Earthquake Weather (38 page)

Angelica gave the screen a startled look, then twisted the volume knob.

In the grainy black-and-white picture, the old black woman was standing beside her chair now, and staring directly out of the screen. “Gotta get the
bugs
out of your
house,
” she quavered, apparently reciting the tail end of some exterminator commercial she had interrupted. Mavranos hoped she wouldn’t, this time, go on for several minutes with the parroted recitation.

“But I didn’t—I wasn’t even shaking the pennies,” said Angelica softly.

A crackling had started up inside the dead TV set that they were using as a table for the working one.

“The bugs that work six feet under,” said Kootie in a tense voice.

Mavranos couldn’t tell if the boy was responding to what the old woman had said, or was sensing something nearby, or was speculating on the source of the noise in the dead TV; and he realized that his heart was pounding.

“Too late!” said the old black woman. “The bugs win this round!
You
get out.”

It’s not an exterminator ad, thought Mavranos.

Black smoke abruptly began billowing up from the back of the bottom television set; but its speakers came to booming life, croaking right along with the top TV set’s, when the old woman shouted, “Boy-king, witch, escape artist and family retainer, I am speaking to you all!
Get out now.
They’re coming up the stairs, the ones who hate the California vines! You four go out the window—I will distract the intruders with conversation and difficult questions.”

Before she was finished speaking Mavranos had dropped his beer and stepped forward, and he grabbed Kootie and Angelica by their shoulders and propelled them stumbling across the floor toward the balcony. Pete Sullivan had reached through the black smoke to snatch the car keys off the top TV set, and he stepped along after his wife and foster son.

“There’s a fire escape on the right side,” Mavranos said, trying not to inhale the sharp-smelling smoke. He paused to grab his leather jacket and Angelica’s purse, because their handguns were in them, and then he was standing on the balcony beside Angelica and Pete, taking deep breaths of the fresh air; he shoved the purse at Angelica with one hand while he flexed his free arm into the sleeve of the jacket. “You got a live one in the chamber?” he gasped.

She nodded, frowning.

“Take the time to aim,” he said, boosting Kootie over the railing.

Behind them, a knock shook the hallway door. As if jolted to life by the knocking, the room’s smoke alarm finally broke into a shrill unceasing wail.

“Who is it?” demanded the old woman’s voice loudly from the two sets of speakers. “Be damned if I’m lettin’ any
bug men
into my home!”

Kootie was halfway down the iron ladder now, but Angelica had only swung one leg over the rail, and Pete was standing behind her, uselessly flexing his hands.

Mavranos’s mouth was dry, and he realized that he was actually very afraid of meeting whoever it might be that the old woman was referring to as bug men. “Pete,” he said gruffly, “we’re only on the second floor here.”

Pete Sullivan gave him a twitchy grin. “And it’s muddy ground below.”

Both men clambered over the long rail of the balcony and hung crouched on the outside of it—like, thought Mavranos, plastic monkeys on the rims of Mai Tai glasses—then kicked free and dropped.

After a windy moment of free-fall Mavranos’s feet impacted into the mud and he sat down hard in a puddle, but he was instantly up and limping to the curb, his hand on the grip of the .38 in his pocket as he stared back up at the balcony. “Keep ’em off to the side of me,” he called to Pete, who had got to his feet behind him.

Over the distance-muted siren of the smoke alarm Mavranos could hear the loud, cadenced voice of the old woman—she seemed to be shouting poetry, or prayers.

Kootie had hopped down onto a patch of wet grass, and as soon as he had sprinted to the sidewalk Angelica sprang away from the ladder and landed smoothly on her toes and fingertips. As she straightened up and followed Kootie to the sidewalk, she caught her swinging purse with her left hand and darted her right hand into it.

Pete herded them down the sidewalk past a tall bushy cypress tree and a brick wall; Mavranos followed, but stopped to peek back through the piney branches of the cypress.

Across the lawn and above him, wisps of black smoke were curling out of the open balcony doorway and being torn away by the rainy breeze, but he saw no people up there; and he was about to step away and hurry after his companions when all at once three figures shuffled clumsily out onto the balcony, and from the second-floor elevation looked up and down Lapu Lapu Street. The middle figure, a white-haired man in a business suit, was clearly holding a weapon under his coat; but it was the pair of men flanking him that made Mavranos’s belly go cold.

