by Claire North
“Could you get off the bus, please?”
I got off the bus.
“Can I make a phone call?”
“No, sir, sorry.”
“What’s going on?” I asked, as the sheriff’s deputy took away my bag, found my six mobile phones inside, looked askance at me, and one by one pulled their batteries out.
“Nothing to be worried about, sir; we just need to take you in.”
“What for?”
“Routine enquiries.”
“You just stopped a bus in the desert—that doesn’t seem routine.”
He smiled, a smile which proclaimed, not unkindly, that I was right and this was wrong, and there was nothing to be done about it save be civil in my obedience. Then the deputy found the gun at the bottom of my bag, and asked if I had a licence, and I said sure—at my destination. Let me call my lawyer, and I’m sure he’d sort it out.
That’s when they handcuffed me and put me in the back of the car.
Chapter 31
A dusty road in a dusty nowhere, where somehow, incredibly, people chose to live. We drove for two hours, passing through eight towns on our way, and one drive-through burger joint where the sheriff was greeted by name. He ordered a double with double of everything for himself, a single without the onions for his deputy and a cheeseburger and fries for me. I ate without complaint, hands still locked in front of me and, as we pulled away, asked again why they’d arrested me.
They just chuckled—a paternal amusement at youthful ignorance rather than a thing sinister unto itself—and said it’d all be sorted out in town, just be patient. I leant my head back against my seat and wondered if this was it, if this was how I died, and felt in my pocket for a little Roman coin which they hadn’t bothered to take away from me, rolled it between my fingers and wondered if things were desperate enough yet to give it a throw.
Then the road widened and widened again, and there were lights ahead where there should have been none, too bright, too colourful, an explosion of neon and traffic, declaring bigger, brighter, better. Low houses in grubby straight streets grew taller, whiter, burst up in a sudden leap of concrete and glass, and then grew brighter still, a thousand bulbs glistening above hotel doors, gold and brass on every handle, all real vegetation chopped down to be replaced by shimmering metal facsimiles, fountains lit from below and fireworks above, the stench of petrol fumes and the chatter of voices, aeroplanes circling overhead in a queue to land, the prostitutes and the punters jostling each other in the doors of restaurants and bars and of course, in the centre of it all, the casinos, the churning stomach of this city, for this was Las Vegas, impossible place in the desert, where impossible things almost never happened, and fortune and life was lost in the hope that the mathematics lied. It was a city of flesh and drink, of dollars, dollars, dollars, of loud, frantic hopes and smiles that stretched to the tips of every sunburnt ear, of quiet desperation and the little shuffling men that others avoided, lest their bad luck rubbed off and dragged them into the shallow dark places from which there was no escape. On a street corner, a lone voice proclaimed that vice would bring about the end of the world, and the police were already moving him on, young officers in ironed shirts that stuck darkly to their backs and armpits. Cabbies hurled abuse at each other from across the street, and that was fine because this was a city of winners and it didn’t matter how you won, what force you deployed or what loses you suffered, as long as you were victorious.
Into the heart of this place we went, riding the freeway to Frank Sinatra Drive, where billboards three storeys high proclaimed wonders of musical performance by last year’s pop divas, boxing bouts between had-been giants, celebrity glamour and the kind of life that you had only ever dreamed about—you, you little people, stuck in your little lives reading glossy magazines. This, said the signs, this was where the writers of those magazines came to get their inspiration, this was the heart of hope, the centre of your aspiration, so lay down your cash, roll that dice and be the star.
So said every palatial casino/hotel we passed, but we didn’t stop at the front—we drove through smaller streets to the back of one such giant to where a service door designed to admit two lorries at a time stood open, and men in white hairnets and rubber gloves shouted familiar abuse at each other and unloaded crates of fish on beds of ice, bottles of champagne and loaves of bread in their plastic packaging, boxes of oranges and bags of potatoes, flung from arm to arm like flimsy balls, before being sent down a service shaft to the unseen bowels below.
