Angelica felt a thump through the front seat at her back, and she looked up—Mavranos had thrown his injured head back, though he was still squinting furiously ahead. “So how will it work out?” he asked in a gravelly voice. “Now?”
“I don’t know at all,” said Kootie. His eyes were wide and he was staring up at the rust-spotted bare metal roof. “I think we might all die, if it works out right this time.”
“Let’s see this message,” said Pete.
Luckily Kootie had stuffed it into his right-hand pocket; he was able to dig it out without putting any strain on his bandaged side. “Here,” he said, handing it to Angelica, who passed it over the seat to Pete.
Pete read it aloud, slowly:
“Roma, tibi subito motibus ibit Amor,
Si bene to tua laus taxat, sua laute tenebis,
Sole, medere pede: ede, perede melos.”
He handed it back to Angelica, who returned it to Kootie. “It’s a palindrome,” Pete said thoughtfully, rocking in his seat as the truck continued to climb the narrow street. “Three palindromes, that is. Latin, and I don’t read Latin.” He yawned. “Palindromes draw ghosts.”
“I’d like to know what it means,” said Angelica defiantly.
“I think we better go pick up the old lady’s ghost in the meantime,” sighed Mavranos. “I’ll stop at a pay phone on the way and read Kootie’s note to Nardie Dinh; she’ll be able to puzzle it out for us, if we give her time to go through her books—and she owes me one.”
AT A tiny liquor store on the corner of Gough and Filbert, Mavranos found a parking space and then copied the text of Kootie’s note onto the back of his car registration. Finally he got out of the truck, leaving it in park with the engine running.
After he closed the driver’s door he leaned in the open window to say, “Pete, if you see a blue-green BMW, you just ram it and then drive away, and meet me at Li Po at sunset.”
He trudged across the tiny lot into the liquor store, slapping his pockets for coins for the pay phone by the beer cooler.
He strode up to the phone and dropped a quarter into the coin slot, and then punched in the well-remembered Leucadia number; and after a recorded voice asked him to deposit another dollar and thirty cents, and he impatiently rolled six more quarters into the slot, he heard ringing, and then Nardie’s voice saying, cautiously “Hello?”
“Nardie,” he said, “this is Arky, still up in San Fran, with—apparently!—still no conclusions.” His forehead was damp; he had almost said concussions. He wanted to touch the back of his head, and to ask her about the dashboard statue she had given him. But, She didn’t do it, he told himself, and he only said, “I got some Latin for you to translate, if you got a pencil—”
“It means, ‘And in Arcadia, I—”’ came Nardie Dinh’s voice. “It’s an unfinished sentence, like the story’s not over, okay? I think the speaker is supposed to be Death, so it’s like Death hasn’t made up his mind yet what he’ll do, here. Where have you seen it?”
Mavranos blinked, and discovered that the telephone cord was long enough for him to open the beer cooler and pull out a can of Coors. “What?” he said. “But it’s longer than that. And where did you find it?”
Nardie Dinh paused. “This is something that’s lettered on a sign somebody put up on the big pine tree out front, by the driveway. Et in Arcadia ego. What Latin have you got?”
“Jeez. Well, mine’s longer. Have you got a pencil?”
“Shoot,” she said.
He winced, and his finger hovered over the tab on the beer can, but he knew the owner was watching him and would throw him out if he opened it in the store. He read her the three palindromes slowly, spelling the words out. “I’ll have a translation for you in an hour,” she said. “I suppose you’re not at a phone I’ll be able to call you at?’
“No,” he told her, “I’ll call you.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and he wished he could open the beer, for his mouth was dry. “Nardie, your brother—”
“Oh, Arky!” Her voice was startled and not happy. “Do let it lie, please!”
“I—well, I discover I can’t. Anymore. I know he doesn’t forgive me, but I do have to ask you—ask you—” He was sweating. “I have to tell you that I’m—sorry, for it.” He coughed, and though his eyes were squeezed tightly shut, his voice was almost casuaclass="underline" “Always have been.”
“I know you are, Arky. Don’t still trouble yourself about it—whatever my feelings were for my brother, or are now, I love you—” She laughed awkwardly. “I was going to say ‘I love you anyway,’ but there’s no ‘anyway’ to it; you did what you had to do, for all of us. So I’ll just say, I love you.”
Mavranos discovered that he hadn’t been inhaling or exhaling, and he let his breath out now in a long sigh. “Thank you, Nardie. I love you too. Call you back in an hour or so.”
He remembered to pay for the can of beer before he walked out of the store, and he popped it open as he walked across the asphalt to the truck, which was still idling where he’d left it. In spite of his undiminished dreads of what was to come, his step was lighter, and after he had got back in and taken a deep sip of the beer, he wedged the can between his thighs and said, with a fair imitation of hearty cheer, “Now we’re off to pick up Kootie’s old lady.”
In the rear-view mirror he saw the boy close his eyes.
MAVRANOS DROVE right by the place, because Kootie wasn’t sure whether it had been two or three blocks he had walked up to get to California Street, and none of these office and apartment buildings looked familiar to him—and it was only after they had driven past the Bush Street intersection that he realized that the six huge, shaggy eucalyptus trees they had just passed must be all that was left of the long row of “trees he had seen when he had walked out of Mammy Pleasant’s run-down Victorian ; mansion an hour ago.
“Back,” he said. “Her house is gone, but those six eucalyptuses are where it was.”
“She say meet you by the trees?” asked Mavranos as he signalled for a right turn to go around the block.
“She said ‘Look to the trees, you’ll see how.’ To pick her up. And last week on the TV she said ‘Eat the seeds of my trees.”‘ He shifted uncomfortably. “She’s just a ghost, remember—I don’t think we’ll have to make much room for her in here.”
Mavranos looped around Sutter and Laguna to Bush, and then turned right onto Octavia again and parked at the curb, putting the truck into park but leaving the engine running. Where Pleasant’s dry brush yard had been was now a walkway-transected green lawn out in front of a Roman-looking two-story gray stone building. “It’s a…a pregnancy counseling center,” said Angelica, staring at the big white ‘ sign out front as she opened the door and climbed down to the sidewalk. “That’s a…pleasant…use for the property.” Pete got out of the passenger side and stood beside her as she shaded her eyes to look up and down the street. Finally she stared down at the pavement and scuffed some leaves aside. “There’s a stone plaque inset in the sidewalk here—it says something about—” She frowned as she puzzled out the letters. “Mary Ellen Pleasant Memorial Park,” she read aloud, “…mother of civil rights in California…supported the western terminus of the underground railway for fugitive slaves…legendary pioneer once lived on this site and planted these six trees.” Angelica looked up.