by Tim Powers
And there, across the glittering pool and framed by the curved trunks of palm trees, stood the long, low building that Crane viscerally remembered as the Flamingo.
It was painted pale tan now instead of pistachio green, and little wrought-iron false balconies had been bolted across the lower halves of the windows, and the narrow terrace on which he had seemed to stand with Benjamin Siegel yesterday was walled in now—though he thought he could still see its outline—and to the right the sky was blocked by another high-rise wing of the Flamingo Hilton, and to the left loomed a tall crane and beyond that the pagoda-roofed towers of the Imperial Palace; but this neglected building down here at the feet of the giants was the heart of the Flamingo, the heart of the Strip, the heart of Las Vegas.
“Your place, Dad,” he said softly, stepping down to the concrete deck and starting around the right side of the pool.
He and Mavranos pushed open the narrow glass doors of the Oregon Building and wandered around in the quiet greencarpeted rotunda. Crane rapped on a wall, noting the cold silence of marble under the wallpaper. Siegel had built his castle solidly.
They took the elevator to the fourth floor, but one of the double doors to Siegel’s penthouse suite had a brass plaque on it that read “Presidential Suite,” and Crane decided that whatever high roller was renting the place wouldn’t let a couple of bums come in and start prying shelves out of bookcases.
Back down the elevator they went, and out through the back doors to a sloping lawn with a pink metal flamingo standing on it. Crane remembered a parking lot back here, and a couple of bungalows with nothing but desert beyond, but now there was a driveway and the Arizona Building, with the new parking structure peeping up over its roof.
“Dig under that there flamingo?” suggested Mavranos.
Crane was looking back up at Siegel’s penthouse. “In the…vision, or hallucination, he had a ladder hidden behind a bookcase,” he said thoughtfully, “leading down. That would wind up in the basement, I guess.” He pointed at a driveway off to the left that led down to an underground delivery and service entrance. “Let’s go in there.”
“Hope they aren’t rough on trespassers in this town,” Mavranos growled as they trudged forward.
“Act drunk, and tell ’em you were looking for the men’s room”
“I think I am drunk. And I wouldn’t mind finding a men’s room.” Mavranos shook a Camel out of a pack and lit it, walking backward to shield the match flame. Then he waved the pack at Crane.
“No, thanks,” Crane said.
“You haven’t had a cigarette since you climbed out of the lake,” Mavranos observed. “You on that wagon, too?”
Crane shrugged. “Just haven’t wanted one. I’m getting healthy, I think.”
The descending driveway ramp led them out of the sunlight to a dock area set back in under the building. A broad conveyor belt ran up to the surface of the dock, and big boxes of Soft Blend bathroom tissue were stacked on the extended forks of a little parked power-lift truck.
Up on the dock level a green wooden counter window opened in the far wall, with a NO SOLICITATION sign posted on the inner wall. No one was at the counter, so Crane stepped around a plastic mop bucket and hurried up the three steps. Mavranos was right behind him, cursing under his breath.
They were at the south end of a long corridor with a lot of wheeled blue bins parked along the wall. White-painted pipes were hung under the ceiling, making the corridor seem to Crane to be roofed with bamboo.
“The ladder would have come down…somewhere this way,” he said, starting down the hall and trying to keep the shape and size of the building in his head.
Every door they passed had “NO EXIT” stenciled on it in red, but at one of them Crane paused, and then tried the knob. The door opened, and they stepped into a high-ceilinged room in which thrummed an enormous water heater. Pipes and gauges made it necessary to duck, in order to walk around, but Crane hunched and sidestepped his way to the very back of the room—and for several seconds he just stared at the wooden ladder that was bolted to the concrete wall and disappeared into a dark shaft above.
Crane was certain that it led all the way up to the bookshelf in Siegel’s suite.
It genuinely wasn’t a hallucination, he thought. I really did talk with the ghost of Bugsy Siegel yesterday.
