The Mirror Thief (2 page)

Lights are coming on all over the city, trembling in the rising heat. The blue-white beam of the Luxor is just visible in the distance, a streak in the indigo sky. Curtis thinks about home, wonders whether he should call, but Philly is three hours ahead: Danielle will already be asleep. Instead he undresses to his boxers, folds his clothes, tries to find something sexy on the widescreen TV, but all he seems to get are computer graphics of cruise missiles and 3-D rotating maps of the Gulf. After a while he puts down the remote and does pushups and situps on the carpeted deck as the talking heads drone on above him, speculating eagerly about the war to come, their jerky pictures freezing up from time to time, glitching out into flat digital mosaics.

When he’s done, Curtis mutes the television and opens the safe again. His wedding ring is there, next to the box of ammunition, and he slips it on, takes it off, puts it in his mouth and sucks on it, clicking it against the backs of his teeth. He unholsters the little revolver, unloads and checks the cylinder, and dry-fires it at the flickering TV, one hundred times with his right hand, eighty with his left, until his forearms burn and his index
fingers are raw and chapped. It’s a new gun; he doesn’t know it as well as he should.

His stomach turns over with a gurgle, still upset by the long flight and the many sleepless hours before it. He locks up the ring and the pistol and walks into the fancy marble head, where he sits on the commode and fishes through his shaving kit for his nailclippers. His hands smell like gun-oil and are cracked from the dry air, and for the first time today Curtis remembers, really remembers, what it was like being in the Desert.

Later that night, on his way back from dinner, Curtis spots Stanley’s girl at a blackjack table downstairs.

He stops for a second, blinking in surprise, then begins a slow clockwise orbit of the gaming floor, keeping her on his good side, in his periph. Picking up a ginger-ale along the way to busy his hands. She’s looking around, but not at him.

Two hundred eighty degrees later he parks himself at a video poker machine, breaks a roll of quarters, wets his lips from his clear plastic cup. He’s been worried about recognizing her—he has no photo to go by, and only saw her once before, nearly two years ago, at his dad’s wedding—but now he’s surprised to find he knows her right away. She still looks like a college student, although she must be near thirty by now. She reminds Curtis of some of the white kids who used to Metro in from College Park to hear his dad’s combo play in Adams-Morgan, or on U Street. Cool, smart, a little cagey. Toughened up by a few hard knocks—brought on by bad decisions, not by circumstances or bad luck. Thin. Wavy brown hair. Big eyes, widely spaced. She should be pretty but she’s not. A mistaken idea of pretty. Pretty sketched by somebody who’s never seen it, working off a verbal description.

Curtis watches her for the better part of an hour: her shifting eyes,
the trickle of people behind her. Waiting for her to move, or for Stanley to materialize from the crowd. Stanley never does, and she doesn’t budge. She’s definitely counting cards, but she doesn’t seem to be after a big score; her bets don’t change much as the count goes up and down. She seems distracted, like she’s just killing time.

The machine deals Curtis three queens, and he dumps one, afraid of hitting a big payout and drawing attention to himself. The girl is playing just like he’s playing. Does she know she’s being followed?

Then, off to the right, an old man in a sportcoat, slender and compact, hurrying along the patterned maroon bulkhead. It’s not Stanley—too gawky, too nervous—but the girl stops in mid-play, her eyes widening. She tracks the old man for a second, her brow furrowed, and then slumps in her seat. The dealer says something to get her back in the game, and she shoots him a glare. It’s all over in an instant.

But now Curtis knows: he’ll be able to find her here whenever he needs to. She’s looking for Stanley too.

He drops the last of his quarters and heads back to his room. A fax is waiting for him: a cartoon drawn on
SPECTACULAR!
hotel letterhead, showing a muscular dark-skinned man sodomizing an older guy with exaggerated Semitic features. The cartoon Curtis’s expression is grim, determined; his face and arms are densely shaded with slashing diagonals. Comma-shaped teardrops shoot from the panicked Stanley’s wrinkled eyes. Across the top of the page, Damon has written in block capitals,
GO GITTIM!!!
Across the bottom,
THAS MAH BOY!!!!!

Curtis crumples the fax and drops it in the trash. Then he fishes it out, rips it into small pieces, and flushes the pieces down the toilet.

It rains overnight. Curtis wakes to see lightning flash against the bathroom door, rolls over to get a better look, and dozes off again right away.
He remembers hearing drops against the glass, but in the morning there’s nothing, no sign of moisture at all.

