The Teleportation Accident (29 page)

‘What is it?’

‘He wouldn’t tell me the answer. He’s secretive sometimes. But I know. I worked it out. It’s love, Egon. Love can uproot almost anything.’

‘You think love makes the Teleportation Device run?’

‘Yes. The reason it works is that . . . Oh, Egon, I love him!’

‘Who?’

‘The Professor, of course. I love him! He’s the most wonderful man I’ve ever met. He’s so clever and kind and honest and dedicated.’ Just talking about it seemed to make her squirm into herself with pleasure like someone trying on a new fur coat for the first time. ‘And now I know he’s brave, too! You saw how he was, after what happened. And then after you left I started crying and he came upstairs and he knew exactly what to say. I love him so much. I go to bed thinking about him and I wake up thinking about him and then I’m allowed to spend all afternoon with him. I’m so lucky he works here at the weekends, too – I can’t stand my days off.’

‘So you’re fucking him?’

She snorted. ‘No, I am not, you reptile! We’ve never so much as exchanged a significant glance. He doesn’t even suspect how I feel.’

‘Why don’t you tell him?’

‘I couldn’t. I’d be too humiliated. I know a genius like him would never be interested in a girl like me. He’d be nice about it, of course, but if he ever found out, I’d just wither away.’

‘But, Adele, you’re the most exquisite girl I’ve ever met. He’s only a boring scientist.’

‘That shows you shallow you are, Egon. He’s a great man. He’s invented a teleportation device.’

‘So have I, as it happens.’

‘But this one is going to change history.’

‘And it works because you’re so in love with him. So who is
he
in love with?’

‘No one,’ replied Adele, showing a crackle of hypothetical jealousy. ‘He’s too wedded to science.’

‘So how does it work for him?’

Adele bit her lip. ‘It doesn’t.’

‘It doesn’t work for him?’

‘No.’

‘But if it runs on love, and he doesn’t know that you love him, how does he explain the fact that it works for you and not for him?’

‘He doesn’t know.’

‘What do you mean?’

She couldn’t meet his eyes now. ‘He thinks it does work for him. I always perform the experiments for him and he’s so adorably absent-minded so sometimes when he’s not paying attention I . . .’

‘You fake the results?’

‘Yes. Oh God, Egon, don’t look at me like that. I coax the results along a bit because I couldn’t bear him to be discouraged. I’m not deceiving him, really. He thinks the Teleportation Device works, and it does. I know it does because I test it myself every night. I put things in it and they disappear, just as they’re supposed to.’

‘How do you know someone else isn’t meddling with it while your back is turned?’

‘That wouldn’t be possible. I’ll show you.’

She got down off the table, led him to the back of the room, and swung open a heavy steel door that looked as if it had been installed more recently than the lab’s other fittings. The chamber beyond was about the size of a lavatory. Its walls, floor and ceiling were all lined with grey rubberised panels, and in the centre was a small platform.

‘Can I go inside?’ said Loeser.

‘Just for a minute.’

He stepped through. ‘What’s the point of all the rubber?’

Adele followed him in. ‘Electrical insulation. And behind the rubber there’s lead. The Professor still has no idea what the radiation in there might do to a human body. That’s why the door’s on a time lock.’

‘Like a bank vault?’

‘Yes. Once it’s closed, it can’t be opened until the cycle is over. So no one can blunder inside.’

A prototype teleportation chamber would be a pretty memorable place to fuck someone, it occurred to Loeser. ‘So if someone were to shut it now, we’d be trapped in here together for hours?’

‘The time lock’s synchronised to the ultramigration accumulator, and there’s no experiment running, so it won’t operate. I just wanted you to see how I can be sure that no one else is interfering with the things I put in here.’

‘What sort of things do you mean, by the way?’

‘Just . . . things. It doesn’t matter. But it works. It’s only a question of making it work for the Professor as often as it works for me. And that will happen, I know it will, if he just carries on a bit longer without getting put off by these petty shortfalls.’

‘But if these things disappear, aren’t they supposed to reappear as well? Isn’t that the point of teleportation?’

‘They do reappear. Somewhere. I’m certain. But at the moment, I can’t quite control it, so I don’t know where. I think it’s because I can’t control my heart, either.’

‘You used to be such a little demon and now you talk like somebody’s simpering chattel. If Bailey is Hephaestus, you’re one of his robotic handmaidens.’

