King of Diamonds

by Ted Thackrey

  “When they wake up—the angels and Jack Soames—they’re going to know it was you whipped their heads,” I said.

  Willie grinned. “All depends,” he said.

  I waited for him to explain.

  “Depends how hard you tunk me on the rock when you split,” he said, handing me his homemade blackjack. “It gotta be hard enough to make sure I wake up last, see, but not so hard I don’t wake up at all. Now hurry and get into those clothes we took offa Sid. You ain’t never in the world gone get out of here dressed like the Preacher.”

  Willie made one side excursion to check the pressure of the “creeping” boiler while I fumbled through the clothing swap.

  “Can’t tell how long I’ll be out of touch,” he said cheerfully. “No offense, Preacher, but I don’t think you got too much experience swinging a sandbag. And it’s a kind of an art, y’know.”

  I allowed as how that might be a fact, at that, and tied the laces of Sid’s shoes and stood up and asked him what he thought.

  He didn’t answer at once.

  The shoes were too small and the denim jeans were too short. But the T-shirt fit well enough and I thought I might pass. At least long enough to get through the lobby and out the door.

  Willie wasn’t so sure.

  “Thing is,” he said, eyeing me critically, “most of the people living here know each other. I mean, they see more of each other every day than anyone else, so the thing you got to do, you got to give them the idea they seen you before but just can’t call your name, y’know?”

  I did, and my regard for Willie went up yet another notch. Richard Boleslavsky couldn’t have put it better.

  “So, what do I need?”

  Willie shook his head. “Mostly,” he said, “it’s your face.”

  “Too late to get another one of those,” I pointed out. “It’s Sunday, and all the discount face shops will be closed for the weekend.”

  But Willie didn’t see the joke. “No,” he said seriously. “I mean, not your face, y’know. Not what you look like. I mean . . . how you look.”

  I was a little slow on the uptake, but Willie was patient.

  “Your eyes,” he said. “They’re—I dunno—different from the eyes around here. More alive. Like, y’know, there’s someone really back inside there? They’ll spot that in a minute!”

  I thought about some of the specimens I’d seen since arriving at the hotel and half turned to the cracked mirror hanging over his washstand. It showed me a scarecrow. Areas of the scalp that I’d shaved to produce Good Old George Armbruster’s bald spot and receding hairline were covered with stubble, and bruises were only half faded at the right temple and elsewhere, especially around the neck where a collar-restraint had been used. In addition, the wrists looked, exactly like wrists that had recently been too tightly handcuffed after bursting free of leather bindings.

  Not much to be done about any of that. But I saw what was worrying him about the eyes.

  “You mean, more like this?” I said, thinking of oatmeal and switching focus to the middle distance.

  Willie wasn’t overimpressed.

  “Uh . . . yeah,” he said. “Pretty much, I guess. But there’s still something wrong. The right eye—”

  He broke off suddenly, embarrassed.

  “Aw, shit, Preacher,” he said. “Sorry. I forgot.”

  I laughed and couldn’t resist giving the smelly old snitch a fraternal hug. It brought him into just the right position, and I don’t think he ever heard the air-splitting sound the sand-filled sock made as I brought it down on the side of his head.

  He collapsed without a sound, and I tied him up beside the angels.

  I think I could have found my way back to the elevator, but I’d spotted the rear staircase just outside Willie’s hideaway. It brought me to a door with what looked like a heavyweight dead bolt set above the knob and I thought I might have to try the elevator after all, but it wasn’t locked and a moment later I was standing in the dim griminess of what seemed to be a rear service corridor.

  A door labeled “Speedway” was to my right, and I covered the three steps to it in a kind of euphoric float.

  But it wasn’t as easy as all that. The door was locked, and so was the one marked “Supplies” a little farther down the passageway. Which left only one option. Marked “Lobby.”

