Four
When Lepidopt unbolted the door and pulled it open, Malk was startled by how exhausted the man looked — Malk knew Lepidopt was forty, but at this moment, with the lines in his hollow cheeks and the wrinkles around his eyes, and with the stray curls of his prayer-toupee stuck to his forehead, he looked twenty years older. In his hand was a piece of white paper that he had clearly written out as a report, in the strict Mossad format with the addressee and subject line underlined.
Malk knew there was no superior officer for Lepidopt to give it to — it could only be a copy-to-file letter; a bit of kastach, covering one's ass.
"What did I miss?" Malk asked cautiously after he had stepped inside and Lepidopt had closed and rebolted the door. The curtains were drawn, and a lamp by the window had been switched on. "There was no particular man and girl at the Chinese Theater."
Young Bozzaris was standing in the kitchen doorway by the bowl of macaroni this time, silhouetted by the fluorescent ceiling light, and Sam Glatzer was sitting on the couch, asleep. The room smelled of salsa and corn tortillas.
Lepidopt nodded. "No, they went straight home. Glatzer received another transmission."
Malk noticed the tape recorder on the coffee table, among a litter of greasy waxed paper and cardboard cups; apparently the transmission had arrived so suddenly that it had been easier to bring the recorder to Glatzer than to bring Glatzer to the recorder.
"Any locators this time?"
Lepidopt leaned his back against the curtained window and rubbed his eyes. "No, still no locators." He lowered his hands. "Glatzer's gamúr."
Malk looked again at the old man on the couch. Glatzer's chin was on his chest, and he wasn't moving at all. The holograph talisman lay on his belt buckle, its cord curled slackly across his shirt.
"Oh weh," Malk said softly. "Was it… stressful?"
"I'll play it back for you. After dark we can drive him to Pershing Square, sit him at one of those chess tables, and then call the police to report a body there. Perishing Square. Poor Sam. Sit down."
Malk sat down in the chair next to the door, across from the couch.
Lepidopt had apparently rewound the tape to the right place, for when he pushed the play button there was only a moment of silence and then the abrupt beginning of a recording.
Lepidopt's voice began it, a few syllables ending with "—go!" Then Malk heard Glatzer's frail voice: "The girl, in a house, with cats. Now the Eiffel Tower — no, it's just a picture of it — a bicycle race, in France — some crazy giggling guy in a gray suit is riding in it, passing everybody — he's riding a red bicycle, not any kind of racing bike — he won, he broke the tape—"
Bozzaris's recorded voice interjected, "Pee-wee's Big Adventure is what that is."
"—crowd is carrying him to a lawn—"
"What?" said Lepidopt's voice.
"It's a movie," Bozzaris had explained then, "somebody's watching it."
"It's a movie, on a TV set," said Glatzer's voice. "Now it's a different movie, one woman playing two roles — no no, two women playing one role—" For several seconds the old man was as silent on the tape as he was now on the couch. Malk wished he'd asked for a cigarette before the tape started; he couldn't shake the thought that the tape voice was Glatzer talking live from wherever dead people go.
A hoarse cry shook out of the machine, and then Glatzer's voice went on breathlessly, "I can't follow her, she's falling out of here and now. I almost fell out with her— Wait, she's back — everything's on fire, up the hall and the TV set — running through smoke — I'm fine, let me get this! — a man's voice says, 'Was there somebody in the house, at the door?'"
Malk kept looking at Glatzer's dead body in its shirt and tie, half expecting gestures to accompany these terse, fragmentary impressions.
From the recorder Glatzer's voice said, "'I didn't mean to burn Rumbold,' says the little girl."
The tape recorder was quiet again for a while, though Malk could hear recorded panting. He made himself look away from the body.
Glatzer's voice went on finally, "'I want to bury Rumbold,' says the girl. 'It was the movie — it wasn't Pee-wee except for the first couple of minutes, then it was a black and white, a silent' — uh — 'She was a witch!' Now — now a car is pulling into the driveway, an old guy in it, in a, a green station wagon — he's — the girl is holding on to her father — I can see the old guy, he's—"
Then there was the sound of a sharply indrawn breath, and blurred exclamations from Lepidopt and Bozzaris.
Lepidopt now reached down and switched off the recorder. "And then he died."
And we lost our remote viewer, Lepidopt thought. Our psychic eyes are gone. We killed this old man — and what did we get for it? Not even any locators.
Through the curtain he could hear the faint music from the speaker taped to the living room window: Madonna's "Who's That Girl?"
Lepidopt didn't think he had ever been this tired. Malk and Bozzaris had better not need help walking the dead body from the car to one of those cement tables in Pershing Square with a chessboard on it in mosaic tile. They'd have to remember to take the talisman off the body.
He thought of the old man sitting there abandoned in the night, with no player on the other side of the table; and he almost asked, Who played Rooster Cogburn in True Grit?
Instead he pushed away from the window and said to Bozzaris, "What have we got right now?"
"From the noon tape," said Malk, "we've got an old woman who died on Mount Shasta, and she was probably the Marity woman: Sam said she just appeared there, and of course Sam saw her via the holograph talisman, which would indicate her. What was it she said, just before she died?"
"It sounded like 'voyo, voyo,'" said Bozzaris. "Voyou is French for hoodlum, if that's worth anything. And then an hour and a half later," he went on, sitting down in his white plastic chair by the computer, "we have a man and a little girl who quote Shakespeare. And they apparently know the Marity woman fairly well — he said she doesn't drink, or own a gun."
"And the guy knew her age, within two years," put in Malk. "And he says she went to Switzerland after Chaplin died in '77, and she's got the Chaplin footprints from the Chinese Theater in this shed."
Lepidopt was pleased that they were thinking, and let them go on with it.
"I still think they're locals, the man and the girl," Malk went on. "This seems like L.A. to me."
"But the old woman got mail as Lisa Marity," Bozzaris reminded him, "and we've checked L.A., past and present, for any Marity."
Malk nodded. "And there's no indication that this man and girl know anything," he said. "They were surprised by the Chinese Theater slab, and the guy said 'a bunch of old letters' with no evident informed guessing, and they assumed it was a plain thief who broke into the house, not a reconnaissance team. Obviously they don't—"
"Hah!" interrupted Bozzaris, springing lithely from his chair. He grabbed a hefty telephone book from the kitchen shelf and began flipping through it.
"What?" asked Lepidopt.
"The little girl said, 'Divil a man can say a word agin them,'" Bozzaris said excitedly, "it's a Cohan song. It's Harrigan in the song, but with Marity it'd be 'M-A-double R-I,' see? We've been" — he was tossing his way through the white pages — "looking for either the Serbian Maric or the Hungarianized Marity, with one r, but what if the old lady added an extra r to make it look Irish? Nothing in L.A. — Bert, give me Long Beach, and you get busy on Pomona or something."