CHAPTER FOURTEEN:
Visiting Old Friends
“It says no trespassing.” Yoneda looked back at Tacitus, who was still getting out of her rental Toyota parked at the cul-de-sac curb. She was standing in front of a solid-looking wooden door in a long six-foot-high cinder-block wall, and she nodded at the two signs bolted to the door. “It says it twice.” Over the top of the wall she could see tall eucalyptus trees bending in the wind, and hear the fast-pulse rush of cars on the freeway beyond.
Tacitus closed the car door and came puffing up to her. “Certain people have had keys made,” he said, reaching into his pocket. “If anybody asks, you can pretend to be a city worker, can’t you?”
Yoneda looked around nervously as the old man fitted a key into the door’s lock, but nobody was stepping out of the Craftsman-style houses along the street or peering from the windows of the one visible apartment building.
She was carrying a six-pack of Budweiser beer in a plastic 7-Eleven bag, and it probably wasn’t very cold anymore. This would be the third “freeway-side gypsy nest” the two of them had visited; the first one, off an exit of the 101 Freeway north of Hollywood, proved to have been colonized by belligerent homeless folk since Tacitus’s last visit, and the second one had been physically occupied by a car that had crashed through a shoulder rail, and had been surrounded by ambulances and police cars.
Tacitus got the wooden door open, and the two of them shuffled through onto a narrow dirt path shaded by overhanging boughs and bordered on the freeway side by thick oleander bushes. From the left Yoneda heard a rapid knocking, and she quickly looked in both directions along the path as Tacitus closed the door behind them, but nobody else was immediately visible; she peered through the bushes and saw a dirt and ivy slope that led down to the busy lanes of the 10 freeway. The breeze, sifting through the shrubbery, smelled of car exhaust and rosemary.
“This way,” said Tacitus, picking his way along the path toward the knocking sound. Castine jumped when thunder cracked overhead, followed by a diminishing rumble.
“There’s hardly a cloud in the sky!” she said, and was annoyed to hear the petulance in her own voice.
Tacitus looked back. “That’s not thunder.”
Yoneda pursed her lips and resolved not to ask the indicated question. “What’s that knocking sound?”she asked instead.
Tacitus stepped into a clearing that was littered with beer cans and cigarette butts, and he nodded toward what appeared to be an upright broomstick rocking rapidly back and forth on a hinged iron housing set firmly in the dirt, striking the raised edges of the housing at each stroke. Yoneda saw that the swinging wooden pole was capped by the skull of a small animal.
“I’m glad traffic is moving down in the lanes,” said Tacitus, “we need a good current.” He pulled from his jacket pocket the battered paperback copy of New UFO Breakthrough and began riffling the pages. Sunlight filtering through the surrounding greenery gleamed on his damp forehead.
He paused and lookd up. “I won’t ask you personal questions,” he told Yoneda, “but it’s entirely possible that you won’t be able to see Frankie’s ghost. If I succeed in summoning it, you may simply see me apparently talking to myself. But if you can see the ghost—don’t look it in the eye.”
Yoneda was bleakly amused to realize that she was disappointed. It seemed there would be no actual ghost after all, just this old fool pretending, perhaps believing, that he was talking to someone who wasn’t there.
“Okay,” she said.
She put down the bag with the six-pack in it and stretched her fingers. After getting five-hundred dollars for the Hemingway book at a rare book store on Santa Monica Boulevard, and topping up the Toyota’s gas tank, Tacitus had insisted that she buy the beer to mollify any vagabonds who might be loitering in whatever nest they found. She swore to herself that she wasn’t going to carry the bag one step further.
Tacitus held the book open and touched a page. “Frankie,” he called softly in the direction of the slope. “Frankie, it’s Tacitus. You’re free of those men now. Tell me what they mustn’t know.”
The breeze sighed through the leaves, and the traffic down the slope whined past, and after a few seconds Yoneda shifted her feet in the dirt. She would really have to call Lubitz again soon.
