says it’s too dangerous even to bring into play right now. In any case, blackmail hasn’t worked either. And Drabsfarben’s getting worried. The NKVD have taken the Comintern apart, and they see Drabsfarben as a Comintern man all the way through. That means he has to watch his back. He goes out in public now less and less. Did you hear what happened to Willi Münzenberg?’
‘Who is that?’
‘Didn’t you know him in Berlin? He came up in the Comintern at the same time as Drabsfarben. They worked together for years. They used to leave parcels for each other at some second-hand bookstore.’
‘Luni’s!’
‘I don’t know. But a couple of months ago Münzenberg was found hanging from a tree outside an internment camp near Lyons. Drabsfarben thinks the same thing could happen to him. He thinks the only way he can save himself now is to get Bailey to Moscow. I just hope he fails.’
‘So do I! Bailey’s supposed to be running my Teleportation Accident tonight.’ Loeser finished his beer. ‘Are you still going to pay me the thirty dollars every month?’ he said.
‘No. If the Cultural Solidarity Committee carries on, I want it to do some honest good for honest exiles.’
‘Oh. All right, well, one last question: have you really seen Jascha kill someone?’ For the first time Loeser wondered if Drabsfarben might have had something to do with the deaths at CalTech.
‘Maybe I was just saying that to scare you. Either way, though, if you breathe a word about any of this to anyone, you’ll have a hell of a lot more to worry about than those forged cheques.’
‘You needn’t worry, Mrs Mutton. I won’t tell anyone. Whom would I tell?’
The answer, of course, was Blimk. He told Blimk. After Dolores Mutton left him alone in the bar of the Chateau Marmont, Loeser paid the bill, walked down to the shop where he still spent most of his afternoons, and repeated every sensational detail.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more persuasive demonstration of why you shouldn’t get involved in politics,’ Loeser concluded.
‘I feel sorry for the lady,’ said Blimk, who had not made any comment on Loeser’s odour, perhaps because, by the standards of the shop’s regular customers, it was not memorably unpleasant.
‘I shouldn’t still be scared of her, but I am.’
‘So you want a number for my buddy in Washington?’
‘Your Lovecraft man at the Department of State? Why?’
‘Probably easier than calling the FBI out of the blue.’
‘Why would I want to call the FBI?’
‘Tell ’em what’s going on in the Palisades.’
‘I’m not telling anyone about this except you. If getting Bailey to Moscow is really Drabsfarben’s last chance to save himself, then there’s nothing more he can make me do for him now. I don’t have to worry about it any more. I can just sit back and watch what happens.’
‘But he’s a commie spy. Probably wants to bring the whole country down.’
‘I thought you weren’t political.’
‘I ain’t, but a fella’s got some responsibilities to the place he lives.’
‘Not me,’ said Loeser. ‘I am what is sometimes termed a rootless cosmopolitan. I had no responsibilities to Berlin and I certainly have no responsibilities to Los Angeles. Anyway, so what if Drabsfarben does bring the country down? What would anyone mourn? Jell-O salads with mayonnaise?’
‘You been here five years and you’re still pretending you hate this place? Five years and you’re still worried about what your buddies from back home would say if they heard you admit you kinda liked it?’
Blimk had never spoken so sharply to him before. ‘Look, I read an article in The Nation last year by some English writer,’ Loeser declared, ‘where he said, “If I had to choose between betraying my country” — well, not that this is my country — but anyway, “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend” — well, not that Drabsfarben is my friend — still, “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should …” — well, I can’t remember exactly how it ended, but the point was … until you’ve seen Dolores Mutton in a red dress you can’t comprehend the position I’m in.’
‘You think it won’t make any difference to you if the commies get this teleportation fella? You ain’t read about all these deals Hitler and Stalin keep making?’
‘I try not to pay attention to any of that.’
Blimk put down his cup of coffee. ‘Get out of my store.’
‘What?’
‘I might not love my country like I ought to, but I like it okay, and I think it’s been nicer to you than you deserve.’
‘Would you still like your country so much if it took your store away?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Have any more of those men from the Traffic Commission come by recently?’
‘So what if they have?’
Loeser was about to tell Blimk all about the elevated streetcar terminal, but he knew the information was too important to give up in haste. ‘I just mean your opinion might change one day.’
‘I said get out of my store. Out.’
Loeser decided he just did not have the inner faculties to resolve a quarrel with his best friend on the same day as the première of The Christmas Teleportation Accident; but he couldn’t go straight to the Gorge Auditorium, because he’d always taken a sort of Berkeleian idealist approach to first nights, believing that problems didn’t really start to multiply until the director was there to deal with them; and he didn’t want to go home because of the skunk bomb. So instead he sat in a drugstore on the edge of Elysian Park long enough to arrive at CalTech with only about an hour to spare, no more than was sufficient to give Bailey’s new theatrical effect the proper test run it had been awaiting for so long. Passing the Obediah Laboratories on his way to the Gorge Auditorium, however, Loeser was dismayed to see Bailey himself going inside. He pursued the physicist upstairs to room 11, too impatient to knock.
‘Professor Bailey? I’m sorry to interrupt, but we really both ought to be at the theatre by now.’
‘Just a minute, Mr Loeser.’ Bailey was already bent over the controls of the ultramarine accomplishment or whatever it was called. Loeser sighed and looked around the room. On a desk nearby was Bailey’s toy steam engine, and beneath it Loeser noticed a slim white book with a familiar yellow illustration of a row of shacks: The Shadow Over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft.
‘I had no idea you were a Lovecraft aficionado, Professor!’ said Loeser.
‘What?’ Bailey looked up from his machine, and then an expression of displeasure passed across his face as he saw the novella in Loeser’s hand. ‘Would you mind putting that back, please?’
Thumbing through the book, Loeser discovered that Bailey had even annotated some of the pages in pencil. He’d never seen such tiny knotted handwriting. ‘I should introduce you to …’ He was about to say ‘my friend Blimk’, but stopped himself ruefully. ‘You know the whole story of Lavicini, don’t you?’ he said instead. ‘Not just what Rackenham put in his travesty?’
‘Yes.’
‘The tentacles and the smell and so on. Doesn’t it seem to you sometimes as if Lovecraft could have written the story of the Teleportation Accident?’
‘I can’t say I’ve noticed any commonalities,’ said Bailey. ‘Now, Mr Loeser, I’ve just come from the theatre and of course I shall be rushing back directly, but if you’ll excuse me I do need a short while longer to get this experiment running.’
