Earthquake Weather

O God! that one might read the book of fate,

And see the revolution of the times

Make mountains level, and the continent,—

Weary of solid firmness,—melt itself

Into the sea! and, other times, to see

The beachy girdle of the ocean

Too wide for Neptune’s hips; how chances mock,

And changes fill the cup of alteration

With divers liquors! O! if this were seen,

The happiest youth, viewing his progress through,

What perils past, what crosses to ensue,

Would shut the book, and sit him down and die.

—William Shakespeare,

Henry IV, Part II

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

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 death-day 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 Meiggs 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 Faberge 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 mannikins.

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 Adrocles, 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 dialling 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 east 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 cant 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 grimy 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 sourly, 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, isnt it?—and, if it comes to that, his, too. Her terrible father’s. A lot of jumping around, reshuffling and discarding, might happen before we all get out of San Francisco.

He tucked the cassette carefully into his shirt pocket.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Besides that all secret men are men soon terrified, here were surely cards enough of one black suit, to justify the holder in growing rather livid as he turned them over.

—Charles Dickens,

A Tale of Two Cities

DR. Armentrout knew he was lucky to have got out of the smoky apartment building and back down to the street, and his car, and to Long John Beach, before encountering this…very shifty woman.

The day had started propitiously, but this last half hour had been a rout.

LATE LAST Thursday his teal-blue BMW had finally limped off the 280 at Junipero Serra Boulevard and sputtered up Seventh to Parnassus to the UCSF Medical Center, where he had got a couple of colleagues to make some telephone calls for him; the upshot was that he had been allowed to take over house-sitting duties at the nearby Twin Peaks villa of a neurologist who was on sabbatical in Europe.

The first thing he had done at the empty house was to change the phone-answering message. Then, very quickly, he had made a photocopied blank sheet of letterhead from the nearby Pacifica minimum-security psychiatric facility, and he’d altered the phone and fax numbers on it to those of the absent neurologist’s house; he had addressed the sheet to Rosecrans Medical, and typed on it a transfer for Long John Beach, along with a request for Beach’s records—to make it look plausible he had had to ask for everything: nursing progress reports, psychosocial assessment, treatment plan, financial data, the legal section. He hoped the neurologist was in the habit of keeping a lot of paper in his home fax printer. Long John Beach was 53-58, on a full conservatorship, but the old man’s “conservator” had been a fictitious entity from the start, so there’d been no risk in signing the remembered made-up name.

Then Armentrout had telephoned Rosecrans Medical and peremptorily announced his application for immediate administrative leave. He’d explained that he was temporarily working as a consultant at UCSF Medical, and pointed out that he was entitled to six weeks a year of vacation, and had never taken any of it. He had named one of the other doctors, an elderly Freudian, to serve as acting chief of staff in his absence. Nobody had argued with him, as he had known they would not—a chief of psychiatry could pretty well do as he liked in a clinic.

To his surprise, he had felt bad about violating their trust, breaking the rules—and not just because he would lose his career and probably be charged with a felony if he were to be caught. He had pursued a psychiatric career largely out of gratitude for his own long-ago deliverance from guilt and shame, and he regretted the necessity of this dishonesty far more than he had ever regretted the killing of a patient.

While waiting vainly to hear from Plumtree’s Omar Salvoy personality on the cellular telephone, Armentrout had printed up a flyer and posted it in various bars and surf shops and parks around the city; REWARD FOR INFORMATION, the flyer had read, followed by a picture of Koot Hoomie Parganas—an old school photo, the same one that had been on billboards in Los Angeles when the boy had dropped out of sight in ’92—and one of Angelica Anthem Elizalde, also from that year, blown up from a newspaper photo, and unfortunately showing her with her mouth open in surprise and her eyes closed. He had printed the absent neurologist’s phone number at the bottom, and let the answering machine take all calls to it.

There would have been no point in listing the number of his cellular phone—it rang all day long now, with apparently every idiot ghost in the country wanting to threaten him or weep at him or beg him for money or rides to Mexico. He had to answer it every tune, though, because it was the line Salvoy would call in on; and at times during this last couple of days, tired of Long John Beach’s insane rambiings, Armentrout had even stayed on the line and had disjointed conversations with the moronic “ghostings,” as the old writers had referred to the things. They certainly were more gerund than noun.

THE WOMAN he was facing now, though, seemed to deserve a noun.

THIS MORNING a call had come in on the neurologist’s line, and Armentrout had picked it up after hearing a few sentences. It was an old man calling from a pay phone at the Moscone Convention Center, and he was excitedly demanding the reward money. Armentrout had driven over there and paid him fifty dollars, and the man had then told him that the woman and boy on the flyer, and two other men, were living in an upstairs apartment on Lapu Lapu, a block away.

And probably the old informant had been right. When Armentrout had burst into the indicated apartment, wearing his clumsy two-figure mannikin appliance, the occupants had apparently just fled out the window. Two smoking television sets sat one atop the other in the middle of the room, chanting crazy admonitions at him like Moses’ own burning bush. He had shambled past them out onto the balcony before fleeing the room, but, though the two mannikins he was yoked with had seemed to twitch spontaneously as he had stood out there in the rainy breeze, he had seen no one on the street below.

And so he had shuffled sideways back down the stairs and outside to the car. Fortunately Long John Beach had got tired of waiting in the back seat and had got out to urinate on the bumper—for Armentrout had no sooner opened his mouth to yell at the one-armed old man than he became aware of someone standing only a yard away from Long John Beach and himself.

Armentrout had jumped in huge surprise, the two mannikins strapped to his shoulders twitching in synchronized response, for there had been no one standing there a moment earlier. The impossible newcomer was a lean dark-skinned woman in a ragged ash-colored dress, and her first words to him were in French, which he didn’t understand. In the gray daylight her face was shifting like an intercutting projection, from bright-eyed pubescence in one instant to eroded old age in the next. Armentrout knew enough not to meet her eyes.

“No habla Frangais” he said hoarsely. This is a ghost, he told himself. A real one, standing beside my car on this San Francisco sidewalk. His shirt was suddenly clammy, and the heads and arms of the mannikins yoked on either side of him were jiggling because his hands were shaking on the control levers inside the jackets of their green leisure suits.

“No habla Français” echoed Long John Beach, stepping forward and shoving his still-swollen nose against the outside ear of the right-hand mannikin, “today. No grandma’s cookies, so de little mon say. Madame has forgotten that we agreed to play in partnership this evening.”

The flickering woman goggled at the four heads in front of her—teeth were appearing and disappearing inside her open mouth—and clearly she was uncertain as to which head was which. Armentrout was careful to look away from her eyes, but as her gaze brushed past him he felt his attention bend with the weight of her unmoored sentience, and he shuddered at the realization that he had come very close to dying in that instant—in a group therapy session once he had seen a patient meet the eyes of a ghostly figure that had been loitering out on the lawn for several days after an in-house suicide, and the ghost figure had disappeared in the same moment that the patient had toppled dead out of his chair.

Now Long John Beach raised the amputated stump of his left arm, and the two Styrofoam mannikin heads began nodding busily. Armentrout wasn’t doing it—he could feel the control lever in his nerveless right hand jiggling independently of him.

“If she hollers, let her go,” Long John Beach chanted as the heads bobbed, “my momma told me to pick this verry one, and out…goes…you.”

He sneezed at the woman, and her face imploded; and with a disembodied wail of “Richeee!” she all at once became nothing more than a cloud of dirty smoke tumbling away down the sidewalk.

“G-good work, John,” stammered Armentrout, spitting helplessly as he spoke The ghost-woman’s final cry had sounded like Armentrout’s mother’s voice—invoked by Long John Beach saying my momma?—and he was afraid he was about to wet his pants; well, if he did, he could switch trousers with one of the mannikins, and people would think the Styrofoam-man had wet his pants. That would work. But then Armentrout would be wearing lime green pants with a gray tweed jacket.

He assured himself that what he feared was impossible. How could his mother’s ghost be here? He had left his loving mother in that bathtub in Wichita thirty-three years ago, drunk, dead drunk; and then intensive narcohypnosis and several series of ECT had effectively severed that guilt-ghost from him, way back in Kansas. “John, what do you suppose—”

“We better motate out o’ here,” interrupted the one-armed old man. “That was several girls in one corset. I sneezed a ghost at ‘em to knock em down, but they’ll be back soon, with that ghost glued on now too.”

“Right, right. Jesus.” Armentrout was blinking tears out of his eyes. “Unstrap me, will you?”

With the deft fingers of his one hand—or maybe, it occurred to Armentrout now, with help from his phantom hand—Long John Beach unbuckled the two-mannikin appliance, and Armentrout shrugged it off and tossed it into the back seat and got in behind the wheel and started the car. After the old man had gone back to the bumper to finish pissing, and had finally got in on the passenger side, Armentrout drove away through the indistinct shadow of the elevated 80 Freeway.

“Let me tell you a parable,” said Long John Beach, rocking in the passenger seat. “A man heard a knock at his door, and when he opened it he saw a snail on the doorstep. He picked up the snail and threw it as far away as he could. Six months later, he heard a knock at his door again, and when he opened it the snail was on the doorstep, and it looked up at him and said, ‘What was that all about?’”

Armentrout was breathing deeply and concentrating on traffic. “Don’t you start getting labile and gamy on me, John,” he said curtly.

He was driving north on Third Street, blinking through the metronomic windshield wipers at the lit office windows of the towers beyond Market Street. Beside him Long John Beach was now belching and gagging unattractively.

“Stop it,” Armentrout said finally, as he made a left turn and accelerated down the wet lanes southeast, toward Twin Peaks and the neurologist’s house. “Unroll the window if you’re going to be sick.”

In a flat, sexless voice, Long John Beach said, “I would be blind with weeping, sick with groans, look pale as primrose with blood-drinking sighs, and all to have the noble king alive.”

Armentrout blinked at the man uneasily. Ghosts were harmless in this form, channelled through the crazy old man, but their arrival often made the car’s engine miss—it had stalled almost constantly on the drive up here—and he worried about what the ghosts might overhear and carry back to the idiot bar where they seemed to hang out—“India,” the old writers had called that raucous but unphysical place. And this particular ghost, this sexless one that seemed to quote Shakespeare all the time, had been coming on through Long John Beach frequently lately, ever since their visit at dawn last Thursday to the beach below Scott Crane’s Leucadia estate.

There was something oracular about this ghost’s pronouncements, though, and Armentrout found himself impulsively blurting, “That last cry, from that ghost out on the sidewalk—that might have been my mother.”

“My dangerous cousin,” came the flat voice from Long John Beach’s mouth, “let your mother in: I know she is come to pray for your foul sin.”

“My foul sin?” Armentrout was shaking again, but he forced a derisive laugh. “And I’m no cousin of yours, ghosting. Don’t bother holding a chair for me, in your…moron’s tavern.”

“Most rude melancholy, Valerie gives thee place.”

“Shut up!” snapped Armentrout in a voice he couldn’t keep from sounding petulant and frightened. “John, come back on!” The one-armed figure was silent, though, and just stared at the streaks of headlights and neon on the gleaming pavement ahead; so Armentrout picked up the telephone and switched it on, meaning to punch in some null number and talk to whatever random ghost might pick up at the other end.

But someone was already on the line—apparently Armentrout had activated it in the instant before it would have beeped.

“Got no time for your ma nowadays, hey Doc?” came a choppy whisper from the earpiece. “She’s back here crying in her drink, complaining about you sneezing in her face. Shall I put her on?”

The cellular phone was wet against Armentrout’s cheek. “No, please,” he said, whispering himself. He knew this caller must be Omar Salvoy, Plumtree’s ingrown father, and Armentrout had no decent defenses against the powerful personality. The tape recording he had made last Wednesday had been magnetically erased by Salvoy’s field—even in the Faraday cage inside his desk!—and the vial of Plumtree’s blood had come open in Armentrout’s briefcase, and soaked the waxed-paper wrapper of a sandwich he’d stowed there for lunch; he couldn’t imagine how he could use a dried-out bloody sandwich as a weapon against the Salvoy personality. “You need my clinic,” he ventured weakly. “You need my authority for commitment of the boy, and ECT treatment, and maintenance on life-support.”

“I don’t need this black dog,” came the whisper. “When it barks, the whole India bar shakes out of focus. Is this your dog?”

In the passenger seat beside Armentrout, Long John Beach rocked his gray old head back against the headrest and began jerkily whining up at the head-liner, in an eerily convincing imitation of a dog.

“Stop it!” Armentrout shouted at him, accidentally swerving the BMW in the lane and drawing a honk from a driver alongside.

“Take it slow, Daddy-O,” Salvoy said through the telephone. “I only got a minute, boyfriend is in the shower, and anyway I’m not…seated properly here, I’m steering from the back seat and can’t reach the pedals—as it were. Valerie is surely gonna kick me out again any time now. This isn’t the Fool’s dog, is it? Get away! Listen, my girl got away from me hard today, and that’s bad because tomorrow is a Dionysus death-day, it’s their best day to do the restoration-to-life trick with Scott Crane’s body. And my girl Janis tells me that they were talking last week to a ghost black lady in the Bay Area who claimed to have died in like 1903; that can only be this old voodoo-queen ghost known as Mammy Pleasant, who’s been screwing with TV receptions around here ever since there’s been TVs to screw with. If the Parganas crowd is still in touch with Pleasant, they might be getting some real horse’s mouth. Better than half-ass goat head. It’ll be by the water, in any case, at dawn—oh shit, stay by the phone.”

With a click, the line went dead. Then, seeming loud in contrast to Salvoy’s whispering, a girl’s nasal voice from the earpiece said, “Doctor, I’m eating broken glass and cigarette butts! Is this normal? I eat till I jingle, but I can’t fill myself up! Won’t you—”

Armentrout flipped the phone’s cover shut and slammed it back into its cradle. That last speaker had probably been the obese bipolar girl who had killed herself last week—but who was the flat-voiced one who had spoken through Long John, the one who seemed always to quote Shakespeare and who apparently called herself Valerie? Could it be Plumtree’s Valerie personality, astrally at large and spying on him? Good God, he had told her about his mother!

And the voice on the sidewalk had been his mother’s—Salvoy had said she’d been in the bar weeping about someone sneezing in her face.

Armentrout sighed deeply, almost at peace with the realization that he would have to perform a seance, and an exorcism, today.

LONG JOHN Beach had hunched forward over the dashboard now, sniffing in fast snorts punctuated by explosive exhalations.

It was so convincing that Armentrout almost thought he could smell wet dog fur. Long John had been doing this sort of thing periodically for the last couple of days, sniffing and whining and gnawing the neurologist’s leather couch—was the crazy man channeling the ghost of a dog?

This isn’t the Fools dog, is it?

It occurred to Armentrout that in most tarot-card decks the Fool was a young man in random clothes dancing on a cliff edge, with a dog snapping at his heels; and certainly Long John’s crazy speech, his “word-salad” as psychiatrists referred to skitzy jabbering, did sometimes hint at a vast, contra-rational wisdom.

But surely, the crazy old man couldn’t be in touch with one of the primeval tarot archetypes! Especially not that one! The Fool was a profoundly chaotic influence, inimical to the kind of prolonged unnatural stasis that Armentrout needed to establish for the life-support confinement of the Parganas boy.

Could the old man possibly channel someone—or something—that big?

A Dionysus death-day.

Armentrout remembered the catastrophic ice-cream social at Rosecrans Medical Center last week. Long John Beach had seemed to be channeling—had seemed to be possessed by—the spirit of the actual Greek god Dionysus on that night. It was hard for Armentrout to avoid believing that Dionysus had somehow been responsible for the earthquake that had permitted Plumtree and that Cochran fellow to escape.

Armentrout thought he knew now why the death of the Fisher King had eliminated all the ghosts in the Southern California area. Murdered in the dead of winter, the slain Fisher King had become compellingly identical to the vegetation-god Dionysus, whose winter mysteries celebrated the god’s murder and devourment at the hands of the Titans and his subsequent return from the kingdom of the dead. Being a seasonal deity of death and the underworld—and incarnate this winter in this killed king—the god had taken all the local ghosts away with him, as a possibly unintended entourage, just as the death of summer takes away the vitality of plants, leaving the dried husks behind. In the case of the ghosts, it was their memories and strengths that had lingered behind, while their lethal, vengeful sentiences were conveniently gone.

If you like dead leaves, Armentrout thought as he drove, it’s good news to have a dead Fisher King; and I like dead leaves. I sustain myself spiritually on those dear dead leaves.

But eventually, he thought, if nature follows her cyclical course, Dionysus begins his trek back from the underworld, and a Fisher King again becomes evident; and the plants start to regain their life, and the ghosts—quickly, it seems!—are again resistant, dangerous presences. The god wants to rake up the dead leaves, he wants to gather to himself not only the ghosts but all the memories and powers and loves that had accrued to them…which scraps I don’t want to let him have. He wants us to figuratively or literally drink his pagadebiti Zinfandel, and let go of every particle of the cherished dead, give them entirely to him…which I don’t want to do.

When Armentrout and Long John Beach had finally got off the 280 Freeway last Thursday, the crazy old man had suddenly and loudly insisted that they take a right turn off of Junipero Serra Boulevard and drive five blocks to a quiet old suburban street that proved to be called Urbano; and in a grassy traffic circle off Urbano stood a gigantic white-painted wooden sundial on a broad flat wheel with Rom numerals from I to XII around the rim of it. After demanding that Armentrout stop the car, Long John Beach had got out and plodded across the street and walked back and forth on the face of the sundial, frowning and peering down around his feet a though trying to read the time on it—but of course the towering gnomon-wedge had been throwing no shadow at all on that overcast day. The passage of time, as far as this inexplicable sundial was concerned, was suspended.

And if Armentrout could succeed in getting the new Fisher King maintained flatline, brain-dead, on artificial life-support in his clinic, Dionysus’s clock would be stopped—at the one special point in the cycle that would permit Armentrout to consume ghosts with impunity—with no fear of consequences, no need for masks.

The two-mannikin framework shifted and clanked in the back seat now as Armentrout drove fast through the Seventeenth Street intersection, the car’s tires hissing on the wet pavement. Market Street was curving to the right as it started up into the dark hills, toward the twin peaks that the Spanish settlers had called Los Pechos de la Chola, the breasts of the Indian maiden.

“There was still time” Long John Beach said, in his own voice.

“For what?” asked Armentrout absently as he watched the red brake lights and turn-signal indicators reflecting on the wet asphalt ahead of them. “You wanted to get something to eat? There’s roast beef and bread at the house—though I should feed you in the driveway, the way you toss it around.” He passed a slow-moving Volkswagen and sped up, eager to put more distance between himself and that shifting maternal ghost on Lapu Lapu Street. “I should feed you Alpo.”

“I mean there was still time, even though I couldn’t see it. It doesn’t stor> because you have something blocking the light. If we coulda seen in infrared,” he went on, pronouncing the last word so that it rhymed with impaired, “the shadow woulda been there, I bet you anything.” The BMW was abruptly slowing, because Armentrout’s foot had lifted from the gas pedal, but the old man went on, “Infrared is how they keep patty melts hot, in diners, when the waitress is too busy to bring ’em to you right when they’re ready.”

“Stay,” said Armentrout in a voice muted to a conversational tone by the sudden weight of fear; he took a deep breath and made himself finish the sentence, “out… of…my…mind. God damn you.” But his thoughts were as loud and rapid as his heartbeat: You can’t read my mind! You can’t start channelling me! I’m not dead!

Long John Beach shrugged, unperturbed. “Well, you go around leaving the door open…”

From the backseat came a squeak that could only have been one of the Styrofoam heads shifting against the other as the car rocked with resumed acceleration—but to Armentrout it sounded like a hiccup of suppressed laughter.

TALL CYPRESSES hid from any neighboring houses the back patio of the neurologist’s, villa on Aquavista Way, and the green slope of the northernmost Twin Peak mounted up right behind the pyrocantha bushes at the far edge of the lawn. After Armentrout had parked the car in the garage and made Long John Beach carry the two-mannikin appliance out to the patio, he fixed a couple of sandwiches for the one-armed old man and then carefully began scouting up paraphernalia for a seance and exorcism in the back yard.

The neurologist’s house didn’t afford much for it—Armentrout found some decisive candles in glass chimney shades, and a dusty copper chafing dish no doubt untouched since about 1962, and a bottle of Hennessy XO, which was almost too good to use for plain fuel this way. Popov vodka would be more appropriate to his other’s—

He hastily drank several mouthfuls of the cognac right from the bottle as he Jrhade himself walk around the cement deck of the roofed patio, shakily lighting the candles and setting them down in a six-foot-wide circle. Then he picked up a hibachi land walked around the circle shaking clumped old ash in a line around the perimeter; after he tossed the hibachi out onto the lawn, where it broke like glass, he walked around the circle again, stomping and scuffing the ash so that the line was continuous and unbroken. The chafing dish he set on a wooden chair inside the circle, and, needing both hands to steady the bottle, he poured an inch of brandy into it.

Then for several minutes he just stood and stared at the shallow copper pan while the morning hilltop breeze sighed in the high cypress branches and chilled his damp face. I can face her, he told himself firmly; if it’s for the last time, and if she’s concealed behind the idiot shell-masks of Long John Beach’s broken mind, and if I’m armed with the Sun card from the monstrous Lombardy Zeroth deck—and there’s brandy to lure her, and then burn her up.

A hitch that might have been a sob or a giggle quivered in his throat.

Will this mean I’ll have committed matricide twice?

He shivered in the cold wind, and took another big gulp of the brandy to drive away the image of the old face under the surface of the water, the lipsticked mouth opening and shutting, and the remembered cramps in his seventeen-year-old arms.

He looked up at the gray sky, and swallowed still another mouthful and mentally recited the alphabet forward and backward several times.

At last he felt steady enough to go back inside and fetch out from under the bed the two purple velvet boxes.

“Finish your sandwich and get out here,” he told Long John Beach as he carried the boxes through the kitchen to the open back door. “We’ve got a…a call to make.”

When Long John Beach came shambling out of the house, absently rubbing mustard out of his hair and licking his fingers, Armentrout had to tell him several times to go over and stand inside the circle, before he finally got the old man’s attention. “And step over the ash line,” he added.

At last the old man was standing inside the circle, blinking and grinning foolishly. Armentrout forced himself to speak in a level tone: “Okay, John, we’re going to do our old trick of having you listen in on a call, right? Only this time, you’re going to be the telephone as well as the eavesdropper. ‘Kay?”

Long John Beach nodded. “Ring ring,” he said abruptly, in a loud falsetto.

Armentrout blinked at him uncertainly. Could this be an incoming call? But this couldn’t start yet, he hadn’t lit the brandy yet! “Uh, who is this, please?” he asked trying to sound stern so that the old man wouldn’t laugh at him if he’d just been clowning around and this wasn’t a real call.

“Dwayne,” said Long John Beach.

Armentrout tried to remember any patient who had ever had that name “Dwayne?” he said. “I’m sorry—Dwayne who?”

“Dwayne the tub, I’m dwowning!”

Armentrout reeled back, gasping. It wasn’t his mother’s voice, but it had to be a sort of relayed thought from her ghost.

“J-John,” he said too loudly, fumbling in his pockets for a match or a lighter, “I want you to light the brandy—light the stuff in that pan there.”

He found a matchbook and tossed it into the circle, then fell to his knees on the wet grass beside one of the purple velvet boxes. I can’t shoot him, he thought, it wouldn’t stop her, she’s just passing through Long John’s train-station head.

He flipped open the other box and spilled the oversized cards out onto the grass, squinting as he pawed through them until he found the Sun card.

When he looked up, Long John Beach had lifted the copper chafing-dish pan in his one hand and was sniffing it. And now it was Armentrout’s mother’s voice that spoke from the old man’s mouth: “Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope!”

“Put that down,” Armentrout wailed.

The pan tipped up toward the old man’s mouth.

“Mm—” Armentrout choked on the word mom, and had to make do with just shouting, “Don’t drink that! John! Kick out that woman’s ghost for a minute and listen to me!”

Suddenly, from the gate by the garage, a man’s voice called, “Dr. Armentrout?”

“Get out of here!” Armentrout yelled back, struggling to his feet. “This is private property!”

But the gate clanged and swung open, and it was the young intern from Rosecrans Medical Center, Philip Muir, who stepped out onto the backyard grass. He didn’t have his white coat on, but he was wearing a long-sleeved white shirt and a tie. “John!” he exclaimed, noticing the one-armed old man standing in the ash circle on the patio. Long John Beach was noisily drinking the brandy now, and slopping a lot of it into the white whiskers that bristled on his cheeks and neck these days. Muir turned to Armentrout. “He’s supposed to be at Pacifica.”

“I—have him out on a day pass,” Armentrout panted. “This is none of your—”

“Richie!” called Armentrout’s mother’s voice from Long John Beach’s throat, bubbling around the last gulp of the brandy. “Can you hear me under water? I’ve got a beard! Did they have to give me…hormones? Pull the plug, darling, and let me breathe! Where’s some more of this whiskey?”

Muir sniffed sharply. “And you’re giving him whiskey? Doctor, I—”

“It’s not whiskey,” babbled Armentrout, “it’s brandy, she doesn’t know the difference—”

Muir was frowning and shaking his head. “‘She’? What’s the matter with you? Have you got Plumtree and Cochran up here too? I know Cochran is in the area, he telephoned the vineyard he works at—”

Armentrout interrupted him to call out, “I’ll get you more liquor in a moment! just—wait there!”

But Long John Beach blinked at him and spat. “I was never a liquor man,” he said. “I just ate smokes.”

Armentrout sighed deeply and sank down cross-legged beside the two velvet boxes. At least his mother was gone, for now. But Muir surely intended to report this, and investigate Beach’s transfer, and end Armentrout’s career. “Come over here, Philip,” he said huskily, lifting the lid of the box that contained the derringer. “I think I can show you something that will explain all of this.”

“It’s not me you need to be explaining things to. Why on earth did you give Plumtree ECT? What the hell happened during the ice-cream social last Wednesday? Mr. Regushi swallowed his tongue!”

Armentrout again got wearily to his feet, one hand holding the box and the other gripping the hidden derringer “Just look at this Philip and you’ll understand.”

Muir angrily stepped forward across the grass. “I can’t imagine what it could be.” “I guess it’s whatever you’ve made it.”

The flat, hollow boom of the .410 shot-shell was muffled by the cypresses and the hillside.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

TROILUS: What offends you, lady?

CRESSIDA: Sir, mine own company.

TROILUS: You cannot shun yourself

CRESSIDA: Let me go and try.

—William Shakespeare,

Troilus and Cressida

COCHRAN said he’s been walking and taking the cable cars to get down here into Chinatown,” said Archimedes Mavranos. “Maybe the cable cars were full today, and he’s gotta hike the whole way.”

Shadows from a slow ceiling fan far overhead swept rhythmically over the red Formica tabletop.

“He might have sold us out,” said Kootie. “Maybe bad guys are just about to come busting in here.” He had asked for a straw with his Coke, and now he glanced over his shoulder; the bartender was looking at the television in the corner above the bar so Kootie stuck his straw into Angelica’s glass of Chardonnay and took a sip of it. “It’s sacramental,” he explained to his foster-mother when she frowned at him. “The king needs a sip at noon, especially if bad guys are due.”

“I don’t need Coke in my wine,” Angelica said.

“If bad guys want to open a hand in a no-limit game like this,” said Mavranos with more confidence than he felt, touching the front of his denim jacket and glancing at Angelica’s purse, “they’re liable to see some powerful raises.”

Pete Sullivan was sitting beside Angelica at the table by the stairs that led down to the rest rooms, and he was deftly, one-handed, cartwheeling a cigarette over the backs of the knuckles of his right hand; it had been unlit, fresh from the pack, when he’d started, but the tip was glowing when he flipped it into the air off his last knuckle and caught it by the filter in his lips.

“Wow,” said Mavranos.

“Yeah, wow,” agreed Pete irritably as he puffed smoke from the cigarette. “Magic tricks. But if I try to hold a weapon, my hands are no good at all. Even a pair of scissors I drop, if I think about stabbing somebody.” He wiggled his fingers. “Houdini made sure his mask wouldn’t be capable of hurting anybody.”

Kootie grinned wanly. “He can’t even play video games,” the boy told Mavranos “The hands think he’s really trying to shoot down enemy pilots.”

Mavranos opened his mouth to say something, then focussed past Kootie toward the front door of the bar. “Heads up,” he said.

Sid Cochran had just stumbled in from the street, and Mavranos felt his face tighten in a smile to see the blond Plumtree woman lurching along right behind him.

Mavranos pushed his chair back and stood up. “I was afraid we weren’t ever going to see you again, ma’am,” he said to Plumtree.

Plumtree’s hair was wet, and Mavranos thought she looked like someone going through heroin withdrawal as she collapsed into the chair beside Kootie. There were cuts under her chin and at one corner of her mouth, and her face had a puffy, bruised look. “Shove it, man,” she said hoarsely. “I’m an accessory to a murder today. More than anything else in the world, I want not to be. Soon, please God.”

“A murder today?” asked Kootie.

Plumtree closed her eyes. “No. I’m still, today, an accessory to Scott Crane’s murder. Is what I meant. But tomorrow I might not be.”

“Tomorrow you might not be,” Mavranos agreed.

“She insisted on coming,” said Cochran nervously as he took the chair opposite her, next to Pete Sullivan. “We’re laying our cards on the table here, but we can see yours too. We saw your truck in the Portsmouth Square parking structure, and saw what had to be your, your dead guy under a tarp in the back of it. If we’d wanted to screw this up, we’d have put a bullet through Crane’s head right then.”

Plumtree was blinking around now at the gold-painted Chinese bas-reliefs high up on the walls, and she squinted at a yard-wide, decorated Chinese paper lantern hanging from a string above the bar. An old Shell No-Pest Strip dangled from the tassel at the bottom of the lantern.

“Can I get a drink in this opium den?” she asked. “What is all this shit? The entrance to this place looks like a cave.”

Mavranos could smell bourbon on her breath right across the table. “It’s named after a famous eighth-century Chinese poet,” he told her. “The pictures painted on that lantern are scenes from his life.”

“What’d he do to earn the No-Pest Strip?” she asked. “Somebody get me a Bud, hey?”

I guess there’s no need for her to be sober, thought Mavranos; he shrugged and leaned over to pick up his own beer glass, which was empty.

“I’ll have a Singapore Sling,” Cochran said. He glanced at Plumtree. “They make a good Singapore Sling here.”

“Said the Connecticut Pansy,” remarked Plumtree absently. “Did flies kill him?” she asked Mavranos. “Your eight-cent poet, I mean—that yellow plastic thing is to kill flies, if you didn’t know.”

“Las moscas,” said Cochran, and Mavranos realized that he wasn’t totally sober either. “That’s what they call flies at a vineyard. They can get into the crush, if you do it after sunup—the Mexican grape-pickers think flies will carry little ghosts into the fermenting must, make you dizzy and give you funny dreams when you drink the wine, later. I suppose you might die of it, if enough ghosts had got into the wine.”

