Last Call (Last Call 1)

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 posthumous 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 Bearnaise 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.

Again the man seemed to be in his thirties, with slicked-back brown hair and heavy-lidded, long-lashed eyes that made his faint smile secretive. A tailored pinstripe suit jacket was open over a white silk shirt with six-inch collar points.

On the polished surface of the table between them rested a pair of wrapped sugar cubes, a can of Flit insecticide, a golden cup like a chalice, and a haftless, rusted blade six inches long.

Crane remembered that Cups was his own suit in the Tarot deck, and he reached out a hand—he noted with no particular surprise that he seemed to be wearing a silk shirt, too, with onyx cuff links—and pointed at the cup.

Apparently pleased, the man smiled and stood up. Crane now saw that he was wearing high-waisted pinstripe trousers to match the jacket, and expensive-looking leather shoes with pointed toes.