My God, Frazier thought, peering over the edge. Hurwitt lay face down in the courtyard five stories below, arms and legs splayed, lab coat billowing about him.
He was at the airport an hour later, with a light suitcase that carried no more than a few day’s change of clothing and a few cosmetic items. He flew first to Dallas, endured a 90-minute layover, went on to San Francisco, doubled back to Calgary as darkness descended and caught a midnight special to Mexico City, where he checked into a hotel using the legal commercial alias that he employed when doing business in Macao, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
Standing on the terrace of a tower 30 stories above the Zona Rosa, he inhaled musky smog, listened to the squeals of traffic and the faint sounds of far-off drums, watched flares of green lightning in the choking sky above Popocatepetl and wondered whether he should jump. Ultimately, he decided against it. He wanted to share nothing whatever with Hurwitt, not even the manner of his death. And suicide would be an overreaction, anyway. First he had to find out how much trouble he was really in.
The hotel had InfoLog. He dialed in and was told that queries were billed at 5,000,000 pesos an hour, prorated. Vaguely, he wondered whether that was as expensive as it sounded. The peso was practically worthless, wasn’t it? What could that be in dollars—100 bucks, 500, maybe? Nothing.
“I want Harvard Legal,” he told the screen. “Criminology. Forensics. Technical. Evidence technology.” Grimly, he menued down and down until he was near what he wanted. “Eyeflash,” he said. “Theory, techniques. Methods of detail recovery. Acceptance as evidence. Reliability of record. Frequency of reversal on appeal. Supreme Court rulings, if any.”
Back to him, in surreal fragments, which, at an extra charge of 3,000,000 pesos per hour, prorated, he had printed out for him, came blurts of information:
Perceptual pathways in outer brain layers…broad-scale optical architecture…images imprinted on striate cortex or primary visual cortex…inferior temporal neurons…cf. McDermott and Brunetti, 2007…utilization of lateral geniculate body as storage for visual data…inferior temporal cortex…uptake of radioactive glucose…downloading…degrading of signal…degeneration period…Pilsudski signal-enhancement filter…“Nevada vs. Bense,” 2011…hippocampus simulation…amygdala…acetylcholine…U.S. Supreme Court, 23 March 2012…cf. Gross and Bernstein, 13 Aug 2003…Mishkin…Appenzeller…
Enough. He shuffled the print-outs in a kind of hard-edged stupor until dawn; and then, after a hazy calculation of time-zone differentials, he called his lawyer in New York. It took four bounces, but the telephone tracked him down in the commute, driving in from Connecticut.
Frazier keyed in the privacy filter. All the lawyer would know was that some client was calling; the screen image would be a blur; the voice would be rendered universal, generalized, unidentifiable. It was more for the lawyer’s protection than Frazier’s: there had been nasty twists in jurisprudence lately, and lawyers were less and less willing to run the risk of being named accomplices after the fact. Immediately came a query about the billing. “Bill to my hotel room,” Frazier replied, and the screen gave him a go-ahead.
“Let’s say I’m responsible for causing a fatal injury and the victim had a good opportunity to see me as the act was occurring. What are the chances that they can recover eyeflash pictures?”
“Depends on how much damage was received in the process of the death. How did it happen?”
“Privileged communication?”
“Sorry. No.”
“Even under filter?”
“Even. If the mode of death was unique or even highly distinctive and unusual, how can I help but draw the right conclusion? And then I’ll know more than I want to know.”
“It wasn’t unique,” Frazier said. “Or distinctive, or unusual. But I still won’t go into details. I can tell you that the injury wasn’t the sort that would cause specific brain trauma. I mean, nothing like a bullet between the eyes, or falling into a vat of acid, or—”
“All right. I follow. This take place in a major city?”
“Major, yes.”
“In Missouri, Alabama, or Kentucky?”
“None of those,” said Frazier. “It took place in a state where eyeflash recovery is legal. No question of that.”
“And the body? How long after death do you estimate it would have been found?”
“Within minutes, I’d say.”
