Last Call

by Tim Powers

  Shapes seemed to rush through the sky on the rising wind, fluttering and sighing, but Diana sensed no threat in whatever the things might be; and the waves were high, as if giants under the water were shifting uneasily in sleep, but she thought that any such giants would not harm her.

  She spat on the sand. “I’m bleeding.” The inside of her mouth was cut, but the half disk had apparently broken up before reaching her throat. She spat again. “Kind of a lot.”

  Nardie straightened up lithely and laughed, coughing in the midst of it. “Me too. But I guess we won’t die of it after all.”

  Diana took a step toward the water, hitching and wincing and wondering how many of her ribs might be cracked. “Let’s get in the water.”

  CHAPTER 50

  Raising Blind

  Crane allowed himself to hang on to the edge of the table for a moment. The sky was brightening again outside the ports, and the yellow light cast by the lamps on the paneled walls began to look sickly.

  “Dizzy,” he said as Newt finished counting the bills in the middle of the table.

  The Amino Acid bartender had pulled the ports closed again shortly after the huge voice had begun to roll its syllables across the lake from the direction of the Black Mountains and the dam, and the air in the cabin was stifling with the smell of Doctor Leaky and cigarette smoke. Crane thought his dizziness now might be as much from nausea as from the illusion of spinning…spinning diesel, as Ozzie would have said.

  “Seventy-nine hundred,” croaked Newt finally.

  Leon separated out of his billfold a thick bundle of thousands and hundreds, and his good eye burned into Crane’s good eye as he tossed the bills onto the stack Newt had counted.

  The socket of Crane’s false eye throbbed, and he wasn’t quite able to close the eyelid. Good joke, he thought, if I succeed here but die later of meningitis. Gingerly he touched the corner of his eye. It hurt, and his fingertip was smudged with mascara.

  “Cut for high card,” said Leon.

  Crane looked across the room at Doctor Leaky. Once again alertness seemed to glitter in the old man’s gaze, and Crane looked away in case his father’s body might guess something, say something that would warn Leon.

  But the senile old body couldn’t have been alert and guessed Crane’s purpose, for it didn’t say anything at all.

  Crane flexed his right hand, noticing for the first time that he had chewed the painted nails down to the quicks, and he lowered his fingers over the deck and lifted half of it off.

  He showed the card to the other players, then looked at it himself.

  The Page of Cups. His card, Ozzie had said; soon to be replaced by the King? He quickly lowered the cards back down onto the deck, fearing that Leon might notice the card’s faintly stained corner.

  Leon was smiling, and panting. “A tough one to beat!” he said.

  Newt leaned forward, slid the deck to himself, and shuffled it again, then pushed it to a spot in front of the shivering Hanari body.

  With a trembling hand Georges Leon lifted off the top half of the deck, and he hesitated even as he raised the cards.

  Crane’s heart seemed to have stopped. He missed the crimped card, Crane thought. He’s going to come up with an Ace—

  But the card Leon showed was the Ten of Swords. Crane’s heart was beating again, and he laughed weakly and rapped the table with a fist. “Yes!” he said, letting his hot burst of triumph show, for everyone would assume he was just pleased at having won the doubled pot. “Gotcha!”

  “Aw, bad beat,” said one of the other players to Leon.

  Leon grimaced and shrugged. “You win,” he told Crane. “I don’t know when I’m going to learn that that’s not a smart bet.”

  “Thanks,” said Crane hoarsely.

  “You’re taking the money,” said Leon.

  Crane thought of Ozzie, and stared coldly into the unswollen eye. “Looks like it.”

  “You’re selling the hand. I’ve bought it, I’m assuming it.”

  “It’s all yours, believe me.”

  Crane tamped the stacks of bills and slid them in between his spread elbows, leaving one hundred out on the table as his ante for the next hand.

  He had done it.

  He had sold Leon the hand that Doctor Leaky had conceived in the informal Assumption game by the Dumpster behind the liquor store on Wednesday.

  Crane had no idea what might happen now. This scheme might not work, and he might lose his body tomorrow, but he had done all he could.

  “That’s two hundred to you.”

