April 4

“MY FAVORITE DISH on my menu, sweetheart, swear to God.” Nestor lays the plate in front of me. “People come in, they sit down, they see ‘vegetarian moussaka,’ they think, If moussaka ain’t meat it ain’t moussaka, so they order the steak, the pork belly, the lamb chops. They dunno what they missing. Go on. Taste. My own mother, God watch over her soul, that’s her recipe. Hell of a lady. Navy SEALs, ninjas, those Mafia guys, next to a Greek momma, they a sack of quivering pussies. That’s her, in the frame, over the till.” He points at the white-haired matriarch. “She made this café. She invented no-meat moussaka too, when Mussolini invaded and shot every sheep, every rabbit, every dog. Mama had to—wassaword?—improvise. Marinate the eggplant in red wine. Simmer the lentils, slow. Mushrooms cooked in soy sauce—she added soy sauce after she came to New York. Meatier than meat. Butter in white sauce, cornflour, dash of cream. Heavy on the paprika. That’s the kick. Bon appétit, sweetheart, and”—he passes me a clinking glass of iced tap water—“save space for dessert. You too skinny.”

“Skinny,” I pat my midriff, “is not one of my worries.”

Off he drifts, deftly avoided by higher-speed younger staff. I fork an eggplant and squish up some white sauce, smoosh on a mushroom and eat. Taste being the blood of memory, I remember 1969, when Yu Leon Marinus was teaching only a few blocks away, Old Nestor was Young Nestor, and the white-haired lady in the frame, upon learning that the Greek-speaking Chinaman was a doctor, held me up to her sons as the American Dream incarnate. She gave me a square of baklava with my coffee every time I came here, which was often. I’d like to ask when she passed away, but my curiosity might attract suspicion, so I downstream today’s New York Times and flick to the crossword. But it’s no good.

I can’t stop thinking about Esther Little …

IN 1871 PABLO Antay Marinus turned forty. He had inherited enough Latino DNA from his Catalan father to pass as Spanish, so he signed as a ship’s surgeon aboard an aging Yankee clipper, the Prophetess, at Rio de Janeiro, bound for Batavia in the Dutch East Indies, via Cape Town. Notwithstanding a typhoon of Old Testament fury, an outbreak of ship fever that killed a dozen sailors, and a skirmish with corsairs off Panaitan Island, we limped into Batavia on Christmas Day. Lucas Marinus had visited the place eighty years before, and the malarial garrison town I remembered was now a malarial city. One cannot cross the same river twice. I traveled inland to botanize around Buitenzorg, but the brutality meted out by Europeans to the Javanese natives robbed me of all pleasure in Javanese flora, and when the Prophetess slipped anchor in January for the youthful Swan River Colony in Western Australia, I wasn’t sorry to leave. I’d never set foot on the southern continent in my entire metalife, so when our captain gave notice of a three-week layover in Fremantle for careening, I decided to spend two of them in the Becher Point wetlands. I engaged an eager-to-please local man named Caleb Warren and his long-suffering mule. Prior to the 1890s Gold Rush, Perth was a township of only a few hundred wooden dwellings, and within an hour Warren and I were making our way on a rough track through wilderness unchanged for millennia. As the rough track turned notional, Caleb Warren turned silent and moody. These days, I’d diagnose the man as bipolar. We walked through scrubby hills, swampy gullies, saltwater creeks, and copses of leaning paperbark trees. I was content. My sketchbook for February 7, 1872, contains drawings of six species of frog, a detailed description of a bandicoot, a botched sketch of a royal spoonbill, and a passable watercolor of Jervoise Bay. Night fell and we camped in a circle of rocks atop a low cliff. I asked my guide if Aborigines were likely to approach our fire. Caleb Warren slapped the butt of his rifle and announced, “Let the bastards try. We’ll be ready.” Pablo Antay recorded his impressions of the deep breakers and spatter of spray, the droning babel of insect scratches, mammalian barks, and the calls of birds. We ate “bush duff” with blood sausage and beans. My guide drank rum like water, and answered, “Who gives a damn?” to anything I said. Warren was a problem I’d have to fix the following day. I watched the stars and thought of other lives. I don’t know how much time passed before I noticed a small mouse skip up Warren’s forearm, onto his hand, and up the stick that served as a toasting fork to the greasy lump of sausage impaled there. I hadn’t hiatused the man. Warren’s eyes were open but he didn’t reply or stir …

