Angelica spoke up in answer, angrily. “Of course it’s true! If Kootie could revive the dead king, do you think he wouldn’t have done it?”
After staring at Kootie for another second or two, Plumtree turned a tired smile on Angelica. “No, lady,” she said quietly.
Mavranos swiveled his bleak gaze to Angelica. “Now I know how you feel,” he said hoarsely, “delivering the bad news to people.” He cleared his throat, but when he spoke again his voice was still as gritty as boot soles on sandstone: “I think Miss Plumtree’s plan might work.”
Angelica was visibly tense. “Who is that bad news for?”
“You all, goddammit. You and Pete and Kootie. Shit. What Diana and I meant to do by coming here was to confer the kinghood onto the man with the bleeding wound in his side. That office, the kinghood, would have carried with it a lot of protections—Miss Plumtree can tell you again how much work she had to do to get through the defenses to Crane. But—if Crane can be revived, even though he’s dormant and powerless right now, then Kootie doesn’t become the king after all. There are no protections. And you people are fatally compromised—you’ve invited us in, you’ve voluntarily taken the dead king’s very body in, given it shelter and respect! You’ve eaten bread and drunk wine in his corpse’s presence, you’ve declared allegiance and fealty to his reign, like it or not. The bad guys know your address, this bad psychiatrist and—” He glanced at Plumtree, “—and other villains. And they won’t let you live, you all being sworn-in soldiers in the routed side’s army now, and knowing what you know. These two,” he said, waving at Plumtree and Cochran, “found you tonight—hell, their taxi driver found you. And old Spider Joe had no problem, apparently, and he’s blind. By morning you may have armored assault vehicles pulling up out front. You’ve blown your mask-gaskets by letting us in, and I don’t even think you could run and hide somewhere else, now, and stay effectively hidden for long.”
Angelica had stood up from the couch during this, and paced to the kitchen doorway and back. “Then anoint Kootie,” she said. “Make Kootie the king, as you originally planned. We’ll have the protections of the true living king then.”
Mavranos reached up to the side and laid the revolver on the bookshelf beside the inert stuffed pig, and he wiped the palm of his hand on his jeans. “I deliberately killed a man once, at Hoover Dam, to protect my friends, and it has weighed cruel hard on me ever since. I won’t—I won’t kill a living person to protect a dead man; especially a living person I’ve become indebted to. You can march into the kitchen there and, I don’t know, chop Scott’s head off with a carving knife, if you like. I won’t shoot you, Angelica. Kootie would become king then, even without the blessings of me and Diana, which it would damn sure be without. But Kootie will have become king by being an accessory to the murder of his predecessor … as, in fact, most of the previous kings have done. And his will be—trust me!—a reign poisoned at its root.”
Cochran thought of the phylloxera lice, killing the sunny grapevines from the darkness six feet under.
“I … won’t do that,” said Kootie softly.
“Then I take back our invitation!” shouted Angelica. “I hereby annul it! I never invited you in, and all we did for your damned king was lay him out on the kitchen table! Pete and Kootie will carry him right back out to your abracadabra truck—and you can wipe your fingerprints off the doorknobs and take your kids and your toothbrushes and get out of here—take a broom with you and sweep your footsteps off the walkway as you leave!” She looked at Pete and lifted her open hand, and caught the little bottle of Vete de Aquí oil that he obediently tossed across the room to her.
“Go,” said Plumtree with a giddy wave, “and never darken our towels again.”
Mavranos smiled sadly at Angelica. “You took my forty-nine cents, that first day.”
“Cheerfully refunded!” Angelica stamped to the desk, pulled open the top drawer, and pawed through a pile of scattered change. Then she turned and threw seven coins at Mavranos.
The coins tumbled to a Wiffle-ball halt in mid-air; and they seemed to pop there, silently, like big grains of puffed rice; and then they fluttered away on dusty white wings toward the dripping ceiling.
Cochran watched them, and cold air on his teeth made him aware that his mouth was hanging open. The coins had turned into live luna moths, and a chilly draft had sprung up in the room.
Angelica was panting audibly as she dug seven more coins out of the drawer, and she flung them too toward Mavranos.
