Bay said, “The next one’s in your eye.”
“All right, all right.” Pino pulled the cards out of his flesh. “I’m bleeding here, for Christ’s sakes.”
“Paper cuts,” Bay said.
I said, “Get out of my office.”
Bay said, “You know if I can find you so easily, so can Halliday.”
Pino walked past him to the door.
Bay said, “You’re not going to save your ass by icing Halliday. I sent the video to your bosses at WITSEC.”
Pino said, “You’re a dead man.”
Bay lifted another card, and Pino left. Bay threw the card. It circled the room and came back to his hand. He said, “Shit, I probably shouldn’t have told him that.”
Bay and I sat at the Center Bar at the Silver Palace. He nursed a diet soda. I was on my second martini. My nerves were raw and taut. I knew I could drink all day and not feel unconstrained, not go slack and sloppy. Bay tapped his phone, and I heard a swoosh. He said he’d just sent the recent video taken in my office to the WITSEC folks.
“Not to the cops?” I needed to get myself a new phone. And hold on to it.
“They have no interest.”
“Where do you suppose Pino is right now?”
“Probably trying to arrange a new identity for himself before he loses all access to his contacts.”
We heard a commotion and turned to see a woman, quite inebriated apparently, drive her Hoveround into the chair of a man sitting at a slot machine. When she tried to back away she ran over another man’s foot and then into a slot machine. The man’s wife or girlfriend threw a drink in the driver’s face. The driver grabbed her cane and swung it at the woman, but missed. Security arrived, in the form of two large bald guys with goatees, who escorted the driver away, and the gamblers went back to their darling machines.
I smelled Drakkar Noir and turned to see Open Mike. He clapped me on the shoulder and said, “What do you know. What do you know.”
I thanked him for the cologne.
He said, “De nada, amigo. How’s it working out for you?”
“Let me buy you a drink.”
“Actually, I’m here to speak to Bay about some business.”
“I’ll take a walk.”
I took my drink and headed for a less deafening area of the casino, unsure of where that might be. By the food court, I figured. And that’s where I found Vladimir the perfidious, sitting with a woman in a black satin crepe dress at a table for two outside the deli, the both of them holding hands. I stopped. “Vladimir.”
He looked up. “My friend.”
“What’s … going on?” I flourished the whites of my eyes in a gesture meant to express befuddlement and disapproval. The woman had an unusually deep jugular notch, cadmium-orange hair, a gap in her front teeth, and tiny eyes with Prussian-blue irises that were perhaps slightly misaligned in a way that made you stare into them until you realized you were being rude. She wore Scrabble tile earrings, an X on one ear, an O on the other. She told me her name was Geisha, but Vladimir called her Iljana. She regarded me with amusement and impatience. She asked me if I liked tongue. I confess to feeling flustered. I blushed. She pointed to her sandwich. “It’s scrumptious,” she said. “Get it sliced, hot, on rye with a smear of Dijon.”
Vladimir said, “Iljana works here at the casino.”
She said, “I’m a slut attendant.”
I said, “Excuse me?”
“The slut machines.”
“Ah.”
“When your machine goes off, I give you the payout; you give me the zuke.”
“The what?”
“The tip.”
Vladimir told me that Iljana was from Odessa in Ukraine. She understood the Russian soul. Iljana asked me, if I were an animal, what kind of animal would I be. I said I didn’t know. She cocked her head and studied my face, looked me up and down. “A lemur, I think. You know lemurs?”
“Big eyes, long tail.”
“Toothcombs and toilet claws.” She fiddled with the X earring. “Now you ask me impertinent question.”
I wanted to say, Are you ever just yourself? Or, Do you know that Vladimir is soon to be married? And Vladimir may have sensed the uncomfortableness that might ensue should I do so, and he asked Iljana to visit the Design Outlet across the way, pick something out she liked, and he’d meet her there shortly. She stood, grabbed her gold clutch, blew Vladimir a kiss, curtsied to me, and said, “We say in my country, ‘The word enough does not exist for water or fire or women.’” And she left.
I said, “What are you doing, Vladimir?”
He smiled. “You know what I’m doing.”
“Why are you doing it?”
That smile again. “You know why I’m doing it.”
