“Really, Mark. You did get a transplant, didn’t you? Maybe not Uncle Paul, but it’s someone new. I’m sure of it.”
“Sorry, sweet. I don’t mean to shake your faith in your own womanly intuition, but it just isn’t so. What you think you see in me is the nervous reaction of a bone-tired man.” The phone chimed. “Excuse me, will you?”
As he turned away from her, Mark passed a mirror and peered into its oval depths. Yes, he thought. She’s right. There is a change. I didn’t notice it, but she, who was away—
The effect was an odd one: as though an overlay of Paul’s features had been placed on his own. There was a tension about his facial muscles, perhaps resulting from some new disposition of his features. Mark felt a twinge of distress. If Paul had infiltrated him to this extent so fast, was an attempt at going dybbuk lying just ahead? Paul was, above all else, sly. This present mood of benign cooperation might simply be Paul’s way of setting him up for the kill.
And, also, he wasn’t happy about the accuracy of Risa’s guess. She was a smart girl, of course, but was it so obvious that he had taken possession of Paul’s persona? If she saw it, would others? He was ruined unless he maintained the secret.
He picked up the telephone on the fifth chime.
“Yes?”
“Miss Volterra is on her way back to New York,” a flat, mechanical voice reported. “She left Evansville twenty minutes ago.”
“Is she being tracked?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Noyes?”
“He’s with her. They seem to have had a quarrel. He looks upset. And she’s the angriest-looking woman I’ve ever seen.”
14
RISA WENT TO HER apartment a floor above her father’s, unpacked, changed, and returned to the lower apartment. She had never seen Mark in such a state before. Usually, no matter how severe the crisis might be, he remained at the center of the storm, calm, self-possessed. Something must be very seriously wrong now.
His appearance puzzled her too. A man of forty didn’t alter his whole facial makeup between one week and the next, not unless something of impact had occurred, like taking on a new persona. He denied that he had. Why, then, did he have this new gleam in his eyes, that feral radiance that she associated with Uncle Paul? Jokingly he had told her of bribing Santoliquido and getting Paul’s persona. Well, Santoliquido was beyond reach of bribery, no doubt, but such things could be arranged in other ways. Risa was aware of her father’s tactics, more so, possibly, than he realized; she had seen him many times bluntly admit some outrageous act simply to make it look inconceivable that he had committed it.
The more she mulled it, the more convinced she was that he had somehow obtained the illegal transplant. Only that could account for the alteration in his bearing. Risa knew quite well that a transplant could bring about such changes; she had seen it in herself since Tandy had come to her. Her look was softer, now, more feminine; she had shed the chip-on-the-shoulder tomboyishness in favor of a more seductive approach, and she credited that to Tandy.
In her father’s apartment Risa listened in astonishment to the story of the discorporation of Martin St. John.
“You helped to solve Santoliquido’s problem for him, you know,” Mark told her. His hand tapped his knee in a gesture uncomfortably reminiscent of the old man’s. “By hunting down that dybbuk, you handed Santo an empty body at just the right time, and he dumped Paul into it.”
“Couldn’t you have stopped him?”
“I didn’t really want to, Risa. Short of keeping Paul in cold storage forever, I had to let him go to someone. I figured it was better that he go to St. John than to Roditis.”
“Agreed. But the discorporation—”
“It happened last night. As I reconstruct it, Roditis sent his flunky Noyes to Elena. Elena not only told him where St. John was being kept, but brought him here. Noyes gave St. John a tricky poison. This morning, he and Elena flew out to one of Roditis’ headquarters. Now they’re on their way back.”
“I never trusted that bitch, Mark.”
He laughed. “I know. I wrote it off to your monstrous Electra complex.”
“Which is genuine. But not so monstrous that it distorts every judgment I make. Elena’s worthless, and I’ve been trying to get you to see it all along. But at least she hasn’t done you any real harm. You don’t lose anything by St. John’s discorporation.”
“I do,” he said, “if Roditis reapplies for Uncle Paul and gets him.”
“But if he’s part of this discorporation conspiracy, he’ll be sent to erasure himself!”
