“Oh, Cody,” Cochran groaned.
Plumtree cringed back in the seat, but the Follow-the-Queen trick had worked
it was Cody’s voice that said, “God, it was him, wasn’t it?” She spat again. “Don’t let me sleep any more. Get to the goddamn temple on the peninsula and let’s get this paid off”
Cochran realized as he put his arm around her stiff shoulders that she had known all along that a death would be owed in payment.
But he was resolved that it would be his own.
THE DARK clouds were breaking up, and the sky was clear and molten red over the long piers of Fort Mason nearly a mile away to the east when Pete drove the truck slowly down the service road behind the yacht club; when they had passed the end of the asphalt and the tires were grinding in sandy mud, Cochran saw that the chain with the NO ADMITTANCE sign hanging from it had been hung across the path again.
“What’s another dent,” said Angelica hollowly.
“We won’t be getting shot at, this time,” said Pete.
“Ideally,” put in Cochran.
“Sometime,” came Scott Crane’s hoarse voice from the back of the truck “I will need to hear about all this.” He spoke absently, blinking and squinting as he tried to look at the red sky ahead. “My first dawn,” he said. “It’s very bright.” Tears were rolling down over his prominent cheekbones now, possibly from trying to stare at the dawn.
Pete clanked the engine into low gear, and Cochran heard the groan and snap of the chain breaking, and then the rustle as the broken ends sprang away into the shrubbery.
Cochran had rolled down the window, and in spite of the dawn chill he was taking deep breaths of the sea air. He could smell flowers and fresh-turned loam on it too, and he saw that the roadside anise bushes that had been brown and dry when they had been out here two weeks ago were now brightly green and bursting with tiny white flowers.
Pete brought the truck to a slow, squeaking halt a few yards short of the descending stone stairway, up which Angelica had carried Crane’s skeleton in the rain two weeks ago, when dead birds had been falling out of the sky. And Cochran thought he could see a slowly rocking shimmer beyond the stone walls.
Cochran’s face was wet and his mouth was dry, and he was breathing shallowly; and his thoughts were chasing each other around in his head without becoming complete sentences: We’ll all step down there, but not all of us will—me, rather than her, hut I hope—think, will you, there must he some way to—but me rather than her, me rather than her—
He didn’t fumble in levering open the door, and when he stepped down onto the gravelly sand he was steady enough not to be knocked over when the big black dog bounded out and collided with his legs. He reached up and took Plumtree’s hand as she hopped out of the truck, and they could hear the rusty squeal as Pete swung the tailgate down.
Plumtree was staring south across the narrow inlet at the white house-fronts of the Marina district—the windows were dark, but a few bicyclists were distantly visible on the sidewalks of the Marina Green.
“My male parent probably told you I’ll die here,” Plumtree said quietly, “and that may be true. I think I wouldn’t mind that—I knew that might be part of the price of undoing our murder—if I hadn’t met you, Sid.”
Cochran opened his mouth, but couldn’t think of anything to say. If he did manage to pay for the murder himself, he and Cody would still not be together.
“I—feel the same way,” was all he could come up with.
There was faint music on the gentle breeze from over the water, distant bells and strings tracing a melody he knew he had loved long ago: bright and almost sprightly, wafting with forlorn insouciance around a core of nostalgic despair. At each moment he could almost anticipate the next note—could almost have hummed along, if his throat had not been choked with grief—and he knew this was only the bridge, that the melody would soon be returning to the valiantly, uselessly brave tragedy of the main theme.
Scott Crane had walked to the head of the white marble stairs, and stood for a moment looking down toward the cobblestone-paved dock. Then he sat down on a broken Corinthian pillar and lowered his head into his hands. Blood was still running from his ears, and his bare right foot shone red in the strengthening light.
Cochran took Plumtree’s hand and walked across the crunching sand to the head of the stairs. He could hear the others following him, and the pad and panting of the dog.
At the top of the stairs he stopped, staring down at the dock-like pavement below.
At first he thought a stray patch of fog had clung to this comer of the choppy bay water; then his eyes shifted their perspective in some way …
And a crystal boat rocked in the gray water under a glassy mast, and smoky transparent forms sat at the thwarts; they became fleetingly clear when he looked squarely at them, then flickered away in a kaleidoscope tumble of diaphanous faces and hands, and he saw that they were frail shells of people, ghosts, blinking around in the dawn. He recognized old blind Spider Joe, who still wore the daddy-longlegs filaments around his waist, and thought he saw Thutmose the Utmos’, though without crutches now; and then he saw, clearly, Archimedes Mavranos standing up by the bow. Mavranos was looking back at the people on the dirt above the dock stairs, and Cochran thought he was smiling and waving.
The faint distant music paused for a full second, like a dancer on tiptoe; then it swept back, stronger—gracious and smiling and evoking sun-dappled streets and old walled gardens even as it bade farewell to all things and bowed to oblivion.
Plumtree pulled her hand free of his; there was a finality to the gesture that chilled him, and he spun toward her.
And as if she stood in the center of a ring of mirrors, he saw more than a dozen of her, opaque enough so that where several overlapped he couldn’t see the red of the truck through them.
Then he saw that two were still solid—no, it was only one, but it was alternately Cody and then Janis, and Plumtree appeared to shift her position against the distant buildings as she changed from one to the other, as if he were helplessly looking at her first through one eye and then through the other. Her ragged blond hair gleamed or was backlit in the dawn’s glow.
“I’ll take this flop,” said Cochran hastily. “I’ll pay the life.”
“You didn’t kill him, Sid;’ said Cody. “I’ll go. I’ve loved you, Sid, and that’s a real magic trick—that was never a part of me—”
She shifted, backlit against the brightening sky, and “No,” came one voice that was both jams and Valorie speaking; ‘“madame has forgotten that we agreed to play in partnership this morning.’” It was clearly Janis who went on, ‘That’s lames Bond to Tracy di Vicenzo, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, when he volunteers to cover her gambling losses. You wouldn’t remember it, Cody—you set the book on fire.” The Janis figure clenched her fists, as if against an internal struggle. “I’ll never ditch you. Daddy—where I go, you go, I swear on my life!” Then she sagged, and it was a lifeless face that swung from the boat to the brightening dawn behind the distant piers, and back. “See how the morning opes her golden gates, and takes her farewell of the glorious sun!”
There were two Plumtree bodies now; Cody was clearly standing away from the figure that was Janis and Valorie; and that figure was fading.