Plumtree’s boyfriend made a suppressed snorting sound.
“I wish we did still have that magical string from Mexico,” Angelica told him scornfully; “I’d love to see you suddenly notice that your goddamn shoes were on fire, or you suddenly had a live bat in your hair, when you tried to snap it.”
“On Halloween day of ‘92,” Pete went on, “we were dragged out of our apartment here at gunpoint by the people who wanted the Edison ghost that was in Kootie’s head then—you got any problems with that, mister?—and the dried thumb was somewhere else, the bad guys found that; but I grabbed the plaster hands—and they disappeared—and suddenly I had Houdini’s hands.” He held his hands up and wiggled the short, strong fingers. “And I’ve had ’em ever since. They won’t hold a weapon—I guess Houdini didn’t want his decoy hurting anyone—and I’m more comfortable now writing with a fountain pen, and shaving with a straight razor; but at least I can do lots of parlor-magic stunts.” He clenched the hands into fists. “Angie’s right, though—they are mine now. They wouldn’t disguise the source of the call.”
For a moment no one spoke, and the drumming of water falling from the leaky ceiling into the pots and pans was the only sound.
Then, “Arky has the dried eyeball of a dead Fisher King,” said Kootie. “That would be a fine scrambler.”
“Make it two beers,” called Plumtree, “if I gotta sit here and listen to all this creepy shit.” Angelica could hear the tremor of fear under the woman’s bravado.
Angelica decided that she would have a beer herself; and maybe some of the tequila, which she could now smell heating up in the kitchen, if there was any still left in the bottle. She rocked her head back against the doorway frame with a firm knock “I suppose you really do have that,” she said wearily to Mavranos. “And I suppose a one-time Fisher King’s ghost might not have been banished by the current Fisher King’s death, because of standing behind the shotgun, as it were.” She sighed. “An eyeball. So is it activated at all, in any sense? I mean, is there any ashe in it, any vitality? How far away is the rest of this…dead Fisher King? If his body is real far away, or under water, then your…dried eyeball…won’t be a whole lot of use.”
“Oh well,” said Mavranos, shrugging and shaking his head, “as a matter of fact, I think the rest of him is in Lake Mead. And I think he’s used up anyway.”
“Oh, well,” agreed Angelica, and she strode into the kitchen and walked around the dead king’s feet to the refrigerator. Johanna was stirring the aromatic pot of mint leaves and tequila on the stove, and the sharp smell of it reminded Angelica to snag a beer for herself along with the two for Plumtree.
She heard Pete ask Mavranos, “Who was it?”
“Bugsy Siegel,” came Mavranos’s rueful answer. “The eye was shot out of his head when he was killed in ’46, and Scott’s father had it stashed away in a hidey-hole in the basement of the Flamingo Hotel in Vegas. Scott’s father was king, from ’46 until ‘90.”
“No shit? Hey, Angie!” called Pete then. “We’re in business after all.”
CHAPTER NINE
The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden shoes. The hands of the man who sawed the wood, left red marks on the billets; and the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was stained with the stain of the old rag she wound about her head again. Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees—BLOOD.
—Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
AND now they’re all drinking, thought Cochran, and cooking up a pot of some kind of noxious mint-and-tequila punch; and young Boogie-Woogie—Kootie—has refilled his wine cup at least once; and if there’s a crazier brand of bullshit being talked in California tonight, it’s gotta be in a loony bin for far worse cases than any at Rosecrans Medical. But I’m supposedly the one who’s the drunk.
“Bugsy Siegel’s ashes are in the Beth Olaum Mausoleum at the Hollywood Cemetery on Santa Monica, only about twenty miles from here,” the man called Pete was saying now. “His ghost was a pal of my dad’s ghost—Angie, you remember, it was Siegel’s ghost that rapped back knock-knock when I rapped knock, knock, knock-knock, knock, when we were there to pick up my dad’s ghost, day before Halloween in ’92.”
“I do remember that,” allowed the woman who was coming back from the kitchen with three cans of Coors. Two for Cody and none for me, Cochran thought. He thought of going into the kitchen and fetching a couple for himself, but couldn’t face the thought of seeing the dead man again.
And he was still unsettled by the picture on the card that Cody had shown him—with the comment This was you tonight—the fat, bearded, idiot face of the drunken figure in the drawing, the crown of roses that seemed to conceal horns, the animal-skin cloak, the sketchy legs that bent the wrong way like a goat’s and ended in sketchy stumps like hooves!
Kootie had lifted out of one of the cardboard boxes an electric pencil sharpener, and now the boy carefully unsnapped its wood-grain printed plastic cowl. Underneath, instead of the crossed grinders of a pencil sharpener’s works, a thick stick of yellow chalk was attached to the rotor.
“This middle section is pretty deeply grooved from the last time,” Kootie said peering at the chalk. “But we can attach the spring to a different section, closer to the motor, and I remember how Edison set it up.”
“I’m not sure Edison himself knew what he was doing,” said Pete.
“I remember how he set it up,” said Kootie.
“Fine,” said Pete. “Good.” He glanced at Cochran and smiled. “That’s our speaker, our receiver—that pencil sharpener. Most speakers use induced changes in the field of a magnet to wiggle the diaphragm; we can’t do that, because an actual physical magnet would draw ghosts the way a low spot on a pavement collects rainwater. If we did this a lot, I’d hook up a piezoelectric quartz, or an electrostatic setup with perforated condenser plates, but this arrangement actually does work well enough. We’ll soak the chalk with water, and then attach the diaphragm spring to the surface of the chalk, which will be spinning when we turn on the pencil sharpener—wet chalk is toothy and full of friction ordinarily, see, but it gets instantly slick when there’s an electric current going through it. The changes are variable enough and rapid enough to get decent low-quality sound out of the attached diaphragm.”
Cochran understood that the man was sociably trying to let him in on what was going on, so he returned the smile, jerkily, and nodded. “Clever,” he said.
“It was better sound quality than a lot of the headphones out there,” said Kootie.
“I’m not dissing your old orisha, son,” Pete said mildly. In one hand he picked up a rack of glass tubes and in the other a glass cylinder that had a little metal rod rattling in it like a bell clapper. “I’m gonna take the vacuum pump out to the kitchen and hook it to the faucet to evacuate the Langmuir gauge. You might get everybody crowded into the laundry room, Kootie, or out in the back yard. Out of this room, anyway.”