Forced Perspectives

by Tim Powers

  “Well, most people did have to die, to get there.” She had freed some fragments of Vickery’s tamale, and tossed them out over the water toward the ducks. “So why did you want to talk to Laquedem? Grouchy old guy, as I recall.”

  “There’s signs that say don’t feed the ducks.”

  “You’re not a cop anymore. So why?”

  He stopped walking and turned to face her. “Oh hell. You’ll think I’m crazy. There’s a trash can over there, if you want to pitch that stuff.”

  Castine waved her fistful of litter. “It can wait.”

  He exhaled and shook his head. “Okay. When I snuck back to my apartment, about five hours after the attempted snatch with the baby carriage in the crosswalk, there was a guy waiting there, standing by the street-facing living room window. But I had climbed in through the bedroom window, silently, and I made sure he was alone and then came up behind him and got him in a blood chokehold—as opposed to an air one—and when he lost consciousness I tied and gagged him. These guys aren’t pros, whoever they are.”

  “Oh, Sebastian,” said Castine with a look that was both pitying and exasperated, “I bet I know what you went back for.”

  “I—well, damn it, I bet you do. That copy of The Secret Garden. And it was gone. It was the only thing missing, as far as I could tell. The only person besides you and me who knew about that book was my old boss—”

  “Lady Galvan,” said Castine, nodding. “With her supernatural-evasion car service.”

  “—And I went straight to her garage and braced her about it. It turned out she had told somebody about the book, some guy who claimed to collect such things and asked if she knew of any for sale. He left her a business card, but it was fake. So then I drove to Barstow and became Bill Ardmore.”

  “And that’s the other reason—the main reason?—that you didn’t want to get too far away from L.A.”

  He shrugged and nodded. “I want to get the book back. I don’t want them to have it—and maybe,” he added, “use it, somehow.”

  “It’s not a real person,” said Castine, wearily. “You know that. She never existed! She’s imaginary.”

  “Right,” said Vickery, his voice flat. “Imaginary. My daughter times the square root of minus one. But when the conduit to the Labyrinth was open, we were able to see her. Speak with her, even. She talked about the robin who showed Mary Lennox the key to the secret garden, in that story.”

  After a moment, Castine nodded, making even that concession with evident reluctance. She walked to a nearby trash can and dumped the lunch remains, then walked back, wiping her hands on the blanket draped over her shoulders.

  “So what have you been doing?” she asked, “in Barstow?”

  “I’ve got a little nest alongside the 15 freeway, outside of town, and I’ve been—well, I’ve been calling up ghosts from the freeway current, and asking them if they can sense her. I think fresh ghosts can sometimes sense . . . fossilized spirits, the ones that are subsumed forever in some organic object. The ghosts seem to hear them as a subsonic note, if they can be persuaded to listen for it.” He smiled, not happily. “I go through a lot of M&Ms and cigarettes, bribing them.”

  Vickery took a look back the way they’d come, but he couldn’t see the street from here. He turned to Castine.

  She was staring at him wide-eyed. “I thought the ghosts were all gone now! Since we closed the conduit to the Labyrinth!”

  “People still die, Ingrid, and as long as particles of indeterminism—that is, free wills, which is to say, people—move rapidly past non-moving particles, like on freeways, the current is going to be generated, and ghosts can . . . manifest themselves! They do still crop up.”

  “And you a Catholic! Consulting the dead!”

  Vickery spread his hands. “I don’t consult dead people! They’re in Heaven or Hell or someplace. I consult their ghosts, which aren’t them.”

  Castine gave him a disapproving look. “They’re pretty dead, though.”

  “Lively sometimes, you gotta admit.”

  “But—you don’t talk to them in complete sentences, do you? They’ll get a fix on you, try to switch places with you!”

  Vickery shook his head. “They’re not as substantial, not as powerful, as they were last year, when they were plugged into the crazy dynamo of the Labyrinth. It’s like dropping a radio into your bathtub—if it’s just working on its own batteries, not plugged into 120 volts, you’re okay.”

