by Tim Powers
“Did it fucking work?” Plumtree demanded. “Is Scott Crane alive now?”
Cochran bared his teeth in irritation and pity. “No, Cody. It—failed, I’m sorry.”
“I think the truck was heading back to Leucadia,” said Pete, who had opened the driver’s-side door and had one foot down on the pavement. “I think it would have driven all the way back there, like a horse that knows the way home—if somebody would have filled the gas tank every hour.”
Plumtree had taken a wobbling step back across the asphalt. “Did it work?” she asked. “Where’s Scott Crane?”
“Radioactive!” Mavranos seemed to say, loudly but in a slurred voice.
“No, Janis,” Cochran said. “I’m sorry, but it didn’t work.” It occurred to him that Plumtree was sounding like a concussion victim herself.
“Look at me,” Angelica said to Mavranos.
“You’re upside-down,” Mavranos said in a high, nasal voice, “but I’ll look at you all you want.” To a tune that Cochran recognized as some old Elvis Costello song, Mavranos sang, “You better listen to your radio.” But he slurred the last word, so that it seemed to be ray-joe.
Angelica had jerked back against the open door, her forehead wrinkled above the sunglasses. “You—your pupils are normal,” she said uncertainly. “But we’ve got to get you to a hospital, Arky, you’ve got a—”
“Bitch broke my nose!” Mavranos braced himself on his elbow and sat up, feeling his face. “Is my traitor sister here?” He blinked at Angelica. “Who the hell are you people? My nose isn’t broken! Am I—did I do it, am I the king?”
Angelica held out the white stone fragment. “This was a statue of a, a fat Buddha,” she said, and Cochran could tell that she was trying to keep her voice level. “Do you—recognize it?”
“Buddha,” said Mavranos in his new, high voice, “it’s not Buddha, it’s Tan Tai, gook god of prosperity. I gave her one like it once, when she was still my loyal half-sister.”
Angelica stepped slowly away from the truck, glancing worriedly at Cochran and Plumtree. “Look only at me please,” she said to them in a quiet, professional tone. “Pete? Eyes front. We won’t be going to a hospital after all, unless I see a deterioration in Arky’s vital signs.”
Cochran could feel goose bumps rasping the fabric of his damp shirtsleeves, and not because of the dawn chill. He understood now that a ghost had got punched into Mavranos’s head back there; and he wondered if it was one of the ones that had clustered ahead of the truck on the drive back from the ruins at the end of the yacht-club peninsula, or if it was one that Mavranos had been carrying with him all along, like an old intolerable photo in a sealed locket.
To Cochran, Angelica said, “You’re a local boy—where is there water nearby? Tamed water, contained water. With—we need to get Arky and me into a boat, very quick.”
“A boat?” echoed Cochran, trying not to wail in pure bewilderment. “Okay. Well! Golden Gate Park, I guess. Stow Lake. You can rent boats, I think.”
“Close by?” asked Angelica.
“Two or three miles back the way we came.”
“It’s not—famously haunted or anything, is it?”
Cochran rocked his head uncertainly. “There’s supposed to be druid stones on the island in the middle of the lake,” he said, “and I heard that there were stones from a ruined Spanish monastery around the shore; but my wife and I went looking for this stuff a couple of years ago, and couldn’t find any of it. Anyway, no, I’ve never heard of any hauntings or murders or anything.”
Remotely, as if from some previous life, he remembered the picnic he and Nina had unpacked on the Stow Lake island one sunny weekday morning, and how in the bough-shaded solitude at the top of the island hill they had soon forgotten the sandwiches and overturned the wine as they had rolled around on the dewy grass. They had made a sort of bed of their cast-off clothing, and when they had finally collapsed, spent, Nina had said that it had been as if they’d been trying to climb through each other.
And now he jumped, for Plumtree had slid her hand up the clinging seat of his wet jeans.
“Can we go?” she asked quietly. “Did they get the dead man back alive again?”
“No,” Cochran said, blinking away tears of exhaustion, “Tiffany. It failed. The dead man is—deader than he was before.”
