In 1964, in her second time line, Bette lifted her head from the steering wheel. Stars glittered in the frigid sky over Battle Creek.
She depressed the clutch, ignited the engine, shifted into first gear, and eased onto the street.
She drove toward her small, bleak apartment, one of many small, bleak apartments in which she had left no trace during her long career in intelligence. She would gaze at the black-and-white pictures of her children, which were like chips of gold that she had hidden in the lining of her briefcase. Then she would fall asleep.
Bette
May 7
BETTE WAS STARTLED back to the Halcyon House kitchen in June 1991, by a footstep on the porch.
Still holding Bootstrap Jack, whose prototype had stood on the desk of the General Mills executive so long ago, she slipped over to the open door to the attic steps, then heard the slap of mail falling through the front door flap onto the foyer floor.
Just the mailman.
Hurrying up the narrow back stairs, she reached the third floor, gathered her dirty clothes from the bathroom floor, and returned to the attic. Back inside the refuge of the pink bedroom, she turned yet another bookshelf on pivots to reveal a small room containing a bank of electronics. She sat down and flipped the main switch. The ancient computer, from the early 1980s, flickered on. The radio amplifier did not work. She removed the lid and replaced two tubes with new ones from a supply drawer, and it lit up. She turned on the microphone that was in the library and got a green light. The kitchen and living room were live as well. They had not bugged their children’s rooms. A reel-to-reel tape recorder sat on the floor.
On the computer screen was a radar sweep, of sorts. A line swept around and around, deforming at a certain point. Somewhere in Georgetown was as accurate as she could get. Not good enough. She needed more sophisticated equipment, and she was reasonably sure that it existed in this timestream. All the other technological markers were here. She’d have to learn more about how things worked here to find the best way to do it. Opening the top of an old Victrola, she removed two thousand dollars, then reconsidered and added another thousand, in large and small bills, then closed up the electronics room.
Inside the closet of the pink bedroom, she put the money into a leather purse from the attic, which also held a stashed pistol, ammunition, and a birth certificate for one Jane Smith from Arkansas, with which to get a current ID. Opening yet another pivot door in the closet, she descended a hidden staircase that opened in the basement. The doorway was concealed by a built-in shelf. She shut the shelf, full of cobwebbed cleaning supplies, and let herself out the basement door.
* * *
She hoped she’d returned before Jill got back from work.
Emerging from the viaduct, wearing new gardening galoshes to trudge through the stream, she bushwhacked through the enjungled backyard, passing her long-ago grotto refuge, and gained the mowed lawn, hidden from the street by vast growths of roses, well-seeded perennials, and tall, fragrant peonies.
She’d made friends with Manfred before leaving that morning. The big dog loped toward Bette. Bette put down her heavy shopping bags and cooed at her, scratched behind her ears while Manfred wagged her tail.
Bette climbed the secret stairway, depositing her booty in her little bedroom.
She’d quickly bought a lot of up-to-date, anonymous-looking, moderately expensive mix and match skirts, slacks, blouses, a few dresses, a business jacket, underwear, hiking boots, high heels, running shoes, and casual shoes, which she placed in the little closet, mixed in with the older clothes. She now had a D.C. driver’s license and a passport in her purse. On Fourteenth Street, she’d purchased a few knives, a throwing star, and ammo for her gun.
And now, dessert.
She opened her tech purchase—a marvelous Q module, and all that went with it—a Q-phone, a larger screen, and a plethora of programs. She’d acted like a complete idiot in the store, which regarding this version of Q, she was, and the salesman had worked with her for two hours, selling the capabilities and applications, showing her how it worked.
Bette sat on her little bed, cross-legged, thrilled. Even a bit teary.
This was not the culmination of what Hadntz, she, and Sam had worked on for years. She knew that all war had not yet vanished. But this was a huge step forward. Everyone had these. Well, almost everyone she had seen today, whipping them out to take calls or to get information. She wondered how other places in the world fared.
She went into her radio room and turned on the living room microphone, wearing headphones. As Bette played with her Q, she heard the front door open. Jill said, “Manfred! Down!”
The microphones worked. She turned them off; she had no desire to eavesdrop on her family, except to hear the magic of their voices.
She returned to her little bed, leaned against a pile of pillows, and began exploring the capabilities of her Q, quickly reaching a place where she could eavesdrop on local Q conversations, before then turning to other matters. In a few hours, she uncovered the problem: She was here because one imperfect Device, given to Sam by a German named Perler, in World Prime, was here, somewhere in Georgetown. It was dangerous; near-functional because it fed upon Q’s advances and updated itself sporadically, imperfectly, yet, over the decades, with increasing strength. She was able to triangulate to some extent, but these tools were not powerful enough to locate the imperfect Device precisely. And, for the same reason, whoever was in possession of the Device could not find the later evolutions of the Device, the H-5, the H- … oh, she didn’t really know the number of evolutions any longer, because there had been so many that it had become a smooth continuum, like the growth of a child to an adult. Yet, despite the power of Q, this imperfect, early incarnation held disruptive power, which, combined with, say, the Game Board, would become much more powerful.
She had to find it.
Jill
A PHONE CALL
May 7
THAT EVENING, Jill indeed missed Whens, but she was also blessedly alone—which was, in her opinion, much different than loneliness. Aloneness had charged potential. She could think.
After talking with Elmore about Whens’ aversion to his new girlfriend—or at least, newly revealed, as Jill suspected that she was not exactly new—Jill felt better. Somewhat surprisingly, to herself at least, she viewed Tracy as a positive development, if only for her own selfish reasons. An Elmore caught up in a new relationship was an Elmore with less time to make her life more difficult than it had to be regarding Whens.
Home after a long day in the chilly, air-conditioned Bank, she turned on the radio and unpacked the salad she’d picked up on the way home. She’d thrown open all the windows, admitting the ambrosia of spring air, laden as it was with creek dampness, the fragrance of hidden roses, even the smell of wet asphalt.
Her colleagues had welcomed her back coolly, but she didn’t care. They were probably jealous of all her time off. She’d dealt with paperwork having to do with a loan to Kenya, met with her long-suffering assistants, and treated them to lunch.
Otherwise, it was as if she’d never left, although she was quite pleased with her hefty raise. The only bothersome part of work was the Ohio guy, Bill, who apparently believed he was the living incarnation of some Norse god. Even though, supposedly, his family had lived in the Midwest for generations. Jill gathered that he was deeply aggrieved about many things, which he managed to convey through intimate asides that seemed calculated to elicit a response from her. She always left his vicinity as soon as possible and took care not to put herself in situations that included him. She didn’t like the guy at all, case closed—except that, unfortunately, he seemed to fancy her. She wasn’t at the stage of filing a complaint, but if his behavior continued, she might.
Oh, well. Much to do.
