Plumtree’s shoulders bobbed with tired laughter. “Don’t try Nicaragua,” said Pleasant’s voice.
“No, Mom,” said Kootie. “What, should I save myself for Omar Salvoy?” He was speaking softly, not looking at any of the others in the kitchen, “if the, the god, is offering me his debt-payer wine, I’m very damn ready to take a drink.” He went on even more quietly, “And I do owe a beheading. He might not take it, but I owe it.”
“We’ll see about that,” said Angelica, bur her voice was too loud, and Cochran thought she looked lost and scared.
“How do we get a guide?” asked Mavranos.
Angelica threw him a surprised, hurt look. “Arky, Kootie is not—”
“On the resurrection day,” said Pleasant, “you are to give a ride to a hitch-hiker. In your motor-car. I have now told you this. And this woman,” she said, touching Plumtree’s forehead, “is to carry with her, at all times, that gold cigarette lighter. I have now told you this.” She nodded virtuously.
And of course you’d have told us two weeks ago, thought Cochran angrily, if we’d simply asked: Should we be picking up hitch-hikers? Should Plumtree hang on to that Dunhill lighter?
“Go ahead and get her goddamn shoes, Kootie,” he said. He crossed to the back door and pushed it closed, not looking out through the broken glass; he was afraid he might see the naked figure of Scott Crane’s ghost out there, sitting in the wet grass and possibly even mournfully looking this way.
CODY CAME back on just as the sun was redly silhouetting the northernmost peaks of the Montara Mountains. Cochran was in the driveway, walking around the shrouded Suburban with a tire-pressure gauge, when through the open living-room window he I heard a cry and a thudding fall.
He let the gauge clatter to the driveway pavement and just sprinted across the grass to the window, punched in the screen, and pulled the curtains up.
Plumtree was lying on her side on the carpet, huffing furiously and struggling up to a sitting position, trying to get traction with the crumbly eucalyptus-bark soles of Pleasant’s penance shoes. Mavranos and Pete scuffed and bumped to a halt in the hall doorway a moment after Cochran leaned in the window.
“This is like the—end of the—fucking Wizard of Oz,” Cody panted, blinking away tears. “Everybody leaning in to see if the—little girl is okay. After her knock on the head.” She was sitting up on the floor now, hugging her side and breathing deeply. “She was—dancing! I came on in the middle of some—kind of goddamn pirouette, off balance. Don’t help me up!” she said in a wheezing voice to Mavranos, who had hurried across the room to her. “My ribs are like broken spaghetti in a cellophane bag. I’ll get up on my own. In a minute.” She looked up at Cochran. “She was dancing around in here, all by herself! How old is she?”
“Hundred and something,” said Mavranos.
“And now I bet I’ve got a broken hip, too,” Plumtree said, “from falling on whatever she put in my pocket.” Bracing herself on an old overstuffed easy chair, she fought her way to her feet, then reached into the hip pocket of her jeans.
“Look at that,” she said, holding out the gold Dunhill lighter. “The old dame was staling the lighter!”
Cochran swung one leg over the windowsill and climbed into the room, thrashing out from under the curtain like, he thought sourly, a rabbit from under a magician’s handkerchief.
“No she wasn’t, Cody,” he said. “That’s supposed to be in your pocket.” “We discover,” added Mavranos.
“Have Angelica earn her keep,” said Plumtree, “and tape up my ribs or something. And for God’s sake get me something to drink.”
Cochran started toward the hall. “You want your mouthwash?” “No,” she said, “ghosts don’t seem to have spit. I want vodka.” She squinted belligerently from Pete and Mavranos and Cochran to the window beyond the flapping curtain. “The day’s over, it looks like. Is it possible for you to tell me what’s been going on?”
“We can try,” said Cochran. He took her arm, and she let him lead her down the ball toward the dining room. “Have something to eat, with your vodka,” he said gently. “The old lady made a fine-looking shrimp remoulade this afternoon, and I was going to make some sandwiches.” He was nodding solemnly. “I think if we all take our time, and Idon’t interrupt each other, we can actually explain what’s gone on today.”
“Well don’t goddamn strain yourselves,” she said, leaning on Cochran.
“Oh, well,” he said, his voice suddenly quivering with an imminent, mirthless giggle, “I don’t know that we can do it without straining ourselves.”
“It really calls for mood music,” said Pete from behind them. His voice too was tense with repressed hysteria. “Wagner, I think, or Spike Jones.”
Mavranos gave a harsh bark of laughter. “And I better make some hand-puppets,” he said.
Even Plumtree was snorting with nervous merriment as they came lurching and cackling into the living room, drawing puzzled stares from Angelica and Kootie.
Cochran made ham and pepper-jack cheese sandwiches, and Plumtree switched from vodka to beer when they ate, then went back to vodka after the dinner dishes were cleared away; and the occasional pauses in the tense and unhappy conversation were punctuated by horns and sirens wailing past on the highway at the bottom of the sloping backyard, the 280.
AND SEVEN miles to the northeast, in the Li Po bar in Chinatown, Richard Paul Armentrout sat at a table under the high, slowly rotating fans and nervously rolled the rattling pomegranate shell around the ashtray and the club-soda glasses. The two Lever Blank men had frisked him in the downstairs men’s room, but after a quick, whispered conference between themselves they had decided to let him keep the pomegranate. Lucky for them that they did, Armentrout thought defiantly. I wouldn’t be talking to them if they’d taken it, and on their own they would never figure out how to find the king with it.
Now they were sitting on the other side of the table from Long John Beach and himself. Armentrout was sure they had guns concealed under their tailored Armani suit coats somewhere. Plumtree had told him about the commune she had grown up in, and he was finding it difficult even to believe that these two gray-haired businessmen had been leaders of a Bay Area hippie cult in the sixties, much less that they were still somehow involved in it.
“We tried,” said the balding one who had introduced himself as Louis, “to stop the resurrection out at the St. Francis Yacht. Club on the seventeenth of this month; some field men of ours did interfere, and in fact the attempted resurrection did fail. We would have acted more decisively if Mr. Salvoy had approached us sooner, and if there had not been unavoidable delays in establishing that the…apparent young woman was Mr. Salvoy; that required summoning entities we don’t usually hold congress with, and procedures, out in the remote hills around Mount Diablo, that the ASPCA wouldn’t approve of.”
The other man, Andre, leaned forward. “Had to kill some goats;” he said. “Needed their heads, for the entities to speak through.”
“Let me tell you a parable,” said Long John Beach.
“Not now, John,” said Armentrout in embarrassment.
Armentrout knew that these two men wanted to intimidate him; and he was intimidated, but not by what they were saying. He forced himself not to focus on the television screen above and behind the men, and he tried not to listen to the two voices buzzing out of the television speaker.