… blood, like sacrificing Abel’s, cries
Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth
To me for justice and rough chastisement …
—William Shakespeare,
Richard II
AFTER A MORE DISTANT sort of pop-pop-pop sounded from the cliffs above the plain of ruins, and while echoes of the rapid knocks were still batting away between the old broken walls, Plumtree swung her ponderous gaze to Cochran, and she saw his face change from the robust color of damp cement to an ashier gray. It was certainly an external noise, she reasoned. It must have been gunfire. Cody always springs away at sudden dangerous sounds—telephones, gunfire.
Plumtree skipped lightly ahead down the muddy path, almost tap-dancing in instinctive time to the constant hammering noise in her ears, and she beckoned Cochran forward, downhill, toward the ruins and the wide, still lagoons that were separated by eroded walls from the crashing sea beyond. The lush, steel-colored vegetation on either side of the path shook in the ocean breeze.
“Further down?” she heard him say. His voice was shrill and uncertain. “Toward the baths?”
“A seething bath,” Plumtree pronounced, “which yet may prove against strange maladies a sovereign cure.”
“Valorie,” he said as he hurried after her.
The clatter and thump that rang ceaselessly in her head increased its tempo, and she knew that an emotion was being experienced. “She that loves her selves,” she called, “hath not essentially, but by circumstance, the name of Valorie.” The emotion was something like shame, or cowardice—or fear of those.
On an impulse but resolutely, she halted and pulled from the pocket of her jeans the object she had prepared at Cochran’s house, when they had stopped there earlier this morning; and she held it out to him in a hand that shook with the rhythmic cracking in her head. “This form of prayer can serve my turn,” she said: “ ‘Forgive me my foul murder.’ ”
Still glancing up at the cliffs and the road, Cochran took the folded cardboard from her hand.
And Cochran paused to stare obediently at the green-and-tan 7-Eleven match-book Plumtree had handed him, but it was just a matchbook. “Thanks, Valorie,” he said, “but could I talk to Janis?” Neither Janis nor Cody, he reflected fretfully, had ever mentioned that Valorie was crazy. “Jan-is,” he repeated.
He shifted impatiently from one foot to the other, grateful, in this chilly mist or sea spray, for the jeans and boots and flannel shirt and London Fog windbreaker he had changed into at his house; and he was nervously reassured by the angular bulk of the holstered .357 Magnum clipped onto his belt in the back.
“Scant!” Plumtree exclaimed; and then she stared around at the vast, fog-veiled amphitheater into which they had by now halfway descended. “Wow, I’m glad I don’t have to pretend with you, Scant! Are we still in California, at all?”
“Yes,” he said, taking her arm and hurrying her forward. “San Francisco—that building up on the promontory behind us is the Cliff House Restaurant, Cody and I were just in there. It’s only been a few hours since you were last up. But let’s get … behind a wall, okay? I swear I heard gunfire up on the highway—not a minute ago.”
She trotted along beside him, and he was tensely glad that the bouncing blond hair and the lithe legs were Janis’s again, and that the deep blue eyes that blinked at him were those of his new girlfriend, in this strange landscape under this rain-threatening gray sky.
He could see why she had doubted that they were still in California. The Sutro Baths had only burned down in 1966, but these low, crumbled walls and rectangular lagoons—all that was left of the baths, overgrown now with rank grass and calla lilies—fretted the plain in vast but half-obliterated geometry between the steep eastern slope and the winter sea like some Roman ruin; long gray lines of pavement cross-sections, broken and sagging, showed in the hillsides in the misty middle distance, and every outcrop of stone invited speculation that it might actually be age-rounded masonry. Fog scrimmed the cliffs to the north and south to craggy silhouettes that seemed more remote than they really were, and made the green of the wet leaves stand out vividly against the liver-colored earth.
“Who was just up?” Plumtree panted. “Were you going to light a cigarette for somebody?”
A low roofless building with ragged square window gaps in its stone walls stood a few hundred feet ahead of them, where the path broadened out to a wide mud-flat, and Cochran was aiming their plodding steps that way. “Valorie,” he said shortly. “No, she gave me these matches.” He flipped the matchbook open, and then he noticed fine-point ink lettering, words, inscribed on the individual matches.