Again the coins dragged to a halt in mid-air, and twitched and puffed out in the moment that they hung suspended, and became live white moths that fluttered away in all directions. The long office room was cold now.
Pete stepped forward then, and he caught Angelica’s wrist as she was scrabbling in the drawer for more coins; and she collapsed against him, sobbing. “Why did you people have to … come here?” she wailed, her hot breath steaming in the chilly air.
Mavranos spread his hands. “Why did Kootie have to be the one with the qualifications, the unhealing cut in his side?”
Blind Spider Joe held up two of Angelica’s Lotería cards; Cochran leaned forward to peer at them, and saw that they were a pair, two copies of a picture of a woman in a narrow canoe, labeled LA CHALUPA.
“Nobody’s brailled these cards for me,” the old man said irritably. “What are these?”
“They’re both the same,” said Kootie. “A lady in a little boat. She’s got, uh, baskets of fruit and flowers by her knees, jammed in the bow.”
“Two boats,” Spider Joe said. “You were in a boat on a boat, a boat aboard a boat, when you got wounded, boy, isn’t that right? And you had a guide who protected you through the ordeal, somebody like Merlin, or Virgil who escorted Dante through the Inferno. That was a rite de passage—he didn’t just save you, he saved you for something. That’s when you swung around to point here, to this.”
“When my side got cut?” said Kootie. “Not boats—I was in a van that some bad guys had driven up inside a truck, on Slauson, by the L.A. trainyards. I was being kidnapped. And the ghost of Thomas Edison saved my life.”
“And you had been prepped,” Spider Joe went on, “like a piece of amber rubbed with a cloth, charged—fasting and observances as a child, that’s obvious, and then you were violently severed from that life, and then you must certainly have renounced your name and your race; and you were a passenger, helpless. And what’s a little charged boat floating aboard a boat?” asked Spider Joe. “It’s a compass. You’ve got to get to the boats now, point north, find a new Merlin or Virgil—or Edison. An intercessor.”
Pete Sullivan was squinting at the old man, and now he looked at Mavranos. “You know this old guy, Arky. Is there value in this?”
Mavranos opened his mouth and closed it, and shrugged. “He seemed to give Crane some good advice, before the big poker game on the houseboat on Lake Mead.”
“It sounds like the old black lady’s boat, her pirogi,” said Diana. She glanced at Angelica. “Do you still think she was just a … random ghost drawn by your telephone?”
“This is the blind leading the blind,” Angelica said.
Cochran stood up, though he had to lean on the desk, and he crossed his arms to hide the foolish writing on his T-shirt. “You tried to get your man Crane on the phone, and he wasn’t there,” he said. “North, says the, the oracular Mr. Spider Joe here; and you said that TV signal originated in San Francisco, and the old black lady’s ghost was talking about San Francisco—obviously she was talking about the 1906 earthquake and fire, and she said ‘Yerba Buena burning,’ and Yerba Buena isn’t just the Spanish term for mint, it was the original name for San Francisco, because of all the wild mint that used to grow on the north-shore dunes there. Your very house leaks because it’s raining in San Jose, which is next door to San Francisco. And she said, ‘You all need to come here, and I’ll guide your boats,’ remember?” And back up in the Bay Area, he thought yearningly, I can get
my bearings, get to my house and get some clothes, pick up a paycheck, talk to my lawyer. “For all sorts of reasons, none of us wants Crane to just keep Janis’s body. We all have a stake in him getting his own back.” Or, better, him just going untraceably away, he added to himself. “And Mr. Mavranos points out that we can’t stay here. If we all leave now, we can be at the Cliff House in San Francisco for breakfast.”
“To the boats,” said Plumtree gaily.
CHAPTER 11
PANDARUS: … Is it not birth, beauty, good shape, discourse, manhood, learning, gentleness, virtue, youth, liberality, and such like, the spice and salt that season a man?
CRESSIDA: Ay, a minced man; and then to be baked with no date in the pie, for then the man’s date is out.
—William Shakespeare,
Troilus and Cressida
AS JOHANNA WAS BANGING around in the reeking steamy kitchen, insistently making snacks to sustain the travellers during the proposed long drive, Archimedes Mavranos was standing in the middle of the office floor and giving orders. He had taken his revolver down from the shelf again, and with his finger outside the trigger guard was now slapping his thigh with the barrel to emphasize his points.