A few of these men glanced at us as the sheriff pulled up, but they’d worked there long enough and seen enough to ask no questions, expect no replies. They pulled me through a concrete maze of service corridors, past catering units banging food onto crystal plates, laundry rooms smelling of starch and soap, staff locker rooms stinking of sweat, maintenance offices with tools hanging from homemade racks on the wall, until at last we came to a lift with a plain metal door and only one option for where it might go—up—and only two floors it could go to. As they pulled me inside, I felt the coin in the palm of my hand, and felt that this was it, the last moment, the final call, and stayed still and quiet between my captors, though my breath came faster than I could contain.
I wondered if I was ready to die, and discovered that I was.
I wondered if I was ready to become a slave of the white, a piece of the Gameshouse, for ever nothing, for ever no one, trapped beneath the veil, and found that the idea paralysed my very thoughts.
The lift rose a long time. When it stopped, we were inside a bookshelf. The bookshelf was pushed back, revealing itself to be no more and no less than a crude, painted thing, ugly in its pretentiousness, crude in its concealment of the lift. Beyond the bookshelf was an office. I counted twenty-three steps between the door and the single desk set in the centre of its pink marble floor. Water ran quietly down the back wall, a crinkled surface of polished copper and brass, flecked with green, draining into a small pool whose bottom was lined with polished pebbles of silver and gold. Down one side of the office ran more painted books; down the other was a window which looked out across the entire city, lit up at night in all its grid form, like a firefly net or a chess-board.
Behind the desk, a chair of white leather was draped with a tiger’s skin. Opposite it, two far smaller leather chairs were bedecked with the remnants of slaughtered bear. Into one of these I was pushed, my hands were freed and, without so much as a “so long, sonny” my two captors turned and went back the way they’d come, and I was left alone.
I waited.
The city went straight ahead or left and right beneath me, a million lives clinging to the roads, red lights one way, white the other. A helicopter landed on the roof of a casino nearby, disgorging wealth in high heels. A police car whizzed by below, silent in the darkness. I waited. The desk in front of me was empty, save for a set of two bright green plastic dice, a single chip valued at five thousand dollars and a spikey-haired troll doll no bigger than my hand, its frock of straight pink hair shaved to no more than stubble against its plastic skull, a smile drawn on its already smiling face in red felt-tip pen.
I waited.
Silence in the office.
Water fell and I waited.
Did not move.
Felt eyes watching me.
Waited.
Want to talk about it? I asked.
No, I replied, squeezing my eyes tight. No. Just… No.
Behind the blackness of my eyelids, faces came unbidden. Van Guylen, dead at the end of the bed. A dying man playing cards; a singer on the ferry from Saint-Malo. A doctor who helped out of duty; children laughing on a beach by the sea. Tracer fire over the city of Jammu; a hit squad shooting down at me as I fled through Tehran.
Go away, I sighed. Go away.
Two Chinese policemen gunned down in a nowhere place, in the desert near a town which produces nothing but rubble.
I refuse them. They are not my orders; they are not orders I recognise within the
boundaries of the law.
A pair of Russians cheerfully beating each other with birch in the woods, proclaiming hate as they smiled warmly over the dominos set. We believe in something more than they do. That’s why we’ll always win.
Dead pieces played for small gains. I’m fucking getting out of here before they get my wife and kids, fuck you, Silver, fuck you!
“Get on with it,” I snapped, and was surprised to hear my own voice ring round the room. “For God’s sake, just end it!”
