The instructor that day had been a deeply tanned, gray-haired old fellow with eyes as pale as spit; he had taken them into the wilderness to show them a thing that he claimed was "one of the Aeons" — specifically the Babylonian air devil Pazuzu.
Far out in the desert, half an hour's steep hike from where they had had to park the jeeps, the students and the instructor had finally stood at noon in a shadeless, yards-wide summit ring of carved, weathered stones under an empty sky, and the old instructor had meditated for a while and then pressed his right hand on to an indentation in one of the stones — and then they were reeling with vertigo in the center of a clanging whirlwind, but it had palpably been a living, sentient whirlwind; and young Lepidopt had known in his spine and his viscera that it was the world that was spinning, and the alien creature, the Aeon Pazuzu, that was holding still. In comparison to it, nothing he had ever encountered had been motionless.
Nothing else in the training had been as dramatic as that, but some things had been more upsetting — as when the students had been trained in astral projection. On the several occasions when Lepidopt's consciousness had hung in the air, looking down at his own slack body on a couch, he had always been afraid that he would be spun away into the whirling honeycomb of the world and never find his way back to his physical body. Every time he had pulled himself back into his body, sliding into it as if he were inching into a tight sleeping bag, it had been with a profound sense of relief and a resolution never to leave it again.
There had always been afternoon prayers in the truck, and evening ones if the lessons went on that long, but the Psalms all seemed to Lepidopt to have been chosen for their apologetic or resentful tone.
Lepidopt realized he'd been staring across the table at Glatzer's collapsed body. He stood up and crossed to the wide front window, and leaned his forehead against the curtained glass, idly listening to the faint music audible from the speaker taped against the windowpane — it was the new U2 song, "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For."
Neither have I, Lepidopt thought. We seem to be very close now, but I wonder if I'll live to find the… the technique, the technology, the breakthrough that Isser Harel has been searching for ever since learning of a nameless little boy who appeared in England in 1935 long enough to leave impossible fingerprints on a water glass.
It had opened up a whole new direction of scientific inquiry. Isser Harel had kept it very secret, but perhaps not everyone else involved had been as discreet.
The Iraqis had been pursuing research in the same direction in the late 1970s; and Lepidopt, working with a Halomot team on a war-surplus destroyer in the Persian Gulf in '79, had detected the Iraqi research station at Al-Tuweitha, a few miles southwest of Baghdad. The world thought it was simply an Iraqi nuclear reactor that Israeli F-16s bombed to rubble in June 1981; only Menachem Begin and a few agents in the Halomot — and Saddam Hussein and his top advisors — had known what sort of device the Iraqis had been trying to build behind the cover of installing the French-built Tammuz reactor.
How odd, he thought, that Moslems could even get close! Had they studied the Hebrew Kabbalah?
The intelligence services of several countries seemed to be aware of the new possibility, just as they had vaguely known of "the uranium bomb" in the early '40s; in 1975 the Soviet premier Brezhnev had asked for an international ban on weapons "more terrible" than any the world had yet seen.
But it had been a Jew who discovered this thing, twenty years before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948; and in the text of the second- century Zohar was the passage, At the present time this door remains unknown because Israel is in exile; and therefore all the other doors are removed from them, so that they cannot know or commune; but when Israel will return from exile, all the supernal grades are destined to rest harmoniously upon this one. Then men will obtain a knowledge of the precious supernal wisdom of which hitherto they knew not.
And Israel wasn't in exile anymore.
It's all been one war for me, Lepidopt thought — and he made a narrow fist with the thumb and three fingers of his misshapen right hand.
Bozzaris had said something to him. Lepidopt looked up.
"What?"
"I said the dead woman on Mount Shasta was definitely the woman known as Lisa Marrity. I got my sayan on the phone, and I had him call police departments in L.A. and Shasta and ask about a Lisa Marrity, with two rs. The guy just called back — a hospital in Shasta pronounced her dead at 12:20 this afternoon. Driver's license says she was born in 1902 and lived at 204 Batsford Street in Pasadena. The Siskiyou County sheriff wants to look into it — it may have been suicide, since she had hardly anything but a note on her with next-of-kin phone numbers — which my man got and passed on to us, yes! — and witnesses say there was a big gold swastika on the grass under her body, made out of gold wire, just like Sam saw at noon. Real gold, they claim, though it was all gone by the time the cops got there."
"Some hippies," said Lepidopt, echoing what poor old Sam had said. He got to his feet. "Airline tickets, gas receipts?"
"None, and no keys at all, and no cash or credit cards at all. And she was barefoot, like Sam said, no shoes anywhere near her. Way up a hiking trail, and no cuts on her feet."
"Huh. So who are these next of kin?"
"A Frank Marrity — two rs — and a Moira Bradley. Frank's in the 909 area code, that's an hour east of Pasadena, and Moira's 818, which is Pasadena."
Bozzaris was in the kitchen with the Pasadena telephone directory. "Bradley," he read, "Bennett and Moira, as in 'Uncle Bennett,' note. 106 Almaraz Street. We haven't got any 909 directories here."
"Yes, that's got to be the 'Uncle Bennett' that Sam caught a reference to," said Lepidopt. "Right before 'pulled the tombstone down.' Get your sayan to look up Frank Marrity. And then you can take Sam to Pershing Square. Don't forget to take off the holograph talisman."
"I won't. But you'd better get Tel Aviv to send us another remote viewer to hang it on."
"Yes. Won't be as good as poor old Sam, I'm sure. I'll send Admoni an e-mail tonight." He wasn't looking forward to sending the report — the Mossad strongly disapproved of letting sayanim get hurt, much less killed; still, Glatzer had been in his seventies, and a heart attack had never been unlikely. "What's our safe-house situation like in the 909 area?"
"The two apartments are still stocked and paid up, in San Bernardino and Riverside," said Malk. "But for this kind of work your best bet is—"
"I know," said Lepidopt. "The tepee place."
"The Wigwam Motel on Route 66, right."
"Book us a room. A tepee. A wigwam."
I'll start with Frank Marrity, Lepidopt thought. He's almost certainly the guy Glatzer was reading this afternoon, the guy with the little girl.
Five
Huck Finn is told by Huck Finn himself, from his point of view."
Suddenly unwilling to read whatever sentence might follow that first one, Frank Marrity let the Blue Book test pamphlet fall into his lap. The stack of similar Blue Books stood on the table beside him, but he had just this moment decided to call in sick tomorrow, so they didn't depress him nearly as much as they had when he had sat down.
He was in the uphill living room, in a chair by the cold fireplace, and Daphne was asleep on the couch in front of the uphill TV set. She had drifted off during Mary Poppins, and he had turned the set off. She seemed to be sleeping peacefully, and he was reluctant to wake her.