“I’m sure each of us has a funny story about flies,” said Mavranos patiently, “but right now we’ve got more important…issues at hand.” He turned away toward the bar, then paused and looked back at Plumtree. “The poet is supposed to have drowned—the story is he fell out of a boat, drunk, in the middle of the night, reaching for the reflection of the moon in the water.”

“Rah rah rah,” said Plumtree.

When Mavranos got back to the table with the three drinks and sat down, Plumtree greedily took the glass he pushed across to her and drank half of it in one long, wincing sip. “I should have told you to get two,” she said breathlessly when she had clanked the glass back down. “Do you people have a set of handcuffs? My father took over control of my body three days ago, and I just this morning got free of him; and I feel like he spent the whole time body-surfing in avalanches. But he might come back on at any time.” She opened her mouth and clicked her teeth like a monkey.

Mavranos stared at her. We should just ditch these two losers, he thought. Get back to the truck now, and just drive away.

“No, Arky,” said Angelica sharply. She was glaring at him. “She’s the one that’s going to do the…that’s going to let Crane assume her body.”

Plumtree glanced at their faces. “Well, yeah. What, were you—” Her bloodshot eyes widened in sudden comprehension. “My God, you were gonna have the kid do it! Shit, did you people even consider the possib-lil—possibility that Crane might not be able to get back into his old body, afterward?—that he might have to keep the one he takes for this?”

“We did consider that,” said Kootie. “I did consider that. But we’re all gonna get killed if this doesn’t get settled. Our TV burned up today, and—well, you had to be there. And,” he added with a scared glance at Mavranos, “I’m taking Arky’s word that Crane won’t keep my body, if he can help it at all.”

“Well, he won’t get a chance,” Plumtree told him with a haggard but possibly kindly meant smile. “I’m going to do it.”

“Damn right,” said Angelica.

“Kootie’s correct,” said Mavranos, “in saying that we’ve got to settle this situation—we’ve got to collapse this probability wave, let the daylight into Schrodinger’s shitty cat box. As long as there’s no real king working, we’re all exposed—hell, spotlighted—and pretty near totally defenseless. You’re staying at a motel or something?”

“Ye-es,” said Cochran cautiously.

“Well congratulations, you now have four houseguests. I hope the management won’t mind. Were gonna do this thing tomorrow at dawn, it looks like, this restoration-to-life, so there’s no point in us getting a different room at the same motel. We just this morning got rousted out of our place by some kind of walking department-store dummies, and—”

Cochran choked on his Singapore Sling. “Did they,” he said after he’d wiped his mouth redly on his sleeve, “move in synch, like they were puppets working off the same strings?”

“They did,” said Mavranos stolidly. “And suddenly I don’t like the idea of Scott’s body sitting out there in the truck, you know? Let’s finish up here, and get to your motel. With you and me and Pete, we should be able to get Scott into the motel room. And then we’ve got some preparations to make.”

Kootie nodded, and Angelica scowled at him.

“Finish every drop of your drinks,” said Plumtree with a ghastly, exhausted gaiety, “there’s poor people sober in China.”

CHINESE NEW Year was still two weeks off, but Asian boys on ribbon-decked bicycles tossed strings of lit firecrackers ahead of the six of them, as they walked south on the Grant Street sidewalk under the red-and-gold pagoda-roofed buildings, so that their ears rang with the staccato popping, and their noses burned with the barbecued-chicken smell of gunpowder, and Kootie was treading on fragments of red paper that crumpled and darkened on the wet pavement underfoot like fallen rose petals; and when they trudged across the wet grass of Portsmouth Square, the hoboes and winos hobbled out of their path and seemed to bow, or at least nod, as they passed.

And when the had ™led into the two vehicles—Plumtree riding in the front seat of Mavranos’s truck, and Pete riding in the Granada with Cochran, for mutual trust as much as to make sure both parties knew the way to the Star Motel—crows and mockingbirds swooped over them as the old car and truck labored up Van Ness, the darting birds seeming to be fighting in the gray sky.

At Lombard Street at the top of Russian Hill, where a right turn would have led them down the ornamental, brick-paved “crookedest street in the world,” they turned left instead, and drove down the straight lanes between bars and car-repair shops and liquor stores and motels, and after three blocks both vehicles ponderously turned left up the driveway into the Star Motel parking lot.

When they’d parked and all climbed out onto the asphalt, Angelica and Plumtree crowded around the tailgate of Mavranos’s dusty red truck to block the view as Pete and Cochran and Mavranos slid Scott Crane’s body out from beneath the tarpaulin. The body was dressed now in jeans and a white shirt, though with no shoes or socks, and Cochran tried not to look at the bloody bandage knotted around the thigh, over the denim.

The body was limp, not stiff, but they managed to tilt it into an upright posture and march it right past the ice and Coke machines and up the stairs to Cochran’s room; Plumtree had got her key out and scrambled ahead of them, and had got the door open by the time they had carried the dead king to the room.

They flopped Scott Crane down onto the bed that didn’t have Cochran’s homemade Ouija board on it, and Mavranos straightened the body’s arms and legs and unlooped the graying beard from the sawn-off stump of spear that stood up from the throat. The room was still humid from Plumtree’s and Cochran’s showers this morning, and smelled like old salami and unfresh clothing.

“Just like Charlton Heston in El Cid” said Kootie bravely. “Dead, but leading the army.”

“He is d-damn cold,” panted Cochran as he stood back and flapped his cramping hands. His heart was pounding more than the couple of minutes of effort could justify, and he was shivering with irrational horror at having touched the dead man again. “How can you—think he—” His voice almost broke, and he turned toward the TV set and just breathed deeply.

“Your place—could use some airing,” said Angelica, smoothly calling everyone’s attention away from his momentary loss of control. “Kootie, see if you can’t open the windows, while I go back down to the truck for our witchy supplies.”

“Don’t blame me for this pigpen,” said Plumtree, “I been away.”

“Witchy supplies,” put in Cochran in a carefully neutral tone. He gave Plumtree a resentful glance, very aware of the cassette tape in his shirt pocket and the French-language missal in the bedside table drawer. Kootie had ducked under the curtains and was noisily yanking at the aluminum-framed window.

Mavranos had his hands in the pockets of his denim jacket as he stared at Cochran. “I got to ask you to give me your gun,” he said. “I almost apologize, since we’re all really on the same side here and my crowd is taking over your place this way, for tonight—but Miss Plumtree said herself that her dad came on three days ago and she just this morning came back to herself; and you appear to have a…loyalty to her. I can’t justify—”

“Sure,” said Cochran, speaking levelly to conceal his reflexive anger. Slowly, he reached around to the back of his belt and tugged the holster clip free. Then he tossed the suede-sheathed gun onto the bathroom-side bed.

Mavranos leaned forward to pick it up with his left hand, keeping his right in his jacket pocket. “Thanks,” he said gruffly. “If we run into outside trouble, I’ll give it back to you.”

Cochran just nodded. I can see his point, he insisted to himself. I’d do the same, in his place.

Angelica came tromping back upstairs lugging a green canvas knapsack, and Cochran had to move his NADA sign and papers as she began unpacking its contents onto the bedspread.

She lifted out some springy shrub branches that smelled vaguely of eucalyptus, held together by a rubber band. “Myrtle,” she said. “Sacred to Dionysus, the books say. And a bottle of wine for us all to drink from, to show him respect.”

With shaky fingers Cochran took from her the bottle she had dug out of the knapsack. It was, he saw, a Kenwood Vineyards 1975 Cabernet Sauvignon, and the stylized picture at the top of the label was of a skeleton reclining on a grassy hillside.

Cochran’s ears seemed to be ringing with a wail that he was afraid he might actually give voice to, and for the moment he had forgotten the dead king and his confiscated gun. “This—was never released,” he said, making himself speak slowly. “This label, I mean, with this picture on it. I remember hearing about it. David Goines originally did one of a nude woman on the hill, and the BATF rejected it because they said it was indecent, so he did this one of the same woman as a skeleton; and they rejected it because of fetal alcohol syndrome or something. Finally Goines did one of just the hillside, and that got okayed, and Kenwood printed it.” He looked up into Angelica’s concerned gaze, and let himself relax a little. “But this was never released, this label was never even printed!—except, I guess, for this one. Where the hell did you find it? And why did you get it? I mean, it’s a twenty-year-old Cab! There must have been cheaper ones.”

Angelica opened her mouth, then closed it. “I,” she said finally, “don’t remember what it cost. But I got change back from a twenty, and we got ice and some canned green beans in the same purchase, I remember. This was the only fancy wine they had, at this little place called Liquor Heaven in the Soma neighborhood—Arky, you drove us there and waited in the truck, remember?—the only other wine was one of those bum’s-rush specials, Hair-of-the-Dog or some name like that.”

Mavranos had been watching Plumtree and Cochran, but now he slowly turned to Angelica. “…Bitin Dog?” he asked.

Cochran sat down on the bed heedlessly crushing Angelica’s myrtle branches and he was remembering the Mondard figure in the mirror in the vision he’d had last week in Solville. “That’s how it looks in a reflection,” he said dizzily. “You must have been in Looking-Glass Land. The right-way name is something like pagadebiti”

“Get your butt off the boughs of holly,” Plumtree told him.

“No,” said Mavranos, “stay where you are, Dionysus probably likes it a bit crushed, like cats do catnip. Miss Plumtree, you sit beside him. You got your maquina, Angelica?”

Angelica touched the untucked tail of her blouse. “Yes, Arky,” she sighed.

“Stand over here and keep your hand on it, and watch those two. Pete and I gotta go to the truck, drag up some of our scientific apparatus, more of our high-tech defensive hardware.”

KOOTIE SNIFFED the air after Arky and his foster-dad had shuffled outside and pulled the door closed behind them. He sensed at least a couple of fragmentary personalities buzzing clumsily around the room.

“The king’s body is drawing ghosts,” he told his foster-mom. “A couple got in when Arky opened the door just now.” He sniffed again. “Just little broken-off bits, probably shells thrown off of somebody who didn’t even die of it.”

Kootie knew that people, especially very neurotic people whose personalities spun in wide and perturbed orbits, often threw ghost-shells in moments of stressfully strong emotion. Kootie could feel the insistent one-note resonance of these, and his hands were shaky and he wasn’t able to take a deep breath.

He found himself staring at Janis Plumtree’s loose blouse and tight jeans, and he snorted and shook his head to dispel the induced lust. Easy to guess what the unknown source-person was up to, he thought, when he shed these…psychic snake-skins! And the man must have been left bewildered and abruptly out-of-the-mood after they’d broken away.

The vibrations of the ghost fragments did have a strongly male cast; Kootie wondered what his own response would have been if the source-person had been a woman—would he have found himself looking at…at Cochran?—or would he have been so out-of-phase with them that he wouldn’t have sensed their presence at all?

“I’m okay,” he told Angelica, who had taken her eyes off Cochran and Plumtree long enough to give Kootie a raised eyebrow. “I hope Arky’s bringing up the St. Michael and High John the Conqueror sprays.”

“I packed ’em,” she said.

In spite of himself, Kootie was staring at Plumtree again. She was clearly nervously excited—she had pulled a little order pad out of her pocket and was flipping through the pages, nodding and mumbling to herself.

She looked up and caught his gaze, and her sudden smile made his heart thump. “Tomorrow,” she said through her teeth, “no matter what it may cost me, I won’t be a murderer anymore!”

Her companion seemed less happy about the idea—Cochran was frowning as he shook a cigarette out of a pack and flipped open a book of matches. Probably he’s worried that this attempt tomorrow will work the way she thinks it will, Kootie thought, and his girlfriend’s body will suddenly have a fifty-two-year-old man in it. Talk about out-of-phase!

Kootie wasn’t aware of the ghost fragments now—probably his lustful response had blunted his latent Fisher King ability to sense them. As if I took a long sniff of a rare hamburger that was cooked in an iron pan, he thought ruefully, or spent the day at the top of a modern high-rise building, far up away from the ground, or gargled with whiskey on a Friday in Lent.

Cochran struck a match—and the matchbook flared in a gout of flame, and Cochran had dropped it and was stamping it out on the carpet.

Cochran and Plumtree both exclaimed “Son of a bitch!” and Plumtree went on to add, “You clumsy stupid shit!”

But Kootie had caught a whiff of cooked bacon on the stale, humid air, and he said “I think you burned up the ghosts, Mr. Cochran. Toss me the matches, would you?”

Cochran bent over, pried the matchbook from the carpet, and tossed it to Kootie who juggled the hot thing around in the palm of his hand to look at it.

The moment of flame had not obliterated the letters inked onto each match. Kootie read the words carefully, then looked up at Cochran. “The match you lit has ‘tenebis’ written on it, doesn’t it?”

Cochran bent down again and brushed his hand over the carpet until he had found the match he had struck; then he straightened and stared at it.

“‘Tenebis,’” Cochran read. He looked at Kootie. “You’ve seen this inscription before? It’s Latin, right?”

“I suppose it’s Latin,” Kootie said. “I’ve never seen it before, but I can tell what the missing word must be—’cause it’s a palindrome. See?” He tossed the matchbook back to Cochran. “The letters read the same backward as forward.”

“On a matchbook,” said Angelica with a wry smile. “That’s like the people who letter LA. Cigar—Too Tragical around chimneys and frying pans—or gun muzzles,” she added, touching the grip of the automatic in her belt. “Ghosts are drawn to palindromes, and these tricks burn ’em up—dispel ’em into the open air, unlike in the coal of a cigarette, which sends their broken-up constituent pieces straight into your lungs, for a nasty predatory high. The palindrome torchers send them safely on past India.”

This seemed to jar Cochran. “What exactly the hell do you people mean by ‘India’?” he asked.

A measured thumping sounded at the motel-room door, and Kootie could hear Arky Mavranos impatiently call something from outside

“Peek out before you unlock it,” Angelica said as Kootie stepped toward the door.

“Right, Ma.” Kootie peered out through the lens, then said, “It’s just them,” as he snapped back the bolt and pulled the door open.

Mavranos came shuffling in carrying one of his spare truck batteries in both hands; Pete Sullivan followed, carrying a stack of boxes balanced on top of the ice chest. An electric plug dangled from one of the boxes.

“On the table by the window,” said Mavranos to Pete. “Hook up the charger to the battery, a quick charge on the ten-amp setting—if it’s not too dead you might have time to drag one of the others up here and charge it too.”

“What’s India?” insisted Cochran.

“Uh—ghosthood,” said Angelica, frowning at the boxes Pete was putting down. Then she glanced at Cochran and apparently noted the man’s anxious squint. “In Shakespeare’s time,” she went on patiently, “India was sorcerously hip slang for a sort of overlap place, a halfway house between Earth and Heaven-or-Hell. It’s the antechamber to Dionysus’s domain—the god was supposed to have come to Thebes by way of Phrygia from northern India, around Pakistan.”

“Pakijaper came no more” sang Plumtree, to a bit of the tune of “Puff the Magic Dragon.”

Mavranos barked out two syllables of a laugh at that, wiping black dust off his hands. “I’m gonna—” he began.

“So what would it mean,” Cochran interrupted shakily, “to say…’Her bed is India, there she lies, a pearl’?”

Angelica was frowning at him with Kootie thought, puzzled sympathy. “That’s a line from Troilus and Cressida” Angelica said. “It would mean ‘she’ is in that India ; space—a ghost associating with a living person, or vice versa. The overlap, see? And I the ‘pearl’ reference would probably mean she’s accreting stuff from the other category—physical solidity, if she was a ghost to start with, or ghosts, if she was a living person. The Elizabethan slang for ghosts was ‘ghostings’—by way of folk etymology from ‘coastings,’ meaning coastlines, outlines, silhouettes; traced replicas—and later in the play—”

“I’m gonna go trace the coastline here,” said Mavranos, “the north coast from Fort Point by the bridge to where those three old ships are moored at the Hyde Street I Pier: the area where the wild mint used to grow, that gave the city its original name I of Yerba Buena. I’ve got a piedra iman, and a—”

“A magnet?” said Angelica, turning toward Mavranos. “But that’s only good fordrawing ghosts, Arky, you don’t want Crane’s ghost—”

“Why aren’t you gonna check west of the bridge?” demanded Plumtree. “The Sutro Baths ruins is where we saw his naked ghost, last week, and that’s west of the bridge. I think you should—”

“But you don’t want his ghost—” Angelica went on and Kootie was interrupting too: “We should see what the old black lady has to say about it—”

Arky had lifted one of Angelica’s weather-beaten stuffed toy pigs out of the box Pete had carried in, and now he shoved a C battery into the compartment in its rear end; and the pig’s sudden harsh mechanical burping silenced the two women and Kootie.

After three noisy seconds Mavranos pulled the battery out, and the croaking stopped. “I’m not gonna look for his ghost,” he said clearly, “nor where we saw his ghost. What I want to do first is search around the area where your old black lady’s banker friend drowned, back in 1875; that’s near the Hyde Pier. And I’m gonna use?the magnet along with a magnetic compass—I figure that when the compass needle ignores both the magnet and the real magnetic north pole, I’ll have found the spot ; where we can yank Scott back here from the far side of India. Wherever the spot is, it’s got to be a regular black hole for plain-old ghosts, and they’ve got to add up to a pre-emptive magnetic charge—especially now, on the eve of Dionysus’s day.” He bared his teeth in a smile. “Okay?”

“Just asking,” said Angelica.

“I have no idea how long this’ll take,” Mavranos went on. “I’m gonna walk it, and cleave you people the truck. If I get no readings at all, I’ll just come back here, well before dawn, and we can do the restoration-to-life right at the spot where the banker jumped in.” He swivelled an unreadable stare from Kootie to Angelica to Plumtree. “You all are gonna want to figure out your tactics. Don’t go out—order a pizza delivered, and if you need beers or something, send Pete. Angelica,” he added, with a nod toward where Cochran and Plumtree sat on the bed, “if they try anything at all, don’t you hesitate to—”

“I know,” said Angelica. “Shoot our hosts.” ^ “Right,” agreed Mavranos. He slapped the pocket of his denim jacket and nodded at the solid angularity of his revolver. Then he was out the door, and the clump-clop of his boots was receding down the stairs.

“What happens,” asked Plumtree bleakly, “if you untie that bandage from around Crane’s leg?”

“He bleeds,” said Angelica. “He’s got no pulse, but fresh blood leaks out of him.”

“Not forever,” Plumtree said. “Where we stabbed him#8230;his throat stopped bleeding after a while, right? I mean, I doubt they tied a tourniquet around his neck, then:’ She sighed hitchingly, and ran her fingers through her disordered hair. Her lips were turned down sharply at the corners. “Tilt a few good slugs of his blood into that empty Wild Turkey bottle. Tomorrow I’ll—probably have to—” Her eyes widened in evident surprise and her face went pale. “Scant! Why am I—”

Plumtree stood up and wobbled to the bathroom then, barely managing to slam the door behind her before Kootie heard her being rackingly sick in there.

“Who’s in the mood for a pizza?” he asked brightly.

‘Hush,” said Angelica quietly. She opened her mouth as if to say more, then just repeated, “Hush.”

AT SUNSET the entirely discorporate spirit of Scott Crane stood on a cliff over a sea, and it was no longer possible for him to overlook his sin of omission. The call of the one neglected tarot archetype could no longer be drowned out in the busy distractions of life. It had been beckoning during three winters—whispering from six feet under in the agitation of the lice that blighted the vineyards, wheezing in the fevered lungs of Crane’s young children in the winter months, and roaring like a bull in the cloven earth under Northridge a year ago tomorrow. And on New Year’s Day of this year it had come to his house.

It had worn many faces—that of Crane’s first wife, and that of his adopted father, and a hundred others; but today it wore the face of the fat man he had shot to death in the desert outside Las Vegas in 1990. A bargain had been made, and his part had not been fully paid.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“Afraid?”

“It’s plain enough, I should think, why he may be. It’s a dreadful remembrance. Besides that, his loss of himself grew out of it. Not knowing how he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never feel certain of not losing himself again. That alone wouldn’t make the subject pleasant, I should think.”

—Charles Dickens,

Tale of Two Cities

THE sky beyond the curtains had been dark for hours, and the clock on the bedside table read 10:30, when the traditional Solville knock sounded on the door: rap-rap-rap, rap, in the rhythm of the Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb.”

Angelica was sitting on the carpet in front of the television, and she put down her jar of pennies. “Peek out anyway,” she told Kootie as she straightened her legs and stood up. It was a relief to be able to look away from the grotesque, distressing images on the screen.

Kootie hurried to the door and peered out through the lens. “It’s him,” he said as he unchained the door, “alone.” He pulled the door open.

Mavranos brought in with him the smells of crushed grass and cold pier pilings, and Angelica thought she could see the stale room air eddy behind him as he strode to the ice chest and crouched to lift out a wet can of Coors.

“I found our place,” Mavranos said shortly, after popping the top and taking a deep sip. “It’s hardly more than walking distance from here. I found it at sunset, but I’ve spent all this time making sure I wasn’t followed back here. There was a lot of local hippies dressed up as druids there—or druids dressed as hippies?—and I kept on seeing them after I left the place.”

He finished the can and crouched again to get another. “I’d see ’em on rooftops, and in passing buses, but each of ’em was looking at me, I swear, with no expressions at all on their faces, under the hoods. I finally lost ’em by buying a—hah!—a Jiminy Cricket latex rubber mask in Chinatown, and then wearing it while I rode the cable cars Washington-to-Mason-to-Jackson-to-Hyde in a windshield circle for about an hour.” He glanced at Angelica. “‘Windshield’—the olden-times word was ‘widdershins.’” He twirled a finger in the air. “It means moving counterclockwise, to elude magical pursuit.”

“I know what widdershins is,” said Angelica. “Contra las manecillas. So where is this place? Is it where the banker drowned?”

“No, it’s—well, you’ll see it tomorrow at dawn. It’s out at the end of the peninsula at the Small Craft Harbor, on the grounds of some yacht club; I had to step over a ‘No Admittance’ sign on a chain. It looks like an old ruined Greek or Roman temple. I asked about it at the yacht club—apparently the city planners had a whole lot of cemetery marble left over after they cleared out all the graveyards in the Richmond District in the thirties, transplanted the graves south to Colma, and so somebody set up this pile of…steps and seats and pillars and patchwork stone pavements…out at the end of the peninsula. Very windy and cold—and the compass needle had no time for my magnet or the north pole; I swear I could feel that compass twisting in my hand, so the needle could point straight down.”

His eyes moved past Angelica to the body on the bed, and when he gasped and darted a glance toward the Plumtree woman, Angelica knew he had seen the fresh blood smeared on Scott Crane’s jeans.

“She go messin’ with him?” Mavranos demanded. “Did her dad, I mean?”

Angelica took hold of his arm. “No, Arky. We decanted some of Crane’s blood into a bottle. We think she’ll have to—”

“Phlebotomy,” put in Kootie.

“Right,” Angelica agreed nervously; “it looks like she’ll probably have to, to drink some of Crane’s blood, to summon Crane, to draw him into her body tomorrow.”

Mavranos’s nostrils widened in evident distaste at the thought, and Angelica sympathetically remembered how the poor Janis personality had found herself suddenly in a body that was convulsing with nausea, after the Cody personality had first proposed the idea and then fled.

Mavranos glared around the room and ended up staring at the television, which for the last five minutes had been insistently showing some French-language hardcore pornographic movie.

“So you decided to distract yourself with some T-and-A,” he said sourly. “You psychiatrists figure this is wholesome entertainment for fourteen-year-old boys, do you?”

“T and…?” echoed Angelica. “Oh, tits and ass, right? Sorry—to me T-and-A has always been tonsillectomy-and-adenoidectomy.” With a shaky hand she brushed a damp strand of hair back from her forehead. “No, damn it, we’ve been trying to get this off the screen—we had the old black lady, for a few seconds—but now shaking the pennies and even pushing the buttons on the set won’t shift us from this channel.” She glanced at Kootie, who was studiously looking away from the screen but who had clearly been upset—even haunted, she thought—when the desperate, contorting figures had first appeared on the screen.

From far away out in the chilly darkness came the metronomic two-second moan of a foghorn.

“I been hearing that all day, seems like,” Mavranos said absently, “it’s the horn on the south pier of the Golden Gate Bridge. Two seconds every twenty seconds.” He sat down on the carpet and put down his beer can so that he could rub his eyes. “Okay,” he said with a windy sigh, “so did the old black lady have anything useful to say? She’s supposed to be our intecessor, and she’s been awful scarce.”

“She,” Angelica began; then, “No,” she said. I’ll tell you later, Arky, she thought. “Cochran and Plumtree have been working his homemade Ouija board, though, and—”

But Kootie spoke. “She said, ‘The debt-payer is always a virgin, and must go to India still a virgin.’”

Angelica could feel her face go slack with exhaustion; she was certain that this was a verbatim recollection of the old woman’s words. Then she made herself raise her head and put on a quizzical expression. “Yes,” she said briskly, “that’s what she said.” Oh, it won’t be you, Kootie, she thought. I won’t let it be you, don’t worry. Oh, why the hell are we even—

“Damn this garbage!” she burst out, and she sprang to the wall and yanked the television’s plug right out of the wall socket.

And then she just blinked from the cord in her hand to the television screen, on which the sweaty bodies still luminously strained and gasped. Her chest went suddenly hollow and cold a full second before she was sure she had pulled out the right plug.

Mavranos had got to his feet and stared at the wall behind the dresser the television sat on, and now he even waved his hand across the back of the the set as through cerifying a magic trick.

“Lord,” he said softly, “how I do hate impossible things. Pete, let’s carry this abomination down to the truck, and—”

But at that moment the screen went mercifully dark at last.

“Bedtime for the satyrs and nymphs,” Mavranos said. “And for us too, I think.” He looked toward Plumtree and Cochran. “What did the Ouija board say?”

Plumtree shifted on the bed. “We asked to talk to anyone who knew about this…situation of ours, and—well, you tell him, Scant.”

Cochran reached behind Plumtree to pick up one of the many sheets of Star Motel stationery. “‘Canst thou remember a time before we came unto this cell?’” he read. “‘I do not think thou canst, for then thou wast not out three years old:”

“I do think that’s your subconscious speaking,” Angelica said to Plumtree. “Or the core-child, the traumatized personality: the poisoned comatose girl in your Snow White scenario, or the battered lady bus driver in Cody’s Dirty Harry version.” Angelica looked at Mavranos and shrugged. “God knows why it’s in that Shakespearean language Pete’s pretty sure it’s from The Tempest, the exiled king Prospero talking to his daughter Miranda.”

Valorie always talks that way,” said Cochran. “She’s the oldest personality, and I think she may be—” He hesitated, and then said, “I think she may be the core-child.”

You were going to say dead, weren’t you? thought Angelica. You were right to keep that idea from her, whether or not it’s true.

Quickly, so as not to let Plumtree think about Cochran’s momentary hesitation Angelica asked him, “Why does Janis call you Scant?”

Cochran glanced at the back of his right hand and laughed uncomfortably. “Oh, it’s a childhood nickname. I grew up in the wine country, doing odd jobs around the vineyards, and when I was ten I was in a cellar when one of the support beams broke under a cask of Zinfandel, and I automatically stepped forward and tried to hold it up. It broke my leg. The support beams are called scantlings, and the cellarmen told me I was trying to be a proxy scantling.”

“Atlas would have been a good name, too,” remarked Kootie.

“Or Nitwit” said Mavranos, stepping away from the television. “Angelica, you and Miss Plumtree can sleep on the Ouija-board bed by the bathroom after you clear the pizza boxes off it, with her on the bathroom side, away from Crane’s body; and we’ll tie a couple of cans to her ankle so as to hear her if she gets up in the night. Cochran can sleep on the floor on that side, down between the bed and the wall. Kootie can sleep over by the window, and Pete and I will take turns staying awake with a gun; well, I’ll have a gun, and Pete can wake me up fast. At about five we’ll get up and out of here.”

“If that TV comes on again during the night,” said Kootie in a small voice. He sighed and then went on, “Shoot it.”

“I bet my hands would let me do that, actually,” said Pete.

VALORIE’S PERCEPTIONS and memories and dreams were always in black-and-white, with occasional flickers of false red and blue shimmering in fine-grain moire patterns like heat waves; and always there was a drumming or knocking, which she understood was an amplification of some background noise present in the soundtrack—or, if there was no actual sound to exaggerate, was simply imposed arbitrarily on the scene. Her dreams never had any fantastic or even inaccurate elements in them, aside from the constant intrusive percussion—they were just re-run memories—and her default dream was always the same, and all the Plumtree personalities experienced at least the last seconds of it whenever she did:

Her mother was wearing sandals with tire-tread soles, but in the dream they rang a hard clack-clack from the sidewalk concrete, and Plumtree’s little shoes and shorter steps filled in the almost reggae one-drop beat.

“They’ve painted a big Egyptian Horus eye on the roof” said her mother, pulling her along by the hand. “Signaling to the sun god, Ra, he says. All the time Ra Ra Ra! But he blew his bigplay at Lake Mead on Easter, and nobody can pretend anymore that he’s gonna be any kind of king.”

Plumtree couldn’t see the men dancing on the roof of the building ahead of them, but she could see the bobbing papier-mache heads that topped the tall poles they carried.

The sun burned white like a magnesium tire rim, straight up above them in the sky, at its very highest summer-solstice point.

“You stay by me, Janis,” her mother went on. “He’ll want to do the El Cabong bang-bang, but he won’t try anything with me today, not if his own baby daughter is watching. And—listen, baby!—if I tell you to run along and play, you don’t go, hear? He wont hit me, not with you there, and he cant…well, not to talk dirty, let’s just say he can’t—okay?—unless he’s knocked me silly, kayoed me past any ref’s count of ten. As close to dead as possible. I never even met him before he—I didn’t even meet him during, I was in a coma when he—when you stopped being just a glitter in your daddy’s evil eye. Dead would’ve been better, for him, but if you knock ’em dead you can’t knock ’em up, right? Never mind.”

On the sidewalk in front of the steps up to the door her mother stopped. “And what do you say,” her mother demanded, “if he says, ‘Baby, do you want to leave with your mother?”

Plumtree was looking up at her mother’s backlit face, and the view blurred and fragmented—that was because of tears in her eyes. “I say, ‘Yes,’” Plumtree said obediently, though the cadence of her voice indicated an emotion.

Plumtree s eyes focussed beyond her mother—above her. Way above her.

This was the part of the dream that the other Plumtree personalities always remembered upon awakening.

There was a man in the sky, his white robes glowing in the sunlight for a moment; then he was a dark spot between the girl on the pavement and the flaring sun in the gunmetal sky. Plumtree opened her eyes wide and tried to see him against the hard pressure glare of the sun, but she could’t—he seemed to have become the sun. And he was falling.

“Daddeee!”

Plumtree pulled her hand free of her mother’s, and ran to catch him.

The clattering clopping impact drove her right down into the ground.

COCHRAN WAS jolted out of sleep and then rocked hard against textured wallpaper in the darkness, and his first waking impression was that a big truck had hit whatever this building was.

