Last Call

In March of 1951, testifying before the Kefauver Senate Crime Investigating Committee, Virginia Hill stated that Siegel had told her the Flamingo Hotel was "upside down"—though she was able to cast no light on what he might have meant by that statement.

—Colin Lepovre, Siegel Agonistes

And upside down in air were towers

Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Son, I have seen the good ship sail

Keel upward, and mast downward, in the heavens,

And solid turrets topsy-turvy in air …

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King

CHAPTER 1: "I'll Still Have You, Sonny Boy"

Georges Leon held his little boy's hand too tightly and stared up from under his hatbrim at the unnaturally dark noon sky.

He knew that out over the desert, visible to any motorists along the lonelier stretches of Boulder Highway, the rain would be twisting in tall, ragged funnels under the clouds; already some flooding had probably crept across the two lanes of Highway 91, islanding the Flamingo Hotel outside town. And on the other side of the earth, under his feet, was the full moon.

The Moon and the Fool, he thought desperately. Not good—but I can't stop now.

A dog was barking a block or two away, in one of these alleys or parking lots. In spite of himself, Leon thought about the dog that appeared on the Fool card in the Tarot deck and the dogs that in Greek mythology accompanied Artemis, the goddess of the moon. And of course, the picture on the Moon card generally showed rain falling. He wished he were allowed to get drunk.

"We'd better be heading for home, Scotty," he told the boy, keeping the urgency out of his voice only with some effort. Get this done, he thought.

Palm fronds rattled overhead and threw big drops down onto the pavement.

"Home?" protested Scotty. "No, you said—"

Guilt made Leon gruff. "You got a fancy breakfast and lunch, and you've got a pocketful of punched chips and flattened pennies." They took a few more steps along the puddled pavement toward Center Street, where they'd be turning right toward the bungalow. The wet street smelled like dry white wine. "I'll tell you what, though," he said, despising himself for making an empty promise, "tonight after dinner this storm will have cleared up, and we can drive out of town with the telescope and look at the stars."

The boy sighed. "Okay," he said, trotting along to keep up with his father, his free hand rattling the defaced chips and pennies in his pocket. "But it's gonna be a full moon. That'll wash everything else out, won't it?"

God, shut up, Leon thought. "No," he said, as though the universe might be listening and might do what he said. "No, it won't change a thing."

Leon had wanted an excuse to stop by the Flamingo Hotel, seven miles outside of town on 91, so he had taken Scott there for breakfast.

The Flamingo was a wide three-story hotel with a fourth-floor penthouse, incongruously green against the tan desert that surrounded it. Palm trees had been trucked in to stand around the building, and this morning the sun had been glaring down from a clear sky, giving the vivid green lawn a look of defiance.

Leon had let a valet park the car, and he and Scott had walked hand in hand along the strip of pavement to the front steps that led up to the casino door.

Below the steps on the left side, behind a bush, Leon had long ago punched a hole in the stucco and scratched some symbols around it; this morning he crouched at the foot of the steps to tie his shoe, and he took a package from his coat pocket and leaned forward and pitched it into the hole.

"Another thing that might hurt you, Daddy?" Scott asked in a whisper. The boy was peering over his shoulder at the crude rayed suns and stick figures that grooved the stucco and flaked the green paint.

Leon stood up. He stared down at his son, wondering why he had ever confided this to the boy. Not that it mattered now.

"Right, Scotto," he said. "And what is it?"

"Our secret."

"Right again. You hungry?"

"As a bedbug." This had somehow become one of their bits of standard dialogue.

"Let's go."

The desert sun had been shining in through the windows, glittering off the little copper skillets the fried eggs and kippered herrings were served in. The breakfast had been "on the house," even though they weren't guests, because Leon was known to have been a business associate of Ben Siegel, the founder. Already the waitresses felt free to refer openly to the man as "Bugsy" Siegel.

That had been the first thing that had made Leon uneasy, eating at the expense of that particular dead man.

Scotty had had a good time, though, sipping a cherry-topped Coca-Cola from an Old Fashioned glass and squinting around the room with a worldly air.

"This is your place now, huh, Dad?" he'd said as they were leaving through the circular room that was the casino. Cards were turning over crisply, and dice were rolling with a muffled rattle across the green felt, but Leon didn't look at any of the random suits and numbers that were defining the moment.

None of the dealers or croupiers seemed to have heard the boy. "You don't—" Leon began.

