“That’s a good thought,” I said. “We really should do something about setting up your office downstairs. We’ve got the desk and the chair that goes with it. You could use it any time.”
“True.” Which was all he said.
He walked over to the bay window, drew the gun, took up a place just to one side, and began studying the view of the neighborhood. At irregular intervals but at least a dozen times a day, he did just this: checked the garage area in back of our flat and the street out front. With the Beretta in hand, he’d scan for suspicious loiterers. The expression on his face while he did this always frightened me: no emotion, not a quiver of a muscle, just a cold impersonal gaze as if his eyes were lenses for a security camera.
What would happen, I wondered, if he saw a clear threat? A couple of shots, I supposed, and he’d worry about explanations later. The guilt would strike him later, too. I’d seen him in the grip of a nightmare after he’d killed a criminal that most people would dismiss as worthless and despicable. For a few minutes I watched him search the outside world for targets. He’s doing it for you, I reminded myself. He was risking his own precarious inner balance to keep me safe. Finally, the silence made every nerve in my body twitch.
“Ari?” I said. “Are you still interested in working in the other flat?”
“Yes and no.” He holstered the Beretta and turned away from the window. “It would be more comfortable than the kitchen table.”
“That’s the yes. What’s the no?”
“I have to admit that the trans-dimensional drawer in your father’s desk bothers me. Will it suddenly appear? Will it swallow things I’ve placed in the other drawers? Silly of me, I suppose.”
“No, not at all. I’ve wondered the same thing. I wish we could talk to my dad about all this stuff, like those boxes. I guess they were his, anyway. The blue-violet apparition seemed to think they belonged to her.”
“The apparition.” Ari spoke quietly in a tone that signaled defeat. “I’d managed to forget about her. Right. Blue apparitions. Desks and briefcases with trans-dimensional bits tucked inside.” He looked my way and grimaced. “Werewolves, now including Michael’s girlfriend. Practically my sister-in-law.”
“I know, I know,” I said. “You should have been an insurance adjustor.”
He rose and with great dignity stalked into the kitchen. In a minute or two I heard the tiny clicking of keys that told me he was working at his laptop. I returned to my own computer, where I found a waiting e-mail from NumbersGrrl. She wanted to see the inter-level gate. Desperately, she said.
“I’ve got a bunch of bonus airline miles piled up that are going to expire,” she continued. “So I thought maybe I could just fly out if it wouldn’t hang you up in any way. I’m sorry, I know I’m being really rude to push like this, but do you think your aunt could let us have a look at the thing? I could be in San Francisco tomorrow. I mean, the miles are going to expire next week. And—oh, yeah—my real name is LaDonna Williams.”
I understood. For years she’d studied deviant levels, parallel worlds, and the gates between them as theoretical constructs, as chunks of math, equations no more substantial than fairies and leprechauns. Now she had a chance to check her work, as it were, against reality. Besides all that and the airline miles, I wanted to meet her. A few more exchanges, and we had everything set up.
“Itzak Stein phoned me just now.” Ari wandered back into the living room. “He wants to have dinner tomorrow. I told him yes.”
“I wish you’d asked me first. We’re going to have dinner tomorrow with one of my Agency contacts.”
“Can’t Itzak come along? You can hardly discuss Agency business in a public restaurant.”
“That’s true, yeah. I’ll just tell LaDonna what she can and can’t say in front of him.”
For our dinner with Itzak and LaDonna, we chose the Elite, a Cajun cafe on Fillmore Street, because it had private booths, little mahogany cubicles left over from the 1930s. We could, if we were careful about volume, discuss unclassified but delicate subjects without being overheard. We reached the restaurant early, as did Itzak. We found him having a drink at the bar—a stressful day at the bank, he told us, was to blame.
“You should get another job,” Ari said.
“Not so easy in these troubled times,” Itzak said. “And this one has a great benefits package. Health insurance, retirement, goodies like that.”
Ari rolled his eyes.
“Not everyone likes to live on the edge like you do,” Itzak said with a grin. “Some of us want to have an old age. That means we have to provide for it.”
