Forced Perspectives

by Tim Powers

  Taitz sat back, still watching Harlowe. “Huh. I think we’d better find Vickery and Castine.”

  Harlowe tapped the polished box on the seat. “The bloody sock has worked fine so far.”

  The bloody sock. Taitz had seen Harlowe working the old white sock in the office on Sepulveda this morning, and it hadn’t so much looked bloody as just very dirty; but the brown stains on it were supposed to be Ingrid Castine’s blood, and she and Sebastian Vickery had experienced something last year—death and resurrection, according to some stories, or just a brief corporeal trip to the afterworld and back, according to others—something that made their souls oscillate irregularly, in a way normal souls did not, like a couple of Frequency Modulation radio transmitters in a world of Amplitude Modulation. And any samples of Castine’s FM blood would resonate in tune to the metaphorical transmitter, which was Castine herself, and be drawn to it.

  Harlowe’s ambitious Singularity project required the participation of a nearly unique sort of pair, and, because of their crazy history, Ingrid Castine and Sebastian Vickery were ideal.

  They were so desirable, in fact, that Harlowe had waited a dangerously long time in the hope of getting them. Constant monitoring of Castine had not been difficult—she worked in a government office in Washington D.C. and had an apartment in Gaithersburg—but after Elisha’s unsuccessful attempt to snatch Vickery in February, the man had effectively disappeared. The Singularity project was already in perilous gestation, but Harlowe had maddeningly postponed finding some other pair—because, it turned out, he had had his nieces in mind as an option all along. A dubious option, Taitz thought.

  And then, just three days ago, Castine had placed the ad in the Los Angeles Times, and Harlowe had guessed that it was a message to Vickery, stating the time, but not the place, of a proposed meeting. The guess had been effectively confirmed when Castine booked a flight for today to Los Angeles: the city where she and Vickery had reportedly died and somehow been resurrected last year, and where Vickery had last verifiably been living. On her arrival at dawn, Castine had rented a car from Hertz at the airport . . . but had then unexpectedly done a fast lanes-crossing exit from the 405 freeway, shaking off the Singularity cars that had been following her, and she had not used her credit card since.

  At that point the bloody sock had been the only hope of tracing her. Harlowe had bought the unsavory thing months ago from a freeway-side gypsy who claimed to have inherited it from another of that furtive tribe, and this morning Harlowe had wrapped the stiffened white sock around a stapler, for weight, and tied a string around it and, holding the free end of the string, dangled it like a pendulum over his desk.

  It had consistently swung away from vertical toward the northeast.

  And so four cars had set out at noon, driving up Venice Boulevard, with Harlowe right here in the Chevy Tahoe holding the string and calling directions to Tony, the earnest young driver.

  The pendulum had begun swinging more northward as they drove through Culver City, and at the Fairfax intersection the four cars had turned north; the pendulum had been tilting steadily northward then, but when they passed Melrose it had abruptly begun straining to the south, so they had all made U-turns.

  And the pendulum had swung to the right, and then backward, as they passed a white Honda parked at the curb near Canter’s Delicatessen, and Taitz had recognized Ingrid Castine’s profile in the Honda as they had passed it.

  Tony had managed to park the Tahoe SUV at the curb only a few spaces ahead of her, and the three other cars had sped on to find parking spaces nearby.

  Castine had been an hour early for the probable 2 PM assignation, and after sitting in her car for twenty minutes she had started it again and driven south; but before Tony had been able to steer out into traffic after her, one of the men in the other cars reported that she had simply turned right on Oakwood and done a U-turn at the next street—and when she had got back to Fairfax she had turned left and found a space to park on the east side of the street, across from Canter’s. And after another fifteen minutes she had got out of her car and walked to the crosswalk.

  And it had all been going as planned until Elisha got out of his surveillance car and went into the restaurant.

  “Did Elisha try to poison Castine?” asked Taitz now, as the SUV crossed Third Street.

  “I don’t know,” said Harlowe. “He put something in her water glass, and I knocked it over.” He opened the wooden box and lifted out the string-wrapped sock and stapler, and handed it to Taitz. “You track her for a while, my hands are shaky.”

