Crane picked it up. It was heavy Springfield Arms .45 with wooden grips. He paused, wondering if the man wanted him to do anything with it; then his host turned away, and Crane shrugged and tucked the gun into the belt of the gray slacks that had replaced the black wet-suit pants.
The man walked to an open sliding glass door at one corner of the pool-facing side of the room, and looked back and beckoned with a manicured hand.
Crane got to his feet, noting that he was wearing shoes instead of rubber fins and that he didn't seem to have the weight or bulk of the scuba tank on his back, and he walked across the carpet and followed his host out onto a small square terrace.
Below them a green lawn dotted with palm trees stretched out to the concrete apron of the pool, and beyond the pool was the casino, painted pistachio green. On the far side of the casino, past the narrow highway, the desert stretched away to the horizon, and Crane had to lean over the terrace coping and look to his right to see the nearest building, a low, rambling structure on the highway's far side half a mile north.
He recognized it. He'd been there many times as a little boy.
That was the Last Frontier, a sort of dude ranch casino and motel with western decor and a short "street" of transplanted ghost town buildings behind it to entertain children.
It was later sold, reopened in 1955 as the New Frontier, and then was torn down in '65. The Frontier Casino in which he had been playing Poker last week was built in '67 on the same spot.
And of course he knew where he was. He looked down, and shivered to see the remembered rose garden.
He was on the penthouse terrace of the Flamingo Hotel as the place had been in early '47, before the murder of Benjamin Siegel—popularly known as "Bugsy," though the man had seldom been called that to his face. This was how the Flamingo had looked when it was still the only elegant casino-hotel in Las Vegas. With its fourth-floor penthouse, it was the tallest building within seven miles.
Crane straightened and looked at the flashily dressed man standing beside him. He tried to say, "Mr. Siegel," but only succeeded in blowing air out of the regulator.
"You know what place this is," said Siegel. Crane caught a trace of a New York accent, and he saw that the sound was now synchronized with the mouth.
Crane nodded.
"My castle," Siegel said as he turned and walked back into the long living room. "Your father probably took you here, after he shot me up."
He paused at a narrow bookcase that was built into the wall; the lower section was enclosed, and he winked at Crane and lifted away the knee-level bottom shelf, spilling books onto the floor. Under the shelf, instead of the narrow box of a cupboard, was a rectangular shaft that receded away into darkness below, with a wooden ladder mounted against the far wall of it.
"Bolt-hole and hidey-hole," Siegel said.
He tossed the shelf aside and strode back to the table and resumed his chair.
"Sit down," Siegel said.
Crane walked back across the carpet and perched himself on the edge of the opposite chair, aware of the hard bulk of the gun under his belt. He reminded himself to breathe steadily and not hold his breath; back in the real, 1990 world, he might be rising or sinking right now, or even floating on the surface.
"John Scarne showed me a gimmick for a proposition bet one time," said Siegel, peeling off the paper wrappers from the sugar cubes. He put the bared white cubes out on the table and then unscrewed the cap of the can of Flit. "It's called la mosca. That means 'the fly' in Spanish."
From below the table he lifted an intercom microphone. "Hey, chef?" he said into it. "This is Benny. Jack's here, and we need one live fly." He let go of the microphone, and it dissolved into smoke.
Siegel dipped a finger into the can and then lightly touched the top face of each sugar cube. "I won ten grand off Willie Moretti with this, once, right here in this room. The idea is, you bet on which sugar cube the fly will land on. It looks like an even-up bet, right? But what you do, you turn the cubes so the one your man picked has the DDT face up, and the other is DDT down. The fly always goes for the unpoisoned face, and you win your bet."
A quiet knock sounded on a hallway door behind Crane, and Siegel called, "Come in!"
Crane heard a door open, and then a figure in a tuxedo had walked up from behind and stopped beside his chair. Siegel pointed at the tabletop.
Crane was able to keep from shouting through the regulator, but he did twitch back in his seat when he saw the room service waiter's hand.
It was the hand of a skeleton, the bones furred and strung with wet brown algae. The long fingers daintily set down a cardboard box with holes punched in the lid. A loud buzzing sounded from inside it.
One of Siegel's eyes was blank white now, with the sheen of pearl, but he smiled at Crane and turned one of the sugar cubes upside down, and then he lifted the lid off the box.
The fly was a buzzing insect that seemed to be the size of a plum, and it was up and out and flying around the table in an instant, its jointed legs dangling loosely under its swooping body.
Crane flinched away from it, but it was circling the sugar cubes now.
"Say you'd bet five grand he'd land on that one," Siegel said cheerfully, pointing at the one with the DDT face still up.
The fly landed on the other one, its long legs seeming to hug the cube, its face working at the surface.
The light through the windows was dimming; Siegel waved a brown hand, and several lamps came on, casting a yellow glow over the table. The motion had startled the fly away from the sugar, and while it was looping heavily through the air again, he picked up the cube the insect had spurned and tossed it over his shoulder, out the window.
"That was for betting," Siegel said. His voice was raspy now, and Crane looked up at him. The tan skin of Siegel's cheek was peeling, exposing rough blue coral. "This is for … illustration."
Again the fly landed on the cube and began gnawing at it. Crane could hear a tiny grinding.
"It knows there's a poison one," wheezed Siegel, "but it doesn't realize this is the one. It sees the sweet edible face and doesn't know it hides the same poison."
In the dimming light, dots seemed to be flickering on the cube, as if it were a white die; then the flickering marks seemed to be card suits. The fly was tossing aside fragments of sugar in its haste to devour the cube, and its bristly head was buried in a hole it had eaten into the thing.
Then the fly shuddered and tumbled off. It lay on its back, its long legs working in the air and a muddy liquid running out of its face.
"Too late," said Siegel huskily, "it realizes its mistake."
The windows behind him were closed now, and behind the glass rectangles, as if they were panels of an aquarium, churned the algae-fogged water of Lake Mead.
The walls and furniture were dissolving, and the light was going fast.
Siegel's head hung in the smoky dimness in front of Crane. The hair was gone, and the skin was a mossy smoothness except where the coral showed through. "He killed me," grated the head, "shot out my eye, cut off my head in the mortuary, and threw it in the lake! In memory of me, too, do this."
The rubber rim of the diving mask was suction-cupping Crane's face again, and its sides blocked his peripheral vision, and he could feel the slick layer of water between his skin and the neoprene wet suit. When he kicked himself away from the head that sat on top of the spire, his fins propelled him well back, so that the head was now just the bumpy top of the column in the murky water.