‘Well, at least I don’t go to bed with other men any more. Isn’t that what you always used to object to so much?’

‘Yes, I suppose there is that. Still, you’ve changed so much. I don’t like it, Adele.’

‘That’s the promise of this country, isn’t it? To come here and reinvent yourself? I’m always reading that in the editorial column of the
Herald
.’

‘Why would I want to reinvent myself? I’m happy as I am.’

‘You don’t seem very happy.’

‘That’s temporary.’ Except, he realised, it was supposed to be temporary because he hadn’t found Adele yet. And now he’d found her, and she wasn’t exactly pole-vaulting into his arms. Still, if she wouldn’t fuck him in the teleportation chamber, maybe one day he could at least do a few lines of coke off the platform.

‘You shouldn’t be in here,’ said Adele, perhaps presciently.

Loeser followed her back out to the laboratory. ‘Do the police know who killed Marsh?’ he said.

‘No.’

‘Because I’ve been thinking about it. It’s Ziesel.’

‘What?’

‘It must be. Ziesel is a man to whom terrible things are destined to happen. It’s intrinsic to his character. Yet here he is with a job and a wife, loved and respected. It can’t be as simple as that. There must be something else going on that we don’t know about, to spoil things. And this fits perfectly. He obviously has some compulsion to murder. The only reason he has such a perfect life at the moment is so that it will be all the more painful when he gets dragged off to some verminous lunatic asylum.’

‘You sound as if you positively long for his life to be a catastrophe.’

‘No, I don’t, I’ve got nothing against him, I just mean that there are some people for whom things must always go wrong, or the universe isn’t working properly. Ziesel is one of those. You can tell as soon as you meet him. So unless he’s got some other disturbing secret, he must be the Monster of CalTech.’

‘But, Egon, everyone knows it was Slate.’

‘Just because of his two-dimensional face and his speech impediment?’

‘No. He murdered all those dogs. There was never proof, quite, but everyone knew it was him. And they were found in just the same way – chests torn open, hearts missing.’

‘Jesus Christ, Marsh’s heart was missing?’

‘Yes. Slate has no alibi. And I know better than anyone, because I’m always here at night, and Slate’s always here too. He’s not cleaning. He’s just stalking around. He’s not even supposed to work after six, but I’ve seen him here at two in the morning. He tries to hide from me sometimes.’

‘Aren’t you scared?’

‘No. It sounds absurd, but the way he looks at me – I can just tell he wouldn’t hurt me. He might hurt anyone else, but he wouldn’t hurt me. I’m sure of it.’

‘I saw Dr Clarendon in the basement.’

‘Yes, he often works late too. I can’t understand why he’s not more afraid, after this morning – alone down there in the dark.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Egon, I need to take some more readings. You should go home. You’re not safe here either.’

‘Has Ziesel gone home?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then we’re both safe. Don’t be silly. It can’t be Slate. That would be too obvious. I’m definitely not going home yet. What is it? What are you looking at?’ Loeser turned, and then let out the sort of noise a Pomeranian makes when you tread on its tail. Standing there in the doorway of room 11 was Slate himself, who for some reason gave a long, slow shake of the head and then hobbled on down the corridor and out of sight.

‘I think I might go home after all,’ said Loeser hoarsely. He waved goodbye to Adele, hurried out of the Obediah Laboratories, and sprinted to his bike.

As he cycled back down Del Mar Boulevard, he thought about Bailey’s Teleportation Device. Could it really run on love, as Adele claimed? He found the idea insipid. Loeser himself hadn’t been ‘in love’ since he was at university, and he’d long since forgotten what it felt like; the notion was as abstract to him now as it had been when he was a child. But desire was another matter. It was desire, not love, that had uprooted Loeser, that had brought him all the way to California. Desire, he believed, could uproot almost anything. Adele had probably just confused the two, as people did. But if the Teleportation Device ran on desire, then that implied that Adele felt some tremendous voltage of lust for wobbly old Professor Bailey. And that was just as implausible. Still, if she really did, did that mean he’d got to her too late? Something leaden settled in his stomach at the thought. What use was
Dames! And how to Lay them
now? Perhaps, as they said in English, ‘that ship had sailed’. Or perhaps, with Adele, the ship had never even docked. Perhaps there was no ship. Perhaps there was no harbour. Perhaps there was no sea.

