Kootie started to say something, then wordlessly took the little blanket and began slowly folding it.
“Okay,” said Mavranos. “Good. We’ll have Crane’s body in the back of the truck, like under a tarp, and Angelica will be sitting just forward of that, in the back seat, with a gun: Miss Plumtree is our tool for restoring Crane, but at the same time she’s a potential Trojan Horse, she contains the man that killed him—so Angelica has to be ready to shoot her if her father should take over and try to mess things up.”
Plumtree was nodding absently, shaking a cigarette out of a pack from her purse.
“If I shoot her,” noted Angelica shakily, “she won’t be much use in restoring Crane.”
“You might not kill her,” said Mavranos.
“And even if you did,” put in Kootie, who seemed tensely distracted as he tucked the folded-up baby blanket into his hip pocket, “we might find another way.”
Angelica opened her mouth as if to demand an explanation of that, but Cochran overrode her. “She!—came here voluntarily!” he said loudly. His face was hot, and he was trying not to stutter. “At some peril to herself.” He turned to stare into Angelica’s hostile brown eyes. “You’re Spanish,” he said breathlessly. “Okay, that counts. But I’m Irish. If you decide to kill her, or hurt her, you’d be smart to kill me first.”
“Noted,” said Mavranos stolidly. “Joe, do you need a ride anywhere that’s along the 101 north? We won’t want to take a route that strays too far inland—I think proximity to the sea is part of what’s been sustaining Crane’s corpse.” He grinned at Angelica. “Along with Apollo and Afro-Dydee, natch.” He stared toward where Spider Joe sat on the floor beside the couch, then turned to Pete.
“The, uh, ‘beasties,’” Mavranos went on. “Those strange dead guys that you had stacked in your trashed old van last week—we’re gonna have to delay long enough to rip up the turf again over where we planted ’em.”
Pete Sullivan frowned with evident distaste. “What the hell for? I let all the air out of the old Chevy Nova’s tires after we parked it over them; and those were old tires, they might not take air again.”
“All of us together can push it,” said Mavranos softly, “even on a flat or two.” He had been steadily slapping his thigh with the gun barrel, and now he struck himself hard enough with it to make Cochran wince. “Shit,” Mavranos said in an almost conversational tone. “The thing is, Pete, we gotta…well, a Dumpster in back of some gas station wouldn’t be right; we do owe Spider Joe a burial.”
Cochran watched everybody else turn to stare toward the couch before he looked away from Mavranos’s stony face.
Spider Joe’s head was rolled back, and above his slightly opened mouth the sightless eye sockets gaped at the ceiling; and the metal filaments that stood out from his belt were bent double, folded back across his khaki shirt like a dozen crossed fencing foils.
“He did traverse afar,” said Mavranos, “to bring his gifts to the king—to return those two silver dollars.”
“Poor old fucker,” said Plumtree quietly. “You got lots of dead guys around here, huh.”
For a long moment the dripping in the pans was the only sound. Cochran’s teeth ached with the desire to be away from this building.
“Go with my blessings, Spider Joe,” said Kootie softly, “whoever I may be in this.”
After a pause, “His wife was the one who lured my mother to her death,” said Diana. “I wonder if I—” She shook her head. “His last words,” she went on, “were, ‘Get to the boats, point north, find a new Merlin or Virgil or Edison. An intercessor.’” She had been rubbing her eyes as she spoke, and now looked tiredly around at the others in the steamy, smoky room; drops of water fell from the ceiling and plunked in idiot drumming into the various pots, and the moths were bumping against the shade of the lamp on the desk. “An intercessor is for dealing with somebody else—a person more powerful. Who,” she asked, “do you imagine that person would be?”
“Wake up and smell the Kahlua,” said Mavranos. “That person would be nobody else but Dionysus.”
“Ah, God,” said Angelica softly. “I was really hoping it wouldn’t be. I didn’t want this to involve the Bay Area—that country’s all…vineyards.”
The word vineyards caroled in Cochran’s head, echoed by the syllables of Vignes; and insistent memories flooded his mind—of the pre-dawn rolling clatter of the stainless-steel Howard winepress cylinder during the October crush, always run before daylight to elude las moscas, the flies and bees and whatever influences they might carry into the wine; of the fresh, sharp smell of new wine fermenting in a two-hundred-gallon redwood tank when he would pump the awakening juice over the cap of grape skins, the new-born red vintage splashing and spurting out of the hose and flinging up spray; and of the cathedral silence in the eight-foot-wide lanes between the vines, roofless holy aisles carpeted with yellow mustard-weed flowers in the spring, plowed under in the fall and sown with the yeast-rich pomace of spent grape skins to assure continuity of benevolent wild-yeast strains on the skins of the next season’s grapes.
And he lifted his right hand now and started at the gray ivy leaf mark on the back of his knuckles…and reluctantly he called up his impossible childhood memory of what had happened on the day his hand was cut.
“I think he’s right,” Cochran said hollowly. “I think it is Dionysus.” He looked at Plumtree, and had no idea who might be behind her eyes at the moment. “When they were talking about shooting you, just now,” he said to her, “did you…do your stay-calm trick, did you throw your anger over onto me?”
“No,” Plumtree said. “They weren’t insulting me, I wasn’t mad. That was all you—but hey, I gotta say I liked your style.”
“Well, good for me. But a person can throw other things, anybody can. What I mean is, you can throw away grief for dead people you loved, if you’re willing to disown along with it all you have of them, all your memories and all your—all the feelings you had about them…which are arguably of no use to you anymore anyway, they’re just stuff in your head that there’s nothing to be done with anymore, like a collection, a very damn costly collection, of eight-track tapes after all the stereos are gone that ever played ’em.”
“Yeah,” said Plumtree quietly, “they just make you unhappy. All you could do would be dust off the big old cassettes; whistle the tunes from memory and try to remember the instruments, and the vocals.”
Pete closed his eyes for a moment and shook his head. “This is all just—deep and moving as hell, you know, but it’s near midnight and—”
“Let the guy talk,” said Mavranos.
“You can disown the dead person,” Cochran went on, “but not just into a void; I suppose that’d…like, violate the law of conservation of grief, right? The god wants you to give it all to him” He smiled, but didn’t dare look at anyone but the dead body of Spider Joe. “And it’s a gift, that the god takes it—in exchange he gives you ‘surcease from sorrow.’“
“Euripides?” said Mavranos.
“That’s what the tailor says,” put in Plumtree with hectic cheer, “when you bring in a torn pair of pants; and then you say, ‘Eumenides!’“