King of Diamonds

by Ted Thackrey

  “My sister. Perdita,” he said in a voice gone suddenly neutral and expressionless. “She wants to talk to you.”

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  “Ye shall know them by their fruits,” says the Gospel.

  “Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Perdita Soames’s voice was as warm and pleasantly accented as I remembered from our last contact. And her approach was direct.

  “I’m calling for Gideon,” she said. “He thinks it’s time to call a truce.”

  I’d been holding the receiver a little away from my head to make sure the other people in the room with me could hear, but their reactions were no help at all.

  Suleiman’s face remained immobile.

  And Angela’s offered only the normal apprehension of an animal whose den has been discovered. And invaded.

  “ ‘Truce,’ ” I said, “is a flexible word. Covers a multitude of possible conditions and arrangements—and in any case, I always prefer to deal with principals.”

  The slight was intentional, in the hope of an unguarded rejoinder. But if there was resentment, or any reaction at all, my ear failed to detect it.

  “The Master,” she said evenly, “is a man with many tasks waiting for his hand. His days and nights are full in a way that most people cannot even imagine. And this is a small matter at best.”

  Well . . . maybe just a little resentment. And adroitly handled.

  “In that case,” I said, “perhaps there is less to talk about than we both imagined.”

  I made the words as flat as possible. And finally got a reaction.

  “I was selected to make this call,” she said, “and to conduct negotiations—if that’s what they are going to be—because my husband and my brother are both involved in this . . . ah . . . situation. And so, I think, is Mrs. Palermo’s daughter. Maria Theresa.”

  Angela’s expression didn’t change at the mention of the girl’s name. But her color faded to whiteness of paper.

  “All right, then,” I said. “We talk. But on neutral ground.”

  “Agreed. Do you know the beach area well?”

  “Not really. No.”

  “Then if I may suggest—a public place, on the beachfront. In daylight.”

  It sounded almost right.

  “And not in South Bay City,” I said.

  The hesitation was only momentary.

  “And not in South Bay City,” she agreed. “You have someplace in mind?”

  I didn’t and said so.

  “Perhaps you’ve heard of the Manatee? A restaurant at the foot of Pier Avenue. In Manhattan Beach.”

  I’d heard of it. And been on friendly terms with the owner, once upon a long-gone time. But there seemed little point in telling her so.

  “I can find it,” I said.

  “Wonderful. I’ll be expecting you . . . shall we say in half an hour? And alone.”

  “Let’s say that.”

  “Until then . . . ”

  She hung up and I put my own receiver down and looked at the two other people who had been monitoring the conversation. They were waiting for me to say something brilliant and confident. And reassuring.

  But I kept my mouth shut.

  Angela’s recent character appraisal notwithstanding, I’m not really such a con man as all that.

  The Manatee hadn’t changed much over the years.

  I’d missed it on my tour of the beach with Angela the day before, and Perdita Soames’s selection of the place as neutral ground—which almost certainly meant it was Gideon’s private turf—had made me wonder what I would find. But it seemed almost untouched.

  Which was more than you could say for its surroundings.

  A couple of stand-up hamburger joints that had been next-door neighbors had been cleared away to create a parking lot for Manatee customers, and the little pizzeria that had struggled along across the alley had turned into a pricey-looking establishment called the Bicycle Boutique.

  The Manatee’s weathered-wood facade appeared to be unaltered, however, and the old sign—block lettering arranged in an arc above a crude but recognizable representation of a sea cow playing the harp—was still swinging from rusty hooks over the door.

  I wondered if the same would be true inside.

  A man named Shoo-Fly Johnson had built the place in the late 1950s, using two beachfront lots left vacant by fire, and a bundle of money he’d won playing lowball for three days straight against a quartet of Dallas oilmen with more money than card sense. I had been a novice in the poker trade at the time, storing my lares et penates in a little beach apartment and learning my trade on the table-stakes circuit from Cincinnati to Vegas. So naturally I had to meet Shoo-Fly.

  And he was a surprise. Most of the successful poker players I had met before then were men whose facade of calm self-confidence was shield and buckler for the driven man within—compulsive winners, which is better than being compulsive losers. But not by much.

  Shoo-Fly, however, was something else again, and the difference was apparent from the first words he spoke after the introduction I had wangled from a mutual friend.

  “If you come to talk poker,” he said, “I got to tell you right here in front, you come to the wrong place . . . ”

  Well, that was certainly what I had come to do. Yes. But the reaction intrigued me, and I shook my head—which got a big laugh from Shoo-Fly.

  “Always did like a man could lie with a straight face,” he said. “Let’s drink some of my liquor. On the house.”

  So, we did that, and spent the next few hours in mutual enjoyment of such topics as politics, women, horses, war, and the probable future of the unlimited substitution rule. Poker came up only once, and then in passing, to accompany the explanation for Shoo-Fly’s aversion.

  “Thing is,” he said, “I played all the poker I am ever going to play. Past tense. So, I try not to think about it no more than I have got to.”