The two figures were bony and angular inside their identical lime-green leisure suits, and their bland faces swung back and forth in perfect unison—and though they didn’t appear to say anything, and their theatrically raised hands didn’t move to touch the white-haired man, Mavranos was certain that the pair had somehow perceived him. And at the same time he was sure that they were inanimate manikins.

Mavranos turned away and ran; but by the time he had caught up with Pete and Angelica and Kootie he had reined in his momentary panic and was able to plausibly force his usual squint and grin. The old red truck with Scott Crane’s tarpaulin-covered body in the back of it was at the curb in front of them, and there was no use in spooking these people—though before long he would have to tell them what he had seen.

Not right now, though—not for several minutes, several miles, at least. Whatever it is, it’s what Nardie saw in Leucadia last week.

“It looks like we
all
go meet Cochran today,” he panted as he held out his hand to Pete for the car keys. “And,” he added in a voice he forced to be level, “I hope there aren’t any bug men at Li Po.”

In an upstairs room at the Star Motel in the Marina district of the city, Sid Cochran was sitting on the bed, gently nudging a clean glass ashtray across the back of a yellow enameled-metal National Auto Dealers Association sign he had salvaged two days ago from a gas-station Dumpster at Lombard and Octavia.

The sign was lying face down on the bedspread, but he knew that the front of it read NADA, and he found that oddly comforting. On this blank side he had inked the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and numbers from 0 to 9, in a bow-and-string pattern like what he remembered seeing on Ouija boards. Up by the pillows, next to an ashtray full of cigarette butts, lay half a dozen sheets of paper covered with lines of lettering tentatively divided into words by vertical slashes.

He had been trying for some time now to conduct a lucid conversation with the ghost of his wife.

Now the ashtray appeared to have stopped moving again, and he sat back and wrote down the last letter it had framed, and then he stared uneasily at the latest answer the ashtray had spelled out for him:
CETAITLEROIETPUISSONFILSSCOTTETAITLEROI.

After driving away from the Sutro Bath ruins on Thursday in his old Granada, and then looping around and around the blocks of the Marina district until he was sure they were not being followed, Cochran and Plumtree had checked into this motel on Lombard Street. Cody had used Nina’s Visa card, signing “Nina Cochran” on the credit-card voucher.

Plumtree had stayed up all that night and into Friday the thirteenth, watching television with the sound turned low enough so that Cochran could at least try to sleep; Cochran’s only clue as to which personality might be up at any time had been the choice of programs. Cochran had gone sleepily stumbling out to meet Mavranos at noon, and when he had got back to the motel at about two in the afternoon, Plumtree had been gone. Cochran had slept until nearly midnight, by which time she had not reappeared.

And he had not seen her since. Twice on Saturday the telephone had rung, but when he had answered it there had been only choked gasping on the line.

On both of the days since her disappearance he had gone out to meet Arky at the Chinese bar at noon, and a couple of times a day he had trudged to the deli on Gough for coffee and sandwiches and bourbon and beer, but he had spent most of his time drunkenly studying the French Catholic missal he had found in Nina’s sewing room when he and Plumtree had stopped at his house early on Thursday morning.

One page of the little volume was clearly a family tree. Cochran learned that Nina had not been the first of her family to have emigrated to the United States—a grand-uncle, one Georges Leon, had moved to New York in 1929, and then onward west to Los Angeles in 1938, and had had a son in 1943. Old Georges had apparently been a black sheep of the Leon family, had
n’avait pas respecte le vin,
disrespected the primordial French rootstocks. In tiny, crabbed script someone had declared that, precisely because the Bordeaux wines were terrible from 1901 through 1919, these were the times when all true sons of
père Dionysius Français
should show their loyalty, not go running off to
les dieux étrangers,
strange gods.