Her hand was snatched away, but he didn’t look at her to see who she might be now; he just stepped to the side to block her view of Mavranos and said, rapidly, “Remember the little girls we saw on the roof of that clown’s house? I think we’re in the same sort of situation now. Look only at Angelica. Do you follow me?”
“Mirrors can ricochet,” she said bleakly, in the voice he now recognized as Cody’s. “I’m looking no higher than the ground.”
Angelica gently pressed the truck door closed until it clicked, as if to keep from waking someone up. “You lead the way to this lake,” she told Cochran as she pulled open the truck’s back door to get in. “And when we get there, you walk ahead of us and buy the tickets or whatever.”
“Right.” Cochran turned back to the Granada, jerking his head at Plumtree to follow.
“What’s left for us?” Plumtree asked dreamily as she got in on the passenger side and Cochran started the engine again. “After this?” Perhaps she was talking to herself.
“Getting drunk,” he said anyway, clanking the shift lever into reverse. “What did you think?”
“Oh,” she said, nodding. “Right. Of course.”
“Boats first.”
“To the boats,” she said, emptily.
CHAPTER 21
CRESSIDA: … he is himself.
PANDARUS: Himself? Alas, poor Troilus, I would he were.
CRESSIDA: So he is.
PANDARUS: Condition, I had gone barefoot to India.
—William Shakespeare,
Troilus and Cressida
AT THE CORNER OF Stockton and Washington, Kootie had found only the Chinese restaurant he remembered having passed at dawn, next door to the Jade Galore shop; the restaurant wasn’t open, and the old man who had been peering into a mirror propped against the restaurant wall was gone now, and the big old gilt-framed mirror too. Someone had even swept up the dead sparrows. Kootie had turned away toward the wet intersection, stepping to the curb and mentally cursing the Chinese woman who had given him the useless message, when he sensed a change in the light from behind him.
And when he turned around, the restaurant was gone.
In its place stood a three-story plaster-fronted building with narrow arched windows. At a wrought-iron gate to an enclosed patio garden, the woman in white stood staring out at him, and behind her he could see the big framed mirror, propped now against a knotty tree stump in the rainy garden. On a white sign over the gateway arch, plain black letters spelled out, PLEASANT BOARDING HOUSE.
Oh, this is magic, Kootie thought, his spine suddenly tingling with a chill that wasn’t from the cold rain. I should run away.
Run away to what place, he asked himself bitterly then, that hasn’t been conquered? To what people, that haven’t been defeated and probably killed?
His breath was hitching and catching in his throat.
The Chinese woman beckoned with constrained urgency, and touched a finger to her lips. Kootie noticed that though she was still draped in white, it was a frail linen robe she was wearing now, and the fabric appeared to be dry.
At least she’s offering shelter, he told himself as he shrugged and stepped back across the sidewalk from the edge of the curb. His sneakers squished on the pavement, and he could feel cold water spurting between his toes.
The woman tugged the gate open on hinges that made no sound over the clatter of the rain, and then pushed it closed again after Kootie had stepped through onto the round paving stones laid out across the patio mud. “What is this place?” he whispered to her.
Her face was tense as she shook her head again and pressed her cold lips to his ear. “Later,” she br
eathed, and at least her breath was warm. “Don’t wake up the master of the house.” As she pulled her face back she nodded out toward the garden without looking that way.
Kootie had to look. He glanced over his shoulder as the woman took his elbow and hurried him toward a pair of windowed doors ahead—but all he saw in the walled garden, aside from the dripping ginger stalks and rose vines on the far side of the rain-stippled puddles, was the tree stump with the mirror leaning against it.
Squinting against the rain, he saw that the stump was a gnarled and hairy old grapevine, a full yard thick, with jagged, chunky outcrops where old canes had been pruned back. A soggy animal fur had been draped around two of the truncated woody limbs as if around shoulders, and to Kootie the bumpy bark between the cane stumps looked, in the moment before the woman pulled him through the doors into a dry, pine-floored hallway, like the whiskery gray face of an aged man.