At last he tore his gaze away from the ladder and looked around the room. “This here is all too new,” he called quietly to Mavranos, who was still standing by the door. “But I swear we’re on the right track.”
Mavranos squinted at the plywood and concrete and throbbing machinery and sniffed the disinfectant-scented air. “If you say so. Let’s get out of here, okay?”
Crane climbed out from behind all the machinery and pushed the door open and peeked around it, but there was no one in sight. He stepped out, followed by Mavranos, and they walked further down the corridor.
The hall was more blockily shadowed now and had narrowed almost to a tunnel, with pipes running along the walls as well as overhead, and the green linoleum floor was cracked and water-stained, but at the same time Crane sensed that these walls and ceiling were older and more solidly built. As if to confirm it, he noticed that the big dark green cans stacked on an ankle-high shelf along the western wall were labeled as Civil Defense-certified-safe drinking water. Apparently this older section was stout enough to have been designated an official bomb shelter.
He remembered the marble walls behind the wallpaper overhead.
“Siegel had this tunnel built,” he said softly as he shuffled along, bracing himself against the pipes and watching by the broken light of occasional caged bulbs to avoid clanking his head against any of the down-hanging valves. “I believe we’re in the onetime King’s emergency escape route.”
Bolt-hole and hidey-hole, he thought.
And then it was Mavranos who saw it.
A red jackknife handle stood out of the wall ahead of them, and Mavranos pointed at it. “I guess this is where he practiced knife throwing,” he said.
The knife handle protruded from a foot-wide circular patch of newer cement, and Crane shivered when he saw the scratched figures in the old bricks around it: suns and crescent moons and stick figures carrying swords.
Mavranos had idly taken hold of the knife’s handle and was pulling at it, but it didn’t budge. He swore and tugged harder, even bracing his leg against the wall, and finally had to let go and wipe his hand on his jeans.
“That’s in there solid,” he said breathlessly.
Feeling as if he were taking part in an old, old ritual, Crane stepped forward and closed his right hand around the nowsweaty plastic handle. It seemed to be a Swiss army knife.
He tugged, and the jackknife came out of the cement patch so easily that he rang a water can against the far wall with the butt of the knife.
“I loosened it,” said Mavranos.
Crane kept his right eye firmly closed. He didn’t want to see the jackknife as some kind of medieval sword.
He was already hearing things.
With his good eye he looked up and down the hall, but there was no one in sight besides himself and Mavranos, so he ignored the sound of the Andrews Sisters singing “Rum and Coca-Cola,” and the rattle of chips and laughter, that seemed to echo from just around some unimaginable corner.
He swung the knife back to the east wall and pressed the point against the newer cement. The blade cut through as easily as it would cut cardboard, and after a few moments of sawing—while Mavranos stared—Crane had cut the disk of cement free and pushed it inside.
“Do you happen to hear…music?” Crane asked.
“I hear nothin’ but my heart, and I don’t want to have to start worrying about it. Why? Do you hear music?”
Crane didn’t answer but peered into the hole.
The space inside the wall was about a cubic yard in volume. Dimly he could see a very old and fragile-looking Tarot card, the Tower, tacked to the far wall of the little chamber.
The card was upside down.
He closed the knife and put it into his pocket, smiled nervously at Mavranos, and then reached into the hole.
He groped around carefully in the cavity and found a little cloth bag that proved to be full of teeth and a small cracked mirror in a tortoiseshell frame—what must it one time have reflected, or failed to reflect?—and in a bottom corner there were three little hard lumps that might have been pomegranate seeds; and finally his groping fingers found, under everything, wedged flat against the floor of the space, the wooden box he remembered.
He pried it free, lifted it out of the hole, and opened it, and he shuddered to see again the innocent-looking plaid backs of the cards.
He turned over the first one. It was the Page of Cups, a young man standing on a rippled cliff edge holding a cup, and the corner was lightly stained. Hesitantly Crane licked that corner of the card, and he thought he faintly tasted salt and iron.
