A Matter of Time Read online

Ah. The genie from the bottle. Cash brightened. “Hey. Good. Bring him up. You made my day, Tom.”

  “On the way.” Mysterious laughter lurked round the fringes of Kurland’s voice.

  “Hey, John....” he called from his gym locker of an office.

  A florid, gray-haired man with the build of an athlete long gone to seed, who looked like he ought to be traveling in a cloud of flies, pushed through the main door. “‘Lo, Beth,” he said.

  “Winehead Andy,” Cash muttered. “The Prince of Hungary. I’ll get you for this, Kurland.”

  Officer Tavares tried stopping the man. He just grinned and kept coming, with a little wrist-flick of a greeting to Old Man Railsback, who was snoring in a chair in a far corner.

  “It’s all right, Beth.”

  “‘Lo, Sarge.”

  “Hi, Andy. What is it this time?” As if he didn’t know. The man, who claimed to be a deposed Prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (he was neither old enough nor, insofar as Cash had been able to determine, did he speak a word of German or Magyar), was, with a blush, going to admit that, in a fit of madness, he had slain the mystery man. Andy swore that he was the Jekyll-and-Hyde type.

  “Can’t live with it anymore, Sarge. Had to turn myself in....”

  The man had confessed so often that Cash no longer found him amusing.

  Neither did Lieutenant Railsback. “What the hell is that wino doing in my squad room?” he thundered from his office.

  “The usual,” Beth replied, returning to her work.

  Rather than come out looking for trouble, Railsback slammed his door.

  “All right, Andy. You know the routine,” said Cash. “How’d you do it?”

  “Knife. In the back. Grabbed him from behind and stabbed him in the heart....”

  “Wrong-o, Andy. You lose again. Think it out better next time. That’s hard for a right-handed man.”

  “Just testing, Sarge.” He stopped smiling. “I really strangled him....”

  “Missed again.” Cash shook his head. He didn’t understand. Andy’s sole ambition seemed to be to get himself put away.

  There had been a time when he was a semipermanent resident in the holdover downstairs, especially in winter, but these days every room with a lock on its door was packed with genuine bandits.

  “Shot him?”

  “Andy, here’s two bucks. Go over to the Rite-Way and tell

  Sarah I said to give you the breakfast special.”

  Andy took the money. “Sarge, one of these days you’re going to catch me red-handed. Then you’ll believe me. It’s my mind, see. I can’t remember afterward....”

  “I know, Andy. Till I do, you’ll keep getting away with it. Meantime, I’ve got to go by the book. Now do me a favor. Go eat breakfast.”

  Andy stood tall as he left. A wino, yes, but he walked like a prince.

  “Beth, remind me that Tom Kurland is one up on me.”

  “Us.” Her dark eyes sparkled mischieviously. “I’m working on it already.”

  “Make it vicious.” He walked to a window. “He’s out the door already.”

  Below, Andy scampered through traffic.

  “Liquor store?”

  “You must be part Gypsy. Anything on my corpse?”

  “No. No ID. No claim on the body. FBI says they’ve given up trying to locate prints.”

  “Norm,” said Railsback, “you get rid of him yet?”

  “He just needed the price of a bottle, Hank.”

  “About your mystery corpse. ‘Bout time you got it certified nonhomicide, isn’t it? Get it off our backs? I don’t like it. I want it pushed back, out of the way.”

  “Not yet. Maybe in a couple days.”

  It’s really bizarre, Cash thought, the way this is affecting us. Railsback would not have let go of any other case for weeks or months. But with this one even the marginally involved people, like Beth, were behaving strangely.

  Once Railsback did get it shoved back, little happened.

  Events elsewhere devoured Cash’s attention and emotions.

  IV

  On the X Axis;

  Lidice, Bohemia, 1866; A Minor Event during the Seven Weeks’ War

  A wise man once observed: The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

  Fiala... Marda... Fiala tossed her head violently, battered her temples with her fists. What was happening? Was it the Prussians?