Loeser put down the book. ‘It’s the first night! Why are you running an experiment now?’
‘I promise it won’t distract me from tonight’s Teleportation Accident. But I think Adele and the others were very anxious to see you. They didn’t seem to know what to do about Lavicini.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, I assumed you knew — there’s been some sort of problem with your leading man. I didn’t catch all the details.’
In Berlin, from the beginning of his career, Loeser had observed that even among the most pugnacious of the New Expressionists a degree of nervousness was to be expected before any first night, but the atmosphere he found backstage at the Gorge Auditorium suggested a cast and crew awaiting the audience like sinners an apocalyptic judgement. Then Adele rushed up to him. ‘Egon, you idiot, where have you been? We’ve been calling your house for three hours! And what’s that smell?’
‘I wasn’t at my house. Forget about the smell. Tell me what’s happened.’
‘Dick’s in hospital.’
‘What?’
‘There was an accident. He was just walking along near that bakery on Lake Avenue and a car swerved to avoid a little girl running across the road—’
‘God in heaven, Dick’s been hit by a car?’
‘No, the car hit the bakery and it knocked down that big papier-mâché cupcake and the cupcake rolled straight into Dick. He’s got a concussion and they won’t let him leave until tomorrow morning. Who’s going to play Lavicini?’ Loeser thought of the time Hecht had put on a ‘performance’ of The Summoning of Everyman, which had consisted of informing the audience half an hour after the play had been due to start that the lead actor had drowned in a well (false) and that their tickets would not be refunded (true). ‘I thought maybe we could ask Rackenham,’ added Adele.
‘He wouldn’t know any of the script.’
‘But he’s so charming it almost wouldn’t matter.’
‘Absolutely not.’ Loeser straightened up to his full height. ‘I’ll have to play Lavicini.’
‘Oh, Egon, no!’
‘Well, who else? I don’t think we’re about to compromise on Ziesel. I’ll just need a last look through the script. Tell everyone not to worry. By the way, I want to return something you lent me.’ Loeser took from his pocket the pair of pearl-handled nail scissors that he’d brought with him from his house and held them out to Adele with a smug flourish.
‘Those don’t belong to me.’
‘Yes, they do.’
‘I’ve never seen them before.’
And as crucial as it was that Adele should be lying to him about this, it did look as if she were telling the truth. Discouraged, Loeser put down the nail scissors on the prop table and let her hurry away to put on her make-up. Half an hour later, he emerged from a dressing room in a costume that felt a bit dejected by the absence of Dick’s big surfer’s shoulders but was otherwise not too bad a fit. Hunched in a nearby corner, Mrs Jones, who played Montand in male drag, was repeating her three lines to herself over and over again with such heavy emphasis that she seemed to wish to exclude the possibility of any other grammatically valid sentence ever being formulated in English by anyone. Peering around the side of the front curtain at stage right, Loeser observed that the audience were already taking their seats. The Muttons had joined the Millikans for cocktails at the Athenaeum Club before the show, and now all four sat together in the front row — along with Jascha Drabsfarben. As if he stood before a favourite painting after consulting for the first time an essay on its symbolism, Loeser tried to find in the familiar features of Drabsfarben’s face all that he had now learned about his old acquaintance. But the spy still looked, to Loeser, like a composer.
Further back, Gould, Hecht, and Wurtzel passed back and forth a bag of peanuts. And even Plumridge was here with his wife. Loeser couldn’t see Rackenham or Gorge, but he did see Woodkin, who was saying something to a girl next to him who caught Loeser’s attention immediately. She was around twenty-two or twenty-three, with shiny hair the reddish-brown of a rooster’s hackles and dark, narrow eyes, and she wore an expression of such cold, fathomless, authoritative boredom that if you happened to catch sight of it at a public event like this one, you would not just feel stupid for enjoying what she was not enjoying, but also, somehow, ugly and culpable. Loeser couldn’t look away, until he remembered that in only a short while he was actually going to have to go out on stage in front of her.
Loeser didn’t feel nervous, though. He was Lavicini. He always had been. He could already see the lights of the Arsenal reflecting off the lagoon. Perhaps he wouldn’t even let Dick reclaim the role for the remaining four performances. There was still a short while before the curtain went up, so he went looking for Bailey, and soon found him talking to Adele next to the prop table.
‘Is everything ready for the Teleportation Accident, Professor?’
‘Indeed it is,’ said Bailey.
‘You’re sure? We haven’t had a chance to test it.’
‘You must trust the Professor, Egon,’ said Adele.
‘Can you describe it to me, at least?’
‘Well, since there are only four people on stage at the time, but Lavicini kills twenty-five people and a cat, I thought the best way to represent—’
‘ “Kills”?’
‘Pardon me?’
‘You said Lavicini kills twenty-five people. Lavicini doesn’t kill anyone. The Teleportation Device goes wrong and twenty-five people die as a result. That’s why it’s called the Teleportation Accident.’
‘Oh, yes, of course,’ said Bailey. ‘I misspoke.’
‘I don’t mean to be pedantic but it’s just that if Lavicini destroyed the Théâtre des Encornets deliberately’ — Loeser coughed — ‘it would be … it would be a very different play.’
That cough, rather like a death rattle, was the faint and involuntary laryngeal expression of a vast and imperative internal crisis, because it was just at that moment that Loeser made a deduction about Bailey — making this deduction as a sort of breech birth, upside down, so that somehow he had the conclusions in his forceps before he could count off the premises — realising, all at once, that Bailey really did think Lavicini had destroyed the Théâtre des Encornets deliberately; that Bailey planned to do much the same to the Gorge Auditorium; that Bailey must have killed Marsh and Clarendon and Pelton and all those others — and remembering only afterwards so many separate facts that he already knew but had never put together: that the State Department were working with Bailey on new weapons; that Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, thought everything Lovecraft wrote was true; that The Shadow Over Innsmouth was about human sacrifice; that Bailey had always seemed to know a lot more details about Adriano Lavicini than Rackenham had bothered to put in The Sorceror of Venice; that no one knew for certain which mysterious force was supposed to power the Teleportation Device; that Drabsfarben cherished some secret about Bailey too big and dangerous, somehow, to exploit for blackmail; and even that there had been a certain piscine calm to Bailey’s expression when Marsh’s body had tumbled out of the storage cupboard in the basement of the Obediah Laboratories on that day in 1938.
