Tim Powers - Last Call (22 page)

"What's up?" asked Mavranos. "Hear something?"

Crane forced himself not to breathe fast. "No," he said levelly. "Nothing."

Nothing,
echoed the voice.
I'm good enough for a quickie in the truck while your friends are inside, but when they're around I'm nothing.

Ozzie's head came up. He looked around quickly, frowning and wiping drool from his chin. "Who are you and where are you taking me?" he demanded.

"Oz, it's me, Scott, remember?" Fright made Crane speak too loudly; in a quieter tone he went on, "We're going to Las Vegas to find Diana. She's—what was it?—flying in the grass."

The old man sagged, all his imperiousness gone. "Oh, yeah," he said faintly, and then he shivered and pulled his suit coat more tightly around his narrow shoulders. "Oh, yeah."

"Be across the border into Nevada soon," said Mavranos without taking his eyes off the highway.

Ozzie wiped his eyes and blinked out the window. "I'd like to have seen more of California," he mumbled. In a firmer voice he said, "Over the border we'll be on their turf,
his
turf. Play tight."

Mavranos lifted a fresh can of beer from the ice chest and swirled his hand in the water, bumping a few cans together. "How much longer?"

"To Vegas?" Crane said. "Another hour or so."

Ozzie shifted awkwardly on the seat. "I've heard that there's a casino just over the border now. Dirty Dick's or something. Let's stop there for a bit. I think I'm going to throw up my Baker cheeseburger, and then I should eat something like a—a tuna fish sandwich, maybe, or a bowl of soup." His knobby hands found the rubber grip of his aluminum cane and held it tightly.

"I wouldn't mind a bite myself," said Mavranos. "Something with some onions and salsa."

Ozzie shut his eyes and clenched his jaw.

Are you going to leave me in the car again? Why don't you take me inside with you? You used to love me. You used to—

"What was it," asked Crane loudly, "that you didn't like about the cards I threw down, when I was playing with the nut back there, I think it was the Ace and Queen of Hearts and the Ace of Spades?" The disembodied voice seemed to have stopped, so he let himself stop jabbering.

Both Ozzie and Mavranos were looking at him with expressions of puzzled uneasiness.

"Well," Crane went on in a more normal tone, "you didn't look as though they were good news, Ozzie. I thought of it just now and wanted to ask before I forgot." He knew his hands would shake if he gestured with them, so he clasped them in his lap.

"Oh," said Ozzie. "Huh. Well, it may not have counted for anything, playing for sugar and candy like that. And I didn't notice any funny business with smoke or drink levels."

"I read somewhere voodoo gods like candy," put in Mavranos.

"Or sea monkeys," said Crane impatiently. "But what
was
it?" he asked Ozzie.

The old man rubbed his face. "Well, as I told you, Hearts is the suit of the—the King and Queen. The sun King and the moon Queen, you know. And the Ace of Hearts is the combination of them, like yin and yang. Your father doesn't want any such combination, though, or at least not one that's not contained in himself. And the Queen of Hearts is probably still Diana's card in some sense, since she's the daughter of that Lady Issit, who was the goddess."

Crane remembered the card that had covered the Ace and Queen of Hearts. "And what's the Ace of Spades?" he asked.

Ozzie waved one spotted old hand. "Death."

That reminded Crane of something, but before he could catch the memory, Mavranos was speaking.

"I think this place up ahead here is what you were talking about—Whiskey Pete's it's called," Mavranos said, and a moment later there was the
click-click, click-click
of the turn indicator as he signaled for a lane change, and the sound continued as, moments later, he slanted off the highway onto the exit ramp and began to press the brake pedal.

"How many maps did you get?" Ozzie asked suddenly.

"Maps," echoed Crane without comprehension. It alarmed him that he didn't know what Ozzie was talking about, and he clasped his hands together even tighter.

"From the nut," Mavranos said. "When you went out to his car."

"Oh, right. I don't know—three or four. They're under Arky's wind-breaker there."

Whiskey Pete's was a tan-colored, spotlighted and neon-lit castle, with turrets and towers and arches, and crenellations along the tops of the walls as if for the emplacement of only momentarily absent archers. The caricature figure of a gold prospector sat on the highest wall, above the giant CASINO sign, and at the far ends of the lower wall were two figures of Parisian-looking dancing girls. Behind the glowing edifice the hills of the desert were black humps against the purple sky.

