Ozzie pushed his remaining chips toward the dealer as a tip, then stood up and walked across the burgundy carpet toward the far stairs. Crane looked back to Mavranos and cocked his head after the old man. Mavranos nodded and stood up, bringing his beer with him as they walked around the sunken playing floor.
Ozzie was standing by an awning with PLAYERS CORNER scripted above it in neon. "I'm having a drink or two," he announced. "You," he said to Scott, "are sticking to coffee or Coke or something, right?"
Crane nodded, a little jerkily.
Slowly, but with his bony chin well up, the old man led Crane and Mavranos into the bar and to a tartan-patterned booth against the back wall.
The bar was nearly empty, though a wide oval of parquet in the middle of the floor and a mirrored disco ball turning unilluminated under the ceiling implied times of festivity here in the past. In spite of the Victorian flourishes on the dark wood pillars of the bar and the sporty prints framed on the walls and the heavy use of tartan, the band of mirror under the ceiling and the vertical mirrors that divided the walls every few yards made the walls look like free standing panels, subject to disassembly at any moment. A wide-screen television was mounted on the wall, showing some news program in black and white with no sound.
"What did you buy, in that last hand?" Crane asked.
"Luck," said Ozzie. "It's not too hard to speed-read the hands, get the gist of them, as they go by, like identifying creatures in an agitated tide pool—but if you're gonna reach in and grab one, you've gotta be sure you know exactly what it is. I had to wait for a hand that was—that would further us. That we could—that was acceptable. And it's hard to calculate seven cards and all their interactions when you've got a tableful of gamblers joggling your elbow." He rubbed his face with gnarled, spotty hands. "Took a long time for a—an acceptable hand to show up."
Mavranos slouched low in the seat and peered around at the decor with an air of disapproval. " 'Where fishmen lounge at noon,' " he said sarcastically, " 'where the walls/ Of Magnus Martyr hold/ Inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold.' "
"More Eliot?" asked Crane.
Mavranos nodded. He waved at the nearest cocktail waitress and then turned to Ozzie. "So how's the weather?"
The old man shook his head. "Stormy. A lot of Spades, which is the modern version of the Swords suit in the old Tarot deck. Just about any Spade is bad news, and the Nine's the worst—I saw it a lot. A double Ballantine scotch on the rocks," he added to the cocktail waitress, who was now standing beside the table with her pad ready.
Coke, thought Crane. Soda water—maybe with bitters. Goddammit. V-eight. Seven-Up.
"Hi, darlin'," said Mavranos. " You've got to excuse our friend here—he doesn't like pretty girls. I'll have a Coors."
"Maybe he doesn't think I'm pretty," said the waitress.
Crane blinked up at her. She was slim, with dark hair and brown eyes, and she was smiling. "I think you're pretty," he said. "I'll have a soda water with a shake of Angostura."
"There's conviction for you," said Mavranos, grinning behind his unkempt mustache. "Passion."
"He didn't sound like he meant it," agreed the waitress.
"Jesus," said Crane, still distracted by sobriety and Ozzie's talk of bad weather, "you're half my age. Honest, ten years ago you'd have had to beat me off with a stick."
The waitress's eyes were wide. "Beat you off?"
"With a stick?" put in Mavranos.
"God," Crane said. "I meant—" But the waitress had walked away.
Ozzie didn't seem to have heard anything after he'd ordered his scotch. "The Hearts suit—that used to be Cups—seems to be allied with Spades, and that's bad. Hearts is supposed to be about family and domestic stuff, marriage and having children, but now it's in the service of—of ruin. The King and Queen of Hearts were showing up interchangeably in the same hands as the worst Spades." He looked at Crane. "Were you playing when the smoke shifted?"
"Yeah."
"You had the Jack of Hearts and the Joker in your hand, I'll bet."
Even though he had decided he believed all this, it made Crane uncomfortable to see evidence for it. "Yeah, I did."
"Those were your cards even in the old days, I remember—the one-eyed Jack and the Fool."
The drinks arrived then, and Ozzie paid the waitress. She left quickly.
Crane stared after her. It bothered him to realize that she was, in fact, pretty, for she held no more attraction for him than did the pattern in the rug. He could imagine her naked, but he couldn't imagine making love to her.
"So," said Mavranos after taking a deep sip of his Coors, "what does all this mean to us?"
Ozzie frowned at him. "Well … the Jack of Hearts is in exile, and the Hearts kingdom has sold out to the Swords; if the Jack's going back, he better do it disguised. And every water card I saw was bracketed by Hearts, meaning the water is tamed by the King and Queen. Since we're headed for Las Vegas, that means we should be leery of tamed water, which sounds to me like Lake Mead."
"Fear death by water," Crane said, grinning vaguely at Mavranos.
"And the," Ozzie went on, "the balance is way out of kilter, so your cancer cure looks a little less unlikely, Archimedes. It's like the ball's bouncing around crazy in the Roulette wheel, and it might not even fall into a slot but fly right out onto the floor. Anything's possible right now."
The old man turned to Crane. "Your situation is completely crazy. I told you the King and Queen of Hearts were acting as though they were the same person? As far as I can deduce, that's the person that's after you, and it's your parent, and is male and female at the same time."
"Ahoy," commented Mavranos. "A hermaphrodeet."
"My real, biological father … or even my mother … might still be alive," Crane said thoughtfully.
"This almost certainly is your biological father," Ozzie said irritably. "The bad King. He must not have recognized you at that damned game; he wouldn't have bothered to become your parent through the cards if he'd known he already was, genetically."
Crane's mouth was open. "How … no, how could Ricky Leroy have been my father? He was remembering the older man who had taken him fishing on Lake Mead so many times when he was four and five years old.
"It's a new body," said Mavranos.
"Right," Ozzie agreed. "He can do that, don't you listen? And maybe he's had a sex change operation since you saw him."
"Or maybe," Crane said, "he's got both male and female bodies he works out of."
Ozzie frowned. "Yes, of course. I should have thought of that—I hope I'm not too old for this." He sipped his scotch. "And I saw a whole lot of Nines and Tens of Diamonds together, and they mean, in effect, action now."
"I'm ready to go," Mavranos said.
Ozzie looked at Mavranos's cigarette—the smoke was rising more or less straight up—and then he held his glass up and stared at it. He hiked around on the seat to look at the television screen, which was now in color. "Don't you guys want lunch?"
"I could do with something," said Crane.
"I think the fortune-telling window has gone by," said Ozzie. "I'm gonna take this drink and go back to that table and kick some ass, now that they all think I'm the poster boy for Alzheimer's disease."
Crane and Mavranos walked around to the little delicatessen in the far corner of the hangar-size room and had roast beef sandwiches while Ozzie went back down to the playing floor.
At one point Crane got up and walked around the perimeter to the men's room. When he came out, one of the pay telephones in front of him was ringing, and he impulsively picked it up.