Before she was finished speaking Mavranos had dropped his beer and stepped forward, and he grabbed Kootie and Angelica by their shoulders and propelled them stumbling across the floor toward the balcony. Pete Sullivan had reached through the black smoke to snatch the car keys off the top TV set, and he stepped along after his wife and foster son.
“There’s a fire escape on the right side,” Mavranos said, trying not to inhale the sharp-smelling smoke. He paused to grab his leather jacket and Angelica’s purse, because their handguns were in them, and then he was standing on the balcony beside Angelica and Pete, taking deep breaths of the fresh air; he shoved the purse at Angelica with one hand while he flexed his free arm into the sleeve of the jacket. “You got a live one in the chamber?” he gasped.
She nodded, frowning.
“Take the time to aim,” he said, boosting Kootie over the railing.
Behind them, a knock shook the hallway door. As if jolted to life by the knocking, the room’s smoke alarm finally broke into a shrill unceasing wail.
“Who is it?” demanded the old woman’s voice loudly from the two sets of speakers. “Be damned if I’m lettin’ any bug men into my home!”
Kootie was halfway down the iron ladder now, but Angelica had only swung one leg over the rail, and Pete was standing behind her, uselessly flexing his hands.
Mavranos’s mouth was dry, and he realized that he was actually very afraid of meeting whoever it might be that the old woman was referring to as bug men. “Pete,” he said gruffly, “we’re only on the second floor here.”
Pete Sullivan gave him a twitchy grin. “And it’s muddy ground below.”
Both men clambered over the long rail of the balcony and hung crouched on the outside of it—like, thought Mavranos, plastic monkeys on the rims of Mai Tai glasses—then kicked free and dropped.
After a windy moment of free-fall Mavranos’s feet impacted into the mud and he sat down hard in a puddle, but he was instantly up and limping to the curb, his hand on the grip of the .38 in his pocket as he stared back up at the balcony. “Keep ’em off to the side of me,” he called to Pete, who had got to his feet behind him.
Over the distance-muted siren of the smoke alarm Mavranos could hear the loud, cadenced voice of the old woman—she seemed to be shouting poetry, or prayers.
Kootie had hopped down onto a patch of wet grass, and as soon as he had sprinted to the sidewalk Angelica sprang away from the ladder and landed smoothly on her toes and fingertips. As she straightened up and followed Kootie to the sidewalk, she caught her swinging purse with her left hand and darted her right hand into it.
Pete herded them down the sidewalk past a tall bushy cypress tree and a brick wall; Mavranos followed, but stopped to peek back through the piney branches of the cypress.
Across the lawn and above him, wisps of black smoke were curling out of the open balcony doorway and being torn away by the rainy breeze, but he saw no people up there; and he was about to step away and hurry after his companions when all at once three figures shuffled clumsily out onto the balcony, and from the second-floor elevation looked up and down Lapu Lapu Street. The middle figure, a white-haired man in a business suit, was clearly holding a weapon under his coat; but it was the pair of men flanking him that made Mavranos’s belly go cold.
The two figures were bony and angular inside their identical lime-green leisure suits, and their bland faces swung back and forth in perfect unison—and though they didn’t appear to say anything, and their theatrically raised hands didn’t move to touch the white-haired man, Mavranos was certain that the pair had somehow perceived him. And at the same time he was sure that they were inanimate mannikins.
Mavranos turned away and ran; but by the time he had caught up with Pete and Angelica and Kootie he had reined in his momentary panic and was able to plausibly force his usual squint and grin. The old red truck with Scott Crane’s tarpaulin-covered body in the back of it was at the curb in front of them, and there was no use in spooking these people—though before long he would have to tell them what he had seen.
Not right now, though—not for several minutes, several miles, at least. Whatever it is, it’s what Nardie saw in Leucadia last week.
“It looks like we all go meet Cochran today,” he panted as he held out his hand to Pete for the car keys. “And,” he added in a voice he forced to be level, “I hope there aren’t any bug men at Li Po.”
IN AN upstairs room at the Star Motel in the Marina district of the city, Sid Cochran was sitting on the bed, gently nudging a clean glass ashtray across the back of a yellow enameled-metal National Auto Dealers Association sign he had salvaged two days ago from a gas-station Dumpster at Lombard and Octavia.
The sign was lying face down on the bedspread, but he knew that the front of it read NADA, and he found that oddly comforting. On this blank side he had inked the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and numbers from 0 to 9, in a bow-and-string pattern like what he remembered seeing on Ouija boards. Up by the pillows, next to an ashtray full of cigarette butts, lay half a dozen sheets of paper covered with lines of lettering tentatively divided into words by vertical slashes.
He had been trying for some time now to conduct a lucid conversation with the ghost of his wife.
Now the ashtray appeared to have stopped moving again, and he sat back and wrote down the last letter it had framed, and then he stared uneasily at the latest answer the ashtray had spelled out for him: CETAITLEROIETPUISSONFILSSCOTTETAITLEROI.
After driving away from the Sutro Bath ruins on Thursday in his old Granada, and then looping around and around the blocks of the Marina district until he was sure they were not being followed, Cochran and Plumtree had checked into this motel on Lombard Street. Cody had used Nina’s Visa card, signing “Nina Cochran” on the credit-card voucher.
Plumtree had stayed up all that night and into Friday the thirteenth, watching television with the sound turned low enough so that Cochran could at least try to sleep; Cochran’s only clue as to which personality might be up at any time had been the choice of programs. Cochran had gone sleepily stumbling out to meet Mavranos at noon, and when he had got back to the motel at about two in the afternoon, Plumtree had been gone. Cochran had slept until nearly midnight, by which time she had not reappeared.
And he had not seen her since. Twice on Saturday the telephone had rung, but when he had answered it there had been only choked gasping on the line.
On both of the days since her disappearance he had gone out to meet Arky at the Chinese bar at noon, and a couple of times a day he had trudged to the deli on Gough for coffee and sandwiches and bourbon and beer, but he had spent most of his time drunkenly studying the French Catholic missal he had found in Nina’s sewing room when he and Plumtree had stopped at his house early on Thursday morning.
One page of the little volume was clearly a family tree. Cochran learned that Nina had not been the first of her family to have emigrated to the United States—a grand-uncle, one Georges Leon, had moved to New York in 1929, and then onward west to Los Angeles in 1938, and had had a son in 1943. Old Georges had apparently been a black sheep of the Leon family, had n’avait pas respecte le vin, disrespected the primordial French rootstocks. In tiny, crabbed script someone had declared that, precisely because the Bordeaux wines were terrible from 1901 through 1919, these were the times when all true sons of père Dionysius Français should show their loyalty, not go running off to les dieux étrangers, strange gods.