Carpet fibers abraded his face, and a mattress was jumping and slamming on box springs only inches from his left ear; he couldn’t see anything, and until he heard shouting from Mavranos and abruptly remembered where he was and who he was with, Cochran was certain he was back in the honeymoon motel room behind the Troy and Cress Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas in 1990, again enduring the tumultuous escape-from-confinement of the big man in the wooden mask.

“Earthquake!” someone was yelling in the pitch blackness. Cochran sat up, battered by the mattress that was convulsing beside him like a living thing, and then he scrambled forward on his hands and knees until his forehead cracked against some unseen piece of furniture—the dresser the television had been sitting on, probably The pizza boxes tumbled down onto his head, spilling crumbs and crusts.

“Mom!” yelled Kootie’s voice. “Mom, where are you?”

Two shrill voices answered him: “Here!”

Light flooded the room, just yellow electric lamplight but dazzling after the darkness. Squinting, and blinking at the trickle of blood running down beside his nose, Cochran saw that Angelica was standing beside the door with her hand on the light switch, and that Mavranos was crouched between the beds holding his revolver pointed at the ceiling. Kootie and Pete Sullivan stood beside Angelica, staring at the bed with Plumtree on it.

The bed was still jumping, the bedspread flapping like manta-ray wings, and Plumtree’s body was tossing on it like a Raggedy Ann doll—even though the rest of the room had stopped shaking.

“Omar!” grated a shrill, keening voice from between Plumtree’s clenched teeth. “Damn your soul! Stop it, take one of the girls, Tiffany or Janis, just let me go!” The three empty beer cans that Mavranos had wired to her ankle with a coat hanger were shaking and clattering.

Kootie has provoked the Follow-the-Queen sequence, Cochran thought; he did it when he yelled for his mother. Next card up is wild, whatever you declare it to be. Dizzy and light-headed, Cochran opened his mouth.

“Nina!” he called hoarsely.

“Omar, I will kill any child conceived in this way!” screamed the voice out of plumtree’s mouth. “God will not blame me!”

It hadn’t worked.

Cochran’s bruised forehead was chilly with sweat. “J—” he began; then, “Cody!” he called.

At first he wasn’t sure the card he had declared would be honored, for though Plumtree’s eyes sprang open she was now gasping, “In the name of the father, the sun, the holy ghost!” Then she had rolled off the spasming mattress and scrambled across the carpet to the front door, the beer cans snagging in the carpet and hopping behind her.

“Whoa,” said Mavranos.

The mattress flopped down flat and stopped moving.

Mavranos stared at the bed with raised eyebrows. “I,” he said, as if speaking to the bed, “was talking to Miss Plumtree.”

Cochran half-expected the bed to start jumping again at this explanation, but it just lay sprawled there, the mattress at an angle now to the box springs, the pillows and blankets tumbled in disorder.

“Get back by boyfriend,” Mavranos told Plumtree.

Somewhat to Cochran’s surprise Plumtree had no rude retort, but just obediently stepped back toward the bed; though she did shake her ankle irritably, rattling the attached cans. She was smacking her lips and grimacing. “Jeez, was my female parent on? I hate her old spit. I gotta gargle, excuse me.” She hurried past Cochran into the bathroom, and he could hear her knocking things over on the sink.

The light in the room was flickering, and when Cochran looked around he saw that the television had come on again, possibly because of having been jolted in the earthquake. Again the screen showed a glowing nude man and woman feverishly groping and sucking and colliding.

Mavranos stepped back to see behind the set, and frowned; clearly the cord was still unplugged.

“Could you get me a beer, Angelica?” he said, holding out his left hand and not taking his eyes off the television. He was gripping the revolver in his right hand, and Cochran wondered if he might actually shoot the TV set, and if he’d think of muffling the shot with a pillow.

Angelica leaned over the ice chest and fished up a dripping can; she popped it open and reached over to slap it into his open palm.

“Thanks.” Mavranos tilted the beer can over the ventilation slots on the back slope of the television set, and after a few seconds of beer running down into the sets works the picture on the screen abruptly curdled into a black-and-white pattern like a radar scan, with a blobby figure in one corner that looked to Cochran like a cartoon silhouette of a big-butted fat man with little globe limbs, and warts all over him; and the sound had become a roaring hiss that warped and narrowed to mimic whispered words: et…in…arcadia…ego…

Then it winked out and was dark and inert, a wrecked TV with beer puddling out from the base of it. Mavranos absently drank the rest of the beer and clanked the can down on the dresser.

For several seconds no one spoke, and the distant foghorn moaned out in the night.

Mavranos raised the gun barrel for silence while he stared at the watch on his left wrist.

Cochran began to let the muscles in his shoulders relax, and he gently prodded the bloody bump on his forehead.

The foghorn sounded again, and Mavranos lowered his arms. His face was expressionless. “What time is it?” he asked.

“You were just staring at your watch!” said Angelica.

“Oh yeah.” Mavranos looked at his watch again. “Quarter to five, apparently that’s showtime.” He sighed shakily and rubbed his left hand over his face. “Let’s mobilize. Angelica, get your witchy shit together and have Pete carry it downstairs and into the truck while you cover him with your .45, and don’t forget to bring that Wild Turkey bottle with Scott’s blood in it. Don’t put stuff in the back bed, though—we’ll be carrying Scott down and putting him back there. I’ll drive the truck, and Pete can drive Mr. Cochran’s Granada—”

Plumtree had stepped out of the bathroom, and Cochran could smell the Listerine on her breath from a yard away, though he was ashamed to meet her eye. She dug in the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a bundle of bills.

“Kid,” she said to Kootie. When he looked up, she thrust the bills out toward him. “This is yours. A hundred bucks—long story, don’t ask. I want to give it to you now, in case we get…in case we don’t quite meet again.” Cochran thought there was gruff sympathy in her voice. “No hard feelings.”

Kootie was holding the little yellow blanket that bald-headed Diana had given him back in Solville, but he reached across the bed with his free hand and took the money. “Thank you, Janis Cordelia Plumtree,” he said.

“And Janis Cordelia can ride shotgun in the Granada,” Mavranos went on rapidly “with Angelica behind her ready to shoot. Come on, everybody, up! I want us out of here in five minutes.”

Angelica snatched up her knapsack and grabbed the Wild Turkey bottle. “What’s the hurry, Arky?” she asked irritably. “Sunrise isn’t for another hour or so, and you said the place is walking distance from here.”

Mavranos had peered through the peek hole and now unchained the door and pulled it open. “That foghorn, just now—it’s sounding every fifteen seconds, not twenty, and it’s a different tone. It’s a different foghorn.”

Pete was squeezing the battery charger’s clamps off the terminals of one of Mavranns’s car batteries and then lifting the battery in both hands. “So?” he asked breathlessly. “Maybe the wind’s from a different direction.”

“They don’t vary that way, Pete,” said Mavranos impatiently, “or they wouldn’t be any good as foghorns, would they? We’re—we’re Scott’s army, this king’s army, and in that sense we wont truly exist until the potential of his resurrection becomes an actuality. Our wave-form has to shake out as one rather than as zero. And I think—this wrong foghorn makes me think—that we’re a fragmented waveform right now, that psychically we’re somewhere else too, as well as here in a motel on Lombard Street.”

“So,” said Angelica, spreading her hands, “what do we do?”

“What are you asking me for?” Mavranos snapped. “All I can think of is for us to go to this crazy cemetery temple on the peninsula, in the wrong gear and without even our TV-star intercessor, and hope we can catch up to ourselves.” He darted a glance around the room. “Where’d Kootie go?”

“He’s right outside,” said Angelica. “He waved his hand in front of his face like he wanted fresh air, and he stepped out.” She hurried to the door, calling, “Kootie?”

She leaned around the doorjamb to look, and then she had lunged outside, and Cochran heard her voice from out on the railed walkway: “A note!” she yelled. “Shit—‘Cant be with you for this—sorry—’ Pete, he’s run away!”

KOOTIE HAD already tiptoed down the stairs and sprinted across the dark parking lot the Lombard Street sidewalk, and was now hurrying to a cab that had pulled in the curb after he had, without much confidence, waved to it. He levered open the back door and scrambled in. Better than hiding behind a Dumpster somewhere, he thought nervously, and I can afford this now, thanks to Miss Plumtree. He hiked up the seat to stuff Diana’s baby blanket into his hip pocket.

The cab driver was an elderly black man who stared at him dubiously over his shoulder. “You okay, kid?”

“Yes,” panted Kootie. “Drive off, will you?”

“I don’t like hurry.” As if to prove the point, he cocked his head to listen to a Idispatch on his radio. ‘And I don’t like driving people who turn out to not have any money,” he went on finally. “Where did you want to go?”

Kootie bared his teeth in impatience and tried to remember the name of any place in San Francisco. “Chinatown,” he said.

“You better give me ten dollars up front, kid—I’ll give you the change when we get there.”

Hurriedly Kootie dug out of his pocket the money Plumtree had just given him, and he held the bills up to the window to be able to see the denominations by the glow of the nearest streetlight. He peeled off two fives and thrust them over the top of the front seat to the driver.

At last the driver shifted the car into gear and accelerated away from the curb. Kootie pressed his lips together and blinked back frightened tears, but he didn’t look out the back window.

ANGELICA TRUDGED back up the stairs from the parking lot. Many of the motel rooms had their lights on after the earthquake, and the doorway at which Mavranos stood wasn’t the only one that had been opened.

“No sign of him,” she told Mavranos when she had stepped inside and closed the door. “There was a taxi driving away—he might have been in it, or not, and I couldn’t see what company it was anyway.” She gave Plumtree a look that was too exhausted to be angry. “Thanks for giving him getaway money.”

Plumtree narrowed her eyes, then visibly relaxed and just pursed her lips. “He was going anyway—read the rest of the note!—and if the money did let him take a cab, you should be glad he’s not walking, in this neighborhood at this hour.”

“Gimme the note.”

Pete Sullivan wordlessly passed to Angelica the piece of Star Motel stationery that had been weighted down with a motel glass on the walkway outside the room, and Angelica forced her tired and blurring eyes to focus on the clumsy ballpoint-ink letters:

MOM & DAD & EVERYBODY—I CANT BE WITH YOU FOR THIS. I’M SORRY. I KNOW ID HAVE TO DO THE BLOOD DRIKING—HOPE YOU CAN READ THIS, I DON’T TURN ON THE LIGHT—JESUS I HOPE TV STAYS OFF—I’D HAVE TO DRINK THE BLOD, & I CANT DO IT AGAIN: LET SOMEBODY HAVE ME—& ME BE OUT OF MY HEAD. EDISON IN 92, NEVER AGAIN, ID GO CRAZY. I HAVE NOT TAKEN THE TRUCK. I DO HAVE A KEY TO THIS ROOM BUT I’LL BE BACK AFTER, I’VE GOT MONEY, ENUFF. I LOVE YOU DONT BE MAD KOOTIE

Angelica looked up at Mavranos. “I’ve got to stay here.”

Mavranos started to speak, but Pete Sullivan overrode him. “No, Angie,” he said loudly. “We’ve got to go through with this thing, this morning. We’ve got Plumtree, and we’ve got the dead king—and we need a bruja. And Kootie knows where we’ll be, he heard Arky describe the place—if he wants to find us, that’s where he’ll go, not here.”

“Just what I was gonna say myself,” growled Mavranos.

Plumtree had sat down on the bathroom-side bed, and was untwisting the coat-hanger wire from around her ankle. “You don’t mind if I get rid of the house-arrest hardware now, do you? Me, I’m glad the kid’s out of it.”

She tossed the wired beer cans aside and straightened up, then looked around and chuckled softly. “Do you all realize what we’ve done to this room? Burnt the rug and now stomped old pizza crusts into it, blasted the bed, poured beer in the TV—at least Janis made it to the toilet to puke last night. There’s even a lot of shed black dog hair on the beds! I’m glad it’s no credit card of mine this is on.” For a moment her face looked very young and lost, and Angelica thought of the little girl who had been hospitalized because the sun had fallen out of the sky onto her. “Get your Wild Turkey bottle and let’s go,” Plumtree whispered. “And please God I still be here by lunchtime, and Crane be alive again.”

“All of us still alive at lunchtime,” said Mavranos, nodding somberly. “Amen.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I would be blind with weeping, sick with groans,

Look pale as primrose with blood-drinking sighs,

And all to have the noble duke alive.

—William Shakespeare,

Henry VI, Part II

THE pavement of the yacht club’s empty parking lot was wet with sea spray and pre-dawn fog, and the low overcast looked likely to drop actual rain soon. The clouds were moving across the sky from the direction of the Golden Gate Bridge, but the eastern horizon was still open sky—a glowing pearl-white, making black silhouettes of the long piers at Fort Mason a mile away.

In spite of the dim light, Angelica Sullivan was wearing mirror sunglasses—Standard precaution, she had told Cochran curtly when she and Plumtree had climbed out of Cochran’s Ford Granada; the mirror surface throws ghosts back onto themselves, prevents ‘em from being able to fasten on your gaze. Don’t you look squarely at anything.

Cochran remembered the half-dozen little girl ghosts he had glimpsed on the roof of Strubie the Clown’s house in Los Angeles, and how Plumtree had yelled at him for looking at them. Right, he thought. I won’t look at anything.

Driving the Granada with Cochran and Plumtree and Angelica in it, Pete had followed Mavranos’s red truck up Divisadero to Marina and Yacht Road, and the two vehicles were now parked side by side in the otherwise empty lot. Beyond the curb and a short descending slope of tumbled wet boulders, the gray sea of the San Francisco Bay looked as rolling and wild as open ocean.

On a shoulder strap under her tan raincoat Angelica was carrying a compact black Marlin .45 carbine, its folding stock swivelled forward to lie locked against the left side of the trigger guard; and as she stepped away from the Granada she pulled back the rifle’s slide-lever and let it snap back, chambering a live round. The extended base of a twelve-round magazine stuck out from the magazine-well, and back in the motel room Cochran had seen her stuff a couple of extra magazines in the pocket of her jeans and a couple more in the raincoat’s left pocket.

You expecting an army? he had asked her.

I want to have plenty of the ghost-killer hollow-points, she had answered in a flat singsong voice, as if talking to herself, hut I want hardball too, full jacket, ‘cause if shoot off the first magazine’s dozen rounds and need more, I’m likely to be shooting at a distance after that, or through car doors, and hardball’s more reliable for that kind of thing-and adrenaline’s likely to make me shaky, loosen my grip, and hollow-points don’t feed through smoothly sometimes if the gun’s not being braced firmly. Hardball in the raincoat hollow-point omieros in the jeans.

You’ve given it thought, Cochran thought now as he watched her pull the raincoat around herself and loosely tie the belt in front.

Plumtree was wearing a cranberry-colored cashmere sweater of Nina’s, and she was huddled against the Granada’s front bumper beside Cochran and blowing into her cupped hands. “I don’t see any of Mavranos’s hippie druids,” she said quietly.

“With luck they don’t get up this early,” said Cochran. I hope nobody does, he added to himself. Mavranos said we’ll be trespassing, going on out to the end of this peninsula.

And what about coming back? Is it really conceivable that Scott Crane will be walking back here with us? Limping, I guess, with the bullet in his thigh now. And—

“My God,” he said; then, speaking more loudly, “Angelica? You’re gonna remember to pull the spear out of his throat, right? It’d be no good if he did come back to life, if—”

He saw two reflections of his own pale face in Angelica’s mirror sunglasses when she smiled at him. “We’ve thought of that, Sid. Thanks, though.” She looked past him. “Arky? How wide is the path to the cemetery temple place? I think you should just back the truck right out to it.”

Mavranos had opened the back of the truck and was kneeling on the tailgate. “Back it out there?” he said, squinting over the Granada’s roof at her. “Well, it would mean we don’t have to carry Scott’s body….”

“Nor the rest of the crap,” Angelica agreed. “And I like the truck’s exhaust—with the muffler all fucked up the way it is, it’s kind of a spontaneous bata drumbeat, and it’s the pulse of the king’s vessel.”

“There’s a chain across the path,” Mavranos went on. “Probably padlocked.”

“What’s another dent? What’s some more scratches in your paint?”

“Quicker exit afterward, too,” allowed Mavranos. “That’s worth a lot. Okay.” He hopped down to the pavement and hoisted the lower half of the tailgate shut, though he left the top half raised. “Pete will walk backward ahead of me, waving directions so I don’t go off into the water; Plumtree and Cochran ahead of Pete, so I can keep an eye on ‘em over Pete’s shoulder; Angelica behind, watching for pursuit.”

“I should have my gun;’ said Cochran.

Mavranos frowned at him. “Actually, I suppose you should. Okay.” He walked around to the open drivers-side door and leaned in, then walked back to the rear of the truck with Cochran’s holstered revolver. “Just keep it away from Miss Plumtree,” he said as he handed it to Cochran. “And put it away for now.”

Cochran reached behind himself with both hands to clip the holster to the back of his belt.

Mavranos pointed to the northeast corner of the parking lot. “The path starts behind that building, as a paved service road. All of you meet me there.”

He got into the driver’s seat and closed the door, started the engine again, and audibly clanked it into reverse; the truck surged backward out of the parking space and began yawing away across the asphalt in a broad circle.

“After you two,” said Angelica to Cochran and Plumtree, punctuating the request by letting the hidden rifle barrel briefly tent the tan fabric of the raincoat in front of her knee.

They all began trudging after the receding red truck. When Plumtree took his hand, Cochran glanced at her in surprise, for Cody had been on a moment before; but then he saw that it was still Cody—by now he could recognize her stronger jaw and the deeper lines around her flinty eyes

Her nostrils flared as she inhaled deeply. “Kahlua,” she said, “burning.”

Cochran too had caught a whiff of hot-coffee-and-alcohol on the cold sea breeze. “Just like down in Solville.”

She squeezed his hand. “I guess that means something is gonna happen.”

He looked at her again, but the humble and subdued voice had still been Cody’s.

THE BATTERING exhaust of Mavranos’s truck rolling along at idle speed in reverse behind them set the pace of their walk.

“Don’t fall over the chain here, Pete,” called Cochran over his shoulder.

After Plumtree and Cochran stepped over the chain with the rusty no admittance sign hanging from it, their shoes were crunching in sandy red dirt, and they could see a cluster of low, rectangular stone structures and an iron light pole a hundred yards ahead of them at the end of the narrow spit of land; and a few seconds later they heard the chain creak and snap and then thrash into the dry wild-anise bushes that fringed the road.

“What chain?” came Pete Sullivan’s voice from behind them, speaking loudly to be heard over the indomitable drumming of the truck’s exhaust.

Cochran and Plumtree kept walking along the dirt path, their hands in their pockets now because of the chill. Puddles in the road reflected the gray sky, and the red dirt was peppered with fragments of brick and marble.

They were close enough to see the structures ahead now—Cochran and Plumtree were already walking past ornate broad capitals of long-gone Corinthian columns that sat upside-down on the dirt like heroic ashtrays, and spare blocks of carved and routed granite that lay at random among the weeds; but though the low walls and stairs and tomb-like alcoves ahead had been cobbled together out of mismatched scavenged brick and marble, the site had a unified look, as if all these at-odds components had come to this weathered, settled state together, right here, over hundreds of years.

A motorboat had been crossing the choppy water of the yacht harbor to their right, between the peninsula and the distant white house-fronts on Marina Boulevard; it had rounded the tip of the peninsula and was coming back along the north side, several hundred feet out, and now Cochran heard a rapid hollow knocking roll across the waves.

And behind him, much closer, he heard the rattling pop of car-window glass shattering. Brick fragments exploded away from a stairway head in front of them even as he had grabbed Plumtree’s forearm and yanked her forward into a sliding crouch behind a low marble wall.

He looked back—Pete was running back toward Angelica, who had flung open her raincoat and raised the short pistol-grip rifle, and the open back end of the red truck was jumping on its old shock absorbers as it picked up speed.

Angelica fired three fast shots, then quickly unfolded the stock and had it to her shoulder and fired two more even as the ejected brass shells of the first three were bouncing on the red dirt. Out here under the open sky the shots sounded like sharp hammer blows on a wooden picnic table.

The truck ground to a halt with its back bumper rocking only a couple of yards from where Cochran and Plumtree were crouched, and two more hard gunshots impacted the air—Cochran realized that Mavranos was now shooting at the boat through the hole where his passenger-side window had been.

The motorboat had paused, out on the gray water; but now its engine roared, and its bow kicked up spray as it turned north and began curving away from the peninsula, showing them nothing but wake and a bobbing transom.

Pete and Angelica came sprinting up as Mavranos hopped down out of the truck.

“Let’s get him out,” Angelica gasped, “and down these stairs to that cobblestone lower level there. I should have had hardball rounds first up. You all carry him, I’ll fetch the bruja stuff.”

Cochran stood up, and realized that he had drawn his revolver at some point during the confrontation, and that it was cocked; and after he had carefully lowered the hammer he had to touch the cold barrel to be sure he hadn’t fired it. His right hand was shaking as he reached around behind him and stuffed the gun back into its holster. He brushed a buzzing fly away from his ear, and then, with huge reluctance, stepped toward the truck.

ROBED AND whole and in some sense still barefoot, the spirit of Scott Crane stood beside the lapping gray water. It wasn’t precisely where Mavranos and the Plumtree woman and the two silver coins were—he was just as immediately aware of the capering naked ghost of himself that was flickering like a hummingbird at the ruins by the sea, where the foghorn moan came for two seconds every fifteen seconds—but what confronted him either way was the water, the obligation to cross the cold, unimaginable water.

Obligation but not inevitability. He could with only moderate difficulty blunt and truncate himself enough to animate the ghost, become no more than the ghost but at least be wholly that, and stay here, with real physical mass; free to shamble around in the familiarity of noisy human streets, and bask in the earthly sun, and pour the coarsening common short-dog wine down his shabbily restored throat. He would be a poisoned and diminished quantity, but still a real quantity.

Or he could take the two silver dollars that Spider foe had brought back to him, at such cost, and spend them on the oblivion that the Greeks had represented as Charon’s ferry over the River Styx—and then drink from what the Greeks had called Lethe, the river of forget-fulness and surrender.

No guarantees of anything there, that way, not even of nothing. Total abject and unconditional surrender, to whoever or whatever it might ultimately be behind the busy, clustering gods and archetypes that humanity had tried to hold up to it for size. He could hope for mercy, but there would certainly be justice, a justice older and more implacable than the forces that kept the suns shining and the galaxies wheeling in the nighttime sky.

SITTING IN the steamy BMW idling in’the Star Motel parking lot, Long John Beach turned to the two-mannikin appliance in the back seat. “Let me tell you a parable,” he said.

“Talk to me, goddammit,” said Armentrout hoarsely, gripping the sweat-slick steering wheel. They were here during the Marina 3.2 earthquake last night, one of the motel guests had told him. They were all yelling at each other, and yelling, “Where’s Kootie?” They carried a guy down the stairs to a truck, and drove away, some of ‘em in the truck and some in a beat old brown Ford.

“I’ll tell you all,” Long John said equably. “A man’s car drove over a cliff, and in midair he jumped out, and caught hold of a tree stump halfway down the cliff. Below him is only fog, and he can’t climb up or down. He looks into the sky and says, ‘Is there anybody up there? Tell me what to do!” And a big voice says, ‘Let go of the tree.’ So after a few seconds the guy says, ‘Is there anybody else up there?’“

Armentrout nodded impatiently, and finally turned to Long John. “So? What did he do?”

The one-armed man shrugged. “That’s the end of the story:’

DOWN A set of mismatched brick-and-marble stairs, under the shadow of a scrollwork-roofed marble alcove that looked as if it should shelter the carved effigy of a dead king, a broad cobblestone-paved crescent with a raised stone edge-coping projected out over the sea like an ancient dock.

At the moment the only dead king present was laid out on the pavement below the alcove, his jeans and white shirt blotting up moisture and grime from the puddles between the uneven paving stones; and all that was on the broad table-like slab under the alcove roof was a couple of sheets of corrugated cardboard, bedding for some absent transient.

In the direction of the peninsula point and the iron light pole another set of steps led back up to road level from this stone floor, flanked against the open gray sky by a bench that was a marble slab laid across two broken granite half-moons. Cochran realized that he badly wanted to feel that this shelter was an enduring, solid edifice—but it was too obvious that what distinguished this place from a real, old ruin was the fact that all the stone edges here, even the ones fitted up against each other as part of some wall or seat, were broken and uneven. A line from some poem was tolling in his head: These fragments I have shored against my ruins…

Plumbing pipes projected up out of the muddy ground at every shelf and wall-top, their open-mouthed ends bent horizontal to project the echoing sound of sea water rising and falling in their buried shafts, a deep twanging like slow-fingered ascending and descending slides on slack bass-guitar strings. Cochran’s thudding heartbeat and his shallow panting seemed to provide a counterpoint, and it was only plumtree’s evient, valiant desperation to accomplish the task at hand, and his own queasy shame at having called for Nina’s ghost during the Follow-the-Queen episode, that kept him from wading out into the cold sea on the Marina side and trying to swim to shore.

His face was chilly with sweat, and not just because of having had to help carry the cold dead body a few moments ago. In his mind he was again seeing the carbine jolting in Angelica’s fists and flinging out ejected shell casings, and the brick stairway-top exploding into dust and high-speed fragments, and he was shaking with a new, visceral comprehension of velocity and bullets and human mercilessness. He couldn’t help but be glad that he hadn’t fired his own gun.

Angelica had fetched her canvas knapsack from the truck while Mavranos and Pete and Cochran had been carrying Scott Crane’s body down the steps, and now she was spreading out on the damp stones her paltry-looking tools—there was, along with the assorted garage-sale litter he’d seen last night in the motel room, an empty H. Upmann cigar box, a can of Ronsonol lighter fluid, a pair of pliers, a Star Motel postcard…Cochran shook his head in bewilderment.

Mavranos cussed and slapped at his own neck. “No hippie druids this morning,” he said, “but we got flies up the butt.”

“Here, at this hour,” said Angelica in a strained voice, “those can’t be anything but ghost-flies; las moscas, little essences of dead people, either brought in on us or already here. Ordinarily they’d just be an implicit cloud, but they’re condensed to individuality this morning by the sudden low pressure of having the dead king right here.” She glanced up, frowning. “Try not to breathe them—and if any of you have got any bleeding cuts, cover them.”

She handed Mavranos the bottle of 75 Kenwood Cabernet. “You hold this, Arky,” she told him; “open it when I tell you.”

“Go ahead and do this thing right,” Mavranos said, “but as much on fast-forward as you can, okay? Those guys in the boat will be back, or their friends.”

“Right, Arky,” Angelica said, “but it’s important for this procedure that all the minds present understand what’s going on, assent to it.” Speaking to all of them, she went on rapidly, “See, we’re gonna be doing a kind of ass-backward honoring-of-the-dead here. Usually the procedure is to have a heavily masked guy, a Lucumi ogungun, let himself be taken over by the ghost of the deceased; it’s to let the ghost see the funeral and mourners and flower displays and all, and everybody being sorry, so that the ghost can go away, can dissipate happily and not hang around and cause trouble.”

While she’d been talking she had laid the cigar box on the stones and draped it with a white linen handkerchief, and now she set on it a water glass from the motel. As she hoisted a plastic bottle of Evian water out of the knapsack and began twisting off the cap, she said, in a formal tone, “This is an altar, a bóveda espiritual.” It seemed to be a declaration, and she poured the glass half full of water as she spoke.

She looked up at Plumtree then, and her mirror glasses were lozenges of glowing argy sky. Cochran could see the butt of the slung carbine under her open raincoat. “The way it ordinarily works,” Angelica went on at her previous quick pace, “is you set out a glass of some nice kind of water, and everybody dabs some on their hands and temples, as a kind of cleansing, so the guest-of-honor ghost will have a transparent medium to focus on but wont fixate on anybody.” She took the Wild Turkey bottle out of the canvas sack and twisted out the cork. “But,” she said hoarsely, “we don’t want his ghost, we want him. And we want to make sure that he does fixate, that retreat is not even an option for him.”

She poured the still-liquid red blood into the water, about three tablespoons, and then covered the glass with the Star Motel postcard to keep the ghost-flies out of it. “So you’re going to drink this.”

Plumtree was biting her lip, but she nodded. “This has to work,” she was whispering, “please let this work, this has to work…” The sunburn was spotty over her cheekbones, as if the skin was stretched tight, and Cochran guessed that her hands would have been trembling if she had not been clenching them tightly together, as if in prayer.

Cochran remembered the note Kootie had left, when he had run away last night. I cant do it again…me be out of my head…I’d go crazy. This woman, Cochran thought, underwent electroconvulsive therapy six days ago this morning. She was knocked out of her own head, and has been evicted again several times since then by her terrible father…most recently for more than two whole days, and she got herself back just yesterday morning. Cochran remembered her saying yesterday, in a falsely bravely cheerful voice, The goat head was speaking, in a human language…But she’s here doing this, voluntarily. Assenting, and then some.

He stepped closer to her and reached out and squeezed her hand. Without glancing away from the glass of streaky red water on the draped cigar box, Plumtree shook her hand free of his.

“No offense,” she said faintly. “This is our flop.”

Cochran took a step back. Over the wavering drone of the flies he heard a faint pattering on the stones behind him, and when he turned he saw Mavranos brushing tiny cubes of truck-window glass out of his hair.

“I could drive back for coffee and doughnuts,” Mavranos said.

“We’re almost ready here,” said Angelica.

She now laid the myrtle branches on the stones and squirted them with the Ronsonol lighter fluid; and she laid out as well the gold Dunhill lighter and the two silver dollars that Spider Joe had brought to Solville.

At last Angelica straightened up, with a visible shudder, and elbowed the slung carbine back behind her hip. “Okay, Arky,” she said, “open that skeleton-label wine. We’re each going to take a sip of it, and then I’m going to light the myrtle. This stuff will get—God help us!—it’ll get the attention of Dionysus, his remote attention, I trust, and that will give us a line-of-sight link to the underworld.”

“And from the underworld right back to us, here,” said mavranos stolidly as he twisted the corkscrew of his Swiss Army knife into the cork. “Pogo?” he called loudly into the gray sky. He yanked the cork out with a frail pop. “That’s a sound you ought to recognize, old friend.”

He tipped the bottle up to his lips, and after a couple of bubbles had wobbled up inside it he lowered it and passed it to Pete Sullivan, who also drank from it.

“Plumtree last,” said Angelica, taking the bottle from her husband and handing it to Cochran. The harbor breeze was tossing her black hair around her face. “And out of the glass.”

Cochran raised the cold bottle and took several deep gulps, and he was so hungry for the blurring effect of alcohol on his empty stomach, on this terrible morning, that he had to force himself to hand it back without swallowing more.

“Thirsty boy,” said Angelica bleakly. “You’re not through yet, by the way.” She drank a token mouthful herself, then crouched again by her little altar and, flicking the postcard away, topped up the water glass with purple Cabernet. She clanked the bottle down on the stones and lifted the glass, and straightened up and handed it to Plumtree.

