Cochran kept his eyes on Plumtree. Her face was shifting in response to it all, like a fencer parrying in different lines, and once Cochran got a broad wink that he thought must have been from Tiffany. She reached through the contorting forms as if through cobwebs to drop the quarter into the slot, and punched his home number into the keypad as if emphasizing points by poking someone repeatedly in the chest.
After a few moments she tensed and said, “Hi. It’s me, the girl-of-a-thousand-faces. Use the old king’s eye as a scrambler to call me back at this number.” And she read off the number of the pay phone and hung up the receiver.
“Good thinking,” said Cochran through slitted lips.
“Don’t talk!—they could get down your throat. They do but jest, poison in their jest; no offense i’ the world.”
At last the telephone rang, and Plumtree snatched up the receiver. “Hello? Hello?” She took the receiver from her ear and knocked it against the aluminum cowl around the phone. “I’m deaf!” she said loudly. Into the phone she said, “Kootie, Arky, I hope you can hear me. I’m deaf, so just listen!” Her voice softened. “Arky, you’ve got the cutest butt. Out!” Cody yelled, apparently at Tiffany. “Listen, you’ve both got to get out of there, right now—take the—”
She looked at Cochran in panic, and he knew that it had just occurred to her that Janis was listening, and could relay their plans to Omar Salvoy, in her mental Snow White cottage. “The way Sid told Arky this morning, exactly that way, are you following me?”
She flipped the receiver around in her hand and bit the earpiece—and Cochran realized that she was hearing by bone conduction. She fumbled the receiver back to her ear. “Good, don’t say anything more, we’re being overheard here in spite of your scrambler, it’s enough that I know I’m not just talking to somebody who likes calling pay phones. Listen, we’re going, right now, to—to George Washington’s head.”
Cochran nodded. Janis hadn’t been on when they had hiked through the tunnel at the Sutro Bath ruins and seen the boulder that he had said looked like Washington; and Cody wasn’t saying that this was the big event, happening today instead of tomorrow as they had all expected. Janis could relate all of this to her father without his knowing where Kootie and Mavranos would be going.
“Tell me you understand,” Cody said, and again bit the receiver. Then she said into the mouthpiece, “Good. Oh, and Kootie better bring that … that little yellow blanket that the bald lady gave him, if he’s still got it.” She sighed. “Go,” she added, and she hung up the chewed and spitty receiver. Cochran faintly heard one of the ghosts say that the telephone was for calling room service to order food, that one didn’t eat the telephone.
Plumtree took Cochran’s elbow and led him out of the swarm of idiot ghosts, and neither of them inhaled until they had got back to the truck.
“That was Kootie,” Plumtree panted, “and then Arky. They understood, and I didn’t hear either of ’em say anything that would clue anybody. They’ll meet us there.” She looked nervously at Cochran. “I can hear the rain, now, but I don’t know about voices. You say something.”
He smiled at her. “Vous etes tres magnifique,” he said, and he was sure that it had been his own deliberate decision to speak in French.
She laughed tiredly. “Thank you very kindly, sir, now I hear you clearly.”
“Back in the truck” said pete, “everybody don’t want Kootie to get there before we do. Sid, you got a ten for gas?”
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
Yes. Like the mariner in the old story, the winds and streams had driven him within the influence of the Loadstone Rock, and it was drawing him to itself, and he must go.
—Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities
THE secret switchboards of the city logged dozens of calls in the ordinarily slow witchery-and-wonders categories, as reports of supernatural happenings were phoned in from Daly City south of town up to the Sunset area around Ocean Beach and the Richmond district north of Golden Gate Park—accounts of brake-drums singing in human voices, root beers and colas turning into red wine in the cans, and voices of dead people intruding on radio receptions in unwelcome, clumsy karaoke. In Chinatown, under the street-spanning banners and the red-neon-bordered balconies and the white-underlit pagoda roofs, hundreds of nests of firecrackers were set hopping on the puddled sidewalks, clattering like machine-gun fire and throwing clouds of smoke through the rain, and the lean young men noisily celebrating the new year frequently paused below the murals of dragons and stylized clouds to listen to the storefront radio speakers, out of which echoed an Asian woman’s voice predicting earthquakes and inversions and a sudden high-pressure area locally.
Old Volkswagens and Chevrolets and Fords, painted gold and hung with wreaths at the front and back bumpers, roared with horns honking north through the hospital glare of the Stockton tunnel, to emerge in Chinatown at Sacramento Street still honking, the passengers firing handguns out the windows into the low sky. Police and paramedics’ sirens added to the din, and under the gunpowder banging and the electric howls was the constant hiss of the night rain, and the unending echoing rattle of the cables snaking at their steady nine-miles-an-hour through the street-pavement slots.
On the Bay Bridge, from remote Danville in the hills over on the east side of the bay, three white Saturns passed over the Coast Guard Reservation on Yerba Buena Island on their way in to the China Basin area of the Soma district; and two more were moving west up Ocean Avenue toward the Great Highway and Ocean Beach.
Dr. Armentrout had had to insist, almost tearfully, that the driver of the lead car get off the 280 at Ocean instead of continuing toward Chinatown.
Armentrout was sitting in the back beside Long John Beach and the two-figure mannikin appliance, but the Lever Blank man in the front passenger seat shifted and said, “It’s the pomegranate.” He turned around. “What does it do, point?” When Armentrout just gripped the dry gourd and stared belligerently, the man added, “We won’t take it from you, if you tell us where we can get another one.”
“I picked it from a bush in the meadow where Scott Crane was killed,” Armentrout muttered finally, “at his compound in Leucadia.” He held the thing up and shook it, and dry seeds rattled inside. “In daylight, even such daylight as you get up here, its shadow is perceptibly displaced toward the king, which is the Koot Hoomie boy, I think. I’ve been—shadowing him.” He choked back a frightened giggle, and sniffed; he was still shaking, and his shirt was more clammy from sweat than from rain. “And,” he added, “tonight it … even tugs a little.” He nodded toward the windshield. “That way.”
Armentrout had hysterically demanded that the two-figure mannikin appliance be brought along in this car too, and now it was sitting ludicrously in Long John Beach’s lap beside him. Armentrout wondered if Long John Beach too found the two figures heavier lately than they used to be.
“The royal tree,” said Long John Beach from behind the two Styrofoam heads, in what Armentrout had come to think of as the Valerie-voice, “hath left us royal fruit.”
“It led us to the red truck,” said the driver, “back there in Colma where we had to switch cars. Was the boy in the truck?”