Robert Ferrigno - Prayers for the assassin

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.