I guess there’s no need for her to be sober, thought Mavranos; he shrugged and leaned over to pick up his own beer glass, which was empty.
“I’ll have a Singapore Sling,” Cochran said. He glanced at Plumtree. “They make a good Singapore Sling here.”
“Said the Connecticut Pansy,” remarked Plumtree absently. “Did flies kill him?” she asked Mavranos. “Your eight-cent poet, I mean—that yellow plastic thing is to kill flies, if you didn’t know.”
“Las moscas,” said Cochran, and Mavranos realized that he wasn’t totally sober either. “That’s what they call flies at a vineyard. They can get into the crush, if you do it after sunup—the Mexican grape-pickers think flies will carry little ghosts into the fermenting must, make you dizzy and give you funny dreams when you drink the wine, later. I suppose you might die of it, if enough ghosts had got into the wine.”
“I’m sure each of us has a funny story about flies,” said Mavranos patiently, “but right now we’ve got more important…issues at hand.” He turned away toward the bar, then paused and looked back at Plumtree. “The poet is supposed to have drowned—the story is he fell out of a boat, drunk, in the middle of the night, reaching for the reflection of the moon in the water.”
“Rah rah rah,” said Plumtree.
When Mavranos got back to the table with the three drinks and sat down, Plumtree greedily took the glass he pushed across to her and drank half of it in one long, wincing sip. “I should have told you to get two,” she said breathlessly when she had clanked the glass back down. “Do you people have a set of handcuffs? My father took over control of my body three days ago, and I just this morning got free of him; and I feel like he spent the whole time body-surfing in avalanches. But he might come back on at any time.” She opened her mouth and clicked her teeth like a monkey.
Mavranos stared at her. We should just ditch these two losers, he thought. Get back to the truck now, and just drive away.
“No, Arky,” said Angelica sharply. She was glaring at him. “She’s the one that’s going to do the…that’s going to let Crane assume her body.”
Plumtree glanced at their faces. “Well, yeah. What, were you—” Her bloodshot eyes widened in sudden comprehension. “My God, you were gonna have the kid do it! Shit, did you people even consider the possib-lil—possibility that Crane might not be able to get back into his old body, afterward?—that he might have to keep the one he takes for this?”
“We did consider that,” said Kootie. “I did consider that. But we’re all gonna get killed if this doesn’t get settled. Our TV burned up today, and—well, you had to be there. And,” he added with a scared glance at Mavranos, “I’m taking Arky’s word that Crane won’t keep my body, if he can help it at all.”
“Well, he won’t get a chance,” Plumtree told him with a haggard but possibly kindly meant smile. “I’m going to do it.”
“Damn right,” said Angelica.
“Kootie’s correct,” said Mavranos, “in saying that we’ve got to settle this situation—we’ve got to collapse this probability wave, let the daylight into Schrodinger’s shitty cat box. As long as there’s no real king working, we’re all exposed—hell, spotlighted—and pretty near totally defenseless. You’re staying at a motel or something?”
“Ye-es,” said Cochran cautiously.
“Well congratulations, you now have four houseguests. I hope the management won’t mind. Were gonna do this thing tomorrow at dawn, it looks like, this restoration-to-life, so there’s no point in us getting a different room at the same motel. We just this morning got rousted out of our place by some kind of walking department-store dummies, and—”
Cochran choked on his Singapore Sling. “Did they,” he said after he’d wiped his mouth redly on his sleeve, “move in synch, like they were puppets working off the same strings?”
“They did,” said Mavranos stolidly. “And suddenly I don’t like the idea of Scott’s body sitting out there in the truck, you know? Let’s finish up here, and get to your motel. With you and me and Pete, we should be able to get Scott into the motel room. And then we’ve got some preparations to make.”
Kootie nodded, and Angelica scowled at him.
“Finish every drop of your drinks,” said Plumtree with a ghastly, exhausted gaiety, “there’s poor people sober in China.”
CHINESE NEW Year was still two weeks off, but Asian boys on ribbon-decked bicycles tossed strings of lit firecrackers ahead of the six of them, as they walked south on the Grant Street sidewalk under the red-and-gold pagoda-roofed buildings, so that their ears rang with the staccato popping, and their noses burned with the barbecued-chicken smell of gunpowder, and Kootie was treading on fragments of red paper that crumpled and darkened on the wet pavement underfoot like fallen rose petals; and when they trudged across the wet grass of Portsmouth Square, the hoboes and winos hobbled out of their path and seemed to bow, or at least nod, as they passed.
And when the had ™led into the two vehicles—Plumtree riding in the front seat of Mavranos’s truck, and Pete riding in the Granada with Cochran, for mutual trust as much as to make sure both parties knew the way to the Star Motel—crows and mockingbirds swooped over them as the old car and truck labored up Van Ness, the darting birds seeming to be fighting in the gray sky.
At Lombard Street at the top of Russian Hill, where a right turn would have led them down the ornamental, brick-paved “crookedest street in the world,” they turned left instead, and drove down the straight lanes between bars and car-repair shops and liquor stores and motels, and after three blocks both vehicles ponderously turned left up the driveway into the Star Motel parking lot.
When they’d parked and all climbed out onto the asphalt, Angelica and Plumtree crowded around the tailgate of Mavranos’s dusty red truck to block the view as Pete and Cochran and Mavranos slid Scott Crane’s body out from beneath the tarpaulin. The body was dressed now in jeans and a white shirt, though with no shoes or socks, and Cochran tried not to look at the bloody bandage knotted around the thigh, over the denim.
The body was limp, not stiff, but they managed to tilt it into an upright posture and march it right past the ice and Coke machines and up the stairs to Cochran’s room; Plumtree had got her key out and scrambled ahead of them, and had got the door open by the time they had carried the dead king to the room.
They flopped Scott Crane down onto the bed that didn’t have Cochran’s homemade Ouija board on it, and Mavranos straightened the body’s arms and legs and unlooped the graying beard from the sawn-off stump of spear that stood up from the throat. The room was still humid from Plumtree’s and Cochran’s showers this morning, and smelled like old salami and unfresh clothing.
“Just like Charlton Heston in El Cid” said Kootie bravely. “Dead, but leading the army.”
“He is d-damn cold,” panted Cochran as he stood back and flapped his cramping hands. His heart was pounding more than the couple of minutes of effort could justify, and he was shivering with irrational horror at having touched the dead man again. “How can you—think he—” His voice almost broke, and he turned toward the TV set and just breathed deeply.
“Your place—could use some airing,” said Angelica, smoothly calling everyone’s attention away from his momentary loss of control. “Kootie, see if you can’t open the windows, while I go back down to the truck for our witchy supplies.”