Tim Powers - Last Call (42 page)

The telephone was ringing again. He let it ring.

He had read that the weight of the air at sea level was fourteen pounds per square inch. Vaguely he wondered if he would be able to stand up against that, or even keep from falling backward across the bed.

Eventually a smell broke through to him. A morning smell, he knew what it was—hot coffee.

He turned his head toward the bedside table—and then started violently.

A steaming coffee cup stood there beside the clock, a white McDonald's "Good Morning" cup like the ones he and Susan had somehow acquired half a dozen of.

He stood up and left the room.

The police might come looking for him at the carousel bar, so he took the elevator all the way down to the ground floor and walked out the front doors of the Circus Circus, across the broad parking lot to where a giant white stone ape waved at the traffic coursing south on the brightly sunlit expanse of Las Vegas Boulevard. He flagged a cab and asked to be taken to the Flamingo.

When it dropped him off, he walked slowly across the crowded sidewalk and up the steps and through the brass-framed glass doors into the casino, then threaded his way through the sudden carpeted dimness between the slot machines and the Blackjack tables to the bar at the back.

"A shot of Wild Turkey," he told the waitress who eventually strode over to his corner table, "and a Bud chaser. Oh, and could I have a telephone brought over to this table? I'm expecting a call."

The bar was nearly empty at this early morning hour, and was brightly enough lit so that the casino floor beyond the open arch was a darkness full of meaningless clanging and flashing lights.

"Honey, I can bring you a phone, but you better call whoever it is. We got a lot of lines—the odds are bad on you
getting
any call."

Crane just nodded and waved.

He leaned back and looked nervously around at the framed pictures on the walls. My dad's place, he thought. I wonder if he still comes back here, if he still has a hidey-hole for things that might hurt him. If so, it might be anywhere. It couldn't be in the
same
place, that hole in the stucco under the front steps; those steps are gone, along with the Champagne Tower and Siegel's rose garden and the front lawn. Maybe he does still come back—maybe he'll come back here sometime in this very body of mine, once he's taken it.

Crane thought about his father, who had taken him as a little boy on fishing trips out on Lake Mead, and had taught him about the tides of cards; and who had then hurt Crane, and gone out of his life forever.

The shot and the beer arrived with the telephone, and after Crane paid the waitress, he just stared for a while at the three objects on the dark tabletop.

So much for the target that shoots back, he thought. So much for moving all-in. I'm about to step out of cover empty-handed; fold after calling all but the last terrible raise.

What was it Ozzie said?

They blew her up.

I suppose, Crane thought, that the reason I didn't feel her death through our old psychic link was that she didn't feel it either. Instantaneous destruction—what's to convey?

He lifted the shot glass and stared at the amber whiskey. I could just not do this, he thought; I could put this glass down and get a cab to the police station. Call the raise, and keep on living.

For what?

I didn't share her pain, because there wasn't any. But maybe I'm sharing her death.

He drained the shot glass in one long sip, feeling the rich, good burn of the stuff warm his throat and his stomach. Then he drank half of the icy Budweiser and sat back in the canvas chair, blinking and blank-eyed and waiting.

The telephone in front of him rang, and he lifted the receiver to his ear.

"Hi, Susan," he said. He inhaled, glanced indifferently around the bar for some delaying factor and found none, and exhaled. "Can you forgive me?"

And in the lobby and casino and restaurants of the Riviera, over the babble of the guests and the gamblers and the ceaseless rattling of chips, the disembodied public-address voice called, "
Paging Oliver Crane; paging Oliver Crane
," for a while, and then gave up on that and went on to other announcements and summonings.

But there was heard among the holy hymns
A voice as of the waters, for she dwells
Down in a deep; calm, whatsoever storms
May shake the world, and when the surface rolls,
Hath power to walk the waters like our Lord.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
Idylls of the King

All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

NANO: Now prithee, sweet soul, in all thy variation
Which body would'st thou choose, to keep up thy station?

