by Farris, John
"It's bad luck to open an umbrella in the house," he said.
"I'm not superstitious." But she collapsed the umbrella anyway, and sat low on the edge of the Roman tub to watch him shave. His hair had turned out well, a shade of brown that looked right with his normally ruddy complexion; just a few streaks of white remained around the ears. Hester had trimmed away most of the shag. With heavy glasses and pipe and a calculated slouch he was transformed. Whipsnade Professor of Economics at NYU. Or one of the bright young Jesuits in the Cardinal's office.
"Have you always had thievery in your bones?" she said admiringly. "No. I was carefully taught."
"Suppose the housekeeper had walked in while you were upstairs burgling the rectory of good old Immaculate Conception?"
"It's a very old house, and it'll fall down one of these days. I would have started talking about support walls and beams and bracing. I would have drawn diagrams until she got bored and remembered something else she needed to do. People want to believe what you tell them, it simplifies their lives."
"I believed you when you told me about Robin. But it was hard to believe, I mean suddenly the place where I worked sounded so sinister. How long did you watch me before you decided to take a chance?"
"Six weeks."
"And how long before you started to trust me?"
"I set out my mousetraps. I was a big piece of smelly cheese. Nobody tried to take a bite."
"I don't know how you had the nerve to do that, after what you'd already been through."
The iron would be hot by now and she had work to do, but Hester liked sitting there looking at him. In a couple of hours he'd be gone and then it might be a very long time before she saw him again . . . if he made it back to her at all. Just three days ago she'd been certain that the computer's terse obituary meant the end of it.
Paragon est 2115 hrs
ID: Deja Vu
Ref: Sandia File
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Current Status?
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Deceased/Details Follow:
On 18 June 1975 at approximately 0200 Robin Sandza fell or jumped into the East River from the promenade of Carl Schurz Park vicinity East 86th St/Four witnesses interrogated by police provided similar accounts of the incident/The body was not recovered/On 19 June the office of the Coroner
Peter had stayed away for hours while she tried to read, tried to sew, napped fitfully. When at last he walked in, half-frozen, cold rain on his face, she could see at a glance that no proof of his son's death would ever be good enough: having survived this long on luck and nerve and will, he probably would not have believed if they had shown him a disinterred corpse in a coffin.
Four witnesses had seen Robin take the long plunge into the tidal river; why wasn't that enough? Hester had decided it was enough for her, but she couldn't say so. Peter mattered too damned much . . . more than she mattered to him, another truth that was unwelcome. But he needed her close, not to talk to, not right away, just to touch if he wanted. He needed, on a dreary afternoon, the reassurance that he was not totally alone.
Hot vegetable soup made with beef and bone marrow; dark imported beer at room temperature. A real fire, not the tame gas-log affair but hefty logs graying on the hearth, fountains of sparks, the sting of hardwood smoke, the always-changing, entrancing flames. Her head was in his lap, his fingertips light on the nape of her neck.
"Did you always know that Robin was a psychic?"
"No. He kept it from me for a long time. That wasn't difficult to do, I saw very little of him while he was growing up. I think he wanted to tell me, long before he got around to it. But he was worried sick he'd do it badly, and destroy the relationship. He knew I'd be pretty damned disturbed."
"Were you?"
Peter smiled. "We were in St. Thomas—April of '74. He was growing up fast—every time I saw him he was six months, a year older, and I was beginning to think it was a terrible waste of both our lives. By then I knew I wanted out of MORG. It wasn't a matter of age, or nerves, or reflexes. I still checked out pretty good: simple reaction time of .14 seconds, or .26 seconds in a six-choice situation. I have the perceptual speed and dynamic visual acuity I had when I was a kid. I can still make the long shots, up to fifteen hundred yards when you've got, at most, twelve inches to work with. But it had all . . . gone flat, somehow. I'd lost my sense of outrage. I felt like I had overstayed my adolescence by about fifteen years.