… as four tall natives with hunting spears slipped into the globe of firelight. A scrawny dog with a stumpy tail sniffed around. I stood up, uncertain whether to run, talk, brandish my knife, or egress. The visitors ignored Caleb Warren, who was still frozen out of time. They were barefoot and wore a mixture of settlers’ breeches and shirts, Noongar skin cloaks, and loincloths. One wore a bone through his nose and all were ritually scarred. They were warriors. Whatever the costume, context, or century, one knows. I held up my hands to show I had no weapons, but the men’s intentions were unreadable. I was afraid. Egression in those days took me ten or fifteen seconds, much longer than four spearmen needed to end Pablo Antay’s peripatetic life, and death by skewering is quick but unpleasant. Then a pale, all skin-and-bone woman moved into the firelight. Her hair was tied back and she wore a shapeless cassock of the type handed out by missionaries faced with large quantities of native skin to cover up. Her age was hard to guess. She walked with a lopsided gait and she inspected me at close range with a critical eye, as if I were a horse she was having second thoughts about buying. “Don’t fret. If we want kill, y’be dead hours ago.”

“You speak English,” I blurted.

“M’father taught me.” She spoke to the warriors in what I would soon recognize as Noongar and sat on a rock by the fire. One of them prised the stick out of Caleb Warren’s fingers and sniffed the sausage. He took a cautious bite, and another. “Y’guide’s a baddun.” The woman spoke to the fire while addressing me. “He’s a plan to fill y’with grog, hit y’head, take y’money, throw y’off that cliff. Yer’ve more money’n he’ll see in two year, see. Big …” she searched for the word, “… tempting. That the right word, issit?”

“Temptation, perhaps.”

The woman clicked her tongue. “He’s a plan t’tell Swan River whitefellas you go in bush’n never come back no more. Steal y’goods.”

I asked her, “How can you know that?”

“Fly out.” She touched her forehead and one-handedly mimed a fluttering. “Y’know how. Aye?” She watched my reaction.

I felt a rushing sensation in my chest. “You’re … psychosoteric?”

She leaned closer to the fire. I saw European angles to her jaw and nose. “Big word, mister. Ain’t speak English boola time. F’get boola. But my soul-spot bright.” She tapped her forehead. “You, same. Boylyada maaman. Yurra spirit talker too.”

I tried to etch every detail onto my memory. The four warriors were rifling through Warren’s backpack. The stumpy dog sniffed about. Burning driftwood spat out sparks. Pablo Antay Marinus had happened upon a female Aborigine psychosoteric on the western edge of the Great Southern Continent. She was chewing a sausage now, and belched. “What y’name-it, this … pig-meat-stick?”

“A sausage.”

“Sausage.” She tasted the word. “Mick Little made sausages.”

The statement begged the question: “Who’s Mick Little?”

“This body’s father. Esther Little’s father. Mick Little kill pigs, make sausages, but he die.” She mimed coughing and held out her hand. “Blood. Like this.”

“Your body-father died of tuberculosis? Consumption?”

“That’sitsname it is, aye. Then men sell farm, Esther’s mother, a Noongar woman, she go back in bush. She takes Esther. Esther die, and I go in her body.” She frowned, rocking to and fro on her heels.

After a little time, I spoke up. “This body’s name is Pablo Antay Marinus. But my true name is Marinus. Call me Marinus. Do you have a true name?”

She warmed her hands at the fire. “My Noongar name’s Moombaki, but I’ve a longer name what I ain’t tellin’.”

Now I knew how Xi Lo and Holokai had felt upon entering the Koskov family’s drawing room in Saint Petersburg, fifty years earlier. Quite possibly this Atemporal Sojourner would want nothing to do with Horology, nor care that there were others like her, scattered thinly throughout the world, but I felt heartened that we were a species one individual less endangered than fifteen minutes before. I asked my visitor my next question in subspeech: So do I call you Esther or Moombaki? Time passed and no answer came. The fire shifted its burning bones, and sparks spiraled up as the warriors spoke to one another in quiet voices. Just as I concluded that she wasn’t telepathic, she subreplied: You a wadjela, a whitefella, so t’you, I’m Esther. If yurra Noongar, then I’m Moombaki.

“This is my thirty-sixth body,” I told Esther. “You?”

Esther killed questions she found irrelevant by ignoring them, and she did it now. So I subasked, When did you first come to this land? To Australia?

She patted her dog: I’m always here.

