Tim Powers - Last Call (67 page)

"Nardie," she called. "Come out."

"I'll die."

Diana smiled tiredly. "Not right away."

"I'm not," sobbed Nardie from among the shadows, "in any way …
dressed
for this!"

"Nobody is. She'll overlook it. Come out—if you're not too afraid. I'll understand, if you are."

Nardie stepped hesitantly out onto the moonlit grass and then with visible effort walked up to stand beside Diana.

"I
am
too afraid," she said, looking down. "But I'm more afraid of what I'll be if I don't do this." She took a deep breath. "Okay?"

"Look up," said Diana.

Nardie obeyed, and in the moment before she, too, raised her eyes to the inhuman gaze overhead, Diana saw her friend's face glow with reflected light.

Be a true friend to my daughter, Bernardette Dinh.

"Yes," whispered Nardie. "I will."

An idea was conveyed then, something like
bathe
or
cleanse
or
be baptized
, and in Diana's head appeared a clear picture of a vast lake behind an enormous man-made dam.

The face leaned down closer and breathed on them, and the warm wind of it swept them off the ground. The dark island was gone, and they spun through vast golden halls whose pillars resonated to a triumphant chorus of deep, inhuman chords, as if the sea and all the mountains of the world had found voices to raise in a song that was older than mankind.

And the two of them were noticed, and remotely greeted.

Then they were ascending through darkness, and Diana's only anchor was Nardie's hand clasped tightly in her own. Lights began to wink at some indeterminate distance, and a choppy murmur grew in volume.

A whiff of cigarette smoke tickled Diana's nostrils—and a moment later the racket of chattering human voices and clicking chips crashed in on her ears, and she could see again.

She and Nardie were sitting on stools at another of the dim bars in Caesars Palace, and they released their hands and blinked dazedly at each other.

"How are you girls doing?" asked the bartender.

Diana picked up the glass in front of her and sniffed the inch of clear liquid in it; she could detect no smell at all. She cleared her throat. "Uh—what are we drinking?"

The bartender didn't quite roll his eyes. "Quinine water."

"Yeah, give us another round."

Diana's heart was still pounding, and she had no peripheral vision; to meet Nardie's gaze again, she had to look directly at her. The ashes in a nearby ashtray weren't shifting at all, but Diana thought she could still feel the hot wind of her mother's breath in her hair.

Nardie was clutching the edge of the bar. "Are we," she whispered, "going to
stay
here, do you think?"

"Yeah," said Diana, "I think we're in a landing pattern."

Somehow a live turtle, its shell as big as a dinner plate, was walking along the top of the bar toward them, pushing glasses out of its way with stumpy, leathery feet.

In its beak-like mouth was a Poker chip. Perhaps because of the artificial light, the turtle's shell and skin appeared to be gilded. Nobody else seemed to see the creature.

Diana forced herself not to close her eyes. "Um—turtle," she said levelly. "Coming up behind you."

Nardie pursed her lips and nodded, then sighed and turned to look.

The turtle was beside her drink now. It lowered its head and opened its jaws, and the chip clicked to the polished surface of the bar. Nardie slowly reached out and picked up the chip, and the turtle bowed again and—was gone.

Both women jumped at the abrupt, noiseless disappearance, and the bartender, stepping up with their drinks, spilled a splash of quinine water out of one of the glasses. "What?" he demanded irritably, looking around.

"Nothing," said Nardie. "Sorry."

When he turned away, shaking his head, she held the chip out toward Diana on her open palm.

The center of the clay disk was a grinning harlequin face, like that of the Joker in a deck of cards. Around the rim were imprinted the words "MOULIN ROUGE, LAS VEGAS."

"I thought that was in Paris," said Nardie.

"It was the name of a place here, too," said Diana. She picked up her drink. "I think it burned down in the 60s. It was the first casino to let blacks in. See the harlequin pattern, checkerboard black and white diamonds?"

"
'Ebony and i-vory,'
" sang Nardie in a frail voice. "I get it." The rim of her glass chattered against her teeth. "Guess who the turtle was."

"Touche Turtle. I give up, who was he?"

