DAVID QUANTICK
“There is no longer any need, in explaining the phenomena of combustion,
to suppose that there exists an immense quantity of
fixed fire in all bodies.”
—Antoine Lavoisier, Memoir on Combustion in General, 1777
She was sitting in my office before I’d even stepped through the door. I must have left the door unlocked: it was a mercy she didn’t find me sleeping at my own desk, an empty bourbon bottle in front of me. It had happened before; once, a prospective client walked in and found me with my face stuck to a case file with my own drool. He was an enormous man who’d lost a tiny dog, and he walked out after I suggested he search his own clothes before hiring me.
But this time I’d at least made it to my car before passing out and waking up just in time to drive home, pass out on the bed, shower, and come back in to work again. To myself, at least, I looked like the shine on an apple. To her, I guess, not so much, judging by the look she gave me as I walked in.
“Relax,” I told her, “this is my office.”
“You’re P. D. Jackson?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Pete died,” I told her. “I took over from him and I haven’t had time to get the sign changed.” I didn’t tell her Pete had been dead six years—you need to inspire your client with confidence whenever possible.
She was still looking at me in an odd way. At first I thought it was the tie, a painted horror with a green parrot on that had not been improved when I spilled mustard on it. Then I realized her gaze was directed an inch or two above the tie, and she was looking at my face. I had caught a look at it myself earlier and I could see her point of view: it was blotchy, and badly shaved, and looked like I’d peeled it off a dead guy.
“I’ve had influenza,” I told her, and sat behind the desk. With something big and heavy between us, she relaxed a little.
“Well,” she said. “Now I’m here, I suppose I’d better get to it.”
For the first time, I got a good look at her. She was what my ex-wife would have called second-glance beautiful—at first glance she was just another city girl, worn down by work and life, but at second glance you saw the beauty, like a piece of music you never cared for that suddenly makes you cry.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“What’s yours?” she said, still suspicious.
I showed her the hunk of wood I’d had made with my name on it. It cost twice what it was worth, and the guy who’d made it spelled my name wrong in two different places, but it would do. It wasn’t my real name anyway—I’d left that in the dust that spawned me.
“My name is Melissa,” she said eventually, like it was an admission of guilt. Maybe it was.
“So what brings you here, Melissa?” I said, trying to sound like a pal and failing. “Lost cat? Lost husband?”
She shook her head. “I’m allergic to cats,” she said. “Husbands, too.”
It was a joke. We were moving closer, like two armies in the night.
“I’ll try and remember that,” I said. “About the cats, that is.”
She gave me a look that said back off, mister. It wasn’t hard to figure out—it was a look I was seeing a lot these days.
“Tell me then,” I began again. “What brings you to me?”
That was when she lost it. Her face was a mess of tears.
“I’m dead,” she said, finally choking the words out through sobs like punches.
“Dead?” I replied. “Why, what did you do? Who’s after you?”
“No,” she said, “you don’t understand.”
“Make me understand,” I said.
“When I say I’m dead,” said Melissa, “I mean I’m dead.”
I must have looked puzzled. I was puzzled.
“I’m dead,” she repeated. “I died. Someone killed me.”
She looked me in the eye. She might have been crazy, but she believed what she was saying alright.
“I was murdered,” Melissa said. “And I want you to find the man who did it.”
I sat back in my chair. For once I was glad of my hangover: it was a cloud to hide inside, a shield against a reality that had suddenly lost its mind and was now running round my office like a cartoon animal, cross-eyed and blowing raspberries at the whole notion of sanity. I took a moment to digest her words.
“If you’re dead,” I said, “how come you’re here, walking and talking? You seem pretty alive to me. Unless this is all a dream or something like that.”
She shook her head.
“This is no dream,” she said. “I’m dead alright.”
And she began to unbutton her blouse.
“Stop right there,” I said. “I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s a little early in the morning and besides, we hardly know each other.”
She gave me a look that would have withered the roses on my desk, if I’d had any.
“Relax,” she said. “You’re safe from my feminine wiles. Like I told you, I’m dead.”