  The pain broke the grip on her mind.

  Father lay sprawled half in, half out of the doorway. Mother knelt before the Virgin, moaning.

  Fiala was having a fit. He heaved on his pallet, shrieking.

  Her brother? She was an only child.... And her mother had died in the Uprising.

  Couldn’t be the Prussians. The armies were north of Lidice.

  Lidice? What the devil was Lidice?

  Who was Marda?

  “Uncle Stefan....” Oh, Lord, her mouth wouldn’t shape the words right.

  Mother whirled, stared in horror.

  Where am I? What’s happening to me? Who are these people? What’s wrong with my mind?

  What’s wrong with my mind? God help me! Something’s in my head. Possessing me.

  German. That was it. Only no one spoke German anymore. Not outside a classroom.

  It was a strong demon. “Mother.... Priest.... “Mother ran from the house. Would Father Alexander believe her?

  What was this mumbo-jumbo? Only recidivist subversives believed that nonsense anymore. Only stupid, ignorant country people....

  “Oh blessed Jesus, help me!”

  Slap! “Marda!”

  The blow floored her. And terminated the contest. The terrified thing in her mind twisted away with a fading shriek, as if sliding off round the treacherous curves of a Klein bottle.

  Who was this ragged brute? The man who had been lying in the doorway.

  “Father?”

  “Yes. Come on. Get up.”

  The words were butchered by lips and tongue that had never spoken Czech.

  “What happened?”

  “I’m not sure. There’s no time to worry about it now. Just accept it. Help me with Stefan.”

  His absolute calm enveloped her, included her. The thing inside her, the other, momentarily gave up trying to reassert itself. Numbly, she seized the feet of the hovel’s remaining, now silent tenant and helped swing him onto the rude table. He was just a boy, yet his face was a land on which several bad diseases had left memorials.

  No one outside a labor camp lived this way. Dirt floor to sleep on, a pallet stuffed with straw. Only furniture a homemade table.... No, there were a few crude pieces in shadowed corners. No water. No toilet.

  This wasn’t her world.

  “The woman. She went for someone.”

  Then she studied herself.

  And received a greater shock.

  The body she wore, beneath the crudest peasant clothing, was tiny, emaciated, just entering puberty. It was the female counterpart of the boy on the table. “Oh....” It couldn’t be a labor camp.

  One of those places, only rumored, where they experimented on enemies of the State?

  Outside, the sun was rising. On a morning like this, the spires of Hradcany Castle would be visible from the church belfry.

  A scant sixty miles to the northwest, men named von Bismarck and von Moltke were defining her history with words spoken by the mouths of cannon. Already the troops were moving at Königgratz.

  She had come to a land more alien than she could believe.

  Its name was July 3,1866.

  V

  On the Y Axis;

  1975

  The collapse of South Vietnam had begun in January, a slow, snowballing thing that had not seemed serious at first. But when Hue and Da Nang went and the North Vietnamese started whooping down the coast routes like a juggernaut, it became obvious that the end had finally come. Those with an emotional investment in the country could, like watching the football Cardinals go into the second half
down by seventeen, hope for a miracle, but that hope was wan.

  One night Cash woke to find Annie sobbing beside him. He pretended not to notice.

  Later that week he found her sniffling in the kitchen when he returned from work.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Been a rotten day. Everything went wrong. And now I burned my finger.”

  She was lying. The stove wasn’t hot. But he let it slide. Even shared griefs had to have their private facets.

  “Nancy’s bringing the kids over tomorrow.”

  “Yeah? Second time this week. What’s up? I thought she didn’t like us that much.”

  “People change.”

  “I guess.” They just could not get it out in the open.

  The worst cruelty, for Cash, was the indifference of the people he encountered. But they were dead-tired of Vietnam. Most would have been pleased to see the damned country follow Atlantis’s example.

  Cash was angry and unapproachable most of the time.