  Castine shook her head. “Well, remember your math anyway. Jeez.”

  Vickery smiled and nodded. “Two plus two is four and nothing else. I remember.” The field in which ghosts could appear was one of gross indeterminism, irrationally expanded possibility, and the hard, unyielding logic of mathematics could drive ghosts away—if they paid attention.

  “And don’t let them stick their tongues out at you,” she added, for the ghosts they’d encountered last year had been able to quickly extrude their tongues, which were freezingly, incapacitatingly cold.

  “I’ve got a chicken-wire screen there, to keep them away from me.” Like the screen in a confessional, he thought—except in this case the figures on both sides of the screen are looking for absolution. “And what have you been doing, back east? Why are you still with the TUA?”

  “Oh.” The question seemed to have startled her. “It’s not the same TUA now, it’s been merged into Naval Intelligence—it’s not the agency that killed Eliot, anymore.” Vickery recalled that Eliot had been the name of her fiancé, murdered last year by the TUA when it had still been a rogue, autonomous agency. “I do clerical work there. I—after last year, I just want the rest of my life to be . . . humdrum. Boring, even.” She laughed without smiling. “Socrates said the unconsidered life is not worth living, but that’s what I want. Wanted.”

  She walked slowly to the trash can and dropped the crumpled wax paper into it, then looked around at the lake and the grass as if to reassure herself that she was still in the blessedly ordinary world. “But then,” she went on in a harsh whisper, “the visions of that terrible old house started intruding, and I—I can’t—I hardly dare sleep anymore, thinking that it’s leading up to something—that I might one day soon see it for real, be standing in front of it!” She turned to him, her eyes frightened. “Do we die there?”

  “I—” Vickery paused, looking past her.

  On the other side of the lake, two men were walking swiftly along the shore-side pavement, and to Vickery they seemed to be looking closely at the people they passed. The dark windbreaker one of them wore reminded him of the two men who had rushed at their car on the sidewalk in front of Canter’s.

  He took Castine’s elbow and turned her south, away from the lake. “Don’t look back,” he said, “and don’t visibly hurry—but hurry.”

  She nodded and took long steps off the pavement and across the grass to keep up with his stride. “Bad guys?”

  “I’m pretty sure.”

  “No—how?”

  “Dunno. We’ll try to get on a bus or something before they see us.”

  Past a cluster of acacia trees and a couple of tall palms, he could see traffic moving from left to right on Seventh Street, which lay at right angles to the street on which they had left the car. He tried to remember if there was a bus stop on Seventh along this block. A free taxi, or any taxi at all, would be very unlikely.

  Then his view of the street and cars seemed to flatten. He clutched her arm and whispered, “Oh no!”

  He heard her say, “What—” and then the light dimmed and all sounds faded away to silence.

  He could still feel the grass brushing past under his shoes, and Castine’s arm in his gripping hand, but what he saw was a dilapidated two-story Victorian house fifty yards in front of him, with an eroded dirt slope rising behind it. In the coppery echo light he couldn’t make out the color of the house, and it seemed to crouch out there in front of him like a huge, ragged spider. Several of the downstairs windows were broken, and the broad po
rch slanted down sharply to the right, its farthest extent partly buried in the sand. A motorcycle, an old Harley Davidson panhead, leaned on its kickstand close to the porch railing.

  Castine was palpably leading him now. They were stepping more slowly but with evident deliberateness, and he hoped she understood that he was—briefly, God willing!—experiencing an involuntary time-spike echo vision.

  From his point of view he was striding quickly toward the old house, and the difference between his real, felt pace and his visually perceived one brought back memories of treading moving walkways at airports. He reminded himself that he was in no sense physically present in the scene he was seeing, and that he couldn’t be sensed by any people who might appear in it.

  And in fact he saw a man step out of the front door, onto the porch. Vickery knew that Castine must have felt his shudder when he recognized the lean face—it was the same face he had seen in an upstairs window, in previous episodes like this.