He’s already dialed before he thinks to look at his watch—it’s Friday, nearly noon now in D.C.—but Mawiyah picks up anyway. Curtis! she says, a broad smile in her voice.
As-Salaam-Alaikum
, Little Brother! I didn’t recognize your number on the Caller-ID. You get a new phone?

I did, Curtis says. I sure did. Say, I just remembered what day it is. I’m surprised to find you home. I figured you’d be on your way to the temple by now.

Well, we’re running a little late this morning. And thank God for that, or we would have missed your call! How are you?

I’m doing all right. I don’t want to hold you up too much, though. I was hoping to catch my dad. He’s around?

Curtis hears a soft tap as Mawiyah sets the receiver down. Her whippoorwill voice grows distant, abstract, as she moves through the house. As he waits, Curtis is struck by a couple of memories in quick succession. First, her photo, hung outside the library at Dunbar: six years ahead of him, still a legendary presence there. Four days a week he passed it on his way to the practice field and another asskicking courtesy of the defensive line. Second, years later: her singing “Let’s Get Lost” in a tiny 18th Street club, eyes closed against the blue light. His father behind her, in shadow, leaning on his bass. Out of prison, not yet cleaned up for good. She was Nora Brawley then; his dad was still Donald Stone. Curtis had come straight from National, on leave from Subic, jetlagged and exhausted, still wearing service-alpha greens. He remembers a beerbottle’s sweat beneath his fingers, and the way everything seemed to be tipping over. Stanley was there somewhere, too. Invisible. His voice a loose thread in the dark.

Curtis hears his father’s heavy footsteps, telegraphed through the floor, the table, the phone. Little Man!

Hey, Pop.

Real smart, calling when you know I can’t talk for too long. Let me call you back on my cell.

No, that’s okay, Pop. I just want to ask a quick favor. I’m trying to get in touch with Stanley.

Curtis feels a bubble of silence open between them. Stanley? his father says. Stanley Glass?

Yeah, Dad. Stanley Glass. I need to get a hold of him. Do you maybe have a telephone number, or—

What in the hell you need to talk to Stanley Glass for, Little Man?

It’s—I’m just trying to help somebody out, Pop. Friend of mine’s looking for him. This is the guy I told you about, the one who’s gonna hook me up with that job at the Point.

At the what? I thought you said you’re gonna be working for—

The Spectacular. I am. It’s the same thing, Dad. Everybody who works there calls it the Point, because—

Well, then what does your
friend
want with Stanley Glass? And has he ever heard of dialing 4-1-1? Stanley’s right there in the Philly White Pages. You just gotta—

I don’t think Stanley’s in Philly anymore, Dad. Or in AC. I think he’s out here.

Wait wait wait. Out where?

Vegas, Curtis says. I’m calling you from Las Vegas.

His father draws a heavy breath, lets it out. Curtis has made a mistake by bringing him into this. Look, Dad, he says. I know you don’t have time to talk—

I haven’t kept up with Stanley too much, Curtis, his father says. Stanley is a great man and a great friend, one of my oldest friends in the world, but I haven’t talked to him too much since Mawiyah and I got married. I don’t judge him, and I don’t bear him any ill will, but the fact is, Curtis—

I know, Dad.

The fact is—if I may finish—the fact is that Stanley is a professional gambler. And Mawiyah and I are good Muslims now. Or I’m trying to be one, anyway. And the teachings of the Prophet, peace be upon him, very specifically prohibit—

I know all about this, Dad.

I know you know. But you need to understand. Stanley is a gambler all the time. He is a pure gambling machine. To be with Stanley is to
gamble with Stanley. And so: I cannot be around Stanley. I love him, he’s my brother, but—

Look, Dad, I’m making you late. This is not that important. I understand what you’re saying, and—

I just need you to hear me out on this, Curtis.

I’m hearing you out, Dad. All right? I’m sorry I bothered you. I gotta go. Tell Mawiyah goodbye for me.

Curtis hangs up. He stares at the new cellphone for a moment, pondering his own apparently limitless capacity for misunderstanding and foolishness. He still hasn’t called his wife.

He makes the big hotel rack to calm himself down, pulling the sheets flat and tight. This provides a kind of cheap satisfaction and solace. Outside, the rinsed-and-dried city buzzes in the morning light, inventing itself for the coming day.

