Last Call (Last Call 1)

"In a crude way, yes." Joshua smiled as he opened the box and lifted out a deck of oversize cards with plaid-pattern backs. "But it's so imprecise that I wouldn't take money for it or recommend it for any serious questions. The Tarot is the original instrument, of which playing cards are a simplified, truncated form made for games." He wasn't smiling as he looked at Crane and added, "This isn't a game."

"I wouldn't be here if I thought it was." Crane leaned back in the chair, concealing his nervousness. This would be only the third time he'd been exposed to the Tarot deck, and the first time the cards would be speaking to him, responding to a question from him, and he wasn't looking forward to it. "How does it work? I mean, how do the cards … know about me?"

"I'd be lying if I told you I knew for sure." Joshua had spread the cards out face down across the unfolded silk and was gently scattering them around with both hands. "Some people think it's out-and-out magic, and I've got a foolish little booklet that will tell you that vibration rays from your fingers somehow combine with the oxygen in the room to direct which cards you touch." He had gathered them up into a deck again and tapped the edges flush. "The fact is, they do work."

He steepled his fingers under his chin, leaving the squared-up deck in front of him. "They may be the surviving fragments of the Book of Thoth," Joshua said, "supposedly composed by the god Thoth, handed down fugitively from the earliest Egyptian kingdoms. Iamblichus, the fourth-century Syrian, claimed that the mystery cults of Osiris locked initiates into a room on the walls of which were painted twenty-two powerfully affecting symbolic pictures—and there are twenty-two cards in the Major Arcana, the suitless picture cards that have been dropped from your modern playing deck. Whatever it is that the cards represent, they … resonate, strongly, with elements in the human psyche, the way a struck tuning fork can make a glass across the room vibrate. I think that, in some micro or macro way, there's sentience behind them; they're aware of us."

Then they'll probably recognize me, thought Crane. Climb up on my knee, Sonny Boy.

He wiped his palms down the sides of his pants.

"Now," said Joshua, "I want you to empty your mind of everything except the question you've come to ask. This is serious, so take it seriously."

Clear your mind for the cards, Crane thought. He nodded and breathed deeply.

"What is your question?" asked Joshua.

Crane suppressed a hopeless smile, and when he spoke, his voice was level. "How do I take over my father's job?"

Joshua nodded acknowledgment. "Can you shuffle cards?" he asked, pushing the deck toward Crane.

"Yes."

Crane cut the deck and gave the cards seven fast riffle shuffles, instinctively squaring the cards flat against the table so as not to flash a glimpse of the bottom one. He pushed the deck back to Joshua. "Cut?"

"No."

The old man quickly dealt the cards out into two piles, one twice as big as the other; the bigger pile was then dealt out the same way, and then the bigger of these piles was divvied up in the same two for one ratio …

Eventually he had six uneven stacks, and he picked up the westernmost stack and began laying it out on the table in a vertical pattern.

The first card was the Page of Cups, a picture of a young man in Renaissance-looking clothes standing in front of a stylized ocean and holding a chalice from which a fish head was peeking out.

Crane relaxed with relief and disappointment. The drawing was a nineteenth-century-style line drawing, and was not one of the vividly colored quattrocento paintings that his father had used. Probably nothing will happen with this deck, he thought.

The faint snap the card made as it touched the silk was followed by the patter of raindrops on the window beyond the curtains.

When there are gray skies, thought Crane.

The next card was the Emperor, an old king on a throne, with his legs awkwardly crossed as if because of some injury.

Close thunder shook the window, and from out on the street came the screech and slam of a car accident. The rain was heavier, hissing on the pavement outside.

Joshua looked up, startled, but dealt the third card.

It was the Fool, a young man dancing at the edge of a precipice while a dog snapped at his heels.

The rest of the cards abruptly flew out of Joshua's hand and sprayed at Crane, who ducked as they whistled and clattered past him. One had ticked against the surface of his plastic eye, and for one shocked moment Crane was a little boy again, stunned with injury and unbearable betrayal.

But he forced himself to think, to remember who he was and why he was here.

The cards, he told himself harshly, remember? Don't cry, you're not five years old now. You came to consult the cards.

I guess any Tarot deck will work after all, he thought.

His heart was pounding.

He thought, But I don't like, or understand, the answer.