Tim Powers - Last Call (58 page)

Crane waved his free hand. "
Arky
!" he yelled hoarsely.

The boat roared, turned its bow toward him, and began to increase in size, rising and falling and throwing spray out to the sides.

He hoped Mavranos could handle the boat well enough not to run him down—especially since Mavranos was looking off to the starboard and pointing at something.

Crane blinked water out of his eye and looked more closely. Mavranos was pointing his
revolver
at something.

Crane twisted his head around in that direction and saw another boat, further away, with a couple of figures standing up in it.

Then Mavranos had arrived and had spun the boat out in a spray-flinging halt, blocking Crane's view of the other boat.

"In, Pogo!"

Mavranos had flung an end of rope over the side, and Crane grabbed it and pulled and kicked, and at the expense of all his remaining strength he managed to clamber aboard even with his tank and weight belt still on.

"You take the gun," Mavranos said, shoving the revolver into Crane's shaking, dripping hand. "I'm getting us out of here."

Crane obediently tried to hold the gun up and aimed at the men in the distant boat. "Who," he gasped, "are they?"

"I don't know." Mavranos sat down in the pilot seat and shoved the throttle forward. "Their boss and another guy went in the water with spear guns a little after you went in," he shouted over the roar of the engine, "and I looked at them and they looked at me, but neither of us had any real excuse to mess with the other—but they got real agitated just now when one of them, their boss, I guess, came back up."

He took one hand off the wheel to point, and Crane let himself glance away from the other boat long enough to see the hooded and masked head bobbing inertly on the surface of the water behind them. Mavranos's wake rippled under the head just then, and it rocked as loosely as a floating basketball.

"They don't know if he's dead," called Mavranos. "We want to be well away before they make up their minds what to do."

The distant boat seemed to be moving now, but Mavranos had a good head start, and the men in the other boat would probably stop to pull the floating body aboard.

Crane let his quivering arm lower the gun, and after just sitting and panting for a dozen bouncing jumps over the waves, he got up on his knees and popped open the release buckle of the weight belt … and then, though he could feel hot blood leaking across his skin under the torn wet suit, he stared for several seconds at the rough object the belt had been holding against him.

It was recognizably a semiautomatic pistol, but the wooden grips were gone, and the slide was rusted solid with the frame, and crusty brown corrosion had narrowed the muzzle to a rough-edged little bore that a .22 round wouldn't fit through.

He put it down carefully on the pebbled white plastic deck and after a moment remembered his cut side and reached for the backpack harness release buckle.

Under the neoprene skin, blood had blotted down his leg nearly as far as the knee and had gorily soaked his crotch, but the cut itself, though long and ragged, wasn't deep; when he tied the sleeves of his shirt around his waist, balling up the bulk of the shirt over the cut, the cloth didn't seem to be absorbing much blood.

He picked up the decayed gun and then dizzily groped his way forward and collapsed into the seat beside Mavranos. The lake breeze was wonderfully cool on his sweaty chest and in his wet hair.

"That's—that was their boss, all right," he said loudly, "and I believe he is dead. The lake won't contain a dead would-be King's head. If I'd died down there,
my
head'd be poking out."

Mavranos glanced at him with one eyebrow raised over a squint. "You kill the other guy, too?"

"I—yeah, I think so." Crane was shivering now.

"With what? Your knife?"

"Uh … with this."

Mavranos glanced down at the rusted chunk of metal on Crane's lap, and his eyes widened. "That's a
gun
, isn't it? What did you do, hit 'em with it?"

Crane was pressing his side above the bump of his pelvis. His cut was starting to ache, and he wondered if Lake Mead water was particularly infectious. "I ought to try to eat something," he said. "I'll tell you all about it, over dinner back in Vegas. Right now let's return this boat and get the hell out of these mountains. The wet suit's too full of blood to turn back in to the shop, and the weight belt's got a spear tear in it—I'll tie the whole lot of gear together and sink it before we get in. The dive shop can put it on my Visa."

Mavranos shook his head and spat over the side. "The way this goddamn royal family throws money around."

