Last Call

by Tim Powers

  …and between the leafy arms of an oval wreath he saw himself, naked, frozen in a moment of running with one leg bent, while around the outside of the wreath stood an angel, a bull, a lion, and an eagle; and then the perspective changed and the figure that was himself was upside-down, hanging by the straight leg while gravity folded the other;

  …and he saw dozens of other figures: Arky Mavranos, walking away across the desert, carrying a bundle of swords as long as stretcher-poles; old Ozzie standing on a sandy hill and leaning on a single sword; Crane’s dead wife, Susan, hanging what seemed to be a basketful of hubcaps on a branch of a dead tree…

  …and he saw a bodiless, winged cherub’s head, pierced through and through with two metallic-looking batons.

  The cherub’s one eye was staring straight into Crane’s one eye, and he screamed and tried to run, but his muscles wouldn’t work; he couldn’t turn away or even close his eyes. There was nearly no light, and he couldn’t breathe; he and the cherub head were far underwater, hidden from the sun and the moon and the stars and the figure that danced on the far cliffs, and he moaned in fear that the thing would open its mouth and speak, for he knew he would have to do what it said.

  The dream had become trivial and stiflingly repetitious after that. He had seemed to be in a wide, airless, natural underground pool, trying to find a well up which he could swim to the surface, and there were a lot of wells, but every time he made his way kicking and paddling and bubbling up to the surface of one of them, he found that he was in someone’s house—a cigarette would be trailing smoke from an ashtray, or fresh clothes would be draped over a chair and the shower would be running—and, alarmed at the thought of being caught in someone else’s place, he had, over and over again, submerged himself and let the air out of his lungs and kicked back down into the darkness of the common pool that underlay all the individual wells. Eventually the hopeless repetition had left him awake, staring up at the white plastic smoke-alarm on the flocked motel ceiling.

  The last dream house had been the one where the lance head and the cup lay in a pool of color-stained sunlight on green felt. Without even needing to touch them, he had known that they weren’t really there, didn’t belong there, and were there even in this illusory form only because there was not, today, any place where they belonged.

  Now Crane looked at the digital clock on the bedside table. 2:38 P.M. And there was a note on the table, held down against the air conditioner breeze by a Coors can.

  He and Ozzie and Mavranos had checked into this motel at about six-thirty this morning, he recalled now. It was a little ten-unit place somewhere out past the Gold Coast on the wrong side of I-15, he remembered, and a “credit card imprint” had been necessary to get a room. Crane had two Visas in his wallet, one for Scott Crane and one for Susan Iverson-Crane, and Ozzie had made him use Susan’s, to avoid being traced by anyone looking up the name Crane. Scott.

  Crane and Mavranos had let the old man have the bed, and had dragged in a couple of sleeping bags from the Suburban for themselves.

  Crane wriggled out of his sleeping bag now and stood up, wincing at the hot pain in his bandaged leg.

  Something was wrong. What?

  He tried to remember all the events of the last forty-eight hours. Gardena, he thought, and Baker, with that weird kid who played Go Fish, and the beer I sneaked in the car…Whiskey Pete’s, and the beer and bourbon I got on the way to the men’s room…that pickup truck, the man with the hair and the voice, and his friend Max with the gun…the streets around the downtown area, and a dozen goddamn grocery stores, not one of which employed anyone named Diana….

  None of it was particularly reassuring, but neither did any of it seem to call for the degree of dread that was speeding his heartbeat and chilling his face. He felt as though he had overlooked something, failed to think of something, and now someone who had depended on him was…frightened, alone with bad people, being hurt.

  Caused by me.

  He picked up the note. It was in ball-point ink on a piece of a grocery bag.

  Archy and I have gone to check out a casino or two, it read. Seemed like you could use more sleep. Be back around four.—Oz.

  Crane looked at the telephone, and after a moment he realized that his open hand was hovering over the instrument. What is it? he asked himself uneasily. Do you want to call somebody, or are you waiting for a call?

  His mouth was dry, and his heart was pounding.

