Earthquake Weather

  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.

  But this morning he had nevertheless helplessly found himself consulting the NADA sign and the ashtray once again, and a few minutes ago, at lonely random, he had got around to asking about her disgraced grand-uncle Georges Leon.

  The answering string of letters that he had just copied down was easily translatable as, “He was the western king, and then his son Scott was the western king.”

  And he now remembered Pete Sullivan dialing out Scott Crane’s full name on the old rotary telephone in the laundry room in Solville, six days ago—Cochran had noticed at the time that one of the two last names had been Leon.

  It could hardly be a coincidence—apparently the dead king in the back of Mavranos’s truck was some remote cousin of Cochran’s dead wife.

  Abruptly there was a hard knock at the motel-room door, and Cochran jumped so wildly that both ashtrays sprang off the bed; then he had dived to the closet and fumbled up the .357 with hands so shaky that he almost fired a bullet through the ceiling.

  “Who is it?” he demanded shrilly. He hoped it was Plumtree at last, or even Mavranos—and not the police, or Armentrout with a couple of burly psych-techs and a hypodermic needle, or whoever it had been that had shot at Mavranos by the Sutro ruins last week.

  “Is that you, Sid?” came a woman’s hoarse voice from outside.

  Carrying the gun, Cochran hurried to the door and peeked out through the little inset lens. It was Plumtree’s flushed face staring at him—in fact, in spite of the apparent sunburn and the tangled blond hair across her face, he could recognize her as being specifically Cody. And even through the peep-hole he could see dried blood on scratches below her jaw and at one corner of her mouth.

  He pulled the chain free of the slot and swung the door open. “Cody, I’m damn glad to—” he began, but guilt about his recent schemes stopped his voice.

  She limped in past him and sat down heavily on the bed. She was wearing clothes he hadn’t seen before, khaki shorts and a man’s plaid
flannel shirt, but she smelled of old sweat, and her bare legs were scratched and spattered with mud and burned a deep maroon. As he closed the door and reattached the chain, Cochran remembered dully that the Bay Area sky had been solidly overcast this whole past week.

  Plumtree was shaking her head, swinging her matted hair back and forth, and she was mumbling, perhaps to herself, “How do I hang on, how do I keep him down? I feel like I’ve been stretched on the rack! Even Valorie can only pin him down sometimes.” She looked at the gun in Cochran’s hand, and then her bloodshot eyes fixed on his. “Shooting me might be the best plan, that Mavranos guy’s no idiot. But right now you better tell me you’ve got something to drink in here.” She sniffed and curled her grimy lip. “Jeez, it stinks! Talk to the school nurse about hygiene, would you?”

  “I—” Cochran stopped himself, and just tossed the gun down on the bed and fetched the current pint bottle of Wild Turkey from the windowsill. After he had handed it to her he hesitantly picked the gun up again and tucked it into his belt.

  Plumtree tipped the bottle up and took several messy swallows, wincing as the whiskey touched the cut at the corner of her mouth; but she nodded at him over the neck of the bottle as she drank, and when she had lowered it and gingerly wiped her mouth, she wheezed, “Don’t be shy about it,” breathing bourbon fumes at him. “Put one through my thigh if you’ve got the leisure and elbow room, but—if I turn into my dad?—you stop me.” The bottle had been half full when he’d handed it to her, but there was only an inch or so left when she gave it back to him. “How long have I been gone?” she asked. “Not too long, I guess, if you’re still here. I was afraid you wouldn’t be—that, like, everything happened a year ago, and the king was dead past recall.”

  “Today is Monday the sixteenth,” he said, “of January, still. You’ve been gone … two full days.” He thought of wiping the neck of the bottle, then just tilted it up for a sip. The whiskey will kill any germs, he thought. “Where were you?” he asked after he had swallowed a mouthful of the vapory, smoldering liquor.

  “You’re a gentleman, Sid. Where was I? I—” She inhaled sharply, and then she was sobbing. She looked up at him and her eyes widened. “Scant! You found me!” She clawed the bedspread as if the room might begin tossing like a boat; then she grabbed his arm and pulled him down beside her, and buried her face in his shirt. “God, I hurt all over—my teeth feel like somebody tried to pull them all out—and I’m a mess,” she said, sniffling. “Hold on to me anyway. Don’t let me run away again! You might have to handcuff me to the plumbing in the bathroom or something.” He had both his arms around her now, and felt her shaking. “But don’t—Jesus, don’t hurt him, if he comes out.”

  He patted her dirty hair and kissed the top of her head. I’ve got to just throw away that cassette from the phone-answering machine, he thought. Even if it would serve as a potent lure, how could I possibly have thought of—pushing this woman out of her own head, in order to get Nina back?—or even just compounding Janis’s problems by adding one more ghost to her sad menagerie? And Nina is dead, she’d only be what Kootie called a ROM disk, like Valorie. I swear I will not settle for that!

  The bottle was in his right hand, behind her, and he wished he could get it up to his mouth.

  “Where have you been, Janis?” he asked softly.

  “Where—?” She shuddered, and then shoved him away. “Right back to me, hey?” she said. “Janis can’t face this flop? Or did you have Tiffany here, is that why you’re on the bed? How much time’s gone by now?”

  Cochran stood up. “It was Janis,” he said wearily, “and just for a few seconds. Cody, I wish you—never mind. So where were you all?”

