Cat in an Ultramarine Scheme

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Temple was surprised to find that he was not a flake at first sight.

  Simply Santiago was a larger-than-life self-made South American entrepreneur and inventor, the Richard Branson of the southern hemisphere. Born Tomás Santiago in modest lower-middle-class circumstances in São Paolo, by age twenty he’d founded a Web-design business. Now a youthful-looking fifty, he supported projects from slum clearance to advanced communications and the more spectacular art forms, like emo music, futuristic media, and the flashiness of Rio’s famous Carnavals.

  His trademark white suit, his dramatic face and figure were prominent where big money gathered, at yacht and horse races, international soccer matches, and in Brasilia, the country’s ultramodern and also dazzlingly white city. He made the Fontana brothers pale by comparison, and that was going some.

  Temple couldn’t imagine a more likely candidate to build on Gangsters Limo Service’s hip and successful reputation, and upgrade that stylish mob pizzazz to the attached hotel and Las Vegas. In fact, her only question was why such an international bigwig would want to work for a modest boutique hotel.

  The answer came as she darkened the screen and rose from Van’s desk. Follow the money. That was always the key to motivations everywhere. Vegas’s big spenders were strapped for tourists and cash, sitting atop billions of dollars of idled projects. Santiago could make a splash at Gangsters and remake it as a showroom for his gaudy media expertise as well as a more focused and successful enterprise.

  Van had wanted Temple’s assessment of this guy, his flashy ego, and, most important, his business and personal history. Temple would have to dig far deeper, but on first glance he was the Prince Charming of Chutzpah for good reason.

  She headed down a floor to the Fontana Suite, happy she could endorse Nicky’s instincts and eager to see what Simply Santiago had to show them.

  Temptations of Temple Bar

  Max had set the Mondeo’s driver’s seat in a position of slight recline to accommodate his six-foot-four frame . . . if he hadn’t lost an inch or two in height with his leg injuries. Taking physical stock and measurements could wait until later.

  At the moment, he felt invigorated, happy he could stretch his spine and legs and be driving . . . in control and reasonably secure for the first time since he’d awakened in the Swiss clinic a week ago, not knowing who he was.

  They drove through a cobblestoned touristy area of shops and art galleries on Dublin’s southern side while Gandolph consulted maps on his cell phone.

  “Lunch?” he asked, looking up.

  “You’re not as pretty as my last lunch companion, but why not?”

  “You drive, Max. I’ll direct.”

  “Got it.”

  “You don’t seem to have problems keeping to the left.”

  “Probably like riding a bicycle,” Max said. “Once learned, it engraves itself on your brain.”

  “Then I’m glad this trip of ours is taking you down an engraved memory lane.”

  “I can’t say I remember this part of Dublin at all, but back then, it was probably shabby and in need of restoration, considering how popular and tidy it is now.”

  “They say the cobblestones date back to the seventeenth century.”

  “Our quest hardly needs to look that far backward,” Max said, driving slowly to avoid pedestrians.

  “The next right will bring us to a car park. Can you walk about a bit?”

  “Need to,” Max said.

  The day sported an encouraging swath of blue sky when they strolled back to the main square. Sunlight gleamed off the paint and chrome of lightweight urban motorcycles herded and chained against a lamppost. It glinted from the clear glasses of passersby. Few wore sunglasses, as Max did. For him, they were an instant disguise and a screen from behind which he could examine the scene and its thronging extras.

  “I’d forgotten the first-floor flower boxes,” Max commented. “The beauteous, bounteous hanging flowers draping every pub sign in the British Isles.”

  “You do remember that floor levels are counted with ‘one’ starting above street level.”

  “Such bizarre small changes of custom,” Max said, “but telling. Oh,” he added, stopping as he saw where Gandolph was heading, “the lady in red. A bit gaudy, but welcome in a land of frequent gray weather.”

  The pub ahead occupied a curving corner spot, its sweeping exterior enameled scarlet except for a deep green background at the top, bearing the large gilded letters of its name.

  “The Temple Bar,” Max read aloud.