"I know," Scotty had said in quick shame, "you don't talk about important stuff in front of the cards."

They left through the door that faced the 91, and had to wait for the car to be brought around from the other side—the side where the one window on the penthouse level made the building look like a one-eyed face gazing out across the desert.

The Emperor card, Leon thought now as he tugged Scotty along the rain-darkened Center Street sidewalk; why am I not getting any signs from it? The old man in profile, sitting on a throne with his legs crossed because of some injury. That has been my card for a year now. I can prove it by Richard, my oldest son—and soon enough I'll be able to prove it by Scotty here.

Against his will he wondered what sort of person Scotty would have grown up to be if this weren't going to happen. The boy would be twenty-one in 1964; was there a little girl in the world somewhere now who would, otherwise, one day meet him and marry him? Would she now find somebody else? What sort of man would Scotty have grown up to be? Fat, thin, honest, crooked? Would he have inherited his father's talent for mathematics?

Leon glanced down at the boy, and wondered what Scotty found so interesting in the rain-drabbed details of this street—the lurid red and blue hieroglyphs of neon in tiny round bar windows, the wet awnings flapping in the rainy breeze, cars looming like submarines through the filtered gray light …

He remembered Scotty batting at the branches of a rosebush during a brightly sunlit walk around the grounds of the Flamingo a few months ago and piping out, "Look, Daddy! Those leaves are the same color as the city of Oz!" Leon had seen that the bush's leaves were instead a dusted dark green, almost black, and for a few moments he had worried about Scotty's color perception—and then he had crouched beside the boy, head to head, and seen that the underside of each leaf was bright emerald, hidden to any passerby of more than four feet in height.

Since then Leon had paid particular attention to his son's observations. Often they were funny, like the time he pointed out that the pile of mashed potatoes on his plate looked just like Wallace Beery; but once in a while, as had happened at lunch today, he found them obscurely frightening.

After breakfast, while the sun had still been shining and these rain clouds were just billowy sails dwarfing the Spring Mountains in the west, the two of them had driven the new Buick to the Las Vegas Club downtown, where Leon held an eight-dollar-a-day job as a Blackjack dealer.

He had cashed his paycheck and taken fifty cents of it in pennies, and had got the pit boss to let Scotty have a stack of the old worn chips that the casino defaced by die-punching a hole through the centers, and then they had walked to the tracks west of the Union Pacific Depot, and Leon had shown his son how to lay pennies on the tracks so that the Los Angeles-bound trains would flatten them.

For the next hour or so they ran up to lay the bright coins on the hot steel rails, scrambled back to a safe distance to wait for a train, and then, after the spaceship-looking train had come rushing out of the station and howled past and begun to diminish in the west, tiptoed out to the track where the giant had passed and tried to find the featureless copper ovals. They were too hot to hold at first, and Leon would juggle them into his upended hat on the sand to cool off. Eventually he had said that it was time for lunch. The clouds were bigger in the west now.

They drove around, and found a new casino called the Moulin Rouge in the colored neighborhood west of the 91. Leon had not even heard that such a place was being built, and he didn't like colored people, but Scotty had been hungry and Leon had been impatient, so they had gone in. After Scotty had been told that his flattened pennies wouldn't spin the wheels of the slot machines, they went to the restaurant and ordered plates of what turned out to be a surprisingly good lobster stew.

After Scotty had eaten as much as he could of his, he shoved the sauce out to the rim of the plate; through the mess at the center peeked the harlequin figure that was apparently the Moulin Rouge's trademark.

The boy had stared at the white face for a moment, then looked up at his father and said, "The Joker."

Georges Leon had shown no expression as he followed his son's gaze to the face on the plate. The androgynous harlequin figure did resemble the standard Joker in a deck of cards, and of course he knew that the Joker was the only member of the Major Arcana figures to survive the truncation of the seventy-eight-card Tarot deck to the modern fifty-three-card playing card deck.

In previous centuries the figure had been called the Fool, and was portrayed dancing on a cliff edge, holding a stick and pursued by a dog, but the Joker and the Fool were unarguably the same Person.

A piece of lobster obscured one of the grinning figure's eyes.

"A one-eyed Joker," Scotty had added cheerfully.

