"No," Crane said, "but I want to use these to set it up. Less wear and tear on my head. The actual game is going to be played with"—he sighed—"a Lombardy Zeroth deck."
Nardie glanced at him sharply. "My half-brother has a card from that deck," she said. "The Tower. He wants to use it to become King."
"Swell," said Crane. "I hope he looks at it cross-eyed and goes crazy."
"He already did," she said. "Are you … talking about the game on the lake?"
"Yes."
"You're not going to play in it, are you? Again?"
"Yes."
She shivered visibly. "You couldn't get me out on that boat."
Diana turned around. "When are you going to do this, Scott?"
He didn't look up from the cards. "The game's going to be played tonight and tomorrow night and during the day on Good Friday. I'll start tonight, and keep on playing until I get the trick done."
"Is that guy you conked gonna be there?" asked Mavranos.
"Yeah," said Crane. "In that body, if it's not dead or in a hospital. He's the host."
"He'll recognize you."
"He would, but I'll be disguised."
"How?"
There was a knock at the door then, and Diana walked across the room and let in the bellboy, who set the tray of Cokes on the table, and gave him some money.
"How are you going to disguise yourself?" Mavranos asked again when the bellboy had left.
Crane grinned worriedly at his friend and shook his head. "I don't know. Shave my head? Wear glasses? Dye my face and hands black?"
"None of those sound very good," said Diana.
"You could go in full clown makeup," Nardie said. "I think they do it for free at Circus Circus."
"Or you could go in an ape suit," said Mavranos. "There's gotta be a place in town that rents ape suits."
" 'Each one volunteered his own suggestions,' " quoted Crane with a forced smile. " 'His invaluable suggestions.' "
"That's Lewis Carroll," said Nardie.
Crane looked at her, and his smile became genuine. "Right." She and Diana had told him what her connection was to all this, but now he really paid attention to her for the first time, and he noticed her fine black hair and porcelain face. "I love that poem," he said. " 'Neither did he leave them slowly, with the—' "
"A woman," Diana interrupted harshly.
Mavranos raised his beer as if in a toast. "A woman!"
Crane frowned at her. "What?"
"Go as a woman. It's the only disguise that will work."
Crane laughed shortly—but saw that Mavranos and Nardie had raised their eyebrows as if considering the idea.
"No," he said. "This is going to be tough enough without showing up in drag, for Christ's sake. I'll shave my head and wear glasses. That'll—"
"No," said Nardie thoughtfully, "your face is too distinctive. I haven't seen you very often, but I'd recognize you bald and with glasses. I think drag is it—lots of makeup, lipstick, a striking wig—"
"Makes me hot," allowed Mavranos.
"It wouldn't work," said Crane in a confident, dismissing tone. "What about my voice?" He pitched his voice falsetto and said, "Do you want me to talk like this?"
"Just talk normally," said Diana. "They'll all just write you off as a brassy transvestite."
"Nobody's gonna look hard at a queer," Mavranos agreed. "If anybody starts to, just wink at 'em."
Somehow, dwarfing his fear that he would fail, and that Diana would be killed, and that he himself would lose his body on Holy Saturday when his father assumed the bodies he had bought during the 1969 games, Crane felt light-headed with panic at this new suggestion. I will not do it, he assured himself. Don't even worry about it.
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.