  Hesitation was out of the question. At any moment Soames or one of the angels might manage to free himself and raise the alarm, or someone with a suspicious mind and a memory for faces might pop into the corridor, see me, and want to know what I was doing there.

  But I took an extra moment before going through the door nonetheless.

  Willie’s advice about keeping the face blank and the expression neutral was good; a snitch learns the art of camouflage early or he doesn’t survive. And I knew a couple of variations on the theme.

  Most people go through life without conscious perception of the aura that surrounds them and their fellows, never experiencing the wa—perhaps even denying its existence.

  But they use it, all the same.

  “I had a feeling he was going to jump down my throat” and “I knew he wanted to buy, all he needed was a little encouragement” and “I knew he wanted to kiss me, but was too shy to ask” are commonplaces of ordinary conversation, while “He has a presence onstage that is electric” and “The audience was swept away by charisma, to which the actual content of the speech was secondary” are the everyday language of theatrical and political life.

  Concealment, therefore, requires a masking of the wa—abnegation of the individual to the point of nonexistence. And that, too, can be conscious or unconscious.

  Ask any successful shoplifter.

  Or the poor soul who can never seem to get his order taken at a lunch counter . . .

  So, I took a little time at the lobby door, getting into the part. No hurry. All the time in the world as I went through the checklist, making sure my face was blank, my stare fixed on the middle distance, and my wa carefully shielded when I finally placed my hand on the knob. And turned it. And stepped through into the pearl-white softness of early dewdrop morning-by-the-sea.

  No doubt about the time of day.

  One of the many things I’d been in too much of a hurry to ask Willie was the time, and I hadn’t bothered to steal a watch from the angel whose clothes I was wearing. But the quality of the light coming through the front windows of the old South Bay Plaza—and the scene outside—left no room for speculation.

  Dawn is a state of mind along the beaches of southern California. You almost never see the sun.

  The place has never yet had to survive a hurricane, and rainy days are few. But low clouds and fog are a function of the onshore breeze that springs up at sunrise, and it is only on the rare days of dry Santa Ana wind conditions that beach dwellers are privileged to observe the Maxfield Parrish lighting of low-angled sun against dappled dunes and breakers.

  You learn to live with it.

  And even enjoy the ambience. At first glance the lobby scene seemed almost the one I remembered from long-ago visits: old leather furniture grouped at strategic points offering views of the sand and the Strand beach walk—a few of the chairs occupied now by individuals who seemed intent on the not-much that was happening outside—plus the inevitable clutter of fern-and-rubber-tree rain-forestation common to aging hostelries the world over.

  But one major change had been made. A battered but handsome walnut reception desk that had occupied central position at the rear of the lobby was gone, and in its stead the Temple of the Eternal Flame had erected its own peculiar symbol—the tall and attenuated ankh cross, rough-hewn in stud-grade fir and stained to resemble Spanish walnut—on a pedestal dominating the entire room.

  I passed it without a second glance, on course for the front door.

  “Blessed be!” a masculine voice behind me called.

  I froze.

  “Blessed be, brother. Have you forgotten to sign the chore book for the day
?”

  Sometimes camouflage can work too well.

  On his feet and advancing toward me from his former position at a desk beside the elevator door was a powerfully built youngster—an angel, almost certainly—with a flat ledger and a pen in his hand.

  Nothing to do but try to play the hand.

  “Blessed be,” I said noncommittally and waited for him to take the lead.

  Which he did.

  “Still early,” he said, opening the book and flipping a page back and forth before looking up at me again. “So we got some pretty good stuff left. You want dishes or hall cleanup?”

  Willie was right; the eyes were all wrong. He was looking at me and seeing me, but the focus was somewhere behind the back of my neck. What’s more, I would have been willing to bet that no drugs had been used to get him that way. They wouldn’t have been necessary.

  I decided to risk an experiment.

  “Maybe I could give Willie a hand,” I suggested. “Down in the furnace room.”

  He blinked, and almost made it back to reality. But missed the brass ring at the last instant.

