Three Days to Never

by Tim Powers

  A muffled knock sounded from the door in the living room.

  It was today’s two-and-two recognition knock, but Lepidopt stepped behind the kitchen wall, reinforced now with white-painted sheet steel, and he glanced at the bowl of dry macaroni on the shelf by his left hand; but when Bozzaris had got the door unbolted, it was Bert Malk who stepped in, his jacket wrapped around his fist, his tie loosened over his unbuttoned collar, and his sandy hair visibly damp.

  “Matzáv mesukán?” he asked quietly. It meant Dangerous situation?

  “No,” Lepidopt said, leaning out from behind the wall. “Just new information.”

  Malk slid a small automatic pistol out of his bundled jacket and tucked it into a holster behind his hip. “It’s worse in here than on the street,” he complained. “I’ll take a cut in pay if you’ll get an air conditioner.”

  When Bozzaris had closed and rebolted the door, Lepidopt tossed the stack of printout onto the counter and stepped out from behind the kitchen wall. “It’s not the cost, it’s the constant evaporation.”

  “Sam’s gotta learn to screen out phase changes,” Malk said irritably. “Why don’t cigarettes bother him?”

  Malk already knew the answer—smaller scale, and the fire hides it—and Lepidopt just said, “Come listen to this new tape he made.”

  He led Malk to the closed door off the kitchen, and knocked.

  A scratchy voice from the other side of the door said, “Gimme a minute to get dressed.”

  “Sorry, Sam,” said Lepidopt around his cigarette as he opened the door, “time untied waits for no man.” He led Malk into the cluttered room.

  Skinny old Sam Glatzer was sitting up on the bed, strands of his gray hair plastered to his gleaming forehead, and in the glare from the unshaded bulb on the ceiling, his face seemed particularly haggard. The window in here was covered with aluminum foil, though Lepidopt could hear the speaker behind it—violins and an orchestra; Lepidopt hadn’t been a fan of classical music since 1970, but Sam always brought along Deutsche Grammophon tapes in preference to whatever the radio might provide, though there was a strict rule against bringing any Rimsky-Korsakov. The stale air smelled of gun oil and Mennen aftershave.

  Sam was wearing only boxer shorts and an undershirt, and he hooked his glasses onto his nose, scowled at Lepidopt and then levered himself up off the bed and began to pull on his baggy wool trousers. A whirring fan turned slowly back and forth on one of the cluttered desks, fluttering the fringe of one of Lepidopt’s toupees that sat on a Styrofoam head on another desk.

  “Bert needs to hear the tape,” Lepidopt said.

  “Right, right,” the old man said, turning away to zip up his trousers and fasten his belt. “I haven’t got anything since that one burst. I’ll wait in the living room, I don’t like to hear myself talk.” The old man caught the “holograph” medallion that was swinging on a string around his neck—required equipment for every Halomot remote viewer—and tucked it into his shirt before buttoning it up.

  When he had left and closed the door, Lepidopt sat on the bed to rewind the little tape recorder. Malk leaned against the nearest desk and cocked his head, attentive now.

  The tape stopped rewinding, and Lepidopt pushed the play button.

  “—on, right,” came Sam’s reedy old voice, “turn off the light, I don’t want afterimages.” There was a pause of perhaps half a minute. Lepidopt tapped ash onto the carpet.

  “Okay,” came Sam’s voice again, “probable AOL gives me the Swiss Family Robinson tree house in Disneyland, I don’t think that’s right, just AOL, analytical overlay—let me get back to the signal line—voices, a man is speaking—‘And we’ll not fail.’ Following somebody saying, ‘Screw your courage to the sticking place,’ that’s Shakespeare, Lady Macbeth, this may be off track too—the man says, ‘She’s probably about eighty-seven now.’ The house is on the ground, not up in the tree, little house, it’s a shed. Very crapped-out old shed…‘She doesn’t drink whisky,’ says the man. They’re inside the little house now, a man and a little girl, and there’s a gasoline smell—I see a window, then it’s gone, just empty air there—and a TV set—‘An ammunition box,’ says the man, ‘I don’t think she’s ever had a gun, though.’”

  Sam’s voice broke up in a coughing fit at this point, and Lepidopt’s recorded voice said, “Can you see any locating details? Where are they?”

