Mishal had paused in the shadow of a shaggy magnolia that draped its branches over the wall of the Roosevelt Hotel parking lot, and Malk and Lepidopt scuffed to a halt beside him.
"Remember that all we want is information about this opposing group, and any information either of these people might have about Einstein's machine. We will appear to care about this man's daughter, and whatever terms this woman may want, but in fact we will not care about them. Everyone is either target or enemy."
"We're katsas," Lepidopt repeated. "We know this."
"Oh?" Mishal squinted at him. "Wouldn't that dybbuk, articulate in the girl's body, have been more useful than the girl inviolate?" He held up one thin hand. "Well no, since you let the opposing group capture the girl. Point withdrawn."
Malk glanced at Lepidopt and rolled his eyes for a moment before sauntering ahead to do a route of the hotel lobby, identify Marrity and the woman and make sure no one else was watching them.
At a more leisurely pace, Lepidopt and Mishal tapped up the hotel's back steps.
"No offense," said Mishal.
"Of course not," said Lepidopt. In fact he was wondering if the elder katsa's criticism had been valid. Did I, he wondered, jump in to recruit Marrity too quickly, just because the little girl was in danger of being inhabited by that thing?
And he remembered again being in her bedroom, and wondering if she would like his son Louis.
I'm too old for this, he realized; but one way or another I'll be out of it soon.
Malk was on the second-floor balcony on the far side of the lobby when Lepidopt and Mishal walked in; he was holding a newspaper in his right hand, which meant there was no sign that Marrity and the woman were being watched, and then he leaned against the railing and opened the paper, pointing the fold of it downward and slightly to his right. Lepidopt followed the implied line and saw Frank Marrity sitting on a couch with an attractive dark-haired woman on the Hollywood Boulevard side of the lobby.
In any meeting, he recalled, the agent must be there and sitting down before you enter; you never wait for him at a meeting place.
Lepidopt stepped forward across the tile floor while Mishal hung back, and he walked the long way around the fountain to approach Marrity from in front.
Marrity saw him and stood up. "Mr. Jackson," he said. "This is Charlotte, uh..."
"Charlotte S. Webb," said Charlotte, smiling quizzically and not getting up.
Lepidopt grinned, and noticed that Marrity did too. Anybody with a book-loving child, he thought, would recognize that title. He wished he could remember the name of the pig in Charlotte's Web, to be able to make a clever reply.
"Do you have any children?" he asked her.
"With luck a little girl," she said. "Parthenogenesis."
Lepidopt stared at her for a moment, then pulled a metal chair across the tile to the opposite side of their table and sat down, slightly in profile to Charlotte and with the tail of his jacket hanging away from his belt.
"I'm Eugene Jackson," he said. "Shortly we'll be joined by another man, possibly two. We want to get the pair of you away from here to a safe place."
"I want some terms agreed on before I go anywhere with you," said Charlotte. "I've proposed a deal to my former employers, and I'm going to go through with it unless I can make a different deal with you people."
Mishal stepped up to the table, carrying a chair in one hand. He put it down facing away from the table and sat down straddling it, one forearm lying along the chair back. With his other hand he pulled two folded sheets of ragged-edged paper from his inside jacket pocket and laid them on the table.
"What are the deals?" he asked cheerfully. "Would each of you take one of these papers? Don't get them wet. Oren, do you have matches?" Charlotte pointed at her lighter, but he said, "No, we need matches."
"I've got some," said Marrity. He shifted on the couch and pulled a matchbook out of his pocket and tossed it beside the ashtray, then picked up one of the sheets of paper and unfolded it impatiently. It was blank, and felt oddly coarse.
"Handmade," said Mishal.
"If I lead you to my former employers," said Charlotte, "and tell you everything I know about them, you rescue Daphne and I get to use the time machine." She smiled. "And since it's a time machine, I get to use it before I lead you to them."
Mishal laughed and pulled another folded sheet of paper out of his pocket. This one seemed to be plain typing paper, and it had markings on it in black ink. "No, not before. Oren, you remember this exercise, help them get some matches burned. I want each of you to copy onto your sheet of paper the symbols drawn on this." He unfolded the third sheet and laid it out flat on the table.
Lepidopt recognized the curves and circles — they were kolmosin, also known as "angel pens," or "eye-writing" because the arrangements of the figures often made them seem to be childish drawings of eyes. He picked up Marrity's book of matches, tore one out and struck it. The head flared bright purple and yellow.
Marrity was staring at the six lines of complex figures. "Couldn't we just xerox that sheet onto these blank sheets?"
"No," said Mishal, "it's got to be in your own hand, and you've got to use burnt matches to draw it. And note that on this original, none of the lines touch each other! They can't in your copies either."
Lepidopt shook out the match and lit another. "Break the heads off," he said to Marrity. "It's easier to draw with just the cardboard stick." His nose itched with the smell of sulfur.
"What is this," Marrity asked, pushing the burnt match with his finger, "a test of coordination or something?"
"It's an amulet," said Mishal. "Don't sneer, your greatgrandfather invented this one. In 1944 — for the war effort! — he made a handwritten copy of his 1905 paper on relativity, and auctioned it off. Among all the pages of arcane symbols for reference frames and constant acceleration, nobody noticed this sheet of kolmosin, though the FBI was watching him closely. And by the time the manuscript got to the Library of Congress we had lifted the sheet anyway. As he meant us to do." He glanced at Lepidopt. "You didn't lose your remote-viewer's holograph talisman, did you?"
Lepidopt could feel the disk against his chest, with the fragment of Einstein's manuscript sealed inside it. "No," he said. But I'm not the remote viewer Sam Glatzer was, he thought. He struck another match.
"What," said Marrity, "will be different after we've done this than is the case now?"
"Nicely put!" said Mishal.
"He's an English lit professor," said Charlotte smugly, linking her arm through Marrity's.
"Ah." Mishal squinted at Marrity. "These, when you have folded them correctly and put them against your skin, will make you untrackable by the people who have your daughter. We'll be able to sneak up on them. Right now you're both occulted by proximity to me" — he pushed back the jacket and shirtsleeve above his right wrist, and Marrity saw the black lines of part of a tattoo on his forearm — "but you might not always be with me."
"Okay." Marrity freed his arm from Charlotte's and picked up one of the matches Eugene Jackson had laid out for him. Peripherally he saw that Charlotte had picked one up too, but she paused, humming some old half-familiar tune.
Of course, he thought, she can't do it unless someone watches her do it!
"This is some kind of magical stuff," he said, dropping his match. "I'll watch her do it first. See what happens."
He stared at the sheet with the printing on it, and then at Charlotte's blank sheet. She picked up a match and, as he continued to shift his gaze from one sheet to the other and back, she began copying the curves and circles.