Tim Powers - Last Call (12 page)

"Arky, what's this got to do with fat men?"

"Well, if you apply a certain equation to as many of the points on the plane as you can, apply it over and over again—you gotta have a powerful computer—some of them go flying off to infinity and some stay finite. And if you color the ones that stay finite black, they form the silhouette of a warty fat man. And if you color-code the other points by how
quickly
they want to go infinite, you find that the fat man is surrounded by all kinds of shapes, boiling off of him, that look like squid tentacles and seahorse-tails and ferns and rib-cages and stuff."

Crane seemed to be about to speak, but Mavranos went on.

"And you don't always need Mandelbrot's equation. The fat man shows up in a lot of
other
functions on the complex plane, as if the shape of him is a—a role that's just waiting for something to come along and assume it. He's a constant figure, along with other lobed and geometrical shapes that look like … well, case in point tonight, like Hearts and Clubs and Diamonds and Spades, often as not."

Crane squinted at him for several seconds. "And something about … the Wizard of Oz, you said. How'd you learn about all this?"

"It's become a—a hobby of mine, studying weird math."

"And this fat man's name is … Mandelbrot?"

"No, no more than Frankenstein's monster was named Frankenstein. The equation was developed by a guy
named
Mandelbrot, Benoit Mandelbrot. A Frenchman. He belonged to a group, a club in Paris, called Bourbaki, but he split from them because he began to
understand
randomness, and it didn't sit well with them. They were real prove-it-by-the-rules boys, and he was finding new rules."

"Bourbaki," said Scott drunkenly. "Ecole Polytechnique and the Bourbaki Club."

Mavranos forced himself to breathe slowly. Mandelbrot had gone to the Ecole Polytechnique. Crane did know something about this, or about something that had to do with this.

"You seem to take it pretty lightly, somebody shooting out your windows," Mavranos said carefully.

"
'When there are gray skies,'
" Scott sang, "
'I don't mind the gray skies—you make them blue, Sonny Boy.'
"

Mavranos blinked. "Do you have a son?"

"No, but I'm somebody's son."

Mavranos sensed that this was important, so he spoke casually. "Well, yeah, I suppose so. Whose son are you?"

"My foster father said I was a bad King's son."

As indifferently as he could, Mavranos asked, "Is that why you play Poker?"

Scott took a deep breath and then put on a grin in a way Mavranos could imagine someone putting on armor. "I don't play Poker anymore. Actually I went out for a job tonight. I think I'm going to be a rep for … Yoyodyne. They manufacture … stuff, locally. Maybe you've heard of them."

"Yeah," said Mavranos, backing down, "I think I have."

"I'd better be heading for bed," Scott said, elbowing himself up out of the chair. "I've got to meet with them again tomorrow."

"Sure. Susan's been wondering where you've been."

Oddly, this seemed to shake Scott. "I bet," he said finally. "See you
mañana
."

"Okay, Pogo."

After Scott had gone inside, Mavranos sipped his Coors thoughtfully. He's it, all right, he thought. Scott Crane is definitely my connection to the place where math and statistics and randomness border on magic.

And magic is what I need, he thought, fingering the lump under his ear.

Again Scott Crane dreamed of the game on the lake.

And as always, the dream-game progressed just as the real game had happened in 1969 … until he won the cut, and was raking in the pile of money.

"You're taking the money for the hand," said Ricky Leroy softly. Already tension was filling the big room, like a subsonic tone that Scott could feel in his teeth and his belly.

"Uh … yes."

"You're selling it."

"Scott looked around. Something profound was moving or changing somewhere, but the green table and the other players and the paneled walls looked the same. "I guess you could put it that way."

"And I've bought it. I've
assumed
it." Leroy held out his right hand.

Scott released a handful of bills and reached across and shook hands. "It's all yours."

