What perils past, what crosses to ensue,
Would shut the book, and sit him down and die.
—William Shakespeare,
Henry IV, Part II
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It was an inconsistent and ubiquitous fiend too, for, while it was making the whole night behind him dreadful, he darted out into the roadway to avoid dark alleys, fearful of its coming hopping out of them like a dropsical boy’s-Kite without a tail and wings. It hid in doorways too, rubbing its horrible shoulders against doors, and drawing them up to its ears, as if it were laughing.
—Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
FOR five days now the skirts of the storm clouds had swept across the fretted hills and smoky lowlands of San Francisco. At the northeast corner of the peninsula the intermittent downpours had saturated the precipitous eastern slope of Telegraph Hill, loosening wedges of mud that tumbled down onto the pavement of Sansomme Street, where old wooden cottages still stood from before the 1906 earthquake, having been saved from the subsequent fire by bucket brigades of Italians who had doused the encroaching flames with hundreds of gallons of homemade red wine; and the rain had swelled the waters of Stow Lake in Golden Gate Park, making a marsh of the playground to the south and completely submerging the strange old stones that edged the lake’s normal boundaries; and in the southeast corner of the city the rain had frequently driven customers out of the open-air Farmer’s Market on Alemany Boulevard, and kept the Mexican children from playing in the streets of the Mission District east of Dolores. In the blocks of run-down post-war housing in Hunter’s Point, east of the 101, gunfire from passing cars was more common than usual.
In fact, incidents of random gunfire had increased all over the city in the five days since a burst of semi-automatic weapons fire had startled tourists outside the Cliff House Restaurant on the northwest shore, on the morning of January 12th. Of less general concern, the wild monkeys that lived in the sycamore trees on Russian Hill had begun a fearsome screeching every evening at sunset, and in the sunless dawns vast flocks of crows wheeled silently over the old buildings at the south end of the Embarcadero by the China Basin. The Chronicle ran a brief human-interest article about the spontaneous street-dancing that had started in these South-of-Market streets and alleys around the French restaurant whose name translated as I Am Starving, the rain-soaked dancers were described as neo-Beatnik youths and unreconstructed old hippies, and the dance was supposed to be a revival of the French carmagnole, and the preferred dance music appeared to be the 1970 Melanie song “Candles in the Wind.”
The newspaper had noted that the carmagnole dancers liked to toss lit strings of firecrackers around their feet as they stamped and spun in the ferocious dance, but to Archimedes Mavranos, standing now on the second-floor balcony of the apartment he had rented on Lapu Lapu Street in the shadow of the elevated Bay Bridge Freeway, the staccato pop-pop-pop sounded like volleys of full-auto machine-gun fire.
He was tapping his current can of Coors on the wet iron balcony rail. “I don’t like it,” he said over his shoulder.
“Duh” said Kootie from the living room behind him.
After frowning for another moment down at the shiny car roofs trundling by on the wet pavement, Mavranos smiled and turned back to the room. “I guess I have made it clear that I don’t like it,” he allowed. “But dammit, it is the day the earthquake blew up L.A. The one-year anniversary.”
Kootie was sitting against the door of the unfurnished room, holding a red-blotted face-cloth to his side, and Pete and Angelica Sullivan stood over the old black-and-white television set they had brought along from Solville. It was sitting on top of another TV set, newer but non-functioning, that they had found in the street.
“We drove up there too, a day or so later, to Northridge,” said Pete, without taking his eyes from the images on the working screen, which were just a modern Ford ad at the moment, “to look at the wreckage. Kootie insisted.”
“Of course the seventeenth of January is a day to be scared of,” Kootie said to Mavranos. “I saw what happened to L.A. But that would be why the French people you told us about made such a big deal of it. How could Dionysus’s mid-winter death-day be anything but scary?” He smiled unhappily. “He’s the earthquake boy, right?”
“Our pendulum stuck over the thirty-first, too,” pointed out Angelica—wearily, for she had pointed it out many times already. “Tet.”
“Our pendulum,” said Mavranos in disgust as he drained his beer and strode in through the living room to the kitchen, which fortunately had come with a refrigerator. “Our scientific apparatus” he called derisively as he took a fresh can from the refrigerator’s door-shelf.
Angelica had brought along several jars of pennies to shake at the TV, and over the last five days the old black woman had several times been induced to intrude on the TV screen here in San Francisco, though the reception of her inserts was scratchy here with some unimaginable kind of static. And she had spoken, too, though her opening words each time had been just an idiot repetition of the last phrases spoken on the real channel before her image had crowded out the normal programming.
At first the old woman had said that they must find her house, and “eat the seeds of my trees,” so that one of their party could be “indwelt,” which apparently meant inhabited by the old woman’s ghost. The disembodied image on the television had insisted that this was the only way she could properly guide the dead king’s company.
Angelica had vetoed that. We have no hosts to spare, she had said. This is just identity-greed, she wants a body again, and she probably would cling. She can advise us just fine from the TV screen, and do her interceding from there.
And the old black woman had had a lot to say, even just from the television speakers. She had babbled—uselessly, Mavranos thought—about being a penitential servant now of Dionysus, whose chapel she had apparently desecrated during her lifetime; she had said that they needed to call the god beside untamed water, and had talked uncertainly about some banker friend of hers who had drowned himself “near Meg’s Wharf.” Pete had gone to the library and established that her drowned friend had been William Ralston, who had founded the Bank of California, and who had drowned near Meiggs Wharf in 1874 after his bank went broke. And she had said that a calendar would have to be consulted with “a plumb line” to determine a propitious date.
Angelica had called on her bruja skills and made a pendulum of hairs from Scott Crane’s beard, weighted with the gold Dunhill lighter a professional assassin had once given to Crane; and, after Mavranos had been sent out to buy a calendar, Kootie had dangled the makeshift pendulum over the January page.
The glittering brick-shaped lighter had looked like some kind of Faberge Pez dispenser with its mouth open, for Angelica had had to open the lid to knot the hair around it—and the lighter had visibly been drawn to the square on the calendar that was the seventeenth, continuing to strain toward it, as if pulled magnetically, even after Kootie’s hand had moved an inch or so past it. And, as Angelica had noted, the swinging lighter had been tugged toward the thirty-first, too, which was the Vietnamese Tet festival and the Chinese New Year. The Year of the Dog was ending, the Year of the Pig due to start on the first of February—and that date was the first day of Ramadan, the Moslem holy month of fasting.