Alternate Routes

by Tim Powers

  “Good, thanks, Rachel. Anything else you remember about him? What’s he look like?”

  “Big white beard; crippled up from a car accident.”

  Vickery made himself speak casually: “Crutches?”

  “Sure. His main business is getting specific messages to and from people on the other side—people in the afterlife.” She shrugged. “And maybe it’s some Jewish kosher thing, but he wears his shirt and pants backward, with the buttons and zipper behind. And he sometimes wears two pairs of glasses at the same time, one pair over the other, though I suppose that’s not a kosher thing.”

  “Unlikely,” agreed Vickery. Specific messages, he thought.

  He lowered his head so that Voss wouldn’t see any fast pulse in his throat. This is definitely a guy I need to talk to, he thought—but he’s also a guy the TUA thought was worth getting in contact with. And Rachel will likely try to sell the information that an ex-cop named Herbert Woods is looking for Ike Liquidatem, if she can find anybody who’d pay to know it. I’d better try to get to him soon; today.

  Voss opened her mouth, closed it, then leaned forward. “Listen, Woods, you be careful with this stuff, right? You know about cops and robbers, but there’s . . . monsters out there, if you go down the wrong sort of street.”

  “I’ve already got that idea,” he said, getting to his feet. “Well, thanks, Rachel.” He laid another of his diminishing roll of twenties on the table. “That’s for the beers, and you can put the change on my account. I’ll see you around, hm?”

  Terracotta and Brett didn’t speak until the Hsaio Tower was several blocks behind them on Wilshire Boulevard and they were passing the wide lawn of the National Cemetery on their right; Terracotta looked away from it, toward Brett, who was driving.

  “Wheeler made me wait,” he said, “and then told me nothing. He says when the report’s ready they’ll send it to the Extension. Did you get anything?”

  Brett drove under the 405 overpass, and when they were out in the sunlight again he steered into the onramp to take the freeway back south.

  He pursed his lips, then shrugged and nodded. “The countermeasures team . . . didn’t get her,” he said. “Yeah, I found one of the team, a guy I know, in the cafeteria, pretty shaky.” He spread his fingers for a moment without letting go of the wheel. “Castine showed up, on a street overlooking the rendezvous point we had her fiancé give her, driving one of those cars with ads shrink-wrapped all over it—seventh floor is running the license plate now. Some guy on a motorcycle was—”

  “This agent told you a lot.”

  Brett merged into the right lane and sped up. He opened his mouth, but it was a couple of seconds before he spoke. “Like I said, I know him. Anyway, Castine had backup. Some guy on a motorcycle killed the designated shooter—shot him in the head—and then impeded the pursuit. They figure it might have been Woods.”

  “Did your friend say how many cars we fielded?”

  “Three, in addition to the solo shooter.”

  “Three cars, six countermeasures agents, and one guy on a motorcycle impeded them enough so that Castine got away?”

  “Got away.” Brett laughed briefly. “Well, Woods was Secret Service, and LAPD, if it was him. And whoever it was, he just delayed them long enough so that she was able to—uh, according to this agent—to disappear.” Brett was staring straight ahead. “Here’s the thing—she was on the 110 freeway and swerved straight toward the retaining wall, but didn’t hit the wall. She . . . vanished.” He looked over at Terracotta and raised an eyebrow. “Hm? Into thin air.”

  Terracotta sat up straight. “What do you mean? Where did she go?”

  “She didn’t go anywhere, is what I mean. What this guy meant. She just went away, in no direction. Out of existence.”

  Terracotta took a pack of Camels out of his jacket pocket and reached for the cigarette lighter on the console.

  How will that affect the imminent consummation, he wondered. Does a car count as a force-carrying particle?

  “Did he say if Abbott was any help?”

  “Apparently he wasn’t. They got him to extend the freeway field toward where they knew she was, but he didn’t sense her. The agent said they suspect Castine’s car was shielded or grounded somehow against spirit detection. That might have had something to do with her being able to vanish. We’re on the frontiers of some truly weird shit, no getting around it.”

