Tim Powers - Last Call (68 page)

Not wanting to consistently sit next to Leon, Crane had this time stacked the deck with the requirement that he sit two places to his father's right, and he had succeeded in getting that seat. The man between Crane and his father held the pair of Tens, and he rapped the table to check. Leon bet two hundred, and everybody called it, and then the man with the Tens raised it another two hundred. All the other players called the sandbag raise.

Crane's hand was up for bid now, and he managed to sell it for the seven hundred he had in the pot. The man with the Tens refused a $700-bid for his own hand and then bought Leon's hand in turn for $750.

"All
right
," the man said as he gathered Leon's cards face up into his own board, now showing a Tens Up Two Pair, "I wanted that, thank you, Mr. Hanari. I figured I could buy it; I notice you always sell your hand, never wait and buy one."

Crane saw the Art Hanari face frown slightly under the bandage, and he realized that his father wasn't pleased to have his Assumption strategy noticed. Leon made the Hanari lips smile. "I'll have to start mixing up my play," he said.

Not quite yet, thought Crane, please.

The betting went around again, and at the showdown the man who had bought Leon's hand had a Full Boat, Tens Over, which lost to an Aces Over Boat.

The deal was now Crane's.

He gathered in the cards, and then, as he tossed into the center of the table the hundred-dollar bill that was his ante, he hit the edge of his glass of soda water and sent it rolling across the table, spilling the water out in a series of pulses like a sine wave.

It was a fine distraction, and Crane had the cards dumped into his open purse, and the stacked deck flipped up onto the table, while everybody was still in the first syllable of a surprised curse.

"Sorry, sorry," Crane muttered, reaching out to dab ineffectively at the stain with a paper napkin.

"Stevie!" called the Hanari body to the Amino Acid bartender, "a towel here, quick!" Crane's father gave him a wrathful glance out of his unswollen eye. "The Flying Nun doesn't seem to appreciate the fact that these are hand-painted cards and must not get wet!"

"I said I was sorry," said Crane.

The green felt in front of him was dry, and he began smoothly riffling the cards and doing the pull-through shuffle. The deck that was in his purse now was the one with the Jack of Cups card that had split his eye forty-two years earlier, and he wished for luck's sake that were the deck he would deal from tonight.

After seven riffles and false shuffles he passed the deck to Newt for the cut, and easily negated it when he recombined the cards under his fast-outswept hand. Everyone's attention was still on the mopping-up of the spilled water.

When the green felt had been blotted with a towel and then been painstakingly blown dry with a hair-dryer that one of the Amino Acids had had to fetch from the bathroom, and the game was finally allowed to proceed, Crane spun out the first three cards to each player, two down and one up.

The first round of betting added fifty-two hundred dollars to the pot, and then Crane dealt out the second up cards.

This time his father held the Ten and Eight of Swords down and the Knight of Clubs and the Six of Cups showing. Crane's cards were the remainder of the hand Doctor Leaky had bought in the parking lot game the day before, the Nine and King of Swords down and the Seven of Swords and the Eight of Cups showing. Crane could plausibly buy the "Art Hanari" hand now, seeming to be trying for the Six-Seven-Eight three-Straight.

"And," said Crane after the last bet had been called, "Mr. Hanari's hand is up for the mating. What is he bid?"

One man bid $500, and a woman raised it to $550, but Hanari just kept shaking his head.

"I'll go six hundred," said Crane. And, he thought, if the rest of you bastards will just have the simple card sense to buy the hands I've laid out for you, I'll win this with the King-high Swords Flush.

"Uh," said Leon through the lips of the Hanari body, "no."

"Six-fifty," said Crane, concealing his impatience. He could feel sweat starting out under the makeup on his forehead; it would begin to look odd if he had to bid too much more for an apparent middle-size three-Straight.

"No," said Leon, "I think I'll buy one this time."

He's chosen this hand to
vary his play
, thought Crane, because of what that son of a bitch said in the last hand.

"Seven hundred," said Crane, trying to conceal his desperation.

