“Melville, then. Herman Melville’s by-blow.”
“Wish it were true.”
“Is.”
I heard the great weight behind the door roll back on creaking wheels. The portal drifted wide.
I saw an immense woman in an immense crimson velvet queen’s robe receding on roller wheels in a metal throne across the hardwood floor to the far side of the room. She stopped by a table on which rested not one, but four crystal balls, corus-cant with light from a green-and-amber Tiffany lamp. Queen Califia, astrologer, palmist, phrenologist, past and futurist, sank inside three hundred mountainous pounds of too-too-solid flesh, her stare flashing X rays. A vast iron safe hulked in the shadows.
“I don’t bite.”
I stepped in. Crumley followed.
“But leave the door open,” she added.
I heard the peacock scream in the yard and dared to hold out my other hand.
Queen Califia reared back as if burned.
“You know Greene, the novelist?” she gasped. “Graham Greene?”
I nodded.
“Wrote about a priest who lost faith. Then witnessed a miracle he himself had caused. The shock at his renewed faith almost killed him.”
“So?”
“So.” She stared at my hand as if it were disconnected from my arm. “Lord.”
“Is it happening to you?” I said. “What happened to that priest?”
“Oh, God!”
“Did you lose your faith, your power to heal?”
“Yes,” she murmured.
“And now, just now, it all came back?”
“Dammit! Yes!”
I crushed my hand to my chest to blind it.
“How’d you guess that?” I said.
“No guess. Scares the hell out of me.”
She saw the wedding invitation and the newspaper in my outstretched hand.
“You’ve been up to see him,” she said.
“You looked. That’s cheating.”
That brought a half smile and then a snort. “People ricochet off him and end up here.”
“Not often enough, I think. May I sit?” I said. “I’ll fall if I don’t.”
She nodded at a chair a few feet away, a safe distance. I fell into it.
Crumley, ignored, looked peevish.
“You were saying?” I said. “People don’t visit old Rattigan often. No one knows he’s alive on Mount Lowe. But someone went there and yelled at him today.”
“She yelled?” The great mountain almost melted in remembrance. “I wouldn’t let her in.”
“Her?”
“It’s always a mistake”—Queen Califia cast a glance toward the crystal balls—“to guess futures and, damn fool, tell them. I give hints, not facts. I won’t tell people what stocks to buy, what flesh to borrow. Diets, yes, I sell vitamins, Chinese herbs, but not longevity.”
“You just did.”
“You’re different.” She leaned. The rollers under her massive chair squealed.
“The future lies ahead of you. I’ve never seen a future so clear. But you are in terrible danger. I see all the time that you have to live, but someone could destroy it. Be careful!”
She paused for a long moment, closed her eyes, and then said, “You her friend? You know who I mean.”
I said, “Yes—and no.”
“Everyone says that. She’s black and white and wild all over.”
“Who are we talking about?”
“We don’t need names. I wouldn’t let her in. An hour ago.”
I looked at Crumley. “We’re catching up, getting close.”
“Don’t,” said Califia. “The way she yelled I thought she might have a knife. ‘I’ll never forgive you!’ she screamed. ‘You gave us the wrong road maps, down instead of up, lost instead of found. May you roast in hell!’ Then I heard her drive away. I won’t sleep at all tonight.”
“Did she say—this sounds crazy—where she was going?”
“Not crazy at all,” said Califia. “I would think that since she went first to that old fool on Mount Lowe who she dropped after one bad night, then me who put her up to it, well, next, why not the poor sap who performed the ceremony? She wants to get us all together, to push us off a cliff !”
“She wouldn’t do that.”
“How would you know? How many women you had in your life?”
At last I said, sheepishly, “One.”
Queen Califia mopped her face with a handkerchief big enough to cover half her bosom, regained her composure, and slowly advanced on me, propelling herself on glider wheels with dainty pushes of her incredibly small shoes. I could not take my eyes off how tiny her feet were compared with the vast territory above, and the great lunar face that loomed on that expanse. I saw the ghost of Constance drowned beneath that flesh. Queen Califia shut her eyes.