  Crane looked up from his gnawed fingernails. Leon had been speaking to him.

  “Oh,” said Crane. “Sorry.” He lifted four hundreds from one of his stacks and tossed them into the pot. “I make it four,” he said.

  “You haven’t looked at your down cards!” said Newt petulantly. “You’re raising blind?”

  “Raising blind,” Crane agreed.

  Station wagons with luggage belted onto the rooftop racks jammed the marina streets on this Friday afternoon, and tanned young men and women in scanty swimsuits thronged the sidewalks and drank beer from dewy cans or drove puttering scooters between the slow, smoky lanes of traffic.

  Easter break, thought Crane as he walked slowly up the street, carrying his high-heeled shoes under his arm and feeling the hot pavement abrade the soles of his nylons. We could all do with an Easter break.

  “Ahoy, Pogo!” came a shout from among the horns-and-laughter-and-chatter background noise.

  Crane smiled tiredly as he looked back and shaded his eyes.

  Arky Mavranos was striding toward him at his old gangly pace, and though he was pale, he seemed solemnly happy, too.

  “You look like a real piece of the old shit today,” said Mavranos quietly when he reached Crane. They began walking on toward the Lakeview Lodge, Mavranos ostentatiously walking a yard or two to the side of Crane and letting an occasional pedestrian pass between them.

  “You did it,” said Mavranos.

  “Sold it to him,” Crane agreed, “bought and paid for.”

  “Good.”

  “How did it go with you?” asked Crane, in a moment when they were alone in a sunny crosswalk.

  “They’re both dead,” Mavranos said softly. “Snayheever and Pogue. Pogue didn’t get to screw things up. I’ll…tell you about it, tell all three of you…sometime later.” He coughed and spat. “Maybe not today, all right?”

  Crane could see that whatever had happened had cost Mavranos. “Okay, Arky.” He reached out and squeezed Mavranos’s elbow.

  Mavranos stepped away from him. “None of your fag tricks.”

  “Seriously, Arky, thank you.”

  “Don’t…thank me.” Mavranos unknotted his bandanna and tossed it into a planter they were walking past. “Pogue’s magic was a—a randomness thing, disorder, chaos—and when he…died, the dam snapped back into order. It was a phase-change like what would have set Winfree’s mosquitoes all doing the chorale from Beethoven’s Ninth, with Busby Berkeley dance steps.”

  Crane blinked at his friend and wondered if he was too tired to be understanding what Mavranos was saying. “You mean you think…?”

  Mavranos touched the lump under his ear. “I swear it’s smaller already, perceptibly smaller, than it was on the drive down here.”

  Crane was laughing and blinking rapidly and shaking Mavranos’s hand. “That’s terrific, man! Goddamn, I can’t tell you—”

  And then they were hugging in the middle of the sidewalk, and even Mavranos ignored the hoots and catcalls.

  With their arms around each other’s shoulders they stepped up to the lobby doors of the Lakeview Lodge and shoved through and hurried breathlessly into the dark bar.

  Diana and Nardie pushed away from the table at which they’d been waiting, and though they winced and limped like people who have recently had too much exercise, they were laughing when they hobbled over and hugged Crane and Mavranos.

  They all sat down, a
nd Mavranos ordered a Coors—and then made that two, one for Nardie. Crane and Diana both ordered soda water.

  “You sold it to him,” Diana said to Crane when the cocktail waitress had walked off toward the bar.

  “Yes, finally.” Crane rubbed his hands down his face, not caring what his makeup looked like. His right eye socket stung. “And I think my arachnoid is infected.”

  “Spider,” said Mavranos, translating the word. “Spiderlike. What, something about Spider Joe?”

  “It’s a part of the brain,” said Crane through his hands. “It gets infected when you’ve got, uh, meningitis. The socket of my missing eye is just…on fire.” He lowered his hands and leaned back in the booth. “I’ve got the saline solution and rubber bulb in my purse. As soon as we trade news, I’ll go to the head and rinse out the socket.”