She cleared a place at the kitchen table, dished out the salad she’d picked up, poured a glass of pinot grigio, and sat down with her notebook. As she ate, she jotted down her forthcoming tasks and attendant concerns.
Her main job, right now, was to gather information for an upcoming meeting regarding the Bank’s international preschool buildings, called Children’s Houses. She’d fostered the project for many years. These modular buildings, in distribution at last after years of waiting, had a backload of orders and loan applications. They were autotelic—self-teaching, projecting holographic children that demonstrated the use of materials. Refinements would inevitably continue, because the process was open source and on Q, and could be vetted and edited by thousands of qualified engineers and educators.
Now—this was the exciting part. She lifted her pencil, breathed in the rain-fresh air, and relished the moment.
Now she could finally devote more time to an ongoing, parallel school project, Q-Schools. During the past five years, soliciting input from worldwide experts in education, architecture, microeconomics, molecular engineering, and epidemiology, she had kept tabs on the development of a prototype school pod, a tough little embryo that could grow in almost any terrain. Each school was self-healing and imbued with Q. She was still pondering all kinds of ramifications.
Q-Schools were not like Children’s Houses.
Local municipalities had to request Children’s Houses, oversee construction, and comply with local code requirements. Communities requesting Children’s Houses were in agreement about the need for more schools, but did not have the means to finance them. The Bank’s role, under several mandates, including the promotion of gender equality and economic empowerment in areas of need, was to provide financing for targeted projects such as these schools. Jill’s long-term dream was that a higher level of worldwide education might empower those who might be able to, eventually, be clearheaded about war.
But perhaps deeper changes had to take place in humans before war could be eliminated. Neurobiological changes. That was what Megan claimed, that was her true work: figuring out what those changes might be, and how to nudge them along biochemically.
“Yes,” Brian had said, just a few days ago, in his smart-alecky way, holding up her vitamins. “This pill for weight loss. This little yellow one—memory. And this big clear one, folks—this pill is for world peace and international cooperation on all good things.” Megan had fumed out of the room.
“And what do you think about this Q-School plan, Manfred?” she asked. “Yes?”
Manfred beat her tail against the floor.
“Good girl.”
Q-Schools would grow from nanotech seeds. They would be much, much cheaper than even Children’s Houses.
Q-Schools would, of course, be linked to Q. Q would assess need and place the schools, based on statistics and studies of gender inequality, general poverty, availability of education, and the likelihood that the people in the area of need would probably not even know of the existence of the prefab Children’s Houses, much less have the municipal organization to request them. Most rural, poor communities would welcome such schools. Shoot, even affluent communities would want them, but they weren’t Jill’s concern.
Forgetting her salad, Jill jotted down means of informing the populace about Q-Schools—dropping classbooks, even old-fashioned flyers, ways to prepare communities. Optimal time frames. Material for those who could read, recordings and videos for those who could not. Often, small children had little to do, and families conscripted older children, who might otherwise be contributing to the family income, to care for them. Q-Schools were naturally attractive. Once parents knew they were safe, they would allow their children to use them, obviating the need for parental or older-child supervision. Kind of like day care, but with education thrown in. That might be a good angle—freeing up those older children for income production—although, of course, they too, needed to be in school.… At any rate, Q’s baseline altruistic algorithms would optimize each school according to local needs. The agricultural or other work in which their parents were engaged would be the focus of pedagogic materials. If their local environment was embedded in the environment, children learned to read and write easily. Their crops and their biological processes, the local flora and fauna, were real, concrete, and then they were pictures, represented by words holding strong meaning to those children. Children could write stories about what was actually happening around them. Once they realized how reading and writing empowered them, there was no turning back. Jill had seen this in her mother’s school.
Jill was certainly aware that some communities and cultures would not welcome Q-Schools, even though their curriculum was value-free. All preschoolers had the same urge to learn, to master their physical environment. Learning how to count, how to manipulate objects comparatively, even mastering putting one’s thoughts in writing, were not cultural acts—except that some cultures valued such acts, and some denied them to certain members.
Jill, and many other people, firmly believed that denial of the basic tools of reading and writing was a form of child abuse. Censorship, as well as denying literacy, was one of the main tools of repressive regimes. The list of those who had denied literacy to certain people was long, and included the Catholic Church during the Spanish Inquisition; Southern states that had prohibited literacy for slaves by law; fundamentalist religious groups, equally distributed among Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sects; and every other society that limited literacy for one reason or another.
A recent United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child had produced a document that recognized the child’s right to an education. Primary education was to be, ideally, compulsory and freely available to all.
This was impossible in many locations. But the Q-Schools would give those places, those children, the opportunity to go to school and become active agents in the international community.
A nanotech school set down by Q in a place in which girls and women might be persecuted for literacy could be problematic—and dangerous—for the girls and women in that community who insisted on attending them. Perhaps, thought Jill, the men in control in such places, and the women who abetted them, needed education just as much as the girls and women disbarred from participating in society. She leaned back and laughed. A quick shot of tolerance, please! Really, Jill, you’re too much. Why did she, much less the huge group of people around the world, think they had the right to foist education on anyone?
The history of education was fraught with such battles. Besides, it wasn’t foisting. Attendance wasn’t mandatory.
At any rate, such schools would fall under a UN mandate. There were fuzzy plans in the works to send Peacekeepers to areas denying their children access to the schools. They would safeguard the rights of those children, much as Johnson had sent the National Guard to Mississippi in Jill’s first, lost timestream to safeguard the right of black children to attend school.
She had not developed the seed plan, only sparked it, though over the years she had helped shape development and facilitated contact between interested parties. The seed was the result of international cooperation, and had been the subject of heated discussion in many United Nations committees. Public opinion deemed the schools too controversial to use, presently.
She had a copy of present, constantly updated plans. Though the Q-Schools were controversial, she had invited a speaker to her forthcoming meeting just to put the idea into people’s minds.
“This Q-School, Manfred? Here in my notebook? It’s just a seed. Just a gleam in the eye of a planning committee.” She closed her notebook, and pushed it aside.
Next, she had to find her father’s notebooks in the attic and start reading them. She’d tried, soon after he left, but it was too painful, and she had put them aside. It was another way of avoiding the past, she realized now. Her therapist likened it to war veterans refusing to talk about their war experiences, or even, sometimes, acknowledge them. In the worst cases, those memories could erupt suddenly, landing the victim precisely where she’d landed.
The notebooks might hold some clues about what had happened. Maybe not. But Sam had told her to read them, when she saw him in the hospital. Had she seen him in the hospital?
Yes. She had. She laughed. The therapist thought she should tell Megan and Brian this gigantic thing she’d done, yet Brian had gone around the bend on just hearing she’d seen Mom and Dad.
