Prayers for the assassin

CHAPTER 46

Jack-six. Eight-five. Ten-queen. Seeing the dealer had a six up, the Wise Old One stood pat on all three of his $1,000 bets.

The Texas soybean magnate in first position stared at his cards as though trying to read Egyptian hieroglyphs. His wife, a big blonde, jiggled her drink, the ice cubes rattling as she pondered her play. After careful consideration, the soybean magnate took a hit on thirteen, drew a face card and busted. The big blonde, with fifteen-fifteen with the dealer showing a six-demanded a card too, got a nine, and busted.

Anna, the dealer, turned up her hole card, a ten. Sixteen. Forced to take another card, she drew a five. For twenty-one. She raised an eyebrow at the Old One sympathetically as she swept the table of bets.

“What rotten luck,” said the big blonde. She patted the Old One on the arm. “We’ll get her this time, pappy.”

The Old One fixed her with a cool stare. Touched by a Texan who called him pappy. A Texan with a diamond-crusted crucifix around her neck. A Texan who didn’t know how to play twenty-one, taking the card that should have busted the dealer. How many ways was that an abomination? The only way it could be more of an insult would be if the woman were having her menstrual period.

Jack-nine. Jack-eight. Ten-ten. The dealer showed a four. The Old one split his tens, was given a queen for the first ten and a king for the second. Perfect. He now had two twenties, a nineteen, and an eighteen.

The big blonde took a hit on her five-eight, drew a jack, and busted.

The soybean magnate took a hit on his six-seven, drew a deuce for fifteen, and took another hit. The dealer actually made him repeat the request. “Hit me, damnit, you deaf?” said the peckerwood.

Anna slid him a queen. Busted him. Turned over her hole card, a king, giving her fourteen. The next card was a seven, giving her twenty-one. Another sweep of the chips. Another slight smile for the Old One.

“Let’s go, honey,” said the soybean magnate. “This dealer’s got it in for us.”

Anna watched them leave. “I bet you hate to see them go.”

The Old One laughed, put a $1,000 chip on all six spots on the table, cutting off any future players. Most of the time he enjoyed company at the table, enjoyed the mix of people who wafted through the casino. Different faces. Different histories. Catholics and moderate Muslims from Los Angeles and Chicago and Seattle, peckerwoods from Chattanooga and Atlanta and New Orleans. Businessmen from Tokyo and Beijing and Paris and London and Brazil. A buzz of languages and desires. The Old One was fluent in most of the languages. Most of the desires too. Today though, he preferred to play alone.

Anna dealt him six hands, dealt herself a ten upcard.

The old one hit his seven-five. Hit his five-eight. Hit his six-five. Stuck his nine-jack. Stuck his ten-eight. Hit his nine-three.

Anna turned up a seven. She won two hands, paid him for his four winners. Her hands danced across the green felt, long and slim and perfectly manicured. Lovely hands. “You sure you don’t want me to call the Texans back?” she murmured.

“We’ll just have to carry on together,” said the Old One.

A cocktail waitress came round, brought him his usual single-malt with one cube of ice.

The Old One tossed a $25 chip onto her tray, toasted Anna, and took a sip. Savored the sensation. He limited himself to one drink a day out of deference to his kidneys and liver. The transplants took more and more out of him, and his bouncebacks from his weekly transfusions were briefer and less intense as the years passed. He let a few drops of single-malt rest on his tongue. In spite of all the science in the world, there was an upper limit to human existence. Allah himself, the all-knowing and merciful, had decreed that all men must die. How else were they to enter Paradise?

Anna dealt another round of cards.

The Old One made his choices almost instinctively. Silently scratching his cards on the felt when he wanted a hit, placing his chip atop his cards when he was standing pat. After so many years he knew the most mathematically beneficial plays. He couldn’t count cards with any certainty-the dealers used ten decks-but whether twenty-one was gambling or applied number theory was certainly debatable. Not that the Old One cared. The Holy Qur’an forbade gambling, but he was at peace with the game. At peace with his daily drink of alcohol. Even a pork chop crusted with garlic when the mood struck. Allah would excuse the occasional lapse. He smiled, thinking of what his first teacher would have said of such sophistry.

Anna smiled back at him, thinking his pleasure was directed at her. She paid off his blackjack, swept away the rest of his bets.

