in boots and short shorts offering pearly white thighs, but the skin of their faces ghostly, showing skeleton bones thinned by chandeliered light and years of cocaine. Down the gauntlet of green felt blackjack tables a long row of dealers raised their hands and washed them in the air.
I went through the casino toward the baccarat pit. And as I approached the gray-railed enclosure, the crowd in front of me broke to spread around the dice pit and I saw the bacarrat pit clear.
Four Saints in black tie waited for me. The croupier running the game held up his right hand to halt the Banker with the shoe. He gave me a quick glance and smiled his recognition. Then with his hand still up he intoned, “A card for the Player.” The laddermen, two pale Jehovah, leaned forward.
I turned away to watch the casino. I felt a rush of oxygenated air and I wondered if the senile, crippled Gronevelt in his solitary rooms above had pushed his magic buttons to keep all these people awake. And what if he had pushed the button for Cully and all the others to die?
Standing absolutely still in the center of the casino, I looked for a lucky table on which to begin.
Chapter 55
“I suffer, but still I don’t live. I am an X in an indeterminate equation. I am a sort of phantom in life who has lost all beginning and end.”
I read that in the asylum when I was fifteen or sixteen years old, and I think Dostoevsky wrote it to show the unending despair of mankind and perhaps to instill terror in everyone’s heart and persuade them to a belief in God. But long ago, as a child when I read it, it was a beam of light. It comforted me, being a phantom didn’t frighten me. I thought that X and its indeterminate equation were a magic shield. And now having remained so prudently alive, having passed through all the dangers and all the suffering, I could no longer use my old trick of projecting myself forward into time. My own life was no longer that painful and the future could not rescue me. I was surrounded by countless tables of chance and I was under no illusion. I knew now the single fact that no matter how carefully I planned, no matter how cunning I was, lies or good deeds done, I couldn’t really win.
Finally I accepted the fact that I was not a magician anymore. But what the hell. I was still alive and that’s more than I could say for my brother, Artie, or Janelle or Osano. And Cully and Malomar and poor Jordan. I understood Jordan now. It was very simple. Life was too much for him. But not for me. Only fools die.
Was I a monster then that I didn’t grieve, that I wished so much to stay alive? That I could sacrifice my only brother, my only beginning, and then Osano and Janelle and Cully and never even grieve for them and only weep for one? That I could be comforted with the world I had built for myself?
How we laugh at primitive man for his worry and terror of all the charlatan tricks of nature, and how we ourselves are so terrified of the terrors and guilts that roar in our own heads. What we think of as our sensitivity is only the higher evolution of terror in a poor dumb beast. We suffer for nothing. Our own death wish is our only real tragedy.
Merlin, Merlin. Surely a thousand years have passed and you must finally be awake in your cave, putting on your star-covered conical hat to walk through a strange new world. And poor bastard, with your cunning magic, did it do you any good to sleep that thousand years, your enchantress in her grave, both our Arthurs turned to dust?
Or do you have one last magic spell that can work? A terrible long shot, but what’s that to a gambler? I still have a stack of black chips and an itch for terror.
I suffer, but I still live. It’s true that I may be a sort of phantom in life, but I know my beginning and I know my end. It is true that I am an X in an indeterminate equation, the X that will terrify mankind as it voyages through a million galaxies. But no matter. That X is the rock upon which I stand.
ABOUT THE AUTHUR
Mario Puzo was born on Manhattan ’s West Side in a neighborhood known for decades as Hell’s Kitchen. His first books,
