Earthquake Weather (20 page)

Johanna spoke from the back doorway: “Did you try to call up his ghost?”

“Any
ghost
of him wouldn’t be
him
,” Mavranos said wearily, stepping back and rubbing his eyes with his free hand, “any more than a—goddammit, an old video or tape recording, or a pile of holograph manuscript, or an old pair of his pants, would be him.”

“I was possessed by the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison for a week in ’92,” said Kootie, looking up from his golden bowl, “and that ghost was as lively as they come; and I have some understanding now of what the king is … what he does, what he monitors. And I’ve got to say that even
Edison’s
ghost wouldn’t have had the
scope
for the job.”

“Jesus, lady,” Mavranos burst out, “if you
are
the one that killed him, how did you
get
to him? He was castled!”

“A knight’s move,” said Plumtree flatly. “I’m not the same person, necessarily, from moment to moment, so I can’t be psychically tracked if I don’t want to be. And I approached from around below the grounds, from the beach, with the whole half-globe of the Pacific’s untamed water at my back. And I used a spear that was already inside his defenses—I was told that he had injured himself with it, once before—and my own blood was on the spearpoints, so I was in the position of overlapping his aura.” She frowned. “And I—there was something about a phone call—he was in a weakened state. And it was midwinter, the shift of one year to the next—the engine of the seasons had the clutch out, coasting.” She looked up at Mavranos and shrugged. “
I
—this person talking to you now—I didn’t set it up, or
do
it.
I
just … cooperated, went along with somebody else’s plan. And I don’t know who that ‘somebody else’ was.”

“He accidentally shot himself in the ankle with a speargun, in ’75,” said Diana. She visibly shifted her weight from one foot to the other, as if in sympathy. “I remember it.”

“So,” said Mavranos, “did you have any …
ideas,
about how you’d go about bringing the king back to life?”

“Yes,” Plumtree said. “And then I was told that Koot Hoomie Parganas could probably do it too. I came looking for him—figuring he could at least help me, somehow. See, I don’t know
exactly
how I’ll go
about
it.”

“How did you
plan
to do it?” Mavranos asked with heavy patience. “Approximately.”

“Where is the body?” Plumtree countered.

“Do you need the body, to do your trick?”

She shivered. “I hope so. But I suppose not.”

“If you even reach out toward his foot,” Mavranos told her, “I’ll shoot you away from him, please trust me on that.” He gestured toward the kitchen doorway with the revolver, which Cochran estimated was at least .38 caliber, and which appeared to be fully loaded—he could see the holed noses of four hollow-point bullets in the projecting sides of the cylinder.

“Let’s adjourn to the next room,” Mavranos said.

Cochran stood up when Plumtree did, and followed her into the fluorescent-lit kitchen.

The white-robed body of a powerfully built, dark-bearded man was lying on a long dining-room table in there. A three-inch metal rod stood up out of his beard above his throat.

“Shit!” exclaimed Cochran. “Is this
him,
is this guy
dead
?” His mouth was dry and his heart was suddenly pounding. Forgetting Mavranos’s threat to Plumtree, he stepped forward and touched the figure’s bared forearm—the flesh was impossibly cold, as cold as an ice pack, and he stepped back quickly. “You can’t keep a dead guy in here. Have you called the police? Jesus! Are you all—”

Angelica had walked up to him, and now put her hands on his shoulders and pushed down hard. His knees buckled, and he sat down abruptly on a chair that Diana had slid behind him a moment before.

“He is dead,” Angelica said to him clearly. “The only symptoms he doesn’t show are livor mortis, which is the discoloration caused by blood settling in the lowest areas of the body, and any evidence of decomposition. These
may
be signs that your girl
can
do something. Take a deep breath and let it out—would you like a drink?”

“No! I mean—hell yes.”

Cochran heard a clink behind him, and then Diana was pressing a glass of amber liquid into his shaking hand. It proved to be brandy.

“
Do
something?” he said breathlessly after he’d drunk most of it and helplessly splashed the rest onto the front of his T-shirt. “What you can
do
is call the—the coroner. All this supernatural talk is just—entertaining as hell, but it’s all
crap,
you’ve got—”

“This is
all
supernatural,” said Pete Sullivan loudly, overriding him. “From this undecaying body here all the way down to the TV in the other room. It’s all real, independent of whether you believe it or not.”