A Sojourner has that luxury. You never left Australia?

She told me, “Aye. I stay on Noongar land.”

I envied her. For a Returnee like myself, each resurrection is a lottery of longitudes, latitudes, and demography. We die, wake up as children forty-nine days later, often on another landmass. Pablo Antay tried to imagine an entire metalife in one place as a Sojourner, migrating out of one old or dying body into a young and healthy one, but never severing one’s ties to a clan and its territory. “How did you find me?”

Esther gave the last lump of sausage to the dog. “The bush talks dunnit? We listen.”

I noticed the four warriors taking the saddlebags from the mule. “Are you stealing my baggage?”

The half-Aborigine rose. We carry y’bags. To our camp. You gunna come?

I looked at Caleb Warren and subworried, Something’ll eat him, if we leave him here. “Or he might just catch fire, or melt.”

Esther inspected her hand. Soon, he wake, his head like bees. He think he kill you already.

WE WALKED MOST of the night to an outcrop whose Noongar name meant “Five Fingers” in English, not far from present-day Armadale. This was home for the warriors’ clan, and the season’s residence for Esther. When day broke, I tried to make myself as useful to my hosts as I could, but although I’d been resurrected as Itsekiri, Kawésqar, and Gurage tribespeople in earlier lives, I’d grown pampered as Lucas Marinus, Klara Koskov, and Pablo Antay, and two centuries had passed since I had hunted and foraged for dinner. I was of more use in helping the women to cure kangaroo hides, setting a broken arm, and gathering bush honey. I also busied myself gratifying my curiosity as a proto-anthropologist: My journals describe the burning of scrubland to smoke out game; totemic animals; a visit by five men from the south to trade red ocher for prized burdun wood; and a paternity suit, settled by Esther, who ingressed into a fetus to perform a psychosoteric DNA test. Esther’s skin-group showed me the pity owed to a simpleminded uncle, a distrust of my Europeanness, and respect for a Boylyada maaman colleague of Moombaki’s. The children were the least reserved. One boy named Kinta used to borrow my jacket and hat and strut about, and they all liked showing off their bushcraft skills to the clumsy pale visitor. My attempts to speak Noongar caused endless amusement, but with the tribe’s help Pablo Antay compiled the best extant glossary of the Noongar language.

Moombaki, I learned, was not thought of as a god but a spirit guardian, a collective memory, a healer, a weapon of last resort, and a sort of assize judge. She moved from skin-group to skin-group at the start of each of the six Noongar seasons, helping each family and clan as best she could, and circulating the idea that violent resistance to the Europeans would result in more dead Noongar. Some called her a traitor, she told me, but by the 1870s her logic was demonstrable. The Europeans were too many, their appetites too voracious, their morality too fickle, and their rifles too accurate. The Noongar’s slim hope of survival lay in adaptation, and if this altered what it meant to be Noongar, what choice was there? Without knowledge of the Ship People’s minds, however, even this slim hope was doomed, and so Moombaki had chosen a ten-year-old half-caste girl for her present sojourn. Similarly, she had invited Pablo Antay to Five Fingers with a view to learning about the world and its peoples.

By night, then, Esther and I sat across the fire from each other at the mouth of her small cave and subspoke about empires, their ascents and falls; about cities, shipbuilding, industry; slavery, the dismemberment of Africa, the genocide of the natives of Van Diemen’s Land; farming, husbandry, factories, telegraphs, newspapers, printing, mathematics, philosophy, law, and money and a hundred other topics. I felt like Lucas Marinus once did, lecturing in the houses of the Nagasaki scholars. I talked about who the settlers landing at Fremantle were, why they had voyaged here, and what they believed, desired, and feared. I tried to explain religion, too, but the Whadjuk Noongar had a distrust of priests after men had distributed blankets “from Jesus” to several clans up the Swan River, only for the recipients to die a few days later of what sounded like smallpox.

In most other subject areas, however, Esther was the teacher. Her metaage became apparent one night when she recited the names of all her previous hosts, and I lined up one pebble per name. There were 207 pebbles. Moombaki sojourned into new hosts when they were about ten and stayed until death, which implied a metalife stretching back approximately seven millennia. This was twice as old as Xi Lo, the oldest Atemporal known to Horology, who at twenty-five centuries was a stripling compared to Esther, whose soul predated Rome, Troy, Egypt, Peking, Nineveh, and Ur. She taught me some of her invocations, and I identified within them various tributaries to the Deep Stream from long before the Schism. On some nights we transversed together, and Esther enfolded my soul in hers so I could spirit-walk much further and faster than I was otherwise able. When she scansioned me I felt like a third-rate poet showing his doggerel to a Shakespeare. When I scansioned her, I felt like a minnow tipped from a jar into a deep inland sea.

