by Mick Farren
“Do you mind if I sit here?”
The woman shook her head. “Of course not.”
Semple seated herself and picked up the donut. It was forty-eight hours stale. “That’s really an amazing pair of boots.”
The woman’s expression was entirely neutral. Her skin was coffee-colored and she had a small red caste mark in the exact center of her forehead. “Many people tell me that.”
At the end of the allotted ten minutes, Semple got up and, leaving a third of the aging donut and half of the cup of deadly coffee, walked out of the coffee shop and headed for the elevators. The woman in the buckle boots watched her as she made her exit and then continued to stare after her through the steamed-up glass of the window.
Semple was right, Jim noted as he closed the door behind him. It was room 807. In the time since Semple had phoned, a great deal had come back to him—most of the events on the Island of the Gods, up to the point where the light had come down and whisked them away. To his deep chagrin, however, the recent days of what Semple had described as “bourbon, depravity, and room service” were still a total and frustrating blank. Still worrying about his lessthan-complete memory, Jim started down the corridor just in time to cross paths with a large brown rat with a pink naked tail that slipped out of a door marked STAFF ONLY. The rat looked up at Jim as though he had a full and equal right to be in the corridor. “Hey, Morrison, you know Doc’s on the tenth floor and he’s not doing too well.” The rat had a thick Irish brogue.
Jim nodded. “I heard already. I’m going up there right now.”
“If you need any help, just whistle. Doc’s an old pal o’ mine.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, but how did you know my name?”
The rat shook his head. “Jayzus, you think I’m an eejit or something? Don’t I know Jim Morrison when I see him?”
After the third floor, Semple was the only passenger in the elevator, and when the doors opened on the eighth, Jim was standing waiting. Semple beckoned him in. “Come on. We might as well go straight up to ten.”
As he stepped into the elevator, she noticed a strange expression on his face. When the doors closed, Jim suddenly pulled her to him. His hands traveled over her intimately. “Most of the last week just came back to me. I guess it was the elevator that triggered it.”
The suddenness of it all took her breath away. Her arms went around him, and she kissed him, wide-mouthed and deep. Her legs felt weak with a sudden flow of desire. With his left hand he raised her skirt, stroking the backs of her thighs, whispering in her ear. “Now that I can remember, I want to experience you in the present. I want to live those Polaroids all over again.”
“Two floors hardly gives us time.”
Jim sighed ruefully. “I know that.”
“You’re just going to have to wait.”
The elevator doors opened. Semple took Jim by the hand. “Let’s go and see about Doc.”
They stepped out into the tenth-floor corridor, and were immediately confronted by two men walking toward them. One was an elderly transvestite in a bottle-green, satin cocktail dress that was a harmonic disaster with his sallow, heavy-jowled complexion and pet pug face. It also didn’t help that he hadn’t shaved in two days and one of his false eyelashes was missing. He was walking clumsily bowlegged in high-heeled pumps, while counting a large number of plastic gold coins into a patent leather purse. The other man was tall with the tentatively obsequious look of a longtime companion and flunky. When all of the coins were safely stowed in the bag, the transvestite glanced at his companion with a grin of unpleasant self-congratulation. “I think we got out of there just in time.”
“You know they were letting you win, Edgar.”
The transvestite looked around testily. “Of course they were letting me win. You think I’m a fool? They always let me win. Even here, they’re still afraid of me.”
As Jim and Semple passed the pair, Jim quickly leaned close and whispered, “Do you know who they are?”
Semple shook her head. “No, should I?”
“It’s J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson.”
“Here in Hell?”
“Can you think of a better place for them?”
Jim stopped walking and half turned. His face was angry and set. “I really ought to do something about that bastard.”
Semple frowned. “Like what?”
“Like punch him clear out to the pods, like payback for all the good people he fucked and fucked over.”
“We ought to be focusing on getting Doc out of the poker game.”
Hoover and Tolson were waiting for the elevator. Hoover glanced at Jim with an expression of routine contempt. Jim clenched his fists. “It’d give me a fuck of a lot of satisfaction to know I’d put J. Edgar Hoover’s lights out.”
“There’s got to be worse than him running around the Afterlife.”
“Not many.”
“We really don’t have the time. We have to concentrate on Doc. That’s what Danbhala La Flambeau said.”
The five-card stud was cutthroat and Doc Holliday was running on pills and fear. His lungs felt raw from too many cigars; he suspected they might be bleeding again. The various kinds of dope he’d taken were clashing with the alcohol; he was developing an epic headache from staring at the cards. His frock coat was hanging over the back of his chair, long since shucked off, sweat soaked the armpits of his evening shirt, and the lace ruffles were wilting. The game had been going on for longer than he could remember, and he knew he was in well over his head. This in itself was no big thing. He’d been in a hundred previous games—more if you counted lifeside—in which the waters had threatened to close over him. What made this one different was that Lucifer seemed to be playing for keeps. In the old days, the Prince of Darkness would have been looking for souls to come into the pot: these days, since souls no longer signified, he was into pieces of minds and memory when the chips were really down. Already one player, a bizarro in a silver suit who called himself the Saber-Toothed Kid, was lying in the back room alternately catatonic and whimpering, having anted up the connections to a selection of synapses on a marker to Lucifer when he’d been cleaned out of ready cash chasing a busted flush. No one seriously expected the Saber-Toothed Kid to recover, although the question of what to do with him when the game was over had yet to be resolved. Doc had toyed with the idea of maybe selling the Kid as a warm body to Hoover and Tolson, but had kept it to himself. It was likely others might join the bizarro before the conclusion finally came to pass.
