Last Call

by Tim Powers

  He blinked and looked around at the complacent Spanish-style houses and the green lawns. “Hmm? Oh—no, it’s not anything like it.” His voice sounded oddly flat in his head. He was making an effort to talk normally, to talk as he would have if he had not just…killed a man. “This is the only place in Nevada where gambling’s not legal,” he went on doggedly. “In fact, hard liquor only became legal here in ’69.”

  “No gambling at all?”

  “Nope.” He grinned stiffly and shook his head. “’Cept for a—a certain Poker game on a houseboat once every twenty years or so.”

  And that starts up tomorrow night, he thought. And when this latest series of games is done, come Holy Saturday, he’ll assume this old body of mine, unless I’ve stopped him somehow.

  On the radio Janis Joplin was wailing, but not for him.

  “Huh,” said Mavranos. “Nothing to do me any good. Maybe I can get in a game of penny-lagging.”

  Crane glanced at Mavranos, feeling oppressed now about him, too. Mavranos was definitely thinner and paler than he had been when they’d driven out from Los Angeles, and now he was never without the bandanna tied up tight around his throat. I wonder, Crane thought, if Trumbill could, possibly, have cured Arky’s cancer. Surely that was just a desperate bluff.

  “Left up ahead there, on Lakeshore Road,” Crane said.

  “We’re not going to the dam?”

  “No. The nearest marinas and beaches are up the west shore of the lake. That’s where we can rent scuba gear and a boat. At the dam all you can do is look.”

  “I wanted to see the dam.”

  “We’ll go see it later, okay?” said Crane shortly. “Later in the week. You can buy a T-shirt and everything.”

  “It’s one of the seven man-made wonders of the world.”

  “Yeah? What are the others?”

  “I don’t know. Montezooma’s Revenge at Knott’s Berry Farm’s one, I think.”

  “We’ll get you a T-shirt there, too, on the way home.”

  Their laughter was brief and tense. Mavranos finished his beer and popped another. Poor dead Janis Joplin howled on out of the speakers that were hung on adhesive tape from the roof struts behind the front seat.

  At a dive shop near the Government Dock Crane rented a new outfit of U.S. Divers scuba gear and a full wet suit with hood and boots and a gear bag to carry it all in. They rented a speedboat at the Lake Mead Resort Circle, and by noon they were gunning out across the blue face of the lake under the empty blue sky.

  After a few minutes they had left behind the water-skiers and had got out to where the wind was raising random choppy waves, and Crane pulled back on the Morris throttle, reversing the engine and bringing the boat to an uneven, rocking halt. Mavranos had been hanging on to the dashboard bar during the bouncy, spray-flinging ride, and now he took off his Greek fisherman’s cap, whacked it against his knee, and put it on again.

  “You through shakin’ us up?” he asked in the sudden quiet. “I’m gonna step back to the ice chest, but not if you’re gonna bounce me right out.”

  “Yeah, I’ll take it easy.”

  They were alone out on the water under the arching, cloudless sky, but Crane had to focus his eye to stop seeing the fat man’s body jumping and bursting as the bullets hit, and he yawned so that his ears would pop and he would blessedly hear only the wind and the idling engine.

  Well, he thought, here I am. What do I do now, just jump in?

  A little red fishing boat rocked on the water a hundred yards away, and the man in it seemed to be looking at them. Crane wondered if their crashing arrival out here had scared off all the fish.

  Mavranos came back and sat down in the bucket seat, a fresh beer foaming in his fist. “Ride did the beer a lot of good,” he growled, wiping foam off his mustache. “Where’s the head?”

  “You gotta just piss over the side, man,” said Crane. “No, I know what you meant.” He brushed the wind-disordered hair back from his forehead and looked around at the vast face of the lake. “I, uh, don’t know, exactly. It’s probably in this section of the lake, the Boulder Basin; there’s also the Overton Arm and the Temple Basin and Gregg Basin, miles away over those mountains, but this is certainly the most accessible part.”