TWENTY DAYS AFTER my arrival, I said my goodbyes and set out with Esther toward the Swan River valley accompanied by the four warriors who had escorted us from Jervoise Bay. We headed north from Five Fingers, climbing into the Perth Hills. My guides knew the wooded, trackless slopes as unerringly as Pablo Antay knew the thoroughfares and alleys of Buenos Aires. We camped in a dry creek near a water hole, and after a supper of yam, berries, and duck meat, Pablo Antay fell into steep-sided, slippery sleep. I slept until Esther subwoke me, which is a disorienting reveille. It was still dark, but a predawn wind was stirring the slanting trees into near speech. Esther was outlined against a banksia bush. Blearily, I subasked, All well?

Esther subreplied, Follow. We walked through a stretch of nighttime forest of rustling she-oaks, up a sandstone ridge that cleared the treeline before trifurcating into three “prongs.” Each of these ridges was only a few feet wide, but a hundred paces long, and with steep drops on either side I proceeded with great caution. Esther told me this place was called, descriptively, Emu’s Claw, and led me along the central “toe.” It ended at a lookout point over the Swan River. The looping watercourse was burnished pewter by starlight, and the land was a crumpled patchwork of light and dark blacks. A day’s walk to the west, streaks of surf delineated the ocean, and I guessed that a rough clutter on the north bank of the river was Perth.

Esther sat, so I sat too. A currawong sang throaty gargle phrases in a peppermint tree. I’m gunna teach y’m’true name.

You told me, I subreplied, it would take a day to learn.

Aye, it’s true, but I’m gunna speak it inside y’head, Marinus.

I hesitated. This is a gift I’ll struggle to repay. My true name is only one word long, and you already know that.

“Ain’t y’fault yurra savage,” she said. “Shurrup now. Open up.”

Esther’s soul ingressed and inscribed her long, long, true name onto my memory. Moombaki’s name had grown with the tens, hundreds, and thousands of years since Moombaki’s mother-birth at the Five Fingers, back when it was known as Two Hands. While much of her true name lay beyond my knowledge of the Noongar language, as the minutes passed I understood that her name was also a history of her people, a sort of Bayeux Tapestry that bound myth with loves, births, deaths; hunts, battles, journeys; droughts, fires, storms; and the names of every host within whose body Moombaki had sojourned. With the word Esther her name ended. My visitor egressed and I opened my eyes to find slanted sunlight flaming the canopy below us sharp green, torching the scrub dark gold and reddening the whale-rib clouds, and countless thousands of birds, singing, shrieking, yammering. “Not a bad name,” I said, already feeling the ache of loss.

A marri tree bled gum and starry blooms. Corymbia calophylla.

“Come back anytime,” she said, “or y’kin y’spoke of.”

“I will,” I promised, “but my face will have changed.”

“World’s changin’,” she said. “Even here. Can’t stop it.”

“How’ll we find you, Esther? Me, or Xi Lo, or Holokai?”

Camp here. This place. Emu’s Claw. I’ll know. The Land’ll tell.

I wasn’t surprised to find that she’d gone back. So I set off for Perth, where a dishonorable man called Caleb Warren would soon suffer the fright of his life.

I FINISH FILLING in twenty-seven across—VERTIGO—before looking up to find Iris Marinus-Fenby mirrored in Holly Sykes’s sunglasses. Today’s head-wrap is lilac. I guess her hair only partly recovered from the chemo five years ago. Holly’s indigo dress extends from the buttoned throat to her ankles. “I’m a world-class ignorer of attention-seekers,” Holly slaps the envelope on the table, “but this is so crass, so intrusive, so bizarre, it’s off the scale. So you win. I’m here. I walked down Broadway, and at every crossing I thought, Why give even one minute to this head-meddling nutso? I don’t know how often I almost turned back.”

I ask, “Why didn’t you?”

“ ’Cause I need to know: If Hugo Lamb wishes to contact me, why not do it like everyone else and send an email via my agent? Why send you and this”—she knocks on the envelope—“this tampered-with photo? Does he think it’ll impress me? Reignite old flames? ’Cause if he does he’s in for a heck of a disappointment.”