“She’s using you. You love her?”
“Carefully.”
“Keep your clothes on and your motor running. She ask you to get her with child?”
“Not in so many words.”
“No words, just bastard stillborns. She whelped monsters down the whole L.A. basin, lousy Hollywood Boulevard, dead-end Main. Burn her bed, scatter the ashes, call a priest.”
“Which priest, where?”
“I’ll put you in touch. Now …” She paused, refusing to spit out the name. “Our friend. She’s always missing. One of her dodges, to make men panic. One hour with her does it. They riot in the streets. You know the game Uncle Wiggily? Well, Uncle Wiggily says jump back ten hops, head for the Hen House, quit! ”
“But she needs me!”
“No. She dines on spoilage. Blessed are the wicked who relish wickedness. Your bones will knead her bread. If she were here, I’d run her down with my chair. God, she made Rome’s ruins. Hell,” she added. “Let me see your palm again.” Her massive chair creaked. Her wall of flesh threatened.
“You going to take back what you saw in my hand?”
“No. I just say what I see in an open palm. You will have another life beyond this! Tear up that newspaper. Burn the wedding invitation. Leave town. Tell her to die. But tell her cross-country by phone. Now, out!”
“Where do I go from here?”
“God forgive me.” She shut her eyes and whispered, “Check that wedding invitation.”
I raised the invite and stared.
“Seamus Brian Joseph Rattigan, St. Vibiana’s Cathedral, celebrant.”
“Go tell ’im his sister is in two kinds of hell, and to send holy water. Scram! I got lots to do.”
“Like what?”
“Throw up,” she said.
I clutched Father Seamus Brian Joseph Rattigan in my sweaty palm, backed off, and bumped into Crumley.
“Who are you?” said Califia, finally noticing my shadow.
“I thought you knew,” Crumley said.
We went out and shut the door.
The whole house shifted with her weight.
“Warn her,” Califia cried. “Tell her, don’t come back.”
I looked at Crumley. “She didn’t tell your future!”
“Thank the Lord,” said Crumley, “for small blessings.”
Chapter Thirteen
Back down the steep cement steps we went, and under the pale moonlight by the car, Crumley peered into my face. “What’s that mad-dog look?”
“I’ve just joined a church!”
“Get in, for Christ’s sake!”
I got in, running a fever.
“Where to?”
“St. Vibiana’s Cathedral.”
“Holy mackerel!”
He banged the starter.
“No.” I exhaled. “I couldn’t stand another face-on. Home, James, a shower, three beers, and to bed. We’ll catch Constance at dawn.”
We passed Callahan and Ortega, nice and slow. Crumley looked almost happy.
Before the shower, the beers, and the snooze, I pasted seven or eight newsprint front pages on the wall over my bed, where I mi
ght wake in the night in hopes of solutions.
All the names, all the pictures, all the headlines big and small saved for mysterious or not mysterious reasons.
Behind me, Crumley snorted. “Horse apples! You going to commune with news that was dead as soon as it was printed?”
“By dawn, sure, they just might drop off the wall, slide under my eyelids, and get stuck in the creative adhesive in my brain.”
“Creative adhesive! Japanese bushido! American bull! Once those things are off the wall, like you, do they propagate?”
“Why not? If you don’t put in, you never get out.”
“Wait while I kill this.” Crumley drank. “Lie down with porcupines, get up with pandas?” He nodded at all those pictures, names, and lives. “Constance in there somewhere?”
“Hidden.”
“Hit the shower. I’ll stand guard on the obituaries. If they move, I’ll yell. How does a margarita strike you as nightcap?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” I said.
Chapter Fourteen
St. Vibiana’s Cathedral awaited us. Downtown L.A. Skid Row. At noon, heading east, we stayed off the main boulevards.
