“When my side got cut?” said Kootie. “Not boats—I was in a van that some bad guys had driven up inside a truck, on Slauson, by the L.A. trainyards. I was being kidnapped. And the ghost of Thomas Edison saved my life.”
“And you had been prepped,” Spider Joe went on, “like a piece of amber rubbed with a cloth, charged—fasting and observances as a child, that’s obvious, and then you were violently severed from that life, and then you must certainly have renounced your name and your race; and you were a passenger, helpless. And what’s a little charged boat floating aboard a boat?” asked Spider Joe. “It’s a compass. You’ve got to get to the boats now, point north, find a new Merlin or Virgil—or Edison. An intercessor.”
Pete Sullivan was squinting at the old man, and now he looked at Mavranos. “You know this old guy, Arky. Is there value in this?”
Mavranos opened his mouth and closed it, and shrugged. “He seemed to give Crane some good advice, before the big poker game on the houseboat on Lake Mead.”
“It sounds like the old black lady’s boat, her pirogi,” said Diana. She glanced at Angelica. “Do you still think she was just a…random ghost drawn by your telephone?”
“This is the blind leading the blind,” Angelica said.
Cochran stood up, though he had to lean on the desk, and he crossed his arms to hide the foolish writing on his T-shirt. “You tried to get your man Crane an the phone, and he wasn’t there,” he said. “North, says the, the oracular Mr. Spider Joe here; and you said that TV signal originated in San Francisco, and the old black lady’s ghost was talking about San Francisco—obviously she was talking about the 1906 earthquake and fire, and she said ‘Yerba Buena burning,’ and Yerba Buena isn’t just the Spanish term for mint, it was the original name for San Francisco, because of all the wild mint that used to grow on the north-shore dunes there. Your very house leaks because it’s raining in San Jose, which is next door to San Francisco. And she said, ‘You all need to come here, and I’ll guide your boats,’ remember?” And back up in the Bay Area, he thought yearningly, I can get my bearings, get to my house and get some clothes, pick up a paycheck, talk to my lawyer. “For all sorts of reasons, none of us wants Crane to just keep Janis’s body. We all have a stake in him getting his own back.” Or, better, him just going untraceably away, he added to himself. “And Mr. Mavranos points out that we can’t stay here. If we all leave now, we can be at the Cliff House in San Francisco for breakfast.”
“To the boats,” said Plumtree gaily.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
PANDARUS: …Is it not birth, beauty, good shape, discourse, manhood, learning, gentleness, virtue, youth, liberality, and such like, the spice and salt that season a man?
CRESSIDA: Ay, a minced man; and then to be baked with no date in the pie, for then the man’s date is out.
—William Shakespeare,
Troilus and Cressida
AS Johanna was banging around in the reeking steamy kitchen, insistently making snacks to sustain the travellers during the proposed long drive, Archimedes Mavranos was standing in the middle of the office floor and giving orders. He had taken his revolver down from the shelf again, and with his finger outside the trigger guard was now slapping his thigh with the barrel to emphasize his points.
“Diana,” he said, “you take one of the Sullivans’ cars and go back to Leucadia with the boys—Nardie and Wendy will be tired of taking care of all the young’uns by themselves. Mr. King-Arthurs-Shorts and Miss Plumtree can sit up in the front seat of the truck with me, and Kootie and Pete and Angelica can sit in the back seat, with Angelica holding—”
“Kootie certainly won’t go along,” interrupted Angelica, who had sat down on the couch and crossed her arms. “And Pete and I aren’t cowards, but I don’t see why we should go along either.” She blinked around belligerently. “And you can’t take one of our cars. Pete or I can drive Diana and the boys back to Leucadia.”
“I thank you for the offer,” said the woman Cochran had begun to think of as the cue-ball madonna, “but we’ll take a bus. I would be honored to die with you, Angelica, if it were necessary, but I wouldn’t let my boys or my unborn baby go anywhere with someone who was targeted to die.”
Angelica drummed her fingers on the arm of the couch. “Why,” she asked Mavranos, “would you even think of bringing a fourteen-year-old boy?” One of the moths fluttered past her face, and she waved it away impatiently.
“He’s more than that, Angelica,” Mavranos said. “He’s an apprentice king—no, a journeyman king; he can see and sense things we can’t. And if we fail, he’s the king—he should be up to speed for that, be able to land running. And I’ll tell you another bit of bad truth, I’m not at all sure that this restoration-to-life will work, without him.”
“Meaning what?” Angelica demanded.
“I don’t know at all what it means,” said Mavranos, baring his teeth. “But he’s here, he’s empowered, as you shrinks like to say. He’s a uniquely potent soldier in the king’s meager army.” He shrugged. “But, if the boy doesn’t want to go, I certainly won’t try to compel him.”
Cochran couldn’t help sneaking a sidelong glance at Kootie.
The boy was frowning and holding his wounded side. “My mom and dad will die if this doesn’t succeed,” he said carefully.
Angelica leaped lithely to her feet. “Kootie, that’s not—”
“Or hide real damn low,” assented Mavranos. “Moving frequently, not keeping souvenirs. For the rest of their lives.”
“What have we been doing but hiding real damn low?” Pete said to Kootie. “The cops have been looking for us since ‘92, and for your mom since before that. Kootie, we don’t—”
“Well what about him?” Mavranos said, turning to face Pete Sullivan. “Kootie himself? He was brought up to be king, groomed for it—by the plain universe, apparently, if not by any specific person. Weren’t you listening to Spider Joe at all? Even if Kootie never gets to take the crown, the ambitious guys will want him dead, like a valid pretender, and his is a soul they’ll want to eat; they’ll want it bad. You think he can keep his belt and his watchband Möbiused all his life one edge and one side get along forever with half his strength?”
“I will go with them,” said Kootie. He had picked up the bottle of Mondavi Chardonnay from the back corner of the desk, and now refilled his gold fish-cup. He smiled at Angelica. “And I won’t insult you and dad by asking whether or not you’ll come along.”
The bald woman’s lower lip was pulled away from her teeth in what might have been profound relief or pity, or both; and she hurried into the kitchen and came back with a ratty pale-yellow baby blanket. “Kootie,” she said hoarsely, “this belonged to my mother, who was…such a successful avatar of the Moon Goddess that she was killed for it in 1960, at the order of Scott’s natural father, when he was king. Spider Joe could tell you about it. Carry it with you, and she’ll help you do…whatever it might be that you have to do.”