She undid her blouse, right down to the waist, and pulled the fabric away from her throat. I started back in my seat so hard that I nearly kicked the desk over.
There was a hole right in the middle of her rib cage. A big one, big enough for a child to put its fist into.
“It goes all the way through,” she said. “You can see daylight out the back. Wanna?”
“Thanks but no thanks,” I answered. Curiosity overcame revulsion, and I stood up and peered at her front. It was a deep hole alright, black and misshapen inside, like someone had taken a flaming torch and thrust it into her.
“Can I—?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Nobody’s poking me.”
I looked her in the eye.
“I have to,” I said. “I’ve been taken in before.”
She sighed, and buttoned up as far as she could. I took a deep breath, and stuck my finger in the hole.
“Jesus!” I yelled, pulling out my finger. “That’s hot!”
“Believe me now?” she asked, doing up her blouse.
“Maybe,” I said. I frowned. “I don’t get it. How can it be so hot?”
She shrugged. “I haven’t really given it any thought. What with being dead and all.”
“That again.”
“Feel my pulse.”
Now it was my turn to shrug. I put my finger on her wrist. It was warm enough to the touch, but I couldn’t find a pulse. I tried a different finger, the other wrist, her neck: nothing.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“How many more times?” she fired back. “I’m dead. Do I have to call a priest?”
I shook my head. I needed a drink, but all the drink I had was still inside me, stale and resentful.
“You got any money?” I asked her.
She agreed to my usual terms and paid up front, which meant I was able to buy her lunch. We went to Hank’s, where I had coffee and a ham sandwich because hangovers make me hungry, and she had nothing because she was dead.
I wiped away the last fragment of ham from my chin, took out a pad and pencil and wrote Melissa at the top of the page, like a real pro.
“Shaky handwriting,” she noted. “Guess I know where that fee’s going.”
“I get results,” I retorted. “Although normally the client and the corpse have the decency to stay two different people.”
“Maybe I’m the killer too,” Melissa said. “That was a joke, by the way.”
“Yeah, I could tell by the way you smiled when you told it,” I replied. “That was a joke too.”
“I don’t have a lot to smile about right now,” she said, and I felt sorry for her. I didn’t believe she was dead, not for a second, but whatever was really going on, she was in a bad way.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was. This time she really did smile, a smile that made my heart ache, and my loins too. I’m just a guy, after all. “How about you start at the beginning?” I added, pencil at the ready.
So she did.
Her full name was Melissa May Isinglass. She was thirty-four years old, spoke French and Spanish, and had trained as a dancer and a stenographer (“Not at the same time,” she reassured me). She wasn’t from California, but she’d been here about seven years, just long enough to realize that waitressing doesn’t always lead to meetings with big Hollywood producers. She took the steno course and within a month, she had a job with some guy called Andrew Isinglass.
“Same name as you,” I said.
She shot me a dry look.
“Reader, I married him,” she said.
Isinglass was a professor up at the university, a historian. I pictured some elderly baldhead with spectacles draped over his beaky nose, but Melissa showed me a photograph and I had to revise my opinion. He was handsome, chisel-jawed, and only some of his hair had fallen out. Maybe it was love or just constant proximity, but either way, after eight months Melissa and Isinglass were married.
“At first we were very happy,” she began.
“Those five words should be the motto of the American Divorce Society,” I interrupted.
“It wasn’t like that,” said Melissa. “What came between us wasn’t us, it was his work.”
“I guess some guys prefer old books to beautiful girls,” I said.
She smiled as if to say thanks, but it was a pinched smile, as if to say but no thanks.
“He was a nice man,” she said. “He was kind, attentive, he made me happy. And then—”
And then he went nuts, is basically how it went, according to her. Nights in the library, days in the lab—for some reason he had a lab, which is not how they did history in my day, but there he was, reading books and making notes and—
“Making experiments,” Melissa said.
“I thought you said he was a historian?”
“He was,” she agreed. “He said he was researching hypotheses and he couldn’t take them at face value, so he had to test them himself.”
