“No, wait. Don't break off. This is important, Mr. Cermak. And I'd be willing to pay for access.”
“Really? How much?”
I gave him a number. It was a minimum amount, but it's always easy enough to increase the offer if necessary.
“Okay,” he said. “I'll do what I can. But payment up front, please.”
“Let's see what you have to offer first.”
“What exactly are you looking for?” His tone softened a bit. Not much, but enough.
“Do you have anything that belonged to him? Correspondence? Diary? Anything like that?”
He had to think about it. “There's a diary. I have a lot of stuff, actually. My wife never throws anything out.”
“What else?”
“Pictures. A lot of pictures. And an award he received. In high school, I think it was. I don't have any correspondence.” He couldn't think of anything else. “Mostly pictures,” he said. “And a notebook.”
“When can we talk?”
I doubted that Gregory Cermak had ever looked much like his brother. Where Eliot could have been a leading man, Gregory might have been a guy who'd spent most of his time hanging out in the woods. He had hard, almost immobile, features, and he was irritable and impatient. He introduced me to his wife, Vella, who seemed beaten down, then made it clear that she must have other things to do.
He didn't have much to tell me, mostly stories about him and Eliot growing up together. His resentment of his brother came through loud and clear. Eliot had been selfish. “Though maybe I shouldn't say that.” The other kids in school hadn't liked him as they had Gregory. “He was always whining about something, but please don't print that. The only reason I'm saying it is so you can understand he wasn't really what everybody thinks now.”
“Greg,” I said, “how do you account for his actions during the earthquake?”
“Look, Chase,” he said, “I'm not saying he was a bad person. If I said that, I'm sorry. It's not what I meant. I just wanted you to understand he was as human as everybody else. He ran into buildings and pulled kids out while everybody else ran in circles and screamed that he'd get himself killed. Which is ultimately what happened.” He said it as if it demonstrated his brother's bad judgment. Then his tone changed: “I like to think that if I'd been there, I'd have done the same thing.”
“You weren't there?”
“No,” he said, in a tone that suggested I wouldn't believe him. “I was on a job.”
“Did you ever meet Robin?”
“Chris Robin? Not really. I saw him at a distance once or twice. I don't think I ever actually talked to him, though.”
“Did they come down from the Skydeck on the shuttle?”
“Yes. Eliot's skimmer was at the terminal. He took Robin home and then rode back to Caton Ferry.”
“He wasn't very lucky, was he?”
“No.” I saw a hint of regret.
“What about the yachts? You know he and Robin lost some yachts?”
“I heard about that, yes.”
“Do you know anything about them?”
“Not really. I joked with Eliot about them. What were there? Three?”
“Four.”
“Okay. Yeah. They'd just take them out somewhere and dump them.”
“And you've no idea why?”
“Eliot said they were junk. They were just using them for experiments.”
“Did he say what kind?” He shook his head. “How about where they went? Did he ever-?”
“No. When I asked Eliot about it, he laughed it off. They bought them, or rather Robin did, and I think they deliberately took them out and got rid of them. But I don't know. Eliot was never inclined to tell me stuff.”
“And you've no idea where?”
“No.” He bit his lower lip. “I remember he said something about one of the yachts, the Firebird, I think it was. The last one.”
“Yes?”
“I remember asking Eliot, just before he left, where he was going. And he said, 'Just for a spin.' I asked him what he meant, and he said two hundred billion klicks. He shrugged, like it was just around the corner.”
“Two hundred billion. You sure?”
“Yeah.”
“It wasn't million?”
“No. It was billion. It stuck in my mind because usually he'd say he was headed for Toxicon, or the Moon, or wherever. But that time, no. It was just two hundred billion klicks. I remember telling him it sounded like a long walk.”
That couldn't be right. Two hundred billion kilometers would take you absolutely nowhere. Well outside the planetary system, but it would deposit you in the pit. In interstellar space.
“What about the Breakwater?” I asked.
“It got junked.”
There were pictures, holograms, even a bust of Eliot sculpted, according to Gregory, by a girlfriend. In school, Eliot had been at the top of his class a few times, and he had framed certificates to testify to it.
I picked up the diary. This was where I expected, hoped, to find everything laid out, explanations of what he and Robin were trying to do. Maybe I'd even get a sense of what had happened on that final fatal night. So I opened it, in Gregory's presence, and made no effort to disguise my disappointment. It covered only his junior and senior years in high school. Mostly it was a record of love affairs and occasional conquests.
“We did it,” he reported at the beginning of one entry. “I never thought Molly would go along. She always went just so far and backed off. But we did it. O happy day-!”
Damn.
O happy day.
So we went through the pictures. I didn't know any of the people in them, except of course Cermak and Robin. And Gregory. Gregory agreed to identify everybody, provided I increased the remuneration. Remuneration might not have been in his vocabulary, actually. “This is taking up my time,” he said by way of explanation. “And I should warn you up front that some of these people, a lot of them, actually, I don't know.”
Whatever Eliot had been, Gregory was not. He grumbled that I wasn't moving fast enough. He ignored Vella when she arrived with some muffins and fruit juice. She'd probably been attractive when she took her place with him at the altar. He rolled his eyes a lot and didn't seem able to get comfortable in his chair.
Nevertheless, he helped and I made notes. “This was Dr. Farley, the family physician. That was one of Eliot's girlfriends. Yolinda Something-or-other. Don't know who this one is. Oh, yes, that's Talia, his first wife.”
“He was married?”
“Twice. The other one was, um-” He pushed back in his chair, opened the door to the living room, and called to his wife. “Vella, what was the name of Eliot's second wife?”
“Akri,” she said.
“They divorced him?” I asked. “Both wives?”
“Talia did. Akri, I think, just let the marriage lapse.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
“It hardly matters now.”
And here was the picture of Cermak and Robin that had been in the book. And a few more. A couple with Cermak and Akri. One showing Robin sitting in the right-hand seat in a cockpit. “The Breakwater?” I asked.
Gregory shrugged. “Who the hell knows?”
“You were never in it?”
“No. Not me. I like to keep both feet on the ground.”
More pictures from the cockpit. In one, Eliot was looking out at an enormous set of rings. Robin, in another, was just sitting, trying to smile, and not doing a very good job of it, while the same rings cut across the wraparound. I wondered where they were. The instrument panel was visible, but I couldn't make out any details.
