The Mirror Thief (5 page)

The first big blowout since they got married. He’s walked out on her before—a few times, not long after they first moved in—but those times he always came right back: home before she’d changed into her PJs. He had no place to run then, nowhere he could imagine himself going. This time he did. And he went.

To keep himself from remembering the argument, he tries to think of the airport: sleepless hours slouched in the cushioned seats at the concourse gate, alone amid a scattering of laid-over travelers. Concentrating hard on the urgent monotonous drip of news from ceiling-bolted televisions. Barely noticing the sunrise in the windows behind him, doubled by the surface of the Delaware. Watching the war take shape.

That’s something else she said: one of her pent-up gripes.
Why can’t you just admit that it’s getting to you?
Okay, sure. She’s not wrong. The jumpiness and the short temper, the bad dreams and sleepless nights that he shook off after the Desert, after Mogadishu, after Kosovo—shook them off each time, shook them right off, no trouble—sure, they’ve come back a little bit.
I see this at the VA all the time, Sammy D. It’s a normal thing. There’s
a war coming on, and you’re not in it, and that’s gonna bother you
. But it’s not the war that bothers Curtis: it’s everything else. Everything
but
the war bothers him. The war he knows what to do with. The war makes sense.

This favor Damon’s asking—this is not how people get jobs, Curtis. Are you even listening to yourself? Flying to Las Vegas, sneaking around casinos: this is not any kind of career track you want to get on. If you don’t want to think about your future, you can think about mine. All right? Because I goddamn sure am not gonna sit around for the next thirty–forty years to watch you cash disability checks. You hear me? This is not the way a grownup man acts. Not in the real world
.

The real world: that’s the jab she’s leading with nowadays, the power halfback in her offensive pattern. She always says it like there can be no argument about what it means. But to Curtis, the stuff she talks about—cover letters and résumés, community college classes, refinancing the mortgage—it all seems about a million miles removed from what he thinks of as reality. Six thousand miles, anyway. The fact that these are ordinary concerns for every functional adult in America just makes him feel worse. Still, he can’t shake the sense that there’s something inane, something thoughtless, in worrying over stuff like this while another war is coming on. It feels babyish, inconsequential, like playacting that Curtis never took part in and has now long since outgrown.

War is a game too, of course; he knows that. But at least in war the stakes are serious, the horizon of what’s possible vastly expanded, the immediate objectives as unarguable as a white stripe across bermuda-grass. You ready yourself; you go to the war or the war comes to you; you live or you die. Curtis wonders whether he’ll ever feel so alive in this world again.

His eyes have closed; he forces them open. At the stoplight at Flamingo, a group of kids is crossing, led by a barechested boy with blue hair and vinyl pants and a cyalume glowstick that swings by a cord around his skinny neck. The boy dances and spins, the glowstick appears and disappears like a beacon, and Curtis remembers a column of flexicuffed Iraqi EPWs that he moved through a cleared minefield south of Al Burgan back in ’91: the way he felt out the safe route in the sand, searching for the bowls of cool
green light in the smokeblack petroleum darkness of late afternoon. This strikes a spark off another memory: two nights ago, flying into McCarran, the way the lights came up out of the desert, out of nothing, as if the city were made of nothing but light, and all of it radiating from the Strip.

Then the cabbie is waking him, the taxi door is opening, and Curtis has stepped out into the porte-cochère of his own hotel, pinching his wallet with sleep-numb fingers as he watches the cab’s taillights dim and fade under the smug white span of the Rialto Bridge. For a while he just stands there. People step around him. He shakes his head and moves out of the way, adrift on the pavement, rotating to look at the buildings. Rows of trefoils and quatrefoils and crenellations. A gold zodiac ringing a clock’s blue face. Above the clock, the casino readerboard, flashing its loop of news down the Strip. The tinted hotel windows catching whatever news flashes back.

When Damon asked him to find Stanley, Curtis thought of this hotel right away, before the sentence had even cleared Damon’s teeth. For some reason it’s hard now to remember why he thought that. It’s like being here in the flesh is tangling him up—like the place itself is blocking the
idea
of the place.

