Sam's voice broke up in a coughing fit at this point, and Lepidopt's recorded voice said, "Can you see any locating details? Where are they?"
After a few seconds Sam's voice stopped coughing and went on. "No locating details. I see a headstone, a tombstone. Bas-relief stuff and writing on it, but I won't even try to read it. There's mud on it, fresh wet mud. The man says, 'Bunch of old letters, New Jersey postmarks, 1933, '39, '55 — Lisa Marrity, yup.' Uh — and then he says, 'Is that real? … I mean, isn't the real one at the Chinese Theater? But this might be real… She says she knew Chaplin. She flew to Switzerland after he died.' Now there's someone else, 'It's your uncle Bennett…' Uh— 'One, two, three,' and ... a big crash, he pulled the tombstone down… and sunlight again — three people walking toward a house, the back door, with a trellis over it — a broken window — something about fingerprints, and a burglar — 'Marritys,' says the new man, and the little girl says, '"Divil a man can say a word agin them" '—the first man is at the back door, sayi, 'If there was a thief, he's gone.'"
Lepidopt reached out now and switched off the recorder. "Sam loses the link at that point," he said mournfully.
"Wow," said Bert Malk, who had perched himself on the corner of a desk in line with one of the fans. "He said Marity. And Lisa, which is close enough. Did Sam know that name?"
"No."
"We could call the coroner in Shasta, now that we've got a name, see if a Lisa Marity died there today."
"For now we can assume she did. We can get Ernie's detective to call later to confirm it."
"It wasn't a tombstone," Malk went on thoughtfully.
"No, pretty clearly it was Chaplin's footprint square at Grauman's Chinese Theater, and in fact that square isn't in the theater forecourt anymore, it was removed in the 1950s when everybody was saying Chaplin was a communist, and then it got lost. We've already got a couple of sayanim trying to trace where it went."
Malk sighed heavily. "She'd be eighty-five this year, actually. Born in '02." He pulled his sweaty shirt away from his chest to let the fan cool the fabric. "Why wouldn't Sam try to read the writing on the stone?"
"It's like trying to read in dreams, apparently — if you engage the part of the brain that knows how to read, you fall out of the projected state. Ideally we'd have totally illiterate remote viewers, who could just draw the letters and numbers they see, with no inclination to try to read them. But I think it obviously said something like 'To Sid Grauman, from Charlie Chaplin.
"I think this is in L.A., not Shasta," Malk said. "The guy didn't say 'the Chinese Theater in Hollywood,' he just said the Chinese Theater, like you'd mention a restaurant in your area."
" Maybe. "Lepidopt looked at his watch. "This he re tape is only… fifty-five minutes old. Scoot right now to the Chinese Theater and see if there's a man and a little girl there, looking for the Chaplin footprints or asking about them."
"Should I yell 'Marity,' and see who looks?"
Lepidopt paused for a moment with his cigarette lifted halfway to his mouth. "Uh — no. There may be other people around who are aware of the name. And don't be followed yourself! Go! Now!" He stood up and opened the bedroom door.
Malk hurried past him to the apartment's front door and unbolted it; and when he had left, pulling it closed behind him, Lepidopt walked over and twisted the dead-bolt knobs back into the locked positions.
"One minute," he said to Glatzer and Bozzaris, and he strode past them into the spare bedroom and closed the door. The faint music still vibrated in the aluminum foil over the window.
Lepidopt crouched by the bedside table, ejected the new tape and then slotted the cassette they had made at noon — the session that had made him send Malk off on his aborted trip to Mount Shasta — and pushed the play button.
"—goddamn machine," said Glatzer's voice. "I'm seeing an old woman in a long tan skirt, white hair, barefoot, she's just appeared on a Navajo-looking blanket on green grass, beside a tree, lying on her back, eyes closed; it's cold, she's way up high on a mountain. There are people around her — hippies, they're wearing robes, some of them, and face paint — beards, beads — very mystical scene. They're all surprised, asking her questions; she just appeared in the meadow, she didn't walk in. They're asking her if she fell out of the tree. She's — lying on a swastika! — made out of gold wire; it was under the blanket, but they've moved her, and they've seen the swastika. Now one of the hippies is taking a cellular telephone from his backpack — some hippie — and he's making a call, probably 911. Uh — 'unconscious,' he's saying; 'In Squaw Meadow, on Mount Shasta… ambulance' — now she's speaking — two words? 'Voyo, voyo,' she said, without opening her eyes. Ach! Her heart is stopping — she's dead, and I'm out, it's gone."
Lepidopt pushed the stop button, and slowly stood up. Yes, he thought, it was her. We found her at last, just as she died.
He walked back into the living room.
"Can I go too? " asked old Sam Glatzer, getting up from the couch. "I never did get any lunch."
Lepidopt paused and looked over his shoulder at him. Glatzer reminded him of the tired old man in the joke, whose friends arrange for a dazzling prostitute to come to his room on his birthday— I'm here to give you super sex! she exclaims when he opens the door; and he says, querulously, I'll take the soup.
But he was a good remote viewer, and one of the most reliable of the sayanim, the civilian Jews who would efficiently and discreetly provide their skills to aid Mossad operations, for the sake of Israel. Sam was a retired researcher from the CIA-sponsored think tank at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, up near San Francisco, and he was a widower with no children; and Lepidopt told himself that the old man must enjoy using again the clairvoyant techniques he had pioneered back in '72. And over the last several years, Glatzer and Lepidopt had played many games of chess while sitting in safe houses like this, and Lepidopt believed the old man had found them as welcome a break from tension or boredom as he had.
"I'm sorry, Sam," said Lepidopt, spreading his hands, "but I really think we should monitor the 'holograph' line until it's been twenty-four hours. Till noon tomorrow. I'll send Ernie out for any food you'd like." I'll take the soup, he thought.
"Good idea," said Bozzaris, getting up from his keyboard. "Pizza?" Bozzaris did not observe the dietary laws, and ate all sorts of trefe food.
"Whatever he wants," Lepidopt told Bozzaris. "Get enough for three — Bert might be back pretty quick." Bert Malk didn't bother about kosher food either.
After Bozzaris left, tacos and enchiladas having been decided on, Glatzer went to sleep on the couch, and Lepidopt sat down in a chair against the door-side wall, for the afternoon sun was slanting in through the front window, and he stared almost enviously at Glatzer.
A widower with no children. It occurred to him that Glatzer could expire there on the couch, and — though Lepidopt would lose a friend and chess opponent—nobody's life would be devastated. Two lines from an Ivor Winters poem flitted through his head — By a moment's calm beguiled, / I have got a wife and child.