Crane turned. Mavranos was holding out his right hand, and Crane clasped it with his own.
"Don't fuck up," said Mavranos.
Crane made a circle of his thumb and forefinger, then stepped up over the gunwale and jumped into the water with his feet together, his right hand behind his head holding the tank down.
He splashed in, hearing the crackle of the bubbles muffled through his wet suit hood.
The water was cold, about sixty degrees, and as always, it invaded his crotch first. He hooted through the regulator, blowing a cloud of bubbles up past the face plate.
He swallowed and wiggled his jaw, feeling his ears pop as the pressure was equalized, and then he began breathing. Slow and deep, he told himself as he stretched his feet out through the bottomless water. Careful the cold doesn't get you breathing fast and shallow.
He was sinking slowly, and he relaxed and let himself go down. Visibility was terrible—a dust of brown-green algae hung in suspension in the darkening water, and shreds like puffy cornflakes swirled up around him.
About six feet down he passed through one of the planes of temperature difference called thermoclines, and again he hooted at the suddenly colder water. He spread his hands and kicked, halting his descent.
Dimly he could see the slope of the island through the fog of algae. The cobblestone-size rocks were all fuzzed with the yellow-brown muck, and he wondered how he could identify any of the shaggy lumps as a severed head.
But the fisherman had been a little further out anyway. Crane began swimming away through the murk, kicking with long strokes and feeling the pull in the tendons of his insteps.
Very soon his left leg began to ache where he had stabbed it eight days ago.
The repetitive routines of breathing and kicking began almost to hypnotize him. He was remembering dives off Catalina after spring rains, when the visibility was a hundred feet of crystal blue and the boundary plane between the fresher top layer and the saltier one below was a rippling refraction, like heat waves over a highway; and he remembered climbing deep down in tide pools off La Jolla, picking up tiny octopuses and touching twitchy rainbow-colored anemones, and having to patiently untangle himself from long rubbery strands of kelp, and one time accidentally elbowing the release buckle of his weight belt and watching it plummet away into oblivion through the glassy clear water.
All he could hear was the metallic echo of his breathing in the steel air tank, and the air that he sucked in long pulses through the regulator valve was cold and tasted of metal, and as always somehow had a gritty feel in his mouth.
Several times he had glanced at his watch and the pressure gauge, but he had not looked at either one for a while when he began to hear, faintly, something more than his own breathing.
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.
"You're you, still," the man said. Crane noticed that the voice was not perfectly synchronized with the movement of the lips. "I was afraid you might not be." From inside his jacket he pulled a shiny automatic pistol. Crane tensed, ready to jump at him, but the man took the gun by the barrel and laid it on the table in front of Crane. "Take it. Safety's off, and it's chambered. All you gotta do is pull back the hammer and pull the trigger."