  “I don’t think so,” he said seriously. “That’s a special job, not like just chores and all. You’d have to be assigned to it.”

  “Never mind,” I said, breaking in. “Have I got time for a walk—outside—if I take the cleanup detail?”

  He thought it over carefully.

  “Don’t see why not,” he said. “Just be sure and get back in time for breakfast. Master doesn’t like us to miss the morning meal.”

  “It’s a promise.”

  He showed me where to sign, and I scribbled something that would have told him he was talking to Pope John Paul II if he’d troubled to decipher it, and immediately lost interest in me, turning away and bowing in the direction of the big wooden ankh before heading back to his desk.

  I decided that was where I’d slipped up and brought myself to his attention and made a point of making my own obeisance to the pagan love symbol before turning back toward the front door.

  Willie hadn’t warned me about that. And he should have, dammit. But how could I complain? A fine, soft morning in the most peaceful little beach town in the world; just time enough for a stroll to whet the appetite and then back to the Master’s table for a big helping of bacon and eggs and insanity.

  Who could ask for anything more?

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Does it challenge you to achieve the best that is in you, and to do this serene in the knowledge that your best effort will be acceptable . . . or simply tell you to do as you please?

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The angel whose clothes I was wearing had been carrying a little loose change in his pocket, and I spent twenty-five cents of it on a newspaper.

  That told me the date. And raised serious questions about what I’d had in mind as my second assertion of personal freedom.

  I had been Gideon’s guest for nearly two weeks.

  What had become of Suleiman?

  Angela’s sudden appearance in the cast of Gideon’s Halloween Revue made it seem unlikely that he would still be anywhere around the overpriced motel where I’d seen him last.

  If the angels hadn’t scooped him up along with my lady, he was most certainly on the dodge now.

  Which made finding him unlikely.

  But in that case, just what the hell did I have in mind as an alternative?

  I walked south, past the beachfront shops and eateries and on to the residential area not far from the house Good Old George and his wife had rented some time in the dim past, and found a deserted spot where I threw a leg over the beach wall and dropped out of sight, becoming regulation beach-bum-with-newspaper—feet still tightly shod but half buried in the sand, back propped against the pink solidity of mortared cinder blocks, reading and thinking in the kind of anonymous privacy that has become a rare and precious commodity for inhabitants of the final quarter of the twentieth century.

  A glance at the paper I had bought showed me that I had made a mistake.

  It was the Los Angeles Times, a journal of some considerable repute that gave me the whole even-handed scoop on national and international politics, corporate give-and-take in the acquisition wars, social notes from all over, a discussion of responsibility versus libido in the gay community, sports news and results from the professional to the high school level, and a spate of backstairs gossip from Los Angeles City Hall.

  But not one word about doings in funky old South Bay City.

  Gideon’s chance allusion to possible troubles at the casino had left me hungry for information. Was there really a problem? And if so, was it the one I’d engineered, and how far had it progressed? But the South Bay section of the Times is not a daily event. It arrives, tucked neatly out of sight among the more important advertising sections, only two or three days a week, and this didn’t seem to be one of those days.

  Alternative newspapers—a small daily with circulation in the area, and the town’s own weekly ad-and-handout throwaway—were even less likely to contain reliable information.

  And it seemed the wrong time and place to go around asking questions of strangers.

  I settled myself more firmly against the wall, fixed my gaze on the horizonless junction of sky and ocean, relaxed the muscles of my body consciously from head to toe beginning with the clenched fist that had been savaging the back of my neck. And set the mind to work on automatic.

  I was free . . . but still in a cage.

  Southern California is a place of distances and detachment. Urban sprawl had been enshrined in earthquake-safety legislation that limited building height to thirteen stories for more than half a century, and by the time those rules were finally suspended in the 1960s their effect upon the megalopolis was already indelible. Everything was exactly twenty-eight miles from everything else—and still is. Ask anyone who ever tried to live there without a car.

