Earthquake Weather (25 page)

Cochran belatedly noticed that Angelica had brought a glass of something with her from the kitchen, tequila probably, and he watched her take a solid gulp of it now. “I think,” she went on, “that you were standing on the pavement below the building he fell from—I think he partly
landed on you,
which is why you were in the hospital with broken bones. And it was almost certainly a sunny day, because you seem to have identified him with the sun, hence your dream of the sun falling out of the sky onto you, and hence too your no doubt stress-triggered hysterical sunburn and constricted pupils. Conversion disorders, we call that class of physical symptoms.”

Angelica leaned forward—but her head was now over one of the drip-catching pots, and the next drop spattered on her scalp. She leaned back again on the couch. “That much is orthodox—Angelica Anthem Elizalde the doctor talking. Now it’s
Bruja Angelica, del ‘Testículos del León’:
I think that in the instant before his body died, when you were both lying there on the sidewalk or whatever, he managed to look into your eyes, and then he …
jumped across the gap,
threw his soul into your two-year-old body.” She was frowning deeply, staring at the liquor in her glass. “So at the tender age of two you lost your psychic virginity, in what must have been a traumatic violation of your
self.
I doubt that your home life in the hippie cult-commune was real conducive to mental health, but this virtual rape by your own father was undoubtedly the event that triggered your multiplicity.”

“I’m still here,” said Plumtree cautiously. “Valorie hasn’t made me lose time. So this must not be bad news.”

“We-ell,” said Angelica, raising her eyebrows, “the news is that your father is discorporate, but he’s in you; like one of those flanged wedges they use to split logs into several pieces. And he’s
alive,
he’s not a ghost; he never did die, never did experience the psychic truncation of death. He
is,
though, almost certainly the person that killed Scott Crane.”

“My father is alive,” said Plumtree, clearly tasting the thought. “I
didn’t
let him die! I
did
catch him—save him!”

And he’s Flibbertigibbet, thought Cochran nervously. Don’t lose sight of that, Janis.

A jangling metallic screech at the back door made Cochran jump and almost shout; Spider Joe was coming back inside, and the long, stiff wires that projected from his belt were scraping paint chips from the doorframe. “Goddammit,” the blind old man was muttering. Once through the narrow doorway he plodded across the floor, as Mavranos stepped out of his way and the antennae bunched and snagged the carpet and whipped through the air, and finally he sat down heavily on the floor beside the couch. Perhaps self-consciously, he groped around until he found Angelica’s deck of
Lotería
cards, and began shuffling the frail cards in his brown-spotted hands.

Angelica turned back to Plumtree. “Do you know what those lines were that you quoted a few minutes ago?” she asked Plumtree sharply. “A list of defenses, all provisional and makeshift-frail—‘Upon my back, to defend my belly,’ and so forth?”

“Don’t say any more,” said Plumtree hastily, “please. No, I don’t even recall quoting anything.”

“Well, they happen to be from
Troilus and Cressida,
” Angelica said, “a Shakespeare play that isn’t considered one of his good ones, mainly because it doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. But some spiritualists, mediums,
brujas y magos
—the real ones—are very aware of the play.”

“What’s it about?” asked Cochran—in a strained voice, for it had been at the Troy and Cress Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas that he had married Nina Gestin Leon—his beloved dead Nina—and had next morning had his first debilitating hallucination of the big, masked man.

Angelica sighed and finished her drink. “Only a few people know what I’m about to tell you,” she said. “See, Shakespeare didn’t write the play for the general public—its only intended performance was for a small, sorcerously hip audience in London in 1603—and in the published version he had to add four or five lines to the end of the first scene, tacked on after the rhyming couplet that originally ended it, in order to take away the real point of the play—which is that Troilus didn’t go out and fight, but got his wound at home—fatally, by his own hand. Hardly anybody knows, anymore, that it’s really a play about ghosts.”