She finished her glass of wine, poured another, and relished the cool condensation beneath her fingers as she sipped. She glanced at the closed notebook, full of important tasks.
Maybe she should wait until she had more time, until things were settled. She had to get the house in shape for the party. The party was important to her. It would be the official threshold into her new life.
She reopened the notebook, added more to her list.
Tomorrow she would call the bookstore accountant and get back on track with her business. She had to get the store checkbook back from Elmore, who would surrender it gladly. She needed to schedule meetings with salesmen. She could do those during lunch hours, have them meet her at a restaurant near the Bank.
Once she got caught up, everything would run smoothly. Then she’d have time to read the notebooks.
She realized that she’d forgotten her salad and pulled it toward her.
She wondered, as she stabbed radicchio leaves and enjoyed the tang of vinegar, if she was doing the right thing in staying silent, but spent only a second on the answer, which was, how in the world would she know? She might do more harm than good if she told Megan and Brian what she’d done. Their lives might fall apart too.
Finished with her dinner, she opened the back door, carrying her glass of wine, and stepped onto the porch landing, high above the yard, and into the evening, always an enchanted time. Lightning bugs flickered in the dusk. Whens’ swing set, all bright paint and as many rings and trapezes and seesaws that could be squeezed onto one play structure, his holy grail of motion, gleamed against a backdrop of misty woods.
To her left, their land dropped swiftly to the fast-running creek spilling from the viaduct. Kudzu completely enveloped her father’s outdoor kitchen, and a tangle of climbing roses and woody vines obscured the tile-roofed stone grotto Sam had built for Bette down by the creek. Jill slapped a mosquito, and recalled her mother sitting down there, laughing with her father about how her cigarette smoke kept the bugs at bay.
It was more than a memory, though. It was as if Bette’s laughter rose from behind the veil of vegetation; as if her brother and sister, still kids, were running down the hill yelling at each other. It was almost as if she smelled cigarette smoke, and maybe she did, from across the street or something.
Jill descended the stairs with resolution. Memories would definitely splay across her vision—brilliant, lovely memories, intense, and overwhelming—but she just had to live with them and let them go. She was here now, and they were part of being here. She had to come to grips with it all, although now, as Venus appeared and the cicadas took up their rhythmic whirr, she suddenly felt frail and rent.
She made it to the bottom of the stairs and a few steps into the wet grass, with Manfred on her heels, when the house phone, still on the kitchen wall where the old phone had been, rang.
She set the wineglass in the grass—of course it spilled—and ran up the stairs, only because it might be Whens, rattled anew about crushing hugs and perfume. But she was too late. The answering machine clicked on.
“We need the Device,” a muffled male voice hissed. “Now.”
She picked up the phone in time to hear the click as the caller hung up. “Hello?”
Silence.
* * *
In her attic garret, Bette stubbed out her cigarette and tried to trace the call, but failed. She turned out the light and lay back in her bed, aching, simply aching, for Sam.
Megan and Brian
THE WALKING MAN
May 10
IT WAS ABOUT EIGHT O’CLOCK on a Friday evening.
Megan sat at the dining room table, where the Washington Post was spread out, reading the funnies and avoiding the dishes. Sometimes she got through the funnies and the op-ed page before the dishes got the better of her. It was rather Jillish of her, she had to admit. Megan was always the neat, orderly sibling, sweeping, dusting, mopping, and complaining about her older sister’s physical, philosophical, and emotional messes. But dishes … they were another matter altogether.
It was Jim’s turn to put Abbie to bed. Sloshing sounds and bits of song emanated from the upstairs bathroom.
Megan looked up from the funnies when Bingo, their golden retriever, ran to the door, barking. Brian’s truck was out front. She was surprised. Brian lived downtown, and they generally didn’t get together more than once a month.
Megan jumped up and ran to open the door for him. “It is so nice that you’ve come to help me clean up.” She grabbed a Pyrex dish that had macaroni and cheese burned onto it, stacked that with other dirty dishes, and carried her pile into the kitchen.
Brian shrugged and began rinsing plates and handing them to Megan, who slotted them into the dishwasher. “Have you talked to Jill lately?”
“Just yesterday. Why?”
“Whens has been calling Bitsy lately, talking about a ghost.”
“And?”
“It seems strange.”
Megan snorted. “Whens, if you haven’t noticed, is strange. So, what kind of ghost?”
“What do you mean?”
“Casper, for instance, was friendly, white, and floaty. ‘Kind to every living creature.’ Seems to me that if there is a ghost, it must have some specifics.”
“Yeah. Maybe even neurochemistry.” Brian rubbed his forehead with his wrist and grabbed another plate.
“You think that a real person is in the house? Besides them?”
“It’s so big that ten street people could be living there undetected. I guess I’m just nervous about Jill living in that big house alone.”
“She’s not alone. She has Whens and she has Manfred.”
“Right. She refuses to keep a gun.”
Megan glanced at Brian. “Spare me your NRA idiocy, please. Aren’t guns illegal in the District? Do you keep guns in your house, with two children?”
“No, of course not. I keep mine in the work trailer, locked up. But I think she needs some kind of protection. There are some bad neighborhoods just a couple of streets over. She’s just like Mom and Dad, though. She ignores all that. I’ll bet she doesn’t even lock her doors at night. She always has been kind of … I don’t know, unaware that bad things can happen.”
“Brian, downtown is a lot safer now than when we were growing up, and nothing happened to us then. Not a damned thing.”
“Yeah. I suppose.”
“Well, what do you want to do?”
“I’m thinking—just wanted to run this by you—maybe Cindy and the kids and I could move in. We’re renovating that house in Northwest to move into, but it’s going really slow because I have so much business, and the apartment is driving us nuts.”
“It’s fine with me. I wondered why you didn’t move in there in the first place.”
“It was so … closed up. I don’t know. It wasn’t inviting to us.”
“Maybe Cindy thought it might revive your drinking habit?”
“Maybe. The mind of woman is often difficult to discern.”
“Just about everything was difficult for you to discern a few years ago.”
“I agree,” he said mildly, rather disappointing Megan. Sometimes she missed the old, fiery Brian.
“You playing guitar much?”
He shrugged. “I sit in somewhere every few weeks. When you guys come out with your power sleep drug, let me know.”
“You’d probably just use it to take on three more jobs. Delegate! Why can’t Cindy do that? I’ll bet she’d do a fine job.”
“Oh, she would. But in case you haven’t noticed, she has a more-than-full-time job already, and she wouldn’t give that up for anything. You’re right, though. I haven’t found anyone who knows enough to pay attention to all the things I care about. You can take a lot of shortcuts in construction, and I never do.”
“You’re just obsessive,” said Megan. “There are drugs.”