“Not quite yet,” Angelica said to her. “You,” she told Cochran, “hold up that right hand of yours, toward the water, with that birthmark facing out.”

Cochran’s ears were ringing, and he distinctly felt a drop of sweat roll down his ribs under his shirt. “Why?” he whispered. I won’t, he thought. He heard again what he had said in the self-esteem group at Rosecrans Medical Center, on that first day: Reach out your hand, you get it cut off, sometimes. And he remembered seeing the red blood jetting from his chopped wrist, when he had put his hand between the old Zinfandel stump and the pruning shears thirty-three years ago. He was about to say I wont out loud, but Mavranos spoke before he could:

“I got no affection for your girlfriend,” Mavranos said gruffly, “but I gotta say that she’s bought a lot of…plain cold admiration in my rating. Not that she cares, I’m sure. What she’s ready to do…I don’t think I could do. None of the rest of us can claim our part’s too hard in this, compared to hers.”

“That mark on your hand is some kind of Dionysus badge,” Angelica said gently, “isn’t it?”

Le Visage dans la Vigne, Cochran thought. The Face in the Vine Stump. “I suppose it is,” he said helplessly, and then in his mind he heard again the hard crack of Plumtree’s fist hitting the bloody madhouse linoleum floor, right after he had punched Long John Beach in the nose. His teeth ached now as he took a deep breath of the sea air and let it out in shaky segments. “I’m…with you. Okay.” Slowly he lifted his right arm, with the palm of his hand turned back.

“Okay,” echoed Angelica. To Plumtree she said, “Now when I get the myrtle burning, you call to—damn it, you brought this on yourself, you know, girl, I’m so sorry, but—call to Scott Crane; and then drink—” She shook her head quickly and waved at the glass of rusty-colored liquid in Plumtree’s hand, then whispered the last word, “—it.”

Cochran noticed that the peak of the alcove roof and the top of the marble stair were shining now in the cold pink light of dawn. Mavranos stood on tiptoe and looked back down the peninsula.

“Sun’s coming up,” he said, “over Fort Mason.”

“Get the pliers,” Angelica told him. “Pull the spear out of his throat.”

Mavranos swallowed visibly, but his face was impassive as he nodded. “Happy to.” He picked up the pliers and then knelt beside Scott Crane’s body, with his back to the others; Cochran saw his shoulders flex under the denim jacket, and then he was straightening up, holding the closed pliers out away from himself, and the red-stained three-pointed spearhead quivered between the pliers’ jaws.

“Can I pitch it into the ocean?” he asked hoarsely.

“You have to,” said Angelica, nodding and not looking at the thing.

Mavranos reached back over his shoulder and then snapped his hand forward, letting the pliers spring open at the last moment, as if he were casting a fishing fly. The little bloody metal fork spun away, glittering for a moment in the horizontal sunlight, and then disappeared behind a wave.

Cochran looked back at the body of Scott Crane. A spatter of fresh red blood stood out on the dark beard, but the pale, lined face was as composed and noble as before, and he reminded himself that at the moment Crane was incapable of feeling pain.

The two silver dollars were lying on the stones near Scott Crane’s bare feet. “Aren’t you gonna put the coins on his eyes?” Cochran asked.

“No,” snapped Angelica. “They’re his fare over. We want him to come back.”

Then why have them here at all? thought Cochran defensively. His raised arm was getting tired.

Angelica crouched to pick up the myrtle branches and the gold cigarette lighter, and she opened the lighter’s lid and flicked the striker; the myrtle caught and burned with an almost invisible flame, though Cochran could smell the incense like smoke.

Angelica nodded to Plumtree.

Plumtree faced the now-glittering gray water, and when she had lifted the glass she paused. “Not even Valorie?” she asked in a quiet voice, clearly not addressing any of the others present. “This is mine?”

Standing to the side of her with his arm stiffly raised, Cochran could see windblown tears streaming back across her cheek.

“Scott Craned she called strongly out toward the waves and the glowing fog. “I know you can fucking hear me! Come into me, into this body of your murderer!” And she tipped the glass up and drank it down in three convulsive swallows.

WITH A drumming roar like the sound of a forest fire sudden solid rain thrashed down onto the peninsula, flinging up a haze of splash-spray over the stones and blurring the surface of the sea. The sudden haze of flying water was lit by two rapid white flares of lightning, and the sudden hard crash of close thunder battered at the marble walls and rocked Cochran back on his heels.

Plumtree’s hair was instantly soaked, and it flew out like snakes when she flung her head back and shouted out three syllables of harsh laughter.

“Four-and-twenty blackbrides baked in a pie!” roared the voice of Omar Salvoy from her gaping mouth. “When the pie was opened, the brides began to sing! Wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king!”

Cochran had lost his footing, and he twisted as he fell so that his knees and elbows knocked against the wet stones.

He could see the remains of Scott Crane, only a couple of feet in front of his face. It was a bare gray skull that now lolled above the collar of the shirt, and the already-wet fabric was collapsed against stark ribs and no abdomen at all, and the hands that spilled from the cuffs were long-fingered gray bone.

Plumtree turned away from the sea, and even through the dimness and the retinal afterglare from the lightning Cochran could see the white of her bared teeth, and he knew this was Plumtree’s father, Omar Salvoy. He might have been looking straight at Cochran.

“Moth-er!” Cochran yelled, and though he was only trying to induce the Foliow-the-Queen effect in her, to his surprise the wail powerfully evoked his own dormant childhood fear of being heartbreakingly lost and monstrously found, and he was glad that the rain would hide the tears he felt springing from his eyes. For his self-respect more than from any particular hope of its efficacy, he shouted, “Janis’s mom!”

Perhaps it had worked—at any rate the figure that was Plumtree was allowing itself to be hustled back up the stairs by Mavranos, and Angelica was now crouched on the other side of the dressed skeleton, hastily folding the stick-like arms and legs.

Angelica looked up at him over the arch of the cloth-draped breastbone. “Get the Wild Turkey bottle!” she said.

Cochran nodded, and crawled across the stones and snatched up the pint bottle in the moment before Pete Sullivan grabbed him under the arms and hauled him to his feet. Cochran had almost dropped the bottle in surprise—it was as hot as if scalding coffee had just been poured out of it, and he shoved it into the pocket of his windbreaker.

Another flare of lightning lit the weathered stones through the thick haze of rain, and the instant bomb-blast of thunder fluttered the wet hair on the back of Cochran’s head.

Things like beanbags were falling out of the sky and hitting the stones all around him—he squinted at a couple of them as Pete hurried him across the pavement, and he saw that they were dead seagulls. Over the roar of the rain battering the pavement he could hear bestial groans and howls shaking out of the mouths of the deeply moored pipes now.

He and Pete followed Angelica up the slippery stone steps to the roadway mud, and after Angelica had unceremoniously dumped the armful of clothes and bones in through the open back window of Mavranos’s truck they all scrambled around to the side doors and piled in, kicking out old clothes and McDonald’s take-out hamburger wrappings.

Cochran and Plumtree and Pete were all wedged uncomfortably in the back seat; but Cochran relaxed a little when he heard Plumtree muttering about Jesus. Apparently the Follow-the-Queen invocation had worked, and this was the personality of Plumtree’s mother.

Mavranos had started the truck and levered it into gear before they had got the doors shut, and he clicked the headlights on as the truck rocked forward along the dirt path back toward the yacht-club parking lot. Tools and frying pans clanked in the truck bed, and Cochran wondered if Crane’s skeleton was being broken up back there.

Then he leaned forward over the back of the front seat to peer ahead past the squeaking whips of the windshield wipers. Translucent human figures waved and grimaced out on the road in the yellow headlight glare, and stretched or sprang away to the sides as the massive bumper and grille bulled through them.

Angelica was crouched in the front passenger seat with her carbine across her knees. “I see lights, ahead,” she said, speaking loudly to be heard over the rain and wind that were thrashing in through the broken window by her right elbow. “Don’t waste time focussing on these ghosts.”

“Motorcycles,” said Mavranos, squinting through the streaming windshield. He took his right hand from the steering wheel long enough to draw the revolver from under his belt and lay it across his lap. “They’re on Yacht Road, turning into the parking lot.” He tromped on the accelerator, and the old truck bounced violently on its shocks, clanging the tools and pans in the back. “I’m gonna stop,” he called, “sudden, when we’re past the Granada. You all jump out and get into it—I’ll use this truck to clear a path through these guys.”

“No, Arky—” Angelica began, but then the truck had slammed down over a curb and had passed the parked Granada, and was braking hard and slewing around to the right on the wet asphalt. Cochran was pressed against the back of the front seat, but he shoved the right-side door open while the truck was still rocking from side to side, its left side facing the oncoming glare of motorcycle headlights.

He dragged Plumtree out onto the pavement after him, and he was fumbling in his pants pocket for the Granada’s keys. Pete had followed him out and had opened the truck’s front passenger door, but Angelica was arguing with Mavranos and wouldn’t get out.

“I’ll shoot ahead while you drive,” she was yelling. “Pete, go get in the Ford! Arky, drive us out of herel”

Over the stadium-roar of the rain Cochran heard several hard bangs, and the truck’s long right rear window became an opaque spiderweb in the moment before it fell out onto the asphalt in a million tiny pieces.

He saw Mavranos lunge up and across the front seat, blocking Angelica from the gunfire; “Angelica,” Mavranos was yelling, “get down, get back to—”

Five more fast bangs hammered at the truck, and Angelica tumbled backward out of the truck and sat down hard on the puddled pavement. As Pete Sullivan ran toward her, Cochran spun away, toward the Granada. He frog-marched Plumtree around to the passenger side, opened the door, and shoved her into the back seat; then he ran around the front and got in behind the wheel and started the engine.

Angelica was on her feet, and Pete was hurrying her to the passenger side of the Granada. They got in, and Cochran shifted the engine into gear.

“Don’t go!” Angelica was yelling in his ear as he stepped on the gas, “Drive into them, Arky’s been shot, we’ve got to get him—”

“He’s driving,” Cochran told her. He took his eyes off the advancing pavement ahead for just long enough to give her a quick up-and-down glance, but he didn’t see any obvious blood on her rain-soaked jeans and blouse. Apparently she had not been hit.

Ahead of them the truck had surged around and roared forward, and with an audible slam a motorcycle headlight beam whirled up across the dark sky as the truck rocked right over the fallen machine and rider; Cochran swerved his lower-slung car around the body and the spinning, broken motorcycle, and then he tromped on the accelerator to keep up with the racing truck as it sped out of the parking lot. Dead seagulls thumped under the tires.

The motorcycles were behind them now, their headlights slashing the walls of rain as they turned around, and Angelica was lying across Pete’s lap to hold the carbine outside of the car, its black plastic stock wedged against the still-open passenger door.

She pulled the trigger five times—the concussions of the shots were stunning physical blows inside the confined cab of the car, and the flashes of hard yellow muzzle-flare made it impossible to see anything more than the truck’s taillights in the dimness ahead, but the headlights behind didn’t seem to be gaining on them, so Cochran just bit his lip and hummed shrilly and kept squinting through the rain-blurred windshield.

Over the ringing in his ears and the roaring of the engine, he became aware that Plumtree was shouting in a quacking voice in the back seat. “You can’t kill him with bullets,” he dimly heard her say. “Even when his Lever Blank acolytes threw him off a building in Soma, he didn’t die. He is the Anti-Christ.”

“Oh hell,” he whispered. Who to call up, he thought—not Janis nor Cody, there’s no point in breaking the bad news to them yet. “Valorie!” he shouted.

At least it shut her up. Angelica had pulled the door closed and folded the stock of her carbine, but now she had popped out the old magazine and rammed a new one in—hardball rounds, Cochran guessed—and had rolled down the window and was sitting on Pete’s knees with her head and shoulders, and the rifle, out the window.

She fired six measured, presumably aimed shots—the explosions rang the car roof, but were much less assaulting than the previous five had been—and then she hiked herself back inside and rolled the window back up. Cochran glanced at the rear-view mirror and couldn’t see any headlights back there.

“Arky’s shot,” Angelica said breathlessly. “He got shot in the head.”

Cochran nodded at the truck ahead of them, which had just caught the tail end of a green light and turned left onto Marina Boulevard. “He’s driving fine.” Cochran sped up and honked his car horn to catch the yellow light and stay behind the truck; the tires squealed on the slick asphalt but didn’t lose traction.

Angelica rubbed her fist on the steamy inside surface of the windshield and peered out through the glass. “I don’t see him, though—do you see his head at all, if he’s driving?”

Cochran tried to see details of the truck in the moments when the windshield wipers had swept aside the blobs and streams of rain. “No,” he admitted finally, “but he might be sitting real low.” With the feedback-like ringing in his abused eardrums he had no idea how loud he might be talking.

“But—” he went on shakily, in a louder voice. Hadn’t Pete or Angelica noticed? “But the truck is blue, now.”

“It’s—?” Angelica stared expressionlessly at the boxy truck bobbing in the Ian ahead of them. Even in the dim gray light, the truck’s color was unmistakably a dusty navy blue. “And it’s—that’s him, that’s the same truck, we haven’t taken our eve off it.” She sat back between Pete and Cochran, looking all at once small and young behind the wet black metal of the gun in her arms. “The local Holy Week is over, that means—and nobody rose from the dead. We really did fail here today.”

Plumtree wailed in the back seat, and for a moment Cochran thought the mother personality was still on; then she spoke, in the flat cadence of Valorie: “What would you have me be, an I be not a woman? Manhood is called foolery, where it stands against a falling fabric. And tell the pleasant prince this mock of his hath turned his balls to gun-stones”

For a moment no one spoke; then, “I reckon Kootie was right,” said. Pete. “I guess the receiver had to be somebody of the same sex.”

Cochran’s right shoe sole squeaked back and forth between the brake and the gas pedal, and the engine roared and slacked, roared and slacked, as he swerved from one to another of the eastbound lanes to keep the speeding truck in sight ahead of them, and the word sex hung in the steamy air.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The night wore out, and, as he stood upon the bridge listening to the water as it splashed the river-walls of the Island of Paris, where the picturesque confusion of houses and cathedral shone bright in the light of the moon, the day came coldly, looking like a dead face out of the sky. Then, the night, with the moon and the stars, turned pale and died, and for a little while it seemed as if Creation were delivered over to Death’s dominion.

—Charles Dickens,

A Tale of Two Cities

THOUGH he couldn’t see her in the shadowy alley ahead of him, Kootie sensed that the woman in the hooded white raincoat had found the other mouth of this interminable unroofed passage, and was picking her way down the rain-slicked cobblestones toward him, patient as a shadow.

Even if there had not been wooden crates full of cabbage heads and big green onions stacked against the ancient brick walls, the alley would have been too narrow-for any car to drive down it; and the scalloped eaves of the pagoda-style roofs were four or five stories overhead, and Kootie was certain that even on clear days the sunlight had never at any season slanted all the way down to these wet paving stones, k which had probably not been dry of rain water and vegetable juices and spit and strange liquors since the pavement was laid—and Kootie giddily thought that must have been before the 1906 earthquake.

If that earthquake ever even happened, he thought, here.

He was crouching in the deeper shadows under an iron stairway, and all he was doing was breathing deeply and listening to his own heartbeat, which for several minutes now had been alternating between scary rapid bursts and even scarier three-second dead stops. Like bad-reception images on a TV, every object he looked at seemed to have a faint twin half-overlapping it to one side, and he suspected that the rainbow-edged twins weren’t precisely identical to the actual objects; and the cold, oily air seemed to be shaking with big dialogues he couldn’t quite hear, like the faint voices you can catch on a turned-up stereo in the moments between tracks.

He wasn’t at all sure he was still entirely in the real, San Francisco Chinatown.

When he had first noticed the Chinese woman in the white hooded raincoat he had been standing out of the downpour under an awning in an alley called Street of Gamblers; and he had ducked through a touristy souvenir shop to evade her, hunching through aisles of woks and wisdom hats and plastic back-scratchers, and when he had pushed through the far door and stepped out into the rain again, he had sprinted right across the narrow neon-puddled street, between the idling, halted traffic, into the dark slot of this alley. He hadn’t looked back, for when he had caught the woman’s eye in the Street of Gamblers she had for one hallucinatory moment seemed to be the globular black silhouette that had showed up on the motel TV screen this morning in the instant after Arky had poured beer into the set; and he had guessed that, whoever she was, she had assumed a psychic posture that had made her compellingly identical to one of the wild archetypes.

He had hurried down this alley—jogging past inexplicable open-air racks of whole barbecued ducks, under ornate balconies and indecipherable banners and clotheslines crazily hung with dripping squid, and stared at by ancient women smoking clay pipes in open doorways—and he had skidded to a panting halt here when it had finally occurred to him that no real alley in San Francisco could stretch this far without crossing a street.

He hadn’t eaten anything since a few slices of delivery pizza late yesterday afternoon, and he had been wearing this now-wet flannel shirt for twenty-four hours. He was dizzy, and exhausted without being at all sleepy, and he knew by the aching fractures in his mind that something awful had happened this morning. Something besides industrial pollution and dead sparrows was coming down hard with this rain, and the cooked ducks and raw squids were, he thought, probably being exposed to it intentionally, for some eventual bad sacramental purpose.

He jumped in surprise—and a moment later,

“You caught me,” came a high, lilting voice from close by.

He looked up to his left, and there she was, smiling down at him where he crouched under the stairs.

He had been startled a moment before she had spoken. He was on bar-time again, experiencing events a moment before they actually happened. That meant that she, or somebody, was paying a magical sort of attention to him—but he had bleakly guessed that already.

Her face under the white plastic hood was younger than he had thought, and the faint aura he saw off to one side of her was rainbow-colored now, and was clearly just a reiteration of her real shape.

He noticed that her feet were bare on the wet stones, and that the long black hair that trailed across her chest between the lapels of her raincoat seemed to be clinging to bare skin, rather than to any clothing.

He hiked himself forward and stood up in what he now thought of as the duck-and-squid-basting rain; and he opened his mouth to say something, but she spoke first:

“What are you looking for?” she asked.

Kootie thought about that. “Shelter, I guess,” he said. “Food, rest.” He glanced fearfully up and down the alley, clenching his fists against another burst of rapid heartbeat. “Real streets,” he added breathlessly.

“Go to this place,” she told him, pulling a folded sheet of white paper out of the raincoat pocket and handing it to him. Her fingertips were as cold as the rain.

Then she had hurried past him and away, and the wings of her raincoat spread out wide in the rainy wind, so that she was a white triangle receding away with eerie speed between the close, dark walls.

Kootie unfolded the piece of paper, trying to shield it from the rain with one shaky hand. It was a poorly photocopied line drawing of a scowling Chinaman with tiny smudged images of ships and animals all over his shirt and trousers. In the bottom margin of the paper, ballpoint-ink numbers were arranged unevenly:

60

31 10, 78 53:

49 80, 86/100 90 91.

—12

Kootie looked after the vanished woman. He understood this code, but he wondered how she had known that he would. It was the Cuban charada china, a lottery and rebus system that had been brought to Havana by Chinese contract laborers in the mid-nineteenth century. Originally of thirty-six characters, it had been expanded during the twentieth century to include a hundred symbols.

This reproduction of the famous drawing was so poorly copied that not even the little images on the chino’s clothing, much less the tiny numbers beside each one, could be made out—but Kootie’s foster-mother Angelica had done so much divination work with the antique system that Kootie effortlessly remembered what picture each number traditionally referred to.

Now he tried to read the indicated images as a message, a letter to him, and after a few moments he had mentally arranged them into phrases, filling in gaps with words that seemed probable:

(On this day of) dark sun

Deer Big Fish, Bishop of (Thomas Edison’s) electric light:

(Look for a, you’ll find a) drunk physician (or physician for drunks), (at the) hotel (or convent) (where you saw the) big mirror and the old man, (by the) gemstone tortoise.

—Saintly woman (or prostitute)

How long, Kootie wondered, was she following me? Right around sunrise, when the dead sparrows fell out of the sky with the sour rain, I did see an old man propping up a big gilt-framed mirror against a brick wall and staring at me in the reflection. I think he was in front of a Chinese restaurant, though, not a hotel or a convent—though in fact this was right next to a shop called…Jade Galore, with a big jade tortoise in the display window. It had been near the Street of Gamblers…Washington and Stockton.

Even as he wondered how he might find his way back to the normal San Francisco streets, he heard the rippling throb of car tires on wet pavement; and when he stepped forward and looked to his left, he saw the muted colors of cars moving past across the alley from left to right. A real street!—ask and ye shall receive, he told himself.

He thought about the old man he’d seen with the mirror…and about the woman in the white raincoat.

Saintly woman (or prostitute).

Angelica would see danger in this invitation, spiritual peril even more than physical peril. Not everybody that uses magic is bad, she had told him more than once over the past two years, but it’s always bad for them—even if you’re masked and working for the good of others or in self defense, it coarsens and blunts your soul.

Kootie was trudging toward the cross-street ahead, not taking his eyes off the vision of the passing cars, but he was very aware of the paper crumpled in his hand. Angelica would expect him to run away from whatever it was that this letter offered—run to a Catholic church, or to the police, even; ideally, of course, she would expect him to run to her and Pete, if he could find them.

But he knew what his psychically concussed symptoms this morning meant. As Mavranos had pointed out, Kootie was a member of Scott Cranes magical army now—and he knew, in his guts and his spine and the primitive base of his brain, that their army had within the last hour suffered the equivalent of a nuclear strike.

All he could sense with his stunned powers was injury and absence. The attempt to restore Scott Crane to life had palpably failed. Mavranos and Plumtree and Cochran were very likely dead.

Kootie’s thoughts just exploded away into chaos whenever he tried to think about his foster-parents. He couldn’t believe that Pete and Angelica were dead, but he knew too that his individual capacity for belief wouldn’t affect whatever was. His natural parents had been tortured to death only a little more than two years ago; and now the fugitive couple who had taken him in, and had loved him and cared for him and been loved by him, might very well be dead too.

He could only postpone that thought, for now.

For now, Kootie was alone and conspicuous in a hostile, awakened city.

49 80, he thought. 12.

He had emerged at last from the dimness of the alley—his sneakers were scuffing on the wet cement of the street sidewalk now, and the passing cars were so obviously real that he could see the momentarily clear tread-prints of their tires on the puddled asphalt as they rolled past, and so close that he could see faces behind the rain-beaded window glass. This street was Stockton. Washington should be the next street down to his left.

He shoved the crumpled paper into his jeans pocket. His legs were shaky, and he had to actually glance down at his belt to make sure he had not buckled it in a Möbius twist—he had not—but he sighed and began shuffling south, toward Washington Street.

THE BLUE truck hadn’t been stopping for red lights as it led the Granada on a swerving, skidding chase through the dawn streets of the Richmond district. The truck had braked for cross-traffic, but then gunned through the rainy intersections as soon as a gap between oncoming cars appeared, as if the red lights were just yield signs. Cochran had been hard-pressed to keep the vehicle in sight through the slapping windshield wipers, and even so he had had to run a couple of red lights himself, cursing and sweating as he did it. He had told Angelica to stash her gun under the seat in case they were pulled over by a cop.

On the long westbound stretch of Geary Street, Cochran had briefly been able to pull up in the left lane alongside the racing blue truck, and Pete had hiked himself up nearly to a standing position in the Granada’s passenger seat, with his head and shoulders out the window; and when he had slumped back down in the seat and looked across Angelica at Cochran, his rain-wet face was pale.

“He’s lying across the seat,” Pete had said flatly. “Face down, with blood on the seat by his head.”

Cochran had hissed angrily as the truck had edged ahead again. Both vehicles had at times reached speeds of at least fifty, probably sixty—at green lights flying right across the stepped intersections and clanking the abused shock absorbers on the downhill slopes—and he’d been glad these Chinese restaurants and secondhand clothing shops weren’t open yet, and that traffic was sparse. “So who’s driving?” he’d demanded.

“Nobody is,” Pete had said. “The truck is.”

“I don’t mean to be—” Cochran had begun. “Damn it, do you mean the truck is driving? Driving itself?”

“That’s what he means,” Angelica had told him, chewing her knuckles. “If he’d stop—if it would stop—at a red light, Pete could get out and get behind the truck’s steering wheel.”

“No chance of that, it looks like,” Cochran had said grimly. “Maybe the thing’ll run out of gas.”

NOW THE truck and the car were on the Great Highway, headed south along the western coast under the lightening gray sky, having screeched through the twisting promontory lanes of Point Lobos Avenue and gunned past the Sutro Bath ruins and the Cliff House Restaurant.

Last week we saw Crane’s naked ghost on the seaside rocks down there, Cochran had thought as he had leaned the speeding car around that bend of the highway. Today we’re chasing a runaway truck with Crane’s skeleton dumped in the back of it and the Kootie kid is gone and Mavranos is probably dead. The king’s army has been pruned back right down to the dirt.

The open lanes of the Great Highway stretched straight ahead, with the slate-colored sea to the right and the massive greenery of Golden Gate Park and the stumpy tower of an old windmill rolling past to the left beyond the northbound lanes. Ahead of the Granada the truck was barrelling along, staying in its lane.

Pete Sullivan was sweating. “Pull up right behind him,” he told Cochran, “and kill the wipers. We left the back window of the truck’s tailgate open, see?”

Cochran switched off the windshield wipers and carefully edged up behind the truck, watching its close bumper rock nearer by inches as the two engines roared on and the lane markers whipped past under the wheels. The raised horizontal window at the back of the truck bobbed on its struts.

“Hope he don’t brake,” said Cochran through clenched teeth, “or—”

“What the hell are you going to do, Pete?” interrupted Angelica. “You can’t!”

“I can’t,” said Pete Sullivan, flexing his hands and staring at the close back of the truck through the rain-stippled windshield, “but I bet Houdini can.” He glanced at Angelica. “Arky might be dying in there”

“Or dead, she told him shrilly, “and you might be dying right on this highway! Under the wheels of this very car I’m driving in! Pete, you can’t. You may have Houdini’s hands, but you haven’t got his…the rest of his body!” Out of the corner of his eye Cochran saw her pat Pete’s knee, as if the subject were closed. “We’ll wait for the truck to run out of gas.” To Cochran she said, “Hey, back off, you’re gonna run right up his tailpipe. And turn the wipers back on.”

The seat jerked hard then as Plumtree grabbed it from behind, and Cochran lifted his foot away from the gas pedal to keep from being jolted into accidentally ramming the truck. Plumtree seemed to be trying to climb over the seat—and then she was clawing at the open passenger-side window as if she intended to climb right out of the speeding car.

“Take these rats thither” she was saying loudly, “to gnaw their garners. Worshipful mutineers, Valorie puts well forth; pray, follow.”

Pete Sullivan pried her wet hands loose from the window frame. “I’ll go,” he said, speaking distinctly into her blank face. “I will go. You stay.” He pushed her backward against evident resistance until she was again sitting stiffly in the back seat.

In the rear-view mirror Cochran saw her lean back in the seat, watching Pete steadily.

“Catch up,” Pete told Cochran as he turned around in the front seat and again peered out through the rain-blurred windshield. “Get closer. Angie, what you can do is say a prayer to…Ogun, right?” He was panting, almost laughing. “Isn’t he the orisha of iron—Detroit iron, I hope!—and the guy who takes people who die in traffic accidents? Tell him to hold off, here.”

Angelica held up the hand she’d been chewing on, and Cochran saw blood on her knuckles. “I’ve been,” she said. “There’s iron in blood. But—Kootie needs you! I need you, goddammit!”

Pete rocked his head toward the back seat. “Imagine the scene in here if I don’t. Anyway it’s gonna work.”

Angelica was nodding, and biting her knuckle again. She took her bloody hand away from her face long enough to say, “I can see you’re going to do it. If you die—listen to me!—if you die here I will not forgive you.”

Pete dragged his knees up until he was crouching on the seat. “I’m not gonna die.” He threw a bright glance at Cochran and said, “Watch me, and the truck. Compensate.”

Cochran was dizzy with the realization that there was no way out of this. “Get it over with,” he said tightly, gripping the wheel and gently fluttering the gas pedal to keep the car’s bumper close to the truck’s. He didn’t dare glance away from the truck’s horribly close back window to look at the speedometer, but the lane markers were hurtling past and he knew the two vehicles must be doing sixty miles per hour.

Pete hiked himself up to sit on the windowsill, with his whole upper body out of the car, out in the battering rain; then he raised his left knee outside and braced the sole of his shoe against the doorpost. He leaned forward against the headwind, and peripherally through the windshield Cochran saw his right hand grip the base of the radio antenna; then Cochran was aware of the fingertips of Pete’s left hand pressed against the top edge of the windshield glass.

“Fucking lunatic,” Cochran whispered absently. The steering wheel and the gas pedal seemed to be living extensions of himself, aching with muscular tension, and he felt that he was using the car to reach out and hold the speeding truck.

And he was balanced in the driver’s seat, ready for it, when Pete jackknifed forward and slammed prone against the outside of the windshield; Cochran just raised his head to be able to see over the blur of Pete’s shoulder against the glass, and the speeding car didn’t wobble in the lane.

Angelica was muttering syllables in which Cochran heard the name Ogun several times; and in one corner of his mind he realized that the words droning in his own head were the Lord’s Prayer.

Outside the glass, Pete’s hands were braced out to the sides and in front of him as he slowly drew in his feet and edged forward across the car’s hood on his knees. His weight was on his fingertips, and it seemed to be his hands that were maintaining his balance.

Houdini’s hands, Cochran thought.

Now the fingers of Pete’s right hand were curled over the front edge of the car hood, and the left hand slowly lifted in the rushing headwind…and beckoned.

Cochran increased the pressure of his foot on the gas pedal by an infinitesimal degree; and he felt a nevertheless solid clang shake the car as its bumper touched the truck’s.

And in that instant Pete’s hands had both lifted away from the hood, and his legs had straightened as he lunged forward in a dive.

Angelica exhaled sharply, and Cochran could only guess at the control it had taken for her to make no greater sound.

But now Pete’s shoes were clearly visible kicking in dark gap under the raised back window of the truck. He had gone into the truck rather than under the car’s wheels.

Cochran was shouting with hysterical laughter as he snatched his foot off the gas pedal and trod on the brake, and Angelica was laughing too, though the sudden deceleration had thrown her against the dashboard.

“He must have landed right on Crane’s skeleton!” Cochran yelled delightedly.

“He’ll come up wearing the skull like a hat!” agreed Angelica.

“A skullcap!” crowed Cochran, and then he and Angelica were both laughing so hard that he had to slow down still more to keep from weaving in the lane.

“A kamikaze yarmulke,” choked Angelica. “Catch up, catch up, you don’t want to lose ’em now. And turn the windshield wipers back on.”

Cochran’s hands were shaking on the wheel now., and the tires thumped over the lane markers as the car drifted back and forth. When he switched the windshield wipers back on, he could see the dim silhouette of Pete Sullivan inside the truck, clambering over the seats.

When Pete seemed to have got up to the driver’s seat the truck wobbled visibly and then backfired like a cannonshot, with two flashes of bright yellow flame at the exhaust pipes by the back wheels.