Near the end of that last Vegas trip, Curtis and Stanley walked together to exactly this spot. They stood on the bridge, and they watched the gondolas pass in silhouette over the green coronas cast by underwater lights. The new moon lurked in the east, erased by the earth’s shadow, still somehow visible. Stanley kept talking, talking. Curtis was very drunk. He remembers leaning stiff-armed against one of the twin white columns by the boulevard sidewalk, sucking in deep breaths to hold his liquor down.

The Doge, he brought these two columns back from Greece. The real ones, I’m talking about. Not this fake shit here. Twelfth Century, it would have been. The Doge—this guy was like their king, see?—he brought ’em back from a campaign against the Byzantines. Disastrous campaign. He brought back the plague, too. People weren’t too happy about that, so they rose up, and they killed him. For years these two columns, they were just lying there next to the water. Every so often, somebody’d say: Hey, you think we ought to raise these things up? But they were so big, see, that nobody could figure how the hell to do it. But then this kid comes along, this engineer, and he says,
sure, I’ll put these upright for you. But if I can do it, I want the go-ahead to run dice games between ’em. People said okay, and the two columns went up, right there on the Piazetta. And that is where it all began, kid. Fast-forward four hundred some-odd years, 1638. That’s when the first casino opens on the Grand Canal. I’m talking about the first modern casino, the first casino as you and I know it. The casino as a business. The casino as an institution. The institution that has fed and housed my ass for the last forty years, my whole grown-up life. These other joints, these other bullshit cities they keep building on the Strip—I’m talking Paris, I’m talking New York—I look at that, and I think: what the fuck? But this place here, this place makes some goddamn sense. It’s the holy city, kid. The gambler’s Jerusalem
.

Is that really what Stanley said? Or did Curtis conjure this memory from other half-recalled conversations he half-listened to through the years, adding detail from his own Italy trip back in—what was it, ’98? And why should it matter anyway what Stanley said? Does it relate in some way to the fix he’s in now? Where does that trail lead?

Goddamnit, kid—I forgot the most important thing! The whole reason I started telling this screwy story. Listen: the Doge brought
three
columns back from Greece. Not two: three. The longshoremen fucked up, and one of ’em wound up in the drink. It’s still down there, stuck in the muck at the bottom of the lagoon. And that’s the lesson you gotta learn, kid: there’s always gonna be three. Anytime you think you see two of something—doesn’t matter what—you start looking around for the third. Likely as not, you’re gonna find it. This profound secret I now entrust to you
.

Curtis yawns, stretches, turns back toward the entrance. He trudges past the gold armillary-sphere fountain in the domed lobby, heading for the elevators. Then he slows to a stop.

On the wall behind the registration desk hangs an old-style perspective map: a turkeyleg island viewed from midair, imagined onto paper by some ancient earthbound cartographer, now repurposed by hotshot design consultants into this great gilded frame. Swarmed by tall ships, crowded with palaces and domed churches, bristling with belltowers and spires. The blue reverse-S of a canal slashes through its thick western end.
From the corners, cherub-headed clouds blow favorable winds. A couple of bearded gods look down.
MERCVRIVS PRECETERIS HVIC FAVSTE EMPORIIS ILLVSTRO
. Curtis stares at the map for a long time before he realizes that he’s looking for Stanley there, expecting to spot him loitering in a tiny piazza, smirking. The clerks at the desk are eyeing Curtis nervously. He shakes his head, turns to go.

And not toward the elevators this time, but into the grand galleria. Strolling between marble columns, below meticulous fake frescoes: plump foreshortened angels vaulting through white cumulus. Feeling like maybe he’s onto something, though he’s not yet sure what. His rubber soles are silent on the cube-patterned stone deck as he passes the entrance to the museum
—ART THROUGH THE AGES extended through May 4th!
—into the casino beyond.

He finds her without much effort, alone at a $25 blackjack table near the baccarat pit. She’s wearing jeans and a loose pink tanktop; her hair is up in a clip. She and the dealer—a stocky South Asian kid—have fallen into a comfortable rhythm, barely looking up or speaking, moving cards and chips. She’s playing two spots, with a nice pile of green and black in front of her. It looks like she’s given up on Stanley for tonight.

