“What did your doctor say?” I asked.
“I’m all right,” Vic answered. “He told me to go home and rest. And then I wondered, can I even do that?”
“If you aren’t going to talk about—what did you call them?—succubi.”
“Leticia could still try to use me to get at you.”
“I don’t think so. The lords don’t make the same move twice. It costs them style points. Or maybe it’s just boring.”
She shook her head. “My God.”
“I know it’s weird.”
“It’s more than weird! It’s horrible! How do I go back to a normal life knowing what I know?”
I took her hand. “You go back because your normal life is just as real and important as you thought. Your family’s real. Your friends are real. Your school and the kids are real. It’s just that the world has this… other layer to it. And it’s scary. But you don’t ever have to deal with it again. Think of it like, I don’t know, starvation in Africa. Bad but far away.”
She took a deep breath. “I’ll try.” And something in her face told me she was going to be okay.
She kissed me goodbye like a sister would before getting out of the cab. I watched her until she got inside the apartment we’d shared, then told the driver to take me to the Icarus.
I wondered how I was supposed to focus on poker after the day I’d had, then realized that, with Vic safe and nobody waving guns at me, I actually felt okay. In fact, I was looking forward to playing.
But first things first.
The cab dropped me in front of the hotel. I walked over and checked Dad’s T-bird. It still looked fine with the red light of sunset reflecting from the windows. There hadn’t been any tickets, vandalism, or break-ins. Glad that somebody, or some magic spell, was looking out for it, I headed on into the hotel and up to the desk.
The clerk was a guy with an Abe Lincoln beard and pointed steel caps on his oversized knuckles. He tried to keep it from showing in his face, but I could tell he knew someone had tried to take me out of the tournament and was sorry I’d made it back.
“Yeah,” I said, “I love you guys, too.”
“Lord Timon has been asking for you all afternoon,” he replied.
“Then he can go on asking a little longer. Where is she?”
“Uh… who do you mean, sir?”
I stared at him the way you stare down an opponent at the poker table. “Is that really the way you want to play it?”
He lowered his eyes. “I think she’s in the service area.”
He was right. A’marie was in the kitchen, where the cooks were bustling around preparing tonight’s buffet. She was spooning globs of whipped cream on top of some kind of parfait. Her face turned funny when she saw me coming. It was like she was scared and relieved at the same time.
“Time for your break,” I said. I took her by the forearm and led her to the start of the dark, dusty section where she’d hidden the finheads. “Now hand it over.”
Unlike her buddy out at the desk, she didn’t try to play dumb. She reached inside her tuxedo jacket and brought out the handkerchief with the drop of my blood.
I stuffed it into my hip pocket. “Now the pipes.”
She blinked. “They’re all I have from my family.”
“At this point, do you think I give a rat’s ass?”
She brought them out.
I reached to take them, and then, like somebody flipped a switch, I was just sick of the whole situation. Even with a damn good reason, it was just no fun being mad at her.
“Never mind,” I said. “Keep them. Just don’t use them on me anymore.”
She tucked them away. “Thank you.”
If I was going to go soft, I might as well mush out completely. “Have you heard from Georgie? How is he?”
“He’s all right. The Ones Who Linger are almost impossible to kill. I guess that if Death decides he doesn’t want you, it’s hard to change his mind.”
“Good. I’m glad he’s okay.”
“I’m glad you are.”
I snorted. “Said the woman who helped bury me alive.”
“I know it must have been awful, but I swear, it was to keep you safe as much as anything. Did you rescue Victoria?”
“Yeah. She’s all right, too.”
“Good.” She took a breath. “Look, I know you don’t have any reason to believe this, but I really am sorry.”
“I believe it,” I said, and it was true. I could hear regret in her voice and see it in her face.
But maybe she didn’t believe me, because she kept on in the same way. “It was wrong, especially after you helped Rufino. It made me no better than Timon.”
“Come on. That’s not true.”
“All I can say is that I won’t to do anything like that again. I can’t promise for the others, but I can for me.”
“Thanks. And not that it’s worth anything, but I wish I was the guy who has the fix for everybody’s problems. That would be nice.”
After that, we kind of ran out of things to say. And so, even though I didn’t feel much like dealing with Timon, it didn’t seem like there was much point in putting it off any longer.
I found him on the mezzanine as usual, with Gaspar guarding the door to the meeting room. When I walked in, he was sitting with a deck of cards spread out on the table in front of him, and holding one up right in front of his face. He turned in my direction, sniffed three times, then showed it to me.
“Is this the five of hearts?” he asked.
“Deuce of diamonds,” I replied.
“Damn it!” he whipped the card at the floor, and I got a better look at the wet lumps in his eye sockets. I could make out pupils now, though they weren’t the same size or completely round. I could also see speckled streaks where irises were trying to separate out from the whites.
“Even if you could make the cards out when you hold them that close,” I said, “it wouldn’t be good enough. You need to be able to see them when they’re in the middle of the table.”
“I know that!” he snarled.
“So why torture yourself? Are you that desperate to get back to the table? There’ll be other games.”