  Taitz reluctantly took hold of the bundle and unwound the string. The sock and the stapler were perceptibly warm, though the interior of the vehicle was nearly chilly; and of course the sock had never been washed, and he made a mental note to wash his hands at the earliest opportunity.

  He held it up by the free end of the string, feeling both ridiculous and uneasy, and stared at it as it swung with the movement of the car. “I dunno, chief,” he said, “it seems to be swinging east more than anything else.”

  “Take a left on Third Street, Tony,” said Harlowe, “and call the other drivers, tell them to catch up.”

  CHAPTER TWO:

  A Lot of M&Ms and Cigarettes

  “Whoa!” exclaimed Taitz as the sock bundle swung around on the end of the string he held. “We just passed her, to the right!”

  “That was Sycamore,” said Tony from the driver’s seat, signaling for a lane change. “I’ll loop around the block.”

  “Quickly,” suggested Harlowe.

  “I’m on it.”

  Tony made a right turn and sped down a narrow street of well-kept old houses set back from the sidewalks, the SUV’s windshield flickering between direct sunlight and the shadows of curbside trees, and at the next intersection he turned right, and then right again, and then he was cruising slowly up Sycamore while the three men in the back alternately peered at the dangling sock and looked out the side windows.

  “To the right,” Harlowe muttered, “now directly to our right—I don’t see anybody—is she in that house? Where’s their car?”

  The sock jerked backward on its string. “She’s moving!” exclaimed Foster, hiking forward on his seat and opening the door. “Tony, stop the car!” A hot breeze smelling of cut grass broke up the cool interior air.

  The SUV rocked to a halt. Harlowe was snapping his fingers and frowning. “You’d better both grab her—and get Vickery too!”

  But Taitz stayed seated, glancing from the slanting sock-string to the pavement outside the open door. “Uh, Foster,” he said, “pick up that tissue paper on the sidewalk. Quick, it’s blowing away.”

  “I don’t see anybody!” Foster called back.

  To Harlowe, Taitz said, “Tell him to fetch it.”

  Harlowe raised his eyebrows, but said loudly, “Foster! Bring me that tissue paper!”

  A moment later Foster was standing on the pavement outside the SUV, still squinting up and down the street, while Harlowe sat back and gingerly uncrumpled the sheet of Kleenex and held it up by one corner.

  Red spots on the tissue paper were evidently blood. Taitz sighed and laid the sock-and-string on the seat beside him.

  “Get back in here, Foster,” Harlowe snapped, and when Foster had climbed back in and closed the door, Harlowe said to Tony, “East on Third again.”

  “Rightie-O.” The vehicle sped forward.

  “Rightie-O,” echoed Harlowe softly, with evident distaste.

  Foster was panting, and he swiped his sleeve over his bald head. “What,” he said, peering at the tissue paper in the relative dimness of the SUV’s interior, “she got a nosebleed?”

  “Or something,” agreed Harlowe, handing it to Taitz. “Burn this, will you? The effect apparently diminishes as the square of the distance, and this small thing was close enough to us to eclipse her signal.”

  Taitz took the tissue paper from him and with his free hand dug into his pocket for a lighter. He flicked
the flint wheel, and the tissue readily caught fire. The SUV had no ashtrays, so when the thing was flaming out he looked around and then dropped it on the instep of his right shoe and ground it out with the heel of his left.

  Harlowe nodded, and Taitz blew on his fingers and then picked up the weighted string. Soon the sock was detectably pulling away from vertical again, distinct from the rocking of the vehicle.

  “You should have cut the sock into three pieces,” said Taitz. “We could triangulate her location.”

  “Of course I thought of that,” snapped Harlowe, “but the stains are so faint and dried out—I was afraid a third, or even a half, of the sock wouldn’t get a perceptible pull.” He frowned at the dangling sock. “I didn’t expect her to throw chaff.”

