Given the logistics of our layout, there’s really only one practical way to hold a large conference in The Place.
Everybody who expects to be talking a lot more or less has to get into the pool.
Everyone else gathers around it to listen and respond.
Fortunately in Key West the weather is
always
perfect for this.
I customarily open the bar for the duration of a Council: anybody may help himself, as long as he fetches at least one drink to someone in the pool each time he does.
The cash drawer is left open, folks deposit their money without supervision or formalities, and the next day I just figure out how much booze is missing and punch that into the register to humor the IRS.
“Okay,” I said, when I judged it was time to call us to order, “all of you know the basics of the situation now, right?
We need to defeat a giant homicidal psychopath, in such a way that he doesn’t find out.
Now it seems—”
“Order of Jake, point,” said Walter.
“Yes, Walter?”
“Is really trip this necessary?
We offed him pay today; why keep on it not doing?
Money’s no us for problem.”
“Good pinto,” Brad agreed.
Walter had a point.
There’s this cluricaune…never mind, it’s a long story.
What it comes down to is we all more or less gave up worrying about money a long time ago.
There was no reason we couldn’t just pay the weekly bite Little Nuts demanded and forget him.
“That’s easy for
us
to say,” said Double Bill.
“Few of our neighbor establishments are as fiscally fortunate.”
There were rumbles of agreement.
Most of the bars in Key West—like most of the people in Key West—are just barely hanging on.
“You want that guy in here every week, like a recurring yeast infection?” Long-Drink asked Walter and Brad.
They frowned.
“Hell, on,” Brad muttered.
“Ton if we can help it.”
Treading water beside me, Willard spoke up.
No, I take that back: he wasn’t Willard, now.
He was The Professor once again, for the first time in many years.
“There’s another point to consider,” he said.
“Remember what Little Nuts wants the money
for
.
He plans to use it to finance a war with the Russian mob—here on Key West.”
There was a collective
rooba rooba
of dismay.
“Sounds like the problem might be self-correcting, then,” suggested Marty.
The Professor looked pained.
“How’s that?”
“Well, there are three possible outcomes.
The Russians win, and everything goes back to just the way it was.
Or they and Tony Junior take each other out, and we’re shut of two nuisances.
At worst Tony wins, in which case we’re no worse off than we are right now.
Better, maybe, because he turns his attention elsewhere.”
“That turns out not to be the case, I’m afraid,” said The Professor.
(I don’t believe I know any politer way to say “You’re full of shit.”)
“In the first place, you neglect a fourth possibility: Tony and the Russians might prove so evenly matched that neither can defeat the other.
Key West is not a big rock; they could easily destroy it altogether.”
A rumble went around that was the vocal equivalent of a shudder.
“But consider this,” the Professor said.
“No matter which of the four outcomes we get…we definitely get a boatload of FBI agents and state cops with it.”
“Jesus Christ!” said at least a dozen people.
I was one of them.
Another dozen or so went for “Holy shit!”
“My word,” “God bless my soul,” “Yikes,” and “Ouch” also had their adherents, and we’re multicultural enough that “
Caramba
,” “
Bojemoi
,” “
Sacre
bleu
,” “
V’ancula
,” and “
Oy
,” all put in an appearance.
“They’ll be all over Key West like ants at a picnic,” the Professor went on when the hubbub had subsided somewhat.
“They’ll talk to everybody they think Tony might have extorted.
We’re having trouble enough dealing with a state education department inspector—does anybody here think we’re ready to persuade the FBI we’re normal citizens?”
I thought about it.
Suppose Lex stayed at the bottom of the pool,
and Ralph and Alf kept their mouths shut, and Erin held off on time traveling or teleporting anywhere for an hour or so, and none of the Callahans picked that moment to arrive naked from the other end of space and time, and no aliens or gangsters happened to shoot any of us or set off any thermonuclear devices in our midst…could we possibly all play normal human beings well enough to convince FBI agents?
Nah.
No way in Hell.
I wasn’t sure exactly what it would be, but
something
would surely go wrong.
Pixel, perhaps: I was confident I could get Ralph and Alf to (literally) play dumb, but as one of my favorite songwriters said, you just can’t herd cats: there’s simply no controlling Pixel.
(Well, maybe two of his former servants could manage it, a little—Robert and Virginia Heinlein—but nobody since.)
He’d probably take offense at something and walk through a wall and that’d be it.
Or Nikola Tesla would show up, juggling balls of fire—and Nikky has been
pissed
at the FBI ever since they stole all his papers and possessions from his hotel safe the day he died.
With my luck he’d demand his stuff back, and underline the point with lightning bolts.
One of our newer regulars, Papaya, spoke up.
He’s got a terrible stutter I won’t attempt to reproduce, on the grounds that Papaya would edit it out of his speech if he could do so in life, and I
can
do it for him here, so why not.
(What about Walter and Brad, then, you ask?
Neither of them has a problem with the way they speak.
Why—do you?)
I mention it only because he’s a classic example of why I contend we need laws to constrain parents in the naming of their children.
His people are Cajun Conchs, who came to the Keys generations ago from Nova Scotia by way of Louisiana, and they thought nothing of naming a boy after one of their favorite local fruits.
Unfortunately the family name was LaMode.
If you tell people your name is Papaya LaMode, they’ll naturally conclude you have a stutter, not to mention an odd sense of humor; almost inevitably, you’ll develop both.