A waiter appeared and showed us to our booth. Ari insisted on sitting with his back to the wall, and I took the chair next to him. Itzak sat down at one side and put his drink on the square table. He was a decent-looking guy, neither handsome nor ugly, with wire-rimmed glasses and thinning brown hair, which he wore short, probably at the bank’s insistence. When he grinned, which was often, he looked not handsome but definitely attractive.
“I was wondering,” Ari said, “if you could come over Sunday and look at the security system. The alarm went off the other night, but the record function didn’t register the reason.”
“Oh, yeah?” Itzak said. “Nothing showed up at all?”
“It simply said unidentified energy flux.”
Itzak blinked a couple of times. “Now that’s too strange,” he said. “Sure, I’ll be glad to come over. It’ll beat playing WoW all weekend.”
“Playing what?” Ari said.
“World of Warcraft. Never mind. I’m not going to even try to explain what that is.”
Ari was about to press him for an answer when the waiter appeared in the door to the booth.
“Your other guest is here,” he said.
“Thanks.” I got up and went to welcome LaDonna Williams.
A slender woman in her twenties, LaDonna wore a cream-colored suit with a red silk blouse and high heels. Since her skin was a gorgeous dark brown, the total effect was stunning. Her dark hair had an auburn overtone, probably the result of the expensive-looking straightening process that let it flow down to her shoulders. She also carried a large brown leather shoulder bag, which she slung from the back of her chair.
Itzak stared while trying not to stare while I introduced them. I could tell from his smile that infatuation hovered nearby. LaDonna greeted him politely and sat down across the table from him. She glanced at Ari when I introduced him and nodded a hello, then turned to me.
“It’s good to meet you finally,” she said, “after all those e-mails.”
“It is, for sure,” I said. “I just wish I understood the math better.” I glanced at Itzak. “LaDonna’s a math expert who does contract work now and then for my outfit. Let’s see, you do IT, don’t you?”
“Well, a little more than just IT,” Itzak said.
Ari looked up from the menu he’d been reading. “His degrees are in computer science, all three of them,” Ari said. “Cal Tech, wasn’t it, for the PhD?”
“Yeah,” Itzak said. “I didn’t want to live in the Boston sprawl.”
“You were sure right about that,” LaDonna said. “I went to MIT. Great school, terrible congestion all around it.”
“No kidding!” Itzak smiled at her. “Did you major in math?”
This time LaDonna returned the smile, and they were off, geek to geek, exchanging details of their college careers. Ari looked pleased with himself and went back to reading the menu. It is a truth widely acknowledged, I reflected, that a man who’s decided to marry tends to shove his old friends in the same direction. He also had to persuade me, of course, a much harder job.
During dinner LaDonna and Itzak both tried to be polite. They would float a general conversation that Ari and I could join, but sooner or later some tangent would lead them off into Mathland. I began to realize, while the waiter was clearing the main course plates, that LaDonna had an ulterior motive. I rummaged in my memory and remembered that ye
s, I had indeed told her about the incredible security system that Ari’s friend had designed and helped him install. Combined with the advanced degrees in computer science, his gadget lore made his a brain worth picking.
With the dessert their conversation did claim my attention, mostly because LaDonna sounded so sly.
“What do you think of the controversy over fractal geometry?” she said. “Is it anything more than pretty pictures on the computer screen?”
“Of course,” Itzak said. “We haven’t found its root applications yet, that’s all.” He smiled his charming grin. “Unless of course it determines the structure of the multiverse. Assuming there is a multiverse.”
Judging by her SPP, I thought LaDonna was going to levitate out of her chair in beatific joy. Instead, she turned to her shoulder bag and took out an iPad. She opened the bright red cover to reveal a matching skin.
“Oh, I think that the multiverse could be a valid concept,” she said. “Let me show you why.”
They shoved plates out of the way and leaned across the table with the iPad between them. I craned my neck to look at the screen and saw upside-down chunks of math. Their conversation failed to enlighten me. I returned my attention to Ari, who looked more pleased with himself than ever.
