Last Call

by Tim Powers

  A moment later Ozzie blinked and rubbed his eyes, wondering if he had suffered a concussion when the car door hit him, for he seemed to be seeing double—next to the little boy crouched on the walkway, and half overlapping him, was a semi-transparent duplicate image of the boy.

  Then, though young Oliver didn’t move, the duplicate image stood up, turned away, and stepped into invisibility.

  Ozzie was having trouble breathing, and when he breathed out sharply, he realized that his nose was bleeding. There must be blood all down the front of his shirt.

  He finally hobbled his way to Oliver, who was kneeling now. Ozzie knelt beside him. The boy’s face was red and twisted with violent sobbing, and when Ozzie put his arms around him, he clung to the old man as if he were the only other person in the world.

  In the laundry room of the apartment building on the other side of Sun Avenue, Diana braced herself against a washing machine and waited for her breathing and heartbeat to slow down.

  She was too stunned by the almighty slam that had shaken the street under her feet to cry, but in her head was nothing but an endlessly repeating wail of Hans, Hans, Hans…

  At last she was able to breathe through her nose, and she straightened up. Mostly because she found herself facing a washing machine, she fished three quarters out of her pocket, laid them in the holes in the machine’s handle, and pushed it in.

  The machine went on with a clunk, and she could hear water running inside the thing. The still air smelled of bleach and detergent.

  Hans, you damned, arrogant, posing fool, she thought—you didn’t deserve a whole lot, but you deserved better than this.

  She forced herself not to remember the times, in bed but also cooking dinner or out with Scat and Oliver on a holiday, when he had been thoughtful and tender and humorous.

  “Was that a bomb?” came a woman’s voice behind her.

  Diana turned around. A white-haired woman pushing an aluminum walker was angling in through the door, kicking along in front of her a plastic basket full of clothes.

  Diana knew she should say something, seem curious. “I don’t know,” she said. “Uh…it sounded like one.”

  “I wish I could go look. I was shoving this stuff down the breezeway, and boom, I see all this shit go flying into the air! Probably it was a dope factory.”

  “A dope factory.”

  “PCP,” the old woman said. “Could you put my clothes in here? It kills me to bend over.”

  “Sure.” Diana stuffed the yellow blanket into her tight hip pocket, then hauled the clothes out of the basket and dumped them into a washer.

  “They need chemicals like ether and stuff to make their PCP, and they gotta cook it. And since they’re dopers, they get careless. Boom!” The old woman looked at the other machine, which was spinning its empty drum. “Honey, these machines are for tenants only.”

  “I just moved in.” Diana dug a twenty-dollar bill out of her pocket. “I don’t have a car yet. Could I pay somebody here to drive me to work? It’s just—just over at the college.”

  The old woman eyed the bill. “I can drive you, if you can wait for my stuff to get done, and if you don’t mind being seen in a beat-up ten-year-old Plymouth.”

  “I don’t mind the car, but could we go now?”

  “What about your clothes?”

  Diana waved at a wooden shelf on the white wall. “I’m sure the next person to use the machine will just put ’em aside.”

  “I’m sure.” The old woman took the twenty. “Okay, if you’ll fish my stuff out again and carry it all back to my apartment for me. I can do mine later, I guess.”

  “Great,” said Diana. Her elbows and knees had begun shaking, and she knew she was going to break down crying very soon, and she didn’t want it to happen while she was still anywhere near this tract of unlucky celestial bodies.

  Crane was about to leave his room at the Circus Circus when the telephone rang.

  He had left a note for Mavranos, who was off somewhere chasing his statistical phase-change, and had tucked the .357 into his belt and zipped up his nylon jacket, and now he paused with his hand on the doorknob and stared at the ringing phone.

  Ozzie or Arky, he thought. Even Diana doesn’t know we’re here. If it’s Arky, he’ll want me to go help him in some fool way, and I’ve got to get out to Spider Joe’s trailer. Of course, if it’s Ozzie, he might have some news about Diana, some way I can help her, some way I can maybe at least fractionally redeem myself with her.

