Last Call (Last Call 1)

Nardie touched his shoulder. "What if it's the only way?" she asked softly. "Do you remember Sir Lancelot?" Crane shook his head stubbornly, and she went on. "He was riding to rescue the Queen, Guinevere, and on the way he had to ride in a cart. It was a horrible disgrace to ride in a cart in those days; criminals were paraded up and down the streets in them, so that people could jeer and throw things, okay? Lancelot hesitated for just a moment before climbing in, and afterward, when he had rescued her, she wouldn't speak to him because of his brief hesitation, because for a couple of seconds he had put his personal dignity ahead of his duty to her. And he agreed that she was right."

"God." Crane stared down at the cards.

It would be the best disguise, he admitted to himself. And what do you care, really, if a bunch of strangers—and your father—think you're a drag queen? They won't know who it is. Is Diana's life worth less than your—your raddled dignity? Your dignity, the dignity of a trembly old bum only six days on the wagon? Six days on the wagon and at most three days on the cart.

He looked at Diana, and she didn't look away. "Let the record show," he said hoarsely, "that I hesitated no longer than Lancelot did." He turned to Dinh. "Did Guinevere forgive him?"

"That was in Chretien de Troyes's book, right?" said Mavranos. For a moment Dinh was clearly baffled by his barbarous pronunciation of the name, but then she blinked in comprehension and nodded, and Mavranos told Crane, "Yeah, she did eventually."

"Hear that, my lady?" Crane said to Diana.

As if to punish them all, he pulled his father's wooden box out of his pocket, opened it, and spilled the Lombardy Zeroth deck out on the bedspread. With a trembling hand he fanned them out.

"Ah," sighed Nardie, her voice suddenly wounded and sad.

Crane was staring at the horribly affecting, morbid old miniature paintings, but he was peripherally aware that Mavranos had stood up and Diana had stepped closer. Suddenly sorry, Crane reached out to hide the cards.

"No," whispered Diana, catching his hand tightly. "I need to … meet these things."

"It's done," said Mavranos gruffly. "No use taking half a dose." He bent down and spread the cards out more fully with steady, calloused fingers.

The Fool and the Lovers and the Moon and the Star and the Emperor and the Empress stared back up at the four of them, and Crane found that he was holding Diana's hand on one side and had clasped Mavranos's on the other. Mavranos was also holding Nardie's hand.

Though the cards on the bed didn't move or change, in his head their patterns shifted like the scales on an uncoiling diamondback rattlesnake, and though the sun shone in brightly through the window, he fell away into the well in the bottom of his mind, down into the subterranean pool all such wells shared.

He didn't know how much time passed before he began to float back up into his own consciousness.

Crane found himself focusing on the World card, a hermaphroditic figure pictured dancing within a wreath that was an oval with pointed ends. Gotta be male and female for this, he thought dazedly.

He found that he could sense the minds of his companions—Mavranos's bluff front covering profound fear, Diana's anxiety for her children and suppressed love for Crane, Nardie's cocksure despair—and he knew that they could sense, too, whatever his own character was.

At last he released their hands and picked up the wakeful-seeming cards. "I've got to arrange these," he said awkwardly. "While I'm doing that, maybe you girls could go downstairs and buy me some clothes and stuff."

"I think you'd be a size twelve," said Diana, moving away from the bed.

At no time during the taxi ride south to Lake Mead did Crane manage to forget the weight of the foundation and blush and powder on his face and the hair spray that was holding his eyebrows down smooth. To his own humiliation he had tried to speak in a falsetto voice when he told the driver where he wanted to go. It had been a failure; the man had started violently and then mumbled obscenities for the first few minutes of the ride, relapsing finally into outraged silence.

Crane spent the half-hour drive trying to read the prop Dinh had found for him, a copy of Poker for Women by Mike Caro. The advice in the book struck him as sound, but of course there was no chapter on Assumption.

The stacked Lombardy Zeroth deck bulked in his white patent-leather purse like a chambered automatic with the safety off.

When at last the cab pulled into the marina parking lot, Crane looked at his new gold chain-link watch; it was only four-thirty. He hoped Leon was letting players come aboard this early, for he didn't want to have to wander around. He could sit in a bar, but he shuddered at the thought that someone might try to pick him up.

"Fifty dollars, dearie," said the driver. Crane paid him without speaking again and got out.