Mavranos scowled around at the kneeling clay people in the guttering torchlight. “Are you people volunteers?” Mavranos roared at them, and Cochran thought there was a note of desperate hope in the man’s voice. “Do you mean to put yourselves in the way of what’s happening here?”
“We’re here of our own will, which is the god’s will,” called one of the figures.
Mavranos nodded, though he was still frowning and squinting as if against the glare of the vanished lightning. “If this cup may pass away,” he muttered. Then, more loudly, he said, “Let’s get to the cave.”
Plumtree took Cochran’s right hand, and the two of them set off across the marshy plain, with the others following; the mud-people did appear to be allies, but when Cochran glanced back he saw that Angelica with her bundle of soaked fabric, and Mavranos with his hand in the pocket of his raincoat, were hanging back a few paces to watch the roofless building and the landward slopes and the path behind.
Cochran was suddenly, viscerally sure that not all of the king’s company would survive this night; and he was still dizzy from his mouthful of the forgiveness wine, and wondering what memories and loves it had taken from him’and if it might soon take more.
“This is like in a chess game,” he said to Plumtree through clenched teeth, “when all the castles and bishops and knights are focussed on one square, and there’s like a pause, before they all start charging in and knocking each other off the board.” He walked faster, pulling her along the slope up toward the cave mouth, so that several yards of thrashing rain separated them from Pete and Kootie.
“I don’t care what—” he said to her, “well, I do, I care a lot—but whatever you think, whatever your feelings are, I’ve got to tell you—” He shook his head bewil-deredly. “I love you, Cody.”
She would have stopped, but he pulled her on.
“Me?” she said, hurrying along now. “I’m not worth it, Sid! Even if I love you—”
He glanced at her sharply. Do you?” he asked, leaning his head toward hers to be heard, for his heart was thudding in his chest and he couldn’t make himself speak loudly. “Do you love me?”
She laughed, but it was a warm, anxious laugh. “How do I love thee?” she said. With her free hand she pulled her soggy waitress pad out of her jeans pocket. “Let me read the minutes.”
From far away behind them, somewhere on the overgrown terrace paths above this plain but below the highway, came two hard pops that were louder than the drumming; and Cochran was still wondering if they had been gunshots when several more echoing knocks shivered the rain, and then the dark basin behind them was a hammering din of gunfire.
He looked back, crouching and stepping in front of Plumtree. Mavranos had his revolver out as he backed fast across the mud, and Angelica had thrown away the bundle of cloth and was holding the pistol-grip .45 carbine in both hands. Cochran could see winking flashes now on the distant ruined buildings and along the seawall; most of the shooters seemed to be firing into the air, and perhaps this whole barrage was just a live-ammunition variation on the Chinatown firecrackers.
But Cochran drew his own revolver again, hollowly reflecting that he now had only two rounds left in the cylinder.
“I’m still here,” said Cody wonderingly as the two of them scrambled on up the muddy slope. “Gunfire, a lot of it, and I haven’t passed the hand.”
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
False eyebrows and false moustaches were stuck upon them, and their hideous countenances were all bloody and sweaty, and all awry with howling, and all staring and glaring with beastly excitement and want of sleep.
—Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
DR. Armentrout and Long John Beach had jumped off the muddy path to the left after his first reflexively answering shot had provoked so much return fire, and the two of them had tumbled over an old ivy-covered stone wall, with the two-mannikin appliance flailing wildly on Armentrout’s shoulders, and then they tumbled and spun down a mud slope in darkness, away from the torches up on the path. He believed at least one of the Lever Blank men had been shot.
When they had still been in the car the pomegranate had been pulling hard enough to jump away from his hands when he had let go of it, and so he had made sure to grip it tightly as they had climbed out of the Saturn in the parking lot up the hill—he could imagine the thing getting away from him and rolling off into the night to find the king by itself. He had ordered Long John Beach to strap the heavy two-man appliance onto him, and he had held the pomegranate tightly in each hand while sliding the other through the arm loops—even when the left-hand-side Styrofoam head had nuzzled his cheek in an eerie similitude of affection or attack.
With the mannikins flanking him, the leisure-suited aluminum-pole arms around his shoulders, there had seemed to be six people who ran across the drag-strip highway and started down the path toward the Sutro Baths ruins, and they must have been conspicuous; before Armentrout and Long John Beach and the two Lever Blank men had walked ten yards, their way had been blocked by torch-bearing figures of a sort Armentrout had seen before, on the Leucadia beach.
And tonight again he had stared at the human eyes in the clay faces, and again he had used his most authoritative doctor’s voice as he’d said, “What, precisely, is your business here? Get out of our way, please.”
An earthen hand pointed at the pomegranate he held, and a red mouth opened on teeth that glittered in the close orange torchlight: “That’s what you took,” said an adolescent voice, “from up the stairs at the Leucadia Camelot.”
With his free hand Armentrout pulled the little derringer out of his inside jacket pocket. He levered the hammer back, and then confidently raised the gun and pointed it at the center of the breastless, clay-smeared chest. “Get out of our way, please,” he said again.
And then a ringing explosion flared in the ivy to the right, and Armentrout was tugged around in that direction by a punch to his right-side mannikin.
His instant twitch of astonishment clenched his fists—the hollow pomegranate crumpled in his left hand, and his right hand clutched the little gun—
—and then his wrist was hammered by the impact of the wooden ball-grip being slammed into his palm, and the muzzle-flash burned his retinas—but not so dazzlingly that he wasn’t able to see the clay-smeared figure step back and then sit down abruptly in the mud, with a ragged golf-ball-sized hole in its chest.
The shrubbery had seemed to erupt in glaring flashes and deafening bangs then, and Armentrout and Long John Beach had vaulted over the ivy on the downhill side of the path. In the ensuing tumbling slide, Armentrout just tried to let the aluminum bodies and the grunting mannikin heads take the abrasions and knocks, while he kept his hands clamped on the gun and the broken pomegranate.
When they had rolled to a halt in a rainy pool down on the plain, Armentrout sat up in the water and squinted sideways at the Styrofoam head on his right shoulder. A great red flare of afterimage hung in the center of Armentrout’s vision, but he could see that the Styrofoam man had been shot squarely through the forehead—and then he looked away again quickly, because for just an instant the blank white features had been the face of Philip Muir, pop-eyed and gaping as it had been after Armentrout had put a point-blank load of .410 shot between Muir’s eyes.