Then Cochran saw Pete Sullivan’s hand wave out of the driver’s-side window, and the truck swayed smoothly back and forth in a clearly deliberate S-pattern.

Angelica exhaled. “He’s got control,” she said softly. “He’ll be pulling over real quick.”

“Not here,” said Cochran, “there’s no shoulder.” He let himself finally take his eyes off the truck and look around at the landscape. The gray surf still streaked the sea beyond the fence to the right, but at some point they had passed the green forest wall of Golden Gate Park, and now it was low pastel-colored apartment buildings and bungalows that fretted the gray sky to the left. “He’ll want to turn inland to find some place we can park,” he said, and he clicked his left-turn indicator to give Pete the idea.

PETE STEERED the blue truck in a careful left turn onto Sloat Boulevard, and then drove slowly through half a dozen residential blocks of old white-stucco houses to the parking lot at the South Sunset Playground. There were no other cars in the lot as Cochran swung the Granada into the parking space next to the truck, and Angelica was out of the car before he had even come to a full stop. When Cochran turned off the ignition and got out, she was already standing at the opened passenger-side door of the truck. The rain had stopped and the clouds were breaking up in the east, and the mirror lenses of Angelica’s sunglasses flashed as she leaned into the truck cab over Mavranos.

“Can you push against Pete’s hands with your feet?” she was saying to Mavranos. “Both feet? Good! Open your eyes, Arky, I want to check your pupils.” She looked up toward Pete, who was still behind the wheel of the truck. “We’ll need to get him to a hospital, stat. He’s conscious, with no bleeding from the ears or nostrils, and this isn’t a bullet wound, but…he was knocked out, it is a concussion.”

She doesn’t want to say possible subdural hematoma, thought Cochran nervously. Mavranos is probably in shock, and doesn’t need to hear that there might be blood leaking inside his skull, lethally pressing against the brain.

Plumtree had climbed out of the back of the car now, and she was leaning on the front fender, blinking around at the lawns and swing sets and the two vehicles. “Did it work?” she asked hoarsely.

“Not a bullet wound?” said Cochran, reluctant to answer Plumtree. He could see that the truck’s windshield was starred with cracks radiating from a hole low down on the passenger side. “What is it then?”

Angelica turned her mirror lenses toward him, then held out a fragment of polished white stone. “A bullet hit this statue he had on his dashboard—some kind of Buddha—and part of it hit him, to judge by the fragments in his scalp. A glancing blow to the back of the head, above the occipital region.” She turned back to Mavranos, whose head Cochran could just see on the truck seat. “Arky,” she said. “Open your eyes for me.”

“Did it fucking work?” Plumtree demanded. “Is Scott Crane alive now?”

Cochran bared his teeth in irritation and pity. “No, Cody. It—failed, I’m sorry.”

“I think the truck was heading back to Leucadia,” said Pete, who had opened the driver’s-side door and had one foot down on the pavement. “I think it would have driven all the way back there, like a horse that knows the way home—if somebody would have filled the gas tank every hour.”

Plumtree had taken a wobbling step back across the asphalt. “Did it work?” she asked. “Where’s Scott Crane?”

“Radioactive!” Mavranos seemed to say, loudly but in a slurred voice.

“No, Janis,” Cochran said. “I’m sorry, but it didn’t work.” It occurred to him that Plumtree was sounding like a concussion victim herself.

Look at me,” Angelica said to Mavranos.

“You’re upside-down,” Mavranos said in a high, nasal voice, “but I’ll look at you all you want.” To a tune that Cochran recognized as some old Elvis Costello song Mavranos sang, “You better listen to your radio.” But he slurred the last word, so that it seemed to be ray-joe.

Angelica had jerked back against the open door, her forehead wrinkled above the sunglasses. “You—your pupils are normal,” she said uncertainly. “But we’ve got to get you to a hospital, Arky, you’ve got a—”

“Bitch broke my nose!” Mavranos braced himself on his elbow and sat up, feeling his face. “Is my traitor sister here?” He blinked at Angelica. “Who the hell are you people? My nose isn’t broken! Am I—did I do it, am I the king?”

Angelica held out the white stone fragment. “This was a statue of a, a fat Buddha,” she said, and Cochran could tell that she was trying to keep her voice level. “Do you—recognize it?”

“Buddha,” said Mavranos in his new, high voice, “it’s not Buddha, it’s Tan Tai, gook god of prosperity. I gave her one like it once, when she was still my loyal half-sister.”

Angelica stepped slowly away from the truck, glancing worriedly at Cochran and Plumtree. “Look only at me please,” she said to them in a quiet, professional tone. “Pete? Eyes front. We won’t be going to a hospital after all, unless I see a deterioration in Arky’s vital signs.”

Cochran could feel goose bumps rasping the fabric of his damp shirtsleeves, and not because of the dawn chill. He understood now that a ghost had got punched into Mavranos’s head back there; and he wondered if it was one of the ones that had clustered ahead of the truck on the drive back from the ruins at the end of the yacht-club peninsula, or if it was one that Mavranos had been carrying with him all along, like an old intolerable photo in a sealed locket.

To Cochran, Angelica said, “You’re a local boy—where is there water nearby? Tamed water, contained water. With—we need to get Arky and me into a boat, very quick.”

“A boat?” echoed Cochran, trying not to wail in pure bewilderment. “Okay. Well! Golden Gate Park, I guess. Stow Lake. You can rent boats, I think.”

“Close by?” asked Angelica.

“Two or three miles back the way we came.”

“It’s not—famously haunted or anything, is it?”

Cochran rocked his head uncertainly. “There’s supposed to be druid stones on the island in the middle of the lake,” he said, “and I heard that there were stones from a ruined Spanish monastery around the shore; but my wife and I went looking for this stuff a couple of years ago, and couldn’t find any of it. Anyway, no, I’ve never heard of any hauntings or murders or anything.”

Remotely, as if from some previous life, he remembered the picnic he and Nina had unpacked on the Stow Lake island one sunny weekday morning, and how in the bough-shaded solitude at the top of the island hill they had soon forgotten the sandwiches and overturned the wine as they had rolled around on the dewy grass. They had made a sort of bed of their cast-off clothing, and when they had finally collapsed, spent, Nina had said that it had been as if they’d been trying to climb through each other.

And now he jumped, for Plumtree had slid her hand up the clinging seat of his jeans.

“Can we go?” she asked quietly. “Did they get the dead man back alive again?”

“No,” Cochran said, blinking away tears of exhaustion, “Tiffany. It failed. The dead man is—deader than he was before.”

Her hand was snatched away, but he didn’t look at her to see who she might be now; he just stepped to the side to block her view of Mavranos and said, rapidly, “Remember the little girls we saw on the roof of that clown’s house? I think we’re in the same sort of—situation now. Look only at Angelica. Do you follow me?”

“Mirrors can ricochet,” she said bleakly, in the voice he now recognized as Cody’s. “I’m looking no higher than the ground.”

Angelica gently pressed the truck door closed until it clicked, as if to keep from waking someone up. “You lead the way to this lake,” she told Cochran as she pulled open the truck’s back door to get in. “And when we get there, you walk ahead of us and buy the tickets or whatever.”

“Right.” Cochran turned back to the Granada, jerking his head at Plumtree to follow.

“What’s left for us?” Plumtree asked dreamily as she got in on the passenger side and Cochran started the engine again. “After this?” Perhaps she was talking to herself.

“Getting drunk,” he said anyway, clanking the shift lever into reverse. “What did you think?”

“Oh,” she said, nodding. “Right. Of course.”

“Boats first.”

“To the boats,” she said, emptily.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

CRESSIDA: …he is himself.

PANDARUS: Himself? Alas, poor Troilus, I would he were.

CRESSIDA: So he is.

PANDARUS: Condition, I had gone barefoot to India.

—William Shakespeare,

Troilus and Cressida

AT the corner of Stockton and Washington, Kootie had found only the Chinese I restaurant he remembered having passed at dawn, next door to the Jade Galore shop; the restaurant wasn’t open, and the old man who had been peering into a mirror propped against the restaurant wall was gone now, and the big old gilt-framed mirror too. Someone had even swept up the dead sparrows. Kootie had turned away toward the wet intersection, stepping to the curb and mentally cursing the Chinese woman who had given him the useless message, when he sensed a change in the light from behind him.

And when he turned around, the restaurant was gone.

In its place stood a three-story plaster-fronted building with narrow arched windows. At a wrought-iron gate to an enclosed patio garden, the woman in white stood staring out at him, and behind her he could see the big framed mirror, propped now against a knotty tree stump in the rainy garden. On a white sign over the gateway arch, plain black letters spelled out, PLEASANT BOARDING HOUSE.

Oh, this is magic, Kootie thought, his spine suddenly tingling with a chill that wasn’t from the cold rain. I should run away.

Run away to what place, he asked himself bitterly then, that hasn’t been conquered? To what people, that haven’t been defeated and probably killed?

His breath was hitching and catching in his throat.

The Chinese woman beckoned with constrained urgency, and touched a finger to her lips. Kootie noticed that though she was still draped in white, it was a frail linen robe she was wearing now, and the fabric appeared to be dry.

At least she’s offering shelter, he told himself as he shrugged and stepped back across the sidewalk from the edge of the curb. His sneakers squished on the pavement, and he could feel cold water spurting between his toes.

The woman tugged the gate open on hinges that made no sound over the clatter of the rain, and then pushed it closed again after Kootie had stepped through onto the round paving stones laid out across the patio mud. “What is this place?” he whispered to her.

Her face was tense as she shook her head again and pressed her cold lips to his ear. “Later,” she breathed, and at least her breath was warm. “Don’t wake up the master of the house.” As she pulled her face back she nodded out toward the garden without looking that way.

Kootie had to look. He glanced over his shoulder as the woman took his elbow and hurried him toward a pair of windowed doors ahead—but all he saw in the walled garden, aside from the dripping ginger stalks and rose vines on the far side of the rain-stippled puddles, was the tree stump with the mirror leaning against it.

Squinting against the rain, he saw that the stump was a gnarled and hairy old grapevine, a full yard thick, with jagged, chunky outcrops where old canes had been pruned back. A soggy animal fur had been draped around two of the truncated woody limbs as if around shoulders, and to Kootie the bumpy bark between the cane stumps looked, in the moment before the woman pulled him through the doors into a dry, pine-floored hallway, like the whiskery gray face of an aged man.

The woman in the white robe was leading him quickly toward a set of polished black wood stairs that led upward. “What is this place?” Kootie whispered again.

“It’s his boardinghouse,” she whispered back. He takes in boarders? Kootie thought. “It’s not here all the time,” she went on, “but it’s always here on January seventeenth, for people with the right kind of eyes—and with this bad checkmate rain, the place would certainly have been here today in any—case or else this rain couldn’t have happened except on this day, St. Sulpice’s Day. If you’re a fugitive, you’re welcome here.” They had reached a shadowy upstairs corridor with narrow gray-shining windows along one wall, and she led Kootie by the hand to an open interior door. .

“Are you hungry?” she asked. “I’ve cooked you a king’s breakfast.”

Kootie could smell some kind of spicy roasting meat on the musty air. “Hungry as a bedbug,” he said, quoting an old Solville line that had somehow evolved from Don’t let the bedbugs bite.

“Me too!” she said with a breathless laugh as she stepped into the dimly lit room. “This Death-card rain will bring out a lot of fugitive places in the city, like toadstools, that won’t be there anymore after the sun comes out again. But the eating is best here.”

Kootie followed her into the room, and quickly stepped across onto a knitted rug so as not to drip rain water onto the polished wood floor. There were no windows in the room, but flames in oil lamps on the walls threw a soft illumination across dark old tapestries and a battered white make-up table and a huge, canopied bed. A black-brick fireplace took up most of the far wall, and though there were no logs on the grate, a tiny brass brazier stood on the broad hearthstone, with coals glowing under a grill draped with strips of sizzling, aromatic meat. A basket of thick black bread slices stood on a carpet nearby.

“The Loser’s Bar is surely out there somewhere today,” the woman said as she tossed her head back, freeing her long black hair from the linen hood, “serving pointless seafood today—though they might as well be serving cooked sandals and baseball caps, for all the good it can do anyone on a day like this.”

Her hair was lustrously dry now, and Kootie wondered how she could have dried it, and changed her clothes, and prepared this food, in the few minutes since he had seen her in the long alley off the Street of Gamblers. And he remembered how her silhouette had seemed for a moment to be the knobby round figure that had shown up briefly on the motel television.

I don’t care, he thought. I can take care of myself. He saw a bottle of dark wine by the mirror on the make-up table, and he was able to cross to it and pick it up without stepping on bare floor.

The label just said, BITIN DOG.

“I shouldn’t,” he said uncertainly, “be eating…meat.” Or drinking alcohol, he thought.

“Here’s a dry robe for you,” she said. “You don’t want to meet the lord of this house in those clothes anyway. Take them off and get warm.” She looked at the bottle in his hand and smiled at him. “You can have a drink of that…after. It’s the wine of forgetfulness, you know. And it’s all right—it you can swallow with impunity, as much as you like, the whole bottle.” She knelt in front of him and began prising loose the knots in his soaked sneaker laces. She looked up at him. “You’d like some of that, wouldn’t you? Impunity?”

“God,” said Kootie softly, “yes.” After, he thought. After what?

“The peppered venison is still raw in the middle,” she said. “We can eat it, too, after.”

“Okay,” he said, and began unbuttoning his shirt with shaking fingers. He hoped the cut over his ribs wasn’t bleeding through the bandage.

Fleetingly to his mind came an image of himself buttoning his shirt as he stumbled sleepily out of his Solville bedroom, sniffing onions and eggs and coffee on jasmine-scented morning air, yawning and replying As a bedbug! to Angelica’s cheery Are you hungry?

Good-bye to all that, he thought despairingly.

THE BOATHOUSE in Golden Gate Park was locked up and the boats were inert and chained to the dock when the five bedraggled figures trudged across the lake lawn to the shuttered rental window, but the two teenaged park employees who’d been banging around inside agreed to open early after Angelica made Cochran offer them a hundred dollars; and by the time the sun was coming up over the cypresses, two electric boats were buzzing slowly out across the glassy surface of Lake Stow—Pete and Angelica and the distracted Mavranos in one, and Cochran and Plumtree closely pacing them in the other.

The boats were small, with not quite enough room on the padded benches for three people to sit comfortably. A toggle switch on the right side by the steering wheel turned the electric motor of each boat on and off, and with no windshield the long flat hood was a sort of table. Cochran wished they could have stopped to get beer in addition to his hundred dollars, he had paid twenty-six dollars for the minimum full hour for two boats, and it looked as though it would take the tiny engines the whole hour to coax the boats all the way around the wooded island in the middle of the lake. The unrippled water ahead was studded with ducks and seagulls who all might have been asleep. Cochran remembered the dead birds that had fallen out of the sky after Crane had turned into a skeleton, and so he was relieved when a couple of these ducks awoke and went flapping away across the lake, their wing tips slapping rings in the water like skipped stones.

The boat with Angelica and Pete and Mavranos in it buzzed along at a dog-paddle pace only two yards to the right of Cochran’s elbow, which hung out over the low gunwale of the boat he shared with Plumtree.

“Angie, shouldn’t we be going the other way around?” asked Pete Sullivan in a near-whisper. “This is clockwise, not…windshield.”

“I wish we could,” Angelica muttered. “But that’s an evasion measure, we don’t dare—we might wind up losing the wrong one.” She shook her head. “God, this is slow! The motor on this boat sounds like a sewing machine.”

Cochran thought of the woman who had been called Ariachne in the version of A Tale of Two Cities that he had read on the plane home from Paris a week and a half ago—the woman who sewed into her fabrics the names of people who were to be beheaded on the guillotine.

Angelica sighed and squared her shoulders. “What’s your name?” she said now, speaking to Mavranos. Her voice was clear in the still air.

“Ray-Joe Pogue,” Mavranos said quietly. “I’m not okay, am I? I remember now—I fell off of Hoover Dam. I was blind, and a man told me it was the water below me, Lake Mead, but he lied. It was the other side of the dam below me, the tailrace, the power station roof—way, way down, with a hard, hard landing.”

“It’s the water below you now, though,” Angelica said gently. “You can see it, can’t you?” She dipped her hand in the water, lifted a palmful and let it trickle back into the lake.

“I’m seeing two of everything,” said Mavranos. He looked at Angelica. “There are two bulls in your glasses! Did you have animals in your glasses before? You do now.” He was visibly shivering.

‘Now you’re seeing as you should be seeing,” said Angelica. “The pairs will get rather apart—like bars in a prison—until you can escape between them.” She smiled. But you should lose some weight! Tell me how your sister betrayed you.”

Cochran remembered Angelica’s description of a conventional honoring-of-the-dead ritual. Clearly she was trying now to lift the ghost away from Mavranos’s mind, over this giant cup of relatively transparent water so that the ghost wouldn’t…fixate. And, in asking the ghost to talk about itself, she was apparently trying to get it to relax its psychic claws out of Mavranos’s mind and memories. It probably helped that Mavranos’s mind was still concussed and disorganized—that must have been why he’d been in such a hurry to get here.

“Nardie Dinh,” came the high, nasal voice from Mavranos’s mouth. “Bernardette Dinh. She was my half-sister, our dad married a Vietnamese woman after he divorced my mom. I was supposed to become the king, at the succession in ‘90, and Nardie was supposed to be my queen. I kept her a virgin, until I should take the crown, the cown of the American West…but she rebelled against me, she was ungrateful for what I had made her into, with diet and discipline and exposure to the gods behind the Major Arcana tarot cards…she killed the woman I had placed her with, escaped me. Nardie threw in her lot with the Scott Crane faction—”

All at once, with a chill, Cochran remembered Mavranos saying back in Solville that he had once killed a man at Hoover Dam.

“—and she hit me in the nose, broke my nose, five days before Easter. Swole up, black eyes. I couldn’t become the king with the injury, and for sure there wasn’t time for it to heal. I drove out to the dam to stop the succession, use magic to throw it off for another twenty years…and she sent—this man!—” Mavranos’s hand touched his face “—to kill me.”

Mavranos’s head rocked back to stare into the overhanging alder branches against the sky. “It’s true,” he said in a harsher voice, “that I killed you. On purpose, knowing what I was doing—because you would have killed my friends, if I hadn’t. But Nardie didn’t want me to do it.”

He inhaled hitchingly, and when he spoke again it was in the nasal voice: “But she thanked you for doing it. I was aware of that.” And Mavranos’s natural voice said, It’s true.”

Angelica’s mouth was open and she was frowning, as if she wanted to convey a message to Mavranos without letting the Pogue ghost hear; and Cochran wondered of Mavranos had ruined Angelica’s plan by awakening now and conversing with the ghost; but Mavranos was speaking again in his own voice:

“Ray-Joe Pogue, the bars are nearly wide enough apart for you to leave, to jump, and it is water below you, this time. I’ve carried you, in guilt, for five years, nearly—and Nardie has too, I’ve seen it pinch her face when people talk about…family I bet we’ve both thought of you every day, your death has been a, like a bad smell that I can’t get rid of, that notice just when I’ve started to forget about it and have a nice time.” Mavranos yawned, or else Ray-Joe Pogue did. “Before you go free,” Mavranos said, ‘can you forgive us?”

“Do you want that?” came the other voice from his throat.

Angelica dipped her hand into the water again.

Mavranos inhaled to be able to reply. “Yes. We do both want that—very badly”

“Mess with the bull, you get the horns,” said the high voice. “It’s enough to know that you do want it.”

Mavranos sighed deeply, and his head rocked forward—and Angelica whipped her hand across and slapped him in the face with a handful of water.

“Now, Arky!” she, said urgently. “What’s my name? Where were you born? Who’s president of the United States?”

Mavranos was spitting. “Angelica Sullivan, goddammit. Muscoy, San Bernardino County, California, in 1955, okay? And William Jefferson Airplane Clinton.”

Both boats had stalled in the water.

“Get these boats moving out of here,” said Angelica sharply, “the ghost is off him but it’ll be a standing wave here for a while. Everybody lean out and paddle, if you have to.”

Cochran flipped the toggle switch on his boat off and on again, and the motor resumed its buzzing and his boat surged slowly ahead of Angelica’s until she copied his move and got hers running again too.

Pete Sullivan exhaled as though he’d been holding his breath. “Good work, Angie.”

Angelica pushed her hair back from her face, and Cochran saw that she was sweating. “He might have forgiven you, Arky,” she panted, “but I had to swat him off right then—he had let go of your mind for a moment, in something like real serenity, but he might have grinned on again at any moment, and clung. It would have killed you.” She looked around, and spun the steering wheel to avoid tangling the boat in the arching branches of an oak tree that had fallen from the island bank into the water. “Sorry, if I was too hasty.”

Mavranos cleared his throat and spat mightily out past the bow. “I’ll…get along without it,” he said hoarsely. “Damn, I can still taste his ghost. Motor oil and Brylcreem.”

Plumtree spoke up from beside Cochran. “You want people to forgive you?”

Cochran steered the boat ponderously out toward the middle of the water. “Some people want that, Cody.”

“I’m Janis. I’d rather buy a new tire than drive on one with a patch.”

The boats were trundling around the east end of the island in the middle of the lake. Seagulls wheeled above a waterfall that poured over tall stone shelves on the island, and closer at hand Cochran saw some kind of Chinese pavilion on the shore, among the green flax stalks that crowded right down into the water. At the-top of the island hill he could see the trees around the clearing where he and Nina had made love, so terribly long ago.

“We’re going to watch you closely, Arky,” said Angelica. “If your pupils start to act funny, or your pulse, or if your speech gets slurred or disconnected—’waxing and waning mentation’—then you are going into a hospital, and we can do our level best lo keep you masked in there. But you’ve—right now you’d be much better off out of such a pace.”

Mavranos nodded grimly, touching the cut in the back of his scalp. His hair was “spiky with bourbon as well as blood, for Angelica had sterilized it with a few hasty splashes from a pint bottle Mavranos had kept in his glove compartment, promising to put a proper bandage on it as soon as the wound had been “thoroughly aired out.” Presumably it had been, now.

“Nardie Dinh gave me that statue I had on the dashboard,” Mavranos said. “She probably did mean something by it, even after all these years, though she loves me like a—like a brother. Damn sure she didn’t mean it to be shot into my head.” He looked at Angelica. “But it was. And I think you mean ghosts would be attracted to me in a hospital…now.”

“There are a lot of scared, lonely, hungry ghosts hanging around in hospitals,” Angelica said, staring ahead. The boats had rounded the eastern end of the island, and were now buzzing irresolutely in the direction of a double-arched stone bridge.

Mavranos laughed weakly. “Keep your eyes on the course, by all means,” he said. “Lose control of this torpedo and we’re liable to plow right up onto the bank. What I mean is, I’m particularly vulnerable right now, aren’t I?”

Yes,” said Angelica. She gave Plumtree a haggard stare. “What did you mean, Janis, about a new tire?”

“Oh, I meant like a…relationship that’s been…fractured,” Plumtree said. “I wouldn’t try to patch it up, I’d just move on and meet somebody new, somebody who didn’t yet have any disappointments with me.”

“Or cobble up a new personality out of some of the unused lumber of your soul,” Cochran said tiredly, “one that hasn’t even met the other person yet. Fresh start all around.”

Plumtree nodded. “My father hath a power; inquire of him, and learn to make a body of a limb.”

That had sounded like Shakespeare. “Valorie?” Cochran asked.

“Janis,” Plumtree said, glancing at him impatiently. “I told you that, Sid.”

A lot of the tall oaks had fallen into the water on this side of the island, and the interior wood at the split stumps was raw and pale, and the leaves on the water-spanning branches were still green; clearly these trees had been felled in the storms that had battered the whole California coast two weeks ago, at dawn on New Year’s Day…when Scott Crane had been killed.

“Don’t say anything specific,” Plumtree said hastily, “about why we’re here, or you wil have Valorie in the boat with you. But even in what we were trying to do, I—I wanted him to be alive again, but I didn’t want his forgiveness. I didn’t want one bit more of his attention on me than would have been necessary! And even that, Valorie would have taken.” There were tears in her eyes, and she let Cochran put his arm around her.

“Not your flop,” he said.

She buried her face in the shoulder of his damp windbreaker, and when his hand slid down to her waist his palm was on her bare, cool skin where Nina’s sweater had hiked up away from her jeans; and he found himself remembering Tiffany’s hand caressing him half an hour earlier—and the steamy sweater smelled of Nina’s rose-scented perfume, blended once again here with the wild odors of pine sap and lake water, and for just a reflexive moment, before instant shame actually pulled his lips back from his teeth, he wondered if the rain had ruined the cassette in his shirt pocket.

None of them spoke as the boats buzzed quietly under the island-side arch of the old stone bridge. Cochran noticed one, then several, then dozens of black turtles perched motionless on the unnaturally horizontal branches of the felled trees—but as soon as he started to watch for them, all the dark ovals he focussed on proved to be pinecones.

He lifted his left arm from around Plumtree so that he could steer the boat with that hand; his right hand, with the ivy-leaf mark on the back of it, he stuffed into the pocket of his windbreaker.

To the left, beside the park road, a particularly big redwood tree had fallen this way across the lakeside footpath, and a segment as broad as the path had been sawed out of the six-foot-thick log so that strollers and bicyclists could pass unimpeded. Perhaps the tree was too heavy to move, and would stay there forever as a randomly placed wall, while its water-arching branches would eventually be overgrown by ivy and form a sort of new; hollow bank. After a while, like the cemetery construction on the yacht-club peninsula, it might look like part of the original plan.

With that thought Cochran looked ahead—and at last saw the carved stones of the Spanish monastery.

They were set low into the lakeside mud as an irregular segmented coping between the park grass and the water, each placed so that a broken-stone face was turned upward; only from this vantage point, low and out on the water, could the fretted and fluted carved sides be seen.

“Nina and I didn’t search from out in a boat,” he said wonderingly. When Angelica gave him a weary, questioning look, he went on, “There’s the stones from the old monastery—from here you can see what they are.”

Mavranos blinked ahead uncomprehendingly. “What are they?” He had still been unconscious when Cochran had mentioned them before.

“William Randolph Hearst bought a medieval Spanish monastery,” Cochran said, quoting what Nina had told him, “and he had it dismantled and shipped to America to reassemble over here—but the crates and plans burned up, and nobody knew how-to put the building back together again. And after a while the park maintenance guys began using the stones for…odd little landscaping projects, like that He pointed ahead, at the half-submerged bits of forgotten pillars and porticoes.

“And you said there are druid stones on the island,” said Pete Sullivan. “Maybe the monastery stones counter those, balance ‘em—net zero.”

“A monastery building would have been formally blessed,” Mavranos muttered, nodding. “Sanctified.”

“I’m glad you were along,” Angelica told Cochran. “This lake was a perfectly balanced place to shake off the ghost.”

“Not the job those stones thought they’d have,” Mavranos went on, “when they were carved up so pretty, I bet—just sitting here in the water, not even looking different from plain old fieldstones to anybody walking by ‘em. But there’s this purpose they can serve. Even broken. Because they’re broken.”

Again Cochran thought of walls made of chance-fallen trees, and stairs and benches and pavements made of scavenged pieces of derelict cemetery marble.

“There’s the dock,” said Pete, pointing ahead and to the right. “Our tour’s up. Where to now? Back to the Star Motel, see if Kootie’s waiting for us there?”

“Not yet,” said Angelica. “And not in the truck with Crane’s skeleton in it. We—”

Plumtree jumped in the seat beside Cochran. “His skeleton’s in the truck? How did he—” She blinked around. “What? What scared Janis?”

Cochran turned to her, wondering if he was about to summon Tiffany here, and if so, what he’d tell her. “Crane’s skeleton is in the truck, Cody.”

She blinked at him. Then, “Fuck me!” she said, and in spite of himself Cochran smiled at the idea that he might take the exclamation as evidence of Tiffany’s presence; but in fact he could see that this was still Cody. “I’m still on?” she said angrily. “How come I’m the one that gets to stay with all the horrible flops lately? His skeleton? Goddammit, Valorie’s supposed to take the intolerable stuff!”

“I guess you can tolerate more than you imagine,” said Cochran gently.

“They say that God won’t hit you with more than you can handle,” said Mavranos in a faint, shaky voice, possibly to himself. “Like, if He made you so you can just take a hundred pounds per square inch, He won’t give you a hundred and one.”

“We’re still too hot,” Angelica went on. “Magically, I mean. There’s been a lot of fresh—” Her breath caught in her throat. “—fresh blood spilled, this morning. I think plain compasses will point at us for a while after all this stuff—and we can’t be certain we haven’t been followed, either. On the drive down here, we were all looking ahead at the truck, not back. If Kootie is at the motel, he’ll wait for us, he’s got a key. And I guess he’s … the king, now. He’ll have the protections that come with the office.” She looked around among the trees at the anonymous pastel Hondas and Nissans that had begun to drive slowly past on the park road. “We should drive somewhere, aimless, watching behind, and just sit for an hour or so. Give ourselves time to fall back to our ground states.”

I’m a, a citizen of the ground state,” said Plumtree. “And our—community hall—is a bar. I need a drink like a Minnie needs a Mickey.”

“The truck can go where it likes,” Cochran declared. ‘The Ford is going to the first bar we find.”

“I’d be interested in finding something to chase that cabernet with,” ventured Pete.

“I don’t think” said Angelica judiciously, “that I can stay sane for very long, right now, without a drink, myself.” She sighed and clasped her elbows. “Arky, I guess you can have one, but you’d better stay sober. Doctor’s orders.”

Mavranos didn’t seem to have heard any of the discussion. “But can we really imagine,” he went on quietly, “that He’d give you anything less than ninety-nine-point-nine?”

Angelica frowned at Mavranos’s disjointed rambling, probably thinking about waxing and waning mentation. “If Kootie’s at the motel,” she said again, absently, “he’ll wait for us. And he’ll be safe. He’s the king now.”

WHEN HE had tugged off his shirt and jeans and kicked his soaked sneakers heedlessly away across the gleaming floor, the woman had kissed Kootie, her arms around his neck and her robe open on nothing but bare, hot skin against his cold chest. Her tongue had slid across his teeth like an electric shock.

They had fallen across the quilt on the huge, canopied bed, and Kootie had been feverishly trying to free his hands to pull the robe off of her and tug his own damp jockey shorts off as she kissed his neck and chest—when he’d heard what she had been whispering.

“Give me you,” she’d been saying hoarsely, “you’re not a virgin—fill me up—you’re so big—you can spare more than I can take—and not near die.”

Die? he had thought—and then her teeth had begun gently scoring the skin over the taut muscle at the side of his neck.

If she had been drawing any blood at all it had been from no more than a scratch, and the sensation had been only pleasurable…

But he had suddenly been aware that his psychic attention and self was wide open and strainingly extended, and that with all the strength of her own mind she was trying to gnaw off apiece of his soul.