Leon had hastily paid the bill and dragged his son out into the rainstorm that had swept into town while they'd been eating. They'd driven back as far as the Las Vegas Club, and then, feeling conspicuous in the big car, Leon had insisted on leaving it there and putting on their hats and walking the few blocks back through the dwindling rain to the bungalow on Bridger Avenue that was their home.

Scott's eighteen-year-old brother, Richard, was on the roof, scanning the nearby streets and housefronts when they walked up, and he didn't glance down when they unlocked the front door and went inside.

Leon's wife was standing in the kitchen doorway, and the smile on her thin, worn face seemed forced. "You two are home early."

Georges Leon walked past her and sat down at the kitchen table. He drummed his fingers on the Formica surface—his fingertips seemed to vibrate, as if he'd been drinking too much coffee. "It started raining," he said. "Could you get me a Coke?" He stared at his drumming hand, noting the gray hairs on the knuckles.

Donna obediently opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle and levered off the cap in the opener on the wall.

Perhaps encouraged by the drumming, or trying to dispel the tension that seemed to cramp the air in the room, Scotty ran over to where his father sat.

"Sonny Boy," Scotty said.

Georges Leon looked at his son and considered simply not doing this thing that he had planned.

For nearly twenty years Leon had worked toward the position he now held, and during all that time he had managed to see people as no more a part of himself than the numbers and statistics that he had used to get there. Only today, with this boy, had he begun to suspect the existence of cracks in his resolve.

He should have suspected the cracks earlier.

The boat trips on Lake Mead had been strategy, for instance, but he could see now that he had enjoyed the boy's enthusiasm for baiting hooks and rowing; and sharing some of his hard-learned advice about cards and dice had become, as he should have noticed, more a father sharing his skills with his son than mere cold precautions.

Donna clanked the bottle down in front of him, and he took a thoughtful sip of Coke.

Then, imitating the voice of the singer they'd seen in the lounge at the Las Vegas Club one night, he said, " 'Climb up on my knee, Sonny Boy.' "

Scotty complied happily.

" 'When there are gray skies …' " Leon sang.

" 'What don't you mind in the least?' " recited Scotty.

" 'I don't mind the gray skies …' "

" 'What do I do to them?' "

" 'You make them blue …' "

" 'What's my name?' "

" 'Sonny Boy.' "

" 'What will friends do to you?' "

Leon wondered what friends that was supposed to refer to. He paused before singing the next line.

He could stop. Move back to the coast, go into hiding from the jacks, who would surely come looking for him; live out the remainder of his life—twenty-one more years, if he got the standard threescore and ten—as a normal man. His other son, Richard, might even still recover.

" 'What will friends do to you?' " Scotty repeated.

Leon looked at the boy and realized with a dull despair that he had come, in the last five years, to love him. The lyrics seemed for a moment to hold a promise—maybe Scotty could make these gray skies blue. Had the Fool been holding out a last-chance offer of that?

It could have been.

But …

But it didn't matter. It was too late. Leon had come vastly too far, pursuing the thing whose dim shape and potential he had begun to discover in his statistical calculations all the way back in his twenties in Paris. Too many people had died; too much of himself had been invested in this. In order to change now, he would have to start all over again, old and undefended and with the deck stacked against him.

" 'Friends may forsake me,' " he said, speaking the line rather than singing it. Let them all forsake me, he thought. I'll still have you, Sonny Boy.

He stood up and hoisted the boy easily onto his shoulders. "Enough of the song, Scott. You still got your money?" The boy rattled the worthless chips and pennies in his pocket. "Then let's go into the den."

"What for?" asked Donna, her hands hooked into the back pockets of her jeans.

"Man stuff," Leon told her. "Right, Scotto?"

Scott swayed happily on his father's shoulders. "Right!"

Leon crossed the room, pretended to be about to ram the boy's head into the door lintel, then at the last moment did a deep knee bend and stepped through. He did the same trick at the door to the den—provoking wild giggles from Scotty—and then lifted him down and plopped him into the leather chair that was Daddy's chair. The lamp flame flickered with the wind of it, throwing freakish shadows across the spines of the books that haphazardly filled the floor-to-ceiling shelves.

Scotty's blue eyes were wide, and Leon knew the boy was surprised to be allowed, for the first time, to sit in the chair with the cup and lance head and crown hanging on wires overhead.

"This is the King's chair," the boy whispered.

"That's right." Leon swallowed, and his voice was steadier when he went on: "And anybody who sits in it … becomes the King. Let's play a game of cards." He unlocked the desk and took from it a handful of gold coins and a polished wooden box the size of a Bible.

