John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

I nodded and got to my feet.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“I’m grateful for your candor, Ms. Menügayan—”

“Julia.”

“I appreciate your telling me all this, Julia, but I’m going home now. You’ve just made it clear that there isn’t anything I can give Hildy that her husband can’t give her sixteen times over, and that her fling with me was nothing more than that: the latest in a long and trifling sequence. As you can probably imagine, I’d like to be alone.”

I felt proud of my self-control, under the circumstances, but Menügayan only laughed. Her laugh was a dull, toneless thing, oddly damp and forlorn, like the call of some creature of the lightless deep.

“You’ve got a funny way of talking, Tolliver. Kind of old-timey. Anybody ever tell you that?”

“Lots of people,” I said, buttoning my coat. “Most recently R. P. Haven’s wife.”

“I’m disappointed in you, I have to say. One tiny cloud on the horizon and you’re calling it quits. What would your daddy say?”

“That’s none of your business. Who the hell is my father to you?”

“As I’ve mentioned, I used to be a member of the Church of Synchronology. A fairly high-ranking member. I had my own trailer.”

I looked at her. “This house belongs to Haven, doesn’t it?”

Menügayan shrugged.

“Why do you stay, if you hate them so much?”

“Not my decision. The Church likes to keep its jaundiced eye on me. What the Listener demandeth, He receiveth.” She leaned smoothly forward, smiled up at the ceiling, then fixed me with what whodunits like to call a “hungry” look. I knew I should run for my life, but I stayed where I was. Where did I have to go?

“Tolliver,” Menügayan said slowly. “ Waldemar Tolliver.”

“I should probably explain about that. The truth is, I—”

“Quite a responsibility to carry that name, I should think. Quite an honor.”

“An honor?” I said, before I could stop myself. “I have a hard time seeing—”

“Waldemar is a name of no small significance to the Church. It was the name of one of our great apostles — the greatest, perhaps. The Timekeeper, we call him. He did battle with the forces of chronology and lost. Perhaps you’ve heard the tale?”

I shook my head. “Like I said, I really need to—”

“He died violently, a martyr’s death, at the hands of an international cabal of scientists and bureaucrats and Semites, in a forest on the Russo-Polish border. His blood — like that of Jesu of Nazareth — is on the hands of the children of Israel. They had too much invested in the Lie of Chronologic Time, you see, to let him live. But there’s a reason, beyond simple mechanics, that a clock’s face is shaped like a circle. Waldemar’s hour was once —praise be to the Prime Mover! — and it shall be again.” She threw her head back and sang, in a girlish falsetto: “Jan Sküs is the name of a friend I met once, and Sküs Jan is a friend I’ll meet twice.” She held her breath for a moment, then gave a tight laugh. “As you can see, Tolliver, the Scripture still moves me.”

I gaped at her, sickened and dumbstruck. She sat there serene as a panther.

“Why have you told me all this? What do you want from me?”

“That’s simple. I want you to steal R. P. Haven’s wife.”

My head felt hot and empty. The candles shuddered weakly in their sconces. The uniform glowed redly in the hall.

“Ms. Menügayan—”

“Julia.”

“You’ve just made it clear to me, Julia, that Haven has everything and I have nothing.”

“That’s true!” she said genially. “Or practically true. But you do have one thing — one small piece of the jigsaw — that your enemy lacks. And it’s a piece that fits right in the middle.”

“What is it?” I mumbled. “What piece do I have?”

Menügayan smacked her lips. “That should be obvious by this point, Waldy. You have me.”

I’m going to work today , my grandfather said to himself. It’s Monday, and I’m going off to work .

He liked how the phrase sounded in American mouths. He liked how unguarded it sounded, how brashly naïve, as if work were a brightly lit hall filled with hundreds of people, possibly thousands, every last one reserving his judgment. He’d waited more than four years for the opportunity of saying those words to himself, and now, at the age of not-quite-sixty, he was as boisterous and cocky as a schoolboy. Via God knew what series of backroom intrigues, Wilhelm had secured him a position in the offices of Kaiserwerks, a midrange timepiece manufacturer based in Niagara Falls — not coincidentally, one of Empress Sisi’s Cabinet’s suppliers — that specialized in brass-and-Bakelite travesties for coddled little girls. According to Wilhelm, Vincent Kaiser himself had okayed the appointment, impressed both by Kaspar’s credentials and the story of his travails. Kaspar privately thought it more likely that Felix “Bunny” Mastmann, Wilhelm’s occasional post-theater companion, had put the hire through without asking his boss; but he certainly wasn’t complaining. He had children to feed, and payments to make on the dilapidated stucco cottage that he’d recently begun renovating. A man who lived as a guest in another man’s house couldn’t marry, after all, regardless of his probity and intentions. And marriage was on my grandfather’s mind.

Ilse Veronika Card, my paternal grandmother, is fated to pass in and out of this history with a minimum of fuss, as she probably would have preferred. Of all the women drawn into the Toula/Tolliver orbit, she was perhaps the least brazen — which by no means signifies that she was tame. My grandfather met her in the most prosaic place in town: the German/Yiddish section of Cosgrove’s Book & Vitamin Emporium, across the street from the state university. She had on dungarees — a noteworthy sight on a woman in forties Buffalo — and a man’s flannel shirt with its sleeves rolled up high, something downright unheard-of. A list of books had been scrawled across her forearms in blue ballpoint ink. Kaspar had always had a weakness for tomboys — I suppose, Mrs. Haven, that it runs in the family — but what sealed his fate was her incongruousness: the quality she had of seeming both furtive and entirely at her ease, as though she slept in some back alcove of the store. The parallels to his meeting with Sonja were striking, but my grandfather paid them no mind. He was eager by then for an event with no precedent, no through-line to the past, and he knew that he’d found one at last. The slight, brown-skinned woman before him could never be Sonja — would never have wanted to be her — and Kaspar thanked C*F*P for it. The years of seeing his dead wife in every well-intentioned face were over, and Ilse was the captivating proof.

She was older than he’d first supposed, newly turned thirty-four, and considered unmarriageable by everyone who knew her, on account of what was generally referred to as her “willfulness.” Willfulness wouldn’t have bothered my grandfather much — he was used to that from Sonja, and even more so from the twins — but he found Ilse eager to prove the town wrong. She accepted his attentions gratefully, slumped and sad-bodied though he’d become, and bore the twins’ blank-eyed indifference — and Wilhelm’s suspicions — with consummate patience and grace.

Which is not to say, Mrs. Haven, that there weren’t a few surprises hidden down her dungarees.

Unless you were planning on being dropped behind enemy lines, German was an unpopular interest to have in those days — even a dangerous one — but Ilse was studying it for no other reason, she informed Kaspar shyly, than its beauty. She was learning the language by means of an Air Force — issued set of flash cards entitled “Military German Lingo,” packed with phrases designed to help paratroopers subjugate the Hun. On their first evening out — at Parkside Candies Soda Fountain & Sweet Shoppe, on Main Street — Ilse fanned out the cards on the sticky glass-topped table as though she planned to read his fortune from them. Kaspar’s English was serviceable by then, more or less, but Ilse insisted on German. That was what she’d brought the cards for, after all.