The Mirror Thief

by Martin Seay

  Kagami’s smile is steady, his expression unchanged.

  I think Stanley’s got a firewall set up, Curtis says, between the people who know where he is and the people who know what really happened in Atlantic City. I don’t think you know what happened in Atlantic City.

  Kagami remains statue-still, but his eyes flicker evenly across Curtis’s face, his chest, his hands. Taking him in. Curtis feels like he’s being sliced up, sorted into piles. I have to admit, Kagami says, that I am pretty curious about that.

  Yeah. Me too.

  Kagami shifts his weight, crosses his legs. Did you get the latest bulletin? he says. As of last night, the Casino Gaming Bureau is no longer running the show at the Spectacular. It is now a Major Crimes investigation.

  Curtis blinks. What happened? he says.

  Well, it seems that a couple of days ago this old geezer was out on Absecon Bay in his Boston Whaler. Trapping crabs. The old guy hauls in one of his traps—

  Kagami hold out his hands as if cradling a regulation football.

  —and there’s this enormous blue crab in it. A real monster. And the crab is gnawing on a chunk of human foot. Foot belongs to a Southeast Asian male in his late twenties or early thirties. The missing dealer from the Point is a twenty-eight-year-old Korean kid. So. Everybody say hello to the Major Crimes Division.

  Curtis is aware of his pulse, an impatient tap in his neck and temples. He looks out the window. A long way off the ground. This is fucked up, Walter, he says.

  A little more than you signed on for, ain’t it, kid?

  Curtis stares at the table, rotates the empty mug beneath his fingers. Picturing Damon in the Penrose Diner. His red-rimmed eyes. His ripped sleeve. It was maybe a bad idea to drink the Irish coffee. He thinks he can feel the tower swaying in the wind, but there isn’t any wind. Walter, Curtis says, I’m not gonna ask you where Stanley is. I will ask you this. Did you put Graham Argos onto me? Did you give him my number?

  You got a reason to think I did?

  He tried to make me think he got it from a bartender or a pit boss or somebody. But I think he got it from you. He knew that I’d talked to you. And he knew Damon sent me out here. Only you and Veronica knew that. He hadn’t talked to Veronica.

  What’s your point, kid?

  That was not a nice surprise for me, man. That dude makes me nervous.

  Yeah? Kagami says. Well, no shit, Curtis. He makes me nervous too. I was hoping you guys would short each other out.

  You could’ve given me a heads-up. Why didn’t you call me?

  Because I don’t like you, kid. You give me a bad feeling.

  Kagami says it softly, almost apologetically. He crosses his arms over his chest, turns to look down at the Strip.

  Curtis lets that hang for a few seconds, breathing in and out. You don’t even know me, man, he says.

  Let’s just say that what I do know does not endear you to me.

  They sit in silence for a while. Curtis clenches his jaw; Kagami slumps wearily in his chair. Curtis is angry, but he can’t shake the feeling that Kagami isn’t entirely out of line. He’s about to stand up, head for the door, when Kagami catches a passing waitress and orders a cognac. What’re you drinking, Curtis? he says. You want another coffee?

  No, thanks. I’m good.

  C’mon, kid. Hang around for a couple minutes.

  Ginger ale, Curtis says, and settles back in his seat.

  The lights have stopped flashing in Naked City aside from an ambulance headed west on Sahara; they watch it until it reaches the interstate and disappears. Then their eyes drift back to the Strip. Following its blazing path south as it grows denser and purer, a tracer round fired at Los Angeles.

  Put yourself in my place, kid, Kagami says. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I still don’t. What would you have done?

  I hear you. You just want to protect Stanley.

  I just want to be a good goddamn citizen of the People’s Republic of Clark County, Nevada. That’s all I want. I want to defend Stanley’s inalienable right to disappear when he wants to, and to stay disappeared for as long as he likes. I take this stuff very seriously, Curtis.

  The waitress comes back with their drinks. Curtis sips his ginger ale, sips again. Kagami swirls his brandy, looks out the window. You spend a lot of time out here, kid? he says.

  In Vegas? Not too much. My last trip was about three years ago.

  Have you heard the CVA’s new ad slogan yet? The official slogan?

  What happens here stays here? Curtis smiles. Yeah. I heard it.