"Well, I don't know. But I grew up in Hanoi, okay? And there's a lake in town there, where the post office is, called the Lake of the Restored Sword. In the fifteenth century a guy called Le Loi is supposed to have been out on it in a boat, and a golden turtle swam up and took back from him a sword that he'd been given to drive out Chinese invaders. Hey, excuse me," she said more loudly.

The bartender strode up to them again. "Can I help you, miss?"

"Can I get a hamburger here? Fried, rare?"

"Sure, if you like. Everything on that?"

"Doesn't matter. And a—a Budweiser, please." She turned back to Diana. "I can feel the air conditioning now, and see things to the side of me."

Diana darted her eyes around and shivered. "Me too. I guess we're all the way back." She could smell the quinine water in her glass.

"But when we were still circling in, the turtle gave me this." She rolled the chip end over end across the backs of her fingers and then tucked it into her shirt pocket. "I guess I'd better hang on to it."

"You might have to call a bet," Diana agreed.

Within a couple of minutes Diana was comfortable in the gin-scented coolness, but Nardie was still shaking. Diana asked her if anything in particular was wrong and if she wanted to leave, but each time Nardie just shook her head.

At last the bartender set the steaming hamburger and the frosty beer in front of Nardie, and she picked up the hamburger and took a bite of it. Diana looked away from the red-stained bun around the rare ground beef.

"There," said Dinh a few moments later, after taking a deep sip of the beer and clanking the glass back down on the bar. She was smiling, but tears shone in her eyes.

Diana stared at her. "There?" she said, mystified.

"You … raised me up, to your mother, to the goddess. You asked her to bless me, too, and she told us
both
to get cleansed in the lake. You're not the first person to make me more than I was, okay? But you're the first person to do it without standing to benefit from it—in fact, risking your own safety. I think I could have displaced you, after receiving that blessing."

"Okay," said Diana cautiously.

"But … damn, don't you see?" The tears overflowed her eyelids and ran down Nardie's cheeks. "I just now ate red meat, probably cooked on an iron grill, and I drank alcohol! I've unfitted myself for the queenhood! I've totally pledged my allegiance to you now; I'm of no use to my half brother anymore."

Then Diana did understand, and she leaned forward and hugged her friend, ignoring someone behind her who whispered, "Jeez, check out the dykes!"

"Thank you, Nardie," Diana said quietly. "And I swear, by our mother, that I won't leave you behind. I'll take you with me."

Nardie patted Diana's shoulder and then they both sat back, a little self-consciously. Nardie took another sip of her beer and sniffed. "Well, you'd better," she said. "Right now I'm an orphan, in a tiny boat, on a goddamn big ocean."

After they had walked back to the Flamingo and Diana had shaken Crane awake, he wearily got dressed and made coffee.

Then, in the afternoon sunlight that slanted in through the unopenable hotel window, he sat down on the carpet and began laying out face up the cards of his father's Lombardy Zeroth deck. Leon had taken out the twenty-two Major Arcana cards yesterday, and Crane tentatively began moving the remaining fifty-six cards around into four-card combinations.

It was like slowly turning a kaleidoscope in which living faces fell into new patterns and alignments in the barrel instead of colored glass chips, and he passively let the razory identities resonate through his mind.

Again he tried to arrange the cards so that he could plausibly buy his father's hand and so that, after all the purchases and sales of hands, his King-high Flush would win at the eventual showdown. Twice he sat back and sipped his lukewarm coffee, confident that he had a lock on the hand, only to notice a rogue buy that would give one of the other players a Full Boat or Four of a Kind, and he had to break it all up and start again.

In his mind, crystalline lattices of alien hatreds and fears and joys grew and were broken, over and over again, like ocean waves rising and then falling and shattering into spray.

At last he was satisfied with the layout, and he carefully picked up the cards in the order in which they would be dealt.

"Front!" he called as he tucked the stacked deck into his purse.

It was Nardie Dinh who appeared in the connecting doorway. "What am I," she asked, "a bellboy?"

"It was a joke," he said, standing up and running his fingers through his hair. "Sorry. Listen, could you do my makeup? Getting the dress on I think I can do by myself now."

"Sure, come in the bathroom," said Nardie, leading the way; then she stopped and turned around, smiling. "Hey, Scott, congratulations on your upcoming wedding! Diana told me about it."