  For Diana, he thought as he started back toward the phone, I’ll put Spider Joe off for another day.

  He picked up the phone. “Hello?”

  At first he couldn’t tell who it was—only that it was someone sobbing.

  “What?” said Crane uneasily. “Speak!”

  “It’s Ozzie, son,” came the old man’s voice, choked with tears. “I’m at the police station again, and they want you to come down, too. And Archimedes.”

  “Why? Quick!”

  “She’s dead, Scott.” The old man sniffed. “Diana’s dead. She went back to her apartment to get something, and they blew her up. I was there, I saw it—I would have followed her in, but I had Oliver with me—oh God, what good have I been to either one of you?”

  Diana was dead.

  All the tension and hope went out of Crane, and when he spoke, it was with the gentle relaxation of total despair. “You’ve…been a good father, Ozzie. Everybody dies, but nobody gets a father better than you’ve been to both of us. She loved you, and I love you, and we both always knew you loved us.” He sighed, and then yawned. “Oz—go home now. Go back to the things you said you liked, your Louis L’Amour novels and your Kaywoodie pipes.” Go gentle into that good night, he thought; rest easy with the dying of the light.

  The telephone receiver was fatiguingly heavy, but Crane hung it up without a sound.

  For a while he sat on the bed, hardly thinking at all. He knew that the police wanted to talk to him and would eventually knock on his door, but he had no impulse either to seek them out or to avoid them.

  The telephone was ringing again. He let it ring.

  He had read that the weight of the air at sea level was fourteen pounds per square inch. Vaguely he wondered if he would be able to stand up against that, or even keep from falling backward across the bed.

  Eventually a smell broke through to him. A morning smell, he knew what it was—hot coffee.

  He turned his head toward the bedside table—and then started violently.

  A steaming coffee cup stood there beside the clock, a white McDonald’s “Good Morning” cup like the ones he and Susan had somehow acquired half a dozen of.

  He stood up and left the room.

  The police might come looking for him at the carousel bar, so he took the elevator all the way down to the ground floor and walked out the front doors of the Circus Circus, across the broad parking lot to where a giant white stone ape waved at the traffic coursing south on the brightly sunlit expanse of Las Vegas Boulevard. He flagged a cab and asked to be taken to the Flamingo.

  When it dropped him off, he walked slowly across the crowded sidewalk and up the steps and through the brass-framed glass doors into the casino, then threaded his way through the sudden carpeted dimness between the slot machines and the Blackjack tables to the bar at the back.

  “A shot of Wild Turkey,” he told the waitress who eventually strode over to his corner table, “and a Bud chaser. Oh, and could I have a telephone brought over to this table? I’m expecting a call.”

  The bar was nearly empty at this early morning hour, and was brightly enough lit so that the casino floor beyond the open arch was a darkness full of meaningless clanging and flashing lights.

  “Honey, I can bring you a phone, but you better call whoever it is. We got a lot of lines—the odds are bad on you getting any call.”

  Crane just nodded and waved.

  He leaned back and looked nervously around at the framed pictures on the walls. My dad
’s place, he thought. I wonder if he still comes back here, if he still has a hidey-hole for things that might hurt him. If so, it might be anywhere. It couldn’t be in the same place, that hole in the stucco under the front steps; those steps are gone, along with the Champagne Tower and Siegel’s rose garden and the front lawn. Maybe he does still come back—maybe he’ll come back here sometime in this very body of mine, once he’s taken it.

  Crane thought about his father, who had taken him as a little boy on fishing trips out on Lake Mead, and had taught him about the tides of cards; and who had then hurt Crane, and gone out of his life forever.

  The shot and the beer arrived with the telephone, and after Crane paid the waitress, he just stared for a while at the three objects on the dark tabletop.

  So much for the target that shoots back, he thought. So much for moving all-in. I’m about to step out of cover empty-handed; fold after calling all but the last terrible raise.

