Last Call: Expiration Date Part 45

Angelica couldn't remember now what service this old woman was grateful for-some haunting ended, some bowel disorder relieved, some recurrent nightmare blessedly forgotten.

"No," said Angelica, "I haven't-"

But now a man in a mechanic's uniform blundered into the kitchen behind the old woman. "Mrs. Sullivan," he said breathlessly, "your amuletos finally worked-my daughter sees no devils in the house now. I got the cundida at work this week, so I can give you two hundred dollars-"

Angelica was nodding and waving her hands defensively in front of herself. She knew about cundidas-a group of people at a workplace would contribute some amount of each paycheck to the "good quant.i.ty" fund, and each week a different one of them got the whole pool; among the new-immigrant Hispanic community, to whom bank accounts were an alien concept, the cundidas were the easiest way to save money.

"I didn't do anything," she said loudly. "Don't pay me for your blessings-somebody else has paid the price of it."

And who on earth can that have been? she wondered.

"But I need to pay," the man said quietly.

Angelica let her shoulders droop. "Okay," she said, exhaling. "If I run into your benefactor, I'll pa.s.s it on. But you can only give me forty-nine cents."

During Christmas week in 1993, Angelica had-finally, at the age of thirty-five-flown alone to Mexico City and then driven a rented car more than a hundred miles southeast to a little town called Ciudad Mendoza. Members of her grandfather's family were still living in the poor end of the town, known as Colonia Liberacin, and after identifying herself to the oldest citizens and staying with some of her distant relatives until after Christmas, she had got directions to the house of an old man called Esteban Sandoval, whom she was a.s.sured was the most powerful mago south of Matamoros. In exchange for the rental car and the cut-out hologram bird from one of her credit cards, Sandoval had agreed to complete and formalize and sanction her qualifications for the career she had fallen into a year earlier.

For three months Sandoval had instructed her in the practices of the ancient folk magics that are preserved as santera and brujera and curanderismo; and on the night before he put her on the bus that would take her on the first leg of her long journey back to her new American family, he had summoned several orishas, invisible ent.i.ties somewhat more than ghosts and less than G.o.ds, and had relayed to her from them her ita, the rules that would henceforth circ.u.mscribe her personal conduct of magic. Among those dictates had been the distasteful name that she was to give to her business, and the requirement that she charge only forty-nine cents for each service.

Pete Sullivan accepted the exact change from the two people and walked over to toss it too into the barrel of coins.

Kootie was at the open kitchen door now, silhouetted against the spectacle of Angelica's colorfully dressed clients dancing under the sun-dappled palm trunks outside, and his eyes were wide and the hand he was pressing to his side was spotted with fresh blood.

"Mom-Dad-" he said. "They're here, nearly-block or two away."

Pete pushed the old woman and the mechanic out of the kitchen, into the crowded office room, and when he turned back to Kootie and Angelica he lifted the front of his untucked shirt to show the black Pachmayr grip of the .45 automatic tucked into his belt.

It was, Angelica knew, loaded with 230-grain hollow-point Eldorado Starfire rounds that she had dipped in an omiero of mint and oleander tea; and Pete had carefully etched L.A. CIGAR-TOO TRAGICAL in tiny letters onto the muzzle ring of the stainless-steel slide.

"Take it, Angelica," he said tensely. "I could hardly even pick it up this morning. My Houdini hands are on extra solid today."

Angelica stepped forward and pulled the gun out of Pete's pants, making sure the safety catch was up and engaged. She tucked it into her own jeans and pulled her blouse out to cover it.

Kootie nodded. "We'll receive them courteously but carefully," he said.

Through the open kitchen door, from the street, Angelica could now hear an approaching discordant rumble, like bad counterpoint tempo beaten out on a set of bata drums that the orishas would surely reject for being perilously tuned; and when she stepped outside, striding resolutely across the sunlit walk and onto the driveway, she saw a big, boxy red truck turn in from the street and then slowly, boomingly, labor up the gentle slope toward where she stood. Peripherally she noticed that Kootie was now standing at her left and Pete at her right, and she reached out and clasped their hands.