“Frankie,” Tacitus went on, “we’ve seen your notes, but we don’t know what to do. Help us.”
For another half a minute the two of them stood still; and Yoneda had just opened her mouth to finally protest at how ridiculous this whole enterprise was when suddenly there was another person in the clearing.
She jumped backward, caught her balance, and stared down at the dirt, breathing deeply. Her heart was pounding—she could see the newcomer’s white sneakers, and they were floating an inch or so above the dirt. From long, disciplined practice, she forced herself to stand steady and ready, and to be acutely aware of everything around her.
The leaves on all sides thrashed, and for a moment Yoneda thought a whole phalanx of ghosts was manifesting itself, and she was about to allow herself to run; but the leaves subsided and no other figures appeared. Her gaze crept up the wavering figure of what was evidently actually Frankie Notchett’s ghost—black dress shoes now, and jeans, a tan sweater—but didn’t focus on the vaguely youthful face under a thatch of brown hair.
“It’s the rings,” quavered the ghost in a high, piping voice that made Tacitus wince, “the shining rings in the sea at night . . . that’s how you can approach them.”
“Okay, Frankie,” Tacitus said gently, “tell me about the rings in the sea.”
“Out past the jetties, in the open ocean—you can’t know where they’ll be, you just watch . . . hope, or fear, that they’ll appear . . .”
“Buncha booshit,” came a hoarse voice from the bushes.
Yoneda spun in that direction; a burly, deeply tanned old fellow with white hair tumbling over the shoulders of a threadbare woolen coat was pushing aside a branch to step into the clearing.
“Got no rings in my seat,” the intruder added belligerently.
Yoneda noted that the man’s ruptured old shoes pushed aside twigs and dragged tracks in the dirt; clearly he was not a ghost. She crouched and opened the 7-Eleven bag, and when she straightened up she was holding one of the beers.
“Here.” She held it out to the ragged intruder, who snatched it. “Shut up.”
She looked back at the ghost. It was rippling now, as if it were painted on a clear sheet of plastic. “But when it was there,” it said in evident windy lament, “at last, on the deck in the cockpit, I—ran!—to the controls!—and gunned away, out of the ring!” The figure broke up into segments, then re-formed. “Ach—don’t look at me!”
The old hobo had opened the beer and chugged three big swallows, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve and looked around at the clearing with no particular interest. Clearly he couldn’t see the ghost.
A phone buzzed in the pocket of Yoneda’s jacket, and her hand automatically pulled it out; but it wasn’t the second Consumer Celluar phone she’d bought this morning. It was her old ruined flip phone—her wind-phone, her kaze no denwa.
Her vision narrowed until the old phone in her hand was all she could see. Her arm twitched with the impulse to throw it away—this impossibly vibrating phone, along with the tormented apparition hovering in the clearing, was a stark contradiction of her certainties in the world— but instead she gripped it so tightly that she felt its buzzing in the bones of her hand.
The ghost broke through her shock with a shrill whine: “You think you’d have had the guts to stay, Tacit Ass? You think you’re better than me?” Even without looking at its face, Yoneda saw the hole of its mouth expand widely.
Recalling what Vickery and Castine had said last night, she grabbed Tacitus’s arm with her free hand and yanked him aside as the ghost’s tongue suddenly extended six feet, slapping against the cinder-block wall. Tacitus fell heavily to the dirt, face down, and the tongue began to retract and then evaporated.
Yoneda was watching the ghost, ready to jump to one side or the other, and she became aware that she had opened her old flip-phone. “Daddy,” she whispered into it, “make this thing go away!”
From the phone came a clearly audible voice: “Rayette!”
All at once the ghost rotated ninety degrees to horizontal, and was now obviously suspended in mid-air.
The hobo stepped right through it, still casually holding his beer can. “I can see that phone got no battery,” he mumbled. “Lemme look at it.”