“Why not sit down and order lunch while I explain?”

“I don’t think so. I only eat lunch with friends.”

“Coffee, then? One drinks coffee with anyone.”

With ill grace, Holly accedes. I mime a cup and mouth “Coffee” at Nestor, who makes a coming-right-up face. “First,” I tell Holly, “Hugo Lamb knows nothing about this. We hope. He’s gone by the name of Marcus Anyder for many years, incidentally.”

“So if Hugo Lamb hasn’t sent you, how can you possibly know that we met years ago in an obscure Swiss ski resort?”

“One of us resides in the Dark Internet. Overhearing things is what he does for a living, as it were.”

“And you. Are you still a Chinese doctor who died in 1984? Or are you alive and female today?”

“I am all those four.” I put a business card on the table. “Dr. Iris Marinus-Fenby. A clinical psychiatrist based in Toronto, though I consult further afield. And, yes, until 1984 I was Yu Leon Marinus.”

Holly removes her sunglasses, scrutinizes the card, and me, with distaste. “I see I have to spell this out, so here goes: I haven’t seen Hugo Lamb since New Year’s Day 1992, when he was in his early twenties, yeah? He’ll be in his midfifties by now. Like me. Now, the manipulator of this image shows Hugo Lamb still looking twenty-five years old, give or take, with the Helix Towers—built in 2018—and iShades hooked over his Qatar 2022 World Cup T-shirt. And the car. Cars didn’t look like that in the nineties. I was there. This photo has been buggered about with. Two questions for you: ‘Why bother?’ and ‘Who bothered?’ ”

A kid at the next table’s playing a 3D app: A kangaroo’s bouncing up a scrolling series of platforms. It’s off-putting. “The photo was taken last July,” I tell Holly. “It has not been altered.”

“So … Hugo Lamb found the fountain of eternal youth?”

A young waiter with Nestor’s heavyweight nose walks by with a T-bone steak sizzling on a hot plate. “Not a fountain, no. A place and a process. Hugo Lamb became an Anchorite of the Chapel of the Blind Cathar in 1992. Since his induction, he hasn’t aged.”

Holly takes this in and puffs out her cheeks. “Well, great. That’s that cleared up. My one-night fling is now … let’s say it, ‘immortal.’ ”

“Immortal with terms and conditions,” I equivocate. “Immortal only in the sense that he doesn’t age.”

Holly’s exasperated. “And nobody’s noticed, of course. Or does his family put it down to moisturizer and quinoa salad?”

“His family believe he drowned in a scuba-diving accident off Rabaul, near New Guinea, in 1996. Go ahead, call them.” I give Holly a card with the Lambs’ London number on it. “Or just shirabu one of his brothers, Alex or Nigel, and ask them.”

Holly stares. “Hugo Lamb faked his own death?”

I sip my tap water. It’s passed through many kidneys. “His new Anchorite friends arranged it. Obtaining a death certificate without a dead body is irksome, but they have years of experience.”

“Stop talking as if I believe you. Anyway, ‘Anchorites’? That’s something … medieval, isn’t it?”

I nod. “An Anchorite was a girl who lived like a hermit in a cell, but in the wall of a church. A living human sacrifice, in a way.”

Nestor drifts up. “One coffee. Say, is your friend hungry?”

“No, thank you,” says Holly. “I … I’ve got no appetite.”

“Come on,” I urge her, “you just walked from Columbus Circle.”

“I’ll bring a menu,” says Nestor. “You a veggie, like your friend?”

“She’s not my friend,” Holly fires back. “I mean, we just met.”

“Friend or not,” says the restaurateur, “a body’s got to eat.”

“I’ll be leaving soon,” declares Holly. “I have to rush.”

“Rush, rush, rush.” Nestor’s nasal hair streams in and out like seaweed. “Too busy to eat, too busy to breathe.” He turns away and turns back. “What’s next? Too busy to live?” Nestor’s gone.

Holly hisses: “Now you made me piss off an elderly Greek.”

“Order his moussaka, then. In my medical view, you don’t eat—”

“Since you’ve raised the subject of medical matters, ‘Dr. Fenby,’ I knew the name was familiar. I checked with Tom Ballantyne, my old GP. You came to my house in Rye when I was very nearly dying of cancer. I could have your medical license revoked.”

“If I was guilty of any malpractice, I would revoke it myself.”

