It was an inconsistent and ubiquitous fiend too, for, while it was making the whole night behind him dreadful, he darted out into the roadway to avoid dark alleys, fearful of its coming hopping out of them like a dropsical boy’s-Kite without a tail and wings. It hid in doorways too, rubbing its horrible shoulders against doors, and drawing them up to its ears, as if it were laughing.
—Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
FOR FIVE DAYS NOW the skirts of the storm clouds had swept across the fretted hills and smoky lowlands of San Francisco. At the northeast corner of the peninsula the intermittent downpours had saturated the precipitous eastern slope of Telegraph Hill, loosening wedges of mud that tumbled down onto the pavement of Sansomme Street, where old wooden cottages still stood from before the 1906 earthquake, having been saved from the subsequent fire by bucket brigades of Italians who had doused the encroaching flames with hundreds of gallons of homemade red wine; and the rain had swelled the waters of Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park, making a marsh of the playground to the south and completely submerging the strange old stones that edged the lake’s normal boundaries; and in the southeast corner of the city the rain had frequently driven customers out of the open-air Farmer’s Market on Alemany Boulevard, and kept the Mexican children from playing in the streets of the Mission District east of Dolores. In the blocks of run-down post-war housing in Hunter’s Point, east of the 101, gunfire from passing cars was more common than usual.
In fact, incidents of random gunfire had increased all over the city in the five days since a burst of semi-automatic weapons fire had startled tourists outside the Cliff House Restaurant on the northwest shore, on the morning of January 12th. Of less general concern, the wild monkeys that lived in the sycamore trees on Russian Hill had begun a fearsome screeching every evening at sunset, and in the sunless dawns vast flocks of crows wheeled silently over the old buildings at the south end of the Embarcadero by the China Basin. The Chronicle ran a brief human-interest article about the spontaneous street-dancing that had started in these South-of-Market streets and alleys around the French restaurant whose name translated as I Am Starving; the rain-soaked dancers were described as neo-Beatnik youths and unreconstructed old hippies, and the dance was supposed to be a revival of the French carmagnole, and the preferred dance music appeared to be the 1970 Melanie song “Candles in the Wind.”
The newspaper had noted that the carmagnole dancers liked to toss lit strings of firecrackers around their feet as they stamped and spun in the ferocious dance, but to Archimedes Mavranos, standing now on the second-floor balcony of the apartment he had rented on Lapu Lapu Street in the shadow of the elevated Bay Bridge Freeway, the staccato pop-pop-pop sounded like volleys of full-auto machine-gun fire.
He was tapping his current can of Coors on the wet iron balcony rail. “I don’t like it,” he said over his shoulder.
“Duh,” said Kootie from the living room behind him.
After frowning for another moment down at the shiny car roofs trundling by on the wet pavement, Mavranos smiled and turned back to the room. “I guess I have made it clear that I don’t like it,” he allowed. “But dammit, it is the day the earthquake blew up L.A. The one-year anniversary.”
Kootie was sitting against the door of the unfurnished room, holding a red-blotted face-cloth to his side, and Pete and Angelica Sullivan stood over the old black-and-white television set they had brought along from Solville. It was sitting on top of another TV set, newer but non-functioning, that they had found in the street.
“We drove up there too, a day or so later, to Northridge,” said Pete, without taking his eyes from the images on the working screen, which were just a modern Ford ad at the moment, “to look at the wreckage. Kootie insisted.”
“Of course the seventeenth of January is a day to be scared of,” Kootie said to Mavranos. “I saw what happened to L.A. But that would be why the French people you told us about made such a big deal of it. How could Dionysus’s mid-winter deathday be anything but scary?” He smiled unhappily. “He’s the earthquake boy, right?”
“Our pendulum stuck over the thirty-first, too,” pointed out Angelica—wearily, for she had pointed it out many times already. “Tet.”
“Our pendulum,” said Mavranos in disgust as he drained his beer and strode in through the living room to the kitchen, which fortunately had come with a refrigerator. “Our scientific apparatus,” he called derisively as he took a fresh can from the refrigerator’s door-shelf.
Angelica had brought along several jars of pennies to shake at the TV, and over the last five days the old black woman had several times been induced to intrude on the TV screen here in San Francisco, though the reception of her inserts was scratchy here with some unimaginable kind of static. And she had spoken, too, though her opening words each time had been just an idiot repetition of the last phrases spoken on the real channel before her image had crowded out the normal programming.