  What was it Ozzie said?

  They blew her up.

  I suppose, Crane thought, that the reason I didn’t feel her death through our old psychic link was that she didn’t feel it either. Instantaneous destruction—what’s to convey?

  He lifted the shot glass and stared at the amber whiskey. I could just not do this, he thought; I could put this glass down and get a cab to the police station. Call the raise, and keep on living.

  For what?

  I didn’t share her pain, because there wasn’t any. But maybe I’m sharing her death.

  He drained the shot glass in one long sip, feeling the rich, good burn of the stuff warm his throat and his stomach. Then he drank half of the icy Budweiser and sat back in the canvas chair, blinking and blank-eyed and waiting.

  The telephone in front of him rang, and he lifted the receiver to his ear.

  “Hi, Susan,” he said. He inhaled, glanced indifferently around the bar for some delaying factor and found none, and exhaled. “Can you forgive me?”

  And in the lobby and casino and restaurants of the Riviera, over the babble of the guests and the gamblers and the ceaseless rattling of chips, the disembodied public-address voice called, “Paging Oliver Crane; paging Oliver Crane,” for a while, and then gave up on that and went on to other announcements and summonings.

  BOOK THREE

  The Play of the Hands

  But there was heard among the holy hymns

  A voice as of the waters, for she dwells

  Down in a deep; calm, whatsoever storms

  May shake the world, and when the surface rolls,

  Hath power to walk the waters like our Lord.

  —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, Idylls of the King

  All in a hot and copper sky,

  The bloody Sun, at noon,

  Right up above the mast did stand,

  No bigger than the Moon.

  —SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

  NANO: Now prithee, sweet soul, in all thy variation

  Which body would’st thou choose, to keep up thy station?

  ANDROGYNO: Troth, this I am in: even here would I tarry.

  NANO: ’Cause here the delight of each sex thou canst vary?

  ANDROGYNO: Alas, those pleasures be stale and forsaken.

  —BEN JONSON, Volpone

  Hopes die, and their tombs are for token

  That the grief as the joy of them ends

  Ere time that breaks all men has broken

  The faith between friends.

  —ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE, Dedication

  CHAPTER 28

  Bedtime at Last

  Though he hadn’t been to Las Vegas for twenty years before this trip, Ozzie knew this sort of off-the-Strip bar. In the early evening it would have been full of husky construction workers downing their after-work beers. Now the clientele was stage hands and theater people, and cold white wine was the most commonly poured drink. After midnight the prostitutes would drift in for whatever it was that they favored.

  For Ozzie this was the eye of the storm, the period of calm between the first fight and the last.

  Ozzie peeled open the pack of Chesterfields he’d bought from the cigarette machine in the corner and shook one out. He had quit smoking in 1966, but he had never quite forgotten the sometimes profound satisfaction of lighting up and hauling smoke deep into his lungs.

  The bartender tossed a book of matches onto the bar beside Ozzie’s mug of beer.

  Ozzie gave him a tired smile. “Thanks.” He struck a match and puffed the cigarette alight.

  Before he put them away, he took a last look at the other choices.

  A message in the personals column of the Sun or the Review-Journal, he thought. No, Scott won’t be reading papers.

  And maybe, he thought then, I’ve done enough by leaving the message at the Circus Circus desk: I’ve left young Oliver with a woman named Helen Sully in Searchlight. She’s in the book. Diana’s dying wish was that you take care of her two sons. It’s what you can do—do it. Love, Ozzie.

  But Scott might not go back to the Circus Circus.

  Ozzie sipped the cold beer and frowned, remembering how the fat little boy had begged him to stay with him.

  “You’re not too old to be our dad,” Oliver had said tearfully as Ozzie had driven Diana’s Mustang south on the 95 this afternoon, toward Searchlight. “Scat and I need a dad.” The boy had still been subdued and trembling, all the arrogance knocked out of him by the explosion of his home, the death of his mother.