"Jesus," said Mavranos as he drove across the vast parking lot toward the spectacle. "It looks like something that aliens would catch people in and then fold up just before dawn and fly back to Mars with."

"Does your dome light work, Archimedes?" asked Ozzie.

"You bet."

"Let's look at these maps right here in the car. I don't like the idea of looking at them inside that place."

Mavranos parked and turned off the engine and the headlights, then switched on the dome light as Ozzie carefully pulled the folded maps out from under Mavranos's windbreaker. He began unfolding the top one.

In the anonymous darkness and swooping headlight glare of the highway, the dusty little Morris droned right on past the Whiskey Pete's exit ramp, heading east, toward Las Vegas.

"Poland?" said Crane, staring at one of the maps. "She couldn't be flying in the grass in
Poland
, could she? And shit, look at the caption: 'Partition of Poland, 1939.' " He laid the map over the back of the front seat so the other two could see it.

"Look, though," said Mavranos, squinting through cigarette smoke, "he's marked half a dozen routes, from somewhere to somewhere." With a calloused finger he traced one of several heavy pencil lines that meandered across the map.

"This one's California and Nevada," said Ozzie tensely, looking at a map he'd just unfolded. "More routes marked."

The old man held it up, and Crane tried to make sense of the map lines that had been emphasized in heavy pencil. The Colorado River was traced from about Laughlin down to Elythe, and then the line moved inland to some town called Desert Center; the 62 Highway was marked from the Nevada border west to the 177 junction; one line just followed the California border from the I-15 to the river, though there was no road or river along the route, only the imaginary straight line; and heavy pencil strokes had crossed out two names; in the glove compartment Crane found a pencil with an eraser and rubbed out the shiny black patches and then just stared, as puzzled as before, at the names "Big Maria Mts." and "Sacramento Mts." revealed underneath.

"It looks like a big round trip," said Crane, "from Riverside to the border, down the length of the border to Blythe, and then back up to the 40 on unpaved roads, and back to Riverside."

"With a lot of side trips," said Ozzie. "Notice the fainter pencil lines along these dirt roads out around the 95."

"Gentlemen," said Mavranos ponderously, "the man was nuts."

But Ozzie was shaking his head doubtfully. "The moon, the Jack and Queen of Hearts … He was plugged in somehow. Don't throw these away."

There were two other maps, one of Michigan and one of Italy, both deeply scored with pencil lines.

"I wonder if he'll miss them," said Crane.

"Yeah," said Mavranos unsympathetically, "next time he's in Poland he'll be up Shit Creek without a you-know-what, as my mom used to say. We ready to go inside, or what?"

"You okay for walking?" Crane asked Ozzie as he opened the door and climbed down to the pavement.

"There's nothing wrong with me," said Ozzie peevishly.

Ozzie hurried away in the direction of the men's room, while Crane and Mavranos stood in the entry and blinked around in the glare-punctuated dimness.

Just inside the bank of glass doors, isolated on the red-carpeted floor by a circle of velvet ropes hung from brass poles, was a 1920s-vintage car, its body riddled with big-caliber bullet holes. A nearby sign announced that this was the very car in which Bonnie and Clyde had been shot to death. Welcome to Nevada, Crane thought.

After a few minutes Ozzie came back, white-faced, red-eyed, and leaning on his cane.

"And Ozzie makes three," said Crane, pretending to notice nothing out of the ordinary.

This was the first time he'd been in a Nevada casino in more than fifteen years, but as he led the way through the ranks of clattering slot machines to the restaurant in the back, he felt as though no more than a week had passed since he'd last been in this ubiquitous, rackety hall, doors into which could be found in hundreds of places across the breadth of Nevada. Whether you walked in through a door in Tahoe or Reno or Laughlin, or across a littered pavement in the Glitter Gulch area of downtown Las Vegas or up a polished marble stair on the Strip, it always seemed to be the same big, noisy dark room that you found yourself in. It was carpeted, and it smelled of gin and paper money and tobacco and air conditioning, and a disquieting number of the people at the tables and the slot machines were crippled or deformed or startlingly obese.

