Tim Powers - Last Call (59 page)

"Bullshit," said Crane, "I've
seen
two different complete decks, one in 1948 and one in 1969. And I've talked to the man who painted one of them."

There was a long silence from the other end of the line. Finally the man said, quietly, "Was he all right?"

"Well, he was blind." Crane was silent now for a few seconds. "He, uh, cut out his eyes twenty years ago."

"Did he indeed. And you've seen the cards, a full deck. Are
you
all right?"

Crane pressed his side and enviously watched Mavranos sip beer. "No."

"Trust me," said the voice on the telephone, "it won't help you to look at those things again. Absorb yourself with crossword puzzles and daytime soap operas. Actually, obtaining a lobotomy might be your wisest course."

The line clicked and went dead.

"No luck," Mavranos observed as Crane hung up the phone.

"No," Crane said. "He said he
might
be able to get me
part
of a deck for half a million
dollars
. And then he told me I should get a lobotomy."

Mavranos laughed and stood up, then braced himself on the wall and felt the bandanna around his throat. He looked angrily at his beer can. "These things just aren't working, Pogo."

"Maybe you're not drinking them quite fast enough."

"Possible." Mavranos tottered to the ice chest and crouched to lift out another. "Your dad's got a deck."

"Sure, but even if I could find them, he couldn't use them if I had them, could he?"

Mavranos blinked. "Guess not. Can't have archaic and eat it, too—har-har-har." He popped open the fresh beer. "But he had another deck once."

"The deck he cut out my eye with, yeah. He probably didn't use it again, not with my blood on it."

"You figure he threw it out?"

"Well, no. I wonder if you'd even dare
burn
a deck of those things. I suppose he …"

Crane stood up and crossed to the window. Outside, palm trees waved in the breeze over the morning traffic.

"I suppose he
hid
it," he said softly, "with the other things that might otherwise be used to hurt him."

"Yeah? Where would he hide such stuff?"

Crane remembered the last day he had spent with his father, in April of 1948. They had had breakfast at the Flamingo, but before they had gone inside, his father had put something into a hole he'd knocked into the stucco under the side of the casino's front steps. Crane could still remember the rayed suns and stick figures scratched into the stucco around the hole.

But that old casino wasn't there anymore. That whole building, and the Champagne Tower at its south end, had been knocked down sometime in the 60s. A big glass and steel high-rise stood there now, with the present-day casino, much bigger, as the ground floor.

Still, it was his father's place, the old man's castle in the wasteland—his tower.

Crane shrugged. "Let's go look around the Flamingo."

Al Funo tapped his finger against the cab windshield. "That blue truck," he told the driver. "Follow it—I'll make it worth your while, even if you've got to follow it back to L.A."

The Glock 9-millimeter, fully loaded with eighteen rounds of Remington 147-grain subsonics, hung in his shoulder holster, and the oblong jewelry box was in his jacket pocket.
Time to settle Scott Crane's hash,
he thought.
Give him the good news
—he patted his jacket pocket—
and the bad news
—and he touched the lump under his armpit.

"I can't go outside the city limits," said the cabdriver.

"Then you just better hope
they
don't go outside the city limits," Funo said in a hard voice.

"Shit," said the driver derisively.

Funo frowned, but forced himself to relax and watch the truck ahead. He would take a bus home to Los Angeles this afternoon. The Dodge he'd been sleeping in was no good.

Saturday morning, when he'd started the car in the Marie Callender's parking lot, the engine had made the most horrible clattering din he'd ever heard; it had quieted down, though, and he'd been able to drive it until last night—when he went over a speed bump in the parking lot of the Lucky supermarket on Flamingo Road, and the terrible noise chattered out from under the hood again, and the engine had simply stopped for all time. He had managed to push the old Dodge into a parking space, and he spent the night in it right there.

And then this morning, while he'd been away for breakfast, somebody had broken into the car, had popped the lock right out of the driver's side door! Nothing had proved to be missing. To judge from the scattering of dust bunnies, the intruders had groped around under the front seat, but Funo hadn't been keeping anything there.