“And when was that?”
Frazier hesitated. “Within the past twenty-four hours.”
“Then there’s almost total likelihood that there’s a readily recoverable photograph in your victim’s brain of whatever he saw at the moment of death. Beyond much doubt, it’s already been recovered. Are you sure he was looking at you as he died?”
“Straight at me.”
“My guess is there’s probably a warrant out for you already. If you want me to represent you, kill the privacy filter so I can confirm who you are, and we’ll discuss our options.”
“Later,” Frazier said. “I think I’d rather try to make a run for it.”
“But the chances of your getting away with—”
“This is something I need to do,” said Frazier. “I’ll talk to you some other time.”
He was almost certainly cooked. He knew that. He had wasted critical time running frantically back and forth across the continent yesterday, when he should have been transferring funds, setting up secure refuges and such. The only question now was whether they were already looking for him, in which case there’d be blocks on his accounts everywhere, a passport screen at every airport, worldwide interdicts of all sorts. But if that was so they’d already have traced him to this hotel. Evidently, they hadn’t, which meant that they hadn’t yet uncovered the Southeast Asia trading alias and put interdicts on that. Well, it was just a lousy manslaughter case, or second-degree at worst: They had more serious things to worry about, he supposed.
Checking out of the hotel without bothering about breakfast, he headed for the airport and used his corporate credit card to buy himself a flight to Belize. There he bought a ticket to Suriname, and just before his plane was due to leave, he tried his personal card in the cash disburser and was pleasantly surprised to find that it hadn’t yet been yanked. He withdrew the maximum. Of course, now there was evidence that Loren Frazier had been in Belize that day, but he wasn’t traveling as Frazier, and he’d be in Suriname before long, and by the time they traced him there, assuming that they could, he’d be somewhere else, under some other name entirely. Maybe if he kept dodging for six or eight months, he’d scramble his trail so thoroughly that they’d never be able to find him. Did they pursue you forever? he wondered. A time must come when they file and forget. Of course, he might not want to keep running forever, either. Already, he missed Marianne. Despite what she had done.
He spent three days in Suriname at a little pastel-green Dutch hotel at the edge of Paramaribo, eating spicy noodle dishes and waiting to be arrested. Nobody bothered him. He used a cash machine again, keying up one of his corporate accounts and transferring a bundle of money into the account of Andreas Schmidt of Zurich, which was a name he had used seven years before for some export-import maneuvers involving Zimbabwe and somehow, he knew not why, had kept alive for eventualities unknown. This was an eventuality now. When he checked the Schmidt account, he found that there was money in it already, significant money, and that his Swiss passport had not yet expired. He requested the Swiss chargé d’affaires in Guyana to prepare a duplicate for him. A quick boat trip up the Marowijne River took him to St. Laurent on the French Guiana side of the river, where he was able to hire a driver to take him to Cayenne, and from there he flew to Georgetown in Guyana. A smiling proxy lawyer named Chatterji obligingly picked up his passport for him from the Swiss, and under the name of Schmidt, he went on to Buenos Aires. There he destroyed all his Frazier documentation. He resisted the temptation to find out whether there was a Frazier interdict out yet. No sense handing them a trail extending to B
uenos Aires just to gratify his curiosity. If they weren’t yet looking for him because he had murdered Hurwitt, they’d be looking for him on a simple missing-persons hook by this time. One way or another, it was best to forget about his previous identity and operate as Schmidt from here on.
This is almost fun, he thought.
But he missed his wife terribly.
