It was at this instant, watching the Timekeeper’s body resolve itself into its component particles, that I remembered how I’d fallen out of time. I hadn’t fallen at all, Mrs. Haven. I’d jumped.
IT WAS MENÜGAYAN, fittingly enough, who broke the news about your disappearance. After a week in Vienna being ministered to by the Kraut (who’d managed, by a heroic effort of will, to conceal her relief at how things had turned out) I got a standby seat on a direct flight to Newark, rode a series of progressively more malodorous buses into Manhattan, and found a hostel in Chelsea that I could just barely afford. I kept away from West Tenth Street, for obvious reasons, but eventually I dialed your neighbor’s number. I could tell right away, by her grunted “Who’s this?” that she was even more depressed than usual. I assumed the reason must be Haven’s triumph.
“I need to see you, Julia. I need to ask—”
“Tolliver?”
“Of course it’s me. I’ve come back.”
No response.
“What is it?” My throat went tight at once. “Is this line not safe?”
“Don’t be an idiot. What do you want?”
“To see you, that’s all.” When no answer came, I said, “I shouldn’t have run away, Julia. I should have listened to you. I should have trusted in your plan, even though you never told me what it was. Now something terrible has happened, the worst possible thing, and I need your advice. Can I meet you somewhere?”
Her breath came through the line in a low, toneless whistle, as if she were falling asleep.
“All right, Tolliver,” she said finally. “Come on over.”
“Over there? Are you crazy? The last time I saw Haven—”
To my bewilderment she gave a stony laugh. “Shut up and get over here, Tolliver. It’s never been safer.”
“Listen to me, Julia. I don’t think—”
She set down the receiver with a bang.
* * *
I knew your brownstone was vacant as soon as I saw it. No one had been home for weeks and the place had been gutted. Menügayan confirmed this when I asked her.
“I grokked that something pesado had gone down as soon as those movers showed up. They didn’t leave beans behind, either — just some Klimt posters down in the basement.” She shuddered. “Piles of them, actually. Hideous stuff.”
I told her about our meeting at the post office, about our elopement, about our time in Vienna and Znojmo — I told her everything, Mrs. Haven, down to the most piddling detail. She was the only person I could tell it to, the whole hopeless fiasco, and it felt good to tell it. She sat there like a pile of rocks and let me ramble on.
“You see, Julia? That’s why Haven has shifted his base of operations. He’s finally got what he needs: he can chrono-jump now, or so he believes. He doesn’t know about the changes Artur made, apparently, or he doesn’t care. My guess is that he’s relocating upstate, to that villa of his, to work on a new type of exclusion bin, or some other device we don’t know about yet. Which means that if I want to find her — to find Hildy, I mean — all that I have to do—”
“Why the hell would you want to find her, Tolliver, after what she’s done to you? Is this some kink of yours — some glutton-for-humiliation type of deal? Is it penance for your Nazi uncle, or for your father, or for your whole pathetic family? Taking one for the team, are you, Tolliver? I’m just curious. Because the last time I checked you didn’t have one. No team. No friends. No family to speak of. You’re on your own, little man, just like everyone else. It’s time you made a fucking note of that.”
The above speech was delivered in a lifeless monotone, barely loud enough to hear, but it had the effect she intended. By the end of it I was shivering with rage.
“I need to see her,” I said. “I need to hear what happened in Znojmo from Hildy’s own mouth — not from Haven or his army of cyborgs, and definitely not from you.” I got to my feet. “I’ll go up to that compound of theirs, if I have to, and pound on the door until they let me in.” I wavered for a moment, breathing hard. “I’ll leave right now, in fact. I’ll go today.”
Menügayan watched me with a look of bleak amusement. “I forgot,” she said. “You haven’t heard the news.”
“What news?”
“Forget Hildegard, Waldy. Forget both of them.” She shut her eyes. “That’s what I hope to do.”
The sorrow in her expression gave me pause. “I apologize for losing my temper, Julia. I’ll admit that things look pretty bad right now, but if we put our heads together—”
“Haven’s jet disappeared eleven days ago over the Atlantic, a few miles southeast of the English coast. One minute they were clear on the radar, the next they were gone. There hasn’t been a whisper from them since.”
A curious thing happened as Menügayan spoke. The cluttered slate-gray walls that had always made the room seem like a props closet in some defunct third-string theater began to fall away, to move steadily outward in all four directions, until the couches were the only solid objects, twin parenthesis-shaped atolls in a depthless, twilit sea. Menügayan was still there, and so was I; but everything else had lapsed into the shadows. This all took place without the slightest sound.
Free of the room’s distractions, I was able to bring my full attention to bear on Menügayan herself, and to see how profoundly she’d changed. There had always been a power to her sullenness, or at least a kind of adolescent menace; now there was only exhaustion. Her neck was wedged into a horseshoe-shaped velveteen pillow, the kind tourists carry on overnight flights. All the vengefulness and guile had been sucked out of her.
“There’s only one explanation,” I murmured. “The two of us will have to face the truth.”
“You’re right about that,” she said, gentler now. “It won’t be easy at first, but—”
“They disappeared just south of England, you said? Off the southeastern coast?”
“Does it matter?”
“It matters, Julia.” I nodded. “GMT.”
“What the hell is that supposed to—”
“Zero degrees longitude. The prime meridian. The Royal Observatory at Greenwich.”
Her eyes went wide and glassy. “Jesus, Tolliver.”
“They’ve made the jump already,” I said, pulling on my coat. “Ottokar’s calculations were right, somehow, in spite of the alterations Artur made. Any confined space can be used, if it falls within certain parameters — Haven told me so in Znojmo. You see what this means, don’t you?”
“I’m not—”
“They’ve used his jet as their exclusion bin.”
* * *
I left Menügayan’s brownstone soon after, feeling restless and confined by my own skin. There was no point in heading upstate — not yet, at least — so I drifted across town, in the approximate direction of my hostel, going over everything I’d learned. I’d attempted to talk the implications through with Menügayan; I’d expected her to brighten at the news of a genuine jump, if only because it meant that you were still alive. Instead she’d pulled back into herself like a barnacle, going saucer-eyed and quiet. It was obvious she thought I’d lost my mind.
This disappointed me, Mrs. Haven, I have to admit. Maybe Enzie and Genny had been right, after alclass="underline" maybe you had to be a Tolliver to play cards against the chronoverse and win. But as I was crossing Union Square, to my own astonishment, I realized I didn’t give a damn. If the rest of humankind saw no worth in our theories, whose problem was that, in the final accounting — ours, or the rest of humankind’s?