Last Call

by Tim Powers

  The barrel of the rifle rested comfortably in one of the squares formed by the lattice, and for several minutes Leon just crouched on the seat of a wooden bench and swiveled the gunsight back and forth and gauged the layout.

  Beyond the intimidatingly close glass of the living room window, Siegel was sitting on a flower-patterned couch, reading the sports page of the very newspaper Leon had passed on to him; next to him another man was dozing with his arms crossed. The furniture of the room was rococo, all cupids and marble and statuary lamps. A little figure of Bacchus, the god of wine, stood on a grand piano, and on the wall hung a painting of a nude woman holding a wineglass.

  As the window disintegrated into glittering spray, the first two shots shattered the statue and punched through the painting; Ben Siegel had started to get up, and the next two bullets tore apart his face; Leon fired the last five shots of the clip blindly, but he had the impression that at least two more had hit Siegel. The noise of the shots racketed up and down the street, but Leon had been able to hear the clinks of the ejected shells bouncing off the wooden bench he was crouched on.

  Then he had run back to the car and had tossed the rifle into the back seat and had started the engine, and as he drove fast out of the neighborhood he had exulted in being able to regard what he had just done from the vantage points of twenty-two new, crystalline personalities.

  It was June 20—in pre-Christian times the first day of the month-long celebration of the death of Tammuz, the Babylonian fertility god, who had reigned in a desert region where the summer sun imposed a sort of hot winter’s death on the growing cycle.

  There would be a new King reigning at the end of the celebration on July 20.

  And out in the bleak heart of the Mojave Desert that night a sandstorm raged around the Flamingo Hotel and stripped the paint from the bodies of all the exposed cars, right down to the bare metal, and permanently frosted the windshields.

  Later Leon learned that four of his nine bullets had hit his quarry, and that Siegel’s right eye had been blown cleanly out of his head and into the next room.

  Back home in his bungalow now, Georges Leon hobbled from room to room on crutches and watched the sleepy, hot street through the two eyes of Richard on the roof. He listened to the radio and read the newspapers and penciled marks on his charts and avoided going into the kitchen, where the dropped card still lay on the linoleum.

  He had at first heard that Scotty had died with Donna in the car crash, then that the police investigation had failed to find a child’s skeleton in the burned-out shell of the wrecked Chevrolet; Abrams had talked to Bailey and the other men, and he was able to figure out where Donna had got the boy out of the car, but by that time it had been hopeless to try to track any other cars that might have been driving around Ninth Street on that evening.

  Advertisements and radio appeals and a police missing person report all had failed to get the boy back. And in the course of his searches and tracings, Leon had come across the disquieting fact that there was no casino called the Moulin Rouge anywhere in Las Vegas.

  Frenziedly he took up hobbies—stamp and coin collecting, buying items and staring at the faces and denominations and trying to read the meanings of them. He slept only when exhaustion knocked him down, and paid no attention to the ringing of the telephone.

  For hours he sat painfully on the floor of the den, inventing a new form of Poker; for he now needed another way to become a parent.

  Finally one night he could ignore the issue no longer, and at midnight he crawled out of the bedroom on his hands and knees and crouched on the kitchen floor with a cigarette lighter.

  The card still lay where Donna had dropped it after pulling it out of Scotty’s sliced eye. For a long time in the darkness Leon sat with his trembling fingers on it.

  At last he turned it over, and he ignored the wind whispering around the bungalow as he spun the flint wheel of his lighter and looked.

  The card was, as he had feared, the profile figure of the Page of Cups, the equivalent in modern terms of the Jack of Hearts. A one-eyed Jack.

  The wind rattling the flimsy screens was from out of the west, sighing across the Mojave Desert from Death Valley and beyond. For at least an hour Georges Leon crouched on the floor and stared in that direction, knowing that it was from that quarter of the compass that his adversary, the one-eyed jack, would one day come.