“Hypotheses”—I managed to get the word out without biting my tongue off—“from old books?”
“Yes.”
“I’m no scientist,” I said (I noticed she didn’t contradict me), “but these hypotheses, if they were old, then—wouldn’t they have been tested already? So the people writing the books would have been able to say, hey this hypothesis is a crock?” I had never said the word “hypothesis” so much in my entire life. I was hoping I never would again.
“That’s what I said, more or less,” Melissa agreed. “But Andrew said a true historian takes nothing for granted. And then he said—”
Melissa frowned at the oddness of the memory.
“He said he had to find a way in.”
“A way in to what?”
She shook her head.
“A way in to the future.”
I looked at her.
“These notebooks cost money,” I said. “I’m not just going to fill it with nonsense.”
Melissa took a deep breath.
“Okay,” she said. “But first I need some fresh air. All these cooking smells are making me ill, and jealous.”
We took a walk.
“Andrew wasn’t being entirely honest when he said he was an historian,” said Melissa as we strolled up La Cienega like a young, half-dead couple. “He’d studied a lot of things, but mostly he was a chemist. Or a physicist. Same difference.”
I was about to explain the difference when I saw the tiny smile playing on her lips.
“Either way,” she said, “Andrew was working a lot of different rackets. I soon realized he was plowing through those old books in search of—”
She turned to me.
“He once said to me that history is 1 percent progress and 99 percent debris. Know what he meant by that?”
I shook my head, to save time.
“He meant that all we know from history is the successes. The battles won, the diseases conquered, the problems solved. Everything else goes into the trash. We don’t care who lost the wars, who didn’t find the vaccine, or who failed to solve the mysteries of the universe.”
“You’re pretty eloquent for a dead girl,” I said.
“Oh, you should have heard me when I was alive,” Melissa replied. “I could charm the professors from the trees.”
A sad smile crossed her face, and I realized she must have really loved him, once. Then it was gone, and she went on.
“I said before that Andrew was looking for a way into the future. I didn’t know what he meant, but he told me he could only find that way in by looking in the trash. He said everyone else had failed because they’d stuck to the usual paths. They’d mistaken the passage of time for progress.”
“Quite a talker.”
“That he was. He certainly convinced me,” said Melissa. “Andrew said he was going through all the discarded ideas of history—the trash—to find something the olden days people had missed. Like a…”
“Like a private dick looking for clues at a crime scene after the flatfoots have trampled all over it?” I asked.
“You got it,” she said.
“I don’t understand—well, any of this,” I said. “But especially the part about the way to the future. Was he trying to build a…?” I could scarcely say it.
“A time machine?” finished Melissa. “Not in so many words. He didn’t want to travel in time, he just wanted to stand at the crossroads and look down the paths. The different roads history might have taken.”
“The Devil’s at the crossroads,” I said. It was an old song that just came into my head.
“It was for Andrew,” said Melissa.
She sat on a bench and I sat next to her.
“One day I went into his lab with some papers,” she said. “And he was gone.”
“You mean he’d left you?”
“I mean he was gone,” she said. “You ever walk into a room and you can tell someone just left? Like there’s no one there, but you can feel their presence?”
I nodded. “I had a wife like that once,” I said.
Melissa ignored me. “I was sure he had just gone outside for a cigarette,” she went on. “He wouldn’t let anyone smoke in the lab. I was just reaching for the door handle when I heard him say my name. I turned around, and there was nobody there.”
She had her purse open, looking for her own cigarettes. Then she shook her head.
“Oh, that’s right, I’m dead,” she said.
“The dead can’t smoke?” I asked.
“No breath to inhale,” she explained. “Don’t interrupt me.”
“Sorry.”
“There was nobody there,” she continued. “I looked around and said his name. Nothing. Then once more, my name, out of thin air. Almost like it was inside my head. I sat down. My heart was beating like crazy. ‘Stop it,’ I told him. But he didn’t listen. He just kept saying my name. I was getting more and more scared. Every time he said my name and I couldn’t see him saying it, my pulse sped up. I was getting warmer, too.”