“I hope you’re taking those particular drugs.” Brian bent over the macaroni and cheese pan and scrubbed hard. “Why did you let this burn? Oh, of course, you wouldn’t. It was Jim. You have him on double duty tonight? Cooking and bedtime? What a slave driver.”
“I’ll be on all weekend. He has a Sunday night deadline. Just let it soak.”
Brian wiped his hands on his pants, leaned against the counter, and folded his arms. “I guess it’s not really that Jill’s alone. It’s that she isn’t … herself.”
Megan nodded. “I’ve thought that too. But I’m not sure why. Actually, that’s a kind of psychosis. Thinking that someone has been taken over by someone else. That’s what those mass psychosis movies in the fifties were about.”
Nestled within the field of memory studies was the new theory of false memory formation. She had been reading more about this, thinking that perhaps Jill was a victim. “Maybe stress has caused her to make things up that she believes are real.”
“Can people do that?”
“They can and do, all the time.”
“Jill said she saw Mom and Dad while she was in the hospital.”
“She was on some really heavy drugs. I think she misses them even more than we do. Especially Mom.”
“So you don’t think she really could have.”
“Do you … think she might have?”
“Mom was never found. I mean, not her … we never had a funeral or anything.”
“No, there was never a body.”
“And Dad—well, same for him.” Brian put soap in the dishwasher and turned it on. “I mean, it could be one of these false memories you’re talking about, or a hallucination, or—”
“Or she could have really seen them. Why didn’t you mention this before?”
“Well, I guess—I just got mad at Jill when she said that. I know that sounds—”
“Just like you. What else did she say?”
“After that, she just shut up. I asked her about it last week, and she looked at me like I was the crazy one.” He looked around the now-clean kitchen. “Man, you’re lucky I came by. You’re so slow—”
“‘Meticulous’ is the word. But don’t try to change the subject.”
“No, ‘slow’ is the word. It would have taken you all night. I’ve got to go home and do it all again.”
“Oh, poor thing. I’m glad to hear that you do something around the house.”
“It’s that or death.” Brian grabbed a large glass, opened the refrigerator, got some iced tea, and followed Megan into the living room. Jim, upstairs, said to Abbie, “Okay. But just one more.”
Brian sat down and took a long drink of tea. “We should have tried harder to find Dad. I think that’s part of the problem. Everything feels unfinished.”
Megan lounged back on the couch and put her feet up on the coffee table.
“Maybe one of us should go now,” said Brian.
“To Germany? You mean Jill.”
“Well, she’s the obvious one.”
Megan laughed. “Great idea. A nice trip to Germany to find our vanished father right after she gets out of the booby hatch. You do remember that she went nuts the last time, right?”
“She has less responsibilities than we do,” Brian protested.
“Yeah. Just a five-year-old, a dog, a bookstore to manage, a full-time job, and a lot of legal shit to keep up with.”
“Well, there’s that…”
“What was your plan? Keep Whens at your house and bundle her onto a plane with a map?”
“Something like that,” he admitted. “She’s been strange ever since she came back from New Orleans twenty years ago. Remember? She was supposed to interview for college and wrecked the car.”
“She and Dad would never talk about that either. Maybe we should ask Jill about seeing Mom and Dad in the hospital again.”
“Isn’t she kind of … fragile? I mean, I don’t want to be the one who lands her back in the loony bin.”
“Seeing them again is what we all want to happen. I dream about them all the time. I’m sure she imagined it, but if we ask, it might get her talking about things we need to talk about.”
They heard the barely audible click of a door closing. Jim, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, tiptoed down the stairs. “She’s out at last. Iced tea, Brian? Didn’t your sister offer you a beer?”
Megan sent Jim a look that said, loud and clear: Brian! Shouldn’t! Drink!
Jim ignored it. In his oft-expressed opinion, Brian was a grown-up. Megan wasn’t sure.
Brian said, “Well … it is Friday.”
“Indeed.” They heard the whoosh of bottle tops being removed with a church key, and two clicks as they hit the counter. Jim brought Megan a bottle of San Pellegrino water without asking. Her aversion to drinking alcohol often led to mild needling in her family, but this time, Brian let it pass without even mentioning how much more expensive her fancy water was than his beer.
“You know,” said Megan, “my memories of those times are kind of hazy.”
“We were young.”
“Sure, but … remember Mom, in Hawaii? How—glowing—energized, she was? She loved us. How could she just … leave us? Something happened. She was kidnapped, or something. And how…”
“Abbie?” said Jim, turning around in his chair. Abbie was standing at the top of the stairs.
“I need cereal,” she said.
“You need to go back to bed.”
Instead, she came downstairs and went into the kitchen.
“No. You already had some milk.”
She walked into the kitchen, opened a low cupboard, and took out cereal boxes, which she set on the floor.
“Abbie. Put those away and get back to bed.”
She pulled a baggie of small figures from the depths of the cupboard, held them to her chest, and hurried up the stairs. She slammed her bedroom door.
“She just wanted the Spacies,” said Megan.
“They’re still pretty popular. Remember when we first got them?”
“Yeah. They were so cool. Girl astronauts. Before we even went to space. I guess kids all over the world had them. I brought a few of the old ones from the house for Abbie to play with. Maybe I should have put them in the safe-deposit box—I bet they’re going to be collectors’ items.”
“Yeah. Did you ever notice that they heal up when the dog chews them or kids decide to crush them with an asteroid? Kind of spring back, like the plastic swells, or something. I’ve heard that if you could cut the damn things in half they’d grow two, but the new ones don’t do that. I think it made the cereal manufacturers mad.”
“Oh, Brian, you’re so naïve. They’re an early form of nanotechnology. Molecular replication. The government decided they were dangerous and insisted that they be taken off the market—not that anyone in any government lab has been able to crack the code and disable them, or use it for anything else. Whoever really developed them was way ahead of their time.”
“Really,” said Jim. “My investigative reporter’s ears are burning. Aren’t there notes? Formulae?”
“So proprietary that no one’s ever laid hands on them—lots of shell organizations, dead ends. It is pretty interesting.” She laughed. “I mean, you can see why they were banned. What if they took over the world? Literally? Our homes and busses piled high with Spacies—”
“Well,” said Brian, “I took a few of them too, for Bitsy. She plans to live in the moon colony.”
Megan grimaced. “I’d hate that.”
“It takes a certain personality. Didn’t one of them go batshit not long ago?”
“Ha! NASA didn’t ask us to help. We can do anything with drugs. Just about. Did I tell you? We’re working on a memory drug.”
“What’s that?”
“Just what it sounds like. It enhances the formation and retrieval of memories.”
“Like for when you’re studying?”
“Probably, eventually. Right now we’re concentrating on the geriatric market, which is about staying oriented.”
“But what if you want to forget?”
