by Tim Powers
“Not for extended conversations, though, I bet.” He took a sip from his glass of V-8, into which he’d shaken several splashes of Tabasco. “In this hippie commune you grew up in,” he said; “what was it called?”
“The Lever Blank. My mom and I lived at their farm commune outside of Danville for another couple of years after my father died.”
“Did they let you watch a lot of TV?”
Plumtree stared at him. “This was mandala yin-yang hippies, Sid! Organic vegetables and goat’s milk. Old mobile homes sitting crooked on dirt, with no electric. My father was the only one that even read newspapers.”
“So how did you ever see ‘Captain Kangaroo’? And Halo Shampoo ads? And I’m not sure, but it seems to me that neither one of those was still being aired in ’71. I’m an easy ten years older than you, and I hardly remember them.”
Plumtree calmly picked up her fork and shoveled a lump of scrambled egg into her mouth. “That’s a, a terrible point you make, Sid,” she remarked after she had swallowed and taken a sip of coffee. “And I don’t seem to be losing time over it, either, do I? This must be my flop. Do you think I’m an alcoholic? Janis thinks so.”
“Of course not,” he said, with a laugh. “No more than I am.”
“Oh, that’s good, that’s reassuring. Jesus! The reason I ask is, I need a drink to assimilate this thought with. Let’s pay up and get out of here.”
“Fine,” Cochran said, a little stiffly.
Oh, sorree, Plumtree thought, restraining herself from rolling her eyes.
As Cochran took their bill to the cashier, Plumtree walked out of the yellow-lit restaurant to the muddy parking lot. The sky had lightened to an empty blue-gray vault, but she felt as though there were the close-arching ceiling of a bus overhead, and that the battered madman who had hijacked the bus and cowed the driver had now turned and begun to advance on the hostage children, all the brave little girls.
The chilly dawn wind was throwing all sounds away to the south, and she was able to hum “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” until Cochran had come out of the restaurant and shuffled up to within a yard of her, before she had to stop humming for fear he might hear.
North of King City they were driving up through the wide Salinas Valley, with green fields of broccoli receding out to the far off Coast Range foothills. Long flat layers of fog, ragged at the top, hung over the ruler-straight dirt roads and solitary farmhouses in the middle distance, and Cochran began to notice signs for the Soledad Correctional Institute. Don’t want to be picking up any hitch-hikers around there, he thought. We’ve got enough of them aboard right now. Neither he nor Plumtree had spoken since getting back into the car in the parking lot of the Denny’s in King City, though she had taken a quick, bracing gulp of the vodka after she had started the engine, and, after a moment of resentful hesitation, he had shrugged and opened one of the warm beers. The sky had still been dark enough then for her to turn on the headlights, but she reached out now and punched the knob to turn them off.
“Smart thinking,” he said, venturing to break the long silence. “We’d only forget to turn them off, once the sun’s well up.”
“And it’s cover,” she said, speaking indistinctly through a yawn. “You can tell which cars have been driving all night, because they’ve still got their lights on. Everybody with their lights out is a local.” She yawned again, and it occurred to Cochran that these were from tension as much as weariness. “But we can’t hide—I can’t, anyway—from my father. Those are his memories, those TV things. Captain Kangaroo, that shampoo. He was born in ’44.” A third yawn was so wide that it squeezed tears from the corner of her eye. “If we’re compartmentalized, in this little head, then he’s leaking into my compartment. I wonder if he’s leaking into the other girls’ seats too.”
Seats? Cochran thought.
“Like in a bus,” she said. “You could step off, you know, Sid. Like the driver in that movie, Speed, who got shot, remember? The bad guy let him get off the bus, because he was wounded. When we stop at your house. I could drop you off at some nearby corner, in fact, so Flibbertigibbet won’t even know where you live.”
After a long pause, while he finished the can of warm beer and reached down to fetch up another, “No,” Cochran said in an almost wondering tone; “no, I reckon I’m … along for the ride.”
