The coffee at the bottom of Thomas's cup was as thick, as mud, but he drank all that could be tapped out. Skooney had set the last half of hers aside.
"Today's… Saturday, right?" Thomas asked. She nodded. "A week and two days ago," he went on, "I was pumping a vat of Pinot Noir at the Merignac monastery."
"Pumping a vat?" echoed Skooney.
"Yeah. The grape skins float on the surface in a thick layer, and you have to pump the wine from below over them again and again until it's dark enough. The skins are what give it the red color."
"Oh." She thought about it for a while. "You were a monk?"
"Sort of. An apprentice monk."
"Not a student from Berkeley?"
"No. I made that up."
A muted hissing swept over the building and Thomas realized it was raining. "It's been a hell of a week," he said. "And now rain."
Someone had located the furnace, and after clinking around in its works for ten minutes managed to light it and fill it with strips of the wall paneling. Thomas stretched out along the wall base to sleep some more.
Gladhand was thumbing the cork into the bourbon bottle when Thomas shambled up, rubbing his eyes. "Did I wait too long?" Thomas asked.
"Well, yes. It's 12:01. But go ahead, have a cup for medicinal purposes." Thomas picked up a paper cup, which he extended to Gladhand to receive the whiskey. "Sit down, Thomas; we have things to discuss." Gladhand poured himself a cup and merely sipped it reflectively.
"It's like a chess game," the theater manager said, half to himself. "You study the situation, the strengths, weaknesses, ignorances; then you construct a plan and begin to put it into effect—but even as you move, the situation changes under your feet. Your opponent can disappear and be replaced. You can be replaced. Politics is a very slippery arena."
"Uh, no doubt, sir," Thomas said, mystified by all this.
"Have you looked at the assignment lists yet?"
Thomas shook his head.
"You're to be in the smaller force that attacks from the rear. A man named Naxos Gaudete is leading that group. Spencer was to have been his lieutenant—kind of all around errand runner, in other words—and I'm thinking you might do as a replacement."
"What would I have to do? I mean, I don't—"
"Nothing difficult. Just fetch things, carry a few boxes perhaps, relay messages. You won't even be in the actual fighting—wouldn't be anyway, with your trigger finger gone."
"I see. Well, sure; just so Gaudete doesn't expect me to know how to load cannons or anything."
"Splendid. By this time tomorrow, God willing, Joe Pelias—the real one—will be smoking a cigar in the mayor's office."
"Does he know the date's been moved up? Where is he, anyway?"
Gladhand sighed. "You're looking at him," he said softly.
Thomas blinked. "Am I?"
"Yes. Ten years ago, when that grenade nearly blew off my legs, two friends loaded my bleeding wreckage into a baker's cart and drove me deep into the city. I had an ex-wife living down on Central, and she grudgingly nursed me back to health while Hancock's damned android began taking over my… job, my life. When I'd healed, as much as I ever would, the android was well-entrenched in city hall. So I decided to wait and organize an underground resistance army that I could use, when the time came, to restore me to the mayor's office. I grew a beard, shaved my head and had the roots killed, and became Nathan Gladhand, theater manager."
Thomas shook his head wonderingly. "How long was it before you bought the Bellamy Theater? You must have worked in cellars and school auditoriums for a while."
"Hell no," Gladhand smiled. "One thing I am not is poor. I had big accounts in a dozen banks between Santa Barbara and Laguna. Under various names, of course, and coded by my thumbprint. This current effort is exhausting my funds, I'll admit, but the money has served its purpose."
"Where'd it all come from? Were you always rich?"
"No. I embezzled the devil out of the city treasury, you see, during my term as mayor. Hah! Ever since my reign the city has been nearly broke, in spite of the taxes. I think Hancock found out about my book-juggling and imaginary committees and all, and paid somebody to throw that grenade at me." Gladhand took a long swallow of his whiskey. "Bourbon renewal, I call this," he said, waving his glass. "One gulp and the whole neighborhood looks more elegant. Anyway, Hancock was an idealist, you see. Always horrified. Horrified when I had a drink or two in the office, horrified when I gave highly paid posts to pretty but otherwise unqualified young girls; hell, even horrified when I'd hang convicted murderers. So he had me removed from the picture and put an 'infallible' android in my place (he was always at me about how 'morally unfallen' androids were). That was a real laugh. The new Pelias kept the capital punishment and broadened the qualifications for it. And his cops were always gunning down citizens for things like cheating a newspaper machine.
Hancock killed himself four years later. Sic semper idealists."
Thomas rolled a mouthful of bourbon on his tongue and said nothing.
"And there'll be a place of honor for you in the new regime, Rufus," Gladhand said. "A nice, big office where you can write all the poetry you like. I'll have the government printing office publish your works."
Thomas shook his head. "I can't write poetry any more."
"Of course you can."
"No," Thomas insisted. "It's gone. I wrote a sonnet— iambic heptameter—this week, and I can see now that it was the last poem I'll ever write. It isn't just that my mind is dry for the moment—I know how that feels, and this isn't it. It's as if… as if part of my brain has been amputated."
Gladhand started to speak but changed his mind. "Drink up," he said after a pause. "This business has crippled both of us."
The rain had stopped for the moment, but an icy damp wind whipped at the oilcloth lashed over the two cannons that were being pulled behind the cart Thomas was in. The caravan rattling swiftly down the three southbound lanes of the Hollywood Freeway carried no running lights, and Thomas, peering back over his shoulder, could only occasionally make out the black bulks of the following troop and ammunition carts.
"Spring Street exit ahead," barked Gaudete, who sat beside Thomas. "Give them two flashes to the right."
Thomas picked up a steaming dark lantern from the floorboards and, leaning out on the right side of the cart, slid the lantern's iron door open-and-shut, open-and-shut. A quick acknowledging flash came from the wagon behind, and Thomas set the lantern down.
Gaudete snapped a long lash over the heads of the four horses. His droopy black mustache was matted with scented oil that had run down from his hair during the rain, and he kept sucking at the ends of it. "What's the time?" he snarled.
Glancing at the luminous face of the watch he'd been ordered to hold, Thomas answered, "23:55 hours."
"Fine."
Thomas sat back and pulled his corduroy coat tighter about him and patted the bulge in his right pocket that was a .45 calibre seven-shot automatic pistol.