Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

Alex kept walking. Further ahead, another blurt of neon: a pair of hearts knitting and unknitting unceasingly, a white cross: a wedding chapel. He needed to be away from here. He took one of the roads off the Strip and walked down it, away from the people and the lights, and when he saw a shabby-looking bar he went into it and sat down.

There was a long bar, a pool table, a jukebox and a funk of smoke. The walls were entirely covered in beer mats and most of what light there was came from old neon on the walls, a green crown-cap bottle the size of a baseball bat and a red horse with a yellow cowboy on it.

‘What?’ said the barman.

‘Whiskey, please,’ said Alex, and regretted the ‘please’.

‘Up?’

‘Sorry? Oh. Yeah. Please.’

Alex put ten dollars down, and necked the whiskey while the barman brought him his change. It was bourbon, and it gave his throat a sweet scald. He coughed. He put a single dollar bill on the bar for a tip and asked for another.

The barman scratched his neck, poured it, watched Alex drink the second. Alex wasn’t used to drinking shots – he didn’t normally even like whiskey much, and bourbon less – and a swimmy calm descended on him. He was playing at being someone else. Drinking hard was what you were supposed to do, he thought, in these circumstances.

He had a third, more slowly after a moment of reflux made him gag, and then the fourth was on the house. Alex stared glassily across the bar at the bottles, and behind the mirror in which he could see his own dark reflection, and tried to think about what had happened.

He had been shocked. Now the shock was thawing into shame. Why had he been angry at Carey? It hadn’t been her fault. He was mouthing to himself. He’d just sprung it on her. She was shocked. And then he’d reacted instantly, and in the worst way – But the pity , that was what got to him. The look of sadness on her face. That was what had humiliated him. She looked sorry for him. He couldn’t stand to be around her, and that was tough shit on her. What was she thinking of? Coming to Las Vegas with him. She’d come to dump him. That was – Christ, no wonder she’d been embarrassed. What a fucking, fucking idiot. Nice one, Smart. Simpering. The ring. The whole thing. If she’d had any sort of courage she’d have dumped him by text message.

Even in pain, Alex noted, he was still more than capable of feeling the sting of embarrassment.

All that remained to do was to pick up his humiliation and go home. Pay off the car. Pawn the ring – well, he couldn’t exactly recycle it, could he? He barked mirthlessly. And then he thought of going to a pawn shop and handing it over for a few dollars. He liked the hurting tawdriness of it. Or just throw it in a bin.

But he loved her! Some small abject part of him wailed. He couldn’t get round that. And never more so, he thought, than now. Just the thought of her skin made a lump come to his throat. What if he went back? This could be just a row. They could just forget about it. He rehearsed that thought without sincerity.

He ordered another whiskey, and was just leaving the tip on the bar when his phone leaped in his pocket and his stomach fell through the seat of his chair. Carey? He pulled it out. No. Not Carey. A text message.

It was from Rob. The message said: ‘How Green Was My Valet?’ He looked at it blankly. It was like a message from another universe, a time capsule from an age when he had thought stupid jokes were funny. He turned off his phone, settled back at the bar, had another whiskey, went back to feeling sorry for himself. If he drank enough, he reasoned, not only would the truth of his feelings become apparent to him, but the course of action he needed to take would also decide itself for him.

He found himself attending to the background noise of the jukebox. He was reaching just that mood when whatever song comes on will acquire a generalised sense of tragic grandeur. Had ‘Barbie Girl’ or the ‘Birdie Song’ come on, they would have seemed to speak directly to him of the futility of life. As it was, he had mawked his way already through ‘Simple Twist of Fate’, ‘Born to Follow’ and – bizarrely – ‘Cum On Feel the Noize’.

Then, in a ragged tangle of chords, underpinned by a sluggish drumbeat, another song he recognised began, and he rested his elbows on the bar, pushed his cheeks up with the heels of his hands and closed his eyes.

Once I thought I saw you… in a crowded hazy bar…

His lips moved quietly to the words. She was. She was like a hurricane. She was spontaneous and – were hurricanes spontaneous? Never mind – free and… she danced like a hurricane, like hurricanes dance, from one star to another, on the light…

Chugging, chiming, sad-defiant. The song made no sense at all, but it seemed in that instant to mean everything to Alex. There were calms in her eyes. And, like a hurricane, Carey had blown the modest bungalow of his happiness flat.

If he hadn’t thought the barman would see him, laugh at him and stop serving him, he would have allowed himself a blub.

Alex still had his eyes closed when Sherman emerged from the door of the washroom and started walking down the bar. The toilet, for reasons Sherman didn’t want to think about, was entirely painted in textured black gloss paint, and the bulb in there had gone. Sherman had been in this dive long enough – fifteen bottles of Molson long, ever since he’d lost most of his stack at blackjack up on Fremont Street – and the toilet had made his decision for him. Here, in the fanciest town he’d ever been in, he’d found a khazi that would have disgraced a rough pub in Plymouth.

He’d been standing tiptoe on sodden wads of bum roll, the closest he could get to the pan, leaning over forward with one hand steadying himself on the cistern pipe. Occasional glints of light from outside showed a seatless bowl, sprinkled with drops, in the general direction of which he had pissed with ferocious need. He had shaken off, nearly losing his footing as he did so on the slippery floor, and walked out with the full intention of finding somewhere very, very cheap to kip.

And it was then that he clocked the skinny kid at the bar, nodding his head to the music like a nonce. And it occurred to him that something about the kid was familiar.

No, he exhaled quietly. You are shitting me. That’s the prick that killed Davidoff.

Sherman’s first thought – which was his first thought in pretty much all circumstances in any case – was that something fishy was going on. What were the chances of the little bastard fetching up here? And why? He hadn’t seemed keen to speak the last time they’d met.

Could it be Ellis tying up loose ends? One of the reasons Sherman had chosen Vegas was that it was an easy city to get lost in, an easy city to make money safe in. If there was going to be a clean-up operation, Sherman had been determined to make sure he was out of the way of the mop.

He’d been careful – booked a flight to LAX, booked a ticket on a Greyhound bus east with his credit card, not taken it, and paid for another ticket on a bus to Las Vegas with cash. That one, he had got aboard. He’d been here less than twenty-four hours. If they had figured out he was here, they really wanted to find him. And that was very bad news for him.

It was the kid, though.

OK, smooth. The smart thing to do was slip out and get lost. But. But. The blackjack – dealer paying 21 twice in a row, Sherman doubled down both times and stuck on 20 – the beer, the fact he was going to be staying in some horrible hotel again, the crappy toilet and the general fuck-up Sherman’s life had become… all of these seemed in some way to be this lad’s responsibility. Sherman didn’t yet know whether the kid was going to get him killed, but it didn’t seem unlikely at this rate. And then there was Davidoff, also not to be forgotten. Sherman was buggered if he wasn’t going to take a run at him one way or another.