The ghost rotated further, and was now upside down; and then kept rotating, faster, until within seconds it was spinning like a propeller behind the hobo.
Tacitus had scrambled to his feet, and was staring wide-eyed at the spectacle. Abruptly the ghost disappeared, and the surrounding shrubbery shook once again.
“C’mon,” said the hobo, “lemme see your phone.” He grabbed at it, and when Yoneda pushed him away he swung a fist at her face.
She ducked it, but had to halt her instinctive counter-strike when Tacitus’s foot pistoned horizontally into the man’s midsection. The beer can flew to the side and the man grunted explosively and sat down hard.
Tacitus recovered his stance and strode past Yoneda. “Come on,” he panted, “we’ve got to get to Frankie’s boat.”
Yoneda paused to hold the old flip phone to her ear. She mouthed the word Daddy? but the phone was once again just an inert construction of metal and plastic.
The breeze was chilly on her face, and she impatiently cuffed away tears and hurried along after Banach. “His boat?” she said. “Why?”
“Logs, notes—the state of his compass—”
“You need to let me take you to—ONI, safety, damn it!”
“After, maybe.”
Yoneda rolled her eyes. “You can have the godddamn beers!” she called back toward the clearing.
Following Plowman’s directions, Vickery got off the 101 Freeway at Gower and turned straight up Beachwood. As the street mounted toward the Hollywood sign visible on the green hills in the distance, Santiago was peering out the side window at the neat apartment buildings behind geometrically trimmed hedges. . . and the turreted and balconied houses that were as big as the apartment buildings and set well back from the street . . . and the grass strips, bright green in the mid-day January sunlight, that extended from the curbs to the sidewalks.
“I never get this far north,” he muttered.
“This place we’re going is further up,” said Plowman. “It was some kind of Theosophical temple in the ’20s, but after the Battle of Los Angeles in 1942—”
“The what?” said Castine, turning around.
“One night in February of ’42,” said Plowman impatiently, “some silvery things showed up in the sky, and everybody thought it was Japanese bombers because an actual Jap sub had shelled an oil field near Santa Barbara the day before, and a lot of Navy radar systems along the coast were activated. So the Coast Artillery Brigade fired a million machine guns and a ton of anti-aircraft shells at the things in the sky. They wrecked a couple of buildings and cars in Long Beach, but of course they didn’t hit any flying saucers, and eventually the Air Force said it had just been meteorological balloons. Anyway, right after that night, a psychic and/or schizophrenic woman called Mimsy Borogrove—”
Castine was chewing a fingernail. “’Twas brillig, I’m sure,” she said quietly.
“Mimsy Borogrove bought this temple,” Plowman went on, overriding her, “and started up a cult to try to contact the space people. At first she ran it as a square-dance club, with apparently some very weird calls and steps, but after a while she decided that anti-king chess was the best way to connect with the flying saucers.” He sat back and crossed his arms. “Last time I was there it still looked like some kind of temple. I should know it when I see it.”
After less than a mile, Vickery drove between the two stone gates that once marked the entrance to the 1920s Hollywoodland development, and then he was steering Galvan’s old Dodge up the curling, narrower extent of Beachwood Drive. Here walls or garages or thick hedges crowded right up to the curb, with just roofs or chimneys or upper stories visible on the slopes beyond them, while towers and the top edges of long white walls indented the blue sky at the hill crests on either side.
At a gesture from Plowman, Vickery turned left up a narrower lane, and Castine said, “That sign said road closed—local traffic only.”
“Pierce is visiting old friends,” Vickery told her.
“I hope,” said Plowman faintly.
“You used to be a member?” Castine asked him.
For several seconds the old man just looked out at the close shrubbery the car was passing. “Not really,” he said finally. “Borogrove’s grand-daughter and I were . . . an item, you could say, in the late ’70s, early ’80s. She’d have been about thirty.” He sighed shakily. “I don’t know that I was entirely a gentleman, in those days.”