At first the old woman had said that they must find her house, and “eat the seeds of my trees,” so that one of their party could be “indwelt,” which apparently meant inhabited by the old woman’s ghost. The disembodied image on the television had insisted that this was the only way she could properly guide the dead king’s company.
Angelica had vetoed that. We have no hosts to spare, she had said. This is just identity-greed, she wants a body again, and she probably would cling. She can advise us just fine from the TV screen, and do her interceding from there.
And the old black woman had had a lot to say, even just from the television speakers. She had babbled—uselessly, Mavranos thought—about being a penitential servant now of Dionysus, whose chapel she had apparently desecrated during her lifetime; she had said that they needed to call the god beside untamed water, and had talked uncertainly about some banker friend of hers who had drowned himself “near Meg’s Wharf.” Pete had gone to the library and established that her drowned friend had been William Ralston, who had founded the Bank of California, and who had drowned near Meigg’s Wharf in 1874 after his bank went broke. And she had said that a calendar would have to be consulted with “a plumb line” to determine a propitious date.
Angelica had called on her bruja skills and made a pendulum of hairs from Scott Crane’s beard, weighted with the gold Dunhill lighter a professional assassin had once given to Crane; and, after Mavranos had been sent out to buy a calendar, Kootie had dangled the makeshift pendulum over the January page.
The glittering brick-shaped lighter had looked like some kind of Fabergé Pez dispenser with its mouth open, for Angelica had had to open the lid to knot the hair around it—and the lighter had visibly been drawn to the square on the calendar that was the seventeenth, continuing to strain toward it, as if pulled magnetically, even after Kootie’s hand had moved an inch or so past it. And, as Angelica had noted, the swinging lighter had been tugged toward the thirty-first, too, which was the Vietnamese Tet festival and the Chinese New Year. The Year of the Dog was ending, the Year of the Pig due to start on the first of February—and that date was the first day of Ramadan, the Moslem holy month of fasting.
Mavranos drank the fresh beer in three very big swallows, then popped open another can to carry with him into the living room.
“The thirty-first would probably work,” he told Angelica stolidly. “I’m with you, I like it better; for one thing, we might be able to get more of a showing from this dead lady that’s supposed to be our intercessor. But the thirty-first is two weeks from now. The seventeenth is tomorrow. We’ve been in San Francisco five days today. Scott’s body is still in the back of the truck, and we’ll be getting warm weather eventually. And as Kootie says, if we’re going to ask Dionysus for a favor, it does make sense to do it on his own … terrible … day.”
He looked out the window at the gray concrete pillars of the elevated 101, and he remembered the newspaper photos of the collapsed double-deck 1-880 in Oakland, after the big quake in October of ’89; and he remembered too the flattened cars he and Scott Crane had viewed in Los Angeles a year ago. “Shit,” he said mildly. “I guess we do have to try it tomorrow, intercessor or no intercessor. You should have picked up a football helmet for each of us, along with your skeleton wine.”
“And some Halloween masks,” said Kootie quietly, with a somber glance at Marvranos. “Two or three apiece, ideally.”
Mavranos returned the boy’s look, and thought, You’ve known all along how this will have to go, haven’t you, kid? And you came along anyway, to save your parents. Aloud, he said, “Yeah, they’re probably real cheap this time of year.”
Angelica darted a suspicious look from her foster-son to Mavranos. “That Plumtree woman had better still be willing to go through with this,” she said. “Does Cochran say anything about her, what she’s been doing for four days? I don’t suppose he’ll bring her along today.”
“No chance of that,” said Mavranos. “Just like I haven’t, for example, been bringing Scott’s body along when I’ve met Cochran at the bar. They-all and us-all don’t trust each other; he thinks I’ll try to shoot Plumtree, and I think Plumtree’s dad will try to finish the job on Scott’s body.” He took a sip of the beer and licked foam off his graying mustache. “I bet Cochran takes as circuitous a route back to wherever he’s staying as I do when I come back here.”
“Wherever he’s staying?” spoke up Angelica. “Isn’t she staying with him?”
“Well, I assume,” Mavranos began; “he tells me that she is—” Then he exhaled and let himself sit down cross-legged on the wooden floor. “I think she ran away from him, actually,” he admitted in a level voice, “and he doesn’t want to tell me. I think Cochran doesn’t have any clue where she is. Sorry. I think her father came on sometime, and just … ran away with her body.”
Cochran had been visibly drunk at their last two noon meetings at the Li Po bar, and too hearty in his assurances that Plumtree was still eager to get the dead king restored to life; and Mavranos had got the uneasy impression that Cochran was hoping to hear that Mavranos had somehow heard from her.