“Diana,” he said, “you take one of the Sullivans’ cars and go back to Leucadia with the boys—Nardie and Wendy will be tired of taking care of all the young’uns by themselves. Mr. King-Arthur’s-Shorts and Miss Plumtree can sit up in the front seat of the truck with me, and Kootie and Pete and Angelica can sit in the back seat, with Angelica holding—”
“Kootie certainly won’t go along,” interrupted Angelica, who had sat down on the couch and crossed her arms. “And Pete and I aren’t cowards, but I don’t see why we should go along either.” She blinked around belligerently. “And you can’t take one of our cars. Pete or I can drive Diana and the boys back to Leucadia.”
“I thank you for the offer,” said the woman Cochran had begun to think of as the cue-ball madonna, “but we’ll take a bus. I would be honored to die with you, Angelica, if it were necessary, but I wouldn’t let my boys or my unborn baby go anywhere with someone who was targeted to die.”
Angelica drummed her fingers on the arm of the couch. “Why,” she asked Mavranos, “would you even think of bringing a fourteen-year-old boy?” One of the moths fluttered past her face, and she waved it away impatiently.
“He’s more than that, Angelica,” Mavranos said. “He’s an apprentice king—no, a journeyman king; he can see and sense things we can’t. And if we fail, he’s the king—he should be up to speed for that, be able to land running. And I’ll tell you another bit of bad truth, I’m not at all sure that this restoration-to-life will work, without him.”
“Meaning what?” Angelica demanded.
“I don’t know at all what it means,” said Mavranos, baring his teeth. “But he’s here, he’s empowered, as you shrinks like to say. He’s a uniquely potent soldier in the king’s meager army.” He shrugged. “But, if the boy doesn’t want to go, I certainly won’t try to compel him.”
Cochran couldn’t help sneaking a sidelong glance at Kootie.
The boy was frowning and holding his wounded side. “My mom and dad will die if this doesn’t succeed,” he said carefully.
Angelica leaped lithely to her feet. “Kootie, that’s not—”
“Or hide real damn low,” assented Mavranos. “Moving frequently, not keeping souvenirs. For the rest of their lives.”
“What have we been doing but hiding real damn low?” Pete said to Kootie. “The cops have been looking for us since ’92, and for your mom since before that. Kootie, we don’t—”
“Well what about him?” Mavranos said, turning to face Pete Sullivan. “Kootie himself? He was brought up to be king, groomed for it—by the plain universe, apparently, if not by any specific person. Weren’t you listening to Spider Joe at all? Even if Kootie never gets to take the crown, the ambitious guys will want him dead, like a valid pretender, and his is a soul they’ll want to eat; they’ll want it bad. You think he can keep his belt and his watchband Möbiused all his life, one edge and one side, get along forever with half his strength?”
“I will go with them,” said Kootie. He had picked up the bottle of Mondavi Chardonnay from the back corner of the desk, and now refilled his gold fish-cup. He smiled at Angelica. “And I won’t insult you and dad by asking whether or not you’ll come along.”
The bald woman’s lower lip was pulled away from her teeth in what might have been profound relief or pity, or both; and she hurried into the kitchen and came back with a ratty pale-yellow baby blanket. “Kootie,” she said hoarsely, “this belonged to my mother, who was … such a successful avatar of the Moon Goddess that she was killed for it in 1960, at the order of Scott’s natural father, when he was king. Spider Joe could tell you about it. Carry it with you, and she’ll help you do … whatever it might be that you have to do.”
Kootie started to say something, then wordlessly took the little blanket and began slowly folding it.
“Okay,” said Mavranos. “Good. We’ll have Crane’s body in the back of the truck, like under a tarp, and Angelica will be sitting just forward of that, in the back seat, with a gun: Miss Plumtree is our tool for restoring Crane, but at the same time she’s a potential Trojan Horse, she contains the man that killed him—so Angelica has to be ready to shoot her if her father should take over and try to mess things up.”
Plumtree was nodding absently, shaking a cigarette out of a pack from her purse.
