Through the ragged hole in the windshield Marrity could see a sidewalk shaded by jacaranda trees. It all seemed a lot farther away than it could really be.
"'Among other things,'" said the Rascasse voice. "What other things?"
Marrity wished he could get out of the car. In spite of the fresh air blowing in through the torn windshield, the smell of burnt plastic was making him sick, and his bent leg ached all the way up to the hip.
"In 2006 I wiped some of the dust off the glass cylinder the condensors are in," he said hoarsely, "and looked in it with a flashlight. Einstein, or Lieserl, had painted Hebrew letters on the ten condensor plates. I couldn't rotate them, or see the letters in toward the axis, but in several places I saw the Hebrew word Din, which is the name of one of the ten Sephirot, the ten world emanations of God. In his letters to Lieserl, Einstein seems to have equated Din with determinism. Judgment with no mercy mixed in, I gather. No indeterminacy, no uncertainty. Anyway, I couldn't have copied out all the letters on the plates without taking the thing apart."
"And now the Mossad has it," said Golze. His voice was frail, and when Marrity looked at the fat man in the driver's seat beside him, he wondered if Rascasse's optimistic diagnosis was correct; Golze appeared to be dying. Perhaps Rascasse knew he was, and wanted him to die. Maybe Rascasse won't need to have killed Nobodaddy, Marrity thought — maybe he can just prevent him.
"And," Marrity went on, "you couldn't build the Chaplin slab."
"Are you close?" wheezed Golze irritably. "We're sitting in a parked car with the windshield — fuck — broken out."
"Five minutes since we left from Echo Park," said Rascasse's voice, which seemed to be just shaking the air now, independent of the radio's speaker. "We're on the 101 now, soon to hit the Pasadena freeway junction. Just a few more minutes. What's the Chaplin slab? Why wouldn't… Shirley Temple's do as well?"
Marrity realized what had been nagging him about the way Rascasse was speaking — it was all in iambic pentameter.
"The slab," he said, "is a sort of kink in time — in conjunction with the machine, it works like a catalyst, it makes it easier to get out of the time stream. My sister, Moira, took out a restraining order against me, in 2003—claimed I was a dangerous drunk! — but one day when she wasn't home, I broke into her stupid house and found some letters from Chaplin to Grammar, written in 1933 and '34." He smirked, distracted by the memory. "They may have been romantically involved! Grammar would only have been thirty-one in '33, and Chaplin—"
"Goddammit," said Rascasse's voice, "how's the slab a kink in time?"
"Right, right." Marrity frowned but went on, "Well, Chaplin was with Grammar in '33, when she jumped back in time, and he got dislocated too, for a moment. He found himself occupying his 1928 body, kneeling next to Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks in the Chinese Theater forecourt, pressing his hands into wet cement. A moment later he was back in the Kaleidoscope Shed and it was 1933 again, but" — Marrity shrugged — "it was the 1933 Chaplin who made those handprints in 1928. The slab, just by existing, is a violation of sequential time."
"We're on the Pasadena freeway now," said Rascasse's disembodied voice.
Still in iambic pentameter, Marrity noted. His hands were trembling, and he clasped them together as if in prayer.
Twenty-one
After the bus had pulled up alongside the battered car and Marrity had helped Golze climb aboard, Rascasse's voice from the bus radio had told the driver to go back to Hollywood and pick up Charlotte Sinclair; and again Marrity had noticed that Rascasse spoke in iambic pentameter.
Now the bus was parked in streaky palm-tree shade in a remote corner of the Alpha Beta parking lot at Pico and La Cienega, idling with the air-conditioning running, and Charlotte was sprawled across the left-side seats just behind the Baphomet head's cabinet, blinking sleepily and seeing through old Marrity's eyes on the other side of the aisle. Golze was slumped next to Marrity, against the window frame, and when Marrity glanced at him she saw that the fat man's face was deadly pale behind his sparse beard. She assumed that Rascasse's body was still lying on a bunk in the back of the bus, but nobody had looked there and she hadn't the energy to ask.
She was about to feel in her purse for the half-pint of Wild Turkey when, through old Marrity's eyes, she saw the pointer on the electronic Ouija board swoop up to the letter T in the upper-right corner. Nobody remarked on it.
Rascasse's voice rang out of the empty air behind the driver. "Paul's right. We need to take the Daphne girl."
Charlotte had jumped in surprise and now she wished someone would look around. Take it easy, she told herself — if Rascasse can project his awareness, it should be no trick for him to project his voice. She took a deep breath and let it out.
Today the bus smelled like a slum restroom: bleach and excrement. She didn't let herself think about the young man she had helped lure aboard, last night; instead she recalled what the bodiless voice had just said.
"Why the child?" she asked.
Nobody answered her, and then Marrity's view swiveled around to her. She couldn't tell if she needed lipstick — nobody had looked squarely at her when they'd picked her up, and now her head was just a silhouette against the bright window at her back.
"Daphne," Marrity said, "burned up the Chaplin movie." His voice was a hollow monotone, and she wished Golze would look at him.
But Golze was just staring at his curled hands in his lap. "We need the damn movie," he said. "We need sideways too, not just up and down."
"These two are going to take her to Palm Springs," Marrity went on, "and somehow cause her never to have existed. I won't remember her, or any of this, after."
Charlotte just said, "Ah." And neither will I, she thought. I suppose that's another thing that's actually possible — deleting people from the universe.
She looks like I used to.
Charlotte recalled the stories she'd heard about the anomaly Einstein had supposedly left in a tower in Palm Springs — an anomaly that could short out a person's lifeline, so that person had never existed.
And I waved at her, this afternoon, because she looked like my… my "little daughter": my uncorrupted younger self. Two little girls—one to disappear, literally without a trace, the other to finally get a life.
"Now, Mr. Marrity," said the disembodied voice from the air, "if you would please just open up the cabinet you see in front of you." Rascasse's voice didn't really sound organic — it was like someone using a violin bow to play a xylophone. "Go on, it isn't locked."
"Damn head never knows anything," muttered Golze from beside Marrity. "How many times did we ask it to find Einstein's daughter?"
Marrity's viewpoint ascended jerkily as he got to his feet and focused on the pairs of opposed brass cones that were the cabinet's handles.
"Last time I was here," Marrity said, sounding shaky, "nineteen years ago by my watch, this is where you kept that black head."
"It still is," said Charlotte, and she shifted her perspective to the driver, who was metronomically switching his gaze back and forth between the rearview mirrors and the empty pavement in front of the parked bus. It was much more restful than seeing the damned head.
But the cabinet behind the driver was still right in front of her, and she heard the latch snap and the doors creak open, and she caught the shellac and spice and old shoes smell of the thing.