The woman in the white robe was leading him quickly toward a set of polished black wood stairs that led upward. “What is this place?” Kootie whispered again.
“It’s his boardinghouse,” she whispered back. He takes in boarders? Kootie thought. “It’s not here all the time,” she went on, “but it’s always here on January seventeenth, for people with the right kind of eyes—and with this bad checkmate rain, the place would certainly have been here today in any case—or else this rain couldn’t have happened except on this day, St. Sulpice’s Day. If you’re a fugitive, you’re welcome here.” They had reached a shadowy upstairs corridor with narrow gray-shining windows along one wall, and she led Kootie by the hand to an open interior door.
“Are you hungry?” she asked. “I’ve cooked you a king’s breakfast.”
Kootie could smell some kind of spicy roasting meat on the musty air. “Hungry as a bedbug,” he said, quoting an old Solville line that had somehow evolved from Don’t let the bedbugs bite.
“Me too!” she said with a breathless laugh as she stepped into the dimly lit room. “This Death-card rain will bring out a lot of fugitive places in the city, like toadstools, that won’t be there anymore after the sun comes out again. But the eating is best here.”
Kootie followed her into the room, and quickly stepped across onto a knitted rug so as not to drip rain water onto the polished wood floor. There were no windows in the room, but flames in oil lamps on the walls threw a soft illumination across dark old tapestries and a battered white make-up table and a huge, canopied bed. A black-brick fireplace took up most of the far wall, and though there were no logs on the grate, a tiny brass brazier stood on the broad hearthstone, with coals glowing under a grill draped with strips of sizzling, aromatic meat. A basket of thick black bread slices stood on a carpet nearby.
“The Loser’s Bar is surely out there somewhere today,” the woman said as she tossed her head back, freeing her long black hair from the linen hood, “serving pointless seafood today—though they might as well be serving cooked sandals and baseball caps, for all the good it can do anyone on a day like this.”
Her hair was lustrously dry now, and Kootie wondered how she could have dried it, and changed her clothes, and prepared this food, in the few minutes since he had seen her in the long alley off the Street of Gamblers. And he remembered how her silhouette had seemed for a moment to be the knobby round figure that had shown up briefly on the motel television.
I don’t care, he thought. I can take care of myself. He saw a bottle of dark wine by the mirror on the make-up table, and he was able to cross to it and pick it up without stepping on bare floor.
The label just said, BITIN DOG.
“I shouldn’t,” he said uncertainly, “be eating … meat.” Or drinking alcohol, he thought.
“Here’s a dry robe for you,” she said. “You don’t want to meet the lord of this house in those clothes anyway. Take them off and get warm.” She looked at the bottle in his hand and smiled at him. “You can have a drink of that … after. It’s the wine of forgetfulness, you know. And it’s all right—it you can swallow with impunity, as much as you like, the whole bottle.” She knelt in front of him and began prising loose the knots in his soaked sneaker laces. She looked up at him. “You’d like some of that, wouldn’t you? Impunity?”
“God,” said Kootie softly, “yes.” After, he thought. After what?
“The peppered venison is still raw in the middle,” she said. “We can eat it, too, after.”
“Okay,” he said, and began unbuttoning his shirt with shaking fingers. He hoped the cut over his ribs wasn’t bleeding through the bandage.
Fleetingly to his mind came an image of himself buttoning his shirt as he stumbled sleepily out of his Solville bedroom, sniffing onions and eggs and coffee on jasmine-scented morning air, yawning and replying As a bedbug! to Angelica’s cheery Are you hungry?
Goodbye to all that, he thought despairingly.
The boathouse in Golden Gate Park was locked up and the boats were inert and chained to the dock when the five bedraggled figures trudged across the lake lawn to the shuttered rental window, but the two teenaged park employees who’d been banging around inside agreed to open early after Angelica made Cochran offer them a hundred dollars; and by the time the sun was coming up over the cypresses, two electric boats were buzzing slowly out across the glassy surface of Lake Stow—Pete and Angelica and the distracted Mavranos in one, and Cochran and Plumtree closely pacing them in the other.