The red truck rocked and clattered to a halt a couple of yards in front of them. It was streaked and powdered with dust, but its red color shone through lividly; and she noticed that an aura like heat waves shimmered around it for a distance of about a foot, and that the leaves of the carob trees on the far side of the driveway looked gray where she viewed them through the aura.

The truck's driver's-side door clanked and squeaked open, and a rangy man of about Pete's age stepped down to the pavement; his worn boots and jeans seemed only deceptively mundane to Angelica, and his lean, tanned face, behind a ragged mustache the color of tobacco and ashes, was tense with care.

"What seeems to be the problem?" he drawled, and there was at least some exhausted humor in his voice and his squinting brown eyes.

The pa.s.senger-side door was levered open now, and a pregnant woman in a wrinkled white linen sundress stepped down onto the driveway-side gra.s.s. She too looked exhausted, and her blond hair was pulled back, like Angelica's black hair, into a hasty, utilitarian ponytail-but Angelica thought she was nevertheless the most radiantly beautiful woman she had ever seen.

"Any problem here," said Pete levelly, "is one you've brought with you. Who are you?"

"Good point," said the man with the mustache, nodding judiciously. "About us bringing it with us. Sorry-my name's Archimedes Mavranos, and this lady is Diana Crane." He looked past Angelica's shoulder and raised an eyebrow. "And we sure do apologize to be interrupting your party."

Angelica glanced behind her, and realized how odd the crowd in the parking lot must look-the kneeling old women giving thanks, the men and women appearing to pantomime swimming and goose-stepping and traffic-directing as they flexed various freshly pain-free limbs, and the six apparently naked men crowded into the Little Mermaid inflatable pool.

"We're humbly looking," Mavranos went on seriously, "for a man with a wound in his side that won't quit bleeding."

After a moment, Kootie let go of Angelica's hand; he held up his blood-reddened palm, and then, as slowly as a surrendering man showing a gun to a policeman, lifted his shirttail to show the b.l.o.o.d.y bandage.

"A kid!" said Mavranos with an accusing glance toward Pete. He peered more closely at Kootie, then stepped forward. Angelica let her right hand brush the hem of her blouse over the .45, but the man had only knelt before Kootie and taken the boy's left wrist in his gnarled brown hand. "You've Mbiused your watchband?" he said gently. "That won't work anymore, son. Now when you do that you're just insulating yourself from your own self." He had been unbuckling the watch strap as he spoke, and now he tucked the watch into Kootie's shirt pocket. "If you follow me. Oh, and the same with your belt, hey? That I'll let you fix. Lord, boy," he said, shaking his head as he lithely straightened up again, "both legs and your left hand! You must have been weak as a kitten all day."

Kootie seemed embarra.s.sed, as though he'd blundered into a girls' rest room by mistake. The boy quickly unbuckled his belt, straightened out the twist, and re-buckled it; then he pointed at the truck and asked gruffly, "Why is your truck the color of blood?"

The pregnant woman by the truck closed her eyes, and Mavranos crossed his arms and nodded several times. "The hard way, of course. You take the low road and I'll crawl in the G.o.dd.a.m.ned dirt, right? That's the spirit. Oh, that was the wrong question, boy!"

He turned and walked back to the still-open driver's-side door, and for a moment Angelica hoped these two people, and whatever they might have brought with them in the truck, would now just go away; but Mavranos only leaned in to hook out a can of Coors beer, which, from the way it swung in his hand as he trudged back to where he had been standing, was already half-emptied.

He took a sip from it before speaking. "But since you ask. This lady and a friend painted it red on Ash Wednesday of 1990, in Las Vegas, to elude detection by the police-like the blood of the lamb over the doorposts in Egypt, right?-and ever since then the truck spon-tane-eously turns red every year during Holy Week. Ordinarily it's blue."