“Warmer?”
“That’s what I said. I was burning up inside. Like fear had caught fire inside me. There was this terrible heat,” she said, gesturing to her breast. “A rod of pain, white hot like a poker, right through me. I could feel my bones melting, I could feel my flesh burning. I started to black out. I knew I was dying. And then I saw him.”
“Andrew?”
“Andrew.” She nodded, her face pale. “He was looking right at me. He wasn’t sad, or angry, or worried, or anything. He was just…studying me. That was the worst part. Much worse than dying. The look on his face, like I was a specimen.”
There were tears in her eyes.
“That was the last thing I saw before I died.”
I’ve met some people in my time. Killers, liars, weepers, laughers, the whole shebang. Every kind of crazy and every shade of nuts. They always have one thing in common. It could be in the eyes, it could be in the voice, but it’s always a tiny sliver of doubt that their version of reality is really the right one. Even the confident ones, the guys who think they should be running the world and we’re all squashed insects on their boot soles, have that moment when the eyes flicker and some tiny corner of their brain is trying to say, wait a minute here.
But Melissa, who said she was dead and had apparently been killed by her invisible husband literally burning her heart out, sounded as normal as whoever the last sane person I’d met was. She was scared and tired and upset and angry in all the ways people who aren’t crazy are, and not once did I detect a sudden twitch of uncertainty in the way she looked or spoke.
How do you believe someone who insists that the impossible is true?
You trust them, that’s how.
I dropped the notebook in the nearest trash can and took Melissa’s hand.
“I believe you,” I said.
She looked me right in the eyes.
“I should hope so,” she said. “Now, please, I need you to find Andrew.”
She yawned.
“I have to sleep,” she said. “Let’s hope I wake up, right?”
I didn’t think that was funny.
“You can’t go home,” I said.
“I’m not staying at yours,” she said, indignantly. “I’m a lady. Besides, if your place smells anything like your clothes, I will definitely die if I sleep there.”
I still wasn’t laughing. I peeled off a slice of the money she’d given me and gave her the address of a half-decent motel. Then I hailed a cab.
“I’ll call you tonight,” I said as she got in.
“Be careful,” said Melissa. “He’s already killed me, and I’m his wife.”
I said nothing to that. There’s a time for comedy and a time to be serious.
I stepped into a telephone kiosk and fanned open the phone book. Isinglass was hardly a common name. There were two listed—one was a dry cleaners’ and the other was up in the Hills. I took a crazy gamble and wrote down the address in the Hills.
Half an hour later, I was in a bar, waiting for night to fall. An hour after that, full to the gills with lime soda, I drove up to the house. It was a huge mansion, the kind of place that wanted to be a lunatic asylum when it grew up, but for now, had to settle for being cheerlessly imposing. A long gravel drive led up to a front door so imposing that I felt bad knocking on it without a mob of angry peasants behind me with flaming torches. Instead, I rang the doorbell. Nobody answered. The door was locked, so I walked around the place. No dogs attacked me and no burly henchmen ran out and clubbed me to the ground. After a couple of minutes, I found a half-open ground-floor window, raised it, and climbed inside the house.
The room I was in was some kind of library, which figured. In the darkness it was hard to make out the names of the books, but they were all pretty old and had gold writing on the spines, so I guessed they weren’t any fun. I left the room and made my way into the entrance hall. An enormous stuffed bear, arms outstretched like it had been pushing a trolley when it was killed, stood next to a huge wooden staircase, apparently made for giants. I climbed the stairs half a step at a time and found myself on a landing whose walls were studded with portraits of people who by the look of it had all been painted with pickles up their backsides. Down the landing, I could see a door, surrounded by thin lines of light. I slid along the wall like I was my own shadow, hesitated for a moment, and swung into the room.
And then I felt it. The exact same sensation that Melissa had described to me. Like someone had just left the room. An absence that was equally a presence. Pointlessly, I looked around for evidence of whoever it might be—a cigarette still smoking in an ashtray, maybe—but there was nothing, only a feeling. There was something else too, something Melissa might not have noticed because she was used to it. A smell, the scent of strong aftershave, astringent rather than perfumed: the kind of thing a man might buy who didn’t really care for such things. An absent-minded professor type of guy.
