King of Diamonds

by Ted Thackrey

No. The information I’d picked up about the inner workings of the casino was interesting. But it wasn’t really useful, and it was probably as much as I was going to get. For tonight, anyway. Good Old George was a washout and the evening was wasted effort and it was time to go. I glanced at the cheap, overornamented wristwatch George was wearing on the inside of his right wrist, decided it was night outside—California gaming establishments have no more windows or clocks available to the general public than their counterparts in Nevada—and wondered if there might be a fog.

  Worth a look. Walking around in fog, especially when the neighborhood is not familiar, can be a real mind-sweeper for a man who needs to do some serious thinking. And anything would be better than sitting here, looking at a slowly flattening glass of beer.

  I tossed a bill on the bar to cover the price of the bottle plus an overlarge tip and headed for the parking lot.

  No one seemed to take any interest whatever in my departure, and that at least was a victory of sorts. Maybe the only one for the evening. If nothing else, Good Old George seemed to have remained anonymous.

  Pushing through the double door into the night, I saw that my hopes for a beach fog had been only half fulfilled. The air was clear and the stars faintly visible here on the bluff where the South Bay City Casino was perched. But there was no sign of a moon or a horizon and only a dim loom from streetlights or business district neon along Pier Avenue, down the hill and closer to the sea. I would be in fog by the time I reached my rented house on the beachfront.

  I took a deep breath, decided the night might not be a total write-off after all, and moved out briskly through the mercury-lighted maze of automobiles in the direction of the dimness. But it was a short walk.

  One set of overhead lights was out, and I wondered vaguely about that—it was an exception to what appeared otherwise to be an efficient operation. But I was too far into the fuzz-brained character of Good Old George to take the elementary precaution of avoiding the pool of relative darkness it afforded.

  And the result was about what you’d expect.

  I was passing a nondescript Volkswagen van parked next to a little foreign pickup truck when my collar was seized suddenly from behind and I felt something sharp prod a little warning hole in the back of the Harry Truman Aloha Special. Just above the kidneys.

  “Be holding real still, now,” a hoarse voice said, “or I’m gonna stick this in you and walk around you . . . ”

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  The trouble is—as an old poker-playing friend of mine once remarked—“Not all trappers wears fur hats!”

  What he meant was that appearances may be deceiving; poker is the art and science of ambush.

  And not all false prophets go about wearing warning signs . . .

  TWO

  It seemed almost natural, a proper and fitting end for the kind of day I’d been having, and I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry. But the knife prodding my back was a convincing argument against doing either.

  I stood perfectly motionless.

  But not merely waiting for orders. Good Old George might be a pushover for a parking lot heist, but Good Old George was getting to be sort of an embarrassment anyway. Hadn’t done any of the jobs he was supposed to do. So, the hell with him, and the first thing to get rid of—even before the shirt or the padding or the sandals and socks—was the mental set that made his clock tick.

  It came apart without protest between one breath and the next, leaving me a decade or so younger and about forty pounds lighter.

  Better. Oh, much better . . .

  The hand on the collar of the aloha shirt had bunched it back and up to bring the top button close to my throat. But it was still too loose to be a convincing grip, and the button would be no problem for any countermove I might decide to make.

  Which left the knife.

  I’d have been happier, probably, if the point had been poking into some of the padding I’d used to make myself seem heavier. But the hand holding it seemed a little unsteady, and its owner had kept the point in place for far too long. A blade man who knows his business lets you get an idea of what he’s holding and then moves back to let you guess where it is.

  Doing it this way kept both of his hands occupied and his balance dependent on me—while my hands were free, and I was at just the right stance to execute the sudden twist-and-kite that left the point of his knife stabbing hard into empty air while the side of my hand smashed into the vulnerable angle between the base of his neck and the left shoulder.

  He went down like a sack of fertilizer, and I heard the knife go skittering out of reach under the van.

  “Shit!” he said.

  But that was the last breath he could spare, because then I was on his chest with one knee buried in the V of his rib cage while the other pinned his right wrist to the ground.

  It was all happening too fast for him. At close quarters in the dimness I could see his eyes still widening, trying to cope with the changed situation, and I let him have a moment to accept reality before bearing down on the solar plexus. I might have given him a little more, but my nose told me I didn’t have time.

  Lemon-soured bread dough was burning somewhere behind me—and that was bad news, because a man who is really frightened is far more dangerous than one who merely wants to interest you in a freehand share-the-wealth plan. He will kill you just to prove he’s not afraid.

  There is an organ meridian just beneath the armpit, and I used it to take my first attacker out of the play for long enough to deal with the second—allowing the blow that left him with a temporary paralysis to flow naturally into a simple right-shoulder roll that brought my more vulnerable parts out of the immediate danger zone and let me have a fleeting look at his partner.

  No surprise.

  Ambient light from the facade of the casino showed me the gaunt and sweat-beaded face of the poor chump who had made such a production of losing the last of his stake to me at seven card stud. At first glance he appeared to be unarmed, but the way he held his right hand and arm made me take a closer look. And wonder how he had survived adolescence.