"Anyway, we both had a lot on our minds during the flight down, there was a kind of awkwardness between us. By then Robin had read me, he had a good idea of who and what I was, he knew the names of men I'd killed. Even so he loved me. It was my love he was afraid of losing, because he felt like a goddamn monster."
"Poor Robin."
"We chartered a boat, fished for jack and pompano, did some diving. Our usual routine. When he finally got all the emotional knots untangled and confessed—"
"You couldn't believe a tenth of what he told you."
"No. So he flipped a Kennedy half dollar fifty times. Forty-seven times it came down heads. Robin said he could keep it up all afternoon, but it was boring. Then he unsheathed his diver's knife and asked me to stand behind him. He wasn't wearing anything but swim trunks and burn cream on his shoulders and nose. He stood in the sun on the stern deck with his right arm outstretched, palm up. He put the knife in his palm and concentrated on it for a couple of minutes. His hand was steady. The knife suddenly flew and stuck with tremendous force in the mast twelve feet away. Robin retrieved the knife and held it up, and I remember how the sun flashed on the blade. He passed his other hand over the blade and it wilted like an unwatered flower. Then he straightened the blade, not quite as good as new: it was about an eighth of an inch out of plumb."
"Good Lord. What did you do?"
"I smiled; asked him how he did it. He said, By wanting to, that's all I know. Robin looked tired. I went below to get him some lemonade and fix myself a drink. I poured a hell of a lot of gin over ice and drank it before it was cold. The sight of a tempered steel knife blade curling over at the tip wasn't easily dismissed from the mind."
"No indeed."
"When I tried to apply reason to what I'd seen, my mind just—balked. Nothing looked quite right to me, but I didn't blame that on the gin. I couldn't tell if I was looking at water or artfully contrived, blue concrete. I had the eerie notion I could walk on it, all the way to Buenos Aires. I wondered if the multiplication tables still worked. I wondered if the sun was going to set as usual, or if it would hang in that particular spot in the sky forever—"
"In other words, you freaked."
"I finally realized what was affecting me: simple terror. I'd dealt with terror before. You have to get yourself moving. Do something, anything, but don't just stand there paralyzed. So I took Robin his lemonade. He was anxious and uncomfortable. I don't know how I looked to him. I imagine my smile was badly hung. But when I gave him the glass and touched his hand I found that I could breathe again. After that I was okay. Different, but okay."
"When did you decide to quit MORG?"
"On the spot. It was obvious that Robin was going to need me, badly. I had an obligation, a moral obligation to complete an assignment I'd been working on for a year. Then I could come home to stay. Ellis Tidrow had been wanting to return to missionary work for some time. Borneo, New Guinea, one of those Godforsaken places. I told Robin I was ready to be a full-time father. At first he was afraid I'd made the decision because I thought he needed a keeper. When I convinced him otherwise, he was—overjoyed. God, we had a beautiful time the rest of that week, making up for some long-gone years."
"Smoke getting in your eyes?" Hester asked.
"No, I'm crying:"
"Oh," she said.
"Don't worry, I won't go apeshit on you."
"It isn't apeshit to cry when you love someone."
Peter moved her, but tenderly, got up to walk off his emotion. He added another log
to the fire. He came back to her. He was angry now, though not at himself. Hester closed her eyes and touched him blindly, erotic because of the tears she had seen.
"I think Childermass planned to take Robin from me the night I introduced them," Peter said. "Robin had prepared a couple of reasonably difficult demonstrations. Ball bearings on a Formica table top. He kept several of them in constant motion without rolling any off the table, a feat which I couldn't duplicate using both hands. Childermass wrote down a long series of numbers, sealed the original in a metal box, kept a check list. Robin held the box in his hands. From eight feet away Robin ran the numbers off on a digital calculator, almost faster than the eye could follow. It was obvious, even then, that Robin's talents . . . had no practical limitations."
"I don't understand why you had to tell Childermass that Robin' was a psychic."