  “You think?” The cigarette lighter socket had a plastic lid and no heating-element plug. Terracotta frowned, and tried to get his hand into his pocket against the restriction of the seatbelt. “And they didn’t get Woods either.”

  “If that’s who it was. No.”

  Terracotta had got a lighter out of his pocket, and shook a cigarette out of the pack onto his lip. “At least she’s not dead.”

  “Oh? You sure? Anyway, you wanted her dead.”

  Terracotta winced when he turned the flint-wheel with his punctured thumb, but he lit the cigarette and drew the smoke deep into his lungs. It was against protocol to smoke in agency cars, and he waited to see if Brett would object; it was exactly the sort of thing he would object to, strongly. “I wanted her over there,” he said, each syllable a puff of smoke, “and now she clearly is. It’s possible to be over there without dying. Look at . . . Orpheus. Dante. That radio evangelist from the ’20s, Aimee Semple McPherson. They all went there and came back.”

  “Orpheus,” said Brett, nodding. “Okay.”

  Terracotta exhaled a plume of smoke that curled against the windshield, and Brett had still not objected to the breach of protocol. Was it trivial, now, in light of some new fact? Terracotta had spoken to Wheeler, the Los Angeles TUA field office chief, and the man had glancingly referred to a visitor from the D.C. headquarters, and then pursed his lips and hastened to say that they merely anticipated such a visitor. Terracotta was sure now that an inspector was in town, covertly, and that Brett had spoken with him while Terracotta was uselessly questioning Wheeler; there was no way that one of the countermeasures team would have been idling around in the cafeteria so soon after a failed operation, and been so talkative.

  Brett was the senior agent at the Extension, after Terracotta. Was Brett to be assigned to replace him, take over the Extension’s activities?—pursue the political intelligence that headquarters was concerned with, at the expense of Terracotta’s admittedly eccentric-seeming research?

  Not now, not while the consummation was so close at hand!

  But Brett must have known that Terracotta would doubt the story about the agent in the cafeteria. Perhaps he meant to implicitly warn him.

  “Just in the last twenty-four hours,” Brett went on, speaking more easily now, “less than that, actually, Castine meets Woods—who heard your toxic malmeme four years ago—gets hold of some kind of spirit-stealth car, wiggles out of our trap, and maybe crosses over alive into the afterworld hallucination state, however that works. And Woods backs her up and gets away. You think maybe she intended to meet Woods yesterday, and do all this? Maybe she’s been a mole all along, like working for Putin or somebody.”

  “No, she’s working for, always has been working for, her damned conscience. Woods probably provided the car, he’s the contaminating influence.” He pushed the button to lower the window and threw the cigarette out, then turned to face Brett. “Listen, whoever you talked to at Hsaio today, are you still working for me?”

  “Uh,” said Brett, reddening a little as he stared at the traffic ahead, “yes—till the end of the week.”

  “After that I’m working for you?”

  “That’s . . . oh hell, Terracotta, I don’t know. No, I got the idea you’re going to be extensively debriefed—after they figure out exactly what they want to ask you—and then you’ll probably be sent back to D.C. Promoted sideways.”

  Terracotta nodded grimly. “Something sideways, anyway, I’m sure.”

  Then I’ve only got four and a half days, he thought—to accomplish the merger, the compl
etion, the consummation, that I appear to be determined to accomplish; if the word I refers to any real purposeful entity, and is in any sense this body sitting beside Brett in this car.

  “We need to get all three radio rooms working again,” he found himself saying. “All scanners back on watch-and-watch. Interview any and all accessible deleted persons.”

  Brett frowned. “Any and all? Every dipshit deleted person who wants us to call his mom, or says he has a winning lottery ticket?”

  “Yes yes, any and all. We need to . . . widen the conduit.”

  Traffic and idiot drivers will provide plenty of souls crossing to the desert highway afterlife from the LA freeways, he thought—we need to get as many ghosts as possible coming back the other way. Exchange.

  “You’re in charge,” conceded Brett. He didn’t have to actually say for now.