As of course you are now, thought Vickery, and he knew Castine must be thinking something similar.
“What are we hoping to learn there?” he asked.
“What?” said Plowman, clearly called back from other thoughts. “Oh, I told you. They’ve made some connection with the UFOs, and kept it up. First with square dancing, then chess. They’re—” He paused, then went on carefully, “It’s like they’re a seismograph with delusions that it can solicit earthquakes, okay? But they are a seismograph, as it were. If anybody knows the resurrection timetable, it’s them.”
“Why do we say we’ve come to visit?” asked Castine.
“I’m going to tell them that Bill here,” Plowman said, nodding toward Vickery, “is a friend of mine, and today he told me about taking you out to Giant Rock yesterday to see the crashed flying saucer, and you both saw all those things in the sky. Go ahead and describe that, but don’t mention your thing in the L.A. River last night, it’s too coincidental that you were both there for that too. And don’t mention any of that crap about infrared retro-vision. And girl, don’t say you’re with ONI, or anything about crop circles. You’re just Bill Ardmore’s Pasadena girlfriend, okay?—probably a waitress somewhere.”
“Sister,” said Castine.
Plowman squinted from her to Vickery. “I’ll want to hear the story about that hang-glider one day. But the thing is, these chess-folk do effectively monitor the UFOs. If we can get ’em to open up, they can give you a pretty accurate picture of what the things are doing, and when.”
“I wish they were still square dancers,” said Castine. “I like the way they dress up.”
“This crowd dresses like hippies,” said Plowman, “or they did in the ’80s. And for God’s sake—listen!—no mention of the negation lines, right? Put the papers and photos under the seat now.” He looked sideways at Santiago. “Not about the sugar and honey lines either.”
Santiago nodded. “The lineas are no good anyway. The giant robot is sitting on most of them.”
“Stupid robot,” muttered Castine.
“Guns under the seat too,” added Plowman. “They might frisk us. Hell, they might even have metal detectors by now.”
Vickery thought about it for a moment, then reluctantly pulled the .45 from his jacket pocket and leaned down to tuck it under the seat. Castine was doing the same with the revolver that had belonged to old Tacitus until last night; Vickery heard it clink against Yoneda’s .380 semi-automatic. Vickery wasn’t altogether surprised to see Santiago lean forward to reach behind himself and then push something under the driver’s seat.
The road wound up between overhanging pine trees now, and between the houses were ivied slopes held back by retaining walls made of horizontally laid railway ties. Some of the retaining walls looked ready to collapse, with the vertical anchor ties leaning toward the road. Vickery recalled that such anchors were called “dead men,” and they reminded him of the wooden metronomes the freeway-side gypsies set up in their nests. He glanced uneasily at the little metronome on the dashboard, but it was still just rocking with the motion of the car.
After a few more ascending turns they had left the trees behind, and the bunker-like houses they passed on the right seemed to be single-story because their other floors extended down the side of a ravine not visible from the road. Yuccas and sparse bushes dotted the brown slopes on their left.
“Around the next curve,” said Plowman, leaning forward. “There’s a driveway paved with pennies instead of gravel, must be a million dollars worth. Drive slow and everybody keep your hands visible—last time I was here they were all hippies, like I said, but armed hippies.”
Vickery steered around the sharp turn, and the white building that swung into view did indeed look like some kind of temple. A turret with narrow vertical windows flanked a tall arched façade, and as he drove cautiously along the road in front of the place he saw stairs in the shadow of the arch leading up to a second floor, with the top of a dome visible further back. Several pickup trucks were visible beyond the turret, and two men in white robes stood in the shadow of the arch.
“Driveway on your right,” said Plowman. “Hands visible, everybody!”
Vickery turned into the driveway, which appeared to be paved with broken glass, glittering in the sunlight, not pennies.
Plowman waved through the windshield at the pair in the shadows. “Park here and walk up.”