Funo was bobbing slightly on the cab seat now, staring at the blue truck ahead.
Settle his hash,
he thought tensely,
pop a cap, drop the hammer, sell him the farm, hand him his ass, feed him his shorts.

Mavranos parked the truck in the multi-story parking structure behind the old Flamingo buildings, and he and Crane got out and took the elevator down to street level and then walked around to the Strip side face of what was now the vast Flamingo Hilton Casino Hotel.

North of the wide casino doors a new front was being added onto the casino building, and a chain-link fence separated the Strip traffic from the dusty raw dirt under the new glass facade, over the top of which marched a procession of two-dimensional pink glass flamingos, some still with the manufacturer's stickers on them. Men in hard hats were hammering up wooden forms for concrete across the dirt, and Crane and Mavranos stood on the sidewalk outside the fence and leaned against the chain-link to let the streams of tourists walk past.

"Where was it your daddy hid his secrets?" Mavranos asked. A fat woman sweating in an orange sunsuit stared at him as she swung past.

"About where that guy's setting up rebar," said Crane. "But the ground's been planed off. There's nothing left from the old days."

Mavranos yawned a couple of times, frowning as if the yawns weren't catching. "Well, it ain't likely that any of the reconstruction would have caught him by surprise. Where would he have moved his hidey-hole to?"

Hidey-hole,
Crane thought.

Bolt-hole and hidey-hole.

He stepped back from the fence. "To some place that hasn't changed since the old days. Let's go look at the original Flamingo building—what they call the Oregon Building now."

They retraced their steps to the front entrance and went inside and threaded their way through the cold, dark, clanging casino, between the banks of slot machines and the closely spaced tables—Mavranos craning his neck to see cards on the Blackjack layouts and no doubt wishing he'd brought along some kind of goldfish—and out the back doors into the hot glare of sun on splashing water and bone white deck and oiled, tanned bodies.

And there, across the glittering pool and framed by the curved trunks of palm trees, stood the long, low building that Crane viscerally remembered as the Flamingo.

It was painted pale tan now instead of pistachio green, and little wrought-iron false balconies had been bolted across the lower halves of the windows, and the narrow terrace on which he had seemed to stand with Benjamin Siegel yesterday was walled in now—though he thought he could still see its outline—and to the right the sky was blocked by another high-rise wing of the Flamingo Hilton, and to the left loomed a tall crane and beyond that the pagoda-roofed towers of the Imperial Palace; but this neglected building down here at the feet of the giants was the heart of the Flamingo, the heart of the Strip, the heart of Las Vegas.

"Your place, Dad," he said softly, stepping down to the concrete deck and starting around the right side of the pool.

He and Mavranos pushed open the narrow glass doors of the Oregon Building and wandered around in the quiet green-carpeted rotunda. Crane rapped on a wall, noting the cold silence of marble under the wallpaper. Siegel had built his castle solidly.

They took the elevator to the fourth floor, but one of the double doors to Siegel's penthouse suite had a brass plaque on it that read "Presidential Suite," and Crane decided that whatever high roller was renting the place wouldn't let a couple of bums come in and start prying shelves out of bookcases.

Back down the elevator they went, and out through the back doors to a sloping lawn with a pink metal flamingo standing on it. Crane remembered a parking lot back here, and a couple of bungalows with nothing but desert beyond, but now there was a driveway and the Arizona Building, with the new parking structure peeping up over its roof.

"Dig under that there flamingo?" suggested Mavranos.

Crane was looking back up at Siegel's penthouse. "In the … vision, or hallucination, he had a ladder hidden behind a bookcase," he said thoughtfully, "leading down. That would wind up in the basement, I guess." He pointed at a driveway off to the left that led down to an underground delivery and service entrance. "Let's go in there."

"Hope they aren't rough on trespassers in this town," Mavranos growled as they trudged forward.

"Act drunk, and tell 'em you were looking for the men's room."

"I think I
am
drunk. And I wouldn't
mind
finding a men's room."

Mavranos shook a Camel out of a pack and lit it, walking backward to shield the match flame. Then he waved the pack at Crane.

"No, thanks," Crane said.

