When Akinwole went to bed, I watched the end of the ball game. New York came in from behind for an unexpected victory. Afterward, the local Vegas news. The volume was set down low. The announcer droned off the day’s tally of murder and mayhem. It comforted me. I liked hearing about troubles that weren’t mine. Bomb attacks. Coups. Invasions. Plane crashes. Mass graves. The grislier, the better. I was almost under when the final news story drilled through my slumber.
“And finally, in other news today,” the blond announcer-cum–runway model read off her teleprompter, “a leading Cirque du Soleil performer from the Bellagio here in Las Vegas has been arrested in Toronto, Canada, in connection with a recent downtown fire that destroyed one of that city’s historical properties two weeks ago.”
I drew closer to the screen to be sure I had it right. There he was: Yuri, in a dated publicity shot. His head all bald and shiny. His eyes close together. The last time I’d seen that freak, he was on the floor of the Pullman’s toilet, clutching his throat.
They played a clip of the Cirque show, followed by the same footage of the Ellington fire that showed the two fire-fighters dragging me away from the flames before the building collapsed.
“Yuri Ivanhov was arrested earlier today, along with Burian and Pavel Volkov, believed to be relatives and accomplices of the accused. The men were identified by police using footage from a nearby security camera.”
They hustled Yuri up some courtroom steps, along with the two thugs who’d beaten me senseless. Yuri looked sullen. Underbite had a bruise on his cheek. The Heavy Guy was trying to hide his huge head under his jacket. A guilty perp parade, to be sure.
“Police are keeping quiet about a motive, and a publication ban has been imposed by the court.”
A commercial for a local Volkswagen dealership flashed across the screen, featuring a man dressed like a rabbit being chased by a hunter. “It’s Rabbit season. No money down. Zero percent financing …” I thought they stopped making that car.
I switched off the TV and tried to sleep. In the dark, on the couch, events rewound in my head and played back in jittery stop motion: Bernstein, Yuri, and me snort coke. Yuri acts dangerous. Me, more dangerous. Yuri on the piss-drenched floor. Bernstein with the might-have-been drag queens. Hornsmith blackmails Courtney. Courtney hires Russian mob rejects to scare us. Russian mob rejects who turn out to be Yuri’s cousins. I bash them with a frying pan. They torch the Ellington. The camera captures them. So much for the faulty wiring. The Russians had done it. Old Mr. Gupta the tailor witnessed them celebrating from his bar stool. They’d done it for Courtney. They’d done it for Yuri. They’d done it for money and revenge. The rest was happenstance.
TWENTY
Vegas
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Akinwole laid into his Big Man Breakfast with enthusiasm. Three ketchup-bloodied eggs, sunny side up. Four buttered pancakes with syrup. Canadian bacon. Boston baked beans. Sausages. Hash browns. Peanut butter and jam on toast. With his head bent down to the plate, he shovelled food into his mouth. Every so often, he slurped black coffee from a mug. A restful sleep had given him an appetite.
“You are not eating?” he said between mouthfuls.
Ice cubes melted in my Coke while the fruit bowl in front of me offered flavourless bits of green cantaloupe and freakishly large strawberries infused with the palpable misery of migrant Mexican pickers hoping for a better tomorrow. My liver ached from an infernal coil that had wormed its way out of the couch into my side. I was weary of being worn out. All the dope was smoked. There hadn’t been a drink since Detroit. This morning, self-medication was down to cola with a couple of Advil.
“They got the guys who burned down our building,” I said finally. “I saw it on the news last night. It wasn’t faulty wiring.”
“So, who did it?” Akinwole rinsed his mouth with coffee before another load of hash browns went in.
“One was a performer from a Cirque show here in Vegas,” I said. “The others were his cousins.”
“That makes no sense,” Akinwole said. “Why would a circus performer from Las Vegas set fire to a building in Toronto?”
It made perfect sense. Fate had tossed Yuri across my path and forced me to defend myself against him. Hornsmith had blackmailed Courtney. Courtney collected unsavoury types for dirty jobs. Yuri’s criminal cousins. Unleashed, the Russians had taken to violence for cash and revenge. Undoubtedly, Trang had organized the publication ban to keep his new business investment out of the news. Events were so intertwined and connected that I couldn’t formulate a reply.