“She’s written something on ’em,” he said; and he felt safe in stopping to squint at the carefully printed words, for the popping from the highway had been distant and hadn’t been repeated. He read the words off each of the matches in order, aloud: “‘Si bene te tua laus taxat, sua laute tenebis.’ Latin, again.”
“Again?”
“There was some Latin writing on the ashtray last night, in that bar, Mount Sabu—”
“Scant!” she interrupted, seizing his arm and staring at the top of the northern cliff wall. “God, you almost lost me, almost got Valorie back!”
Cochran had spun to look up that way, his right hand brushing the back of his belt; but he could see nothing up on the fog-veiled cliff top.
“What?” he said tensely, stepping sideways to catch his balance on the slippery mud. “Should we run?”
“There was a wild man up there, looking down here!”
“Shit. Let’s—let’s get inside this,” he said, stepping up onto the undercut foundation of the roofless stone structure and crouching to fit through one of the square window gaps. Grass and gravelly sand covered any floor there might have been inside, and when he had glanced around and then helped Plumtree in, they both crouched panting against one of the graffiti-painted walls. Cochran had pulled the revolver free of the holster, and he belatedly swung the cylinder out and sighed with relief to see the brass of six rounds in the chambers.
“What’s a wild man?” he asked, snapping the cylinder closed.
“Bearded and naked! In this weather!”
“A naked guy?” Cochran shook his head. “I don’t know how scared we’ve got to be of a naked guy.”
“I looked away. I didn’t want to look at his face.”
“Didn’t want to look at his face,” Cochran repeated tiredly. He stared up into the gray sky that from where he sat was bisected by low stone crossbeams. “I wonder when the others will show up here. I wonder if they will. I did give the hostess at the restaurant ten bucks to tell them we’d meet ’em down here, in the ruins.”
“ ‘If’? You said they would, Scant!” She glanced up wide-eyed at the ragged top of the wall close above their heads—as if, Cochran thought, she was afraid her wild man might have bounded down from the cliff and be about to clamber right over the wall. “They’re bringing the king’s body, right?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“And it’s still okay? They didn’t drop it on its head or anything?”
Cochran smiled. “It’s still apparently inhabitable, Janis.”
“Good. I did help kill him, and I do owe him his life back, but … I’d just as soon get to keep my own life afterward, not let him just have me … even though that’s what I deserve.” She shivered visibly and, after another fearful glance at the close top of the wall, leaned against Cochran. “Of all things,” she said in a small voice, “I don’t want what I deserve.”
“None of us wants that,” he agreed quietly.
He draped his left arm around her shoulders, and he wondered if she might be mixing up the death of Scott Crane, for which she had been to some extent responsible, with the death of her father. A question for Angelica to wrestle with, he thought; though in fact Angelica, and now Janis, don’t believe Janis’s father died at all. Somehow.
Her shoulder was pressing into his ribs the tape cassette he’d taken from the telephone answering machine in his house a couple of hours ago, and he shifted his position—not to relieve the jabbing, but to keep the cassette in his pocket from possibly being broken.
When he had punched in his kitchen-door window with an empty wine bottle that had been standing on his back porch, he had heard his wife’s voice speaking inside the house—“… and we’ll get back to you as quickly as posseebl’ …”—and even though his mind had instantly registered the fact that the voice was coming from an electronic speaker, his spine had tingled with shock, and his hands had been clumsy as he had unlatched the chain and pushed the door open.
Whoever had called had not stayed on the line to leave any message.
He had gone to the telephone answering machine and popped the cassette out of it, without letting himself think about why he was taking it; and then he had gone to her sewing room to find a sample of Nina’s handwriting. Cody had followed him, and in a surprisingly humble tone had asked if she might “borrow” some of Nina’s clothes. Cochran had curtly assented, and as Cody had gone through Nina’s closet and dresser, he had pulled out the drawers of her desk. And while Cody carried away underwear and jeans and blouses and a couple of jumpsuits and sweaters, Cochran took from one of the desk drawers an old French-language Catholic missal, on one page of which Nina had written a lot of presumably important dates, including their wedding day; several snapshots, with Nina’s inked notes on the back, were tucked in between the missal’s pages, and he tamped them in firmly before tucking the book into his jacket pocket. And from the bedroom he had retrieved the gun and half a dozen twenty-dollar bills and Nina’s wallet.