  Gandolph was silent.

  “Can’t say I’ve ever been here before,” Max went on. “There’s a Temple Bar in London, isn’t there?”

  “And in Las Vegas,” Gandolph said in an odd, cautious tone. “Two, you could say.”

  “What’s with the same name everywhere?”

  “Here,” said Gandolph, “the tourist guides report that a family named Templeton lived in the square in the sixteen hundreds. Temple Bar in London was a gate to the city in earlier centuries, later becoming part of the four Inns of Court, the city’s legal conclave.”

  “You are a bundle of trivia today, Garry. And what about Las Vegas, which I should remember something of?”

  “Temple Bar is a landing on Lake Mead. In the Arizona section, really, but it attracts Vegas tourists.”

  “I doubt this place does,” Max said, after another long gaze at the blazing wall of red.

  “Ah,” Gandolph enthused, “but the oysters and Guinness are famous here; the music is traditional and free and has won the Irish pub music crown for years; and the ‘craic’ is unbeatable.”

  “Craic?”

  “The local gossip and josh and chatter, which any passing patron can join into.”

  “I’d prefer to listen, and be drawn into the food and drink.”

  By then they’d entered the set-back double red doors and found a tiny free table. Amid the manic music of fiddle and harmonica and drums and the shouted neighboring craic, the pair ordered and ate, imbibing Irish laughter along with the oysters and smoked salmon and Gubbeen cheese and molasses-dark Guinness. They listened rather than talked, for once.

  “Was there a reason,” Max asked later, as he threaded the Mondeo back through the Temple Bar area and drove out of the city, “for us to stop there?”

  “To fuel up on food and drink and happy music for our journey,” Gandolph said, his shrug saying, “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “And to fuel up my memory?” Max asked.

  Gandolph looked over with a rueful smile. “I always have hopes on that.”

  “So I didn’t pass the Temple Bar test.”

  “This journey is not a test, Max. No pass or fail. Just what is.” Silent but somehow content, he and Gandolph continued north into the fringes of County Fingal, forging into less traffic the farther they went. Above them, massed clouds skated across the sky, creating alternating slashes of sunshine and shadow on the sweeping green and gray-stone countryside.

  A Chieftains CD on the car player alternated cheery and soulful Irish folk music, jigs segueing into ballads.

  “The song selection is setting the stage for my split personalities?” Max asked wryly.

  Garry Randolph looked calm and relaxed in the passenger seat. Gandolph the Great’s magician-nimble fingers, though, were tapping the central console in a nervous stutter that didn’t quite keep time with the addictively rhythmic Celtic music.

  “I’m looking for signs of the careless, passionate young man you were, yes,” Garry admitted. “Oh, you fell in love with Ireland when you and your cousin, Sean Kelly, drove from County Clare to Dublin, diagonally across the glorious rolling scenery. Seventeen, fresh out of high school, and on your own. Sean was eighteen. Why did you graduate younger?”

  “I can’t remember why, or arriving here then, but I must have skipped a year in grade school. Somehow.”

  “So, you were mature for your age. Yet a bit raw. Socially awkward.”

  “Got me
. You’re the historian.”

  “You were still a virgin.”

  Max laughed. “What an embarrassing thing to bring up now, Garry. I know I’m not anymore, at least, from recent events.”

  Max’s impish grin met Garry’s stone face.

  “You have no idea who Ms. Schneider really is or what her agenda was, or still might be,” Garry said. “You were foolish, Max. That kind of sexual bravura got you and Sean tangled up with the IRA all those years ago when you were green and seventeen. You don’t need to act impulsively anymore.”

  “Maybe I did, just then.” Max’s fingers flexed on the steering wheel. “All right. You’ve briefed me on the short form of my personal and professional history with Ireland. I know you entered the picture after my dalliance with Kathleen O’Connor and after Sean waited out our tryst in a Northern Ireland pub, which an IRA bomb blew up, and with it my cousin, to smithereens of pint-glass shards and bone while he was nursing a lonely Guinness.”

  “O’Toole’s.”

  Max flashed him a confused look.