"This isn't Holy Week," ventured Pete. "This is New Year's Day."

"Oh, the error of it hadn't eluded me, honest," Mavranos said. He looked again at Kootie, and frowned. "You were a street beggar in L.A. a couple of years ago, weren't you? With an old black guy and a dog? Didn't I give you five bucks?"

Kootie's eyes widened, and then narrowed in a slow, shy smile. "Yeah, you did. And it was a blue truck."

"Sure," Mavranos said. "I remember now I saw room for the crown on your head even then. I should have figured it would be you we'd find today." After crouching to put his beer can down on the pavement, he straightened and spat in the palm of one hand and then struck it with his other fist; the spit flew toward the kitchen, and he looked up at the crazy old building for the first time.

He was staring at the sign over the door. "I met Leon," he said softly; "though he had lost his testculos years before."

On top of her anxious tension, Angelica was now embarra.s.sed too. "It means 't.e.s.t.i.c.l.es of the Lion,' " she said. "All consultorios have animal valor names-Courage of the Bull, Heart of the Leopard, things like that. It's ... a custom."

Mavranos looked down at her, and his eyes were bright until he blinked and resumed his protective squint. "We're in the choppy rapids of custom every which way you look, ma'am. Now, the random ... trajectory of my spit has indicated your building. Will you give permission for my party to come inside?"

Party? Angelica was suddenly certain that there was a third person in the old red truck-a person, the person, central to all this-sick or injured or even dead; and suddenly she very strongly didn't want any of these strangers inside the buildings of Solville. Apparently permission would have to be given for that to happen-and she opened her mouth to deny it- But Kootie spoke first. "I am the master of this house," the boy said. "And you have my permission to bring your party inside."

Angelica wheeled on Kootie, and she could feel her face reddening. "Kootie, what are you-" Then she stopped, and just exhaled the rest of her breath in helpless frustration.

Under the tangled curls of his black hair, Kootie's face looked leaner, older now; but the apologetic smile he gave her was warm with filial affection, and sad with a boy's sadness.

Mavranos's grin was flinty. "Just what you were about to say yourself, ma'am, I know," he growled. "Oh well-now that the boy's got the strength in his limbs back, maybe he could help me and this other gentleman with the carrying." He picked up his beer can and drained it, then tossed it onto the gra.s.s. Perhaps to himself, he said, softly, "But why couldn't the boy have asked me whose truck it was?"

Again Angelica opened her mouth to say something, but Mavranos waved her to silence. "Moot point and rhetorical question," he said. "It always happens this way, I guess."

"At least give me forty-nine cents!" Angelica said. If these people pay me and thus become clients of mine, she thought, if I'm following my ita in my dealings with them, we can be protected by the orishas; if there are any orishas left out there, if my ita still counts for anything, after whatever it is that has happened today.

Mavranos grinned sleepily and dug a handful of change out of his jeans pocket. "Look at that," he said. "Exact." He dropped the quarter and two dimes and four pennies into her shaky, outstretched palm. He looked past her at Kootie and Pete, and called, "You fellas want to give me a hand? Let me get the back of the truck open."

He plodded back toward the truck, his hand rattling keys in the pocket of his old denim jacket, and Kootie and Pete exchanged a nervous glance and then stepped forward to follow him.

BOOK ONE.

TO THE BOATS.

The likeness pa.s.sed away, say, like a breath along the surface of the gaunt pier-gla.s.s behind her, on the frame of which, a hospital procession of negro cupids, several headless and all cripples, were offering black baskets of Dead Sea fruit to black divinities of the feminine gender ...

-Charles d.i.c.kens, A Tale of Two Cities.

TROILUS: Fear me not, my lord; I will not be myself, nor have cognition Of what I feel.

-William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida.

CHAPTER 3.

"In short," said Sydney, "this is a desperate time, when desperate games are played for desperate stakes. Let the Doctor play the winning game; I will play the losing one ..."

