Tim Powers - Last Call (4 page)

Reversed, it could permit a King to build an intimidating castle, and keep it.

And to absolutely cement his identification with the building, and cement, too, his status as the modern avatar of Dionysus and Tammuz and Attis and Osiris and the Fisher King and every other god and king who died in the winter and was reborn in the spring, Siegel had opened the hotel on the day after Christmas. It closed—"died"—two weeks later and then reopened on March 27.

Close enough to Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter.

Sagebrush-scented air cooled Leon's damp face when they opened the back of the station wagon.

"Okay, carefully now, he's been shot, and he's lost a lot of blood. Guillen, you get in the back seat and push as we pull."

Doctors in white coats were scurrying around the wheeled cart they slid him onto, but before they could move him in through the emergency room doors, Leon reached out and grabbed Abrams's sleeve. "Do you know if they've found Scotty yet?" Wherever the boy was, he was still psychically opened, still unlinked.

"No, Georges," Abrams said nervously, "but I wouldn't have heard—I left the house the minute I got your call."

"Find out," Leon said as one of the doctors broke his weak grip and began to push the gurney away, "and let me know! Find him!"

That I, too, may go and worship,
he thought bitterly.

Southwest on Highway 91 the truck with the boat behind it rumbled across the desert landscape toward distant Los Angeles, the glow of the headlights superfluous under the full moon.

A month later Leon sat in the passenger seat of Abrams's car as they drove—much more slowly now—through sunlit streets away from the hospital. The foothills were a dry tan color, and sprinklers threw glittering spirals of water across the artificially green lawns.

Leon was bandaged up like a diapered baby. The doctors had removed his prostate gland and two feet of his large and small intestines, and his genitals had been a shredded mess that had virtually come away from the body when the doctors scissored his pants off.

But I haven't lost everything, he told himself for the thousandth time. Siegel did, but I haven't. Even though I no longer have quite all the guts I used to.

"Holler if I jiggle you," said Abrams.

"You're driving fine," Leon said.

In his role as Fisher King, the supernatural king of the land and its fertility, Ben Siegel had among other things cultivated a rose garden on the grounds of the Flamingo. Roses were a potent symbol of the transitory nature of life, and Siegel had thought that by keeping a tamed plot of them he could thus symbolically tame death. The flowers had eventually become routine to him, not requiring the kind of psychic attention of which, as the Fisher King, he was capable.

Leon had heard that they had bloomed wildly in June of 1947 before he had killed Siegel, throwing their red petals out across the poolside walkway and even thrusting up sprouts through the cracks between the concrete blocks.

Still living in Los Angeles, Leon had been whittling away at Siegel's remaining vulnerabilities, the aspects of his life that had not been withdrawn behind the walls of the castle in the desert.

These vulnerabilities were two: the Trans-America wire service and the woman Siegel had secretly married in the fall of '46.

Bookmaking couldn't go on without a wire service to communicate race results instantly across the country, and Siegel, as a representative of the Capone Mob, had introduced Trans-America to the American west as a rival to the previous monopoly, James Regan's Chicago-based Continental Press Service.

Trans-America had prospered, and Siegel had made a lot of money … until Georges Leon had visited Chicago in June of '46 and killed James Regan. The Capone Mob had quickly assumed Continental from Regan's people, and then Trans-America was superfluous. The Capone Mob expected Siegel to transfer all his clients to Continental and then fold Trans-America, but Leon managed to see to it that the order was delivered in the most arrogant terms possible. As Leon had hoped, Siegel refused to abandon his wire service, and instead told the board of directors of the Combination that they would have to buy it from him for two million dollars.

The Flamingo was already under construction, and Siegel was bucking the still-effective wartime building restrictions and material priorities. Leon had known that Siegel needed the income from Trans-America.