“Not like this one. Not if you don’t win!”
“I am winning.”
“So far. But where were you this afternoon?”
I sighed. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does if you were off making a deal with one of the others. And how do I know if you won’t explain yourself?”
“Fine,” I said, and told him the story, sort of. I left A’marie, Georgie, and Lorenzo out of it.
Unfortunately, the edited-for-TV version left Timon frowning. He might look like a pile of greasy rags and smell like ass, but he wasn’t dumb. “That story doesn’t account for all your time,” he said.
“Sure it does. Vic and I had to wait a long time at the clinic.”
He leaned close to me and sniffed. “You smell of graveyard earth.”
Shit. “All right. I didn’t tell you everything. But you don’t need to know the rest.”
“I do if I’m going to trust you!”
“You’re going to trust me because you still don’t have a choice.”
“You’re… insolent!” He spat it at me like it was the filthiest insult he could think of.
“Be glad. Maybe that’s what keeps me a step ahead of the other lords even though I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. Anyway, how come you’re mad at me and not them?”
“I am mad, but they were just playing the game. You’re my vassal, and you disobeyed me!”
“Because I’m not a vassal. I’m your partner. Live with it.”
He looked like he was about to fire something back. But then he took a long breath and let it out slowly. It seemed to make his cloud of funk even fouler, but maybe that was my imagination.
“You can’t survive in our world without the protection of a patron,” he said. “I hope you figure that out before it’s too l
ate. But for now, we have work to do.”
“Sounds good. Teach me to make a ward that will stop a bullet.”
“That’s not practical. You’re getting stronger, but after the day you’ve had, and the night in front of you, you can’t afford to spend the energy. But you can start learning how to raise the various aspects of yourself into prominence as quickly and easily as you’ve learned to invoke your sign of power.”
So we worked on that till suppertime. To my relief, there was no raw, carved human meat on the buffet tables tonight, maybe because Wotan didn’t show up. Neither did the Pharaoh.
But Gimble and Leticia were there and whispering together. Leticia smiled at me, set her plate of paella and her glass of white wine on a table, and glided over to me in her usual way. Not quite like a pole dancer slinking around the stage, but close enough.
“Poor Pablo didn’t make it,” she said. “And the police have the gun with your fingerprints.”
“Bullshit,” I said.
She laughed. “You’re right. It is. My servants and I cleared out right after you did, so I don’t know what happened when the police arrived. I imagine Mrs. Sullivan handled it all somehow. But I can’t tell you what happened to Pablo.”
“Like I care,” I said.
She smiled. “You have no reason to, but you do. It’s your weakness.”
“Even if it is, you didn’t have any luck taking advantage of it today.”
“Touché! I certainly didn’t. All I did was get us both all hot and bothered. We could take care of that. There’s plenty of time before midnight. No magic, just sex, I promise.”
My mouth got dry and I stepped back a little, like you’d back away from a hot fire. “Right. You promise. And I trust that why?”
She laughed again. “You can’t blame a girl for trying. You have a dab of something on your mouth.” She ran her fingertip over my lips and sent a shiver through me. Then she popped it between her own lips, sucked it, winked, turned, and walked back across the room to Gimble. I tried not to stare at her ass.
She, Gimble, and I were in our seats at the poker table with fifteen minutes to spare. Wotan limped in at ten till with sores and blisters dotting the exposed parts of his tattooed skin.
That surprised me. I understood that the lords were out to get each other just as much as they were the “insolent” human in the game. But after a day when a couple of them had done their damnedest to kill me or at least screw with my head, it was easy to forget.
Leticia gave Gimble an inquiring look. But if he knew anything, he wasn’t talking, and naturally there was nothing to read in the painted face bobbing at the end of his flexible neck.
Wotan called for a double shot of bourbon and knocked it back. Then he watched the door and the grandfather clock. The rest of us started watching with him, waiting to see if the Pharaoh was going to show.
It was three to twelve when he did, hobbling along with Davis’s help. This time he really needed it, because something had ripped off his left leg at the knee and his head off his shoulders. The chauffeur hadn’t bothered to bring along the torn-off piece of leg, but he had the head tucked under his arm.
I stared, and I wasn’t the only one. It was like when Queen started laying eggs. It even startled other Old People, and reminded me they could be as strange and mysterious to one another as they were to me.
I realized Davis was going to have trouble supporting the Pharaoh and pulling out his chair at the same time, so I got up and pulled it out for him. The mummy’s dry, sunken eyes shifted in my direction. “Thank you,” he said. Magic let him whisper even without lungs.
“Are you okay?” I asked. It was hands down the stupidest thing I’d ever said.
But he answered, “Yes, actually. I keep my life in jars, and as long as they’re intact, there’s not much anyone can do to me that can’t be mended. You’d think other sportsmen would work that out once they’ve known me for a while. But I suppose that some of us simply have a less… analytical approach to competition.”
Wotan glared.
Davis put the Pharaoh’s body in the chair and his head on the table in front of it, looking out at the rest of us. Then he went to sit with the rest of the spectators, and the mummy showed us he could still work his arms just fine. He put a cheroot between his head’s withered lips and lit it.