  Outside, a white Porsche pulled into the motel parking lot.

  Al Funo stepped out of the car and stared around quizzically at the row of windows and doors, each door a different bright color. Poor old Crane, he thought. This is where he stays when he’s in Vegas?

  He tucked his sunglasses up into his styled sandy-colored hair as he walked across the lot to ward the office. He knew he was going to have to approach Crane a bit more carefully this time. The bullet through the windshield, or something, had apparently spooked him into some elementary caution, and if Funo hadn’t gone to the extra trouble of using a jewelery store’s ID number to get the details of Crane’s credit file from TRW, he’d never have learned about the Iverson-Crane Visa card.

  Bells on strings clanged as he pushed open the office door and stepped into the air-conditioned dimness. The floor was shiny green linoleum, and aside from a standing rack of pamphlets and coupon books for tourists, a green vinyl couch was the only furniture.

  Just not any class at all, Funo thought sadly.

  When a white-haired woman appeared from the little office in the back, he smiled at her with genuine affection. “Hi, I’d like a room, please—probably just for one night.”

  As he was filling out the form she handed him, he said, “A friend of mine is supposed to be staying here, too—Crane, Scott Crane? We had to drive out separate; I couldn’t get the extra day off work.”

  “Sure,” said the old woman. “Crane. Fortyish guy, with two buddies, one with a mustache and the other real old. They’re in six, but they just a little bit ago drove off.”

  “In his red pickup?”

  “No, it was a big blue thing, like a cross between a station wagon and a Jeep.” She yawned. “I could put you next to them, in five or seven.”

  “Hey, that’d be great, thanks. Heh-heh, listen, don’t tell them I’m here, okay? I want to surprise them.”

  She shrugged.

  Funo gave her his MasterCard rather than his American Express because he knew she would call it in; that’s how he had found Crane after all. This was becoming expensive, in both money spent and work time lost. He wondered if there was some way to make it pay, to get it out of the category of auto-assignment. He thought about the gray Jag, and the telephone number that he had got with the registration data on the Jag’s Nevada license plate number. That fat man driving it had been after something. And he had seemed to have money—but what did he want?

  When Funo signed the draft, he noticed the date: 4/1/90. April Fool’s Day.

  It upset him. It seemed to mock what he was doing, make him seem insignificant.

  He gazed at the old woman until she looked up, and then he gave her a wink and his best boyish smile.

  She just stared at him, as if he were a stain on the wall, a stain that might resemble a person if you squinted at it in a certain way.

  He was glad he had already signed the voucher, for his hands were trembling now.

  Mavranos drove out of the multilevel parking structure behind the Flamingo and steered the big Suburban along the broad driveway, past the taxi stand and the loading zone toward the Strip. He took it slow over the wide speed bumps, but still the car rattled as it crested the lines of raised asphalt, and the ice shook and swashed in the ice chest. The Strip was clear either way for a hundred yards when he got to the street, and he made his left turn as easily as he would have in some quiet Midwest suburb.

  “What are the odds of that?” he asked Ozzie, forcing himself to squint intently and not smile. “Making a left so easy in front
of the Flamingo?”

  “Christ,” wailed the old man, “you’re looking for big statistical waves, okay? If you start watching for, I don’t know, numbers on license plates, or two fat ladies wearing the same flowered shorts, you’re—”

  Mavranos laughed. “I’m kidding you, Oz! But I swear a couple of things back there signified.”

  They had watched a Craps table at the Flamingo for a while, had walked across the street to listen for patterns in the ringing and clattering of the slots at Caesars Palace, and then had written down a hundred consecutive numbers that came up on a Roulette wheel at the Mirage. Twice, once crossing the street west and once east, Mavranos had simultaneously heard a car horn honk and a dog bark and had looked up to catch hard sun glare off a windshield, so that for half a minute afterward he’d seen a dark red ball everywhere he looked, and at Caesars, three different strangers had whispered, “Seven,” as they shouldered past him. He had eagerly asked Ozzie if he thought these coincidences might mean anything, and the old man had dismissed them all impatiently.