“Andrew,” I said. “I know you’re here. Show yourself.”
For a moment there was nothing, and I felt foolish for addressing an empty room. Then—with, I swear, an audible pop!—he was there in front of me. Professor Andrew Isinglass, hair unkempt, manly chin jutting, lab coat done up wrong.
“How did you know I was here?” he asked.
“When you’ve been jumped from behind in dark alleyways as often as I have—” I began. Isinglass held up a hand to interrupt me. I guessed he was the rhetorical kind of professor.
“I have work to do,” he said. “Important work. What do you want?”
“I’m taking you in for murder,” I said. “Melissa May Isinglass.”
He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. I could see his point. I was arresting him for killing someone I’d just sent away in a cab.
“Melissa isn’t dead,” he said. “She’s still walking around and talking. And I mean talking. The chewing-out she gave me after—”
Now it was my turn to interrupt him. “After you killed her?” I asked.
Isinglass said nothing. He was fiddling with something on his wrist. I picked up a large book—An Experiment In Time, or some such—and threw it at his hand. The something fell off and I caught it.
“What’s this?” I said.
He looked pale and furious all at the same time.
“Give me that,” he said.
“Not until you answer my questions,” I retorted.
His shoulders sagged.
“You’re not taking me in?”
“Like you said, Melissa’s still walking and talking. You can’t have habeas corpus when the corpus is still paying your expenses.”
“Melissa hired you to investigate her own—” He wouldn’t say the word.
“Death, that’s right. Which is what I’m doing right now. So what say you clear this up for me, before I accidentally break this thing you value so highly?”
His eyes fell on the object I had taken from him. It was a large ugly bracelet made of metal and porcelain, with two pocket watches crudely soldered onto it.
“Alright,” he sighed.
“That’s better,” I said. “Now pull up a lab stool and let’s get cozy.”
“I’m an historian by profession but, unlike my colleagues who get all of their satisfaction from raking over the ashes of the past, I like my research to have a practical application. People are always talking about learning from history, but they never mean it. They just like to catalogue the past and stick it up in the attic like bundles of old newspapers, never to be read again. Whereas I’m more like someone who actually does read those old newspapers, scanning them from front page to back page, looking for stories the attic-fillers missed.
“History is full of roads not taken, and ideas not taken up. I wanted to go back and see if I could find those ideas. What if someone had found a way to build an internal combustion engine way back when, but they hadn’t been taken seriously because they were a religious crank or a woman? What if there was a lost cure for the common cold, or a cheaper form of electricity? Some people thought Tesla had found that, but Edison beat him to the punch. Imagine if we could live in Tesla’s world, not Edison’s.
“Gradually I began to assemble a case history of inventions, ideas, and discoveries that should have been well-known years ago but at the time were suppressed, or ignored, or just laughed at. At that time my ambitions were narrow. I would publish them all in a book and maybe it would change things, maybe not.”
He took a cigarette from a pack but didn’t offer me one. These great men, eh?
“But the more I came to think about it,” said Isinglass, “the more I realized it was too late. The big corporations would block any ideas that challenged them. And I hadn’t found any olden-days cures for the common cold. I hadn’t even found a good way of removing warts. I needed to think bigger. I needed to forget the specific inventions and discoveries, and focus on the ideas.”
He looked at me. I looked at his cigarette. He got the idea and offered me the pack.
“You know the story of the jet engine?” he asked.
“I know what a jet engine is,” I replied. “I read about it in a girlie magazine, I think.”
“The jet engine is a comparatively new invention,” Isinglass said. “But it wasn’t something that a single guy dreamed up one day. It was more a possibility that occurred to engineers and scientists all around the world at the same time. The British thought of it about the same time the Germans did, and so did we, and the French.”
“That’s nice,” I said, not taking his point.