Plumtree laughed happily, and began drunkenly singing the kid’s song, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” After she had finished the trite lyric and started it up again, frowning now and waving at him, his face heated in embarrassment as he gave up and joined in, singing the lyric in the proper kindergarten counterpoint. And until he put out his hand to stop her, the vodka bottle between her knees was rhythmically rattled as she swung the wheel back and forth, swerving the big old car from one side of the brightening highway lane to the other in time to their frail duet.
CHAPTER 14
… blood, like sacrificing Abel’s, cries
Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth
To me for justice and rough chastisement …
—William Shakespeare,
Richard II
AFTER A MORE DISTANT sort of pop-pop-pop sounded from the cliffs above the plain of ruins, and while echoes of the rapid knocks were still batting away between the old broken walls, Plumtree swung her ponderous gaze to Cochran, and she saw his face change from the robust color of damp cement to an ashier gray. It was certainly an external noise, she reasoned. It must have been gunfire. Cody always springs away at sudden dangerous sounds—telephones, gunfire.
Plumtree skipped lightly ahead down the muddy path, almost tap-dancing in instinctive time to the constant hammering noise in her ears, and she beckoned Cochran forward, downhill, toward the ruins and the wide, still lagoons that were separated by eroded walls from the crashing sea beyond. The lush, steel-colored vegetation on either side of the path shook in the ocean breeze.
“Further down?” she heard him say. His voice was shrill and uncertain. “Toward the baths?”
“A seething bath,” Plumtree pronounced, “which yet may prove against strange maladies a sovereign cure.”
“Valorie,” he said as he hurried after her.
The clatter and thump that rang ceaselessly in her head increased its tempo, and she knew that an emotion was being experienced. “She that loves her selves,” she called, “hath not essentially, but by circumstance, the name of Valorie.” The emotion was something like shame, or cowardice—or fear of those.
On an impulse but resolutely, she halted and pulled from the pocket of her jeans the object she had prepared at Cochran’s house, when they had stopped there earlier this morning; and she held it out to him in a hand that shook with the rhythmic cracking in her head. “This form of prayer can serve my turn,” she said: “ ‘Forgive me my foul murder.’ ”
Still glancing up at the cliffs and the road, Cochran took the folded cardboard from her hand.
And Cochran paused to stare obediently at the green-and-tan 7-Eleven match-book Plumtree had handed him, but it was just a matchbook. “Thanks, Valorie,” he said, “but could I talk to Janis?” Neither Janis nor Cody, he reflected fretfully, had ever mentioned that Valorie was crazy. “Jan-is,” he repeated.
He shifted impatiently from one foot to the other, grateful, in this chilly mist or sea spray, for the jeans and boots and flannel shirt and London Fog windbreaker he had changed into at his house; and he was nervously reassured by the angular bulk of the holstered .357 Magnum clipped onto his belt in the back.
“Scant!” Plumtree exclaimed; and then she stared around at the vast, fog-veiled amphitheater into which they had by now halfway descended. “Wow, I’m glad I don’t have to pretend with you, Scant! Are we still in California, at all?”
“Yes,” he said, taking her arm and hurrying her forward. “San Francisco—that building up on the promontory behind us is the Cliff House Restaurant, Cody and I were just in there. It’s only been a few hours since you were last up. But let’s
get … behind a wall, okay? I swear I heard gunfire up on the highway—not a minute ago.”
She trotted along beside him, and he was tensely glad that the bouncing blond hair and the lithe legs were Janis’s again, and that the deep blue eyes that blinked at him were those of his new girlfriend, in this strange landscape under this rain-threatening gray sky.
He could see why she had doubted that they were still in California. The Sutro Baths had only burned down in 1966, but these low, crumbled walls and rectangular lagoons—all that was left of the baths, overgrown now with rank grass and calla lilies—fretted the plain in vast but half-obliterated geometry between the steep eastern slope and the winter sea like some Roman ruin; long gray lines of pavement cross-sections, broken and sagging, showed in the hillsides in the misty middle distance, and every outcrop of stone invited speculation that it might actually be age-rounded masonry. Fog scrimmed the cliffs to the north and south to craggy silhouettes that seemed more remote than they really were, and made the green of the wet leaves stand out vividly against the liver-colored earth.
