But Kootie spoke first. “I am the master of this house,” the boy said. “And you have my permission to bring your party inside.”
Angelica wheeled on Kootie, and she could feel her face reddening. “Kootie, what are you—” Then she stopped, and just exhaled the rest of her breath in helpless frustration.
Under the tangled curls of his black hair, Kootie’s face looked leaner, older now; but the apologetic smile he gave her was warm with filial affection, and sad with a boy’s sadness.
Mavranos’s grin was flinty. “Just what you were about to say yourself, ma’am, I know,” he growled. “Oh well—now that the boy’s got the strength in his limbs back, maybe he could help me and this other gentleman with the carrying.” He picked up his beer can and drained it, then tossed it onto the grass. Perhaps to himself, he said, softly, “But why couldn’t the boy have asked me whose truck it was?”
Again Angelica opened her mouth to say something, but Mavranos waved her to silence. “Moot point and rhetorical question,” he said. “It always happens this way, I guess,”
“At least give me forty-nine cents!” Angelica said. If these people pay me and thus become clients of mine, she thought, if I’m following my ita in my dealings with them, we can be protected by the orishas; if there are any orishas left out there, if my ita still counts for anything, after whatever it is that has happened today.
Mavranos grinned sleepily and dug a handful of change out of his jeans pocket. “Look at that,” he said. “Exact.” He dropped the quarter and two dimes and four pennies into her shaky, outstretched palm. He looked past her at Kootie and Pete, and called, “You fellas want to give me a hand? Let me get the back of the truck open.”
He plodded back toward the truck, his hand rattling keys in the pocket of his old denim jacket, and Kootie and Pete exchanged a nervous glance and then stepped forward to follow him.
BOOK ONE: TO THE BOATS
The likeness passed away, say, like a breath along the surface of the gaunt pier-glass behind her, on the frame of which, a hospital procession of negro cupids, several headless and all cripples, were offering black baskets of Dead Sea fruit to black divinities of the feminine gender…
—Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
TROILUS: Fear me not, my lord; I will not be myself, nor have cognition Of what I feel.
—William Shakespeare,
Twilus and Crcssida
CHAPTER THREE
“In short” said Sydney, “this is a desperate time, when desperate games are played for desperate stakes. Let the Doctor play the winning game; I will play the losing one…”
—Charles Dickens,
A Tale of Two Cities
WHERE Janis Cordelia Plumtree finally wound up was in a chair in the TV lounge.
She had visited people in hospitals where the lines on the linoleum floors led you somewhere—“Follow the yellow line to OB” or something—but the black lines in the gray floors of Rosecrans Medical Center just led around in a big dented loop, with frustrating gaps where hallways crossed. Maybe the point was that you were free to pick your own destination…the TV lounge, or the meds station, or your “room” with two unmade beds in it and no bath or shower and a door that couldn’t lock.
There were wire-reinforced windows in the halls and the lounge, but the views were only of fenced-in courtyards, shadowy in the late-afternoon sunlight and empty except for picnic tables and dome-topped swing-door trash cans; and you generally couldn’t get out there anyway.
The pictures on the walls—vapid reproductions of watercolor flowers—had rectangles of Plexiglas over them in the frames, rather than real breakable glass. She couldn’t remember how she knew this, she didn’t recall having touched one in the… nine days she’d been living here.
“I think he’s like you,” Dr. Armentrout went on. The rotund white-haired psychiatrist had dragged up a chair next to the one she’d collapsed into after finally stepping off the floor-line circuit and wobbling into the TV lounge. He had been talking to her for a minute or two now, but she was looking past him.
On the TV, hung behind a clear Plexiglas shield up above head-height on the wall beyond Armentrout, Humphrey Bogart was showing his teeth, talking mean and ruthless as he told the fat man, “We’ve got to have a fall guy.” There were no colors—all the figures, the Fat Man and Bogart and Joel Cairo and “the gunsel,” were in black-and-white, like a memory for someone else.
Plumtree shifted on the vinyl chair and tucked her denim skirt more tightly around her knees but didn’t take her eyes off the screen. Murder had been done, apparently, and a scapegoat would have to be…turned over.
“What a flop,” she said; then added, absently, “Who’s like me?”
“This man Cochran, who’s being transferred here from Metro in Norwalk,” said Armentrout. “His wife was killed Sunday before last, New Year’s Day, at dawn—dressed herself up in a bedsheet and tied ivy vines in her hair and ran out into traffic on the 280, up in San Mateo County.” Plumtree didn’t look at the doctor or speak, and after a few seconds he went on, “She was pregnant, and the fetus died too, do you suppose that’s important? Last week he flew her ashes back to her family estate, in France. He appears to have had a delusional episode there, and another when he got off the plane at LAX, in Los Angeles.”
“Rah rah rah,” said Plumtree.
“What happened on that Sunday morning?” he asked, as casually as if he hadn’t been asking her that question every day.
“This guy’s wife was run over by a bus,” Plumtree said impatiently, “according to you. Cockface.”
The doctor’s voice was tight: “What did you call me, Janis?”
“Him, not you. Wasn’t that what you said his name was?”
“Cochran.”
The vinyl seat of Armentrout’s chair croaked as he shifted, and Plumtree grinned, still watching the movie.
“Cochran,” Armentrout repeated loudly “‘Why do you say it was a bus? I didn’t even say she was hit by a vehicle. Why should it have been a bus?”
THE TV screen went dark, and then flared back on again.
IT WAS a Humphrey Bogart movie; apparently The Maltese Falcon, since Plumtree saw that Elisha Cook and Mary Astor and Sidney Greenstreet were in it too. She was surprised to see that it was in color, but quickly reminded herself that they were colorizing all those old movies now. She couldn’t remember how long she might have been sitting here watching it, and was startled when she glanced to the side and saw. Dr. Armentrout sitting in a chair right next to her. She unfolded her legs and stretched them out, with the heels of her sneakers on the floor and the toes pointed upward.