Lepidopt shambled past Malk and Bozzaris into the stuffy kitchen and took a telephone book from the shelf. He thumbed through the pages to the Marriage-Martinez page, and squinted down the columns.
"Here's a Marrity, L," he said, "with two rs." He flipped to the cover. "Pasadena."
There proved to be no more Marritys at all in the Los Angeles area.
"I bet that's her," Malk said. "I knew this was local."
Lepidopt stared at the telephone book in his hands. "We should have found this… years ago," he said sadly.
"Natural oversight, though," said Bozzaris with a shrug. "If you were looking for M-A-R-I, you'd never see that solitary Marrity way over there. There's a whole nation of Marquezes in between — and Marriots. And you wouldn't expect to find her listed anyway."
"Still," said Lepidopt, "there it was, all this time."
"Hey," Bozzaris said, "nobody's human." It was an old Mossad line, a confusion of "nobody's perfect" and "I'm only human."
Lepidopt nodded tiredly. "Get on the phone," he told Bozzaris, "and tell your sayan to look up Lisa Marrity with two rs. Your San Diego detective. Have him check L.A. and Shasta."
He sat down on the couch facing Sam, and when Malk stepped toward him, he waved him off.
When he had returned to Tel Aviv in mid-June of 1967, unable to work because his hand was still bandaged, he had brooded, and checked out various books on Hebrew mysticism from the library, and finally he had visited a friend who was an amateur photographer.
Lepidopt had wondered if it had been the Shekinah, the presence of God, that had given him the prediction that he would never again touch the Western Wall — the prediction that he had foolishly tested, at the cost of his finger and a good bit of his hand — and he remembered how the Lord had warned Moses to keep everyone back from Mount Sinai, in the book of Exodus: "You shall set bounds for the people round about, saying, 'Beware of going up the mountain or touching the border of it. Whosoever touches the mountain shall be put to death: no hand shall touch him, but he shall be either stoned or shot; beast or man, he shall not live.
To Lepidopt this had sounded like precautions, in terms a primitive people could follow, against exposure to radiation; especially the order that anyone who got too close to the mountain should be killed from a distance. So he gave his photographer friend the film badge he had been issued when the Fourth Battalion's mission had been to find the Rephidim stone in the southern wastes of the Sinai desert. Lepidopt wanted to know if the film showed that he had been exposed to divine radiation.
The photographer broke open the film badge in his darkroom and developed the patch of film it contained, but while it wasn't transparent and unexposed, neither did it show the graduated fogged bands of radiation exposure — instead the negative showed, in white lines against a black background, a Star of David inside two concentric rings, with a lot of Hebrew words in all the spaces and four Hebrew words evenly spaced around the outer circle. The words in the corners proved to be the names of the four rivers of Paradise— Pishon, Gihon, Prath, and Hiddekel — and the script inside the star read, "Your life story be sacrosanct, and all who are in your train." Between the rings had been various names such as Adam and Eve and Lilith, and word fragments in all the diamond-shaped spaces had been rearrangements of the letters of the Hebrew word for "unchanged" or "unedited."
To his own surprise, Lepidopt had not taken this as evidence of divine intervention; his belief, he discovered, was that the diagram had been exposed onto the film and inserted into the ORNL badge before it was issued to him.
Perhaps the photographer had mentioned the odd "photograph" to friends; or perhaps all the men who had so briefly been assigned to the Fourth Battalion were monitored; in any case, Lepidopt received postwar orders to report to the army base in Shalishut, outside Tel Aviv. There, in a garage that was empty except for himself and half a dozen white-coated technicians, he was given a series of peculiar tests — he was asked to describe photographs in sealed cardboard envelopes, to identify playing cards just by looking at the backs of them, and to heat up coffee in a cup inside a glass box. To this day he had no idea if his guesses about the photos and the cards had been accurate, or if the coffee had heated up at all.
For the next several months he was called back for more tests, but these were more mundane — he was given a number of thorough physical examinations, and his reflexes were tested; the medical staff gave him strict dietary instructions, steering him away from preservatives, hard liquor, and most meats.
After three months the program had become more instruction than testing. If he hadn't been amply paid for the time all this took, he might have refused to go on, even though he understood this was part of his army reserve service. Certainly it was pazam in both senses of the word: service time, and a longtime too. Luckily he had still been single in those days.
The instruction was mostly done in a windowless trailer that was driven from place to place throughout the day, perhaps at random; five other students, all males of about his own age, sat with him at a bolted-down trestle table that ran the length of the trailer, and the twenty-one-year-old Lepidopt was soon able to take readable notes with his left hand, even when the truck braked or turned unexpectedly. The students seldom had the same instructor twice, but Lepidopt was surprised that each instructor was a tanned, fit-looking man of obviously military bearing, in spite of the anonymous suits and ties they all wore.
He would have expected bent old scholars, or disheveled fanatics — for the texts the students analyzed were spiral-bound photocopies of old Hebrew mystical books. Some had titles — Sepher Yezirah, Raza Rabba — but others just bore headings like British Museum Ms. 784, or Ashesegnen xvii or Leipzig Ms. 40d.
Often when the texts were in Hebrew they had to be copied out in the student's handwriting before they could be read aloud, and in those cases the students had also had to fast for twenty-four hours before beginning, and make sure to write each letter of the text so that it touched no other letter; and often the lectures were delivered in whispers—though surely there could have been no risk of being overheard.
The texts had largely been antique natural histories with interesting but outlandish theories, such as Zeno's paradoxes that appeared to show that physical motion was impossible; but Lepidopt had been surprised to see that the fourteenth-century Kabbalist Moses Cordovero, in his book Pardes Rimmonim, had defined lasers while describing God and the amplified light that connects Him with His ten emanations; and that the succession of these emanations, or sephirot, seemed to be a stylized but clear presentation of the Big Bang theory; and that these medieval mystics apparently knew that matter was a condensed form of energy.
It had seemed to young Lepidopt that the instructors emphasized these things a bit defensively, in order to lend some frail plausibility to the wilder things in the texts.
Those wilder things began to have a stark, firsthand plausibility on the day when the students were taken in several jeeps out to some ruins in the desert north of Ramie — and that night in his own room, having pulled the curtains closed to block the view of the night sky, Lepidopt had wondered what sort of action the Fourth Battalion would have been faced with in the Sinai desert, at the Rephidim stone, if the orders had not been changed.