The Mirror Thief (41 page)

I was. I was a guard.

You went to high school in D.C., right?

Dunbar, all four years.

She’s studying him closely. How tall are you, Curtis? she says. If you don’t mind my asking?

I don’t mind. I’m five-seven.

Five-seven. And the other kids were—

All about eleven feet tall, yeah.

That cracks her up. Okay, she says. Cool. And after you got out of the hospital? After all the gnarly physical therapy? What did you do then?

Curtis laughs too. I went to college, he says. For about a minute. Then I went into the Marine Corps.

They’re quiet for a while. She looks to the right, past the façade of the Ca’ d’Oro, toward the clocktower—twenty-four-hour dial, gold zodiac loop—and the pulsing readerboard above it. She shifts her weight as she turns. Her hip comes to rest against Curtis’s leg: scrawny and sharp, fever-warm. He looks down. There’s the tattoo again, more of it this time. The two figures under the tree are a bearded old man and a young man with a sword. Two triangles are superimposed over the scene: one pointed up, one pointed down. Veronica’s skin is dark, tanning-bed tan.

You ever think about going back to school, Curtis?

That’s pretty much what my wife wants me to do.

I’ll bet she’s real excited about you being out here, isn’t she?

Yeah. We weren’t exactly on speaking terms when I left. She’s pretty upset.

Veronica’s hair is sliding off her back, across her left shoulder. She drops her head forward and the rest of it comes down. Behind her, the hotel readerboard is playing video of a juggler next to flashing blue text:
A PEACOCK WITH A THOUSAND EYES!

Curtis, she says, how come you’re not wearing a wedding ring?

He takes a long breath, moves away a little.

Is that a bad question?

No, he says. It’s a good question. I’ll give you an honest answer.

She straightens up, looks at him.

When I was stationed overseas, he says, every so often I would run into these intelligence guys. Interrogators. Sometimes military, sometimes not. I never got to know any of them personally. But a few I met, they liked to talk about their work. What they did. And what I found out was, there’s a certain kind of person who’s good at that job. I got a sense of how these guys operate, how they see the world. Now, to people like you and me, a ring on my finger just says
I love my wife
. But to these guys, a ring on my finger says
this is how you can hurt me
. I always liked to think these guys were few and far between. But once you learn to spot them, what to look for, then you start seeing them all the time. Anyway, coming out here, not knowing what I was getting into, I figured that’s something I better not broadcast. That’s all.

She nods. I understand, she says. You’re smart to be careful.

Curtis smiles, shrugs.

Well, she says. I should go. I’m getting light on walking-around money.

You headed back inside?

No, she says, I can’t win here. If you win big or lose big, people start to notice. They’re paid to pay attention. I don’t want anybody to ever remember seeing me here.

Present company excluded, of course.

Of course. Anyway, the fucking smell in this joint is killing me.

Smell? Curtis says. I guess I stopped noticing it.

They pipe it through the vents. All the Strip joints do it, but this one is by far the worst. It’s like ferrets fucking in a potpourri bowl.

Curtis laughs. Veronica smiles, looks away.

Hey, Curtis says. Thanks for talking to me. Seriously. Thank you.

No sweat, she says. It was my pleasure. I hope all this shit works out.

She offers her hand, and he takes it. Then she steps behind him and heads toward the bridge to the Boulevard.

Hey, Veronica?

She stops, half-turned.

Is Stanley gonna talk to me?

Veronica looks at him for a second, squinting against the sun. Then she opens her mouth to speak.

I know you talked to him last night, Curtis says. You don’t have to tell me where he is. I’m not even gonna ask. Do you think he’ll talk to me?

A challenge appears in her eyes, then fades, replaced by something closer to pity. I think so, she says. But not now. He’s not ready yet.

She turns again to walk away, then turns back. You shouldn’t wait around for him, Curtis, she says. You should just go home.

Her long shadow slices between the balusters on the bridge, a moving beam of dark. Curtis watches her go. He could head over to McCarran first thing in the morning. Get on standby. He ought to call Danielle, let her know.

He hears a rush of wings: a flock of snow-white pigeons billows from the parking garage, pouring around the belltower in a formless spume. The shimmering cloud thins out over the city, banking across the sun; the white wings go black in silhouette. Curtis looks for Mount Charleston in the distance, but with the sun behind them the mountains are indistinguishable, shrunken, and he can’t make out its shape.