  During the downhill plunge to the fall of Saigon he remained utterly distracted. Nothing could draw him out of the netherworld to which he had retreated. He had little time for murders or murderers. His thoughts all revolved around that one little country, that pimple on the ass of the world, where his oldest son was still missing....

  He did not really care about Vietnam per se. He was no rabid anti-communist. The system had done wonders in China. Through the later years of the war he had been critical of United States involvement, though for reasons at variance with those vocalized in the streets. Those he could not comprehend at all. They had no apparent relation to reality, only to wishful thinking about how the world should be. He felt that, like a too cautious coach, the United States had gone, at best, for a draw. He felt the military should have been allowed to go for a victory with everything but nuclear weapons, and to hell with futile arguments about the propriety of being there in the first place. Once you’re wet, you should go ahead and swim, not cry about falling in, he thought. But he kept his opinions to himself, being rational enough to know they were opinions and not something Moses had brought down from the mountain in his other hand.

  He had greeted the January, 1973, news of United States withdrawal with relief. The Kissinger “peace” had seemed a last, comic punctuation to an era of futility. He had predicted the disaster even then, and had tried to school himself to live with its inevitable consequences.

  Vietnam was dead. The people who had buried it wanted everyone to forget. That would be nice, Cash thought. He wished he could. If he had known for sure about Michael, he might have been content to stick his head in the sand with the rest. But he knew the other side wouldn’t forget. They knew, now, that they had carte blanche in that end of the world. They knew, from peasant to premier, that the fall of Saigon symbolized far more than the culmination of years of warfare. It marked the east’s watershed victory in World War III. Solzhenitsin had pointed it out: the west had been fighting a halfhearted and half-assed delaying action since 1945; Vietnam had marked the beginning of the end. From the fall of Saigon onward the collapse would cease to be gradual. The west, whether good or evil or whatever, was about to come apart, and at a rate which, historically speaking, would be precipitous. Cash supposed he would live long enough to see the barbarians at the gates himself.

  But, from a historical perspective, it would not matter much. Life would go on. The big change would be in which gang of mental cases would be running things.

  Times were when Cash grew extremely cynical. Especially about government and the people in it.

  Annie, in her anger, in her passion to show others her feelings, volunteered to adopt an orphan. There weren’t enough to go around. After the collapse, she decided they would sponsor a Vietnamese family. Cash acquiesced, hoping she would not start blaming them about Michael, expecting she would forget the whole thing when she calmed down.

  Mayag? ez put everyone on an even keel again. It was silly, being such a small incident, not well executed at all, and likely to be nothing more than a fix for the national pride.

  Yet next day Cash was able to get back into his world, to work by more than the numbers.

  John Harald was more perceptive than Cash had suspected.

  During the grim months he had not said a word about the mystery corpse. That morning after Mayag? ez, quiet because even the bandits were home following the news, he strolled into Cash’s office and dropped the ancient file onto his desk. “Want to glance through this?”

  “What?”

  “Carstairs’s file on the Groloch investigation. The missing man.”

  “That again?”

  “Just have a read. I’ll be catching up on my paperwork.”

  They had been a lot less formal in the old days, Cash discovered. Carstairs’s report contained a lot of opinion and suspicion that was hard to separate from evidence. The story was much as Annie had described, though Carstairs had been convinced that Miss Groloch had murdered Jack O’Brien. Good riddance, he had observed. But the extent of the report indicated that he had put a lot of hours into hunting a solution.

  Initially, Cash’s strongest reaction was an eerie feeling of déjà vu. Carstairs’s emotional responses had been identical to his own.

  Atherton Carstairs had felt driven to find out what had happened to O’Brien. And had faced the same reluctance to push it on the part of his superiors. They had wanted to write it off as a simple disappearance after only two days — despite the fact that there had been a dozen witnesses willing to testify that O’Brien had been seen entering Miss Groloch’s house, that later there had been the screams of a woman being beaten, then a masculine voice pleading for mercy. And O’Brien had never come out.