“If anything can be proven.”
“You seem to have reconstructed everything,” Risa said.
He nodded. “To my own satisfaction. Not necessarily to that of the quaestorate. I’ve got to get Elena to admit she cooperated in the murder. That’ll allow the quaestors to demand a mindpick of Noyes. If Noyes is picked, he’ll incriminate Roditis, and we’ll have won—maybe. But it’s a tricky road.”
“If I were Roditis,” Risa said carefully, “I’d get hold of both Elena and Noyes and give their minds a good blanking. That’ll cut the line of incrimination before it reaches him.”
“I suspect he’s done just that. They spent the morning with him in Indiana, and now they’re on their way backmost likely with their minds swept clean of last night’s fun.” He clenched his fists and struck an attitude of anger and determination, incredibly Paul-like. “No matter what happens, Roditis won’t get Paul! Maybe he’s won this round, maybe he’s lost everything—but the persona won’t go to him. Somehow. Somehow.”
Risa was startled by the depths of her father’s agitation. She couldn’t see why he was so troubled over this discorporation, annoying and infuriating though it was. His reaction seemed all out of keeping with the event. Yes, Elena had betrayed him. Yes, Roditis had managed to make Uncle Paul available again, just when it seemed the troublesome persona was locked away in St. John for keeps. But that simply meant that the status was back to what it had been a few days ago. Why this frenzy of tension? He was so worked up that he had taken her fully into his confidence, something he had never done before. Risa was flattered by that. It wasn’t so long ago—only at the beach party—that he had coolly told her to run along and play, that these things did not concern her. The change in him was so dramatic that it was suspicious.
Why was he worried?
Was he afraid that the investigation of the St. John murder would turn on him? That he might be mindpicked by the quaestors? That they might discover something he wished very much to hide—like the presence in his mind of an illegal Paul Kaufmann persona?
Everything seemed to be coming back to that, Risa observed.
Her father excused himself to take another call. Risa wandered about the apartment, assessing the intricacies of the situation. It seemed imperative to discard the notion that her father was in possession of Uncle Paul’s persona. The persona had gone to the empty Martin St. John, hadn’t it? Then it couldn’t simultaneously have been imprinted on Mark. They took strict precautions against a double transplant of that sort, Risa thought. Sealed the master recording away in a special vault, or something, until it was needed again, if ever it was. In this case, since St. John had been so quickly discorporated, the master would be needed again. But ordinarily, the Paul Kaufmann persona would be passed along as a secondary within its next carnate possessor’s persona, and so there’d be no call for reverting to the old master.
Yet that recording of Paul Kaufmann would still exist in the files, yes? And what about all the earlier recordings of him? Surely they weren’t thrown away.
Risa began to see vast scope for chicanery within the supposedly foolproof regulations of the Scheffing Institute. She began to see how plausible it was that her father might have obtained a bootlegged transplant of Uncle Paul.
—Go easy, Tandy warned her. You’re getting all tied up in this thing.
Risa tried to slip her leash of sudden tensions. Sh
e noticed a green-bound volume lying on a table and picked it up idly. It was the Bardo Thödol, she discovered with some surprise. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the cult book of the new religion that was sweeping eastward from California. She hadn’t known her father owned one. This copy looked brand-new. Risa touched the activator stud and flipped through the book, wondering how people could get so enmeshed in the silly stuff merely because rebirth had become a practicality. To dig up an obscure branch of decadent Buddhism, with absolutely no relevance to the Scheffing process, and to devote time and energy and money to its study—
“From the Eastern Realm of Preeminent Happiness,” she read, “the Buddha Vajra-Sattva, the Divine Father-Mother, with the attendant deities, will come to shine upon thee. From the Southern Realm endowed with Glory, the Buddha Ratna-Sambhava, the Divine Father-Mother, with the attendant deities, will come to shine upon thee. From the Happy Western Realm of Heaped-up Lotuses, the Buddha Amitabha, the Divine Father-Mother, along with the attendant deities, will come to shine upon thee. From the Northern Realm of Perfected Good Deeds, the Buddha Amogha-Siddhi, the Divine Father-Mother, along with the attendants will come, amidst a halo of rainbow light, to shine upon thee at this very moment.”
