“Poor old Death sounds like the bad witch in Sleeping Beauty,” said Mavranos. “Pissed off because she was the only one not invited to the christening.”
“You haven’t … been there, Arky. Death isn’t a … it doesn’t embody a characteristic that shows up in humans, the way the others do, so you can’t relate to it at all. There’s no common ground. It has no face—and I can’t just arbitrarily assign the face of, say, poor Susan to it, ’cause that was just my own personal closest death mirrored back at me; anybody else there would have seen some face from their past.” He coughed weakly and shook his head. “In the court of the tarot archetypes, Death’s just a blobby black hole in the floor.”
Mavranos had taken a deep breath then—and he wondered if he could bring himself to say what he thought he had to say here, for Scott Crane was his closest friend, and Mavranos was godfather of Scott and Diana’s first child—but he made himself say it: “Seems to me there is … one face you could put on Death.”
Crane sat there on the air conditioner and stared at the dead grass and didn’t speak, and Mavranos wondered if he had heard him. Then Crane shifted, and coughed again. “You mean the fat man in the desert,” he said softly. “My father’s bodyguard, my father’s emotionless hired assassin. And I killed him, in cold blood—the first shot was in self-defense, to save you as much as me, but he was still alive after that. The last five shots, when he was lying in the gully below the road, were to make sure he didn’t wind up recovering in a hospital.”
Mavranos nodded, though Crane couldn’t see the gesture. The fat man had at some time become a localized embodiment of one of the oldest, possibly pre-human archetypes, a cold figure of almost Newtonian retribution which showed up spontaneously in desert swap-meet legendry and country-western songs and insane-asylum artwork and even, as a repeating obese silhouette, in certain iterative mathematical equations on the complex number plane. Diana’s mother had been an avatar of the Moon Goddess, and the fat man had killed her outside the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas—“shot the moon in the face”—when Diana had been an infant, in 1960. Mavranos had not been sorry when Crane had killed the fat man, but that homicide was surely Crane’s letter of introduction, his indenture, to the kingdom of death.
“No,” said Crane finally. “It can’t be done. It doesn’t need to be done.”
Mavranos had thought of reminding him of the phylloxera, had considered mentioning the many species of tropical fish that had recently stopped being born with any distinct sexes, and the rapid decline in the sperm count of modern male humans—even the slow, progressive collapse of Hollywood Boulevard down into the catacombs being dug for the MTA Metro Rail—but at that point an unkempt middle-aged couple and their two blank-eyed children had come shuffling up through the brown grass to where the bearded king sat, and had hesitantly asked Scott if everything was going to be okay. They were living in their car, they told him, and had hung curtains in the windows, and were wondering if they shouldn’t simply keep living in those cozy quarters forever, even after the houses had been put back up again.
Scott had wearily told them that he would do what he could; and they had showed no surprise, only sympathetic gratitude, when Scott had pushed his own wrist down onto the jagged piece of metal and then held out his hand so that his blood dripped rapidly onto the dry dirt.
Mavranos had muttered a panicky curse and sprinted to the nearby truck for the first-aid kit. And he had noted bleakly, after he had tied a bandage around Scott’s wrist and helped him up for the walk back to the truck, that no flowers had sprung up from where the king’s blood had fallen.
It’s what Nardie Dinh calls the Law of Imperative Resemblance,” said Mavranos to Angelica and Pete now.
Fog was beginning to roll in off the ocean, and Mavranos knew that it would be getting worse as the night wore on toward dawn and their route led them inland at Gaviota; maybe he’d get Pete to drive for a while. “There are eternal potent forms out there,” Mavranos went on, “idiosyncratic outlines, and if you take on enough characteristics of one of the forms, if you come to resemble it closely enough, knowingly or not, you find that you’re wearing the whole damned outfit—you’ve become the thing. It arrives upon you.”
“Like critical mass,” said Kootie sleepily, rocking on the passenger seat.