“Ever seen W. C. Fields in If I Had a Million? Bought some old tin lizzies and rammed road hogs. Super,” said Crumley. “That’s why I hate highways. I want to roadkill. You listening?”
“Rattigan,” I said. “I thought I knew her.”
“Hell.” Crumley laughed gently. “You don’t know anyone. You’ll never write the great American novel, because you don’t know shoats from shinola. You overestimate character where there is none, so you upchuck fairy princes, virgin milkmaids. Most writers can’t even do that, so you go with your taffy pulls, thirteen to the dozen. Let those realists scoop dog doo.”
I remained silent.
“Know what your problem is?” Crumley barked, and then softened his voice. “You love people not worth loving.”
“Like you, Crum?”
He glanced over cautiously.
“Oh, I’m okay,” he admitted. “I’ve more holes than a sieve, but I haven’t fallen through. Hold on!” Crumley hit the brakes. “The pope’s home away from home!”
I looked out at St. Vibiana’s Cathedral in the midst of the slow-motion desolation of long-dead Skid Row.
“Jesus,” I said, “would have built here. You coming in?”
“Hellfires, no! I was kicked outta confession, age twelve, when I skinned my knees on wild women.”
“Will you ever take Communion again?”
“When I die. Hop out, buster. From Queen Califia to the Queen of Angels.”
I climbed out.
“Say a Hail Mary for me,” Crumley said.
Chapter Fifteen
Inside the cathedral it was empty, just after noon, and just one penitent was waiting by the confessional when a priest arrived and beckoned her in.
His face confirmed I was in the right place.
When the woman left, I ducked in the other side of the confessional, tongue-tied.
A shadow moved in the lattice window.
“Well, my son?”
“Forgive me, Father,” I blurted out. “Califia.”
The other confessional door banged wide with a curse. I opened my door. The priest reared as if I had shot him.
It was Rattigan Déjà Vu. Not svelte in ninety-five pounds of suntanned seal-brown flesh, but marrowed in a wire-coat-hanger skeleton-thin Florentine Renaissance priest. Constance’s bones hid there, but the flesh skinned over the bones was skull pale, the priest’s lips were ravenous for salvation, not bed and sinful breakfasts. Here was Savonarola begging God to forgive his wild perorations, and God silent, with Constance’s ghost burning from his eyes, and peering from his skull.
Father Rattigan, riven, found me harmless save for that word, jerked his head toward the vestry, led me in, and shut the door.
“You her friend?”
“No, sir.”
“Good!” He caught himself. “Sit. You have five minutes. The cardinal is waiting.”
“You had better go.”
“Five minutes,” said Constance from inside the mask of this genetic twin. “Well?”
“I’ve just visited—”
“Califia.” Father Rattigan exhaled with controlled despair. “The Queen. Sends people she can’t help. She has her church, not mine.”
“Constance has disappeared again, Father.”
“Again?”
“That’s what the Queen, ah, Califia said.”
I held out the Book of the Dead. Father Rattigan turned its pages.
“Where’d you get this?”
“Constance. She said someone sent it to her. To scare her, maybe, or hurt her, or God knows what. I mean, only she knows if it’s a real threat.”
“You think she might just be hiding to spoil things for everyone?” He deliberated. “I myself am of two minds. But then there were those who burned Savonarola then and elevate him now. A most peculiar sinner-cum-saint.”
“Aren’t there similarities, Father?” I dared to say. “Lots of sinners became saints, yes?”
“What do you know about Florence in 1492 when Savonarola made Botticelli burn his paintings?”
“It’s the only age I know, sir, Father. Then Savonarola, now Constance …”
“If Savonarola knew her, he’d kill himself. No, no, let me think. I’ve starved since dawn. Here’s bread and wine. Let’s have some before I fall.”
The good father pulled a loaf and a jug out of the vestry closet, and we sat. Father Rattigan broke the bread, then poured a small wine for himself, and a large for me, which I took gladly.