Her father returned to the room. Risa held out the book and said, “Mark, what’s this?”
“I visited the big lamasery in San Francisco when I was on the Coast. They gave it to me as a souvenir.” He shrugged the book aside. “They’ve picked up Elena and Noyes at the airport. Elena claims she was on her way to see me anyway. She’ll be here any minute.”
“And Noyes?”
“He’s being brought along separately, and not so willingly. I want to keep him apart from Elena until I’ve heard her story. I’ve arranged for him to be held upstairs in your apartment for a little while. All right?”
“I suppose. But where am I going to stay?”
“Right here with me,” Mark said. “I’ll need your assistance.” He tossed her a recording cube. “Get every word of the conversation onto this, and make sure Elena doesn’t see you doing it. Also, get ready to jump her if she tries to attack. I’ll have her scanned for concealed weapons before she’s brought in, but she’ll still have her fingernails.”
Risa felt a tremor of delight at receiving these responsibilities from her father. She said, “Do you really think you’ll learn anything from Elena or Noyes, now that they’ve been out where Roditis could blank them?”
“I can’t say. I doubt that he’d be foolish enough to let them get away with their memories intact. But big men sometimes slip up in the details.” A signal flashed at the door. “Elena’s here.”
He had her sent in—without any of the guards who had picked her up and accompanied her here. Risa was taken aback by the fury in her eyes; Elena seemed to be bubbling with wrath. She was dressed in what was for her a plain, even dowdy costume, and she strode into the room with a vigor far removed from her usual languid saunter.
“Mark! Oh, Mark, I’ve got so much to tell you!” she burst out.
“I imagine you have,” Mark said. He shot a glance at Risa, who had quietly switched on the recording cube. Risa nodded.
Elena looked at her too. “In private,” she said.
“You can speak in front of Risa. She’s already aware of what’s happened. At least, she knows as much about it as I do. But you must know a lot more.”
Color came to Elena’s cheeks. She looked clearly uncomfortable about Risa’s presence. There was an exchange of glares.
Mark said, “I want to know what took place in this apartment on Thursday, Elena.”
Elena paced the room in barely suppressed rage. “For most of the day, I have no idea. Martin St. John was here, in the guest bedroom, watched over by a squad of robots.”
“Yes. Then?”
“Charles Noyes came to me. He said he had important business to discuss with St. John. He begged me and begged me until I agreed to bring him here.”
“That was a grave mistake, Elena.”
“I know, Mark. But I brought him. We went into St. John’s bedroom together.”
“You saw St. John? What condition was he in?”
“Alive,” said Elena. “Fatigued, but doing well. Your uncle was working hard to get control over the body. Noyes asked me to leave him alone with St. John for a few minutes. I did. Very shortly Noyes came out of the room. St. John was screaming. He was having peculiar convulsions. Noyes left the apartment, and soon St. John was dead.”
“Would you say he was murdered by Noyes?”
“That’s reasonable to assume,” Elena admitted.
“How did Noyes explain what had happened?”
“He said St. John had had a kind of stroke.”
“Did you notify the quaestorate?” Mark asked.
Elena shook her head. “I stayed here for a while after Noyes had left. Then I went home. I notified no one.”
“Not even me.”
“Not even you, Mark.”
“You helped Noyes discorporate St. John, then,” Mark said.
“No.” Elena’s nostrils flared in anger. “I had no idea he would do such a thing! I swear it, Mark! I was wrong to let him in here, to allow him to be alone with St. John, but I never suspected he meant to murder him!”
“Perhaps,” said Mark. “But in any case your actions are strange. First you let a known agent of Roditis into my house and give him carte blanche to murder my guest. Then you rush off without calling the authorities. And the following morning you fly away to see Roditis himself. You spent a couple of hours in Evansville today, didn’t you? Didn’t you, Elena?”
