But hadn't Einstein taught at Princeton?
Marrity flipped through the stack again, peeking into the envelopes, and saw another in English. He carefully drew the letter out of the envelope — which was plain, postmarked Princeton, New Jersey, April 15,1955. The letter was handwritten, in the same difficult scrawl as the Peccavit signatures.
My dear Daughter, Marrity managed to puzzle out, Derek was here — did you know?
And Marrity stopped reading again, his face suddenly cold. Derek, he thought. That's my father's name. He ditched us in '55— sometime before May, since my mother killed herself in May. Was he just off visiting his grandfather? If so, why didn't he ever come back? Did he die? If he died, why wouldn't Grammar have told Moira and me?
Quickly he worked his way through the rest of the letter.
I hope you have not told him too much! I said to him to go Home, I am always watched, can tell him Nothing. And Derek not knows his own Origin, that he has no lineal Status. I have spoken to NB when he was here in October, just enough to assure he has no Inkling of the Maschinchen. And he has not. I am in Hospital, with a ruptured Aortic Aneurism, and I know I do not survive. I wish to have seen you one more Time! We are such Stuff as Dreams are made on, and our little Life is rounded with a Sleep.
It was signed simply, Your Father.
That last sentence was of course from The Tempest.
With a shaking hand Marrity laid the letters aside, and stood up and tiptoed into the hall, where the Britannica volumes stood on a shelf above head height. He pulled down the EDWA to EXTRACT volume, blew dust off the top page edges, and flipped to the article on Einstein.
It listed his birth year as 1879, but there was no death date in this 1951 edition. Marrity only skimmed the accounts of Einstein's discoveries, but noted that Einstein had become professor of mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, in 1933.
An image more vivid than a daydream unfocused his view of the page — Daphne was dreaming. In her dream a young man with long hair was tied up and gagged, lying on his back in some kind of recessed space in a metal floor between padded, bolted-down seats, and a hand with a knife hovered over his throat; then it was Daphne lying on her back on a red-and-black linoleum floor, and Marrity was crouched over her with an opened pocketknife in one hand, pushing her chin up with the other—
"Daph!" he called, stepping quickly back into the living room. He was anxious to wake her before the dream could go any further. "Daph, hey, your movie's over! Up up up! You can sleep with me tonight, since your bed's all smoked. Right right?"
She was sitting up, blinking. "Okay," she said, apparently mystified by his liveliness. The dream was clearly forgotten.
"And I don't have time to correct those papers tonight," he went on, "so I'm going to call in sick tomorrow. We can have lunch at Alfredo's."
"Okay. Did you clean up my bedroom?"
"Yes. Come on, up."
"How does it look?"
"Halbfooshin'." It was a family word that meant pretty bad, but not near as bad as a little while ago.
She smiled. "Tomorrow we can flip the mattress and put the bed different?"
"Right. You've been east-west — we'll put you north-south for a while. The cats will still land on you when they come in the window."
She nodded contentedly and followed him down the hall.
Viewed by the other drivers on the westbound 10 freeway this evening, the bus generally looked black — its bright blue showed up only when it sped past under one of the high-arching streetlights — and a driver passing it had to squint to make out the word HELIX along its side.
The windows along the side of the bus were gleamingly dark in the back, but the two or three right behind the driver's seat glowed yellow, and a driver passing the bus in the fast lane was able to glimpse a white-haired man sitting as if at a table.
In the lounge area behind the bus's driver, Denis Rascasse sat back in one of the two captain's chairs and with his open hand rolled his Bic pen across the flat newspaper in front of him.
"Lieserl Marity came out of hiding in order to die," he said formally, as if he were dictating a newspaper photo caption.
"In effect," agreed Paul Golze. He sighed and audibly shifted his bulk in the other captain's chair, probably passing from one ear to the other the telephone that was connected to the modified CCS scrambler. "A Moira Bradley called the hospital at twelve forty-five — she's one of the next of kin. And at six-ten a cop from San Diego called too, a detective, asking about Lisa Marrity. Nobody else, no press."
By the interior lights glowing over the seats and fold-out tables at the front of the bus, Rascasse was working on the Los Angeles Times crossword puzzle. Without looking up, he said, "I think we should get that cop." His French accent made the last word into something like coop or cope.
The Vespers radar dish at Pyramid Peak near the Nevada border covertly monitored all telephone communications that the NSA bounced off the moon, and swastika and Marity were two of the hundred high-specificity words the Vespers computer was programmed to flag. Tonight these two had occurred in the same conversation, and one of the technicians at the compound outside Amboy, all of whom had been on full alert since shortly after noon, had telephoned the New Jersey headquarters as soon as the correlation was noted and transcribed, and the New Jersey people had called Rascasse.
Paul Golze spoke into the telephone; "Read me the entire conversation, slowly." He began scribbling on a yellow legal pad.
Stretched out on a couch by the dark galley in the back of the bus, Charlotte Sinclair paid wary attention to the two men at the tables ten rows forward.
Charlotte had lost both eyes in an accident, but she could see through the eyes of anyone near her.
She was tensely amused whenever one of the two men looked at the other; they were such opposites, physically — Rascasse tall and straight with close-cropped white hair, Golze slouchy and fat and bearded, and always pushing his stringy black hair away from his glasses.
Charlotte wondered if she would be able to sleep.
She had lit a cigarette to kill the spicy smell of the thing they called the Baphomet head, but the smoke irritated her eyelids, and she crushed it out in the armrest ashtray.
Instead she reached under the seat and lifted out of her bag the bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon, still reassuringly heavy, and twisted out the cork cap. A mouthful of the warm liquor dispelled the incense-and-myrrh smell perfectly, so she had another to work on dispelling the memory of the thing as well, and then corked the bottle and tucked it beside her under her coat.
It had been three years now since Rascasse had picked her up in a poker club in Los Angeles and she had begun working for the Vespers, but she still didn't know much about the organization or its history.
The thing they were looking for now was apparently invented in 1928, but the Vespers had supposedly been pursuing it under other forms for centuries. Before the advances in physics during the twentieth century, it had been categorized as magic — but so had hypnotism, and transmutation of elements, and ESP.
Rascasse had told her once that the Vespers were a secret survival of the true Albigenses, the twelfth-century natural philosophers of Languedoc whose discoveries in the areas of time and so-called reincarnation had so alarmed the Catholic Church that Pope Innocent III had ordered the entire group to be wiped out. "The pope knew that we had rediscovered the real Holy Grail," Rascasse had said, nodding toward the chalice-shaped copper handles on the black wood cabinet behind the driver's seat. "We lost it during the Church's Albigensian Crusade, when Arnold of Citeaux destroyed all of our possessions at Carcassonne." When Charlotte had dutifully made some derogatory remark about the Catholic Church, Rascasse had shrugged. "Einstein suppressed it too, after rediscovering it in 1928."