"Do you remember what MORG stands for?"
"Multiphasic, Operations, and umm, Research something-or-other."
"Research Group."
"MORG. That's . . . really grotesque, when you think about it."
"Just a bastard little agency that never made it at DOD. Except for Childermass it would have been dismantled along about the beginning of the Korean War. But Childermass is one of the great bureaucrats and demagogues, the equal of Hoover himself. He took an agency nobody knew much about and created a sphere of influence in the Cold War climate of the fifties. All he needed to become really powerful was a few hundred million dollars. He got the swag by scaring people. He tricked and lied and blackmailed. He conned large numbers of otherwise sensible men into believing that the CIA and the FBI weren't enough. We needed MORG. And did we ever get it."
"I don't think you answered my question about Robin and—"
"I was so tired of the gangster work, the neighborhood protection rackets. Which is all it ever amounted to despite the rhetoric and the chauvinism. We were protecting our no-doubt vital interests in neighborhoods like Cambodia, Peru, and the Trucial Oman States. And the old ways always worked best: a payoff here, a killing there. I was damned tired and just a little careless long before I recognized the symptoms. I ought to have quit cold, but Childermass argued me out of it. I accepted double salary and a title in an area where my training and judgment might be valuable. A sensitive post. Too sensitive, because Robin had access to everything inside my head. Sooner or later that would have caused trouble. So I told Childermass. Hell, I all but invited him to steal my son."
"You didn't know Childermass was interested in psychic phenomena."
"No. The Russians and the Czechs had been diddling with it for years, reason enough for Childermass to sink a few million into Paragon Institute. Nothing much had come of his investments. But it was all there, just waiting, for Robin."
Peter got up to open a bottle of Irish beer and poke up the fire. Hester curled deep in the tub chair, looking out at him like a dreamy animal in a winter den.
"That's one reason why I don't believe my son is dead," Peter said quietly. "Dr. Irving Roth is a liar. His computer also tells lies, and four `witnesses' will lie to their graves because they've been handsomely bought. Childermass leaves nothing to chance. Robin was too valuable to be let out of Paragon by himself, particularly at two in the morning."
"What if he . . . broke out for some reason?"
"And jumped in the river with four people watching? It's a little too neat, Hester."
"I guess so."
"Childermass found himself in possession of a unique natural resource. The Russians don't have one. The Chinese don't have one. He wanted Robin locked up—the euphemism is 'involuntary sequestration'—where his researchers could devote full time to him. He didn't want any questions asked about the boy, ever. Robin's 'death' was easy to fake, but there was a bigger problem."
"You?”
Peter nodded. "Childermass knew that as long as I was alive there was no chance he could get away with any of it. Robin was scheduled for five days of tests at Paragon Institute. In the meantime Childermass had an urgent request. One of our Russians had died in Vladimir prison after eight long years. As soon as he was in the ground the Ukrainian NTS got his wife out; she had refused to leave Russia as long as Sergei was alive. There was a chance she had some information, one of many pieces of a puzzle we'd been working on for a long time, and because I'd known them both it seemed likely Katya would be willing to cooperate with me. She was old and sick and we were working against time, so I flew to Finland immediately. But I was a few hours late; Katya had lapsed into a coma and was failing so rapidly there was no chance she would recover. I saw her briefly. Maybe it was Katya. Or maybe it was some other old woman they'd drugged for the occasion."
"Who do you mean, they?"
"Our Baltic group. The Principal is, or was, a man named McGourty. I think I killed him, but to this day I don't know for sure. Good old McGourty. He sprung for dinner at Kalastasaturppa and got me to the Helsinki airport in plenty of time to catch the 7:30 P.M. Finnair flight to Copenhagen. From there I was connecting direct to New York on SAS. I said goodbye to McGourty at the gate. The plane was a DC-9, I think, and the flight was lightly booked, maybe twenty-five passengers in all.