Maybe the sense of humor is compensation enough, I don’t know.
“So if I’m hearing you right, we seem to have four basic alternatives—none of which is acceptable.
Is that the situation?”
The Professor and I exchanged a glance across the pool.
“Well,” he said, “that
was
the situation…until Erin changed the rules.
It turns out she has a fifth ace up her sleeve.”
“The Ace of Thugs,” Erin said.
She was her usual age again, now.
Usual for this ficton, I mean.
She sat crosslegged at the approximate center of the pool, a few inches above the surface of the water.
I’ve never quite understood how she can do that.
It isn’t quite Transiting, the form of teleportation Solace and the Callahans taught her—is it?
I asked her about it, once.
The trouble was, she answered me.
“It has allowed her,” the Professor went on, “to devise the first new con I’ve heard of in a very long while.
If we can pull this off, not only will we get left alone to continue our valuable research in defining the maximum human tolerance for bliss, everyplace between here and Miami is going to become a slightly nicer place to be.”
Papaya frowned.
“Parts of Florida becoming
nicer
?”
He shuddered.
“That just ain’t natural.”
“Neither is a party,” Doc Webster said softly from his chaise longue over on the bar side of the pool.
“You have to make it happen.”
“Amen,” said several voices.
“Hush, Doc—I want to hear about this new con,” said Mei-Ling, running fond fingers through the memory of her husband’s hair.
Like more than one of my customers, Mei-Ling used to be a player herself once—before her conscience started bothering her, and she retired to respectability as an honest whore.
(“Now the marks
ask
me to screw them,” she told me once.
“And they’re
happy
I’m good at it.”)
By the kind of synchronicity which would be implausible anywhere else, and seems inevitable in The Place, four other patrons of mine happened to follow the same unconventional career path…and all five ended up working in the same whorehouse: the one Mike Callahan’s wife Lady Sally used to run in Brooklyn.
At different times, is the kicker—all five met each other for the first time here in Key West, the day I arrived to open up The Place back in
‘89.
In a further resonance, the other four are two couples, who both met and married while working at Lady Sally’s House: Joe and Arethusa Quigley (of whom more anon), and the Professor and Maureen.
(I once ventured to suggest that Mei-Ling’s marriage to Doc Webster slightly damaged the perfection of the symmetry.
“Not at all,” the Doc said.
“I did the same jobs as the other five, just more efficiently.
A good con man takes your money and sells you first-rate bullshit.
A good hooker takes your money and sends you away feeling better.
I was a physician: I split the difference.”
The best I could come back with was, “And the fee.”)
Doc murmured something in Fukienese that caused his wife’s fingers to slide down the back of his head and begin kneading at the base of his skull.
“Yes, Erin dear: ‘Straighten us, ‘cause—”
He interrupted himself to purr briefly.
Or maybe it was more Fukienese.
“‘—we’re ready.
What exactly is your new game?”
“I just heard of a new one, way up in western Canada someplace,” Joe Quigley interrupted.
“Second cousin of mine.
Some kind of time travel scam.”
“So is mine,” Erin admitted, looking interested.
“Huh.
I wouldn’t put it past my second cousin to claim-jump a new con.
Yours involve the Beatles?”
Now Erin was confused.
“No.”
“Elvis?”
She shook her head.
“The biggest celebrity involved in mine is the conqueror of Florida.”
“Jesus Christ!” said Long-Drink McGonnigle.
“You mean Jeb, the man so accursed by God he has George Bush for both father and brother?”
“I saw that movie,” Susie Maser said.
“Faye Dunaway.
She was his sister
and
his daughter.”
Doc Webster nodded.
“
Chinatown
.
With Nick Jackleson.”
In a heroic attempt to regain and focus the attention of the group, Erin raised her volume slightly.
“I didn’t mean the present governor.
I’m talking about the very first European ever to see the place.”
“Knack Sickle Gin,” said the Doc, trying to get it right.
“Jackson Nickel,” Walter riposted, getting into the spirit of the thing.
Erin raised her volume a little more—and herself, too, another foot or two higher above the water.
“And I don’t claim that it’s a new con—far from it.
What I’m talking about is probably the first con that was ever perpetrated on a white man in this state, actually.”
“Nixon Jackal,” the Doc muttered.
He shook his head irritably.
“Jack’s Knuckle In.”
I was near enough to pick up mild alarm in his tone, and began to be mildly alarmed myself.
Doc was emphatically not a rude man.
Almost pathologically not a rude man.
And he loved Erin.
He seemed to have caught a case of Spoonerism as if it were hiccups.
Erin unfolded her legs and stood up on the surface of the pool.
“Actually, the only change I’m really making in the scam is to cheat.
That will make it much easier.
But it will also—”
Smokes spoke up.
“Who
was
the conqueror of Florida?
Flagler, right?”
Smokes is another example of what I was talking about earlier.
“Smokes” is actually not a nickname, despite the fact that he is one of maybe ten living humans who enjoy marijuana more than I do, and looks it, and his last name is Pott.
In fact he had his first name legally changed, at
considerable
difficulty and expense, largely because he could no longer stand the one his parents had thoughtlessly seen fit to saddle him with.
Pete.
Well, if your name is Smokes Pott, you’re going to end up living in Key West.
That’s just the way it is.
So again we see how careless parental nomenclature can warp destiny.
(There’s even a tiny pun in there, for smoking pot must start with a peat pot.)