‘Excuse me for a moment, Professor,’ said Loeser. Then he turned and walked as fast as he could to the costume rails, where Ziesel, who had been promoted this year from sound and lighting technician to stage manager, stood with a clipboard. Loeser didn’t know if he could apprehend Bailey on his own, but Ziesel had bulk. ‘Come with me,’ he said.
‘I think we might have lost one of the carnival masks,’ said Ziesel.
‘Come with me right away,’ Loeser repeated. So Ziesel followed him back to the prop table — where Bailey and Adele were no longer waiting.
Loeser looked around. Dismissing an unhelpful recollection of the time Rackenham had taken Adele away from him at the corset factory, he was about to begin a search for the pair. But then he realised what must have happened.
Bailey knew that he knew.
Loeser’s cough alone couldn’t have been enough to betray him, but something in his eyes, or something in his voice, or just something in the psychic torsion of the space between them must have told Bailey that Loeser had finally worked it all out.
‘Fire!’ Loeser shouted. No one noticed. ‘Fire!’ he shouted again, and this time a couple of student stagehands turned to look at him. ‘Fire! There’s a fire! There’s a huge, raging fire!’
‘Egon, what in heaven’s name are you doing?’ said Ziesel.
Loeser ran past the flats to the curtain and pushed through it to the stage. There was some confused applause. ‘Fire!’ he shouted. No one moved. ‘Fire! Fire! Fire! Feuer! Fire! Get out if you value your lives!’ And Stent Mutton was the first one to rise.
Running back into the wings, he almost collided with Slate. ‘Make sure everyone gets out,’ he said to the janitor. ‘Everyone!’
‘Where’s the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the—’
‘It doesn’t matter. Just do as I say.’
Backstage, Loeser found Ziesel again. ‘If your stage fright was really that bad, Egon, you could just have—’ began Ziesel before Loeser grabbed his arm and pulled him towards an exit. At a creditable pace they sprinted together across the lawn to the Obediah Laboratories, and then up the stairs to room 11. Loeser pushed open the door.
‘No further, please, Mr Loeser,’ said Bailey. With one hand he covered his assistant’s mouth to stop her screaming, and with the other he held the pearl-handled nail scissors to her carotid artery, the two blades hinged halfway open like a drafting compass ready to plot a small circle on the pale plane of her neck. Behind him, the heavy steel door of the teleportation chamber was wide open, and the ultrasonic accordionist was making a noise like a portable vacuum cleaner. Loeser thought he could feel a static itch in the hairs on his arms.
‘We’ve evacuated the theatre,’ said Loeser. ‘I don’t know what your “novel theatrical effect” really was, but it won’t hurt anyone now.’
‘Then Miss Hister will have to be the sole subject of this experiment,’ said Bailey. ‘There is void in things. Remember that, Mr Loeser, whatever happens. There is void in things. Cross this country in a wheelbarrow and you will see it.’ Unsteadily, as if practising some awkward new dance step with a reluctant partner, he began to pull Adele backwards towards the teleportation chamber. Loeser’s hands were both fists of panic but he didn’t know what else to do except stand there next to Ziesel and watch. He’d known Adele for twelve years, longer than anyone on this continent, and she was going to be made a human sacrifice right in front of him.
Then Bailey, not seeing where he was going, knocked the back of his thigh on the edge of a desk. And he relaxed his grip on Adele for an instant, but it wasn’t quite enough for her to get free — until she lunged sideways, grabbed the toy steam engine from the desk where Loeser had put it down earlier, and jammed it backwards into Bailey’s left eye.
Bailey gave a surprisingly feminine scream and thrust the nail scissors into Adele’s flank. ‘Adele!’ Loeser shouted. Which was when Ziesel bowed his head, charged forward like a rugby player, and propelled Bailey backwards into the teleportation chamber.
‘Dieter, don’t let him close the door,’ cried Adele through tears of pain. ‘There’s a time lock! You’ll be trapped in there with him!’
So Loeser, galvanised at last, made his own dash forward. But just as his fingertips brushed the handle, the door of the teleportation chamber swung shut with a terminal clunk. With one hand, Ziesel had been trying to wrench the nail scissors out of Bailey’s grasp. With the other, he’d locked himself inside.
Loeser punched the door in frustration and then dropped to his knees to attend to Adele, who lay curled on her side. The twin wounds from the nail scissors, like bite marks from a vampire bat, didn’t look especially deep, and Loeser was grateful that he’d designed Adele’s ballerina costume in tough Neo-Expressionist stingray leather instead of the more traditional silk. Near by lay the toy steam engine, its tinplate pilot slick with optical gore.
‘I’ll be all right,’ said Adele. ‘But we have to save Dieter.’
Loeser pressed his ear to the steel door for a moment, but he could hear nothing from the other side. ‘How can we get into the chamber?’
‘I don’t know. Run. Find someone.’
Loeser kissed her on the lips for the second time in his life and then did as he was told. Outside, a crowd was milling around by the doors of the Gorge Auditorium. Mrs Jones, still in costume, stood hugging a purposeless fire extinguisher. He rushed up to the Muttons.
‘Egon, what in the world is going on?’ said Stent Mutton.
‘We need help. We don’t know what to do.’
When Loeser returned to room 11 with the Muttons, Adele was sitting up against the wall with her hand pressed against her punctures. She explained to the Muttons about Ziesel and the time lock.
‘Can’t we just break the mechanism somehow?’ said Stent Mutton.
‘Even if we could, it’s on the inside of the door,’ said Adele.
‘Disconnect it from Bailey’s device?’ said Loeser.
‘The timer’s already started — that won’t do anything.’
‘Then we need one of those oxya-such-and-such cutting torches,’ said Mutton. ‘Like my bank robbers used in Silent Alarm.’
‘Dr Pelton used to have one of those for taking apart his old rocket prototypes,’ said Adele.
‘Where would it be now?’
‘I don’t know. They cleared out his lab after he … After the Professor…’
‘We’ll split up and search,’ said Mutton.
So Loeser went down to the basement, but he tried every storage locker that wasn’t locked, even Marsh’s erstwhile tomb, without success. Upstairs, he found Mutton returning from a similarly fruitless search of the nearby laboratories.
‘There must be some other way.’
‘I know how to to to get in.’
Loeser turned: it was Slate.