The boats were small, with not quite enough room on the padded benches for three people to sit comfortably. A toggle switch on the right side by the steering wheel turned the electric motor of each boat on and off, and with no windshield the long flat hood was a sort of table. Cochran wished they could have stopped to get beer—in addition to his hundred dollars, he had paid twenty-six dollars for the minimum full hour for two boats, and it looked as though it would take the tiny engines the whole hour to coax the boats all the way around the wooded island in the middle of the lake. The unrippled water ahead was studded with ducks and seagulls who all might have been asleep. Cochran remembered the dead birds that had fallen out of the sky after Crane had turned into a skeleton, and so he was relieved when a couple of these ducks awoke and went flapping away across the lake, their wing tips slapping rings in the water like skipped stones.
The boat with Angelica and Pete and Mavranos in it buzzed along at a dog-paddle pace only two yards to the right of Cochran’s elbow, which hung out over the low gunwale of the boat he shared with Plumtree.
“Angie, shouldn’t we be going the other way around?” asked Pete Sullivan in a near-whisper. “This is clockwise, not … windshield.”
“I wish we could,” Angelica muttered. “But that’s an evasion measure, we don’t dare—we might wind up losing the wrong one.” She shook her head. “God, this is slow! The motor on this boat sounds like a sewing machine.”
Cochran thought of the woman who had been called Ariachne in the version of A Tale of Two Cities that he had read on the plane home from Paris a week and a half ago—the woman who sewed into her fabrics the names of people who were to be beheaded on the guillotine.
Angelica sighed and squared her shoulders. “What’s your name?” she said now, speaking to Mavranos. Her voice was clear in the still air.
“Ray-Joe Pogue,” Mavranos said quietly. “I’m not okay, am I? I remember now—I fell off of Hoover Dam. I was blind, and a man told me it was the water below me, Lake Mead, but he lied. It was the other side of the dam below me, the tailrace, the power station roof—way, way down, with a hard, hard landing.”
“It’s the water below you now, though,” Angelica said gently. “You can see it, can’t you?” She dipped her hand in the water, lifted a palmful and let it trickle back into the lake.
“I’m seeing two of everything,” said Mavranos. He looked at Angelica. “There are two bulls in your glasses! Did you have animals in your glasses before? You do now.” He was visibly shivering.
“Now you’re seeing as you should be seeing,” said An
gelica. “The pairs will get farther apart—like bars in a prison—until you can escape between them.” She smiled. “But you should lose some weight! Tell me how your sister betrayed you.”
Cochran remembered Angelica’s description of a conventional honoring-of-the-dead ritual. Clearly she was trying now to lift the ghost away from Mavranos’s mind, over this giant cup of relatively transparent water so that the ghost wouldn’t … fixate. And, in asking the ghost to talk about itself, she was apparently trying to get it to relax its psychic claws out of Mavranos’s mind and memories. It probably helped that Mavranos’s mind was still concussed and disorganized—that must have been why she’d been in such a hurry to get here.
“Nardie Dinh,” came the high, nasal voice from Mavranos’s mouth. “Bernardette Dinh. She was my half-sister, our dad married a Vietnamese woman after he divorced my mom. I was supposed to become the king, at the succession in ’90, and Nardie was supposed to be my queen. I kept her a virgin, until I should take the crown, the crown of the American West … but she rebelled against me, she was ungrateful for what I had made her into, with diet and discipline and exposure to the gods behind the Major Arcana tarot cards … she killed the woman I had placed her with, escaped me. Nardie threw in her lot with the Scott Crane faction—”
All at once, with a chill, Cochran remembered Mavranos saying back in Solville that he had once killed a man at Hoover Dam.
“—and she hit me in the nose, broke my nose, five days before Easter. Swole up, black eyes. I couldn’t become the king with the injury, and for sure there wasn’t time for it to heal. I drove out to the dam to stop the succession, use magic to throw it off for another twenty years … and she sent—this man!—” Mavranos’s hand touched his face. “—to kill me.”