“No,” I said, “it makes no sense. I need the toilet.”
Like a cow caught midthought, Akinwole stopped chewing to watch me slide out of the booth.
“Can I have your fruit?” he said.
In the can, I gripped both sides of the sink and took deep breaths to steady the rising bile that swirled in my guts. My fingers and arms jangled like they were permanently asleep. My back felt like a cold lizard was clamped to my spine. No appetite. Ache in the marrow. This was not the way toward a better situation. I splashed cold water on my face and examined my red eyes in the mirror.
From the locked toilet cubicle behind me, someone coughed.
“Hey, kid, I’d be obliged if you tossed me a roll of toilet paper from the other stall. I’m out here.”
There was something about that voice, like an old familiar song, impossible to say from where or when. Chalk it up to my general condition. I threw over a roll from the next stall.
“Here you go.”
I resumed the inspection of my sorry features in the mirror. Moments later, the toilet flushed, and the door swung open. The occupant emerged. He tucked his white shirt into a beautiful blue sharkskin suit. Yellow socks peeked out between the pants cuffs and a pair of two-tone Oxfords. It took me a second to be sure, while in the mirror Hornsmith zipped himself up. Ice filled my head. I kept my hands under the warm water, my tenuous connection to the world.
The washroom smelled of camphor. In the reflection, his marble pallor betrayed his condition — at least to me, since I knew him to be dead. His beard was groomed to razor-sharp perfection. His hands were hairless, translucent.
“What’re you doing here?” My voice echoed off the white-tiled walls. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“I need to set matters right,” he said. “I need to do something good before my release is complete.”
He fumbled with the taps. He wasn’t in a hurry to wash his hands. The dead don’t wash. He was going through the motions to stand beside me. The deafening roar of the water made me strain to hear his words.
“It’s my last chance, Latour, to get it right,” Hornsmith said. “You make your plays. You lay your money down and pray you did it right. Pray you get it back in spades.”
The money, I guessed. He was after his money.
“That’s what you’re here for?”
“My time is limited,” he said. He straightened his collar in the mirror. “Soon, my train’s pulling out of the station, and I must be on it. Otherwise, I’ll be doomed to roam around here forever. Meanwhile, there’s much to be done.”
He patted around his pockets.
“I must’ve left my pocket watch by the toilet.”
“You left your watch?”
He said, “I was playing with it. I like doing that while I think.” He pushed his way back into the stall and said, “Latour, I’m going to settle my score soon. Bet on it.”
I turned to face him. The cubicle door swayed back and forth, the stall empty. Hornsmith had vanished. In the silence that followed, there wasn’t a residual glimmer to confirm his visitation. No sound. No smell. No trace. Nothing to reveal he’d been by.
Ghosts weren’t within my experience. They didn’t exist for me. We came from nothing and we returned to nothing. That much was certain. The business in between a miracle. Beyond that, the mysteries of creation eluded me.
Still, it was possible that Hornsmith’s apparition signified
something. If he’d come here to set something right, like he’d said, perhaps he planned to help set me right. Why else would he follow me all this way? From the ether of his limbo, he’d seen how I’d given the money to his wife and to Shirley Rose. Maybe that had inspired him. Now he was here to help me to turn the remaining money into a larger stake to start a new life. For a moment, I forgot his selfish nature. Instead, I surfed on the notion that he’d reached out from the Beyond to alter my fate. That he planned to do something good for a change. Make the world a better place. You can bet on it, he said. Bet on it. The notion blossomed into an urgent need to take the money and plonk it on a card table. I was fixed on the belief that Hornsmith would help me double it before I continued down the freeway to the coast. This was a sign. I was dead certain of it.
Back at the table, Akinwole had cleared off breakfast and was busy with a strawberry milkshake. I slid in across from him.
“I was getting worried,” he said. “You were gone a while.”
“I’ve been thinking,” I said, “when we get the car working, we should start our day in the casino.”