“Baptist?” he said.
“How did you guess?”
“I’d rather not say.”
I tipped back my glass. “Can you help me with Constance, Father?”
“No. Oh, Lord, Lord, maybe.”
He refilled my glass.
“Last night. Can it be? I stayed in the confessional late. I felt … as if I were waiting for someone. Finally, near midnight, a woman entered the confessional and for a long while was silent. Finally, like Jesus calling Lazarus, I insisted, and she wept. It all came out. Sins by the pound and the truckload, sins from last year, ten years, thirty years past, she couldn’t stop, on and on, night on dreadful night, on and on, and finally she was still and I was about to instruct her with Hail Marys when I heard her running. I checked the other side of the confessional but only smelled perfume. Oh Lord, Lord.”
“Your sister’s scent?”
“Constance?” Father Rattigan sank back. “Hell burned twice, that perfume.”
Last night, I thought. So close. If Crumley and I had only come then.
“You’d better go, Father,” I said.
“The cardinal will wait.”
“Well,” I said, “if she returns, would you call me?”
“No,” said the priest. “The confessional’s as private as a lawyer’s office. Are you that upset?”
“Yes.” I twisted the wedding ring on my finger, absently.
Father Rattigan noticed.
“Does your wife know all this?”
“Approximately.”
“That sounds like delicatessen morality.”
“My wife trusts me.”
“Wives do that, God bless them. Does my sister seem worth saving?”
“Doesn’t she to you?”
“Dear God, I gave up when she claimed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was a Kama Sutra pose.”
“Constance! Still, Father, if she shows up again, could you call my number and hang up? I’d know you were signaling her arrival.”
“You do know how to split hairs. Give me your number. I see in you not so much a Baptist but a fair Christian.”
I gave him my number as well as Crumley’s.
“Just one ring, Father.”
The priest studied the numbers. “We all live on the slope. But some, by a miracle, grow roots. Don’t wait. Your phone may never
ring. But I’ll give your number to my assistant, Betty Kelly, too, just in case. Why are you doing this?”
“She was heading fast off a cliff.”
“Watch out she doesn’t take you with. I’m ashamed I said that. But as a child she skated out and stopped in mid-traffic to laugh.”
He fixed me with a bright needle eye. “But why do I tell you this?”
“It’s my face.”
“Your what?”
“My face. I look in mirrors but never catch myself. The expression always changes before I can trap it. It’s got to be a blend of the Boy Jesus and Genghis Khan. It drives my friends crazy.”
This relaxed some of the priest’s bones. “Does idiot savant sound right?”
“Almost. The school bullies took one look and beat the hell out of me. You were saying?”
“Was I? Yes, well, if that screaming woman was Constance, and her voice seemed different, she gave me orders. Imagine, orders to a priest! Gave me a deadline. Said she’d be back in twenty-four hours. I must give complete forgiveness for all her sins, twenty thousand strong. As if I could assign such mass-market absolution. I told her she must forgive herself, and ask others for forgiveness. God loves you. ‘But He doesn’t,’ she said. And then she was gone.”
“Will she come back?”
“With doves on her shoulders or lightning bolts.”
Father Rattigan walked me to the front of the cathedral. “And how does she look? Like a siren singing to lure damned sailors to drown. Are you a poor damn sailor?”
“No, just someone who writes people on Mars, Father.”
“I hope they are happier than we are. Wait! Good Lord, there was a thing she said. That she was joining a new church. And might not come back to douse my ears.”
“What church, Father?”
“Chinese. Chinese and Grauman’s. Some church!”
“To many it is. You’ve been there?”
“To see King of Kings, I found the forecourt superior to the film. You look as if you’re about to break and run.”
“To the new church, Father. Chinese. Grauman’s.”
“Stay off the quicksand footprints. Many sinners have sunk there. What film’s playing?”
“Abbott and Costello in Jack and the Beanstalk.”
“Lamentable.”
“Lamentable.” I ran.