ANDROGYNO: Troth, this I am in: even here would I tarry.

NANO: 'Cause here the delight of each sex thou canst vary?

ANDROGYNO: Alas, those pleasures be stale and forsaken.

—Ben Jonson,
The Fox

Hopes die, and their tombs are for token
That the grief as the joy of them ends
Ere time that breaks all men has broken
The faith between friends.

—Algernon Charles Swinburne,
Dedication

Though he hadn't been to Las Vegas for twenty years before this trip, Ozzie knew this sort of off-the-Strip bar. In the early evening it would have been full of husky construction workers downing their after-work beers. Now the clientele was stage hands and theater people, and cold white wine was the most commonly poured drink. After midnight the prostitutes would drift in for whatever it was that they favored.

For Ozzie this was the eye of the storm, the period of calm between the first fight and the last.

Ozzie peeled open the pack of Chesterfields he'd bought from the cigarette machine in the corner and shook one out. He had quit smoking in 1966, but he had never quite forgotten the sometimes profound satisfaction of lighting up and hauling smoke deep into his lungs.

The bartender tossed a book of matches onto the bar beside Ozzie's mug of beer.

Ozzie gave him a tired smile. "Thanks." He struck a match and puffed the cigarette alight.

Before he put them away, he took a last look at the other choices.

A message in the personals column of the
Sun
or the
Review-Journal
, he thought. No, Scott won't be reading papers.

And maybe, he thought then, I've done enough by leaving the message at the Circus Circus desk:
I've left young Oliver with a woman named Helen Sully in Searchlight. She's in the book. Diana's dying wish was that you take care of her two sons. It's what you can do—do it. Love, Ozzie.

But Scott might not go back to the Circus Circus.

Ozzie sipped the cold beer and frowned, remembering how the fat little boy had begged him to stay with him.

"You're not too old to be our dad," Oliver had said tearfully as Ozzie had driven Diana's Mustang south on the 95 this afternoon, toward Searchlight. "Scat and I need a dad." The boy had still been subdued and trembling, all the arrogance knocked out of him by the explosion of his home, the death of his mother.

"I'm going to try to get you a dad, Oliver," Ozzie had said. "Sorry—do you mind me calling you Oliver?"

"It's
your
name," the boy had said, "I don't mind it. Don't ever call me … that other name, that I used to want. That was the—I don't even know. I broke that off and chased it away."

The Sully woman lived in a big ranch-style house just outside the city limits of Searchlight. She had worked with Diana at a pizza parlor four years ago, and had liked her and kept up the friendship, and she had six boys of her own; she cheerfully agreed to take care of either or both of Diana's boys until their uncle would get around to showing up.

I broke that off and chased it away.

Ozzie now took a deep drag on the cigarette, and he didn't cough. His lungs remembered smoke, had evidently wondered what had become of it. And the kid wasn't speaking figuratively, he thought as he sipped some more of the beer. I
saw
the Bitin Dog personality walk away, in front of that blown-up apartment.

No, Scott might not get the message at the hotel, and an ad in the paper won't work. He finished the beer and stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray.

He caught the bartender's eye. "Have you got a deck of cards around?" Ozzie asked.

"Think so." The bartender dug around among the litter by the cash register, then tossed a box onto the bar in front of Ozzie. There was a color photo of a smiling naked woman on the front of the box, and when Ozzie opened it and tipped the worn cards out, he saw that the backs of the cards were all the same picture.

"Hot stuff," he said dryly.

"You bet. You know any card tricks?"

"No." Ozzie wondered why he had not ever learned to do anything with the cards besides make a cautious living. "I was always too scared of them," he said. He looked up at the bartender, noticing that though the man was middle-aged and his apron was tight over an ample belly, he was younger than Scott, and incalculably younger than Ozzie himself. No time to spare, he thought. "Can I buy these from you?" he asked, tapping the sad, worn deck.

The bartender's look of puzzlement became half-concealed contempt. "You can keep 'em, Gramps," he said, turning away and staring at the television set on a shelf up under the ceiling.