Hobbling as fast as he could, the janitor led Loeser along the corridor, up a flight of stairs, and along another corridor, where there was a lavatory with a padlock on the door and a sign that said ‘Out of Order’. Loeser realised that they must be directly above room 11. With a key from the loop on his belt, Slate got them into the lavatory, in which Loeser observed an extendable metal ladder leaning against the wall and a neat square gap in the floor about two feet on each side. Then Slate got down on his hands and knees, reached down into the hole, and hauled up what Loeser recognised from its grey rubberised panels as a section of the teleportation chamber’s ceiling. Evidently not every inch of the chamber had really been lined with lead.
Frightened, Loeser peered down into the room below. Ziesel lay on his back next to the platform, his head in a halo of blood, his eyes wide open, nail scissors still protruding from his neck. The struggle had probably ended within a few seconds of the door shutting.
Bailey, however, was gone.
With no one to rescue and no one to apprehend, Loeser turned back to Slate. ‘Did you set all this up yourself?’ he said, gesturing at the hole and the ladder.
Slate nodded.
‘Why? Why would you want to go down into there while the time lock is on?’
Slate didn’t reply, but instead turned and went out of the lavatory. Loeser followed him back down two flights of stairs to the basement, where Slate unlocked a storage locker in a far corner with another key from the loop of his belt. Then, with an oddly showmanlike sweep of his hand, he stepped aside.
Here, Loeser saw, was a strange cousin of the antique wooden chest in his own house, except that it less resembled a police evidence box than the collection of holy relics in some decrepit Black Sea chapel. Slate had installed six little wooden shelves inside the storage locker, and arranged carefully on those shelves were the same varieties of private female oddments that Loeser himself had been puzzling over for four years: knickers, stockings, garter belts, brassieres, hairclips, lipsticks, eyebrow pencils, nail files, perfume bottles, handkerchiefs, sleep masks. No jewellery, though.
‘Do these all belong to Adele?’ he said.
Slate nodded.
‘She puts them in the teleportation chamber, and then you climb down the ladder and steal them and bring them back here?’
Slate nodded.
‘Are you in love with her?’
Slate looked at his feet.
‘My sympathies,’ said Loeser. Leaving the janitor to his Wunderkammer, he went back up to room 11, where Dolores Mutton was with Adele. ‘Stent’s gone to find a stretcher,’ she said.
‘Where’s the Professor?’ said Adele.
‘Gone,’ said Loeser. ‘Ziesel’s dead, but Bailey’s gone.’
‘How?’ said Dolores Mutton. ‘Was there another way out of that closet or whatever the hell it was?’
‘Not from the inside. But maybe from the outside.’ Part of Loeser was reluctant to say any more, but if Adele knew now that her beloved was a lunatic, it couldn’t do her all that much more harm to find out that her experiments with his Teleportation Device had never actually worked. ‘Slate — the janitor — he had a way.’
‘So Jascha got him after all,’ said Dolores Mutton.
‘What do you mean?’ said Loeser.
Dolores Mutton glanced at Adele, then beckoned Loeser out into the corridor where they couldn’t be heard. ‘Jascha was running out of time, remember?’ she said in a low voice. ‘Maybe tonight was his last chance. Maybe he knew that, whatever happened, he’d be gone by tomorrow. Either on his way back to Moscow with Bailey, or bundled into the trunk of a car by some NKVD agent and taken out to the desert for execution.’
‘But he was in the theatre with you.’
‘Yes. He was. But then you called your fire drill, and by the time we got outside, he’d vanished.’
‘How could he have known about Slate’s skylight?’
‘He probably has something on this Slate guy. Like he has something on everyone.’
Drabsfarben could have picked the padlock on the lavatory, thought Loeser, or just used a duplicate key, and then lowered the ladder so that Bailey could escape. After that, he could have replaced everything as it was. There would just about have been time during the search for a cutting torch. Perhaps Slate had even made sure to delay telling Loeser about toilet cubicle until Drabsfarben had made his escape with Bailey. Up and down through the trapdoor was always how the devil made his entrances and exits. ‘But if Drabsfarben’s gone,’ said Loeser, ‘that doesn’t prove he got anywhere near Bailey. Maybe the NKVD picked tonight to retire Drabsfarben. Maybe they had someone on campus. You told me he goes out in public less and less now. Maybe this was their best opportunity.’
‘In any other circumstances, if Jascha had just disappeared like this with no warning, that’s what I might have thought. But Bailey’s gone. You said he couldn’t have got out from the inside. So it must have been Jascha. There’s no other explanation. Jascha’s saved himself. The son of a bitch.’
‘I’m going to talk to Slate again.’ Loeser went back down to the basement, where the janitor now sat smoking on a bench, his body hunched tensely around the cigarette as if he thought it was only half dead and might still escape from him.
‘Are you you you you you going to tell Adele?’ said Slate.
‘I don’t know yet. But listen to me, Slate, did Jascha Drabsfarben know about your shrine? Did he blackmail you with it? Did he ask you questions about Bailey? Did you ever tell him about your secret trapdoor?’
Slate just looked at his feet.
‘Come on, Slate, answer me. Jascha Drabsfarben.’
‘I don’t know who who who who who that is.’
‘Tell me the truth. You didn’t have to show me your shrine. But I think you looked almost relieved afterwards. Was that because Drabsfarben can’t hold it over you any more now that he’s not the only one who knows?’
‘I don’t know who that is,’ repeated Slate. And Loeser couldn’t tell if this rare forbearance of his stammer was a sign that he was lying or a sign that he was telling the truth. He went back upstairs to room 11 and, as he entered, he heard a sound from the door of the teleportation chamber like a bolt slamming back.
‘What was that?’ said Dolores Mutton.
‘The ultramigration accumulator should have finished a basic cycle by now,’ said Adele, ‘so the time lock’s disengaged.’
Loeser pulled open the door of the teleportation chamber, and then took a step back as a gush of liquid ran out over the threshold. He hadn’t noticed before when he was looking down from the room above, but the whole chamber was puddled, as if someone had emptied out most of a bath full of water in there. Curious, he squatted down, wet his finger on the floor, and then licked it.
‘Egon, what are you doing?’ said Adele.
‘It tastes salty.’
‘That’s probably Dieter’s blood. You’re going to make me vomit.’
‘No, it’s more like … sea water.’
‘We’re twenty miles from the ocean. A pipe must have leaked or something.’
‘Why would there be salt water in the pipes here?’
