The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden shoes. The hands of the man who sawed the wood, left red marks on the billets; and the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the stain of the old rag she wound about her head again. Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a night-cap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees—BLOOD.
—Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
AND NOW THEY’RE ALL drinking, thought Cochran, and cooking up a pot of some kind of noxious mint-and-tequila punch; and young Boogie-Woogie—Kootie—has refilled his wine cup at least once; and if there’s a crazier brand of bullshit being talked in California tonight, it’s gotta be in a loony bin for far worse cases than any at Rosecrans Medical. But I’m supposedly the one who’s the drunk.
“Bugsy Siegel’s ashes are in the Beth Olaum Mausoleum at the Hollywood Cemetery on Santa Monica, only about twenty miles from here,” the man called Pete was saying now. “His ghost was a pal of my dad’s ghost—Angie, you remember, it was Siegel’s ghost that rapped back knock-knock when I rapped knock, knock, knock-knock, knock, when we were there to pick up my dad’s ghost, day before Halloween in ’92.”
“I do remember that,” allowed the woman who was coming back from the kitchen with three cans of Coors. Two for Cody and none for me, Cochran thought. He thought of going into the kitchen and fetching a couple for himself, but couldn’t face the thought of seeing the dead man again.
And he was still unsettled by the picture on the card that Cody had shown him—with the comment This was you tonight—the fat, bearded, idiot face of the drunken figure in the drawing, the crown of roses that seemed to conceal horns, the animal-skin cloak, the sketchy legs that bent the wrong way like a goat’s and ended in sketchy stumps like hooves!
Kootie had lifted out of one of the cardboard boxes an electric pencil sharpener, and now the boy carefully unsnapped its wood-grain printed plastic cowl. Underneath, instead of the crossed grinders of a pencil sharpener’s works, a thick stick of yellow chalk was attached to the rotor.
“This middle section is pretty deeply grooved from the last time,” Kootie said, peering at the chalk. “But we can attach the spring to a different section, closer to the motor, and I remember how Edison set it up.”
“I’m not sure Edison himself knew what he was doing,” said Pete.
“I remember how he set it up,” said Kootie.
“Fine,” said Pete. “Good.” He glanced at Cochran and smiled. “That’s our speaker, our receiver—that pencil sharpener. Most speakers use induced changes in the field of a magnet to wiggle the diaphragm; we can’t do that, because an actual physical magnet would draw ghosts the way a low spot on a pavement collects rainwater. If we did this a lot, I’d hook up a piezoelectric quartz, or an electrostatic setup with perforated condenser plates, but this arrangement actually does work well enough. We’ll soak the chalk with water, and then attach the diaphragm spring to the surface of the chalk, which will be spinning when we turn on the pencil sharpener—wet chalk is toothy and full of friction ordinarily, see, but it gets instantly slick when there’s an electric current going through it. The changes are variable enough and rapid enough to get decent low-quality sound out of the attached diaphragm.”
Cochran understood that the man was sociably trying to let him in on what was going on, so he returned the smile, jerkily, and nodded. “Clever,” he said.
“It was better sound quality than a lot of the headphones out there,” said Kootie.
“I’m not dissing your old orisha, son,” Pete said mildly. In one hand he picked up a rack of glass tubes and in the other a glass cylinder that had a little metal rod rattling in it like a bell clapper. “I’m gonna take the vacuum pump out to the kitchen and hook it to the faucet to evacuate the Langmuir gauge. You might get everybody crowded into the laundry room, Kootie, or out in the back yard. Out of this room, anyway.”
“While you’re in the kitchen,” spoke up Cochran, trying not to speak with passion, “could you get me one of those beers?”
Behind him Plumtree snickered. Pete looked at Kootie, who shrugged and nodded.
“Okay,” Pete said.
Young Oliver was leaning against the couch, and now he hesitantly spoke. “You’re gonna call our father’s ghost, now? Not him, himself, but his ghost?” The boy’s face was stiff, but Cochran could see the redness in his eyes.
“That’s right, Oliver,” said Mavranos. “You’re the man of your family now, you can be there for it, if you like.”
