Only Begotten Daughter (21 page)

“Don’t you dare cross me.”

“You crazy? Mess with the wrath of Katz? Me?”

Julie fed the apprentice junkie to a candle flame. The paper ignited, becoming a bright orange blossom, then a swarm of ashes floating around the purified temple like black moths.

The wrath of Katz. She liked the sound of that.

A
LTHOUGH BIX CONSTANTINE DISBELIEVED
in hell as intensely as he did in heaven, he knew what the place would be like. Hell, for Bix, was jealousy. It was failed journalists seeing their enemies receive Pulitzer Prizes. It was compulsive gamblers seeing jackpots gush from adjacent players’ slot machines and sex-starved young men seeing their friends piled high with naked cheerleaders.

Bad enough that Julie had left Dante’s with a dealer, one of those smooth, intellectual types with graying hair and an aura of smug fitness, but now things were getting even worse. The bastard had a yacht, a seagoing penthouse no doubt, moored to the ruins of Steel Pier, the word
Pain
spread across its transom. How carefully he’d tracked them—through the lobby, across the Boardwalk, down the wharf—at last finding a vantage point behind a wooden zebra on the moribund carousel. The outrages never stopped: when her lustful companion extended his hand, Julie took it eagerly; when he waltzed into his cabin, she stayed by his side. Within minutes the yacht was under sail, cruising south toward Ocean City. Who was he? A disciple who’d lost his heart upon seeing her picture in the paper? One of her old college professors, moonlighting in the casinos—they’d always been hot for each other, and now they were finally free to go rolling in the nautical hay?

Bix slunk away like a scolded but unrepentant dog. Where was gratitude? He’d given this bizarre and unemployable woman a job … made her a quasi-celebrity … loved her. Traitor, she’d called him. Bullshit. God Almighty couldn’t have defended that column, not the way she wrote it.

Eight-thirty
P.M
., with the sunlight fading fast, stars peeping through the clouds. On the Boardwalk the change of shifts occurred: spiffily dressed couples strode out of their hotels while sad, penniless daytrippers drifted woozily toward their shuttle buses; a second exodus comprised the cripples and blind beggars, whose infirmities elicited sufficient guilt and alms only in the accusatory gleam of day. Bix flipped open his wallet, cracked the seam. Fifty dollars. For acute jealousy, what was the anesthetic of choice? Lobster? Alcohol? Whores? Slot machines? He slipped into Resorts International and, obtaining two hundred quarters, watched submissively as the one-armed bandits bled them away, a hundred and fifty quarters, ninety, sixty, twenty, ten.

A small fortune gushed forth, jangling into the payoff box. Damn. He was too tired to feed that much back. Like a Wall Street milkmaid, he staggered to the change island carrying two enormous buckets, quarters slopping over the edges, and converted his jackpot to bills. Roulette would solve the problem, ah, yes, Fortuna’s wheel. “Here’s three hundred,” he grumbled to the croupier. “Six fat chips will do.” The Mafia flunky counted Bix’s wad, then fed it into a slot in the table, forcing it down with a lucite ramrod. Snapping up his six fifty-dollar chips, Bix placed them on
ODD
. The croupier spun the wheel, tossed the ball; it bounced among the grooves like a pebble skimming across a pond. The wheel stopped: 20. Even. Good. Bix left.

Dawn seeped through the city like the pale flashings of a million sickly fireflies. Sea gulls ruled the Boardwalk; the rich were back in their hotels. Bix walked south, scanning the ocean, gray and glassy in the pretide calm. Somewhere behind him, fire engines rolled, their sirens howling like tortured cats. No sign of
Pain.
He
had
fought for her, damn it, he
wasn’t
a traitor.

A fearsome armada bore down on Absecon Beach.

Bix blinked. His chins fell. It was all ludicrously true: a long rank of cabin cruisers flying religious banners—saints praying, lambs nailed to crosses—and heading for the southern casinos. Revelationists, the crucified sheep announced. The flag on the lead boat showed Jesus beheading a winged serpent. Bix attempted to laugh, failed. With their dark windows and death-white hulls, the yachts were imperially unfunny.

Pale figures scurried about the decks tossing over large bundles that, smacking the water, abruptly transmuted into motorized rafts. The Revelationists climbed in. Ten rafts. Twenty, fifty, a hundred. Two hundred rafts, dotting the smooth ocean like a vast herd of migrating sea lions. Within minutes the first wave of invaders arrived, leaping into the shallows, their bodies wrapped in white flak jackets mottled with dark blotches, their hands locked tightly around red plastic jugs and battery-powered Black and Decker hedge trimmers.