Ozzie smiled sourly to himself. He thinks I'm going to go back to some hotel room and … and
turn
some card tricks, he thought, with this pathetic, repetitive paper harem. Oh well. One bartender's opinion of me is a pretty small factor in all this.

But he could feel that he was reddening, and he touched the carefully tied knot of his tie self-consciously.

North, he remembered, was to his left. He shuffled the deck quickly seven times, then laid out four cards in a cross. The Jack of Hearts was the card at the north end of the cross.

North it is, he thought, levering himself up off the barstool with his aluminum cane and then digging in his pocket for money to pay for the beer. As always, he left a precisely calculated fifteen percent tip.

Crane shifted in his chair and watched the bet go around the green felt table.

He was in the cardroom of Binion's Horseshoe, right next to the doorway that had been opened in the wall when the Horseshoe had taken over the Mint next door. From the paneled cardroom walls looked down framed photographs of members of the Poker Hall of Fame—Wild Bill Hickock, Johnny Moss, Doyle Brunson—and as Crane sipped his newest bourbon on the rocks, he wondered what the old masters thought of his playing.

He had opened under the gun—the first player to the dealer's left—with three Jacks. Tonight, no matter where he played, he couldn't seem to get any bad hands—and now three other players were calling his fifty-dollar bet. That was good; he'd draw two to his Jacks, and the other players would probably figure he was so drunk that he might well be drawing to a pair and a kicker—or even to a three Flush, or nothing but dreams—instead of high Trips.

It was true that he was drunk. The field of his vision seemed to be shifting up all the time, like a television with bad vertical control, so that he constantly had to be bringing his gaze
down
to focus on anything.

And whenever he looked at his cards, he had to close his false right eye, or else through it he would see his hand as consisting of Tarot cards. Not his real father's lethal deck, thank God, nor even the one that poor Joshua had tried to read for him, but a deck he had dreamed of—the deck in which the Two of Batons was a cherub's head speared through by two metal rods.

"Cards?" said the house dealer loudly.

Crane realized that the man was talking to him, and was probably saying it for the second time. Crane raised two fingers and tossed out the Four and Nine of Hearts. The cards he got in exchange were the Nine and Two of Spades, no help.

The two players to his left just rapped the table; they were standing pat, at least pretending to have unimprovable hands.

And, Crane thought sadly, they had both been playing tight all along, not staying with low Two Pairs or trying for gut-shot Straights or three Flushes and apparently never bluffing. They probably
did
have pat hands. Certainly at least one of them did.

So much for three Jacks.

He checked instead of betting, and when one of them did bet, and the other one raised, and the "cold" raise came around to him, he slid two of his Jacks under his chips and threw the other three cards away. When he would be asked to show his openers, he would show the pair, which was the minimum a player could have in order to open; and opening with just a pair of Jacks under the gun was a foolish move. Seeming to have done it would confirm him in the eyes of the other players as a money-careless drunk.

He had been playing Poker all over town for about sixteen hours, starting in the Flamingo's cardroom right after the first phone call from the ghost of Susan. She had called several times since, ringing pay phones he had happened to be standing near; her voice was hoarse, and she didn't talk for any longer than it took for her to tell him that she forgave him and loved him. He knew she'd be waiting for him in the bed of whatever motel room he would eventually wind up in, but like a nervous bridegroom on his wedding night, he wanted just a couple more drinks before … retiring.

Twice among a thousand snatches of desultory conversation, once at the Sands and once from a cabdriver who had asked him what line of work he was in, he had heard of a series of Poker games that was to be played on a Lake Mead houseboat next week, starting Wednesday night and continuing through Good Friday.

He tried not to think about that now.

He reached for his drink, then hesitated and glanced to his right—but of course there was
not
a woman standing there. All day he had been catching these glimpses out of the corner of his false eye. Somehow it didn't worry him that he was able to
see
through the painted plastic hemisphere; somehow he had always known that his father could give back what his father had taken away.