  The Pico Kosher Deli was one of a row of narrow establishments on the south side of the street, and Vickery parked his motorcycle in a lot a few doors past it and walked back to the little restaurant. He shuffled in past a display case full of brownies and cakes and stood by the cash register, and very shortly a man in an apron stepped up and raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

  “I’m looking for a guy I met in here a couple of times,” Vickery said, “white beard, crutches? His name was Ike something.” The name Liquidatem, if Rachel Voss had even remembered it correctly, was too melodramatic.

  The man gave him a blank look. “Rings no bells, sorry.” Then he sighed and said, “But why don’t you sit down and have a sandwich.”

  “. . . Okay.”

  Vickery walked on into the dining room and sat down at a green leather booth facing the street. Another man brought him a menu, and Vickery wasn’t sure whether the man at the register had meant him to wait or just order something if he meant to hang around; but the spicy smells of pastrami and corned beef made up his mind for him, and he ordered a roast beef sandwich with horseradish on rye bread.

  During the next twenty minutes a few people came in and sat down at other booths, but none were on crutches.

  Vickery had finished the sandwich, and was considering ordering the kokosh cake for dessert, when he saw a familiar figure move past the window outside, and a few moments later the boy Santiago was standing by the cash register. He crossed to Vickery’s table and sat down on the other side of the table.

  “Now you getting in deep, hey?” the boy said cheerfully. “Your girl recognized the guy at the church?” He sniffed the air and stared at the crumbs on Vickery’s plate, and Vickery noticed that the boy’s wrists were thin in the loose leather bands.

  “I want to see him, Santiago.”

  The boy rocked one hand in the air, palm down. “Eso es nada, but maybe he wants to see you. You know why the fantasmas spilled all over the city this morning?”

  I’m not surprised, thought Vickery. “Yes, I guess I do know why. I want to talk to him about what happened there.”

  “Tell me something.”

  Anticipating a question, Vickery waited a few moments; then he realized that Santiago was asking for some fact that would confirm his claim to know something about the event.

  “It happened on the 110,” he said, “just north of the Third Street onramp, about an hour after we saw you at Holy Sacrament church . . . probably about exactly ten AM.”

  “Bingo. He wants to see you. You know Rambam? Place on Robertson?”

  “Some kind of old folk’s home. Sure.”

  “Tell ’em you want to see Isaac Laquedem—Liquidatem was just a name that got made up for a joke.” The boy slid out of the booth and stood up, with a wary glance toward the waiter. “Did you ever pay me my ten bucks?”

  “Yes, Santiago, and then some. This morning.”

  “Oh yeah. Well, see you.”

  The boy hurried outside, and Vickery got to his feet. He laid another of his twenty-dollar bills on the table and walked toward the door, but he paused just short of it and touched the bulk of the .45 in his pocket.

  The old man met with a TUA official today, he thought; could he be a TUA ally? If Rachel Voss did contact him, she’d have said that it was Herbert Woods who wants to see him. The TUA would recognize that name.

  Santiago might or might not know if there were snipers on a roof outside, and he might or might not have told me, even if he knew there were.

  Vickery’s palms were sweaty, and he could feel his heart beating.

  I should leave this place by the back, and abandon the bike.

  And abandon Castine—though realistically she’s lost beyond any hope of recall anyway.

  One guy came back, in 1960.

  Sure, and the moon landing was faked and Tupac Shakur is still alive.

  She saved your life yesterday, and today she sacrificed herself to avoid betraying you.

  She’d never have had a chance to betray me, they clearly meant to kill her out of hand.

  Still.

  He took a deep breath and exhaled, then stepped out onto the sidewalk, his hand on the gun and his eyes rapidly scanning the rooftops and the few pedestrians and the parked and passing cars. He walked carefully to the bike, knees flexed and ready to dive in any direction, and he was strongly reminded of simulated attacks in Hogan’s Alley at the Rowley Training Center in Michigan.

  And, as in many of those simulations, nothing happened this time. He got on the bike, started the engine, and rode to the Robertson intersection.

