THIRTY-FOUR
The Lady led Jimmy to the Haight. In her silver Prius.
He didn’t have any trouble keeping up. He’d left Angel and Lucy behind at the waterfront, left them and the others and almost everything else behind, left the gathered Sailors to cry and wonder what was next, for those so inclined. There wasn’t any traffic. Anywhere. It was as if the city had gotten the word: Tonight belongs to Others.
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.
With every mistake, we must surely be learning.
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.
I don’t know why nobody told you how to unfold your love.
I don’t know how someone controlled you.
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.
093
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.”