Curtis picks up a plastic cup of orange juice and watches from the slots, writing on the back of one of Damon’s
SPECTACULAR!
business cards with a hotel inkstick. Then he moves in closer until he’s a short distance behind her. She’s in good shape: back and shoulders well-muscled, posture ramrod-straight. Pro gamblers have to be athletes, Stanley always said; poised enough to sit for hours, waiting for the right cards. Curtis tries to remember how long the two of them have been a team.

The dealer—his nametag reads
MASUUD
—looks up at him. A minute later he looks up again, and Curtis steps forward, reaches into the pocket of his jeans. He colors in two hundred of Damon’s dollars and takes a seat a couple of spots to her right, far enough along the table’s curve to keep her in view. He keeps his eyes trained on the cards at first, but within a dozen hands he’s down to two green chips, and she still hasn’t recognized him, hasn’t even looked at his face.

On the next round she stands on a twelve and a sixteen with the dealer showing an eight; Masuud turns over a six, busts with a jack. If this was his joint, Curtis thinks, he’d bounce her right now. He glances over as he collects his single chip: she had four hundred dollars on the line.

Thanks, he tells her. That was a gutsy play.

She shrugs. Glad it worked out, she says.

How you doing tonight?

She doesn’t answer right away, doesn’t look up at all. I’m doing okay, she says. And yourself?

Not too good tonight, Curtis says. Can’t seem to get anything started.

Well, she says, meeting his gaze at last. I hope your luck changes. Her face is blank. She turns back to her cards.

Three rounds later he’s wiped out. He tokes Masuud with the last bill in his wallet and retreats, hiding in the slots again. He thinks about going to the cage—cashing one of Damon’s traveler’s checks, coming back—but he doesn’t want to lose sight of her, and at this point he’s pretty sure he can wait her out. It’s nearly four a.m. The casino is still hopping; he keeps forgetting it’s the weekend.

He stops at the Oculus Lounge to get icewater for his empty cup. As he steps back onto the carpet, he sees Masuud clap out, receive his toke, and go. A middle-aged Filipino woman takes his place: the graveyard shift coming on. Stanley’s girl plays a few more rounds—out of courtesy, and to make sure the new dealer isn’t running cold—then gets up, stretches impressively, and heads toward the cage with her chips.

He waits for her to cash in, tracks her through the tables, and falls into step beside her as she approaches the slots. Coming up on her left. Hello again, he says.

She glances over, flashes a thin smile. Doesn’t slow down.

Looks like you did pretty well tonight, Curtis says.

Yeah.

You win everything on blackjack?

Yeah, she says. Hey, listen—I’m not looking for any company tonight. Okay? No offense.

None taken. You’re Veronica, right?

She jerks to a halt. He steps into her path, turns to face her. Her hands come up, then move to her hips. Excuse me? she says.

Can I talk to you for a second?

What is this? she hisses, her lip curling into a sneer. You’re security? Jesus. Okay, I want to see some ID, and I want to talk to the shift boss, because this is bullshit.

Curtis backs up a step, palms out. I’m not security, he says.

Then what is this?

You don’t remember me, do you?

She looks at him. Squinting, like it’s dark, like they’re underwater. Then her eyes widen, go to his jacket, his belt. Her pupils dilate. Blood flees from her face.

Hey, listen, he says. I’m not—

You’re from back East. Atlantic City. Right?

He shakes his head. Not AC, he says. Philly.

She’s shrinking away: shifting her weight, not backing down. Quick, shallow breaths. So? she says. What do you want?

I’m looking for Stanley.

She snorts. Her eyes drop to the deck for a second, scanning the patterned carpet. Yeah? she says. Well, join the fucking club, pal.

You don’t know where he is?

I have no
idea
where he is. Okay? I haven’t seen him or heard from him in days. And I don’t know how to reach him. Understand? And if I did—if I
did
know—then you better fucking believe I wouldn’t tell you. You got it? Am I being clear?

Hey, whoa, ease up a second. I’m not—

Who sent you here?

Curtis blinks, confused. This sounds wrong, but it isn’t. Until now, he hasn’t thought of himself as sent.

Who sent you? she asks again. Who are you working for?

I—I’m not working for anybody. I came out here on my own. I’ve known Stanley for years.

Bullshit.

Okay. Look. I know Damon Blackburn at the Spectacular. He’s an old friend. And he asked me to help find Stanley.