“Well, hijo mío,” said Angelica sternly to the boy as she went on loading her .45 magazines, “you’re not going to be taking communion at this Mass.”
CHAPTER 13
The bay trees in our country are all withered,
And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven,
The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth,
And lean-looked prophets whisper fearful change;
Rich men look sad, and ruffians dance and leap,
The one in fear to lose what they enjoy,
The other to enjoy by rage and war.
These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.
—William Shakespeare,
Richard II
BERNARDETTE DINH, KNOWN AS Nardie to her few close friends, was perched crouched on a dead peach-tree limb, staring down the flagstone steps that led away between rows of dead grapevines to the beach and the dawn-gray sea. Five years ago she had got into the habit of climbing a tree when she was very scared or disoriented, and during these last eleven days she must have spent nearly a full day’s worth of hours up in the branches of this or that dead carob or apple or avocado tree in different corners of the Fisher King’s Leucadia estate, in the periods when she could get Wendy to keep an eye on the kids.
Twenty years ago, when Nardie had arrived at Clark Air Base in Manila on the rainy morning of April 29 in 1975, airport personnel and travellers alike had exclaimed over her and the other passengers that got off the plane with her: Oh, thank God you’re safe! She had then learned that the Saigon airport had been heavily shelled at 5 A.M., just four hours after her plane had taken off; but rockets had been shelling Saigon for two months before her American father had got her a ticket, and for the whole ten years of her life to that point, as she recalled it now, there had always been the background noise of planes and bombings. Her luggage had been mailed ahead, but never did show up anywhere—when she finally arrived at Camp Pendleton in Southern California, all she had had was the clothes she’d been wearing and the cellophane-thin sheets of gold leaf her father had managed to stuff into her pockets.
California had been bewildering, even with the help of other immigrant Vietnamese; Here the poor eat beef every day, she had been told, and the rich people are all vegetarians. And when her new American half-brother had taken her to a modern shopping center in Costa Mesa, the thing that had most struck her had been the pennies and nickels and even quarters scattered in the pool around an indoor fountain; she had struggled with the two ideas of it: that people had tossed the coins in there, and that other people didn’t climb in to get them out.
Nardie was thirty now—but since the first of this month, when Scott’s dead body had been found in the canted meadow down here between the house and the beach, she had been dreaming of those days again. But the fountains in her dreams were dry and bare, and the rockets came plummeting out of the night sky before the airliner she was in could take off.
The last time Nardie had seen Scott Crane alive, he had been trudging away barefoot down these flagstone steps to rescue his four-year-old son, Benjamin; Scott had got some kind of formal threatening challenge over the telephone only ten minutes earlier, and when he had hastily awakened and summoned to the atrium everybody that lived here at the compound—Arky and Wendy and their two teenage daughters, and Diana’s two teenage sons by her first marriage, and Nardie herself, and Diana and the four young children she and Scott had had together—Benjamin had proved to be missing, and the three-year-old girl had said that a black crow had flapped down onto Benjamin’s bedroom windowsill and told the boy that a magical woman in the meadow needed to see him right away.
It was a woman, on the ph
one just now, Scott had told Nardie and Arky and Diana in the kitchen as he’d pulled off his shoes and tugged his still-dark-brown hair out of the rubber-banded ponytail and let it fall loose onto his shoulders; she claimed to have spoken to the ghost of my first wife, Susan, who was the embodiment of Death in the Las Vegas desert five years ago; and she knows I was called the Flying Nun in the big game on Lake Mead, and she said she was going to “assume the Flamingo,” which must mean that she’s some “jack,” some rival, from the game five years ago, when the Flamingo Hotel was still the king’s bunker-castle. I told her that it had been torn down, but I guess she’s got a piece of the physical building—and that would be a potent … charm, talisman. She must have a lot of other things, too, protections and masks and even maybe a tethered ghost or two, to have got in here past our wards without showing up as a consistent, solid intruder. And we have to assume that she’s got Benjamin now. I’ve got to go meet her alone, or it’s too likely that she’ll kill him.
