Last Call Read online

  “‘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 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 t
he 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 École 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.