I felt something bite into my hand and, looking down, saw the Roman coin I had been clutching all this time pressed so hard into the skin that it was starting to bruise; and then there he was, striding into the room from behind his ridiculous painted bookcases, white cowboy boots pulled up to his knees, pink shirt, white tie and a black suit. The suit was pinstriped, though so subtly as to be almost imperceptible to the naked eye. The thin threads of not-black that ran through the silken material were gold; threaded gold, I realised, as the owner of it perched, one leg across the corner of his own too-large desk, and beamed at me. I added up the value of the thin metal embedded in the silk and concluded it was probably worth more than a small house in downtown LA, and wondered if you could put it in the washing machine. I considered this question long and hard, as in thinking about it, I could avoid looking at the face of the man who wore it—the smiling, grinning face—until at last he said, “Have you gone and got blood on my chair?”
I realised that the wound in my shoulder was very gently bleeding, seeping through the fabric of my shirt.
“It’s okay,” he said as I made to cover the wound with my hand. “It’ll add a certain character.”
I closed my eyes tight, turned my head away, then opened my eyes fast and looked into the face I had longed not to see again.
“Hello, Bird,” I said.
“Hello, Silver,” he replied, then smiled and pressed one hand against his lips. The fingernails were long, brown, ragged, curving to the end like claws, though the rest of him was perfectly pressed and pampered. “Shit,” he chuckled. “I nearly called you by your real name.”
Chapter 32
There is a story told.
It is only one of many, but isn’t that always the case where the Gameshouse is concerned?
It is the story of a brother and a sister a long, long time ago. He was wild, brave, strong, adventurous; she was quiet, learned, studious and wise. They loved each other with the kind of tussling love that siblings have, and one day, as they were walking by the sea, they had an argument.
Said the brother, “People are savage, reckless, governed as the animals are. Instinct and the will to survive, power and the scent of blood—these are what drives people in everything they do. Love is power; kindness is selfish; society is a tool that is used by the strong to grow stronger, a system of ascendency and might, no more. Pierce through the pretty clothes of civilisation, and you will find blood beneath, just as it has always been, as it must always be.”
Said the sister, “I do not think so. I believe that humanity betters itself every day. We formulate laws to govern our behaviour, aspire to reach beyond ourselves in imagination and deed. We overcome our animal needs, our base emotions, and become creatures of reason, and in reason we find a definition of that which may be ‘good’.”
“Poppycock!” exclaimed the brother, though this being many thousands, thousands of years ago, he may have used a different word to convey his meaning.
“Very well,” she replied. “I will prove it to you!”
So a conflict ensued, the brother and sister each trying to prove their point, and in time they both grew old and they both grew great, and when they should have died they would not, for there was still this battle to be won, and as they were now both very powerful, they lived, gathering to themselves the means to victory, until, after a few centuries had gone by, it was almost as if they could not remember the point they had to prove. So it was that the sister withdrew to a perfect place, a house where logic, reason and the rules of law could be deployed by great minds to overcome any problem, and where the power of human thought could be shown to be greater than any petty emotional need. Some naïve philosophers argued that she was an embodiment of some sort of “order” or “law” or even finer notions as a “yin” which opposed a “yang”, but in truth, these were markers that spoke more about the men who applied them, than her.
“The house,” she once said, “proves that it is reason, intelligence and logical minds which shape the destiny of humankind.”
For his part, the brother retreated to a valley in the mountains and gathered to him the wild people, the dancing people, the people who fed on human flesh because they were hungry and drank blood because it was rich, and who learned hunting from wolves and lusted to be masters of the sun and moon, and screamed in the darkness when it could not be so, and raged at the world. Again, philosophers attempted to apply their ideas to him, calling him chaos and barbarism, but he just laughed.
“Take your proofs somewhere else! Can you prove love? Can you prove passion? Can you prove humanity? We are the wild things that need no words, and you shall never imprison us with your language.”
Thus it was, when I first met Bird. His people beat me as they dragged me through the valley because they could, and because I could not stop them, and because there were no laws save strength and blood. They threw me at his feet, and as I begged for my life he tutted and said if I was too weak to win it, I was too weak to have it.
He said, “Why do you want to live at all, being such a wretched little thing?”
I replied, “My wife. The Gameshouse has taken my wife.”