  It’s brilliant, Kagami says. It sums up everything. People call Las Vegas an oasis in the desert. No! It is the fucking desert. That’s the key to the whole trick. Look down at that valley. You know what was down there a hundred years ago? Nothing. Some Mormons. A couple dozen cowboys. A few pissed-off Paiutes. The year I was born, there were ten thousand people living there. Today there’s a million five. That’s sixty years. Sixty years is nothing, it’s a heartbeat. What’s drawing all these people? Huh? Nothing. It’s like a big blackboard, or one of those—what do you call it?—a dry-erase board. Wipe it clean. Draw in what you like. I mean, read up on your history, kid. You wanna make something disappear? You wanna make it invisible? Haul it out here. The desert is the national memory hole. Manhattan Project? Never heard of it. American Indians? Hey, I don’t know where those guys went. Gambling. Hookers. Nuclear waste. I guess you probably noticed the Desert Inn.

  I noticed that it’s gone, yeah.

  Steve Wynn blew it up a couple years ago. October 2001. Collapsing buildings were not regarded as so much fun at the time, so he did it without the usual hoopla. But remember the party he threw back in ’93, when he imploded the Dunes? Or that New Year’s Eve when they brought down the Hacienda? Name me another place anywhere that routinely blows up its historic buildings. Las Vegas is a machine for forgetting.

  Kagami sets his snifter on the table. I’m gonna smoke a cigar, he says, leaning over and reaching into his pocket. Do you want a cigar?

  No, thank you.

  Kagami produces a brown leather case, removes a dark panatela, and sets to work on it with a gold bulletcutter. You’ve been around, Curtis, he’s saying. You’ve seen the world. Europe. Asia. Middle East. Me and my wife, we travel as much as we can. We did a fun thing last year for our tenth anniversary. We went back to Italy for two weeks. Northern Italy, where we did our honeymoon. You know what we did? We used the same guidebooks. Just to see if we could. And it worked. Same restaurants, same hotels. I remember we ate at this one place, this bacaro, that had been in business since 1462. Blew my mind.

  Kagami’s cigar case and cutter disappear. He takes a big naphtha lighter from his pocket and strikes it. A spritz of sparks. A two-inch tongue of flame. After a few puffs he snaps it shut with a loud clear chime, like the sound of a flipped coin.

  Okay, he says. Now imagine you and your better half are tooling around Las Vegas with a guidebook from 1993. How do you think you’re doing? Ooh, honey, let’s go see the Sands! Sorry, sweetie-pie. What about the Landmark? The Landmark’s a parking lot. The El Rancho? The Hacienda? You’ll never see the Hacienda, it doesn’t exist. The city is always changing. Always, just for the sake of doing it. And that’s why it’s always the same. Get it? That’s its nature, its essence. Invisible. Pure. Formless. Indestructible. What do you know about roads?

  Say again?

  Rhodes. Island in the Aegean Sea. Used to be a colossus there, right? Okay. What about Alexandria? Had a pretty nice library, I hear. New York? Couple tall buildings. I’m talking about ruined fortresses here, kid. Collapsed empires. Places become defined by what they lose. Once it’s gone, it’s eternal. Everything you see down there—everything!—is on its way out. Everything self-destructs. I mean, fuck Rome. This is the eternal city. Pure concept.

  The waitress appears again out of nowhere with an ashtray and a fresh ginger ale that Curtis doesn’t really want. Kagami moves the tray a few inches closer, th
en takes a sip of cognac. The jazz trio is playing a sad French song that Curtis can’t quite place. Les musées, les églises, ouvrent en vain leurs portes, it goes. Inutile beauté devant nos yeux déçus.

  Kagami rotates his cigar slowly, deposits a tidy gray mound in the cutglass tray. I love this silly fucking town, he says. I got desert running through my veins. I was born out here. Did you know that?

  Curtis shakes his head. My dad told me you knew Stanley from California, he says. I figured you were from out there.

  My family’s from Los Angeles. And L.A.’s where I grew up. But I was born out here. About a hundred fifty miles on the other side of those mountains.

  Kagami aims a short finger in the general direction of Mount Charleston, lost somewhere in the darkness over Curtis’s right shoulder, far out of sight. Curtis doesn’t turn around.

  You know where the Owens Valley is? Kagami says.

  Not exactly. I know it’s west of Nellis, across the state line.

  It’s about fifteen miles outside of Death Valley National Park. That should give you an idea of the climate. I was born there at a place called Manzanar. You ever heard of Manzanar, Curtis?