“Because it wasn’t just an invention,” said Isinglass. “It was an idea. An idea whose time had come. And that’s how things happen. Inventions don’t come along because some guy is messing about in his workshop one afternoon and decides to stick some pipes on an aero engine. It’s because there was an idea in the air, just hanging there.
“That’s when it came to me,” Isinglass said, a glassy look in his eye. “If I wanted to change anything, I had to change the idea.”
“You’ve lost me,” I said. Isinglass didn’t look surprised. He just carried on talking.
“If I could change the way people thought about things,” he said, “if I could go back in time and change the prevailing ideas, then I could influence the development of the world.”
“If I could go back in time,” I said, humoring him, “I’d kill that bastard Hitler. I lost too many good friends in that war.”
Now Isinglass’s eyes were glistening.
“But why kill Hitler when you could kill fascism?” he asked. “Why murder a man when you could root out the idea that perverted the minds of that man’s followers?”
I nodded.
“Great idea,” I said. “I mean if you had a—”
I looked at the metal bracelet I was holding, the one with the two pocket watches.
“Exactly,” said Isinglass. “Exactly.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
“I told you, I’m a researcher,” Isinglass replied. “I found an essay here, a pamphlet there, and even some diagrams. People have been trying to do this for years. They just never pulled it all together.”
“You’re so public-spirited,” I said. “Why not give the information to the government? Or Ford?”
As the words left my mouth, I already knew the answer.
“Because they’d bury it,” said Isinglass. “Or sell it, or give it to the military. No, the only way I could do this was by myself.”
The way he told it, he spent months building the bracelet while his marriage went to hell.
“I was trying to be a husband and to save the world,” he said, a sentence which would drive any woman away. “And I was trying to find the answer. Something I could use to change the negative patterns of history.”
“Did you find it?” I asked, casually.
He smiled. It was a sad smile, but also superior.
“Do you know what phlogiston is?” he asked.
I shook my head. “The Congressman for Maine?” I asked. “An Italian tenor? No, wait, I have it. That old Greek barber on Sunset.”
He practically sneered at me.
“Phlogiston’s not a person,” he said. “It’s an idea. There was a time when it was the biggest idea of them all.”
I won’t bore you with the details, not like he bored me with them, but it seems that once upon a time, what passed for scientists in the eighteenth century were trying to find some explanation for, essentially, everything. And they came up with the dumbest idea ever: a substance that you couldn’t see, or smell, or touch, or hear, that was everywhere. It was called—yes, you’re ahead of me—phlogiston, and it was the mysterious element that explained how we breathe and how we live. You couldn’t see it, like I say, but it was there. It was the Emperor’s New Ingredient X. But it was the big cheese among ideas for years, until someone discovered oxygen, which had the distinct advantage over phlogiston of being actually real.
“So what?” I said.
“So what if they were wrong?” said Isinglass. “What if modern science—because Lavoisier’s interpolations on Priestley’s discoveries are arguably the first building blocks of science today—was built on a lie?”
“What if it wasn’t?” I shot back, but he didn’t seem to hear me.
“All I had to do was move things around a little,” said Isinglass. “Make sure phlogiston stayed the dominant idea in science, and bingo—save the world.”
“Just like that,” I said.
“Just like that,” he agreed.
I stared at him.
“So you went back in time, destroyed all the evidence that said oxygen’s our man, and that was it?” I asked.
“That was the plan,” he said.
“What went wrong?”
For the first time since we’d met, Isinglass looked ashamed.
“Lavoisier’s work, his notes and books, were all in French,” he said.
“Don’t tell me,” I replied. “You don’t speak French.”
Fortunately, Isinglass knew someone who did: his wife, Melissa. Without explaining what he was doing, he gave her a second bracelet, told her to hang on, and—just like that—dropped them both off at the corner of Paris and Eighteenth.
“The shock nearly killed her,” he said, a little too matter-of-factly for my liking. “And she wouldn’t cooperate at first. She just stood there, shaking.”
“Do you blame her?” I asked, angrily.