—In an instant’s flash of intolerable memory he was again duct-taped into a seat in a minivan that had been driven up inside a moving truck in Los Angeles—“a boat in a boat”—while a crazy one-armed man with a hunting knife was stabbing at his ribs, trying to cut out his soul, and consume it—

Abruptly the room seemed to tilt, and grow suddenly darker and hotter, and he was unreasoningly sure that he was about to fall bodily into her furnace mouth, which in this moment of virtiginous nightmare panic seemed to have become the gaping black fireplace below his feet.

He felt himself sliding—

And with all the psychic strength that the events of this terrible morning had bequeathed to him, he lashed out, with such force that he was sure he must have burst a blood vessel in his head.

He hadn’t moved at all, physically, and only a second had passed, when he realized that her skin was impossibly cold and that her bare breasts were still—she was not breathing.

He tugged his arms out from under her chilly weight and scrambled off the bed. Sobbing and shaking, he clumsily pulled his jeans and shirt on, and he was thrusting his feet back into his sodden sneakers, when the hallway door was snatched open.

An old woman was standing silhouetted in the doorway.

“Call nine-one-one,” Kootie blubbered, “I think she’s—”

“She’s dead, child,” the old woman said sternly. “Both the telephones downstairs are still ringing themselves off their hooks with their poor magnets shaking, and the god’s big mirror has got a crack right across it. She’s dead and flung bodily right over the spires of India like a cannonball. What-all did the poor woman want, one little bit of the real you, and you couldn’t spare it? Child, you don’t know your own strength.” She shook her head. “He can’t meet you now, with or without the humble-pie breakfast, the wine and the venison. Later, and probably not affording to be as polite as it would have been now. You’ve clouded yourself beyond his sight here today.”

Kootie cuffed the tears from his eyes and blinked up at her—and then clenched his teeth against a wail of pure dismay. The figure scowling down at him was the old woman he and his parents had seen so many times on the magically tuned black-and-white television. Now he could see that her eyes were of different colors, one brown and one blue.

“I’m Mary Ellen Pleasant,” she told him. “You may as well call me Mammy Pleasant, like everybody else. Now, boy, don’t you fret about what you’ve done here, bad though it damn well is—hers won’t be the first dead body I’ve disposed of in secret. Right now you get your clothes in order, and come down and talk to me in the kitchen.”

She stepped back out into the hall, mercifully leaving the door open. As her footsteps receded away along the wooden floor outside, Kootie stood up. Without looking toward the nearly naked body on the bed, he crossed to the make-up table and picked up the bottle of Bitin Dog wine.

Youd like some of that, wouldn’t you? he remembered the woman saying. Impunity?

The humble-pie breakfast…

COCHRAN HAD said, “Couldn’t have asked for a better place,” and swung the Granada across momentarily empty oncoming lanes into the uneven parking lot of a bar-and-restaurant that seemed to be a renovated cannery from the turn of the century, the walls all gray wood and rusty corrugated iron. Over the door nearest where he parked was a sign that read THE LOSER’S BAR, but Plumtree pointed out a sign over the main building: SEAFOOD BOHEMIA.

“Fine,” Cochran said as they left the car unlocked and hobbled to the bar door “we can have bohemian seafood for lunch, if they take plastic here.”

The dusty blue Suburban was out in the center divider lane of Masonic Avenue, its left blinker light flashing.

Cochran plodded up the wooden steps, hiking himself along with his hand on the wet wrought-iron rail, and he held the bar door open for Plumtree.

She took one step into the dim interior, and then stopped and looked back over her shoulder at him. “Sid,” she said blankly, “this place—”

He put one hand on her shoulder and stepped in past her.

The mirror-studded disco ball was turning over the sand-strewn dance floor, but again there was no one dancing. The air still smelled of candle wax, but with a strong accompaniment of fish-reek this time instead of mutton. Two men in rumpled business suits, conceivably the same men as before, stood at the bar and banged the cup of bar dice on the wet, polished wood.

The dark-haired waitress in the long skirt smiled at them and waved toward a booth near the door.

“We shouldn’t stay,” whispered Cochran. He was still holding the door open, and he glanced nervously back out at the car and the parking lot and the Suburban, which was now turning into the lot.

“You think if you go in and shut the door, we’ll walk out and be on Rosecrans again?” asked Plumtree. “Down in Bellflower?”

“It’s possible,” he said, his voice unsteady. “If it’s possible for this place to be here at all.”

“Wait in the car, if you like.” She stepped away from his hand, into the dimness of the bar. “I’ll try to sneak you out a beer from time to time. I need a drink.” She was shaking, but clearly not because of the weird bar.

“—No,” he said. “I’m with you.”

They both stepped inside, and as the door squeaked shut behind them they scuffed across the sandy wooden floor to the indicated booth and sat down, with Plumtree facing the front door. Cochran noticed two aluminum crutches propped on the seat of the booth beyond theirs, but neither he nor Plumtree were inclined to be peering around at their surroundings, and they just humbly took the two leather-bound menus the waitress handed them.

“Two Budweisers,” said Plumtree. She was breathing deeply, like someone hoping not to be sick.

“And I’ll have two Coorses, please,” said Cochran. “Oh, and there are three more in our party,” he added, holding up three fingers. The waitress nodded, perhaps understanding, and strode away back to the bar, her long skirt swirling the patterns I of sand on the floor.

Plumtree had opened her menu, and now pried a slip of paper from a clip on | the inside cover. She frowned. “Do you remember if the specials were all fish things, before?”

“No, I don’t,” skid Cochran. “I ordered off the printed menu that time.”

“I didn’t look at the specials either, then.” She read, “Barbunya, Morina, Levrek—mullet, cod, bass—this is all fish. And it seems more Middle Eastern now, than Greek. If it was Greek before.”

“Then maybe this isn’t the same place, because I do remember you saying it was—” he began; then he paused, for she had flipped the specials sheet over and then pushed it across the table toward him.

On the back of the sheet, in his own handwriting in ballpoint ink was written: CODY, JANIS, TIFFANY, VALERIE, HIM. The E in VALERIE had been crossed out, with an O written in above.

“Do you remember writing that?” she asked.

In spite of everything that had happened to him during this last two and a half weeks, Cochran’s first impulse was to look around at the other people in the bar, to see who had set up this hoax; then he sagged, remembering how random and unconsidered had been their route to this place today.

“Sure,” he said dejectedly. “It was only a week ago, and I wasn’t that drunk.” His heart was thudding in his chest, and he stared at the paper and wondered if he was more angry or scared. “I guess this is more…magic, huh.”

Plumtree tapped the word HIM. “I can’t,” she said, “ever have kirn come on again.” She touched her face and her throat. “Do you see these cuts? Razor nicks! I think he was skaving.” Behind Cochran the front door squeaked.

He opened his mouth, but Plumtree had looked past him, toward the front door, and now held up her hand to cut him off. “The rest of the losers have arrived,” she said loudly; then she leaned toward him and whispered quickly, “I think he had to!”

Mavranos and Pete and Angelica slid into the booth from Cochran’s side, so that Pete Sullivan was now crowding him against Plumtree.

“Scott’s skeleton is all busted to shit,” said Mavranos.

“Valorie says Pete jumped on it,” said Plumtree.

“Somebody should bury it,” said Mavranos, “back at the Leucadia compound.”

“You can do that yourself, Arky,” said Angelica. “Oh hell—a tequila añejo, neat, with a Corona chaser,” she said to the waitress who had walked up with a tray and begun to shift full beer glasses onto the table, “and a—Coors Light, Pete?—for this gentleman, please. Arky? Dr. Angelica Elizalde says you can have one beer.”

Mavranos heaved a windy sigh. “A club soda for me,” he said. “That which I greatly feared hath come upon me.”

“What, sobriety?” said Pete Sullivan. “I don’t think that’s a decision you should make right after a concussion.”

“At Spider Joe’s trailer, out in the desert north of Las Vegas in 1990,” Arky said “the Fool archetype took possession of everybody in the room, except me. J knocked the tarot cards onto the floor, broke the spell. I couldn’t…have a personality in my head that wasn’t me.”

Angelica touched his scarred brown hand. “He’s gone, Arky,” she said. “I’d tell you he was inhabiting one of those ducks on that lake now, if I wasn’t sure he went right on past India.”

Mavranos nodded, though Cochran got the feeling that Angelica hadn’t addressed the man’s real concern. “I’ll stick with water,” Mavranos said. “It probably should be salt water, for the leaching properties.”

“Carthage cocktail,” came a gravelly voice from the table behind Cochran, away from the front door. “In the winter and spring, surfers taste fresh water in the San Francisco Bay sometimes, from the Sacramento River.”

Cochran shifted around to see the speaker, and at this point he was only a little surprised to recognize the black dwarf who had made his way on crutches out of the Mount Sabu bar down in the Bellflower district of Los Angeles, when Cochran and Plumtree had been…had been here, there; and Cochran recalled now that when the dwarf had opened the door then the draft from outside had smelled of the sea.

The little man’s aluminum crutches stood on the seat next to him, the cushioned ends leaning against the electric light sconce over his gleaming bald head. An iron wok sat incongruously on the table in front of him, red-brown with rust and filled to near the rim with a translucent reddish liquid that seemed to be wine.

Cochran had braced his right hand behind Plumtree’s shoulders, and now the black man was staring at the back of Cochran’s hand. He met Cochran’s eyes and exposed uneven teeth in a smile, then rang the rim of the wok with an oversized spoon. Ripples fretted the surface of the wine, for that’s what it was—Cochran could smell it now, a dry domestic Pinot Noir or Zinfandel.

Plumtree on his right and Pete on his left were leaning forward, leaving Cochran to talk to the stranger.

“My name is Thutmose?” said the black man. “Known as Thutmose the Utmos’? This year the surfers haven’t tasted freshwater yet.” He ladled some of the wine into a glass with the spoon. “Do you think they will?”

Cochran had already gulped down half of one of his beers, and he could feel the dizzying pressure of it in his head. “No,” he said, thinking of the failure at dawn. “I reckon they won’t, this year.”

“That’s the wrong attitude,” said Thutmose. “Will you drink some of my wine? It’s decent store-bought Zinfandel right now, and it could be…sacramento”

“No, I’ve—I’m working on beer,” said Cochran. His neck was aching from being twisted around toward the dwarf, and he was irritably aware that the others at his table were now talking among themselves.

Thutmose seemed disconcerted. “Do you know where Zinfandel came from?” he snapped. The whites of his glittering eyes were as red as the wine.

“What, originally?” Cochran closed his tired, stinging eyes for a moment, then opened them. “Sure, a guy named Count Haraszthy brought it to California from I Hungary in the 1850s.” He was trying to keep track of both conversations—behind him he heard Angelica say, “I picked up the lighter, but the two silver dollars were just gone.” And Plumtree helpfully said, “Well, the lighter’s worth a lot more than two bucks.”

“It showed up in the eastern Mediterranean in 1793,” declared Thutmose, “right after the revolutionaries up in Paris desecrated Notre Dame cathedral—they deliberately stored grain there, in the place that had already been holy to the vine for thousands of years before any Romans laid eyes on the Seine River—and then they—filled the gutters of Paris!—with the blood of the aristocrats who had been using the holy wine’s debt-payer properties too freely. ‘It is not for kings and princes to drink wine, lest they drink, and forget the law.’ Proverbs 13. So the Zinfandel grape all at once and appeared and started growing wild in all the god’s old places, in Thebes, and Smyrna, and Thrace, and Magnesia. The Yugoslavian Plavac Mali grape is a strayed cousin of it. And the disrespected vine took its new Zinfandel castle right across the water to America, tossing the bad root-lice behind it like the Romans sowed salt in Carthage. A mondard of the new world now.”

Halfway through the little man’s speech, long before even the word mondard, Cochran had nervously realized that Thutmose was somehow involved in the season’s Fisher King contentions, and that he must be here at the Losers Bar for reasons related to those of Cochran’s party; clearly too the dwarf had at least guessed that Cochran and his friends had been concerned in it.

As if confirming Cochran’s thought, Thutmose said, “You’re the people who had the red truck, and the undead king.”

But it’s all over now, Baby Blue, Cochran thought helplessly. The red truck’s blue now, and the undead king is deader than a mackerel. Kootie will be king now, and Kootie isn’t here.

“Do you know what sin-jan-dayl means, in classical Greek?” Thutmose went on, in a wheedling tone now. “A sieve, washed clean and bright and joyous in the noonday sun.’ Drink the sacramental Zinfandel and become the sieve—all your loves fall right through you to the god, and you’re cleansed and cheered in the process—you’re refreshed, even under the harsh eye of the sun. ‘Give wine unto those that be of heavy hearts.’” The little man was practically declaiming now, and Cochran hoped Plumtree hadn’t heard the bit about the eye of the sun.

Again the dwarf rang the wok with his spoon, and it dawned on Cochran that Thutmose wanted him to acknowledge the rusty bowl, refer to it.

It’s a half-ass Grail, Cochran thought suddenly; and Thutmose is some sort of near-miss, fugitive, underworld Fisher King—crippled by God-knows-what unhealing injury, and clearly hoping for some kind of vindication, some salvific Wedding-at-Cana miracle from Dionysus. This terrible New Year has probably brought hundreds like him to San Francisco. And now he’s seen the “Dionysus badge” on my hand—maybe he even saw it when we were in this place back in L.A., and he’s somehow found me again.

At the Li Po bar on Sunday, Mavranos had told Cochran how Kootie had asked the wrong question when first confronted with the red Suburban truck—Why is it the color of blood? instead of Who does it serve?

“Why,” asked Cochran gently now, “is your bowl the color of blood?”

Thutmose the Utmos’ sighed, and seemed to shrink still further. “When he was a baby-god, Dionysus was laid in a winnowing fan. You’re being a dog in the manger.” He shook his head, and there were tears in his red eyes and the word dog seemed to hang in the air. “It’s rust, what did you think? Goddammit, I’m an ex-junkie, trying to turn my life around! I used wine to get off the smack, and now I just want to find the god’s own forgiveness wine.” He tapped the wok with the spoon again, miserably. “A heroin dealer used it to mix up batches, step on the product. When it got too rusty for him to use, he gave it to me. I scraped some of the red crust off and cooked it up in a spoon, and, I slammed it, even though I was sure I’d get lockjaw. It did do something bad to my legs—but I didn’t die, and this red bowl kept me well for months.”

“None of us here can do anything for each other,” interjected Plumtree. Cochran saw that she had shifted around and was listening in. “If we could, we’d be in a place called the Glad Boys Bar, or something, not here.” She slid out of the booth now and stood up. “Come talk to me over by the phones,” she told Cochran.

Glad to get away from the unhappy dwarf, Cochran got up and followed her across the sandy floor.

Cochran hadn’t heard the front door squeak while he’d been listening to Thutmose, but there were a lot of people in the long barroom now, though they were all talking in low whispers. Cochran thought they looked like people tumbled together at random in an emergency shelter—he saw men in dinner jackets or denim or muddy camouflage, women in worn jogging suits and women in inappropriately gay sundresses—and none of them looked youthful and they all looked as if they’d been up all night. Cochran reflected that he and his friends must look the same way.

As he and Plumtree passed the bar, Cochran saw a man pay for a drink by shaking yellow powder out of a little cloth bag—and before the lady bartender carefully swept the powder up, Cochran was able to see that it was some kind of grain, perhaps barley.

We walked in here through a door in Los Angeles once, he thought, and now through a door in San Francisco—how old is this place, and from what other places has that door opened, perhaps on leather hinges, over the centuries and even millennia? Boston, London? Rome, Babylon, Ur?

Cochran was relieved to see that the pay telephones were the same modern pushbutton machines he and Plumtree had used to call Strubie the Clown.

“Listen,” said Plumtree hoarsely. “What we’ve got to do? Is escape.”

“Okay,” said Cochran. “From what? To where?”

“You remember,” said Plumtree in a near-whisper, “who the he on the menu-specials paper referred to, right? After he was on in ‘89, I ached in all my joints, and had nosebleeds. And in Holy Week of ‘90, when he tried to win the Kinghood in that poker game on Lake Mead, he was on for a day and a half, and I had a nervous breakdown so I can’t remember what I felt like. But this time, ending yesterday morning, he had me for almost three full days, and I could hardly even walk, yesterday and today.” She touched her jaw and the corner of her mouth. “And I swear he shaved while he was in this body!”

Cochran winced, and nodded. “Probably meaning—like you said—that he had to.”

“Right. He’s not a ghost, he’s not dead—he imposes his natural form on this body when he’s in it for any length of time, so it’s…like I’m taking steroids. I grow fucking whiskers, and I’m sure he screws up my period.” She was blinking back tears, and Cochran realized that she was frightened, and possibly struggling to stay on for this flop. “I think if he was to occupy me for too long—” She slapped her chest. “—this would turn all the way into a man’s body—a clone of his body, the one that got smashed when it fell partly on me, on the Soma pavement in 1969.”

Cochran spread his hands. “What can you do?

“God, I don’t know. Figure out a way to kill him, don’t tell Janis. Hide out, in then meantime, and stay away from that Kootic kid—he is very interested in that Kootie kid.”

“We can go to my house,” Cochran said. “You remember it, you were on when we were there last week.”

She pushed back her ragged blond bangs and stared at him. “You don’t mind living with a murderess? Or even maybe one day a murderer?”

Cochran stared into Cody’s frightened, squinting eyes—and admitted to himself that in these last eight nightmare days this rough-edged young woman had become, for better or worse, a part of his life. The jumpy infatuation he had initially felt for Janis was gone, but at this moment he couldn’t imagine a life for himself that didn’t abrasively and surprisingly include Janis Cordelia Plumtree.

“I think,” he said with a weary grin, “we’re partners, by now.”

“Shake on it.”

He shook her cold hand.

“Let’s hit the road,” she said.

“Okay. But let’s have lunch first.” He smiled. “And then you can help me get rid of a stolen car in my back yard, when we get there.”

“I can deal with that,” she said. “I hadn’t forgotten it.”

Thutmose didn’t look up from his bowl when Cochran and Plumtree returned to the booth. The waitress was just taking orders for food, and Cochran quickly asked for carp in wine while Plumtree frowned over the menu and grumpily settled for stuffed mussels.

BY THE time the food arrived, Cochran had finished both his beers and ordered two more. The fish tasted like pier pilings and the wine sauce was featureless acid and he hadn’t realized the dish would have raisins in it.

All the people in the bar were still talking in whispers, and after his fourth beer Cochran noticed that the whispering was in counterpoint unison—a fast, shaking chant that took in the bang-and-rattle of the bar dice as punctuation. The exhausted-looking men and women were all jerkily walking back and forth and between each other, and after staring in befuddled puzzlement for a few moments Cochran saw that their spastic restlessness was a dance. The dancers didn’t appear to be enjoying it, perhaps weren’t even doing it voluntarily. Beneath the rapid shaking whispers and the noise of the dice there was a deep, slow rolling, like a millwheel.

Plumtree leaned toward him. “Let’s hit the road,” she whispered. “And…to a-void complications…let’s just walk out without saying anything:’

It was easy enough to slide out of the booth again and walk away across the gritty floor—in the booth behind them Angelica was clearly avoiding her own appalling recent memories by talking consolingly to Mavranos, and Pete Sullivan was waving his empty glass and trying to catch the waitress’s eye—and soon Cochran and Plumtree had made their ducking, sidestepping way, helplessly participating in a few shuffling steps of the joyless group dance, to the front door.

Outside, in the fresh wet-greenery-and-topsoil breeze from Golden Gate Park, the sun had broken through the morning’s overcast and glittered in the raindrops that still speckled the brown Granada and the blue Suburban. Oddly, there were no other vehicles in the lot.

As Cochran opened the Granada’s passenger-side door for Plumtree, she paused by the back end of the truck to peer in through the dusty glass. Cochran had carefully avoided looking at that window at all, not wanting to see the tumbled, broken skeleton of Scott Crane.

Now Plumtree shuddered visibly, and stepped back to catch her balance; but a moment later she again stepped up to the back of the truck and looked in.

And again she staggered, and it was a blank look she gave him as she finally shuffled forward and got into the Granada.

“You okay?” he said as he got in himself and started the engine.

“Fine,” she said. “Don’t talk. On the way to—on the way—stop for some cigarettes and booze. Mores regular, and Southern Comfort.”

Cochran had said “Okay,” before remembering that she had asked him not to talk. He nodded; and, because he was drunk it was easy for him to think only about how he would get from here over to Mission Street, which would take him south to the 280, seven miles down which he would find South Daly City—right across the highway from the little transplanted-cemetery town of Colma—and his empty, empty house.

NEITHER OF them spoke at all as Cochran steered the old car down the straight, narrow lanes over South San Francisco and then looped west past San Bruno Mountain, with its highway-side Pace Vineyards Tasting Room billboards; and even with a wordless stop while he ducked into a strip-mall liquor store, it was only twenty minutes after leaving the Loser’s Bar parking lot that he pulled into his own driveway and switched off the car motor.

Plumtree had her arm around his waist and her head on his shoulder as they trudged up the walkway to the front door; and when he had unlocked the door and led her in, then handed her the liquor-store bag and locked the door again behind them, it seemed only natural that they should both shuffle into the bedroom. The bureau drawers were still pulled out and disordered from their hasty visit five days earlier.

Plumtree twisted the cap off the bottle of Southern Comfort and poured several big splashes of the aromatic liqueur into the glass on the bedside table, and drained it in one swallow Then as she unbuttoned her blouse with one hand she touched his lips with the forefinger of the other. “No talk,” she whispered.

Cochran nodded, and sat down on the bed to take off his muddy shoes.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

I would not deprive Col. Haraszthy of a moiety of the credit due him as the first among the first grape culturists of this state, but an investigation of the subject forces the conclusion, that the glory of having introduced [the Zinfandel grape] into the state is not among the laurels he won…To who is the honor of its introduction due? To an enterprising pioneer merchant of San Francisco, the late Captain F. W. Macondray, who raised the first Zinfandel wine grown in California in a grapery at his residence, on the corner of Stockton and Washington streets, San Francisco.

—Robert A. Thompson,

San Francisco Evening Bulletin,

May 1885

WITH no key to the motel room, Angelica and Pete and Mavranos just sat in the blue truck for an hour in the Star Motel parking lot. Mavranos hadn’t eaten anything at the Loser’s Bar, and at one point he got out and trudged across the street to get a tuna sandwich, but he came back to the truck to eat it, and when he had tossed the wrappers onto the floorboards there was still no sign of Cochran and Plumtree, nor of Kootie. Every five minutes or so one of them would impatiently get out and climb the stairs to knock at the room door, but there was never an answer.

They had driven back up here in a roundabout route that had taken them through the green lawns of the Presidio, with Pete at the wheel and Angelica watching behind to be sure they weren’t followed. Cochran and Plumtree had sneaked out of the bar and driven away with Angelica’s carbine still under the front seat of their car, but she still had her .45 handgun, and Mavranos’s .38 was on the truck seat now, under an unfolded Triple-A map.

Angelica’s flesh quivered under the .45 that was now tucked into her belt.

The full-throated bang, and after the blue-white muzzle flash faded from her retinas she saw one less motorcycle headlight in the dawn dimness behind the racing Granada…and then she had steadied the jumping rifle sights on another headlight…

“What’s two times twelve, Arky?” she asked quickly.

Mavranos sighed and wiped the steamy inside surface of the windshield. “Twenty-four, Angelica.”

“It’s your mentation that’s waxing and waning, Angie,” said Pete irritably from the back seat. “You were saving our lives. If my stupid hands could hold a gun, it would have been me shooting out of the car window.”

“Oh, I know you would have, Pete,” she said miserably, “and you came back for me both times when they were shooting at us. I’m glad it wasn’t you. I wouldn’t wish this on you.”

Mavranos was squinting at her sideways with what might have been knowing sympathy.

“Twice thirteen,” she snapped.

“Twenty-six,” said Mavranos. “You told me you shot a lady on the Queen Mary two years ago, after you thought she had killed Pete. Today you thought these boys had killed me. Both times the bad people would have killed us, if you hadn’t stopped them, if you hadn’t killed them. What’s half of two?”

“Oh,” she said with a sudden, affected breeziness, “less than one, if it’s me and Pete. Or even me and you, I guess.” She had been looking past Mavranos, and now she lowered her head and rubbed her eyes. “How long has that turquoise BMW been parked over there? Its engine is running. See the steam?”

Pete shifted around in the back seat to peer. “Four guys in it,” he said after a moment. “The two in the back look…funny.”

Mavranos had not taken his eyes from the Lombard Street sidewalk. “There’s Kootic,” he said suddenly.

Angelica whipped her head around—and the thin, scuffling figure walking down the sidewalk from beyond the motel office was indeed Kootie. She yanked open the truck door and hopped down to the asphalt, and as she began sprinting toward the boy she heard behind her the truck’s other two doors creaking open as Pete and Mavranos followed.

She also heard a car engine shift into gear from idle, and then accelerate.

THE GREEN Ripper, Kootie had been thinking insistently as he had trudged up the Octavia Street sidewalk toward Lombard—he was afraid to think about his foster parents, and whether or not he might find them still alive after this ruinous morning—the Green Giant, the Green Knight. I owe him a beheading. The Green Ripper, the Green Giant…

Hours earlier, in the upstairs room of the magical boardinghouse that had appeared at Stockton and Washington, Kootie had picked up the bottle of Bitin Dog in both shaking hands—and he had wondered helplessly how he could possibly keep from drinking it right there. He was sure that the dead woman on the bed had been telling the truth: that the bottle contained real impunity, that if he were to drink it he would simply lose, lose track of, the enormous sin that made even taking each breath seem like the shameful act of a horrifying impostor. Kootie had despairingly thought that especially if his foster-parents were still alive he should drink it—if they were somehow not dead, he couldn’t encompass the thought of going back to them with the mark of a murder on his soul. Angelica would see it on his face as clearly as she would a tattoo.

But he knew that if he drank it, he would forget about them too. In good faith the wine would take all his loves along with all his guilts—and because he would be drinking it in this stolen, unsanctioned moment, the wine would certainly not ever give any particle of them back. It was a kind of maturity that the wine had to offer, which was to say that it was a renunciation of his whole youth—he would be a man if he drank it, but he would be the wine’s man.

After what could only have been a few seconds, really, he had lifted the bottle past his shoulder and flung it into the cold fireplace. It disappeared in that darkness without any sound at all, and he thought that the house had reabsorbed it, and not with disapproval or offense. Only afterward did he fully and fearfully comprehend that he had chosen to remain Koot Hoomie Sullivan—the wounded foster-son of Pete and Angelica Sullivan—the fourteen-year-old who had committed a murder this morning.

That knowledge was like a boulder in the living room of his mind, so that his thoughts had to crawl over it first before they could get anywhere.

He had carried this new and all but-intolerable identity downstairs, where the old black woman had prepared him a different sort of meal than the peppered venison that was cooking to cinders upstairs. It was a spicy hot salmon that Mammy Pleasant set out for him on the kitchen table, served with the fish’s tail and sunken-eyed head still attached; he forked up mouthfuls of it hungrily, and though it blunted no memories it reinvigorated him, made him feel implausibly rested and strong.

And as he had eaten it, he had learned things.

With some evident sympathy, Mammy Pleasant had told him her own story—and, in this impossible building on this catastrophic day, Kootie found that he had no capacity for disbelief left.

She told him that she had been born a slave in Atlanta in the winter of 1815, her mother a voodoo queen from Santo Domingo. At the age of ten Mary Ellen had been sold to a merchant who had placed her in the Ursuline convent in New Orleans, to be brought up by the nuns—but a Catholic convent had not been any part of the god’s plan for her. The merchant soon died, and she was eventually sent to be a servant for a woman who ran a yardage and crockery store way up north in New England, on remote Nantucket Island.

In New England in those days a new variety of wine grape had appeared, brought in obscurely on the transatlantic schooners and cultivated in American greenhouses. Something terrible had already begun to devastate the great old European vineyards of the Herault and the Midi, but in America this new wine from across the sea flourished aggressively. It was variously known as the Black Lombardy and the Black St. Peter’s, but in 1830, at the Linnaean Botanic Gardens on Long Island, it was tentatively dubbed the Black Zinfardel.

On wintry Nantucket Island the teenaged Mary Ellen had discarded the Caribbean voodoo systems her mother had taught her, and had begun giving her allegiance to an older god, a wild deity of woods and ivy. As a teenager she learned to tie strips of pine bark to the bottoms of her shoes, so as to mask her footprints when she stole fruit from neighboring farms at night, and she had only been caught when she had used the trick to steal exotic Brazilian peanuts.

The woman storekeeper had taught Mary Ellen how to ferment and bottle the new wine—and when Mary Ellen was twenty-four, and still a virgin, the store had caught fire and burned, and the storekeeper had died of shock, or possibly fright, after staring too intently at the tall, wildly dancing flames. Mary Ellen inherited hundreds of the miraculously undamaged bottles.

The new variety of wine was also called pagadebiti, Italian for debt-payer, and Mary Ellen had understood that the god had come to her in it, and that he was generously holding out to her the duty to drink it and become his American Ariadne, rescued by him from abandonment on a bleak island. She knew that the god was Dionysus, and that he was offering to take all her debts, past and future, in exchange for her individual will.

But her will had prevailed—she had sold the wine, for profane cash, to a local importer who had a lifetime of old crimes to forget.

A Hungarian emigrant called Agoston Haraszthy had arrived in America in that same year, 1840, and by 1848 had taken on the role of secret king of the American West in distant San Diego—the first of the New World kings—but Mary Ellen had already unfitted herself to be his destined queen, and his reign would now be unbalanced and obstructed.

For sheer concealment she went through the rituals of conversion to Roman Catholicism, and then married a man who owned a tobacco plantation in Charles Town, Virginia. She poisoned him with arsenic, and shortly after that married the plantation overseer in order to sacramentally take the man’s fortuitous last name Plaissance, which derived from the French plaisant:—a jester, a joker. It was a name hat was virtually a motley mask in itself.

She took her new husband back to New Orleans. Though ostensibly Catholic now, Mary Ellen bore little resemblance these days to the girl who had scampered through the halls of the Ursuline convent in muslin dresses and ribbon-tied sandals—she took up the bloody practice of real voodoo, under the tutelage of the infamous Marie Laveau, who got for Mary Ellen a high-paid position as cook for the household of a planter in nearby Bayou St. John.

Mary Ellen was a sincerely ardent abolitionist, and she used her privileged position to make contacts with negro slaves throughout the New Orleans area; and she managed to spirit away such a number of them to freedom through “the Underground” that the authorities began looking for the light-skinned negro woman who always seemed to attend somehow at the escapes—and this slave-stealing woman was too-accurately described as tall and thin, with mismatched eyes.

And so one night Mary Ellen had fled, leaving behind in her bed a bolster wrapped in her nightdress with a wig on it. Marie Laveau booked steamship passage for her to San Francisco, by way of Cape Horn.

Mary Ellen arrived in San Francisco on April 7, 1852—but Agoston Haraszthy himself came to the city only a few months later to establish his kingdom in nearby Sonoma; and of course he had brought with him cuttings of the god’s New World wine, which by this time had already reached the Bay Area and was known, properly at last, as Zinfandel.

The god would still have forgiven her, on some basis—but she fought him.