Arky Mavranos had tried to insist that it was his own clear duty to go and rescue the child—I’m Benjamin’s godfather, Scott, he had said forcefully, and I’m not wounded.
Scott Crane had refused to let Arky go, and had then had to flatly forbid the man’s offers of “armed back-up support, at least.”
And so Scott had gone padding down that set of steps alone, to the tilted meadow below the house … and a few minutes later Benjamin had come running back, sobbing about a woman who had knocked him down and held a spear to his throat, and who had changed into a man. Daddy stayed to talk to the man, the boy had said. It’s a very bad man.
At that moment the pans had begun rattling in the cupboards, and the overhead light had begun swinging on its chain.
Arky Mavranos and Diana had simply bolted outside then, and skipped and hopped down the shaking steps after Scott … and by the time they had got to the slanting meadow, the earthquake had stopped, leaving only smokelike clouds of raised dust hanging over the cliffs to mark its passage, and they had found Scott’s supine body on the grass, speared through the throat.
They had half-carried and half-dragged the body back across the meadow to the steps before going to get Nardie to help carry, and apparently blood had fallen copiously from Scott’s torn throat, like holy water shaken from a Catholic priest’s aspergillum—
—And, from every point where the blood drops had hit the grass, a spreading network of flowers and vines had violently erupted up out of the soil in a ripping spray of fragmenting dirt clods, as if in some kind of horticultural aftershocks—so that Arky and Diana had in effect been shuffling along at the advancing, upthrusting edge of a dense thicket of vibrant grape and ivy and pomegranate. An hour later Nardie had seen a couple of uniformed police officers escorting a blond woman around the edge of the newly overgrown meadow, but they had gone away again without even ringing the bell at the outer gate.
Mavranos had lifted Crane’s body into the back of the—tragically, prematurely!—red truck, in preparation for driving away with Diana to search in the north for another man who would have an unhealing wound in his side: the man whom they would acknowledge and bless as the next Fisher King.
Nardie had given Mavranos a baseball-sized white stone statue of Tan Tai, the Vietnamese god of prosperity, to put on the truck’s dashboard; and only after the truck had gone creaking and rattling away down Neptune Avenue did she recall that her half-brother had given her one very like it, back in the brightly familial days before he had tried to break her spirit and mind to further his own bitter Fisher Kinghood ambitions. Arky Mavranos had had to kill her half-brother eventually, at Hoover Dam during the terrible Holy Week in 1990—Nardie hoped now that her gift had not been an unwitting expression of some lingering subconscious resentment. She had never … blamed poor, staunch Arky for the death of her only blood sibling.
All the magical new plants had wilted and withered during the following week, along with all the other plantings on the whole sprawling estate; and now the grounds were drifted with dry leaves—among which, if she looked closely, she could discern husks of perished bees and the stiffened, lifeless forms of the million earthworms that had come corkscrewing up out of the ground on that morning—and Nardie could only hope that a new good king would somehow be appointed before the Tet celebration at the end of the month.
Crane had kept a rose garden near the house, and when all the red petals had fallen to the brick pavement last week, they had looked to Nardie like the exploded scraps of firecracker paper that used to litter the Saigon pavements on Tet Nguyen Dan, the festival of the first day of the Vietnamese New Year. She had put a photograph of Scott Crane on her Tet altar, and now she whispered a prayer to the Kitchen God, a humble entreaty for, somehow, prosperity and health for her friends during this disastrous new year.
All she could see ahead of her, in the notch between the brown grapevines, was a triangle of the distant gray sea … but now she heard the scuffle of someone, possibly several people, climbing the cement stairs that led up the sloping cliff from the beach sand to the slanting meadow. Nardie watched the flagstone steps, but the visitors were probably just more of the white-clay dancers, come to solemnly jump rope with trimmed lengths of kelp for a while in the blighted meadow below the steps—though generally the unspeaking white figures kept that softly drumming vigil at the end of the day, when the red sun was disappearing below the remote western horizon.
