Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

At the edge of the machines, about a hundred feet away, there’s a blond kid, a pudgy fratboy type, leaning against an ATM. He’s wearing a ballcap and a Mirage T-shirt; he’s turned away from Curtis, reading a travel guide. And inside the travel guide is a mirror: about four inches by six, catching a little light from the chandelier over Curtis’s head. Curtis freezes, lowers his phone from his ear, takes a couple of quick steps, and the guy’s gone.

The gaming floor is crowded, Curtis is out of shape, and getting there seems to take forever. He’s got the guy in a corner, but it’s a big corner: Curtis hasn’t seen him pop up at the escalators, or at the Noodle Asia, so he figures he must’ve ducked into the sports book area. After quick glances left and right, that’s where he follows him.

It’s darker inside than on the casino floor: most of the light comes from dozens of flickering TVs, and Curtis’s vision takes a moment to adjust. A few Australians are glued to a soccer match; most other screens are recapping NCAA basketball. In a far corner, Curtis can make out a single luminous map of Iraq.

He looks around for a baseball cap, then for blond hair, then for a Mirage T-shirt, but strikes out across the board. Moving into the room, he spots the brim of the guy’s cap sticking out of a wastebasket. He picks it up, and finds the guy’s blond hair sewn neatly inside. As Curtis lifts it to his face, there’s movement somewhere to his left: someone making for the exit.

The guy is light on his feet. Curtis just catches a glimpse of him as he’s rounding the corner up ahead, blackhaired now, an MGM Grand hoodie pulled over his T-shirt. By the time Curtis thinks to look at his shoes, he’s already vanished. Curtis makes the corner not far behind him, feeling winded, and ducks through the first opening to his left.

It’s a little lounge, a salsa band playing to a crowded house. Colored lights sweep the floor; middle-aged white people shuffle and grin. Curtis knows right away that it’s over. No telling how many changes of clothes the kid’s got. If only he’d looked at the shoes. He stands there for a moment, fuming, catching his breath. His left foot is cold and sticky where the spilled drinks soaked through. After a while, he steps back onto the gaming floor and dials the number the guy called him from.

No answer, no voicemail set up. After five tries Curtis quits, then takes a moment to save the number in the phone. His fingertip mashes the small buttons. Whistler appears on the LCD screen.

He calls Damon on his way back to the elevators. As before, there’s no greeting, just a beep. Damon, Curtis says. It’s me. You got some explaining to do. I just had a very fucked-up phone conversation with some little freak who’s here in Vegas dialing me from a 609 cell, who wants me to give you some message about how he knows what went down in AC and how he wants you to guarantee his safety, but I’m having a hard time doing that, see, because I don’t know who the fuck he is or what the fuck he’s talking about. All right? Now I am tired of being jerked around by you, motherfucker. You need to call me — on the phone , not any more of this fax machine bullshit — and give me the poop. Until you do that, I am suspending operations, effective immediately. I am sitting by the swimming pool, and I am spending your goddamn dollars. Hear me? You need to be straight with me, man. Because this is fucked up. Later.

The keycard slides; Curtis steps into his room. There’s a rasp along the tile, something stuck to the damp sole of his shoe: a folded-over sheet of hotel stationery. He catches whiffs of rum and orange juice as he stoops to peel it off.

We need to talk

I’m upstairs in 3113

Come by tonight after 11:30

VERONICA

It’s past 11:30 now. Curtis half-turns toward the door, then stops, thinking. Feeling suddenly very happy. Feeling like himself. Things are happening.

He turns, crosses the unlit suite, opens the safe. Checks the revolver’s cylinder — five brass caseheads, a neat gleaming ring — and clips it to his belt. His leather blazer is draped over a chair by the window; Curtis slips it on, smoothes the hem to hide the pistol, turns to check his silhouette in the mirror on the wall.

A second pair of eyes stares back at him. Black eyes in a waxen face.

Reflex puts the pistol back in his hand, but aims it automatically at the image in the glass; Curtis curses, wheels to look over his shoulder. As he moves, the phantom in the mirror wavers and warps — like a TV screen raked by a magnet — and dissolves from sight. Curtis feels the sickening, not-unfamiliar sensation of his brain losing its grip on his body: he sees himself wild-eyed, half-crouched, jabbing the pistol at dark corners, although he knows full well that he’s alone. His eye has tricked him, or his mind has.

He straightens up, holsters the gun. His wrists and jaw quiver a little from adrenaline, and he clears his throat, shakes his head roughly, scowls at his solitary reflection. This has happened before, though not for a long time. When he first returned from the Desert, he saw ghosts often: dead faces, dead bodies or parts of bodies, what remained of the enemy after the daisycutters and FAE clusters fell on them. In Kuwait the dead were an annoyance, something not to step in, but when he shipped home they came to haunt him — charred skulls peeping from car windows, shriveled arms curled in flowerbeds — and bothered him badly for many days, until one day they didn’t anymore. Now it seems they’re back, which doesn’t surprise him. These days it seems like everything is coming back.

What’s strange, though, is that the face in the mirror didn’t look like any memory from the Desert. It was a dead face, that’s for sure, and also a familiar one, but not a face from any battlefield he’s known. It looked like Stanley.

Curtis doesn’t know what to do with that; doesn’t want to think about it. He clears his throat again, rubs his face. Disgusted with himself. Topside, Veronica is waiting.

He pauses in the doorframe on his way out, just long enough to reach and turn on the lights. Checking to see if the room really is empty, which of course it is. Pointless. Curtis’s gaze tracks the tile floor, the mahogany armoire, the wrought-iron divider, the tables and the couches, until it arrives at the windows, which show him the parts of the room he can’t see from where he stands: the big rack, the door to the head, his own small shadow in the corridor. The fancy room reminds him of the waitress who took his order in the Oculus Lounge, and also of some of the nurses at Bethesda: good at what they do, so good that their skill becomes a screen that conceals the fact that they don’t care. It’s a plush room, but it’s not comfy. Nobody’s home.

For an instant — only an instant — Curtis is scared that he might die out here.

The room seems ready for him to leave, so he does. He switches off the light, and the dark comes in behind him.

From the way the numbers run on his floor, Curtis can hazard a guess as to where Veronica’s suite is, and he climbs the stairs at the opposite end of the building.

Four flights. Taking his time. The door opens on a hallway identical to the one he just came from. He moves silently down the corridor, past the elevators, counting the numbers down, listening hard as he goes. There’s no sound beyond the drone of air ducts. Curtis is thinking that everyone must be at the tables down below when a door opens ahead, and two women in floorlength fur coats step out. They exchange parting words with a male voice inside, and the door closes behind them. Both women wear shiny red latex gloves; one carries a black attaché case. They smile brightly at they pass. Hi! they say.