The Mirror Thief (3 page)

On the last trip, they were moving in a pack through one of the big casinos—Caesars, or maybe the Trop, scaring civilians, razzing flyboys from Nellis—when Curtis felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to find Stanley there. Stanley looked thin, even gaunt, but still dialed in tight; he was lithe and strong in Curtis’s awkward embrace. When Curtis asked what brought him to town, Stanley just gave him a funny grin that could’ve meant
do you have to ask?
could’ve meant
you’d never guess
. They talked for a minute about Curtis’s dad, about the Corps, about people they both knew back East, and then the conversation turned a corner and Curtis, maybe three-quarters drunk, found himself unable to keep up. Stanley was telling a story about a hand of blackjack he’d played at the Barbary
Coast—about something that happened during it, or something it made him think of—and then about an English magician named Flood, and a famous trick he did in which unrelated objects moved in ghostly parallel, as if linked by invisible threads. Curtis kept expecting Stanley to explain how the trick was done, or to connect it back to the blackjack game, but he never did, and suddenly he was silent, watching Curtis, waiting for a response.

Now, sitting in the booth at the Gold Spike, sponging spilt yolk with folded-over toast, Curtis is shaken by the memory: it cools his blood, stifles his appetite. It’s hard to say why. Partly it bothers him that he could fail so completely to understand a man he’s known his whole life. But that’s not it, or not entirely. Something else is poisoning the recollection: a nightmare feeling, irrational and uncanny. A sense of menace hidden in plain sight. The presence of an impostor. As if it wasn’t really Stanley that Curtis met in the casino that night. Or, worse, that it was Curtis who was off, who wasn’t really himself.

At the time, of course, he didn’t feel any of this: it was just an awkward moment. He and Stanley stood there; Curtis looked down, shuffled his feet. Then Damon walked up, and Curtis introduced them.

And that was it: the first time the two of them met. It seemed like such a small thing then. Like nothing. Now Curtis can barely track what has followed from it.

The rest of that night is a drunken blur in his memory, but he retains one last lucid image: Damon sitting at a $25 table, bright-eyed and focused, smirking at his cards as Stanley hovered behind him, a hand on his shoulder, whispering into the shaven base of his skull.

So in a way, Curtis figures, all of this is his own fault.

The dayshift comes on at noon, and Curtis begins walking down Fremont, from the ElCo to the Plaza, stopping at every casino along the way.
He talks to croupiers and dealers, waitresses and bartenders, floor people, security guards, and every pit boss or casino host whose ear he can bend. In each case he tailors his story to his audience, mostly blowing variations on
I’m looking for a friend, he’s staying somewhere in town, I’m hoping to throw some action his way
. Everybody gets Curtis’s cell number, and he drops a few double sawbucks where he thinks they might do some good. A couple of people say they’ve seen Stanley in the last week or so. Everyone over the age of forty seems to recognize his name.

Curtis was nervous at first about operating in the open, laying such thick spoor, but he’s over that now. If he’s not visible, then this isn’t going to work, not in what little time he’s got. He’s never been wired for cloak-and-dagger shit anyhow, which by now Damon should know. Sneaking around, in Curtis’s view, generally amounts to time-wasting; better to just say what you want, then own whatever comes with wanting it. If Damon has a problem with that approach, he could have called somebody else. Out here Curtis has done nothing wrong, has nothing to hide from. Not yet, anyway.

At each place he stops, he makes the same clockwise circuit of the tables, scanning the crowd for Stanley’s bald head, his narrow shoulders, his beaked nose. He comes up empty every time, but always feels like there’s something he’s not seeing. He’s rusty, and still doesn’t trust his eye.

He leaves Main Street Station with two rolls of quarters in his pocket and catches the trolley to the Stratosphere. Starting his long trek south. He’s making better time, zeroing in on the right people: pit bosses with ten-dollar haircuts, middle-aged bartenders, valets who look him in the eye. Damon’s cash is going fast, but Curtis feels like he’s buying something with it now.