The Andrews Sisters started on “Sonny Boy:”
“Whe-e-en there are gray skies
I don’t mind the gray skies….”
“We’re out of here,” Crane told Mavranos hoarsely. He left everything inside the hole but the wooden box, which he tucked inside his Levi’s jacket.
A tall brown man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a white pith helmet and Sony Walkman earphones was smiling broadly and sweeping the lens of a video camera across the back lawn of the Oregon Building. Gleaming sunglasses hid his eyes.
“The basement service entrance, under the building on the south side,” he said, still grinning, into the video camera’s microphone. “Now’s the time.”
“Gotcha,” came a voice over the earphones.
The tall man swung the camera toward the dock area under the building, catching in its focus a young man in a dark suit who was standing uncertainly by the stack of bathroom tissue boxes. The young man held something dark and oblong in his right hand, and the man with the camera instinctively felt for the bulk of the automatic in its holster on his right hip, under the untucked shirttail. He was showing a lot of white teeth in his smile now.
“Now’s the time,” he repeated.
Two men in unspecific tan uniforms were pushing a Dumpster down the paved ramp, and a station wagon with Montana license plates was weaving along the driveway between the Oregon and Arizona buildings.
One of the men with the Dumpster let go of it to approach the young man in the suit. Their conversation was brief, and the smiling man with the camera heard none of it, but a moment later the man in the suit was doubled over, his chin by his knees, and the two uniformed men grabbed him, took a gun away from him, and tossed him into the Dumpster and began pushing it back up the ramp.
The station wagon had stopped. Its tailgate was down, and the man in the suit was quickly bundled out of the Dumpster and into the car. The uniformed men climbed into the back with him and pulled the tailgate shut.
The smiling man had tucked the video camera under his arm and strolled across the grass to the car. He took off his white pith helmet and got in on the passenger side, still smiling.
The station wagon started forward again, turned east past the parking structure and around west onto Flamingo Road, signaling for every turn and proceeding at an inconspicuous speed.
They had thrown a blanket over Al Funo’s head, and he could feel the bite of a narrow nylon tie-wrap drawn tight around his wrists behind his back; his ankles were bound together, too, doubtless with another tie-wrap.
His heart was thumping, but he could breathe again, and he was grinning toughly against the scraped metal bed of the station wagon. You’ve always lived by your wits, old son, he told himself, and you’ll find some way to talk or fight or run your way out of this. Who are these guys anyway? Friends of Reculver and the fat man? Damn, and I almost had Scott Crane at last. I wonder if these guys mean to keep Crane’s gold chain. They’ve got another think coming, if they do.
One of his captors spoke. “We got time for lunch before Flores comes in from Salt Lake. I never got breakfast.”
“Sure,” said another one from the front seat. “Where do you figure?”
“Let’s go to Margarita’s,” said the first speaker.
Funo didn’t appreciate being ignored. “The Dumpster and the uniforms was good,” he said from under the blanket, proud of the ironic humor in his voice. “Like having a pencil behind your ear and carrying a clipboard—hey-presto, you’re invisible.”
“Shut up, Fucko,” said the man in the front seat. “That’s in the Frontier,” he went on.
“So?” said the man sitting over Funo. “It happens to have the best chimichangas in town.”
“Bullshit,” said somebody else.
“There’s a guy back there in the Flamingo basement,” said Funo with a chuckle, “who ought to buy you guys lunch. You saved his life. I was gonna give him that gold chain and then drop the hammer on his ass.”
“Shut up, Fucko.”
Funo was glad the blanket was over him, for suddenly he could feel his face reddening. Good God, he’d said he wanted to give Crane a gold chain, and then he’d said something about “the hammer,” and “his ass.” What if these men thought he wanted to sodomize Crane?
“I—I went to bed with the guy’s wife—” Funo began desperately.
