“Nearly midnight, Scott,” called Mavranos, “on the eleventh of January, ’95; Arky Hand Diana, and some allies; and we’ll have to try you again somehow, or you’ll have to catch us at some pay phone we might be near, okay?—I don’t think we’re gonna be by this phone much longer.”
Now that he had sat down again, Cochran found that he was hardly able to keep his eyes open. The voices of these strangers, and his cramped posture, and his nervous exhaustion, all strongly called to mind the sleepless twelve-hour flight home from Paris four days ago—he could almost hear again the faint brassy big-band music that had seemed to whisper perpetually from some forgotten set of earphones several rows ahead; and his eyes were aching now as they had when he had kept trying to read A Tale of Two Cities, while fatigue had been persistently casting faint, hallucinatory green bands across the bottoms of the pages; and he squinted in the glare of this laundry-room lightbulb and remembered how the horizontal white light of dawn over the north Atlantic had lanced in through the 747’s tiny windows, and been reflected in wobbling flickers onto the white plastic ceiling by the compact-mirrors of ladies fixing up their slept-in makeup.
When the jet had landed at LAX in Los Angeles, he had got off and walked right out of the airport, abandoning his luggage.
Summoning all his strength now, he struggled to his feet and mumbled, “Which way to the head?”
Mavranos, still holding the revolver, pursed his lips and scowled at him. “Hold tight, sonny,” he said. “Your bladder won’t pop.”
“You’re not Speedy Alka-Seltzer,” agreed Pete absently as he hovered over the phone, “you won’t dissolve.”
“It’s not—” Cochran swayed in the smoky air. “I think I’m gonna puke again.”
“Oh hell,” Mavranos said, glancing for reassurance at the unconscious Plumtree “Down the hall to the right. If I see you turn left, toward the kitchen, I’ll shoot you, okay?”
“Okay.”
Cochran stepped carefully over the telephone cords to the doorway, and glanced at the ivy-leaf mark on the back of his right hand to make sure he didn’t turn the wrong way by mistake.
He followed his hand sliding along the wallpaper to the hallway corner. As he had done at the airport, he was forcing himself not to think about the consequences of this course of action; all his concentration was on the immediate tasks: step quietly down the side hall, unchain the street door, and then hurry away into the night, away from the dead body in the kitchen and everybody here, never looking back.
But when he had shambled around the hallway corner he froze.
Instead of the remembered narrow hall through which he and Plumtree had entered the building, with its threadbare carpeting and low, flocked ceiling—
—he was in a broad, dark entry hall, at the foot of a spiral staircase that curled away upward for at least two floors; rain was drumming on a skylight far overhead, and drops were free-falling all the long way down the stairwell to splash on the parquet floor at his feet. In the taut, twanging moment of astonished vertigo he rocked his head forward to look at the floor, and saw in the wood a stain that he was viscerally certain was old blood.
Then he had no choice but to look behind him.
A gilt-framed mirror hung on the panelled wall, and in the mirror, behind the reflection of his own wide-eyed face, stood the man he had met in the streets of Paris rive days ago, who had called himself Mondard.
Cochran whirled to face the man, but there was no one there; he was still alone in the empty baroque hall; and so he had to look back into the mirror.
The man in the reflection had the same curly dark beard he’d had when Cochran had first spoken to him in the courtyard of the Hotel L’Abbaye, around the corner from the Church of St. Sulpice, but now it reminded Cochran of the bearded dead king who lay somewhere behind him; and these liquid brown eyes had shone with this same perilous joy even when they had stared at Cochran from a living bull’s head on the man’s shoulders, later that same morning in the narrow medieval Rue de la Harpe; and when Cochran had fled, stumbling over ancient cobblestones past the Lebanese and Persian restaurants with whole lambs turning on spits in the windows, the thing that had pursued him and finally tripped him up on the Quai Saint Michel pavement by the river had been a man-shaped bundle of straw, with dried ivy for hair and split and leaking grapes for eyes.
In the hotel courtyard the man had introduced himself as Monsieur Mondard having to lean close to be heard over the glad baying of the dog in the lobby, and he had frightened Cochran by speaking of the dead Nina and offering him an insane and unthinkable “surcease from sorrow”—and as Cochran stared again now into the reflection of those horizontally pupiled eyes, he knew from their unchanged hot ardor that Mondard was still holding out the same offer.
“Donnes moi le revenant de la femme morte,” Mondard had said, “buvez mon vin de pardon, et debarrassez-vous d’elle.” Give the dead woman’s ghost over to me, drink my wine of forgiveness, and be free of her.
In that old Paris courtyard, under the marbled winter sky, Cochran had believed that the man could do what he offered: that he could actually relieve him of the grief of Nina’s death by taking away Cochran’s memories of her, his useless love for her.
And he believed it again now. The figure in the mirror was holding a bottle of red wine, and in the reflection the letters on the label were something like I BITE DOG AP but Cochran couldn’t read it because of the sudden swell of tears in his eyes. Why not take a drink of the sacramental wine, and by doing it give over to this creature his intolerable memories of Nina—give to this thing that called itself Mondard his now cripplingly vestigial love for his killed wife?
When he looked up into Mondard’s face, the goat-pupilled eyes were looking past him, over Cochran’s shoulder; a moment later they were warmly returning his gaze, and he knew that Mondard was promising to provide the same solace, the same generously ennobling gift, when Cochran’s grief would be for the death of Plumtree.
And Cochran wondered exactly how Nina had come to run out into the lanes of the 280 Freeway at dawn, ten days ago; had she been chased?…Lured?
Nina was dead, and Cochran was suddenly determined not to betray his love for her by disowning it; and janis was alive, and he was not going to sanction her death, abandon her to this thing, even implicitly.
The bottle of wine, “Biting Dog” or whatever it was called, gleamed in the long-nailed hand in the mirror’s reflection, and on the back of the hand was a mark that might have corresponded to the mark on Cochran’s hand—but Cochran shook his head sharply, and turned away and blundered back the way he had come.
CHAPTER TEN
“You know that you are recalled to life?”
“They tell me so.”
“I hope you care to live?”
“I cant say”
“Shall I show her to you? Will you come and
see her?”
—Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
PLUMTREE was still huddled under the sink when Cochran stepped carefully back into the stark yellow light of the laundry room, but she was blinking and looking around now and Angelica was crouched beside her, talking to her.
Pete was hunched over the telephone, tapping the hangup button; the paper speaker cone on the shelf was silent in the instants when the phone was hung up, but always came back again with the same noise, which was distant mumbling and laughter and vitreous clinking, as if the phone at the other end had been left unattended in a crowded bar somewhere. Perched up on the washing machine, Kootie was frowning in the mint-and-tequila smoke from the kitchen, and holding his bleeding side.