“Like critical mass,” said Kootie sleepily, rocking on the passenger seat.
“Well, hijo mio,” said Angelica sternly to the boy as she went on loading her .45 magazines, you’re not going to be taking communion at this Mass.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The bay trees in our country are all withered,
And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven,
The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth,
And lean-looked prophets whisper fearful change;
Rich men look sad, and ruffians dance and leap,
The one in fear to lose what they enjoy,
The other to enjoy by rage and war.
These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.
—William Shakespeare,
Richard II
BERNARDETTE Dinh, known as Nardie to her few close friends, was perched crouched on a dead peach-tree limb, staring down the flagstone steps that led away between rows of dead grapevines to the beach and the dawn-gray sea. Five years ago she had got into the habit of climbing a tree when she was very scared or disoriented, and during these last eleven days she must have spent nearly a full day’s worth of hours up in the branches of this or that dead carob or apple or avocado tree in different corners of the Fisher King’s Leucadia estate, in the periods when she could get Wendy to keep an eye on the kids.
Twenty years ago, when Nardie had arrived at Clark Air Base in Manila on the rainy morning of April 29 in 1975, airport personnel and travellers alike had exclaimed over her and the other passengers that got off the plane with her: Oh, thank God you’re safe! She had then learned that the Saigon airport had been heavily shelled at 5 A.M., just four hours after her plane had taken off; but rockets had been shelling Saigon for two months before her American father had got her a ticket, and for the whole ten years of her life to that point, as she recalled it now, there had always been the background noise of planes and bombings. Her luggage had been mailed ahead, but never did show up anywhere—when she finally arrived at Camp Pendleton in Southern California, all she had had was the clothes she’d been wearing and the cellophane-thin sheets of gold leaf her father had managed to stuff into her pockets.
California had been bewildering, even with the help of other immigrant Vietnamese; Here the poor eat beef every day, she had been told, and the rich people are all vegetarians. And when her new American half-brother had taken her to a modern shopping center in Costa Mesa, the thing that had most struck her had been the pennies and nickels and even quarters scattered in the pool around an indoor fountain; she had struggled with the two ideas of it: that people had tossed the coins in there, and that other people didn’t climb in to get them out.
Nardie was thirty now—but since the first of this month, when Scott’s dead body had been found in the canted meadow down here between the house and the beach, she had been dreaming of those days again. But the fountains in her dreams were dry and bare, and the rockets came plummeting out of the night sky before the airliner she was in could take off.
The last time Nardie had seen Scott Crane alive, he had been trudging away barefoot down these flagstone steps to rescue his four-year-old son, Benjamin; Scott had got some kind of formal threatening challenge over the telephone only ten minutes earlier, and when he had hastily awakened and summoned to the atrium everybody that lived here at the compound—Arky and Wendy and their two teenage daughters, and Diana’s two teenage sons by her first marriage, and Nardie herself, and Diana and the four young children she and Scott had had together—Benjamin had proved to be missing, and the three-year-old girl had said that a black crow had flapped down onto Benjamin’s bedroom windowsill and told the boy that a magical woman in the meadow needed to see him right away.
It was a woman, on the phone just now, Scott had told Nardie and Arky and Diana in the kitchen as he’d pulled off his shoes and tugged his still-dark-brown hair out of the rubber-banded ponytail and let it fall loose onto his shoulders; she claimed to have spoken to the ghost of my first wife, Susan, who was the embodiment of Death in the Las Vegas desert five years ago; and she knows I was called the Flying Nun in the big game on Lake Mead, and she said she was going to “assume the Flamingo, “which must mean that she’s some “jack,” some rival, from the game five years ago, when the Flamingo Hotel was still the kings bunker-castle. I told her that it had been torn down, but I guess she’s got a piece of the physical building—and that would be a potent…charm, talisman. She must have a lot of other things, too, protections and masks and even maybe a tethered ghost or two, to have got in here past our wards without showing up as a consistent, solid intruder. And we have to assume that she’s got Benjamin now. I’ve got to go meet her alone, or it’s too likely that she’ll kill him.
Arky Mavranos had tried to insist that it was his own clear duty to go and rescue the child—I’m Benjamin’s godfather, Scott, he had said forcefully, and I’m not wounded.
Scott Crane had refused to let Arky go, and had then had to flatly forbid the man’s offers of “armed back-up support, at least.”
And so Scott had gone padding down that set of steps alone, to the tilted meadow below the house…and a few minutes later Benjamin had come running back, sobbing about a woman who had knocked him down and held a spear to his throat and who had changed into a man. Daddy stayed to talk to the man, the boy had said. It’s a very bad man.
At that moment the pans had begun rattling in the cupboards, and the overhead light had begun swinging on its chain.
Arky Mavranos and Diana had simply bolted outside then, and skipped and hopped down the shaking steps after Scott…and by the time they had got to the slanting meadow, the earthquake had stopped, leaving only smokelike clouds of raised dust hanging over the cliffs to mark its passage, and they had found Scott’s supine body on the grass, speared through the throat.
They had half-carried and half-dragged the body back across the meadow to the steps before going to get Nardie to help carry, and apparently blood had fallen copiously from Scott’s torn throat, like holy water shaken from a Catholic priest’s aspergillum—
—And, from every point where the blood drops had hit the grass, a spreading network of flowers and vines had violently erupted up out of the soil in a ripping spray of fragmenting dirt clods, as if in some kind of horticultural aftershocks—so that Arky and Diana had in effect been shuffling along at the advancing, untrusting edge of a dense thicket of vibrant grape and ivy and pomegranate. An hour later Nardie had seen a couple of uniformed police officers escorting a blond woman around the edge of the newly overgrown meadow, but they had gone away again without even ringing the bell at the outer gate.
Mavranos had lifted Crane’s body into the back of the—tragically, prematurely!—red truck, in preparation for driving away with Diana to search in the north for another man who would have an unhealing wound in his side: the man whom they would acknowledge and bless as the next Fisher King.