It's afternoon in Tel Aviv right now, he thought; Louis is probably with Deborah, maybe having lunch. If I were there he would want to go to Burger Ranch for lunch, and get one of those disgusting Spanish burgers, with the watery tomato sauce on it.
Lepidopt remembered riding on the old Vespa scooter with Louis through the quiet evening streets of Tel Aviv, stopping to feed the many stray cats and watch lights come on behind the shutters and awnings and planter boxes that residents had hung all over the balconies of the 1920s Bauhaus apartment buildings, breaking up and humanizing the once stark architectural lines.
He pushed the tormenting thoughts away.
Lepidopt and Malk and Bozzaris were in one of the tepee rooms of the Wigwam Motel in San Bernardino, on what had been Route 66 until two years ago but was only Foothill Boulevard now. The neighborhood, right across the highway from the train yards and the towering Santa Fe smokestack, had already begun to deteriorate. Luckily the Wigwam Motel was still in business — nineteen conical cement tepees arranged irregularly across three weedy acres, each tepee twenty feet tall and painted white with a pastel zigzag line around the middle. To see their cars, Lepidopt would have to get down on his hands and knees and peer out through one of the two diamond-shaped windows.
The safe-house apartments were more conveniently located, and had garages and closets, and were certainly much bigger, but these concrete tepees, with steel-pipe "lodge poles" crossed at the narrow top, had the virtue of being largely free of right angles — a hostile remote viewer would find it difficult to get preliminary reference bearings.
And Lepidopt was in no danger from telephones in nearby rooms!
"My sayan is dead," said Bozzaris harshly, hanging up the telephone. "The detective in San Diego. The police down there found his body an hour ago. Apparently he was tortured."
Lepidopt's face was cold. Another sayan dead, he thought. "How could our, our adversaries have found out about him?" he asked.
"He called the LAPD about Lisa Marrity yesterday," said Bozzaris. "And then he called the hospital in Shasta. Probably the adversaries were monitoring calls to the hospital. Fuck." He was still crouched beside the telephone, his head lowered and a lock of his black hair hanging across his face.
Malk shifted in his chair at the little table. "You figure the 'adversaries' is the crowd with the dark-haired sunglasses girl?"
"For now I figure that." Lepidopt stood up from the bed and leaned against the slanted wall beside the front door. He dug a pack of Camels out of his pocket and shook one loose. "And clearly they're not just Einstein scholars, or Charlie Chaplin fans. We should have roped in the old guy in the Rambler when we had the chance. They're likely to get him next, whoever he is." He struck a match and puffed rapidly on the cigarette.
Two sayanim dead, he thought. Sam Glatzer was a heart attack, but this one sounds like plain execution. Tel Aviv would not be pleased — sayanim were sacrosanct. There would have to be retribution for this.
"Bert," said Bozzaris, straightening up and stepping away from the wall to stretch, "at the Italian restaurant, you did pick up those two beer bottles from the old man's table, right? The Rambler
"Yes," said Malk.
"Then Frank Marrity must have approached him in the restaurant, shortly after he and his daughter arrived. The fingerprints on the bottles are all Frank Marrity's."
Lepidopt could feel the skin tighten on his face. He exhaled a stream of smoke, and then said, "For sure?"
Lepidopt's voice had been strained, and Bozzaris stared at him curiously. "Yes."
"Bert," said Lepidopt, feeling again the tension he had felt in the wrecked lobby of the Ambassador Hotel in Jerusalem, on the night before they had besieged the Lion's Gate in June 1967, twenty years ago now. "You've got your half of the orders?"
Malk looked startled. "Yes."
"Haul it out." He dug a set of car keys from his pocket and tossed them to Bozzaris. "Ernie, get the can of Play-Doh out of my car."
Bozzaris also looked disconcerted, but only said, "Right, Oren."
"Tel Aviv told us not to do anything," said Malk as Bozzaris unbolted the door and stepped outside, letting in a lot of chilly night air that smelled faintly of sagebrush and diesel exhaust. Lepidopt could briefly see a diamond-shaped lozenge of yellow light from a tepee in the middle distance. "That would include reading those orders now."
"This supercedes what Tel Aviv said." And I'm glad it does, Lepidopt thought; I want to see what we're supposed to do, before the arrival of the Prague katsa, who outranks me.
"What, all our sayanim dying?"
"That too."
"Does Tel Aviv know about your 'never again' premonitions? "
Malk and Bozzaris hadn't known, until the necessity of insulating himself from all telephone bells had made Lepidopt explain it to them.
And I must not hear the name of the actor who starred in True Grit. Don't say it!
For members of the Halomot branch of the Mossad, they had seemed very skeptical.
"Yes," Lepidopt answered. Tel Aviv took it seriously, he thought. Now Admoni probably intends this new katsa to replace me, if he didn't intend that already.
Lepidopt heard a car trunk slam shut, and then Bozzaris hurried back inside and closed and bolted the door. In his hand was a yellow can of Play-Doh with a blue plastic lid.
"Don't open it yet," Lepidopt told him, "it starts to dry out pretty quick." He reached into his shirt and pulled up the inch-wide steel cylinder that he always wore on a cord around his neck, while Malk was doing the same. Each of the cylinders was lathed to resemble a stack of disks, with the gaps between each precisely as wide as the disks, and the edges of the disks were visibly engraved with tiny figures.
Lepidopt held out his hand for Malk's, and Malk lifted the chain off over his head and stood up to pass it across to him.
"This is premature," said Malk.
Lepidopt shook his head decisively. "Should have done it Sunday."
He held the two cylinders up next to each other, with their top and bottom faces exactly parallel — the disk edges of one precisely matched the grooves of the other, and it looked as if he could have pushed them together to some extent, like meshing two combs.
"The engineering branch seems capable of precision machining, anyway," Lepidopt said. "Let's hope they remembered to do the text in mirror image." He pulled the cord off over his head, untied the knot in it, and slid it out through the ring in the top of the cylinder.
Malk had sat down again and was lighting a cigarette of his own, with shaky fingers. "Even if they didn't," he said impatiently, "there's a mirror in the bathroom."
"True, true. Okay, Ernie," Lepidopt told Bozzaris as he unsnapped the chain on Malk's cylinder and drew it free of the ring, "open the can and roll me out a flat sheet of the stuff."
As Bozzaris was prying open the can's lid, Malk asked, "What's the movie, that the girl watched? That made her burn up the VCR?"
"Almost certainly it's a thing called A Woman of the Sea," said Lepidopt, "filmed in 1926 by Josef von Sternberg. There were a couple of versions, and this would be the one edited by Charlie Chaplin, with scenes Chaplin shot. The brain-eating bit is supposed to have been only implied, subliminally. This Daphne is obviously a sensitive girl; and tough — I wouldn't want to watch it." He looked at Malk and shrugged. "And I guess I won't. It was never shown in theaters, and Chaplin burned all the prints and negatives in '33, on June 21, the first day of summer. Three years ago there were still two people living who had seen the film, but Paul Ivano died in '84, and Georgia Hale died in '85."