China City

At the corner of Ord and Spring a huge iron gate led to a winding street calling itself Dragon Road. Past the gate, every roof had a pagoda, every surface was painted red or gold, and every nail held up at least one long string of paper lanterns or silk flags. Men in conical straw hats pulled rickshaws back and forth, shouting for business.

‘What is this?’ said Loeser as he stepped down from the bus.

‘China City,’ said Blimk. ‘It just opened and I been wanting to see it.’

Last night, after he got home, Loeser hadn’t been able to sleep. Marsh’s disheartened corpse had jigged in his mind with Slate hunched in the doorway, so that he found himself almost wishing for the familiar scuffling of his ghost over his head. So that morning – having tossed and turned for so long that his sheets had cycled through every possible permutation of rumple and were somehow actually neater when he got out of bed than when he got in – he dressed, abolished a pot of coffee, and took an early streetcar to Blimk’s shop. By the time he arrived, a plumber was already at work on a leaky pipe next to Blimk’s desk, and he was making too much noise for either of them to concentrate on their reading, so they decided to close the shop for a few hours and take a bus downtown. Blimk did have a car, but he was considerate about Loeser’s transport anxiety.

One of the consequences of Harry Chandler using the influence of the
LA Times
to make sure Union Station was built at the Plaza, Blimk now explained, was that the old Chinatown with its brothels and opium dens had been demolished in 1933 to make way for it, and for five years now the Chinese population of Los Angeles had not had anywhere in particular to live. But now there were two neighbourhoods competing for their favour: China City, built by a wealthy San Francisco socialite (and friend of Harry Chandler) called Christine Sterling who’d already converted nearby Olvera Street into a ‘Mexican’ tourist attraction, and New Chinatown, a few blocks north-east, built by a businessman called Peter Hoo Soo who was President of the Chinese American Assocation. Sterling’s development was a good deal more ornate: she’d leased studio props from Cecil B. DeMille and she’d had the town hall decorated by a set designer called Wurtzel to look like a Chinese pirate junk.

‘I knew him in Berlin!’ said Loeser.

‘He works on a lot of Goatloft’s movies now,’ said Blimk.

‘But I can’t actually see any Chinese people here. Except waiters and rickshaw drivers.’

‘Would you live here, if you were a Chink?’

‘No, I suppose not.’

At the Muttons’ parties, the most recent Jewish arrivals always complained about how first they’d been dismissed from their jobs and then they’d been forced out of their homeland. They said it had broken their hearts, and they claimed to miss every little thing about Berlin. Loeser now imagined stuffing them all into Germany City: a square mile of freshly painted beer halls and art galleries and cabarets, with its own miniature Potsdamer Platz and and its own miniature Romanisches Café and even its own miniature Kempinski’s Haus Vaterland (which like the real one would have its own USA-themed bar, which would have its own Los Angeles, which would have its own Germany City, and so on ad infinitum). They’d probably like it better than Pacific Palisades. Christine Sterling’s China City, he saw, was as if Paris had been rebuilt by a set designer who’d only heard about it from Herbert Wolf Scramsfield and
The Sorceror of Venice
; and yet it still didn’t feel any more obviously artificial than the rest of Los Angeles, even though Los Angeles wasn’t imitating anything except itself. A man with a gentle case of Gorge’s agnosia could walk down Dragon Road and believe he was really in Peking. What if that literalist walked down Sunset Boulevard? Would he understand this cosmopolis better than anyone, or would he be trapped in a recursion? When Loeser heard the exiles whine, he sometimes thought to himself that he, too, had been dismissed from his vocation and forced out of his homeland. His vocation was sex. His homeland was the female body. He felt just as lost as they did, but no one was ever sympathetic. And as he turned left down Lotus Road with Blimk, it occurred to him that China City was to China exactly as
Midnight at the Nursing Academy
was to a living, breathing girlfriend. The simulation might seem laughable at first, but perhaps after seven years away from home, an immigrant from Guangdong would come here and weep with guilty relief, because it was the nearest thing he had left to what he remembered. They passed a restaurant that advertised its chef as knowing ‘100 Different Ways to Fix a Chicken’ (but did not explain how the chicken was faulty), and Loeser said to Blimk that they should stop for chop suey because he’d never had it before. Blimk told him that chop suey didn’t even exist in China. And Loeser decided that Chinese food invented by Americans was exactly what he wanted to eat that morning.