  Wilshire Boulevard cuts MacArthur Park in half from east to west, and Vickery found a parking space alongside the southern half, within sight of the park’s broad lake glittering in the sun. He and Castine got out and made their way across the grass to a curling lane lined with tarpaulin-roofed booths, tables under umbrellas, and even just blankets spread out on the grass, all decked with merchandise for sale—fruits and vegetables, toys, clothing, cell phones, Spanish language CDs—and the breeze was redolent with the smells of salsa, teriyaki and marijuana.

  Vickery bought a gaudy Hawaiian shirt and another pair of sunglasses for himself, and a baseball cap with “Hollywood” stitched on the front for Castine. The yellow blanket was still draped over her jacket and the right knee of her trousers was torn and spotted with blood, and altogether they didn’t look much like the couple who had fled Canter’s less than an hour earlier.

  Food vendors pushed shopping carts, equipped with coolers or little ovens, across the open area beside the lake, and from one of them Vickery bought a couple of tamales in waxed paper and two plastic cups of agua de tamarindo, and he and Castine carried them across the grass to a cement bench. Only a few yards away a flotilla of ducks patrolled the shore, and seagulls whirled in the blue sky overhead, and the bench proved to be nearly whitewashed with bird dung old and new. Vickery and Castine sat down on the grass.

  “This is nice, actually,” said Castine, looking around as she pulled a rubber band off a paper napkin wrapped around a plastic fork. “I hate it that I’m—back in trouble in L.A. again!—but I wish I’d known about this park when I was working here.”

  “It’s nice now,” Vickery agreed. He had already freed his fork, and, after glancing back toward the car, he began digging into his steaming tamale. “Ten years ago it was rough. When I was in LAPD, I was mostly assigned to the Hollywood and Wilshire Divisions, but for a while I was out here in Ramparts. It was all gangs here in those days, the 18th Street Gang and MS-13. This was where you came to get crack or heroin, or fake green cards and driver’s licenses. Or to get killed.”

  “But you quit that, and became a Secret Service agent.”

  “Sure did. And that nearly got me killed.”

  “Don’t look back,” she said. Then, seeing him again glance toward the street, she added, “What did I just say? Why do you keep looking at the car?”

  “They can’t sneak up on us here,” he said, “if they’re tracking us somehow. And I’ve got a gun.”

  “How can they be tracking us?” Castine looked around in alarm, then frowned at him and took a forkful of her tamale. “Even if they,” she said, chewing, “I don’t know, followed me from the United terminal and put a GPS tracker on my rental car and followed me to Canter’s, they can’t have put one on your car, and you made sure nobody followed us here.”

  She paused, then looked away over the lake. “Maybe—God help me—maybe they were after you, all along, and figured I’d lead them to you. Which I did!”

  He nodded. Certainly her notice in the Times had brought him out of hiding. “I think they want both of us. That guy with the red boots that I threw onto the table said, ‘It’s him, we’ve got both of them.’”

  “But I busted your anonymity for them! Now even if you go back to your Bill Ardmore life in Barstow, they at least know what you look like these days.” Guilt appeared to make her irritable, and she faced him and added sharply, “Why Barstow, anyway? That’s not very far from L.A. What was wrong with . . . Las Vegas, New York, London?”

  Vickery started to crush his plastic cup, then made his hand relax. “Partly,” he said in a carefully level tone, “to be close enough to L.A. to get to Canter’s quickly and cheaply, on the specified date, if you gave me short notice.”

  “Oh. Sorry, again.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “Both of us. You said these people tried to corner you, in February—what happened?”

  “Yeah.” He sat back and set his half-eaten tamale aside. “Well. For a week or so I’d had a sort of itchy feeling that I was under somebody’s surveillance. I seemed to pass too many people with earbuds, and my phone battery ran down quicker than usual, and twice I didn’t get my phone bill. Altogether it wasn’t enough to make me jump ship, but the echo vision was still working consistently then, not just showing me that terrible old house in the canyon like it does lately—”

  She huffed one syllable of a mirthless laugh. “‘Echo vision!’”

