Marrity remembered the tire-soled sandals he and Daphne had seen on the brick floor of the Kaleidoscope Shed. "Uh…" he began.
"Stay right where you are, I'll send somebody to pick you up. For right now just tell me your nearest big cross streets — call this number again in half an hour to give me your exact location."
"Nearest…?" said Marrity, trying to remember. "Uh, Franklin and Beachwood, I guess. We're up in the hills." He glanced at Moira. "Can we call the — what do you think of the idea of us calling the police? Or my sister's employer?"
"Don't call anyone else. Repeat, do not. Just sit still and call me again in half an hour."
Daphne was tugging at Marrity's sleeve. "Something you've got to tell him!" she whispered.
"One second," said Marrity into the phone; then he covered the mouthpiece and said, "What, Daph?"
"They've got to feed the cats!"
Marrity nodded and took his hand off the phone. "You still there?" he asked.
"Yes."
"We have one condition, for our cooperation. A… gesture of good faith, on your part."
"What is it?"
"You people need to put a twenty-pound bag of Purina Cat Chow in my kitchen. Lay it down flat, like a pillow, and then cut the whole top surface off. It's stiff paper, there're knives in the drawer to the right of the sink. They'll be all right for water, they all drink out of the toilets."
"Your house is certainly under hostile surveillance."
"That's why I'm asking a pro to do it, not one of the neighbors."
The voice laughed. "Fair enough. We'll do it. Talk to you in thirty minutes."
Nineteen
Lepidopt switched off his portable telephone and tucked the bulky thing into its carrying case. He shifted in the passenger seat to look around; they were on Fairfax, not far south of Hollywood Boulevard.
"Ernie," he said to Bozzaris, "get to Lieserl's house right now — 204 Batsford Street, in Pasadena — take the 101 south to the northbound Pasadena freeway, it ends very close to her place."
Bozzaris visibly decided on the quickest way to the 101, then made a fast right turn onto Santa Monica Boulevard.
"And when we get there," Lepidopt went on, "you go into the shed in the backyard and find the gold swastika on the floor. It might be under whatever the floor is, which I hope isn't concrete. Photograph the swastika, trace any wiring or machinery and photograph that, and then take it all out; we'll want to reassemble it at the Wigwam Motel. That other crowd has got the old twenty-first-century Frank Marrity. He's with them voluntarily — he'll probably want to delay telling them about the machine in the old lady's shed until he's made some deal, got some assurances, but they might abbreviate that. So be quick."
"The old guy knows this stuff about the shed?"
"It's got to be how he came back here, from the future."
"Ah. You'll want me to drop you off somewhere."
"No, I'll wait in the car, outside her house. None of that crowd has seen me before. If they arrive in the middle of your work, I think we'll kill them."
The portable phone buzzed again, and Lepidopt thought Marrity must have thought of some other task like feeding the cats; but it was an old man's voice on the line.
"What?" said the reedy old voice.
Lepidopt's chest was suddenly cold, for he thought he recognized the voice. Easy enough, he thought, to make the phone ring again. Just push some electrons around, reactivate the circuitry that was activated a moment ago.
"Uh," said Lepidopt hoarsely, "Sam?"
Peripherally he could see Bozzaris glance sharply at him.
"I don't know what it is," said Sam Glatzer's voice. "But it's in a cement tepee. And it's also in a truck. This thing."
"What is, Sam?" A moment later Lepidopt bared his teeth, belatedly remembering that it's no use asking ghosts questions before they've given the answers.
He was sweating. He had talked to a ghost only once before, and that had been during his training in Tel Aviv in 1968, in the trailer, with an instructor and other students — and the ghost hadn't been anyone he had known.
Another ghost voice intruded on the phone line now — a younger man, possibly drunk: "Two days I sat beside my body, staring at the holes in my chest." Looking out the car window, Lepidopt noted that they were driving past the gray stone walls of the Hollywood Cemetery.
"Not that," said Sam, "but a place that looks like that."
"Okay," said Lepidopt helplessly.
"I went to my grandfather," said the other man's voice; a moment later the voice added, "to find out who I am, where I came from."
Lepidopt gritted his teeth. The intruding voice was certainly a ghost too, so there was no point in telling him to be quiet.
"And it's in the Swiss Family Robinson tree house at Disneyland," said Glatzer's voice, "in a manner of speaking."
"Right," Lepidopt said. What is, Sam? he thought. He tried to remember everything Sam had said so far.
"At the Chinese Theater," Glatzer went on. "It's in a lot of places."
"But I have no mother, really," interjected the other voice, "Only children."
"You know what a capacitor is, right?" said Glatzer. "Put the hand in when the cement was wet. It's more like a capacitor."
"My mother will hide them," said the other ghost voice, "or try to. Everyone who dwells here is safe."
"The thing I thought was a gravestone," said Glatzer.
Lepidopt sighed and wiped his forehead.
"Tell me about it, Sam," he said, to pave the way for the things the old man's ghost had already said; for he had it now.
"They'll try to find my children," said the other voice unhappily.
"Oren," said Glatzer, "listen…"
Oren Lepidopt held the phone to his ear, but neither of the ghosts said anything more.
Lepidopt supposed that was the last thing he would ever hear Sam Glatzer say: Listen…
Lepidopt switched off the phone. "That was Sam Glatzer," he told Bozzaris. "His ghost. He says we've got to get the Charlie Chaplin footprint slab too. It's apparently part of the machine, and it's apparently in the shed too. It's a capacitor, he said." He began punching numbers into the phone. "I'd better get some sayanim with a truck."
Bozzaris's eyebrows were up, and he was nodding as he watched the glittering lanes ahead of him. "How did Sam sound?"
Lepidopt laughed harshly. "Good. Rested."
Denis Rascasse's body was stretched across one of the bunks at the back of the parked bus. He was breathing through his open mouth, in ragged snores. The gash in his scalp had been rubbed with Neosporin and bandaged, but he was still unconscious and there were no plans to take him to a hospital. Young Hinch sat up front in the driver's seat, twisting a Rubik's Cube on each square of which he had painted a Hebrew letter.
Rascasse's attention was several miles away, at Echo Park. He had long since lost the body habit of seeing from two close-set points as if he were using organic eyes, and his perspective was broad — sunlight was gleaming off the lake in a million directions like a fire, and at the same time the lake was a placid jade green with no reflections at all; he could see all sides of every one of the trees around the lake and the undersides of the lotus lillies on the western shore. Nothing was "in front of" anything else.
But he couldn't focus on one of the rental boats on the lake.
He knew why. Golze and the elderly Frank Marrity were in that boat, and Golze must have removed the Chaplin's-hat ribbon from the Baphomet head and buttoned it around his own neck — almost certainly with a twist to make a Moebius strip of it.