"Why not the cone?" asked Marrity. "Did he touch it?"
"Yes! He's supposed to take it from the bottom of the package, with the little paper holder, but he took it out of the top, with his fingers."
"His hands are probably clean."
"He handles money."
"Oh, yeah — good point."
Bennett had ordered a cup of coffee, but pushed it aside on the picnic table after one sip. He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his white shirt, since all the paper napkins Daphne had pulled out of the dispenser had blown away when her father moved Rumbold's box, which had been holding them down.
"Those Sturm and Drang guys," said Bennett, "told me they were in negotiation with you to buy something Grammar had — this machine, apparently. They said you were going to keep the money, even though Moira should get half."
"That was a lie," said Marrity, sipping a cup of coffee of his own. "I've never spoken to Sturm und Drang, and I only met the sunglasses girl yesterday afternoon. We just talked about Milton, but then this morning she tried to shoot me, and a few minutes after that she tried to shoot me and Daphne both."
"Are you serious? Shoot you? Did she have a gun?"
"Yes, Bennett," said Marrity patiently, "and she fired it too. Several times. At me."
Bennett frowned and shook his head. Then he asked, "Who's Milton?"
"A poet," said Daphne. "Dead for a longtime."
Bennett waved impatiently. He was squinting fiercely at the cars in the shopping-center parking lot. "Why would your father have stayed with that crowd?" he asked Marrity.
"He knows them, I gather," said Marrity. "I don't know anything about him — we only met him yesterday."
"Moira hates him."
"So do I, probably. Though he saved my life this morning, at the hospital."
"You didn't tell us Daphne was in the hospital," said Bennett. "I had to find out from Sturm and Drang, this morning."
"It was very sudden," said Marrity.
"My dad did a tracheotomy on me, on the floor of Alfredo's restaurant," said Daphne proudly, "on Base Line. With a knife."
"They gave you fifty thousand dollars?" asked Marrity.
"I guess so. You did a tracheotomy yourself? An emergency tracheotomy? Wow." He wiped his mouth on his sleeve again. "Originally the fifty thousand was for whatever it was that your grandmother had, this machine, I guess. But then it was just for handing over you and Daphne."
Marrity shuddered. "I'm glad you didn't hand us over to them." He didn't ask Bennett whether he had intended to split the money with him.
Daphne had by now eaten all the ice cream off the cone. "Don't you think the germs would be dead by now?"
"What germs?"
"From the ice-cream man's hands. Wouldn't the open air kill them?"
"I suppose it might."
She held the cone up and blew on it, turning it to catch all sides. "They'd blow off, wouldn't they? Germs?"
"Yeah, I bet they would. Be sure to chew it, thoroughly."
"You're supposed to say, 'Absolutely.'"
"Absolutely."
"Well don't say it if you don't mean it."
"Daph, I have no idea whether they'd blow off or not."
"Well, he didn't touch the tip," she said judiciously, and bit the point off the end, and melted ice cream spilled down her chin and onto her blouse.
She dropped the cone onto the table. "I need clean clothes," she said. "So do you, Dad. We've been wearing these since yesterday. And toothbrushes."
"There's our taxi," said Marrity, getting to his feet.
"I think there's a washing machine at this house we're going to hide out in," said Bennett.
Charlotte was looking out through the eyes of the old fellow who claimed to be Frank Marrity from the future.
In the rearview mirror she could see the blue eyes of young Hinch, who she recalled had been a theology student at a Bay Area seminary before his progressive, urbanely skeptical instructors had driven him to look elsewhere for a true supernatural power. The Vespers had picked him up with the promise, as she privately thought of it, that "ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat the fruit thereof, then your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."
Denis Rascasse, slumped unconscious now on the far side of the Marrity guy, would probably have said something like efficiency rather than evil. And cowardice rather than good.
Over the headrest of the passenger seat she could see a few curls of Golze's disordered dark hair.
The radio on the dashboard clicked and hissed, and then a voice said, "Tierce."
Golze picked up the microphone. "Seconde."
"We found Prime's car, guns of Navarone." Golze impatiently switched frequencies, and the voice went on, "On Yucca. Nobody relevant visible in the neighborhood. The stereo was burned up, car full of smoke."
"Does it run?"
"Yes, runs fine."
"Meet us at Santa Monica and Moby Dick." Click. "And Van Ness. We'll switch cars, you take this one."
"Gotcha," said the voice, and Golze hung the microphone on its hook.
"Take us to Santa Monica and Van Ness," he said to Hinch.
Charlotte wondered why the stereo of Rascasse's car should have caught fire.
Abruptly she found herself seeing her own right-side profile; she was alarmed by the stress lines around her mouth and eyes. She turned to look toward the Marrity man, and was glad to see that in the full-face view, the sunglasses hid the crow's-feet at the corners of her eyes.
"Why the hell," he asked her, "did you try to kill Frank Marrity — my younger self — this morning?" She wished she could see his expression.
"I think," said Golze quickly, "that we've all been working under some misunderstandings." He shifted his bulk to peer back around the headrest at the old Marrity.
From the constriction at the top of Marrity's vision, Charlotte guessed that he was frowning.
"Soon enough," Golze said, "we'll all be able to ask and answer all the questions." Golze's eyes were blinking behind his glasses, and Charlotte saw him glance to the far right side of the rear seat, toward the slumped figure of Rascasse. "I think Rascasse is dead," he added. "Dying, anyway." He turned and looked ahead again.
Charlotte tried switching to Rascasse's point of view — and found herself seeing Golze and Hinch head-on, and old Marrity in the rear seat behind them; apparently her viewpoint now was from the dashboard, looking backward. Faces and hands were unnaturally bright, as if this image were seen by infrared radiation. Rascasse was evidently out of his body, but not far out of it.
She switched back to the Marrity view. "I don't think so," she said.
On her right, the old Frank Marrity cleared his throat, jiggling her vision. "Really, why did you kill him?"
"It was that Bradley guy," said Golze, "he hit him on the head with a gun butt. Your brother-in-law, if you really are Frank Marrity."
"I mean my father, in 1955. I — that doesn't make any sense."
"How do you know it doesn't make any sense? You were what, three years old? Anyway, I don't know, I wasn't even born yet. Rascasse said your father was more useful to us dead than alive, whatever that might mean, if anything." Golze hitched around in the seat again and smiled back at Marrity. "So give us a sample. What's some news from the future?"
"Are you sure you killed him, then?"
Golze shrugged. "Rascasse says we did. He seemed pretty sure. Why, did you hear from him after '55?"