-Charles d.i.c.kens, A Tale of Two Cities WHERE JANIS CORDELIA PLUMTREE finally wound up was in a chair in the TV lounge.

She had visited people in hospitals where the lines on the linoleum floors led you somewhere-"Follow the yellow line to OB" or something-but the black lines in the gray floors of Rosecrans Medical Center just led around in a big dented loop, with frustrating gaps where hallways crossed. Maybe the point was that you were free to pick your own destination ... the TV lounge, or the meds station, or your "room" with two unmade beds in it and no bath or shower and a door that couldn't lock.

There were wire-reinforced windows in the halls and the lounge, but the views were only of fenced-in courtyards, shadowy in the late-afternoon sunlight and empty except for picnic tables and dome-topped swing-door trash cans; and you generally couldn't get out there anyway.

The pictures on the walls-vapid reproductions of watercolor flowers-had rectangles of Plexiglas over them in the frames, rather than real breakable gla.s.s. She couldn't remember how she knew this, she didn't recall having touched one in the ... nine days she'd been living here.

"I think he's like you," Dr. Armentrout went on. The rotund white-haired psychiatrist had dragged up a chair next to the one she'd collapsed into after finally stepping off the floor-line circuit and wobbling into the TV lounge. He had been talking to her for a minute or two now, but she was looking past him.

On the TV, hung behind a clear Plexiglas shield up above head-height on the wall beyond Armentrout, Humphrey Bogart was showing his teeth, talking mean and ruthless as he told the fat man, "We've got to have a fall guy." There were no colors-all the figures, the Fat Man and Bogart and Joel Cairo and "the gunsel," were in black-and-white, like a memory for someone else.

Plumtree shifted on the vinyl chair and tucked her denim skirt more tightly around her knees but didn't take her eyes off the screen. Murder had been done, apparently, and a scapegoat would have to be ... turned over.

"What a flop," she said; then added, absently, "Who's like me?"

"This man Cochran, who's being transferred here from Metro in Norwalk," said Armentrout. "His wife was killed last Sunday, New Year's Day, at dawn-dressed herself up in a bedsheet and tied ivy vines in her hair and ran out into traffic on the 280, up in San Mateo County." Plumtree didn't look at the doctor or speak, and after a few seconds he went on, "She was pregnant, and the fetus died too, do you suppose that's important? Last week he flew her ashes back to her family estate, in France. He appears to have had a delusional episode there, and another when he got off the plane at LAX, in Los Angeles."

"Rah rah rah," said Plumtree.

"What happened on that Sunday morning?" he asked, as casually as if he hadn't been asking her that question every day.

"This guy's wife was run over by a bus," Plumtree said impatiently, "according to you. c.o.c.kface."

The doctor's voice was tight: "What did you call me, Janis?"

"Him, not you. Wasn't that what you said his name was?"

"Cochran."

The vinyl seat of Armentrout's chair croaked as he shifted, and Plumtree grinned, still watching the movie.

"Cochran," Armentrout repeated loudly. "Why do you say it was a bus? I didn't even say she was. .h.i.t by a vehicle. Why should it have been a bus?"

The TV screen went dark, and then flared back on again.

It was a Humphrey Bogart movie; apparently The Maltese Falcon, since Plumtree saw that Elisha Cook and Mary Astor and Sidney Greenstreet were in it too. She was surprised to see that it was in color, but quickly reminded herself that they were colorizing all those old movies now. She couldn't remember how long she might have been sitting here watching it, and was startled when she glanced to the side and saw Dr. Armentrout sitting in a chair right next to her. She unfolded her legs and stretched them out, with the heels of her sneakers on the floor and the toes pointed upward.

"So what do you say, Doctor?" Plumtree said brightly. Partly to delay further talk, she dug a little plastic bottle of Listerine out of her shirt pocket, twisted off the cap, and took a sip of it.