  There should be a hand holding a sword, he thought helplessly, sticking up out of the water.

  He unfolded the map the boat rental clerk had given him. “Let’s see what we got,” he said, tracing his finger along the outline of the Boulder Basin. “I don’t know, here’s Moon Cove; that sounds possible. And Deadman’s Island; I like that.”

  Mavranos leaned over and breathed beer fumes at him. “Roadrunner Cove,” he read. “I like that. Beep-beep.”

  Crane looked back at the gear bag, wondering if he would even get into the wet suit today.

  “Let’s just go,” he said finally. “I’ll take it slower, but hang on.”

  He drove the boat along at a steady twenty miles an hour northward, paralleling the west coastline up toward Moon Cove.

  Blank your mind, he told himself. Maybe the dead King is ready to guide you, but the static racket of your thoughts is keeping him from getting through.

  He tried, but he wasn’t able to make himself really relax into it. Blanking his mind in these circumstances seemed too much like leaving one’s car running and unlocked in a bad neighborhood.

  After only a few minutes they had rounded the cove’s north point. Crane consulted the map and learned that the inlet ahead of them was called Pumphouse Cove. A houseboat with bright blue awnings was moored there, and he could see a family and a dog around a picnic table on the shore.

  This didn’t feel like the right place. The sun was hot on his head, and he envied Mavranos his cap and his beer.

  He swung the boat around and headed back south, angling further out away from the shore, heading for the string of islands poking up above the water like a dead god’s vertebrae in the southern reaches of the basin.

  “What kind of fish they got in here?” Mavranos called over the burbling roar of the engine.

  “Big catfish, I hear,” said Crane loudly, squinting in the breeze. “And carp. Bass.”

  “Carp,” repeated Mavranos. “That’s goldfish grown up, you know; they don’t die of natural causes, I heard. And they survive winters frozen solid in pond ice. The molecules in their cells just refuse to take the shape of crystallization.”

  Crane was glad that the breeze and the motor roar made it natural not to reply. His search for a sunken severed head almost seemed rational compared with Arky’s notions about math and science: anti-carcinogenic beer, phase-changes in the sports betting at Caesars Palace, goldfish that couldn’t be killed…

  Deadman’s Island, hardly more than a bumpy good-size boulder with a narrow beach around it, was the closest of the islands. He squinted at it, and then stared at the red fishing boat that stood on the water very close to the east shore of it.

  Mavranos had brought his battered Tasco 8 × 40 binoculars from the truck, and Crane let off on the gas and took them out of their box.

  He stood up on the fiber glass floorboard and leaned on the top of the windshield to steady the binoculars, and then he got the fishing boat in his view and twisted the center focus wheel.

  The little fishing boat sprang into clarity, seeming now to be only a dozen yards away. The fisherman was a slim man in his thirties with dark hair slickly combed back, and he was staring straight at Crane, smiling. He bobbed his fishing pole as if in greeting.

  “Arky,” said Crane slowly, “is that the same guy there, fishing, that we saw when we first stopped? ’Cause I don’t see how he could have got here so fast from—”

  “Fishing where?” Mavranos interrupted.

  Still staring straight at the man through the lenses, Crane pointed out over the bow of the boat. “There, by the island.”

  “I don’t see anybody. There’s some water skiers way off.”

  Crane lowered the binoculars and glanced at Mav
ranos. Was he blind drunk?

  “Arky,” he said patiently, “right there, by the—”

  He stopped talking. The fishing boat was no longer there. And it could not have moved around the island out of sight in less than several minutes—certainly not in the second and a half that he’d looked away.

  He exclaimed, “It’s gone!” even though it seemed like a stupid thing to say.

  Mavranos was staring at him impassively. “Okay.”

  Crane exhaled, and realized that his heart was thudding in his chest and that his palms were damp.

  “Well,” he said, “I guess I know where to dive.”

  He sat back down and cautiously stepped on the gas pedal.