  “I was—well, I was out in the hills. I’ve got to remember this, huh? Out in the woods with people wearing hoods, killing goats.” Tears spilled down her cheeks, and smeared the grime when she cuffed them away, but when she went on her voice was animated, a parody of vivacity: “One of the goat heads wound up on a, a pole, and I was on for just a couple of heartbeats when it was in the middle of speaking to us, in what I think was Greek. The goat head was speaking, in a human language. Goats have horizontal pupils because they look from side to side, mostly, and cats have vertical pupils because they’re always looking up and down. My pupils are … staying after school for detention. I don’t know who the hooded people were.” She nudged the NADA sign with her hip. “Whaddaya got, a Ouija board? Ask it who they were.” She smiled at him. Her nose had begun bleeding. “The hooded people.”

  Cochran glanced at the clock radio on the bedside table. He still had an hour and a half before he was to meet Mavranos. In the last couple of days he had got into the habit of walking up Russian Hill on Lombard to Van Ness and catching the cable car down to California Street and then taking another one west to Chinatown, but today he could drive the old Granada, and hope to find a parking place. He might even get Cody to drop him off at a corner near Grant and Washington. No, she’d be way too drunk—maybe Janis could drive him.

  “Okay,” he said. He stepped into the bathroom and hooked a face-cloth off the towel rack, then tossed it to her as he bent down beside the bed to retrieve the clean ashtray. “Your nose is bleeding, Cody,” he said, placing the ashtray on the metal sign. “Put pressure on it.” He sat down on the bed and laid his fingertips on the round piece of clear glass. “Who has … Miss Plumtree been with, during these last few days?” he asked.

  As soon as he spoke, it occurred to him that Cody should be touching the ashtray too, and that he should have cleared the ghost of Nina off the line; but the ashtray was already moving.

  “Write down the letters as they come,” he told Plumtree nervously.

  “I can remember ’em,” she said, her voice muffled by the towel.

  “Will you please—here we go.” The ashtray had paused over the L, and now moved sideways to the E.

  “Letterman,” mumbled Plumtree. “I knew it. I was with David Letterman.”

  When the ashtray planchette had spelled out L-E-V-R, Plumtree inhaled sharply and stumbled back to the Wild Turkey bottle and took a gulp from it, wincing again. “Fucking Lever Blank,” she gasped as blood spilled down her chin, “that’s what I was afraid of. Goddamn old monster, he can’t leave that pagan hippie cult alone, even though they threw him off that building in Soma.”

  “It’s not ‘lever,’ dammit,” interrupted Cochran loudly without looking up from the metal sign. “Will you please write this stuff down? It’s L-E-V-R, with no second E. And now an I, and an E … get the goddamn pencil, will you?” He glanced quickly at her. “And you’re bleeding all over the place.”

  “Okay, okay, sorry. Just, my hands feel like I’ve got arthritis.” The alcohol was visibly hitting her already—she was weaving as she walked back to the bed, as if she were on a ship in choppy water. She fumbled at the paper and pencil. “What …?”

  “L-E-V-R-I-E-R-B,” he spelled out. “And another L—and an A.”

  She was goggling blearily at the board now. “And N … and C …” she noted, painstakingly writing the letters.

  After several tense seconds, Cochran lifted his fingers from the ashtray. “That’s it. What, Levrierble …?”

  “Levrierblanc.” She held out the blood-spattered sheet of paper and gave him a scared, defiant glare. “That’s still Lever Blank, if you ask me. The French version.” She pressed the towel to her nose again.

  “My wife is French,” he said, nodding, realizing even as he spoke that it was an inadequate explanation. “Was.”

  “I know. Sorry to hear she died, dirty shame.” She snapped a dirty fingernail against the paper, spiking the blood drops on it. “It’s two words. Blanc’s the second word, like Mel Blanc.”

  Cochran nodded. Obviously she was right—and he suspected that if Nina hadn’t been their … operator here, it would have come out in plain English as LEVERBLANK.

  “A goat head,” he said, “speaking Greek.” In his mind he heard Long John Beach’s crazy lyr
ics again: … and frolicked in the Attic mists in a land called Icaree. “I think you’d better write down everything you can remember about this Lever Blank crowd.” He glanced again at the clock radio. “Not right now. I’ve got to meet Mavranos in a little over an hour. Let’s get Janis to drop me near the place, she—” isn’t falling-down drunk, he thought; “—isn’t having a nose-bleed, and then you can come back here and—”

  “Janis drive? Fuck that. I can drive, and I’m meeting Marvos—dammit—Mavranos with you, too. We’ll get this done. I don’t want to have that little kid’s dad’s blood on my hands one hour more than I have to.” Her own blood was running down her wrist. “He just wants, my father, he wants to become king, like he failed to do when he was in a body of his own. A male body, he needs. If we can get Crane solidly raised from the dead, I think my father will have no reason to hang around, he’ll just go back into hibernation, like a case of herpes in remission. You don’t have herpes, do you?”

  Cochran blinked at her. “No.”

  “Tiffany does. You should know. I won’t even drink out of a glass she’s used. How far away is it, where you’re meeting Marvy-Arvy?”

  “Oh—no more than twenty minutes, if we drive. Of course if we’ve got to find a place to park the car, I don’t know how long that might take. No, I really think it’s too dangerous for you to be there, Cody—if Mavranos gets hold of you, he’s liable to do something like—”

  “Nothing I’ll object to. Nothing I won’t deserve. I got his friend killed.” She struggled up from the bed, still pressing the bloody face-cloth to her nose. “You got coffee? Good. Make me a cup, and pour the rest of that bourbon into it. I’m gonna,” she said with a sigh, as if facing a painful ordeal, “take a shower.”