The Eighty Eighth Key Ch 60 61

Chapter 60

Elizabeth Bullitt walked across Harvard Yard to the T Station across from the Coop. Once there, she hopped on the Red Line towards Mass Gen but got off at MIT; she walked towards the river and to the Physics Department in Maclaurin 4 and, after looking around for a few minutes, found the office she wanted. She looked at her wristwatch before she stepped inside, then finding a few students already there, waiting -- she assumed -- for faculty office hours. She found an empty chair in the small anteroom and sat down, doing her best to blend in.

Almost two hours later the last legitimate student walked into the office; after this student left she heard the professor call out "Next!" and Liz stood and walked inside, then stood before the desk, waiting to be acknowledged.

The woman was tiny and seemed almost owl-like, with hot, inquisitive eyes magnified by eyeglasses as thick as a Coke bottle's, all under a shock of unruly chestnut-colored hair. Her white lab coat was coated in chalk dust and her stockings were bunched in wrinkled rows around her ankles. The poor woman was, Liz could readily see, a total dweeb.

"You aren't in my seminar. Who are you, and what do you want?"

"My name is Elizabeth, and I'm an undergrad at Harvard studying music theory, and I wanted to speak with you about harmonics and quantum wave theory."

The owl's eyes blinked rapidly now. "Oh? And tell me, just how do these things apply to music theory?"

"They don't, at least not directly."

The owl shrugged. "Okay?"

"I'm more interested in harmonically induced states that might enable, well, the ability to perceive time differently."

The owl smiled dismissively. "Indeed. How so?"

"That's what I wanted to talk to you about."

"Well, I would say that such a thing is not possible...unless, of course, you are talking about the sort of metabolic dyschronia that accompanies drinking too much alcohol too quickly."

Liz smiled back as dismissively. "No, not quite. I mean literally to slip back in time, as an observer only, so that you could passively observe events in the past."

"Not possible. If, and I mean if such travel is possible we could only journey to the future times."

Liz nodded. "So...what if I told you that you could slip back in time, and do so with almost no expenditure of energy?"

"Then I would say you are wasting my time. You might also try reaching out to the psychiatric counseling services available to you at Brigham and Women's..."

"Would you like me to show you how?"

The owl's eyes began blinking rapidly again, but she uttered not one word.

"All I need is a piano," Liz added.

Eisenstadt stood and took off her lab coat, revealing an ancient cardigan coated with even older layers of chalk dust. "Come with me," the Nobel Laureate in Physics sighed, as she took off for the Security office.

"I'd rather you not take me to the security guard if you don't mind," Liz said.

"What makes you think I am doing that?"

"Call it a hunch, Dr. Eisenstadt. Look, I need you to trust me...because I need your help, and so do a couple of friends of mine."

"Help? What do you mean by help?"

"Trust me, okay? Now, maybe you'd better come with me..."

+++++

The leather cup on Harry's latest prosthesis chafed against the folds of skin on the stump of his thigh, and after only ten minutes of exercise, the pain was so intense he needed to stop and pull the thing off. The technician examined Harry's skin and made notes, then he and Ida helped Callahan back into bed. She wiped the sweat from his forehead and got him a glass of ice water as he cried in frustration.

"What about my piano?" Harry asked her -- again. "Any word from the moving company yet?"

"We have no room for such a thing here, Harry, and until we know how well you will be able to move around it is pointless to consider buying a house just yet."

"It's not pointless to me, Ida."

"It is too soon, Harry," she said, but she could see the pain in his eyes, almost like the pain of withdrawing from a powerful narcotic, and yet she'd never once considered that music could act like that on the brain.

"Well then, I'd like to return to California, back out to the house at Sea Ranch."

"But I've already told you..."

"I know what you told me, and I'd like to speak to someone from the embassy about my passport. Now, Ida! Today!"

Ida stood and walked out of Harry's room.

She walked to a locked door, opened the lock to her "secret office" and went inside. She dialed Colonel Goodman's number from memory.

+++++

They took a taxi to Kirkland House, her dorm, but she walked with Professor Eisenstadt to the music building. One of the piano rooms was vacant and they went inside.

"You're serious, aren't you?" Eisenstadt said. "I mean, you really think you can do this, right?"