She quickly got employment as a gourmet cook, serving Cajun pirogis and shrimp remoulade and exotic spicy jambalaya to the bankers and gold-dealers of San Francisco—and she made contact with escaped slaves and was able to find jobs for them in the households of affluent families; and then she used her beneficiaries as spies to garner valuable particulars of scandal…murders, illicit births, embezzlements, abortions. Soon she owned several laundries, but blackmail was her real business.

“My life,” she had told Kootie ruefully this morning at the kitchen table, “was based on the very opposite of any divine pagadebiti.”

In her voodoo procedures she didn’t hesitate to use the power of alcohol, and even of wine, but always in spitefully broken or vitiated forms. The founder of the mercantile firm F. W. Macondray & Company had erected a grapery, a greenhouse-chapel to the god’s holy vine, at the corner of Stockton and Washington—and so in 1866 Mary Ellen Pleasant, as she now called herself, bought the property and sacrilegiously converted it to the boardinghouse whose kitchen she and Kootie were now sitting in; and to the bankers and steamship owners who dined at her boardinghouse she served hot raspberry vinegar, and cowslip wine, and double-distilled elderberry brandies. When in 1892 she finally killed the man who had been her main benefactor in San Francisco, she first hobbled his ghost by serving him wine from which she had boiled off all the alcohol…and then after she had pushed him over a high spiral stair railing she hurried down to where his body lay on the parquet entry-hall floor and pulled the hot brains out of his split skull, so that the ghost would be sure to dissipate in confused fragments.

“A surer trick than those ashtrays with Madam, I’m Adam or some such nonsense written around them,” Mammy Pleasant had told Kootie this morning.

“I bet,” Kootie had said hoarsely.

“But at the turn of the century the god caught up with me,” she had said, taking Kootie’s empty plate to the sink, “and took everything away—my great house on Octavia Street, my servants, my money—until at the last I was a plain homeless charity case, shambling around the Fillmore district like…like a bolster with an old wig on it, in a nightdress. I had only one companion left by then, a negro giant who was actually my captor and guard, known to people as Bacus—” She spelled it out for Kootie. “—because people didn’t ever see it spelled right, which would have been B-A-C-C-H-U-S. He—it—was a sort of idiot fragment of the god’s attention. And finally, on January eleventh of 1904, in the spare room of a mere Good Samaritan acquaintance, I died.”

Kootie looked past her. He thought the strings of garlic and dried red peppers hung in the high corner of the ceiling had lost some of their color in the last few minutes, even become a bit transparent, but he wished forlornly that he could just forget his life and become one of the boarders here.

The old woman went on softly, perhaps talking to herself: “For a while after that I just drifted in the gray daguerreotype-plate ghost-world version of the city, lost, mostly on the beaches by Sutro’s Cliff House and Point Lobos and Land’s End. It was a time of cleansing exile for me, like Ariadne abandoned on Naxos by her false human lover Theseus. At last, three Easters and three days after I died, the god mercifully did come back for my ghost, and he knocked down Yerba Buena when he came.”

She looked up at Kootie, and her mismatched eyes were again sharp. “For me,” she said, “January eleventh is the open door of the revolving year, and on that day I was able to call out to you people, to try to tell you all what you had to do. And I was interceding for you all with the god—he broke your two friends out of the madhouse on that night, and allowed the king’s ghost to be called and drive them right to where you were, where his body was. You had every species of help.”

“I don’t know that we’ve done very well,” said Kootie.

“You’ve all done very badly,” she agreed, “and amassed huge debts.”

From a shelf stacked with old gray cookbooks and account ledgers she now pulled down a jarringly modern oversized paperback book with garish red and green swirls and the word FRACTALS in big red letters on the slick cover. She flipped it open to an inner page and showed Kootie a color picture of flames or ferns or octopus tentacles boiling away from a warty, globular black shape.

“Have you seen this silhouette before?” she asked gently, pointing to a clearer picture of the five-lobed silhouette, which resembled a fat person with a little round head and stumpy arms and round buttocks.

Kootie could only look away from the picture and nod and close his throat against sudden nausea. It was the silhouette that had appeared on the television screen in the motel this morning after Arky had poured beer into the set, and it was, too, the shape he had momentarily seen overlapping the pretty Chinese woman when he had first glimpsed her today in the Street of Gamblers.

Mammy Pleasant sighed and shook her head. “Oh, it’s death, child, the person of the god’s unholy trinity that’s retributive death, and you can testify yourself that it does love to have people enter into its terrible bargain. It was the person of the god that came for me first, on that cold January eleventh morning, demanding payment for chopping down the vine in Macondray’s grapery—dethroning the vine god, killing the vegetation king, beheading the Green Knight. In olden-days history it was called the Quinotaur, and it gave power to the Frankish king Merovee in the Dark Ages—it came to him in the form of a talking bear, and Merovee cut its head off—and it came back under the name of”—she tapped the page—“Pepin the Fat, to kill Merovee’s greatly-greatly-grandson Dagobert, and that ended the Merovingian line of kings in that long-ago time. And it’s been known as Bertilak of the High Desert, the Green Knight, who met Sir Gawain at the Green Chapel on New Year’s Day, a year after Gawain had cut off Bertilak’s head, to collect on that debt. Other folk, meaning to or not, have let the Quinotaur take over themselves to some degree, and always they come back to demand payment-in-kind for their deaths.”

Mammy Pleasant seemed to relax, though she was still frowning. “You should go now, child. The New Year is close at hand. The Quinotaur doesn’t always take the life he’s owed—the Green Knight didn’t behead Gawain, just nicked his neck, because he showed courage. Show courage yourself.”

“Courage,” echoed Kootie, and the word reminded him of the Cowardly Lion of Oz. The memory of watching that innocent movie on television in Solville, in the contented days before the red truck had arrived, before Kootie was a murderer, brought tears to his eyes.

She tugged a bookmark out of the volume’s back pages and handed it to Kootie. “You people should have come to me for this before. Your king is the suicide king now, you’ve got to keep him in your deck—he’s unconditionally surrendered, you see, and is waiting for his instructions, any orders at all. But the god is merciful sometimes—these commandments haven’t changed.” She handed Kootie the paper—he glanced at it, but it seemed to be poetry in Latin, which he couldn’t read. “You bring your people back here,” the old woman went on, “and take me away with you. The god still looks with favor on your king, and wants you all to succeed in restoring him to life: the god owes a good turn to one of your king’s company. But it will cost each of you much more, now, than it would have once. Child, it can’t any longer be your king who comes under your curly-haired roof—and your king will have to come somewhere else.”

Mammy Pleasant put down the book and then moved some jars away from a breadbox on the counter, scattering dust and tearing cobwebs. Kootie looked around and saw that the kitchen had deteriorated in the last few moments—the windows were blurred with greasy dirt now and blocked by vines clinging to the outside of the glass, and the paint was flaking off of the sagging shelves. The old woman tugged open the lid of the breadbox, breaking old rust deposits—and then she lifted out of it Diana’s yellow baby blanket. She reached across the warped table to hand it to him.

Kootie wordlessly took it and tucked it into the back pocket of his jeans. He knew it must have fallen out of his pocket in the bedroom upstairs, not an hour ago; and he couldn’t even bring himself to wonder how it had wound up here.

Mammy Pleasant blinked around at the iron sinks and the cutting boards and the wire-mesh pantry doors, as if for the last time. “This place won’t stay visibly wedged into your electric new world much longer,” she said. “I’ll show you out.”

She led him out of the kitchen—into a huge shadowy Victorian hall, clearly once elegant but now dark and dusty and empty of furniture. A spiral stairway receded away up toward a dim skylight several floors above, and when Kootie looked down at his feet he saw a dark stain on the parquet floor.

“We’re in my house on Octavia Street now,” Pleasant told him as she led him to a tall, ornate door at the end of the passage, “not as it was in my arrogant days, and anyway it won’t last much longer here either. You all come back here and get me. Look to the trees, you’ll see how.” She twisted the knob and pushed open the door. “Go left,” she said from behind him, “up the street. Don’t look back for a few blocks.”

Kootie blinked in the sudden gray daylight. Splintery old wooden steps led down to a yard choked with brown weeds, and beyond a row of eucalyptus trees he could see a street, with a cable car trundling up the middle of the pavement and ringing its bell.

He remembered this cable-car bell from the first time they had got Pleasant on the television in Solville, and he recalled Thomas Edison’s ghost telling him once that streetcar tracks were a good masking measure—“the tracks make a nice set of mirrors.” For a while, Kootie thought now as he stuffed the piece of paper into his pocket. Not forever.

Obediently he walked down the steps and across the overgrown yard to the sidewalk, where he turned left, kicking his way through the drifts of acorn-like seeds that had fallen from the eucalyptus trees.

He was sweating in the cold morning air, and he wasn’t tempted to look back as he walked away from the house; he didn’t even want to look around, for there were no traffic lights at all visible between the corniced buildings bracketing the narrow intersection ahead of him, and aside from the receding cable car all the vehicles on the street were horse-drawn carriages, and though he was aware of the clopping of the horses’ hooves and the voices of the quaintly dressed people that he passed, he was aware too of breezy silence in the background. The air smelled of grass and the sea and wood smoke and horse manure.

After he had walked two blocks, the noise of the modern world abruptly crashed back in upon him: car engines, and radio music, and the sheer roaring undertone of the modern city. His nostrils dilated at the aggressive odor of diesel fumes.

Oh, this is magic, he thought, for only the second time in that whole morning.

Between the traffic lights swung a metal street sign—he was at the intersection of Octavia and California, and Lombard Street and the Star Motel lay a dozen steep blocks ahead of him.

If my mom and dad are still alive, I’ll meet them there, he thought. If they’re not, if they’ve been killed because I ran away this morning—

Recoiling away from the thought, and from a suspense that could not possibly be resolved either way without grief, he began a loud chanting in his head to drown out all thoughts as he strode north on the Octavia Street sidewalk: The Green Ripper, the Green Giant, the Green Knight. I owe him a beheading. The Green Ripper, the Green Giant, the Green Knight…

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

Gawain, stand ready to ride, as you bargained;

Seek in the wilderness faithfully for me,

As these knights have heard you to solemnly promise.

Find the Green Chapel, the same blow take bravely

You’ve given today—gladly will it be given

On New Year’s Day.

—Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,

lines 448-453

ANGELICA glanced jerkily back over her shoulder—the bumper of the turquoise BMW was scooping fast across the motel parking lot pavement toward her—no, it would miss her—it was accelerating straight at Kootie.

She tried to run faster toward the boy, and she managed to suck enough air into her lungs to yell to him, “Get out of the way!”

Kootie just stood and stared; but Mavranos was ahead of her now his arms and knees pumping and his dark hair flying as he lashed himself across the lot. As the low MW roared past her, painfully clipping her left elbow with the passenger-side mirror and nearly spinning her off her feet, she saw Mavranos bodyblock Kootie right off his feet to a driveway-side planter as the car screeched to a halt where Kootie had been standing. The two heads in the rear seat flopped forward and back as if yanked by one string. Mavranos had rolled over Kootie and was struggling to his hands and knees the sidewalk past the planter, and Angelica saw a clenched hand poke out of the BMW’s driver’s-side window. A stubby silver cylinder was squeezed in the fist, and it “as pointed toward where Kootie lay thrashing weakly among the flowers.

The icy recognition of It’s a gun shrilled in Angelica’s head, but as she sprang forward again she also thought, imperatively, but he’s!—the king now!—he’s got protections against plain guns!

The fist was punched back out of sight by the recoil, and the pop was loud nough to set her ears ringing and deafen her to the roaring of her panting breath and he hard scuff of her sneaker soles on the pavement.

LONG JOHN Beach tried to hold on to the seat-back with his phantom left hand bur when Armentrout stood on the brake the psychic limb snapped like taffy and his head smacked the windshield; still, he was able to peer out the open driver’s-side window as the doctor frantically contorted his own arm to get the little gun extended outside the stopped, rocking car.

Even in the passenger seat on the far side of the console, Long John Beach was only a couple of yards from the boy who was lying on his back among the pink geraniums…and in the instant before the gun flared and cracked back against the doorframe, their eyes met, and Long John Beach and the boy recognized each other.

The rangy man in denim who had shoved the boy out of the car’s path was on his feet, and he lunged at the car and slammed a tanned fist against the windshield hard enough to flash silvery cracks across it. Then he was reaching in through the open window and had grabbed a handful of the doctor’s white hair—

But wailing Armentrout stamped on the gas pedal, and though his head was yanked violently back, the car had slewed out into the lanes of Lombard Street; horns were honking but there were no audible collisions, and in a moment Armentrout had wrestled the wheel into line and was steering the car fast down the eastbound left lane.

“That was the boy,” Armentrout was whispering rapidly, “I know that was the boy! He was older, but the face was the same as the one in the picture.”

“That was Koot Hoomie Parganas,” said Long John Beach.

Peripherally he could see Armentrout glance at him, but Long John had seized on an old memory, and had no attention to spare for the doctor. The sight of the boy in the flowers had reminded him of some old event.

He nearly never remembered anything of his life before Halloween of 1992, when he had been found on the shore rocks beside the permanently moored Queen Mary in Long Beach. When the police and paramedics had found him he had had a ruptured spleen and a collapsed lung, with “pulmonary hemorrhages”—as well as a set of handcuffs dangling from his bloody right wrist. He had spent weeks in a hospital, at first with a chest tube inserted between his fifth and sixth ribs. Apparently he had been in the lagoon around the old ship when an underwater explosion had occurred. The doctors had speculated that he must have been exhaling in the instant of the blast, and curled up into a ball, and that that was why he hadn’t been killed; another man in the water had been killed…and must have lost at least his shoe and all the skin off his left foot, for…for somebody had previously handcuffed Long John Beach’s wrist to the man’s ankle!

But Long John Beach had been going by another name, then—another makeshift name based on a city he had found himself in.

Like a whisper the old name came to him: Sherman Oaks.

He had been hunting for Koot Hoomie Parganas in that long-ago season, and so had the man who had died in the underwater explosion…and so had a fat woman who had been some kind of movie producer. Each of them had wanted to get hold of the Parganas boy, and kill him, and inhale the powerful ghost that the boy contained—the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison.

Sherman Oaks had failed, and of course the man who’d died in the explosion had failed. Perhaps the fat lady had succeeded in inhaling Edison.

No—she couldn’t have, because that would have involved killing the boy, and Long John Beach had just seen the boy a minute ago, alive.

The boy’s face, when the haunted brown eyes had locked on to Long John Beach’s gaze just now, had been pale and gaunt, and openmouthed with surprise and apprehension—but the sick wrinkles around the eyes spoke of some imminent punishment feared but expected, even accepted. The expression was one of fearful guilt, Long John Beach thought.

The boy’s face had been younger when Beach had first seen it, but it had worn that same look of pathetically anticipating and deserving punishment.

The Parganas boy had apparently run away from home one night in October of ‘92, directly after stealing the Edison ghost from whatever shielded hiding place his parents had kept the thing in. Long John Beach—Sherman Oaks, rather—had tracked the ghost’s intense field to the boy’s Beverly Hills home, and he had duct-taped the boy’s mother and father into chairs and tortured them to find out where the ghost had gone. But they hadn’t known where, and he had wound up killing them in a fury of hungry impatience, finally even gouging out their sightless eyes.

And then later that night the boy had come back home, repentant and sorry, visibly ready to take his punishment for having run away and stolen whatever glass container had held the ghost.

It had been Sherman Oaks, not his parents, who had awaited him; but the boy had eluded Oaks, and had run out of the house…right through the room in which sat his dead mother and father.

And then a few days later Sherman Oaks had succeeded in briefly capturing the boy, in a van in the back of a moving truck—and after terrifying him nearly to madness Oaks had tried to kill him, and had in fact managed to stab him in the side with a hunting knife.

Long John Beach had never, since Halloween of ‘92, had much awareness of himself as a distinct person. The Edison ghost had lashed out at him somehow and broken something in his mind, so that he’d been left with nothing but the useless ability to channel stray ghosts, as inertly and promiscuously as a tree harbors birds. But now, in this swerving, speeding car, that tortured boy in the flowers back there was connected to his self. The boy’s evident unhappiness was not—Long John Beach flexed the hoardings of his mind to be sure, and it was true—was not separable from the admittedly dim and decayed entity that was Long John Beach’s own self.

He knew that as Sherman Oaks, and probably as other personalities before that one, he had killed people; and he remembered that in those old days he had been addicted to inhaling ghosts, consuming them rather than just channelling them, strengthening his own soul by eating those poor dissolving “smokes”—but suddenly it was Koot Hoomie Parganas, whom he had not even killed, that was an intolerable weight on his frail mind.

There was no new sound in the humming BMW, and Long John Beach saw nothing but the drab motels of western Lombard Street through the windshield, but he was suddenly aware of a change.

A personality that wasn’t a ghost, and might not even have been human, lifted him like a wave under a foundering ship; cautiously, still clinging to the prickly husk that was his identity, he nevertheless let the new person partway into his mind.

All at once he was speaking. “I always have a dog,” Long John Beach found himself saying. “For now he barks all night at the end of his tether. Chancy measures at the bowsprit of the million-dollar hot-air balloon, what you might call an exaltation of barks if you had to spit-shine a wingtip hanging upside down by one ankle.” He was laughing excitedly now. “Just imagine! Shouting out of your liver and lights to hand-deliver these parables—pair-o’-bulls!—to the momma’s boy who wants to put the salmon in the freezer.”

“You and your dog.” Armentrout was blinking rapidly at the traffic ahead, and breathing through his mouth. “It doesn’t matter now,” he whispered. “It’s all cashed out, I killed the boy back there.”

Long John Beach gathered back the shreds of his mind and pushed himself away from the big inhuman personality—and he got a quick impression of a young man in patchwork clothes, with a bundle over his shoulder, dancing at the edge of a cliff. He recognized the image—it was one of the pictures in the doctor’s set of oversized tarot cards, the one the doctor called The Fool.

The doctor was afraid of that one. And Long John Beach was not ready to surrender himself to The Fool. The one-armed old man’s identity was nothing more than a limp threadbare sack, angular at the bottom with the fragments of broken poisonous memories and short, rotted lengths of intelligence, but it was all he had.

In spite of his uneasiness with the memories of the Koot Hoomie Parganas boy, he was not ready to surrender himself to The Fool.

KOOTIE WAS sobbing and trying to get up when Angelica tumbled to her hands and knees in the muddy planter beside him; Pete slid to an abrading stop against the cement coping beside her.

Mavranos was kneeling on the other side of the boy, and holding him down with hands that were red with fresh blood. “Let your ma look at you, first,” Mavranos said irritably, and then he squinted up into Angelica’s face. “He was rolling over when the bullet hit him—I don’t think it was a direct hit.”

“Mom!” Kootie wailed. “I thought you were all dead!”

“Check it out as a doctor, Angie,” said Pete breathlessly.

“Hit him?” she panted. “We’re fine, Kootie, we’re—all just fine.” To Pete she snapped, “It can’t have hit him.” Gently but irresistibly she pushed Kootie down on his back in the snapping geranium branches and pulled his shirt up, and the familiar old unhealed knife cut over his left ribs was now a raw long gash with blood runneling down his side and pattering onto the green leaves.

Angelica’s peripheral vision cringed inward so that all she could see was this gleaming red rip in Kootie’s white skin; but she replayed what Pete had said and forced herself to look at it professionally. “You’re right, Arky—it’s shallow, no damage at all to the muscle layer and hardly even scored the corium, the deeper skin layer—not life-threatening.” She grinned at the boy as confidently as she could, and gasped out, “Welcome back, kiddo,” but she knew the look she then gave Mavranos must have been stark. “Get the truck here right now. I don’t want my boy in a hospital like this.”

“Right.” Mavranos scuffled to his feet and sprinted heavily away.

“Let’s get you moving, Kootie,” Angelica said, grunting as she and Pete helped the boy stand up. Bright drops of blood spilled down the left leg of his jeans, and she mentally rehearsed grabbing the first-aid kit that Mavranos kept in a box beside the back seat. “That must have been a magical gun—” she began. Then she looked into his eyes. “You’re not hurt anywhere else, are you? Physically?”

“No.” But Kootie was crying, and Angelica knew it was about something that had happened before this shooting…and after he had run away in the pre-dawn darkness this morning.

“Tell your dad and me about it when we get clear of this,” she said gently.

“And I thought,” the boy sniffled, “that I got you killed, by running away. I just ran away from you! I’d give anything if I could go back and do that different.”

“We’re just fine, son,” said Pete, hugging the boy against himself. “It’s okay. And now you’re back. We’re all alive for our…reconciliation here, and that’s a very big thing.”

Angelica remembered Pete making a very similar apology to his father’s ghost, on the night before Halloween in ’92—Pete too had run away once, when it counted—and she winced in sympathy and opened her mouth to say something; but the shrill whine of the truck engine starting up stopped her.

The truck came grinding up behind her and squealed to a halt, and Angelica helped Pete hustle Kootie around the front bumper to the back door. As soon as they had boosted him in onto the back seat and clambered aboard themselves, Pete in the front seat and Angelica in the back seat with Kootie, Mavranos gunned the dusty blue truck out of the parking lot; Kootie sprawled across the seat, and Angelica, crouched on the floorboards beside him, had to lean out over the rushing pavement to catch the swinging door handle and pull the door shut.

Then she hiked the first-aid kit down with one hand while she raised her other hand over the back of the front seat; and Pete had already opened the glove compartment, and now slapped into her palm Mavranos’s nearly empty bottle of Jack Daniels bourbon.

Kootie was lying on his back, and Angelica knelt over him and popped open the first-aid kit. “This’ll hurt,” she told him as she tore open a gauze pad envelope and spilled bourbon onto the cotton.

“Good,” said Kootie. Then he said, “The old guy in the passenger seat of that BMW—it was Sherman Oaks, the one-armed guy who killed my natural mom and dad. I recognized him. And he recognized me.”

Angelica suppressed a worried frown, and just pressed the wet bandage onto his wound. “Drive right out of the city, Arky,” she called over her shoulder, “in whatever direction you’re heading. To hell with whatever we left in that motel room. When we’re—”

“No,” said Kootie through clenched teeth. “First we’ve got to go to Octavia Street—uh, two blocks south of California Street.”

“Tell me which,” growled Mavranos from the driver’s seat.

“Why, Kootie?” asked Pete, hunching around to look back at the boy. “If that Sherman Oaks guy is here in town—”

“We’ve got to do it right this time,” said Kootie hoarsely. “We’ve got to fetch Mammy Pleasant. She’s the old black lady from the TV, and her house is on Octavia there.”

“Oh, honey, that—didn’t work out,” Angelica said as she peeled adhesive tape off a roll. She restrained herself from glancing over his head toward the bed of the truck. “That’s all over.”

It’s not,” Kootie said, closing his eyes as Angelica pressed the strip of tape tightly over the bandage “He can still come back. To life. Dionysus wants him to.”

“South on Van Ness,” announced Mavranos as the truck leaned into a right-hand turn. “I’m going straight on down to the 101 south unless somebody convinces me to do different.”

“Arky,” Kootie wailed, “get over to Octavia! We won’t ever be okay until we’ve paid this thing off. Does it look like we’re done, here? Does it look like I’m the king now? He can still he restored to life.”

“You don’t know the whole story, Kootie,” said Pete. “We do. Trust me, there’s no way—” He paused, for Mavranos had swung the truck into another hard right turn at Filbert, and the battering exhaust was echoing back from the close garage doors alongside the narrow, steep street. “Arky—? The 101 is—”

“Talk to me, Kootie,” said Mavranos. “If he can still come back, it can’t be into his own body anymore. That turned into a skeleton, and got all busted up.”

“And it won’t be into yours,” said Angelica, peeling off another strip of tape. “I will sabotage any effort at that, I promise. So don’t even—”

“No,” said Kootie, “it would have been that way, if we’d done it right, and then he would have shifted back into his own. Arky and the Plumtree woman were right about that. But we were doing it wrong, we didn’t get Mammy Pleasant to guide us like she told us to, and then I ran away—” He sniffed. “Mammy Pleasant gave me a message for Crane, some Latin poetry on a piece of paper, from Dionysus.”

Angelica felt a thump through the front seat at her back, and she looked up—Mavranos had thrown his injured head back, though he was still squinting furiously ahead. “So how will it work out?” he asked in a gravelly voice. “Now?”

“I don’t know at all,” said Kootie. His eyes were wide and he was staring up at the rust-spotted bare metal roof. “I think we might all die, if it works out right this time.”

“Let’s see this message,” said Pete.

Luckily Kootie had stuffed it into his right-hand pocket; he was able to dig it out without putting any strain on his bandaged side. “Here,” he said, handing it to Angelica, who passed it over the seat to Pete.

Pete read it aloud, slowly:

“Roma, tibi subito motibus ibit Amor,

Si bene to tua laus taxat, sua laute tenebis,

Sole, medere pede: ede, perede melos.”

He handed it back to Angelica, who returned it to Kootie. “It’s a palindrome,” Pete said thoughtfully, rocking in his seat as the truck continued to climb the narrow street. “Three palindromes, that is. Latin, and I don’t read Latin.” He yawned. “Palindromes draw ghosts.”

“I’d like to know what it means,” said Angelica defiantly.

“I think we better go pick up the old lady’s ghost in the meantime,” sighed Mavranos. “I’ll stop at a pay phone on the way and read Kootie’s note to Nardie Dinh; she’ll be able to puzzle it out for us, if we give her time to go through her books—and she owes me one.”

AT A tiny liquor store on the corner of Gough and Filbert, Mavranos found a parking space and then copied the text of Kootie’s note onto the back of his car registration. Finally he got out of the truck, leaving it in park with the engine running.

After he closed the driver’s door he leaned in the open window to say, “Pete, if you see a blue-green BMW, you just ram it and then drive away, and meet me at Li Po at sunset.”

He trudged across the tiny lot into the liquor store, slapping his pockets for coins for the pay phone by the beer cooler.

He strode up to the phone and dropped a quarter into the coin slot, and then punched in the well-remembered Leucadia number; and after a recorded voice asked him to deposit another dollar and thirty cents, and he impatiently rolled six more quarters into the slot, he heard ringing, and then Nardie’s voice saying, cautiously “Hello?”

“Nardie,” he said, “this is Arky, still up in San Fran, with—apparently!—still no conclusions.” His forehead was damp; he had almost said concussions. He wanted to touch the back of his head, and to ask her about the dashboard statue she had given him. But, She didn’t do it, he told himself, and he only said, “I got some Latin for you to translate, if you got a pencil—”

“It means, ‘And in Arcadia, I—”’ came Nardie Dinh’s voice. “It’s an unfinished sentence, like the story’s not over, okay? I think the speaker is supposed to be Death, so it’s like Death hasn’t made up his mind yet what he’ll do, here. Where have you seen it?”

Mavranos blinked, and discovered that the telephone cord was long enough for him to open the beer cooler and pull out a can of Coors. “What?” he said. “But it’s longer than that. And where did you find it?”

Nardie Dinh paused. “This is something that’s lettered on a sign somebody put up on the big pine tree out front, by the driveway. Et in Arcadia ego. What Latin have you got?”

“Jeez. Well, mine’s longer. Have you got a pencil?”

“Shoot,” she said.

He winced, and his finger hovered over the tab on the beer can, but he knew the owner was watching him and would throw him out if he opened it in the store. He read her the three palindromes slowly, spelling the words out. “I’ll have a translation for you in an hour,” she said. “I suppose you’re not at a phone I’ll be able to call you at?’

“No,” he told her, “I’ll call you.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and he wished he could open the beer, for his mouth was dry. “Nardie, your brother—”

“Oh, Arky!” Her voice was startled and not happy. “Do let it lie, please!”

“I—well, I discover I can’t. Anymore. I know he doesn’t forgive me, but I do have to ask you—ask you—” He was sweating. “I have to tell you that I’m—sorry, for it.” He coughed, and though his eyes were squeezed tightly shut, his voice was almost casual: “Always have been.”

“I know you are, Arky. Don’t still trouble yourself about it—whatever my feelings were for my brother, or are now, I love you—” She laughed awkwardly. “I was going to say ‘I love you anyway,’ but there’s no ‘anyway’ to it; you did what you had to do, for all of us. So I’ll just say, I love you.”

Mavranos discovered that he hadn’t been inhaling or exhaling, and he let his breath out now in a long sigh. “Thank you, Nardie. I love you too. Call you back in an hour or so.”

He remembered to pay for the can of beer before he walked out of the store, and he popped it open as he walked across the asphalt to the truck, which was still idling where he’d left it. In spite of his undiminished dreads of what was to come, his step was lighter, and after he had got back in and taken a deep sip of the beer, he wedged the can between his thighs and said, with a fair imitation of hearty cheer, “Now we’re off to pick up Kootie’s old lady.”

In the rear-view mirror he saw the boy close his eyes.

MAVRANOS DROVE right by the place, because Kootie wasn’t sure whether it had been two or three blocks he had walked up to get to California Street, and none of these office and apartment buildings looked familiar to him—and it was only after they had driven past the Bush Street intersection that he realized that the six huge, shaggy eucalyptus trees they had just passed must be all that was left of the long row of “trees he had seen when he had walked out of Mammy Pleasant’s run-down Victorian ; mansion an hour ago.

“Back,” he said. “Her house is gone, but those six eucalyptuses are where it was.”

“She say meet you by the trees?” asked Mavranos as he signalled for a right turn to go around the block.

“She said ‘Look to the trees, you’ll see how.’ To pick her up. And last week on the TV she said ‘Eat the seeds of my trees.”‘ He shifted uncomfortably. “She’s just a ghost, remember—I don’t think we’ll have to make much room for her in here.”

Mavranos looped around Sutter and Laguna to Bush, and then turned right onto Octavia again and parked at the curb, putting the truck into park but leaving the engine running. Where Pleasant’s dry brush yard had been was now a walkway-transected green lawn out in front of a Roman-looking two-story gray stone building. “It’s a…a pregnancy counseling center,” said Angelica, staring at the big white ‘ sign out front as she opened the door and climbed down to the sidewalk. “That’s a…pleasant…use for the property.” Pete got out of the passenger side and stood beside her as she shaded her eyes to look up and down the street. Finally she stared down at the pavement and scuffed some leaves aside. “There’s a stone plaque inset in the sidewalk here—it says something about—” She frowned as she puzzled out the letters. “Mary Ellen Pleasant Memorial Park,” she read aloud, “…mother of civil rights in California…supported the western terminus of the underground railway for fugitive slaves…legendary pioneer once lived on this site and planted these six trees.” Angelica looked up.

“And it says she died in 1904. You were—here today, Kootie?”

Kootie was half sitting up in the back seat, staring out through the open back door.

“Her old house was still standing when I was here,” called Kootie, “an hour ago, by my clock. There were more trees then, and they weren’t so big and shaggy.”

“I should have had more respect for her ghost,” said Angelica. “She sounds like she was a fine woman.”

“She had her faults,” said Kootie shakily. “Like us all, I—” he let the sentence hang unfinished. “Do any of the trees…look funny?”