Oliver shook his head. “No,” he whispered. “It’d—”
“It’d just be him dead in that room too,” said his brother Scat solemnly. “Like it is in the kitchen.” He looked at Oliver and then said, “We’ll wait in the back yard.”
Their mother, Diana, just bit her knuckle and nodded.
Cochran followed Plumtree and Angelica and Diana into the flower-wallpapered little laundry room, and he sat down beside Plumtree at the foot of a sink in the corner. Kootie had climbed up on top of the washing machine, which was one of the heavy-duty commercial kind that had a push-in slot for quarters; the pencil sharpener sat on a shelf beside his shoulder, attached now to the frame of a disassembled pasta machine with a spring and a paper loudspeaker cone attached to it.
Pete had set up a TV table and a lawn chair in the middle of the linoleum floor, and almost ceremoniously had placed on the table an old black Bakelite rotary-dial telephone that was connected with phone cords trailing one way to the pencil sharpener and strung along the linoleum floor the other way to the assembly on the table out in the office. Johanna had stayed in the present-day kitchen to keep an eye on the pan of mint-and-tequila, though the astringent smoke from it was making Cochran’s eyes water. Probably she just forgot about it, he thought, and went outside to listen to the music some more, and the pan’s on fire. He sipped his freshly opened beer cautiously, not having any idea how long this procedure might take; crazy old Spider Joe had elected to join the boys outside in the yard, where the music was, and Cochran was wishing he had gone along with the old blind man.
“Can I have the … eye?” Pete asked Mavranos, who was standing by the washer and puffing on a Camel cigarette as if to drive away the burning mint smell. With the hand that wasn’t holding the gun, Mavranos dug a wad of tissue paper out of his shirt pocket and passed it across to him. “And,” Pete said as he carefully unwrapped it, “we’ve got Crane’s … murderer, and his wife, here, which should one way or another work as a homing beacon. Kootie, start up the speaker; and Angie, would you do the honors in the next room?” He looked at Cochran as Angelica sidled past the TV table out into the office. “We’re out past physics again,” he said. “She’s got to light some candles, and pronounce certain Spanish rhymes, and splash Vete de Aquí oil over the door lintel.” He looked at Diana, who was standing beside Mavranos. “I need Crane’s full name, and his birthdate. I realize it seems like bad security, to be dealing in his real psychic locators, but we can’t have any masks at all in the way, for this.”
“Scott Henri Poincaré Leon Crane,” said Diana—who, even in the harsh electric light from the single naked bulb dangling from the ceiling, looked to Cochran’s befuddled gaze like a luminous preliminary Botticelli painting of Venus, before the hair was brushed in. “February 28, 1943.”
The pencil sharpener was spinning the wet chalk cylinder now, and a featureless hiss was rasping out of the paper speaker. Angelica hurried back into the little laundry room, wiping her hands on her blouse and exposing for a moment the grip of the automatic pistol in her waistband.
Pete grimaced as he lifted out of the tissue paper an angular black lump like an oversized raisin; but he sat down in the lawn chair and started to dial.
But even before he had carefully pulled the 7 hole of the dial around to the stop, a buzzing sounded from the speaker; it stopped, then started up again.
“Uh … that’s an incoming call,” Angelica said helplessly. “You may as well answer it.”
Pete picked up the receiver. “Umm … hello?”
The frail voice of an old woman came shaking out of the paper speaker cone: “Pirogi,” it said. “That’s a bayou boat, barely big enough for a body to kneel in. It’s a thing you can cook, too, looks like a boat—stuff an eggplant with seafood once you’ve gouged away the … the core of the vegetable like a dugout canoe. If he hollers, don’t let him go, right? You all need to come here, I can guide your boats. I betrayed the god, I desecrated his temple, but this is my day of atonement. Today is January the eleventh, isn’t it?”
For several seconds nobody spoke, then Kootie said, “Yes, ma’am.”
“Ninety-one years ago today,” rasped the old woman’s disembodied voice, “I died. Three Easters and three days later he came for me, out of the sea, and he knocked down all the buildings and took all the other ghosts to himself, burned them up. Yerba buena, burning.”