Vickery switched off the engine and pulled up the emergency brake lever, then opened the door, letting a chilly breeze smelling of clay and creosote sweep into the car. He looked down before he stepped out, and saw that the driveway was paved with what must have been thousands of broken pairs of eyeglasses; and under the fragments of glass and wire and black earpieces he could, here and there, make out the brown disks of an infinity of pennies.
The two men walked out from under the arch, their white robes flapping in the breeze as they trudged across the dirt yard. As he stepped out of the car and straightened, Vickery saw that their heads were shaven and their faces were at once both pale and weathered-looking—squint-wrinkles around the eyes, lines down the cheeks.
Plowman had got out too, and called, “Afternoon, gents! I’d be much obliged if you could tell Linda Loma that Pierce Plowman is here with two eyewitnesses to the business out by Giant Rock yesterday.”
He had to repeat his name, but then the two robed men told Plowman’s party to wait where they were, and went back through the arch and up the stairs into the building. Vickery squinted up at the glaringly white façade, and noticed that the stepped top edge bristled with tiny black and white and red spikes. To keep away birds? he wondered.
“Linda Loma was your old girlfriend?” he asked Plowman quietly as Castine and Santiago got out of the car, stepping carefully on the broken glasses.
Plowman pursed his lips, perhaps at the term girlfriend, then nodded. “She was born in Loma Linda, see. They had a theory in the ’60s about linking people’s names with the land—there’s a woman named Laurel Canyon, even a guy named Forrest Lawn.”
Both of the robed men came back down the stairs and walked out onto the broken glasses and pennies. “Who’s the kid then?” one asked.
“My nephew,” piped up Castine. “I’m watching him for the day.”
“Well, purification is for everybody,” said the other man, stepping forward while his companion stepped back. “Arms out to the side, please,” he said to Vickery, and when Vickery complied, the man patted him down efficiently.
Second time today, Vickery thought sourly.
The man did the same with Santiago and Plowman, and then just had Castine open her jacket and turn around while he poked her ribs and stomach and the small of her back with one finger.
The man nodded and turned away, and Vickery and his three companions glanced at one another—variously baffled, irritated and uneasy—and followed the man across the yard, under the high arch and up the stairs.
A woman was standing in the open doorway at the top of the stairs, also wearing a white robe, and their guide sidled past her into the building. Stepping out of the sunlight into the sudden shade and peering up, Vickery was at first only able to see that the woman was tall, with short gray hair and a round face.
Her voice was a startling falsetto: “You waited until the last, Pierce. But you’re here, bless your recalcitrant soul. Becky will be pleased, I know. But who are your friends?”
“These two,” Plowman said, nodding toward Vickery and Castine, “witnessed the apparition at Giant Rock yesterday morning.” He visibly thought of saying more, but made do with just nodding again.
“They’re welcome,” said Linda Loma. She raised her hands, and her teeth showed in a smile. “In the end you came back, Pierce! To atone.”
She stood aside, and after a moment’s hesitation they all cautiously filed up the stairs and into a wide, high-ceilinged lateral hallway with framed abstract paintings on the walls. The floor was black-veined marble, and the hallway smelled of air-conditioning and, faintly, marijuana.
Vickery glanced at Plowman, wondering how the old man was taking the word atone. Plowman’s eyes were narrowed, and he briefly held up crossed fingers.
Five wooden chairs were arranged around a mosaic-topped table to the left, below a narrow window, and Linda Loma waved toward them. Everybody took a seat, and Vickery wondered if the robed bald man who now stood several yards back had made sure there were enough chairs for the group.
Plowman introduced Vickery and Castine as he had said he would; and between the two of them they gave a vivid and complete description of the events of the previous morning, including the exploding van.
“Those things you saw,” said Linda Loma when they had faltered to a stop, “aren’t actually things. They are angels coming to Earth to guide us all to Paradise. One of the ones you saw alighted in the Los Angeles River last night and established a shrine there. They descend from the astral to the material, for us.”
