"Cool it, Hank," Cash said. "Sit down and shut up till we're done. We just bought a time bomb."
Railsback recognized distress, was reasonable enough to realize a tantrum was inappropriate. "Talk to me," he said.
"We got a claimant for our John Doe. Guy's sister. Positive ID. Absolutely no doubts. But…" And Cash gave him the buts.
As was becoming more common, Railsback thought before he growled. But he growled anyway. "Norm, I don't want anything to do with it. Get it out of here. There's got to be some way we can dump it on somebody else…"
"There's still a murder file open."
Railsback pulled a bottle of pills from a drawer, gobbled a couple. "Who knows? You and Harald. Me. The sister. Anybody else? This hits the papers and TV, they'll clobber us."
"Not today's developments. I guess the wives are current through yesterday. Oh, and there was the attendant at the morgue, but he didn't know what the hell was going on."
Railsback rubbed his forehead. He got headaches when the pressure was on. He was an ulcer man, too. He ate Valium like candy. "Too many. It's going to leak somewhere. All right, you guys dug it up, you bury it. One way or another, you get out there and prove she's a nut. Maybe we can't find out who he is, but we damned sure better find out who he isn't."
"How? "John asked.
"I don't care. It's your problem. Use your imagination. Roust this Fiala Groloch. Way you describe her, she's got trunks full of mementoes. Look for prints. Do whatever you have to, but do something."
VI. On the Y Axis;
Through 8 August 1964;
The Chinese Puzzle
A man named Huang Hua, whose true name was something else entirely, spent the years 1956-1973 in virtual self-imprisonment in a two-room office in a basement in Peking. He was a veteran of the Long March and the engineer of the POW defections during the Korean War.
One room was living quarters. It contained his bed and toilet. The other contained cooking facilities and a small desk with a single telephone. Along one wall stood a bookcase containing numerous looseleaf notebooks of western manufacture, each filled with the tiny, precise characters of his pen, plus several hundred books, mostly in English. Along the base of another wall were cartons of office supplies, more than Huang could use in two lifetimes. He was a hoarder.
Only four men knew why Huang had gone into hibernation: himself; the chairman; Lin Piao; Chou En-lai.
In 1971 Lin would feel compelled to let the Muscovite revisionists in on the secret. Air Force fighters caught his aircraft over Mongolia on September 12.
Huang's telephone linked directly with a small underground establishment in Sinkiang. It was the only regular connection. Security was more strict than at the Lop Nor facility.
Huang's life and project reflected the Chinese character. He had failed in Korea. Certain that other chances would arise, he had kept his project going and growing. Not once did the policy-makers ask him to justify the expense or necessity. Tibetans, Indians, recalcitrant regionalists, old Nationalists, even a few Russians from the 1969 clashes on the Ussuri River, and Burmese from the border skirmishes there, came to his facility. He learned. He polished. He refined. He persevered.
August 8, 1964, provided one of the great moments in his life. That was the day the Chairman himself phoned to give him the news about the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
All things came to the man who was patient.
VII. On the Y Axis;
1975
Cash and Harald were in the station parking lot when John said, "We can't prove a thing even if we do find prints that might've been O'Brien's."
"Why?"
"How do we prove they're his? How do we date them? If they match the John Doe, all we prove is that he was in the house. Not when."
"Yeah. Well, shit. At least we'd have a reason to ask Miss Groloch some questions."
"If she cooperates. We haven't got a warrant, you know."
"Whose side are you on, John?" Cash slammed the car door. "Can you see what the court would say if we applied?"
But they went on in hopes she would cooperate. Carstairs had noted her willingness to do so several times. That had fed his suspicions.
On the way Cash told Harald what Sister Mary Joseph had had to say about Miss Groloch. With a sigh, Harald replied, "I'll dig through the records. This's getting to be a lot of work for no return, Norm."
Miss Groloch, of course, was in, and remembered them. "Sergeant Cash. Detective Harald. Just in time you are. I just put some cookies out to cool. Tom!" she shouted toward the rear of the house. "You get down!" Cash could not see the cat. She explained, "On the table he will be getting now. We know each other well. Sit. Sit. The tea I will start." She bustled toward the kitchen.
Miss Groloch's parlor had not changed since their previous visit. Cash began wondering about the economics of her life. Annie had said no one could remember her having left the house since the O'Brien incident. He and John had caught the mailman on the way in. The man claimed that all she ever got was junk mail. No personal letters, no Social Security checks.
"What about tax forms?" Cash had asked.
The man had not been on the route that long. But then he did remember that she sometimes received packages from a health food firm in New Jersey. He had seen nothing that might have been a tax refund or rebate check.
At Lambert's, the little market a block north, the manager had told Cash that his boy delivered twice a week, in small amounts. She always paid in cash, and always gave the boy a list for next time. Her tastes seemed a bit old-fashioned, but not as much as might be expected of a refugee still steeped in the last century.
Cash wanted a look at her kitchen, to see if she had a refrigerator.
A thousand questions piled up every time he thought about Miss Groloch. And he had barely scratched the surface. The questions came like those little metal puzzles you take apart, then can't get back together, only in a chain a hundred puzzles long.
"Now," said Miss Groloch, the amenities performed, "What can I do for you this time?"
Sometimes Harald had the tact of an alligator. He did it on purpose. "We've got a positive identification of our corpse: Jack O'Brien."
When you look into a kaleidoscope and turn the barrel, patterns shift. Sometimes, after the flicker, the change seems undetectable.