Nobody’s asked him any tough questions, but he runs through his story anyway, rehearsing made-up dialogue as he’s passing between casinos, crossing the boulevard. Thinking back to ten days ago, South Philly, Damon in a booth at the Penrose Diner. Swirling the dregs of his third coffee, brown parabola lapping the bone-white rim.
I’m not asking you to lie. Just keep it simple. If anybody presses you, you just tell ’em you’re collecting on a marker. That’s the truth, right?
Yellow hair trimmed to a uniform
half-inch, longer than Curtis had ever seen it. Beige houndstooth suit wrinkled like it’d been slept in, though Damon clearly hadn’t slept in days.
The trick is to have layers. See? You give up a little, they think they got the whole picture
. Dark eyes watery but alert, like greased ballbearings. One obsidian cufflink in his black poplin sleeve, a few raveled threads where its mate was torn out.
It’s fine to drop my name if you think that’ll help. Nobody’s gonna know what happened in Atlantic City. Or, if they do know, they won’t make any connections
. A new mobile phone atop an unmarked #10 envelope. An e-ticket printout inside—
UA 2123 dep PHL 07:00 arr LAS 09:36 03/13/2003
—wrapped around three packs of hundred-dollar traveler’s checks.
What you tell your wife is your business. Look, this is not dangerous. Nobody’s breaking any laws. You find him, and you call me. You do it no later than twelve a.m. next Tuesday night. It’s that simple
.

Curtis watched Damon’s Audi pull out of the lot and disappear up the onramp toward the Whitman Bridge. He finished his slice of apple pie along with the chocolate napoleon that Damon had barely touched, ordered himself another coffee, and sat not reading his newspaper until nearly rush hour, when he walked back to the subway. The next morning he awoke at four with Danielle’s alarm, listened as she dressed and left for work, and lay sleepless and staring at the sky through the miniblinds as it went from black to red to yellow to white. Then he rose and cleaned up and caught the bus down to Collingdale, where he bought the gun.

South of Fashion Show Mall the casinos are bigger, busier now that it’s later in the day, and everything takes longer. By eight o’clock he’s past the airport, leapfrogging places that seem unlikely, feeding quarters to the southbound trolley as it carries him from block to block to block. He stops at the buffet at the Tropicana to load up on prime rib and peeled shrimp by the glow of heatlamps and coral-reef aquariums, then sits for an hour above the deserted pool and watches the reflections of palmtrees nod in the wind-purled water. Once his food has settled, he humps it east to the Hôtel San Rémo, west to the Orleans, south to the Luxor and Mandalay Bay.

On the long ride back to his own hotel he nods off for a second, then jolts awake, his heart skittering. Outside the streaked bus windows the
city seems different, alive in a way that it wasn’t before. There’s steady foot traffic along the boulevard, laughing and shouting and acting out, and the street is full of high-end rental cars, windows down, stereos rattling. Stretch limousines idle at curbside, sly and circumspect, while the sidewalk procession slides backlit across their mute black windshields. Time seems to pass in a hurry. Curtis thinks of bad places he’s been, of nights he’s spent along razor-taped perimeters, eyeing burning wells and distant winks of small-arms fire. Very different from this. But the same nervous thrill, the same sense of something gathered just beyond the lights, waiting for a signal to move. For the first time in a long while Curtis feels as if he’s in the world again—the real world, inhuman and unconstructed—where he can be anybody, or nobody, and where anything is possible.

He’s reached the door to his room, is swiping his keycard, when his cellphone throbs to life. The unfamiliar ringtone startles him; he jumps, the door swings open, and the keycard drops and slides along the tile just inside the jamb. Curtis digs for the phone as he stoops to retrieve it.

A loud voice on the line, not one he can place. Curtis! it says. How you been, man?

I’m good. What’s up?

You know who this is? You recognize my voice? It’s Albedo, man! Remember me? I hear you’re in town!

Curtis doesn’t know anybody named Albedo—or Al Beddow, for that matter. A white guy, probably his own age. Blue Ridge accent: North Carolina, Virginia. Crowd noise in the background. Yeah, Curtis says. I’m here for a few days.

That’s great, man. We gotta hook up, we gotta hang out. What are you doing right now?

I’m—I just got back to my hotel.

Your hotel? Fuck, man, it’s like eleven. You can’t go back to your hotel. Look, I’m at the Hard Rock right now with some people. You need to get your ass over here. You know where it is?

Curtis knows where it is. He’s half inside his doorway, dead phone
cradled in his hand. Trying again to place that voice. Maybe somebody he talked to earlier. Maybe somebody who’s watching what he says because of who he’s with. Curtis closes his eyes, tries to form a picture of Albedo—shrouded in dim light, loud music, the clamor of raised voices, Stanley’s maybe among them—but at the center of Curtis’s picture is an absence, a void in the smoky air, and he quickly gives up.

