Among the Living (72 page)

She parked in front of The ’Choke.

And the stories started to knit themselves together. The way broken bones are said to. And scar tissue.

She got out of the Prius in a hurry and didn’t lock it. She went into The ’Choke. Jimmy went past the coffeehouse and turned around and came back up on the other side of the street, stopping three storefronts away. He could use a cup of coffee. He already knew he was only hours away from the end, whatever it was.

The violet light of the story had begun to pulse.

He didn’t know exactly what he expected to find in The ’Choke, but what he found was Mary.

They were all working on her. Or at least they were all around her. She was in the center of the group, with her hands around a cup of tea or something. The hippie with the Vandyke and his people, Sexy Sadie and Polythene Pam, they were all there, listening to what Mary was saying and nodding. She had that end-of-a-long-day look but smiled more than you would expect, but the kind of wistful smile that admits defeat. That wants the day to end, whether there’s another one after it or not.

The Lady stood by, five feet away, almost at attention.

Mary finished what she was saying, and Sadie and Pam stood and leaned over her and hugged her, that way women do, draping themselves over the other.
I understand.

Mary saw Jimmy.

He just stood there in the doorway. As if he was in charge, as if
he
was going to determine what happened next.

As if he could save her.

When the others saw him, they closed the circle around Mary, made her disappear. Like bodyguards. Like magic. They were already in motion, leading her away, out the other entrance, the one on Ashbury.

Jimmy went after them. “Don’t go with them,” he said.

He saw her eyes in the middle of them.

And then they were gone. All of them. They were already crossing the Panhandle at Ashbury, the whole merry band of them. And not waiting for the light. He went after them.

Beatles music was in the air.

Maybe, maybe not.

So this was the black house. Inside.

They had left the door open. He had the idea they never locked it. There probably wasn’t even a key.

The living room, the first room in the front of the house, had twenty-foot ceilings and red velvet drapes, Persian rugs on the floor. Mahogany furniture, a wall covered with prints of birds, in different-sized frames, gold frames. There were velvet pillows everywhere and a collection of hats on pegs on another wall.

It was a woman’s house. Or
women’s
.

He kept expecting to be jumped. Maybe hippies never attack. Next to the living room was a dining room, with a twelve-foot table. Fresh flowers. The kitchen was done in white octagonal tile with a strip of black around the backsplash, looked a little institutional, but on the glass of the window over the double sinks some hand had painted “Good Day Sunshine . . .” in clear acrylic, yellows and blues.

The Beatles’ music was coming from the back of the house somewhere. It only made clearer to Jimmy that they were gone already, that they’d run in here and then out the back, to buy time. The sound somehow said empty house.

He found the CD player. There was a den in the back of the house. Painted purple, semigloss. The speakers were built into the ceiling, made it sound like God was listening to
The White Album.

Jimmy eyed the stairs, thinking maybe they were still in the house, upstairs. But then there was a mechanical sound, from the anteroom outside the den.

An elevator stood open. It was integrated into the dark woodwork. He hadn’t noticed it before when he came through. It wasn’t standing open before. There didn’t seem to be a call button for it. He stepped in. He could smell Mary’s perfume, floating above the patchouli of the hippies.

There were three buttons. He went with Up.

But it had other ideas. As soon as he’d stepped into it, the elevator had started to make noises, motors and levers. Not-so-great gears turn, too. It went down. One flo or. It stopped, but the doors didn’t open. Jimmy pushed the bottom button, and it continued. A light over the door pulsed, a soft light behind a circle of ivory, that seemed to be measuring time and not distance. If it
was
distance, it felt like ten floors. It stopped, roughly.

It opened onto a ten-foot-square room, a room hewn out of rock. With an arched opening to the right, a tunnel leading away.

In the tunnel there were train tracks and a shiny electrical contact centered overhead. It was small.

OK, I’ll bite,
he thought, and started down the tunnel.

He could stand upright but thought to keep his head and hands away from the power line. There were lights on the wall every fifty feet, gaslights refitted with clear incandescent bulbs.

He walked a half mile. It stayed level. It was dry. He would have thought it would be damp, wondered how they did it. He came through a section with a great rumbling nearby, vibrating gear sounds from the other side of the rock. (A cable car barn?) Near the end, there was an intersection with a larger tunnel, this one tiled, a look from another age, a hint of Le Métro. It all seemed automatic, as transportation networks go. There was a light, red/green, at the intersection.

It shined green, so he kept going.

There was a sound behind him. He turned just as an open train car stopped inches away from running him down. It was simple, inelegant, an open box on wheels, eight feet long. A Sailor manned the helm, standing in the rear, like a gondolier. His face wore no expression. Back home, this kind of Sailor was called a Walker. It was a good job for a Walker.

He rode a good distance in the second tunnel, was brought into a room. The tunnel and cart and driver continued on beyond it. He stepped out. The conveyance stayed put.

It was a waiting room. There was a pair of empty wingback chairs.

And three doors.

One opened, saving Jimmy from any test of character or intuition.

It was the dog man. “Here,” he said, “this way,” and held the door open.

Jimmy just put one foot in front of the other.

