Her mother had known, of course, that he would die. But knowing had not helped, because the plague could not be evaded like angry peasants, like some pillaging army. One third of the population of Europe was winnowed by plague that century. Catherine and her mother, though, were lucky and lived. But they had no land, and no man. They had only the knowing to support them—in Catherine, too, by that time; and so they wandered through Europe, gypsy-like, telling fortunes wherever someone would listen, to earn their bread and bed, and sometimes a little silver.
Catherine’s mother had only the knowing, no more, for she died of old age, a white-haired, bent-backed crone: half blind, half deaf, toothless. But shortly after that death, Catherine discovered that she herself had an additional skill—she could steal time.
She was beginning to go gray by then, and to find an ache in her back in the mornings. And one day as she told fortunes in an inn on the road from Trier to Koblenz, she found herself jealous of a customer. The customer was young, beautiful, a woman just-married and spending her merchant husband’s money on the foolish fantasies, as she called them, of a fortuneteller. She tossed Catherine a gold coin for those fantasies, because they had been of beautiful children and long life and prosperity. And as Catherine caught the coin to her bosom, she yearned with all her heart to have a piece of the new bride’s youth.
In the next moment, she realized that her prediction for the woman had not been exactly right, that her life would not be quite so long. That, in fact, it would be five years shorter than Catherine had first thought. But she didn’t say anything about it, because the fortune was told and the gold paid. She only wondered why her skill had so betrayed her. The next morning, there was no ache in her back; nor did it return; and some weeks later she saw that her gray hair was growing out dark once more. At that, she knew what she had done, and she felt a little remorse—but only a little, because the woman had called her skill foolish. Afterward, though, she never stole as many as five years from a single person. Instead, she took a month here, a week there, whenever she needed them, her age bobbing up and down, from a few gray hairs to none at all.
A woman who never grew old could not stay in one place very long, but neither could a fortune-teller, so her gypsy life went on as before. The years passed, the decades, and the decades piled into centuries. Sometimes she found a lover, though she always left him. Sometimes she found a patron, though she always left him, too, or her. She grew familiar with many places, many customs, many languages. It was not a bad life, as long as she was young.
In the seventeenth century, she finally found a way to make her own fortune. Foreseeing the success of the Dutch East India Company, she saved up a few gold coins and went to Amsterdam to invest them in a ship that she knew would come home heavy-laden with spices. Within a few years, she no longer needed to ask coin or food for telling the future. The economics of the world had changed, money could breed money, and a woman who could see tomorrow could become rich.
That was when she stopped stealing time and started taking it as pay for knowing.
Now, nearly three hundred years and four thousand miles from that first investment, she had all the wealth she would ever need, in stocks, bonds, precious metals and stones, and bank accounts. For nearly three hundred years, she had found people willing to trade their time for the assurance of money. Not everyone would do it, of course. Ninety-nine percent would not. But Catherine had become very good at finding that other one percent, or at enabling them to find her.
READER AND ADVISER.
She raised her head from the crystal ball. It was still early, but she decided to go home, perhaps watch a few videotapes, listen to a Utile music. Just now, she lived in a condominium on the lake, a pleasant place she planned to keep for four or five more years, before she moved to anther part of the city. She took a bus to the public garage where she had left her minivan, changed clothes in the van, and drove home, an ordinary-looking middle-aged woman, nothing like the gypsy of the shabby storefront.
The next day, when she arrived at the store, Steven’s wife was waiting outside.
“Madame Catherine,” she said. “I’d like to speak to you.”
Beth was her name, the name that Steven had scribbled on the memo pad. She was thinner than his memories of her, and her face was tired around the eyes; Catherine knew she had not slept the previous night. And there was Steven, focused sharply within her life—Steven as he once had been, Steven as he was now. She had seen him eighteen hours ago.
“Come in, Beth,” said Catherine, pushing the door open.
They settled on either side of the table, Beth with her hands folded in her lap, the gypsy fortune-teller behind her crystal ball.
“You know who I am?” said Beth.
Catherine nodded. “Your husband was here yesterday. I see that he followed my advice and called you.”
Beth’s folded hands tightened. “Thank you for getting him to do that. When he left, I tried to find him, but…” She shook her head. “So thank you. For giving him back to me.”
Catherine waited, knowing there would be more.
Beth stared at the crystal ball. “He thinks you really can tell the future.”
“I can,” said Catherine.
“And he tells this… this really wild story about you giving away winning lottery numbers, in return for years of a person’s life.”
“I do that sometimes,” said Catherine. “Do you want a winning lottery number?”
Beth shook her head. “I want Steven.”
Catherine leaned back in her chair. “I don’t give away lives here. I give away money. If that would help you…”
“It won’t. I wish it could, but it won’t. He’s going to die. And I don’t want him to. I don’t want him to!” Her eyes squeezed shut, and tears started down her cheeks. Then she gulped and knuckled the wet streaks away with both hands.