  “I’m going to try to get you a dad, Oliver,” Ozzie had said. “Sorry—do you mind me calling you Oliver?”

  “It’s your name,” the boy had said, “I don’t mind it. Don’t ever call me…that other name, that I used to want. That was the—I don’t even know. I broke that off and chased it away.”

  The Sully woman lived in a big ranch-style house just outside the city limits of Searchlight. She had worked with Diana at a pizza parlor four years ago, and had liked her and kept up the friendship, and she had six boys of her own; she cheerfully agreed to take care of either or both of Diana’s boys until their uncle would get around to showing up.

  I broke that off and chased it away.

  Ozzie now took a deep drag on the cigarette, and he didn’t cough. His lungs remembered smoke, had evidently wondered what had become of it. And the kid wasn’t speaking figuratively, he thought as he sipped some more of the beer. I saw the Bitin Dog personality walk away, in front of that blown-up apartment.

  No, Scott might not get the message at the hotel, and an ad in the paper won’t work. He finished the beer and stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray.

  He caught the bartender’s eye. “Have you got a deck of cards around?” Ozzie asked.

  “Think so.” The bartender dug around among the litter by the cash register, then tossed a box onto the bar in front of Ozzie. There was a color photo of a smiling naked woman on the front of the box, and when Ozzie opened it and tipped the worn cards out, he saw that the backs of the cards were all the same picture.

  “Hot stuff,” he said dryly.

  “You bet. You know any card tricks?”

  “No.” Ozzie wondered why he had not ever learned to do anything with the cards besides make a cautious living. “I was always too scared of them,” he said. He looked up at the bartender, noticing that though the man was middle-aged and his apron was tight over an ample belly, he was younger than Scott, and incalculably younger than Ozzie himself. No time to spare, he thought. “Can I buy these from you?” he asked, tapping the sad, worn deck.

  The bartender’s look of puzzlement became half-concealed contempt. “You can keep ’em, Gramps,” he said, turning away and staring at the television set on a shelf up under the ceiling.

  Ozzie smiled sourly to himself. He thinks I’m going to go back to some hotel room and…and turn some card tricks, he thought, with this pathetic, repetitive paper harem. Oh well. One bartender’s opinion of me is a pretty small factor in all this.

  But he
could feel that he was reddening, and he touched the carefully tied knot of his tie self-consciously.

  North, he remembered, was to his left. He shuffled the deck quickly seven times, then laid out four cards in a cross. The Jack of Hearts was the card at the north end of the cross.

  North it is, he thought, levering himself up off the barstool with his aluminum cane and then digging in his pocket for money to pay for the beer. As always, he left a precisely calculated fifteen percent tip.

  Crane shifted in his chair and watched the bet go around the green felt table.

  He was in the cardroom of Binion’s Horseshoe, right next to the doorway that had been opened in the wall when the Horseshoe had taken over the Mint next door. From the paneled cardroom walls looked down framed photographs of members of the Poker Hall of Fame—Wild Bill Hickock, Johnny Moss, Doyle Brunson—and as Crane sipped his newest bourbon on the rocks, he wondered what the old masters thought of his playing.

  He had opened under the gun—the first player to the dealer’s left—with three Jacks. Tonight, no matter where he played, he couldn’t seem to get any bad hands—and now three other players were calling his fifty-dollar bet. That was good; he’d draw two to his Jacks, and the other players would probably figure he was so drunk that he might well be drawing to a pair and a kicker—or even to a three Flush, or nothing but dreams—instead of high Trips.

  It was true that he was drunk. The field of his vision seemed to be shifting up all the time, like a television with bad vertical control, so that he constantly had to be bringing his gaze down to focus on anything.

  And whenever he looked at his cards, he had to close his false right eye, or else through it he would see his hand as consisting of Tarot cards. Not his real father’s lethal deck, thank God, nor even the one that poor Joshua had tried to read for him, but a deck he had dreamed of—the deck in which the Two of Batons was a cherub’s head speared through by two metal rods.