“Yesterday?”
“Today is Thursday; you’ve lost a day. Anyway, we struck paydirt with your other name. Noroguchi was the real thing, a tenured professor at Berkeley, in the medical school, no less. That is, until he was murdered.”
I could hear her flipping through my canvases, waiting for me to respond. I could imagine her half-smile.
“Don’t you want to know who murdered him?”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Philip DeCandyle.”
“Ray, I always said you should have been a cop,” she said. “You take the fun out of everything. Manslaughter.
Plea-bargained down from Murder Two. Served six years at San Rafael. The creepy one was an accessory but she never went to jail.”
“I thought you said they were both creepy.”
“She’s creepier. Did you know her tits are different sizes? Don’t answer that. Did you know you have a blank canvas here in the finished pile?”
“It belongs there,” I said. “It’s called ‘The Other Side.’”
On Monday, it was DeCandyle who picked me up in the Honda. “Where’s Sorel?” I asked. I had to know. Even if she was dead I wanted to be with her.
“She’s okay. She’s waiting for us at the lab.”
“I’m dying to see her,” I said. I didn’t expect DeCandyle to laugh and he didn’t.
He drove maddeningly slowly. I missed Sorel’s breathtaking speed. I asked him to tell me about Noroguchi.
“Dr. Noroguchi died during an insertion; that is, failed to retrocute. I was blamed. But I get the distinct feeling you’ve heard the whole story.”
“And he’s still there.”
“Where else?
“But why him? Millions of people are dead but we don’t see them.”
“You’ve seen Edwin?” DeCandyle stopped and there was a scream of brakes as someone almost hit us from behind. He stepped on the gas. “We don’t know why,” he said. “Apparently the connection persists when it’s strong enough. He and Emma were partners on many insertions. Too many. Emma’s convinced that it’s possible to penetrate deep enough to find him.”
“To bring him back?”
“Of course not. He’s dead. Edwin always insisted on going deeper and deeper even though we didn’t have the C-T
chamber then. It’s Emma’s obsession now. If anything, she’s worse than him; than he was.”
“Were they—”
“Were they lovers?” It wasn’t what I was going to ask, but it was what I wanted to know.
“Toward the end, they were lovers,” he said. He laughed; a bitter little laugh. “I don’t think they knew I knew.”
When we got to the institute I heard rhythmic shouts and the unfamiliar crunch of gravel.
“We’ll have to enter through the back,” DeCandyle said. “We have demonstrators out front. A local preacher has been telling the natives that we are trying to duplicate the Resurrection in the laboratory.”
“They always get it backward,” I said.
We entered through a side door, directly into the lab. I sat on the gurney waiting to hear the swish of Sorel’s nylon jumpsuit between her legs. Instead I heard the suss of rubber tires and the faint ringing of spokes.
“You’re in a wheelchair?”