  The level of the lake was down, and the lower stretch of the Deadman’s Island shore was a morass of once-drowned and now reexposed manzanitas, their short branches hung with strings of algae—like, Crane thought, Spanish moss strung on cypresses in a bayou. Here and there, too, were algae-covered angularities that must have been long-lost fishing poles. The rocks were just slick-looking humps with no definition under the blanket of green algae, and the breeze near the island was tainted with the wet, fermenting smell of the stuff.

  “It’s a real soup you’re gonna be divin’ into,” observed Mavranos as Crane sat on the gunwale and worked his arm through a wet suit sleeve.

  “Cold, too,” said Crane morosely. “And rented wet suits never fit snug. There’s a special kind of headache I get when I’m under cold water for too long.”

  He had tugged and coaxed the wet suit on and had pulled the Buoyancy Control Device, looking like a deflated life preserver vest, over his head.

  “Should have got a dry suit,” said Mavranos helpfully. “Or a diving bell.”

  “Or scheduled this meeting somewhere else,” Crane said. He adjusted the straps of the backpack harness and then had Mavranos hold up the tank while he snaked his arms through the straps. He bent forward with the weight on his back to adjust them, and he made sure that the waistband release was clear and that it opened to the left. In spite of his reluctance to enter the cold, murky water, he was pleased to see that he still remembered how to suit up.

  He hoped he still remembered how to breathe through a regulator. His old diving instructor had always insisted that the most dangerous thing about diving was the way gases behaved under pressure.

  Dressed at last, with his weight belt on over everything and its quick-release buckle situated well clear of the BCD, he stood up and stretched. The wet suit was tight enough that it took effort to straighten both arms, but he thought it could be snugger across the front.

  Oh well, he thought. A long, hot shower at whatever motel we wind up at.

  His mask was up on his forehead, and the regulator mouthpiece swung by his elbow, and he turned to Mavranos before fitting it all on.

  “If…say, forty-five minutes goes by,” he said, “and I’m not back here, go ahead and split. The money’s in a sock in my pants there.”

  Mavranos nodded stolidly. “’Kay.”

  Crane pulled the mask away from his forehead and settled it down over his face, and then he tucked the regulator mouthpiece between his teeth, breathed through it a few times and pushed the purge button to check the lever spring, and finally put one foot up on the gunwale.

  Dimly under the mask strap and the foam neoprene of the hood, he heard Mavranos say, “Hey, Pogo.”

  Crane turned. Mavranos was holding out his right hand, and Crane clasped it with his own.

  “Don’t fuck up,” said Mavranos.

  Crane made a circle of his thumb and forefinger, then stepped up over the gunwale and jumped into the water with his feet together, his right hand behind his head holding the tank down.

  He splashed in, hearing the crackle of the bubbles muffled through his wet suit hood.

  The water was cold, about sixty degrees, and as always, it invaded his crotch first. He hooted through the regulator, blowing a cloud of bubbles up past the face plate.

  He swallowed and wiggled his jaw, feeling his ears pop as the pressure was equalized, and then he began breathing. Slow and deep, he told himself as he stretched his feet out through the bottomless water. Careful the cold doesn’t get you breathing fast and shallow.

  He was sinking slowly, and he relaxed and let himself go down. Visibility was terrible—a dust of brown-green algae hung in suspension in the darkening water, and shreds like puffy cornflakes swirled up around him.

  About six feet down he passed through one of the planes of temperature difference called thermoclines, and again he hooted at the suddenly colder water. He spread his hands and kicked, halting his descent.

  Dimly he could see the slope of the island through the fog of algae. The cobblestone-size rocks were all fuzzed with the yellow-brown muck, and he wondered how he could identify any of the shaggy lumps as a severed head.

  But the fisherman had been a little further out anyway. Crane began swimming away through the murk, kicking with long strokes and feeling the pull in the tendons of his insteps.

  Very soon his left leg began to ache where he had stabbed it eight days ago.