  He was clutching an argyle sock weighted at the toe with a single big rock, trusting it to give him the edge he would need to rob someone.

  Too much television . . .

  My feet were under me now, and he was still looking at the place where I had been instead of where I was, so there was no need for a feint—and plenty of leisure to measure the ankle strike that brought him to my level. I even let myself take an extra split second to gauge exactly the force of the blunt-lance blow that turned out his lights.

  He went down without a sound, boneless and almost graceful, the weighted sock slipping from nerveless fingers to display a pathetic little hole in the toe. No satisfaction. No gain. I felt like a schoolyard bully.

  Jesus out of the boat!

  And there was worse to come. My mind was fully open again, and I had already detected signs of renewed activity from the knife man. But nothing prepared me for the first words he spoke when he regained control of his lungs and vocal cords.

  “Aw, fa Chris sake!” he said in a thick South Boston husk that I would have recognized anywhere. “Fa Chris sake, Preacher . . . is that really you?”

  Some days are more frustrating than others.

  I had arrived in South Bay City with hair dyed and middle padded in the hope of being anonymous—and spent a night trying to lose money at the poker casino in an effort to hear gossip and obtain information.

  But I had won instead of losing, heard almost nothing that I didn’t already know . . . and managed to find my old friend Willie the Ear in a fog-filled parking lot at midnight.

  Wonderful!

  I eased back on my heels to get a better look at him.

  And sort out the memories.

  His real name was Wilhelm Heinz Axelhoff, but nobody had called him that in a long, long time.

  To friends, acquaintances, colleagues—and the police o
f at least twenty states—he was simply Willie Axe, alias Willie the Ear, a semiskilled small-time holdup man whose real vocation happened to lie in the hazardous but sometimes highly paid realm of inside information.

  Willie was a snitch. And a good one: His tips were credited with having enabled police technicians to eavesdrop on private conversations of the Five Families’ leaders in New York, forestalling the tunnel robbery of a major bank vault in San Francisco, and even helping to uncover the inner workings of a major political espionage ring in Washington, D.C.

  But it is a nerve-racking profession. Willie had to keep moving in order to stay alive, and I hadn’t seen him for nearly five years—which made our meeting in the parking lot of the South Bay Casino all the more discouraging.

  “Hello, Willie,” I said. “Guess I should have been expecting you. Everything else has been going wrong . . . ”

  I think it gave him his first laugh of the day.

  Say this for Willie: Whatever his other faults, he always seems to know when to shut up.

  The gaunt character with the open-toed blackjack was sleeping the sleep of the innocent and weary, and there was almost no chance that he would remember what had happened when he finally woke up. So, Willie asked no questions and made no comment when I mentioned for him to help me carry his sometime colleague to a safer location in the shrubbery at the side of the parking lot. Nor did he offer any protest when I led the way out of the lot and steered him half a block down the street to an all-night café.

  We ordered coffee and waited for it to arrive before starting the inevitable conversation. And he gave me the first move.

  “Willie,” I said, “you learn slow.”

  And that made him smile.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I do, for sure. But how inna hell was I supposed to know it was you. Inna dark that way, I mean, and you lookin’ like you do? Son of a bitch, Preacher, what happened? You look like your own fuckin’ grandfadda!”

  Contact.

  We went back a long way. Willie had just left South Boston a jump ahead of two button men assigned to make their bones by giving him a concrete overcoat when I noticed him casing a back-room poker game in Cincinnati and warned him off in time to keep him from suffering the fate of a less fortunate grifter who had tried the heist and wound up in the charity ward of a nearby hospital with both knees broken.

  Cincinnati police provide real protection in return for the bribes that make their low-salaried jobs desirable and seem to feel that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure when it comes to holdups.

  I was surprised to find him back at his old trade here in South Bay City.

  Even in Cincinnati, he had been starting to get the idea that he really wasn’t cut out to be Jesse James—and that retailing street gossip could be a more rewarding career for a man equipped with his special combination of energy and ethical ambiguity. At our last meeting he had told me he was through with the holdup business forever. Permanently retired.

  “Funny you should mention the way I look, Willie,” I said. “Because I was about to say you look just the same as you did back in Ohio . . . like a three-time loser trying for four.”

  But this time I didn’t get a smile.

  Instead, his eyes went cloudy and seemed to change focus, softening to look at something in the distance beyond the walls of the little diner.

  “ ‘The salvation of the righteous,’ ” he said in a voice from which the harsh accent was suddenly missing, “ ‘is of the Lord. He is their strength in the time of trouble.’ Psalm thirty-eight. Verse thirty-nine. Blessed be!”

  I could hear it. But I couldn’t believe it.

  All the same . . .

  “ ‘And the Lord,’ ” I said, “ ‘shall help them, and deliver them. He shall deliver them from the wicked, and save them, because they trust in him.’ Psalm thirty-eight. Verse forty.”

  His eyes came back to where we were sitting, and he was seeing me again instead of whatever it was that he had been looking at, but the voice was still not his own when he answered.

