Last Call

by Tim Powers

  One of Leon’s heels slid forward now on the blood-soaked carpet, and the first pains seized his abdomen like wires tightening, and he gritted his teeth and moaned.

  The longer Abrams took getting here, the more horrible the jolting drive to the hospital would be. Where the hell are you, Abrams?

  When the pain subsided a little, he thought for just one moment about the card that was not in the room. Then he pushed his thoughts back to his past victory, his taking of the western throne.

  Leon had moved west from New York to Los Angeles in 1938, bringing with him his thirty-year-old wife and his eight-year-old son, Richard; and he soon learned that Siegel had preceded him in that westward pilgrimage. After the disquieting visit to the Rex, Leon joined the Hillcrest Country Club in Beverly Hills, and it was there that he finally met the man.

  And though Siegel had been only thirty-two, he had fairly radiated the power. Like Joe Adonis, he was anxious to keep fit and young-looking, as the king would have to be, but Siegel had seemed to know that more than shed blood and virility and posing would be necessary.

  They had met in the bar, and the man who introduced them noted that they were the only two people in the room who were drinking plain soda water.

  The remark had seemed to focus Siegel’s attention on Leon. “George, was it?” he asked, his half-closed eyes qualifying his smile. His brown hair was oiled and combed back from his high forehead.

  “Close enough,” Leon said.

  “You ever play cards, George?” Siegel’s Brooklyn accent made “cards” sound like “cods.”

  “Of course,” Leon had said, lowering his head over his glass so that the quickened pulse in his throat wouldn’t show. “Would you be up for a game of Poker sometime?”

  Siegel had stared at him then for several seconds. “No, I don’t think so,” he said finally. “It only bores me when Jacks keep calling my Kings.”

  “Maybe I’ll have the Kings.”

  Siegel laughed. “Not if I’m the dealer—and I always am.”

  Leon had tried to pay for the drinks, but Siegel waved him off, telling him with a wink that his money was no good.

  Flattened pennies and holed chips, Leon thought now.

  Leon had kept track of the man.

  In the summer of that year Siegel had organized a treasurehunting expedition to Cocos Island, several hundred miles off the west coast of Costa Rica; by November he was back and denying reports that he had found there a life-size gold statue, supposedly of the Virgin.

  But Leon obtained a photograph of the statue from a drunken old man called Bill Bowbeer, who had provided the original treasure map; the picture was blurred and stained, but Leon could see that the metallic figure wore a crown in the shape of a crescent moon embracing a sun disk—much more like the Egyptian goddess Isis than the Christian Mary.

  Shortly after that Siegel went to Italy with the countess who had funded the treasure hunt, and a few weeks later Leon had got a letter from an associate in Milan.

  One of the fifty-nine card fragments was missing from the Sforza Castle playing card collection; the informant had not known enough about the collection to be able to say which one.

  Leon had bought a ticket on the next plane to Milan.

  The Sforza cards had been discovered in the long-dry medieval cisterns of Sforza Castle during a renovation at the turn of the century. They had been a roughly stratified mix of eleven different incomplete decks, the top scattering of which were recent enough to have the French suits of Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, and Spades; but the lowest were from a Tarot deck painted in 1499, and Leon was certain that the missing card would be one of these. He had catalogued them in detail in 1927, and so he was probably the only person who would be able to determine which was absent.

  When he got to Milan, he found that the missing card was indeed from that oldest deck. It was the Tower card. Looking it up in the notes he’d made eleven years earlier, Leon knew that it was a nearly whole card depicting a tower being struck by lightning, with two human figures caught frozen in mid-fall along with some pieces of broken masonry.

  For the next eight years Leon had been unable to guess why Siegel would have wanted that particular card.

  The knocking at the front door came only seconds before Leon heard someone come in through the kitchen door, which Donna had evidently left open.

  “Georges?” called a voice he recognized as that of Guillen. “Where are you?”

  Leon, too weak to answer audibly, sat back and concentrated on breathing and waited for them to find him. He heard Guillen unlock the front door and let Abrams in, and then he heard them padding nervously through the living room.