  The file included a thick sheaf of letters. For years Carstairs had kept up a correspondence with friends in other cities, hoping someone would stumble on to O’Brien alive. A search of Miss Groloch’s house, in a day when such things need not be done so politely and proper, had produced nothing. He had not found a doily out of place, let alone bloodstains or evidence of violence. For weaponry the woman had possessed nothing more dangerous than a few kitchen knives.

  Carstairs had made his final entry in 1929, on the eighth anniversary of the case, and the eve of his assignment to the Board of Police Commissioners. He had left best wishes for anyone who became interested in his hobby case.

  He had finally surrendered.

  Pasted to the last page was a snapshot of a man and a woman, in the style of the early twenties. Penned on the yellowed sheet was “Guess who?” in John’s hand, with an arrow indicating the man.

  The resemblance was remarkable. Even to the suit. And the woman was undeniably Fiala Groloch.

  “John!” Cash thundered. “Get in here!”

  He appeared quickly, wearing a foolish grin. “Saw the picture, eh?”

  “Yeah. You didn’t fake something up, did you?” John and Michael, as teenagers, had loved practical jokes. John had once gone through a camera stage. He and Michael had made some phony prints showing Cash and a neighbor woman leaving a motel. There had been virtual war with Annie before the boys had confessed. Cash had never forgiven them.

  Because he really had been guilty, his feet of clay had been innocently, accidentally exposed, his darkest secret had been hauled, bones rattling, from its casket by children who knew not what they did. The experience had made him suspect there might be something to the law of karma after all.

  John’s smile faded. “Not this time. You want to run tests?”

  “No.” Cash believed him. He didn’t want to, though. “Wait. Maybe. This’s impossible, you know. It can’t be him.”

  “I know.” Harald seemed proud of his little coup, but frightened. As was Cash, who felt like a wise Pandora about to open the box anyway.

  “There’re no prints in the file,” Cash observed. “Did they use them then?”

  “Got me. I don’t even know how to find out.”

  “They started
in the eighteen hundreds, I think. Didn’t Sherlock Holmes use them?”

  “Shee-it, I don’t know. Never made any difference to me.”

  “Okay. Okay. We got a problem. How to prove our corpse isn’t Jack O’Brien. We need something concrete. Dental records?”

  “No way. You saw the coroner’s report. No dentist ever saw the inside of that mouth. Perfect teeth.”

  “Yeah. Wouldn’t find anything medical, either. It’d be here in the file. Scars and things. Carstairs doesn’t mention a one. You’d think a guy with O’Brien’s street record would’ve gotten cut up a little. Must’ve been a lucky bastard. Bet you couldn’t even find a birth record.... Wait! O’Brien. Catholic....”

  “Got you.” John started to leave.

  “Hold on here. Let’s have a plan. All we can do is find out if he was born here, maybe if any relatives are still alive.... Yeah, that’d help. Find somebody who really knew him besides Miss Groloch. Wouldn’t be conclusive, though.”

  Cash paused, thought for nearly a minute. “We need to get ahold of something with his prints. You think any would still be around?”

  John spread his hands, shrugged. “They found pterodon bones in Texas a couple months ago.”

  “Okay. Anything’s possible. Slide out when Railsback isn’t looking and start checking parish records. I’ll cover for you.”

  “But Railsback is looking,” the lieutenant said from behind Harald. “What’re you up to now?”

  “Not much. A little hobby case, you might say.”

  “Yeah,” said John. “Just a check on a birth certificate. It’ll only take half an hour.”

  Railsback spotted the file. And picture. “Hey, the John Doe. Where’d you get this? Who is he?”

  Harald and Cash exchanged looks.

  “Well?”

  “Name’s Jack O’Brien,” said Cash. “That man disappeared in 1921. This is the file on the investigation.”

  “Eh?” Railsback frowned. “What the hell? You’re shitting me.”

  “Nope.” Improvising, Cash added, “We thought the John Doe might be a relative.”

  “Really?” Railsback gave them both the fisheye. “You got the Donalson thing straight?”