Truer than you yet know, Cody, thought Cochran. You should have been here for what Angelica said about your father a minute ago.
Plumtree was still holding Mavranos’s gaze, though Cochran could see the glitter of tears in her eyes. “And,” she went on steadily, “if he can’t manage the trick of getting himself back into his own body—even though it does happen to be so perfectly preserved right here in your kitchen!—then he can simply, God, simply stay in mine, keeep it. Mine’s not perfect, and it’s the wrong sex, but it’s young, and it’s all I have to give him, by way of atonement.” She wiped her eyes impatiently on her shirtsleeve. “That was my plan. Dr. Armentrout said Koot Hoomie Parganas might know a way to do it, maybe another way.” She looked up at the boy on the desk. “Hanging around here tonight, I get the idea you don’t, in fact, know a way to do it. Is that…true?”
Angelica spoke up in answer, angrily. “Of course it’s true! If Kootie could revive the dead king, do you think he wouldn’t have done it?”
After staring at Kootie for another second or two, Plumtree turned a tired smile on Angelica. “No, lady,” she said quietly.
Mavranos swivelled his bleak gaze to Angelica. “Now I know how you feel,” he said hoarsely, “delivering the bad news to people.” He cleared his throat, but when he spoke again his voice was still as gritty as boot soles on sandstone: “I think Miss Plumtree’s plan might work.”
Angelica was visibly tense. “Who is that bad news for?”
“You all, goddammit. You and Pete and Kootie. Shit. What Diana and I meant to do by coming here was to confer the kinghood onto the man with the bleeding wound in his side. That office, the kinghood, would have carried with it a lot of protections—Miss Plumtree can tell you again how much work she had to do to get through the defenses to Crane. But—if Crane can be revived, even though he’s dormant and powerless right now, then Kootie doesn’t become the king after all. There are no protections. And you people are fatally compromised—you’ve invited us in, you’ve voluntarily taken the dead king’s very body in, given it shelter and respect! You’ve eaten bread and drunk wine in his corpse’s presence, you’ve declared allegiance and fealty to his reign, like it or not. The bad guys know your address, this bad psychiatrist and—” He glanced at Plumtree, “—and other villains. And they won’t let you live, you all being sworn-in soldiers in the routed side’s army now, and knowing what you know. These two,” he said, waving at Plumtree and Cochran, “found you tonight—hell, their taxi driver found you. And old Spider Joe had no problem, apparently, and he’s blind. By morning you may have armored assault vehicles pulling up out front. You’ve blown your mask-gaskets by letting us in, and I don’t even think you could run and hide somewhere else, now, and stay effectively hidden for long.”
Angelica had stood up from the couch during this, and paced to the kitchen doorway and back. “Then anoint Kootie,” she said. “Make Kootie the king, as you originally planned. We’ll have the protections of the true living king then.”
Mavranos reached up to the side and laid the revolver on the bookshelf beside the inert stuffed pig, and he wiped the palm of his hand on his jeans. “I deliberately killed a man once, at Hoover Dam, to protect my friends, and it has weighed cruel hard on me ever since. I won’t—I won’t kill a living person to protect a dead man; especially a living person I’ve become indebted to. You can march into the kitchen there and, I don’t know, chop Scott’s head off with a carving knife, if you like. I won’t shoot you, Angelica. Kootie would become king then, even without the blessings of me and Diana, which it would damn sure be without. But Kootie will have become king by being an accessory to the murder of his predecessor…as, in fact, most of the previous kings have done. And his will be—trust me!—a reign poisoned at its root.”
Cochran thought of the phylloxera lice, killing the sunny grapevines from the darkness six feet under.
“I…won’t do that,” said Kootie softly.
“Then I take back our invitation!” shouted Angelica. “I hereby annul it! I never invited you in, and all we did for your damned king was lay him out on the kitchen table! Pete and Kootie will carry him right back out to your abracadabra truck—and you can wipe your fingerprints off the doorknobs and take your kids and your toothbrushes and get out of here—take a broom with you and sweep your footsteps off the walkway as you leave!” She looked at Pete and lifted her open hand, and caught the little bottle of Vete de Aquí oil that he obediently tossed across the room to her.
“Go,” said Plumtree with a giddy wave, “and never darken our towels again.” Mavranos smiled sadly at Angelica. “You took my forty-nine cents, that first day.” “Cheerfully refunded!” Angelica stamped to the desk, pulled open the top drawer, and pawed through a pile of scattered change. Then she turned and threw seven coins at Mavranos.
The coins tumbled to a Wiffle-ball halt in mid-air; and they seemed to pop there, silently, like big grains of puffed rice; and then they fluttered away on dusty white wings toward the dripping ceiling.
Cochran watched them, and cold air on his teeth made him aware that his mouth was hanging open. The coins had turned into live luna moths, and a chilly draft had sprung up in the room.
Angelica was panting audibly as she dug seven more coins out of the drawer, and she flung them too toward Mavranos.
Again the coins dragged to a halt in mid-air, and twitched and puffed out in the moment that they hung suspended, and became live white moths that fluttered away in all directions. The long office room was cold now.
Pete stepped forward then, and he caught Angelica’s wrist as she was scrabbling in the drawer for more coins; and she collapsed against him, sobbing. “Why did you people have to…come here?” she wailed, her hot breath steaming in the chilly air.
Mavranos spread his hands. “Why did Kootie have to be the one with the qualifications, the unhealing cut in his side?”
Blind Spider Joe held up two of Angelica’s Lotería cards; Cochran leaned forward to peer at them, and saw that they were a pair, two copies of a picture of a woman in a narrow canoe, labeled LA CHALUPA.
“Nobody’s brailled these cards for me,” the old man said irritably. “What are these?”
“They’re both the same,” said Kootie. “A lady in a little boat. She’s got, uh, baskets of fruit and flowers by her knees, jammed in the bow.”
“Two boats,” Spider Joe said. “You were in a boat on a boat, a boat aboard a boat, when you got wounded, boy, isn’t that right? And you had a guide who protected you through the ordeal, somebody like Merlin, or Virgil who escorted Dante through the Inferno. That was a rite de passage—he didn’t just save you, he saved you for something. That’s when you swung around to point here, to this.”