Kootie winced as he got to his feet. “Consider phlebotomy,” he said.
“ ‘—Who was once as tall and handsome as you,’ ” added Mavranos, automatically making a pun on the line in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land about Phlebas the drowned Phoenician sailor.
Angelica’s face was suddenly pale as she whirled to glare at Kootie, and her voice was low: “I forbid it absolutely. We’ve got money—we’re going home. Or somewhere. To hell with this king.”
Pete Sullivan was blinking at the woman and the boy in alarm. Clearly no one had got Mavranos’s pun, not that it mattered. “What?” said Pete. “Lobotomy? For who?”
“Phle-botomy,” said Angelica, still scowling at her foster son. “Venesection, bloodletting; from Crane’s body into a, a wine glass, I suppose. You are simply not going to let the, that dead man who we don’t even know, occupy your head, Kootie! You’re not going to let him have your body! Pete, tell him that we—”
“Mom,” said Kootie stonily. “Angelica. We’ve all known, we haven’t talked about it but we’ve all known—come on!—that the king would probably have to take my body to do this, not that woman’s.” His eyes glistened, but he seemed even angrier than Angelica. “Look at my qualifications—I’m a male, for one thing. I’m not a virgin, psychically; and I am a virgin, physically, which Plumtree probably is not; and I’ve been living the king’s discipline, fish and wine, and rituals, and visions! Call me fucking Fishmeal, excuse me. I’ve got to be … served to him.” His shoulders relaxed, and he rubbed the face-cloth across his eyes, leaving a brushstroke of fresh blood on his cheek. “And who knows, it might work out just the way the Plumtree woman said—he might just use my body to do the magical stuff that’ll let him get back into his own.”
“His own?” shouted Pete. “His own is over fifty years old! And two weeks dead! You’ve been planning this? Your mother’s right. Even if he wanted to, the Fisher King probably couldn’t shift back out of an adolescent body into an old one! Any more than water can run uphill! How would this ‘bloodletting’—”
“ ‘Even if—?” Mavranos interrupted harshly; then he took a deep breath and started again. “ ‘Even if he wanted to’? You—goddammit, you didn’t know the man, so I guess I got no right to take offense. But you know me, and I’m telling you now that he wouldn’t, ever, save his own life at the expense of somebody else.” He glared at the TV. “Hey, turn it up—our lady’s on again.”
Angelica gave the screen a startled look, then twisted the volume knob.
In the grainy black-and-white picture, the old black woman was standing beside her chair now, and staring directly out of the screen. “Gotta get the bugs out of your house,” she quavered, apparently reciting the tail end of some exterminator commercial she had interrupted. Mavranos hoped she wouldn’t, this time, go on for several minutes with the parroted recitation.
“But I didn’t—I wasn’t even shaking the pennies,” said Angelica softly.
A crackling had started up inside the dead TV set that they were using as a table for the working one.
“The bugs that work six feet under,” said Kootie in a tense voice.
Mavranos couldn’t tell if the boy was responding to what the old woman had said, or was sensing something nearby, or was speculating on the source of the noise in the dead TV; and he realized that his heart was pounding.
“Too late!” said the old black woman. “The bugs win this round! You get out.”
It’s not an exterminator ad, thought Mavranos.
Black smoke abruptly began billowing up from the back of the bottom television set; but its speakers came to booming life, croaking right along with the top TV set’s, when the old woman shouted, “Boy-king, witch, escape artist and family retainer, I am speaking to you all! Get out now. They’re coming up the stairs, the ones who hate the California vines! You four go out the window—I will distract the intruders with conversation and difficult questions.”
Before she was finished speaking Mavranos had dropped his beer and stepped forward, and he grabbed Kootie and Angelica by their shoulders and propelled them stumbling across the floor toward the balcony. Pete Sullivan had reached through the black smoke to snatch the car keys off the top TV set, and he stepped along after his wife and foster son.
“There’s a fire escape on the right side,” Mavranos said, trying not to inhale the sharp-smelling smoke. He paused to grab his leather jacket and Angelica’s purse, because their handguns were in them, and then he was standing on the balcony beside Angelica and Pete, taking deep breaths of the fresh air; he shoved the purse at Angelica with one hand while he flexed his free arm into the sleeve of the jacket. “You got a live one in the chamber?” he gasped.
She nodded, frowning.