He dropped the coins onto the carpet. "Pot's not right."

Scotty dug the holed chips and flattened pennies out of his pocket and tossed them onto the floor in front of the chair. He grinned uncertainly at his father. "Pot's right."

Defaced currency against gold, Leon thought. The pot is indeed right.

Crouching in front of the boy now, Leon opened the box and spilled into his hands a deck of oversize cards. He spread them out on the carpet, covering their bets, and waved at them. "Look," he said softly. A smell like incense and hot metal filled the room.

Leon looked at the boy's face rather than at the Tarot cards. He remembered the night he had first seen a deck of this version, the suppressed Lombardy Zeroth version, in a candle-lit attic in Marseilles in 1925; and he remembered how profoundly disturbing the enigmatic pictures had been, and how his head had seemed to be full of voices, and how afterward he had forced himself not to sleep for nearly a week.

The boy's eyes narrowed, and he was breathing deeply and slowly. Awful wisdom seemed to be subtly aging the planes of his young face, and Leon tried to guess, from the changing set of his mouth, which card was under his gaze at which moment: the Fool, in this version without his characteristic dog, standing on a jigsaw-edged cliff with an expression of malevolent idiocy; Death, also standing at the wavy cliff edge, looking more like a vertically split mummy than a skeleton, and carrying a bizarrely reminiscent-of-Cupid bow; Judgment, with the King calling up naked people from a tomb; the various face cards of Cups, Wands, Swords, and Coins … and all with repugnantly innocent-seeming patterns of branches or flower vines or ivy in the foreground somewhere … and all done in the vividest golds and reds and oceanic blues …

Tears glistened in Scotty's eyes. Leon had blinked away his own before gathering in the deck and beginning to shuffle.

The boy's mind was opened now, and unconnected.

"Now," said Leon huskily, "you're going to choose eight c—"

"No," interrupted Donna from the doorway.

Leon looked up angrily, then relaxed his face into wooden impassivity when he saw the little gun she held with both fists.

Two barrels, big bore, .45 probably. A derringer.

In the instant Leon had seen the gun, there had been a faint booming overhead as Richard had scrambled across the tiles on the roof, but now there was no sound from up there.

"Not him too," Donna said. She was breathing fast, and the skin was tight over her cheekbones, and her lips were white. "This is loaded with .410 bird-shot shells. I know, I figured it out, what you did to Richard, okay? I figure that's, it's too late there for him." She took a deep breath and let it out. "But you can't have Scotty too."

Check and a big raise, Leon told himself. You were too involved in your own cinch hand to watch the eyes of all the other players.

He spread his hands as if in alarmed acknowledgment of defeat … and then in one smooth motion he sprang sideways and swept the boy out of the chair and stood up, holding Scotty as a shield in front of his face and chest. And a devastating raise back at you, he thought. "And the kid," he said confidently. "To you."

"Call," she said, and lowered the stubby barrel and fired.

CHAPTER 2: No Smell of Roses

The blue-flaring blast deafened and dazzled her, but she saw the man and the boy fall violently forward, and the boy collided with her knees and knocked her backward against the bookcase. One of her numbed hands still clutched the little gun, and with the other she snatched Scotty up by his collar.

Leon had been hunched on his hands and knees on the blood-dappled carpet, but now he reared back, the cards a fan in his fist. His face was a colorless mask of effort, but when he spoke, it was loud.

"Look."

She looked, and he flung the cards at her.

Several hissed past her face and clattered into the book-spines behind her, but through her collar-clutching hand she felt Scotty shudder.

Then she had turned and was blundering down the hall, shouting words that she hoped conveyed the fact that she still had one shot left in the gun. By the kitchen door she snatched the car keys off the hook, and she was trying to think, trying to remember whether her Chevrolet had gas in the tank, when she heard Scotty's whimpering.

She looked down—and the ringing in her ears seemed to increase when she realized that the card attached edge-on to the boy's face was actually embedded in his right eye.

In the stretched-out second in which nothing else moved, her numbed hand tucked the gun into her pocket, reached down, and, with two fingers, tugged the card free and dropped it. It slapped the floor, face down on the linoleum.

She wrestled the door open and dragged the shock-stiffened little boy out across the chilly gravel yard to the car; she unlocked the driver's side door, muscled him in and then got in herself, pushing him along the seat. She twisted the key in the ignition at the same moment that she stomped the accelerator and yanked the wheel sideways.