“Yes,” she said hoarsely. “But I was never working for Roditis. I had no part in this murder, except through stupidity in giving Noyes access. I’ll take a mindpick to prove it. Let the quaestors pick all they want.”
“I will,” he assured her.
“If Roditis had obtained my help in discorporating St. John, don’t you think he would have blanked me while I was in Evansville?”
Kaufmann conceded the point. Clearly Elena hadn’t been blanked, which meant that Roditis had no knowledge of her status as an accessory. “But what were you doing there, then?”
“You won’t like the answer, Mark.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“Not in front of your daughter.”
“Risa can hear it.”
“What I have to say is—not complimentary to you,” Elena said. “You would prefer not to have anyone but yourself hear it.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“Well, then,” Elena said, “I went to Evansville to make love with Roditis. I’ve desired him for months. This was my opportunity. You were away. Noyes was with me, and he was flying to Evansville, and I asked him to take me along. While Noyes was being blanked by Roditis’ men, I went to Roditis and—”
“Noyes was blanked?” Kaufmann said leadenly.
“Of course. Roditis knew that he’d probably be traced to St. John. Noyes had to be blanked so that the trail wouldn’t lead back to Roditis. So I went to Roditis. He would not have anything to do with me. He refused me!” She was flushed, agitated, her breasts heaving wildly. “I went close to him, and he pushed me, like this—away. So it was all for nothing. I humiliated myself to him and he pushed me.”
There was a lengthy silence in the room. Risa feared that Elena might hear the throbbing of the recording cube, so silent did everything become. But Elena stood transfixed, hearing nothing but the thunder of her own indignation.
—She was turned down, Tandy said. No wonder she’s so mad now! She’s willing to tell your father anything, just to get even with Roditis.
Risa agreed. She could not help feel a pang of pity for Elena in this moment of her defeat. To be spurned by Roditis, to have to come back here and reveal not only her promiscuity but her rejection—how that must sting!
Mark said finally, “Noyes was definitely blanked, eh? You’re sure of that.”
“Positive. He w
ill be of no use to you as a witness. I am the only one who can testify,” Elena said.
Mark shook his head. “You didn’t see the crime. We’ve already got evidence that you and Noyes were at the apartment at the time of the discorporation, but the best we could hope for from that would be to get a mindpick on Noyes. Which will come up blank. We couldn’t possibly get any court to grant a mindpick of Roditis on your suspicions alone. We’re stopped, Elena.”
“No! No! Fight, Mark! We all know Roditis was behind this murder! Put your best lawyers to work!”
Mark smiled coolly. “You’d love to see Roditis ruined, wouldn’t you, Elena? But only because he turned you down. If he had slept with you, you’d be selling me out right and left, wouldn’t you?”
“Don’t deal in ifs, Mark. I’ve told you the truth. You’re free to hate me, free to throw me aside, but don’t preach to me. All right?”
“All right, Elena. Will you go into that bedroom and wait there? I want to talk to Noyes now.”
“He’s here?”
“They’re holding him upstairs. Please stay out of sight while I’m questioning him.”
“You will get nothing from him. Nothing!”
“Please,” Mark said.
Elena entered the bedroom and closed the door.
Risa’s eyes met her father’s. Mark looked wearier than ever, but that strange Paul-like effect was even more pronounced. He appeared to be drawing on an inner reservoir of will.
He picked up the phone and asked to have Charles Noyes brought in.
Noyes edged into the room like a beast brought to bay by hounds. The strain was getting fearful. All the way back from Evansville he had pretended to Elena that he was Kravchenko, to keep her from turning on him again. And meanwhile Kravchenko had recovered from his shock and was awake again, fighting more strongly than ever to gain control, now that he had had a night’s taste of freedom.
Kravchenko hammered at Noyes’ forehead. Noyes’ clothing was pasted to his skin by the sweat of fear. His knees were watery. His eyes moved in quick birdlike flickers, nervously, warily. He knew he was caught, knew that all was over. Elena, in her fury with Roditis, was determined to spill everything. And he, unblanked, was caught in the middle, his mind full of unwanted knowledge that was sure to come out.