“Take the time to aim,” he said, boosting Kootie over the railing.
Behind them, a knock shook the hallway door. As if jolted to life by the knocking, the room’s smoke alarm finally broke into a shrill unceasing wail.
“Who is it?” demanded the old woman’s voice loudly from the two sets of speakers. “Be damned if I’m lettin’ any bug men into my home!”
Kootie was halfway down the iron ladder now, but Angelica had only swung one leg over the rail, and Pete was standing behind her, uselessly flexing his hands.
Mavranos’s mouth was dry, and he realized that he was actually very afraid of meeting whoever it might be that the old woman was referring to as bug men. “Pete,” he said gruffly, “we’re only on the second floor here.”
Pete Sullivan gave him a twitchy grin. “And it’s muddy ground below.”
Both men clambered over the long rail of the balcony and hung crouched on the outside of it—like, thought Mavranos, plastic monkeys on the rims of Mai Tai glasses—then kicked free and dropped.
After a windy moment of free-fall Mavranos’s feet impacted into the mud and he sat down hard in a puddle, but he was instantly up and limping to the curb, his hand on the grip of the .38 in his pocket as he stared back up at the balcony. “Keep ’em off to the side of me,” he called to Pete, who had got to his feet behind him.
Over the distance-muted siren of the smoke alarm Mavranos could hear the loud, cadenced voice of the old woman—she seemed to be shouting poetry, or prayers.
Kootie had hopped down onto a patch of wet grass, and as soon as he had sprinted to the sidewalk Angelica sprang away from the ladder and landed smoothly on her toes and fingertips. As she straightened up and followed Kootie to the sidewalk, she caught her swinging purse with her left hand and darted her right hand into it.
Pete herded them down the sidewalk past a tall bushy cypress tree and a brick wall; Mavranos followed, but stopped to peek back through the piney branches of the cypress.
Across the lawn and above him, wisps of black smoke were curling out of the open balcony doorway and being torn away by the rainy breeze, but he saw no people up there; and he was about to step away and hurry after his companions when all at once three figures shuffled clumsily out onto the balcony, and from the second-floor elevation looked up and down Lapu Lapu Street. The middle figure, a white-haired man in a business suit, was clearly holding a weapon under his coat; but it was the pair of men flanking him that made Mavranos’s belly go cold.
The two figures were bony and angular inside their identical lime-green leisure suits, and their bland faces swung back and forth in perfect unison—and though they didn’t appear to say anything, and their theatrically raised hands didn’t move to touch the white-haired man, Mavranos was certain that the pair had somehow perceived him. And at the same time he was sure that they were inanimate manikins.
Mavranos turned away and ran; but by the time he had caught up with Pete and Angelica and Kootie he had reined in his momentary panic and was able to plausibly force his usual squint and grin. The old red truck with Scott Crane’s tarpaulin-covered body in the back of it was at the curb in front of them, and there was no use in spooking these people—though before long he would have to tell them what he had seen.
Not right now, though—not for several minutes, several miles, at least. Whatever it is, it’s what Nardie saw in Leucadia last week.
“It looks like we all go meet Cochran today,” he panted as he held out his hand to Pete for the car keys. “And,” he added in a voice he forced to be level, “I hope there aren’t any bug men at Li Po.”
In an upstairs room at the Star Motel in the Marina district of the city, Sid Cochran was sitting on the bed, gently nudging a clean glass ashtray across the back of a yellow enameled-metal National Auto Dealers Association sign he had salvaged two days ago from a gas-station Dumpster at Lombard and Octavia.
The sign was lying face down on the bedspread, but he knew that the front of it read NADA, and he found that oddly comforting. On this blank side he had inked the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and numbers from 0 to 9, in a bow-and-string pattern like what he remembered seeing on Ouija boards. Up by the pillows, next to an ashtray full of cigarette butts, lay half a dozen sheets of paper covered with lines of lettering tentatively divided into words by vertical slashes.
He had been trying for some time now to conduct a lucid conversation with the ghost of his wife.
Now the ashtray appeared to have stopped moving again, and he sat back and wrote down the last letter it had framed, and then he stared uneasily at the latest answer the ashtray had spelled out for him: CETAITLEROIETPUISSONFILSSCOTTETAITLEROI.
After driving away from the Sutro Bath ruins on Thursday in his old Granada, and then looping around and around the blocks of the Marina district until he was sure they were not being followed, Cochran and Plumtree had checked into this motel on Lombard Street. Cody had used Nina’s Visa card, signing “Nina Cochran” on the credit-card voucher.