“Gambling is not something I do,” Akinwole said. “Can we look around instead? Go to the Luxor and see the Sphinx? Drive by the Chapel of Love?”
“Gambling is something I have to do before we go sightseeing,” I said. “I’m on fire. I have a feeling.”
“Sounds like a virus.”
“It won’t take long. An hour, tops.”
Hornsmith had said he’d settle the score. Hornsmith said to bet on it. I was prepared to go with that.
Akinwole wasn’t enthusiastic.
“Betting eleven to win ten is idiotic,” he said. “Statistically, the house keeps almost every cent that walks in.”
“It’s about profits, not percentages,” I said. “The spirit is with me today. I need an hour. Let’s go before something changes.”
The Firebird had calmed down overnight. By morning, the radiator was content with a few beer cans full of tap water from the bathroom. With that, we headed down to the strip, where everything glistened, sleek and new. Where everything blended into a single shiny landscape of Gucci, Prada, and Louis Vuitton stores in bold, geometric structures. After the long drive across the bleakness of the American heartland, we’d arrived in a shimmering oasis.
Awestruck, we took in the mirage: The Great Pyramid of Luxor, created in reflective glass, sparkled in the sun. The Sphinx without the broken nose. The Eiffel Tower without the hassle of Parisians. The Statue of Liberty, perfectly identical to the real Mother of Exiles, only cleaner. Glacial steel towers of shiny black and green at the Aria. The red and blue wedge of the Westgate Towers blended into the sky — impossible to tell where one started and the other ended. Stunning monuments to modern design, all.
The broom-swept streets were lined with lush palms and emerald-green shrubbery trimmed to perfection. Discreet gardeners in starched camouflage outfits blended in with the foliage so we wouldn’t be reminded that real people serviced the dreamscape. Audis, Range Rovers, Mercedes-Benzes, and brand-new American muscle cars like the Charger and the Camaro polished to showroom condition purred at stop-lights. Sidewalks were crowded with people in fresh shades of blue, pink, and white. They sauntered hand in hand over to the MGM lion and the fountains of the Bellagio for holiday snaps. A calm silence like thick cotton muted the entire scene. Only the occasional shirtless, shit-stained, wild-eyed person wandering barefoot through the dream mottled its perfection.
When we reached the end of the strip, we entered another part of the city, where the casinos were from another era. Here the harsher, more familiar reality of this broken country nibbled away at the edges of the decadent desert paradise. The billboards were faded. Some were cracked or broken. There were fewer people on these streets. Some of them pushed grocery carts filled with empty bottles. Others carried green garbage bags over their shoulders. One crawled out of a culvert with a sleeping bag under his arm.
The various one-way streets were difficult to negotiate back to the shiny dream. Nothing ran on a grid, and no landmark helped us set our bearings. This city required an intuitive sense of direction that eluded us. After several U-turns and dead ends, we found ourselves under the el by the old Las Vegas Hilton, the first place that hinted we were back into the newer city. To my surprise, Akinwole recognized it.
“This used to be the largest resort in the world,” he said. “Elvis lived up there in the penthouse. He played over eight hundred shows here. Can we look?”
“I didn’t figure you for an Elvis guy.”
Akinwole said, “My stepfather was here the night of Elvis’s last show. I recognize the hotel from his souvenir postcards.”
It was a lucky sign.
A life-sized statue of the King in all his Vegas glory greeted us by the entrance. The famous open-necked rhinestone pant-suit. The sideburns. The guitar slung over his shoulder. The microphone in one hand midsong. His other hand reaching out to the adoring throng. America’s answer to Mozart.
The muted chimes of slot machines and the clickity-clack of roulette wheels filled the lobby. People threw dice at craps tables. Placed bets on cards. Cocktail waitresses in short skirts and stilettos brought free drinks on serving trays. There was no sense of place other than here. There was no sense of time except now.
My lungs expanded, invigorated by the oxygen pumped into the casino. Blood moved into places it hadn’t been in a while. Air circulated so well that despite the clouds of cigarette smoke, the room was odourless and pure. The temperature was kept cool so everyone would stay awake to gamble.