“You’re putting me in an awkward position. Am I not supposed to tell Cerise, your bride, what you’re up to?”
“That would wound her.”
“You’re cheating before you’re married.”
“I’m sowing the last of my wild oats.” And then he changed the subject and asked me what I made of the Halliday affair.
I told him I hoped Halliday would testify and put the criminals in jail, but I didn’t think he would.
“Perhaps is dead.”
“He’s not.”
“Perhaps soon.”
You see precious few stalwart and attractive young people at the casino like the stylish and carefree urban professionals you do see in the ads for the casino—no dazzling and confident high rollers in casual suits and evening dresses clapping their hands and congratulating one another for hitting the jackpot, breaking the bank, looking wholesome, hearty, and sober with their Cole Haan loafers and Fossil handbags, and flashing their brilliant white teeth. Fashion at the Silver Palace runs to off-brand tracksuits, Bermuda shorts and sandals, fanny packs, ball caps, and visors. An inordinate number of gamers have loose and persistent coughs. Bay calls a walk down an aisle of slots a symphony for catarrh. Their skin is sallow and can take on the color and texture of catfish belly, the bodies are either lumpy or wizened.
People-watching at casinos is fascinating—there’s a story in front of every machine—but it, like aging, is not for the timid. I was back sitting at the bar with Bay and watching a man with a portable oxygen cylinder and a nasal cannula pull the handle with one hand and smoke a cigarette with the other. Ching! Ching! Ching! Lucky bastard won again. I asked Bay what Open Mike needed to talk to him about, if it was any of my business. He told me Open Mike had noticed I wasn’t wearing the cologne I supposedly liked so much, and he was a little hurt. “Open Mike heard from Kanaracus that there’s an internecine power struggle under way in our Russian community between the Petersburg Russians and the Moscow Russians. And the former Soviet republics are picking sides. Georgia and Kyrgyzstan with Petersburg, and the Tajiks and Uzbeks with Moscow.”
A thickset fellow wearing an I’M WITH SNOPES → T-shirt stood at the rail across the circular bar from us. He seemed to be looking at me. He chomped on an ice cube and flipped up the shaded lenses on his eyeglasses. He was looking at me. Maybe he knows me, I thought. Maybe he thinks he knows me. Maybe he wants to know me. Maybe he’s trying to pick a fight. I don’t know why I do it, but whenever unsmiling people stare at me, I stare back, and when I do, I can feel myself becoming belligerent, like I’m ready to start something I know I can’t finish. And that’s what I did. Clearly the mind was not in charge at the moment. The arrow on the T-shirt pointed to a drinker at the wearer’s left, a man with a Band-Aid on his cheek and another on his throat. A man in a rumpled suit. Pino Basilio, in the flesh. Pino smiled and lifted his drink. I told Bay we had a stalker. He turned and waved. He said we should pay our respects. Do we have to?
When we arrived at Pino’s chair, the thickset fellow put down his drink, bowed, and left.
I said to Pino, “A friend of yours?”
“Don’t know him from Adam.”
“He seems to know who you are.”
&
nbsp; Bay said, “Shouldn’t you be transforming your identity and burrowing underground?”
“I will when I’ve settled my affairs.” Pino sipped his cocktail.
“You won’t try anything in here.”
“I’m a patient man.”
Why I looked away at just that moment I can’t say, other than I felt an urge to do so, and when I did, I saw him sitting at a blackjack table. How was it my eyes fell on him, of all the people in this swarm of bodies? He had on a pair of enormous sunglasses, the kind that fit over your prescription eyeglasses, the kind you wear if you’re planning on flying too close to the sun. Later, after the bloodshed, if some investigator were to ask you to describe the assailant’s face, all you would remember would be those glasses. You’d remember the unzipped black hoodie—although there’d be others who would call it blue. You’d remember the orange WHEATIES, BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS T-shirt, the Cubs ball cap, and the hood pulled over it. You might even remember the scuffed-up desert boots, but you wouldn’t remember the face.