She glanced at Plumtree, with what might have been sympathy. “I’ll have to re-read it, but it takes place during the Trojan War—you know? like in Homer?—and it’s about a Trojan girl, Cressida, who is being prepared to be a vehicle for the ghost of her dead father. The Greeks who are besieging the city have got hold of the ghost, and they want to use it against the Trojans, but they’ve got to get the ghost into a living body that’s both compatible with it and not a virgin, psychically. It’s a dirty-pool move, like using biological warfare, and some of the Greeks such as Ulysses don’t approve of the tactic; the Greek soldiers are suffering disorientation from the powerful ghost’s proximity, and they’re using masking measures—‘emulation,’ Ulysses calls it—to insulate themselves. So anyway, a traitor spiritualist in Troy is talking Cressida into having sex with the ghost of her dead
boyfriend,
Troilus, who near-decapitated himself with his sword before the action starts. In the play it’s never outright stated that Troilus is dead, a suicide ghost, but his very name should have been a clue to the theater-going public, really—in Homer’s
Iliad,
the Troilus character is dead long before this point in the story, though Homer doesn’t say he killed himself out of unrequited love of Cressida, as Shakespeare secretly has it. Anyway, a trade is set up—the clueless Trojans agree to turn over Cressida in exchange for some VIP prisoner-of-war Trojan, and the spiritualist manages to get Cressida into bed with Troilus’s ghost just barely before she’s got to leave the city. And, of course, the Greek scheme works: Troy falls, the noble prince Hector is killed. Though,” she added, visibly restraining herself from glancing toward the kitchen doorway, “Apollo and Aphrodite preserved Hector’s body from corruption.”

Mavranos was still holding the revolver. He looked across the room at Plumtree and asked, “What was your plan for reviving Scott Crane?”

She shivered under Cochran’s arm and muttered, “In the name of the Father, the Sun, the Holy Ghost.” The lights flickered; then she squinted at Mavranos. “Okay, sorry—what did you say?”

“I asked you how you planned to restore Crane to life.”

“A time for hard questions.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “I believed a
living
king would be able to restore him. A king in a living body. I knew he was a, a magic guy, and I figured he knew how to do shit like that. So I wanted to find the Flying Nun’s—Crane’s—presently disembodied spirit, and let him take my body, so he’ll
be
occupying a living body—
this
one—and he’ll be able to do the magical trick, whatever it involves.
I know
how to … open myself up, ‘wide unclasp the table of my thoughts,’ step aside and let another personality take control of my body—I do it a hundred times a day. And he wouldn’t be compromising himself by violating my spiritual virginity—I’m a regular Grand Central Station for personalities passing through this little head. So far they’ve all been homegrown, as far as I know, but I’m confident that any … psychic hymen! … is long gone.”

Truer than you yet know, Cody, thought Cochran. You should have been here for what Angelica said about your father a minute ago.

Plumtree was still holding Mavranos’s gaze, though Cochran could see the glitter of tears in her eyes. “And,” she went on steadily, “if he can’t manage the trick of getting himself back into his own body—even though it
does
happen to be so perfectly preserved
right here
in your kitchen!—then he can simply, God, simply stay in mine,
keep
it. Mine’s not perfect, and it’s the wrong sex, but it’s young, and it’s all I have to give him, by way of atonement.” She wiped her eyes impatiently on her shirtsleeve. “That was my plan. Dr. Armentrout said Koot Hoomie Parganas might know a way to do it, maybe another way.” She looked up at the boy on the desk. “Hanging around here tonight, I get the idea you
don’t,
in fact, know a way to do it. Is that … true?”

Angelica spoke up in answer, angrily. “Of course it’s true! If Kootie could revive the dead king, do you think he wouldn’t have done it?”

After staring at Kootie for another second or two, Plumtree turned a tired smile on Angelica. “No, lady,” she said quietly.

Mavranos swiveled his bleak gaze to Angelica. “Now I know how you feel,” he said hoarsely, “delivering the bad news to people.” He cleared his throat, but when he spoke again his voice was still as gritty as boot soles on sandstone: “I think Miss Plumtree’s plan might work.”

Angelica was visibly tense. “Who is that bad news for?”

