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At the Black Magic
Casino and Hotel
A "Take Your Pick-Axe" Honorable Mention
Option Cby
Kevin James Miller
Ballantine was the founder and CEO of Top Gun Software, a Fortune 500 corporation. To have done everything Ballantine had done and still be on the sunny side of thirty was better than a slice of Heaven.
In addition, Ballantine owned the deluxe DVD editions of The Godfather trilogy, GoodFellas, both versions of Scarface, and had seen all those movies many times. The Sopranos, Ballantine was convinced, was the greatest thing on TV –- and would be the greatest thing on TV for centuries to come.
As he explained to very close friends, he would never recommend shooting somebody, or breaking their legs, or blowing up their car. Nevertheless, the successful businessman, boyfriend, or lover employed a certain degree of strategic ruthlessness, a lesson the gangster genre in pop culture taught all the time, for those who listened. Ballantine had taken the lesson to heart hundreds of times, whether in bribing a federal regulator, or putting this or that woman firmly and clearly in her place.
Ballantine’s doorman, Marek, had a package waiting in the lobby. The FedEx wrapped box was maybe three feet long and two feet wide. Ballantine wrenched the package out of the doorman’s hands, waved Marek off impatiently, and studied the package so lovingly he almost bumped into a wall on his way into the elevator.
On the way up to his penthouse, Ballantine thought of history, and Carlo Donatelli.
Donatelli was one of the superstars of the American Mafia, assassinated in the establishment he managed, the Black Magic Casino and Hotel, in Las Vegas, in 1965. Ballantine had read everything he could about the hoodlum king.
In his apartment, Ballantine dropped his briefcase on his black leather couch and set the package on his teak coffee table.
The contents of the package had cost a bid of $50,000 on eBay.
Ballantine lifted a silver dollar, a g-string, and a pickaxe out of the wrapping paper and cardboard and laid it on his coffee table.
The coin was stamped with the year 1964. Donatelli, a big supporter of JFK, had used his political connections to get one of the first one hundred JFK silver dollars.
The g-string was among these items because for a while Donatelli’s favorite among his many mistresses was one of the dancers at the Black Magic. According to historical rumors, Donatelli had her shot to death and her body dumped in an elevator after she started to pressure him into leaving his wife.
The pickaxe was there because Donatelli kept it to remind himself of the silver mine he won in a poker game. He won it from a man who had, over forty years previously, had stolen Donatelli’s girlfriend. Donatelli gloated about the revenge for a month, and then sold the mine to a German firm.
Ballantine held the pickaxe for a moment in his hand, and smiled and nodded, and laid it back down on the coffee table.
Then his hand was suddenly a thing of liver spots, wrinkles, and gray hair sprouting between broken knuckles.
A gasp caught in his throat. He felt all the moisture suddenly gone from his mouth.
“You okay, boss?”
The man who said that to Ballantine stood right in front of him. He was about forty years old, almost seven feet tall, close to three hundred pounds, and sporting a severe scar on his left cheek and a fat, broken nose thrusting out from beneath his sunken eyes. This, Ballantine knew, was Roberto Gallo, 1960s Mob bodyguard.
Ballantine looked around the room. His condominium apartment was gone. He was in a large office with a window looking out over the neon nightlife of Las Vegas.
Ballantine saw a faint reflection in the window: A white-haired man with small, dark eyes who wore a three-piece blue and black tailored Italian suit.
Some invisible hand had snatched away Ballantine’s youth, beauty, and very identity. He needed to scream at the impossible unfairness of it all. However, he dreaded God-knew-what-else might be done to him so he held his tongue.
The faint reflection in the window belonged to him. Somehow, he was inside the body of Carlo Donatelli, the dead underworld legend.
A desk calendar lying next to a glass ball paperweight caught his eye.
June 7, 1965.
He looked at his watch -– which he knew would be on his left wrist and would be a diamond-encrusted Rolex.
11:55 p.m.
Ballantine tore off a calendar page, revealing June 8, 1965.
Carlo Donatelli was shot to death in his office -– would be shot to death in his office –- at 4:15 in the morning on June 8, 1965, with a .45 slug, a murder still unsolved more than forty years later.
Gallo said, “Boss, you okay?”
Ballantine grabbed his own cheek and pinched it hard.
He didn’t wake up from a nightmare. He -– apparently -– was not dreaming, although the question of his sanity was still up for debate.
“Bobby,” he said, hopefully sounding in charge, and sane. “We should get a car and drive to Hollywood tonight. Get us a bunch of those movie star broads. Just you and me. What do you say?”“I’m not sure the West Coast bosses are gonna care much about you needing to go hit the road and chase some Hollywood tail. I mean, not with you supposed to be meeting them in five minutes.”