The Old One’s disciples adhered to all aspects of the Qur’an, but the Old One did not feel so compelled. Had not Allah, the all-knowing, granted him a brain and appetite and free will? The Old One followed the affirmations of the Book without fail. He had made his profession of faith, his shahada. He prayed five times a day. He abstained from food or drink during the daylight hours of the month of Ramadan. He gave away 10 percent of his wealth every year. He had made the hajj to Mecca, and Jerusalem.

Anna dealt another round. The cards swishing across the green felt like herons gliding across a lake.

The Old One took another sip of Scotch. The things the Qur’an forbade he chose to moderate. His dietary habits were not pristine. In his youth, he had often been clean-shaven. He had intellectual and business relations with unbelievers, had stayed in their homes, had dined with them. He gambled. He was embedded in the financial and banking industry, whose charging of interest was strictly forbidden. He lacked sobriety in the deepest sense, which is to say, he was often amused at the world and at himself.

Anna busted. Paid him off.

The Old One let his bets ride.

The cards slid across the table. Propelled by Anna’s long fingers.

Perhaps the greatest difference between the Old One and traditional Muslims was his reliance on science and technology. Islam meant submission, but it was submission to Allah, the compassionate, that was required of the faithful. Not to submit one’s intellect. Not to submit one’s curiosity. The prohibitions of the Qur’an were because Allah, the all-knowing, was speaking to the prophet Muhammad, may his name be blessed, a man of the sixth century. The Qur’an was eternal truth, but the men who studied it were in a state of becoming. The prohibitions were designed to keep early Muslims focused on the day-to-day, but the Old One transcended history. Such beliefs would be viewed as apostasy by Ibn Azziz and the fundamentalists, but they were the ones driving the country into ruin. Satellites dropping from the sky. The power grid decaying. Twenty-five years after the civil war and partition, the former United States had been reduced to a third-world backwater whose principal exports were foodstuffs and minerals. The Old One intended to change that. The Islamic caliphate of a thousand years ago had conquered much of the known world, but it had also been a garden of science and learning, a flowering of all the arts. Those days would come again.

Anna busted. Paid him off. Her face was pink under the fluorescent lights. Last year, at the insistence of her boyfriend, she had had an abortion. A male child. She had no idea he knew. The Old One had sent flowers to her house the next morning. Dozens of white roses. No card. Just the flowers. Her boyfriend had been infuriated. Had struck her. Crushed the flowers underfoot. After Anna had left for work, the Old One had sent two men to the house. One man had packed up the boyfriend’s clothes; the other had trussed the boyfriend up and put him in the trunk of his own car. Then they caravanned far out into the desert and buried him alive. Drove partway back and left his car beside the road with a hole in the radiator. Drove back to Las Vegas in their own car.

Anna smiled at him again.

He hadn’t removed the boyfriend because he was romantically interested in Anna. The boyfriend had made her unhappy, and the Old One liked his dealers cheerful.

Ellis, the pit boss, watched him, expressionless. He had been a stockbroker at the London Board of Trade, a successful one too, but his wife had developed brain cancer, and in spite of all his efforts, she had died an excruciating death. Ellis had gone to Las Vegas to dilute his grief and never came back.

The cocktail waitress came by, picked up his empty Scotch. She wore a short skirt that showed off her fine legs. Seamed stockings. Wantonness in a long, straight line.

Her name was Teresa. Twenty-two years old, born in Biloxi, Mississippi. Moved here two years ago. She was working on a degree in hotel management at the local college. Had a 3.4 grade-point average. The Old One prided himself on knowing the people he came in contact with, and he came in contact with dozens of them every day, hundreds of them every month. It was one of the many things he loved about living in Las Vegas. There was always someone new.

The casinos and hotels were filled with Catholics, Muslims, and Bible Belters, none of them discussing religion or politics. You could have looked around and never thought that there had ever been a civil war. They came to relax, to sin, to be free. They came for business too. Salesmen and industrialists from China and Russia and Brazil cut multimillion-dollar deals while they floated in the pool, slathered on sunscreen. High-tech conventioneers flocked to the digitized amphitheaters, exchanging information while nibbling tiger prawns netted that very morning in the Philippines. The streets were awash with tourists from the booming economies of Brazil and France and Nigeria. Everyone came to Las Vegas. The Open City, that’s what the sign at the airport announced.