A tall, balding Revelationist wearing an eyepatch dashed up the ramp. “Down with Babylon!” he screamed, brandishing his hedge trimmer, its blade like the snout of a sawfish. “Down with Babylon!” his flock echoed. Like demented picknickers carrying an inexhaustible supply of lemonade, the invaders bore their plastic jugs across the beach and onto the Boardwalk, all the while waving their hedge trimmers in wild circles over their heads. “Down with Babylon!”

And Bix thought: Down with Babylon? Huh? Babylon?

As the Revelationists charged the Golden Nugget, Bix melted into their ranks, feeling oddly immune. Their utter obliviousness, that was it. These crusaders had a divine mandate, a holy mission that shone from their eyes like sunlight glancing off snow; they would never stoop to murder a mere bystander.

Marching past the liveried doormen, the army stormed into the lobby and entered the casino, a tide of zeal flowing boldly between two guards and depositing Bix in the nearest slot-machine aisle. Did their jugs contain quarters? The Revelationists intended to play the slots till Christ came back? “Spill it,” the one-eyed shepherd said in a gravelly whisper, addressing a stout, fortyish female crusader whose flak jacket was unbuttoned sufficiently to reveal a small silver lamb nailed to a cross. “Pour out God’s wrath.”

The woman did not move.

“Spill it.”

She remained immobile: Lot’s wife, locked in salt.

Zonked as usual by the noise and the lights, the gamblers took no note of the incursion.

“‘And the angel poured his vial upon the seat of the beast,’” the shepherd quoted in the patient tone of a teacher prompting a fourth-grader in a Columbus Day pageant. “Pour it out, Gladys.”

Nothing from Gladys.

With a bold sweep of his arm, the shepherd snatched Gladys’s jug and, uncapping it, splashed a clear fluid onto the carpet. The smell clawed Bix’s nostrils. Gasoline. Gasoline?
Gasoline?
A chain reaction of curiosity rolled across the casino. Pit bosses looked up, the slots stopped tolling, the gamblers’ chatter faded. God in heaven—gasoline!

Other vials popped open, additional wrath spilled out. Hydrocarbon fumes spread through the Nugget like the fartings of a thousand Exxon supertankers.

A counteroffensive converged, a ragtag squad of guards and Mafia strongmen. The Revelationists dispersed, soaking the blackjack aisles, baccarat bays, and video-poker stalls. Like a farmer slopping his hogs, one crusader emptied his jug into the trough of a craps table.

The shepherd pulled a cigarette lighter from his jacket. “‘And the angel poured his vial into the air’!”

“Stop!” shouted a pit boss, charging forward with a drawn pistol. Someone turned on a hedge trimmer and ran it along the pit boss’s abdomen, zipping him open. The pit boss tried to cry out, succeeded only in gurgling. His pistol hit the saturated carpet; blood spurted from his belly like agitated beer. He screamed silently, wetly; he screamed blood.

Keep going, Bix told himself as he staggered toward the lobby, don’t look back.

A fiery roar. A choral shriek.

He looked back. The inferno surged through the casino in great waves, as if an ocean of flames had risen from its bed to engulf the helpless Nugget. So many combustibles: rugs, curtains, felt, currency, playing cards—players. A burning young man embraced a slot machine as he might a lover. An old Pakistani woman, convulsed with terror, flames fanning from her back like a peacock’s plume, flared even brighter as she tried to douse herself with a pitcher of martinis.

In the lobby, a summer shower descended as the sprinkler system cut in. Smoke flowed everywhere, nicking Bix’s eyes. Their mission evidently accomplished, the crusaders poured out of the casino, smiling, laughing, kicking over urns. Blindly Bix charged, coughing violently, each spasm jolting him like an electric shock as he opened the main door.

Air. Sunlight. A sea breeze. The Boardwalk strollers regarded him without interest, as if his panic signaled nothing more than a night of heavy losses. But now came the fire, bursting through the building, blowing out its windows, clambering up its face. And now came the crusaders, their hedge trimmers emitting coarse insectile buzzes. The tourists scattered like infantrymen caught in a strafing—to little avail, for the Revelationists were suddenly upon them, trimming lethally, screaming “Down with Babylon!” Heat whipped Bix’s face, sweat soaked his summer suit. The Golden Nugget shed people like a tree losing fruit in a storm. Panicked vacationers, many aflame, jumped from the hotel tower to the casino roof and from there to the ground, where they climbed over the Boardwalk rail and hurled themselves into the cool unburnable sea.