‘Dr Carradine and his eels are upstairs, maybe it’s something to do with that.’ She glanced sideways at the open door of the teleportation chamber. ‘I can’t make myself believe it yet. About the Professor.’
‘I believe it about the Professor, but I don’t think I really believe it yet about Ziesel. When he shut that door he must have known he’d probably die in there.’
‘He did it to save you and me from the Professor. After all those years you bullied him … You should say something nice to Lornadette.’
‘Who?’
‘His wife.’
‘Oh. Yes.’ Loeser knew he never would.
Adele glanced at Dolores Mutton, then beckoned for Loeser to kneel down next to her so she could whisper in his ear. ‘Egon, do you really still want to fuck me?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘I’d probably let you, when I stop hurting, and when you’ve washed. You saved my life just as much as Ziesel did. But when you kissed me, earlier, it didn’t feel as if you really still wanted to fuck me. So do you?’
Did he? Loeser felt like a wrinkly and complacent Professor of Euclidian geometry who had consented to take a few questions after a lecture and had just been asked, for the first time in his entire career, how he could be absolutely sure that all right angles were equal to one another. He swayed at his lectern with a mixture of terror and joy. For nine years his desire for Adele had been the basic axiom from which all other truths could be inferred. If it were false, then everything might be false. He had to want to fuck her. He had to.
Which was, perhaps, exactly why he didn’t.
Loeser realised that he could no more arouse himself with the thought of Adele’s willing body than he could comfort himself with the thought of the equality of right angles. It had been so deep in him for so long that it almost didn’t mean anything any more. There was no music in the sound of your own heartbeat, no savour in the taste of your own mouth. There was no lust in an axiom.
‘I’m very confused,’ he said. And then, as if in sympathy, the whole room shook. He looked up at Dolores Mutton. ‘What the hell was that?’
‘Sounded like a bomb going off.’
Loeser ran outside, and saw what Bailey had wrought. The Gorge Auditorium looked as if it had been dropped from the height of a weather balloon and had just now crashed down in the middle of the campus, so that the roof was gone, the east wall was gone, the other walls were still crumbling as he watched, and a thick grey ruff of dust was rushing after the audience of The Christmas Teleportation Accident as they scattered in panic from where they had stood near the theatre’s doors. Beyond that he could just make out an orange glow, perhaps a fire beginning to spread through the velvet upholstery of the seats, an oven from which he’d stolen the meat. There were no tentacles. Loeser looked at his watch: it was half past eight. In the play, this was just about when the Théâtre des Encornets would have been destroyed. Bailey must have had his ‘novel theatrical effect’, like his Teleportation Device, on a timer. He went back into the laboratory. Adele, belatedly, had fainted.
After he’d accompanied her as far as the little hospital in Pasadena, he decided to walk straight home. Stent Mutton had told him that he ought to stay on campus to answer questions for the police, but he felt sure they had no chance of finding Bailey, so a delay would hardly matter, and after all that had happened he very much needed a solipsistic whisky. When he turned off Palmetto Drive on to his own street, however, he saw that the lights in his house were on. Was even Woodkin so efficient that he could already have engaged some sort of skunk mortician?
Loeser unlocked the front door. ‘Hello?’ he said.
‘Oh, hello, Loeser,’ said Rackenham, who stood naked in the middle of the sitting room. ‘I didn’t think you’d be back until later. Isn’t it your play tonight?’
Loeser closed his eyes and told himself that it would be an overreaction to ajudge that this was the absolute worst thing to which he could possibly have come home. Lots of other things would have been worse. A ghost, for instance; or a skunk; or a giant ghost skunk; or the vengeful and newly cyclopean Professor Franklin Bailey digging his spurs into a giant ghost skunk like some grim mounted herald of the fish god Dagon; or even his ex-girlfriend Marlene.
No. There was nothing. There was not one thing worse than Rupert Rackenham standing there naked. ‘What the fuck are you doing in my house?’ said Loeser in German.
‘I can promise it will be much better for your peace of mind if I don’t tell you.’
‘Just tell me.’ He was trying not to look at Rackenham’s penis but it seemed to occupy about two thirds of his field of vision.
‘Fine, if you must know: I was with Gorge’s wife. We didn’t know what the smell was — I’d be fascinated to learn, by the way — and there wasn’t time to find anywhere else to go before her appointment with her psychiatrist, so I insisted we make the best of it. At Winchester I slept in a dormitory with eight other boys every term for five years, so this strikes me as pretty mild. But we’d only just got the motor running, so to speak, when she began to feel queasy. So she got dressed and left. I would have left too, but it occurred to me that if the stain on the air turned out to be indelible I might not have any occasion to come back here again, and I ought to find Delia Sprague’s nail scissors at last, so I stayed. They’re some sort of cherished family heirloom and she’s been pestering me for weeks. Wealthy women learn to be forgetful because they know everything can pleasurably be replaced — except that once in a while it can’t. To tell you the truth, when I looked in that box of yours, I couldn’t quite believe the quantity and variety of the rejectamenta. I’m surprised you never wondered where it was all coming from.’
‘Of course I fucking wondered! How many women have you brought here?’
‘A good deal. When you’re out. They can hardly receive me at home, can they? They’re millionaires’ wives. The servants would talk. And my house in Venice Beach is an hour’s drive away. Los Angeles is so spread out. Why do you think I was so keen for you to take this place? And so helpful about bringing you the key after I got it from Woodkin? I hope you haven’t forgotten that when I got you that first invitation to dinner at Gorge’s house, you said you’d owe me a favour.’
There were quite a lot more questions Loeser wanted to ask, but in his bewilderment he could only manage: ‘So why are you still nude?’
‘It’s a warm night for December. Now, old chap, I really must find these nail scissors — might you have any idea where they are?’
‘I can promise it will be much better for Delia Sprague’s peace of mind if I don’t tell you. Just get your clothes.’
The skunk’s colleague gathered his clothes, went into the bathroom to get dressed, and came back out. ‘You know, as it happens, I could ransack a pot of tea: I don’t suppose before I go I could just—’
‘No,’ said Loeser.
‘By the way, have you heard about Brecht?’
‘What about Brecht?’
‘He’s coming to Los Angeles. He’s in Finland now, but he’s going to apply for a visa.’
‘Please just leave my house before you tell me anything else that makes me want to walk into the Pacific.’