  Diana has seized his shoulder. “No,” she said now, urgently, “you’re going to a doctor, are you crazy? My God, meningitis? I’m going to drive out to Searchlight in a couple of minutes to finally get poor Oliver. I can drop you off at a hospital—”

  “Tomorrow,” he said, “I’ll see a doctor. I’ve got to be back here at the lake at dawn. My father will want to start assuming bodies as soon as the sun’s up, and I’ve got to see the end. And I want to disarm and ditch the two decks of cards, if I can, if the…poisoned sugar cube gets him.” He blinked at her through his good eye. “Tomorrow,” he repeated. “Not before.”

  The drinks arrived then, and Crane took a deep gulp of the cold but comfortless soda water. He inhaled. “So,” he said, “did you ladies get your bath?”

  Diana let go of Crane’s shoulder and sat back, still frowning.

  Nardie drank a third of her beer. “Eventually,” she said with a shiver.

  She described the phantom statues that had tried to stop them and how she and Diana had fought them and then finally dispelled them by actually eating the yin-yang Moulin Rouge chip.

  Mavranos brushed beer out of his mustache and smiled crookedly at Crane. “Weird sort of sacrament.”

  Nardie picked up Diana’s glass of soda water. “And then when we finally got into the lake,” she said softly, “before we got out to where we could duck under, the water was fizzing around Diana’s feet, like this!” She swirled Diana’s glass, and bubbles whirled up in it, hissing. “And for just a second, before the wind blew it out, there were—you could hardly see it in the sunlight, okay?—flames around her ankles!”

  “Sounds like electrolysis,” said Mavranos. He was looking into his beer, and Crane guessed that he had somehow been directly responsible for the death of Nardie’s half brother out there at the dam and now didn’t want to look her in the eye. “You were busting apart the H2 and the O, Diana. I remember ol’ Ozzie saying Lake Mead was tamed water; maybe you untamed it.”

  “I did,” Diana said. “With help from all of you. The bubbling kept up nearly the whole time I was in the water, and I could…feel, or hear or see, ride the whole wild extent of it. I could feel the houseboat spinning north of me, and I felt the shaking at the dam.”

  Nardie had drained her beer and waved the empty glass at the bartender. “So,” she said to Mavranos in a conversational tone, “did you kill my brother?”

  Mavranos let go of his beer glass, and Crane thought it was because he was afraid he might crush it in his fist. Mavranos’s eyes were closed, and he nodded. “I did,” he said. “I—in effect I pushed him off the downstream wall of the dam. Snayheever, too—I killed both of them.”

  Crane was looking at Nardie now, and for an instant had seen her eyes widen and her mouth sag. Then she put on a battered smile, and she tapped the back of one of Mavranos’s scarred hands.

  “Each of us has killed someone,” she said, a little huskily, “in this. Why’d you ever think you’d be special?”

  Crane realized that was true: himself, Vaughan Trumbill; Nardie, that woman in the whorehouse outside Tonopah; Diana, probably Al Funo. And now Mavranos had broken a part of himself in the same way.

  “Doctor, my eye,” Crane sang softly, pushing his chair back and standing up. “I’ve got to go irrigate the cavity.”

  Mavranos got up, too, awkwardly. “I gotta call Wendy,” he said. “Home tomorrow?”

  “You’ll probably be home by lunchtime,” said Crane.

  Nardie reached out and caught Mavranos’s flannel sleeve. “Arky,” she said, “I’d have had to do it myself, if you hadn’t. And it would have hurt me more than it’s hurting you. Thank you.”

  Mavranos nodded and patted her hand, still not looking at her. “I appreciate that, Nardie,” he said gruffly, “but don’t thank me.”

  He and Crane walked away toward the rest rooms and the telephones, and Nardie and Diana silently sipped their different drinks.

  EPILOGUE

  I’LL STILL HAVE YOU

  MOSCA: Are not you he that have to-day in court

  Profess’d the disinheriting of your son?

  Perjured yourself? Go home, and die, and stink.

  —BEN JONSON, Volpone

  But were I joined with her,

  Then might we live together as one life,

  And reigning with one will in everything

  Have power on this dark land to lighten it,

  And power on this dead world to make it live.

  —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, Idylls of the King

  Dawn would be soon, and had already paled the blue sky behind the mountains ahead of them, but out the back windows of the roaring and rattling truck the sky was still a dark purple.