“
You
all, goddammit. You and Pete and Kootie. Shit. What Diana and I meant to do by coming here was to confer the kinghood onto the man with the bleeding wound in his side. That office, the kinghood, would have carried with it a lot of protections—Miss Plumtree can tell you again how much work she had to do to get through the defenses to Crane.
But
—if Crane can be revived, even though he’s dormant and powerless right now, then Kootie doesn’t become the king after all. There are no protections. And you people are fatally compromised—you’ve invited us in, you’ve voluntarily taken the dead king’s very
body
in, given it shelter and respect! You’ve eaten bread and drunk wine in his corpse’s presence, you’ve declared allegiance and fealty to his reign, like it or not. The bad guys know your address, this bad psychiatrist and—” He glanced at Plumtree, “—and other villains. And they won’t let you live, you all being sworn-in soldiers in the routed side’s army now, and knowing what you know. These two,” he said, waving at Plumtree and Cochran, “found you tonight—hell, their
taxi driver
found you. And old Spider Joe had no problem, apparently, and he’s
blind.
By morning you may have armored assault vehicles pulling up out front. You’ve blown your mask-gaskets by letting us in, and I don’t even think you could run and hide somewhere else, now, and stay effectively hidden for long.”

Angelica had stood up from the couch during this, and paced to the kitchen doorway and back. “Then anoint Kootie,” she said. “Make Kootie the king, as you originally planned. We’ll have the protections of the true living king then.”

Mavranos reached up to the side and laid the revolver on the bookshelf beside the inert stuffed pig, and he wiped the palm of his hand on his jeans. “I deliberately killed a man once, at Hoover Dam, to protect my friends, and it has weighed cruel hard on me ever since. I won’t—I
won’t
kill a living person to protect a
dead
man; especially a living person I’ve become indebted to. You can march into the kitchen there and, I don’t know, chop Scott’s head off with a carving knife, if you like. I won’t shoot you, Angelica. Kootie would become king then, even without the blessings of me and Diana, which it would damn sure
be
without. But Kootie will have become king by being an accessory to the murder of his predecessor … as, in fact, most of the previous kings have done. And his will be—trust me!—a reign poisoned at its root.”

Cochran thought of the phylloxera lice, killing the sunny grapevines from the darkness six feet under.

“I … won’t do that,” said Kootie softly.

“Then I take back our invitation!” shouted Angelica. “I hereby annul it!
I
never invited you in, and all we did for your damned
king
was lay him out on the kitchen table! Pete and Kootie will carry him right back out to your abracadabra truck—and you can wipe your fingerprints off the doorknobs and take your kids and your toothbrushes and get out of here—take a broom with you and sweep your footsteps off the walkway as you leave!” She looked at Pete and lifted her open hand, and caught the little bottle of
Vete de Aquí
oil that he obediently tossed across the room to her.

“Go,” said Plumtree with a giddy wave, “and never darken our towels again.”

Mavranos smiled sadly at Angelica. “You took my forty-nine cents, that first day.”

“Cheerfully refunded!” Angelica stamped to the desk, pulled open the top drawer, and pawed through a pile of scattered change. Then she turned and threw seven coins at Mavranos.

The coins tumbled to a Wiffle-ball halt in mid-air; and they seemed to pop there, silently, like big grains of puffed rice; and then they fluttered away on dusty white wings toward the dripping ceiling.

Cochran watched them, and cold air on his teeth made him aware that his mouth was hanging open. The coins had turned into live luna moths, and a chilly draft had sprung up in the room.

Angelica was panting audibly as she dug seven more coins out of the drawer, and she flung them too toward Mavranos.

Again the coins dragged to a halt in mid-air, and twitched and puffed out in the moment that they hung suspended, and became live white moths that fluttered away in all directions. The long office room was cold now.

Pete stepped forward then, and he caught Angelica’s wrist as she was scrabbling in the drawer for more coins; and she collapsed against him, sobbing. “Why did you people have to …
come
here?” she wailed, her hot breath steaming in the chilly air.

Mavranos spread his hands. “Why did Kootie have to be the one with the qualifications, the unhealing cut in his side?”

Blind Spider Joe held up two of Angelica’s
Lotería
cards; Cochran leaned forward to peer at them, and saw that they were a pair, two copies of a picture of a woman in a narrow canoe, labeled
LA CHALUPA.

“Nobody’s brailled these cards for me,” the old man said irritably. “What are these?”

“They’re both the same,” said Kootie. “A lady in a little boat. She’s got, uh, baskets of fruit and flowers by her knees, jammed in the bow.”

“Two boats,” Spider Joe said. “You were in a boat on a boat, a boat aboard a boat, when you got wounded, boy, isn’t that right? And you had a guide who protected you through the ordeal, somebody like Merlin, or Virgil who escorted Dante through the Inferno. That was a
rite de passage—
he didn’t just save you, he saved you
for
something. That’s when you swung around to point here, to this.”