  “The bombed pub’s name was O’Toole’s. Notorious now. Never rebuilt.”

  “Okay. I can believe the Irish colleen we co-courted was a modern-day Mata Hari playing guilt trips with the pair of us, or even that she hated teenage boy virgins or American naïveté or something enough to set one of us up for the kill and the other for a world of survivor’s pain and guilt. I can even believe I tracked the three pub bombers and got them killed in a hail of British troop bullets. Why we’re going back to Northern Ireland at this late date I don’t get. That’s one insane war that’s wound down.”

  “I’m following your instructions,” Garry said, “on what to do if anything ever happened to you in the mortal way: find and follow the trail of Kathleen O’Connor, her history and motives. So that’s what we’re doing.”

  “The man who wanted that may not be dead now, but he doesn’t remember the why or wherefore of such a request. From what you tell me, I’m the one who’s left the ‘love of my life’ in Vegas thinking I’ve vanished. This . . . redhead.”

  “Her first name is Temple.”

  “Even the name is just an improper noun to my blasted memory. Is she Greek or Roman?”

  “Neither. One of a kind.”

  “Well, then, I should definitely be winging back to the U.S. immediately to explain myself.”

  “Right into the hands of your attempted murderers.”

  “Not safe there. Not safe here. From what you said I did to enrage the IRA years ago, I shouldn’t be here even now.”

  “Probably.” Garry sighed and eased out his seat-belt strap, which cut diagonally and cruelly across a middle-aged girth. “But a promise is a promise.”

  Max eyed a glimpse of the Irish Sea on the right, glinting like steel gray glass. “Does she have a Web site?” he asked more quietly.

  “Kathleen O’Connor?”

  “No. This Temple.”

  “Probably. She runs a freelance public-relations business. I hadn’t thought of that. She’d have a Web page. When we get to the hotel we can look it up. No distractions now. We’re on the mission you assigned me, and are perhaps half an hour from the Little Flower Convent of Saint Therese.”

  Max rolled his eyes. “A convent? Don’t tell me! The nuns there wear habits to this day, and it’s still as Catholic as the Pope. Predictably Ireland, God bless it.”

  Max noticed Garry’s features settling into deep worry lines he guessed were new to those comfortable, intelligent features. Because of him.

  “Nothing is predictable in our line of endeavor, Max,” Garry said. “Not the present and not the past. Especially not the past. I’ll thank you not to swear me to fulfill any last requests in future.”

  Lights, Action

  Temple approached the Fontana Suite’s double doors, treated like the entrance to a mansion, with etched crystal sidelights and brass torchères, wondering whether to ring the old-fashioned doorbell or just walk in.

  An ear-piercing burst of automatic weapons fire first made her jump, then storm through the doors. She immediately leaped down and to the side, tumbling to the floor.

  The firing stopped so abruptly that the silence hurt her ears in turn. At least she’d brought her iPhone, if not her purse, with the intention of making some quick notes, and could summon help.

  A strange slapping sound came next from the other room. Temple rolled onto her bare, bony knees, not appreciating the cold and rough-textured slate entry floor. She rose awkwardly while pulling her skirt down and tried to tiptoe on her T-strap heels into the marble-floored main room.

  Van and Nicky were clapping. Santiago stood near a massive steel-topped table, beaming like a São Paulo noonday sun.

  A moderately sized flat-screen TV sat on the burnished metal tabletop, which also supported a fifteen-inch-high cityscape of miniature constructions, an elaborate architect’s model.

  Temple looked around thoroughly and could see no source for the weapons fire. Apparently a gangland hit was not in progress.

  “Won’t the tunnel magnify the sound effects unbearably?” Van was asking.

  “Totally programmable,” Nicky reassured her. “Santiago just wanted to get our full attention.”

  Temple thought she should declare her arrival.

  “He certainly got mine from the hall outside the doors. I thought the Chicago Outfit was back to take over . . . or else it was the feared first terrorist offensive on Vegas.”

  Santiago spread his white-suited arms like the statue of Christ of the Andes overlooking Rio’s harbor. He laughed heartily.

