Robert Silverberg: The Dead Man's Eyes

“Senor? Another carafe?”

“No,” he said. “Yes. Yes.” He stared at his plate. It was full of sausages, sweetbreads, grilled steak. Where had all that come from? He was sure he had eaten everything. It must have grown back. Moodily he stabbed a plump blood sausage and ate without noticing. Took a drink. They mixed the wine with seltzer water here, half and half. Maybe it helped you put away those tons of meat more easily.

Afterward, strolling along the narrow, glittering Calle Florida with the stylish evening promenade flowing past him on both sides, he caught sight of Marianne coming out of a jeweler’s shop. She wore gaucho leathers, emerald earrings, skin-tight trousers of gold brocade. He grunted as though he had been struck and pressed his elbows against his sides as one might do if expecting a second blow. Then an elegant young Argentinian uncoiled himself from a curbside table and trotted quickly toward her, and they laughed and embraced and ran off arm in arm, sweeping right past him without even a glance. He remembered, now: women all over the world were wearing Marianne’s face this season. This one, in fact, was too tall by half a head. But he would have to be prepared for such incidents wherever he went. Mariannes everywhere, bludgeoning him with their beauty and never even knowing what they had done. He found himself wishing that the one who had been sleeping with that museum man was just another Marianne clone, that the real one was at home alone now, waiting for him, wondering, wondering.

In Montreal six weeks later, using a privacy filter and one of his corporate cards, he risked putting through a call to his apartment and discovered that there was an interdict on his line. When he tried the office number an android mask appeared on the screen and he was blandly told that Mr. Frazier was unavailable. The android didn’t know when Mr. Frazier would be available. Frazier asked for Markman, his executive assistant, and a moment later a bleak, harried, barely recognizable face looked out at him. Frazier explained that he was a representative of the Bucharest account, calling about a highly sensitive matter. “Don’t you know?” Markman said. “Mr. Frazier’s disappeared. The police are looking for him.” Frazier asked why, and Markman’s face dissolved in an agony of shame, bewilderment, protective zeal. “There’s a criminal charge against him,” Markman whispered, nearly in tears.

He called his lawyer next and said, “I’m calling about the Frazier case. I don’t want to kill the filter but I imagine you won’t have much trouble figuring out who I am.”

“I imagine I won’t. Just don’t tell me where you are, okay?”

The situation was about as he expected. They had recovered the murder prints from the dead man’s eyes: a nice shot, embedded deep in the cortical tissue, Frazier looming up against Hurwitt, nose to nose, a quick cut to the hand reaching for Hurwitt’s arm, a wild free-form pan to the sky as Frazier lifted Hurwitt up and over the parapet. “Pardon me for saying this, but you looked absolutely deranged,” the lawyer told him. “The prints were on all the networks the next day. Your eyes—it was really scary. I’m absolutely sure we could get impairment of faculties, maybe even crime of passion. Suspended sentence, but of course there’d be rehabilitation. I don’t see any way around that, and it could last a year or two, and you might not be as effective in your profession afterward, but considering the circumstances—”

“How’s my wife?” Frazier said. “Do you know anything about what she’s been doing?”

“Well, of course I don’t represent her, you realize. But she does get in the news. She’s said to be traveling.”

“Where?”

“I couldn’t say. Look, I can try to find out, if you’d like to call back this time tomorrow. Only I suggest that for your own good you call me at a different number, which is—”

“For my good or for yours?” Frazier said.

“I’m trying to help,” said the lawyer, sounding annoyed.

He took refresher courses in French, Italian, and German to give himself a little extra plausibility in the Andreas Schmidt identity, and cultivated a mild Teutonic accent. So long as he didn’t run up against any real Swiss who wanted to gabble with him in Romansch or Schwyzerdeutsch he suspected he’d make out all right. He kept on moving, Strasbourg, Athens, Haifa, Tunis. Even though he knew that no further fund transfers were possible, there was enough money stashed under the Schmidt accounts to keep him going nicely for ten or fifteen years, and by then he hoped to have this thing figured out.

He saw Mariannes in Tel Aviv, in Heraklion on Crete, and in Sidi bou Said, just outside Tunis. They were all clones, of course. He recognized that after just a quick queasy instant. Still, seeing that delicate high-bridged nose once again, those splendid amethyst eyes, those tight auburn ringlets, it was all he could do to keep himself from going up to them and throwing his arms around them, and he had to force himself each time to turn away, biting down hard on his lip.

In London, outside the Connaught, he saw the real thing. The Connaught was where they had spent their wedding trip back in ’07, and he winced at the sight of its familiar grand facade, and winced even more when Marianne came out, young and radiant, wearing a shimmering silver cloud. Dazzling light streamed from her. He had no doubt that this was no trendy clone but the true Marianne: she moved in that easy confident way, with that regal joy in her own beauty, that no cosmetic surgeon could ever impart even to the most intent imitator. The pavement itself seemed to do her homage. But then Frazier saw that the man on whose arm she walked was himself, young and radiant too, the Loren Frazier of that honeymoon journey of seven years back, his hair dark and thick, his love of life and success and his magnificent new wife cloaking him like an imperial mantle; and Frazier realized that he must merely be hallucinating, that the breakdown had moved on to a new and more serious stage. He stood gaping while Mr. and Mrs. Frazier swept through him like the phantoms they were and away in the direction of Grosvenor Square, and then he staggered and nearly fell. To the Connaught doorman he admitted that he was unwell, and because he was well dressed and spoke with the hint of an accent and was able to find a twenty-sovereign piece in the nick of time the doorman helped him into a cab and expressed his deepest concern. Back at his own hotel, ten minutes over on the other side of Mayfair, he had three quick gins in a row and sat shivering for an hour before the image faded from his mind.

“I advise you to give yourself up,” the lawyer said, when Frazier called him from Nairobi. “Of course you can keep on running as long as you like. But you’re wearing yourself out, and sooner or later someone will spot you, so why keep on delaying the inevitable?”

“Have you spoken to Marianne lately?”

“She wishes you’d come back. She wants to write to you, or call you, or even come and see you, wherever you are. But I’ve told her you refuse to provide me with any information about your location. Is that still your position?”

“I don’t want to see her or hear from her.”

“She loves you.”

“I’m a homicidal maniac. I might do the same thing to her that I did to Hurwitt.”

“Surely you don’t really believe—”

“No,” Frazier said. “Not really.”

“Then let me give her an address for you, at least, and she can write to you.”

“It could be a trap, couldn’t it?”

“Surely you can’t possibly believe—”

“Who knows? Anything’s possible.”

“A postal box in Caracas, say,” the lawyer suggested, “and let’s say that you’re in Rio, for the sake of the discussion, and I arrange an intermediary to pick up the letter and forward it care of American Express in Lima, and then on some day of your own choosing, known to nobody else, you make a quick trip in and out of Peru and—”