In fact, just about all of the notes in the missal concerned viticulture and wine-making. On the
dates importantes
page, 1970 was noted because Robert Mondavi of California’s Robert Mondavi Winery had in that year met with Baron Phillipe de Rothschild of Bordeaux—in Honolulu, of all the remote places. 1973 was listed just for having been the year in which the Baron’s Chateau Mouton Rothschild claret was finally promoted to the official list of First Growth Bordeaux wines; this development was apparently viewed as bad news by Nina’s family because of the Baron’s association with the Californian Robert Mondavi. One marginal scrawl described the two men as acolytes of the damnable California Dionysus.

Some of the notes were too brief and cryptic for him to make any sense of at all. For 1978 was just a sentence which translated as, “Mondavi visits the Medoc—failure.” The following year was pithily summarized with the French for “Answered prayers! The new phylloxera.”

For 1984 was simply the words
Opus One,
but because of his profession he did know what that must refer to.

“Opus One” was the ’79 vintage California wine that Mondavi and Phillipe de Rothschild had finally released in 1984 as a joint venture between their premier Californian and French vineyards. It had been a fifty-dollar-a-bottle Cabernet Sauvignon with some Cabernet Franc and Merlot blended in, to soften the roughness imparted by the Napa hot spell in May of ’79, fermented in contact with the skins for ten days and aged for two years in Nevers oak casks at Mouton, in the Medoc. Cochran remembered the Opus One as having been a subtle and elegant Cabernet, but the person who had scribbled the notes in the missal didn’t approve of it at all:
le sang jaillissant du dieu kidnappe,
she called it, “haemorrhage blood of the kidnapped god.”

The 1989 entry was on the next page, and it was just
J’ai recontre Androclès, et c’est le mien
—“I have met Androcles, and he is mine.”

A photograph of Sid Cochran was laid in at that page.

Sitting drunk in the Star Motel room, Cochran had taken some comfort from the fact that Nina had treasured his picture this way … until he noticed that in it he was posed with his chin on his right fist, and the ivy-leaf mark on the back of his hand was in clearer focus than his face was.

And so he had improvised the makeshift Ouija board.

Using the glass ashtray as a planchette, he had spelled out a call for Nina’s ghost, and then had let the ashtray drift of its own accord from one letter to another after he had spoken questions aloud to it.

To his shivering nausea and breathless excitement, the device had appeared to work. The indicated letters, which he had painstakingly copied down one by one on sheets of Star Motel stationery, had been resolvable into French words.

The very first words had told him that he was indeed the “Androcles” the missal note had referred to—and his initial suspicion that he had unknowingly propelled the planchette himself, just subconsciously spelling out what he’d wanted to read, had been dispelled when further words appeared:
TU TEXPOSES AU DANGER POUR SAUVER LE DIEU DANGEREUX
, “You put yourself in danger to save the dangerous god.” That part made no sense to him.

Twice he had told his wife’s ghost—aloud, in stammering self-conscious syllables—that he loved her; and both times the slowly indicated letters had advised him to turn all his feelings for her over to the god who died for everyone. The wording had been exactly the same both times, and he had been reminded of the repetitive answers he had got from Plumtree’s Valorie personality.

In spite of that, he had carefully wrapped the cassette from the telephone answering machine in a clean sock and stashed it in the bedside table drawer, beside the Gideon Bible—and he had stayed here at the motel, running up Nina’s credit-card debt, in the hope that Plumtree would come back here, ready to do her mind-opening trick. He had called Pace Vineyards and got them to agree to let him have an unspecified amount of vacation time.

Yesterday morning he had got around to asking the Ouija board about one of the missal notes that had puzzled him—and then, in horrified alarm, he had chosen to regard the resulting answer as delusional, a fever-dream notion induced in the unimaginable sleep of death.

He’d had no choice: for in answer to his question about the unspecified “failure” during Mondavi’s 1978 visit to the Medoc, the planchette had given him the letters
JAI ESSAYE MAIS JAI MANQUE A TUER LHOMME DE CALIFORNIA,
which worked out to spell, “I tried but failed to kill the man from California” in French.

After getting that answer on Sunday morning, he had stayed away from the planchette all the rest of that day—he had spent most of the gray daylight hours on a long, agitated walk among the incongruously peaceful green lawns of nearby Fort Mason. Nina would have been only fourteen years old in 1978—he had assured himself that the Ouija-board statement could not be anything more than a sad, morbid fantasy.