  Now, stopped for a red light in the right-turn lane at the Flamingo Road traffic signal, Mavranos dug out of his pocket the penciled list of Roulette numbers and scanned them.

  “Light’s green,” said Ozzie after a few moments.

  “How I need a drink…” said Mavranos thoughtfully, taking his foot off the brake and turning the wheel but still staring at the list.

  “Watch the road!” said Ozzie sharply. “You’ve got a beer between your knees, as usual, and frankly I think you drink way too much.”

  “No,” said Mavranos, “I mean pi, you know pi?

  Ozzie was staring at him. “You want a pie? Instead of a drink? What the hell kind of pie? Can’t you—”

  Mavranos passed the list to the old man, eyed the traffic, and stepped on the gas pedal. “Here. Pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, you know? Radius times pi squared, you’ve heard that kind of talk. Pi’s what they call an irrational number, three and an infinitely long string of numbers after the decimal point. Well, there’s a sentence you memorize, a mnemonic thing, to remember the numbers that are pi, out to something like a dozen places. I read it in a Rudy Rucker book. It starts, ‘How I need a drink…’—that’s three, one, four, one, five, get it? Number of letters in each word. But I can’t remember the rest of the mnemonic sentence.”

  They had crossed over 1-15. Ozzie squinted through the dusty windshield and pointed. “That’s our motel on the right, don’t miss the driveway. Archimedes, I really am not following—”

  “See where the Roulette numbers were three, one, four, fifteen in the middle there? Look at the paper, I can see where I’m going. What numbers come after that?”

  “Uh…nine, twenty-six, five, thirty-five, eight…”

  Mavranos turned into the lot, parked near their room, and turned off the engine.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I’m pretty sure that’s pi. Well now that’s got to signify, don’t it? Goddamn Roulette wheel just spontaneously starts reciting off pi? I wonder what numbers the other tables were listing. The square root of two, I suppose, or the square root of minus one.”

  Ozzie pulled on the handle and pushed his door open, then stepped carefully down to the hot pavement. “I don’t know,” he said, frowning, when Mavranos had locked his own door and walked around the car, “I guess so, if those numbers are this pi business of yours…but it seems to me this isn’t the thing you’re looking for. This is something else; something else is going on here—”

  A sporty-looking young man was taking an overnight bag out of the back seat of a white Porsche in the next parking space. He was studiedly looking away from them, so he didn’t notice that Ozzie had stepped forward, and he hit the old man in the shin with his bag when he swung it out of the little car.

  “Watch it,” said Ozzie irritably.

  The young man muttered and hurried to the door of number seven, rattling a key against the lock.

  “Goddamn zombies, you got in this town,” Ozzie remarked to Mavranos.

  Mavranos wondered if their neighbor had heard the remark. A moment later the young man was inside his room and had slammed the door hard.

  I guess he did hear it, Mavranos thought.

  A wind was blowing southeast from the jagged Virgin Mountains, tossing the yellow brittlebrush flowers on the miles of canyonside and rippling the wide, deep blue waters of Lake Mead. Vacationers were awkwardly bumping the docks with their rented boats at the Mead Resort Circle, and gasoline made a volatile perfume on the breeze and rainbowed the surface of the water around the docks and slips.

  Ray-Joe Pogue gunned his jet boat straight out across the water for a hundred yards, away from the waterfront grocery store and bait shop, but the wind-raised waves made the lake choppier out here, and after a few seconds of being slammed up and down on the tuck-and-roll upholstery of the seat, he took his foot off the gas and let the rented jet boat rock in the water under the empty blue sky.

  In the sudden relative silence he squinted around at the wide-scattered islands and the far reaches of the Boulder Basin coastline. There were a lot of boats out on this Sunday afternoon, but he didn’t imagine he’d have any problem finding a secluded shore where he could sink the head. The metal box had bounced off the seat beside him onto the floor, and he carefully picked it up and put it back and laid the coiled line on top of it.

  The head in the metal box.