“Well, then it could be torture. Too much memory could be very painful. Forgetting is often therapeutic. Who’s that?” Megan turned and knelt on the couch, peered out the window. It was getting dark, and the interior of the room reflected back at them. Megan cupped her hands against the window so she could see better.
“Just some man taking a walk. Calm down, sweetie,” said Jim.
Megan lowered the shade. “We have to keep this closed in the evening. People can look right into our house.”
“Like you do,” teased Jim. He told Brian, “She always cranes her neck to look into people’s living rooms after dark. She’ll say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know the Fabers liked to read—look at all those books. Let’s go closer. Maybe I can see the titles.’ She’d trample the flowerbeds if I didn’t hold on to her.”
“Seriously. I’ve been feeling watched,” said Megan.
“What?” asked Jim, frowning. “Really?”
“Yeah. I’ve seen that man before.”
Jim said, “I’ve noticed him. Yeah, he seems odd. It’s the fedora, I think. Who wears them anymore? Or maybe the beard? Plaid shorts. Leather shoes, wingtips or something, and black socks. Old-fashioned aviator sunglasses. When it’s cool, he wears green khakis and boots. Carries that walking stick. Aloof guy. I guess I’ve never gotten close enough to say hi.”
Megan bit her bottom lip. “I wonder what his name is. Doesn’t he have a job? He must live around here somewhere. People don’t just wander through subdivisions. They might go on a walk in the evening after work, but they don’t have time to do that in the daytime.”
“Maybe he had a heart attack,” said Jim. “Maybe his doctor told him to walk. I really do see him a lot. At least once a day. And I’m at home most of the time.”
“Well, if I were spying around, I’d at least have a dog with me. People believe in you when you’re walking a dog.” Megan crossed her arms and hunched forward.
“Why don’t you call the clothing police?” asked Brian. “Report him.”
“Don’t make fun of me. I’m not kidding,” said Megan.
“I’m not either. Hello, police? I have something suspicious to report. Strange man. Walking on the sidewalk. Plaid shorts. A fedora, for chrissakes! And here’s the kicker, officer—no dog.”
Abbie came to the head of the stairs again. “I’m scared.”
Jim sighed and turned around in his chair. “Of what, honey?”
“Falling.”
“When did you fall?”
“In my dreams. I’m in a high, high tower, and I always fall off, and I think I might die!” She burst into tears.
Her father ran up the stairs and grabbed her. “It’s okay, I’m here.” He shut the bedroom door behind them.
“She has these falling dreams,” said Megan. “I guess they seem pretty real.”
“Yeah,” said Brian. “They can. Especially to kids.”
“You know,” said Megan, “I have this recurring dream. Or, maybe not a recurring dream. But dreams where I feel as if I’m going to the same place, a place I’ve been before. And when I go there, it’s not … thin, like dreams, but dense, like it’s full of potential, full of things that I need to discover.”
“I have that kind of dream too,” said Brian. “It’s like I need to find out something and I’m searching, and looking, and walking, the whole time I’m there.”
Megan nodded. “There are riots in my dreams. Fires, angry mobs shouting, National Guardsmen. God knows why; I’ve never— What?”
“I have them too. Riots. Lots of fires, and yelling…”
“Huh. Maybe we were both in a riot. At some point. When we were real little.”
“Mine are later. I’m maybe fifteen. You’re thirteen.”
“I’m there too?”
“Of course. We’re in the old house. Dad tells us not to go out…”
“Yeah. And you go out anyway.”
“Right.”
They stared at each other for a moment. Finally Megan said, “What else?”
Brian closed his eyes. “They’re because someone died.”
“Martin. Luther. King.” Megan felt sick to her stomach.
Brian said, “This is very, very strange. Because, yes. It’s him. Sometimes I see him on TV and I think, this is amazing, what a bad dream I had, because here, he is, alive, and an ambassador, and will be the head of the UN, and I keep thinking that he should be dead.”
“Shit,” said Megan.
“Now, now, Mom,” said Jim, coming down the stairs. “No need to swear. I think she’s asleep at last.” Then he looked at their faces. “What?”
“I don’t know,” said Brian. “It’s about Martin Luther King.”
“Oh, yeah. Right,” said Jim. He sat down and picked up his beer. “It was in the Post today. He’s perfect for the head of the UN.”
“No,” said Megan. She stood abruptly, pulled her hair back with one hand while her other went to the small of her back, and paced back and forth in the small living room. “It’s like—we’re having the same dream, Brian. King was … assassinated. Right? Right?”
“Honey, you’re shaking.” Jim got up, put his arm around her waist. “Come on, sit down on the couch with me. That’s right. You’re just wound so tight. You do too much. Want a drink of water? Something stronger?”
She shook her head. She stared at Brian. “Well?”
“Right,” he said, nodding his head slowly.
“Where?”
“In … Memphis?”
“Look,” said Jim, “will somebody please tell me what’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” said Megan. Her eyes filled with tears. “Suddenly I have no f*cking idea what is going on.”
Brian
A DAY AT HALCYON HOUSE
May 18
BRIAN TRUDGED UP the narrow, dusty steps to the Halcyon House attic. It was Saturday morning.
Jill had only been living in the house for a few weeks. Brian was still considering moving in, and Cindy had volunteered to help with repairs, somehow much easier to contemplate than making rushed, wrong choices on their beaux arts beauty. At least, so Cindy claimed. They’d spend the morning and afternoon with Jill, planning the work. It was, of course, Brian’s house too, but he still had mixed feelings about living here again. The minuscule apartment, though, was unbearable.
Bitsy, Abbie, and Whens were running around shrieking with the sheer joy of being together, to magnified effect: When together, they seemed more like six or ten children than merely three. Zoe was in the second-floor ballroom, with its lovely herringbone parquet floor. The floor sagged, and Brian had at first declared it off-limits. He’d locked the door, and Zoe had just looked at him, her hazel eyes impassive, and then sat leaning against the door, as if that room was the dearest in the universe, and opened the notebook in which she wrote music. He decided that the worst thing that could happen was that she might get beaned by a chunk of falling plaster, unlocked the door, and handed her the key. He heard her lock it after she went inside: No screaming children for her, thank you.
She was the only one of the cousins who might have memories of Grandpa Sam. She had been two when Sam left. Zoe was actually one reason that Brian had resisted moving back here. When it became certain that Sam would not come back, Zoe had run through the house like a whirlwind, screaming, crying, angry, ungrabbable as a monkey, screaming, “Grampa! Grampa! Grampa!” as she looked in every corner, every closet, until she was hysterical. Then, she wouldn’t talk for a week. For another year, she drew black arcs that she said were burnt rainbows.