And then Scott was outside his own body, floating above the table in the whirling smoke; perhaps he had
become
the smoke. The scale of everything was changing: the table below him was an enormous green plain, and the other players were giants, expressionless, all trace of humanity left behind in the tininess of comprehensible distances. The walls were gone, Lake Mead was as vast as the night sky, and three of the dam's intake towers were gone; the remaining tower in the water soared away above and seemed to threaten the moon, which in the dream was full and bright.

There was motion out in the night. A figure was dancing on one of the remote cliffs; it seemed to be as far away as the stars, but with the clear vision of nightmare Scott could see that the person carried a long stick and that a dog was leaping around its ankles. The dancing figure was smiling up into the dark sky, apparently careless of the wavy-edged precipice at its feet.

And though Scott couldn't see him, he knew that there was another giant out there, in the lake, under the black water, and that like Scott he had only one eye.

Seized with vertigo, Scott looked down. His own body, and Leroy's, were looking up at him, their faces broad as clouds and absolutely identical.

One of the faces—he couldn't any longer tell which—opened the canyon of its mouth and inhaled, and the smoky wisp that was Scott's consciousness spiraled rapidly down toward the black chasm.

"Scott," Susan was saying. "Scott, you're just dreaming, I'm here. This is me, you're in your own bedroom."

"Oh, Sue," he gasped. He tried to hold her, but she slid away across her side of the mattress.

"Not yet, Scott," she said with a yearning tone in her voice. "Soon, but not quite now. Go have a beer, you'll feel better."

Scott climbed out of bed on his side. He noticed that he had slept in his clothes, and his Poker winnings were still a bulk in his pants pocket. Even his shoes were still on. "Coffee right now," he said. "Go back to sleep."

He blundered down the hall to the dark, stove-warmed kitchen and put a coffee cup full of tap water into the microwave oven and punched full power for two minutes. Then he went to the window and wiped out a clear patch in the condensation.

Main Street was quiet. Only a few cars and trucks murmured past under the streetlights, and the solitary figure walking across the parking lot had an air of virtuous purpose, as if he were going to the early shift at Norm's and not away from the scene of some shabby crime. Dawn was still an hour or so away, but already some birds were cheeping in the big old carob trees along the sidewalk.

Susan's not really in there, he thought dully. She's dead. I know that.

I'm forty-seven.

I never should have lived this long.

It's like sitting in the jungle, changing your bandages and eating canned C-rations or whatever soldiers eat, and watching the skies:
There should have been choppers by now.

Or like riding a bicycle with your feet wired to the pedals. You can do it, for a very long time, but eventually you start to wonder when somebody's going to come along and stop the bike and clip your feet loose so you can get off.

Am I supposed to just keep on doing this?

He thought he could hear someone breathing softly in the bed.

No good could come of thinking about it.

He thought about the six or eight beers in the refrigerator. He had laid them out on the cold rack before he went to bed, like an artilleryman laying out the shells that would be needed for tomorrow's siege.

The microwave binged softly five times, and he opened its door and took out the cup and stirred a spoonful of instant coffee into the heated water, then cooled it with a dribble of water from the tap.

Back at the window with the coffee, he abruptly remembered singing a snatch of "Sonny Boy" in front of Arky. What else had he done or said? He couldn't remember. He never worried about anything he said or did when sober, but he had not been sober last night. Or any night recently.

He walked to the back door and looked through the window at Mavranos's apartment across the alley. The lights were all out. Arky would probably sleep past noon, as always. God knew how the man made a living.

Scott's .357 revolver was lying on the shelf that held all the cookbooks. He remembered laying it there a couple of hours ago when he had had to bend over to pick up the half-full carton of beers.

Rebar. Arky had noticed the shot-out windshield. And Scott remembered that Ozzie had always registered his car with a P.O. box address, in case someone took down his license plate number.

Scott had stopped bothering with that in '80, when he quit Poker and married Susan. His current registration listed this address.

He put the coffee down.

Suddenly he was certain that the gunman had written down his license plate number and had found the address and was now waiting outside in the Porsche, or in another car, watching this house. Perhaps he had planted a bomb under the foundations. That would be the easiest way.