“Who was just up?” Plumtree panted. “Were you going to light a cigarette for somebody?”
A low roofless building with ragged square window gaps in its stone walls stood a few hundred feet ahead of them, where the path broadened out to a wide mud-flat, and Cochran was aiming their plodding steps that way. “Valorie,” he said shortly. “No, she gave me these matches.” He flipped the matchbook open, and then he noticed fine-point ink lettering, words, inscribed on the individual matches.
“She’s written something on ’em,” he said; and he felt safe in stopping to squint at the carefully printed words, for the popping from the highway had been distant and hadn’t been repeated. He read the words off each of the matches in order, aloud: “‘Si bene te tua laus taxat, sua laute tenebis.’ Latin, again.”
“Again?”
“There was some Latin writing on the ashtray last night, in that bar, Mount Sabu—”
“Scant!” she interrupted, seizing his arm and staring at the top of the northern cliff wall. “God, you almost lost me, almost got Valorie back!”
Cochran had spun to look up that way, his right hand brushing the back of his belt; but he could see nothing up on the fog-veiled cliff top.
“What?” he said tensely, stepping sideways to catch his balance on the slippery mud. “Should we run?”
“There was a wild man up there, looking down here!”
“Shit. Let’s—let’s get inside this,” he said, stepping up onto the undercut foundation of the roofless stone structure and crouching to fit through one of the square window gaps. Grass and gravelly sand covered any floor there might have been inside, and when he had glanced around and then helped Plumtree in, they both crouched panting against one of the graffiti-painted walls. Cochran had pulled the revolver free of the holster, and he belatedly swung the cylinder out and sighed with relief to see the brass of six rounds in the chambers.
“What’s a wild man?” he asked, snapping the cylinder closed.
“Bearded and naked! In this weather!”
“A naked guy?” Cochran shook his head. “I don’t know how scared we’ve got to be of a naked guy.”
“I looked away. I didn’t want to look at his face.”
“Didn’t want to look at his face,” Cochran repeated tiredly. He stared up into the gray sky that from where he sat was bisected by low stone crossbeams. “I wonder when the others will show up here. I wonder if they will. I did give the hostess at the restaurant ten bucks to tell them we’d meet ’em down here, in the ruins.”
“ ‘If’? You said they would, Scant!” She glanced up wide-eyed at the ragged top of the wall close above their heads—as if, Cochran thought, she was afraid her wild man might have bounded down from the cliff and be about to clamber right over the wall. “They’re bringing the king’s body, right?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“And it’s still okay? They didn’t drop it on its head or anything?”
Cochran smiled. “It’s still apparently inhabitable, Janis.”
“Good. I did help kill him, and I do owe him his life back, but … I’d just as soon get to keep my own life afterward, not let him just have me … even though that’s what I deserve.” She shivered visibly and, after another fearful glance at the close top of the wall, leaned against Cochran. “Of all things,” she said in a small voice, “I don’t want what I deserve.”
“None of us wants that,” he agreed quietly.
He draped his left arm around her shoulders, and he wondered if she might be mixing up the death of Scott Crane, for which she had been to some extent responsible, with the death of her father. A question for Angelica to wrestle with, he thought; though in fact Angelica, and now Janis, don’t believe Janis’s father died at all. Somehow.
Her shoulder was pressing into his ribs the tape cassette he’d taken from the telephone answering machine in his house a couple of hours ago, and he shifted his position—not to relieve the jabbing, but to keep the cassette in his pocket from possibly being broken.
When he had punched in his kitchen-door window with an empty wine bottle that had been standing on his back porch, he had heard his wife’s voice speaking inside the house—“… and we’ll get back to you as quickly as posseebl’ …”—and even though his mind had instantly registered the fact that the voice was coming from an electronic speaker, his spine had tingled with shock, and his hands had been clumsy as he had unlatched the chain and pushed the door open.
