Aces and Eights

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  It did not smile as it waited for me to get in.

  It did not frown.

  And I discovered that it did not talk, either, as we ghosted out of the garage and turned north on Paradise. All right, then. Go with the flow. I leaned back against the cushions and looked out at people who couldn’t look back at me.

  Las Vegas does not turn its electric signs off in the daytime, so they don’t have to be turned on again at nightfall. Half a mile away, blue–and–red–and–white–and–green–and–gold light named and trumpeted the glories of Caesar’s and the Dunes and the Sahara and the Sands and the Flamingo, setting forth their attractions in a shriek of candlepower.

  They slipped by in march formation as we glided toward the center of town, passing the less ostentatious marquee of the Convention Center, which offered only the names of the evening’s heavyweight gladiators (no price around the legal betting shops, and I speculated idly on how many people elsewhere would know that the bout was a fix, and how much money changed hands over the ignorance).

  Farther, past the lonely top-heaviness of the Landmark and then left across the Strip and into the darkness beyond.

  I wondered, fleetingly, if Francis Carrington Shaw had taken his act on the road and was about to pick up the driver-deck phone and give oral communications yet another try when another turn, this time to the right, gave me an answer that I should have suspected as soon as I knew that he was not really staying at the Scheherazade.

  More than a quarter-century ago there had been a fire.

  The casino and main building of the oldest and least opulent hotel on the Strip, a rambling Wild West-style establishment called El Cholo Loco, had burned to the ground, leaving only the individual ranch house-villas on the grounds that had surrounded it. The fire was no accident. The owner, an arrogant richboy whose father and uncle had built the place, had publicly humiliated a powerful visiting hoodlum, underboss of a family well connected among the Friends of the Friends. So local representatives agreed that an example must be made, in aid of discipline. The best torch in Cleveland was imported for the job, and before the embers of El Cholo had cooled, the richboy was quietly informed that he was a fortunate man. He had been permitted to leave the building before it was consumed by flames. But—who knows?—another time he might not be so lucky. The place was not to be rebuilt. Or sold. And he was not to return to Las Vegas during his lifetime.

  No one was surprised at this. But the richboy turned out to be smarter than anyone had thought. Arrogance at least temporarily cleansed from his soul, he moved forthwith to one of the better-kept sections of Beverly Hills and turned his attention to motion picture production and the Beautiful People it seems to attract. Las Vegas saw him no more, and a neighboring hotel was assigned the task of managing such of the surviving villas on the grounds as might be rentable.

  The owner’s death, a few years ago, had caused hardly a ripple in the local scene. Nor had the sale of his erstwhile property to the Shaw interest. That transaction had been announced at the same time as two others involving well-known and active hotel-casinos, and had been relegated to the bottom half of the resulting news stories. Television accounts did not even mention the deal.

  But of course, it did not pass entirely without comment.

  Wise and knowledgeable eyes scanned all real-estate dealings in southern Nevada, large and small, and they did not miss the significance of this one. Shaw had a reputation for doing things in a hurry; for wanting immediate and visible results. No doubt a new hotel tower—taller and more commodious than all the rest—would rise forthwith on the long-fallow site. Speculation centered on the Big Man’s probable selection of architect and/or builder. Del Webb seemed the most likely choice; that firm had built half of the other hotels in the neighborhood and had a history of meeting its completion dates.

  In fact nothing happened at all.

  The burned-out foundation of the original casino remained as it had been, a rotten and neglected tooth in the otherwise spectacular dentistry of the Strip, and with the passage of time, general interest had become occasional speculation. And then a sometime random thought. And finally nothing at all.

  Newcomers to Las Vegas were the only ones who even noticed the eyesore nowadays.

  The rest simply knew it was there and ignored it with eyes long trained to selective astigmatism.