Sam had adored her, carried her everywhere, became a very convenient babysitter, propping her on the couch as an infant while he played a rich variety of jazz records to “get it into her brain,” read Bette’s Chinese poetry to her, let her noodle on the piano, and played the saxophone for her. She had particularly loved “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
Cindy and Brian had made a big effort to help her, to gradually reintroduce her to the house, to keep pictures of Sam on the walls, until finally she could visit the house without sadness—and sometimes, even with joy, walking the overgrown gardens and identifying the flowers she had “helped” him plant.
No need to reawaken all that by moving in, though.
The kids’ din receded as Brian climbed.
Brian could tell by the faint light spilling down the stairs that someone had left the attic door open again. That sucked any summer coolness, or winter heat, from the three downstairs stories like a chimney. He heard his mother’s voice, scolding them for doing this. Their father was often the culprit. He always seemed to be in another world.
It would have been useful, Brian thought, if one of them had spoken German when they went to Germany to try and find their father.
* * *
As it was, Megan spoke it quite badly, Jill’s fluid French helped a lot, and of course a lot of Germans spoke fine English.
Jill, who was six months pregnant, had made a map of where Sam had been during the war, and drew up an itinerary. Their last stop, after a fruitless search lasting several weeks, was Berlin.
As they were walking down a street, Jill said, “Look. A Deutsche Post. I’ve got some postcards from Dad. They say—”
“What postcards?” asked Brian. “I didn’t know we ever got postcards from him.”
“They all just say he’s fine.” Jill turned into the Deutsche Post, which was empty, and went up to the man at the counter and pulled the postcards from her purse.
“Let me see those,” said Brian.
Jill ignored him, and showed them to the official. “Do you know where this was sent from?”
He looked at them one after the other, then laughed. “They are some kind of hoax. There is no East Berlin. Or West, for that matter. There is just, you know, Berlin. And of course, Berlin is in Germany, not the Soviet Union. What an idea!”
All of the postcards were postmarked “East Berlin, USSR.” “How about the neighborhood?” Jill turned the postcard over and tapped the picture. “Do you recognize it? How about this café?”
He shook his head. “Berlin is large. Walk around. Ask people. Try the War Museum. This neighborhood might have been destroyed in the war. Just about everything was.”
After they emerged from the post office, Brian said, “Let me see those.”
“Let’s find a place to sit down,” Megan said.
They found a café with outside seating. Brian ordered a stein of beer. Megan and Jill rolled their eyes at each other. “What?” snapped Brian.
“That’s your third beer this morning,” Megan pointed out.
“I’m in Germany.” Brian spread the postcards out on the table. “I’ve never seen these before, Jill,” he said. His voice had an edge of accusation.
“I didn’t hide them from you. I told you both about them.”
“You didn’t show them to us,” said Brian.
“I don’t think you mentioned the postmark,” said Megan.
“Maybe he … made them up,” said Jill. “So he couldn’t be tracked.”
“‘Dear Jill,’” Brian read. “‘Your mother and I are fine. Please don’t worry. Love, Dad.’ No, Jill, I don’t think you mentioned that he was with Mom.”
“Maybe they’re really not from him at all,” suggested Megan.
“Who the hell would be sending them, then?” asked Brian. “And why? Couldn’t we have discussed these things before we came all this way?”
“Can we not look at this in a positive way?” said Jill. Her cheeks were getting red. “We’re here now, and here are the postcards.”
“They just f*cking don’t make sense.” Brian flung the postcards out over the iron railing, into the street.
Megan and Jill rushed after them. Jill held up her hand to stop traffic while Megan picked them up. They huffed back to Brian.
“Look at this,” screamed Jill. “It fell in a puddle. You can’t even read it anymore!” She flung it on the table and bent over it, sobbing, holding the other wet postcards in her hands. “This is all we have!”
“Brian, what is wrong with you?” Megan yelled. Everyone in the café was looking at the Americans with great interest.
“What’s wrong with me?” He pushed his chair away from the table. It fell over backward. He stalked out of the café. He booked a flight home. Soon afterward, he joined the Peace Corps.
And then Cindy had straightened him out.
He hadn’t remembered that incident until just now. He had to admit, he’d been at least mildly inebriated most of the time he was over there. Jill had given birth several months later, and he could understand why she’d never brought it up, at least to him—she’d probably forgotten it too, what with not sleeping for a year or so afterward.
East Berlin? Was he imagining that too? His own memories were pretty mixed up.
Brian reached the top of the stairs.
The attic was illuminated like a cathedral. Dancing dust glowed in modulated sun coming through the windows at each end of the enormous room, leaving the center in shadow. Brian immediately broke out in a sweat.
The tops of trees, and the streets and houses far below, were suitably blurred by the dirt on the tiny windowpanes, as if the neighborhood existed in some other age so far away that all detail had faded. Mysterious heaps of stuff—much of it left by previous owners—emanated style-embedded memory. An eight-foot-high mahogany headboard, stern in its right angles, vied with the oak headboard tilted against it, carved with fluid, musical flowers, leaves, and a woman’s face wreathed with long, flowing hair, a fairy creature observing humans from her forest redoubt. The floorboards were several inches thick.
Brian found the chain that turned on the two rows of lightbulbs that his father had installed years ago. Their light was discouragingly sparse. He rested his hands on his hips and tried to decide where to start. He was looking for something quite specific.
He and his sisters had given different forms to the contents over the years. It was a malleable medium. Megan’s month-long attempt to organize it one summer, sweating gallons and emerging in the evenings streaked with dirt and coughing, had fallen to the forces of entropy. Her avenues, lanes, and paths became obscured as her brother and sister tossed objects this way and that in search of something or other—a croquet set in a once fine, now cracked black leather case that they would set up on the flat front lawn and that became a neighborhood attraction on summer evenings. Fragile bagpipe records; Jill’s favorite strategy for a rainy afternoon was to put one on the living room record player and turn it up loud. Within minutes Bette would appear in the doorway, a pained look on her face, and suggest that they go to the Uptown on Connecticut for a movie, her treat. Megan, Brian recalled, actually liked them, and danced along in her own interpretation of a Scottish reel—which lent a touch of authenticity to the purely avaricious intent of Jill and Brian. Yes, there were many useful objects in the attic, and it was a source of endless wealth. There was always a new quadrant to explore, a new source of object wonder.
But today, Brian’s search was not fueled by serendipity. He was looking for his dad’s nickel-plated saxophone. Something—he did not know what—had put it into his mind. Maybe just being back in the house.
The area under the eaves was most promising. He pulled his flashlight from his pocket and cast its beam over dark mountains of nearly a century’s worth of junk, and moved into the suburbs, the most recent deposits.
As he roved, he recalled the life they had made up for the fictional family they imagined had lived in the house at one time. They were Russian. Some of their silk dresses hung on a dowel near the front of the house. They never exactly fit the girls, but that hadn’t mattered. For Brian, there was a moth-eaten tail coat and a water-damaged silk top hat. They’d had a lot of fun up here.