Cochran had driven the stolen Torino out into the back yard and parked it between the garage and the greenhouse, and then draped a car cover over it.
He and Plumtree had driven the rest of the way up the 280 to San Francisco in Cochran’s ’79 Ford Granada. Getting off the freeway onto Junipero Serra Boulevard, and then driving past the lawns of the San Francisco Golf Club and Larsen Park, had made him think of his many bygone trips to the city in this car with Nina sitting beside him, and he had been glad that the car had no tape player, for he might not have been able to resist the temptation to play Nina’s phone-machine greeting over and over again.
Allo—you ’ave reached Sid and Nina, and we are not able to come to ze phone right now …
From far away up the amphitheater slope, someone was whistling a slow, sad melody. Cochran recognized it—it was the theme music from the movie A Clockwork Orange. And that had been some old classical piece, a dirge for the death of some monarch. …
Cochran straightened up, still holding the black rubber Pachmayr grip of the revolver, and he peeked over the top of the crumbling wall.
Arky Mavranos was plodding down the path from the road above, with Kootie hopping and scrambling along behind him. The two of them looked like a father and son out for a morning stroll, the father whistling meditatively—but Mavranos’s right hand was inside his denim jacket, and even at this distance Cochran could see the man’s eyes scanning back and forth under the bill of the battered blue Greek fisherman’s cap.
“They’re here,” Cochran told Plumtree. He lifted the revolver and clicked the barrel twice against a stone that protruded from the top of the wall.
The sound carried just fine in the foggy stillness; Mavranos’s gaze darted to the structure in which Cochran stood, and he nodded and turned to speak to Kootie.
“We’ll negotiate with them,” Cochran said quietly to Plumtree. “They’d like to have you in captivity, but we’ll make it clear that’s not an option. We can get a motel room, and have him give us a phone number where we can reach them. Go on meeting like this, on neutral ground.”
“My aims don’t conflict with theirs,” she said bleakly. “If you’ll come with me, I don’t mind being in captivity, for the … duration of this. All of us are here, their friend is dead, because of what I did, what I let happen. Mea maxima culpa. I’m just ashamed to meet them.”
It’s not entirely why I’m here, Cochran thought, aware of the angularities of the cassette and the French missal in his pockets. “Well—let me do the talking, okay?”
“What?”
“I said, let me do the talking.”
“Oh, blow me.” She looked around at the roofless stone walls. “What are we paying for this room?”
Cochran bared his teeth. “We’re in San Francisco, Cody, and Mavranos and the Kootie kid are walking up. I’ve got a gun, and so does Mavranos, but if you don’t do anything stupid here we won’t have to all shoot each other, okay?”
“Was it him that was shooting at us before? I guess I dove for cover.”
“No, that wasn’t him, I don’t know who that was.” Cochran peered again over the wall. Mavranos was close enough now to be eyeing the stone structure for a place to step up. “I don’t think it was him.” To Mavranos, he called, “I’ve got a gun.”
“So does everybody this morning, seems like,” Mavranos said. He used both hands to climb up onto the exposed foundation ledge a few yards to Cochran’s left, and Cochran noted the deepened lines around the man’s eyes and down his gaunt cheeks. “We got shot at, on the road up there, as we were driving up to that restaurant—maybe you heard it. Semi-auto, definitely, because of how fast the shots came; looks like nine-millimeter, from the holes. We drove on past the restaurant, eluded ’em with some magical shit and some return fire in the numbered streets east of here and parked in an alley off Geary, and Kootie and I took a cab back here.” He noticed Plumtree crouched below him on the inner side of the wall, and touched the bill of his cap. “Mornin’, Miss Plumtree.”
“Was the king’s body hurt?” she asked.
“It—yeah, it was shot in the thigh.” He rubbed one brown hand across his face, leaving a streak of mud down his jaw. “Live blood was leaking out, till we bandaged it tight. I mean, it was purple venous blood, but it turned bright red in the air. Got oxygenated, according to Angelica. It’s a good sign, that the blood is still vital. Not so good that he’s got a bullet in his leg now.”
Cochran glanced down at Kootie, who was still standing on the mud-flat. The boy’s face under the tangled black curls was tired and expressionless.
“Who was it that shot at you?” Cochran asked.
