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LAST CALL - Tim Powers

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LAST CALL

Tim Powers

For Gloria Batsford: With heartfelt thanks for more than a decade's worth of help and advice and

great dinners and sociable friendship; may we all have many decades more.

And with thanks, too, to Chris and Theresa Arena, Mike Autrey, Beth Bailey, Louigi Baker, Jim

Blaylock, Lou and Myrna Donato, Don Ellison, Mike Gaddy, Russ Galen, Keith Holmberg, Don

Johnson, Mike Kelley, Dorothea Kenney, Dana Kunkel, Scott Landre, Jeff Levin, Mark Lipinski, Joe

Machuga, Tim Mc-Namara, Steve and Tammie Malk, Dennis Meyer, Phil Pace, Richard Powers,

Serena Powers, Randal Robb, Betty Schlossberg, Ed Silberstang, Carlton Smith, Ed and Pat Thomas,

and Marv and Carol and Rex Torrez.

PROLOGUE

1948: A Castle In The Wasteland

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

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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?"

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"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

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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

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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 …

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20E-books/Tim%20Powers%20-%20Last%20Call.htm (10 of 340) [12/28/2004 12:43:02 AM]

Powers, Tim - Last Call

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