  After a few seconds Sam’s voice stopped coughing and went on. “No locating details. I see a headstone, a tombstone. Bas-relief stuff and writing on it, but I won’t even try to read it. There’s mud on it, fresh wet mud. The man says, ‘Bunch of old letters, New Jersey postmarks, 1933, ’39, ’55—Lisa Marrity, yup.’ Uh—and then he says, ‘Is that real?…I mean, isn’t the real one at the Chinese Theater? But this might be real…She says she knew Chaplin. She flew to Switzerland after he died.’ Now there’s someone else, ‘It’s your uncle Bennett…’ Uh—‘One, two, three,’ and…a big crash, he pulled the tombstone down…and sunlight again—three people walking toward a house, the back door, with a trellis over it—a broken window—something about fingerprints, and a burglar—‘Marritys,’ says the new man, and the little girl says, ‘ “Divil a man can say a word agin them”’—the first man is at the back door, saying, ‘If there was a thief, he’s gone.’”

  Lepidopt reached out now and switched off the recorder. “Sam loses the link at that point,” he said mournfully.

  “Wow,” said Bert Malk, who had perched himself on the corner of a desk in line with one of the fans. “He said Marity. And Lisa, which is close enough. Did Sam know that name?”

  “No.”

  “We could call the coroner in Shasta, now that we’ve got a name, see if a Lisa Marity died there today.”

  “For now we can assume she did. We can get Ernie’s detective to call later to confirm it.”

  “It wasn’t a tombstone,” Malk went on thoughtfully.

  “No, pretty clearly it was Chaplin’s footprint square at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, and in fact that square isn’t in the theater forecourt anymore, it was removed in the 1950s when everybody was saying Chaplin was a communist, and then it got lost. We’ve already got a couple of sayanim trying to trace where it went.”

  Malk sighed heavily. “She’d be eighty-five this year, actually. Born in ’02.” He pulled his sweaty shirt away from his chest to let the fan cool the fabric. “Why wouldn’t Sam try to read the writing on the stone?”

  “It’s like trying to read in dreams, apparently—if you engage the part of the brain that knows how to read, you fall out of the projected state. Ideally we’d have totally illiterate remote viewers, who could just draw the letters and numbers they see, with no inclination to try to read them. But I think it obviously said something like ‘To Sid Grauman, from Charlie Chaplin.’”

  “I think this is in L.A., not Shasta,” Malk said. “The guy didn’t say ‘the Chinese Theater in Hollywood,’ he just said the Chinese Theater, like you’d mention a restaurant in your area.”

  “Maybe.” Lepidopt looked at his watch. “This here tape is only…fifty-five minutes old. Scoot right now to the Chinese Theater and see if there’s a man and a little girl there, looking for the Chaplin footprints or asking about them.”

  “Should I yell ‘Marity,’ and see who looks?”

  Lepidopt paused for a moment with his cigarette lifted halfway to his mouth. “Uh—no. There may be other people around who are aware of the name. And don’t be followed yourself! Go! Now!” He stood up and opened the bedroom door.

  Malk hurried past him to the apartment’s front door and unbolted it; and when he had left, pulling it closed behind him, Lepidopt walked over and twisted the dead-bolt knobs back into the locked positions.

  “One minute,” he said to Glatzer and Bozzaris, and he strode past them into the spare bedroom and closed the door. The faint music still vibrated in the aluminum foil over the window.

  Lepidopt crouched by the bedside table, ejected the new tape
and then slotted the cassette they had made at noon—the session that had made him send Malk off on his aborted trip to Mount Shasta—and pushed the play button.

  “—goddamn machine,” said Glatzer’s voice. “I’m seeing an old woman in a long tan skirt, white hair, barefoot, she’s just appeared on a Navajo-looking blanket on green grass, beside a tree, lying on her back, eyes closed; it’s cold, she’s way up high on a mountain. There are people around her—hippies, they’re wearing robes, some of them, and face paint—beards, beads—very mystical scene. They’re all surprised, asking her questions; she just appeared in the meadow, she didn’t walk in. They’re asking her if she fell out of the tree. She’s—lying on a swastika!—made out of gold wire; it was under the blanket, but they’ve moved her, and they’ve seen the swastika. Now one of the hippies is taking a cellular telephone from his backpack—some hippie—and he’s making a call, probably 911. Uh—‘unconscious,’ he’s saying; ‘In Squaw Meadow, on Mount Shasta…ambulance’—now she’s speaking—two words? ‘Voyo, voyo,’ she said, without opening her eyes. Ach! Her heart is stopping—she’s dead, and I’m out, it’s gone.”