  I accepted the words at face value and resolved not to pry; Shoo-Fly was a raconteur of talent, valuable as friend and compeer even if he preferred not to share his professional expertise too freely. That was his business and his decision to make. But he could see I was puzzled and was generous enough to take me off the hook.

  “What it comes down to,” he said, “is that I only play games I have got a chance to win—don’t have to be a real good chance, but by the living Christ it got to be some chance, at least, or I cash in my checks—and I purely got no chance to win at poker no more.”

  I didn’t believe that, and I suppose it showed somewhere in my face. Or maybe he was just expecting it.

  “Got me a tell,” he said. “And it’s a real bitch.”

  That was different. But almost as hard to believe.

  A tell—a personal mannerism or visible response that can offer a clue to the player’s inner emotions—is the night terror of all poker professionals. And almost all develop one sooner or later. The most common tells are the ear that seems always to need scratching when you are bluffing the center card of a straight, and the collar that gets adjusted every time you catch the final fifth of a flush. But they are survivable. A day or two of mental effort, an extra ounce of personal discipline, will dispose of the problem—at least until it manifests itself somewhere else.

  But what kind of tell could Shoo-Fly have that was bad enough to put him out of business?

  “It’s my heart,” he said. “Goddam thing’s took to blabbing every single thing it knows to everyone with eyes to see.”

  “You mean, you get heart attacks . . . at the table?”

  Shoo-Fly laughed again.

  “Hell’s fire, boy,” he said. “Don’t I wish it was so! No—ain’t nothing so simple and straightaway as that. What the damn thing does, it just turns my face white every time I got me a real strong betting hand and enough money in the pot to make the thing interesting.”

  He’d found out about his problem from an old-
time poker pro named John Moss, who’d spotted it during a late-night game at Tahoe.

  “John was a real friend to me,” Shoo-Fly said. “Coulda cleaned my carcass to bare bones in there, knowing what he did, and instead he just took me aside and told me about it.”

  He paused, taking a meditative sip of the private reserve stump-blower we were drinking and following the slow movements of the sea in the distance.

  “Went to see a doctor the next day,” he said. “And another the day after that. And never played a hand of poker again.”

  “Nothing they can do?”

  “Not one damn thing. Fact is, they all tell me it is going to get worse, little by little. So . . . no poker.”

  I thought it over.

  “You could play the pot limit games,” I said. “Or with friends. For fun.”

  This time the look I got told me he was wondering if he’d been wrong and I was damn fool after all.

  “Sure, I could,” he said. “But short-money players would know I was used to a different league and either find out why and use that to beat me or take it wrong if I happened to win. One way, I’m a chump. The other way, I’m a son of a bitch. No, thanks.”

  Which was true, of course. And surely one hell of a way to run a railroad. But I could see why he might not want to talk about it and made a point of avoiding the subject on subsequent visits, which were fairly regular until my own game improved to the point where I could afford to buy a little mountain ghost town called Best Licks.

  Arriving early for the appointment with Mrs. Soames and seating myself at the bar, I wasn’t too surprised to get a blank look from the bartender in response to my inquiry about Shoo-Fly. He’d never heard the name.

  “But I only been in town about a month,” he explained. “Maybe Barry, the night man, would know. You say this guy Shoo-Fly used to own the Manatee?”

  I said he had, but it was a long time ago and not very important anyway. Which was true, I suppose, unless you’re the kind who gets the guilties about neglecting old friends.

  The bar decor was much as I remembered: spikey-skinned blowfish dried and used as light fixtures, with a few old fishnets and glass floats to disguise the cheap wallboard and lack of fresh paint. A beach joint is a beach joint is a beach joint. Amen.

  Somebody had moved the old piano to the beachside corner of the room from its former station against the wall, but I thought I recognized a few of the nicks and scars in its lid and speculated idly on the odds against my knowing the pianist.

  A long shot, sure. Still . . .

  Perdita Soames arrived—on time, to the hack of the hour—while I was wondering.

  She was dressed for the beach, with outsize sunglasses and outsize hat and wraparound sundress, but somehow the net impact was unchanged. There was still the impression of gloss and elegance I had noted at our first meeting.

  “What a delightful day,” she trilled by way of greeting.

  “But just the tiniest bit over bright, to San Francisco eyes,” I qualified, allowing her to sweep me along in her wake to a booth in the darker reaches of the room.

  Her laugh was ice crystals at high altitude.

  “I suppose it shows,” she said. “The hat and the sunglasses. No one seems to wear them down here—and I can’t imagine how they survive. The incidence of skin cancer must be fantastic.”

  I nodded. “But they treat all that the same way the Greeks did.”

  She gave me an expectant look in lieu of the straight line.

  “With contempt,” I said, accepting another allotment of the restrained laughter, and waiting patiently through the arrival of the bartender who had only been in town for a month and appeared to be stuck without a waitress at that time of day. She ordered a pink lady—a remarkably apt choice, I couldn’t help thinking—and I stood pat with the beer I’d carried back with me. No talk during the wait for her drink, but she fished around in the beach bag she’d brought with her and came up with something long and Russian-looking in the way of a cigarette.