“If I shoot her,” noted Angelica shakily, “she won’t be much use in restoring Crane.”
“You might not kill her,” said Mavranos.
“And even if you did,” put in Kootie, who seemed tensely distracted as he tucked the folded-up baby blanket into his hip pocket, “we might find another way.”
Angelica opened her mouth as if to demand an explanation of that, but Cochran overrode her. “She!—came here voluntarily!” he said loudly. His face was hot, and he was trying not to stutter. “At some peril to herself.” He turned to stare into Angelica’s hostile brown eyes. “You’re Spanish,” he said breathlessly. “Okay, that counts. But I’m Irish. If you decide to kill her, or hurt her, you’d be smart to kill me first.”
“Noted,” said Mavranos stolidly. “Joe, do you need a ride anywhere that’s along the 101 north? We won’t want to take a route that strays too far inland—I think proximity to the sea is part of what’s been sustaining Crane’s corpse.” He grinned at Angelica. “Along with Apollo and Afro-Dydee, natch.” He stared toward where Spider Joe sat on the floor beside the couch, then turned to Pete.
“The, uh, ‘beasties,’ ” Mavranos went on. “Those strange dead guys that you had stacked in your trashed old van last week—we’re gonna have to delay long enough to rip up the turf again over where we planted ’em.”
Pete Sullivan frowned with evident distaste. “What the hell for? I let all the air out of the old Chevy Nova’s tires after we parked it over them; and those were old tires, they might not take air again.”
“All of us together can push it,” said Mavranos softly, “even on a flat or two.” He had been steadily slapping his thigh with the gun barrel, and now he struck himself hard enough with it to make Cochran wince. “Shit,” Mavranos said in an almost conversational tone. “The thing is, Pete, we gotta … well, a Dumpster in back of some gas station wouldn’t be right; we do owe Spider Joe a burial.”
Cochran watched everybody else turn to stare toward the couch before he looked away from Mavranos’s stony face.
Spider Joe’s head was rolled back, and above his slightly opened mouth the sightless eye sockets gaped at the ceiling; and the metal filaments that stood out from his belt were bent double, folded back across his khaki shirt like a dozen crossed fencing foils.
“He did traverse afar,” said Mavranos, “to bring his gifts to the king—to return those two silver dollars.”
“Poor old fucker,” said Plumtree quietly. “You got lots o
f dead guys around here, huh.”
For a long moment the dripping in the pans was the only sound. Cochran’s teeth ached with the desire to be away from this building.
“Go with my blessings, Spider Joe,” said Kootie softly, “whoever I may be in this.”
After a pause, “His wife was the one who lured my mother to her death,” said Diana. “I wonder if I—” She shook her head. “His last words,” she went on, “were, ‘Get to the boats, point north, find a new Merlin or Virgil or Edison. An intercessor.’ ” She had been rubbing her eyes as she spoke, and now looked tiredly around at the others in the steamy, smoky room; drops of water fell from the ceiling and plunked in idiot drumming into the various pots, and the moths were bumping against the shade of the lamp on the desk. “An intercessor is for dealing with somebody else—a person more powerful. Who,” she asked, “do you imagine that person would be?”
“Wake up and smell the Kahlua,” said Mavranos. “That person would be nobody else but Dionysus.”
“Ah, God,” said Angelica softly. “I was really hoping it wouldn’t be. I didn’t want this to involve the Bay Area—that country’s all … vineyards.”
The word vineyards caroled in Cochran’s head, echoed by the syllables of Vignes; and insistent memories flooded his mind—of the pre-dawn rolling clatter of the stainless-steel Howard winepress cylinder during the October crush, always run before daylight to elude las moscas, the flies and bees and whatever influences they might carry into the wine; of the fresh, sharp smell of new wine fermenting in a two-hundred-gallon redwood tank when he would pump the awakening juice over the cap of grape skins, the new-born red vintage splashing and spurting out of the hose and flinging up spray; and of the cathedral silence in the eight-foot-wide lanes between the vines, roofless holy aisles carpeted with yellow mustard-weed flowers in the spring, plowed under in the fall and sown with the yeast-rich pomace of spent grape skins to assure continuity of benevolent wild-yeast strains on the skins of the next season’s grapes.