“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, ‘I 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 distrustfully. 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 whisky. 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 $40,000 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 corner 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; people who would stay in the airport until they had fed their last quarter to the machines, and then would turn around and get onto the plane back home.
He guessed it must have happened. He suspected that there wasn’t much that hadn’t happened in Las Vegas at some point or other. And America was so damn big that with so many people there was always bound to be somebody.
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. It takes a lot of people believing just the tiniest bit to sustain us. That’s what we need, instead of food. Belief.”
“And Soma is…”
“To take the analogy further, it’s honey wine. 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. Not one of the walking dead, or whatever she is. She wants to live again. 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 a bullet 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, as if he were speaking 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.