The telephone speaker hissed blankly for nearly half a minute, and at last Angelica said, “Well, she’s right, the yerba buena does smell like it’s burning. Johanna,” she called through the doorway, “atenda a lo fuego!” Then she looked at Pete. “You’re getting the party-line effect. Hang up and try again.”
“You are to come and fetch me,” insisted the old woman’s amplified voice, “and another dead lady, too, who is hiding in a tight little box.”
“I—I think it’s the old black lady,” ventured Kootie. “Who was on the TV.”
“I think it is too,” said Angelica. “Will you hang up, Pete? We don’t need help from stray ghosts drawn by the electromagnetic field here, wanting to celebrate their deathdays. Fetch two old women ghosts!—it sounds like a sewing circle. Hang up, and dial Crane’s number.”
“Rightie-o,” said Pete flatly, hanging up the receiver. He leaned forward again with the dark lump—which was apparently someone’s eye!—and used it to rotate the dial. “And I’m enough of a mathematician to know how to spell Poincaré.”
Altogether, for Crane’s name and birth date, Pete dialed thirty-four numbers into the phone. “It’s very long distance,” muttered Kootie, which got a smothered laugh from Plumtree.
Again from the speaker sounded the measured buzz that apparently indicated ringing, and then a click sounded. Pregnant Diana’s hands clenched into fists against the tight fabric of her jeans.
“Hello,” came a man’s baritone voice from the pencil-sharpener apparatus, “you’ve reached Scott Crane, and I’m not able to come to the phone right now. But if you leave your name and number and the time that you called, I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”
“The woman who killed you,” said Diana loudly, “says she can restore you to life. Cooperate in this, Scott! And do give us a call, if you can.”
At the first syllables of the man’s voice, Plumtree’s elbow had bumped Cochran’s knee; he glanced at her now and saw that though she was still sitting slumped against the pipes below the sink she had gone limp, her hands open and palms-up on the linoleum floor and her head bowed forward so that her blond hair had fallen over her face. He didn’t bother to try to rouse her.
“Nearly midnight, Scott,” called Mavranos, “on the eleventh of January, ’95; Arky and Diana, and some allies; and we’ll have to try you again somehow, or you’ll have to catch us at some pay phone we might be near, okay?—I don’t think we’re gonna be by this phone much longer.”
Now that he had sat down again, Cochran found that he was hardly able to keep his eyes open. The voices of these strangers, and his cramped posture, and his nervous exhaustion, all strongly called to mind the sleepless twelve-hour flight home from Paris four days ago—he could almost hear again the faint brassy big-band music that had seemed to whisper perpetually from some forgotten set of earphones several rows ahead; and his eyes were aching now as they had when he had kept trying to read A Tale of Two Cities, while fatigue had been persistently casting faint, hallucinatory green bands across the bottoms of the pages; and he squinted in the glare of this laundry-room lightbulb and remembered how the horizontal white light of dawn over the north Atlantic had lanced in through the 747’s tiny windows, and been reflected in wobbling flickers onto the white plastic ceiling by the compact-mirrors of ladies fixing up their slept-in makeup.
When the jet had landed at LAX in Los Angeles, he had got off and walked right out of the airport, abandoning his luggage.
Summoning all his strength now, he struggled to his feet and mumbled, “Which way to the head?”
Mavranos, still holding the revolver, pursed his lips and scowled at him. “Hold tight, sonny,” he said. “Your bladder won’t pop.”
“You’re not Speedy Alka-Seltzer,” agreed Pete absently as he hovered over the phone, “you won’t dissolve.”
“It’s not—” Cochran swayed in the smoky air. “I think I’m gonna puke again.”
“Oh hell,” Mavranos said, glancing for reassurance at the unconscious Plumtree. “Down the hall to the right. If I see you turn left, toward the kitchen, I’ll shoot you, okay?”
“Okay.”
Cochran stepped carefully over the telephone cords to the doorway, and glanced at the ivy-leaf mark on the back of his right hand to make sure he didn’t turn the wrong way by mistake.