  BOOK ONE

  The People in Doom Town

  You know, my Friends, how long since in my House

  For a new Marriage I did make Carouse:

  Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed,

  And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.

  —The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám,

  EDWARD J. FITZGERALD translation

  “Stetson!

  “You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

  “That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

  “Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?”

  —T. S. ELIOT. The Waste Land

  I watched her fly away for Vegas,

  I waved the plane out of sight,

  Then I tried to drive home without stopping at a bar, but I

  Didn’t make it, quite.

  And sitting with those blue-jeaned shadows there, that had

  Been there all night,

  I found myself shivering over my chilly drink,

  Half dead of fright.

  —WILLIAM ASHBLESS

  CHAPTER 4

  A Real Clear Flash

  Crane recoiled out of sleep, instantly grateful that the sun was shining outside.

  His heart thudded in his chest like a pile driver breaking up old pavement. He knew he’d been dreaming about the game on the lake again, and that something in the real world had awakened him.

  The nights were still chilly in March, and though the sun was now well up—it must have been nine or ten o’clock, at least—the can of Budweiser on the floor beside his bed was still cool. Crane popped the tab and drank half of it in one continuous series of gulps, then absently wiped a trickle of beer from the gray stubble on his chin.

  The can had left a pale ring on the hardwood floor. Susan never criticized his drinking, but she didn’t seem to like it in the bedroom; she’d pick up the can as casually as if it were a magazine or an ashtray and carry it out to the living room. After he noticed the habit, he had purposely set his Budweiser on the bedside table a few times, but her patient persistence had made him feel mean, and now he did it only accidentally.

  The doorbell bonged, and he assumed that it had rung a few moments before, too. He levered himself up out of his side of the queen-size bed and pulled on a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt, then plodded out into the living room. Still buttoning his shirt, he opened the door; he never bothered to look through the peep-hole anymore.

  His next-door neighbor Arky Mavranos was standing on the porch. “Ahoy, Pogo!” Mavranos said, waving two cans of Coors. “What seems to be the problem?”

  All this was Mavranos’s standard greeting, so Crane didn’t reply but just stepped outside, sat down in one of the porch chairs and accepted a beer from him. “Ah,” Crane recited dutifully as he popped the cold can open and held the foaming thing to his ear, “the sound of breakfast cooking.”

  “Breakfast?” said Mavranos, grinning through his unkempt brown mustache. “Noon’s gone—this is lunch.”

  Crane squinted out past the porch rail at the tower of the Fidelity Federal Savings building, silhouetted against the gray sky half a mile north on Main Street, but he couldn’t focus on the flashing letters and numbers on its rooftop sign. The Norm’s parking lot had enough cars in it to indicate the lunch crowd, though, and the daytime crows had replaced morning’s wild parrots on the telephone lines. Mavranos was probably right.

  “I brought your mail,” Mavranos added, pulling a couple of envelopes out of his back pocket and dropping them onto the battered table.

  Crane glanced at them. One was the long
gray Bank of America envelope with the waxed paper address window—probably his statement. It was never current; if he wanted to know how much he still had in his savings account, he could just look at the slip that was spit out of the Versatel machine when it gave him his card back next time. He tossed the unopened envelope into the plastic trash can.

  The other envelope was addressed in Susan’s mother’s handwriting.

  He tossed it away even faster.

  “Just junk!” he said with a broad grin, draining the beer and getting up. He opened the door and went inside, and a few moments later was back in the chair with the half can of Budweiser that he had, in spite of himself, again left on the bedroom floor.

  “Wife off shopping?” asked Arky.

  Off shopping, Crane thought.

  Susan loved those discount stores that were as big as airplane hangars. She always came home from them with bags of things like shark-shaped plastic clips to hold your beach towel down, and comical ceramic dogs, and spring-loaded devices you screwed onto your instant coffee jar that would, when you worked a lever on top, dispense a precise teaspoonful of powdered coffee. Her purchases had become a sort of joke among the neighbors.