By the daylight through the window, Vickery saw that the woman’s face was hatched with so many fine wrinkles that he thought it must in its time have expressed every emotion there was. Repeatedly. At the moment her face seemed to radiate suppressed excitement, and her hands were clasped as if to keep them from trembling.
“They are our saviors,” she said. “When all the thrones and dominions, cherubim and seraphim have finally descended to Earth, they will rise again, all together, carrying us—and we’ll be like them, acting without decision, aware of ourselves only in our reflection in others, as they perceive themselves only in their mutual reflections . . . forever in mutual check . . .” She raised her eyes to the high ceiling, then looked toward a pair of polished wooden doors in the inner wall. “Soon.”
Santiago gave her a sharp look, then glanced back toward the front door.
“I—I think I sensed that,” said Castine. “I think I sensed their hands, ready to lift us up.”
Vickery kept an earnest look on his face, but he wished he could signal Castine to take it easy; and Plowman shifted on the chair beside him.
“Hands!” exclaimed Linda Loma. “Yes, their huge hands are ready to gather us, soon. You are blessed, daughter!”
Vickery decided to jump in. “I could see that they weren’t physical apparitions—astral, like you said.” He looked out the window at the blue sky, then met Linda Loma’s gaze. “Soon?”
“I think you can understand,” the woman said, “and Pierce did bring you here.” She looked at Plowman. “I wish Frankie Notchett had come back too. Did you know he’s dead?” When Plowman nodded, she went on, “We spoke sometimes, but he never repented his apostasy. Out on his boat at night, trying to capture angels!” She shook her head; then stood up, and the others followed suit. “Let me show you our spirit radar.” She crossed to the wooden doors and pulled them open.
Vickery stepped up beside Castine and peered over her shoulder. The octagonal room beyond had probably been big enough for dozens of square dancers, and the high white walls with wide Corinthian crown molding under the ceiling simply dwarfed the five tables set up across the worn parquet floor.
Three robed men sat around each table, and as Linda Loma led Vickery’s party into the room he saw that the tables were inset with wide triangular patterns of black and white squares; and then he saw six-inch-tall black and white and red chessmen standing in various positions on the squares. What Vickery at first thought were shot glasses beside every player’s right wrist proved to be tiny hourglasses.
“We communicate with the angels this way,” said Linda Loma, waving at the tables. “It’s anti-king chess. When one game ends, another will be in mid game and another is opening up. Day and night, the games have never stopped since my grandmother initiated this form of contact in 1949.”
As Vickery watched, a player at one table and then another moved a chesspiece and inverted his hourglass. At the far side of the room a player called, quietly, “Incarnation,” and all three players at that table leaned forward and began rearranging the chess pieces. Another man hurried to the table and replaced one of the red pieces with a duplicate.
“Anti-king?” Vickery said.
“There are three players in each game, as you see.” Linda Loma’s eyes were bright as her gaze darted around the tables. “Three sides. Each of the three kings must continually be in check—that is, be the focus of attention of a piece from one of the other colors. If a king must move to a square where it is not in check—becomes isolated, falls out—it’s considered incarnated, and that king is enshrined.”
The man who had switched chess pieces at the far table hurried out of the room.
Vickery was suddenly sure he knew what the spikes along the façade top were. Did these people imagine that the enshrined kings functioned as antennas? “What,” he asked carefully, “is the . . . goal, of each player?”
“Simply to prolong the game, maintain steady contact. The angels can be read within the strict logic of the chessboard, moves governed by geometry, mathematical logic—and allow the kings to fall into incarnation only when the board logic dictates it.”
“Incarnation,” called a player at a closer table, echoed by another at a table beyond it. Another of the robed men stepped past Vickery to hurry to the first table and replace the isolated king.
“They come in waves,” said Linda Loma, “contractions, and they’re getting more frequent. I believe they’re building toward a crest now—in ten minutes or so they’ll all be calling, and we’ll probably replace a dozen kings.”