He said, “So?”
I said, “Ask me anything, any service, anything at all, I’ll be yours, I swear it; I’ll be yours for ever…” but he dismissed this offer as insignificant, unwanted, uninteresting, and his people howled with delight and made to cut out my heart, my tongue, peel off my flesh, until an idea struck him that seemed to entertain, and from a bag full of teeth and little ground bones, he pulled out a small Roman coin.
“You like games, do you?” he asked as I lay begging at his feet. “She who runs the house—she likes games. She finds they impose patterns on the world, make order where there is only chaos. Let’s play a game, you and I. I throw this coin, and if it lands on a certain side, you live, and if it doesn’t, you die. You can pick which side gives you life—not that choosing makes a difference.”
So I chose, and tossed the coin.
The coin turns, the coin turns.
Empires rise, empires fall, and only the turning remains.
Chapter 33
He said, “Would you like something to drink? Have a Ritz sidecar. Cointreau, cognac—I usually charge five hundred bucks a glass in the bars downstairs, but for you I’ll do it free, for old time’s sake.”
He didn’t wait for me to answer, but produced a handful of bottles from a drawer, a couple of cocktail glasses and, beaming at his own cleverness, a little purple umbrella. I watched him mix the drink, chuckling as the ingredients combined. He downed his in a single gulp. I didn’t touch mine; it sat on the table between us.
“Ain’t you gonna drink it?” he asked, his accent a thick California drawl, and before I could speak, he grabbed it from in front of me, shrugged, said, “Hell of a waste,” and drained my glass down too, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve. This done, he slung himself into his office chair, boots up on the desk, legs crossed, arms folded across his belly, and beamed.
“So,” he said at last. “How long’s it been? You took your sweet time getting round to challenging the bitch.”
“I wasn’t ready before.”
“Looks to me like you ain’t ready now!” he replied brightly. “Getting blood all over my shit, that is.”
“I… didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Where else would you expect to see me? In the fucking mountains, freezing my balls off? The wild tamed civilisation, Silver
, the wild got into civilisation’s veins—this is the place; this is where it’s at. You okay to walk? Walk with me.”
I walked with him, hobbling behind as he swept across the thick red carpets, the marble halls, past the mirrors of polished bronze, the bell boys and card sharps, executive hosts and VIP managers, gamblers, tourists, drunks and hopefuls of the hotel. Subordinates shuffled out of his way, middlemen tried to smile, then looked away. He beamed at all who passed him by and they faltered, feeling perhaps the thing that lay behind the smile, the power, the joy. We swept through the backstage corridors above a concert hall where a woman with two stars over her breasts, one over her groin and very little else, suspended by a wire seven feet above the stage, spun and spun in the white light of the follow-spots.
He beat me, he mistreat me, but that’s okay, he’s my guy…
Below, three thousand people stared in wonder, their faces sparkling in reflected light while oiled, muscle-bound dancers pounded and thrust their way through a routine, faces contorted into grimaces of pain, feet stamping, skin bulging, sweat mixing with grease down the sides of their thick, tanned necks.
I want it hot hot, she sang. I want it now now. I want it more more.
Bird let me watch for a moment, then pulled me on, dragging me by the sleeve like a kitten playing with its prey. In the lift, a man and a woman were tangled in a drunken embrace, fingers clawing at each other, pulling at clothes, skin, hair. I turned away; Bird watched, chuckling to himself, and they didn’t care.
Onto the fifth floor, through crystal doors and down corridors of silver and blue, we came to a quieter lounge, a long bar of polished titanium white and black marble floors, where tables were laid out for the greatest and the grandest to play their games. Dice tumbled and cards fell; a hundred thousand dollars were lost and the loser shrugged; stacks of chips dragged into the house’s hand as the high rollers sipped champagne, three hundred dollars a glass, and caressed the thighs of paid-for strangers, and rolled fortunes away like children throwing stones at a bucket.