“And it’s used to serve the king,” said Kootie quietly, as if that settled it.
RIGHT NOW, thought Mavranos as he glanced in the rearview mirror at the draped tarpaulin in the back, it’s being used to carry the king.
Mavranos remembered another time Scott Crane had lain stretched out in the back of the truck while Mavranos drove. It had been very nearly a year ago, on January 19th of last year.
Scott had been wearing sweatpants for that painful mid-morning trip up the 405 to Northridge, with not even a bit of twine for a belt, but still his legs had been as weak and racked with cramps as if he’d been wearing a Mobius-twisted belt during a solar eclipse; and he had been as sick—vomiting blood, seeing double, hearing voices—as if he had eaten a rare steak cooked in an iron pan on a Friday in Lent.
He had been that way for two days—ever since 4:31 in the pre-dawn morning of January 17th, when the Northridge earthquake had struck Los Angeles with a force of 6.4 on the Richter scale and 6.7 on the more modern moment-magnitude scale. It had been one of the newly recognized “blind thrust faults,” punching the land upward from a previously unsuspected subterranean fault line.
Mavranos had even noticed several white strands in the coppery bushiness of Scott’s beard.
Scott had been too weak to talk loudly enough for Mavranos to hear him up in the front seat of the rackety truck, and the intercom set they had brought along for the purpose was drowned in the static-fields of thousands of ghosts awakened to idiot panic by the quake, and so they had stopped at a Carl’s Junior hamburger place on the way and put together a string-and-paper-cup “telephone.”
Mavranos had specially “stealth-equipped” the truck for the trip, with sea-water in the windshield-washer reservoir and clumps of anonymous hair from a barbershop floor taped onto the radio antenna supplementing the usual tangle of ultrasonic deer-repnelling whistles pined in conflicted patterns on the roof and hood, and he was sure they couldn’t be traced while they were in the moving vehicle; but he was uneasy about Scott’s determination to struggle out of the truck and walk around among the fractured and concussed buildings.
“It’s the date, Pogo,” Mavranos had finally said, turning his head to speak into the paper cup while keeping the string taut, “that makes me nervous about this. It seems like a…almost a warning.” Mavranos had routinely addressed Scott by the name of the possum character in the Walt Kelly comic strip.
“Today is the 19th,” had come Scott’s faint, buzzing answer through the cup.
“Sure it is,” Mavranos had replied impatiently, “but the earthquake was on the 17th. St. Sulpice and all that.”
Scott hadn’t answered right away, but even through the unvibrating string Mavranos had been able to feel the ill king’s irritation. Mavranos still believed that his point had been relevant, though.
A Vietnamese woman who lived at the Leucadia estate had been given the job of tracing historical events having to do with the secret history of the Fisher Kings and their rivals, and she had discovered a peculiar reactionary vegetation-king cult that had appeared in Paris in 1885, four years after a special congress in Bordeaux had, reluctantly but officially, advised grafting all French grapevines onto imported American rootstocks, which were resistant to the phylloxera louse that looked likely otherwise to obliterate all the vineyards of Europe. The dissenting cult had centered around the seminary and cathedral of St. Sulpice in the St. Germaine district of Paris, and had included among its members the writers Maurice Maeterlinck and Stephane Mallarme, the composer Claude Debussy, and eventually the writer and film-maker Jean Cocteau—but it appeared to have been started by a village priest from a parish in the rural.Languedoc Valley south of Carcassonne. The priest, Berenger Sauniere, had in 1885 uncovered some documents hidden in the foundation stones of his church, which stood on the site of an ancient Visigoth winery dating back at least to the sixth century, and of a Roman mysteries-temple before that; Sauniere’s discoveries had led somehow to his getting substantial payments from the French government and a Hapsburg archduke; and Sauniere had suffered a stroke on January 17th of 1917, and died five days later, after an attending priest had found it impossible to give the dying man the sacraments of confession and Extreme Unction. January 17th was the feast day of St. Sulpice.
The Vietnamese woman, a one-time cabdriver and casino night manager called Bernardette Dinh, had flagged this particular cult because it had shown signs of continuing well into the twentieth century in several splintered branches. In the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris she had traced a network of obscure items published from the late 1950s through the 1970s—pamphlets, and issues of a rare magazine called Circuit, and a privately printed booklet called Le Serpent Rouge, which had been published on January 17th of 1967 and whose three authors were found hanged at separate locations less than two months later. All of these publications mentioned the cathedral of St. Sulpice and contained cryptical essays on the science of multi-generational, almost genealogical, viticulture and vine-grafting. Some researchers had evidently considered that Le Serpent Rouge dealt with a long-preserved bloodline, but Dinh had speculated that it referred to a secretly cultivated varietal, snaking its way in concealment down through the centuries, of red wine.
One branch of the cult survived in the village of Queyrac in the Bas Medoc, and another had taken the name of a fifteenth-century Dionysiac cult called L’Ordre du Levrier Blanc and appeared to have relocated to the American west. In all the branches—and in fact in many other cultures, from the Estonians on the Baltic Sea who sacrificed sheep and oxen on that date, to the Egyptian Copts who observed the day as the anniversary of the death of the tormented visionary St. Anthony—January 17 was a date to be both celebrated and, feared.
“At least,” Scott had said finally, his voice humming in the paper cup linked to where he had lain in the back of the truck on that day, “if I have a stroke, I won’t have any trouble remembering some sins to tell the priest.”
“I can help you out there,” Mavranos had agreed; and the tense moment had passed, but they had still been driving north toward the wounded city.
Traffic on the 405 had slowed to a stop near the intersection with the Ventura Freeway, northwest of Los Angeles, and Mavranos had got off onto the crowded surface streets; plywood covered many shop windows along these sunlit blocks, and hasty curtains of chain-link fencing had been hung across the breezeways of several of the apartment buildings they passed, and finally on a side street off Reseda and Roscoe he had simply let the truck engine’s idle-speed drift them to a parking space at the curb, where he stepped on the brake and, almost as an afterthought, switched off the ignition.
His attention sprang out to the surroundings when the clatter of the engine subsided into silence, and he heard Crane hiking himself up to look out too.
The opposite curb was crowded with empty cars parked bumper-to-bumper, glittering in the bright midwinter sunlight; and the roof of every one of the cars was crushed in, the windshields twisted and white with crazed cracking, the side windows just gone. Beyond the block-long line of Bronco and Jetta and Eldorado hulks, across a lot somehow already brown with dead grass, stood the ruptured apartment complex from whose collapsed carports these cars had been extricated—the outer walls had sheared away, exposing interior rooms and doors, and when Mavranos cranked down the driver’s-side window he could smell the faint strawberry tang of garbage on the breeze.