Since the only regular visitor to Loeser’s bungalow was the postman, the sound of Rackenham’s departing footsteps was enough to remind him that he hadn’t checked his mailbox that day. He went outside and found in it a letter with a Berlin postmark. When he looked at the address, he recognised the handwriting, and breathed out the vapours of an overwhelming relief.
Loeser had never replied to that letter about the incident on the tram that Blumstein had sent him in 1938. But his former mentor had persisted in his attempt to patch up their friendship, continuing to write every three or four weeks. Each time, Loeser got through about a paragraph, and then as soon as Blumstein made any reference to the conditions in Berlin, he would stop reading and throw the letter away. Loeser told himself that he hadn’t come to live six thousand miles from the Allien Theatre just to endure rambling appeals for sympathy from his irrelevant former mentor. He began to resent them more and more. Each ivory envelope was like a ragged little emigrant from Blumstein’s life that could not be turned back at the border because it had all the right stamps from all the right officials — like a pestering ghost condom, a dead French letter, stuck down with the warm fluid of all that Loeser had not done but probably should have — as unwelcome in his mailbox as any strange deposit from the domestic spirit in which he had once believed. And as the months went on, it became harder and harder to persuade himself that, when the sight of his own address in Blumstein’s handwriting made him feel as if he had his head caught in a bear trap, it was just some banal combination of boredom and annoyance, rather than, for instance, guilt: because to concede that he felt guilty about Blumstein’s letters, or even to concede that there was any reason whatsoever why he might expect to feel guilty, would demand an internal readjustment of a magnitude not unlike his recent experience with Adele — except without a comparable sense of liberation. And no one could make him concede any of that, so he didn’t.
Then the letters stopped.
When Blumstein was writing letters, Loeser wanted him to stop writing letters. But then when Blumstein stopped writing letters, Loeser wanted him to start writing letters again — and he wanted it ten times as much. When Blumstein was writing letters, Loeser had to force himself not to think about Blumstein. Then when Blumstein stopped writing letters, Loeser still had to force himself not to think about Blumstein — and he had to force himself ten times as hard. Quite often, he’d dreamed about getting more letters, but nothing had actually come until today.
Loeser closed the mailbox. He went back inside. He sat down and he tore open the envelope. He saw that there was nothing inside.
And for some reason the sight of the empty envelope made him think of Ziesel lying dead in that locked chamber, and he coughed twice on the skunk rot, and his eyes filled with tears, and at that moment he knew for sure that Blumstein was going to die before he ever wrote another letter.
This wasn’t logical, of course. There were all sorts of reasons why an envelope might have arrived empty. Blumstein might have made an absent-minded error; or his wife Emma might have; or it might not have been an error at all, but rather a deliberate performative metaphor for the end of any chance of reconciliation; or some postal official might have steamed open the envelope for the purposes of censorship or espionage or theft and neglected to replace the contents afterwards. All those explanations made some sense, whereas there was no causal connection at all to be drawn between an empty envelope and Blumstein’s doom.
Nonetheless, Loeser was certain. He would never see Blumstein again. Not without a phasmatometer.
The telephone rang and Loeser went to pick it up. Just like the very first time a missive from Blumstein had arrived at Loeser’s house, it was Woodkin, mercifully interrupting his thoughts with a summons to the mansion.
He hadn’t seen Gorge since the summer, and upon Loeser’s arrival Woodkin stopped him in the hall. ‘Before you go any further, Mr Loeser, I must warn you that my employer’s condition has continued to deteriorate.’
‘What now?’
‘He can no longer read.’
‘Mein Gott, he’s that ill?’
‘Please don’t misunderstand me. Colonel Gorge is still perfectly capable of interpreting words on a page. That, you might say, is just the problem. When the Colonel reads the word “hurricane” in a newspaper, he now actually believes himself to be in the presence of a hurricane. It’s a further extension of his ontological agnosia — the trouble he has distinguishing between representations and the objects of those representations.’
‘You once told me reading wasn’t one of Gorge’s hobbies.’
‘No, but the Colonel did used to pay close attention to Sky-Shine’s ledgers. Now, however, when he reads “$898,854.02”, for instance, he sees 898,854 actual dollars and two actual cents there in front of him, even though in reality all hard currency was banned from the residence after the third time the Colonel took up arms to rescue George Washington from kidnappers. And when he reads “-$898,854.02”, he sees — well, in the event, after he recovered from his seizure, he was still not quite able to describe the experience — but from what I can understand, it is a kind of palpable and marauding embodiment of a nine-hundred-thousand-dollar deficit. Unpleasant for any businessman. Colonel Gorge, like your compatriot Mr Gödel, is now an adamant mathematical realist. As you would expect, he must conduct his affairs by telephone and get his news from the radio.’
‘What about when he reads a word that signifies an abstract concept?’ said Loeser. ‘ “Regret”, say? What does he see then?’
‘Fortunately, as the Colonel has often told me, abstract concepts mean nothing to him. That is one of the personal qualities to which he attributes his success.’
Despite all this, Gorge didn’t seem at all subdued when Loeser found him in the billiards room. ‘Macbeth, Krauto?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Said Macbeth when they shouldn’t have?’ joked Gorge. ‘One of your actors?’
‘Professor Bailey destroyed your theatre. Not a curse.’
‘Yes. Bailey. Dynamite, he used. Pounds and pounds of it, police are saying. Enough to blow up this whole plaaa—’ And then Gorge rolled like a commando over the side of his armchair and lay on the ground with his hands over his head.
Loeser was now so well trained in the psychopathology of ontological agnosia that it took him only a moment to work out that the tycoon had begun to make an expansive hand gesture signifying the hypothetical destruction of the mansion, caught sight of that hand gesture, mistaken it for the actual destruction of the mansion, and attempted to take cover. ‘That wasn’t an explosion, Colonel, that was just your own hands.’ An expedient as crude as dynamite, thought Loeser, was a poor tribute to Lavicini on Bailey’s part, although perhaps not incompatible with the New Expressionism.
Gorge returned to his seat. ‘Hands! Right. Beg your pardon. Anyway, seems to run in the fucking family, theatres falling down. Not all bad. Still get the tax break. And none dead. Got you to thank for that, Woodkin says?’
‘I take full credit, yes.’
‘And vanished, Bailey, they tell me. Last we’re going to hear about his Teleport Gizmo. So: verdict. Out with it. Real or not?’
‘Bailey certainly hadn’t perfected it. And now there’s no one to continue his work.’
