A big man in a light gray suit sits at the man in the charcoal suit’s table, and, noticing him even if she does not notice the man in the charcoal suit, the waitress, who is too thin to be pretty, too obviously anorectic to work Luxor or the Tropicana, and who is counting the minutes until she gets off work, comes straight over and smiles. He grins widely at her. “You ‘re looking a treat tonight, m ‘dear, a fine sight for these poor old eyes,” he says, and, scenting a large tip, she smiles broadly at him. The man in the light gray suit orders a Jack Daniel’s for himself and a Laphroaig and water for the man in the charcoal suit sitting beside him.
“You know,” says the man in the light gray suit, when his drink arrives, “the finest line of poetry ever uttered in the history of this whole damn country was said by Canada Bill Jones in 1853, in Baton Rouge, while he was being robbed blind in a crooked game of faro. George Devol, who was, like Canada Bill, not a man who was averse to fleecing the odd sucker, drew Bill aside and asked him if he couldn‘t see that the game was crooked. And Canada Bill sighed, and shrugged his shoulders, and said 7 know. But it’s the only game in town. And he went back to the game.”
Dark eyes stare at the man in the light gray suit mistrustfully. The man in the charcoal suit says something in reply. ‘The man in the light suit, who has a graying reddish beard, shakes his head. ‘ ‘““‘“‘,
“Look,” he says, “I’m sorry about what went down in Wisconsin. But I got you all out safely, didn‘t I? No one was hurt.”
The man in the dark suit sips his Laphroaig and water, savoring the marshy taste, the body-in-the-bog quality of the whiskey. He asks a question.
“I don’t know. Everything’s moving faster than I expected. Everyone’s got a hard-on for the kid I hired to run errands—I’ve got him outside, waiting in the taxi. Are you still in?”
The man in the dark suit replies.
The bearded man shakes his head. “She’s not been seen for two hundred years. If she isn’t dead she’s taken herself out of the picture.”
Something else is said.
“Look,” says the bearded man, knocking back his Jack Daniel’s. “You come in, be there when we need you, and I’ll take care of you. Whaddayou want? Soma? I can get you a bottle of Soma. The real stuff.”
The man in the dark suit stares. Then he nods his head, reluctantly, and makes a comment.
“Of course I am,” says the bearded man, smiling like a knife. “What do you expect? But look at it this way: it’s the only game in town.” He reaches out a paw like hand and shakes the other man’s well-manicured hand. Then he walks away.
The thin waitress comes over, puzzled: there’s now only one man at the corner table, a sharply dressed man with dark hair in a charcoal-gray suit. “You doing okay?” she asks. “Is your friend coming back?”
The man with the dark hair sighs, and explains that his friend won’t be coming back, and thus she won’t be paid for her time, or for her trouble. And then, seeing the hurt in her eyes, and taking pity on her, he examines the golden threads in his mind, watches the matrix, follows the money until he spots a node, and tells her that if she’s outside Treasure Island at 6:00 A.M., thirty minutes after she gets off work, she’ll meet an oncologist from Denver who will just have won forty-thousand dollars at a craps table, and will need a mentor, a partner, someone to help him dispose of it all in the forty-eight hours before he gets on the plane home.
The words evaporate in the waitress’s mind, but they leave her happy. She sighs and notes that the guys in the comer have done a runner, and have not even tipped her; and it occurs to her that, instead of driving straight home when she gets off shift, she’s going to drive over to Treasure Island; but she would never, if you asked her, be able to tell you why.
“So who was that guy you were seeing?” asked Shadow as they walked back down the Las Vegas concourse. There were slot machines in the airport. Even at this time of the morning people stood in front of them, feeding them coins. Shadow wondered if there were those who never left the airport, who got off their planes, walked along the jetway into the airport building, and stopped there, trapped by the spinning images and the flashing lights until they had fed their last quarter to the machines, and then, with nothing left, just turned around and got onto the plane back home.
And then he realized that he had zoned out just as Wednesday had been telling him who the man in the dark suit they had followed in the taxi had been, and he had missed it.
“So he’s in,” said Wednesday. “It’ll cost me a bottle of Soma, though.”
“What’s Soma?”
“It’s a drink.” They walked onto the charter plane, empty but for them and a trio of corporate big spenders who needed to be back in Chicago by the start of the next business day.
Wednesday got comfortable, ordered himself a Jack Daniel’s. “My kind of people see your kind of people ...” he hesitated. “It’s like bees and honey. Each bee makes only a tiny, tiny drop of honey. It takes thousands of them, millions perhaps, all working together to make the pot of honey you have on your breakfast table. Now imagine that you could eat nothing but honey. That’s what it’s like for my kind of people ... we feed on belief, on prayers, on love.”
