Lepidopt thought of his son's disorderly room, in their apartment on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv. Louis was only a year younger than Daphne, and he liked Queen too. Lepidopt's wife, Deborah, had been uneasy about the fact that the group's lead singer appeared to be a homosexual, but young Louis already liked girls. Lepidopt wondered if the two children would be friends, if they could impossibly meet; surely they would be; surely Daphne would like the curly-haired Jewish boy with his father's intense brown eyes.
Standing in the dark living room now, Lepidopt wondered if the house was at all psychically flexed by his presence, his inappropriateness. Certainly he was aware of it, standing here with latex gloves on his hands, a Polaroid camera around his neck and a Beretta automatic tucked into the back of his pants.
Twice before in his career he had broken into people's houses when they were absent, and again he felt the sense that the house was poised, like a tennis player who has just sent the ball flying back over the net and is catching his balance to see how it will return; Lepidopt imagined he could hear echoes of the last conversations that had taken place here, and could nearly hear the tones of the next to come.
Being alone in a stranger's house didn't so much convey an acquaintance with the absent owner as give a wide-angle snapshot. Marrity smoked Balkan Sobranie number 759 pipe tobacco, which wasn't the usual sweet-smelling stuff, but Lepidopt didn't know if he was one of those pipe smokers who always had the thing in his mouth and talked around the stem, or one of the ones who was always fiddling with it in his hands, tamping it and relighting it and shoving a pipe cleaner down it; they were different sorts of men. Marrity apparently drank single-malt scotch and Southern Comfort, but Lepidopt couldn't guess, within a very wide range, what sort of drinker he was.
Who are you, Frank Marrity? he thought. Who are you, Daphne Marrity?
The snapshot impression was of a happy father and daughter, comfortable with each other. Books everywhere, a disorder of clothes on the washing machine, cats scuffling in the hall. Marrity kept the house at about 20 degrees Celsius or 70 degrees Fahrenheit; twice Lepidopt had heard the rooftop air conditioner whisper into activity. He probed his mind for the familiar envy of normal lives, and found that it was there as usual.
He was glad the cat or cats were shy of him, for a year ago he had petted one, and a moment later had experienced the certainty that he would never again touch a cat.
Lepidopt had taken Polaroid photographs of the Marrity waste-baskets and then picked through their contents — without much optimism, since the previous intruders had certainly done it too— afterward consulting the photographs to replace the trash exactly as it had been. He had found Marrity's box of paid bills and photographed the telephone bills, again sure that he was the second person in six hours to do it.
If the movie and the machine had been findable, the other crowd had found them. But maybe they had not been findable. Assume the ball is still in play, thought Lepidopt.
Lepidopt had been careful to move quietly throughout the house, assuming that the preceding crew, whoever they were, had left microphones; and he had left some too.
He had stayed away from the telephones — one in Marrity's bedroom, one in the downhill living room and one in Marrity's uphill office — because of the likelihood that the other crowd would already have attached infinity transmitters or keep-alive circuits to the wiring, effectively making microphones out of the telephone receivers even when they were resting in the cradles, apparently hung up.
Lepidopt had left three electret microphones disguised as empty Bic cigarette lighters — one on a high kitchen shelf, one in a gap between two books in the living room, and one inside a dusty spiderweb on the office windowsill. They were tuned from 100 to 120 megahertz, which spanned the high end of the commercial FM band and the low end of the aircraft voice-communication band, but the range of their transmission was no more than five hundred yards, and Lepidopt had rented a house at the west end of the block and set up receivers and tape recorders. The alkali AA batteries in the transmitters should be good for a week or two, at least.
He had also left, in the back of a kitchen drawer full of dusty chopsticks and parts to an old coffee percolator, two little teraphim statues made of fired tan clay, each with the names of the four rivers of Paradise carefully inscribed into their bases; and on top of the refrigerator he had tucked a postage-stamp-size scrap of leather with a Star of David inked on one side, and on the other a Hebrew inscription that said "and it dwindled" — the phrase was from Numbers 11:2, when a fire had broken out among the tents of the Israelites, and had then subsided when Moses prayed.
And now, before leaving, he was trying to guess what the other gang might have missed.
Here in the dark living room there was a faint reek of burnt plastic under the smells of tobacco and book paper and cat box; up the hall the air was just heavy with the cake -frosting smell of fresh paint.
Yesterday's newspapers are still on the kitchen table, he thought. Somebody had oatmeal and Southern Comfort for breakfast. There must be at least one cat, but I don't see him right now, thank God. There are two TV sets, one in the north living room and one in here, and neither one seems to have burned. But, everything's on fire, Sam Glatzer had said, moments before he died, up the hall and the TV set…
The girl's bedroom was up the hall, and Marrity had painted it today.
Lepidopt stepped toward the TV set, though it meant approaching the unshaded window, and he took the penlight from his pocket. He clicked it on, and then crouched to play its narrow beam over the top surface of the television set. It showed no particle of dust, though earlier he had noted that the table and all the bookshelves were faintly frosted with it. He clicked the light off again and tucked it back into his pocket.
He pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket and wrapped it around his latex-gloved forefinger and drew it across the top of the television set — he would look at it later in a bright light, but he sniffed it now, and smelled burnt plastic.
He backed away from the window. If my amulets had been in place yesterday, he thought, the little teraphim statues and the fire-extinguishing Star of David, I bet there would be a working VCR sitting on top of this television set now. And they might very well provide protection in the future.
But he knew the thought was sophistry. It was wrong to use magic, wrong to try to compel God's will.
Next month would be Selichot, beginning on the first Saturday night before Rosh Hashanah, and Lepidopt — if he were still alive— would pray for God's forgiveness through the following two weeks and would finally be restored to holiness on October third, Yom Kippur. As, often in the past, the duties of his job would be prominent among the things he would ask forgiveness for.
It was time to leave. Marrity might come home at any time. Admoni's brief radio message had said that a senior katsa from Prague was being dispatched and would arrive at LAX tomorrow afternoon to take over the operation; Lepidopt was to leave the Marritys and the Bradleys alone until then, and never mind the rival team, whoever they might be.