“What’s Calabi-Yau?” I said.
Ari considered. “A baseball team?”
“Somehow I don’t think so.”
We shared a grin. He caught my hand under the table and squeezed it. Later, once we’d dropped LaDonna off at her hotel, and Itzak had gone on his way home, we agreed that the dinner had succeeded at something we’d never even planned.
Apparently it wasn’t my week for plans. The gate expedition to the deviant world deviated, all right, from the nice, safe experience I’d had in mind. On Saturday morning we picked LaDonna up at the hotel. She was wearing a sleek pair of designer jeans, a substantial red cotton shirt, a jean jacket, and athleisure shoes. I’d dressed similarly, in trouser jeans, a v-necked top in gray with a blue floral placed design, and my burgundy leather jacket. Ari managed to drive reasonably safely, and we got to Aunt Eileen’s just before noon.
The house smelled like vegetable soup and cheese biscuits. As I’d suspected, Aunt Eileen insisted we all come have lunch once we finished our look at Interchange.
“There’s salad, too, of course.” Aunt Eileen gave me a significant look. “For those who might want it.”
“Thanks,” I said. “And dessert, I bet.”
“A chocolate mousse.” Aunt Eileen grinned at me. “Now don’t stay too long over there with all that nasty radiation.”
I led the way down the hall to the ground floor storage room, the one housing the more reliable gate. Michael was waiting for us at the door.
“Where’s Sophie?” I said.
“Hiding upstairs,” he said. “She’s hella freaked, like she thinks José’s gonna come take her back or something. I don’t get it.”
“I can see why she’s afraid of Interchange,” I said. “And the lycanthropy isn’t helping her mood any.”
“True.” Michael said the word exactly as Ari would have said it. “She’s started running a fever. Aunt Eileen said that Pat did, too.”
“Yeah, he did, right before the change manifested.” More evidence, I surmised, that a virus causes lycanthropy. “Don’t rag on her about being afraid, okay? She had a pretty nasty life over there.”
“You’re totally right about that. Don’t worry, I won’t.” Michael turned and opened the door. “Come on in.”
He’d thoughtfully taken the steel safety gate off the window that led to Interchange so we could get back again after our visit. I had a moment’s worry that maybe LaDonna’s lack of psychic talents would keep her from going through, but when Michael opened the gate, she saw the same view through the window as the rest of us did: the sunny garden edged by the giant mutant morning glories.
“Ohmigawd,” she said—several times—in a quiet little voice. “It’s real.”
“We can climb over if you want to, like, stand on another world.” Michael sounded as proud as if he owned the place. “Me and Ari had better go first, though.”
Ari had brought his sports bag with him. He unpacked two pieces of a rifle, the red-and-silver number that looked like a toy but was genuinely lethal. While he put it together and added the bullets, Michael rummaged in the bag and brought out a two-pound pack of coffee beans.
“I asked Ari to bring this,” he told me, “for the old guy who owns the place.”
He climbed through the window, and Ari followed. I helped LaDonna haul herself up to sit on the sill. She hesitated, murmured “ohmigawd” one more time, then swung her legs over and dropped lightly to the ground. I stayed inside. Interchange gave me the creeps.
Maybe I merely had a rational fear of the high level of radiation soaking the place. Maybe. All I knew was that my alarms went off like crazy at the thought of going there—but not only because I sensed danger at that particular time. I never wanted to go there, never ever not.
I leaned on the windowsill and looked out. Under the murky yellow sky the giant morning glories nodded in a light wind. The warty misshapen tomatoes hung thick on their vines. Some were red, but most, a blotchy yellow and brown. From a distance I heard a shrill, high whistle. A pair of big brown dogs dashed through the garden rows toward the house. Well, one ran. The other limped along on three legs. Where the fourth should have been he had a bulge the size of a ping-pong ball.