  Curtis gives Kagami a tight smile. Kagami’s not even looking at him. Yeah, Curtis says. I’ve heard of it.

  I was born there in 1943. I don’t remember it except in little pieces. How the Army blankets smelled. Brown dust in everything. You’d fill up a pitcher with water, and before you could get it to the table there’d be dust on the surface. Little swirls of it. I remember that. My mother wouldn’t talk about it, and my dad died in Italy, but over the years I’ve tried to educate myself a little bit. That led me to other things. If I’m remembering right, Curtis, your father spent the late Sixties and early Seventies playing clubs in Montréal. He ever tell you what I did during Vietnam, Curtis?

  No, sir. He didn’t.

  I went to prison. I walked into the Hall of Justice with my draft card and a Zippo lighter, and I spent twenty-two months at Terminal Island. I’m not trying to be an asshole here, kid. I’m not judging you, and I’m not gonna say you should live your life any different. But if I act a little hostile to the whole idea of military police, then I got some reasons. That’s all.

  Kagami puts the cigar back in his mouth. A gray cloud rises toward the lights. Two thirtysomething women at the next table—flashy shoes, pricey coifs, monogrammed everything—get up and move to the other end of the room, fanning open hands before their disgusted faces. Curtis takes long breaths, counting them, until his teeth unclench.

  I was an MP for twenty years, he says. No matter how hard I try, I can’t get myself to feel bad or regretful about that. Maybe that means that one of these days—when I’m in a real different mood—you and I’ll have to sit down and have ourselves a big old argument. That’s fine. Right now, all I’m going to say is this. I’m not an MP anymore, Walter. But I am still Badrudin Hassan’s son, Donald Stone’s son. And I’m still Stanley Glass’s friend. You and I may be at odds somewhere, but on this particular issue we want exactly the same thing. Which is to keep Stanley safe.

  That may be so, kid. But we want it for completely different reasons.

  I don’t see how that matters.

  I know you don’t, Kagami snaps. That’s the whole problem. At this point, Curtis, it’s about the only thing that still matters.

  Curtis can feel tightness in his neck and temples: the beginnings of a headache. He can taste it on the back of his tongue. He’s about ninety-eight percent sure that he’s wasting his time here, but that other two percent keeps winking at him, lifting up its skirts. The jazz combo is taking a break, and somebody’s forgotten to turn the piped-in music back on; it’s strangely quiet in the room.

  I’m sick of this shit, Curtis says. I’ve been jerked around now in just about every direction. I am ready to go home. There’s only one thing keeping me from getting on a plane. If I leave, and later I find out that I brought something bad onto Stanley by coming out here, something that I had the power to stop, then I’m gonna feel real sorry about that. And I got enough stuff in my life to feel sorry about. So I guess what I want to hear from you is whether you think Stanley’s gonna be okay.

  Kagami shoots him an incredulous look. No, he says. No, Stanley’s not gonna be okay. The man is dying, Curtis. Get it? It doesn’t matter what you do or you don’t do.

  It does matter, Curtis says. It matters to me.

  Kagami doesn’t respond. He’s staring at the night, looking very sad and very tired. Smoke rises from the ash of his cigar in a solid wavering column, like the ghost-white proboscis of butterfly, until the HVAC whisks it away. Curtis is watching it snake toward the ceiling when he notices a low rumble of turbofans outside. He looks out the window, searching the sky for moving lights.

  Recognize that? Kagami says.

  Curtis listens hard, then shakes his head.

  New stealth fighter. I’m pretty sure. Haven’t seen it yet.

  The sound of the engines fades. Heard any news about the war? Curtis asks.

  Kagami shifts in his chair, leans forward. Curtis can see him getting comfortable, shuffling facts in his head, winding himself up for another practiced run of summary and analysis. Then he stops, like he’s tapped out, like he just doesn’t have it in him. Curtis, he says, when’s the last time you talked to Damon?

  I got a fax from him this morning. I haven’t talked to him since I been out here. He’s not returning my calls.

  The waitress passes, and Kagami signals for the check, scribbling on an imaginary pad with the cigar. Then he lifts the panatela to his lips, takes a series of quick puffs, and crushes the stub in the cutglass tray.