The Strip trolley picks Curtis up at Harrah’s, four hundred yards south of his own hotel. He pays his two bucks, takes a seat near the front, and scans the sidewalks as they roll along: Slots A Fun, the Crazy Girls billboard, the fat blue tentacles of the Wet ’n Wild waterslides. Stooped yellow cranes tend the grave of the Desert Inn, swinging steel girders over pale mounds of earth. Guys with firehoses spray everything in sight, trying to cut down on the dust, but it isn’t working: the ground just drinks it up, and the still air is hung all around with wisps of silica.

The trolley is nearly empty at this hour, silent but for the diesel’s lulling chug, and Curtis finds himself twisted in his seat, craning his neck to catch a glimpse of Mount Charleston through the rain-washed morning air. Lots of snow still left at the peak. Even at this distance it’s fiercely white in the blinding sun, a gap at the horizon, a space intentionally left blank.

The mountain vanishes behind the three-legged tower of the
Stratosphere, and Curtis turns forward again. The big casinos are all behind them now, the streets lined with motels, wedding chapels, lingerie shops. The Boulevard between here and downtown always reminds Curtis of Subic, the bridge into Olongapo, minus the shit-smelling river, the moneychanger booths, the boys begging for centavos. A few hard-eyed and ragged leafleteers have already reported for duty, sipping coffee from paper cups, satchels bulging at their feet. Last night’s handbills and magazines blow across the sidewalks: ads for sex clubs, escort services, brothels in Pahrump. The palmtrees are thinning out, replaced by billboards: the city advertising itself to itself. Curtis is surprised by a quick tremor of glee; he catches his breath, fights back a smile.
What happens here stays here
. He’s alone, at risk, alive in his own skin for the first time in years.

The trolley unloads him near Fremont Street, the main downtown drag, lately closed to vehicular traffic and spanned by a steel canopy studded with concert speakers and tiny colored lights. The lights are off now, the speakers silent. A few earlybird dayshifters drift in from the sidestreets: waiters and dancers and dealers in streetclothes, uniforms stuffed into backpacks or duffelbags. Curtis is still operating on Philly time; he feels foolish for starting so early. Wherever Stanley is now, he’s asleep.

Curtis walks up Fourth to the restaurant at the Gold Spike, amused and a little disappointed to find that the price of a two-egg breakfast has more than doubled since his last visit: they now ask a buck ninety-nine. He places his order at the counter, sits in a booth by the window, watches as delivery trucks and taxis and armored cars move across the dust-flecked glass.

Nearly three years gone by. In the summer of 2000, coming off his first Balkan tour, Curtis got TDY’d to Twentynine Palms to help with combined-arms exercises: six months of grit in his molars, charred rock and crucible sun. The way the Corps saw it, Curtis was a combat veteran who’d been in the Gulf in ’91, who’d done counterinsurgency in Kosovo and Somalia, and they wanted him to share his experience with their green recruits. Curtis had been a terrible teacher, reluctant to revisit operations he felt he’d done a halfassed job on in the first place, unable to come up with anything that felt like wisdom in his mouth. He tried to pass along
what he’d learned—battlefield circulation control, rear-area security, processing EPWs—but it all came out as textbook stuff, the same standard-ssue post-Vietnam bromides he’d scoffed at himself at his first CAX back in ’84, and he could tell the boots weren’t hearing it. And anyway, nobody really wanted to think about how to handle fifty Iraqi soldiers surrendering to a four-man scout team, or to a water truck. People are always ready to prepare for the worst, not so much the ridiculous. How many of those fresh-minted marines are in the Sandbox now? Curtis wonders. In Kuwait and Saudi. Waiting for the whistle to blow, for the second half to start.

Twentynine Palms reunited Curtis with guys he went through MP school with at Leonard Wood, guys his own age, and they got to be pretty tight, keeping each other entertained, driving to San Diego or TJ or Vegas on weekends. Damon always organized the Vegas trips: caravans of marines speeding across the desert, taking over whole floors at Circus Circus or the Plaza,
semper fi
’ing back and forth over craps tables and handing fistfuls of taxpayer dollars over to the girls at the Palomino and Glitter Gulch. Damon’s excursions always drew new faces, younger guys, marines Curtis had never met, and they all wanted to talk about Damon. Shit, they’d say, that guy’s the craziest MP in the Corps. But Damon wasn’t crazy. He always kept it together: pacing himself, quarterbacking, pulling the strings. Always in good working order when everybody else was throwing away their money, puking on their shoes.