  Crane took a deep breath and then drained the Budweiser. This looked like being another serious drinking day. “Yeah,” he answered, exhaling. “Potting soil, tomato cages…Spring’s on us, gotta get stuff in the ground.”

  “She was up early.”

  Crane lowered his chin and stared at his neighbor expressionlessly. After a pause he said, “Oh?”

  “Sure was. I saw her out here watering the plants before the sun was even up.”

  Crane got dizzily to his feet and looked at the dirt in the nearest flower pot. It did look damp;. had he watered the plants himself, yesterday or the day before? He couldn’t remember.

  “Back in a sec,” he said evenly.

  He went into the house again, and walked quickly down the hall to the kitchen. The kitchen was uncomfortably warm, as it had been for thirteen weeks now; but he didn’t look at the oven—just opened the refrigerator and took out a cold can of Budweiser.

  His heart was pounding again. Whom had Archimedes seen on the porch? Susan, as Crane could admit if he had a fresh beer in his hand and the alcohol was beginning to blunt his thoughts, was dead. She had died of a sudden heart attack—fibrillation—thirteen weeks ago.

  She had been dead before the hastily summoned paramedics had even come sirening and flashing and squealing up to the curb out front. The medics had clomped into the house with their metal suitcases and their smells of rubber and disinfectants and after-shave and car exhaust, and they had used some kind of electric paddles to try to shock her heart into working again, but it had been too late.

  After they had taken her body away, he had noticed her cup of coffee, still hot, on the table in front of the couch she’d died on—and he had numbly realized that he would not be able to bear it if the coffee were eventually to cool off, if it were to wind up as passively tepid as some careless guest’s forgotten half can of soda pop.

  He had carefully carried the cup down the hall to the kitchen and put it in the stove and turned the broiler on low. And he had told the concerned neighbors that Susan had fainted, and later in the day he had explained that she was back, but resting.

  She had covered for him often enough, calling his boss and saying he had the flu when all he really had was a touch of “inebriadiation sickness,” as he had called hangovers.

  In the ninety-one days since her death, he had been making excuses—“She’s visiting her mother,” “She’s in the tub,” “She’s asleep,” “Her boss called her in to work early today”—to explain each instance of her absence. He had been drinking instead of going to work for a while, and so by mid-afternoon or so he often half believed the excuses himself, and when he left the house, he’d often find himself pausing before he locked the front door behind him, unthinkingly waiting for her to catch up, imagining her fumbling with her purse or giving her hair a couple of final brush strokes.

  He had not looked in the stove, for he knew he wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of the cup cooked dry.

  This was only his third beer for today, and it was already after noon, so he took a deep gulp.

  Whom had Archimedes seen? “Before the sun was even up”—Crane had been asleep then, dreaming again about that long-ago game on the lake. Had the dream conjured up some frail ghost of Susan?

  Or could the house itself generate some replica of her?

  At this moment, as he stood swaying in the middle of the kitchen, it didn’t strike him as completely impossible—or at least not inconceivable. Her personality was certainly imprinted on every room. Crane’s foster father had quitclaimed the house to him in 1969, ten years before Susan had moved in, but neither the young Crane nor his foster father before that had seen a table as anything more than a thing to stack stuff on, nor any sort of sturdy chair as being preferable to another; pictures on the walls had just been snapshots or pages scissored from art books, thumbtacked to the drywall.

  Now there were curtains and carpets and unmottled walls and refinished bookcases that didn’t look as though they’d been bought in thrift stores—though in fact most of them had been.

  He sniffed the warm kitchen air, which still seemed to carry the scent of coffee. “Susan?” he whispered.

  There was a faint rustling from down the hall, probably in the bedroom.