He stepped on a board that rocked beneath his foot and was a bit surprised. He moved back carefully, thinking that it must be something on top of the board, but no; it was the board itself.
He caught one end with his fingertips and pulled it up. There was indeed a hollow place beneath—an imperfect hiding place, given that he had found it just by accident. But it was empty.
He reached around inside it and came up with a little bobble of stuff, kind of like gum. Yuck. He was about to toss it back in when he decided to be a good guy and throw it in the garbage later. That’s what he’d tell his kids to do. He wrapped it in a nearby shred of paper, stuck it in his pocket, and replaced the board.
The mere fact of the space tugged at his mind with insistent gravity. This was important. But why? And then he became irritated that he could not remember.
He had drunk quite a bit the year that they had given up on finding his father. When he began blacking out, after he and Cindy left the Peace Corps and moved back to Washington, he realized the magnitude of his problem—particularly when Cindy gave him the ultimatum. This mystery made him flat-out mad at himself. There were missing pieces. This was one of them.
Maybe Jill would know what had been in the vacant space.
There was no point in lingering on it right now. He’d pass out from heat exhaustion, not alcohol, if he didn’t find what he wanted soon.
He headed for the northwest corner of the house, where his mother had cleared out a space for more current storage. It took some poking, but after another fifteen minutes he scored not only his dad’s saxophone, but a trombone as well.
As he made his way back to the door, carrying his finds, he noticed an open cardboard box that contained composition books. Setting down the instruments, he turned on the flashlight on the box. IN WAR TIMES was written on the cover on the flap, in his father’s neat engineer’s print.
There were five such boxes. He sat on a rolled-up carpet, and plucked the first composition book from the top.
He brushed grime from the cover. Written on it was “Notebook #11.” So there was an order. Glancing inside, he saw that it was about Sam’s time in Germany.
He’d had no idea that his father had kept a war diary. It was fascinating. And, apparently, abandoned.
If they had known about this before they went to Germany …
He wanted to read more.
Downstairs, he would be inundated with kids and chores. If he read just a bit up here, infernolike as it was, he could have a few moments of privacy with his father.
He settled back and began to read.
As Brian did so, he felt as if he assumed the personalities of Sam, his father, and his buddy Wink. His awareness of the hot, dusty attic faded: He was in Germany, in a little town called Mönchengladbach, just a bit east of the Rhine, in March 1945, several months before Germany surrendered on May 8.
Brian absorbed it all: the long, dark wait in Britain as the Invasion was planned and Company C assembled jeeps, guns, radar equipment, and … something else, it seemed. Something secret.
He fell into the world of Sam and Wink, into the chaotic end of the Third Reich, through which the two men were ordered to travel.
It was April 1945. Their assignment was to go to the town of Merkers and present their passes to the CO, where they would get more information about their assignment. It was about thirty miles south, in the mountains, on the other side of the Ruhr.
* * *
“Has this area been liberated?” Sam asked Hap, their CO.
“More or less.” He spoke against the dull, thudding background of shelling along the Rhine, where occupying forces moved steadily northeast. “Here’s a map.”
It was a German road map of the area, printed in 1936, illustrated with a colored drawing. A happy Aryan family motored through fields of wildflowers; in the background were mountains toward which the road wound.
Sam and Wink left immediately, and within five miles were stuck behind a tank battalion. “We won’t get through this town till tomorrow morning,” a sergeant told them when they wanted to get past.
Sam got out the map. “Think we can get around this way?”
The sergeant shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. But watch out. There aren’t many resisters, but the ones who are still fighting are about thirteen years old and in control of mortars. Call themselves Werewolves. Savage little shits. They shot at us in a village this morning. So we called for air support and held back while they pulverized the place. Whole goddamned town had to suffer because of these zealot kids. Hitler’s done a great job with them. Just get ’em when they’re young, that’s all you gotta do.”
Sam and Wink returned to a well-marked crossroads and took the road to Erkelenz. One of the marvels of Germany was that the road signs were intact, and that nobody even thought to turn them around. “They must have thought they would never be invaded,” said Wink.
“They love us,” said Sam.
“They love food and cigarettes and not being forced to die for Hitler.”
So, generally, their map worked. If they were lost, Germans willingly and correctly redirected them. They found such behavior just this side of unbelievable. No self-respecting boy in the U.S. could resist sending someone down the wrong road—particularly an enemy, which they were, because Germany was still at war.
It was easy to blunder into a battle or run into diehard SS patrols, so they were hyperalert. After being shot at by snipers, they looked down the road onto which they were to turn and saw billowing black smoke. “Alternate route,” said Wink, who was presently navigating. It was growing dark, and they decided to stop as soon as they saw a likely place.
Suddenly they passed a sign, and entered a town. Wink halted at sight of a white flag hung from the top window of an intact building.
Another white flag emerged from the cellar.
“What say we take the surrender?” asked Wink.
Before Sam could tell Wink not on your life, rifles flew through a shattered window and landed in the street. The front door opened, and out marched a file of Wehrmacht, their hands in the air.
“Damn,” breathed Wink. “Think it’s a trick?”
“We surrender,” one of them shouted in English. “We are unarmed.” And then from all around, Germans emerged from cellars, all of them surrendering, putting themselves at the mercy of the American conquerors.
* * *
The soldiers invited them into their cellar for brandy as night fell. First Sam gathered the rifles and relieved the soldiers of sidearms and grenades and secured them in the jeep’s footlocker, removing chocolates, coffee, a string of bologna and a crate of sustaining Bordeaux to make room. Wink handed him an American flag. “Think this will keep us from being shelled tonight?”
Sam went upstairs to hang it from a window. The house was intact and neatly decorated. In the front bedroom, he had finished securing the flag and turned from the window when heard a bloodcurdling scream. He took out his gun and opened the closet door, revealing a little girl who continued to shriek.
Her mother emerged from behind a rack of clothing, thrust the girl behind her, and screamed invective at Sam until the German soldier ran up the stairs and calmed her down. “She thinks you are going to rape her. I told her that you are not Russian, but American.”
“Ask her if she can help us with dinner,” said Sam.
They had plates of fried bologna and potatoes, carried downstairs by the little girl.
The German soldiers had a fire going, and seemed quite comfortable in their outpost. “We are very relieved to see you,” said the commander. “We’ve been waiting for you for several days. We were afraid the Red Army would come first.”
“Yes,” said another. “We hear that the German POWs are well taken care of by the Americans.”
“Better than they take care of American soldiers,” said Wink bitterly, referring to the soldiers fighting in December and January, during the Battle of the Bulge, without proper boots, socks, food, or clothing. Sam silenced him with a sharp elbow.