On his way topside Curtis digs out his cell to call his wife, but he winds up phoning Walter Kagami instead.

The Strip gets shabbier north of the New Frontier, but Curtis opts to walk it anyway, to give himself time and space to think.

The block ahead is Old Vegas: the neon clowns of Circus Circus, the Stardust’s psychedelic mushroom cloud, the flashing incandescent egg-beaters of the Westward Ho. Jarhead joints: places Curtis knows. Half the properties are boarded up, waiting for the wreckingball. The equilateral
A-frame of the Guardian Angel Cathedral overlooks the droning gorge of the superarterial, the blue mosaic on its western face lit weakly from below, its sleek freestanding spire echoing the distant tower of the Stratosphere.

The night is cool, maybe fifty degrees, and ambivalent breezes rustle palmfronds, spread exhaust. Curtis sticks close to the curb on the boulevard’s east side, nothing to his left but eight lanes of traffic. He walks quickly, although he’s not in any hurry: Kagami won’t be able to meet until late. He pushes forward, lengthening his stride. As if trying to gain ground on a thought he should be having. He’s pissed off, mostly at himself, and ready to be gone.

What little Curtis knows about playing blackjack he learned in joints like these—Slots A Fun, the Riv, the Ho—after years of fruitless lessons from Stanley and his father.
Pit bosses don’t believe black folks can count, so they’ll never catch you. I’m giving you the keys to the kingdom, Little Man. You won’t have to work a day in your life
. But blackjack with his dad was like driver’s ed with Richard Petty: Curtis had no point of entry. And even back then Stanley was playing an entirely different game.

It was Damon who finally taught him basic strategy: mornings spent sobering up at the two-buck tables at Slots. By the time Curtis rotated back to Lejeune, he’d worked his way through all the North Strip casinos, figured out how to stay afloat for hours of free drinks. He even grossed a little, although his take came out way under minimum wage. Still, he went back to North Carolina with a new understanding of what his dad and Stanley actually did, even if he was still foggy on exactly how they did it. He owes Damon for that, at least. Doesn’t he?

It was two weeks ago today that the call came. As Curtis rode the Broad Street Line south to Marconi Plaza, as he walked the half-mile past the bocce courts and the Quartermaster Depot to the Penrose Diner, his head was buzzing with questions he’d been afraid to ask himself, questions he knew Damon would understand, would maybe even have some answers to. What should he be doing? Should he go back to school? With Curtis’s employment handicap and thirty-percent disability, Voc Rehab would pay tuition, would maybe even offer subsistence allowance, but is
it worth the trouble? Was it dumb for him to get married so soon after getting hurt? With marines mounting up for the Desert again, would it be crazy to think about reenlisting?

Curtis never got to ask Damon those questions. It’s starting to look like he never will. At no point did he believe the story Damon told him, not for a second. But he didn’t exactly disbelieve it, either. Damon has talked him into plenty of questionable shit over the years, but Curtis has never felt suckered or used. Not till now.

The Riviera’s seething façade and the pink parabolas of the La Concha are behind him now. He passes gas stations and fast food joints done up in stuttering neon, new condos where old casinos used to be.
SOUVENIRS T-SHIRTS GIFTS INDIAN JEWELRY MOCCASINS LIQUOR
. Coming up on the Wet ’n Wild: dark and quiet, strange silhouettes against the Sahara towers. The onion dome of the casino just ahead, less Egyptian than Persian, less Persian than Byzantine. The boulevard’s west side is mostly empty lots, hibernating till the next boom. It’s dark enough here to see a few stars, Jupiter high in the southeast. Curtis feels vulnerable without his gun. He doesn’t like the feeling, or the fact that he’s feeling it.

