“I gather,” said Louis, “that you don’t precisely represent Mr. Salvoy. You and he are not partners.”
“No,” agreed Armentrout. “Our interests have overlapped, but my main goal right now is to get a drink of the—”
Andre coughed and held up his hand. “No need to say it, we know you’re not talking Thunderbird.”
On the television screen above the bar, Armentrout’s mother said, “I bet I swallowed gallons of that bath water.” She and Philip Muir were sitting in vinyl-looking padded chairs in front of a blue backdrop with big red letters on it that spelled out AFTERHOURS. She was wearing the same housedress she had been wearing when seventeen-year-old Armentrout had held her under the bath water in 1963, and the dress was still soaked, dripping on the studio floor; but she was opaque and casting a shadow, and when she spoke her teeth glinted solidly between the twisting red-painted lips. Muir, never a heavy drinker and only recently dead, was still a bit translucent, and his eyes were still very protuberant and his forehead visibly blackened in pseudosomatic response to the gunshot that had killed him. “Thanks for sharing,” he croaked. Armentrout remembered greeting cards that audibly produced the syllables of happy birthday or merry Christmas when a thumbnail was dragged down an attachsed strip of textured plastic; Muir’s voice reminded him of them. “I can hold my breath for hours now,” Muir went on. “In fact, I can’t breathe.” Armentrout’s dripping mother reached across the low table that separated the chairs and imploded Muir’s shoulder with a sympathetic pat. “Why would you want to breathe when everything smells so bad?” she said.
“Mr. Salvoy did good work for us,” said Louis, “a long time ago—though he was unsuccessful in becoming the king, in 1969, and had to be retired.” Andre winked at Armentrout.
“We would be happy to take Mr. Salvoy on again,” Louis said, “in this new persona, on the basis of his achieving the kinghood this time, and his being willing to comply with the harsher requirements of the office.” He took a sip from his glass of club soda. “But when he spoke to us on the sixteenth he didn’t tell us quite all about the Koot Hoomie boy. He simply indicated that there was a healthy young body he was ready to assume. If we had known that the boy was virtually the king already, we would not have risked harming him; a plain bullet wouldn’t have been able to hurt the true king, but the truck could have rolled into the sea, and the king could drown in sea water. But as it happens the boy wasn’t present, at that attempt at the yachts club. Our only urgency then was preventing the undesirable Scott Crane kinghood from being renewed.”
Andre spread his hands. “We’ll be happy with either one of them, Salvoy or Koot Hoomie, in the boy’s body. We just want a king, an emissary to the god:’
“A cooperative king,” added Louis. “The boy alone might actually be easier to work with. He’d probably be more malleable.”
“Well,” said Armentrout, carefully not looking at the pomegranate and trying to project easy confidence, “I’ve got a sort of psychic dowsing rod that’s leading me to the boy, and Salvoy is committed to keeping me apprised of his own whereabouts by telephone. I can lead you to both of them.”
“A rabbi in a synagogue,” said Long John Beach, “told his congregation, I am… nothing!’ And after the service, a prosperous businessman from the congregation shook the rabbi’s hand and said, with feeling, nodding and agreeing with the rabbi, I am…nothing!’”
“I’ll tell you frankly,” Louis said to Armentrout, “we haven’t been able yet to ferment the real sacramental…beverage you want, though we’ve preserved and cultivated the very oldest strain of vitis sylvestris vine, untouched by the phylloxera louse plague, and we do press a vintage from it every autumn; waiting for the year when the god will see fit to answer our prayers.”
Armentrout didn’t follow all this—he only knew that if he should not be able to kill Koot Hoomie, his sole hope for immunity from the two ghosts who were now on the television screen would be to take a drink of the fabulous pagadebiti wine: disown the ghosts, let Dionysus have all of Armentrout’s memories of them. But he hoped it wouldn’t come to that, for the god might take all of the ghosts, and pieces of ghosts, that he had consumed over the course of his psychiatric career; and Armentrout wasn’t sure he could mentally or even physically survive that loss. But it’s just a backup, last-ditch measure, Armentrout told himself reassuringly; I’ll almost certainly find an opportunity to kill the boy.
“And the custodian came up,” went on Long John Beach, “and he said, real earnestly, ‘I am…nothing!’ And the businessman jerked his thumb at this guy and said to the rabbi, ‘Look who thinks he’s nothing!’”
Armentrout was looking intently into Louis’s eyes, but from the television he heard imbecilic laughter.
“But bottles of it do survive,” said Louis, a little impatiently. “We still have several that were bottled on the Leon estates in the Bas Medoc in the early eighteenth century. And when the Scott Crane contingent tries to do their resurrection ritual again on Tet, they may very well have got hold of a bottle themselves. Bottles of it are around, especially in the Bay Area. We can make sure that you are given a drink of the god’s forgiving blood, one way or the other.”
Andre said cheerfully, “I imagine we’ll have our people retire the whole party, except for the Koot Hoomie boy and, at least for a while, the Plumtree woman.”
“Certainly the one called Archimedes Mavranos,” agreed Louis. “His commitment to restoring Scott Crane appears to be so strong that he would try to impede the coronation of anyone else.”
Armentrout had to force himself to comprehend that these men were talking about killing Cochran, Plumtree, and the Sullivan couple and Mavranos. Not therapeutically, nor as a regrettable necessity for personal sustenance, as he himself had sometimes had to do, but just because these people were inconvenient, in the way; and for a moment he was profoundly sickened at his alliance with them.
How, he wondered forlornly, and when, did I become indistinguishable from the bad guys?
When Louis and Andre had introduced themselves, they had told Armentrout that they were in the children’s products business these days, and owned a controlling interest in the White Greyhound brand of toys. Armentrout had remembered the White Greyhound Solar Heroes action figures and the Saturn’s Rings carnival set; and he had been unhappy to learn, in conversation this evening, that the toys had been designed to initiate children at least a little way into the Dionysian mysteries. Armentrout had learned that the toy figures in the carnival set had been designed to subliminally embody the Major Arcana figures from the tarot deck: with The Magician as the ticket seller, The Lovers on the Ferris Wheel of Fortune, Death as the janitor, and so forth; the White Greyhound people had carefully not included anything to represent The Fool, but they had had to stop production of the set anyway, because by 1975 children all over the country were spontaneously adding a Clown of their own, and suffering bad dreams at night and even banding together during the day to elude the hideously smiling painted figure of random madness that their consensual credulity had nearly brought into real, potent existence.
Louis and Andre had told him with satisfaction that their original five-year-old consumers were now in their late twenties, and as a segment of American society were beginning to show valuable symptoms.