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.”