  “That’s how I’ve thought of it. A time-spike, a replay of the recent past, right?” He shrugged. “Echo. So I started checking on how long cars had been parked on my street. And early one morning I saw a Ford van parked for a while down the block with its engine running, and when I walked toward it, it drove off. But when I stepped back and focused into echo vision to look at the street as it had been an hour or so earlier, I saw the same van at dawn, parked right across from my apartment, so I walked across the street—”

  “Sebastian! In . . . in echo vision? You’re lucky you weren’t run over by a car in real time!”

  “Well, I looked both ways first, and as it happened I only saw the past for a few seconds. Anyway, I was able to walk to where the car had been earlier. I couldn’t make out the license plate number in that monochrome echo light—couldn’t even crouch and try to feel the embossed numbers, since the van wasn’t actually there anymore!—but I could see the driver through the windshield. And it was that guy that put something in your water glass today. Different haircut, but it was him, I could see him clearly. You know the way people kind of glow, when you see ’em in the past?”

  She nodded. “I remember. Something like brown, but bright.”

  “Yeah. I think it’s infrared, and in echo vision we get it directly in the primary visual cortex, not through the narrow-band retinas at all.” Again he peered across the grass at the parked car, and then around at the people walking along the lakeside pavement, but saw nothing out of the ordinary.

  “So as soon as I was back in real, common time, I got in my car and drove off,” he went on, “aiming to scout the surrounding streets in real time and then—parked, of course!—in echo time. But at the first intersection, a woman was pushing a baby carriage across the crosswalk, against the light, and I had to stop—and when I did, two cars behind me stopped too, and their doors opened and four guys got out and started sprinting toward me. One of them was the guy from the Ford van, having switched vehicles—”

  “You sure it was the same guy? You only saw him in your echo light, and he’d have had to switch vehicles awful quick—”

  “Well, they knew I’d spotted the van. Yes, I’m sure it was him. The woman kept her baby carriage right in front of my bumper, not moving, and she wasn’t looking at me.”

  Castine’s eyes were wide. “Did you . . . run over her?”

  “Hah. No. I reversed hard into the car behind me and did a sharp U-turn. The car whose radiator I hadn’t wrecked tried to follow me, but I got away from him with no trouble.”

  “I’d be surprised if you didn’t.” She finished her tamarindo drink and looked around for a trash can. “And so you became Bill Ardmore.”

  “Well—not that instant. After a couple of hours I snuck back into my apartment, through the bedroom window,
from the next street over.”

  “You did?” she asked in surprise. “Why?”

  Vickery was staring past her. “There’s a gray Chevy Tahoe,” he said thoughtfully. “It just drove by my car without stopping . . . but it’s moving way slow.” He got to his feet. “Up. Face me, not the street.”

  “Just a minute, let me gather up our trash. Probably a lot of cars drive slow.” She balled up the cups and waxed paper and stood up.

  “Let’s move around the south side of the lake,” he said, “and keep facing east.”

  “We should find a trash can. You don’t want to go back to the car?”

  “No, I don’t want them connecting the car with us. If they show up, we’ll evade them and come back later for the car.”

  “Evade them. Okay.” She was looking past him, evidently scanning the clusters of people nearby. “You said you went to Barstow partly to be close to L.A., in case I signaled for a meeting. Why else?”

  Vickery hesitated, then said, “You remember that old guy, Isaac Laquedem. When we last heard of him, he was in Barstow, and I wanted to find him and ask him if he knew anything about that attempt to snatch me.”

  Apparently having satisfied herself that nobody in their vicinity was a threat, Castine was unfolding the wax paper, peering at it. “Did you find him?”

  “No. A couple of times I thought I had a kind of intuition about where he might be, but it didn’t lead to anything I was able to track down. He may be back in L.A., but I haven’t been, except for a couple of furtive sneaks. And I’ve had no luck with internet searches, and he wasn’t the sort to be traceable online anyway.”

  “But you stayed on in Barstow.” She poked at the remains of his tamale. “Why him? He mostly knew about ghosts, and the—the Labyrinth.”

  Vickery looked away, toward the ducks out on the water. “The Labyrinth,” he said, and forced a laugh. “The afterworld! By the time I left L.A., the story among the freeway gypsies was that you and I died, to get there, and were resurrected from the dead, when we came back.”