Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

Is that so.

I did not hear the shots. But I saw the police arrive. The ambulance. The black car, full of holes. It was a terrible sight.

Curtis doesn’t respond. He’s looking out the window, not really seeing anything, remembering. Ladder drills on the practice field at Dunbar. The smell of new grass crushed underfoot. Sirens everywhere. Policecars speeding down Florida toward Adams-Morgan. Helicopters in the air, circling. The assistant principal jogging out, waving to Coach Banner. More than twenty years ago now. Twenty-two, this month.

Many people come to this city to die, Saad is saying.

Yeah, well. I don’t think that’s exactly what Tupac had in mind. I think he just wanted to catch the Tyson fight.

Maybe this is so. Who can say?

Saad’s turn signal clicks again; he’s exiting at Lake Mead Boulevard, turning right, toward Nellis and Sunrise Manor. The white spires of the Mormon temple gleam in the distance. Frenchman Mountain looms beyond.

Maybe your father is smart, Saad says, or is wise, maybe, to think of these things. Everything in this city is made by gambling. Yes? It builds the buildings. It builds the roads. It pays the people. It pays me. All of these things. And always with gambling there is death. You see?

Okay.

This is why we gamble. To face what is uncertain. To confront the unknown, the great unknown. You make your wager. The wheel spins. What will happen? To gamble is to prepare for death. To rehearse. This is the appeal.

You do this rap for all your fares, Saad?

Saad cackles, a rough smoker’s laugh, slapping his palm on the wheel. Only for you, my friend! Only for you. Because you are a serious man. Concerned with serious things. I know this about you. It is in your eyes.

Curtis smiles, doesn’t respond.

Or the man who died here last year! Saad continues, picking up a dropped thread. The Englishman. The rock star.

I don’t know who that is.

The Ox. The one who stands very still.

A thin electronic rendition of “La Marseillaise” is playing below the radio: the ringtone of Saad’s cell. Forgive me, he says, and answers it. Speaking first in English, then switching to Arabic. Curtis tries to follow but soon gives up; some phrases sound familiar, but he can’t recall their meanings. The cab rolls through the light at Pecos Road, passing over the depleted river in its concrete channel. Fewer houses on the sidestreets now. A low roar of jet engines overhead. Curtis settles back in his seat, tries to relax, to think. To get his mind back on Stanley.

But Stanley is slippery, and seems to go everywhere, spinning Curtis back onto himself. His father. Kagami. Los Angeles, in the late Fifties. Art Pepper, dragging himself into the Contemporary studios, white junkie with a dried-up horn, Band-Aid on the broken cork. Pepper was an MP too, Little Man. A prison guard, in London during the war . Columns of orange flame off to the north. The sky burnt black at two in the afternoon. Oily poisoned rain. Ijlis . Sit down. Inhad . Stand up. Sa tuffattash ilaan . Now you will be searched.

Saad is still on the phone, becoming more animated, shuffling in bits of English and French: orange alert, Air Canada, maison de passe , Flamingo Road, dépanneur , oh my god, the Aladdin, une ville lumière , he’s a shithead, forget about him. An F-15 passes directly overhead; Curtis can’t see it, but he knows the sound of the engines. They’re due south of the airbase now, nearing the northeastern edge of the valley. Ranks of white stucco houses topped with orange mission-tiles perch on the foothills ahead, crowding the borders of the government land.

Curtis is wondering if Saad is distracted, if maybe they’ve missed their turn, when they veer onto a sidestreet just past a Terrible Herbst gas station on the corner of North Hollywood Boulevard. The neighborhood is getting anonymous, purely residential; the houses are bigger, newer, farther apart, and suddenly there are none to be seen at all, only steep gated driveways sprouting off the road. The taxi’s transmission downshifts as they climb past cleared gravel pits and an old cement plant, winding slowly through slumps and dry washes and mounds of talus stanched by gabions. Then they crest a rise on a sickening turn and the entire valley is arrayed before them: a sea of roofs and palmtrees, the Strip towers flanked by the Luxor and the Stratosphere, the snows of Mount Charleston in the distance, white blotches hung in midair, the mountain itself vanished in the afternoon haze.

A flashing traffic signal comes into view — a two-lane road with a wide shoulder, cars towing fiberglass boats — but Saad hangs a sharp left before they get there, into a fresh and narrow roadcut marked by a blond limestone sign: QUICKSILVER CASINO & RESORT. The parking area is modest, crescent-shaped, following the curve of the hillside; it’s at maybe a quarter capacity, with Cadillacs and Town Cars and the odd Lexus or Mercedes clustered near the top. Wheelchair ramps stretch downhill like exposed roots, and the handicapped spaces are all full.

They bypass the parking lot and roll up to the entrance: a massive oak portico held aloft by thick columns of smooth riverstone orbs. A little pack of bluehaired white ladies is waiting in the shade, bingo bags and plastic coinpails dangling from their folded hands. A green-and-white placard by the entrance says FIND YOUR POT O’ GOLD AT QUICKSILVER! ST. PATRICK’S DAY IS MARCH 17TH.

Saad is ending his call. We have arrived, my friend, he says. This place will be lucky for you, I think.

It’s farther out than I thought, Curtis says, digging some of Damon’s cash from his wallet.

There is nothing farther. Government land, and then the lake. That is all.

I didn’t think you could build up here.

Saad shrugs. What can you pay? he says. Who is your friend? You can do what you want.

Curtis hands the folded bills over the seat and Saad takes them with practiced ease, watching Curtis in the rearview mirror. Smiling conspiratorially with his eyes. As if they share some secret knowledge about the world.

Curtis opens his door, steps out, leans back in. Hey, Saad, he says. You got a business card?

He glances at the card as the cab is pulling away: SAAD ABOUGREISHA, it says, and a phone number.

The sidewalk beneath Curtis’s feet, which had looked like mortared flagstones from inside the car, is really some kind of springy padding composited from shredded rubber; it gives a little under his weight. He rocks back and forth on his heels, testing the surface, thinking of the deck of the physical therapy room at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, where he first met Danielle.

A boxy shuttlebus sporting the Quicksilver logo — a jazzed-up Indian pictograph of a raven in flight: gaping beak, gleaming reflective eye — pulls into the space Saad vacated. A group of old people exits the bus with the help of a pair of minders, young kids with big smiles and loud voices. The ones standing under the portico wait patiently to board. Curtis watches all this for a while, not sure what he’s looking for. Then he turns and walks to the entrance.

The Quicksilver is high-class for a neighborhood joint: small, rustic, more country club than bingo parlor or shopping mall. The building looks like an Anasazi cliffpalace reworked by Frank Lloyd Wright: lots of exposed beams and slender limestone blocks. The whole thing’s built around an old quarry or open-pit mine, now converted into a sunken courtyard with a pond and a waterfall and a recirculating fountain in the middle. Through the bow window behind the gaming pit Curtis can see madrones and junipers, pergolas twined with wisteria and passionflower, the towering blooms of a couple of century-plants. A halfdozen plump guineafowl peck at the rubber sidewalks, and aside from them the courtyard is deserted.