“Shut up, Fucko.” Someone knocked him stingingly on the back of the head with a finger knuckle. “And they make their own tortillas right there, you can see the guy making them.”
“I just want a burger somewhere,” said the man in the front seat.
By the steady roar of the engine and the smoothness of the ride, Funo could tell that they were on a highway; he couldn’t tell which one, but all highways in Las Vegas lead quickly out into desert.
One of these men might be the person who he had all along known was out there in the world somewhere, the person who would one day kill him, become the most important person in Al Funo’s life.
And now—now!—they wouldn’t even talk to him!
Every time he tried to initiate a dialogue, sincerely and with no judgmental attitude, they rapped him on the head and called him Fucko. It was a worse thing to be called than fucker. At least fucker implied that you had had sex. Fucko sounded like the name of a clown.
At last the car was slowing, and soon Funo heard gravel grinding under the tires.
He braced himself. When the car came to a stop, he would lash upward and back with his head, hoping to hit the face of the man over him; with the blanket off his head he might be able to grab the man’s gun and then pull his bound hands far enough around one side of his body to be able to shoot.
The car rocked to a halt, and he used the rebound of the shock absorbers to get more force into his move—
But the man who had been above him had apparently shifted over against the back door since last speaking, and Funo’s head just brushed the car’s ceiling before he tumbled back down onto his face again.
The men might not even have noticed the action. Funo heard the tailgate swung down, and even under the blanket he smelled the spice of the dry desert air, as workmanlike hands took hold of his ankles and dragged him out; other hands gripped his upper arms, and then he was lowered onto the sand, and the blanket was snatched off his head.
He twisted his face up from the sand and blinked around in the sudden glare. The men had stepped back. One of the uniformed fellows was squinting away, apparently watching the road. The tall man in the Hawaiian shirt had his pith helmet on and was smiling with all his white teeth as he jacked a round into Funo’s own gun.
“There’s something you should probably know about me,” Funo began in a confident tone, but the man in the pith helmet just kept smiling and aimed the muzzle into Funo’s face, and Funo realized that the man was about to simply kill him, with no discussion at all.
“For what, f-f-for wh-what?” Funo choked, thrashing on the dry dirt. “My n-name’s Alfred F-F-Funo, tell me your name at least, we’re imp-p-p-portant to each other, a
t least t-t-tell me your n-n-n-name!”
The hard boom of the gunshot rolled away over the bright desert, startling tiny lizards into brief, short darts across the sand.
“Puddin’ Tame,” said the cocaine dealer, wiping off the gun with a handkerchief and then tossing it down beside the bound body. “Ask me again and I’ll tell you the same.”
CHAPTER 42
Beam Me Up, Scotty
On Tuesday morning Mavranos dropped Crane off in front of the liquor store on Flamingo Road and then drove around the block to park the truck in the back lot and just sit and watch.
Inside the liquor store Crane noticed that the clerk at the register wasn’t the same one who had been working last Thursday, and anyway, Crane’s black eye had by now faded to the faintest yellow tinge. He was able to buy two six-packs of Budweiser without getting a second glance.
The pay phone on the back wall rang as he reached out to push open the parking lot door, and it occurred to him that, for plausibility, he ought to be carrying an opened beer when he approached the Dumpster in the back lot.
He reached into the paper bag as he stepped out into the heat, and tugged a can free and popped it open. Chilly foam burst up around his forefinger.
His hand was halfway up to his mouth, the wet finger extended, before he remembered his new resolves, and remembered, too, the ringing pay phone—and he lowered his hand and wiped the beer foam off on his shirt.
The Lowballers were again hunkered down in a circle in front of the Dumpster, but Crane didn’t see the very old man they had called Doctor Leaky.
He didn’t recognize any of them as Wiz-Ding, the young man who had given him the black eye, either.
“It’s just me, the beer man,” he said with forced cheer when a couple of the ragged young men looked up at his approach.
“’Bout time,” commented one of the players, holding out his free hand without looking away from his cards.