“Funny,” echoed Angelica out on the sidewalk. “Well, they’ve all got strips of bark hanging off ’em…and got bright green moss around their feet.”

“Around their roots,” Pete corrected her, standing by the truck bumper. “Their feet are way up in the air.” He was standing by the second one from the corner, looking up at its thick, bifurcated trunk. “This one looks like somebody buried head-down up to the waist, with their legs sticking up. Wasn’t there a place in Dante’s Inferno, where the damned souls were stuck head-downward?”

“In the Eighth Circle,” called Mavranos from the driver’s seat. He was looking down, fumbling with both hands among the papers on the front seat, and Kootie heard a faint metallic rattle. “The Simoniacs, who sold ecclesiastical offices and indulgences and forgivenesses. Sold is the key word there. But in the book they were stuck head-down in baptismal fonts.” Kootie heard the cylinder of the revolver click closed. “Hurry up,” Mavranos said loudly. “I haven’t reloaded since this morning.” He sat back, not looking at Kootie. “I’ve been…distracted,” he said quietly.

Though she gave a deprecating laugh, Angelica had taken a step back from the gnarled old tree with its two bulky, skyward-stretching limbs. “For what god is a hole in the ground a baptismal font?”

“The god of woods,” said Kootie, though probably only Mavranos could have heard him. He was remembering Mammy Pleasant’s confession of having sold a fabulous cache of the pagadebiti Zinfandel for money, way back in her youth on Nantucket Island. More loudly, he called, “Gather up some of those acorns or chestnuts or whatever they are, from around that tree. And peel off some strips of the bark; she can’t go barefoot.”

A minute later Pete and Angelica climbed back into the truck, Angelica with two pockets full of the seeds and Pete with an armload of musty-smelling damp bark strips.

Mavranos clanked the engine into gear and steered out away from the curb. “Out of town, now?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Angelica, “but not by the 101.” She smiled. “Take the 280 south.”

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

TROILUS: O, let my lady apprehend no fear; in all Cupid’s pageant there is presented no monster.

CRESSIDA: Nor nothing monstrous neither?

—William Shakespeare,

Troilus and Cressida

AFTER he got out of the hot shower Cochran wiped the steam off the medicine-cabinet mirror and thoroughly brushed his teeth, and as he stared at the reflection of his haunted face he kept thinking about Nina’s green toothbrush hanging in its slot only inches behind the hinged mirror; and he decided not to open the medicine-cabinet door again to get out his razor. When he had fumbled out his own toothbrush he hadn’t thought to note how dry Nina’s must be, and he didn’t want to now.

Plumtree had been asleep under the sheet when he had got out of bed to come in here. The shower, and now the shock of a mouthful of Doctor Tichenor’s mouthwash, had sobered him up, and he was profoundly disoriented to realize that a naked blond woman whom he had met one week ago was at this moment inertly compressing the springs of the bed he and Nina slept in.

He was remotely glad that the cassette from the phone-answering machine was in the pocket of his shirt on the back of the dressing-table chair—he didn’t want to know what his response would be if someone were to call now, and Nina’s recorded voice were to speak from the machine.

Plumtree would certainly sleep for at least a couple of hours. Cochran hadn’t been watching the bottle of Southern Comfort, but she must have refilled her glass half a dozen times, before, between, and after. His thoughts just slid away from memories of the details of their lovemaking; all he could really bring himself to remember right now—and even that shakily—was Plumtree’s hot, panting breath, flavored with More cigarette smoke and the peach-liqueur-and-bourbon taste of Southern Comfort.

He spat in the sink, and rinsed out his mouth with cold tap water scooped up in his hand because the bathroom glass was in the other room, sticky with liqueur. He had closed the bathroom door when he had come in here, and now he paused before opening it again; and after a moment of indecision he picked up his jeans and pulled them on and zipped the fly before he turned the damp doorknob and stepped out onto the bedroom carpet.

And he blinked in surprise—Plumtree was sitting up in bed, anxiously holding the sheet up to her chin.

Her shoulders slumped when she saw him. “Oh, you, Scant?” she wailed. “Oh, why? I told you I’d go to bed with you, if you’d wait! I was sure it was going to be a stranger that would walk out of that bathroom! I was just waiting to see what sort of—creep!—it would be, so I’d know who to give this flop to! Oh, Sid—Tiffany?” She buried her face in the sheet, and her muffled voice went on, “I loved you! And I thought you loved me.”

Cochran could feel his face get instantly hot, and at the same time chilly with evaporating sweat, for he suddenly had to fully admit to himself that what he was about to say was a lie. “Janis,” he said, too shrilly, “I thought it was you! Are you saying that it wasn’t you? Good God, I’m sorry, how was I—”

“You stole—me! It’s as if you had sex with me while I was knocked out, unconscious, like when I nearly got raped in the van behind that bar in Oakland. At least that guy didn’t…have me.” She shook her head furiously. “How could I ever give myself to you now?”

“Janis, it was a, a horrible mistake, I swear I really thought we—you were conscious, for God’s sake—we were both drunk—”

“I said ‘as if.’ You knew. Oh, God, I’ve lost you.” She lifted her tear-streaked face and stared at him; then she looked down at the sheet over her body, and flexed her We Finally she smacked her lips. “Oh, you horny son-of-a-bitch. Do you have any idea how badly you’ve hurt her? She was in love with you, you asshole!”

“Oh, I know, Cody,” he said miserably. “But goddammit, we were both drunk, and you do all look exactly alike!”

Cody was scowling at him with evident disgust. “You’re saying you didn’t know it was Tiffany? Didn’t even suspect it might be? Are you honestly telling me that?”

“I—” He sighed. “No.” He lifted his shirt from the chair and slid his numb, leaden arms through the sleeves. “No, I guess not—not the didn’t even suspect part, anyway, I guess. You’re right—she’s right—I wasn’t thinking about who it was, I was just…what you said.” He could feel the fabric of the shirt clinging to his chest already. “Jesus, Cody, I’m not being flippant, and I am sorry. You all deserved way more…respect? consideration?…from me. God, what can I—”

“Try getting out of here, so I can get dressed.”

“Okay. Of course.” He gave her a fragile smile as he buttoned the shirt. “I’m asking for an insult here, and I deserve it—but I’ve got to say I hope you won’t leave. I hope you’ll stay, somehow.” He stepped toward the hallway door. “I’ll be in the kitchen, making some coffee.”

At least she didn’t say anything as he walked out.

At the kitchen sink he filled the glass coffeepot with water and poured it into the back of the coffee machine; the action reminded him of that Mavranos guy pouring beer down the back of the Star Motel TV set, and he remembered that the room had been on Nina’s credit card. Five nights, plus a wrecked TV set. God knew what it would cost.

As he spooned ground coffee into the filter he wondered who Tiffany might be, how complete a person—whether she was anything more than the Plumtree sex function, with no character details besides the sketched-in tastes for More cigarettes and Southern Comfort. Maybe she had been provided with one or two other props he hadn’t discovered—some surface preferences in movies, or food. The ideal girlfriend, some sophomoric types would probably say with a snigger. He wondered if he had ever been shallow enough to say something like that. Well, he’d been shallow enough to act on it, today, which had to be worse.

He slid the filter funnel into the coffee machine and clicked it on and opened the cabinet to snag down a couple of cups. His hands were still shaking. Sugar was on the table, and he opened the refrigerator and took out a half full carton of milk.

Plumtree was like a family of sisters—with a scary, seldom-seen father, and a crazy mother. Cochran had been initially attracted to the nice sister, and now he had gone to bed with the nymphomaniac one; but the one he had come to rely on and even admire was the…the tough one.

He tweaked open the milk carton and sniffed the contents. The weeks-old milk smelled cheesy, and he sighed and poured it down the sink. There was a jar of Cremora in the cabinet, he recalled.

The coffee machine had just started to sputteringly exhale air when Plumtree stepped into the kitchen from the hall. She was wearing her jeans and white blouse again, though she was still barefoot, and she was tugging one of Nina’s hairbrushes through the disordered blond thatch of her hair.

“Coffee sounds good,” she said. “I think spiking it would be a bad idea.”

“I think we’ve had enough to drink for today,” Cochran agreed cautiously.

“Well,” she said, pulling out one of the chairs at the kitchen table and sitting down heavily, “as for the whole day I don’t know. I kind of picture a glass or two of something at around sundown.” When Cochran had set a cup of steaming coffee in front of her, she added, “Bring that milk over here.”

“It’s empty,” he said, turning back to the cabinet. “I’ve got Cremora, though.”

“Cremora,” she echoed, stirring sugar into the coffee. “What do you keep the milk carton around for?”

“I just now poured it out, it was bad.” He glanced at the milk carton, thinking he might save it for the garden. “At the vineyard we put half-gallon milk cartons around young vines,” he added absently as he poured his own cup. “It keeps the rabbits from getting at them, and prevents sunburn, and makes the shoots grow straight, up toward the light at the top.” He carried his cup to the table and sat down across from her, and stared out the window at the roof of the greenhouse as he sipped it. “They’ll be putting out the new seedlings soon, at Pace, in the couple of acres down by the highway.” He used the Italian pronunciation for the vineyard name, pah-chay.

At last he looked at her. Plumtree seemed to be listening, and so he let himself go on about this neutral topic. “And,” he said, “the malolactic fermentation will be starting up soon in the casks of last year’s wine—that’s a second fermentation that happens at about the same time that the new year’s leaves are budding out, as if they’re in communication; it’s bacteria, rather than yeast, and it converts the malic acid to lactic acid, which is softer on the tongue. You want it to happen, in the Zinfandels and the Pinot Noirs.” He smiled faintly, thinking about the vineyard. “When I left for Paris, the grape leaves were all in fall colors—you should see it. The Petite Sirah leaves turn purple, the Chardonnays are gold, and the Cabernet Sauvignon leaves go red as blood.”

“You miss the work,” said Plumtree. “Do you make good wine there?”

“Yeah, we do, actually. These last few years we’ve been having ideal marine-influence weather, and we’re picking later in the season, and our ’92 and ’93 Zinfandels, not bottled yet, are already showing perfect old-viney fruit, with tannin like velvet.” He shrugged self-consciously. “But, hell, since 1990, everybody in California’s been making good wines, it seems like. Not just the names you’ve heard of, like Ridge and Mondavi, but Rochioli in the Russian River Valley and Joel Peterson’s Ravenswood in Sonoma; everybody’s producing spectacular harvests and vintages, in spite of the phylloxera bugs. It’s almost as if the world-scale has to stay balanced—Bordeaux, all of Europe, in fact, have been getting way too much rain in these growing seasons, and they’ve been consistently mediocre since ’90.”

“Well, Scott Crane became king in 1990. I bet ‘95 will be a terrible year.”

“That Kootie kid might be a good king. Maybe we’ll be able to tell if he’s okay, by how the wine turns out.”

Plumtree tasted the coffee and grimaced. “Did your wife like wine? Just because I’m talking to you doesn’t mean I’ve stopped thinking you’re a heartless dickhead.”

He gave her a constricted nod to show that he understood. “Nina,” he said, clearing his throat. “Actually, she seemed to resent the big, vigorous California wines—”

Plumtree’s mouth opened. “Why should the god favor this coast on the wrong side of the world? Where none of the Appellation Controlee commandments are even being observed! Here you are free to mechanically irrigate, if no rain comes! And you may produce…three, four, six tons of grapes per acre, with no penalty! In the Médoc our vandangeurs hold to the god’s old laws, making no more than thirty-five hectoliters of wine from each hectare of land, and we nurture the sacred old Cabernet Sauvignon and supplicate the god to make it into his forgiving blood, as he did in the centuries before the Revolution—and for our pains we scarcely get a wine that’s fit to drink with dinner! It’s rejected like Cain’s sacrifice. Here in barbaric California the desecrated Cabernet is turned into wines like, like cathedrals and Bach concertos, and it’s not even the wine he blesses—he consecrates this unpedigreed upstart interloper Zinfandel.”

Cochran had stopped breathing, for this was Nina’s voice. He could see his shirt collar twitching with his heartbeat, and he hardly dared to move, fearing that any motion might startle her ghost away.

He realized that he should speak. “Uh, not always,” he said in a quiet, placating tone, peripherally reminded of poor Thutmose with his rusty grail full of Zinfandel that he craved to have transformed into the pagadebiti. “Most Zinfandel is just red wine.”

“You called me,” said Nina’s voice. She looked around at her own kitchen. “When I was on the lit marveil, the jumping bed, in the room with all the people in it.” She shifted her chair back from the table and peered out the window at the midday glare on the greenhouse roof. “When was that?”

Cochran remembered having called Nina! when Plumtree’s mother had been controlling her body, right after the pre-dawn earthquake. “That was this morning, early,” he said steadily. He had been ashamed of calling her name, immediately after he’d done it, and he didn’t want to look squarely at the action now. “I didn’t think you heard me.”

“I had a long way to come, to answer.” She was frowning thoughtfully, and Cochran felt goose bumps rise on his forearms as he recognized the top-of-the-nose crease of Nina’s characteristic frown, on Plumtree’s sunburned face. “I was in a—unless it was a dream?—a bar, with a lot of very drunk people.” She visibly relaxed, and smiled at him “Rut I’m home now.”

This isn’t her, he told himself as his heart hammered behind his ribs, it’s just her ghost. Wherever the real Nina is—her bed is India; there she lies, a pearl—she has no part in this. Still, this is a ghost of her, this is her ghost. Could she stay? Sleep in the bed, dampen the toothbrush? She was building a stone fountain in the garden, when she died; could she finish building it now?

But there was something wrong—something subtly but witheringly grotesque—about the idea of dead-reflex, mimic hands finishing the living woman’s interrupted garden work.

And would the unborn baby’s ghost come back, sobbing inconsolably in the darkness late some night?

And could he do this to Cody?

He lifted his coffee cup and stood up and crossed to the sink, pausing by the refrigerator to pry off of its door one of the little flat promotion-giveaway magnets stamped to look like a miniature bottle of Pace Zinfandel. “I’ve decided to have the mark on the back of my right hand removed,” he said over his shoulder as he dumped the half-cup of lukewarm coffee into the sink. He was speaking carefully. “Laser surgery, get it done in a couple of outpatient sessions.”

“Ce n’est pas possible!” she exclaimed, and he heard Plumtree’s shoes scuff on the floor as she stood up. “It is your Androcles mark! The lion owed Androcles an obligation after Androcles merely pulled the thorn from the lion’s paw—but you at some time put out your hand to injury to save the god! I’ve never spoken of it; but the mark is for only the god to take away, as it was for him to bestow it. I would never have—I would not have your child, if its father were not marked by him. My family didn’t send me here simply to—” She gripped his shoulder with Plumtree’s strong hand. “Tell me you won’t do it, Scant.”

“Okay,” he said gently. “Sorry. I won’t do it.”

He filled the coffee cup with cold tap water and carried it back to the table. “Sit down,” he told her, placing the cup of tap water on the table between them and stirring it with the forefinger of his right hand. After she had resumed her seat, he asked, “What…happened, on New Year’s Day?” He touched his forehead with his wet fingertip. Then he took the cassette from the phone-answering machine out of his shirt pocket.

“In the morning, at dawn,” said Nina’s voice with Plumtree’s lips. “I thought it might be him again, this morning, when you called me on the leaping bed. I was thrown awake at dawn on New Year’s Day, and I knew he was calling me, from outside the house. My…I was married to him, through you. And he was freed that morning, when the earth moved and the trees were all knocked down. I wrapped myself in a bedsheet, and tied ivy in my hair, and I ran out to meet him, down the backyard path to the highway. And I—did?—it was loud, and it hurt—but I knew that was how he would come.” She was staring into the clear water in the cup, and she sighed deeply.

Cochran felt empty. “What’s your name?” he asked, in a voice that he tried to keep from being as flat as a dialtone.

Slowly, he slid the little bottle-shaped magnet back and forth over the cassette.

“Nina Gestin Leon. Ariachne.” Plumtree’s blue eyes met his. “I see two of you, Scant. I died that morning, it seems to me now. Didn’t I?”

“Yes, Nina.” Fighting to conceal the aching bitterness in his throat, he said hoarsely, “You died that morning. I flew your ashes back to the Bas Medoc, to Queyrac, and I talked to your mother and father. We were all very sorry that you were gone, none sorrier than me. I loved you very much.” He pushed the erased tape away, until he felt it tap against the coffee cup.

She shivered visibly, and blinked away tears. “Where do I go now?”

Her peace is the important thing here, he told himself wonderingly, not your betrayed love, not your pride. Let her rest in what peace there is to be had. “To your real husband at last, not just to a symbol anymore.” He couldn’t tell if the quaver in his voice was from rage or grief. “I imagine you’ll find the god…in the garden.”

The frown unkinked from Plumtree’s forehead, leaving her sunburned face expressionless; and Cochran closed his eyes and slowly lowered his face into his, hands. He was panting, his breath catching in his throat each time he inhaled, and when he felt hot tears in his palm he realized that he was weeping.

He heard the lifeless voice of Valorie: “O he is even in my mistress’ case, just in her case!” A cold finger touched his cheek. “Stand up, stand up! Stand an you be a man.”

He raised his head and dragged his shirtsleeve across his wet eyes. And then it was recognizably Cody who sat across from him now, blinking at him in bewildered sympathy.

“Sid,” she said. “There’s a car pulling into your driveway.”

He pushed his chair back and stood up. He had left his revolver in the bedroom, and he started down the hall—but then, in the moment before the engine in the driveway was switched off, he recognized the sound of the rumbling exhaust.

He padded barefoot to the front door and squinted through the peephole.

The old Suburban in his driveway was bright blood red. An aura like heat waves was shimmering around it for a distance of about a foot, and the green box hedge on the far side of the driveway shone a brighter green through the aura band.

Pete and Angelica Sullivan were climbing out on this side, and he could see Arky Mavranos getting out from the driver’s side. Kootie’s head was visible in the back seat, “and there was no one else with them.

Cochran unlocked the door and pulled it open, and the ocean-scented breeze was chilly on his wet face.

Pete and Angelica were helping Kootie step down from the back seat, but Mavranos plodded around the front of the truck and up the cobblestone walkway.

“Congratulations,” Mavranos said from the bottom of the porch steps. “You’ve got four houseguests.” He looked over Cochran’s shoulder and smiled tightly, and Cochran realized that Cody must have followed him to the door. “It looks like the trick can still be done—somehow—on new terms that no one’s got a clue about.” His smile broadened, baring his white teeth. “I hope you’re still feeling up for it, girl.”

“Oh, shut up, Arky,” Cody said. She stepped past Cochran, out onto the porch. “Is Kootie hurt?”

“Somebody shot him,” said Mavranos. “Probably your psycho doctor. But the oy’s apparently gonna be okay.”

Cody gave a hiss of concern and hurried down the steps, past Mavranos, to help Pete and Angelica.

IN COCHRAN’S living room Angelica stitched up Kootie’s wound with dental floss from a freshly opened box, Pete kneeling alongside to hand her scissors and cotton, while Mavranos paced back and forth at the front window with his revolver in his and, watching the road. Cochran and Plumtree retreated into the kitchen, where they threw together in a stockpot a big stew of canned clam chowder, crabmeat, chopped green onions, cheap Fume Blanc and curry powder. When it was hot, the aroma apparently convinced everyone that the late breakfast at Seafood Bohemia hadn’t been adequate, and in half an hour all of them, even Mavranos, were sitting around Cochran’s dining-room table mopping the last of the makeshift chowder out of their soup bowls with stale sourdough bread. By unspoken common consent they were all drinking Pellegrino mineral water.

Cochran had to remind himself that these people had treated him rudely—and abused his credit card—and got him into the middle of an actual gunfight, in which people had probably been killed—for he found that he was unthinkingly warmed to have the Sullivans and Kootie and Mavranos come fussing and suffering into his life again, somehow especially after his humiliations with Plumtree and Nina’s ghost. Despite all their bickering and crisis, they always brought with them an urgent, sweaty sense of purpose.

“How long were you people planning to stay here?” Cochran asked now, forcing his voice to be flat and uncompromising. “Overnight?”

Mavranos gave him a bland stare and Pete and Angelica Sullivan looked uneasy, but it was Kootie who answered: “Until the end of the month,” the boy said diffidently. “Until the Vietnamese Tet festival, or maybe the start of the Moslem fast, Ramadan. That’s February the first. Our pendulum—”

“Two weeks?” protested Cochran. “I’ve got a job! I’ve got neighbors! I’ve got—furniture that I don’t need wrecked.”

“It’s not quite two weeks,” said Kootie. “Uh…eleven days.”

“I saw Scott Crane’s skeleton,” said Plumtree. “How is it supposed to work this time? He takes me forever?” She raised her eyebrows. “He takes Kootie forever?”

“Neither, think,” said Kootie. Cochran noticed that the boy didn’t seem happy to be exempted—in fact he looked haunted and sick. “I don’t know—we have to ask Mammy Pleasant. She’s the old black lady from the TV.”

Angelica snorted. “She’s been no help up to now.”

“Maybe Crane will just…materialize a body,” ventured Plumtree.

“No,” said Pete, “where will he get stuff from? He’ll need protoplasm, like a hundred and sixty or so pounds of it!”

“Edison conjured up a sort of body,” said. Kootie quietly, “a mask, at least, when he took me over, in ’92; he used the flesh of a dog I was friends with. I’ve dreamed of it, since. In one second, Fred—the dog—was suddenly just a bloody skeleton, and Edison had a flesh head and hands of his own, and even a furry black overcoat.” He gulped some of the mineral water. “But the flesh was killed in the rearrangement. I’m sure it just rotted, after we shed it.”

Jesus, thought Cochran.

Angelica nodded. “So he’ll not only need protoplasm, but unkilled protoplasm. Are we supposed to bring some homeless guy along? A bunch of dogs?”

“Pigs are supposed to be very like humans, physically,” said Plumtree. “Maybe we should bring a couple of good-size pigs.”

Mavranos was pale, and looked as though he wanted to spit. “Kootie talked to old Pleasant today. Her ghost, but in person, not on a TV. She’s apparently sort of an indentured servant, or prisoner serving out hard-labor time, of Dionysus, and she’s—and the god is too—trying to help us. Apparently. She gave Kootie a message for Crane, some kind of summons and commandment, and it’s in the form of a Latin palindrome. I don’t like that, ‘cause it’s ghosts that are drawn to palindromes, and Crane’s ghost is a naked imbecile running around at the Sutro ruins.”

“Is it the Latin thing I burned up the matchbook with,” asked Cochran, “in the motel room? And there was another Latin bit that Cody and I saw, on an ashtray in L.A. I don’t remember what it was.”

Mavranos hiked his chair back to dig a car registration slip out of his jeans pocket. He unfolded it, and read:

“Roma, tibi subito motibus ibit Amor.

Si bene te tua laus taxat, sua laute tenebis.

Sole, medere pede: ede, perede melos.”

“That first line is definitely the thing that was on the ashtray in L.A.,” said Plumtree.

Cochran could feel hairs stirring on the back of his neck. “After I read that line out loud, there, Crane’s ghost showed up as our taxi driver. And after I read out the second one, in the Sutro ruins, his crazy naked ghost appeared there.”

“Don’t speak the third one now,” said Mavranos. “A naked guy banging around in your kitchen would only upset the ladies. Wouldn’t do me any good, either, seeing a semblance of my old friend in that totally bankruptious state.” He sighed, then glared at Cochran. “Okay if I use your phone? I should see if Nardie’s got the damn thing translated.”

“There’s a speakerphone in the kitchen,” Cochran said. “Talk to her on that, so we can all hear it.”

IN THE sunny kitchen, Cochran and Plumtree resumed their seats at the table, while Pete and Angelica leaned on the counter by the sink. Kootie slumped into a third chair, but looked at the counter as if he’d have liked to climb up on it if he hadn’t had fresh stitches in his side. Cochran recalled that Kootie had sat up on a washing machine when they had tried to call Crane’s ghost in Solville, and he wondered why the boy wanted to be distanced from the ground when important calls were being made.

Mavranos had walked straight to the telephone on the wall and punched in the eleven digits of the long-distance number, and now tapped the speakerphone button.

“Hello?” came a young woman’s cautious voice out of the speaker; Cochran had seldom used the speakerphone function, and he now reflected ruefully that the sound wasn’t as good as what Kootie’s chalk-in-the-pencil-sharpener speaker had produced.

“Arky here, Nardie,” said Mavranos, “with all the king’s horses and all the king’s men listening in. Whaddaya got?”

“Okay, your three palindromes are a pentameter followed by a hexameter followed by a pentameter,” said the woman called Nardie. “That’s a natural alternation in Roman lyric verse, like in Horace and Catullus. This could be very damned old, you know? And the lines do seem to relate to your—our—situation. You got a pencil?”

Mavranos pulled open a drawer under the telephone and pawed through it. “Yes,” he said, fumbling out an eyeliner pencil and Cochran’s January gas bill.

“Okay,” said Nardie’s voice from the speaker, “Roma, with a comma after it, is in the vocative case, addressing Rome, which our context pretty clearly makes ‘spiritual power on Earth; like a rogue version of the Vatican, okay? Tibi subito is ‘to you, suddenly, abruptly.’ Motibus is in the ablative case, indicating in what manner, so it means something like ‘with dancing motion,’ though Cicero uses it in the phrase motus terrae, which means an earthquake.”

“You told me motibus was ‘motor bus,’” Plumtree whispered to Cochran. She seemed relieved.

He nodded tightly and waved at her to be quiet.

“Ibit.” Nardie was saying, “is the third-person future tense of ‘to go’ Of course amor is ‘love,’ but the capital A makes me think it’s a person, like some god of love; and in this suddenness-and-earthquake context very likely a harsh one.”

Cochran was thinking of the god who had awakened him with an apparent earthquake in the Troy and Cress Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas nearly five years ago, and of Nina, who had preferred that god’s fatal love to his own.

“In the second line,” Nardie went on, “taxat is a first-declension verb, taxo, tax-are, meaning ‘hold, value, esteem.’ Literally, it’s ‘if your praise values you well; but in English that’d be ‘if you value your praise well.’ Sua is a possessive pronoun—it has to be in the nominative case, though I’d have liked suam better; anyway, it’s feminine, agreeing with the feminine laus, which is ‘praise’ or ‘fame.’ I think ‘your fame’ here is supposed to be actually, literally feminine in relation to this Amor person, who is fairly emphatically masculine. Laute is ‘gloriously.’ Tenebis is a second-declension verb: ‘to hold, to arrive at.’”

Mavranos was impatiently waving the eyeliner pencil in front of his face. “Nardie, what does the goddamn thing mean?”

A shaky sigh buzzed out of the speaker. “I’m explaining why I think it means what I’m gonna tell you, Arky, okay? Now listen, the last line really does flicker between alternate readings; I just finished untangling this a few minutes ago. Sole, with a comma after it, is like Roma in the first line, it has to be the vocative of sol, direct address for ‘sun,’ as in ‘O Sun.’ Medere is an infinitive or a gerund—or, as we’ve got here, an imperative—of ‘cure, remedy’; it’s not so much ‘to cure’ or ‘curing’ as it is an order, see—‘fix it!’ or ‘remedy it!’ Rede is ‘louse,’ the singular noun, as in Pliny’s use pediculus or the English word ‘pediculosis,’ which means an infestation of lice. Now the verb Ede is very interesting here; it’s either from edo, edere, edi, esum, which ‘is the usual Latin verb for ‘devour, consume, eat away’—or else it’s another verb, edo, edere, edidi, editum, which means ‘breathe one’s last, bring to an end,’ or at the same time ‘give birth to,’ or ‘give forth from oneself.’ Either verb works here, though the long e imposed by the trochaic meter makes me favor the second one. Perede is lemphasis, emphatic repetition of the previous verb, whichever that is. And melos is generally translated as ‘song,’ but it’s a Latinized Greek word—obviously, from the suffix, right?—and the Greek for melos can also be ‘limb.’ As a Latin word it could be either nominative or accusative here, but with the Greek form it’s got to be accusative, a direct object.”

“What,” said Mavranos, speaking with exaggerated clarity, “does—the-damn-thing-mean?”

“Okay. In my interpretation, it means: ‘O spiritual power on Earth, the god of love will come to you suddenly and abruptly,’ either ‘with dancing movements’ or ‘as an earthquake’—or as both, conceivably. ‘If you value your praise highly you will hold it’—or ‘arrive at it’—‘gloriously. O Sun, remedy the louse: give forth from yourself, and give forth from yourself again, your limb.’ And with the confusion of the two edo verbs, there’s the implication of ‘your devoured limb:’”

“Leave the suicide king in the deck,” said Plumtree.

Mavranos frowned at her, but nodded. “I think I tried to tell Scott that, when we went to Northridge after the earthquake a year ago. The subterranean phylloxera lice were a summons from…under sanctified ground.”

“He never could bear to cut back the grapevines, in the midwinter,” said Nardie’s voice from the speaker, “after that first year. Even when the babies started to get fevers and pulmonary infections in the winters, and he had to eat No-Doz all day long, and his fingernails bled.” There was a pause while she might have shrugged. “He was still strong in the summers.”

Cochran was remembering putting out his hand to keep the face in the stump from being beheaded. “What we do next,” he said, glancing at everyone but finally fixing his gaze on Angelica, “is what?”

Angelica gave him a tired smile. “Thank you for the we,” she said. “We won’t ask you for your gun again. What we do next,” she said, stepping away from the counter and stretching, “can’t be anything else but summon Kootie’s silly old black lady, I guess.” She dropped her arms and looked at Plumtree. “We’ve got to talk to her in person.”

“In this person, you mean,” said Plumtree, though only in a tone of tired resignation. “Jeez, if my own genetic father, imposed on me, gives me toothaches and nosebleeds, God knows what this strange old woman will be like.”

“No,” said Kootie, “your father never died, but Mammy Pleasant did. She’s a ghost. When Edison had possession of me, there was nothing like that afterward. Ghosts don’t have the, the psychic DNA of a body anymore, they’ve got no vital structure to impose on the living body that hosts them.”

“Cool,” sighed Plumtree. “Not really my idea of a fun date anyway, to tell you the truth, but I guess that’s neither here nor there.” She stood up from the table. “Tell me what I’ve got to do.”

“I’m Bernardette Dinh,” came the voice from the speaker, “at the king’s overthrown Camelot in Leucadia.”

“I’m Janis Cordelia Plumtree, and my compadre here is Sid Cochran. I hope we can all meet in person one day, in the presence of the king.”

“Back in Solville,” said Kootie hesitantly, “Mammy Pleasant told us, ‘eat the seeds of my trees.’”

Angelica now reached into the pocket of her denim jacket and pulled out a fistful of what looked like angular gray acorns. She dropped them onto the kitchen table, and their rattling was nothing like bar dice. “We picked these up this morning, at the foot—sorry, at the waist—of one of her suffering trees. Koala bears eat this stuff, so it’s probably not poison,” she said. “I figure we can make an infusion in wine, with some of ’em, and grind up some others to mix with flour and make bread.”