Vickery suppressed a shiver as he realized that if Plowman was right about these people, each replaced king commemorated a new crop circle, or sand angel, or oceanic equivalent, somewhere on the globe.
Santiago licked his lips and spoke up: “When does it end?”
Linda Loma gave him a startled look, as if she’d forgotten he was there. “End? Say begin! It begins when the incarnated angels gather to themselves enough grace to . . . fly away! With us!”
Fly even beyond the reach of Chaos, thought Vickery. And they won’t be taking us with them, any more than track runners take their starting blocks with them.
“Soon,” Linda Loma said. She spread her arms toward the tables. “We’ve watched the pattern grow ever tighter, and the frequency peaks will soon merge into one culminant event. You’ve heard that sound like thunder today? You’ll hear it more. The pattern has begun to grow exponetially, and we calculate that the ascension will occur sometime tomorrow night.” He voice had deepened as she spoke. “The critical High Mass will occur, the incarnate shrines will unite. And all of us will be raised up, transformed.”
Vickery’s face was cold, and he could feel his heart beating in his suddenly hollow chest. Tomorrow night? he thought. If these crazy people know what they’re talking about—and Plowman said they’re a seismograph for this stuff—and if our interpretation of Notchett’s poem is correct, which this woman seems to be obliquely confirming—then tomorrow night we’ll all be transformed, sure enough. Blocks of ice, we’ll be.
He knew that if he were in his trailer, in his truck, in a bar, even just out in the sunlight, he would easily, and quite sensibly, dismiss this woman’s wild statements. But in this weird hilltop temple, watching these people intently pursuing their occult purpose, he couldn’t help being alarmed.
Sneakers squeaked on the marble floor, and when Vickery looked around he saw Santiago racing to the front door; the boy yanked it open, and disappeared, and his footsteps could be heard tapping rapidly down the stairs outside.
Linda Loma was blinking in surprise at the open door.
“My nephew, uh, gets restless around grown-up talk,” said Castine, stepping back into the hall. “I’m afraid we’ll have to get him home.”
“His home,” said Linda Loma, “is in Heaven. Fetch him back. And you,” she said to Vickery, “please give your car keys to the facilitator.” She looked past Vickery with a smile, and when he turned he saw that the robed man was now standing behind him, also smiling.
“No,” said Plowman firmly. “You have some claim on me because of Becky, but these people are . . . civilians.” He looked up and down the hall. “Is Becky here?”
Linda Loma’s eyes widened and her voice was strained. “Pierce?”
“What?”
“You don’t even know that our daughter is dead, Pierce? That she died by her own hand eleven years ago?”
Plowman stared at her, expressionless. “You’re lying,” he said hoarsely, but Vickery could see that he believed her.
Linda Loma closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them, staring back at him. “You must make atonement before your apotheosis,” she said gently, “surely you can see that.” She turned to Vickery and Castine. “You’ll be made comfortable, children. Don’t give a thought to—”
Plowman took Castine’s arm and turned toward the door, followed by Vickery, but the robed man blocked their way.
“I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” the man said.
“You show me?” blustered Plowman. “I show you. I got your handful of dust right here.” He raised his free hand in a fist.
The man stepped back, still blocking the way to the door, and his hand had darted under his robe and emerged holding a stainless steel revolver.
The gun barrel moved left and right, covering Vickery and Castine as well as Plowman. Vickery was resentfully gauging the distance between himself and the armed man, and slightly twisting his left foot to estimate how much traction he could have, when Santiago’s voice broke the tension:
“Drop the gun, mister, or I’ll shoot the old lady.”
All heads swung toward the boy, and Vickery wasn’t surprised to see that Santiago was holding in both hands a Sig Sauer P229 semi-automatic pistol, probably .40 caliber. Santiago had stolen it from an unconscious Transportation Utility agent three years ago. The barrel was tilted up, pointing above the heads of the five people in front of him, but not far above.
“And kick it over here,” Vickery said.