They came out into a room, a room where everybody had a purpose. People came and went, carrying things. Most of the people Jimmy didn’t recognize, but the hippies were there and some of the women from the Yards. There was an air of imminent departure, the train leaving the station. Another train, another station. Jimmy looked for a clock, but there wasn’t one.

Duncan Groner came through carrying a wooden box, what could have been a case of booze. He came out of one doorway and headed toward another.

“You still here?” Groner said, didn’t wait for an answer.

The woman with the short-cropped hair and that French look was right at the center of things. The Lady. She’d changed her clothes. Now she wore a dark business suit, blue almost to black, with a waist-length jacket, a straight skirt, a white collar, heels. Like a stewardess on the
Titanic
, if they’d had them.

There was something familiar about the outfit. Then Jimmy remembered the nanny that night on the dock. This was the officers’ version of the suit she wore.

The woman gave Jimmy a pleasant smile.

Christina Leonidas came through. She seemed happy, excited, energized, the way schoolgirls are when they’re working on a project. Putting on a play, a fashion show, a fund-raiser.

“Did you see her yet?” she said. “The Lady?”

“The Lady” was still standing there, maintaining the same smile, standing by. So Jimmy didn’t get it.

“The Queen?” Christina said. “She told us to call her The Lady, or even just Mary, but everyone calls her that, The Queen.
Queen Mary
,” she said and giggled.

And there was a flash of red, like a wink.

Jimmy’s heart fell through a hundred floors.

“She prefers just Mary,” the woman in the suit said to Christina.

Then she turned to Jimmy. “She’s in the drawing room.”

She stood facing him when he came in. The woman in the suit had deposited him on the other side of the door and then clicked away in her heels.

The room was lit up bright, the way a child puts on all the lights when a night turns scary, when questions threaten to overtake everything. There were deep green drapes, a heavy weave, closed across whatever windows there were. Two of the four walls were covered with dark books, floor to ceiling. There wasn’t much furniture, and the wooden floors were bare, polished to a shine that made it look like the two of them, Jimmy and Mary, were standing on water, looking at each other across a gulf.

She stayed where she was.

Jimmy stepped in through the doorway but nothing more. For now.

“I don’t know if you knew or not, but The Man is gone,” Mary said.

“Yeah, I don’t get that,” Jimmy said. “Explain it to me.”

She smoothed out the front of her dress, or dried the palms of her hands on it, if they were damp. She had changed clothes, too, from what she was wearing at The ’Choke, when she was being “consoled,” or he thought she was. Now she was in a gray suit, with a long coat over a long skirt. It was a little odd, high-collared, a little Eva Perón-theatrical.

“There must be other things you want me to explain first,” she said.

“You started with that.” He heard the edge in his voice.

“Help me,” she said.

And suddenly she was Mary again. He almost crossed to her. But he didn’t. He remembered that one of the things that had landed him here, wherever this was, was his predilection for riding to the rescue. Or thinking he could.

“You know, that’s what The Man said to me,” Jimmy said. “
Help me
. He wanted me to get him on his feet, give him a last look at his dimming empire.”

Mary turned her back on Jimmy and reached into the drapes and found the cord and yanked them open. She had her own anger. It was closer to the surface than either one of them thought.

It was the picture window.

It was the drawing room.

It was the house on Russian Hill.

Jimmy felt stupid for not figuring it out before now.

Still with her back to him, Mary said, “I’ll explain it to you. He’s gone. Crossed over. Released. The special exception for Sailors with years of service. The grace of God. A time and a place. That’s all I know about it. That’s all
he
knew, all he understood about it. That leaders sometimes are given a gift.”

“Turn around, let me see you,” Jimmy said.

She turned. She let him stare at her. She knew that right now she was two women to him. She was giving him a chance to try to fit one woman onto the other.

“I understand how you feel,” she said.

“Do you?” he said.

She walked to him. Her hand rose to touch his face, but she stopped it on its way.

She said, “I remember standing in some trees in the middle of the night, in the clothes I had been sleeping in. I remember a man telling me, when he finally got around to it, that he was not what he seemed. That he was something that nobody was, that
couldn’t be
as far as I knew.”

“All right,” Jimmy said.

“I remember six men in a semicircle on a deck, one of them with his face covered with a gray wool scarf, and it a warm night, too.”

“All right, I get it.”

“No, you don’t. You only get part of it, Jimmy.”

She didn’t sound angry anymore.

“We’re even,” he said.

Her face fell. “Is that what you think this is? Something as small and as far away as that?”

The flywheel in his head was spinning so fast it felt like it could come apart. He was trying to
see
it, how this had happened, how he had come to be in this room. He was making lists in his head, drawing diagrams, schematics. He was trying to piece it together. He was trying to re-create the wiring, get it together to where, when he threw the switch, the circuit completed and the light came on.

Mary walked past a table, brushed her fingers across what must have been a switch. All the lights in the room went out at once.

He couldn’t see anything. He heard her walk away from him, toward the window.

His eyes adjusted. What he saw first was a dull red glow, her shoulders and the reflection of their line in the glass of the window.

Until that moment, he wasn’t sure. Wasn’t sure she was a Sailor. It pressed down on him, the knowledge. The fact of it.