The man tapped his losing cards and stood. He stretched his arms and yawned, and I knew immediately and with an inexplicable certainty who he was, and this epiphany ignited a peculiar sensory response in me. Suddenly the racket in the casino muted, and I could see everything with clarity, focus, and definition because my perceptual chronometer had slowed. Or maybe I just paid exceptional attention because I knew something horrendous was about to happen, and so it only seemed like time crawled. I once dreamed that the air around me had thickened like corn syrup, and I could still move and breathe by extending a little more effort; I could even climb the air, and I was not alarmed. I felt like I was sheltered in amber. That was sort of what it felt like now. I was curiously unconcerned for my safety, even as I saw the avenging angel close the distance between us.
I looked at Bay, who was listening to whatever new threat Pino was dishing out, and I tried to will him to look my way because right then I was too panicked to say anything. Surely, I thought, he must sense the urgency in the message I was drilling through the side of his head. I couldn’t move, either, immobility being my usual first response to danger. Pino tapped a cigarette out of his pack. Bay snapped his fingers, and a plasma of flame shot up several inches before it settled. He lit Pino’s cigarette and blew out the flame. Across the room, Vladimir and Iljana walked arm in arm toward the sports book, past an elderly couple having their photo taken with a local celebrity judge, famous for crying on TV during a custody hearing. Bay finally did look my way, and when he did, I looked at the approaching menace, and he followed my gaze, but did not, apparently, see what I saw, nor did he read the obvious alarm on my face. He turned back to the nattering Pino, and I didn’t take another breath until it was over. Pino put his finger on Bay’s chest. The crowd seemed to part for Chafin Halliday, now just yards away and bent on annihilation. I yelled a warning at Bay, but may not have made a sound. All I could do now was impede Halliday’s progress and hope for some miraculous intercession. I saw the man with Snopes sitting on my former bar stool, talking to Open Mike.
I stepped in Halliday’s path and braced myself. Pino lifted his head and blew smoke up and away from his face. Halliday shouldered past me, drew an eight-inch ice pick from his sleeve, stepped up to Pino, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck with one hand, and drove the ice pick into his throat with the other, through the larynx, and on up into the brain. No one moved. No one but Bay and I may have even noticed. Everyone at the bar had turned away quite leisurely from the disaster. Pino stared at his assailant. Bay stepped away and jostled a young woman behind him, who turned to see what oaf had upset her drink and stained her silk blouse, and she will have to live with the memory of what she saw. Halliday slipped the ice pick out of Pino’s throat and plunged it into Pino’s eye, and when the ice pick stopped, he gave the wooden handle a punch with the heel of his hand. And then the sound returned to me, only amplified. Someone screamed; electronic music played; another jackpot! Halliday turned and walked toward the exit, shedding his hoodie and hat and glasses as he did. Some surveillance officer, of course, had witnessed everything on a video monitor somewhere in the bowels of the casino and had notified the security officers on the floor, who met Halliday at the door and us at the bar. Halliday offered no resistance that I could see. By now a small crowd had gathered, more curious, I think, than horrified. Most people kept their seats at their beloved loose machines, and Open Mike and his friend were gone. Bay and I were asked to show our driver’s licenses. We were witnesses and would be called to testify. Only that would never happen. The official report said that Halliday resisted arrest and began fighting with the officers, who were subduing him in a vigorous but appropriate manner. They twice Tasered him and later used pepper spray. Perhaps the Taser did not complete a circuit, a police spokesman said. What? At some point a patrol sergeant arrived on the scene to help out. Paramedics were called to the scene because of the violence with which Halliday resisted. While the paramedics were evaluating, Halliday’s heart stopped. And the broken neck? Due to the violence of his thrashing about. That was the official version, and, as Carlos always said, “What’s true is what’s written down.”
We stood on the beach by the fishing pier, looking out at the twilit horizon and waiting for the sun to rise on Easter morning at Cerise and Vladimir’s wedding. The temperature was in the mid-sixties; the sky was cloudless; a slight breeze drifted in over the water. The Russians, Vladimir included, had arrived en masse in a convoy of Hummers, having come directly from an all-night bachelor party at Lenin’s Mating Call. The men in their high-regulation haircuts, all wore enormous wristwatches and suits of muted dark colors. The women, blondes every one, and all draped in silk shawls, held their very high-heeled shoes in their bejeweled hands. Patience, Bay, and I lit the bamboo beach torches. A Russian in a linen kosovorotka stood at the shore and played a waltz to the pale and waning moon on his garmoshka. Down the beach a blind man walked with his service dog, which wore a reflective blue saddlebag. Plovers pecked their beaks in the sand and ran from the slowly advancing waves. The dog barked at them.