And Leon had managed to meet Virginia Hill, who still frequently visited Los Angeles, where she maintained a mansion in Beverly Hills. She was ostensibly Siegel's girl friend, but Leon had seen the ring she wore, and had seen how dogs howled when she was around them, and had noticed that she stayed out at parties all night when the full moon hung in the sky, and he had guessed that she was secretly Siegel's wife.

Leon had forced himself not to let show the excitement he had felt at the possibility; like a player who tilts up the corners of his cards and sees a pat Straight Flush, he had changed nothing in his day-to-day behavior.

But if he was right about Virginia Hill, he had caught Siegel in a strategic error.

A girl friend would have been of little value, present or absent, but if the King had been foolish and sentimental enough to split his power by voluntarily taking a wife and could then be
deprived
of that corresponding part of his power—if she could be separated from him by water, a lot of it—he'd be seriously weakened.

And so Leon had conveyed to Virginia Hill the idea that Lucky Luciano intended to have Siegel killed—which was true—and that she might be able to prevent it by appealing to Luciano in person in Paris. Hill had flown to Paris in early June of 1947.

Leon had cashed in some real estate and some favors and some threats, and arranged matters so that the Trans-America wire service showed serious problems in its books and personnel.

And late on the night of June 13 Siegel had flown from Las Vegas to Los Angeles to investigate the wire service's apparent problems.

Siegel's private plane touched down on the runway at Glendale airport at two in the morning on June 14.

Georges Leon couldn't act until the twentieth, so for several days he parked at the curb across the street from Virginia Hill's house on North Linden Drive in Beverly Hills and watched the place. As Leon had hoped, Siegel was staying in town, sleeping at Virginia Hill's mansion.

On the afternoon of the twentieth, Leon drove through the hot, palm-shaded streets of Los Angeles to a drugstore telephone booth to deliver the required final challenge.

Siegel answered the phone. "Hello?"

"Hi, Ben. Get a chance to do much fishing out there in the desert?"

After a pause, "Oh," Siegel said impatiently, "it's you."

"Right. I've just got to tell you—you know I have to—that I'm going to assume the Flamingo."

"You son of a bitch," said Siegel in a sort of tired rage. "Over my dead body you will! You haven't got the guts."

Leon had chuckled and hung up.

That night Leon knew the stars were working for him, for Siegel and three friends drove to a seaside restaurant called Jack's at the Beach. Leon followed them, and when they were leaving and thanking the manager, Leon gave a waiter ten dollars to hand Siegel a copy of the morning's
Los Angeles Times
with a note paper-clipped to it that read, "
Good night. Sleep peacefully with the Jack's compliments
." Siegel took the newspaper without glancing at it.

An hour later Leon parked his car by the curb in front of Virginia Hill's Spanish-style mansion. He switched off the engine, and it ticked and clicked like a beetle in the shadows of the dark street.

For a while he just sat in the driver's seat and watched the spotlighted, pillared house, and what he thought about more than anything else was what it had so far been like to live in only one body, to experience only what one person could live; and he tried to imagine being vitally connected to the eternal and terribly potent figures that secretly animated and drove humanity, the figures that the psychologist Carl Jung had called archetypes and that primitive peoples, in fear, had called gods.

It was impossible simply to imagine it—so he got out of the car and carried the .30-30 carbine up the sloping lawn to the rose-covered lattice that blocked the view of the living room from the street. Crickets in the shrubbery were making enough noise to cover the
snap-clank
of the first round being chambered.

The barrel of the rifle rested comfortably in one of the squares formed by the lattice, and for several minutes Leon just crouched on the seat of a wooden bench and swiveled the gunsight back and forth and gauged the layout.

Beyond the intimidatingly close glass of the living room window, Siegel was sitting on a flower-patterned couch, reading the sports page of the very newspaper Leon had passed on to him; next to him another man was dozing with his arms crossed. The furniture of the room was rococo, all cupids and marble and statuary lamps. A little figure of Bacchus, the god of wine, stood on a grand piano, and on the wall hung a painting of a nude woman holding a wineglass.