Leaning farther into the dark entryway, checking the fax and the message-light, he hears a door slam somewhere down the corridor and is suddenly uneasy, an interloper in shared space, aware of the closeness of unseen others. Somebody’s been here while he was out: housekeeping, of course. For a second he can sense the strata of odors in the room—a hidden history of cleansers, perfumes, sweat—before his nose habituates and they’re blended, gone. Due south, a block off the Strip, some kind of event is going on, the grand opening of something. Four times a minute the beam of a swiveling searchlight falls through the open curtains; the suite’s furnishings appear, disappear, appear. With each sweep, the air over the city turns a solid blue, flat and opaque, and the room seems telescoped, shallow, a diorama of itself.

After a couple of passes, Curtis pulls his revolver and checks it in the wan light that leaks from the hallway. Then he hurries back to the elevators, and the door shuts itself behind him.

The Hard Rock is on Paradise Road, between the Strip and the UNLV campus—not far, but Curtis doesn’t want to risk missing Albedo, so he hops a cab and is there in minutes.

He’s been here before, but only briefly and drunkenly, and he doesn’t remember it well. It’s small, chalk-white and curvy, lit from below by purple-gelled spots; the glowing diodes of a streetside readerboard flash
OZZY OSBOURNE!
as the cab turns onto the palm-lined drive. A parade
of revelers—off-duty dancers and bartenders, highrollers from the coast—pours inside by the light of an enormous neon-strung guitar.

As soon as he’s stepped through the Gibson-handled doors Curtis knows Stanley won’t be here. It’s all young MBA types inside, college kids on extended spring break: aside from Ozzy, Curtis is probably the oldest guy in the place. On his way through the crowded lobby he passes a cardigan-clad Britney Spears mannequin, somebody’s glassed-in drumkit, a chandelier made of gleaming saxophones. Aerosmith blasts from speakers overhead. In the circular casino Curtis stops to read the mulberry baize of a blackjack table: there, above a line of lyrics he can’t place—something about getting lucky—is a notice that dealers must hit soft seventeens. Stanley wouldn’t be caught dead within a hundred yards of this joint.

Close to the disc-shaped bar it’s even louder. The crowd, the machines, the PA blend and collide into an indistinct roar, a new silence. Curtis only gradually becomes aware of someone screaming his name from a few yards away: a longhaired white guy. Ripped jeans, Guns N’ Roses T-shirt, motorcycle jacket. He’s grinning, half-silhouetted against the wavery light of a flatscreen TV, one splayfingered arm swaying over his head like a strand of kelp. Curtis is certain he’s never seen this guy before in his life.

Up close, Albedo looks like a bad blend of Chet Baker and Jimmy Buffett. His fingers are sepia-stained; his grip is firm but clammy, tentacled, and Curtis is quick to release it. He’s tall, six-three at least, but soft in the middle. His thin brown hair is pulled back in a curly ponytail, gray at the temples. His eyeballs are rose-rimmed, watery, and he smells of whiskey and pot.

Albedo’s sitting with two young women—one pale, blond, the other dark, probably Hispanic, both wearing sequined halters. Curtis can’t read anything in their faces aside from exhaustion and low expectations. The women move apart and leave two empty barchairs between them; Albedo claps a hand on Curtis’s back and steers him into the one on the right. As he sags into his own seat, his fingers drag drunkenly down Curtis’s blazer and brush the shape of the revolver at his waist, and Curtis knows immediately that this is wrong, that he ought to get out of here.

Albedo’s ordering him a Corona; he introduces him to the women
as if they’re old friends. We were in the Desert together, he says. The first Iraq war. The women’s names are unusual, foreign; Curtis is thinking fast, trying to keep his shit together, not really paying attention, and he forgets them immediately.

You been keeping up with the news from over there? Albedo asks. You believe all the bullshit that’s going down?

What? Did it start?

Any minute, man. Albedo nods sagely, as if privy to secret knowledge. And I tell you what, he says, raising his glass. Better them than us. Right, my brother?

Curtis nods, sips silently.

I was just now trying to articulate to my two young companions, Albedo says, neither of whom has the good fortune to be a citizen of this great nation of ours, the magnitude of the fucked-up-ness going down in the Middle East tonight. Because, see, the first war
—our
war?
—that
was total bullshit. No doubt about that. But
this
just takes the proverbial cake. Am I right, Curtis?