She looks both outraged and baffled. “Why were you in my home?”

“Advising Tom Ballantyne. I was involved in trials of ADC-based drugs in Toronto, and Tom and I both thought your gall-bladder cancer might respond positively. It did.”

“You said you’re a psychiatrist, not an oncologist.”

“I’m a psychiatrist who owns a number of other hats.”

“So you’re claiming that I owe you my life now, are you?”

“Not at all. Or only partly. Cancer recovery is a holistic process, and while the ADCs contributed to your cancer’s remission, they weren’t the only curative agent, I suspect.”

“So … you got to know Tom Ballantyne before my diagnosis? Or … or … just how long have you been watching my life?”

“On and off, since your mother brought you into the consulting room in Gravesend Hospital in 1976.”

“Can you hear yourself? And it’s your actual job to cure people of psychoses and delusions? Now for the last time, why did you send me a digitally jiggled image of a very brief, very ex-boyfriend?”

“I want you to consider that the clause of life which reads ‘What lives must one day die’ can, in rare instances, be renegotiated.”

All the voices in the Santorini Café, all the gossiping, joking, cajoling, flirting, complaining, become, in my ears, a sonic waterfall.

Holly asks, “Dr. Fenby, are you a Scientologist?”

I try not to smile. “To believers in L. Ron Hubbard and the galactic Emperor Xenu, psychiatrists belong in septic tanks.”

“Immortality”—she lowers her voice—“isn’t—bloody—real.”

“But Atemporality, with terms and conditions applied, is.”

Holly looks around, and back. “This is deranged.”

“People said that about you after The Radio People.”

“If I could unwrite that wretched book, I would. Anyway, I don’t hear those voices any longer. Not since Crispin died. Not that that’s any of your goddamn business.”

“Precognition comes and goes,” I snowplow up some spilled sugar granules with my little finger, “mysteriously, like allergies or warts.”

“The big mystery to me is why I’m still sitting here.”

“Guess the name of Hugo Lamb’s mentor in the dark arts.”

“Sauron. Lord Voldemort. John Dee. Louis Cypher. Who?”

“An old friend of yours. Immaculée Constantin.”

Holly rubs at a smear of lipstick on her coffee cup. “I never knew her first name. She’s only referred to as ‘Miss Constantin’ in the book. And in my head. So why are you inventing her first name?”

“I didn’t. It is her given name. Hugo Lamb’s one of her ablest pupils. He’s a superb groomer, and a formidable psychosoteric after only three decades following the Shaded Way.”

“Dr. Iris Marinus-Fenby, what bloody planet are you on?”

“The same one as you. Hugo Lamb now sources prey, just as Miss Constantin sourced you. And if she hadn’t scared you into reporting her so that Yu Leon Marinus was informed about and inoculated you, she would have abducted you and not Jacko.”

Chatter and clinking cutlery is loud and all around us.

Behind us, a girl is dumping her boyfriend in Egyptian Arabic.

“Now, I”—Holly pinches the bridge of her nose—“want to hit you. Really hard. What are, life-trespassing, fantasy-peddling … I—I—I have no words for you.”

“We’re truly sorry for the intrusion, Ms. Sykes. If there was any alternative at all, we wouldn’t be sitting here.”

“ ‘We’ being who, exactly?”

My back straightens a little. “We are Horology.”

Holly heaves a long, long sigh, meaning, Where do I start?

“Please.” I place a green key by her saucer. “Take this.”

She stares at it, then me. “What is it? And why would I?”

A couple of zombie-eyed junior doctors troop by, talking medical prognoses. “This key opens the door to the answers and proof you deserve and need. Once inside, go up the stairs to the roof garden. You’ll find me there with a friend or two.”

She finishes her coffee. “My flight home leaves at three P.M. tomorrow. I’ll be on it, heading home. Keep your key.”

“Holly,” I say gently, “I know you’ve met countless crazies thanks to The Radio People. I know the Jacko bait has been dangled at you before. But please. Take this key. Just in case I’m the real thing. It’s a thousand to one, I know, but I might be. Throw it away at the airport, by all means, but for now, take it. Where’s the harm?”

She holds my gaze for a few seconds, then pushes her empty cup and saucer away, stands, swipes up the key, and puts it into her handbag. She puts two dollars on the photo of Hugo Lamb. “That’s so I owe you nothing,” she mutters. “Don’t call me ‘Holly.’ Goodbye.”

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 699