Anna had two queens. Swept his bets.

The Old One glanced at his fresh cards. Still no word from Darwin. The assassin left messages. Demanded favors from the Old One, but was not available to update him on his progress. Or lack of same. Darwin knew his value, and so did the Old One.

He should have sent Darwin to kill Redbeard and his brother, James, instead of turning to Redbeard’s personal bodyguard. Everything would have been different. With Redbeard dead along with his brother, the Old One’s cat’s-paw would have taken over State Security. Without Redbeard, the Old One could have used his influence to manipulate the president. To stoke his fears. A few more terrorist incidents and the country would have moved to a war footing. A diplomatic breakdown and an attack on the Bible Belt would have been launched, the army and Fedayeen committed, no matter what the cost. One nation, under Allah.

Anna swept his chips away again. Ellis turned away, watched the other tables.

Darwin wouldn’t have failed to kill both brothers, but he was an unknown back then. The Old One had never used his services before, and what he had heard about the assassin he didn’t believe. He did now.

The Old One checked his cards. It was rumored that Redbeard had survived the attempt on his life because he had a copy of the Qur’an in his clothing, the Holy Book blocking two shots to the chest. It sounded like the kind of disinformation that Redbeard would have spread afterward, holding up his survival as an act of divine providence.

The Old One reminded himself not to dwell on the past. One of the markers of senility. He remembered how he had laughed at old men who bound themselves with past mistakes, kings and princes lost in their own memories. There had been a time he had been able to see fifty or sixty years ahead…and act accordingly. Barely forty years old, already wealthy beyond measure, he had seen the fallacy in the European welfare state before any demographer. A cradle-to-the-grave system requires children to keep the wheels spinning, and the Europeans were godless libertines, fornicators without fatherhood. Starting in the early 1970s, he had begun making large donations to politicians and journalists. Men who shaped the debate on immigration. Hardworking Muslims were deemed the answer, and the floodgates opened wide. Young Muslims from North Africa and Turkey, fertile and faithful. The slow-motion conquest of Europe, the nearly bloodless transformation into an Islamic continent, had been perhaps his greatest victory. The fifty years had passed like an afternoon.

More playing cards slipping across the felt. He lifted a downcard. A one-eyed jack peeked back at him. The red betrayer. The Old One thought of the new pope. His new pope. Installed two years ago. Another crop come to its season. Forty years ago, he had seeded his men among the priesthood, a dozen of them, educated and well-connected, skilled in the ways of diplomacy. A dozen of them rising slowly up the church hierarchy. One had now become Pope Pius XIII. When the Old One gave the sign, the pope would make a public declaration of faith. His conversion to Islam would have a profound impact in the Catholic bastions of South America, and on the holdouts in Eastern Europe.

He took a hit on twelve and caught the other one-eyed jack. Busted by the jack of spades. The betrayer betrayed. A bad sign. In keeping with the bad news of these last weeks. Mullah Oxley, nurtured for years by the Old One, had been murdered by Ibn Azziz, a fiery ascetic barely old enough to sprout whiskers. Even now Ibn Azziz was stirring up trouble with the Catholics. Give him enough time and he would fracture the country.

More cards. Anna humming softly to herself. A lullaby to the son she would never have.

Meanwhile Redbeard’s niece was creating her own mischief. Although…there was still a chance that the Old One could use her to his advantage. She and Rakkim might even become the pivotal pieces in the game. Rakkim was a shadow warrior, one of the invisible men. Darwin wanted to kill him, kill the both of them, but that was just another indication of Darwin’s strategic limitations. The great challenge now was to reunite the country, to reclaim the old boundaries of the United States. In spite of its current malaise, the nation was still the best place for a truly vibrant Islam to take root, a transformational Islam. Rakkim’s knowledge of the Bible Belt would be invaluable.

Anna swept away his chips with a clatter.

The Old One realized he had lost track of the cards played. So intent on his successes and failures that he had stopped paying attention. He stood up. Pressed a $1,000 chip into her hand and offered her his blessing.

A faint beep sounded in his ear as he walked through the casino. What did Darwin want now?