Cerise arrived with Ellery and Ellery’s date, my old acquaintance Trevor Navarro. Trevor’s blue hair was cut short and matched his blue mustache, his new blue suit, and his old blue eyes. Ellery wore a white linen suit with a pink carnation boutonniere and a pink silk pocket handkerchief. Cerise’s now-red hair was cut in a chin-length bob. She wore a simple and elegant heliotrope dress and a string of pearls. She clutched a small bouquet of lavender and sage. She beamed. She held on to Vladimir’s hand and leaned her head against his arm. Trevor looked to the horizon and said, “The sun, he is risen,” and the ceremony began.
Vladimir, Cerise, and I were joined in the center of the assembled circle by the witnesses, Anna Andropova and Misha Gurov. I heard the raucous call of a laughing gull overhead and the faint drone of a motorized paraglider somewhere down the coast. I cleared my throat and welcomed our guests to the celebration of the marriage of Cerise Beaudry and Vladimir Drygiin. Anna presented the bride and groom with a small round loaf of bread, sprinkled with salt. She held the dish while the couple each took a bite of the bread. Misha then handed Vladimir a shot glass of vodka. Vladimir lifted his glass; someone yelled, “Gorka!” He downed the vodka and tossed the glass over his right shoulder. Vladimir recited Pushkin’s “Wondrous Moment” in Russian and then in English. Cerise read a poem by St. John of the Cross about the living flame of love. I spoke about marriage being our way of reminding ourselves how essential and invigorating love is, how if love is faith, then marriage is hope, the loftier virtue; if love is blind, marriage is perception; how love is the map and marriage the journey, love, a poem, marriage, a story, and how if you tell a story right, it never ends. I smiled at Patience. And when I asked who presented this bride in marriage, Ellery did. The couple exchanged vows and rings. Ellery wept. I pronounced Vladimir and Cerise husband and wife. The guests cheered. Bay said, “That’s very odd.”
We followed his pointing finger down the beach and saw that the blind man had released his service dog and was now walking away from us. The dog, however, was bounding in our direction with lolling tongue and flopping ears. The garmoshka player put down his instrument and drew a pistol from under his kosovorotka, aimed it at the dog’s flank, and fired. The explosion vaporized the bomb-carrying dog and sent a thirty-foot mushroom of brilliant orange flame into the sky. One of the Russians on the perimeter set off running after the blind man. The rest of us lay on the sand, holding our breaths.
I heard the droning paraglider getting closer, but I couldn’t see him. I did see a fisherman at the end of the pier put down his rod, turn his visored cap around, pick up a Kalashnikov, lift the sling over his shoulder, and take aim, but before he could fire, Vladimir, who was standing right where we had left him, shot the bastard dead. I felt myself cheering at the killing. What was happening to me? The three of us, Patience, Bay, and me, got up and ran, crouching, flinching at every shot fired, stumbling, holding our arms over our precious heads, toward the cover of the sea grapes.
From our new vantage point, we could see Ellery and Trevor playing dead, lying facedown in the sand. At least, I hoped they were playing. I couldn’t see Cerise anywhere. I asked Patience if she was all right, and she looked at me like I was on fire. Right, I thought. Stupid question. Sorry. She said she was too terrified to cry. I thought about my mother under the shelter of juniper bushes in the forest near Telšiai, helpless to do anything as she watched the execution of her family and friends, hopeless, because what was hope now but betrayal?
The Russian men were armed and alert and were cautiously backing away from the shore. The women, some of them screaming, some weeping, hurried away from the beach and toward the parking lot. Out on the water, a cigarette boat raced toward shore. Not cops, of course, but reinforcements, I was certain. The paraglider sailed over the beach, and the pilot, I saw, was armed. He fired and hit at least one Russian before he was hit himself. He slumped forward in his harness. The engine sputtered; the device swirled and drifted as the engine died and began a slow descent to the sea, where the engine dragged our pilot under. The last things we saw were his white legs disappearing into the blue water and the red parasail settling like a shroud over the pilot’s watery grave.
No Regrets, Coyote Page 29