“Local jacks,” spoke up Kootie. “Boys who would be king. The world’s been twelve days without a king, and it’s getting impatient. If we wait long enough, the trees will be trying to destroy Crane’s body. The rocks will be.”
“Kootie’s … sensory apparatus works better up here,” said Mavranos. Plumtree had stood up to be able to see over the top of the wall, and he squinted belligerently at her. “You still up for the restoration-to-life stunt, girl?”
Plumtree gave him an empty look.
And down on the ground Kootie stepped back, his face suddenly paler, and he glared at Plumtree. “Don’t,” he said, almost spitting, “ever … do that to me again.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “Just because neither of us is a virgin, psychically, doesn’t make both of us … sluts.”
Cochran glanced at Plumtree. She was looking down now, and she said, “Well, you just tell your fucking pal—oh, hell, I’m sorry, kid! But Mavranos just now asked me—with a straight face!—if I wasn’t a coward and a liar and a cheat, on top of being a, a murderer. Murderess. ‘Are you still up for it, girlie!’ After I came to you people.”
“And then ran out,” added Mavranos stonily.
Cochran caught on that Cody had thrown her anger to Kootie—who had instantly known where it had come from! “If she was really trying to ‘run out,’ ” Cochran said to Mavranos reasonably, “we wouldn’t have come here to meet you, would we? Let’s not waste time. What do we do next, now that we’re in San Francisco?” How, he thought, does a restoration-to-life work?
Mavranos reached into one of the outer pockets of his denim jacket, and Cochran tightened his grip on his own gun—but what Mavranos pulled out was a can of Coors, which he popped open one-handed. “Okay. Angelica says we gotta call up that black lady that talked to us on the phone, the one who was brushing her hair on the TV. She’s our intercessor, though Angelica doesn’t totally trust her, doesn’t want her taking over. And Angelica brought along a lot of … beacons and landing lights, for Dionysus’s remote attention as well as Crane’s soul: those two silver dollars Spider Joe brought, and a gold Dunhill lighter that some hired assassin gave Crane one time—Angelica says the guy was a representative of Death, so it’s a significant gift—and a bunch of myrtle-bush branches from the back garden. What other stuff we may need we’ll—”
Plumtree interrupted him with a sharp, startled laugh—she was staring over the edge of the wall in the direction of the north cliff—and then she shivered and closed her eyes; Cochran glanced where she’d been looking, and his eyes widened in surprise to see a powerfully built naked man standing on the mud a couple of hundred feet away, facing them, with shoulder-length brown hair and a curly reddish beard that fell over his chest.
And Cochran’s rib cage went cold, for he recognized the man. “That’s our taxi driver!” he exclaimed. “The guy that drove us to Solville!”
“That’s Scott Crane,” said Mavranos hoarsely. “Or his ghost.”
“Catch him in a bottle,” said Kootie.
Cochran stifled a nervous laugh at the foolishness of the boy’s unconsidered remark—but then the naked man turned away, toward the cliff, and suddenly the distance and perspective were problematic. The man seemed to be smaller, tiny, as if he were some kind of elf standing on the rim of the wall a yard in front of Cochran’s face, and a moment later he seemed to be immensely far away, and huge; and when he moved—away, presumably, for his form appeared to shrink—he shifted without any apparent contact with the ground. For one instant he seemed to jump from side to side like a figure in patchy animation—and Cochran grabbed one of the shoulder-height stone crossbeams, viscerally certain that the figure had been holding still and that it had been the whole world that had jumped.
Cochran’s straining eyes focused by default on the cliff face, and he noticed that a deep shadow at the base of it was the mouth of a cave; and when the naked figure flickered away out of sight it seemed to disappear into the shadowed opening.
Mavranos was sprinting away around the coping of a sunken mud lagoon, toward the cliff and the cave.
“It’s just his ghost,” yelled Kootie, starting after him.
“It’s the ghost of my friend!” Mavranos shouted back.
Cochran shoved his revolver into his belt, then crouched to climb back out through the crusted-stone window hole. “Come on,” he gasped at Plumtree, “we should go along.”
She wailed softly as she followed him out. Then, “He drove our taxi?” she said as she hopped down after him from the foundation ledge to the mud. “He must have known who I was! I held a fucking spear to his baby boy’s throat!” Even though she was Cody, she took his hand as the two of them trotted after Mavranos and Kootie. “If it comes to facing him, I think it’ll have to be Valorie. She’s the one who plays intolerable flops.”