The car started, and she slammed it into gear. She snapped the headlights on as the back end was whipping across the gravel, and when the gate to the road came around into the glare, she spun the wheel back to straighten the car out and then they had punched through and were on the street, having only caved in the driver's side against one of the gate's uprights.

"Okay, Scotty," she was mumbling inaudibly, "we're gonna get you help, kid, hang on …"

Where? she thought. Boulder, it's got to be Boulder. There's the old Six Companies Hospital out there. Anything in town here is too close, to easy for Georges to find.

She turned right onto Fremont.

"He is rich," she said, blinking but keeping her eyes on the lights of traffic amid the casino neon that made a glittering rainbow of the wet street. "I was thinking of you, I swear—Christ, he liked you, I know he did! Richard's gone, it was too late for Richard, and I never thought he'd decide he needed more than one."

She swerved around a slow-moving station wagon, and Scotty whimpered. His head was against the far doorjamb, and he was bracing himself against the handle with one hand and covering his ruined eye with the other.

"Sorry. Boulder in fifteen minutes, I promise you, as soon as we get clear of all this. He does have loads of money, though. He only works at the Club to keep in touch with the cards—and the waves, he says—keep in touch with the waves, as though he's living out on the coast, trying to track the tides or something."

"There are tides here, too," the boy said quietly as the car's motion rocked him on the seat. "And the cards are how you track 'em."

His mother glanced at him for the first time since turning south on Fremont. Jesus, she thought, you and he were very damn close, weren't you? Your daddy shared a lot with you. How could he then want to erase you? Erase you, not your little body, of course. Your body was supposed to wind up crouched on the roof with Richard's, I guess—one of you watching west, the other east, so Georges can sit in his den and have a sort of three-hundred-and-sixty-degree motion-picture stereopticon.

Ahead of the Chevrolet a Packard convertible with two people in it pulled out of Seventh Street onto Fremont. "Shit," Donna muttered absently. She took her foot off the accelerator and let the engine wind down—until she glanced in the rearview mirror and was immediately certain that the pair of headlights behind her had been there for the last several blocks, matching her every lane change. There were two people in it, too.

Her stomach was suddenly empty and cold, and she closed her throat against a despairing monotone wail.

That's Bailey and somebody in the Packard, she thought, and behind us could be any pair of a dozen of the guys that work for him, commit crimes for him, worship him. There're probably cars on 91 too, east and west, to stop me if I was going to run for L.A. or Salt Lake City.

The Chevrolet was still slowing, so she gave it enough gas to stay ahead of the car behind—and then at Ninth Street she banged the gearshift into second and pushed the accelerator to the floor and threw the car into a screaming, drifting right turn. People shouted at her from the sidewalk as she fought the wheel; then the tires had taken hold and she was racing south down Ninth. She groped at the dashboard and turned off the headlights.

"I really think you'd be better off dead," she said in a shrill whisper that Scotty could not possibly have heard over the roar of the engine, "but let's see if that's all there is."

The lights of a Texaco station were looming up ahead. A glance in the rearview mirror showed her that for the moment she had lost the following car, so she hit the brakes—saw that she was going too fast to turn into the station lot—and came to a smoking, fishtailing stop at the curb just past it. Scotty had slammed into the dashboard and tumbled to the floor.

She wrenched her bent door open and jumped out, scuffling on the wet asphalt to catch her balance. The gun was in her hand, but a truck towing a boat on a trailer had pulled out of the station and was for the moment blocking her view. It ponderously turned right—it was going to pass her.

Already keening for her doomed child, she dropped the gun, leaned into the car and dragged Scotty's limp body out by the ankles. She caught only a glimpse of the bloody mask that was his face before she grabbed his belt and his collar and, with a last desperate effort that seemed to tear every tendon in her back and shoulders and legs, flung him as high up into the air as she could, as the boat behind the truck trundled past.

The boy hung in midair for a moment, his arms and legs moving weakly in the white light, and then he was gone, had fallen inside or onto the deck, was perhaps going to roll all the way across and fall off onto the street on the other side.

She let the follow-through of the throw slam her back around against the Chevrolet, and she controlled her subsequent tumble only enough so that it left her on the driver's seat. Almost without her volition, her right hand reached out and started the car.

The boat was receding steadily away. She didn't see a little body on the road.