"No," said Leon, swallowing the word so that it sounded almost like the French
non
. "The bidding is closed on these cards."

Crane's heart was pounding, and he kept his chin lowered so that the pulse in his throat wouldn't be visible. "Okay," he said. "Then the next hand is up for auction." He allowed himself a slow sigh. "What is the bid?"

Crane had again lost the chance to buy Doctor Leaky's hand and then let Leon buy it from him at the Assumption.

Leon eventually bought the hand of a young man who had been playing very loose. Crane had to admire the tactic; if the conceived hand should happen to win, this was the one player aside from Leon himself who might choose to match the pot for the Assumption option.

But Leon's Two Pair lost to a Flush, and the cards were gathered and stacked and passed to the man on Crane's left to shuffle and deal out another hand.

Again Crane was left with nothing to do but play for mere money until dawn.

To his intense annoyance, his Flying Nun nickname was picked up by everyone else at the table. At one point the announcement of "A pair of Queens to the Flying Nun!" drew such laughter that the betting was delayed for a full minute.

When the sky had lightened, and everybody had stood up and put on his or her coat and the engines were gunning in reverse as the boat surged in toward the docks of the marina, Leon rang an empty glass with one long, manicured fingernail.

"Attention, gamesters," he said. He was smiling under the bandage, but there was a harshness in his voice that silenced all the idle, tired chat. "Tomorrow is Good Friday, and out of respect this game will end at three in the afternoon. Therefore, to get in at least a little bit of decent play, this boat will … set sail at noon. That's only about six hours from now, so you might want to get rooms at the Lakeview Lodge here, and arrange for wake-up calls."

Fatigue coursed through Crane's arteries like a powerful drug, but it struck him as odd that the game should
end
at three. When businesses had acknowledged Good Friday, he recalled, they were
closed
from noon until three.

If this was a gesture of respect, it was a strangely
inverted
one.

Dancing on the edge of the cliff.

Shuffling dizzily through the still-cool air along the Fremont Street sidewalk, Dondi Snayheever was momentarily eclipsed in the shadow of the towering steel and neon tubing cowboy over the Pioneer Casino. He paused to squint up at the slowly waving figure, and he wondered what personage it might be nearly the shape of.

His maimed hand jerked him forward, and he resumed pushing himself forward through the resistance of the morning air.

Shapes waiting, he thought, like the implicit whirlpool in a bathtub just waiting to come into existence when someone would pull the plug. As if when a cloud formation came to look very damn like some certain enormous bird that was waiting in potential, it would actually
become
that bird.

Birds. Eye of the crow was right last week, but Isis's temple was blown up now. Another bird now, according to the dreams, a pink one.

In a dream Snayheever had seen the fat man blow up the temple. The fat man had achieved a shape, too—had become the giant that had got stunted and round and lost his green color, had become the warty black ball in the math field, containing all the points that would never become infinite.

The fat man wasn't that anymore. He was dead, his boundary broken, and the points would soon be scattered across the desert, free to become infinite or not, as they pleased. Snayheever wondered how long he himself would continue to be the thing he had come authoritatively to resemble.

Dancing on the cliff edge, the dog snapping at his heels.

He could sense his missing finger; it was far away to the south, up high, ringing with the vibrations of tremendous hydroelectric power.

He had no choice but to go there; the personage whom he had become was going to be there, and of course would need its shape.

But first there was someone to say good-bye to, and someone to forgive.

When Crane unlocked the hotel room door and pushed it open, he smelled hot coffee. Diana and Dinh were standing by the window with cups in their hands, and they looked over at him anxiously.

"No," said Crane. He took off his wig and watched, to his own mild surprise, as his arm drew back and flung the cap of auburn hair against the mirror. "No, he didn't buy it. I've got to be back there before noon, and I've got to stack the deck again in the meantime. I won't have time to get any sleep."

Diana hurried over to him and touched his arm. He forced himself not to pull away. "Would you like some coffee?" she asked.

" 'Wood eye, wood eye?' " said Crane absently, quoting the next-to-last line of an old joke Susan had liked.