  This has advantages. Easterners arriving on the West Coast are consistently flabbergasted when they see the areas that pass for slums in Los Angeles; they point to the single-family dwelling with grass growing in the back and front yards and streets lined with old trees and think someone is kidding them. Their notion of a slum is vertical—railroad flats with exposed wiring, peeling wallpaper, broken plumbing, rats, roaches, and piles of fecal matter in the dark hallways.

  To them, the urban complex of La La Land seems like a suburb of Elysium: Never mind the omnipresent street gang graffiti or the muggings and casual drive-by murders that are a feature of almost any quiet evening in the genteel single-story neighborhoods of Watts, Willowbrook, Wilmington, Ocean Park, Cudahy, Compton, and Hawaiian Gardens (and please, let’s not mention the gunfire that seems to punctuate every wedding, party, and other social gathering in these places).

  But the freedom of movement and access that might seem inevitable in such a milieu are more apparent than actual. Movement is hampered by distance and by the inadequacy of public transport. Los Angeles is only now making the first tentative gestures in the direction of rapid transit; urban bus service is slow, expensive, ill-planned, and infrequent. And taxicabs are available only at hub locations such as airports, or by appointment.

  Which brought me back to my own predicament.

  Sometime soon the slumberers I had left behind in the hotel basement would waken. And shortly afterward, a fleet of lime-green automobiles with ankh crosses stenciled on their doors would be hunting me through the streets of South Bay City—aided by the local police.

  Walking was therefore out of the question. And the day was too far advanced to give much encouragement to any amateur efforts at car theft.

  Which left only one option.

  I untied the shoes, pried my feet out of them, and knotted their laces together; shucked off the shirt and stuffed it into one of the shoes. Their former owner had been carrying a small penknife of the sort that comes equipped with a can opener and screwdriver in addition to its two cutting blades. I took th
e little instrument out, selected the smaller of the knife blades, and went carefully to work on the legs of the blue jeans, just above the knee.

  Results were unlovely. I had misjudged length and direction of amputation on both legs, and so was clad now in denim shorts of uneven length, ragged hemline, and uncertain pedigree—a garment ludicrously remarkable anywhere else on earth, but indigenous to the locale where it would be on display and known affectionately to natives as surfer cutoffs.

  And then it was time to go swimming.

  I folded the residual denim carefully out of sight in the newspaper and disposed of both in a handy trash barrel while making my way to the sea, shoes in hand.

  It looked cold and was. Lifeguards hadn’t appeared in their little sand-runner beach towers as yet—their day, I recalled, usually began at about ten o’clock—so the early-morning hot-doggers were still in full cry, their arrogance untrammeled by the little yellow and black flags that marked some areas for swimming and others for those who saw the world in terms of well and poorly shaped waves. Black and menacing in wet suits they posed, insouciant, astride the little skeg-ruddered boards, heads permanently acock over the shoulder, waiting for that one perfect ride.

  Swimmer beware! This is the turf of the surf, and you enter at your own risk; the Big Kahuna is king of the tidelands, and we his chosen people. Get in our way and we will ride our sharp-edged hydrofoils right over you. And not give a damn.

  I waded slowly out until the waves were rising past my waistline and then plunged head first into the next oncoming wave, going deep to avoid the turbulence near the surface and to get my body used to the temperature as quickly as possible. My feet touched the bottom again almost at once, but this time I made a point of squatting a bit to expose as little of the body as possible. Already the temperature of the ocean seemed higher than that of the air above. I kept going, walking when possible, treading each wave as it came in, and keeping a sharp eye on the nearest surfers, who were paying no attention at all to me.

  I was nearly even with them, well past the break line and in water deep enough to let me tread upright without touching bottom, when the wave they had been waiting for finally arrived. They came to life, paddling furiously to match speed and begin the long, sweet ride, leaving me alone about three hundred feet from shore.