Headlights had appeared behind her, from the direction of Fremont. She dragged her legs inside, pulled the door closed, and made a screeching first-gear U-turn, aiming her car straight at the oncoming headlights, and shifted up into second gear as soon as she could.

The headlights swerved away out of her focus, and behind her she heard squealing brakes and a sound like a very heavy door being slammed, but she didn't look back. At Fremont she downshifted and turned right, once again gunning toward Boulder, twenty-five miles away.

The knob of the stick shift was cool in her hand as she shifted up through third to fourth.

She was peaceful now, almost happy. Everything had been spent, and any moments that remained were gravy, a bonus. She rolled down the window and took deep breaths of the cool desert air.

The Chevrolet was racing out past Las Vegas Boulevard now, and all that lay ahead of her was desert … and, beyond any hope of reaching, the mountains and the dam and the lake.

Behind her she could see headlights approaching fast—the Packard, certainly.

That snowy Christmas in New York in 1929, she thought as the desert highway hissed by under her wheels. I was twenty-one, and Georges was thirty, a handsome, brilliant young Frenchman, fresh from the Ecole Polytechnique and the Bourbaki Club, and he had somehow known enough about international finance to get rich when the Depression struck. And he wanted to have children.

How could I possibly have resisted?

She remembered glimpsing the bloody, exploded ruin the load of .410 shot had made of his groin, only a few minutes ago.

The speedometer needle was lying against the pin above 120.

Some anonymous cinder-block building was approaching fast on her right.

God, Georges, she thought as she bracketed it between her headlights, how miserable we managed to make each other.

Leon hung up the telephone and slumped back in the king's chair. Blood puddled hot around his buttocks and made his pants legs a clinging weight.

Okay, he was thinking monotonously, okay, this is bad, this is very bad, but you haven't lost everything.

He had called Abrams last. The man had sworn he'd be here within four minutes, with a couple of others who would be able to carry Leon to the car for the drive to the Southern Nevada Hospital, five miles west on Charleston Boulevard. Leon had for a moment considered calling for a ride to the hospital first, but a glance at his groin had left him no choice but to believe that his genitals were destroyed—and therefore it had been more crucial to recover Scotty, the last son he would ever beget.

You haven't lost everything.

His entire lower belly felt loose—hot and wet and broken—and now that he had hung up the telephone he had two free hands with which to clutch himself, hold himself in.

It's not everything, he told himself. You won't die of a mere shotgun wound, your blood is in Lake Mead and you're in Las Vegas and the Flamingo's still standing, out there on Highway 91 in the rain. You haven't lost everything.

The Moon and the Fool. He blinked away sweat and looked at the cards scattered on the floor around the bookcases and the doorway, and he thought about the card that had left the room, wedged—the thought made him numb—wedged in Scotty's eye.

My reign is not over.

He crossed his legs; it seemed to help against the pain.

He rolled his head back and sniffed, but there was no smell of roses in the room. He was getting dizzy and weak, but at least there was no smell of roses.

His face had been inches from a flourishing rose bush, he remembered dreamily, on the night he had killed Ben Siegel. The branches and twigs had been curled and coiled across the trellis like a diagram of veins or lightning or river deltas.

Leon had stalked Siegel for nearly ten years before killing him.

The East Coast gangster lords had seemed to sense the kind of kingship that nobody had yet taken in the United States. Joseph Doto had assumed the name Joe Adonis and took pains to maintain a youthful appearance, and Abner "Longy" Zwillman had shot a rival named Leo Kaplus in the testicles rather than through the heart, and in 1938 Tony Cornero had established a gambling ship that stayed outside the three-mile limit off the coast of Santa Monica; Cornero named the ship the Rex, Latin for "king," and Siegel had owned fifteen percent of it. Eventually the attorney general had organized a massive bust, and slot machines, Roulette wheels, dice tables, and Blackjack tables—with all their numbers that had so passionately concerned so many gamblers—were thrown into the nullifying sea.

One night a few weeks before the bust, Leon had taken one of the little motorboats, the water taxis, out to the ship, and he had walked over as much of the deck as the public was allowed access to; from one vantage point he was able to see a man way back on the stern holding a fishing pole out over the dark water below. Leon had asked a steward who the solitary nocturnal fisherman was, and the steward had explained that it was one of the owners, a Mr. Benjamin Siegel.

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 treasure-hunting 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 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.