Blackjack was on my mind. Hornsmith was going to toggle the inner cogs of this reality from the other side of the curtain and deal me the winning hand. The plan was to win a bag of money, continue down the road, and settle by the sea. I could almost smell the salty air, the surf lapping calm assurances in my ears. It was a great plan.
“Let’s go,” I said. “I’ve got some cards to play while luck is still with me. You buy some coins for the slot machines and see if the King will bless you.”
He said, “How?”
I peeled fifty bucks from my roll and stuffed it in Akinwole’s breast pocket.
“Stick in a coin and push the button,” I said.
“Which machine do I pick?”
“It doesn’t matter, Akinwole, there’re all the same. Pick one you think has nice lights.”
I pointed him toward the slot machines and promised to meet him in an hour at the bar of the Benihana, a Japanese restaurant we could see across the casino floor.
Soon, I was in line for chips. Ahead of me, someone waved a piece of paper at the teller’s cage in what looked like a complicated transaction. Progress was slow, the line long. I worried that my window to win would close before I could jump out of it. It agitated me. The man and woman in line ahead of me seemed restless as well.
“We have to get back into action, baby,” the man said.
“Yeah,” she said, “you’re hot.”
He shifted his weight and adjusted his neck to displace his impatience.
To me, she said, “Last night, Graham made seven grand.”
I smiled. Polite. I liked being next to winners. Their luck could rub off. This was another good omen.
“Yeah,” Graham said, “I got lucky last night, for sure.”
His girlfriend slurped a margarita through a bendy straw. “You did good, baby.”
He shrugged. “That other guy, Ray? The one with the Prada shades? He scored.”
“He made a hundred grand, I swear,” she said.
Everyone seemed so pleasant here.
“That’s great,” I said.
“Ray travels with a bodyguard,” Graham said.
“That fat guy?” She tipped the glass to one side for a better view of the icy sludge that was once her drink.
“Yeah,” he said, “Rodney.”
She held up her empty glass to a passing waitress, eyebrows arched.
T
he waitress said, “Another?”
“I might as well drink, honey.”
“Anyone else?”
Alcohol would’ve been unwise. This was going to require a clear head. Graham shared the instinct. We both shook our heads, and the waitress departed on her mission of mercy.
“So, what’s Rodney’s deal?” the woman said like I wasn’t there anymore.
“He gets twenty percent.”
“What’s he do for that?”
Graham shrugged. “He’s a big bodyguard. I guess he’s a good guy to get behind when the bullets start flying.”
“Bodyguards?” I said. “People need bodyguards around here?”
The woman looked me up and down like she hadn’t noticed me before. She forced a smile and said, “Oh no, hon, I don’t think that’ll be a problem for you.”
Nervous, I smiled and nodded. I understood what was meant by a twenty percent guy. A twenty percent guy like Rodney might be useful when Lover Man’s boys came for me. Akinwole was my friend. I didn’t want to see him hurt. When the going got dangerous, a professional would be the way to go.
After my turn at the teller, I was anxious to get started. Everywhere, the mood was relaxed. It could’ve been midnight and it could’ve been sunrise. It could’ve been Sunday and it could’ve been Friday. It made no difference. We were all here for one thing. The rest of the world no longer mattered.
At the first table I came across, giddy, I stumbled over the footrest of the high chair and almost fell to the floor. The edge of the table kept me up. The dealer tossed me a glance to make sure I was sure. I nodded. I was. The dealer settled back into his game.
The crisp flick of the cards and the plastic on plastic of the chips tinkled in my ears. The cards came, the bets mounted. It was different from those days back in the greeting card company before Hornsmith, when the boredom had been so profound I’d lost the will to live. It still wasn’t clear what was in store for the future, but certainly, times were more interesting nowadays.
Soon, my losses totalled four thousand dollars. It took thirty minutes. My hands were clammy and cold. My mouth dry. My jaw hurt from grinding my teeth. There was no sign of Hornsmith anywhere. Around me, people gambled away their dreams. Nothing else mattered except to find the bottom. Fast. No one looked up. No joy could be found around the room.
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