Mavranos was blinking around in apparent bewilderment. "Where the hell are all these people when they're not here?" he asked Crane quietly.

"I think they only look like people in this light," said Ozzie with a tired grin. "Before they spun in through the doors at sundown they were dust devils and tumbleweeds and cast-off snakeskins, and their money was warpy bits of busted mirage; and at dawn they'll all leave, and if you were watching, you'd see 'em puff away, back to their real forms."

Crane grinned, reassured to note that Ozzie could still spin his whimsical fantasies, but he noticed that Mavranos only looked more apprehensive.

"He's kidding," Crane said.

Mavranos shrugged irritably. "I know that."

Without speaking, the three of them began filing down the aisles between the slot machines.

In the restaurant Ozzie had a grilled cheese sandwich and a Coors, and Mavranos had a bowl of chili and a Coors, and Crane just had a Coke and ate Mavranos's crackers.

Mavranos had begun to tell Ozzie about the Mandelbrot fat man, and Crane stood up and said he was going to go hit the men's room himself.

He paused on the way to thumb a quarter into one of the slot machines, and after he'd pulled the handle, not even watching the machine's window, twenty quarters were banged one by one into the payout well.

He scooped them out in two handfuls and dumped them into the pockets of his jacket, then touched the machine's handle. "Thanks," he said.

He pretended that the thing said,
You're welcome.
Then he found himself pretending that the thing had said,
Give her one good-bye kiss, at least.

"I … can't," Crane whispered.

Doesn't she deserve at least that?
the machine seemed to ask him.
Are you afraid to look her in the face one last time?

I don't know, Crane thought. I'll have to get back to you on that.

Slowly he limped away from the machine, to the bar, and he dumped a fistful of quarters onto the polished surface.

"A shot of Wild Turkey and two Budweisers, please," he told the bartender. Just one last kiss, he thought. I'm no good to my friends if I'm shaky and forgetful.

The glass screen of a video Poker game was inset flush with the surface of the bar, and Crane dropped a quarter into the slot and pushed the deal button. The images of patterned card backs in the flat glass screen blinked and became face up, and then he was looking at a garbage hand, unsuited and with no Hearts.

At that instant, about forty miles to the east of where Crane stood, five mouths opened and exclaimed, "God,
there's
a Jack!"

The other people on the bus stared at the old man who had shouted.

"What'd he say?" one person asked.

"There's a Jack," someone else answered.

"What's he looking at so hard out the window?"

"Trying to find a rest room, I bet—look, he's wet his pants!"

"Jeez, what's he doing running around loose? He's a hundred if he's a day."

Thought fragments flickered like deepwater fish in the mind residue that occupied Doctor Leaky's head, frail sparks of luminescence darting about on unknowable errands in darkness.
Ninety-one, ninety-one, ninety-one,
ran the unspoken, scarcely connected words.
Not a hundred. Born in '99, born in … that was a Jack. That was a hell of a Jack, west of here … don't smell roses, that's good … don't smell nothing … well, piss …

Art Hanari finally let himself be coaxed into lying back down on the padded table. The masseur had stopped asking him what he'd meant by the remark about a Jack, and now resumed rubbing a lanolin solution into his taut pectorals and deltoids.

The masseur ignored Hanari's perpetual erection. Curious about it at first, he had looked up Hanari' s file, and had found that a "penile implant," a silicone rod, had been surgically inserted into the organ as a drastic cure for primary impotence; it seemed a waste of time, for Hanari saw no women except for a couple of the nurses and physiotherapists, and he showed no interest in them—or in anyone. He nearly never spoke, and he'd had no visitors for at least eight years.

But the masseur had not been surprised to read of the implant operation. Patients at La Maison Dieu could afford anything, and he'd seen much more extravagant cosmetic surgeries.

What had surprised him was Hanari's birth date: 1914. The man was seventy-six … but his pale skin was smooth and firm, and his hair appeared to be genuinely dark brown, and his face was that of a placid thirty-year-old.

Finished, the masseur straightened and wiped his hands on a towel. He looked at the man on the table, who had apparently gone back to sleep, and he shook his head. "God, there's a jack-
off
, you mean," he muttered, then turned to the door.