The cave opened into a roughly straight tunnel, high enough for a person to walk upright in. The passage appeared to be natural, floored with wet gravel and bumpy with stone outcroppings on the rounded walls and ceiling, though Cochran could dimly see a metal railing installed along part of the seaward wall, halfway down the shadowed tunnel. By the time Cochran and Plumtree had come scuffing and panting into the broad entrance, Kootie was a dark silhouette far down the length of the tunnel and Mavranos stood in chalky daylight out beyond the far side, perhaps thirty yards distant. Reflected gray sky glittered in agitated puddles that filled low spots of the floor, and the moist breeze from the vitreous corridor was heavy with the old-pier smell of tide pools.
“Come on,” Cochran said, tugging Plumtree’s cold hand as he stepped into the darkness.
“Take Valorie,” she said tightly, “I hate caves.”
Cochran thought about the dead-eyed woman Plumtree had been right after the hollow knocking of the gunshots, and he shuddered at the prospect of walking through this dim, wet tunnel with her. “I’d rather have you along, Cody,” he said, “actually.”
She shrugged irritably and stepped forward, her sneakers crunching in the wet gravel. “I’m here at the moment.”
The mushy rattle of their shoes on the yielding humped floor echoed from the stone walls, but Cochran could hear too the hissing rise and gutter of contained surf—and when he and Plumtree had trudged to where the metal railing stood against the seaward wall, he saw that two jagged holes opened out from floor level to the outer air, where waves could be seen foaming up over rocks that glittered in the gray daylight outside.
A seething bath, he thought, which yet may prove against strange maladies a sovereign cure.
Up ahead, Kootie too was out in the leaden light now, and Mavranos’s voice came reverberating down the tunnel: “Get your girlfriend out here.”
“Come on, girlfriend,” Cochran said.
She yanked her hand free of his, and hurried past him so that he had to splash along after her.
“Wait for moron Tiffany, asshole,” she called back to him.
He touched the lump in his jacket that was the cassette tape from the telephone answering machine. Tiffany, he thought, or someone else.
There was only a wide ledge under the open sky at the other end of the tunnel, and no way to go farther without climbing over wet, tilted boulders.
Cochran blinked around in the relative glare when he was standing out there beside Kootie and Mavranos and Plumtree, and he pointed at the tan boulder nearest to them, across a narrow gap that had sea water sloshing in it. “That one looks like George Washington,” he said, inanely. It did, though—the broad face turned out to sea in profile, the nose and the jawline and even the edge of the wig, were all rendered in weather-broken stone.
“The father of our country,” said Plumtree brightly.
Kootie was peering down into the water, staring at the foamy scum on the waves. “He’s gone,” he said.
Cochran frowned at Plumtree to stop her from asking if he meant George Washington.
Mavranos was squinting up at the northern cliff face and then out across the huge tumbled stones. “He’s not corporeal,” he said, speaking loudly to be heard over the waves crashing on the rocks farther out. “That’s good, right? He’s not one of the solidified ghosts, like those ‘beastie’ things your dad had in his van.”
“He wasn’t corporeal just now,” Kootie said. “And I think it generally takes a fresh ghost a while to firmly gather up enough … spit and bubble gum and bug blood and plaster dust … to form a reliably solid body. Still, he …” Kootie yawned widely. “Excuse me. Did Crane drink a lot?”
“Drink, like alcohol?” Mavranos scowled at the boy. “Well, he used to. He cut back hard after Easter in ’90—since then it’s been a glass or two of wine, with the bread and fish he has for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Why?”
In a fruity, affected voice, Plumtree said, “I enjoy a glass of wine with my meals.”
Ignoring her, Kootie said, “I think ghosts of drunks solidify faster. And then they keep drinking, buying cheap wine with money they get panhandling—but they can’t digest the alcohol, and it comes bubbling out of their skin like sweat. It’s like the habit is what animates them.” He turned a cold gaze on Plumtree. “Do you drink a lot?”
“Well,” she said, “one’s not enough and a thousand is too many, as they say. Why do you ask?”