Not that Doc was, as yet, reduced to such dire straits as parting with segments of his brain as collateral. He still had a reasonable poke of coin remaining, but he knew the vise was tightening. The amateurs and thrill-seekers had long since been whittled away; the ones who only wanted to tell the story of how they’d been there, lost their rolls, and departed. Hoover had left with Tolson, his nonplaying boyfriend, in tow—and a considerable winning poke, as was always his wont. That left just five of them at the table, and the game appeared destined to go to the death. What Doc had to do was ensure that the annihilation in question was someone’s other than his own, and this was where the fear came in. For the past few hours, he had been doing little more than holding his own. Each time his turn to deal came around, Lucifer would clamp a mechanic’s grip on the deck and spin out cards from the top, bottom, or middle, only able to cheat so overtly to the professional eye because he knew no one would have the stones to call him on it, in his own game, right there in Hell.
Lucifer was formidable in any form, but his current Ike Turner persona—processed Beatle wig and pencil mustache, ruffled disco shirt, diamond sleeve garters, open to the navel and revealing a weight of neck gold sufficient to carry him for at least three rounds of betting—gave him an ass-tightening edge. Anyone going up against him would be left in no doubt that they were finally down with the baddest in town. If anyone could match Lucifer, menace for menace, it was the inscrutable Kali, who sat directly to Lucifer’s le
ft. Topless, as the Hindu goddess of death always appeared in statues and religious prints, with fully exposed blue-black breasts and ruby nipples, but with her extra arms retracted at the request of the other players, Kali had so far been playing an incredibly tight, nolose/no-win game, never going after any of the big rich pots. When Hoover had left, however, Kali had removed her crown of skulls, and Doc wondered if this was a sign that she was about to get serious.
Richard Nixon always played seriously, not to say deviously, but he only ever seemed to go in big-time when he was sure of his cards. So far, as revealed by the call, Nixon had yet to bluff in a major way, but with his shifting eyes, sweat beading his upper lip, and the five o’clock shadow moving toward eight or nine, it was almost impossible to guess what he was thinking. Like Kali, he had been tailgating the game most of the time, sweeping up the smaller pots to keep himself solvent but avoiding any protracted showdown with Doc or Lucifer. Doc had few worries about the final player. He was a stone-faced North Korean, a former secret policeman who had been reassigned from torturer to victim in Kim II Sung’s second-to-last purge. By all accounts, he had held out through over three weeks of physical and psychological horror before being slowly garroted by some of his former subordinates. Although a master of the implacable bluff, the secret policeman was essentially out of his league in present company, and Doc suspected he would be the next to go. His stack was already running grievously low, but Doc didn’t expect him to depart easily. Dour communist tenacity might well force him to risk his entire nervous system before he was closed out and forced to join the Saber-Toothed Kid babbling mindlessly in the adjoining room.
With the Korean eliminated, Doc would be the next logical target. Lucifer and Kali would never go after each other while humans remained to be skinned and sliced. Both were extramortals and their kind tended to engage in their one-on-one combat away from the mere human witnesses. It was always possible that they would go after Nixon next, but Doc considered this unlikely. The disgraced ex-president was a professional survivor; Doc, on the other hand, survived despite himself. Doc’s reckless potential for self-destruction was well-known. Nixon, should he lose all his money, would simply bow out, maybe even demanding the courtesy car fare traditionally due the tapped. Doc would just smile coolly and toss his entire brain into the middle with little more than a second thought. Lesser mortals might have asked him why he simply didn’t rise from the table and walk away. Doc would only have shrugged. “It’s no recreation if a man doesn’t play for blood and sanity.”
The deal passed to Lucifer once more. He tapped the deck and stood up, moving to the small wet bar to pour himself a drink. On this particular night, Lucifer was drinking turquoise science-fiction concoctions from the surface of which a heavy vapor flowed. As he moved from his chair, he glanced back at the others. “Can I get anyone else a drink while I’m up?”
Kali ignored him; she imbibed nothing except the occasional nasal pinch of a dark red powder taken from an ornate enamel and silver snuffbox with a red scorpion inlaid on the lid. Doc had a nasty feeling that the powder was dried blood of some kind, but the blood of what he neither cared to know nor speculate. In response to Lucifer’s offer, the secret policeman nodded curtly. “Whiskey.” Which, for some unknown reason, actually meant vodka. Nixon turned the prow of his ski-jump nose in Lucifer’s direction and smiled his wan smile. “I’ll have a scotch and soda, my friend, if it’s not too much trouble.”
Doc stood up. “It’s okay, I’ll pour my own.”