As Mavranos backed the Suburban out of the marina parking space and clanked it into drive, he paused, then pointed ahead through the cracked, dusty windshield.

"Look at that, Pogo," he said.

Crane shifted on the seat and stared at the opposite row of parked cars baking in the sun. Three were white El Camino pickups.

"You wanna go see if the
El C
is busted off their emblems?"

"No," Crane said, wearing a souvenir Lake Mead sweat shirt now but still feeling shaky. "No, let's just get out of here."

"I don't think we
need
to check, at that," said Mavranos. He drove forward and rocked the truck down the ramp to the road. A sign said that Lakeshore Road was to the right, and he spun the wheel that way. "I think you killed the King of the Amino Acids."

In the parking lot of the Fashion Show Mall across the Strip from the Desert Inn, the raggedy man watched the parked camper and tugged at the forefinger of his left hand and wondered when he would get something to eat today.

He couldn't get the free shrimp cocktails anymore at the Lady Luck up on Third Street by the Continental Trailways bus depot—a waiter there had given him five dollars and told him they'd call the cops if he ever showed up again, looking the way he did and smelling so bad—but Dondi Snayheever could still get plenty of free popcorn at the Slots of Fun on the Strip.

And at the many cheap buffets and breakfasts all over town he had run into specimens that looked far worse than he did.

He was good at begging, too, it turned out. The shadowy, mechanically moving people would often, if briefly, become real Persons when they approached him; and then it would be Strength with her humbled lion, or the Hermit, or the naked hermaphrodite that was the World, or the Lovers, if it was a couple, who dropped gold coins into the palm of his hot, lean right hand. The Persons quickly disappeared after that, leaving in their places the little shadow people, who even with their dim, papery faces managed to express vague puzzlement and distaste and surprise at what they'd done, and the gold coins turned into mere quarters and chips, but he could spend the stuff. Probably more easily than he could spend real gold coins.

He knew what cliff face it was that he was destined to dance on soon, on this coming Friday, Good Friday—he had seen a picture of it, a postcard in a rack in a souvenir store—but he still had to find his mother.

And kill his treacherous father.

That last was going to be hard, since his father could change bodies now. Snayheever had been watching the little figures on the trapezes in Circus Circus yesterday, and he had suddenly been talking to his father—
gumby gumby, pudding and pineal
—but the guards there had made him leave, and he hadn't stayed in contact long enough to work out where his father actually, physically
was
.

The fingers of his right hand were still in under the dirty bandage that wrapped his left hand, wiggling the cold left forefinger.

He had seen a man leave the camper this morning, and he was pretty sure that it was his father. The man had been dressed in a white leather jacket with sequins on it, and high white boots, and his hair had been shellacked into an impressive pompadour, but before Snayheever had been able to come shuffling across the parking lot to him, he had got into a cab and left. And now he must be aware of Snayheever's presence here, for he was staying away.

He won't come back until I leave, Snayheever reasoned. He thinks he can drive away then, and ditch me again. But I'll put a homing device on his truck, so I can always know where he is.

The finger popped free at last, with no pain at all but with a bit of a smell. He pulled it out of the bandage and looked at it, and saw that it was black. Perhaps I'm becoming a Negro, he thought.

He shuffled over to the truck, cleaving his way through the thick air by making swimming motions with his hands, and he crouched by the rear bumper and wedged the finger tightly in behind the license plate.

Free to leave now, he began swimming away across the parking lot in the direction of Slots of Fun.

On Monday morning Crane sat in a motel room off Paradise and stared at the telephone. He shivered in the breeze from the rackety air conditioner, and he pressed the bandage over his hip-bone, wondering if he should change it again.

Nearly twenty-four hours had passed since the spear had cut his side, but the wound was still bleeding—not a lot, but every time he untucked his shirt and peeled back the bandage, he saw fresh red blood on the gauze.

And his scalp and his scarred ankle itched, and his right eye socket throbbed—but while the muscles of his arms and legs should have been aching from yesterday's exertions in the lake, instead he felt altogether stronger, springier, than he had in years.