He followed his hand sliding along the wallpaper to the hallway corner. As he had done at the airport, he was forcing himself not to think about the consequences of this course of action; all his concentration was on the immediate tasks: step quietly down the side hall, unchain the street door, and then hurry away into the night, away from the dead body in the kitchen and everybody here, never looking back.
But when he had shambled around the hallway corner he froze.
Instead of the remembered narrow hall through which he and Plumtree had entered the building, with its threadbare carpeting and low, flocked ceiling—
—he was in a broad, dark entry hall, at the foot of a spiral staircase that curled away upward for at least two floors; rain was drumming on a skylight far overhead, and drops were free-falling all the long way down the stairwell to splash on the parquet floor at his feet. In the taut, twanging moment of astonished vertigo he rocked his head forward to look at the floor, and saw in the wood a stain that he was viscerally certain was old blood.
Then he had no choice but to look behind him.
A gilt-framed mirror hung on the paneled wall, and in the mirror, behind the reflection of his own wide-eyed face, stood the man he had met in the streets of Paris five days ago, who had called himself Mondard.
Cochran whirled to face the man, but there was no one there; he was still alone in the empty baroque hall; and so he had to look back into the mirror.
The man in the reflection had the same curly dark beard he’d had when Cochran had first spoken to him in the courtyard of the Hotel L’Abbaye, around the corner from the Church of St. Sulpice, but now it reminded Cochran of the bearded dead king who lay somewhere behind him; and these liquid brown eyes had shone with this same perilous joy even when they had stared at Cochran from a living bull’s head on the man’s shoulders, later that same morning in the narrow medieval Rue de la Harpe; and when Cochran had fled, stumbling over ancient cobblestones past the Lebanese and Persian restaurants with whole lambs turning on spits in the windows, the thing that had pursued him and finally tripped him up on the Quai Saint Michel pavement by the river had been a man-shaped bundle of straw, with dried ivy for hair and split and leaking grapes for eyes.
In the hotel courtyard the man had introduced himself as Monsieur Mondard, having to lean close to be heard over the glad baying of the dog in the lobby, and he had frightened Cochran by speaking of the dead Nina and offering him an insane and unthinkable “surcease from sorrow”—and as Cochran stared again now into the reflection of those horizontally pupiled eyes, he knew from their unchanged hot ardor that Mondard was still holding out the same offer.
“Donnes moi le revenant de la femme morte,” Mondard had said, “buvez mon vin de pardon, et débarrassez-vous d’elle.” Give the dead woman’s ghost over to me, drink my wine of forgiveness, and be free of her.
In that old Paris courtyard, under the marbled winter sky, Cochran had believed that the man could do what he offered: that he could actually relieve him of the grief of Nina’s death by taking away Cochran’s memories of her, his useless love for her.
And he believed it again now. The figure in the mirror was holding a bottle of red wine, and in the reflection the letters on the label were something like I BITE DOG AP but Cochran couldn’t read it because of the sudden swell of tears in his eyes. Why not take a drink of the sacramental wine, and by doing it give over to this creature his intolerable memories of Nina—give to this thing that called itself Mondard his now cripplingly vestigial love for his killed wife?
When he looked up into Mondard’s face, the goat-pupilled eyes were looking past him, over Cochran’s shoulder; a moment later they were warmly returning his gaze, and he knew that Mondard was promising to provide the same solace, the same generously ennobling gift, when Cochran’s grief would be for the death of Plumtree.
And Cochran wondered exactly how Nina had come to run out into the lanes of the 280 Freeway at dawn, ten days ago; had she been chased? … Lured?
Nina was dead, and Cochran was suddenly determined not to betray his love for her by disowning it; and Janis was alive, and he was not going to sanction her death, abandon her to this thing, even implicitly.
The bottle of wine, “Biting Dog” or whatever it was called, gleamed in the long-nailed hand in the mirror’s reflection, and on the back of the hand was a mark that might have corresponded to the mark on Cochran’s hand—but Cochran shook his head sharply, and turned away and blundered back the way he had come.