Diana gave him her cup, which was nearly full and still steaming. "Here," she said. "I'll make me another one."

Crane put it down on the bedside table. "I don't want any." The smell of coffee hung in the air like smoke, and he couldn't get out of his mind the image of a coffee cup on a stove set on low.

And paramedics, and an ambulance, and after that a bottle to keep him from remembering his dreams.

"That was a line from a joke," he said irritably. " 'Wood eye, wood eye.' " Diana stared at him blankly, apparently never having heard the joke herself. How could she not ever have heard it? " 'Hunchback, hunchback' is the last line," he snapped. "I've also heard it as 'Harelip, harelip.' "

Mavranos had walked in from the next room, and Crane saw him exchange a look with Dinh. That's right, Arky, he thought, I'm going crazy—talking about hunchbacks and harelips. Damn my soul, I would move heaven and earth for a—

The telephone rang on the bedside table, and everyone except Crane jumped. Dinh started toward it, but Crane was closer and snatched it up.

"Hello?" he said.

"
'Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,'
" crooned the voice on the telephone, "
'Save Me, save only Me?'
"

Crane recognized the lines. They were from Susan's favorite poem, Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven."

And of course he recognized the voice.

It's my wife, he thought.

I shouldn't talk to her.

Why not?

Because it's
not
my wife, he told himself. Remember? It's drink, or Death, or something that's both of those things. So I can't even talk to her. But what if it's her, a bit of the real Susan,
too
! Maybe it really is her ghost, and the bad stuff has been laminated onto her.

And even if it's
not
her at all, what if drink can do a convincing imitation of her? I'm probably going to die tomorrow, after I've failed to do this stupid card trick for the third time, after my father kicks me out of my body. Can't I at least
talk
to this thing for a couple of minutes, over the
phone
? What's the harm of just listening to what it has to say? And it might have some information we need. And it sounds so much like Susan, and I'm so tired, that I know I can make myself believe that it
is
Susan. If everyone would just leave me alone.

Finally he spoke. "Just a sec," he said into the phone, then put his palm over the mouthpiece. "This is private," he told the other three, "do you mind?"

"Jesus, Scott," said Mavranos, "that's not—"

"
Do
you mind?" Crane repeated.

"
I
mind," said Diana, her voice breaking. "Scott, for God's sake—"

"Well, if I can't even—all I'm—" He shook his head as if to clear it. "Damn it, go mind in the other room, would you?"

For several seconds Mavranos and Diana and Dinh stared at him; then Mavranos jerked his head toward the connecting doorway, and the three of them silently filed through it and closed the door.

"We're alone," Crane said into the mouthpiece.

"
What do they say
," Susan's voice asked, "
in a bar, at ten to two, when it's your last chance to get a drink
?"

"They say 'last call.' " Crane was trying to be calm, but his voice was shaky.

"
This is last call
," said Susan. "
This is the last time I'll call you. After you hang up, I'm either gone forever or with you forever
."

"You're—um, you're a ghost," said Crane. He wished he could think clearly. His false eye stung—he hadn't washed it or irrigated the cavity since Wednesday; he knew he was just asking for meningitis—and his leg ached and he could feel blood leaking out of the bandage below his right ribs. A wave of exhaustion made him close his eyes.

"So would you be, a ghost, if you'd come with me. Forever, whole again. Go to the card game, why not? Pretend you turned me down—go ahead and stack the deck again, if you want, but leave it in your purse. Who cares what hands go where? And have a drink …"

" 'And when you're mine,' " he said, quoting another poem Susan had liked, " 'I'll kiss you in my glass, fair goddess Wine.' "

"
I'll kiss you back. 'It's even better when you help.'
" Now she was quoting Lauren Bacall from
To Have and Have Not.
" 
'Oh, whistle and I'll come to you, my lad.'
" That was from a ghost story. Well, this was a ghost story.

"I know how to whistle," he said dreamily. "Just put your lips to the bottle and suck." It warmed him to know that all this was making sense to her, as it would not to anyone outside the once-cozy bounds of their marriage. This
had
to be Susan's genuine ghost.