While sitting in sidewalk cafés on the broad Avenida Nueve de Julio, feasting on huge parrilladas sluiced down by carafe after carafe of red wine, he brooded obsessively on Marianne’s affair. It made no sense. The world-famous actress and the awkward, rawboned paleontologist: Why? How was it possible? She had been making a commercial at the museum—Frazier, in fact, had helped to set the business up in his capacity as a member of the board of trustees—and Hurwitt, who was the head of the department of invertebrate paleontology, or some such thing, had volunteered to serve as the technical consultant. Very kind of him, everyone said. Taking time away from his scientific work. He seemed so bland, so juiceless: who could suspect him of harboring lust for the glamorous film personality? Nobody would have imagined it. But things must have started almost at once. Some chemistry between them, beyond all understanding. People began to notice and then to give Frazier strange little knowing looks. Eventually, even he caught on. A truly loving husband is generally just about the last one to know, because he will always put the best possible interpretation on the data. But after a time, the accumulation of data becomes impossible to overlook or deny or reason away. There are always small changes when something like that has begun: They start to read books of a kind they’ve never read before; they talk of different things; they may even show some new moves in bed. Then comes the real carelessness, the seemingly unconscious slips that scream the actual nature of the situation. Frazier was forced finally to an acceptance of the truth. It tore at his heart. There was no room in their marriage for such stuff. Despite his money, despite his power, he had never gone in for the casual morality of the intercontinental set, and neither, so he thought, had Marianne. This was the second marriage for both of them: the one that was supposed to carry them happily on to the finish. And now look.
“Señor? Another carafe?”
“No,” he said. “Yes. Yes.” He stared at his plate. It was full of sausages, sweetbreads, grilled steak. Where had all that come from? He was sure he had eaten everything. It must have grown back. Moodily, he stabbed a plump blood sausage and ate without noticing. Took a drink. They mixed the wine with Seltzer water here, half and half. Maybe it helped you put away those tons of meat more easily.
Afterward, strolling along the narrow, glittering Calle Florida, with the stylish evening promenade flowing past him on both sides, he caught sight of Marianne coming out of a jeweler’s shop. She wore Gaucho leathers, emerald earrings, skin-tight trousers of gold brocade. He grunted as though he had been struck and pressed his elbows against his sides as one might do if expecting a second blow. Then an elegant young Argentinean uncoiled himself from a curbside table and trotted quickly toward her, and they laughed and embraced and ran off arm in arm, sweeping right past him without even a glance. He remembered now: Women all over the world were wearing Marianne’s face this season. This one, in fact, was too tall by half a head. But he would have to be prepared for such incidents wherever he went. Mariannes everywhere, bludgeoning him with their beauty and never even knowing what they had done. He found himself wishing that the one who had been sleeping with that museum man was just another Marianne clone, that the real one was at home alone now, waiting for him, wondering, wondering.
In Montreal six weeks later, using a privacy filter and one of his corporate cards, he risked putting through a call to his apartment and discovered that there was an interdict on his line. When he tried the office number, an android mask appeared on the screen, and he was blandly told that Mr. Frazier was unavailable. The android didn’t know when Mr. Frazier would be available. Frazier asked for Markman, his executive assistant, and a moment later a bleak, harried, barely recognizable face looked out at him. Frazier explained that he was a representative of the Bucharest account, calling about a highly sensitive matter. “Don’t you know?” Markman said. “Mr. Frazier’s disappeared. The police are looking for him.” Frazier asked why, and Markman’s face dissolved in an agony of shame, bewilderment, protective zeal. “There’s a criminal charge against him,” Markman whispered, nearly in tears.
He called his lawyer next and said, “I’m calling about the Frazier case. I don’t want to kill the filter, but I imagine you won’t have much trouble figuring out who I am.”
“I imagine I won’t. Just don’t tell me where you are, OK?”
The situation was about as he expected. They had recovered the murder prints from the dead man’s eyes: a nice shot, embedded deep in the cortical tissue, Frazier looming up against Hurwitt, nose to nose, a quick cut to the hand reaching for Hurwitt’s arm, a wild free-form pan to the sky as Frazier lifted Hurwitt up and over the parapet. “Pardon me for saying this, but you looked absolutely deranged,” the lawyer told him. “The prints were on all the networks the next day. Your eyes—it was really scary. I’m absolutely sure we could get impairment of faculties, maybe even crime of passion. Suspended sentence, but, of course, there’d be rehabilitation. I don’t see any way around that, and it could last a year or two, and you might not be as effective in your profession afterward, but considering the circumstances—”
“How’s my wife?” Frazier said. “Do you know anything about what she’s been doing?”