Plumtree had stayed up all that night and into Friday the thirteenth, watching television with the sound turned low enough so that Cochran could at least try to sleep; Cochran’s only clue as to which personality might be up at any time had been the choice of programs. Cochran had gone sleepily stumbling out to meet Mavranos at noon, and when he had got back to the motel at about two in the afternoon, Plumtree had been gone. Cochran had slept until nearly midnight, by which time she had not reappeared.
And he had not seen her since. Twice on Saturday the telephone had rung, but when he had answered it there had been only choked gasping on the line.
On both of the days since her disappearance he had gone out to meet Arky at the Chinese bar at noon, and a couple of times a day he had trudged to the deli on Gough for coffee and sandwiches and bourbon and beer, but he had spent most of his time drunkenly studying the French Catholic missal he had found in Nina’s sewing room when he and Plumtree had stopped at his house early on Thursday morning.
One page of the little volume was clearly a family tree. Cochran learned that Nina had not been the first of her family to have emigrated to the United States—a grand-uncle, one Georges Leon, had moved to New York in 1929, and then onward west to Los Angeles in 1938, and had had a son in 1943. Old Georges had apparently been a black sheep of the Leon family, had n’avait pas respecte le vin, disrespected the primordial French rootstocks. In tiny, crabbed script someone had declared that, precisely because the Bordeaux wines were terrible from 1901 through 1919, these were the times when all true sons of père Dionysius Français should show their loyalty, not go running off to les dieux étrangers, strange gods.
In fact, just about all of the notes in the missal concerned viticulture and wine-making. On the dates importantes page, 1970 was noted because Robert Mondavi of California’s Robert Mondavi Winery had in that year met with Baron Phillipe de Rothschild of Bordeaux—in Honolulu, of all the remote places. 1973 was listed just for having been the year in which the Baron’s Chateau Mouton Rothschild claret was finally promoted to the official list of First Growth Bordeaux wines; this development was apparently viewed as bad news by Nina’s family because of the Baron’s association with the Californian Robert Mondavi. One marginal scrawl described the two men as acolytes of the damnable California Dionysus.
Some of the notes were too brief and cryptic for him to make any sense of at all. For 1978 was just a sentence which translated as, “Mondavi visits the Medoc—failure.” The following year was pithily summarized with the French for “Answered prayers! The new phylloxera.”
For 1984 was simply the words Opus One, but because of his profession he did know what that must refer to.
“Opus One” was the ’79 vintage California wine that Mondavi and Phillipe de Rothschild had finally released in 1984 as a joint venture between their premier Californian and French vineyards. It had been a fifty-dollar-a-bottle Cabernet Sauvignon with some Cabernet Franc and Merlot blended in, to soften the roughness imparted by the Napa hot spell in May of ’79, fermented in contact with the skins for ten days and aged for two years in Nevers oak casks at Mouton, in the Medoc. Cochran remembered the Opus One as having been a subtle and elegant Cabernet, but the person who had scribbled the notes in the missal didn’t approve of it at all: le sang jaillissant du dieu kidnappe, she called it, “haemorrhage blood of the kidnapped god.”
The 1989 entry was on the next page, and it was just J’ai recontre Androclès, et c’est le mien—“I have met Androcles, and he is mine.”
A photograph of Sid Cochran was laid in at that page.
Sitting drunk in the Star Motel room, Cochran had taken some comfort from the fact that Nina had treasured his picture this way … until he noticed that in it he was posed with his chin on his right fist, and the ivy-leaf mark on the back of his hand was in clearer focus than his face was.
And so he had improvised the makeshift Ouija board.
Using the glass ashtray as a planchette, he had spelled out a call for Nina’s ghost, and then had let the ashtray drift of its own accord from one letter to another after he had spoken questions aloud to it.
To his shivering nausea and breathless excitement, the device had appeared to work. The indicated letters, which he had painstakingly copied down one by one on sheets of Star Motel stationery, had been resolvable into French words.
The very first words had told him that he was indeed the “Androcles” the missal note had referred to—and his initial suspicion that he had unknowingly propelled the planchette himself, just subconsciously spelling out what he’d wanted to read, had been dispelled when further words appeared: TU TEXPOSES AU DANGER POUR SAUVER LE DIEU DANGEREUX, “You put yourself in danger to save the dangerous god.” That part made no sense to him.
