Last Call (Last Call 1)

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."

"Bullshit," said Crane, "I've seen two different complete decks, one in 1948 and one in 1969. And I've talked to the man who painted one of them."

There was a long silence from the other end of the line. Finally the man said, quietly, "Was he all right?"

"Well, he was blind." Crane was silent now for a few seconds. "He, uh, cut out his eyes twenty years ago."