Another time Rascasse had told her that in the 1920s the Vespers — called the Ahnenerbe then — had worked with Adolf Hitler, and had even provided him with the swastika as an emblem; though Rascasse had added that the group's core had never been interested in the screwy Nazi racial philosophies, but had only hoped to use Hitler's government to fund their researches. The association had apparently not worked out, and long before the Ahnenerbe had been incorporated into the SS, the core members had stolen the archives and left Germany and taken on, or possibly reassumed, the name Vespers. Golze said Vespers was a corruption of Wespen, the German word for wasps, though Charlotte liked to think it referred to the French term for evening prayers. Rascasse himself was French, and probably old enough to have been active during the war, but she had never been able to figure out when he had joined the Vespers.
Their researches had to do with the nature of time, and her payment for working with them was going to be derived from that.
But "researches" probably wasn't the right word, except in a historical-detective sense — they weren't hoping to discover how to manipulate time, but to rediscover work that had already been done toward that, work that had subsequently been lost or hidden or suppressed.
In these three years Charlotte had seen them pursue a number of leads — clues that took them to private European libraries, and odd old temples in India and Nepal, and remote ruins in Middle Eastern deserts — all of which had proved to be dead ends. Rumored scrolls or inscriptions were gone or had been misleadingly described, alchemical procedures proved to be too obscure to follow or did nothing, and disembodied Masters turned out to be disembodied imbeciles, if not complete fabrications.
It had been Charlotte herself who had obtained the one solid lead for them: She had got access to a secret archive in New Jersey, and had stolen several files of papers that contained information about a woman who had been living under a false name in Southern California as recently as 1955, a woman who had at one time had possession of some sort of potent artifact. Charlotte hadn't been told all the details, but it had been this discovery that had led Rascasse and his team here to Los Angeles to work with the California branch of the Vespers.
A mouthful of bourbon heated her throat now as she banished the memory of what she had done to get access to that archive.
Charlotte didn't think Rascasse and Golze had truly believed the old woman's device still existed; certainly they had assumed she must have died years ago. But at noon all the Vespers electronic Ouija boards had shaken into activity, with ghosts anxious to know if they still had identities — this and a careful study of the day's seismological charts convinced Rascasse that the device had been activated and used.
He had immediately got the Vespers remote viewers busy trying to triangulate its location; and after an hour they had narrowed it down to somewhere in the Los Angeles area.
Then the old woman's gadget had reportedly moved east, at about 1:30 — the viewers couldn't be precise, since the device had not been activated at the time — and so Rascasse had rounded up Golze and Charlotte and set out in the bus toward Palm Springs.
At one point on that long drive a gong had sounded from the cabinet behind the driver's seat, and the cursor on the electronic Ouija board above the cabinet had been bouncing like the virtual ball on a Pong game, lighting up random letters and numbers. Charlotte had faintly heard the thing in the cabinet moaning.
After a quick, whispered argument with Rascasse, Golze had opened the cabinet doors with evident reluctance.
Charlotte had had to fight down sudden nausea. It seemed to her that the head always smelled worse — like hot rum spiced with "blood and honey and the scrapings of old church bells," as Thurber had once written — when it was agitated. And even though it had no eyes, she always imagined that it was looking at her.
Golze had gingerly lifted the tarry-black head and its wooden base out of the cabinet and shuffled around to the windows with it held out at arm's length, to let the thing, as he said, "scope the traffic," but though the head seemed to quiver with more excitement when he carried it back to the galley and held it up to the back window, none of the vehicles nor anything in the sky had seemed unusual.
Rascasse had curtly told Charlotte to scan the nearby perspectives, but she got nothing more significant than a view of the dashboard of a car or truck, and a rust-flecked white hood. Nothing that looked like opposition.
Charlotte had tried to avoid seeing the awful black head, but at one point while she was using Rascasse's eyes he had looked straight at it.
Polished black skin clung tightly to the eyeless skull, and paisley-shaped panels of silver filigree had been glued or tacked onto the forehead, cheeks, nose and chin, like metal Maori tattoos — probably to cover worm holes, Charlotte thought nervously — and a slack ribbon around its neck swung back and forth underneath the wooden stand. "Charlie Chaplin's hat," Golze and Rascasse called the ribbon. According to Golze it was the liner ribbon from a hat that had once belonged to Chaplin, cut now and fitted with a button and loop.
Charlotte had hastily switched to the driver's point of view.
Golze had eventually put the head back in its cabinet and closed the doors, wiping his hands afterward. Only then had Charlotte taken a deep breath.
At 4:10 P.M., though, the head had begun moaning again behind its closed doors, and again the electronic Ouija board had rapidly indicated meaningless numbers and letters; but, luckily before they could open the cabinet again, Rascasse had got a frantic call from the Amboy compound, reporting that the old woman's gadget had disappeared — dropped right out of the perceptions of all the remote viewers.
Rascasse had immediately made another call to the seismology lab at Cal Tech, but there had been no earthquakes within the last half hour. Apparently the gadget had been briefly activated again— too briefly to hope to triangulate it — but had disappeared without having been used.
They were headed back to the L.A. office now, and Charlotte had long since calmed her nerves with the bourbon. Rascasse would surely get the device soon, whatever it was, and there was nothing she could do to help right now.
She knew that she could look at the highway ahead, and see the lights of windows in the darkness — distant kitchens and bedrooms and living rooms — but she didn't exert herself to look. Right now she didn't want that heimweh, that homesick longing for strangers' lives. She was too distressingly close now to getting a life for herself.
Golze had said he could never sleep on the bus, but usually Charlotte could — the noise and the rocking took Charlotte back to her childhood.
From the age of eight until the age of nineteen, when she had been honorably discharged because of disability, Charlotte Sinclair had been one of several children working for the United States Air Force in a remote string of Minuteman ICBM missile silos in the Mojave Desert south of Panamint Springs. She and the other children had spent most of their days and nights in the underground Launch Control Centers, each of which was a compact three-story house suspended inside a concrete sphere on "shock isolators," four huge compressed-air shock absorbers, and the floor had constantly tilted one way and then the other as the Boeing air compressors tried to compensate for pressure loss in one or another of the shock isolators. Sometimes the floor would stay tilted for hours before the compressor came on, and she and the crew would get used to it — and then it was always disorienting to notice that the stationary blast door appeared to be rotated to one side or the other.