Tim Powers - Last Call Read Online Free PDF Page A

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