  And no coyness about waiting for me to light the thing. But the silver-chased Cross lighter she’d produced along with the cigarette didn’t work on the first try and slipped from her hand to the floor on the second.

  I bent to retrieve it with an unworthy little sense of gratification.

  Perfection can be hard to take.

  The bartender delivered her drink a moment later, and she took a small sip. I did the same with my beer, and then we got down to business.

  “The Master,” she said, “proposes a trade.”

  I didn’t understand and said so.

  “Oh, come now,” she said, the tiniest frown of disapproval appearing momentarily between the beautifully groomed brows. “Surely we’re beyond the need to play games. We came here to discuss a truce, and that always involves the exchange of . . . ah . . . guarantees. You have something we want. And we—”

  “ . . . have Terry Palermo.”

  “Just so.”

  I shook my head. “Sorry,” I said, taking another mini-sip of the brew and enjoying it, “but I’m afraid this just isn’t one of my brilliant days. You’re going to have to spell things out for me. I know what you have. But what is it that Gideon expects in return?”

  Her face didn’t change, and when I tried to touch and examine the wa, nothing happened. It was the second time I had encountered such a condition in one of Gideon’s disciples, and I couldn’t help wondering if they were all like that. Shielded. Blocked. If so, the man might be onto something at that.

  “Surely the quid pro quo is obvious.”

  “Not to me.”

  “The diamonds,” she said. “You have them—well, you may have turned them over to Angela Palermo, though we find that hard to believe. In any case, the Master needs them for his work. Hand them over to us, and the girl is yours.”

  Something was wrong with the acoustics in that end of the room. Her voice had developed a peculiar resonance, and the last word seemed to echo—“yours . . . yours . . . yours”—long after the sentence had ended. Odd. And unsettling.

  But I forced myself to stop wondering about it and concentrate on the business at hand. Diamonds . . .

  “What makes Gideon think we’ve got diamonds?” I said.

  That got me a little smile.

  “My brother,” she said, “is a man of formidable ability and perception in his own field. But not as careful as he might be—especially when it comes to such matters as office security.”

  “Perhaps he simply trusted his sister. Because he loves her.”

  A tiny hesitation told me the dart had been well aimed, and I wondered suddenly how much effort would be required to pry Perdita Soames free from the attachment that seemed so ready to consume her. Less than Gideon might imagine, I suspected, if affection for her brother was still a factor in her emotional life.

  “In any case,” she said, under full control again, “we are aware that you know where the Master obtained the stones he brought to Suleiman for appraisal and sale—and that there is another cache, either remaining on the premises in the Palermo home or turned over to you for safekeeping.”

  The echo was getting worse, and I was suddenly aware of the new and unfamiliar sound, a prolonged musical chord in a minor key. It seemed to be coming from a distance . . . but getting closer all the time.

  And now something was happening to her face.

  A tiny mote of redness appeared, centered between the wings of hair that framed her forehead, and I watched with fascination as it elongated into a thin, knifelike line of blood, bisecting her face. And then the skin of the forehead broke open and peeled back to show me the bright, pale bonework of the dainty skull beneath.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  “Every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  I closed my eye tightly and clamped both hands on the edge of the table. But it was a mistake; the tabletop writhe
d under my touch. Turned soft and yielding, running onto and through the fingers, forcing me to look at the world again in order to retain any semblance of control.

  But looking was a mistake, too. The whole front of Perdita Soames’s face was gone now, the skin folded back to form a blood-flecked pinkness that hung limp under the wings of the hair to expose mandible and teeth in a grin that gaped open briefly to utter a single word, “Preacher?” which echoed and resounded with the volume of a thousand woofers all cranked up to max volume.

  I squinted my one functional eye and was amazed to discover that I had binocular vision again. The right eye—the one that I well knew wasn’t there anymore—had somehow come to life and worked with the left one to force the rim of the table back into solid reality. But the hands attached to the table didn’t belong to me. They were corded claws, marked with outsize liver spots that grew and spread as I watched in horror, and finally developed eyes of their own that opened and blinked and then stared at me with a terrible blue intensity.

  Some bleak, forgotten corner of my mind was still free, and it wanted to tell me what had happened.

  Dropping the silver lighter had been art, not clumsiness, and when I bent to pick it up there had been time enough.

  Time enough.

  Time enough.

  Time enough . . . enough . . . enough . . .

  We were alone in the room except for the bartender who had only been in town for a month, but there was an outside chance he might not belong to Gideon, might be someone who could see and hear and understand. And act. Words formed in my mind. I could see the words chiseled letter by letter in granite. Wanted the whole world to hear them.

  Poisoned. I have been poisoned!

  Call the police!

  I drew breath to speak and it was easier than I’d expected; expelled the air noisily across the vocal cords. And out came the message: “Pea-fucker-my-wagon,” a thick and clownish baritone declaimed.

  That didn’t seem quite right. I tried again: “Bee-shit-pease-