"Well obviously she had something. Maybe her violin is a Stradivarius."
"Frank will tell us. He'll tell me, anyway. Unless this was a crank phone call. 'Anonymity policy'! It's certainly made trouble."
"Call him. Ask him. Or I will."
Charlotte's field of vision swung away from Bennett to a calendar above a telephone on the wall, and then back. "We'll see him Thursday."
Bennett shook his head. "This money guy wants to meet me tomorrow. And Frank won't want to talk at his grandmother's funeral, with Daffy underfoot. Call him."
"Okay."
Charlotte watched the telephone bob closer, and then she saw one of Moira's hands lift the receiver while the other spun the dial. Charlotte read the number out loud as she watched Moira dial it — while from the speaker she heard the clicking of the dial being turned, and the hiss of it spinning back — and she felt Golze shift beside her on the bus seat. "That's Marrity's number, all right," Golze said.
Charlotte could smell tobacco smoke; evidently Golze had lit a cigarette.
Charlotte watched the telephone receiver swing closer and then disappear beyond her right-side peripheral vision; of course she couldn't hear anything from the phone. Then after about twenty seconds it appeared again, receding, and Moira's hand hung it back in the cradle with a loud clatter from the speaker. The microphone must be very near the phone, Charlotte thought.
"'You've reached the Marritys,'" quoted Moira's voice, "'and we're not able to come to the phone right now.'"
"You should have left a message," grumbled Bennett. "'We're onto your filthy tricks.'"
Bennett's frowning face swung back into Charlotte's sight, and Moira laughed. "Or, 'You're not fooling anyone.'"
Bennett laughed too, though he was still frowning. "Do it in a disguised voice," he said. Then, growling in a Bronx accent, "'I know what you been doin', an' you better stop it.'"
"He'd lock the gate," said Moira, "and never answer the phone again."
"Right, and then we'd find out this was a joke call, and your crazy grandmother didn't own anything but old Creedence records. But— he'd never dare go to another X-rated movie."
"Frank doesn't go to X-rated movies. You go to X-rated movies."
"I have to, sometimes, it's business. Anyway, that's why he's jealous of me."
"Drive on," said Rascasse to the young man in the driver's seat. "No use having the bus get noticed for this."
Moira was saying something back, but Golze said, "He mentioned lost Charlie Chaplin films."
The bus surged forward with no more noise than a car would have made; the Vespers had replaced its diesel engine with a Chevrolet 454 V-8, and put disk brakes on instead of noisy air brakes.
"He was just choosing random examples," said Rascasse. "It was an obvious thing to say, after I mentioned films in my call to him. He doesn't know anything about it. Neither does she, probably."
Bennett Bradley's voice was coming out of the speaker now, talking about the Subaru deal that Rascasse had managed to get taken away from him, but already the bus was too far away from the house for Charlotte to see any more. She shifted her attention to Rascasse, who was still standing and looking down at her and Golze. Charlotte took the opportunity to check her lipstick, but it was still fine.
"The artifact moved east, yesterday," Rascasse went on, "and Francis Marrity and his daughter are in a, a crisis. It's got to be Marrity who took it. We should have been at that hospital, not wasting our time here."
But I've soured the approach to Francis Marrity, Charlotte thought, bracing herself for reminders of it; but then the soft gong sounded from the cabinet behind the driver's seat, and in sudden fright Charlotte's vision bounced several times between the driver and Golze and Rascasse, so that in rapid succession she was seeing the empty curbside cars and pools of streetlight ahead of them and two views of her own face — lips pinched and brown eyes wide — one in profile and one head-on.
"See — what it wants," said Rascasse to Golze.
Charlotte thought she could already hear the filigreed-silver jaw hinges snapping inside the cabinet.
"Right," said Golze.
He stood up from beside Charlotte and swayed forward toward the cabinet, and Rascasse stared after him, so Charlotte fixed her attention on the driver, a humorless physics student from UC Berkeley, and watched the cars ahead of the bus through his eyes. They had left the housing tract and were on East Orange Grove Boulevard, passing a Pizza Hut and a Shell station.
She heard the cabinet lock snap, and then she really could hear the Baphomet's jaws clicking; and though she was staring at the dashboard and the taillights beyond the windshield, she could smell the head now, the spicy shellac reek.
She heard several voices whispering — and she had never heard the thing form words before. Reluctantly she let herself share Rascasse's perspective.
The cabinet doors were swung open and the shiny head inside was gleaming in the yellow overhead light; its black jaw, with the chin capped in silver like the toe of a cowboy boot, was wagging up and down rapidly, but it was not synchronized with the whispering.
Golze had switched on the Ouija-board monitor over the cabinet: The cursor on the screen was motionless, but there were several breathy voices huffing out between the Baphomet head's crooked ivory teeth.
"Call me flies in summer," hissed one.
"Eighty cents," whispered another. "Can I bum one of your smokes, at least?"
Charlotte swallowed. "What — who the hell are they?" she managed to ask in a level voice.
"Ghosts," said Rascasse in disgust. "The Harmonic Convergence has brought them out like… flies in summer, and the head attracts them when it's not properly occupied. I think it's worse when we're moving — the head is a psychic charge moving through the Harmonic Convergence field. If we weren't smoking cigarettes right now, we'd draw hundreds of them — probably condensed enough for us to see them."
Charlotte shuddered and reached into her purse for the pack of Dunhills.
The feathery-frail ghost voices were coming faster now, overlapping one another:
"Why will you do it? "
"One, nineteen, twenty-four, twenty-seven, thirty-eight, nineteen."
"Will you show me your tits if I can guess how much money you've got in your pocket?"
"Two whole days."
"Why don't you try a real man? "
"Hello, pretty lady! I can tell you what lottery numbers are gonna win!"
Charlotte cleared her throat. "Should I say hello back? It seems rude to snub a ghost." She was still holding her unlit cigarette — neither Golze nor Rascasse had looked at her, and she didn't want to light it just by touch with her shaking fingers.
Golze answered, "You already snubbed him. They run backward in time. But you could say, 'Hello, ghost!' and then his remark would be a reply to that, not an unprompted salutation."
"Hello, ghost!" she said.
Golze glanced at her, and Charlotte saw her nervous smile through his eyes. Quickly she used his perspective to snap her lighter below the tip of her cigarette. "Is he going to tell us the winning lottery numbers?" she said, exhaling smoke.
"He did already," said Golze. "And he guessed you've got eighty cents in your pocket. No use showing him your tits now, it would be before he asked. I don't think they can actually see anyway."
"Nineteen… twenty-four," said Charlotte quickly. "You should have written down the numbers!"
"They're lying," Golze said. "They don't know which lottery numbers are going to win."
"If they're moving backward in time," said Charlotte, "how come they talk forward? They don't sound like records played backward."