Twice he had told his wife’s ghost—aloud, in stammering self-conscious syllables—that he loved her; and both times the slowly indicated letters had advised him to turn all his feelings for her over to the god who died for everyone. The wording had been exactly the same both times, and he had been reminded of the repetitive answers he had got from Plumtree’s Valorie personality.
In spite of that, he had carefully wrapped the cassette from the telephone answering machine in a clean sock and stashed it in the bedside table drawer, beside the Gideon Bible—and he had stayed here at the motel, running up Nina’s credit-card debt, in the hope that Plumtree would come back here, ready to do her mind-opening trick. He had called Pace Vineyards and got them to agree to let him have an unspecified amount of vacation time.
Yesterday morning he had got around to asking the Ouija board about one of the missal notes that had puzzled him—and then, in horrified alarm, he had chosen to regard the resulting answer as delusional, a fever-dream notion induced in the unimaginable sleep of death.
He’d had no choice: for in answer to his question about the unspecified “failure” during Mondavi’s 1978 visit to the Medoc, the planchette had given him the letters JAI ESSAYE MAIS JAI MANQUE A TUER LHOMME DE CALIFORNIA, which worked out to spell, “I tried but failed to kill the man from California” in French.
After getting that answer on Sunday morning, he had stayed away from the planchette all the rest of that day—he had spent most of the gray daylight hours on a long, agitated walk among the incongruously peaceful green lawns of nearby Fort Mason. Nina would have been only fourteen years old in 1978—he had assured himself that the Ouija-board statement could not be anything more than a sad, morbid fantasy.
But this morning he had nevertheless helplessly found himself consulting the NADA sign and the ashtray once again, and a few minutes ago, at lonely random, he had got around to asking about her disgraced grand-uncle Georges Leon.
The answering string of letters that he had just copied down was easily translatable as, “He was the western king, and then his son Scott was the western king.”
And he now remembered Pete Sullivan dialing out Scott Crane’s full name on the old rotary telephone in the laundry room in Solville, six days ago—Cochran had noticed at the time that one of the two last names had been Leon.
It could hardly be a coincidence—apparently the dead king in the back of Mavranos’s truck was some remote cousin of Cochran’s dead wife.
Abruptly there was a hard knock at the motel-room door, and Cochran jumped so wildly that both ashtrays sprang off the bed; then he had dived to the closet and fumbled up the .357 with hands so shaky that he almost fired a bullet through the ceiling.
“Who is it?” he demanded shrilly. He hoped it was Plumtree at last, or even Mavranos—and not the police, or Armentrout with a couple of burly psych-techs and a hypodermic needle, or whoever it had been that had shot at Mavranos by the Sutro ruins last week.
“Is that you, Sid?” came a woman’s hoarse voice from outside.
Carrying the gun, Cochran hurried to the door and peeked out through the little inset lens. It was Plumtree’s flushed face staring at him—in fact, in spite of the apparent sunburn and the tangled blond hair across her face, he could recognize her as being specifically Cody. And even through the peep-hole he could see dried blood on scratches below her jaw and at one corner of her mouth.
He pulled the chain free of the slot and swung the door open. “Cody, I’m damn glad to—” he began, but guilt about his recent schemes stopped his voice.
She limped in past him and sat down heavily on the bed. She was wearing clothes he hadn’t seen before, khaki shorts and a man’s plaid flannel shirt, but she smelled of old sweat, and her bare legs were scratched and spattered with mud and burned a deep maroon. As he closed the door and reattached the chain, Cochran remembered dully that the Bay Area sky had been solidly overcast this whole past week.
Plumtree was shaking her head, swinging her matted hair back and forth, and she was mumbling, perhaps to herself, “How do I hang on, how do I keep him down? I feel like I’ve been stretched on the rack! Even Valorie can only pin him down sometimes.” She looked at the gun in Cochran’s hand, and then her bloodshot eyes fixed on his. “Shooting me might be the best plan, that Mavranos guy’s no idiot. But right now you better tell me you’ve got something to drink in here.” She sniffed and curled her grimy lip. “Jeez, it stinks! Talk to the school nurse about hygiene, would you?”
“I—” Cochran stopped himself, and just tossed the gun down on the bed and fetched the current pint bottle of Wild Turkey from the windowsill. After he had handed it to her he hesitantly picked the gun up again and tucked it into his belt.