  Lepidopt pushed the stop button, and slowly stood up. Yes, he thought, it was her. We found her at last, just as she died.

  He walked back into the living room.

  “Can I go too?” asked old Sam Glatzer, getting up from the couch. “I never did get any lunch.”

  Lepidopt paused and looked over his shoulder at him. Glatzer reminded him of the tired old man in the joke, whose friends arrange for a dazzling prostitute to come to his room on his birthday—I’m here to give you super sex! she exclaims when he opens the door; and he says, querulously, I’ll take the soup.

  But he was a good remote viewer, and one of the most reliable of the sayanim, the civilian Jews who would efficiently and discreetly provide their skills to aid Mossad operations, for the sake of Israel. Sam was a retired researcher from the CIA-sponsored think tank at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, up near San Francisco, and he was a widower with no children; and Lepidopt told himself that the old man must enjoy using again the clairvoyant techniques he had pioneered back in ’72. And over the last several years, Glatzer and Lepidopt had played many games of chess while sitting in safe houses like this, and Lepidopt believed the old man had found them as welcome a break from tension or boredom as he had.

  “I’m sorry, Sam,” said Lepidopt, spreading his hands, “but I really think we should monitor the ‘holograph’ line until it’s been twenty-four hours. Till noon tomorrow. I’ll send Ernie out for any food you’d like.” I’ll take the soup, he thought.

  “Good idea,” said Bozzaris, getting up from his keyboard. “Pizza?” Bozzaris did not observe the dietary laws, and ate all sorts of trefe food.

  “Whatever he wants,” Lepidopt told Bozzaris. “Get enough for three—Bert might be back pretty quick.” Bert Malk didn’t bother about kosher food either.

  After Bozzaris left, tacos and enchiladas having been decided on, Glatzer went to sleep on the couch, and Lepidopt sat down in a chair against the door-side wall, for the afternoon sun was slanting in through the front window, and he stared almost enviously at Glatzer.

  A widower with no children. It occurred to him that Glatzer could expire there on the couch, and—though Lepidopt would lose a friend and chess opponent—nobody’s life would be devastated. Two lines from an Ivor Winters poem flitted through his head—By a moment’s calm beguiled, / I have got a wife and child.

  Lepidopt had a wife and an eleven-year-old son in Tel Aviv. His son, Louis, would be envious if he knew his father was working in Hollywood. And Deborah would worry that he’d be seduced by a starlet.

  All katsas, Mossad gathering officers, were married men with wives back in Israel; the theory was that married men would be immune to sex traps abroad. Broad traps a-sex, he thought. To preserve you from the evil woman, from the smooth tongue of the adventuress, as the Psalmist said.

  Don’t start the John Wayne stuff till I get there, he thought, then shuddered.

  In that war twenty years ago, Lepidopt’s battalion had stormed the Lion’s Gate again at 8:30 the following morning. Israeli artillery and jet fighters had pounded the Jordanian defense forces within the city, but Lepidopt and his fellow soldiers had had to fight for every narrow street, and the morning was an eternity of dust exploding from ancient walls, hot shell casings flying in brassy ribbons from the Uzi in his aching hands, blood spattering on jeep windshields and pooling between paving stones, and the shaky effort of changing magazines while crouched in one or another of the drainage ditches.

  I see a headstone, a tombstone.

  Lepidopt recalled noticing that the bridges propped over the narrow ditches had been Jewish gravestones, and he had learned later that they had been scavenged from the cemetery on Mount Zion; and now he wondered if, in the subsequent gathering and burial of hundreds of dead Israeli and Jordanian soldiers, anyone had thought to restore the stones to those older graves.

  By midmorning the city had fallen to the Israeli forces; sniper fire still echoed among the ancient buildings, but Jordanians were lined up by the gate with their hands in the air while Israeli soldiers scrutinized their identity papers to see if any were soldiers who had changed into civilian clothing; dead bodies were already being carried out on stretchers, with handkerchiefs over the faces so that medics would not mistake them for the many wounded.