“That’s better,” he whispered. “The clock’s about to strike. Shall we begin?”
We did. With his head on the table, the Pharaoh didn’t have any trouble seeing the cards. But his smokes kept going out. He had to light them over and over again.
While I found out I had my own problems.
Gimble went all in early on. I called with ace-jack suited, and he turned over a pair of fours. A coin toss. I caught a second jack on the flop, but he made trips on the river, and then he was right back in it.
And after that, the cards kept running against me in one of the worst possible ways. I got my share of decent starting hands, but rarely improved on the streets afterward.
At a weaker table, it might not have mattered. I still had more chips than anybody else, and I could have used them to push other players off their hands. But not here. Not tonight. The others had all decided they needed to play back at me, and they did, whenever they had anything or just decided I didn’t. They kept forcing me to fold, and nibbled away at my stack.
I switched into rock mode while I tried to figure out what was the matter. Had I developed a tell? I didn’t think so. Although you can never really know unless somebody takes pity on you and warns you.
Were the cards marked, then, and everyone knew it but me? I looked for crimps and scratches. I didn’t find them.
But maybe somebody had used some kind of magic to mark them in a way I couldn’t see.
I limped in late position with king-ten. The flop missed me as usual, and when Leticia smiled and raised, I folded. Then, hoping it would do some good, I flashed the Thunderbird. It was just a flicker, the symbol hanging in the air one instant and gone the next. I hoped that would keep anybody else from noticing I’d used any mojo.
The backs of the cards I was mucking didn’t change. But one of the cards face up in the center of the table did. For a second, it changed from the nine of spades to the ten.
Except that really, it didn’t. I could feel it had been a ten all along, but magic made it look like something different.
Nobody else seemed to notice it blink back and forth. That was good. I wanted to figure out the whole scam before I tried to deal with it.
At the moment, I had it half worked out. Somebody was using illusion to turn what would have been good cards for me into bad ones. But he couldn’t know which cards helped me unless he also knew what I had in the pocket.
When I figured it out, I almost grinned. Because, like the gadget built into Gimble’s forearm and his suggestion that we signal one another, this part wasn’t really magical. It was the kind of cheating I’d learned to spot long before I ever heard of the Old People. Although I had to admit, I’d never caught anybody doing it exactly this way.
A careful, honest professional dealer sends the cards skimming just above the felt. Because if they fly any higher, somebody might catch a glimpse of the faces. Or some shiny object on the table could reflect them.
The Pharaoh had two shiny objects, a case for his cheroots and his lighter, both silver tonight despite his usual fondness for gold. He also had eyes that were a lot lower to the tabletop than anybody else’s. I was pretty sure he saw every card he dealt, and at least a few that other people dealt.
And all the others must know about it, or they wouldn’t be attacking me so aggressively. He’d even let Wotan, the guy who’d torn him apart, in on it. Their nasty little back-and-forth when Davis brought him in had been a show for my benefit.
I guessed I should be flattered. It meant the Pharaoh thought I was his toughest opposition. And it showed what a cool, conniving bastard he really was.
The flop missed me, or a
t least it looked like it. Unless I called up the Thunderbird, I couldn’t really know. I bet anyway, and Leticia raised.
As usual, I folded. The difference was that this time I threw in my cards with a scowl and a snap of my wrist.
A couple minutes later, the same thing happened again, except that it was Wotan putting me to the test. “Damn!” I said.
He smirked. “You know, human, you don’t do as well when you aren’t catching every card in the deck.”
“I’m not catching any of them!” I said.
Later, I missed filling a spade flush on Fourth Street, and folded when Leticia made a pot-sized raise. “Shit!” I snarled.
“Poor darling,” she said. “I guess it just isn’t your night.”
“It never is,” I said. “Not when it really counts. I do all right for a while, but by the end of a game or a tournament, I get one bad beat after another!”
I waved one of the Tuxedo Team over and asked for a Scotch. It was the first time I’d had anything alcoholic at the table. I drank it fast and got another.
Then the clock struck three, and it was break time.
As I expected, Timon was impatient to see me. With one grimy hand planted on Gaspar’s shoulder and the other clutching my arm, he hauled me out into the lobby. I was worried he meant to go all the way up to his little hideout on the mezzanine, but we didn’t. Either he thought we had enough privacy, or he just couldn’t hold back any longer.
“You’re on tilt!” he said.
“Bullshit!” I said. Or half shouted, really.
“You are,” he said. “You’re frustrated. It’s making you play too many hands, and push too hard.”
“Will you relax?”
“Settle back,” he said. “Conserve your chips and wait for premium hands.”
“How the hell can you give me advice?” I said, raising my voice another notch. “You can’t even see what’s going on.”
“Sylvester describes every hand.” Sylvester was a servant whose inhumanly tall but stooped body and long straight shaggy hair reminded me of a weeping willow. I guessed he’d been handling the play-by-play because Gaspar had trouble seeing the top of the table.
Blind God's Bluff: A Billy Fox Novel Page 14