"Why don't you wait and tell me what you think after we do this," Liz said as she sat at an old Steinway grand. She warmed up by playing a few scales, then she turned to Eisenstadt. "Okay, I need you to clear your mind, do whatever you need to do to get that done..."

"What do you recommend?"

"Deep breathing works for me," Liz replied. "Then I'll need you to think about someplace in the past you'd like to see. I'll start playing a piece, and when you're really concentrating on that place I want you to place a hand on my shoulder -- then relax."

"That's it? We're going to think our way to the past?"

"I'm not sure what does it, professor, but I am pretty sure the music has something to do with what happens."

"The music? Is there a certain piece you play?"

"Clear your mind, professor. Clear your mind, then think of a place, a time...while I start to play..."

Liz began a Chopin nocturne -- until she felt Eisenstadt's hand on her shoulder -- then she drifted into Schwarzwald's Fourth, into the critical Fourth Movement, and inside a shimmering instant she found they were hovering above a desk in a small office in a Swiss patent office, looking down at a man as he worked in fading light on a series of equations...

"Dear God-in-heaven," Eisenstadt whispered, "is it him? Is it really our Alfred?"

"You don't have to whisper, Professor. He can't hear us."

"Get me out of here immediately!" Eisenstadt cried suddenly, so Elizabeth simply stopped playing -- and in the next instant they were back in the tiny music room in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Eisenstadt backed away from Liz as if she was some kinda leper, blinking wildly now like a trapped animal backed into the corner of a cage.

"It's alright," Liz reassured the woman, "just breathe easy..."

"That was Imogen Schwarzwald, was it not? Her Fourth Piano Concerto?"

"Yes, of course."

"How did you come to know such an obscure piece of music?"

"My Godfather was her son."

"What?!"

"I grew up with him, professor. After my father passed away he taught me how to play, and you could say he shaped and guided me as a musician..."

"My grandfather," Eisenstadt sighed, now more mystified than before, "worked with Imogen when she was teaching in Copenhagen..."

"I know, Professor. And I think you should understand that it was Professor Schwarzwald who discovered this doorway."

Eisenstadt began pacing the small room, her eyes flashing like a semaphore beating out an SOS as she circled the floor in a manic frenzy. "This friend of yours, your godfather? Is it he who is in trouble?"

Elizabeth nodded. "He's trapped, being held against his will."

"Well then, I owe it to my grandfather to help Imogen's boy. Now, you must tell me what has happened...and leave nothing out..."

+++++

He'd never particularly liked Frank Sinatra or that peculiar brand of glitzy, Las Vegas-driven cabaret music he'd perfected, but there was something to at least one of his songs that had just recently captured Harry Callahan's imagination. Ever since Ida and Didi had started their tag-team assault on his senses, plying him with all his favorite foods throughout each and every day and on into these endless, pain saturated nights, he'd instinctively known something wasn't right, that he was really, in effect, nothing more or less than their prisoner.

But whose was he, really? Who was behind this charade, because surely these two girls weren't.

The notes kept repeating in his mind like an echo fading in the distance, a word just out of reach and always beyond his grasp, perpetually shrouded in fog. He watched Ida in the kitchen, cheerfully whipping up a fresh hollandaise for his Eggs Benedict while she tended to her carefully poaching eggs, while Didi was on her so-called cell-phone to the team working on his prosthesis, confirming an appointment for later that afternoon.

And they had him, he realized, right where they wanted him.

Only now, locked away up here in this ritzy high rise just off the beach in Tel Aviv, he'd lost all touch with his life back in San Francisco -- indeed, with life everywhere. He had no phone of his own, no access to a computer, and, apparently, no passport. No wallet so no money, not even to a credit card. And every time he asked about getting in touch with DD back at the Cat House his query was met with polite evasions about his health, or the state of his leg, or any one of an endless number of seemingly petty, even trivial excuses.

Yet still the music kept playing, the fading echoes tearing away at the air like windmills...until...the music came for him again and he started singing Sinatra's The Tender Trap.

The words came to him -- all of them, in a wild rush! He knew he had those words locked away somewhere, but what had unlocked the door that had kept them away.

He closed his eyes and started playing through the song on the keyboard in his mind, the words coming back to him in a sudden, furious rush now...and he started humming.

"I haven't heard you do that in ages," Ida said as she came to the table, bringing over his eggs as well as a fresh half of grapefruit. "What are you so chipper about this morning?"