  He had killed several people in his life, and it had never bothered him, and so he was surprised at how much it had hurt him to kill Max. He felt disoriented now, as if he were seriously hungover, and he felt uneasy whenever he looked at the box.

  He had met Max in high school—at one time Max had been in love with Nardie, Pogue’s Asian half-sister—and he and Max had for years been preparing for this summer, this election year, this once-every-two-decades changing of the king. Max was to have been his…who, Merlin, Lancelot, Gawain? But last night, after failing to find the mysterious bus vehicle on I-15, Pogue had ordered Max to pull over and get out of the pickup truck, and had then fired the 12-gauge shotgun into the man’s back.

  He shuddered now in the harsh sunlight, the wind cold on his face, and he didn’t look at the box. He gripped the white plastic gunwale of the jet boat and stared out across the water.

  He had had no choice. Ideally he should not have had to perform this old Phoenician Adonis ritual, but there were too many uncertainties right now. Some jack had got past him last night on the highway, and there had been something suspicious about those three guys, the pirate, the old man, and the retard, in that blue Suburban with all the ribbons and crap all over it. And he couldn’t get a line on Nardie Dinh; for months now he hadn’t picked up any of her dreams. How the hell could she not dream? Was there some drug that suppressed it?

  He had to find her, and before Easter. As his half-sister she was the only one who could serve as the moon goddess, his queen. All the fertility gods and kings mated with women who were in some way their sisters—Tammuz and Belili, Osiris and Isis, even King Arthur and Morgan le Fay—and he had thought he had effectively broken her will during the month-long confinement in that parlor house outside Tonopah. The diet regimen he’d had her on, the blood rituals, the room with the twenty-two pictures—he had groomed her perfectly to assume the goddess-hood, and then, when he had thought she was the broken sleepwalker he wanted, she had knifed the house’s madam and stolen a car and fled to Las Vegas. And now she wasn’t even dreaming anymore.

  He squinted across the waves at a rocky little island a couple of miles away, and then looked at his Lake Mead map, folded to show Boulder Basin. Deadman’s Island, the place was called. That sounded appropriate.

  He turned the wheel, then stepped on the gas. The acceleration pushed him back into the seat, and as he straightened out of the turn, the wind threw the high rooster tail of spray out ahead of him, and heavy drops of water stung his face and knocked his black hair down onto his forehead.
<
br />   He dug out his comb as he steered one-handed, and he swept the hair back up where it belonged. From now until Easter, physical perfection was going to be absolutely essential.

  The man who takes the throne can have no flaws.

  He circled the island in a series of jackrabbit starts, and on the far side he found a little rocky beach with no picnickers on it. He got in fairly close and then threw over the cinder-block that was the anchor.

  Reluctantly he picked up the box, then climbed over the gunwale and waded ashore through the cold water, holding the box high.

  In ancient Alexandria, Phoenicians had enacted the annual death of Tammuz by throwing a papyrus head into the sea, and seven days later the summer current invariably left the head at Byblos, where they’d fish it out and celebrate the god’s resurrection. It was during the interval when the head was in the sea that the location and identity and even the existence of the fertility god were in doubt.

  These next two weeks, from this April Fool’s Day until Easter, would be the tricky period this cycle, and Pogue was determined that it would be his own head—symbolically—that would be taken out of the water on Easter Sunday.

  Max’s poor severed head was wearing Pogue’s Ray-Bans and had one of Pogue’s ties knotted around the stump of its neck, and of course Max had shared Pogue’s and Nardie’s dietary restrictions, eating no red meat nor anything that had been cooked in an iron pan and drinking no alcohol. That was why Pogue had not been able to simply behead some random tourist for this. The head had to be the closest possible representation of Pogue’s own.

  His hands were shaking. He wanted to open the box and reknot the tie. Max had never learned how to tie one, and Pogue could remember a dozen occasions when Max had brought a tie to him, and Pogue had had to tie it around his own neck and then loosen it and pull it off over his head and give it to his friend.

  When I knotted the tie for him this morning at dawn beside Boulder Highway, he thought now, that was the last time I’ll ever do that chore for him.