"If your brother-in-law absconds with the items," said Sturm, "he could sell them to somebody else; and there's very little we or you could do about it. Afterward he could plausibly claim never to have had them. Total ignorance, stout denial."
Bennett's stomach was cold. "But you could go to the police, couldn't you, with your, your list? Your correspondence with his grandmother? I mean, you know what the items are… as well as I do, better than I do, since you know specifically what the old lady wanted to sell." He wished the coffee would get here. "Right?"
Sturm stared at Bennett for a moment. The man's eyes were very pale blue, and the lashes were white. "It's not really a matter we'd like to get the police involved in," he said at last. "You notice that we haven't identified ourselves to you at all. You have no phone number nor address for us. If the transaction doesn't work out, we'll shrug and… disappear. Keep our money."
Great God, thought Bennett. What was that crazy old woman dealing in? Crates of machine guns? Heroin? Whatever this is — fifty thousand dollars! — no identification! — it's obviously illegal. Suddenly and irrationally he was very hungry, and very aware of the hot smells of bacon and eggs at nearby tables.
"Do you know where Marrity and his daughter might have gone," asked Drang, "after hanging up on us?"
"When would I be paid?" asked Bennett. "And how? Since this is — such an off-paper transaction." I should walk out of here, he thought. I know I should. What good would a check be? And if they gave me cash — how could I know it wasn't counterfeit? I have no business dealing with this sort of people. I'm glad I didn't wake up Moira this morning.
Sturm said, "The Bank of America branch on California Street is holding six cashier's checks, each made out in your name for $8,333.00. That adds up to two dollars short of fifty thousand, actually, but we'll pay for your coffee here. As soon as we have the property, we'll drive you to the bank, pick up the cashier's checks, and hand them to you. You can cash them or deposit them wherever you please, at any time during the next three years."
That would work, thought Bennett. He could feel a drop of sweat running down his ribs under his shirt.
"You could split it with your brother-in-law, if your conscience dictates," said chubby Drang with no expression.
Bennett could feel his mouth tighten in a derisive grin.
"Do you know where Marrity and his daughter might have gone?" Drang asked.
"Yes," said Bennett. "But let's pick up the cashier's checks first."
"We can do that," said Sturm, getting to his feet.
"You can owe me for the coffee," said Bennett, with frail bravado, as he stood up too.
I'm not an old man, I'm a young man something happened to. He believed that was a quote from Mickey Spillane.
The man who called himself Derek Marrity stared at the crystals hanging from the switched-off ceiling light in the increasingly sunlit room, unable to sleep in spite of having been awake for more than twenty-four hours. He was lying on Lisa Marrity's narrow bed, where he had slept Sunday night; he had got up at seven on Monday morning, to go to Marrity's house. Now, on Tuesday morning, he wished he had slept late and not visited the poor Marritys at all.
From the bedside table he picked up a battered cigarette butt with a bit of Scotch tape wrapped around it. The filter had once been tan, but was now faded to nearly white.
Look anywhere but homeward, angel.
He dropped the cigarette butt back onto the table.
The crystals were turning in the breeze coming in through the open window above his head; he could smell Grammar's jasmine flowers, and refracted morning sunlight was making dots of red and blue and green light that raced and paused on the book spines and paintings.
The lace curtains were swaying over him. He recalled that Grammar had used the phrase voio voio, which was from the German word for "curtain," to describe empty pretense, portentous talk with no substance, ambitious plans that were impossible. Useless endeavors.
This whole expedition, he thought as he shifted his twisted and aching right leg to a more comfortable angle on the bedspread, has been voio voio.
I can still give young Frank Marrity investment advice, I suppose, but what could really help him, at this point? Would there be any use in telling him the crucial things? Don't drink ? Don't let Daphne drink? Useless, useless.
The Harmonic Convergence has undone me. Earnest, well-meaning young Frank Marrity has undone me.
Daphne was supposed to choke to death, yesterday, on the floor in Alfredo's.
Marrity reached behind his head to turn the hot pillow over.
He had two recollections — three, now — of that terrible half hour in the restaurant.
Originally he had kept on trying the Heimlich maneuver, and kept on trying it, until he had simply been shaking a pale, dead little girl. He could still remember the cramps in his arms. The paramedics had arrived too late to do anything. He had grieved over Daphne, but he had got through the funeral, and the furtive interviews with various secret organizations, and the horrible lonely months afterward, without "taking the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse," as Omar Khayyam had described alcoholism. Two years later he had married Amber, who had been a student in one of his University of Redlands classes in 1988: that is, who would be in one of Frank Marrity's classes next year. He and Amber had not had any children, but they'd been very happy, and had eventually bought a house in Redlands in the mid-'90s. A good time for it, before the prices of houses went up out of sight for a college teacher and his eBay-dealer wife. By 2005, at the age of fifty-three, he had been thinking about early retirement.
He thought of that life as Life A.
And then in the early months of 2006 he had begun to have vivid hallucinations of a different life, a Life B. In this other life he had not married Amber, and Daphne was still alive, still with him, and the two of them were living in a trailer park on Base Line. Moira, a widow by this time, had long since bought out his share of Grammar's house, and was living in it, and had got restraining orders against both him and Daphne. Daphne was thirty-one, and an alcoholic, and she hated her alcoholic father. And, truthfully, by that time he had hated her, and himself too.
In both lives twelve-year-old Daphne had watched Grammar's movie, helplessly, all the way through, while he had been up the hall in his office grading papers; when he had eventually come down the hall to make dinner he had found Daphne still staring at the blank screen. He had ejected the tape and hidden it. That night Daphne had begun to have difficulty swallowing her food.
And though in his original life, Life A, Daphne had choked to death on the floor of Alfredo's the next day, in the intrusive hallucinatory Life B he had punched a hole in her throat, and she had not died; but when she had recovered from the surgery she had written u cut my throat… i hate you on the pad beside her hospital bed. And from then on she had seemed to be possessed by a spiteful, hateful devil.
He could see now that it had been merciful, in the original story of his life, that she had died on the restaurant floor.
The Life B hallucinations had become so frequent and prolonged that he had had to take a leave from teaching, and eventually he honestly didn't know which life was his real one.
He was the single father of the adult Daphne as often as he was the childless husband of Amber.