Pete smiled tiredly and went on in a quieter voice. “Hell, we had a—a piece of string!—here, that an old man in Mexico gave to Angelica; it couldn’t be severed. Just ordinary cotton string, and you could have cut it or burned it in two with a match, or just pulled it apart in your hands—if you could have got
around
to it! But somehow every time you’d try, something would interrupt—the phone would ring, or you’d cut yourself with the scissors and have to go get a Band-Aid, or the cat would start to throw up on some important papers, or you’d accidentally drop the string down behind the couch. I suppose if you really cornered it and forced it, you’d find that you’d suffered a stroke or a heart attack, or got knocked down by a random bullet through the window—and the piece of string would be on the floor somewhere, still whole.” He shook his head. “None of these things make logical sense, but they’re true
anyway.
If you insist on the world being
logical
at every turn, you’ll eventually be forced to retreat all the way into genuine insanity, I promise you.”

“Bring
me
the goddamn piece of string,” said Cochran loudly. “I’ll break the son-of-a-bitch for you!”

Angelica stood back and crossed her arms. “We lost it.”

After a tense moment Cochran let his shoulders slump; he sighed and rubbed his face with both hands. “I suppose he’s really a king, too. What’s he king
of,
what
was
he king of?”

“The land, for one thing,” said Kootie, who had followed them into the kitchen, “the American West. If he’s well, the land is well—right now he’s dead, and we’re in winter and having earthquakes all over. God knows what the spring will be like, or if there’ll even be one.”

Cochran raised his head and stared at the dead man’s strong, bearded face. It was pale, and the eyes were closed, but Cochran could see humor and sternness in the lines around the eyes and down the cheeks. “How could
he
have been … in ‘a weakened state’?” he asked softly.

Mavranos was frowning, and he passed the revolver from his right hand to his left and back again; Cochran could hear the bullets rattle faintly in the chambers. “We didn’t know how. He and Diana were having healthy babies—though this last couple of years the kids were getting bad fevers in the winter—and the land was yielding several crops a year! But there were signs—the phylloxera—”

“The phylloxera had nothing to do with anything,” snapped Diana angrily from behind Cochran.

“Okay,” Mavranos said. “Then I haven’t got a clue.”

“What the hell’s a phylloxera?” asked Plumtree.

“It’s not important,” Diana said. “Don’t talk about it.”

Cochran said nothing—but he knew what phylloxera was. It was a plant louse that in the 1830s had inadvertently been brought from America to Europe, where it had eventually nearly wiped out all the vineyards—the fabulous old growths in Germany, and Italy, and even France, even Bordeaux. The louse injected a toxin that killed the roots, six feet under, so that the vine and the grapes up on the surface withered away and died; the eventual desperate cure had been to graft the classic old European
vitis vinifera
grapevines, everything from Pinot Noir and Riesling to Malvasia and the Spanish Pedro Ximenez, onto phylloxera-resistant
vitis riparia
roots from America. But now, just since about 1990, a new breed of phylloxera had been devastating the California vineyards, which were mostly grown on a modern hybrid rootstock known as AXR#1. Most of Pace Vineyards’ vines were old Zinfandel and Pinot Noir on pre-war
riparia
rootstocks, so the subterranean plague hadn’t hit them, but Cochran knew personally a number of winemakers in San Mateo and Santa Clara and Alameda Counties who were facing bankruptcy because of the expense of tearing out the infested AXR#1 vines and replanting with new vines, which wouldn’t produce a commercial crop for three to five years.

He thought of what Kootie had said—
If he’s well, the land is well.
And he thought of the billions of minute phylloxera lice, busily working away …
six feet under.
The land, Cochran thought, has not been truly well for several years.

“And he was always … less powerful, in winter,” Mavranos said, shrugging, “and stronger in summer. One of the tarot cards that represents him is
Il Sole,
the Sun card.”

“This really is Solville,” said Angelica quietly, “while he’s here.”

Kootie pointed at the withered bean sprouts in Angelica’s Gardens of Adonis pans on the counter by the door. “Solville in eclipse,” he said.

“Not runnin’ a carny peep-show here,” said Mavranos gruffly “Back into the office, now.”