  Vickery’s view of the house stopped expanding, as if he had halted, though he could feel that he and Castine were still trudging forward; the sensory confusion almost made him stumble, but he concentrated on the texture of the real MacArthur Park grass under his pacing feet.

  He knew that in real time he and Castine must be approaching the edge of the park and the lanes of Seventh Street, but what filled his vision was the porch and the man standing on it. The man’s face was framed by tangles of long dark hair that hung down to the shoulders of his open Nehru jacket, and when the man moved to the porch rail and gripped it, Vickery glimpsed the curved grip of a revolver in the man’s belt. The man looked left and right, and then stared with clear recognition directly into Vickery’s point of view.

  Then the sounds and sunlight of present-day MacArthur park washed over Vickery and he could peripherally see Castine in the yellow blanket to his right—and he found himself looking straight at another face, also alarmingly familiar.

  The eyes behind the round black-framed glasses met Vickery’s for a moment and then swept past him, toward the crowded lawns of the park. Sweat was now trickling down the shaved areas over the young man’s ears, and the white shirt under the red suspenders was darkened across the chest.

  Vickery pushed Castine past him, blocking the man’s view of her and wishing he had bought her a garish head-scarf in addition to the baseball cap.

  Ahead of them, a pearl-white Nissan sedan pulled in to the red curb at the same moment that a voice from behind called, “Hold it, you two.”

  Vickery’s hand was on the grip of his Glock as he spun toward the speaker; it was the young man in red suspenders who had spoken, and he was now facing them and holding a pocket-sized semi-automatic pistol.

  “Turn around, lady.” The young man’s voice was tight with evident tension. “And take off the shades.”

  Vickery’s gun was out and pointed at the man’s chest, but before he could speak, a voice from the street behind him said, loudly, “I will shoot you—” and then went on more quietly, “through the heart, if you do not drop your gun.”

  Several pedestrians had exclaimed and stepped back, and a woman screamed—not loudly, but as if the situation seemed to call for it.

  Gritting his teeth, and relying on the fact that the voice had said “through the heart” rather than “in the back,” Vickery held his own gun steady.

  Behind the lenses of the round glasses, the young man’s eyes were wide; he lowered the little gun and then let it fall to the grass. “I was only—” he began.

  Vickery stepped quickly to the side so that he could see both speakers, and he noted the moustache and the plaid sportcoat of a man standing now beside the white car that idled at the curb—this man had been in the entry at Canter’s when Vickery and Castine had run out of the place, and he was now holding a big-caliber stainless steel revolver pointed toward the young man in red suspenders.

  “Go!” he shouted now, waving the gun, and then stepped back and opened the rear door of the white sedan. To Vickery and Castine he said, “Inside, quickly! They must not have you.”

  The young man hesitated, then went sprinting away east down the Seventh Street sidewalk.

  Vickery almost started after him—he was one of the people who had stolen The Secret Garden!—but the gray-haired man in the dark windbreaker and his companion were closer, and moving quickly this way.

  “Let’s do it,” said Vickery to Castine. He crouched to snatch up the gun on the grass and toss it to Castine, and then he shoved his own gun back under his belt and scrambled into the back seat after her.

  Their apparent rescuer tucked the revolver under his sportcoat and ran around to get in on the driver’s side. The car’s interior smelled of licorice.

  In moments the car had sped away west on Seventh Street, but not before Vickery had glance out the back window. The young man in the white shirt and suspenders was hurrying away up the sidewalk, and Vickery noticed something like a bulky white handkerchief stuffed into a rear pocket of his black jeans.

  The man behind the wheel raised his right hand. “You needn’t touch your weapons,” he said. “I am employed by the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, doing work from the Consulate on Wilshire Boulevard.” He waved ahead vaguely. “You must both leave the Los Angeles region, far, immediately. Funds if necessary can be provided.” He glanced at Vickery in the rear view mirror. “I think,” he went on, “you do not know why those various men are pursuing you.”

