She had had perhaps half a dozen lovers during the nine years since the exploding battery had blinded her in the missile silo in the Mojave Desert; and her memory of every one of them was of her own body and a pair of hands.
It still seemed odd to her that she and Denis Rascasse had never been lovers, not even when he had first recruited her three years ago.
Involuntarily she found herself recalling old Robert Jerome, the Fuld Hall custodian at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, in New Jersey. She had seduced the amiable old man in order to get access to the restricted Einstein archives — and then had convinced him that she loved him, to get his help in robbing the extra-sensitive files still kept in the basement of Einstein's old house on Mercer Street.
Even with Robert Jerome, all she could remember was her own face and body, and his wrinkled, spotty hands.
The pebbled-plastic gun-cleaning kit was in the bedside table drawer, and she lifted it out carefully and opened it on the blanket, by touch separating the rods and brushes and sharp-smelling bottles of solvent and oil.
Was she a narcissist? If so, it was by default. She couldn't help but always wind up looking at herself, through someone else's eyes.
But no, that wasn't the way it was — she didn't care about this blinded body, nor even about the twenty-eight-year-old woman who animated it.
If I'm a narcissist, she thought, it's in the same way that the crapped-out old-man Marrity probably is. We want to go back and rescue our younger, more innocent selves from some bad thing that threatens them. I have done nothing but in care of thee. We're willing to throw ourselves away — make ourselves into things that ought to be thrown away — if by doing so we can save that one precious person who by our disgraceful actions will be spared our disgraces.
She looks like I used to.
According to Rascasse, it's possible to leave now and go back and change your past, then return in Newtonian recoil to now again, with your memories intact — with, in effect, two sets of recollections: memories of the original-issue life and memories of the revised one too. Einstein apparently did that in 1928, and Lieserl Marity probably did it in 1933. But I won't do it that way, Charlotte thought. I won't come back.
Throw it away and then wash every particle of memory off your hands.
Robert Jerome had used those old hands she remembered to make a noose out of his own shirt, not very long after Charlotte had impatiently explained to him that she had never loved him, that she had only seduced him to get the papers she had stolen. He had been in jail for being an accessory to burglary, his job and pension lost, when he had killed himself.
He had also been guilty of perjury, in absolving Charlotte of all blame; through a Vespers decoy address she had eventually received a letter that he had written to her from the jail, but she had never asked anybody to read it for her.
I won't impose these memories on the redeemed Charlotte Sinclair, she thought as she began screwing the .38-caliber brush onto one of the rods. I'll save her and then just go away, with all my sins unshared.
Nymph, she thought, reflexively misquoting Hamlet, in your orisons be all my sins forgotten.
Bennett and Moira had walked ahead as the four of them made their way up the steep curves of Hollyridge Drive, with Marrity and Daphne trudging along behind, all of them crowding against a fence or garage door whenever a car slowly moved up or down the narrow lane. Marrity couldn't imagine what happened when two cars needed to pass each other.
Mockingbirds made sneering calls from the aromatic eucalyptus trees overhanging the embankment to their right, and the one resident who noticed the four of them — a blond woman who was hovering with a watering can over a row of tomato plants in red clay pots — stared at them with evident unease. Pedestrians who weren't jogging or walking dogs were apparently unusual. Marrity wasn't surprised — the noon sun was a weight on his shoulders, and this hike would have been strenuous even if he were not carrying his jacket and his briefcase and Rumbold's shoe box. Bennett was holding a paper bag that had a bottle of scotch whisky in it — he'd bought it at the Mayfair Market on Franklin, one block north of Hollywood Boulevard.
Moira had finally driven into the market parking lot about an hour after Bennett had called her. They had all got into another taxi then, while Bennett and Marrity both tried at once to explain to Moira why they were all fugitives, even she; and then, when they had driven no more than half a mile up through the narrow, twisting lanes that curled like shaded streams down the Hollywood Hills, Bennett had told the driver to stop.
Now Moira halted and kicked off her shoes, so Bennett stopped too, and they waited for Marrity and Daphne to catch up.
"So are these spies, Frank? " Moira asked, standing on one foot to rub the sole of the other. "Soviets, KGB?"
"I don't know," Marrity said, pausing to switch his briefcase to his left hand and cradle his jacket and Rumbold in his right arm. "I guess if the NSA's after them, they probably are."
"Bennett says they… shot at you and Daphne?"
"Shot at me, aimed a gun at me and Daph. Serious both times." He lifted his briefcase to wipe his forehead on his shirtsleeve. "This is all true, Moira."
"Bennett says you told him Grammar's father was Albert Einstein." She smiled at him. "I could lose my job over this, not going back after lunch."
Marrity was tempted to open his briefcase and show her the Einstein letters; but he still didn't trust Bennett with knowing about them. "The NSA man we met last night said her father was Einstein," Marrity told her. "So did our father, yesterday morning."
Beside him Daphne nodded solemnly.
Moira's smile had disappeared. "Our father? Who do you mean?"
Marrity looked at Bennett, who shrugged and rolled his eyes. Clearly he had not told Moira about seeing their father.
"My father. Your father. He's back. He—"
"Our father? "Her shoes fell out of her hands and clattered on the asphalt.
"Yes, Moira," said Marrity patiently, "he came back because he heard Grammar died, and he wants to make a deal with these—"
"You've talked to him? Where is he?"
Daphne crouched to pick up Moira's shoes.
"He's with these people who are after us," said Marrity, "who shot at me. He—"
"Where?" She swayed on the narrow black pavement, and Marrity and Bennett each reached out to grab one of her arms. Marrity dropped his jacket.
"I don't know where he is now!" said Marrity. "He was standing on Grammar's lawn when we drove away, an hour and a half ago. We wanted him to come with us, but he waved us off, said, 'Go!' We couldn't wait."
"He had amnesia," said Moira, "all these years. I'm sure of it." Very slowly, supported by Marrity and Bennett, she sat down on the asphalt. The skirt of her brown linen suit was knee length, and she had to sit with her legs stretched out in front of her. Daphne frowned and crouched again to press her palm against the street surface, and Marrity knew she was checking to see if the tar was sticky.
"You can't just sit here," said Bennett anxiously. "Get up, it's only a few steps to this house I have the key to."
"Come on, Moira," said Marrity.
Daphne was crouched beside Moira, her face level with the woman's. "We should get in out of the sun," Daphne said. "We'll all get skin cancer."
Moira blinked at her. "Of course, dear," she said, and let Marrity and her husband help her back onto her feet.