Cash felt no guilt himself, to his surprise. Maybe it would set in after the euphoria passed.
The waitress quickly arrived with Beth's breakfast.
I'm getting close to it now, Cash thought, visualizing Miss Groloch's elfin face.
"Here's how I figure we should do it," Segasture said, and began outlining a plan.
XXVIII. On the X Axis;
1975
She paid the cabbie, tipping generously, then added twenty dollars and asked him to recover her baggage from the railway station. She watched him pull away, then marched up the winding, rose-flanked walk to the door.
He responded almost as if he had been waiting.
"Fiala! What are you doing here?" He spoke German. His English remained as broken as hers. "Come on in."
The house was old, rich, dark. It had changed little with the years.
Fial had. He had aged.
But sixty years separated this meeting from their last.
A woman of sixty, confused and embarrassed, rushed from the rear of the house. "I'm sorry, Herr Koppel. I was in the bathroom." She, too, spoke German, but with a northern accent.
"That's all right, Greta. You and Hans take the car into town, will you? Catch up on your shopping."
The woman withdrew with a slight, stiff, Teutonic bow. She seemed accustomed to disappearing when strangers arrived.
"My God, that woman is ugly."
"But the perfect housekeeper. Absolutely close-mouthed. She and her husband have been with me since forty-nine. They're refugees. I think they were involved with the SS. Whatever, they don't attract any attention."
"Koppel?"
"I changed names during the Depression. My business connections were beginning to wonder about my longevity. It seemed like a good time to disappear. Financial empires were crumbling right and left. But you haven't told me why you're here."
"I had to run. I had to, Fial. After I saw him, and the policeman… I couldn't stay there anymore. It was all closing in…"
The old man guided her to an overstuffed chair. "Sit. I'll make some tea. You settle down. Get your thoughts organized."
One familiar with Fiala would have guessed Fial to be as fussy and old-fashioned as his sister. The interiors of their homes were almost interchangeable, though Fial's place was larger and more carefully maintained. He didn't fear carpenters, electricians, or plumbers.
Fial had two cats and a dog. The beagle, a bitch, was seventeen and so feeble she could barely move. She had lost so many teeth that Greta had to spoon-feed her baby food. Yet Fial refused to have her put to sleep.
Fial returned in ten minutes. "Now tell me about it. From the beginning. I really didn't understand your letters."
"First I'd better tell you. I saw Neulist."
"What?" Fial sprang from his chair, began pacing. "How do you know?"
"I can't tell how. I just knew who he was when I saw him. Maybe because I was unconsciously expecting him."
"We're supposed to have orderly minds," Fial reminded her. "Minds forged and honed by the State. Let's apply them. Go back to the beginning."
He was worried; this lack of pleasantries, this minimization of the amenities, indicated a fear that something critical was in the wind, that they might have to act swiftly.
"It started with the body in the alley."
"I don't understand why the police were so excited. In this country the alleys are carpeted with corpses."
"Because the dead man was the double of Jack O'Brien. Because two detectives found that out and turned the investigation into a crusade. They just wouldn't stop digging."
"But…"
"I know. But it was O'Brien. To perfection. Even to the clothing. I know there had to be differences, but after fifty years I couldn't put my finger on a thing. I was too upset the one time I saw the body, though I remember saying it looked smaller.
"I finally figured it out on the way here. Because I saw Neulist at the funeral. He planted the body. How, I don't know."
Fial paced. "What about why?"
"To stir up the police? That would be his style, wouldn't it?"
Fial stopped abruptly, peered at her. He dropped into his chair. For two minutes he steepled his fingers before his face and stared into nothing.
"Yes it would. Exactly." He paused again.
"There's something I haven't told you, Fiala. Fian's dead." He described the circumstances.
"I went over there personally. In forty-six and again in forty-eight. The Russians weren't much help.
"I always thought there was something fishy about it. But Neulist? No. I didn't suspect that. The informer, Josef Gabiek… in the history I learned, he was a patriot. He was killed in a police raid on a Resistance hideout. But this one wasn't. He disappeared instead.
"I've spent a million dollars trying to find out where he went. I think I know now."
"You should've told me, Fial. I don't need protection from the truth." She had suspected Fian's death for a long time. He would have gotten in touch after the war had he been alive.
"I didn't want you to worry. You always overreacted in emotional situations. Anyway, this one didn't seem that suspicious then. There were fifteen hundred other people in the village, and the raid was identical to the one in our own history-except that Fian was there. There wasn't a shred of evidence against the colonel. I wanted to find Gabiek to satisfy my own curiosity as to his motives, as a check against history as we know it. I certainly couldn't go ask Hitler why the bomb didn't kill him in his bunker and stop the war eight months earlier than it ended. I thought I might uncover some pattern to the changes we've seen. That I might find a way to abort them, or neutralize them, or soften their long-range impact.
"Well, if Gabiek was Neulist, he shouldn't be able to trace us. I don't see how he found you. Unless he got it from Fian somehow. And that's impossible. It had to be dumb luck. I mean, the Czechs let me do some digging where he died. I found his journal, that he kept right up to the minute when the security police started shooting. He never mentioned Gabiek, nor did he have a word to say about Neulist, except a warning about what happened in the programming theater…