Whoever had called had not stayed on the line to leave any message.
He had gone to the telephone answering machine and popped the cassette out of it, without letting himself think about why he was taking it; and then he had gone to her sewing room to find a sample of Nina’s handwriting. Cody had followed him, and in a surprisingly humble tone had asked if she might “borrow” some of Nina’s clothes. Cochran had curtly assented, and as Cody had gone through Nina’s closet and dresser, he had pulled out the drawers of her desk. And while Cody carried away underwear and jeans and blouses and a couple of jumpsuits and sweaters, Cochran took from one of the desk drawers an old French-language Catholic missal, on one page of which Nina had written a lot of presumably important dates, including their wedding day; several snapshots, with Nina’s inked notes on the back, were tucked in between the missal’s pages, and he tamped them in firmly before tucking the book into his jacket pocket. And from the bedroom he had retrieved the gun and half a dozen twenty-dollar bills and Nina’s wallet.
Cochran had driven the stolen Torino out into the back yard and parked it between the garage and the greenhouse, and then draped a car cover over it.
He and Plumtree had driven the rest of the way up the 280 to San Francisco in Cochran’s ’79 Ford Granada. Getting off the freeway onto Junipero Serra Boulevard, and then driving past the lawns of the San Francisco Golf Club and Larsen Park, had made him think of his many bygone trips to the city in this car with Nina sitting beside him, and he had been glad that the car had no tape player, for he might not have been able to resist the temptation to play Nina’s phone-machine greeting over and over again.
Allo—you ’ave reached Sid and Nina, and we are not able to come to ze phone right now …
From far away up the amphitheater slope, someone was whistling a slow, sad melody. Cochran recognized it—it was the theme music from the movie A Clockwork Orange. And that had been some old classical piece, a dirge for the death of some monarch. …
Cochran straightened up, still holding the black rubber Pachmayr grip of the revolver, and he peeked over the top of the crumbling wall.
Arky Mavranos was plodding down the path from the road above, with Kootie hopping and scrambling along behind him. The two of them looked like a father and son out for a morning stroll, the father whistling meditatively—but Mavranos’s right hand was inside his denim jacket, and even at this distance Cochran could see the man’s eyes scanning back and forth under
the bill of the battered blue Greek fisherman’s cap.
“They’re here,” Cochran told Plumtree. He lifted the revolver and clicked the barrel twice against a stone that protruded from the top of the wall.
The sound carried just fine in the foggy stillness; Mavranos’s gaze darted to the structure in which Cochran stood, and he nodded and turned to speak to Kootie.
“We’ll negotiate with them,” Cochran said quietly to Plumtree. “They’d like to have you in captivity, but we’ll make it clear that’s not an option. We can get a motel room, and have him give us a phone number where we can reach them. Go on meeting like this, on neutral ground.”
“My aims don’t conflict with theirs,” she said bleakly. “If you’ll come with me, I don’t mind being in captivity, for the … duration of this. All of us are here, their friend is dead, because of what I did, what I let happen. Mea maxima culpa. I’m just ashamed to meet them.”
It’s not entirely why I’m here, Cochran thought, aware of the angularities of the cassette and the French missal in his pockets. “Well—let me do the talking, okay?”
“What?”
“I said, let me do the talking.”
“Oh, blow me.” She looked around at the roofless stone walls. “What are we paying for this room?”
Cochran bared his teeth. “We’re in San Francisco, Cody, and Mavranos and the Kootie kid are walking up. I’ve got a gun, and so does Mavranos, but if you don’t do anything stupid here we won’t have to all shoot each other, okay?”
“Was it him that was shooting at us before? I guess I dove for cover.”
“No, that wasn’t him, I don’t know who that was.” Cochran peered again over the wall. Mavranos was close enough now to be eyeing the stone structure for a place to step up. “I don’t think it was him.” To Mavranos, he called, “I’ve got a gun.”
