Her face was tense as she shook her head again and pressed her cold lips to his ear. “Later,” she breathed, and at least her breath was warm. “Don’t wake up the master of the house.” As she pulled her face back she nodded out toward the garden without looking that way.
Kootie had to look. He glanced over his shoulder as the woman took his elbow and hurried him toward a pair of windowed doors ahead—but all he saw in the walled garden, aside from the dripping ginger stalks and rose vines on the far side of the rain-stippled puddles, was the tree stump with the mirror leaning against it.
Squinting against the rain, he saw that the stump was a gnarled and hairy old grapevine, a full yard thick, with jagged, chunky outcrops where old canes had been pruned back. A soggy animal fur had been draped around two of the truncated woody limbs as if around shoulders, and to Kootie the bumpy bark between the cane stumps looked, in the moment before the woman pulled him through the doors into a dry, pine-floored hallway, like the whiskery gray face of an aged man.
The woman in the white robe was leading him quickly toward a set of polished black wood stairs that led upward. “What is this place?” Kootie whispered again.
“It’s his boardinghouse,” she whispered back. He takes in boarders? Kootie thought. “It’s not here all the time,” she went on, “but it’s always here on January seventeenth, for people with the right kind of eyes—and with this bad checkmate rain, the place would certainly have been here today in any—case or else this rain couldn’t have happened except on this day, St. Sulpice’s Day. If you’re a fugitive, you’re welcome here.” They had reached a shadowy upstairs corridor with narrow gray-shining windows along one wall, and she led Kootie by the hand to an open interior door. .
“Are you hungry?” she asked. “I’ve cooked you a king’s breakfast.”
Kootie could smell some kind of spicy roasting meat on the musty air. “Hungry as a bedbug,” he said, quoting an old Solville line that had somehow evolved from Don’t let the bedbugs bite.
“Me too!” she said with a breathless laugh as she stepped into the dimly lit room. “This Death-card rain will bring out a lot of fugitive places in the city, like toadstools, that won’t be there anymore after the sun comes out again. But the eating is best here.”
Kootie followed her into the room, and quickly stepped across onto a knitted rug so as not to drip rain water onto the polished wood floor. There were no windows in the room, but flames in oil lamps on the walls threw a soft illumination across dark old tapestries and a battered white make-up table and a huge, canopied bed. A black-brick fireplace took up most of the far wall, and though there were no logs on the grate, a tiny brass brazier stood on the broad hearthstone, with coals glowing under a grill draped with strips of sizzling, aromatic meat. A basket of thick black bread slices stood on a carpet nearby.
“The Loser’s Bar is surely out there somewhere today,” the woman said as she tossed her head back, freeing her long black hair from the linen hood, “serving pointless seafood today—though they might as well be serving cooked sandals and baseball caps, for all the good it can do anyone on a day like this.”
Her hair was lustrously dry now, and Kootie wondered how she could have dried it, and changed her clothes, and prepared this food, in the few minutes since he had seen her in the long alley off the Street of Gamblers. And he remembered how her silhouette had seemed for a moment to be the knobby round figure that had shown up briefly on the motel television.
I don’t care, he thought. I can take care of myself. He saw a bottle of dark wine by the mirror on the make-up table, and he was able to cross to it and pick it up without stepping on bare floor.
The label just said, BITIN DOG.
“I shouldn’t,” he said uncertainly, “be eating…meat.” Or drinking alcohol, he thought.
“Here’s a dry robe for you,” she said. “You don’t want to meet the lord of this house in those clothes anyway. Take them off and get warm.” She looked at the bottle in his hand and smiled at him. “You can have a drink of that…after. It’s the wine of forgetfulness, you know. And it’s all right—it you can swallow with impunity, as much as you like, the whole bottle.” She knelt in front of him and began prising loose the knots in his soaked sneaker laces. She looked up at him. “You’d like some of that, wouldn’t you? Impunity?”
“God,” said Kootie softly, “yes.” After, he thought. After what?
“The peppered venison is still raw in the middle,” she said. “We can eat it, too, after.”
“Okay,” he said, and began unbuttoning his shirt with shaking fingers. He hoped the cut over his ribs wasn’t bleeding through the bandage.
Fleetingly to his mind came an image of himself buttoning his shirt as he stumbled sleepily out of his Solville bedroom, sniffing onions and eggs and coffee on jasmine-scented morning air, yawning and replying As a bedbug! to Angelica’s cheery Are you hungry?
Good-bye to all that, he thought despairingly.
THE BOATHOUSE in Golden Gate Park was locked up and the boats were inert and chained to the dock when the five bedraggled figures trudged across the lake lawn to the shuttered rental window, but the two teenaged park employees who’d been banging around inside agreed to open early after Angelica made Cochran offer them a hundred dollars; and by the time the sun was coming up over the cypresses, two electric boats were buzzing slowly out across the glassy surface of Lake Stow—Pete and Angelica and the distracted Mavranos in one, and Cochran and Plumtree closely pacing them in the other.
The boats were small, with not quite enough room on the padded benches for three people to sit comfortably. A toggle switch on the right side by the steering wheel turned the electric motor of each boat on and off, and with no windshield the long flat hood was a sort of table. Cochran wished they could have stopped to get beer in addition to his hundred dollars, he had paid twenty-six dollars for the minimum full hour for two boats, and it looked as though it would take the tiny engines the whole hour to coax the boats all the way around the wooded island in the middle of the lake. The unrippled water ahead was studded with ducks and seagulls who all might have been asleep. Cochran remembered the dead birds that had fallen out of the sky after Crane had turned into a skeleton, and so he was relieved when a couple of these ducks awoke and went flapping away across the lake, their wing tips slapping rings in the water like skipped stones.
The boat with Angelica and Pete and Mavranos in it buzzed along at a dog-paddle pace only two yards to the right of Cochran’s elbow, which hung out over the low gunwale of the boat he shared with Plumtree.
“Angie, shouldn’t we be going the other way around?” asked Pete Sullivan in a near-whisper. “This is clockwise, not…windshield.”
“I wish we could,” Angelica muttered. “But that’s an evasion measure, we don’t dare—we might wind up losing the wrong one.” She shook her head. “God, this is slow! The motor on this boat sounds like a sewing machine.”
Cochran thought of the woman who had been called Ariachne in the version of A Tale of Two Cities that he had read on the plane home from Paris a week and a half ago—the woman who sewed into her fabrics the names of people who were to be beheaded on the guillotine.