As the window disintegrated into glittering spray, the first two shots shattered the statue and punched through the painting; Ben Siegel had started to get up, and the next two bullets tore apart his face; Leon fired the last five shots of the clip blindly, but he had the impression that at least two more had hit Siegel. The noise of the shots racketed up and down the street, but Leon had been able to hear the clinks of the ejected shells bouncing off the wooden bench he was crouched on.

Then he had run back to the car and had tossed the rifle into the back seat and had started the engine, and as he drove fast out of the neighborhood he had exulted in being able to regard what he had just done from the vantage points of twenty-two new, crystalline personalities.

It was June 20—in pre-Christian times the first day of the month-long celebration of the death of Tammuz, the Babylonian fertility god, who had reigned in a desert region where the summer sun imposed a sort of hot winter's death on the growing cycle.

There would be a new King reigning at the end of the celebration on July 20.

And out in the bleak heart of the Mojave Desert that night a sandstorm raged around the Flamingo Hotel and stripped the paint from the bodies of all the exposed cars, right down to the bare metal, and permanently frosted the windshields.

Later Leon learned that four of his nine bullets had hit his quarry, and that Siegel's right eye had been blown cleanly out of his head and into the next room.

Back home in his bungalow now, Georges Leon hobbled from room to room on crutches and watched the sleepy, hot street through the two eyes of Richard on the roof. He listened to the radio and read the newspapers and penciled marks on his charts and avoided going into the kitchen, where the dropped card still lay on the linoleum.

He had at first heard that Scotty had died with Donna in the car crash, then that the police investigation had failed to find a child's skeleton in the burned-out shell of the wrecked Chevrolet; Abrams had talked to Bailey and the other men, and he was able to figure out where Donna had got the boy out of the car, but by that time it had been hopeless to try to track any other cars that might have been driving around Ninth Street on that evening.

Advertisements and radio appeals and a police missing person report all had failed to get the boy back. And in the course of his searches and tracings, Leon had come across the disquieting fact that there was no casino called the Moulin Rouge anywhere in Las Vegas.

Frenziedly he took up hobbies—stamp and coin collecting, buying items and staring at the faces and denominations and trying to read the meanings of them. He slept only when exhaustion knocked him down, and paid no attention to the ringing of the telephone.

For hours he sat painfully on the floor of the den, inventing a new form of Poker; for he now needed another way to become a parent.

Finally one night he could ignore the issue no longer, and at midnight he crawled out of the bedroom on his hands and knees and crouched on the kitchen floor with a cigarette lighter.

The card still lay where Donna had dropped it after pulling it out of Scotty's sliced eye. For a long time in the darkness Leon sat with his trembling fingers on it.

At last he turned it over, and he ignored the wind whispering around the bungalow as he spun the flint wheel of his lighter and looked.

The card was, as he had feared, the profile figure of the Page of Cups, the equivalent in modern terms of the Jack of Hearts. A one-eyed Jack.

The wind rattling the flimsy screens was from out of the west, sighing across the Mojave Desert from Death Valley and beyond. For at least an hour Georges Leon crouched on the floor and stared in that direction, knowing that it was from that quarter of the compass that his adversary, the one-eyed jack, would one day come.

You know, my Friends, how long since in my House
For a new Marriage I did make Carouse:
Divorced old barren Reason from my Bed,
And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.

—
The Rubdiyat of Omar Khayyam,
Edward J. Fitzgerald Translation

"Stetson!
"You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
"Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?"

—T. S. ELIOT,
The Waste Land

I watched her fly away for Vegas, sure,
I waved the plane out of sight,
Then I tried to drive home without stopping at a bar, but I
Didn't make it, quite.
And sitting with those blue-jeaned shadows there, that had
Been there all night,
I found myself shivering over my chilly drink,
Half dead of fright.

—William Ashbless

Crane recoiled out of sleep, instantly grateful that the sun was shining outside.