“I had no choice,” he said. “Besides, when I did…persuade her to find the books I needed to destroy, something went wrong. The room was flickering, in and out of vision. Then it was two rooms. Then one, then two.”
“You been at the brandy?” I asked.
He shook his head impatiently.
“Changing history is fine, unless you’re at the point of change,” he said. “We were at the crossroads of two worlds—the one where phlogiston was an outmoded theory, and the one where it was real. History was changing, it was unstable, and it was fighting back.”
“Then what?”
“Then Melissa started to burn.”
I stared at him.
“You mean the room caught fire?”
“No,” he said. “Phlogiston—one of its properties is that it contains fire. They called it ‘fixed fire.’ The idea was that it’s in everything, so when something catches fire, it’s just the fire inside it being released.
“Don’t you see?” he said, cold fury in his voice. “The changes I caused made phlogiston real. And the distortion of the two worlds…”
“It made the fire burn,” I said.
“Melissa screamed and tried to beat it out, but it was inside her,” said Isinglass. “I waited for her to die, or something, but she was trapped between two worlds. All I could think of was maybe, if I pushed her back to this world and this time…”
“That’s what she saw,” I said. “She saw you looking at her from the other place. But how come she didn’t mention the other stuff? The books and room?”
“The shock,” said Isinglass. “It removed her memories. I came back as soon as I could. I put the books back, restored time. The plan had failed, for now, but at least I’d made everything okay again.”
“Everything apart from Melissa,” I said, and launched a punch at him. Isinglass caught my fist. He was surprisingly strong for a professor.
“Put her out of her misery,” he said. “She’s neither dead nor alive, a creature of two worlds.”
“She’s more alive than you’ll ever be,” I said. Then I stopped. I had an idea.
“Enough of this,” I said. “I’m calling the cops.”
“What? But I’ve committed no crime.”
“All I have to say is your wife came to see me, said you’d been threatening her, and when you can’t produce her, you’ll be the first suspect.”
“What about the body? Besides, I’ll just say she walked out on me.”
“Without packing a single bag?”
He gave me a searching look.
“What do you want?”
I told him. He didn’t like it.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Is that a phone over there?”
He didn’t look happy, but I didn’t care. I had him and he knew it.
“Alright,” he snapped.
“Great,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to see Paris.”
He gave me the second bracelet he’d made for Melissa, made some adjustments, and then we were there. A room full of books. And even though there was no one there, no footmen in periwigs or women in voluminous frocks, I could tell that I was in the past. Maybe it was the light, maybe the smell, maybe just the sound of carts and horses in the distance, but I knew. I was in Paris, in the eighteenth century.
“This is the exact spot?” I asked.
“Five minutes before it happened,” he said.
“Alright,” I said. “When they get there—when you and Melissa get here, I mean—”
“I know,” he said, “I explain what happened, and I tell them to get the hell out of here.”
“Good boy,” I said.
“Not quite,” he replied, and pulled a knife on me.
I looked at it.
“I’m surprised you didn’t bring a gun,” I said.
“I couldn’t risk destroying books,” Isinglass replied.
“Nice priorities,” I said, and kicked him in the crotch. He shot backward like a burst zeppelin. I punched him in the face three times for luck and once more for fun. Then I pulled off his bracelet, jabbed at mine, and I was gone.
I’m finding it harder and harder to remember what happened. I know there was a guy, and a library. I have some books on my desk, but I don’t know where they came from. One is called Some Curious Trials Of Yore, and there’s a folded corner of paper on a chapter about some poor guy in Paris, way back when. He couldn’t speak French, but he’d been caught red-handed stealing books in some aristo’s library, so that was that.
I put the book in my desk drawer. There was a bottle of bourbon there too, but for some reason I didn’t feel now was the time.
There was a knock at the door. I closed the drawer and a woman came in. She looked worried and tired, but she was beautiful.
“My name is Melissa Isinglass,” she said. “My husband is missing.”
“You want me to find him?” I asked.
She looked me right in the eye and smiled. It was the kind of smile a sunny morning might be jealous of.
“I thought I did,” she said. “But now I’m not so sure.”