"Me?" Callahan sighed. "Chipper?"

"Yes, that sounds very bright and gay! What is it?"

"Oh, nothing much, really. An old Sinatra tune, The Tender Trap, and I've decided it's going to be my declaration of independence."

"Independence?" Didi said, joining them at the table. "Whatever do you need something like that for?"

"Well, because," Harry sighed, looking first at Ida, then at Didi, "because if I don't get a telephone up here, and I mean today, and by that I also mean a telephone that I can use to call the States, then I'm going to throw both of your stupid, skinny asses through that window right over there, and I'm going to laugh while they scrape up your remains off the sidewalk."

Didi smiled and chuckled condescendingly. "Harry...you can't even walk to the bathroom..."

"And why is that, my friend? My dear, very good friend," he added, his voice now dripping in hot, bloody sarcasm. "Why, after how many weeks, or is it months now, of being locked away in this little gilded prison you've whipped up just for me, can I not even wipe my own ass, let alone walk across a room? Hm-m-m? Can you think of a reason, my closest, dearest friend?"

Didi looked away for a moment, her lips quivering, then -- quite angrily -- she threw back her chair and stood before she stomped over to Callahan's. "Go ahead, Harry. Pick me up, right now. Pick me up and carry me over to that fucking window, Harry Callahan, then hold me up and throw me out that window! Go ahead, Harry. Try it, now. I beg you, please, try -- now!" she screamed -- then she pushed Harry's chair back from the table. "You were a man once, weren't you? What's the matter with you, Harry? Cat got your balls and won't give 'em back? Oh, poor Harry! Poor little Harry!"

His eyes bulging, blood vessels in his temples throbbing, he put his hands out on the table and -- he tried -- to push himself up. His arms trembling, his remaining leg almost buckling under the pressure, he stood -- on his own, finally using just the tips of his fingers on the tabletop to steady himself as he fought to remain upright.

"God damn!" Didi cried. "It's about fucking time, Callahan! Is this what it's gonna take to get you up off your ass and moving? Finally?"

Callahan turned and put his fingers around her neck, pure malice in his eyes. "The phone," he gasped, his face red and his lips turning blue. "Today."

"Sure, Harry," she sighed, her victory over him now complete. She'd need to call her father -- immediately! They'd finally had the breakthrough they'd been waiting, and hoping for.

+++++

Dr. Deborah Eisenstadt was a quick study, and she understood all too quickly the implications of this window in time that Imogen Schwarzwald had discovered. Implications this girl from Harvard had yet to even think of. Dangerous implications. Paradoxes in time, certainly, but other potential mishaps awaited the unwary traveler, events which, Eisenstadt feared, could simply undo the fabric of reality. Opening a new, unknown -- let alone unknowable -- dimension was a distinct possibility with such displacements, a possibility that included ending human existence as it was currently understood.

And the more she listened the more afraid she became.

Because some wild-ass cop out in San Francisco had, apparently, stumbled onto, or into, this portal, then, to make matters worse, this Neanderthal idiot -- some kind of homicide detective -- had been tripping along through time for who knew how long? And -- perhaps -- he'd done no real, lasting harm, but that was just an assumption. But if all this was true, Eisenstadt wondered, how long could this happy state of affairs last if this Callahan was out there playing inside the fabric of the universe?

Again, because if this detective was in fact being held against his will, why? Did the people holding him know what he was capable of? Were they planning on exploiting his knowledge? If so, could she and this almost illiterate musician from Harvard -- or was she really a 'cliffie? -- do anything to stop these plans from reaching fruition?

Yet she was troubled by deeper implications.

Because, so far at least, all they could do was travel back in time and observe, yet Elizabeth had told her about an Old Man who was not bound by such limitations. No, this Old Man was interacting with people in the past -- his past, apparently -- and if he was literally interacting with the past then it was more than likely he was trying to shape -- or reshape -- events within his timeline. And if this was the case, not knowing this Old Man's motives might quickly become the most important consideration in all human history.

Or at least currently existing history -- as Eisenstadt understood this current reality.

Yet...if this Old Man could physically slip through time why couldn't she, or even this Elizabeth Bullitt do so, as well? What was his secret?