At her back she could often hear the cars of the crazy local teenagers racing up the street, and she heard at least one screeching past now, and heard too the pop-pop-pop of automatic weapons fire. In this last week and a half she had sensed a kind of vigilant protection in their constant racket, but an impatience too. Absently, Nardie touched the angular weight in her sweater pocket that was her ten-ounce Beretta .25 automatic.
The dry leaves on the peach-tree branches rattled in the chilly wind from the sea, and Nardie caught the familiar wild strains of the music from the beach. Arky had telephoned the Leucadia estate several times from pay phones, and he had laughed once—dryly—when she had described the music to him, and he had told her the name of the constantly repeated song: “Candles in the Wind,” by somebody called Melanie. Apparently the disattached people near where the killed king was were spontaneously playing the same song as were the disattached people near the king’s broken castle. Nardie wondered if the ones near wherever the killed king was had covered themselves with white mud, too.
Definitely there was more than one person in the meadow—Nardie could hear excited voices.
The white-clay dancers had never spoken.
Silently Nardie swung down from the branch, and her tennis shoes crackled only faintly in the dry grass as she landed and then stole to the top of the steps and looked down.
At the edge of the new wilderness of dead vines in the meadow, by the top of the stairs that led down to the beach, four figures stood silhouetted against the vast gray sea. Three stood together with their arms around each other, though the effect was more as if they were handcuffed that way than comradely; the fourth figure, standing apart, was an old man who had only one arm.
The middle figure of the trio, whose styled hair was white, reached out toward a dead pomegranate bush—and when his two dark-haired companions twisted their heads up toward her and clumsily grabbed their crotches in perfect unison Nardie shivered and bared her teeth, for she understood abruptly that only the middle figure was a real person, and that the outer two were some kind of mobile manikins.
As if following the gaze of the two artificial heads, the one-armed old man looked up the slope at Nardie.
“Heads up, Doc, all three,” the old man said, loudly enough for Nardie to hear. “The homegrown Persephone yonder don’t want you triflin’ with her seed pods.”
Nardie realized that she had drawn her tiny gun, so she lifted it and pointed it down the steps toward the two living men and the two dummies, though she kept her finger outside the trigger guard.
The o
ne-armed man turned his shoulder stump to her, as if hiding behind the upraised, missing arm; and the trio shifted position, so that one of the dark-haired manikins was blocking her view of the white-haired man in the middle—who now shakily reached out and plucked the dried gourd of a dead pomegranate from the bush.
Then, in a crackling of trodden dry leaves, all four of the figures in the meadow were lurching away back toward the stairs that led down to the beach, the two manikins waving their free arms in perfect synchronization, like, Nardie thought giddily, a couple of Gladys Knight’s Pips.
Her teeth stung as she sucked in the cold sea air. Should I shoot at him? she wondered. What, she thought then, for stealing a pomegranate? A dead one? And at this range with this stubby barrel, I’d be doing well to put the bullet in the meadow at all, never mind hitting a head-size target. And she remembered Arky’s assessment of her weapon: A .25’s a good thing to have in a fight, if you can’t get hold of a gun.
The four figures tottered away down the beach stairs, the manikin arms waving in spastic unison over the two fake heads.
Nardie straightened up when they had descended out of her sight, and she smiled derisively at herself when she noticed that she was standing hunched, and looking around for cover between nervous glances at the sky. The rockets fell a week and a half ago, she told herself; and you’re living in the dry, coinless fountain.
She pocketed her little gun and turned to trudge back uphill toward the house. She’d have to tell Arky about these intruders, whenever he next called from wherever he was.
She really did hope Arky was safe.
Tan Tai be with you, she thought blankly.