  At last Abrams cautiously peeked into the den. “Jesus, Georges!” he shouted, rushing to where Leon was slumped in the chair. “Jesus, they—they shot you good. But don’t worry, the doctors will pull you through. Guillen! Get the guys in here damn quick!”

  A few moments later half a dozen men were carrying Leon through the hall to the kitchen, with Abrams holding the door and calling tense directions. As they shuffled into the kitchen, Abrams bent to pick up the card that lay face-down on the floor.

  “No,” Leon rasped. “Leave it there.”

  Abrams drove fast, but managed to avoid any bad bumps or jolting turns. The pain was back, though, and to his humiliation Leon couldn’t help letting some of it out in explosive grunts. His groin-clutching hands were slick with blood, and when once he hiked himself up to peer down at himself, his hands looked black, with glittering multicolored highlights from the passing neon.

  I haven’t lost everything, he reminded himself feverishly. Siegel did, but I haven’t.

  Leon had taken up fishing himself in 1939, out at the end of the Santa Monica Pier on moonless nights, catching big, deformed nocturnal sunfish and eating them raw right there on the weathered planking; and he grew unheard-of giant, weirdly lobed squashes in the garden of his little house at Venice Beach and burned the biggest and glossiest of them at various dams and reservoirs in Los Angeles and San Bernardino and Orange counties; and he played Poker in a hundred private games and got a reputation as a spectacularly loose, eccentric player; and he penciled a garageful of maps and graphs and charts, marking in new dots on the basis of his reading of newspapers from all over the world and his observations of the weather; and like Siegel, he had begun cultivating friendships among the wealthy aristocracy of Beverly Hills. Pluto was also the god of wealth, he had told himself.

  And very shortly Leon had begun to see results: Siegel’s position had begun to falter. He was twice arrested for the murder of a New York hoodlum named Harry Greenbaum, and in April of ’41 he was arrested for having harbored the gangster Louis “Lepke” Buchalter.

  Siegel proved to be able to evade these charges, but he must have been able, like a defensive king in a game of chess, to tell that he was under attack.

  But before Leon could decisively topple his rival, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor propelled the United States into World War II, and the frail patterns and abstract figures Leon had been coaxing from his graphs were hidden behind the purposeful directing of industry and society and the economy toward the war effort. His patterns were like ghost voices in static lost when the tuner brought in a clear signal; a few factors, such as the weather, continued to show the spontaneous subtle randomnesses that he needed, but for four years he simply worked at maintaining his seat in the game, like a Poker player folding hand after hand and hoping that the antes wouldn’t eat up his bankroll.

  Eventually President Truman returned from the 1945 Potsdam Conference—feverishly playing Poker with reporters, night and day, during the week-long voyage home—and by the time Truman got back to Washington he had come to the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. The spotter plane for the bomb-carrying Enola Gay was named the Straight Flush.

  With the war ended, Leon was able to renew his aggression.

  And in 1946, again like a beleaguered chess king, Siegel had sensed
the attacks, and castled.

  Most people in the gambling business thought Siegel was a megalomaniac to build a grossly expensive luxury hotel and casino in the desert seven miles south of Las Vegas—but Leon, to his alarm, saw the purpose behind the castle.

  Gambling had been legalized in Nevada in 1931, the same year that work was begun on Hoover Dam, and by 1935 the dam was completed, and Lake Mead, the largest man-made body of water in the world, had filled the deep valleys behind it. The level of the lake rose and fell according to schedules, reflecting the upstream supply and the downstream demand. The Flamingo, as Siegel named his hotel, was a castle in the wasteland with a lot of tamed water nearby.

  And the Flamingo was almost insanely grand, with transplanted palms and thick marble walls and expensive paneling and a gigantic pool and an individual sewer line for each of its ninety-two rooms—but Leon understood that it was a totem of its founder, and therefore had to be as physically perfect as the founder.

  Leon now knew why Siegel had stolen the Tower card: Based on the Tower of Babel, it symbolized foolishly prideful ambition, but it was not only a warning against such a potentially bankrupt course but also a means to it. And if it were reversed, displayed upside-down, it was somewhat qualified; the doomful aspects of it were a little more remote.

  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.

  CHAPTER 3

  Good Night. Sleep Peacefully…

  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 deser
t?”

  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.