  Vickery was breathing carefully and focusing through the windshield at the sunlit cars in the lane ahead of them, forcing his eyes to comprehend volume, depth of field; he didn’t want to fall into another involuntary echo vision.

  “No, we don’t,” said Castine. “Do you know why?”

  “Guesses based on guesses are of no value. My concern is the recovery of an artifact that was negligently curated long ago.” He lifted one hand from the wheel in a dismissive wave. “I will drive you now to the LAX airport, and you will get a flight, do you understand? These men are following you by some means, but they no longer have time to chase you in a distant city. Do you have money, and identification, for tickets?”

  “Uh,” said Castine, giving Vickery a bewildered, questioning look.

  Equally puzzled, he just shrugged. At least this is getting us away from the guy in the dark windbreaker, he thought. Just so this fellow doesn’t insist on seeing us actually buy tickets.

  Vickery cleared his throat. “Well—yes.”

  “Good,” said their driver. “In a few days their project will have become ended, willy nilly, and you could safely return, no matter what their intentions toward you have been.”

  “Why will their project be ended in a few days?” Vickery asked.

  “I will have retrieved the artifact by then, and taken it back to Cairo.”

  The man had hesitated very slightly before the word taken, and Vickery was certain that he meant in fact to destroy the artifact, whatever it was.

  Castine might have noticed it too. “What sort of artifact is it?” she asked.

  “Very new and very old. If you have cell phones, you can arrange a flight even now.”

  “We don’t,” said Vickery.

  “No matter. It is a large airport, there will be many flights available.”

  Harlowe’s men had all fanned out across the park, circling the lake, and Elisha Ragotskie now just needed to get away. The white car had disappeared into the westbound traffic, taking his Beretta Pico with it, so he sprinted across the lanes of Seventh Street to the sidewalk on the south side and began walking rapidly east, his head down. After a few steps he pulled his conspicuous red suspenders off his shoulders and tucked them messily into his black jeans. He was panting, and afraid to look across the street. Harlowe would certainly have Taitz kill him, if they saw him.

  Ragotskie looked down at his right hand, which was still visibly trembling. Would I, he wondered, have been able, actually, to shoot the Castine woman? My finger was on the trigger, the gun wa
s pointed at the middle of her. She was wearing sunglasses, so I couldn’t see her eyes—I wonder if I’d actually have been able to pull the trigger, if I’d seen her eyes. It was so much easier, so much less momentous, to shake cyanide powder into her water glass!

  And who the hell was that man in the midtown orange-plaid sportcoat? If I hadn’t burned my bridges with Harlowe, I’d tell him there seems to be another player in the situation.

  Ragotskie ached to talk to his onetime lover, Agnes Loria, but, as she was now, she might very well just turn him over to Harlowe.

  Ragotskie had cautiously followed Harlowe’s three-car procession to MacArthur Park, and when two of the cars had split off to loop around the north half of the park, Harlowe’s SUV had stopped at a red no-parking curb on Wilshire. Harlowe and Taitz and Foster had all climbed out and gone loping away across the grass, leaving only Tony the driver in the vehicle.

  Ragotskie had stopped his Audi right behind it, and then left the motor running while he grabbed a heavy flashlight and ran up to the rear passenger-side door of the SUV and with three rapid blows smashed the window. Tony had quickly got out on the driver’s side, shouting; but Ragotskie had leaned in through the ruptured glass, grabbed the polished wooden box off the rear seat, and raced back to his own car.

  He had gunned away in reverse, bouncing up the curb for a few yards and then thumping back onto the street again, while Tony had run after him; but Tony had jumped out of the way when Ragotskie shifted into drive and sped forward.

  Ragotskie had then driven around the park and left his car at a bus stop on the south side—he could see his green Audi now, and he was grateful that it had not been towed.

  He was hurrying past a storefront church and a clinic now, and he peered left and right past cars parked at the curb. Before running back across the lanes of Seventh Street to his car, he patted his back pocket to make sure the bloodstained sock had not fallen out. He couldn’t even remember now what he had done with Harlowe’s wooden box.