Plumtree tipped the bottle up and took several messy swallows, wincing as the whiskey touched the cut at the corner of her mouth; but she nodded at him over the neck of the bottle as she drank, and when she had lowered it and gingerly wiped her mouth, she wheezed, “Don’t be shy about it,” breathing bourbon fumes at him. “Put one through my thigh if you’ve got the leisure and elbow room, but—if I turn into my dad?—you stop me.” The bottle had been half full when he’d handed it to her, but there was only an inch or so left when she gave it back to him. “How long have I been gone?” she asked. “Not too long, I guess, if you’re still here. I was afraid you wouldn’t be—that, like, everything happened a year ago, and the king was dead past recall.”
“Today is Monday the sixteenth,” he said, “of January, still. You’ve been gone … two full days.” He thought of wiping the neck of the bottle, then just tilted it up for a sip. The whiskey will kill any germs, he thought. “Where were you?” he asked after he had swallowed a mouthful of the vapory, smoldering liquor.
“You’re a gentleman, Sid. Where was I? I—” She inhaled sharply, and then she was sobbing. She looked up at him and her eyes widened. “Scant! You found me!” She clawed the bedspread as if the room might begin tossing like a boat; then she grabbed his arm and pulled him down beside her, and buried her face in his shirt. “God, I hurt all over—my teeth feel like somebody tried to pull them all out—and I’m a mess,” she said, sniffling. “Hold on to me anyway. Don’t let me run away again! You might have to handcuff me to the plumbing in the bathroom or something.” He had both his arms around her now, and felt her shaking. “But don’t—Jesus, don’t hurt him, if he comes out.”
He patted her dirty hair and kissed the top of her head. I’ve got to just throw away that cassette from the phone-answering machine, he thought. Even if it would serve as a potent lure, how could I possibly have thought of—pushing this woman out of her own head, in order to get Nina back?—or even just compounding Janis’s problems by adding one more ghost to her sad menagerie? And Nina is dead, she’d only be what Kootie called a ROM disk, like Valorie. I swear I will not settle for that!
The bottle was in his right hand, behind her, and he wished he could get it up to his mouth.
“Where have you been, Janis?” he asked softly.
“Where—?” She shuddered, and then shoved him away. “Right back to me, hey?” she said. “Janis can’t face this flop? Or did you have Tiffany here, is that why you’re on the bed? How much time’s gone by now?”
Cochran stood up. “It was Janis,” he said wearily, “and just for a few seconds. Cody, I wish you—never mind. So where were you all?”
“I was—well, I was out in the hills. I’ve got to remember this, huh? Out in the woods with people wearing hoods, killing goats.” Tears spilled down her cheeks, and smeared the grime when she cuffed them away, but when she went on her voice was animated, a parody of vivacity: “One of the goat heads wound up on a, a pole, and I was on for just a couple of heartbeats when it was in the middle of speaking to us, in what I think was Greek. The goat head was speaking, in a human language. Goats have horizontal pupils because they look from side to side, mostly, and cats have vertical pupils because they’re always looking up and down. My pupils are … staying after school for detention. I don’t know who the hooded people were.” She nudged the NADA sign with her hip. “Whaddaya got, a Ouija board? Ask it who they were.” She smiled at him. Her nose had begun bleeding. “The hooded people.”
Cochran glanced at the clock radio on the bedside table. He still had an hour and a half before he was to meet Mavranos. In the last couple of days he had got into the habit of walking up Russian Hill on Lombard to Van Ness and catching the cable car down to California Street and then taking another one west to Chinatown, but today he could drive the old Granada, and hope to find a parking place. He might even get Cody to drop him off at a corner near Grant and Washington. No, she’d be way too drunk—maybe Janis could drive him.
“Okay,” he said. He stepped into the bathroom and hooked a face-cloth off the towel rack, then tossed it to her as he bent down beside the bed to retrieve the clean ashtray. “Your nose is bleeding, Cody,” he said, placing the ashtray on the metal sign. “Put pressure on it.” He sat down on the bed and laid his fingertips on the round piece of clear glass. “Who has … Miss Plumtree been with, during these last few days?” he asked.
As soon as he spoke, it occurred to him that Cody should be touching the ashtray too, and that he should have cleared the ghost of Nina off the line; but the ashtray was already moving.
“Write down the letters as they come,” he told Plumtree nervously.
“I can remember ’em,” she said, her voice muffled by the towel.
“Will you please—here we go.” The ashtray had paused over the L, and now moved sideways to the E.
“Letterman,” mumbled Plumtree. “I knew it. I was with David Letterman.”