  “No, PR lady, it was just me and my media creations. Come closer and see.”

  That was rather like an invitation from an albino tarantula, Temple thought, but she walked over the marble flooring to the silken Asian rug to join Van and Nicky at the hypermodern steel-topped table.

  She was puzzled that the centerpiece TV screen was only a modest forty-six inches wide. Modest size didn’t seem to match Santiago’s egocentric, open-armed style. As she got closer, Temple spotted a twinkle in his deep hazel-green eyes. He was laughing at her . . . and at himself and his poses.

  He reminded her of Max, wearing his Mystifying Max green contact lenses for disguise and his magic act. Max hadn’t done that for ages, concealed his natural blue eyes since then, not since he quit performing two years ago. Temple wondered why her subconscious had resurrected that outdated image. She’d have to do penance and be sure to phone Matt in Chicago tonight. Or at least watch his taped segment on today’s The Amanda Show at home before bedtime.

  “Are you any relation to Flamin—I mean, Domingo?” she asked Santiago.

  “That charlatan?” he asked, still laughing. “Only in a gift for thinking big, they tell me. This will be ‘big’ on a small scale, as you are, Miss Temple, and as is the Crystal Phoenix and Gangsters. Here, Santiago is forced to be confined, in his thinking and the space he has to manipulate. That is what so intrigues me about this project. ‘Big is bad’ today. Wasteful. Costly. Santiago will make magic on a small scale. See this.”

  He gestured at the miniature mock-up. Everything displayed was fashioned from white matte board, so it was mysterious and sculptural. Temple moved her spike heels delicately over the thick-piled rug so she didn’t turn an ankle. Who could resist 3-D miniatures, so like Christmas dollhouses one had never gotten but had coveted in department-store Christmas windows? A four-boy family wasn’t much into dollhouses when it came to the only girl.

  “Oh!” Temple recognized a mock-up of the Crystal Phoenix that resembled the Ice Queen’s palace from the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. That construction anchored one end of the slick silver table. At the other stood another fifteen-story hotel, Gangsters, with low additions for the attached limo service’s office and garages. Between them stretched an elongated spiral of white construction paper.

  “You must imagine,” Santiago said in a hushed, hypnotic voice. “You must imagine this graceful tunne
l as belowground, a swift, silent conduit between Gangsters and the Crystal Phoenix, an underground monorail . . . no, an American-underworld horizontal time tunnel.”

  “A ride?” Van asked, her voice sounding unconvinced.

  “No,” Santiago said. “A fast car chase . . . with intermissions. What is this wonderful American expression from the gangland days—being ‘taken for a ride’? The clients of Gangsters shall have the long-lost experience of that pleasantly helpless, thrilling state so devoutly to be desired.”

  While he paused to let that sink in, Temple and Van crossed glances. Was this guy selling his ideas or seduction? If a combo, that was in the Las Vegas tradition, for sure.

  “So people will be speeding around in underground limousines?” Nicky asked, immersed in the mechanics of the process more than the sensations.

  “It may seem so,” Santiago said. “The ‘limousines’ will look like motorcars, like these ‘stretch’ vehicles, only from the nineteen thirties, forties, fifties, and even sixties. But they will ride like a dream, on rails. On the tunnel walls outside their smoked-glass windows, scenes of iconic American gangster days will unreel before their eyes . . . the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, the deaths of Bonnie and Clyde and Bugsy Siegel, all the delightfully gory happenings of days of yore. But they will unreel backward. It shall be death and resurrection, a theme the very name of the Crystal Phoenix evokes, yes? It will not be morbid, but the happy ending all Americans crave, for themselves and the world. Yes? All people cannot take their eyes off a disaster. All people then hope to see it reversed. The Chunnel of Crime, as you so colorfully christened it, Mr. Fontana, will be the Ride of Resurrection.”

  “We wouldn’t call it by either term,” Temple said. “Box-office poison. Just say it’s ‘Gangsters limos go underground for a thrill ride you can’t refuse.’ ” Or something, she thought.