  The repetitive routines of breathing and kicking began almost to hypnotize him. He was remembering dives off Catalina after spring rains, when the visibility was a hundred feet of crystal blue and the boundary plane between the fresher top layer and the saltier one below was a rippling refraction, like heat waves over a highway; and he remembered climbing deep down in tide pools off La Jolla, picking up tiny octopuses and touching twitchy rainbow-colored anemones, and having to patiently untangle himself from long rubbery strands of kelp, and one time accidentally elbowing the release buckle of his weight belt and watching it plummet away into oblivion through the glassy clear water.

  All he could hear was the metallic echo of his breathing in the steel air tank, and the air that he sucked in long pulses through the regulator valve was cold and tasted of metal, and as always somehow had a gritty feel in his mouth.

  Several times he had glanced at his watch and the pressure gauge, but he had not looked at either one for a while when he began to hear, faintly, something more than his own breathing.

  It was a high and rhythmic sound, and scratchy, but too slow to be echoes of any boat engine. In the algae fog he couldn’t tell if he was rising or descending, so he was careful to breathe continuously, remembering that holding one’s breath in a scuba ascent of nearly any distance could rupture a lung with no warning at all.

  It was music, the sound he was hearing. Some kind of old forties-style swing, with a lot of brass.

  He arched his back up and spread his arms forward, stopping in the dim brown opaque water.

  Was this it? Was something about to happen here? He had once seen a siren device that was supposed to be lowered into water to call divers back on charter boats, and he’d heard of terribly expensive underwater speakers, and he’d read about submarines being tracked by music played in bunk rooms….

  But he had not ever heard music underwater.

  The sound was clearer now. The tune was “Begin the Beguine,” and he could hear a background clatter that was unmistakably laughter and talking.

  An old, dead King, he thought with a shiver that was not all dismay, and he kicked forward again.

  A knobby, pyramidical stone pillar formed in silhouette in the smoky twilight ahead of him. He sat up in the water again, letting the half-inflated BCD hold him at neutral buoyancy, and he sculled with his hands to approach the submerged tower slowly.

  The air that hissed into the regulator when he inhaled was warmer now, and carried the scents of cigarette smoke and gin and paper money.

  As he got to within a yard of it, he could see that the lump at the top of the rough spire was a head, a skull draped with algae instead of flesh.

  The cheekbones and sockets had turned into coral, and in the left socket gleamed a big pearl.

  Crane understood that this sea change was a repairing of damage, a kind of posthumou
s healing, and he thought of the cherub head on the Two of Wands with the two metal rods transfixing the face.

  The music was loud now, and he could almost make out words among the background voices and laughter. Very clearly he smelled charbroiled steak and Béarnaise sauce.

  He reached out slowly through the dirty water, and with the tip of his bare forefinger he touched the pearl that was the head’s eye.

  CHAPTER 40

  La Mosca

  And he jumped violently, blowing out a burst of air in an involuntary shout of surprise.

  He was sitting in a chair, across a table from the man he had seen fishing, and they were in a long, low-ceilinged room with a pair of broad windows behind the fisherman opening out onto a bright blue sky.

  Crane held very still.

  The regulator mouthpiece was still between his teeth, but he was no longer wearing a diving mask, yet he was able to see clearly; therefore he was out of the water.

  Slowly he reached up and took the regulator out of his mouth.

  His mouth instantly filled with lake water, and he put the regulator back in his mouth and blew the water out through the exhaust valve.

  Okay, he thought, nodding to himself as he tried to hold back his ready panic, you’re still underwater; this is a vision, a hallucination.

  This man must be the famous dead King.

  Not wanting to meet his host’s gaze quite yet, Crane rocked his head around to look at the room. A broad cement beam ran down the center of the ceiling, with wooden beams crossing through it at right angles; pictures of landscapes were framed on the cream walls, and low couches and chairs and tables were arranged casually across the broad expanse of pale tan carpet. Through the open windows behind his host he could hear laughter and the splash of someone diving into a swimming pool.

  That was disorienting.

  The air in his mouth tasted faintly of chlorine, and more immediately of leather and after-shave lotion.

  At last he looked at the man across the table.