“And Soma is ...”
“To take the analogy further, it’s a honey wine. Like mead.” He chuckled. “It’s a drink. Concentrated prayer and belief, distilled into a potent liqueur.”
They were somewhere over Nebraska eating an unimpressive in-flight breakfast when Shadow said, “My wife.”
“The dead one.”
“Laura. She doesn’t want to be dead. She told me. After she got me away from the guys on the train.”
“The action of a fine wife. Freeing you from durance vile and murdering those who would have harmed you. You should treasure her, Nephew Ainsel.”
“She wants to be really alive. Can we do that? Is that possible?”
Wednesday said nothing for long enough that Shadow started to wonder if he had heard the question, or if he had, possibly, fallen asleep with his eyes open. Then he said, staring ahead of him as he talked, “I know a charm that can cure pain and sickness, and lift the grief from the heart of the grieving.
“I know a charm that will heal with a touch.
“I know a charm that will turn aside the weapons of an enemy.
“I know another charm to free myself from all bonds and locks.
“A fifth charm: I can catch an arrow in flight and take no harm from it.”
His words were quiet, urgent. Gone was the hectoring tone, gone was the grin. Wednesday spoke as if he were reciting the words of a religious ritual, or remembering something dark and painful.
“A sixth: spells sent to hurt me will hurt only the sender.
“A seventh charm I know: I can quench a fire simply by looking at it.
“An eighth: if any man hates me, I can win his friendship.
“A ninth: I can sing the wind to sleep and calm a storm for long enough to bring a ship to shore.
“Those were the first nine charms I learned. Nine nights I hung on the bare tree, my side pierced with a spear’s point. I swayed and blew in the cold winds and the hot winds, without food, without water, a sacrifice of myself to myself, and the worlds opened to me.
“For a tenth charm, I learned to dispel witches, to spin them around in the skies so that they will never find their way back to their own doors again.
“An eleventh: if I sing it when a battle rages it can take warriors through the tumult unscathed and unhurt, and bring them safely back to their hearths and their homes.
“A twelfth charm I know: if I see a hanged man I can bring him down from the gallows to whisper to us all he remembers.
“A thirteenth: if I sprinkle water on a child’s head, that child will not fall in battle.
“A fourteenth: I know the names of all the gods. Every damned one of them.
“A fifteenth: I have a dream of power, of glory, and of wisdom, and I can make people believe my dreams.”
His voice was so low now that Shadow had to strain to hear it over the plane’s engine noise.
“A sixteenth charm I know: if I need love I can turn the mind and heart of any woman.
“A seventeenth, that no woman I want will ever want another.
“And I know an eighteenth charm, and that charm is the greatest of all, and that charm I can tell to no man, for a secret that no one knows but you is the most powerful secret there can ever be.”
He sighed, and then stopped talking.
Shadow could feel his skin crawl. It was as if he had just seen a door open to another place, somewhere worlds away where hanged men blew in the wind at every crossroads, where witches shrieked overhead in the night.
“Laura,” was all he said.
Wednesday turned his head, stared into Shadow’s pale gray eyes with his own. “I can’t make her live again,” he said. “I don’t even know why she isn’t as dead as she ought to be.”
“I think I did it,” said Shadow. “It was my fault.”
Wednesday raised an eyebrow.
“Mad Sweeney gave me a golden coin, back when he showed me how to do that trick. From what he said, he gave me the wrong coin. What he gave me was something more powerful than what he thought he was giving me. I passed it on to Laura.”
Wednesday grunted, lowered his chin to his chest, frowned. Then he sat back. “That could do it,” he said. “And no, I can’t help you. What you do in your own time is your own affair, of course.”
“What,” asked Shadow, “is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that I can’t stop you from hunting eagle stones and thunderbirds. But I would infinitely prefer that you spend your days quietly sequestered in Lakeside, out of sight, and, I hope, out of mind. When things get hairy we’ll need all hands to the wheel.”
He looked very old as he said this, and fragile, and his skin seemed, almost transparent, and the flesh beneath was gray.
Shadow wanted, wanted very much, to reach out and put his hand over Wednesday’s gray hand. He wanted to tell him that everything would be okay—something that Shadow did not feel, but that he knew had to be said. There were men in black trains out there. There was a fat kid in a stretch limo and there were people in the television who did not mean them well.
He did not touch Wednesday. He did not say anything.