  But Francis Carrington Shaw was a man who played his own games according to his own rules, and moving through the semi-darkened byways of what had once been the grounds of El Cholo Loco Hotel and Casino, I decided the one he had played here was called “total security” and that he had, as usual, played it well.

  The very barrenness of the surroundings made stealth difficult to impossible by night or day, and surveillance would involve electronic eyes that made nothing of concealment. Meanwhile, the closely guarded suite at the Scheherazade would be an effective bit of misdirection, well worth the quiet presence of the squad of tight-lipped youngsters assigned to guard an empty space.

  Nice work.

  But there was no time to admire it. A final easy turn brought us to the front door of a mock-adobe villa apparently no different from any of its fellows. But the car stopped and my door was opened and I can take a hint as well as the next.

  Outside, the air had cooled almost to the temperature maintained inside Shaw’s limousine, and the last rays of desert sunset had faded from the sky. I inhaled and was astonished to catch the distant hint of yucca. Nature is not mocked; give her the least opening and she claims her own. Usually with interest.

  “Pretty night, isn’t it?”

  A man stood framed in the open door of the villa, his face obscured by the light that shone behind him.

  “Draw up a chair—make a long arm.”

  Something familiar about the voice.

  “Always room for one more.”

  Corner Pocket.

  He was grinning a little as he ushered me inside and closed the door behind us.

  “For once,” he said, “I think I have surprised the Preacher.”

  I couldn’t deny it.

  Or understand. Las Vegas is built on cozy arrangements between local authorities and those who command power and money. But Corner Pocket had missed being chief of police because he refused to play the game (“They told me to scratch a shot, and I sank it in the Corner Pocket instead”) and moved over to the DA’s office in protest. What was he doing on Francis Carrington Shaw’s elaborately concealed doorstep? And what was it going to cost me to find out?

  “Proud of this setup,” he said, as we moved into the center of the room. “Designed it myself, right down to the last little thing. Take your shoes off.”

  He was wearing what looked like paper hospital slippers and there was another pair in his hand. I looked at him and waited for him to explain.

  “Oxygen,” he said. “Not much real danger of sparks around here. But the air’s dry and these things make sure you don’t get static electricity to blow us both to hell.”

  It made sense and I took the slippers and began shucking out of my own shoes, but I didn’t stop looking at him and he couldn’t help knowing what kind of thoughts were going through my mind.

  “Ten years now,” he said. “Since before he moved here. The Man’s people came to see me just after I bombed out at the department, and made me an offer I could refuse—but only if I was an idiot.”

  “The district attorneyship?” I said.

  His grin widened.

  “What a campaign,” he said. “Skyrockets and pinwheels! One guy a shoo-in for reelection, suddenly he gets an offer to go to Washington in a corner-office job at the Department of Justice, and wonder of wonders along comes a young lawyer here in town that no one ever paid attention to before, turns out to have some big-bucks backing to run for the vacant office...and the only person who runs against him backs out at the last moment.”

  “Pure coincidence,” I said.

  “Up yours,” he said. “With a boat hook. But d
on’t decide things are one way or the other before you talk to the Man—and don’t be too surprised at anything you see when you meet him. You’re here on my say-so. I’d hate like hell for it to turn out to be a mistake.”

  He opened the door and led the way into the next room.

  It was about the same size as the room we had left, but there the resemblance ended.

  My first impression was of light. And absence of color.

  Walls and ceilings had been cleared of decoration and painted a uniform high-gloss white. The floor beneath my feet was the same shade, not painted but impregnated in the vinyl covering that stretched from wall to wall. It gave the place an eerie lack of perspective, making it seem both larger and smaller than it was—an impression in no way reduced or softened by the intensity of light that poured from massive industrial-type lamps, aimed at the ceiling to give an overall indirect brightness to all corners.

  But all that paled by comparison to the central artifact.

  It was an iron lung, and the head protruding from it—looking at me in the overhead mirror now, with an expression that might have been sardonic amusement—was unmistakably that of Francis Carrington Shaw.