‘Not the point. Told you before. Doesn’t much matter, Bailey’s Teleport Gizmo in particular. Works, though? Means anyone could make one. Means they will, give it a year or two. Means I don’t have to bother about squashing Plumridge and his damned streetcars. Well?’
Loeser thought back to his argument with Blimk that afternoon. If he really did have responsibilities to the place he lived, then he ought to assure Gorge that teleportation was possible. That would mean Los Angeles might still get its streetcar network — might still become a tolerable place to live. But that would also mean Blimk might lose his shop. So what was he supposed to do? Betray his adopted country, or betray his friend? According to that English writer in The Nation, he ought to pick the former. But in this case, his friend had specifically instructed him to be patriotic, so he was betraying his friend either way.
And then he thought of the empty envelope from Blumstein, and he made up his mind. Blimk might be right, up to a point — a man did have responsibilities to the place he lived. But Loeser was beginning to think now that a man’s ultimate responsibility was a lot simpler. Don’t be a total prick to the people who try to be nice to you.
‘Bailey’s Teleportation Device was a fiction,’ he said. ‘His assistant was faking the results. I saw no evidence whatsoever that teleportation is possible.’ The lie tasted briny on his tongue.
‘Not what I hoped you’d say,’ said Gorge. ‘Still, can’t be helped. Like rotten skunk, by the way. Stink on you. Not to be rude.’
Loeser realised this might be his last chance. He’d seen an old acquaintance killed today — he could manage one awkward enquiry. ‘It is, indeed, rotten skunk. Now, Colonel Gorge, I spent more than two years at CalTech watching Bailey on your behalf. I don’t expect to be paid, because you’ve been generous in so many other ways, but there is just one thing…’
‘Stop there, Krauto. Know what you’re going to say.’
‘I don’t think you do.’
‘Book of mine that you want. French. Very rare.’
Loeser was astonished. ‘How did you know?’
‘Not hard to guess after you asked Woodkin about my books. Probably why you came to me in the first place.’
Loeser was even more astonished. ‘Yes, it was.’ Had Gorge smelled that on him too?
‘Told myself I’d never part with it. No use to me now, though — books with words. And no son to pass it down to.’
Loeser was about to point out that the text in Midnight at the Nursing Academy amounted to no more than a few suggestive captions, but he stopped himself. He could hardly believe that after all this time he was now only a few ticks of the clock away from that holy hour.
‘Woodkin?’ Gorge shouted.
The personal secretary came into the billiards room. ‘Yes, sir?’
‘Take Krauto to the treasury. Then call Clowne and tell him he can have Mildred.’
‘Yes, sir. If you’d follow me, please, Mr Loeser.’ They took the stairs down to the mansion’s wine cellar, which didn’t, of course, contain any wine. ‘This is a fortified room containing all the items that Colonel Gorge would most wish to protect in the event of a burglary or anarchist insurrection,’ said Woodkin as he unlocked a heavy door, and Loeser was half reminded of the teleportation chamber and half reminded of Slate’s storage locker. At the same time he realised that in this, as in everything, Gorge was showing good business sense. If the rule of law were ever shattered, perhaps after the big earthquake, then so many people would already have had the idea of stockpiling gold or shotgun shells or tinned peaches that those commodities would be badly devalued in the resultant barter economy. But hardly anyone would have thought to hold on to books. Not Berlin Alexanderplatz or Ulysses or The Sorceror of Venice or even Assembly Line — all those would be worthless when everyone forgot how to read. But there were certain types of printed matter that would never lose their intrinsic value. The wisest shop to loot, in those first days, would be Blimk’s.
Except Loeser now saw that the treasury was not lined with bookshelves, as he’d expected. Instead, the room was dominated by two old sedans with broken windscreens and twisted fenders, parked there underground like escapees from a wrecking yard.
‘Why are these here?’ said Loeser.
‘Colonel Gorge acquired them in 1925 after hearing of an accident that had taken place in Nevada. It was a warm Sunday afternoon, and by coincidence both drivers had spent the morning industriously polishing their cars with Sky-Shine. They were driving in opposite directions, and as they drew near, each was dazzled by the reflection of the sun on the mirrory hood of the other. There was a swerve and a crash. Both drivers survived uninjured, and Colonel Gorge intended to use the cars as part of an advertising exhibit. Later, however, he decided against it.’
‘Why?’
‘Three small girls and a terrier were killed in the accident.’ Woodkin continued the tour. ‘This is a signed photograph of the actress Marlene Dietrich. This is the coyote whose glands were transplanted into the Colonel by Dr Voronoff. This is the authentic skeleton of a Troodonian cantor. This is a flagitious puppet from the Colonel’s great-great-great-great-grandfather’s puppet show, discovered last year in an attic in New Orleans. This is a drawing made by the Colonel’s daughter when she was five. And this is the book that the Colonel wishes you to have.’
It was French, and it was rare, but it wasn’t Midnight at the Nursing Academy. It wasn’t a photo album at all. It was a much older, smaller book, bound in dark red leather like that copy of Dante’s Inferno that Loeser had bought in the Marais, entitled Un rapport de la confession sur son lit de mort d’Adriano Lavicini comme elle a été dit à son ami Bernard Sauvage en l’an de grâce 1691 — a record of the deathbed confession of Adriano Lavicini as it was told to his friend Bernard Sauvage in the year of grace 1691.
‘But the Teleportation Accident was in 1679,’ said Loeser.
‘Yes,’ said Woodkin. ‘Lavicini survived it, however. And when Auguste de Gorge, my employer’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, discovered this fact some years later, he became determined to have his revenge on the Venetian for destroying his theatre. But at that point his resources were meagre, and by the time he found out where Lavicini had been hiding, Lavicini was already dead, so de Gorge’s sole consolation was a copy of this book. Bernard Sauvage had printed only a dozen, intended for his closest associates. It is one of the very few inherited possessions that has survived all the changing fortunes of the Gorge patrilineage. No other copies are now known to exist. All Lavicini’s secrets are here.’ Woodkin paused. ‘Is something the matter, Mr Loeser?’
‘Oh, no. Not at all.’ Loeser knew that this was probably the most extraordinary gift he could ever hope to receive in his whole life. He did his best to conceal his disappointment. ‘Did Lavicini really plan the Teleportation Accident? I think that’s what Bailey thought.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of a woman,’ said Woodkin. ‘He went to Paris because of a woman. He perpetrated the Teleportation Accident because of a woman. He went back to Venice because of a woman. So the testament states.’