Christ, that was right, and how could Ballantine have forgotten? The night somebody had blown away Donatelli, the gangland boss had been meeting with his West Coast superiors. There was a plan to take over the heroin sales to American soldiers starting to fight in Vietnam.
The meeting was to be in a conference room just down the hall.
Gallo left the room first, giving Ballantine a few seconds to remove a .22 automatic pistol from the desk’s lower left drawer. He had remembered that particular detail from the A & E special about Donatelli. Since somebody was gunning for him, Ballantine wanted to even up the odds.
Short, bald, cigar-smoking men and their younger, hulking bodyguards filled the conference room. The hours of the meeting crawled by in slow motion. Ballantine was seriously considering the possibility that organized crime might be boring. The San Diego boss said that if he was going to agree to any overseas deal, he wanted to put the issue of the pornography profits from last year on the table. He was convinced that somebody owed him at least $50,000 more than the courier had delivered. Shocked out of his stupor, Ballantine realized that in order to hold up his end of the discussion he had to get bookkeeping records that were down the hall in Donatelli’s office and a roomful of old men with hair trigger tempers expected him to get those records himself -- now.
Alone, Ballantine started to walk back down the hall to Donatelli's office.
He stole a glance at his watch. 4:05 a.m. Ten minutes until Donatelli’s -– his, Ballantine’s -– murder.
Ballantine stood less than three feet from Donatelli’s office.
He looked around wildly and saw the door to the stairs.
To hell with it. He would dash downstairs, make his way through the Black Magic’s all-night high rollers, terminal losers, and career drunks, emerge onto the Strip, and get as far away as possible from his lethal rendezvous with history and fate.
That, to use an old-fashioned term connected to etiquette, was not done. One did not suddenly walk away from a meeting with a roomful of crime bosses. Common sense said nobody did that who wanted to die a natural death.
However, the collective long reach and wrath of the West Coast bosses in the conference room down the hall, their outrage at their servant stepping out of line, all that was a big, scary question mark.
4:15 a.m. and a .45 slug were locked-down, dead certain facts.
Ballantine started to stride towards the door to the stairway.
When he was a few feet away, he started to run.
The door to the stairway opened.
Ballantine stared at a figure in a long dark coat with its collar turned up, and a fedora. In its hand was clutched the weirdest looking gun Ballantine had ever seen. Bones and a minature skull made up the pistol. The eye sockets in the skull glowed red.
Ballantine’s eyes adjusted to the dim light.
Carlo Donatelli clutched the weird pistol.
“If you aren’t going to say anything, kid, shut your mouth. You look like one of those retards that way. Now let’s take a little stroll back down to my -– I’m sorry -- your office.”
Standing before the window again in the crime lord’s office, the gaudy wonder of Las Vega lay out below him, Ballantine said, “How?”
Donatelli laughed.
“Let’s be practical, kid. How about why? I was hearing rumors that my wife had finally had it with all my playing around and was hiring a hit man, from Paris for Christ’s sake, to whack me. Some guy, my contacts in the CIA said, who had over two hundred confirmed kills. Some guy who I had no control over. What was I gonna do, whack my wife before she could set it up? We don’t have many rules, kid. But not bumping off our kids or our wife is one of them.”
He grinned.
“As for, ‘How?’ Well, why do you think I named this place ‘Black Magic’? Some of this Hollywood, L.A. crowd I’ve had to run around with is seriously freaky. I started to set up this escape route years ago.”
He looked at his odd pistol.
“The way it works, I kill you with this thing, and then I travel back up the timeline and take over your flesh from the moment you, Gazing into the darkness with too much love, stared at those three hexed objects. There’s a lot of fun I can have with something like Top Gun Software. When you look at me, you’re seeing … Not a ghost, exactly. And not flesh, blood, and bones. I’m in a between state that I couldn’t begin to nail down for you without you first reading some dusty old books of magic spells three Popes and the last two Tsars of Russia tried to have destroyed. Hey, you’re getting that surprised retarded guy look. I’d love to lay on you this 3000-year thing about ‘time is clay when touched by the magician’s will,’ but I’ve got business to take care of.”
Ballantine’s hand brushed something in his pocket.
The .22 automatic!
For hours, he had choked so badly on his own fear he had forgotten he was carrying the gun.
With a violent sweep of his arm, he sent the glass ball paperweight flying.
Struck, Donatelli’s arm and weapon snapped away from being pointed at Ballantine.
Ballantine had the .22 in his hand in a flash.
He said, “Say hello to my little --!”
He pulled the trigger.
Empty, the gun only clicked.
Another rumor from the Donatelli legend flashed in Ballantine’s mind -- that he put the gun in the desk, and told everybody about it, but kept it unloaded. Why not? He had once eliminated with his bare hands a Yakuza gunman someone sent to kill him.
Donatelli re-aimed his weapon at Ballantine’s head.
“No, you stupid son of a bitch. Say hello to mine.”
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© Miller, 2006