  He was older than the pictures I remembered, and the cheek bones stood out more prominently.

  “But, yes,” the whispery voice I remembered from the telephone broke into my thoughts. “Yes. Oh, yes. It is me. Come a little closer, please. There’s a chair in here somewhere...”

  There were two of them. But Corner Pocket seemed to want to go on standing by the door, so I hefted one to what seemed a likely spot and sat down in it.

  The eyes, black and depthless—always Shaw’s most memorable feature—followed my movements with interest.

  “You are a trained athlete,” he said when I had settled myself.

  “Not really,” I said. “A little t’ai chi each morning. Some training in others of the martial arts.”

  “Under Yoichi Masuda.” The head nodded, startling me by knowing the true name of the man who lived among us at Best Licks as mahayana master. “A good man, and a worthy champion in his time—always among the clearest of thinkers. I have read two of his books. And some of the poetry.”

  More and more surprises.

  The books did not bear his name, and the poetry had always been carefully anonymous.

  “Master Masuda will be pleased to know of your regard,” I replied formally.

  “If you live to tell him,” the head said, nodding on its pillow. “And that is, I must say, still very much in doubt at this moment. Tell me, sir, have you really so little regard for your own life as recent events would appear to indicate?”

  I started to form an answer, but the trace of a smile at the corners of his mouth told me he didn’t really want or expect one. It was his idea of a pleasantry.

  “We are all in the palm of the Almighty,” I said, deciding to play a game of my own as long as he was in a party mood.

  But the smile faded.

  “I spoke in jest,” he said, “and perhaps it was impolite. Your reply, however, was not in kind, coming as it does from an ordained minister.”

  “I’m a poker player,” I said.

  “You are a priest. Would you like me to recite the dates of your postulancy and ordination, and name the bishops present for the latter? Or the names of the missionary churches to which you were assigned before you went to Vietnam?”

  His voice had strengthened with the last few sentences, and I took a moment to fill in a blank space or two. Now I would be able to tell Margery who had been nosing into the closed places.

  But I still couldn’t imagine why.

  “Your wife’s death—what was her name, Sara? Yes, Sara. Her death was tragic and unnecessary. Shattering. But your reaction was, if you will forgive the observation, juvenile.”

  “No,” I said. “I won’t.”

  The smile returned. “Excellent,” the head said. “Excellent! True emotion. Anger without editing. Better than I’d hoped to see and the equal of anything your friend—Corner Pocket, I think you call him—the equal of anything Corner Pocket had led me to believe.”

  I stood up and moved to put the chair back where I’d found it.

  “If that’s all, then,” I said, “I’ll be on my way. Do I get a ride home or do I walk?”

  The smile stayed put. “Better and better. My apologies, sir. They are sincere, I assure you. But I had to know if my...researchers, let us say...had been led astray. Their work was hurried; I needed answers at once, and I had been badly deceived in the past by another man of the cloth. A sometime colleague of yours, I think. From the University of the South...Sewanee?”

  I hesitated, remembering what Holy Joe had told me of his dealings with Francis Carrington Shaw, and wondering how much of it had been true.

  If this was another move in Maxey’s master plan to edge me into the television evangelism hustle, we were both wasting our time and I had a better use for mine. On the other hand, the man in the iron lung didn’t impress me as the type to have any real interest in such matters, and he seemed to have gone to a lot of trouble to get me here.

  I put the chair back down and sat in it, looking at his reflection.

  “Thank you,” he said. “And now to business...”

  Corner Pocket had been standing just inside the door, watching and listening, and now a signal seemed to pass between him and his employer. He nodded and stepped back into the living room, closing the white door behind him.

  “What follows,” the face in the slanted mirror said, “is for you to know and others only to guess at. Your friend knows most of it. But the parts he does not know will never harm him. And I can imagine circumstances where knowledge could be awkward.”