The robed man hesitated, then crouched slowly and laid the revolver on the marble floor; and after an appraising glance at Santiago, he kicked the gun across the marble floor toward Vickery, who quickly picked it up. Vickery opened the revolver’s cylinder—it held six rounds of half-jacketed hollow points.
He snapped it shut, and with his free hand he dug the keys out of his pocket and tossed them to Castine, and rocked his head toward the front door.
She nodded and followed Plowman and Santiago out the door and down the steps.
Vickery backed to the open door. “I’ll leave the gun,” he called, “in the driveway.” And how the hell, he thought bitterly, did I end up having to hold a gun on these strangers?
Linda Loma was shaking her head sadly. The robed man had straightened up and now stood with his hands open at his sides. Another was now standing in the hall behind the woman, hesitant and peering.
Vickery stepped over the threshold and then hurried down the stairs, looking back and keeping the gun pointed toward the doorway. Out from under the arch and down on the level dirt, he ran to the driveway, his shoes crunching on old eyeglasses; the Dodge’s passenger-side door was open, and as he hiked himself in, Castine accelerated back to the road in reverse, spun the car and shifted to drive, and sped around the curve. Vickery had hung onto the door frame with one hand during the maneuver, and now pulled his legs in and shut the door. He simply pitched the revolver out the window.
“I said I would,” he told Castine breathlessly.
Castine slowed down as the road curved. To their left now were the tops of trees rooted further down the slope, and beyond them a view of rooftops among wooded ridges and the gray towers of downtown L.A. on the horizon. Vickery kept glancing back to make sure no pickup truck was pursuing them.
No one was looking directly at Plowman, and Vickery thought he was aware of it. “Atone,” the old man said finally. “How do you make amends to someone who’s dead?”
Vickery thought again of Cordelia, King Lear’s loyal but forsaken daughter.
Without looking away from the road rushing under the tires, Castine said, “You’ve got another daughter.”
Plowman just slumped back in the rear seat, his eyes closed.
Santiago glanced at him uncertainly, then asked, “How was the Notchett guy trying to catch angels?”
Plowman rubbed his face with both hands, then dropped them in his lap. He sighed and looked at Santiago. “I owe you, kid. We all do. If you hadn’t come back in with that gun . . .” He leaned forward to peer out the window. “Frankie? I didn’t know that’s what he was trying to do. He did go out on the Ouranos a lot at night.”
Vickery looked at him sharply. “That was the name of his boat? Ouranos? Like in his poem?” When Plowman raised one hand in vague question, Vickery turned to Castine. “Where did we put Notchett’s papers?”
“In your briefcase,” she said without taking her eyes off the curving road, “You’ve got your feet on it.”
Vickery bent down and unzipped the briefcase. The papers Plowman had given them yesterday were at the bottom, under the .45 and 9-millimeter magazines and the bundles of twenty-dollar bills, and he pulled them free.
He flipped to the photocopy of Notchett’s amplified translation of Hesiod. “Ouranos,” he read, “Gaia’s son, restrains the stranger hundred handed ones—” He looked back at Plowman. “Did he hope to restrain them with something on his boat? Your Linda Loma said he went out at night on it to try to capture angels. Never mind,” he added when the old man just shrugged.
“Do you know where his boat is?” asked Castine.
“It’s at Howard’s Landing in Huntington Beach, maybe a mile from his apartment.”
“Would you be able to find it, recognize it?”
“Sure, I’ve done a lot of maintenance on it for him—even hoisted one of the engines out last year, to replace the flywheel. I’ve never been out on it with him at night, though.”
“ONI might be watching it,” said Vickery.
“They probably don’t know about it,” said Plowman. “Frankie bought everything with cash, and he got a bill of sale for the boat but never sent in the transfer-of-ownership papers. On paper, some Canadian still owns it.”
Vickery noticed that Castine’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. “I’m afraid we should look at it,” she said. Then added, firmly, “While the sun’s still up.”