  He jumped and lost his footing and sat down heavily on the floor, and cold beer splashed out onto the tiles. “Nothing,” he said softly, not daring to believe that he was talking to anyone besides himself. “I’m cleaning it up.” He bent forward and wiped up the foamy drops with his flannel-sleeved forearm.

  He knew ghosts were impossible—but lately a lot of impossible things had seemed to happen to him.

  On a rainy midnight recently he had been sitting in his chair in the living-room corner—he could never sleep on rainy nights—and he’d been absently staring across the room at the dead philodendron hanging limp over the rim of its pot; and suddenly he had lost all sense of depth and scale—or, more precisely, he had seen that distance and size were illusions. Behind the apparent diversities that distinguished plant tendrils from things like river deltas and veins and electric arcs, there were, dimly perceptible in the fog of true randomness, shapes that stood constant, shapes that made up the invisible and impalpable skeleton of the universe.

  He had been holding a glass of scotch, and he took a deep gulp—and the whisky seemed to become a whirlpool in him, sucking him down into some kind of well that was no more physical than the abstractable shape of the philodendron had been; and then the scope widened and his individuality was gone, and he knew, because knowing was part of being in this place, that this was the level everyone shared, the very deep and broad pool—the common water table—that extended beneath all the individual wells that were human minds.

  There were universal, animating shapes down here, too, far away in the deepest regions—vast figures as eternal-but-alive as Satan entombed in the ice in Dante’s Inferno, and they were ritualistically changing their relationships to one another, like planets moving around the sun, in a dance that had been old long before the early hominids had found things to fear in the patterns of stars and the moon in the night sky.

  And then Crane was nothing but a wave of horror rushing away, toward the comfort of close boundaries, up toward the bright, active glow that was consciousness.

  And somehow when he surfaced, he had found himself in a blue-lit restaurant, a forkful of fettucine Alfredo halfway to his mouth. Smells of garlic and wine rode the coldly air-conditioned breeze, and someone was languidly playing “The Way We Were” on a piano. Something was wrong with the set of his body—he looked down and saw that he had female breasts.

  He felt his mouth open and say, in an old woman’s voice, “Wow, one of them’s ripe—I’m getting a real clear flash from him.”

  I came up through t
he wrong well, he thought, and forced himself away, back down into the blackness—and when he was once more aware of his surroundings, he was in his own living room again, with the rain thumping against the dark window and scotch spilled all down his shirt.

  And only a few days ago he had been sitting on the front porch with Mavranos, and Arky had waved his beer can at all the Hondas and Toyotas driving busily up Main Street. “Suits,” Arky had said, “going to offices. Ain’t you glad we don’t have to wake up to alarm clocks and scoot off to shuffle papers all day?”

  Crane had nodded drunkenly. “Dei bene fecerunt inopis me pusilli,” he had said, “quodque fecerunt animi.”

  Mavranos had stared at him. “What seems to be the problem?”

  “Hmm?”

  “What did you say, just then?”

  “Uh…I said, ‘The gods did well when they made me lacking in ideas and in spirit.’”

  “I didn’t know you spoke Latin. That was Latin, wasn’t it?”

  Crane had taken a deep sip of beer to quell a moment of panic. “Oh. Sure. A little. You know, Catholic schools and all.”

  Actually he had never been a Catholic, and knew no Latin beyond legal terms picked up from mystery novels. And what he’d said didn’t sound like any part of the Catholic Mass he’d ever heard about.

  Sitting on the kitchen floor now, he put the beer down and wondered if he was simply going insane—and if it made any difference.

  He thought about going into the bedroom.

  What if there’s some form of her in there, lying on the bed?

  The thought both frightened and excited him. Not yet, he decided—that might be like opening an oven door before a soufflé is done. The house probably needs time to exude all of her accumulated essence. Fossils need time to form.

  He struggled wearily to his feet and brushed the gray hair back from his forehead. And if it’s not quite her, he thought, I won’t mind. Just so it’s close enough to fool a drunk.