The few people on the sidewalk are gathered in nervous packs, and Curtis scopes them in his periph, catching bits of conversation as they pass. Winsome Scientologist types shilling for timeshares. A clutch of staggering Ace caps, maybe the same guys from before.
What asshole hits a hard twelve against a six? That clown cost me a hundred bucks!
A sandwich-boarded street preacher screaming apocalypse at two hard-eyed motorcycle cops. A wedding party in full finery: mulleted groomsmen, plump bridesmaids in seafoam organza, the bride’s arm held aloft by balloons that catch headlights in their Mylar skin, a cluster of rolling eyes. Four Japanese girls with pink hair and funky glasses, bright-eyed and laughing, huddled like trick-or-treaters. A sunburnt panhandler, cane in one hand, coinpail in the other, and wraparound shades identical to Curtis’s own.
IF YOU ARE MEAN ENOUGH TO STEAL FROM THE BLIND, HELP YOURSELF
. A black kid who looks about thirteen, handing out leaflets for escort services.
Azar é palavra que não existe no meu
dicionário, y’know what I’m saying?
A drunk in a rumpled seersucker suit who’s just pissed on a palmtree, pale dick still peeking from his trousers, foxtrotting an invisible partner across a parking lot, singing “It’s Only a Paper Moon” in a deep steady voice.

At the Holy Cow Curtis crosses to the opposite side and continues north. When the wind is right he can hear the rumble of the Big Shot and the High Roller up ahead, the screams of their riders. He’s too close to the tower now to take it all in at once: the inverted-lampshade crown, the spot-lit tripod base. He tries to ID the international flags outlined in neon above the marquee, then remembers that they’re all fake. Imaginary countries.
All countries are imaginary
, Stanley would say. That reminds Curtis of something else, something Veronica said, about why Stanley’s never been to Italy.
He just never had a passport
. Why
never had
? Why not
doesn’t have
?

A working girl is jogging down the sidewalk toward him—red wig, black fishnets, six-three in four-inch heels, probably trannie—trying to pull on a coat and hail a cab at the same time. She keeps looking over her shoulder at the Aztec Inn like she expects somebody to be after her, like maybe her trick just went apeshit, or she lifted his wallet, or his heart exploded while she was blowing him and she needs to make herself scarce. The look on her face says things are only going to get worse for her. Curtis steps out of her way, avoids eye contact.

A steady stream of taxis picks up and drops off at the casino’s porte-cochère: UNLV kids on double dates, Midwesterners in windbreakers and running shoes. The cabs all turn south when they hit the Strip again. Curtis slips off his ballcap as he steps through the entrance, tucks it in his waistband where the revolver ought to be, letting the brim dangle over his tailbone.

Ten bucks buys him a ticket for the elevators. It takes him a while to figure out where to go next, but once he does the wait’s not long. A walkthrough metal detector—a new Garrett machine—sits at the head of the line, just as Kagami said it would. Security officers hand-search bags and fannypacks, but this doesn’t slow things down as much as the photographer who’s snapping digital photos of everybody who’s headed topside. The guy in front of Curtis—drunk and swaying, handlebar moustache
and
BUCK FUSH
T-shirt, cringing wife and two silent kids—won’t stop bitching about it. Typical Vegas, brother, he says to Curtis. They always gotta be selling you something.

They take the photos, Curtis says, so they have a record of who goes up to the tower. If one of us turns out to be loaded with Semtex and blows the joint up, it’ll make our remains easier to identify. If they can earn a few extra bucks selling the pictures as souvenirs, then I guess they might as well.

The guy laughs and looks at Curtis, but Curtis doesn’t laugh, doesn’t smile, and the guy looks away and quiets down.

The observation deck is on the hundred-and-eighth floor, eight hundred feet up. The elevator takes under a minute to get there. Curtis is still early for Kagami, so he does two laps of the observation deck, clockwise and counterclockwise, yawning hard to pop his ears. The valley glitters to the mountains in every direction, sodium orange and mercury blue, crystals scattered in a pit.

He finds an empty bench between two coin-operated telescopes and sits down and tries to think. Out of habit he wonders where Stanley is, but he knows now that that’s the wrong question, has been the wrong question all along. Better to ask why he’s been so hard to find—or even better, why Damon wants so badly to find him. If Veronica is telling the truth, and Curtis thinks she is, then the number of likely answers to that last question are relatively few, and Curtis doesn’t like the looks of any of them.

He keeps getting distracted by the city, by landmarks translating out of the grid. From this height, the cleared lot where the Desert Inn used to be gaps like a knocked-out tooth. He spots his hotel where the Strip bends due south, its belltower a pale finger laid across Caesars’ brilliant readerboard. Flying in Thursday morning, Curtis was able to catch glimpses of the Luxor, New York, Mandalay Bay, but he couldn’t make out much on the north end; the drop was too quick.