“Wait a minute,” mumbled old Spider Joe, who had been peering in blindly through the doorway. “I’ve got to … put in my two cents’ worth.” He pushed his way into the kitchen now, his projecting curb-feelers dragging noisily through the doorframe and then twanging free to wave and bob over the dead man’s bare feet. One of the metal filaments whipped across Plumtree’s cheek, and she whispered “Shit, dude!” and batted it away.

The white-bearded old blind man dug two silver-dollar-size coins out of the pocket of his stained khaki windbreaker, and for a moment he held them out on his outstretched palm. They appeared to be dirty gold, and were only crudely round, with bunches of grapes stamped in high relief on their faces, along with the letters TPA.

“Trapezus, on the Black Sea,” exclaimed Kootie, “is where those are from. Those are about two thousand years old!”

Spider Joe closed his hand, and when he opened it again the coins were United States silver dollars. “These are what he paid me with, nearly five years ago, for the tarot-card reading that led him to the throne.”

“I remember,” said Mavranos quietly.

“Well, he’s gonna need them again, now, isn’t he?—to pay for passage across the Styx, and for the drink of surrender from the Lethe River, over on the far side of India.” In spite of being blind, the old man shuffled forward, reached out and accurately laid one of the coins on each of the dead man’s closed eyelids.

Mavranos’s face was stiff. “We okay now? Right, everybody out.”

They all began shuffling and elbowing their way through the doorway back into the office, while Mavranos hung back with the revolver; a couple of Spider Joe’s antennae hooked one of Angelica’s bean pans off the counter and flung it clattering to the floor, spilling dirt and withered bean sprouts across the linoleum.

Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport: How soon my sorrow hath destroyed my face.

—William Shakespeare,

Richard II

K
OOTIE WAS BACK UP
on the desk beside the inert television, sitting cross-legged and finishing his fish stew. When everybody had resumed their places, he refilled his wine cup and said, “Who was this person who gave you my name and address?”

“And when did he give ’em to you?” added Mavranos.

“Dr. Richard Paul Armentrout, at Rosecrans Medical Center in Bellflower,” said Plumtree, who was sitting on the floor beside Cochran in front of the couch now. “This afternoon.” Apparently she too was respecting Strubie the Clown’s hundred-dollar bid to be left out of this picture.

Mavranos frowned, his high cheekbones and narrowed eyes and drooping mustache making him look like some old Tartar chieftain. “He
sent
you here?”

“No,” Plumtree said. “Sid and I broke out of the hospital, when the earthquake hit, a couple of hours ago. Armentrout didn’t even believe there
was
a king, much less that I had … helped to kill him, until he talked to me this afternoon. Then he said, ‘Oh, you must have had help, from somebody who was practically a king himself, like this kid from a couple of years ago.’ ” She looked up past Cochran at Kootie. “Which was you.”

Kootie put the bowl aside and took a sip of the wine. “Why did you escape?”

“Armentrout wants to find out what happened on New Year’s Day,” Plumtree told him, “and he wasn’t going to let us go until he was totally satisfied that he’d found out everything, using every kind of strip-mining therapy that his operating room and pharmacy have available; and even then I don’t think he’d have wanted us to be able to talk, after. He wouldn’t have killed us, necessarily, but he’d have no problem fucking up our minds so bad that between us we couldn’t string together one coherent sentence. This afternoon, just as a warm-up, he tried to break off and …
consume
a couple of my personalities.”

“Your personalities,” said Angelica.

“I’ve got MPD—that’s multiple—”

“I know what it is,” Angelica interrupted. “I don’t think the condition e
xists,
I think it’s just a romanticizing of post-traumatic stress disorder, best addressed with intensive exploratory psychotherapy, but I do know what it is.”

“My wife was a psychiatrist,” remarked Pete, “before she became a
bruja.
”

Plumtree gave Angelica a challenging smile. “Would you advise Edison Medicine for the condition?”

“ECT? Hell no,” snapped Angelica, “I’ve never condoned shock therapy for
any
condition; and I can’t imagine
anyone
prescribing it for PTSD, or a hypothetical MPD.”

“Edison Medicine,” came Kootie’s wryly amused voice from above Cochran. “It knocked
me
right out of my own head—and killed my dog.”