"No — that's been my — we hated him for that, my sister and I. For leaving and not ever getting in touch with us."
"Well," said Golze, "any hate is good practice, even if it's baseless, as in this case. Better, in fact, more pure. So tell us something that happens in the future."
Frank Marrity blinked several times. "Uh, the Soviet Union collapses in '91. The Berlin Wall comes down before that, in '89. No war, the whole Communist thing just collapsed from inside, like a rotten pumpkin." He took a deep breath, and after several seconds let it out again. "I want to make a deal with you people. Something I can do for you, something you can do for me. But first you need to buy me a bottle of vodka."
"Vodka after talk," said Golze.
"No," said Marrity. "You people killed my father, and… and I don't know where that leaves me. I've hated him all my life for what he did, and now he's gone, and he didn't do it — and I'm afraid—"
He broke off and laughed weakly, and for a moment, before he blinked his eyes again, Charlotte could see the blur of tears around the edges of his vision. His voice was flat when he went on, "So I insist on a bottle of vodka before we proceed."
Charlotte saw Golze shrug. "Okay," he said. "Charlotte, the guy who's driving Rascasse's car will take you home in this one." Knowing her ways, he stared straight into Marrity's eyes as he added, "You haven't slept in thirty hours, and I don't think we'll catch up with our fugitives within the next ten hours. Get a shower, get some sleep, eat something."
You don't want me to hear you interview the Marrity guy, she thought. But in fact her eyelids and eye sockets were stinging, and she could smell her own sweat.
"Okay," she said.
To her right, she could feel old Marrity relax. He's afraid of me, she thought, and she wondered whether to be amused or annoyed.
She leaned back in the seat, her left elbow on the door's armrest, and again she reached out mentally for the unconscious Rascasse's view — and then she smothered a gasp, though her fingernails reflexively scrabbled at the door and her right hand gripped Marrity's knee, doubtless to his alarm.
Rascasse was fifty feet above Colorado Boulevard — his astral projection was, anyway. Only after a bewildered moment did Charlotte realize that the motionless streamlined train in the lane below them was simply the car their bodies were in — it looked like an impossibly long limousine, stretched from one block to another, right through an intersection — and at the intersection, other elongated vehicles were stuck perpendicularly right through it.
We're a bit outside our time slot, she told herself firmly. We're looking at several seconds at once. The black strings of pearls hanging in the air are probably flapping birds, crows.
Then either Rascasse descended, or he narrowed his focus; she could see Golze in the front passenger seat head-on, nearly level with her and only a foot or so away, and his blurred head became clear, frozen, grinning in a candid moment.
Then she could see inside Golze, by God knew what light; she could see his ribs, the slabs of his lungs, and the veiny sack that was his motionless heart; somehow in this impossible light it appeared to be black.
Then Rascasse's gaze entered the heart, with such a tight focus that the motionless valves were mouths caught pursed or stopped in midsyllable.
Charlotte switched back to Marrity's view, and involuntarily let out a sharp sigh of relief to see the back of Golze's head rocking in the passenger seat in front of her, and brake lights flashing through the windshield.
Golze turned around again to look at her, his eyebrows raised.
"I'm going to sleep right here," Charlotte said, speaking too loudly. "You know the way you think you're falling, right as you go to sleep?"
"Jactitations," said Golze, returning his attention to the traffic ahead. "Common in alcoholics."
Oh yeah? thought Charlotte, genuinely too tired to take offense. But I bet my heart will outlast yours.
Eighteen
When the taciturn young man dropped her off at the corner of Fairfax and Willoughby, Charlotte waited until she heard him drive away and then, since no one was looking at her, she listened to the traffic. Vehicles were growling from left to right in front of her, so she waited until that noise stopped and engines were accelerating back and forth to her right. She stepped confidently off the curb, and used the engine volume to keep herself from slanting out of the crosswalk that she couldn't see.
Stepping off the curb, she thought. I did that, all right. That experience with Rascasse's viewpoint in the car might not have been all the way out to what those boys call the freeway, but it was… pretty far up an on-ramp, at least! A good distance above the surface streets I live in.
Her hands were shaking, and she clenched them into fists.
There was bourbon in her apartment, but she wasn't sure about cigarettes, and right now she needed a cigarette. Up the far curb, she shuffled tentatively across the 7-Eleven parking lot, listening for cars suddenly turning in or backing out of parking spaces, and finally someone was looking at her.
She saw herself from a viewpoint inside the store, through the tinted window, but it was clear enough for her to walk briskly. She smiled and waved toward the viewpoint, just to keep the person looking at her until she reached the doors.
The action reminded her of having waved at Daphne, possibly half an hour ago. What was that all about? she wondered again. Hello? Here I am? Daphne Marrity is not my younger self!
Once inside, she switched to the point of view of the clerk behind the counter, without even having seen if it was a man or a woman. The clerk didn't look at her wallet as the pack of Marlboros slid across the counter between the displays of Bic lighters and little cans of cold-sore balm, so she had to feel for two one-dollar bills — she kept ones folded into squares, to distinguish them from the fives that were folded twice lengthwise, the tens that were folded once lengthwise, and the twenties that were not folded at all. She could see the two quarters the clerk gave her in change, so she didn't have to feel for the milled edges of the coins to know what they were.
Outside again, she paused in the hot, smoggy breeze, scanning the nearby viewpoints for a view of herself; over the years she had become very good at picking herself out even in very crowded scenes. And after a few seconds she located herself in the view of a man — she could see the edges of a mustache at the bottom of the view field — at the roofed RTD bus-stop bench across Willoughby, and he obligingly watched her as she walked the dozen yards to the gate of her apartment building. He even kept her in view as she stepped along the grass-bordered pavement to the front door of her apartment, so she didn't have to drag the fingers of one hand along the walls and windows of the other ground-floor apartments, as she sometimes did.
By touch she fitted the key into the front-door lock, and bolted the door behind her once she was inside. Through the eyes of the man across the street, she could dimly see her silhouette inside the apartment through the always uncurtained windows, but that view was of no use, and she let it go.
Her apartment was chilly with air-conditioning, and the faint smells of upholstery and damp plant soil were a relief after the aggressive exhaust-and-salsa smells of the street.
She hung her keys on the hook by the door and took three strides forward across the carpet, and with the fourth step her left rubber-soled Rockport tapped the linoleum tiles of the kitchen floor.
She peeled the cellophane off the pack of Marlboros and tapped one out. Several lighters were in the drawer under the counter, glasses in the cupboard above, the bottle of Wild Turkey on the Formica-top table, and in ten seconds she had sat down at the table and poured a couple of inches of bourbon into the glass and was waving the fingers of one hand over the lighter to be sure it had lit; then she slowly brought it toward the end of the cigarette, puffing until she could taste the smoke.