The death panic of his dream was all at once back on him, and he grabbed the gun, thankful that he had not turned on the kitchen light. He took a few deep breaths—and then slowly, silently, with trembling fingers unhooked the chain and carefully forced the warped old door open.

The night air was cold on his sweaty face and scalp. He quickly scanned the dark yard over the extended barrel of the gun, then with his free hand pressed the door closed behind him and stole down the steps. For several seconds he just stood and breathed through his open mouth, listening; then he picked his way slowly through the unmowed grass toward the loose boards in the fence. Beyond that lay the alley, the secret city capillary that led to a hundred dark and solitary streets.

One of the jacks found him first and killed him,
thought Vaughan Trumbill when the Jaguar's headlights swept across the parking lot on Second Street and made a glittering snowfield of the Torino's holed rear window.
Her Easter wardrobe is gonna be slim if this keeps up.

He drove on past, turning his big head rapidly from side to side to see if the killer or killers might still be nearby, but all the parked cars he could see were empty and dark.

Could be anywhere, he thought, on a dark porch, on a roof, but they probably wouldn't hang around.

He drove quickly around the block and then pulled in to the parking lot and stopped next to the Torino.

For several moments he just sat in the idling car. The small trout in the tank on the seat next to him—the
poisson sympathique
—was just bumping around randomly. That might mean that Trumbill's quarry was dead, or that the damned fish was just dizzy from motion.

Trumbill got ponderously out of the car and walked to the driver's side of the Torino—and he allowed himself a sigh of relief when he saw that there was no body in the car, nor even any evidence of blood on the upholstery or the billion-faceted windshield.

They only tried,
he thought as he got back into his own car and backed out of the parking lot. He noted the license plate number of the Torino when his headlights were on the car, and after he had parked on the street, he used his car phone to call for the data on the registration. His source promised to call him back in a few minutes.

Then he called for back-up—a clean van and a couple of guys to help. Finally Trumbill sat back in the leather seat and opened a Ziploc plastic bag full of celery and carrot sticks.

It had been a long drive from Lake Mead. The damned trout had first led him to Las Vegas, and then for half an hour had sent him circling counterclockwise around the Flamingo Hilton—Flamingo Road to Paradise to Sands to the Strip to Flamingo again—but had finally settled down and faced southwest. It had stayed pointed that way while Trumbill drove across the midnight desert on the straight dark line that was I-15 to Baker, and then down to Barstow into, eventually, the maze of Orange County. At that point freeways proved to be too fast for the fish to be reliable, and Trumbill had had to exit and negotiate surface streets, slowly enough so that the trout would have time to shift around in its tank on the seat.

During the drive Trumbill had finished the hastily thrown-together bag of tropical fish and seaweed, and now the carrots and celery were gone. He eyed the leaves of the ginger plant in the lawn beyond the curb. Not yet, he told himself.

He glanced around at the neighborhood. There was a 1930s-vintage duplex across the street—Spanish style, white stucco and clay tile roofs—and a similar house at the Main Street corner and a couple of featureless new five-story condominiums behind him. The Torino's owner probably lived in one of the little duplex houses, which he or she probably rented.
I need a snack now,
he thought.

Trumbill opened the door and walked across the sidewalk to the planter, and as he peeled off a few leaves, he wondered which of the last game's winners this would turn out to be—and why he or she had refrained from playing cards again until this evening.

He got back into the car and closed the door.

There was no mystery about why the person was playing cards now, of course. Several of Betsy's fish had started to play again last year, and Trumbill had managed to find and fetch two of them, and they were now safely sedated in a remote house outside Oatman, down the river near Lake Havasu, where London Bridge had been moved to. The start of the third big series of Assumption games was only a little more than a week away. This person tonight would be very eroded by now, obsessed by memories of the '69 game, drunk and personifying the vice, and all in all getting very
ripe
, as Betsy Reculver would say. The tendency to move east, away from the abhorrent ocean, would soon be an overwhelming compulsion. Well, Trumbill would try to assist in that.