When the ashtray planchette had spelled out L-E-V-R, Plumtree inhaled sharply and stumbled back to the Wild Turkey bottle and took a gulp from it, wincing again. “Fucking Lever Blank,” she gasped as blood spilled down her chin, “that’s what I was afraid of. Goddamn old monster, he can’t leave that pagan hippie cult alone, even though they threw him off that building in Soma.”
“It’s not ‘lever,’ dammit,” interrupted Cochran loudly without looking up from the metal sign. “Will you please write this stuff down? It’s L-E-V-R, with no second E. And now an I, and an E … get the goddamn pencil, will you?” He glanced quickly at her. “And you’re bleeding all over the place.”
“Okay, okay, sorry. Just, my hands feel like I’ve got arthritis.” The alcohol was visibly hitting her already—she was weaving as she walked back to the bed, as if she were on a ship in choppy water. She fumbled at the paper and pencil. “What …?”
“L-E-V-R-I-E-R-B,” he spelled out. “And another L—and an A.”
She was goggling blearily at the board now. “And N … and C …” she noted, painstakingly writing the letters.
After several tense seconds, Cochran lifted his fingers from the ashtray. “That’s it. What, Levrierble …?”
“Levrierblanc.” She held out the blood-spattered sheet of paper and gave him a scared, defiant glare. “That’s still Lever Blank, if you ask me. The French version.” She pressed the towel to her nose again.
“My wife is French,” he said, nodding, realizing even as he spoke that it was an inadequate explanation. “Was.”
“I know. Sorry to hear she died, dirty shame.” She snapped a dirty fingernail against the paper, spiking the blood drops on it. “It’s two words. Blanc’s the second word, like Mel Blanc.”
Cochran nodded. Obviously she was right—and he suspected that if Nina hadn’t been their … operator here, it would have come out in plain English as LEVERBLANK.
“A goat head,” he said, “speaking Greek.” In his mind he heard Long John Beach’s crazy lyrics again: … and frolicked in the Attic mists in a land called Icaree. “I think you’d better write down everything you can remember about this Lever Blank crowd.” He glanced again at the clock radio. “Not right now. I’ve got to meet Mavranos in a little over an hour. Let’s get Janis to drop me near the place, she—” isn’t falling-down drunk, he thought; “—isn’t having a nose-bleed, and then you can come back here and—”
“Janis drive? Fuck that. I can drive, and I’m meeting Marvos—dammit—Mavranos with you, too. We’ll get this done. I don’t want to have that little kid’s dad’s blood on my hands one hour more than I have to.” Her own blood was running down her wrist. “He just wants, my father, he wants to become king, like he failed to do when he was in a body of his own. A male body, he needs. If we can get Crane solidly raised from the dead, I think my father will have no reason to hang around, he’ll just go back into hibernation, like a case of herpes in remission. You don’t have herpes, do you?”
Cochran blinked at her. “No.”
“Tiffany does. You should know. I won’t even drink out of a glass she’s used. How far away is it, where you’re meeting Marvy-Arvy?”
“Oh—no more than twenty minutes, if we drive. Of course if we’ve got to find a place to park the car, I don’t know how long that might take. No, I really think it’s too dangerous for you to be there, Cody—if Mavranos gets hold of you, he’s liable to do something like—”
“Nothing I’ll object to. Nothing I won’t deserve. I got his friend killed.” She struggled up from the bed, still pressing the bloody face-cloth to her nose. “You got coffee? Good. Make me a cup, and pour the rest of that bourbon into it. I’m gonna,” she said with a sigh, as if facing a painful ordeal, “take a shower.”
“Could I talk to Janis about all this?”
“No. And what do you mean, ‘she doesn’t have a nosebleed’? It’s her nose too, isn’t it?”
Cochran opened his mouth to point out some inconsistencies in the things she’d said, but found that he was laughing too hard to speak; tears were leaking from the corners of his eyes, and his chest hurt. “I’ll,” he managed to choke, “have the coffee ready when you … get out of the shower.”
Her mouth twitched. “Laugh it up, funny boy,” she said mockingly, then lurched into the bathroom and closed the door with a slam. From the other side of the door he heard her call, “And don’t be peeking in here to see if Tiffany’s on!”
Cochran was still sniffling when he pulled open the bedside table drawer, and he lifted out the cassette and stared at it.
Two full seconds over a lit match would destroy the thing.
But, It’s her nose too, isn’t it?—and, if it comes to that, his, too. Her terrible father’s. A lot of jumping around, re-shuffling and discarding, might happen before we all get out of San Francisco.
He tucked the cassette carefully into his shirt pocket.