On the screen on the wall, Bogart had agreed to Peter Lorre's proposal that the Mary Astor character be turned over to the police. "After all," Bogart said, "she is the one who killed him." He mumbled something about miles, and an archer. Had the murdered person been killed from a distance, with an arrow? Hadn't it been up close with a spear?

But Plumtree had seen this movie before, and this was not how this scene went; they were supposed to pick the Elisha Cook character to "take the fall." Perhaps this was an alternate version, a director's cut or something.

Plumtree looked around for something to spit in, then reluctantly swallowed the mouthwash. "I'm sorry if I haven't been paying attention," she said to Armentrout. She glanced again up at the screen, and added, "I love Bogart movies, don't you?"

Armentrout was frowning in apparent puzzlement. "Why should it have been a bus?" he said.

"Why ask why?" said Plumtree merrily, quoting last year's Budweiser ad slogan.

All the characters in the movie were startled now by a knock at the door. Plumtree recalled that the story took place in San Francisco-a knock at the door could be anything. She held up one finger for quiet, and watched the screen.

The colorized Bogart got up and opened the door-and it was Mary Astor standing in the hallway, apparently playing a twin of herself. Clearly this was some peculiar alternate version of the movie. Perhaps it was well known, perhaps there were alternate versions of all sorts of movies. The Mary Astor twin in the open doorway was wearing a captain's cap and a peacoat spotted with dried blood, and her face was stiff and white-she was obviously supposed to be dead; but she opened her mouth and spoke, in a s.e.xless monotone: "Forgive me. Madame has forgotten that we agreed to play in partnership this evening."

Bogart stood frozen for only a moment, then turned and lifted up in both hands the newspaper-wrapped bundle that had lain on the altar-like table; Greenstreet and Lorre didn't say anything as Bogart handed it to the dead Mary Astor-they certainly didn't want it, the severed head of a murdered king. The live Mary Astor was just sitting on the couch, staring wide-eyed at her dead double in the doorway.

Plumtree's new wrist.w.a.tch beeped three times. She didn't even glance at it.

Armentrout chuckled. "Are you being paged, Janis?"

Plumtree turned to him with a smile. "That's my zeitgeber" she said. "Dr. Muir gave it to me. Zeitgeber means 'time-giver' in German. Dr. Muir suspects that-"

"He's not a doctor, he's just an intern. And he's not your primary, I am." Dr. Armentrout leaned forward abruptly, staring at Plumtree's legs. "Is Muir also the one who strapped a mirror to your knee, Janis?" His good cheer was gone. "Is that so he can look up your skirt?"

Plumtree paused, and the TV picture flickered; but a moment later she gave him a reproachful smile. "Of course not, silly!" She reached down to unbuckle the plastic band that held the two-inch metal disk to her bare knee. "I had a dozen of these on this morning, I must have forgotten to take this one off. It's for the-" She paused, and then recited proudly, "the Infrared Motion a.n.a.lysis System. Dr. Muir has me sit at a computer and take a test, and while I'm doing that the computer measures how much I ... move around. I move fifty millimeters a second sometimes! Doct-Mr. Muir suspects that my circadian rhythms are out of whack. The zeitgeber watch is set to beep every fifteen minutes; it's to keep me aware of the ... the time. When's now."

Armentrout leaned back in his chair. "When's now," he repeated. After a moment he waved at the television. "You're missing your Bogart movie, talking."

"That was the end," she said.

He opened his mouth, then apparently changed his mind about what he was going to say. "But you've had these zeitgebers all along, Janis. I've noticed that you bring the front page of the newspaper to bed with you, so you'll know in the morning what day it is; and you hardly answer a 'howdy do' without looking around for a clock, or sneaking a look at that waitress pad you keep in your purse."

Her watch beeped again, and the television set went dark.

Plumtree sat stiffly; somehow her watch was ... making a noise; she could feel the vibration on her wrist. She didn't touch the watch, or look at it. Maybe it was supposed to be making a noise. She would watch for cues.