The man had been playing possum, Cash decided. For long enough to plan his escape.
Malone came from the Grolochs, knelt beside Norm. 'Now we can't get the news out. What a screw-up. Your friend okay?'
'Just unconscious.'
'Check the woman. The old man's gone. She's going. Wants to talk to you before she does.'
The agent sounded baffled.
Cash went over. Despite her injuries, Miss Groloch remained sitting upright. She had somehow managed to get Fial's head into her lap. Norm felt the man's wrist.
'He's gone,' she said in a voice like a sigh. 'It's God's will. May the one who possessed him… No. He should burn in hell, but not for that. The one who slew him was responsible…' Not only had her English improved, there was an indefinable something about the way she spoke that made Cash suspect some radical changes in her thinking.
'You'd better lie down. Let me see how bad you're hurt.' Three patches of crimson stained her chest.
'No. I am dying. At last. The demon woman… she is almost gone, too.'
'Demon woman?'
'The creature within… that stole my body… The one who was your great-granddaughter.'
'Huh?'
'Be still. Listen. My torments end, and so little time remains.'
Brokenly, ever more weakly, sometimes in words whose meanings she could only guess, the nineteenth- century peasant girl told the twentieth-century policeman of his son and twenty-first-century grandsons and great-granddaughter.
Somewhere in Prague, today, a woman named Ilse Zumsteg had a belly swelling with a son she would name Otho…
Cash didn't believe a word. He didn't dare. This was as crazy as the things John had dreamed up back in the beginning. It had to be the death raving of an insane person.
'Michael,' he whispered.
What sweet vengeances-for the violated peasant girl-must come to be now that she had spoken.
The whole history of a future would be rewritten…
If he could but believe.
Beth knelt beside him, held him, rested her cheek against his arm a moment. Major Tran, barely able to navigate, gently squeezed his other shoulder in a soldier's gesture of reassurance.
'Me and Malone are going to see if we can borrow a phone,' Frank said from the doorway. 'You going to be okay, Norm?'
Norm touched the area where the stray bullet had kissed him. 'Yeah. But ask them to send a priest anyway.'
But he had to do the rites himself, from poor memory.
Miss Groloch died, and left Cash to reflect on the futility of the lives of both her personas-and on the fact that Franz Kafka, too, had come from Prague.
• • •
The lines begin and run off around the ever-curving face of the Klein bottle, seeking their beginnings in any of a thousand directions.
XXX. On the Z Axis;
12 September 1977;
Final Program
Total darkness. Near silence broken only by whispering and restless audience movements.
Suddenly, all-surrounding sound. A crossbreed, falsetto yodel/scream backed by one reverberating chord of the bass guitar. A pillar of red light waxes and wanes with the sound.
Erik Danzer is on.
Nude to the waist, in hip-deep vapor, he rakes his cheeks with his fingernails. He looks like an agonized demon rising from some smoldering lava pit of hell.
Light and sound depart for several seconds.
Sudden light reveals Danzer glaring audience right. Light and sound fade. Repeat, Danzer glaring left.
Harsh electric guitar chords, with the bass throbbing up chills for the spine. Mirror tricks, flashing, put Danzer all over the stage, screaming, 'You! You! You!' while pointing into the audience. 'You, girl!'
The lights remain on, though dimly, throbbing with the master chords. Danzer sometimes seems to be several places at once. The pillar-spot jumps from band member to band member.
The man whose forged German Federal Republic passport bears the joke-name Spuk neither understands nor enjoys. His last encounter with British rock was the Beatles' 'Penny Lane.' He does not know that Harrison, Lennon, McCartney, and Starr have gone their separate ways. He has never heard of 'Crackerbox Palace,' Yoko, Wings, 'No, No, No.'…