‘He really killed all those people because of a woman?’
‘That is not precisely the case, no. I hope you’ll forgive me for suggesting that it would be best if you read the truth for yourself, Mr Loeser. Now, I imagine this has been a demanding evening, and it occurred to me that you might not have had time to attend to your own needs. I understand that Watatsumi is preparing a light supper for the Colonel’s daughter. Perhaps you would like to join her. And perhaps before that you would like a bath and a change of clothes.’
Loeser had never met Mildred Gorge, but when he was shown into the dining room later that evening, he recognised her at once: here was the redhead who had been sitting in the audience at the Gorge Auditorium — forced to attend, he surmised, by her father, who could not go to his own theatre for obvious reasons. Woodkin introduced him. He sat down. She barely acknowledged his presence. And within half an hour, Loeser had decided he was in love.
As prolegomena to an explanation of this surprising turn of events, there now follows a partial list of subjects covered in Loeser’s conversation with Mildred Gorge that night that failed to arouse even the smallest perceptible quantum of approval or interest from the heiress. The delicious seared tuna steak and artichoke salad prepared by Watatsumi; any of Watatsumi’s cooking; any meal she’d ever had; food in general, and also drink; the weather in Los Angeles; the weather anywhere; sunshine in general, and also shade; the generous postgraduate scholarship she had been offered by Cambridge University to study moral sciences; learning in general; rationality in general, and also madness; Britain; Europe; the civilised world; travel in general, and also staying at home; the Gorge mansion; her family fortune; money in general, and also anything bought with it; hypothetical boyfriends; romance in general; human company in general, and also solitude; theatre; art in general; her lucky escape from an explosion that could have claimed her life and the lives of hundreds of others; her continuing survival in general, and also her death; sailing boats; tiger cubs; daffodils; cinnamon; laughter.
She really just didn’t like anything. And although this might almost have sounded almost like an illness, the truth was that Mildred Gorge didn’t seem to be depressed or morbid or arrested in adolescence: her opinions on the world didn’t derive from a mood or a temperament or a pose, but rather from a rational evaluative position. There was nothing to rule out the possibility that at some point in the future, perhaps in only a few moments’ time, she might be girlishly surprised and delighted by some notion, event, object, or human being, but it happened that, just now, everything still bored her. In other words, although one might have supposed that a conversation with Mildred Gorge would have been like auditory ketamine, to Loeser she was the opposite of tiresome. There was nothing more attractive than a girl who was difficult to impress. And he’d never met a girl more difficult to impress than Mildred Gorge. She was a perfect negation of the city in which she’d been born, a pearlescent kidney stone that California had grown in its own gut, one shake of her head enough to shame a million nodding, nodding, nodding oil derricks. He thought of that drawing he’d seen in the treasury: rain falling on a crippled old man alone in some sort of quarry. Five years old, living in Pasadena, and that’s what she’d drawn.
Loeser had never wanted to marry anything so much in his life.
‘It’s strange we’ve never met before,’ he said as a maid cleared the plates. Woodkin still stood in the room, presumably as a chaperone, but Loeser had known skirting boards that were more obtrusive.
‘Not really,’ said Mildred. ‘Since I left Radcliffe I’ve been going to stay with my friend Goneril quite often.’
‘I’m sorry, did you say Goneril?’
‘Yes. Why? Do you know her?’
‘No, but my parents are psychiatrists, and they once had an American patient who called one of his daughters Goneril, and she would have been about your age by now, and it’s such an unusual name…’
‘She has a sister named Regan.’
‘Yes, that’s the one.’
‘And he named his yacht Titanic and his company Roman Empire Holdings.’
‘To prove he was the master of his own fate. What happened to him?’
‘The yacht sank, the company went bust, and his daughters had him certified insane.’
‘Oh.’
‘Luckily Goneril got some money from an uncle.’
In parallel with his realisation that he wanted Mildred Gorge to be his, another new knowledge was now surging within Loeser: that this city, to him, was his bungalow, the Gorge Theatre, his longing for Adele, his monthly cheque from the Cultural Solidarity Committee, parties at the Muttons’ house, the definite absence of Bertolt Brecht … But now he couldn’t rely on any of those things. California was a patient who had never left Dr Voronoff’s operating table, who had accepted transplant after transplant after transplant until its limbs bubbled with moist grapevines of every imaginable foreign gland — but after five years of dribbling sour juices into his new host, a xenograft called Egon Loeser had finally been rejected. And he didn’t know what to do next. Except that when Gorge shouted for Woodkin, and Woodkin left the room for the first time since Loeser had sat down, he knew he had to say something.
‘Your father’s going to make you marry Norman Clowne,’ he blurted.
‘Who’s that?’
‘The Secretary of the Los Angeles Traffic Commission.’
‘Why is he going to make me marry the Secretary of the Los Angeles Traffic Commission?’
‘Because I told him teleportation isn’t real.’
‘Oh,’ said Adele, apparently satisfied by that explanation. ‘I don’t want to marry the Secretary of the Los Angeles Traffic Commission.’
‘I don’t want you to either,’ said Loeser boldly.
‘I guess I don’t have a choice.’
‘You could run away. You could get out of Los Angeles.’
‘And go where? Cambridge?’
Loeser thought back to Dames! And how to Lay them. ‘If you’ve got the fever hots for a velvety piece, but the egg timer’s running out, you may need to put your balls in your mouth and just straight up swing for an elopement. You might think it’s a one in a million shot, but sometimes the lady’s so surprised her brain will flip upside down and she’ll say yes and kiss you. That, see, is how God made her.’ Could that actually work? Could the gland skip off and take with it the kidney stone, no anaesthetic required? Of course, if Mildred wasn’t around to marry Clowne, then Clowne would have no reason to stub out Plumridge’s streetcar scheme, and that would probably mean Blimk would lose his shop. But it was lot easier to stick to tiresome rules like ‘Don’t be a total prick to the people who try to be nice to you’ when you hadn’t just fallen (mostly) in love. And if Lavicini could kill twenty-five people over a woman, or whatever it said in the book he hadn’t read yet, then this didn’t seem so bad in comparison. He’d never tried anything like this in his life, but he knew now that he had to leave Los Angeles whatever happened. He had nothing to lose.
‘New York,’ he said. ‘Come to New York with me.’
Mildred regarded him for a while and then shrugged. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘It’s not as if I have anything better to do.’