  “I’m a saved sinner, Preacher,” he said. “Come the time of the rapture, I’ll be gone up from here and all the gentiles—even you, I guess—they’ll be here for the tribulation. Don’t that never scare you, kinda?”

  I stirred my coffee, which made no sense, because I drink it black. But I wanted to give my hands something to do while I checked the landscape around me. Conversion happens to countess and cutpurse; the need to identify and trust in a power greater than those of the earth is among the oldest and most powerful motives of the race. Human beings were praying and worshiping long before they had the words to identify anything that might have been God. Or gods. Willie’s eyes and voice were persuasive testimony; I have seen enough True Believers in my time to know the signs, and he had them all.

  But less than twenty minutes had passed since he had tried to rob me at knifepoint.

  “ ‘By works a man is justified,’ ” I quoted. “ ‘And not by faith only.’ James two, twenty-four.”

  Willie nodded vigorously.

  “ ‘As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.’ Same chapter, verse twenty-six,” he said. “Sure. I know that. But heisting you—even if we’d’ve got it done, which we surer’n hell didn’t—ain’t no sin. You’re a gentile, see? Unwashed. Not born again of the blood and the fire. So of course you’re fair game for us saved ones.”

  I blinked. “Who told you a thing like that?” I asked.

  “The Master.”

  No blink this time, but I took my time asking the next question because I thought I might know the answer. And it was a little bit too good to be true.

  “What master’s that?” I said.

  “Why . . . the only one there is on earth right now.”

  Willie’s eyes told me I had said something too foolish to be accepted as a serious inquiry.

  “The one who saved me,” he said, his voice rising. “The one who can save us all and who leads us all to the patrimony of glory that is our right and sacred trust. The Master of the Temple of the Eternal Flame. Gideon, of course. Who else?”

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Maybe they just forget.

  But more likely the explanation lies elsewhere. False prophecy can come in many guises . . .

  THREE

  I took a deep breath and managed—barely—to refrain from quoting Isaiah 45:13. But it was a strain.

  Ask and ye shall receive.

  Knock and it shall be opened.

  The Lord moves mysterious.

  Amen, bro . . .

  I had spent a day and part of a night seeking information, inside data not available to the general public, about the Temple of the Eternal Flame. And found the perfect source the moment I finally gave up and stopped trying.

  Willie was still smiling, and this time I smiled back at him and wanted to laugh . . . or would have wanted to under different circumstances. But not this time. And not in this place. And not with the name Gideon still hanging in the air between us.

  That made it serious. And dark. And angry.

  And very, very sick indeed.

  Just three weeks ago everything had been different.

  Ever since I got back from my second tour of duty in ’Nam, I have made my living playing high-stake poker—and spent the money on the little Sierra town of Best Licks, where I live.

  It’s a refuge, a place of healing for strays who never got all the way back from Southeast Asia, and the people who try to reassemble their lives there don’t know where the dollars come from. They think I’m ripping off the government and various foundations for rehabilitation grants, and they attend my Sunday services at the little Church of Best Licks as window dressing for the scam.

  They also know I was discharged as a corporal, a grunt, and would be astonished—perhaps outraged—to learn that I served my first tour in ’Nam as an Episcopal chaplain.

  So I’ve never told them.
/>   Spring had come to the Sierra, and with it the promise of laughter after a long silence.

  But winter had one good bite left in her—a wind-filled blast of fury spawned by the Gulf of Alaska and diverted south by a high-pressure area—and I had improved the hours with our resident mahayana master, swallowing poisons in pursuit of a branch of knowledge very old to the world in which he lived, but very new to me.

  Ogawa-no-jutsu is the Oriental art of breaking down toxic substances in the body. It is a branch of ninjutsu and therefore suspect in the minds of Western scholars, who have invested it with a kind of mythical quality: Jit Suryoko, Ancient Japanese mysticism.

  Sword and sorcery.

  But I have known Yoichi Masuda too long to doubt, and when he told me my body contained the necessary chemicals to neutralize the eight ounces of cider vinegar I had swallowed at his order, I knew it was true and was able to follow his directions well enough to produce a loud and gaseous belch.

  Not much in the way of evidence, perhaps; the belch caused him to laugh, and that set me off. Masuda’s laughter is infectious. But it was enough to build confidence, and when he told me I could handle fifteen milligrams of strychnine I believed it and swallowed the dose as directed.

  Respiration increased almost at once and I could feel my neck and facial muscles beginning to stiffen. All the same, I waited for Masuda’s nod of permission before beginning the treatment we had discussed—blood alcohol concentrated and augmented by sugar transmutation to deal with approaching convulsion; stimulation of the heart muscle and other parts of the nervous system to hold any possible damage at bay until the nux vomica could be chemically altered.

  And then another belch as the chemical processes were completed.

  But this time no laughter; the mahayana master’s face was calm, and the bright eyes held mine as he probed for my wa and saw that it was well with me and held long enough to be sure I had understood.

  I wasn’t sure.

  But after a moment or two he seemed to have no doubt.

  “Next time, cyanide!” he promised as I prepared to fight my way through the two-hundred-yard stretch of wind-blasted snow that separates our houses.