“I’m sorry,” said Catherine, and she sighed. How many wives, she thought, had said those words, in plague after plague? Even her own mother, so very long ago.
“Look,” said Beth, and she was leaning forward now, touching the crystal ball with one hand, her voice tightly controlled. “What happens if somebody gives you the time and takes the money and then changes his mind. Can you give the time back?”
Catherine frowned slightly. “It’s not my policy to give refunds.”
“But can you? Are you able to do it?”
Catherine nodded.
“And does that mean that you could sell someone time. Extra time?”
“You mean for money?”
“For anything.”
“Why would I want to do that, Beth? I haven’t any desire to shorten my own life. Quite the contrary.”
“But could you?”
Catherine looked at her narrowly. “Do you mean, would I sell Steven time?”
“Yes. Yes.”
“I could,” said Catherine, “but I won’t. He doesn’t have anything that I would accept in exchange.”
“But I do,” said Beth. She gripped the edges of the table. “I’m young. I have a lot of life ahead of me. Take some of it—some for yourself and some for Steven.”
Catherine shook her head. “Think of what you’re saying, Beth.”
“Don’t I have a lot of life left?”
Almost unwillingly, Catherine looked into Beth’s future. There was indeed a good deal of life left to her, on the ordinary human scale. “You’re all right,” Catherine told her. “You’ll last into your eighties, as things stand.”
“Then split it between him and me. And take a fee for yourself, a broker’s fee. Isn’t that a good deal? You gain something from it. We all gain.”
“I don’t think so, Beth.”
“Yes, we do!”
“Beth…”
“Don’t you see—that way, we can be together again.”
“He has more troubles than AIDS, Beth. It wasn’t AIDS that drove him away from you.”
“We can do something about th
ose troubles if he lives. But if he dies, we can’t even try.” The tears had started again, and this time she made no move to stop them. “Please, Madame Catherine. We don’t have anyone else to turn to.”
Catherine looked down at the satin-draped tabletop, at the corroded brass pedestal that held the crystal ball. From the corners of her eyes, she could see Beth’s hands to either side, white-knuckled. “You’re making a terrible choice, Beth. There’s no guarantee that he’ll come back to you.”
Beth’s voice shook. “There’s a guarantee now. If you don’t do something, he’s going to die. Guaranteed.”
Catherine reached out to her again, to look at her past, at the better times, to see Steven as she saw him. He had been handsome, once, forty or fifty pounds ago, and he had laughed easily. He had held Beth’s hand a great deal, even after they had been married for a dozen years. His last gift, when he still had a job, was a gold pendant with their initials entwined; she was wearing it now.
“You must love him very much,” Catherine said at last.
“Very much,” said Beth.
Catherine met her eyes. “All right. I can offer you a compromise. In five years, there will be a cure for AIDS. I’ll give him six, to make sure he has time to take it.”
Beth’s eyes were wide. “Will you?”
Catherine nodded.
“And… your fee?”
“There won’t be any fee.”
“No?”
“No. I think you’ll be paying enough as it is.”
“Oh, Madame Catherine…” She found some tissues in her purse and wiped her face and blew her nose. “I’m sorry to be like this in front of you, but… you can’t know how grateful I am.” She balled the tissues up and clutched them in one hand. “When can we…?”
“Can you bring him here at four o’clock?”
“Any time you say.”
“Four.” She waved toward the door. “Go on, now. Go back to him.”
Beth stood up. “This is so kind of you.”
Catherine looked up at her, thinking that in six hundred years she had never loved anyone as much as Beth loved Steven. Not anyone, except perhaps herself. “What will you tell him,” she said, “about this deal?”
“The truth. But only afterward. Until then, I’ll tell him you’ve agreed to give me a lottery ticket in return for the time he has left. You don’t mind, do you?”
“Will he believe you?”
“I think so. He… begged me to ask you for it.”
The bell jangled her departure.
When they came back at four, Steven seemed very calm and said very little, and Beth, too, was subdued. He had bathed and put on clean clothing; but he didn’t look better—the clothes, Catherine knew, were his own old ones, and they hung just as loose on him as his rags had. And she knew also that he had shot up less than two hours ago, coaxed the money out of his wife, making no secret that he was going to use it to buy junk. His argument had been that he would be dead soon, so it didn’t make any difference.
The transfer of time from Beth to Catherine and then to Steven took less than a minute, and only Catherine was aware of it. Afterward, she gave Beth a slip of paper, the supposed lottery number.
“You’re finished here,” she said. “Go home.”
Hand in hand, they left.
Occasionally, over the next few days, she wondered if Beth had finally told him the truth, or if she was just letting him discover it for himself as he lived on, day after day, feeling less and less sick, gaining weight, recoiling from the death that had almost claimed him. She also wondered how long Beth’s job at the supermarket would support Steven’s habit. But she put her curiosity aside. It had never been her policy to follow a client after striking a bargain.