"We were boarding in a light rain, walking across a stretch of wet tarmac, when the bomb went off prematurely, almost blowing the tail section off the plane. The explosion dismembered a couple of cargo busters and a ramp rat. Most of the boarding passengers were injured; fortunately there was a big catering truck between us and the blast. I don't know what caused the bomb to go off at the airport instead of over the Gulf of Finland. Maybe one of the cargo busters pried open the wrong suitcase. I came to in the back of an ambulance parked on the ramp. I remembered vaguely having dinner with McGourty, and there he was again, bending over me on the litter, talking, to me, looking very concerned. I couldn't hear a word he said. He had rolled up my sleeve. I saw the needle in his hand. I couldn't tell you why I reacted like I did. I might have seen something, just for an instant, in his eyes. I think now that McGourty heard the explosion as he was driving away from the airport, turned around and came back in case it was necessary to finish off a bad job. And that's a bad pun, but I got both hands around his throat before he could jab me, and if he wasn't dead when I left him on the litter and drove off in the ambulance, it's only because I wasn't at full strength at the time."
"All those people dead because—"
"Childermass wanted to be sure I didn't come back from Finland. He could have put me up for bids, I can think of half a dozen professionals who would've considered the money worth the risks. Childermass has always been a free spender when it comes to his pie-in-the-sky projects, but my life wasn't worth two hundred and fifty thousand bucks when five thousand would do the trick, and to hell with the rest of the people on that plane. By the time he assigned a reliable assassin, I had my wits about me. It took me six weeks to get home. I had it figured—why he'd done it; what he wanted. I got in touch. He said he knew he'd made a hell of a big mistake, and he wanted to talk. Just the two of us."
"Did you trust him?"
"We worked it out so there was no possibility I was walking into something. But he was so eager to get rid of me he was willing to do the job himself. Childermass isn't a coward, but he's never carried a weapon and as far as I know he's never killed a man. It can be hard to do that first time. He was counting on me to be a little lax. Hardware fixed him up with a High Standard Model 10 riot gun, which is an automatic shotgun a little more than two feet long, with a pistol grip, loaded with Sabot cartridges that generate twenty-two-hundred foot-pounds of energy at the muzzle. It's one of the most evil weapons ever devised. He had the gun under his rain slicker. We met after midnight, in the middle of a parking lot at RFK stadium. His car, a VW, and the stolen car I was driving. I circled until I was satisfied he was alone in the bug. I parked eight feet away, and parallel. He got out. It was raining. He had his right hand through the side slot in the coat. I still didn't expect anything. But the engine was runnin
g: I had one foot heavy on the brake, the other on the accelerator.
"He should have brought that shotgun up firing through the glass of the off-side window—hell, he could have blown the side right out of the car. But he couldn't see well because of the rain, and maybe he didn't trust his fire-power. If he'd done it right, there wouldn't have been anything left of me above the belt buckle. But he wasn't a pro, he wanted the door open. I'd rigged a little something, just to set him back on his heels, make him nervous. A fifty-thousand-candle-power torch that went on as soon as the door was opened, hitting him full in the face, blinding him. He lost his cool and tried to drag that shotgun out from under the slicker. He was back on his heels, still holding onto the door with the other hand. I hit the gas and took off. Childermass lost his balance and fell down hard on his butt with his left arm still extended, and the shotgun was hung up at a bad angle. The jolt triggered it and that big, heavy Sabot slug blew his arm away at the elbow."
"Oh, God, that's terrible! What did you do?"
"Drove fifty feet; stopped. Looked back. Put it in reverse. I figured by the time I ran over him, back and forth three or four times, he wouldn't miss the arm at all."
Hester's face was totally drained of color. "I don't believe . . . you would have done that."
Peter reacted with a fierceness that startled Hester: he took her face in his hands. The pressure of his fingertips made heavy indentations along her cheekbones. She sucked air painfully through clenched teeth. Hester tried to look away, and couldn't.