The elderly man who owned the place followed the dogs. He had a friendly wave for Michael and a nod of recognition for Ari. When Michael handed over the coffee, the old guy grinned his toothless smile and thanked him in a burst of Spanish. He winked at LaDonna, who smiled in return.
During all of this Ari had been keeping watch on the yard, rifle at the ready. Now and then he turned his head in a wide sweep, scanning. I had no idea what kind of trouble he expected to see, but the alarms continued ringing in my head.
“Ari,” I called out. “Get everyone back inside.”
“Right!” he said. “Mike, help LaDonna through.”
Michael laced his fingers together and held his linked hands out at her knee level. She stepped on them with one foot, then pushed with the other to get up to the window like a lady mounting a horse with the help of a groom. I caught her around the waist and steadied her as she slid through into the gate room. Michael followed her inside.
As Ari paused for one last look around, I heard a pounding mechanical rumble overhead. The old guy yelled to the dogs and ran for a nearby shed with the healthy dog rushing after. The three-legged dog scrambled along as fast as he could. Neither barked.
“Ari!” I yelled.
“Coming!” He kept staring up at the sky. “What—a biplane? A sodding biplane, and it’s covered with police insignia.”
For a moment I had trouble breathing. Ari tossed Michael the rifle through the window and hauled himself up to the sill. Overhead the noise of the propeller grew louder and louder. A burst of machine gun fire rattled. Bullets hit the ground. Plumes of dirt like the tracks of some invisible animal marched toward the three-legged dog. It yelped once, then pitched to the ground, dead and bleeding.
Ari swore in Hebrew, then swung his legs through and dropped safely to the floor. My lungs got back to work as the black-and-white biplane roared overhead and flew onward, away from the garden.
“Ah, shit!” Michael said. “The old guy raised that dog from a puppy.”
“Very sad,” I said, “but get us out of here!”
“You bet.” Michael handed Ari the rifle and swung around to stare at the window.
The piece of old sheet shimmered and turned into Aunt Eileen’s crisp white shade. The view outside changed into Uncle Jim’s flower beds and lawn. The wallpaper inside bloomed with faded bunches of violets. We were back. LaDonna let out her breath in a sharp sigh.
“Damn!” she said. “Didn’t even know I was holding it.”
“Yeah,”
I said. “It got me that way, too.”
“That poor dog!” she went on. “I take it that we don’t trust the cops on that world.”
“No, we don’t.” Ari knelt down and began to unload the bullets from the rifle. “Cops is a good name for them. I’d never call them officers of the law.”
“The law of the jungle, maybe,” I said. “Which the place kind of resembles, now that I think about it. It’s too bad we don’t have a more pleasant kind of world to show you.”
“I’m working on that,” Michael said. “The map’s coming along.”
As we left the room, Michael let the others go on ahead but signaled me to hang back. We walked slowly enough to talk in relative privacy.
“That whacked gate upstairs, y’know?” Michael said. “It grew again. It’s hit the third floor.”
“That’s scary,” I said. “Do you think it could spread into the rest of the house?”
“I don’t know. What if it like swallowed the whole house and took it somewhere? Epic fail!”
“Crud! That’s a nasty thought.”
“You bet. Seriously. Jeez, I wish I could talk to Dad. Even if he’s still in jail, I’m his son. Do you think they’d let me see him without, like, arresting me?”
“I don’t know. Although—” I was remembering a remark of Spare14’s. “It depends on which world Moorwood Prison’s in. In some places it’s not a crime to be a world-walker per se, just to use the talent for criminal purposes.”
“It can’t be against the law to want to see your dad.”
“You wouldn’t think so, yeah. Look, I have a new resource person. Let me talk to him and get back to you.”
“Okay. When?”
“I don’t know. It depends on whether he’s in his office. He warned me he might be gone for a while.”
Michael groaned and rolled his eyes.
“Tell me something. That dog. Why did the cops shoot it?”
“That’s one of their jobs, getting rid of deformed animals so they don’t breed. They do the same thing to people sometimes, but only when the people are real bad off, no arms, can’t talk, super gross stuff like that.”