The following dawn, as they were getting directions on how next to proceed, two American jeeps rolled in.
“They’ve surrendered,” said Sam, when the first jeep stopped next to theirs, but the soldiers rushed past them to “secure the town.” One of them returned with an SS knife, which the others admired profusely. “Yeah, hands off,” said the soldier as he stowed it in his pocket.
And then children emerged from houses bearing flowers. All the civilians came out to stand on their doorsteps, and waved as Sam and Wink brought up the rear of the procession, behind two Shermans.
“It’s so easy. And it was so hard.”
“You would have thought they’d fight to the death.”
“They’re finished and they know it. They’re just trying to get on our good side.”
By noon, they had made good progress, passing through Jülich and heading toward Krauthausen, a tiny town close to the Ruhr River. “Let’s see,” said Sam, who was trying to make sense of their latest intelligence. “I think that there’s a pontoon bridge a little bit east of here where we can cross the Rhur. Try that left fork.”
In late afternoon, they turned onto a twisting lane that clung to the side of a mountain. Trees on one side had been crushed down by tanks to afford a track around bomb craters.
Merkers was a small, ugly town on a plateau. Grim barracks and fences surrounded the entrance to a salt mine. Two cog railroad freight cars lay sideways, blasted off the track.
The guard looked at them suspiciously and left to check on their orders. He returned and waved them through with a bored expression.
Inside the fence, two GIs with machine guns lounged against a gray concrete wall on either side of a metal door. Wind roared in the pine trees above them, and brought the sharp, clean scent of snow.
They stepped into a rusted cage elevator, which moved slowly, with the ominous creak of poorly maintained machinery. “This is fun,” said Wink. “I like small, closed, deep places out of which it is impossible to escape if something goes wrong. Like the generator poops out.”
“It’s not closed,” said Sam.
“Gee, you’re right. We could reach out and scrape our hands against that stone shaft.” He looked up through the cage. “We’ll actually be able to see that rusty cable snap. And here we are! Two thousand feet underground.”
They stepped out into a damp, vast tunnel, where Vs of light from bare bulbs on the walls extended into the distance. Posted on one side was the required HEIL HITLER sign, except that someone had painted out HEIL and replaced it with F*ck. Beneath it, several men worked in a makeshift office, a space sectioned off by wooden crates. After a moment, one of the men looked up and came over.
“I’m Levi. I guess you’re the guys we’ve been waiting for. Dance and—”
“Winklemeyer.”
“Right. We’ve got a big transfer job. Need help on the logistics.”
Sam looked around. “Well, what is it?” He was thinking, the ultimate Wonder-Weapon. The manufacturing process, blueprints, mechanical drawings, impenetrable scientific papers.
“Gold.”
“Nah,” said Wink. “What is it?”
“Gold,” said Levi. “Come this way.”
They followed him to a small side gallery. Two more guards stood next to a dynamited hole. Levi stepped through the hole into a place where the lighting was not very strong. “Here.” He yanked open one of a vast army of canvas bags, so many that they stretched far away out of the range of the lights.
Sam reached in and felt a cool, smooth surface. With both hands, he lifted out a small block of gold. It was heavy. “Must be what? Fifty pounds?”
“Two hundred tons in all.”
Sam and Wink looked at each other. “While Europe starves,” Wink said softly.
“The Third Reich was nothing more than a very well-organized pack of murderous, unscrupulous, bloodthirsty thieves. But there’s more. We have reports that this is not an unusual place. They got loot holed up all over Germany.”
Levi led them through a dark tunnel to another stone gallery. A set of tracks ran along one side. Precisely organized sections of paintings, statues, and suitcases stretched as far as Sam could see; he had a feeling that if the next section of lights were switched on this astonishing wealth of European art would continue, and continue, and continue.
A man knelt next to a stack of folios, jotting on a clipboard. He stood and wiped both hands on his pants. “Marsh.”
“Dance and Winklemeyer. They’re going to figure out how to move all this stuff.”
“Know anything about art?” asked Marsh.
“Not much.”
“Well, over here I have six Rembrandts.” He bent and flipped large, framed paintings forward. “I can’t put a price on them. I mean, I was an art dealer. I’ve never seen anything this fantastic. Apparently it was Goering’s collection.”
“His adviser tells us that he paid for every piece,” said Levi, with a grim edge to his voice. “Just had to wait till the price was right, I guess. Let’s see—a Rubens here, a Dürer there. It adds up. Probably took ten train cars to cart this stuff up here so it could rot.”
“That’s a Kandinsky,” said Wink. Marsh looked at him with respect. “Saw it in a book. It’s huge!”
“Yes, well, it’s a great surprise to me that they have this so-called decadent art here, but it does have a monetary value. Kandinsky was at the Bauhaus for ten years, and the whole liberal lot of them had to decide either to toe the party line or get the hell out of the country. Kandinsky is still alive, you know. At least, I think he is. He’s Russian, but he moved to Germany when Russia threw him out, and then he moved to Paris.”
In the dim light, Sam drank in the strange juxtapositions of lines and shapes, the sheer motion of the piece. “He has some interesting thoughts.”
“Indeed.” Marsh rubbed moisture from the braided coronet of an exquisite marble nude with a rag he held. “Salt water can’t be good for this. I guess Goering was thinking he’d be back soon.”
They stood in silence for a moment.
“Well,” said Levi briskly, “I think we’re almost done counting it. I’ll get the lists to you tomorrow. One thing,” he was leading them back toward the head of the tunnel, the brightly lit office and stopped at another doorway. “I haven’t found anyone to catalog this yet.”
Inside yet another gallery, three-foot hoops strung solidly with gold rings hung on metal rods ten feet long, rows and rows of them. Sam lifted his hand to touch one of the hoops, then dropped it. He tried to estimate the weight of what he saw. Levi gestured hopelessly toward what looked like hundreds of barrels, opposite the rings. “Go on,” he said, his voice hoarse.
Wink lifted the lid of one of the barrels.
“What is it?”
“Teeth,” Wink finally said. “With gold fillings.” He set the lid down gently and stood with his head bowed for a long moment.
Levi was gone. Without speaking, they returned to the elevator and held their silence as it clanked to the top.
Night had come to the mountains.
“I don’t want to stay here,” said Wink.
“Me neither.” Sam put the jeep in gear and drove back down the road, on the lookout for craters.
Near the Rhur, where the air was river-damp, they found an empty house and set up camp, carrying candles, food, and wine into the house in silence.
Finally, as they ate bread and cheese and washed it down with Rhine wine, Sam spoke.
“I think we need to make that damned Device work.”
“Seconded.”
But as Sam lay awake in the darkness, he knew it would be much more difficult than just deciding. He wasn’t sure why.
Maybe it was only because it seemed like much work, and that it could drain his soul.
* * *