Later, he wondered if he could have changed things, if that gesture would have done any good, if it could have averted any of the harm that was to come. He told himself it wouldn’t. He knew it wouldn’t. But still, afterward, he wished that, just for a moment on that slow flight home, he had touched Wednesday’s hand.
The brief winter daylight was already fading when Wednesday dropped Shadow outside his apartment. The freezing temperature when Shadow opened the car door felt even more science fictional when compared to Las Vegas.
“Don’t get into any trouble,” said Wednesday. “Keep your head below the parapet. Make no waves.”
“All at the same time?”
“Don’t get smart with me, m’boy. You can keep out of sight in Lakeside. I pulled in a big favor to keep you here, safe and sound. If you were in a city they’d get your scent in minutes.”
“I’ll stay put and keep out of trouble.” Shadow meant it as he said it. He’d had a lifetime of trouble and he was ready to let it go forever. “When are you coming back?” he asked.
“Soon,” said Wednesday, and he gunned the Lincoln’s engine, slid up the window, and drove off into the frigid night.
Chapter Eleven
Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
—Ben Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack.
Three cold days passed. The thermometer never made it up to the zero mark, not even at midday. Shadow wondered how people had survived this weather in the days before electricity, before thermal face masks and lightweight thermal underwear, before easy travel.
He was down at the video, tanning, bait and tackle store, being shown Hinzelmann’s hand-tied trout flies. They were more interesting than he had expected: colorful fakes of life, made of feather and thread, each with a hook hidden inside it.
He asked Hinzelmann.
“For real?” asked Hinzelmann.
“For real,” said Shadow.
“Well,” said the older man. “Sometimes they didn’t survive it, and they died. Leaky chimneys and badly ventilated stoves and ranges killed as many people as the cold. But those days were hard—they’d spend the summer and the fall laying up the food and the firewood for the winter. The worst thing of all was the madness. I heard on the radio, they were saying how it has to do with the sunlight, how there isn’t enough of it in the winter. My daddy, he said folk just went stir crazy—winter madness they called it. Lakeside always had it easy, but some of the other towns around here, they had it hard. There was a saying still had currency when I was a kid, that if the serving girl hadn’t tried to kill you by February she hadn’t any backbone.
“Storybooks were like gold dust—anything you could read was treasured, back before the town had a lending library. When my grampaw got sent a storybook from his brother in Bavaria, all the Germans in town met up in the town hall to hear him read it, and the Finns and the Irish and the rest of them, they’d make the Germans tell them the stories.
‘Twenty miles south of here, in Jibway, they found a woman walking mother-naked in the winter with a dead babe at her breast, and she’d not suffer them to take it from her.” He shook his head meditatively, closed the fly cabinet with a click. “Bad business. You want a video rental card? Eventually they’ll open a Blockbusters here, and then we’ll soon be out of business. But for now we got a pretty fair selection.”
Shadow reminded Hinzelmann that he had no television, and no VCR. He enjoyed Hinzelmann’s company—the reminiscences, the tall tales, the goblin grin of the old man. It could make things awkward between them were Shadow to admit that television had made him uncomfortable ever since it had started to talk to him.
Hinzelmann fished in a drawer, «id took out a tin box—by the look of it, it had once been a Christmas box, of the kind that contained chocolates or cookies: a mottled Santa Claus, holding a tray of Coca-Cola bottles, beamed up from its lid. Hinzelmann eased off the metal top of the box, revealing a notebook and books of blank tickets, and said, “How many you want me to put you down for?”
“How many of what?”
“Klunker tickets. She’ll go out onto the ice today, so we’ve started selling tickets. Each ticket is five dollars, ten for forty, twenty for seventy-five. One ticket buys you five minutes. Of course we can’t promise it’ll go down in your five minutes, but the person who’s closest stands to win five hundred bucks, and if it goes down in your five minutes, you win a thousand dollars. The earlier you buy your tickets, the more times aren’t spoken for. You want to see the info sheet?”
“Sure.”
Hinzelmann handed Shadow a photocopied sheet. The klunker was an old car with its engine and fuel tank removed, which would be parked out on the ice for the winter. Sometime in the spring the lake ice would melt, and when it was too thin to bear the car’s weight the car would fall into the lake. The earliest the klunker had ever tumbled into the lake was February the twenty-seventh (“That was the winter of 1998.1 don’t think you could rightly call that a winter at all”), the latest was May the first (“That was 1950. Seemed that year that the only way that winter would end was if somebody hammered a stake through its heart”). The beginning of April appeared to be the most common time for the car to sink—normally in midafternoon.
