“It isn’t so much anything I do,” he told her after a fortnight at the shop. “Mostly I just find parts and stick them on—the owners do the complicated stuff. But the air inside those cars is sixty years old. You open a door and somebody’s croquet summer comes billowing out at you. Teddy Roosevelt. Lydia Pinkham.”
“It’s always the smell,” Julie said. “All that hot, prickly upholstery just absorbed everything, sunlight and cigarette smoke, sweaty legs. I remember—when I smell an old Pontiac now, I think about my Uncle Mashi, but when I was little I used to think that Uncle Mashi smelled like an old Pontiac.”
Farrell nodded. “Maybe he did. Things get mixed up. The people who bring their cars into the shop, a lot of them look like the people who first bought those cars. It’s the clothes, partly, because they have fun dressing up to the cars, but it’s the faces more. They keep coming in, right out of those old summers, those brown family photographs. The way the League people look like paintings. I keep seeing them.”
“It’s what happens in groups,” she said. “People who get together because of a hobby or an obsession start to look a certain way. Boat people, backpackers, science fiction types, comic book collectors. Even short-wave radio freaks sort of have a look.”
“I don’t mean that,” Farrell said slowly. “I think I’m talking about people who mess with time, whether they know it or not. It’s like what Frederik said—maybe there’s really no present, just the past looping on and on. Yesterday I had to take some of the original paint off a 1912 Taylor, off the door, and all the time I was chipping and soaking and scraping that lovely, tough old paint away, I swear I could feel someone else putting it on. By hand, in a converted livery stable. I know how Frederik feels watching those hawks go up into time. Everything’s so close to everything else.”
He stopped, leaving a ragged hole in the conversation, through which Julie regarded him steadily and unsparingly. For the first time, he noticed a tiny triangular golden fleck in one brown iris that was not duplicated in the other. Her hair’s not as black as it used to be, in this light. Was it ever? She said, “Even if I do resign from the League, you don’t have to. That’s entirely your business.”
“For what it’s worth, she didn’t really mean to kill Micaela,” Farrell said. “She was showing off.” The Falconers’ Guild had effectively disbanded within minutes of the gyrfalcon’s death, leaving Aiffe mistress of her father’s bylaws and a field strewn with torn rabbits and partridges. “I just don’t think she really meant it,” he repeated. “What the hell would have been the point?”
Julie said loudly and abruptly, “We have been through this discussion before.” She started to stand up, bumped her chair against the one behind her, knocked over Farrell’s carrot juice and spent the next few moments helping him to mop it up, all the while snarling, “Didn’t mean it? She means every damn thing she does, always has, ever since she learned how to make a boy who pulled her hair in fifth grade pull all his own hair out, snatch himself baldheaded.” The tables were as close and crowded as her words, and Farrell heard chair legs and Earth Shoes scraping as customers turned to stare. Julie said, “You really think you feel sorry for her. Poor Aiffe, poor skinny little twit, trying so hard to live up to this absurd, misplaced talent that keeps getting away from her. That’s not even pity, that’s contempt, and contempt is what gets people killed, do you hear me, Joe? She’ll do to you exactly what she did to that hawk, for exactly the same reason. To make you take her seriously.”
“I take her very seriously,” he protested.
But Julie was a flash flood, never giving him a moment to grab onto a rhetorical tree root or floating log. “The point? The point is that thing you keep missing, the point is power. Power doesn’t need to explain itself, power is all about not explaining. Power just does because it can.”
Farrell overtipped a grinning, green-bearded waiter and followed her out to the sidewalk where any number of people were patiently tracing the transparent logic of the universe for one another. Julie stalked along ahead of him, shoulder bag flapping like a traffic light in a gale, her shoulders themselves cranked up higher than her chin. Sellers of ceramic whales and stained-glass jewelry leaped out of her way, but a frock-coated street corner mime danced along beside her, aping her furious passage. Julie hacked his ankle when he got too close.
By the time Farrell caught up with her, the strange fury of frustration seemed to have passed, and she walked quietly beside him until they were crossing the campus toward her office. Frisbees climbed languidly over head, waiting on, and bicycles exploded silently past their faces, silver-quick as barracudas, giving no warning. By contrast, their riders appeared almost illusory, incidental, having nothing to do with the vicious purposefulness of the bicycles. Farrell said at last, “I don’t understand.” She turned her head inquiringly, and he said, “I don’t even know what I don’t understand. Tell me.”
Julie turned away to hail a sedately jogging security guard and feed stale cookies to Buddy Holly, the campus’s swaggering Toulouse goose, before she answered him. “Aiffe is a lot more dangerous than her ambitions. You dismiss her because all she wants right now is to reign over something called the League for Archaic Pleasures. But what matters, Joe, what matters is how badly she wants it.” She faced him, gripping his arms just below the shoulders, digging in hard enough to rock him slightly off-balance. “You know how people say, ‘I’d kill to have legs like that, I’d kill to get that job, to get next to him’? Yes, well, Aiffe means it. To wear a crown that looks like a damn sand castle, to lead galliards, to go in to dinner ahead of a lot of fools in fancy long johns—Rosanna Berry would indeed kill for that. Maybe tomorrow she’ll kill to be Homecoming Queen.”
Farrell said flatly, “I don’t believe it. Him, yes, her father, like a shot, no question about it. But her, I’m sorry—I’ve seen her make a total fool of herself, I’ve seen her embarrass people stupidly and make an owl sort of obey her, and she is running around with somebody she called out of somewhere who should definitely not be here. I’m willing to believe that she can do a great many more things, but I still haven’t seen her come anywhere near killing anybody. And if you have, I think you’d better tell me.” His voice had grown louder, and he shrugged her hands away, stepping back.
“I keep telling you,” she said. “More damn people keep telling you things, it’s really amazing.”
She walked on toward the medical buildings, and Farrell tagged after her, snarling, “Right, right, don’t they ever? And isn’t it odd that not one of them can ever give me a straight answer? Ask for the time of day, I’m liable to find out the Duke of Minestrone took it with him when he locked himself in the john ten years ago. Ask for the bus stop, you get a treasure map of a lost kingdom.” He knew perfectly well that he sounded like a put-upon adolescent, but he kept on complaining until they reached her office.
There she turned again and smiled at him with a sudden generosity that stopped his breath. I don’t know her. All this time of being friends, and I could make a better guess at what goes on inside Sia or Egil Eyvindsson, or, my God, Nicholas Bonner, than I could about her. Who is she, and how does a speechless foreigner get to meet her? She said, “In the first place, you’ve got it backwards about Garth and Aiffe. He can’t do anything but bruise you with a wooden sword, but once I saw her do something that was worse than killing, and I’ll never forgive her for it. In the second place, old love, you get a straight answer with a straight question. And I don’t think you’ve ever asked a straight question in all your life.”