  Nardie was in the front seat next to Mavranos, and Diana and young Oliver were in the back seat, and Crane, once again wearing his beat Adidas and a pair of jeans and a long-sleeve shirt, was half lying down in the truck bed among the scattered books and empty beer cans and crescent-wrench sets. His eye hurt. The truck smelled as though Mavranos used old french-fry grease in the engine.

  Oliver sat close to his mother. She had talked to him on the telephone several times since he had seen their house blow up and thought that she was in it, but it seemed he hadn’t really believed she was alive until she had hugged him in Helen Sully’s yard in Searchlight yesterday afternoon, and even now he had to keep checking.

  Mavranos made the left turn off Highway 93 onto the narrower Lake Shore Road, past the still-dark Visitor Center building.

  He lit a cigarette, and Nardie rolled down her window. The morning air was chilly and fresh. “Maybe he’ll have taken the cards and just gone off somewhere,” said Mavranos, sounding almost hopeful.

  “No,” Nardie told him. “To take the bodies, to in effect give multiple birth to himself, he needs a token mother, and the lake’s that. He’ll still be on the boat.”

  “I don’t think the lake’s just a token anymore,” Mavranos said.

  Crane shuddered, dreading confronting his father. He could feel the bulk of the Lombardy Zeroth deck in the inside pocket of his Levi’s jacket.

  Diana hiked around on the seat and looked back at him. “How’s the eye?” she asked softly.

  “Won’t be any different an hour from now, when I can be in an emergency room.” He didn’t tell her that when he had squirted the saline solution into the socket yesterday he had felt the painful bulge of some sort of tumor in there.

  He clutched his elbows to stop shaking. Diana looked twenty years old now, and almost inhumanly beautiful with the blond hair blowing around the smooth lines of her jaw and throat. It would be too horrible to win her and then have some doctor give him a death sentence. For the first time he thought he understood what Mavranos must have been feeling during these past months.

  “I can see the lake,” said Oliver softly, pointing.

  Mavranos stopped the truck in the parking lot of an all-night Denny’s restaurant by the marina, and everyone climbed out to stretch in the chilly predawn air.

  “Nardie and Diana and Oliver can wait inside the restaurant here while Scott and I go to the boat,” Mavranos said quietly as he walked ar
ound to the back of the truck and unlocked the lift-gate and swung it up; the ratchety click-click-click of the struts was loud in the empty parking lot. “If we’re not back in—what do you think?”

  Crane shrugged, still shivering. “An hour,” he said.

  “Call it an hour and a half,” said Mavranos. “If we’re not back by then, just go away. Leave a message for us at the Circus Circus desk.” He looked around the nearly empty parking lot. “And if Crane comes back alone…”

  “Call the police or something,” Crane bleakly finished for him. He touched his still-bleeding side. “My father might have assumed this body after all, and it’d be him, not me.”

  “And Oliver,” Mavranos went on sternly, “no funny phone calls, right?”

  Oliver pressed his lips together and shook his head and mumbled something.

  Mavranos leaned toward him. “What?”

  Nardie shrugged at him. “He, uh, says he isn’t going to steal any more of your beers, either.”

  “Huh. Well—okay.” Standing so as to block the view from the yellow-lit restaurant windows, Mavranos passed Crane the .357. Then he wrapped the short-barrel pistol-grip shotgun in a nylon windbreaker and laid it on the asphalt.

  He pushed the lift-gate up and let it slam shut, then turned the key in its lock and opened his mouth as if to say something—

  —But Crane had gasped involuntarily and pressed the fingers of one hand against his right cheek and forehead. The pain in the eye socket had suddenly become a bright, razoring heat, and he hastily pried out the hemisphere of intrusive plastic and let it fall to the asphalt.

  “He’s being assumed!” yelled Oliver fearfully, scrambling back away from the truck.

  Diana caught Crane by his free elbow, and over the pain in his head he realized she must think he was about to fall.

  Embolism, Crane thought in fright as the expanding, bulging pressure in the socket drove a shrill moan up against his clenched teeth. A stroke, I’m having a stroke.