Two weeks after their bargain, a week after he would otherwise have been dead, Steven came back to the shabby storefront. He waited outside for a few minutes because Catherine was with someone else, but when that client left, he slipped in before the door had even closed.
He thrust the beads aside roughly, and they clicked and clattered as they swung to behind him. “You shouldn’t have done it,” he said.
He looked better—anyone could have seen that. He had gained a little weight in his face, and the whites of his eyes had cleared. And his clothes were still clean. Catherine saw that he was living with Beth; she guessed that he had expected to die with her.
“You shouldn’t have done it!” he said again, and his mouth twisted angrily.
“Sit down, Steven,” she said softly.
Instead, he stood behind the chair, gripping its upholstered back. Then he pounded its cushioned arm with his fist. “How could you do that to her?”
Catherine saw that Beth had only told him the truth that morning. That they had had a fight over it, culminating in Steven storming out. Two weeks before, Catherine reflected, he wouldn’t have had the strength to slam that door. “It was her choice, Steven,” she said. “I gave her what she wanted.”
“She tried to tell me you were wrong about the time I had left. She tried to tell me you were a fake. As if I didn’t know better!” His fingers dug hard into the chair. “Give her back those years! I don’t want them!”
Catherine shook her head. “Our bargain is done. I don’t give refunds. I told her that.”
Steven let go of the chair abruptly. “I never agreed to that bargain.”
“Your agreement wasn’t required,” said Catherine. “The bargain was between Beth and me.”
He pointed at her, jabbing the air with his rigid forefinger. “You stole those years from her. She didn’t know what she was doing!”
“You know that isn’t true, Steven.”
“It must be!”
“Then you don’t know her very well. And you don’t know how much she loves you.”
He lowered his hand slowly. Then his shoulders slumped, as if the act of pointing had drained his strength. He leaned on the chair, shaking his head. “I can’t let this happen to her.”
“She’ll have a long life anyway,” Catherine said. “Even without those few years.”
He kept shaking his head. “You don’t understand. I can’t take those years from her.”
Catherine looked at him long and hard, though only with her eyes. She didn’t want to look at him any other way anymore. Finally, she said, “Steven, don’t you want to live?”
He walked around the chair and sat down. He put one hand on the table, beside the crystal ball. “What will you give me for those years? In money.”
“You can live till they find a cure, Steven,” she said. “You have the time now.”
“What will you give me?”
“Are you sure this is what you want?”
“How much!”
She did the calculations in her head, then looked into the near future for a match. She found one in Saturday’s newspaper. “Friday’s lottery has a four-digit jackpot for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” she said. “That would leave you with three and a half months to spare.”
He frowned. “I meant for everything.”
She looked again. “The three-digit game can give you an extra ten thousand, with fifteen days left over. That’s my best offer.”
“It’s a deal.”
“Steven—”
“It’s a deal!”
Catherine shrugged. “It’s your life,” she said, and she pulled out her memo pad and wrote the numbers down. “Don’t buy the tickets in this neighborhood. Take the bus down Ashland a couple of miles; you’ll find plenty of vendors.” She drew a five-dollar bill from her blouse and passed it over with the sheet of paper. “Here’s your seed money and bus fare.”
He tucked the paper and the bill into his shirt pocket. “I’m ready now,” he said. “For the other side of the bargain.”
It took only a moment for Catherine to draw five years and fifty weeks from him. “Go on, now,” she said when it was done. “You have traveling to do.”
He hesitated. “Have you
… ?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t feel anything.”
“Do you ever feel time passing?”
He swallowed. “Sometimes.” He pushed himself out of the chair. “Thanks, Madame Catherine.”
“Don’t come back,” she said.
His lips made a thin white line. “I won’t.”
Catherine sat watching the beads sway after he had gone, listening to the echo of the bell. No, he wouldn’t be back. She knew that even without reading him.
Three days later, Beth came.
She had been crying, crying till her eyes were swollen and discolored. She slammed the beads aside, stalked to the table, and threw something at Catherine. But that something was only a couple of pieces of paper, and instead of hitting their target, they fluttered wildly and sank to the floor. Lottery tickets.
“He’s dead!” she choked, her voice roughened from the crying. “You killed him with these!”
“Sit down, Beth,” Catherine said softly.
“Why did you do it? Why did you give them to him?”
“Please. Sit down.”
Beth fell into the chair and stared at Catherine with her wide, raw eyes.
Catherine bent to pick up the tickets. She set them on Beth’s side of the table. “He wanted you to have these,” she said.
Beth shook her head. “It’s blood money.”
Catherine looked into her then and saw that the police had called at her apartment, had taken her down to the morgue to identify the body, had told her it was a case of overdose. And in the morning she had gotten an envelope in the mail, with these pieces of paper in it, and a note saying that he loved her.
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