  I was lost, and made no effort to conceal it, but he continued as though I had nodded in full comprehension.

  “This machine,” he said, using his chin to indicate the gleaming steel chamber that surrounded his body, “is not absolutely necessary to my survival. At least not all the time. My lungs and the muscles that control them are in excellent shape, considering the years they have been in service, and my physical condition is far better than most people have been given reason to believe.

  “In point of fact, my only real impairment—if you discount the rumors of Alzheimer’s or worse, and the theory that I have always been a lunatic—is a combination of sleep disorders. Tell me, sir, have you ever heard of Ondine’s curse?”

  I thought it over and shook my head. “Not really,” I said. “There is the mythical tale, of course. Something about a nymph condemned to eternal sleeplessness—”

  “Because she would stop breathing while asleep, and die.” The head nodded, cutting me off. “Yes. That is the myth and that is the origin of the name. But it is no mere fairy tale, let me tell you. The medical profession’s name for the condition is ‘sleep apnea,’ and it is real enough to have dominated my life for the past two years.”

  The head’s mouth quirked in self-mockery.

  “Remember when this country had a President who wasn’t supposed to be able to chew gum and walk at the same time? Funny! Yes. Well, I can’t seem to sleep and breathe at the same time, and I assure you I have yet to get a single laugh out of the situation—because my waking and sleeping periods are and always have been somewhat unusual.

  “Many people vary from the norm in that respect. And profit from it. Edison, for instance, did not spend his nights sleeping. He took catnaps now and then, day and night, but no long periods of uninterrupted sleep. Gave him more time to work and achieve. A major asset!

  “But I don’t—didn’t—sleep fewer hours than anyone else, or more hours, either.

  “Like Edison, I was content with a series of thirty- or sixty-minute naps well spaced through the day. Not a matter of choice. I could not and cannot sleep for more than an hour at a time. Many people, over the years, remarked on the long hours I seemed to work. Such dedication. Admirable! After a while, I stopped trying to disabuse them of t
hat notion for the same reason that I stopped explaining everything else. It simply wasn’t worth the effort.

  “I think, however, that you can appreciate the implications when I tell you that of late the catnaps, while not increasing in duration or frequency, have become totally unpredictable.

  “Combine narcolepsy with a total inability to breathe while sleeping...”

  The voice, which had seemed to strengthen and deepen earlier, had faded now to the parched whisper I remembered from the telephone, and if what he said about his condition was true it seemed possible that he was about to fall asleep again.

  But the black eyes were still wide and alert, watching me with interest. I had the sudden impression of immense personal force and determination. Imprisoned, but still potent.

  “I tell you this,” he said after a moment, “because I require your help. An alliance, if you will. And no sane man allies himself with a weakling—or with the moribund. My condition is inconvenient and it forces me to spend much of my time as you see. In a mechanical coffin. Nonetheless, I can be as useful to you as you to me. And I am prepared to show my usefulness first.

  “You came here, to Las Vegas, because you need money.

  “I can remedy that by placing funds at your disposal. Not unlimited funds; that would be destructive. But more than enough for the purposes of the little town of Best Licks and its resident pastor...”

  I started to reply. To explain. But the face in the angled mirror had expected the refusal and headed it off without losing a step.

  “...or, if that is not satisfactory, I can assist you with your tax problems. You see, I know their origin.”

  I shut my mouth and expelled the breath I had taken. Silently.

  “The IRS,” Shaw said, “is a great bureaucratic beast, and its movements are too ponderous to be really effective. But it can be manipulated. In this case, it responded to what appeared to be legitimate information from a source who outlined a series of irregularities that would, if substantiated, lead to cancellation of the tax-free status of your town and church.

  “The charges are nonsense, of course. But disproving them could take months—perhaps even years. And your assets would be tied up for all that time, while you would be forced to do ongoing business on a strictly cash basis lest any bank account be confiscated.”