“If he was your taxi driver,” the boy said, “he must have had some substance for that. Turning the steering wheel, pushing the pedals. You met him then, and you were the first to see him today. Sometimes a ghost clings to the person responsible for his death, especially if the person has a lot of guilt about the death. Al—Thomas Edison—he had a couple of ’em hanging on him, at one time and another.”
“You’re saying what, exactly?” said Plumtree quickly.
“I’m saying your dad may have had help screwing up our TV set. I’m pretty sure you’ve got the ghost of Scott Crane riding in your head like … like a bad case of lice. And you’re only making the ghost develop faster by drinking all the time.”
Cochran couldn’t tell if Plumtree relaxed or tensed up at this statement; then her mouth opened and she droned, “Sometimes she calls the king, and whispers to her pillow, as to him, the secrets of her overcharged soul: and I am sent to tell his majesty that even now she cries aloud for him.”
“Valorie,” Cochran said.
“She that loves her selves,” Plumtree said woodenly, “hath not essentially, but by circumstance, the name of Valorie.”
Cochran shivered in the chilly ocean breeze, and he was glad Mavranos and Kootie would be accompanying him and Valorie back through the tunnel to the ruins and the mud-flats and the long zigzagging path back up to the normal-world San Francisco highway; for this was the same thing Valorie had said half an hour ago, when he had mentioned her name, and it had just now occurred to him that the Valorie personality was to some extent a kind of reflex-arc machine … dead.
Mavranos had been nodding rapidly while Plumtree spoke, and now he said, “Groovy. Scott sure picked a well-ventilated head to occupy.” He turned a pained look on Kootie. “But in fact he doesn’t know anything about it, does he?”
“Right,” said Kootie. “Crane himself is … somewhere else. Wherever the actual dead people go. Somewhere I guess only Dionysus has the key to. This … ‘beastie,’ this naked thing we saw today, it’s like a ROM disk. Not useless, if we could talk to it, but hardly more a real person than the Britannica on CD-ROM would be. No, Crane himself wouldn’t know about this thing we followed down here, any more than the real Edison knew about the ghost I had in my head two years ago.”
“No doubt.” Mavranos stared at Cochran. “So are you and Miss … Miss Tears-On-My-Pillow coming with us?”
Cochran touched the butt of his revolver. “No.” His heart was beating fast. “No, we’re gonna get a motel room somewhere. You and Angelica can cook up the restoration procedure, and we’ll join you for that. You go get a place to stay, and meet me tomorrow at … Li Po, it’s a bar on Grant Street. At noon. If you forget the name, just remember where we are right now—the street entrance to the bar is stuccoed up to look like a natural cavern. You can give me, then, the phone number of whatever place you’re staying at, and we can set up a time and place where Janis and I can meet you all.”
Mavranos smiled. “You don’t trust us.”
“Somehow I just don’t,” Cochran agreed, struggling to keep his voice level. “I think it must have something to do with,” he added with a jerky shrug, “you all discussing shooting Janis, last night.”
“That’s noble,” Mavranos said. “But she just did one of her personality changes right now, didn’t she?” He smiled at Plumtree. “You’re Dr. Jeckyll, or Sybil, or the Incredible Hulk now, right?” To Cochran he went on, “Any time you leave her alone—hell, any time at all—she could change into her father, who murdered Scott Crane. Do you think he wouldn’t kill you?”
Cochran quailed inwardly when he remembered the man who had spoken out of Plumtree’s body last night at Strubie the Clown’s house; but aloud he said, “I’ll take my chances.”
“You’ll be taking all of our chances,” said Kootie.
Cochran jumped when Plumtree spoke again, but the flat voice was still that of the Valorie personality: “How chances mock, and changes fill the cup of alteration with diverse liquors!”
And Cochran remembered the bottle of wine that the Mondard figure had generously offered him in the hallucinated mirror last night. Biting Dog, or something, the label had seemed to read, in the reflection. And he thought too about Manhattans, and Budweisers and vodka, and Southern Comfort; and about flinty French Graves wine thoughtlessly disparaged at a New Year’s Eve party.
Mavranos had already shrugged and started slogging back down the tunnel; Kootie followed him, after shaking his head and saying, “Liquor, again.”
Cochran took Plumtree’s elbow and led her after them. And all he was thinking about now was the—admittedly warm—twelve-pack of Coors he had transferred from the stolen Torino to his Granada, parked now just up the hill.