“Well, of course I don’t represent her, you realize. But she does get in the news. She’s said to be traveling.”
“Where?”
“I couldn’t say. Look, I can try to find out, if you’d like to call back this time tomorrow. Only, I suggest that for your own good, you call me at a different number, which is—”
“For my good or for yours?” Frazier said.
“I’m trying to help,” said the lawyer, sounding annoyed.
He took refresher courses in French, Italian and German to give himself a little extra plausibility in the Andreas Schmidt identity and cultivated a mild Teutonic accent. As long as he didn’t run up against any real Swiss who wanted to gabble with him in Romansh or Schweizerdeutsch, he suspected he’d make out all right. He kept on moving—Strasbourg, Athens, Haifa, Tunis. Even though he knew that no further fund transfers were possible, there was enough money stashed under the Schmidt account to keep him going nicely for ten or 15 years, and by then, he hoped to have this thing figured out.
He saw Mariannes in Tel Aviv, in Heraklion on Crete and in Sidi Bou Said, just outside Tunis. They were all clones, of course. He recognized that after just a quick, queasy instant. Still, seeing that delicate high-bridged nose once again, those splendid amethyst eyes, those tight auburn ringlets, it was all he could do to keep himself from going up to them and throwing his arms around them, and he had to force himself each time to turn away, biting down hard on his lip.
In London, outside the Connaught, he saw the real thing. The Connaught was where they had spent their wedding trip back in ’07, and he winced at the sight of its familiar grand façade, and winced even more when Marianne came out, young and radiant, wearing a shimmering silver cloud. Dazzling light streamed from her. He had no doubt that this was no trendy clone but the true Marianne: She moved in that easy, confident way, with that regal joy in her own beauty, that no cosmetic surgeon could ever impart, even to the most intent imitator. The pavement itself seemed to do her homage. But then Frazier saw that the man on whose arm she walked was himself, young and radiant, too, the Loren Frazier of that honeymoon journey of ten years back, his hair dark and thick, his love of life and success and his magnificent new wife cloaking him like an imperial mantle; and Frazier realized that he must merely be hallucinating, that the breakdown had moved on to a new and more serious stage. He stood gaping while Mr. and Mrs. Frazier swept through him like the phantoms they were and away in the direc
tion of Grosvenor Square, and then he staggered and nearly fell. To the Connaught doorman, he admitted that he was unwell, and because he was well dressed and spoke with the hint of an accent and was able to find a 20-sovereign piece in the nick of time, the doorman helped him into a cab and expressed his deepest concern. Back at his own hotel, ten minutes over on the other side of Mayfair, he had three quick gins in a row and sat shivering for an hour before the image faded from his mind.
“I advise you to give yourself up,” the lawyer said, when Frazier called him from Nairobi. “Of course, you can keep on running as long as you like. But you’re wearing yourself out, and sooner or later, someone will spot you, so why keep on delaying the inevitable?”
“Have you spoken to Marianne lately?”
“She wishes you’d come back. She wants to write to you, or call you, or even come and see you, wherever you are. But I’ve told her you refuse to provide me with any information about your location. Is that still your position?”
“I don’t want to see her or hear from her.”
“She loves you.”
“I’m a homicidal maniac. I might do the same thing to her that I did to Hurwitt.”
“Surely you don’t really believe—”
“No,” Frazier said. “Not really.”
“Then let me give her an address for you, at least, and she can write to you.”
“It could be a trap, couldn’t it?”
“Surely you can’t possibly believe—”
“Who knows? Anything’s possible.”
“A postal box in Caracas, say,” the lawyer suggested, “and let’s say that you’re in Rio, for the sake of the discussion, and I arrange an intermediary to pick up the letter and forward it care of American Express in Lima, and then on some day of your own choosing, known to nobody else, you make a quick trip in and out of Peru and—”
We Are for the Dark - 1987–90 - The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume Seven Page 2