"You haven't had a cigarette since you climbed out of the lake," Mavranos observed. "You on that wagon, too?"

Crane shrugged. "Just haven't wanted one. I'm getting healthy, I think."

The descending driveway ramp led them out of the sunlight to a dock area set back in under the building. A broad conveyor belt ran up to the surface of the dock, and big boxes of Soft Blend bathroom tissue were stacked on the extended forks of a little parked power-lift truck.

Up on the dock level a green wooden counter window opened in the far wall, with a no solicitation sign posted on the inner wall. No one was at the counter, so Crane stepped around a plastic mop bucket and hurried up the three steps. Mavranos was right behind him, cursing under his breath.

They were at the south end of a long corridor with a lot of wheeled blue bins parked along the wall. White-painted pipes were hung under the ceiling, making the corridor seem to Crane to be roofed with bamboo.

"The ladder would have come down … somewhere this way," he said, starting down the hall and trying to keep the shape and size of the building in his head.

Every door they passed had "NO EXIT" stenciled on it in red, but at one of them Crane paused, and then tried the knob. The door opened, and they stepped into a high-ceilinged room in which thrummed an enormous water heater. Pipes and gauges made it necessary to duck, in order to walk around, but Crane hunched and sidestepped his way to the very back of the room—and for several seconds he just stared at the wooden ladder that was bolted to the concrete wall and disappeared into a dark shaft above.

Crane was certain that it led all the way up to the bookshelf in Siegel's suite.

It genuinely wasn't a hallucination, he thought. I really did talk with the ghost of Bugsy Siegel yesterday.

At last he tore his gaze away from the ladder and looked around the room. "This here is all too new," he called quietly to Mavranos, who was still standing by the door. "But I swear we're on the right track."

Mavranos squinted at the plywood and concrete and throbbing machinery and sniffed the disinfectant-scented air. "If you say so. Let's get out of here, okay?"

Crane climbed out from behind all the machinery and pushed the door open and peeked around it, but there was no one in sight. He stepped out, followed by Mavranos, and they walked further down the corridor.

The hall was more blockily shadowed now and had narrowed almost to a tunnel, with pipes running along the walls as well as overhead, and the green linoleum floor was cracked and water-stained, but at the same time Crane sensed that these walls and ceiling were older and more solidly built. As if to confirm it, he noticed that the big dark green cans stacked on an ankle-high shelf along the western wall were labeled as Civil Defense-certified-safe drinking water. Apparently this older section was stout enough to have been designated an official bomb shelter.

He remembered the marble walls behind the wallpaper overhead.

"Siegel had this tunnel built," he said softly as he shuffled along, bracing himself against the pipes and watching by the broken light of occasional caged bulbs to avoid clanking his head against any of the down-hanging valves. "I believe we're in the onetime King's emergency escape route."

Bolt-hole and hidey-hole, he thought.

And then it was Mavranos who saw it.

A red jackknife handle stood out of the wall ahead of them, and Mavranos pointed at it. "I guess this is where he practiced knife throwing," he said.

The knife handle protruded from a foot-wide circular patch of newer cement, and Crane shivered when he saw the scratched figures in the old bricks around it: suns and crescent moons and stick figures carrying swords.

Mavranos had idly taken hold of the knife's handle and was pulling at it, but it didn't budge. He swore and tugged harder, even bracing his leg against the wall, and finally had to let go and wipe his hand on his jeans.

"That's in there solid," he said breathlessly.

Feeling as if he were taking part in an old, old ritual, Crane stepped forward and closed his right hand around the now-sweaty plastic handle. It seemed to be a Swiss army knife.

He tugged, and the jackknife came out of the cement patch so easily that he rang a water can against the far wall with the butt of the knife.

"I loosened it," said Mavranos.

Crane kept his right eye firmly closed. He didn't want to see the jackknife as some kind of medieval sword.

He was already hearing things.

With his good eye he looked up and down the hall, but there was no one in sight besides himself and Mavranos, so he ignored the sound of the Andrews Sisters singing "Rum and Coca-Cola," and the rattle of chips and laughter, that seemed to echo from just around some unimaginable corner.