  RAMBAM was the name engraved in two-foot-tall letters in the stone lintel over the entry of a pre-war brick apartment building, and Vickery suspected that the current business had adopted the name just because it was so prominent there. He tapped up the steps and pushed open a heavy steel-and-glass door.

  The lobby was narrow, with orange vinyl chairs around a table on the left side of an open hallway, and a sliding glass window in the wall on the right side, and the place smelled of floor polish and Ben-Gay. Little metal seagulls and palm trees were stuck onto the paneled wall behind the orange chairs.

  The glass window slid aside, and a woman with rhinestone cat’s-eye glasses stared out at him.

  “Isaac Laquedem?” Vickery said. “He’s expecting me.”

  “What’s the boy’s name?”

  “The boy—oh. Santiago.”

  “Mr. Laquedem is in the dining room.” She nodded toward the hall. “First doorway on your left.”

  The dining room was larger than the lobby, with long formica-topped tables running the length of it; faded advertising posters with French and Hebrew lettering were spaced along the paneled inner wall. The room was empty except for the white-bearded man sitting below one of the windows. A pair of crutches leaned against the wall beside him.

  “The boy said your name is Vickery.” The man’s voice was low and grating. “I think it’s not.”

  “Call me anything you like,” said Vickery, crossing to take a chair near the old man. The front of Laquedem’s white shirt was smooth, with no overlap or buttons, and two pairs of eyeglasses hung on string lanyards on his chest. One appeared to have no lenses. “I want to ask you about—”

  “Tell me what happened this morning.” The old man lifted the pair of glasses with lenses and slid them on. “Ghost voices pre-empted KFI on my radio, and even on the radios in the next rooms, and I got calls from freeway gypsies all the way out to Palmdale, talking about a huge surge.”

  “Okay. Well . . .” Feeling as if he were in a confessional himself now, Vickery leaned forward and clasped his hands together. “The current on the 110 was very powerful,” he said quietly, “pigeons racing away to keep up with the expanding fringes, a dust storm in downtown LA, ozone smell, whirlwinds across the lanes—and a woman drove a car at the retaining wall and vanished up an offramp that was only there for a moment.”

  The old man’s teeth seemed very white as his tanned and deeply lined face broke into a smile above the ivory beard. “Was it by any chance the car the boy described? With big faces printed all over it?” When
Vickery nodded, he went on, “She must have had some inhabited item with her.”

  “One of the metronomes,” Vickery said.

  “And the caps on those pendulums are always a bit of bone or wood, with a ghost or never-born collapsed into it, I believe? It must have been shaking itself right off the metronome. And she must have killed someone on or near a freeway, to have a track to follow—probably pretty recently, judging by the scope and depth of the splash she made. And was she drunk? No? Then had she recently been severely struck in the head?”

  Vickery thought of the holes in the Taurus’ back window and the blood he had seen on Castine’s face, and he nodded unhappily, hoping it had been a glancing impact.

  Laquedem spread one hand. “It seems one must be at least partly dissociated from this world, mentally, to fit through.” He sat back and crossed his arms. “What is it you want to know?”

  “I want to know,” said Vickery, “how to get her back.”

  Isaac Laquedem frowned and pushed his glasses up on his nose. “Why?”

  “I . . . owe her.”

  “You can’t owe her that much. You must have a lot of yourself invested in her.”

  Vickery considered that. I didn’t have a lot to invest, he thought, and she’s certainly not the most reliable or sensible investment, but—

  “I suppose I have,” he admitted. “She’s . . . a friend, somehow, for better or worse. And I don’t have a lot of those.”

  “Better or worse.” Laquedem echoed. He turned to look out the window, though all he could see from his chair would be the top branches of an orange tree. “Getting her back would mean going there yourself.”

  Vickery had been forlornly hoping for a different answer. But, “So I had rather suspected,” he admitted in a leaden tone.

  “Had you indeed!” The old man turned to look at Vickery. “You were driving that car, earlier today—you brought an administrator of the Transportation Utility Agency to meet me. Are you an agent of theirs?”