The last thing Doc wanted was for Lucifer to pour him a drink. He wouldn’t have put it past the Dark Disco Prince to slip him a Mickey Finn, mind-numbing or worse; although it would have had to have been a pretty damned powerful Mickey to numb Doc’s mind, considering his mighty tolerance for most drugs known to this world and the last. As Doc moved to the bar, he took a discreet pull on his pocket flask of laudanum to calm himself. The very last thing he needed was to perform a blood-hacking coughing fit for this opposition. He figured he still had a couple of hours to go before he would face the combined wiles and chicanery of Kali and Lucifer working in tandem. He knew he would be best advised to just go on walking, out of the game, out of the room, maybe out of the Mephisto Hotel, and perhaps out of Hell itself. He knew, though, that his pride wouldn’t allow it. Even if it destroyed him, no one would ever be able to say that Doc Holliday ran from a challenge, even if the challenge came from the Devil himself. He would not, however, have minded in the least if some deus ex machina had come along and interrupted the game. Where was Big-Nosed Kate to burn down the saloon?
A guard had been posted outside room 1009, a sumo wrestler in a voluminous yellow plaid suit that could only have come from the personal tailor of Nathan Detroit. As Jim and Semple approached the door, he simply shook his head. Jim and Semple halted. “No?”
The sumo wrestler again shook his head. “Not a prayer.”
“No one goes in?”
“No one. Boss’s orders.”
Semple was wondering whether the best tactic would be to bluster, bribe, or seduce their way past the guard. “So who’s the boss?”
The guard looked at her as though her naïveté quite surpassed his understanding. “This is Hell, missy. Who the fuck do you think is the boss?”
“We need to see Doc Holliday.”
“If he’s in there at all, he’ll be coming out one of these days. You can see him then.”
“We got a call.”
The sumo wrestler shook his head for a third time. It seemed to be his sole mannerism. “Nobody called out from in there.”
Semple, with great presence of mind, produced a bag of the Hell coinage. “Doc needs more money. We were supposed to bring it to him.” Semple had decided that, of her three possible options, bribery was the only practical solution. The guard seemed unbluffable; seduction was too complicated, not to mention distasteful; it would have to come down to greasing through on a cash gratuity. She hefted the bag so the coins clinked one against the other. “I have the cash right here.”
The sumo wrestler’s eyes fixed on the bag, validating Semple’s judgment. Who said Hell was without corruption? “Why don’t you give that to me and I’ll take it in to him?”
Now it was Semple’s turn to shake her head. “I really don’t think so.”
“You don’t trust me to give it to him?”
Jim decided it was his turn to play at least a supporting role in this exercise. “It’s not that she doesn’t trust you, it’s just that she has her orders. She has to bring him the bag personally, otherwise it’s her ass.”
The guard’s eyes moved from Jim’s face to Semple’s ass. Maybe seduction might have been a better shot, but it was too late now to change trains. Semple tilted the bag and let a coin drop into the palm of her hand. The guard’s attention moved up again to where she was showing him the money. She let a second coin drop, them a third and a fourth. On five, the guard’s expression changed. He almost looked understanding. “Listen, I don’t want to see old Doc strapped for cash in a big game like this one.”
Jim smiled. “I’m sure old Doc will be very grateful.”
Semple quickly slipped half a dozen plastic coins to the sumo wrestler. Before opening the door to 1009 and easing them through, he treated them to a hard look and a quick instruction. “You’ve got five minutes and then I want you back out here. Don’t be making no noise or upsetting anyone, okay? Or your ass is mine.”
With that, he swung the door open.
The interior of the room was filled with an old-fashioned fug of tobacco smoke, so thick that it glowed in the areas where the light hit it. Doc and Lucifer were smoking cigars, and a hard-faced Oriental held a Turkish cigarette in a steel holder. A good many of the faceless kibitzers lined around the dark periphery of the room also had cigarettes, cigars, and cheroots burning. All focus was on the game in progress, and what light there was came from the lamp directly over the green baize poker table with the cracked, nicotine-stained Tiffany sh
ade. It illuminated the white cards, the hands of the players, and maybe their shirt cuffs, and all the paraphernalia they had laid out on the table in front of them. As Jim and Semple entered, Lucifer was dealing a hand, and neither he nor any of the players looked up. Lucifer flipped a black ace to Doc and Jim hoped that his hole card wasn’t either of the red eights. Or maybe in Hell a dead man’s hand didn’t matter.
As quietly as they could, Jim and Semple merged with the spectators. They were inside, and if the guard outside was as good as his word, they had five minutes to figure a way to get Doc out of there. Jim spotted the small bar and decided that it was as good a spot as any to set up a vantage point—and a shot of something would certainly help him think on his feet. It was only as, with Semple right behind him, he eased toward the booze that he spotted Nixon as one of the players. In the same instant, Nixon saw him and frowned slightly, as though not quite recognizing him. Suddenly Jim knew he wasn’t going to keep his mouth shut, despite what the guard outside might have told him. He stepped forward into the light and glared at Nixon. “You may well frown, you son of a bitch.”