  Listen, kid, he says. Stanley’s gone. He left town this morning, before dawn. I dropped him at McCarran myself. He didn’t say where he was going, and I didn’t ask, but my guess is that he went back to AC to settle with Damon. I think he’s done about all the hiding out he can stand.

  Veronica’s still here. I just saw her.

  Well, she would be, right? If Veronica and Stanley both have the goods on Damon, then they’re gonna split up. They become each other’s insurance.

  I figured they’d be watching each other’s back.

  Kagami shakes his head. You got this all wrong, he says. You’re still talking about Stanley and Veronica like they’re regular people. They’re not. Different set of rules, different set of concerns. You’ve put yourself in a bad spot here. You want me to believe that you’re a stand-up guy, that you’re not some kind of thug? Okay. Be a stand-up guy. Go home to your wife. You can’t help Stanley, kid. You don’t have the juice. Not here, not anywhere. And that’s not something to be ashamed of, believe me. The best thing you can do for him is to forget about all of this. We’re not talking about your old Uncle Stanley who used to do magic tricks. You’re not in that scene anymore. I could tell you some stories. But I won’t. Because he wouldn’t want me to.

  The check comes. Kagami lays a crisp bill in the plastic tray.

  I will tell you this, he says. I heard this one maybe a year or two before I even met Stanley. Back when he was still a very young guy, he was in this poker game in Pasadena—

  Stanley doesn’t play poker.

  He did back then. He was never any good at it, so he quit. To play poker you have to understand people. Stanley doesn’t. It took him a while to figure that out. So. He’s in this poker game in Pasadena. Underground casino, very exclusive. And he’s not doing so great. The pots are bigger than he counted on. So he asks the house for a marker. And they just laugh at him. Come back when you can afford to play here, kid. Okay. Stanley gets up, walks over to the roulette wheel. Roulette’s a pure game of chance, right? No skill involved. Stanley takes a hundred bucks—four green chips, lot of money for a young kid in those days—and as soon as the ball drops, he puts them on four numbers. Bam-bam-bam-bam. So fast you can hardly see his hands move. The numbers are all over the board—but on the wheel, they’re consecutive. Right? One of his numbers
hits. Now he’s got eight black chips. Then, right after the croupier drops the ball again, Stanley splits that stack across four more numbers. Also consecutive on the wheel. And one of those numbers comes up. Seven thousand dollars. He asks them to double the table limit. They call the boss. Boss says okay, but we’re switching croupiers. They bring in the new guy, new guy turns the ball loose, Stanley does it again. He’s sitting on twenty-one grand, and he asks them again to double the limit. Don’t you want your money back? Sure they do. And all of a sudden he’s got over fifty thousand dollars in front of him. By this point the place is shut down. Nobody is playing but Stanley. Everybody in the casino—bartenders, musicians—is gathered around that table. Stanley says he wants the limit upped again, he wants to bet twenty grand. Boss thinks about it, and says okay, but you gotta move to a different table. New table, new croupier. The ball drops. Stanley puts down his four stacks of big nickels. These stacks, he can barely fit his hands around them. The place is like a church. Dead silent, except for that clicking wheel. And then it explodes. Stanley Glass has just won a little over two hundred thousand dollars in five consecutive spins. The dealers are all looking at each other, wondering if they’re gonna have jobs tomorrow. It’s obvious that if Stanley keeps playing he’ll wind up owning the joint. Stanley collects his take, he looks up at the boss, and he says, Do you want to keep playing here, or do you want to let me back into your fucking poker game? This happens, I believe, in 1961. Stanley is nineteen years old.

  The waitress comes back. Kagami waves away his change. He puts his elbows on the table, looks out the window.

  How did he do it? Curtis says.

  What do you mean?

  I mean, what was the trick?

  Kagami gives Curtis a smug smile, lowers his voice, leans closer. The trick was, he says, there was no trick. Stanley saw where the ball was going to go.

  Curtis blinks. How is that possible? he says.

  With an open-palmed shrug, Kagami sags back into his chair. All Stanley’s abracadabra gobbledygook, he says. I used to think it was misdirection. Then I thought, maybe it’s real magic—like he was trying to make impossible things happen. Now I think it’s something else. Impossible stuff happens in Stanley’s world all the time. It’s no big deal to him. I think the magic is him trying to make sense of his world. Which is a very different place from the world you and I live in. And which is maybe some pretty lonely territory for a sick old man.