"Thanks." His good eye was burning with fatigue already. "I hope we all live to be there. But right now I've got to get ready for … my bachelor party." He waved her on ahead. "I suppose most guys don't have their fathers along at their bachelor parties."

"Well," said Dinh judiciously, "most guys don't go in drag."

An hour later Crane stood in his high-heeled shoes in front of the million-dollar display in Binion's Horseshoe Casino. Behind bullet-proof glass, a hundred ten-thousand-dollar bills were ranked together in five columns of twenty, framed inside the doorway-size arch of an enormous brass horseshoe. A pair of stout security guards were staring at Crane in sour disapproval.

"Must be rough," said someone by Crane's elbow. He looked down and saw old Newt, looking withered and old and jug-eared in a wide-lapel plaid suit.

Here the two of us are again, Crane thought, twenty-one years older and both looking pretty bad.

"Hi," he said to Newt. "Can I get a ride out with you?"

"Looks like," said the old man. "My other three haven't shown—down with the nightmarey shakes, I bet. That happens. Let's give 'em a few minutes for courtesy." He looked at Crane's purse. "No gun today, I hope. Throw it in the lake this time, and maybe you, too."

"No, not today. It looks like a peaceful bunch of players anyway." He looked down from the height of his heels into Newt's empty, bird-bright eyes. "What was it that you said 'must be rough'?"

"Shaving, with all that fruitcake makeup—sorry, pancake makeup. Jams up a blade, I bet, or the holes in an electric shaver."

"Well, I suppose it would, but I shave before I put the stuff on." Crane was tired, and forlornly wished for a beer, the way beer used to be for him, and a cigarette, the way they used to taste. And he was thinking of the ghost of Ben Siegel, who had gone to some trouble to let him know that a fly might be tricked into eating a poisoned sugar cube if the poison face was concealed and the fly saw only the harmless face. "It's a hassle," he said absently, "but I do it for the Lord."

The little old man's bushy white eyebrows were halfway up to where his hairline must once have been. "For the Lord, hey?"

"Sure." Crane blinked and made himself remember what he had been saying. "You don't think I
choose
to dress this way, do you? I'm a member of a religious order, is what this actually is all about. Lots of religious orders have to dress weird."

"Huh. They ain't gonna show, I guess. My other players, not your religious orders. Let's blow." Instantly he held up one wrinkled hand. "By which I don't mean—"

"Jeez," said Crane, following the little man through the casino dimness toward the bright patch that was the open door onto Fremont Street, "you're safe from me, Newt, honest."

"And no funny business in the car."

Everybody's cautioning me against funny business, Crane thought. "You have my word of honor."

They were in the noise of the slot machines, and Newt mumbled something that sounded like
Like applying none.

Crane frowned. Applying none of what? Honor? Could this strange little man possibly have some intuition about Crane's plan to dethrone his own father? And he leaned down as they zigzagged their way through the crowd. "What did you say?"

"I said, 'Like the Flying Nun.' Religious order where you gotta dress weird. She could fly, remember?"

Crane was oddly relieved; apparently they weren't talking about honor after all. They were outside now, on the baking, sunlit sidewalk, and he had to shout, "Yeah, I remember!" to be heard over the droning of the picketer with the megaphone.

"I guess that made up for it," yelled Newt, "for having to wear that stuff all the time. At least she could fly."

"I guess."

Crane followed the little man across Fremont and down First Street toward the pay parking lot at the end of the block. This was where he had been shot at eight days ago and saved by a couple of shots from the gun of the fat man—whom he himself had killed four days later. He scuffed the toe of his ridiculous left shoe across the chipped curb, and rasped the painted nails of his right hand over the pockmark in the brick wall.

Crane would have the deal next.

The sky was dark behind the open ports, and the still-warm wind, smelling of distant cooling stone and sage, had raised the lake surface into choppy waves; the levels of the drinks on the green felt table were all rolling and uneven. The cigarette smoke was a mushroom cloud over the pot's scattered bills.

Newt sat to Crane's right and was flipping out the last of the second face-up cards. "… and a Duck to the Seven," Newt was chanting, "no apparent help, Seven gets a Seven, Sevens are cheap, the Flying Nun gets an Ace and a possible Flush draw, another Ten to the Ten of Sticks, pair looks good, and the Nine gets … an Eight toward a Straight." He sat back. "Tens are the power."