Mavranos was sitting in a chair by the window, rubbing a finger over the flimsy paper one of the Sausage McMuffins with Eggs had been wrapped in, and then he licked the re-coagulating cheese off his finger. He swallowed, though he apparently had to rotate his head to do it.

"Back of my throat feels like it's dry, no matter how much I swallow," he said irritably. "Even drinking
water
doesn't help." He looked at Crane, who was still pressing his side. "Cut still bleeding?"

"Probably," Crane said.

"Well, it's right where Snayheever's bullet tore you. Place ain't gettin' a chance to heal."

Crane sipped his coffee. Mavranos of course had brought in the ice chest and was working on a beer. "The Fisher King's supposed to be wounded," Crane said. "Maybe this is a good sign."

"That's a healthy attitude. If it ever does heal up, you can stab your leg again." Mavranos looked at the clock radio on the nightstand. "Your man probably just wanted to get rid of you."

Since midafternoon yesterday Crane had been calling local Tarot readers and New Age occultist shops, and finally this morning he had been referred to a bookseller in San Francisco who specialized in antique Tarot decks.

The man had at first tried to interest Crane in some of the decks that had been reprinted in Europe in 1977, which apparently had been declared the honorary six hundredth anniversary of playing cards, but when Crane repeated the name of the deck he was interested in, and told the man some of the things Spider Joe had said, the bookseller had paused for so long that Crane had wondered if he had hung up. He had then got Crane's phone number and promised to call him back.

"Maybe," Crane said now. "Hosin' me, maybe." He wondered if the man had given the motel room's phone number to some terrible Tarot Secret Police, and if shortly there would be a hard knock at the door.

The phone rang instead, and Crane picked it up.

"Is this," said the bookseller's voice, "the gentleman who was asking about an old Tarot deck?"

"Yes," Crane said.

"Very good. Sorry for the delay—I had to wait for one of the employees to get back from her break, and I didn't want to discuss this over the store phone. I'm in a phone booth right now. Uh—yes, I know what deck you're talking about. It didn't ring a bell at first because it's not sought by collectors and isn't even considered an antique deck. No versions of it that survive are older than the 1930s, though the designs do seem to go way back, possibly antedating, as the name would imply, the recently rediscovered twenty-three cards known as the Lombardy I cards, the owner of which chooses to remain anonymous. Mostly these cards are used now by a few avant-garde psychoanalysts, who don't wish that fact to be known. Not exactly sanctioned by the AMA, hmm?"

"Psychoanalysts?"

"So I am given to understand. Powerful symbols, you know, effective in reviving catatonics and so forth. Equivalent of electroshock therapy in some cases."

Over the phone Crane heard the booming rattle of a truck driving past the man's phone booth.

"Uh," the man said when he could again be heard, "I gather you are not yourself a psychoanalyst, but that you know something about this deck, these so-called Lombardy Zeroth cards. Did you know that there is no one, right now, painting them? At one time there was a sort of guild of a few men who …
could
paint them, but since the war it has been a capital crime in several European countries even to
own
a deck. Nothing on the law books, you understand, but a capital crime nonetheless. Yes indeed. But I do happen to know of a source. You realize this would involve … a good deal of money."

"Yes," Crane said.

"Of course, of course. Well, if you could bring a deposit of half what I estimate it will cost, I can approach the owner—an elderly widowed woman in Manhattan, who keeps the cards in a"—he chuckled uncomfortably—"a lead box in a safe-deposit vault. I'd need … say, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, preferably in cash. She owns twenty cards, from a deck painted in Marseilles in 1933, and—"

"No," said Crane into the phone, "I need a full deck." And by this Wednesday, he thought.

"My dear sir, there simply
aren't
any. Even in the Visconti and Visconti-Sforza collections, for instance, there are no surviving examples of the Devil or the Tower cards. The …
shock treatment
was too severe, I suppose. I can say with confidence that if any complete Lombardy Zeroth decks are in existence anywhere, they would be in the hands of old families in Europe, and not for sale, or even acknowledgment, under any circumstances."