The army split. Three separate raiding parties charged up the Boardwalk, hedge trimmers poised, wrath at the ready. Hastily Bix performed a mental triage. The Tropicana: fated to fall. The Atlantis: it hadn’t a chance. Next came Harrah’s at Trump Plaza, then Caesar’s Palace. Harrah’s was probably doomed, but it would take them five minutes to reach Caesar’s.

He ran, Bix the unfit blob, chuffing past pizza parlors, fortune-telling booths, and Smitty’s Smile Shop. He must have seen Julius Caesar’s kitschy statue a hundred times before, but only now did he notice the fear beneath its imperial gaze; or perhaps the fear was new, the natural terror of a pagan emperor beholding hundreds of Christians gone berserk. “Everybody out!” Bix screamed, charging into the casino. “You’re in danger!”

The blackjack players turned toward him. The slot addicts looked up from their machines.

“There’s a crazy army coming! You must get out!”

The gamblers smiled indulgently and went back to their fun.

Flames bloodied the horizon as Julie drove her Datsun across Brigantine Bridge and headed into the besieged city. Fire engines jammed Baltic Avenue, red lights flashing in stroboscopic bursts. The tenements blazed brightly, an epic disaster tying up the combined Atlantic City and Ocean City fire departments just as Wyvern had foretold. The street was a mass of glistery puddles and tangled black hoses. Ladders rose from the red trucks, angling into the stricken buildings like flying buttresses. Tridents of flame and coils of smoke shot from doorways and windows. Firefighters in rubber masks and oxygen tanks lumbered about like scuba divers from hell. In the center of the chaos, the paramedic Freddie Caspar, last survivor of Pop’s poker club—Rodney Balthazar had shot himself during Passover—gave CPR to a supine woman.

She continued down South Carolina. Eyes swimming in tears, handkerchiefs pressed against their faces, a wave of terrified tourists swept past. A blowsy woman wearing Bermuda shorts and a Sally’s sweatshirt stood at the Atlantic Avenue intersection holding huge wads of charred money in her fists, the jackpot of a lifetime, now ash. A bewildered young man in a motorized wheelchair made crazed figure eights in Harrah’s parking lot like a child driving a bumper car.

Stuff. Miracles always needed stuff. She pulled over by Dante’s, got out. At least she was dressed for the heat: denim cutoffs, a Smile Shop T-shirt
(START A MOVEMENT—EAT A PRUNE).
The smoke was like a disease air gets, spreading outward, penetrating everywhere. Her eyes smarted, her chest heaved, her throat felt like a sack of needles. God had it so much easier. Julie’s fleshless mother could intervene all day and never once gag or weep.

Charging up the Boardwalk ramp, she started through the swarming cinders. Everything from the Nugget to the Sands was lost, a writhing cloud of jet-black smoke laced with flames. Only the district east of Tennessee—the Showboat, Resorts International, Dante’s—remained untouched, as if Wyvern had dispatched a fallen guardian angel to protect his personal casino, his earthly pied-a-terre.

Stuff. She had to find her stuff.

The massacre was all the devil had promised. Human firebrands tumbled from the collapsing casinos. Others succumbed to the hedge trimmers—a harvest of gamblers, reaped by God’s sickles, bundled by God’s wrath. New Jersey, thought Julie, fighting incredulity and nausea, New Jersey, the Garden State.

She faced the sea. Tourists rushed into the tide, hoping to soothe their burns. Other survivors carried their loved ones’ corpses to the beach, setting them on the sand so they might mourn uninterrupted before more judgment arrived. Directly ahead, the truncated hulk of Central Pier shimmered in the August sun. And suddenly there it was, rising above the wharf, reaching for the clouds. Her
stuff.

“Julie!”

A fat man waddled out of the smoke, ripping away his white cotton shirt as if to free himself from the heat’s insistent grip. Soot streaked his ballooning flesh. His sweat shone like fresh varnish.

“I can’t believe it,” Bix rasped. “These fanatics with their gasoline, and people are dying, and I went to Caesar’s and nobody even
listened.
How come you never told me about him?”

“Who?”

“The yachtsman. Did he hump you?”

Anger stunned her. Atlantic City burning, her anonymity on the line, and the traitor dared to be jealous. “I’m Jesus Christ’s sister!” She spat the words in his face. “Of
course
the devil’s going to be interested in me!”

“Don’t start on that—not now!”

“Get out. Go east along Pacific, it’s clear all the way to the inlet.”

She headed toward the pier—toward her stuff—and the foolish walrus followed: through the crumbling archway, around the huge plaster mermaid, past the ceramic sea horses heralding the abandoned aquarium.