  Lepidopt had fought his way through the Moghrabi Quarter, and he was one of the first to reach the Kotel ha-Maaravi, the Western Wall of the Temple Mount.

  At first he didn’t realize what it was—just a very high ancient wall along the left side of an alley; clumps of weeds, far too high to be pulled out, patched its rows of weathered stones. It wasn’t until he noticed other Israeli soldiers hesitantly touching the uneven old masonry that it dawned on him what it must be.

  This wall was all that remained of the Second Temple, built on the site of Solomon’s Temple, its construction completed by Herod at around the time of Jesus and then destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. This was the place of the Shekinah, the presence of God, to which Jewish pilgrims had come for nearly two thousand years until Jordan’s borders had enclosed it and excluded them in 1948.

  Soldiers were on their knees, weeping, oblivious to the sniper fire; and Lepidopt shuffled up to the craggy, eroded white masonry, absently unstrapping his helmet and feeling the breeze in his wet hair as he pulled it off. He wiped one shaky hand down the front of his camouflage jacket and then reached out and touched the wall.

  He pulled his hand back—and powerfully in his mind had come the conviction that he would never touch the wall again.

  He had stepped back in confusion at this sudden, intrusive certainty; and then, defiantly, had reached his hand out toward the wall again—and a blow that seemed to come from nowhere punched his hand away and spun him around to kneel on the street, staring at blood jetting from the ragged edge of his right hand where his little finger and knuckle had been.

  Several of the other soldiers were firing short bursts at the source of the shot, and a couple more of them dragged Lepidopt away. His wound was a minor one on that day, but within an hour he had been taken to the Hadassah Hospital, and for him the Six-Day War was over.

  Four days later it was over for Israel too—Israel had beaten the hostile nations to the north, east, and south, and had taken the Golan Heights, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the Sinai desert.

  And eleven times—twelve times now, thank you, Bert!—in the twenty years since then, Lepidopt had again experienced that certainty about something he had just done: You will never do this again. In 1970, three years after he had touched the Western Wall for the first and last time, he had attended a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade at the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv, and as the last notes of the Allegro Molto echoed away, he had suddenly been positive that he would not ever hear Scheherazade again.

  Two years after that
he had visited Paris for the last time; not long afterward he had discovered that he would never again swim in the ocean. After having part of his hand shot off in testing the premonition about the Western Wall, he was reluctant to test any of these subsequent ones.

  Just during this last year he had, for the last time, changed a tire, eaten a tuna sandwich, petted a cat, and seen a movie in a theater—and now he knew that he would never again hear the name John Wayne spoken. How soon, he wondered bleakly, until I’ve started a car for the last time, closed a door, brushed my teeth, coughed?

  Lepidopt had gone to the Anshe Emet Synagogue on Robertson at dawn today for recitation of the Sh’ma and the Shachrit prayer, as usual, but clearly he was not going to be able to get there for the afternoon prayers, nor probably the evening ones either. He might as well say the afternoon Mincha prayer alone, here; he stood up to go into the other bedroom, where he kept the velvet bag that contained his tallit shawl and the little leather tefillin boxes. Every day he shaved the top of his head so that a toupee could be his head covering, and the one he wore to pray was in the bedroom too. He never kept his yarmulke-toupee in the bathroom.

  Rabbi Hiyya bar Ashi had written that a man whose mind is conflicted should not pray; Lepidopt hoped God would forgive him for that too.

  Three

  The truck cab smelled like book paper and tobacco.

  “When we do go,” Daphne said, cheerfully enough, “we can go to Grammar’s house again too, and pull up the bricks. A-zoo-sa,” she added derisively, seeing the Azusa exit through the windshield. And Claremont and Montclair were coming up.

  She used to think Azusa was an interesting name for a city, but recently she had heard that it meant “A-to-Z USA,” and now she classed it with other ridiculous words, like brouhaha and patty melt.

  She also disapproved of a city called Claremont being right next to one named Montclair. She thought there should be a third one, Mairn-Clot.

  Traffic was heavy on the eastbound 10, and an hour after they had left Pasadena their six-year-old Ford pickup truck was still west of the 15, with San Bernardino and their house still twenty miles ahead. The afternoon sunlight glittered fiercely on the chrome all around them; brake lights glowed like coals. Daphne knew the traffic justified her father’s decision not to go look at the Chinese Theater today, and she had stopped sulking about it.