Instinctively, Eisenstadt understood the Old Man might very well be their ultimate adversary, and if this was true she tried to think ahead a move or two. 'If the Old Man knows Elizabeth is talking to me,' she thought, 'and assuming he understands my background, it's more than likely he'll soon make a move against us, or perhaps just me. So...how do I prepare?'

'By staying one jump ahead of the bastard,' the little voice in her head told her, though perhaps with a bit more certainty than she truly felt.

+++++

She stepped -- quietly -- into her father's office, taking care not to disturb his train of thought. He was reading through a bound report just now, looking up from time to time at screens full of projections -- and lists of looming cost overruns -- all while, apparently, trying not to lose sight of the forest for the trees. Wasn't that the saying he always used?

Keep your eyes on the prize, but don't forget about the bastard sneaking up on you from behind.

She knew he was aware of her presence in the room, yet even so his continuing to ignore her was almost unnerving -- and growing worse with each passing minute. She looked up at the clock on the wall by the door from time to time, her anxiety percolating away now to a slow rolling boil.

"So? What brings you here today?" Colonel Goodman, her father, finally asked.

"A breakthrough, perhaps. Callahan stood today, in anger."

The colonel shrugged. "So? What of it?"

"He is thinking of California again. Of his friends there, of the life he had..."

"We are not ready, Leibchen. And neither is he."

"I know that, Father, yet this was an unexpected bit of progress."

He sighed as he turned and looked out the glass curtain wall over the Tel Aviv skyline in the near distance. "Perhaps this matters. Or perhaps we have been fooling ourselves."

"Father? What has happened?"

"Oh, something. Or...perhaps nothing."

She stared at him now, afraid. It wasn't like him to express befuddlement, not in the least. "Can you tell me anything?"

"Elizabeth Bullitt. She has made contact with a physicist at MIT, no doubt with the idea of trying to get to Harry."

"Can they...?"

"I doubt so -- very much, as a matter of fact. Yet...the possibility still exists."

"What about Richardson, in Palo Alto? Has he made any progress?"

"If he has, we have been unable to learn anything of value. Nothing, really, after events surrounding the crash in Los Angeles."

"Any success on our human trials?"

The colonel shook his head and inhaled sharply through his nose. "No. Richardson's route may turn out to present the only workable solution..."

"And we are too far behind to catch up, are we not?"

Colonel Goodman nodded. "Possibly."

"Then Harry Callahan may be the only means we have to intercede."

The colonel leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers over his chest. Then, looking over his reading glasses, he smiled at his daughter.

+++++

Callahan looked at the phone on the desk, then at his watch. It was early afternoon here, he reckoned, so just about time for DD to get to her office in the Cathouse. He took a long pull from the glass of iced Coca Cola that Ida had just carried out to him, and he closed his eyes and sighed as the cold bubbles played their subtle notes in his mouth.

"Ready for a sandwich?" Ida asked. "Or wait until after you get off your call?"

"No...no...I could eat. Will you join me?" Harry said easily.

"Sure!" Ida said brightly. "Pastrami today? Or chicken salad?"

"Pastrami, I think. With the really hot mustard you got last time."

"Comin' right up," Ida said, but she watched as Callahan picked up the phone and dialed DDs office number in San Francisco. She apparently picked up on the first ring.

"DD? It's Harry."

"Harry? Where the Hell are you?"

"Tel Aviv."

"No shit? Well, how the Hell are you?"

"Pissed. And basically, because I'm being held prisoner."

"What?"

"No passport. Swiss police told me that it had been confiscated, and shortly after that the Israelis basically slipped me out of that hospital, and out of the country, too."

"Indeed. I haven't heard anything about that, Harry. Let me look into it this morning. Are you still in therapy for the leg...?"

"Not really. I'm still waiting for a working leg at this point."

"But...it's been how many weeks?"

"Months, DD. Now...you see the problem?"

"Why haven't you called me?"

"Not allowed?"

He heard DD take a deep breath, and he could hear her pen racing across paper as she scribbled furious sounding notes. "Tel Aviv, you said? Got an address?"

"No, of course not."

"Can you describe the building for me?"

"I guess I'm on about the twentieth floor. All I've seen is beige brick and light blue tile on support columns, and the front of the building is about a block away from the beach."

"...from the beach," he heard DD muttering as she wrote. "Okay, Harry. Got a number I can reach you at?"